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.