Cosmos
Peace, love, and a blessed darkest and lightest to all including the swingier parts of the globe. Our longest day is around 12.5 hours, tempered by clouds, intermittent rain, and a strong breeze, with a high temperature of 28c/82f. The equanimity makes it feel closer to the center of a certain world, but out on the fringes of another one.
(A good reminder to befriend the genius loci.)
Trying to focus on leisure, // to put it as a question. What exactly is it, where does it begin and end in my life?
Why are its edges so blurry?
Also, the idea of spending time. What happens to time if it’s wasted? Does something turn into nothing? Or was it nothing already, so nothing wasted, afterall?
We took a wrong turn in Denpasar today. I did the whole thing where a bule (following my husband, who was following the app) drives into a tiny, urban street that is also a crowded fruit market, and barely squeezes the car through the parked motorbikes and fruit shopping traffic. It was the first time that happened. We did ok. Balinese are so relaxed about stuff like this. People are just glad to see your smiling face.
As I drive, I point out a child hanging on the back of a motorbike, wearing a red and white school uniform, but no shoes. He tells me stories about being hungry, growing up in East Java. How neighbors would invite him in for dinner, to feed him. He always had flip-flops to wear to school, but his mom would get furious if he got his clothes dirty too fast. Kids would do their laundry at school, hand-washing and hanging outside the classroom to dry, so their moms didn’t get angry. (Even the bad kids were afraid of “the moms”.) He had friends that didn’t have flip-flops, because they were poor, so they went to school barefoot. (They didn’t have electricity yet in the village.)
I ask him which is worse, being rich or poor? He says, being rich.
(I’ve heard many of his stories before. We revisit them together, a few at a time. I collect them in an inner archive.)
Living here, I often feel a mixture of awe and loss, at being surrounded by so many stories that aren’t mine to tell, that otherwise slip away. This should probably be felt everywhere, and with everyone. But it isn’t.
Garbage has special metaphorical significance, here. In its apparent self-infliction, its mindless accumulation. (There is a widespread assumption that plastic dissolves back into the earth, like leaves.)
(Wouldn’t that be nice?)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu π
A metaphor for the parts and a different metaphor for the whole, is a human being. // That old triple goddess, the zoon logon echon.
Or like Prometheus holding desperately onto his chains, while his insides are being picked at, so he doesn’t fall into a void. (Permitting a small symbolic alteration..)
I sometimes think about the central mediations of the major Abrahamic religions (as far as I understand them) and how those must be key to the logic of their respective theologies. For Judaism, the covenant. For Christianity, a mother and a father becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child, and/or the passion. For Islam, the messenger.
It gives me some confidence that, even though it seems like a geographical accident, I (we) found my way to the messenger, (the messenger found a way to me?), when a messenger has already accomplished the most important mediations in my life, over and over again, clothed in different bodies and texts and appearances. My life’s passion and work has been the search for and interpretation of messages. Now, I am offered a message of Islam, which is a message of Peace (as-Salam, as in, assalamualaikum). As a world composed of messages, the messaging world has been very kind, to me. It has cradled me, (I always think of Thich Nhat Han, counseling me to cradle my anger), to make the anger inside of me feel loved and cared for, that has been the love and care of the messenger, patiently sending messages. Waiting for me to find them, and listen to them, and discover their sense, and follow them. Until, at last, a message of peace.
A messenger is very close to the Logos. A messenger is an apt prophet for writers and above all translators. A messenger is a teacher who doesn’t teach, a (musical) counterpoint to learning, especially from afar. A messenger carries a message and it’s not, strictly speaking, her own. A messenger might bring the news, or she might bring a message of peace.
The “seeming” shifts. It stops seeming like a geographical accident, and begins to seem like (reveal itself as) destiny. As it does, other things fall into places, that were already falling, as a planetary whole. Like a webbing of streams and rivers flowing into lakes and then oceans.
(I have a tradition.)
A message can come (and go) in many forms. Its essence is in its (departure and) arrival (and in the differences between these things). A message is manifold and fitting.
What I feel, when I feel my feelings, is resonance, and then humility, and then gratitude. (Resonance is with study, which is measured, but all three are somewhat infinite feelings.) That a message might reach me from across the entire world, in a way that feels “right on time”, (a message delivered is always on time), and these are the messages that have.
(I am a jihadi.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.
One might feel alone, or imagine oneself joining a chorus of the unheard. Every song about war is longing in its heart to be a song about peace. (The flow and the solidarity of Music.)
