Well O.K.

I’ll gobble you up
like a Hostess cake
I didn’t really want in the first place.

You go bankrupt.
I hoard remaining stock in the attic.

It makes me ill to think on it.

Sweet is sweet.

Instead,
feed me tannins and
Suck my mouth dry.

What right do I have to feel unworthy,
worthy?
What’s worthy?

How can it be authentic,
when I don’t (won’t) feel?

What if my authentic
steamrolls yours?

Therein lies Suffering.
Unless, I guess…

I am you,
you, me,
your Suffering’s mine
(and Joy)?

Because I act, not of body-feeling,
but tugged by invisible
threads that tie

you

to

me.

Your reverberation in turn:
jangly-staticky-urgent-mute.

Fish bone in my throat
pricks
sticks
and disapparates to phantom feeling that I
swallow
and swallow
and swallow.

The feeling is familiar, like something I lost and learned to get by without, but haven’t forgotten. At first I didn’t think I wanted to remember what it felt like to love that way, but something in me decided I did, and I (weak soul I am) put up little protest. So when this wild feeling came around, instead of turning towards Business At Hand, I started to feed him a little daydream or sweet memory and he grew bolder.

The warm, growly fellow is now a regular guest, barging in at inopportune moments, associating himself with people and situations where he doesn’t (yet) belong. Last Saturday morning, out of the blue, he nestled up inside me, filled my belly then chest so he couldn’t be ignored. By the time I got home, he’d dug his claws into my throat til it was hard to breathe and my eyes got wet. I curled up in bed for the afternoon and placated him with poems and nostalgia.

It worked, but it’s clear this soft, fierce little orphan creature needs more to thrive.

For now, we’ll make do with brisk mornings, writing, the ocean, more red wine than is typical, listening to good music (gongs!) with our eyes closed, and lavishing attention on people and things who make us feel deeply. When the going gets especially rough, we’ll feed ourselves on busyness.

Less, maybe?  :P

It makes me look crazy, but I color-code my calendars so I can look forward or backward and understand at a glance whether I’m actually spending my time the way I want to be spending my time. There’s a whole separate spreadsheet with quarterly goals and approximate hours/week in each area. Notice the light blue: “be well” and red “my loves.” I’m lucky; these colors are actually underrepresented since they tend to overlap with a lot of the rest of my life. I work with people I love and do what I can to treat myself and my body kindly even while working.

It’s kind of like these two juicy bits, via the ever-inspiring Maria P.:

How to live. How to get the most life… . How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble all over the fields on that errand, and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax.

– Thoreau

and this:

Dividing the day between “work” and “leisure” and then measuring how many hours is spent at each activity doesn’t provide us a reliable guide to what we really care about, which is how much of our time we get to spend doing things we find rewarding and fulfilling. It turns out that many people have only a limited appetite for “leisure” in the sense of spending their days at the beach or on the golf course. Rather, they’re interested in pursuing creative or philanthropic activities that, when pursued in earnest wind up looking a lot like having a job.

– Timothy Lee

I’m thankful for my privilege.

He interrupts

the gentle creaking of the luggage bins,
the sweet steel-on-steel-swoosh-rumble.
The train cries: “I’m here, I’m here!”

He doesn’t hear;

nor see the gold glow broken
by streaking shadows of swallows diving down down between rows of corn
miniature from lack of rain.

What will his barge carry?

Containers of cream from the jerseys out to pasture?
Red barns filled with sweet hay?
A mountain of Queen-Anne’s Lace?
Blue flossy clouds painstakingly piled?

A hawk on a wire calls my attention, but

Covetous Voice

quickly restakes his claim.
Shop talk marbles plunk into blue upholstery behind my head,
together with certainty
we plunge predictably forward.