I have a bunch of drafts on my desktop right now – blog posts, stories, books, workshop plans, poster scetches and so on – and another hundred or so in a Dropbox folder.

Ideas come easily to me, infinitetly faster than I can act upon them. That’s always the case, but right now almost all of them fall to the ground soon after they’re born. The pain in my body and caring for the little ones claim most of my energy right now. So they perish, the ideas, like little falling stars. I wont pretend it doesn’t hurt. It does. There’s a special kind of pain in letting a beautiful idea die.

But I’m no longer a starcatcher, running and playing, catching ideas with a bag net.

I’m not the girl running after falling stars anymore. I’m the one sitting, in silent awe, watching them fall. Hands open. When something lands on my palm I know its mine. It’s this one, of all possible ideas, that I can do something with right now, with the slight energy and modest resources I’ve got.

She’s tired, the girl with the star in her hand, and she’s grieving. Not just for pain and sickness, they don’t matter in the end, but for all that she can’t do. She has not yet gotten used to it.

The rules to the game has changed, and she does not yet feel at home in this new way of playing.

But she crouches over the little star, protecting it from the wind. She wants to close her hand around it but stops herself. Wants to hurry but stops herself. Instead, she watches the faint light, quitely wondering when it will grow from glimmer and shimmer to solid flame. She holds back with a feeling that resembles resignation, but is in fact the beginning of trust. The beginning of a deeper knowing. What is meant to happen will happen. And what is mine cannot be taken from me.

What hurts is the dream of something that no longer is. That dream will die, and the grief will be here for a little while, now that a running starcatcher can no longer run.

So shimmer, little stardust. Light up my darkness. I don’t know why you all come when I cannot give you life, but I know my night skies are more beautiful because you’re here.