spent xmas with the future inlaws (which sounds totally scifi) in the south burbs. this holiday already has been most relaxing, welcoming and familial: full of tasty eats made by several different sets of beloved hands; a new stocking with “floyd” glitterscript by “grandma”; cards and packages by post including little schoolboy cookies, a cheese-making kit, and a hand-spun, -dyed, and -knitted hat from my sister. we welcome a new learning guitar into the house for the shower crooner. watched “julia and julie” this afternoon and identified so much with its chaotic women and their quietly brilliant men.
[interlude: at the moment floyd is giving the toy some love in a fashion that feels utterly wrong to us to witness.]
ten. daaaaaays. without any work schedule. open air and wide open space. we’re planning a couple of mini-adventures, getting out and about, packing cameras and setting out to discover fragile dilapidations or inspiring conglomeroddities out along the Somewheres Roadside. we’ll see what turns up, which is the point. and I’m booking some playtable time, for sure– got a start xmas eve eve– started out with wrapping and kind of took off. glue now sits drying, ideas jelling amid cluttered and resifted cutouts. I foresee several cups of cocoa, cups of tea, glasses of wine in the days ahead. this is the friday night of the long holiday stretch. staring down the double barrel of 2010 and 43– out of the aughts we go!
I have been remembering to articulate the need for TIME. just to be, time without feeling rushed or late for or behind on one thing or another. really I have missed timelessness. to have it, even in small sputtering doses and within a confined space before returning to whatever ordinary routine, defined of course in part by having a routine to return to– this feels like such a gift just now.
and quiet deeply craved… tho my inner mouth yearns to say “craven”, just all kinds of wrong meaning, obstinately meaning-full language. logic foiling the tastiness of the straight and curly sound of things. a frequent trouble in my poetry days– I’d let myself go traipsing down some nonsense for the pure auditory seduction in words, of letters thrown together in loving hodge-podge, and then wind up amounting to what, exactly? ah, yeoldesaga of sarah’s tumultuous relationship with writing– fraught with long silences and adverbial clot, the struggles with and hellyeah against meaning.
o, hello, quiet to listen through all this hubbub, the engine-starting, throat-clearing first paragraphs of getting down into the underneath and moving it forward. by gum and golly. Ima be moving it forward. that’s the deal. into the fear. right into the jaws of a host of discomforts. toward the other side, up over the wall.
Merry Christmas to you and your menfolk! :D
As nice as it is to spend time with others, sometimes you just need some time alone to let your words coalesce on the page.