"The time has come," the walrus said.

A blog - the beginning....of the middle...to reach a piece of the end.
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things - Of shoes and ships and sealing wax - Of cabbages and kings - Of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”
More than a century ago when Lewis Carroll penned these words as part of the politically driven poem The Walrus and the Carpenter, I feel quite certain the wildly creative writer may have – in a very different time – begun his first blog post in much the same manner.
As with many of life's beginnings, this time in life is really one more piece of the middle, carrying me back and forth from beginnings to middles and back again to give me hints of the ends. Sound discombobulated? I like to think of our life stories as multi-faceted – some sides connect, and some, are just parts on the other side of the stone.
I begin this conversation at a crossroad in life that is definitely a beginning slammed smack dab in the center of a middle. After a menagerie of career paths and episodes of self-definition, my life has taken a few twists veered toward a new branch in the middle In my early and middle professional years, I worked as a newspaper reporter following assignments and documenting countless stories of the world around me. Between those gigs, I followed my own assignments as a freelance writer documenting stories of the world around me. Later, I found myself in my favorite life role to date, and that was as an English teacher, inspiring students to follow my assignments creating stories of the world around them.
In the middle beyond that, I moved to China for a couple years, and back to America in a displaced geographical location where I must redefine myself. Sound familiar? it seems that many of the people I meet stand at that metaphorical intersection, looking both ways, then forward and backward and all around again, hoping the light will stay red for just a few minutes before changing and forcing us to readjust and redirect.
Last summer, after leaving 500 miles of inch-deep heel marks due north and relocating, I found myself at that intersection waiting for the light to change, and hoping it would stay red for just a while longer so I would not have to take the nose dive into my new life. I decided to go back to my roots and investigate my situation through dancing my fingers across a keyboard.
I began keying through on this journey by focusing on the word “resiliency” - its definition or redefinition for me. Then, just eight weeks after my big move, that traffic light changed with a lightning strike, hurricane-force winds, ice on the roads, and oncoming traffic honking chaotically and veering in every direction - all toward my family and me.
That was the day I had to face a new painful beginning, a horrific ending, and figure out how I would define resiliency and create a new and frightfully unexpected middle to my story.
That sunny and colorful October day, just two long/short months ago, the world stopped spinning when my son, the younger of two children, only boy, senior biology major, backpacker, bug catcher and releaser, musician, and dear one to all who knew him, died in his college apartment.
And such are our beginnings, middles and endings. They do not happen on monumental days, but on random Fridays when we have other plans in place. Life changes redirect the course, sometimes in the most wonderful of ways, and sometimes in the most tragic, but as it is said, the only constant in life is change, and it is up to us to face it, embrace it and power through the intersection to create a new middle to our stories, and a new sense of direction.
Tomorrow, my story will continue with a focus on resiliency - it's meaning for me, and importance in all our lives.