February 2016

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2016.

Sensitivity

Don’t scorn your life just because it’s not dramatic, or it’s impoverished, or it looks dull, or it’s workaday. Don’t scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you’ve got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.

Philip Levine

Tags:

All Love

When I am thirsty, I gulp down water. I do not pause for breath, no matter the size of the glass. No matter if it dribbles down my chin and leaves me gasping for air. Satisfaction, happy at the sweet taste. Water. At first I thought this was a metaphor for my life – me lustily taking it all in, senses on high alert, music, trees, words, mountains, wildness overflowing from my lips. Sometimes, yes.

But I am also the sipper. I take a single drop, and it spreads like sunrise, small then big, big, bigger. I stop and crouch, examine the leaf, the rock, the blade of grass. I pick up the feather and watch it fall, a whole minute if I am lucky and the wind is right. And it is beautiful. The gulping and the savoring. They are the same, really, all love.

Nighttime

Nighttime walking, positively giddy with neon and gliding geese. Quiet and brisk, my hat pulled down over my ears, fingers laced with the hubster’s. Everything I don’t need to see is hidden, forgotten, mostly, save my worries and woes, which, thankfully, are few at the moment. Goodness, yes.

Our little brick house is one step closer to reality. We had inspections yesterday, by fine and thoroughly kind professionals and were grateful for good news and even excitement from our structural engineer (“One quarter inch of settling in sixty years – incredible!”) and celebrated with high-fives and me gasping, “I could hug you!”

So now, my head is full up with ideas I can rightly execute and thinking about contractors, plumbers, tilers, cabinet installers. Someone who will repair and sand the neglected floors. Another who builds fences, so I can spin like a dervish in the back yard with only the hubster and Google satellites to witness it. Excitement. Cabinet fronts! New windows! Light fixtures – sixteen on their way! This is happening, and we are not going to eke it out like Portland. Sixteen years of projects and paint will be done in rapid HGTV style, with us camped out in the basement, using a pink toilet and a sink short enough for elementary schoolers to delight in the oh-my-goodness-I-don’t-need-a-stool wonderment of it all.

And it was SEVENTY degrees outside when I wrote this. In February. Oh, Colorado!

Tags:

Backward

trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.

e.e. cummings

Tags:

blow

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

George Eliot

Tags:

« Older entries