“I committed silences and darknesses to paper, I recorded the inexpressible. I took the measure of vertigo.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud, from “Delirium II. Alchemy of the Word” (tr. Jeremy Harding)
Monday afternoon. Sunny and perfectly beautiful.
I’m sitting on Brett’s computer again, and I thought that I’d try to write a real post today. The biggest problem with this computer is that he has so many filters on it that every time I try to search for something, Firefox crashes, and I have to log in to Word Press again, and it’s just a royal pain.
I just haven’t been feeling up to snuff (curious phrase, that), may be coming down with something. Chills, all over body aches, lethargy . . . and then top that off with a migraine. Yuck. Brett and I had planned to do more grocery shopping yesterday, but I just wasn’t up to it.
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably a fibromyalgia flare-up. I never think about having it until my body kind of goes off kilter and nothing seems to feel right. It’s an insidious condition; I think, though, that I’m fairly lucky in that mine isn’t as severe as I’ve heard it can be. I know of one person who is bedridden for days when he gets an attack.
Things are going well for Corey so far. The ship will probably leave Lithuania for Cape Canaveral later this week. We’ve been communicating by text, although I may have accidentally dialed him as his phone showed a missed call from me. We did speak by phone yesterday, but we’re trying to keep calls to a minimum because of the cost.
Not a lot going on around here. I really need to do the floors as there are doggy hair tumbleweeds in the corners. I look around and then skulk back to my bedroom. Noticing the dust doesn’t really help my state of mind as there is little that I can do about it at the moment. Actually, the house needs a good spring cleaning. You know, clean all of the ceiling fans, wipe down the baseboards, that kind of cleaning. I’m trying not to think about it too much.
“Our lives can’t be lived in flames.
Our lives can’t be lit like saints’ hearts, seared between heaven and earth.
……….
Lift up that far corner of the landscape,
there, toward the west.
Let some of the deep light in, the arterial kind.” ~ Charles Wright, from “Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat”
So let’s see, what’s happening? Brett is in the final stretch of this semester. He’s really enjoying his sketching class, and he’s working on a ten-minute play for creative writing. Eamonn is . . . Eamonn.
I got a nice surprise in the mail on Saturday: a woman’s group in Ohio had written to ask permission to use one of my photographs for an upcoming meeting. The theme is The Road Not Taken, and someone found the photograph I had taken and embedded with the quote from Robert Frost, which I put together for a post a few years back. Anyway, I told them that they could use it as long as they attributed, and they created a lovely bookmark to give to all of the participants.
It’s actually nice to have that kind of unsought, outside validation once in a while. As if some complete stranger has said, “Yes. I like what you’re doing here.” Serendipitous, definitely.
“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ~ Ovid
In other news . . . I’ve been trying to play with Tillie the Lab outside every day, either taking her for a walk—actually, she takes me for a walk—or playing stick with her in the front yard. She’s very good about being outside off the leash. She never runs in the street, and she doesn’t leave the yard. The physical exercise has been good for both of us.
I don’t want her to become sedentary during Corey’s absence. Playing stick involves two sticks at once: I throw one, and she retrieves it but drops it halfway back so that I’ll throw the other one. If I don’t select the sticks, she’s likely to come back with part of a tree, which she has actually done before. We play until we are both winded, and then go inside for a treat (for her, not me).
This is the excitement in my life. Actually, I’m enjoying it. It’s getting me off my butt and out into the fresh air. The walking hasn’t become regular yet, but I think that once I’m over this whatever, I can try to get back to that as we combine walking with stick throwing. I come home through the field behind the house, and I throw the stick as we cross the field. It works. I leave her off the leash until we reach the parking lot, but then put her back on as the people in the parking lot are fanatical in how they zoom in and out of the park. The last time, she carried the stick home in her mouth after I put her back on the leash. Too cute.
“i haven’t done anything
meaningful in so long
it’s almost meaningful
to do nothing” ~ Nikki Giovanni, from “Being and Nothingness”
Could I possibly bore you any more with the inane natterings of this post? As Mary Oliver says below, “last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness.” I don’t think that she was actually referring to tumbleweeds or dusting the ceiling fans, but hey, it sounds so much better as poetics than as real life.
Occasionally I remind myself that if not for Samuel Pepys and his diary, so much of the day-to-day life of old England would have been lost. Pepys (pronounced peeps) wrote about the mundane, the day-to-day life of living in London in the 17th century, but he also wrote about the big things too: the plague, the Great Fire of London.
Okay, I’m not trying to say that my musings will ever rank with Pepys’s musings in importance, especially not in an age in which anyone with a computer can deliver a diary, can jot down a journal, can breech the blogosphere . . . sorry, got a bit carried away . . . although if I recall correctly, Pepsy did spend an inordinate amount of time in coffee and ale houses. I suppose I’m just trying to say that this entry is akin to Samuel noting that he bought fresh cod at the piers—he ate fish, and I have tumbleweeds.
More later. Peace.
Music by Garrett Hedlund, “Timing is Everything” (that kind of day)
A Settlement
Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.
And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.
* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.
~ Mary Oliver
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 