The light this morning was crisp, and its play of light and shadow through trees was stunning under their canopy. The breeze was cool, and every color vibrant. Mother Nature brought her very best today, and nothing about it seemed rough around the edges.

I, on the other hand, have been awake since midnight, when some unknown trigger pulled me from sleep, and my brain decided to turn on, full throttle, and flatly refuse to turn off before morning arrived. It was a snarky jab at the end of a very long week, and today, I feel that every ounce of my being is rough around the edges.

Though here I sit, clicking away. That’s the power of a little public declaration and its subsequent role in accountability, I suppose. At least for me.

In starting this blog, I gave myself permission to practice. I make no claims of quality or the value of its content, and honestly, one direction my brain traveled in last night was through full fledged panic and regret at making such a commitment.

I love to create. I want to spin tales that are beautiful and to touch people with words. Like so many, I grapple with the ego and her desire for success, though I often question what that means. For those of you who knew me when I was very young, the perfectionist side that I still dance with (and that has been responsible for many an avoided action) will (hopefully) make you chuckle, knowingly, when you catch a glimpse of her, as you think to yourselves with a sigh that, “Ah, she’s still the same.”

Something HAS changed, however, and that is the choice to step forward as I am, to claim my hurdles, and to remove my heart from its hermit cave, in all of its roughness and room for improvement, and share it. When I step back, a few hundred words per day released to a handful of people seems such a small thing. Yet, to me, each post feels like an act of bravery, at least for now, reinforcing what I have known to be true; walking one’s path, no matter what it may be, requires courage.

So today, even though I feel positively beat-up, I am thinking of myself as I do my trusty notebook. It has seen spills, rainstorms, and grocery lists, the sweet scribbles of little hands and the angry scribbles of big ones. It has been stamped and squished, lost and found. But it is also where I have recorded some of my favorite words. In it hide pieces of stories, and poetry, and captured memories that I cherish. That notebook is thick, and still has plenty of blank pages to fill. It is valued not only for what it contains, but for all that it has weathered, and for the simple promise of space that it holds.

Humanity is rough around the edges, but it is from within that raw truth that all of the beauty that flows through the cords that bind us emerges. We each matter, just as we are, and I hope, that by taking a leap of faith and opening a door, that someone besides myself might take comfort in that.