This may be obvious, // but as everybody knows, obviousness is relative.
When the thing that would make you happy has been planned out of your civilization, this can mean something different for everybody.
For no reader do I recommend fascism or joining cults or eating an animal.
(Some things can be written in stone. Others should be written only in wax, or on the wind, etc.)
Ten roosters crowing is not just a metaphor, it is also real. Hence, the βnewsβ category. There will be ten roosters crowing, at my house.
(We will have to name them, I guess. The nine juveniles. The dad is already named Frankie. Grace is the Hen. βFun factβ, Grace and Frankie is a tv show starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Frankie is the name of Lily Tomlinβs character.)
When I don’t use an emoji, the mood that I am communicating is, “I am not in the mood to express myself with a cartoon right now.”
(I added that to my emoji dictionary.) (For a minute, I got confused between roosters and emojis. There are a lot of both!)
To communicate in writing requires synthesis between writing as yourself and writing for “the reader”.
“The reader” is only ever inside your head. It is almost absolutely plural. Hmm.
(Inside your head, “the reader” can feel nearly synonymous with “the writer”β¦ also, in a blogging neighborhood.)
To every one of you, I have something different to say.
To every one of you, thank youππ» for showing me ways to break out of my civilization.
(That’s what I look for, in blogs.)
β¦βalmost absolutely pluralββ¦
Salam to allπ
Sky from home (9). // Selamat purnamaπ€
This is a blog.
blog (n.) “online journal,” 1998, short for weblog (attested from 1993, in the sense “file containing a detailed record of each request received by a web server”), from (World Wide) Web (n.) + logos (n.), Ancient Greek for “word, speech, discourse, account, ratio, reason, understanding”.*Β
//
The Logos is alive, a garden too.
A blog is not alive. It is, at times,
unfinished artifact.
βββββββββββββββInsyaAllah,
a blog is a corpse
with connectivity.
The time and place
of a blog is
(A timestamp is
no measure,
but a mark
βββββββββββββββof irony.)
element undefined.
The time and place
of a blog is
(not) in
βββββββββββββββa cloud.
The time and place
of a blog is,
as if,
βββββββββββββββnot here,
βββββββββββββββnot now.
Then where? Chicks hunger. As a family
of elsewhere-dwellers, scavenged absence is
the flavor of their nutriment. They keep
their bodies close to Grace, and Grace makes place
of wayward-turning, gathering to breast:
(What we desire,
ββββββββββββthe shape of Adam.
What we fear,
ββββββββββββthe shape of Adam.
What we would share,
ββββββββββββthe shape of Adam.
What we would be,
ββββββββββββecstatic automatic.)
Deep earth listens through thrum of Polaris,
impregnable flame seals at southern crux.
Burgundy rivers into sunset cup
cascade, return as easterly promise
of flight, and summon orphans back,
(βnot yet. In blip of night,
we are testing,
turning,
always
βββββββββββββββin beta.
We will be
ten roosters
crowing
βββββββββββββββin beta.
Our logic is
loud and in-
fallible,
βββββββββββββββin beta,
pieced from the
scraps of our
βββββββββββββββfalling,
βββββββββββββββfeathered,
βββββββββββββββrapturous
fight.
We are roosters,
ββββββββββββinventing eggs.
We are eggs, re-
ββββββββββββsurrecting hens.
What we share
ββββββββis dabbling
βββββββββββββββin death.
A blog is,
ββββββaerial interred,
βββββββββββββββa corpse
with connectivity,
βββββββββββββββinsyaAllah,)
from rosy graves, whence armies form, of light.
//
*The “real”/recorded etymology, which this is not, is interesting, and if you don’t already know, you might like to read about it. The word comes by way of a ship’s log, so-called based on a nautical technique of using a floating piece of wood to measure the speed of a ship.
Cold damp dark of night ascends, is parted, penetrated by light like swords of angels stabbing through the atmosphere. The remainder is patched parts of gray. Saturday morning is going on, tiny chip-chatterings in coconut trees, sounding roosters-out the four directions, cats glut themselves on breakfast then seek pools of fire to glory-bathe. Grace and chicks burst across the yard in their boisterous reply to dawn.
