my darling is the best darling ever.
pretty handmade glass and silver earrings from wolf bait in logan square.
such an excellent feller.
a spontaneous gift
whazup over he-ah
lotta silence in this little corner of the webs, I know.
when the navelly head grows too fraught, as it tends to do in turbulent periodic bouts, otherwise verbal volubility sinks into great morasses of (invisibly thrashing) silence. so this spring has been– and winter before that, and fall before that– a long season underground. some kind of transitional time, creative soil lying fallow and percolating, psychic skies overcast with dark and gruesome (self-generated) cloud cover, blusters howling, life huddled and hunkered down, all a-shiver. in the midst of which the outer world’s floral hoopla and verdant explosion of leaf only serve as insult to the injury of inner drought.
so a coupla weekends back I was poking around an andersonville thrift store while chris got his hair cut, picking up this and that in the perpetual search for, most likely, some existential explanation not to be found in chipped dishware and secondhand bloomers, when lo and behold there on a shelf sat a little red boxed set of audio cassettes for The Artists’ Way.
and it just so happens my vintage car stereo has a cassette tape player– so I’ve been listening to julia cameron during my drives to and from work– and in place of that too-frequent vortex spin of “what am I doing with my life? god, I hate this traffic/the cacophany of signage/the fleets of hermetically sealed strollers/other drivers/the rampant urban dinge”, have been submersing myself instead in sweetly spoken, at times sung, suggestions of hope and possibility. and I’ve picked back up the book itself and begun reading and doing it once again (this’ll be the third time through), beginning with Week 1.
and when I incline to self-flagellation over not being further along some self-realized and productive creative path, the artists’ way reminds me that the road of creative work is a spiral one– naturally so, like whorled seashells and fibonacci’s mystic sequence and musical octaves– and so I circle back over and again addressing familiar themes and slumps and challenges, and it’s all okay– as long as I am writing writing writing those pages every morning I am in motion, and motion is life.
2:20 a.m.
blooms on the trees once more, and windows thrown open to the night. certain birds that sing through the middle dark. on the way home from work I’ve been driving with the windows full down, warm wind whipping a cyclone of trash around the interior, inventing madcap hairstyles I check out in the rearview. more days and more days and more. the river runs foul through the center of town, flushing itself of debris again and again, posted all along with signs warning hands off, but ducks don’t read. my pillow sucks dreams into oblivion. I sit awake beneath the ticking fan, listening to engines passing, people out late in the park, a lone bird chorusing, a sudden staccato drumbeat, then nothing.
late lunch/early dinner
we <heart> club lucky.
what to say?
this has become a sad, verbally sparse little “blog”, hasn’t it?
oh, believe me, I know.
there’s this irksome compulsion to at least try to be moderately entertaining, insightful or at minimum diverting–and for the life of me these days I’m finding it hard to find faith in my own capacity to do/be so…
and, voila, object lesson in the problem: there the writing goes again drifting into GLUM just like a handful of other false starts over the last several months. by golly, as much as this doggone post wants to drift there, too, I won’t LET it.
(getting an inkling of why other vox neighbors resort to lists of things to be grateful for)
…
and, thus, reticence until I can come up with something better.
up close and personal
my beautiful, beautiful ring– pretty pictures taken by my darlin’.
It’s official
the love/hate, in all its degrees
I know one day I’ll look back and miss the cute puppyhood, but right now floyd is getting on my every last nerve– and I’m kind of looking forward to the middle-aged lap dog he’ll be.
I expect it to be an occasionally similar thing with kids– not-as-young-as-they-might-be parents kind of daydreaming of one day being emptynesters. I expect kids, if I ever have them, to kick my ass. it’s one ass-kicking I welcome, and it pretty much terrifies me.
ah, that thrill ride of caring a lot, about people, things, the work we do in this world, whatever.
I am absolutely hating being kind-of indifferent to the work I do daily. it’s not even the days that make me crazy that make me crazy– ultimately it’s simply not caring enough. I really miss feeling like I was in a position to effect the way forward in substantive ways. wouldn’t it even be nice to find one’s work meaningful? well, there’s reaching for the stars… but, concretely, I miss the high tech world and working in teams of targeted aptitudes. I miss intelligent organization and management. I miss california and north carolina for those things, and some other things.
which leads to nostalgia and the oh-so-long list of the things missed for various reasons– things, of course, from the past, rendered seemingly tame in retrospect.
the present has these intense pockets of authentic feeling and then stretches of … caring less.
I want to care more, I want more. and I stop myself continually in a hundred different ways out of the fear of change and the unknown. I’m not so much afraid of feeling a lot. I am learning that I fear being and appearing stupid (there is ego in it). and I have a concrete fear of being downright dumb. not trusting myself not to render disasters. I feel I have wrought them. the mistakes I’ve made have been rather doozies. I guess it’s the risk you run.
who wouldn’t like to be smarter and more skillful? better liked? charmed and charming? though I’ve seen those with silver spoons choke themselves with them. the risk they run.
we work with the tools we have– or we muffle our own hands with hesitation.
the hats of christmas
handmade by my sister with hand-spun and -dyed yarn
glamorous sort-of hat thingy from chris’s aunt barb
and an original creation by my love, concocted from materials onhand
ho ho holiday
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.