Where is my mind?

Oh!  Uh.  Hey there.

 Sorry to make this a Reader's Digest Condensed Blog - I never wanted, but always feared that would happen.  I've been having a lot of fun, being bored, busy, missing folks, getting better at my job, etc. etc.  Upcoming are some highlights and scenes, and I'll probably flesh out (what an odd and interesting phrase) some of these beyond a basic outline.  The Cliffs Notes version hasn't really changed:  I'm amazed with this place, and I miss you, and my life is a ride on The Scrambler - all lights and colors and the impossibility of making up one's mind.

 Looking at the calendar, I seem to be on the downward arc of this part of the adventure, and that's really overwhelming.  I'm trying to look inside and look forward all at once, while still keeping my feet under me.  Dizzying.  Maybe taking a break to look backward will provide some perspective.

Anyway, here I am again, containing all shapes.   Who knows how this part of the story will end?

Gentle Reminders

(Courtesy of Sarah H.)

Maude: A lot of people enjoy being dead.  But they are not dead, really.  They're just backing away from life.  Reach out.  Take a chance.  Get hurt even.  But play as well as you can.  Go team, go!  Give me an L!  Give me an I!  Give me a V!  Give me an E!  L-I-V-E.  LIVE!  Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.

Maude: Harold, everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves.  You can't let the world judge you too much.

Harold: But I love you.
Maude: Oh, Harold...  That's wonderful.  Go and love some more.

I had roses and apologized to no one.

Happy

Guy Fawkes Day

everybody!

"...for three years I had roses and apologized to no one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must NEVER let them take it from us." - Valerie

The Wanting Comes in Waves

So I started listening to the last HP - an emotional undertaking to be sure - and so all my chores and errands run today have a lachrymal quality. Last night (such a debaucherous tale!) was a whirlwind of a weekend (the stories I could tell!).  I re-organized the kitchen (oh the scandal!) in order to make the tupperware more accessible (no surely not!) and today I made a bit pot o' chili (whee!).

I read a chirruping book called Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim (which has a website that really gets at the nugget of the thing) which inspired me this evening to blow bubbles in the front yard. It was a beautiful, surreal, comforting thing - the book, I mean.  Like a sip of warm tea.  My favorite lines run thus:

"The big bug smiled so wide that his joy lifted him into the air. In an instant he saw the silliness of his seriousness, and in his reverie, he too floated off into the horizon."

I love that - 'the silliness of his seriousness.'  Mmm.  When's the last time you blew bubbles? What were you thinking feeling at the time? At which RPM does it make the record of your life spin?

I've been thinking lately of my life in a larger context: seasonal, or familial, or within a larger universe of friends, acquaintances, people I've met of late. It sounds horribly conceited to envision myself at the center of such a universe, but I what I want to get at more is the sense of interconnectedness, and how I am affecting everyone else, just as I - as the writer of my story - have noticed them affecting me.

It's this:

And these worlds spin orbits around one another and bump into one another's gravity and fling one another across the vast reaches.

And it makes me feel smallish, and safe, believe it or not - like the ups and downs of the most treacherous path grade to a gentler amplitutde when seen at a distance.  The Google Earth Philosophy.

And it makes me feel grateful to you folks, who have known me and taught me and changed my life in the smallest and largest ways.  And if I squint and wish and tilt my head to the left, it makes the geographic distances between us seem much more managable - because the System of Tubes is slow in coming and nothing else is working.  It's good to be pulled out of my own life for a bit to gain a new perspective.  Otherwise I sink slowly into a close, dense haze like Mary Poppin's umbrella into her cloud.

So.  I miss you.  I hope you're well.  I hope we're all doing okay, on this small speck of dust.