Sitting, puzzling, how far into (this) the sun can go, is the waiting question. Sorting through some past impressions and interpretations, shifts in orientation, momentous or errant conclusions drawn. Awareness of other entities, not oneself, inside a self, creeping through cracks and chiselling away in stealthy corners, strangers. Emerging from logic-fogs in desolate confusion, at baffled love, not knowing how one got there or where one left oneself, uncovered. Feeling for order among untrusted elements, a haunted shipwreck and the old debate over the weather, over whether any of this is salvageable, after rain. Leaning on others.
Strength of sun settles as clouds knit back together. There are periods of shadow, periods of heat, hammers sounding from the outer rooms, and weary resignation to the unborn symbols whose beauty-queen machinations dictate progress over the liabilities of (tear-stained, tangled, raw) labile perception. Letting go, carrying on.
Orchid and Traveller //
Lost selves-of-sand resolve as empty time.
As moon that disappeared, or star that failed
to be itself, forging light like iron
chains, and dragging dredged-up planetary
prisoners into debtor’s knowledge. Some
girls worship diamonds, some spilt blood. Of gods,
gravity hallowed flings them, winged, past
the fixed orbit of that rotten town, where
sanctity is suicide, reconceived
as end, turned upside-down. Which ones
are wholesome hunger, scarlet stain, or junk
jetsam, are judged by what rags come undone
in passing. I come close, closer to you.
Here quivers the pink rabbit’s nose, to taste
on solar breezes dying destinies
of sight. Soft lips on eye. And the breathing
body of a ram, inside her, twin horns
repenting tearfully the pious act
of girls, as woman, lost for ‘swords, that shot
their bleak comet close-as-chiasmus to
the split-fruit sundae, cool and creamy core
of chocolate-drizzled, measure-melting Love.
//
(Submitted to Septemberβs IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Matthew Graybosch a.k.a. Starbreaker. The topic is βPower Underneath Despairβ.)
Anger, which is of love and loss, is a dragon (dangerous and dialectical) that you tame, and then ride, through cloud tops scattering rainbows in fizzy, kaleidoscopic patterns at your passing. Its yolk is what heats you from the inside, tears melting as rain into rivulets down clefts of leaf-patterned veins toward the womb of the earth, crying (of servant or master, at sound of own voice), in no color but all color, as metal, water, woodwind, swansong of phoenix, cradled in crescent. You rested there, to watch. From a distance, you beheld charcoal and ashes scattering through atmospheres, burnt snow falling, lining the sponge-tunnels of lungs and gills with glass splinters all colors of black, laying it down until pelvic bones overflow as beggars' bowls, abundantly silent, a prelude to epochal winter. Landscapes, exhausted by element, ripple below you as satin sheets of mineral reflection, and smooth, sonic transitions from error into the opposite of whatever it was you believed, rounding into sustainable orbits, or perfect planetary poems. It’s a chorus of angels, just being themselves, being holy. Those who were decent and kind, who believed with their undine hearts that fishwives were wealthy, and who buried in bosom only what or whom all could be borne by the cosmic queen of moderation, with her gardener’s tools and her grey eyes fading, at staggered horizons, to gold.
(// Fire-egg.)
To the alien, from another side. // Earth used to be the most beautiful place.
You could go running, under-leaf, through waist-deep tangled-grass jungle, wondering about snakes but not stopping because you had lost something in there, your heart breaking along fault lines in egg shells of worry and the impossibility of searching this dense pocket of hiding. The sharp limits of eyes. (It could start to rain and the drops, clear pinpoints and gashes on your naked arms, would feel body-temperature, not quite cool.) You would give birth to yourself, clambering out from staggered layers of green into a rice field, shifting pale to yellow, (footsteps uneven in cracking, caked mud, swaying in) needle-soft fibers cascading with grain. A sea of it. (It could start pouring, but the heavy, like wind-whipped-metal, grey holds.) Do you go left, right, forward into the field, or back to the jungle? (Ok, good choice. Turn to page 56.)
Words come from behind you, you don’t understand those, but fearful fluttering heartbeats, you do. From underneath places, trembling invisibles look back, lines of sight never meeting, from too many directions. You never held what happened, there. Life was snuffed out in missed-crossings, disappeared, or worse, waited past the faltering light, as if to be found again, hoping but knowing, skin and memory growing thin and colder, until heart stopped. It gave up, it was over, but then, you were found. A strange struggle, distracting but home again, having made plans that seem irrelevant, at this point. Washed a sink full of dishes. Sat on the floor, scratching stray sentences in dust. It would be dark, but not raining, and anyway, you would be under the solid wood floor of another world, with footsteps relying heavily on the grammar of your (earthy) answer.
