Monday, October 24, 2011

a method of operation

I have had enough with feeling this way. With my lazy, unfocused lifestyle and this inexplicable melancholy. The lack of writing anything real. The lack of creative ambition. The desire to lie in bed all day, every day, which doesn't seem to ever lift.

Here is the new method of operation, to be practiced every day upon waking at a reasonable hour:

1. Read something. Anything, for any period of time.
2. Take the darling puppy for a walk, and during this time, think. About what I've read, or what kinds of things I want to write and how I'll write them.
3. Write something. Anything, for any period of time.

And then, of course, I'll do some actual work for pay and continue doing all of the necessary things, like showering and buying groceries and contributing to society.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Lost Child

When I was very young, I lost my mother
at the mall. One minute we were together
in the dollar store; the next I was standing
at the store's entrance, crying
next to a stand of cheap sunglasses.

I am no longer a child. I have adult things
like a mortgage and a career and a husband.
But still I flounder, searching up and down
the aisles of a place too big for me to know,
finding nothing. Giving up.

Going back to the start and hoping to be found.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

the first saturday in october

This morning I rode my bicycle to the market and came back with a very full basket of ingredients for stew, wine made from Alberta Saskatoon berries, a tall and leafy sage plant, and a bag of the smallest, most beautiful pears I've ever seen.

And now I'll do a few good hours of real work. I've got video contests to administer and an e-newsletter to write and a host of social media (not mine personally, a client's) to update with clever and upbeat remarks about autumn and registration deadlines.

I am resisting the urge to curl under blankets with ginger tea and All Creatures Great and Small (a charming and silly diversion).

I will resist the urge to get bogged down by all of these feelings of heaviness I've been having.

And I've got cubed pork thawing on my counter to be made into my first stew (and I feel brave for making a stew my mother doesn't usually make). Hers was a staple of my childhood, something warm and thick and hearty to be eaten at Sunday night family dinners. My granddad would warm his slice of bread on the side of the stew pot, and I've copied him all these years. But this stew is just for my tiny, two-person family, and I feel like a change.