360 consecutive days. Like in a row. Morning walk @ Daybreak.
Sun rises at 5:52 a.m, twilight is ~ 50 to 60 minutes earlier. You can do the math. Early.
I’m on I-95 N. I shift in my seat and an electric current fires from lower back, through hip, down the leg and sizzles all the way down to the toes.
I’m back in Physical Therapy. PT, is what the cool people call it. Diagnosis? Not pulled hamstring, but lower back (again). Two weeks in, better, but far from rehabbed.
I ease out of the car, and my conversation with my new Therapist flashes back.
I don’t know who I am becoming. I like who I am becoming, I just haven’t fully met her yet. I don’t think I can go back to a “before.” I don’t think I fit into that life anymore. I’ve just grown and changed, and many priorities and values have shifted. My peak excitement right now is getting ready for baby ducks on the farm in spring. I like the slowness of things right now.
— Mary Fugate, 31, who works in higher education, moved home from Cincinnati to Punxsutawney, Pa., from “Emerging From the Coronavirus” in The New York Times, April 5, 2021
Yesterday, WordPress sent a congratulations email to celebrate another year blogging on WordPress. I deleted it without reading the details. Another year. Ho Hum.
4 days ago, Mimi drops me an email inquiring about post absences. “Out of character. What’s Up? You ok?” Uninspired, was the response.
This morning Sawsan sends a text: “3 Consecutive Days of late posts, did you move to a new time zone?” Nope. LikeRoberto Duran, No Mas.
So, I walk. Cove Island Loop. Outside never fails to inspire.
I get home to jot down my notes.
I search my email trash bin to find the WordPress anniversary message.
My first post was in October 2011. 9 years ago. 9 years of Life.
I turn my attention back to this post.
And I’m blank…
Blank but for passages in Hisham Matar’s Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, The Return, and two related thoughts.
“…like the fan shape the fisherman’s net leaves when it touches the surface of the water, was only momentarily perceptible…” I hope that in some small way this blog has brought some enjoyment to your day.
I asked him what he thought it meant for our lives, for how we spend them, for what they mean. He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life. Tonight I write him a letter telling him I think he was right. But that also I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.
You wander in and out of rain.
The city encloses you. You feel
the darkening of its metals, above ground
and below. Every night
you touch a boundary you don’t understand.
Even asleep you crave sleep,
you hold the moving hours like water.
Rickety dreams, a high feeling of poplars
at the far edge of two fields. Motors
carry you, or your feet pull you forward
in cool dispersals of color.
What happens each day to you
is delicate craft and commerce, each promising
everything, promising
nothing. You are close…
Your weightlessness
is that of summer trees
and seaside towns…
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
