I call myself a writer now.
Sometimes words flow like a river; sometimes they are dammed up. Not elegantly locked behind a Grand Coulee-Hoover architectural-engineering wonder, but stuck in mud and sticks and crumpled leaves emerging in tiny trickles from the buck-toothed beaver monstruction or clogged in neural ruts unable to break free.
Yesterday morning I awoke to fog on the ridge where I live. From the field a short block from my home we can usually see New York City’s skyline, but there was not even Carl Sandburg’s “little cat feet. . . looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches,” only a grey mist swirling. We’ve had a lot of fog on the ridge this spring. I’m not sure if it is warm-earth-cool-air ground fog or lowered ceiling leaving the ridge in a cloud, but from a visibility standpoint, the effect is pretty much the same, white and grey air somewhere between diaphanous and opaque, breeze blown and damp, making me wish for intermittent wipers on my eyeglasses.
I had some idea to write, often a daily task, and words went on a page, trying to explain a vague feeling of disconnection from . . . the news (?), society (?), myself (?). The sense of what I wrote, like the view, was enshrouded in incoherent swirling grey. Later in the day, I wrote a koan card post on LinkedIn about my many-layered agnosticism, pondering Schrodinger-like if the City was still there behind the fog.
I read. Always a good thing for a writer to do when words don’t flow.
Last night I read some chapters in Neal Stephenson’s The Fall or Dodge in Hell, a science fiction novel about the implications of a deceased, but digitally preserved brain living in cyberspace. The living analyze downloaded data, trying to understand if the “beings” are alive and doing anything. I’m at the part where Dodge’s Brain is constructing “Landform” and there is trouble in Eden, stemming from other digitized souls’ differing socio-political worldviews and power dynamics. The living data scientists are too removed to be less than clueless, like studying the stars with a telescope coated in Vaseline.
I revisited William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
I reread a piece by Jeffrey McNulty on “earthing” as he called grounding himself in nature. I had resisted commenting, but this morning I owned up to the conflict between my nature-boy free-spirit side and my MBA-self who calls such ideas “woo-woo.”
I read William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
This morning I read a lovely LinkedIn piece of poesy by Rached Alimi “Every river cannot avoid falling into the sea. . . . . flow through the rocks, defy the winds and find my way.”
The sun burned through the fog today
I like Sunday morning Pip walks, before anyone sensible is up, not enough to take them the rest of the week, but as Billie gets to sleep in one day a week, I get to ruminate, while keeping Pip from chowing down on deer scat. Pip is our eleven-year-old Black Labrador Retriever. She and I are slower now than in our youth. Pip is a bit more willful about where she wants to go and for how long, so I had to convince her to amble to the field.
The City was still there. I was greatly relieved, but Pip was singularly unimpressed. We wandered as is our wont, she sniffing, making sense of the world, me doing something similar without the benefit of her super-nose.
In the morning sunshine, there were bright silver lights in the grass. Last night the dew was heavy. My brown suede shoes were getting soaked, but my MBA-self was AWOL and nature-boy was enjoying the view.
Suddenly, a pinpoint flash of bright red hit my retina and was gone just as quickly. I stopped. I looked down at the grass. I slowly moved my head and one of the diamonds in the green flashed red again. I slowly turned my head once more and a flash of yellow-green zapped my other eye. I stood there moving my head slightly side-to-side and up-and-down for several minutes till I became aware of the grey-muzzled cocked head staring at me quizzically from knee height.
An involuntary chuckle escaped my throat into the humid air and Pip let me know she was ready to go home.
Nature-boy took off his wet shoes and gripped the grass with his toes all the way home.
