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greenstormMorning again. The poem goes:
Whether it's sunny or not, it's sure
To be enormously complex—
Trees or streets outdoors, indoors whoever you share,
And yourself, thirsty, hungry, washing,
An attitude towards sex.
No wonder half of you wants to stay
With your head dark and wishing
Rather than take it all on again:
Weren't you duped yesterday?
Things are not orderly here, no matter what they say.
But the clock goes off, if you have a dog
It wags, if you get up now you'll be less
Late. Life is some kind of loathsome hag
Who is forever threatening to turn beautiful.
Now she gives you a quick toothpaste kiss
And puts a glass of cold cranberry juice,
Like a big fake garnet, in your hand.
Cranberry juice! You're lucky, on the whole,
But there is a great deal about it you don't understand.
~Poem About Morning, William Meredith
I created some order this morning: dumped out all the empties and glasses, put the bottles out in the back alley, threw out a bunch of party trash, I'm doing a bunch of laundry now: towels and sheets. I'll really miss having in-house laundry where I can wake up and just toss my sheets in the machine. If I end up at Angus' place there's a laundromat right downstairs; I wonder if they have drop-off service?
I'm feeling pretty okay. I think I slept a full eight hours last night, and I had a fantastic and very soul-nourishing day yesterday. I need to keep going to bed earlyish. It works. I really regret missing the show last night, but not as much as I would have regretted missing sleep and waking up a little more centered.
Pablo Neruda wrote:
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
Little by little, little by little. I've been repeating life is a process to myself lately. It helps me to find perspective because I can feel that I've come so far, but that I've got some distance to cover yet. Because of this it reminds me that I'm not stuck right where I am right now, I don't need to stay here and I won't stay here. It won't always be like this. That reassures me, and I can go on to follow Jack Gilbert's advice: we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world he says, and fuck it, I'm nothing if not stubborn. It's all a matter of pointing it in the right direction. I'm finding my other land.
When Karen and Angus broke up and I was trying to comfort him, I sent him the breakup-comfort poem. You know,
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Life After Love, Derek Walcott
I've always had a person in that role, some Other Person to smile at, to come home to, to share with. Now I find I'm swinging around a bit, trying to orient it: not on people, because people really aren't big enough or reliable enough to contain it as steadfastly and constantly as I'd like (well, perhaps it's more fair to say the ones I want most aren't) but on stuff. Now, this isn't where it should end up, but it's an interesting process to watch. It wants to center on home, a place that is mine, created inside by my hands and shaped to fit me uniquely. It wants to center on gardening, on service to the earth if you will and the interaction with plants and life systems. These things are feeling much more important to me, and their prioritisation kind of rises up like a shell around me that keeps people at a little bit of a distance.
I think it's a bit of a healthy distance. I've always been an intimacy junkie (how often I've written this since I've coined the term six or eight years ago!) and within the last few years I've also learned to do, and to enjoy, the social round. Now I'll settle into the middle distance for awhile. It's easy to do because it's where people are settling with me. In some ways it feels a little crippled, a little broken: contact but not full-on walking-in-each-others'-skin contact. In other ways it's nice: more people can be included in it because it's incident-based rather than relationship-based and it's not so damn complicated and doesn't stir so much sense of duty and entitlement.
It's an awkward way to live for me right now, like wearing a new pair of jeans that's so stiff and hasn't been broken in yet. I think it'll break in, though.
This entry reads like a student's classroom assignment: read three poems and respond to them one to three paragraphs each. I'm done with the poems now, though.
