"I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on"

This Sunday, the last one in May, finds me singing Joni Mitchell. 

Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad...

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly

My dream at the moment is to fly somewhere quiet and alone. I would take my writing and try to find a way into it that pleases me, that stirs the heat below my surface until sparks turns to flames and I'm flying a writer's high. I think of Samuel Beckett's lines

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”

My problem is that I want them back. I feel as if I wasted so much time, that I have left all too late. Where does one find courage? 

"engulfed by a tide of sadness mingled with flashes of pure happiness"

 I am reading "A Single Rose" by Muriel Barbery that takes place in Japan. 

"'Life is painful,' said Rose... 

The Englishwoman looked away, lost in contemplation of the pavilion.

'If a person is not ready to suffer,' she said, 'they are not ready to live.'"

I feel as if my life is almost over though admittedly, I've always felt like this. I did not expect to live this long and I wonder if this thought has shaped my life. I have dared myself to do things that others have judged selfish even reckless. I regret nothing although many of my actions have caused me discomfort even pain, and worse - sometimes I was responsible for another's pain. 

Over thirty years ago, a male friend said that I would always be unsatisfied. I expect too much from life. Do I? I see living as work. There is so much work, drudgery even, doing all that must be done. I am talking about housework, paperwork, personal hygiene, and even the responsibility that I feel for others - especially my children when they were young - and yet, more often than not, these responsibilities brought "flashes of pure happiness". 

I'm now thinking in song...

When Kris Kristofferson wrote "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose," he said that he was "trying to show that  freedom is a double-edged sword and that you may be free, but it can be painful to be that free..."

I love Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire". 

"I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch

He said to me, "you must not ask for so much"

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door

She cried to me, "hey, why not ask for more?"

Oh, like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free"

I am still trying. A friend once asked me how I'm doing and I replied, "I think I'm happier than I think I am."