Welcome to 37days…

At some point in our lives, we’ll all just have thirty-seven days to live. Maybe that day is today. Maybe not.

There are new, interesting eyes (and, presumably, whole faces) peeking into 37days recently—many as a result of this site being newly noted as a TypePad Featured Blog.

Thanks, TypePad! What a wonderful surprise and honor…

Welcome. Look around. Poke into the archives. I hope you’ll find something of interest and, perhaps, of meaning to you and your life. Why 37days? That answer can be found here.

Arriving to a blog in progress is sometimes like entering a parlor, late, after everyone else has already arrived and is deep in a heated discussion, a conversation too hot for them to pause and catch you up, just as Kenneth Burke imagined in his gorgeous metaphor of an unending conversation. “If fact,” he writes, “the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar… However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

In just that way, this conversation started long before you or I got to this parlor, and it will continue long after we depart into the cold winter night or, in the case of the Land of Blogs, long after we click "back" or "close."

I believe, as did poet Muriel Rukeyser, that the universe is made of stories, not atoms. As I began to ponder my thirty-seven days, one thing became clear: regardless of when that countdown begins, I needed to leave some greater part of myself behind for my two young daughters, Emma and Tess. I needed to leave my stories, to let them know and see me as a real person, not just a mother; leave with them for safe-keeping my thoughts and memories, fears and dreams, the histories of what I am and who my people are. I needed to leave behind my thoughts about living that "one wild and precious life" of which poet Mary Oliver speaks.

I needed to explore what living means and leave them with a notebook of challenges, an instruction manual to guide them as they live their lives without me. Not where to get their hair cut or how to steam artichokes or combat static cling or change a tire or book the cheapest airfare, but the deeper things—how to know what to care about, how to treat others around them (and themselves), what to question, how to love, what to stand up for, and why they should tell stories and listen to the stories of others. Stories are our equipment for living, as Burke said. This blog is the beginning of that guidebook.

Writing my stories for them, teaching and challenging my daughters to live fully—and learning how to live fully myself in the process—that’s what I’d do with my thirty-seven days.

That, and eat dinner at Topolobampo with Billy Collins.

How about you?

That’s all to say….welcome.

If you enjoy your visit to 37days, perhaps you’ll also enjoy my upcoming book, LIFE IS A VERB, to be published by Globe Pequot Press in the fall of 2008. For more info and to enter a drawing for a free, signed copy, click here!