Good Morning...?

I was hoping last night, when I collapsed into bed at eleven, that I'd be out for a good twelve hours. It was a perfect summer night with air that was velvety and only very very slightly cool; the windows were all wide open and the sound of traffic came in clear as any etching. It was the kind of night where you sprawl in bed and get sucked down into sleep like flying through cool water (no, I do not swim ;) and usually spend some time there to surface hours later with all thirst sated.

Maybe I'm out of practice sleeping. I kept waking up.

I did get to catch the most beautiful sunrise I've seen in at least a year. It was golden apricot and pink, not clouded but a pure brilliant spill of colour across the whole sky. And, now that it's morning, the air is still and again slightly cool and very clear, not velvety and not brisk but shimmery-smooth like expensive satin. The Exotic has connected to the internet and he seems happy to see me and there is music playing in the other room.

I don't only fall in love with people, you know. I fall in love with moments, with days, and with things just as precipitously and completely.

I should probably go back to bed soon. I should probably pack for the weekend away: I need to remember to bring two litres of chocolate syrup, plants, a blanket, clothing... The mornings have always been my time, though, little magic spaces created whole and perfect and sparkling wherin there are no other people, and there is a great deal of serenity and beauty.

Maybe if the nights are always difficult this is the compensation?

I've been reading some Spider Robinson lately. It's really nice stuff, healing and buoyant, even if admittedly the writing itself is sometimes a little strange. I spent a fair amount of time meditating on the concept of God as an iron which will no doubt spill out in due course.

I certainly don't believe it's the world's job to feed people only the kinds of happiness they accept constantly until they die.

Patterns and Interludes

The Exotic is a little worried about how much, to his mind, I'm throwing myself into the lives of the Juggler and the Other Woman, how much time I'm spending there, how wholly I'm doing this.

It's almost vaguely irritating, or is it amusing? to think that he has so little experience with me. I don't do things by halves, and I would consider that what I'm doing now is the closest I do come to halves at anything. I'm not living over there completely, after all.

When I first met the SO I spent something on the order of six months constantly at his house, going home for a couple of hours every morning.

When I first met the Exotic, he spent two months straight at mine, never going home (you could plead difficulties of transcontinental traffic here but it would have happened anyhow).

Now I'm spending a little more than half of every week with the Juggler and the Other Woman.

(Here's the SO home for the morning with the possibility of Pearl Jam tickets. Mrrrr)

What does this mean? Does it mean that I submerge my identity in someone else for the intense part of a relationship, that I use it as a refuge and an escape from my life? Maybe a little bit, but at the core surely not. What am I doing, then?

Let's think about this. I feel alive, big, bright, open, and -growing- while I do this. I also feel connected. To a certain extent it probably is some form of escapism, but I do think that at the same time it's the new experience that I'm after. I want to surround the possibility of this new person, to poke myself into every nook and cranny, to see them from all angles and at all times. The pattern of a human being's life and insides is immensely complicated and it's the most interesting thing there is. I don't like being on the outside of people, so I take this time to make a nice niche for myself inside. When that niche is safe, when it's always going to be there, when it's established -- then I can leave it alone sometimes because I can always go back.

And in the interludes, in the spaces between this connection and this drinking-in of other people, I am very complete. I can see the world through many sets of eyes, I can see the world as full of such wildly diverse miracles that people take them for granted. I can feel myself like some solid, weighty object, as a presence that is settled there against the fabric of the world and bound into it.

That's the ideal, of course. Once in awhile insecurity shortcircuits me, I forget that loneliness can pass, and I flip into oscillating mode. It's nothing to blame myself for given my experience, but definitely something to set about changing with new experiences. I wonder how long this relentless assault of love and reliability will take to get taken for granted? Will it ever?

I guess all I can do is wait and see.

Garden Rhapsody, Pt II

My garden, twenty feet in the air and with no actual soil to speak of overlooking the parking lot of a low-rent apartment building, is currently the most beautiful place on Earth and quite probably beyond.

Abraham Darby is... there are no words for this. He's blooming pink with apricot and yellow washes at the base now, tons of blooms, and you can smell the scent clear across the balcony. He's leaning out the railing to show off to all the lesser beings below and sprawling this way too, and it's only the first year I've had him. He has minimal blackspot despite my persistent refusal to spray. He is the exact same colour as the sunrise this morning with each bloom slightly variable, with a button eye in the middle of some, and with the exact right arrangement to his multitude of petals. Abraham Darby, fer thosea yew thet don't get out much, is an Austin rose, a modern attempt to breed roses that have some of the look of old roses while keeping a hardy, bushlike form.

?Heritage is also blooming her pretty little head off, although I still don't know if this one is Brother Cad for sure. We'll see when he finally opens down the way but until then it does have some of the simplistic few-petals delicacy of Heritage. And doesn't have Brother Cadfael's scent, I don't think, so here's my best guess.

JFK has the most unimaginably beautiful flowers anywhere. Everyone needs this rose. Unfortunately my bush is crap, a clearance-sale thing, and I'm not going to let more than one bloom show on him this year because he needs to muster strength and grow canes. I have the unfortunate tendency to try to nurse things back to health which sometimes works but isn't the wisest with roses. Oh, well. The petals have the consistency of... wax? Really soft, really thick, amazing body to them. Incredible flower. Some nice scent. White! Buds come out green! What more could you want?

Love was an impulse buy last year the first time The Exotic went home and left me all alone. It's not really a greenstorm-type rose but it is really pretty in an enormous-flowers, bright-candy-pink-with-white-backing sort of way. The SO says he can see how it's called red. I have to admit that I haven't a clue. It's a deep pink, sure, but it's pink. It's a happy beautiful bush and also my oldest, probably some correlation there, and the flowers really are enormous and happy. Faint scent that keeps me checking for it like any behaviouralist study on random stimulation will show.

The New Yellow!!! And yes, I'm allowed to use exclamation marks like a schoolgirl. The phone rings. I roll out of bed, expecting to hear The Juggler telling me when he'll come visit. (The phone rings, as I type this. It's the Juggler telling me when he'll come visit) I roll out of bed and it's the SO's Mom. Greenstorm, she says, do you want a rosebush? I bought one for you, come down to the parking lot to pick it up.

So I now possess another rosebush, a yellow 'patio' rose of some kind or another. And, I need to motor through the shower.

And oh, ohohohoh! The Exotic may have met a girl. I hope it goes well. I hope it works. I'm so excited. I have weird twinges. He's at a BBQ with her. I love him. More later.