Yesterday I hung out with Piotr for awhile and then Ellen and Adrian. All these people are super-awesome, and both Piotr and Ellen are plant people. Piotr was also super excited when I told him about my pottery wheel (score another point for him). He and I did some floofy fun design stuff on his garden (are espalier apples too much work for you? That corner needs something that won't bother the neighbors but covers the space, how about a plum tree? Why don't you move those rhodos to the back fence and put a cherry tree there? Maybe take this bed out and around like this and cut out the lawn there, leave the lawn there, and put flagstones here?) and then wandered around Cedar Rim nursery for two hours until we were slightly sunstroked/sunburnt/thirst (what a lovely day it was! Like summer!) and I didn't buy a single thing. My abbreviated want list looks like this, though:
*Roses (at $35/each): teasing georgia, abraham darby, golden celebration, love, melody parfumee = $175
*Clematis (at $15/each): perle d'azure, multi-blue, duchess of edinburgh, blue ravine, guernsey cream, and there were two more japanese varieties = $105
*Camellia sinensis teabreeze PINK(!!!) = $15
*There was this yellow magnolia = $180
*Fruit trees (at $35/each) = two varieties of apricot, one of peach, three plums, four figs, three pawpaws, two mulberries (silly girl, mulberries can't be grown on a balcony, nor can magnolia!), one cherry (ann something?) = $560
*Concord grape vine = $10
*Issei kiwi = $20
*Arbutus unedo = $60
*Japanese maples = I didn't count, thank gods.
*Strawberries, sweet sicily, blood sorrel, chocolate mint, orange mint, peppermint, margarita mint, apple mint, angelica, lavender, thyme, rosemary, oregano, tarragon, horseradish, raspberries, summer savory = $60
If we pare the fruit tree list down some (mulberries!? I've gone crazy!), all this is do-able on the balcony at 42nd (which is the new designation for Angus' place, dammit) and it'll leave some room for tomatoes, okra, greens, my current bamboo (they had sucky bamboo there and I didn't want any, haha), a water feature, and a hammock. And really, who could ask for more than that? Well, an automagic watering system might be advisable, but yannow, you take what you can get.
And it wouldn't be all that expensive, especially if I can deal without the magnolia, if I can wait on the maples, and use pots and soil from work.
Okay, this has taken way longer than I expected, gonna head off for my day now and add merely that it was super-amazing-wonderful to hang out with Ellen again.
Whether it's sunny or not, it's sure
To be enormously complex—
Trees or streets outdoors, indoors whoever you share,
And yourself, thirsty, hungry, washing,
An attitude towards sex.
No wonder half of you wants to stay
With your head dark and wishing
Rather than take it all on again:
Weren't you duped yesterday?
Things are not orderly here, no matter what they say.
But the clock goes off, if you have a dog
It wags, if you get up now you'll be less
Late. Life is some kind of loathsome hag
Who is forever threatening to turn beautiful.
Now she gives you a quick toothpaste kiss
And puts a glass of cold cranberry juice,
Like a big fake garnet, in your hand.
Cranberry juice! You're lucky, on the whole,
But there is a great deal about it you don't understand.
~Poem About Morning, William Meredith
I created some order this morning: dumped out all the empties and glasses, put the bottles out in the back alley, threw out a bunch of party trash, I'm doing a bunch of laundry now: towels and sheets. I'll really miss having in-house laundry where I can wake up and just toss my sheets in the machine. If I end up at Angus' place there's a laundromat right downstairs; I wonder if they have drop-off service?
I'm feeling pretty okay. I think I slept a full eight hours last night, and I had a fantastic and very soul-nourishing day yesterday. I need to keep going to bed earlyish. It works. I really regret missing the show last night, but not as much as I would have regretted missing sleep and waking up a little more centered.
Pablo Neruda wrote:
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
Little by little, little by little. I've been repeating life is a process to myself lately. It helps me to find perspective because I can feel that I've come so far, but that I've got some distance to cover yet. Because of this it reminds me that I'm not stuck right where I am right now, I don't need to stay here and I won't stay here. It won't always be like this. That reassures me, and I can go on to follow Jack Gilbert's advice: we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world he says, and fuck it, I'm nothing if not stubborn. It's all a matter of pointing it in the right direction. I'm finding my other land.
