Day: October 27, 2018

we’ve changed to be

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From what or whom did we change to become what we are now?

A letter arrived in which someone exclaimed that she’d taken up near-obsessive baking, and she finally understood my own (now waning) obsession with baking or started to associate baking with some of the feelings I had attached to it – relaxation, a sense of producing something. And when did she turn from a non-baker to someone who dreamed up something sweet to create every night?

For that matter, when did I become someone who welcomed 30C/85F temperatures? There was a time when I would hide from such weather, feeling miserable in the warmth from which I could not escape.

Is it age? Is it experience? Is it the combination of both mixing to give us acceptance of or approval for things we once felt indifferent toward or actively disliked? How do we come to long for things we never wanted?

More curious… how do we change and then change back? Did we never really change or were we having a break? What are the inner workings that drive these sometimes unconscious shifts… and what shifts them back? Is it the need for reflection/rest? Is it the vitality to try something different before feeling the pull of old habits (they do, after all, die hard) and comforts?

“evolving into the invisible”

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Erosion
–Jorie Graham

I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
simultaneous, cut clean
of sequence. No,
it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
tapping the mind.
We are, ourselves, a mannerism now,
having fallen
out of the chain
of evolution.
So we grow fat with unqualified life.
Today, on this beach
I am history to these fine
pebbles. I run them
through my fingers. Each time
some molecules rub off
evolving into
the invisible. Always
I am trying to feel
the erosion – my grandfather, stiffening
on his bed, learning
to float on time, his mind like bait presented
to the stream ongoing, or you, by my side,
sleep rinsing you always a little less
clean, or daily
the erosion
of the right word, what it shuts,
or the plants coming forth as planned out my window, row
after row, sealed
into here….
I’ve lined all our wineglasses up on the sill,
a keyboard, a garden. Flowers of the poles.
I’m gifting each with a little less water.
You can tap them
for music.
Outside the window it’s starting to snow.
It’s going to get colder.
The less full the glass, the truer
the sound.
This is my song
for the North
coming toward us.

Photo by Victoria Alexander on Unsplash