A beautiful mess

"Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present." Leonardo Da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life

At the nudging of my husband, I finally cleaned out the top drawer of my desk.  This desk drawer has served no useful purpose for me in its lifetime.  I usually don't need more than my mouse, some stamps and an ink pen to get through my day, thanks to my heavy use of technology and conversion to a "paperless" office.

However functionally obsolete, the desk drawer remains.

And it has remained a repository of all things golden, all things important and meaningful to me.  Find something and not sure what to do with it?  To the depths of the desk drawer it goes, never to be seen or heard from again.  In fact, I have not even opened the darn thing since two moves ago, when I thoughtlessly slid everything that was on top of my desk into it with one quick motion as the movers made their way up my front walk to ring the bell.

I unearthed the mess today.  Its quite the find.  There it is, in the 15 by 12 inch shallow box - my life.  My memories, my most exquisite joys, my heart and my fears and my travels and my deepest sorrows - all right down there in that drawer that sits ever-so-quietly beneath me each day.  These are things that cannot be organized in any understandable form or fashion - pieces of my past, some things so old I can't recall their exact importance any longer.

This is what I imagine the picture must be inside my head on any given day.  Something like tracing your fingertips along the edge of embroidery.  The physical manifestation of all my hopes, my thoughts and my dreams in all those fleeting moments of life.

The drawer is finally empty - but my mind is now full - busy wandering the landscape of a life so very different just a few short years ago.