All the chapters to come

Sometimes I think about all the things I want to do in this lifetime. All the books I want to read, all the books that exist that I might like to read, that I never will because I just don't know about them all, all the places I want to go, all the poetry I want to hear, all the places I want to live and things I want to do and be and experience, and feel sad because I know most of it will never happen.

Opportunity, cost, the fact that I have children, responsibility, all of that aside, most of it will never happen, just because of the sheer magnitude of all there is to see and experience in this world.

One lifetime just isn't going to be enough.

I want to read hundreds of books, and poems and plays. I want to hear the words of Dylan Thomas slip off the lips of a lover, beneath a star filled sky somewhere in the wild, where humans rarely go.

I want to live in a third world country-several third world countries actually. I want to wake up in some impoverished, war torn somewhere, and know what it's like to be truly thankful for each day you have.

I want to learn midwifery in rural Mexico, in India, in Indonesia. I want to see how women really give birth in Africa.

I want to live in California, in Hawaii, in Italy, Greece, Ireland, Spain and Turkey. I want to live on the beach, in a cabin, in a tree house and on a boat. I want to learn to fly a plane and how to knit a blanket. I want to speak other languages, and grow my own food. I want to start a commune, a birth center, and learn all the secrets of my own femininity.

I want to study religion, read with monks, pray with spiritual leaders, meditate, and question the existence of Heaven, Hell and the absurdity of my own mortality.

I want to raise my kids in hundreds of places, show them hundreds of thousands of things. I want to teach them to be humble, accepting, worldly and strong. I want to teach them compassion, kindness, and how much the human heart can endure. I want to teach them to explore, and to wander. To always look up at a night sky and feel awestruck. To always question, always study, always thirst for more answers, but also respect the divine mystery that pulses through this Universe, and understand that love is something that there are no logical answers to.

I want to do so much. And knowing that just because of how much there is to do, and how little time there seems to be for me to do it in, and all the other things that need to be done as well, just makes me sad.

But it also keeps alive in me the spirit of adventure, and the hope that just around the next corner, any sort of magic could be waiting.

It is a very dangerous business: walking out one's front door.