Somebody who loved you might bring you food that was soft and crunchy and salty and sweet. And a lit stick of honeyed incense. Parts of you would fall back in right places. You could remove clothes, find yourself misshapen, and step into a hot shower under pitch-navy sky. Becoming twin bodies, ocean and sorrow in a breathy coccoon against deep space. I would work my fingers into your scalp, and medicinal smells of sudsy substances would rinse off in slippery streams to either side of your (kissed) face. Scrub around ears. You could be clean. (And the miracle of that.) You could put on clean clothes. You could slip between clean sheets underneath a comforter blanket that was the perfect thickness for this night’s chill, with just enough weight to let you feel, well, enough. Plus a cat, on your legs. Yes, cats were amazing. You could cover your eyes, and drift off, as a warm hand slipped softly into yours. Everything that was lost, would be home, would be dreamt or forgotten, singing or held, would be tucked under feathers, bed scattered with blossoms, and the waning crescent would disappear into the better side of night.
One felt gratitude, and mistook it for fear. That is how beautiful Earth was. We couldn’t contain the joy it put into us, so we turned it upside-down, into fear.
I love being an animal. // As I sit down to write, in the bedroom, there begins an intensifying chip-chip, bok-bok from outside the front door… getting closer… going past. Oh! I do a little inward cheer.
Our house is partly open to gardens, which surround it on three sides, and these are terraced into different segments, to match the terracing of the farmland. Grace usually begins every morning in the “romance garden”, at one top corner, then works her way down to the lowest level, and increasingly, around to the other side of the house. But to go down, the chicks have to flap down a 1-1.5m drop, and while flapping-falling baby chickens are superheroes, they can’t flap-fall back up again.
So typically, as it gets dark, we catch them and bring them back to the brooding house at night, in the “romance garden”. And although they love their house, (Grace cannonballs into the nest and starts primping in the most self-determined, self-righteous way), the catching process isn’t really enjoyable. It involves E. grabbing Grace first, and as soon as he gets her she screams with the rage of Achilles, and he takes her to the hen house. Then I run everywhere chasing fluffy handfulls of zooming, mind-piercing cheeps, to jumble together in a box, count to make sure there are nine, and carry the box up the walls, grass staining hands and knees, back up to their house, for safety and calm and eventually quiet, which takes me a minute. Okay, so it sounds fun. But they self-express in ways that make it obvious, they hate nothing more than to be separated from each other.
Grace is smart. Mother knows that the humans do not like chickens in the hallway. Chickens in the hallway were a big “no”, in the days of B.H.C.E (before-hatched-chicks era). (Because poop.) But we have perhaps, in an undisclosed manner, changed our minds about this. Speaking seriously, as chicken servants, it’s important to us that they can “put themselves to bed”. And to traverse the human-house hallway is almost the only way for Grace to circumnavigate with her chicks through the gardens and levels, and get them back “home”, on their own. (There is another way, but it is slightly more advanced, somewhat under construction, and not nearly as fun for the chickens, probably, yet. It will “become fun” before there are ten roosters using our main hallway as their favorite place to nongkrong. Believe.)
So again, now. I leap up (!) to watch their transgression from the teras. Grace, who has finally built the courage, leads her chicks through the hallway of the house, past me, “that meddlesome woman”. And mom surely feels like a criminal as she does it, from her extreme expression. No, I will re-interpret. She looks at me like I’m the one getting away with a very embarassing murder. Ok, namaste, Grace.
The final obstacle is a quick leap over the goldfish canal. Bloop, bloop, bloop. And finally, after a grand tour of the premises, the hen and chicks emerge from the hallway out into the “romance garden”, which is their home garden, with the brooding house, where they sleep at night. Safe and sound. It is so familiar to all of them. They burst in nine directions, running and celebrating, peeping about it from all around the little piles of rocks, chukk-chukking with success. It’s a party. Grace is feeling extremely proud right now. I give her a lot of verbal praise and celebration. The first time, going all the way around, to bring yourself and your babies back home. Animals really feel these moments. (And βAlhamdulillah.β I love being an animal.)
Revelation. Every day, she takes them all the way around, shooting for home in the late afternoon. As cool shadow overtakes the green. Grace is following the sun.
(β¦ Salam to all.)
“Being Balinese //
is
ββso
βββmuch
ββββupacara.
From being born,
until
βββββ you
ββββββ die,
β βββββ Mas!"
is what he said.