When Karen and Angus broke up and I was trying to comfort him, I sent him the breakup-comfort poem. You know,
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Life After Love, Derek Walcott
I've always had a person in that role, some Other Person to smile at, to come home to, to share with. Now I find I'm swinging around a bit, trying to orient it: not on people, because people really aren't big enough or reliable enough to contain it as steadfastly and constantly as I'd like (well, perhaps it's more fair to say the ones I want most aren't) but on stuff. Now, this isn't where it should end up, but it's an interesting process to watch. It wants to center on home, a place that is mine, created inside by my hands and shaped to fit me uniquely. It wants to center on gardening, on service to the earth if you will and the interaction with plants and life systems. These things are feeling much more important to me, and their prioritisation kind of rises up like a shell around me that keeps people at a little bit of a distance.
I think it's a bit of a healthy distance. I've always been an intimacy junkie (how often I've written this since I've coined the term six or eight years ago!) and within the last few years I've also learned to do, and to enjoy, the social round. Now I'll settle into the middle distance for awhile. It's easy to do because it's where people are settling with me. In some ways it feels a little crippled, a little broken: contact but not full-on walking-in-each-others'-skin contact. In other ways it's nice: more people can be included in it because it's incident-based rather than relationship-based and it's not so damn complicated and doesn't stir so much sense of duty and entitlement.
It's an awkward way to live for me right now, like wearing a new pair of jeans that's so stiff and hasn't been broken in yet. I think it'll break in, though.
This entry reads like a student's classroom assignment: read three poems and respond to them one to three paragraphs each. I'm done with the poems now, though.
Yesterday I hung out with Piotr for awhile and then Ellen and Adrian. All these people are super-awesome, and both Piotr and Ellen are plant people. Piotr was also super excited when I told him about my pottery wheel (score another point for him). He and I did some floofy fun design stuff on his garden (are espalier apples too much work for you? That corner needs something that won't bother the neighbors but covers the space, how about a plum tree? Why don't you move those rhodos to the back fence and put a cherry tree there? Maybe take this bed out and around like this and cut out the lawn there, leave the lawn there, and put flagstones here?) and then wandered around Cedar Rim nursery for two hours until we were slightly sunstroked/sunburnt/thirst (what a lovely day it was! Like summer!) and I didn't buy a single thing. My abbreviated want list looks like this, though:
*Roses (at $35/each): teasing georgia, abraham darby, golden celebration, love, melody parfumee = $175
*Clematis (at $15/each): perle d'azure, multi-blue, duchess of edinburgh, blue ravine, guernsey cream, and there were two more japanese varieties = $105
*Camellia sinensis teabreeze PINK(!!!) = $15
*There was this yellow magnolia = $180
*Fruit trees (at $35/each) = two varieties of apricot, one of peach, three plums, four figs, three pawpaws, two mulberries (silly girl, mulberries can't be grown on a balcony, nor can magnolia!), one cherry (ann something?) = $560
*Concord grape vine = $10
*Issei kiwi = $20
*Arbutus unedo = $60
*Japanese maples = I didn't count, thank gods.
*Strawberries, sweet sicily, blood sorrel, chocolate mint, orange mint, peppermint, margarita mint, apple mint, angelica, lavender, thyme, rosemary, oregano, tarragon, horseradish, raspberries, summer savory = $60
If we pare the fruit tree list down some (mulberries!? I've gone crazy!), all this is do-able on the balcony at 42nd (which is the new designation for Angus' place, dammit) and it'll leave some room for tomatoes, okra, greens, my current bamboo (they had sucky bamboo there and I didn't want any, haha), a water feature, and a hammock. And really, who could ask for more than that? Well, an automagic watering system might be advisable, but yannow, you take what you can get.
And it wouldn't be all that expensive, especially if I can deal without the magnolia, if I can wait on the maples, and use pots and soil from work.
Okay, this has taken way longer than I expected, gonna head off for my day now and add merely that it was super-amazing-wonderful to hang out with Ellen again.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 08:47 pm (UTC)We've waited for the sun to come out, and the rain to dry up a bit, and now we're heading out to finish the arbour posts :)
Thanks for the advice and for our talk - thank you for taking me in.