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.

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.

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.

wilderness

in autumn i am a wandering thing
in broken-in boots
on horseback
rambling

through country i do not own
(and why should we
own what is wild?)

if i disrupt the forest
with hoofprints
between aspen
it will make a change
(in some way)

this country is a gift
and i am not to misuse it

but it keeps calling me out

or rather, in

how do you roast a beet?

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.


- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

on being productive:

have coffee out with Eric
buy a birthday present
buy thread for sewing
clean kitchen
clean office
hang new curtains
laundry (two loads)
get rid of all of the dead plants (there are eight)
stir the compost
put away gardening things
try to hang new shelves
bake sweet potato muffins
make dinner (even if it's breakfast food)
start sprouting a pineapple
watch a classic movie

These things happened today. Eric mowed the lawn and raked half of it. And he vacuumed the floors and displayed his strength and manliness by holding two six foot wall shelves up on the wall at once so I could see what they'd look like.

This is a start.

fall

today the air was crisp
and i was out in it
i learn more every day
how to appreciate it
the beauty of it
the gift of it