With a surprised grin on his wrinkled, spotted face, when he said it, light-hearted, calm, and satisfied to be heard, or not heard. He was sitting in the bale, at the sangga on top of the banjar building, leaning on a post. In front of him was a box-shaped table with offerings, flowers in woven grass dishes, sticky rice jaje, and a spiral-bound notebook, slightly weathered, on the pages of which were words, in the Balinese language, to a song or prayer. He had just been singing into a microphone without looking at that notebook. He had finished the song, switched off the microphone, and set it carefully on the table-box. His face glowed as it dawned on him.
“Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born, until you die, Mas!”
(“Upacara” is ceremony. “Mas” is a polite form of address for my Javanese husband. He looked back and forth between us, when he said it.) We laughed, and my interpretation was that we laughed because the look on his face was so joyous, it must be a joke. E. agreed, making sure I understood, that this great-great-grandfather had just shared with us a really good joke.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to be writing. Sometimes I dissociate at upacara, especially when there’s something unsettling. This one had begun with a nice conversation, while sitting on a mat next to a young Balinese girl with the roundest, deepest eyes, in matching pink sarung and kebaya, who touched her toes with mine, wiggling. As if by accident. But the conversation was with a man from the next village over. He articulately was exchanging acquaintance with E., in a way I could mostly understand, which always comes across as extra considerate. The man was holding a slender white goose. As he listened to my husband, he examined the goose. With two touching fingers, he smoothed a stray feather on its head. He stroked the length of the goose’s body, to calm it, as it shifted with fear.
The goose would momentarily be sacrificed.
I never know what to do with my face, in these situations. What I deeply wish I could do is look into the goose’s eyes and talk to it. To tell it, I see you. I don’t care how that sounds, it’s what I really want to do. But I am a guest. It wouldn’t be right, to my hosts. It wouldn’t be fair, to my husband. So in fact, I am hiding. I don’t want anyone to notice how hard it is, for me, to look anywhere but at the goose. (The discipline of eyes is an essential part of dancing, here.) So I shut off my face. The little girl’s toes are still casually touching my own. But the goose is wrapped in a piece of fabric, around its middle, and the friendly man is re-wrapping it, securing it, as if with care. The wrapped piece of fabric is the sarung of the goose, it is dressed respectfully in sarung, just like me.
Just like all of us.
I bring it up with my husband later, the goose, I cry a little, and we talk about the words of the great-great-grandfather. He is the oldest man in our village, he is ninety-eight, we have sat with him before and nongkrong(ed) as he was holding and caring for his newborn great-great-granddaughter, a very cute and fat baby with diamond studs in her milk caramel ears. E. is impressed that the old man told the joke, and we were the only ones who laughed, not the Balinese people sitting nearby. Me, too. But the spritely old man had addressed it to us, and other people nearby had been distracted, eating. So it didn’t really seem spoken for them.
I keep thinking about the old man’s words, and bringing them up with E., to hear him tell me again. “Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born… until you die, Mas!” E. says, with the right expression. And we laugh. It reminds me of the look on his face, the suspense and the gesture. How, when he said it, he referred to all this, and he referred also to himself. “Upacara, from birth, until death.”
Eveningtime in the sawah, the last night of Odalan, and a sliver of almond light hangs in the east, against periwinkle into deep lavender haze. Chill air floods from the highlands and mist spills out from ravines. The voices of elders carry, again from the banjar, across cloudswept rice fields, and coconut palms are sighing, tidal, in the shifting breeze. They’ve been singing every night, for more than a week. That’s his voice, I know it now.
Sweet smoke-smudged, broken flowers in hair, rice pressed on third eye and throat, sacred water splashed, with mark of goddess on your arm. So many words for how it hurts to let go. The same way it hurts to watch a goose be soothed by a man who’s about to slit its breast and spill its blood, in service to powers that will chase away bad spirits. Compassion is the key to sacrifice, this is what you say, and you hate it. And you are supposed to hate it. And you will wonder at that, but you will do it anyway, you will let yourself be given. Because your life doesn’t belong to you, at all, in the way you believe. Not in a way that will ever make you happy, or good. Not the part of you that hurts like that. And it was a joke, spoken by a man with only a few teeth left. And in his smile, it was an explanation. For both of you, but especially, the stranger.
Tiresias, back and forth between man and woman, gains inner sight through the cruel magic of mutilation. Again and again, verse after verse, the great-great-grandfather sings. There’s something I was, and something I am becoming, he is singing with a grandmother, her voice, trembling, his voice, alive. A steady, alternating song, words weaving between hidden constellations. Nobody who can hear him is as old as he is. I have seen him now, on the roof of the banjar, and I imagine him there, both hands holding the microphone, his eyes half-closed, not needing the book. I say to E., we will go to his funeral. E. says, yes, of course we will.
What I actually want, is that we go to his one-hundredth birthday party. I believe that we will make it there, first. But I don’t know at all, what to bring, that will be an appropriate gift.
There is nothing in this world that is actually straight.
(Isn’t that right?)
(One still loves the geometry of Euclid,
which manages somehow to have nothing,
and everything, to do with all that.)
ΞΌΞΏΟ Οικὴν ΟοίΡι ΞΊΞ±α½Ά αΌΟΞ³Ξ¬ΞΆΞΏΟ . // Mousiken poiei kai ergazou. // Make music and work at it.
(This message comes to Socrates repeatedly in his dreams, as Plato describes in the Phaedo, (at 60e6), which takes place on the day of Socrates' death by hemlock. Socrates also describes himself as experimenting with his interpretation of the message.
This is an example of a daimonic message, in Diotima’sβ¨ sense of daimon, which is something that goes in between the human and the divine. One might keep it as a mantra, or reminder, subject to interpretationβ¦)
The Poem
ὦ ΟίλΡ ΦααΏΞ΄ΟΞ΅, Οοῠδὴ ΞΊΞ±α½Ά ΟΟθΡν;
Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from?
//
Holding (with love, and so
gently) dear Phaedrus
(my day, light-ephemera)
my first and undying
metaphor, for
holding (with love, and so
longing) as asking
(as humbled-home-making)
the perfected question
to keep you. Pan,
beloved, as the drawing-
together (from the inside)
of meaning, and lover
as embrace (from the
outside) of horizon, sun-
set to sunrise, as all-time,
is the heavy becoming light-
as-boundary at the edge
of a world. We are there,
together:
β β ββββthe hand
and the what-would-be-
held.
( As nature
I am birthing and dying
unquestionable irresponsive
a fleeing, hiding and
by-many-wanted thing. )
( As human
I am messy, interminable
a political and personal
history of hysteria, making
and remembering, desiring
and deceiving, a restlessly
in-between
word.
A fool and a monster,
my pillaged possessions
are images and accounts
of war, and music
is how I play failure
as comedy, as a
question for a problem
with a deadly and un-
summarizable sound. )
( As god,
I am end (of motion),
I am source (of motion),
I am being (of motion),
I am (hungry
βββfor motion),
β β ββββββI am
βββmay-we-be
love. )
Morningtime, in a garden. And what is
this, that was laid in my lap? That is si-
lent but asking, that seems sent, but scatters
leafing-out patterns of my un-formed self,
harmonic. I need to know. Is it male
or female, flesh-fire of creature, salad
scrumptious and/or ambrosial bane? Shall I
eat it, be eaten by it, become it
or come into dust, be taken, wind-swept
and tearful, or reborn as clean, unseen
green, after all? I must know. I cannot
not know its reflecting, it blooms when I
touch it, it shivers, it is water-light,
earth-dispersing, kaleidoscope versing,
tongue-teasing shadow of radiant tree.
//
(About.)
Pan //
(Is it)
the shiver
that
passes through your body
(to endings from beginning)
when
you make the connection
(from ending to beginnings)
and then realize
it isnβt you
who made it
(?)
Sometimes, to get back on the right path, you have to circumnavigate the globe.
As time persists in circularity, I wonder (again) what makes this morning different from the last. There are two spider bites on my leg. (Each one two dots of red, making four dots total, with pink smudges of irritation around them.) There is dirty laundry I left soaking, for putting in the wash today. This morning, there is no specific sun, just bright cloud we seem to be a part of. Being-in-cloud is not the best for drying clothes. But the sky changes quickly here, so I, perhaps recklessly, forge ahead, and start the load in the machine.
Sometimes the cloud comes down and eats us, from above, from its permanence, further up the island’s altitude. It can be days or a week with no direction to the light. Cloud also soaks up sound. I’m accompanied now mostly by the shushing, rolling rhythms of the washing machine, nearby. It occurs to me, this is one of the less problematic (almost comforting?) of the machines. Yes, it works. So I can focus on this thing here. I like it and I almost trust the washing machine. (The sun is another matter, here’s hoping happily to be surprised.)
After purple salad.