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my tree

let the peasants rejoice! for the first time in a week i actually slept through the night! woo hoo!

in honor of this most joyous occasion, i thought i would share my tree with you.

on a completely different note, is it possible to be content while your heart desires to be somewhere else? how does one reconcile the desires of the heart with the parameters of waiting?

why are there always more questions?

things not to do when you cannot sleep at 3am

1. make/drink coffee.
2. clean the bathroom.
3. try to read anything written before 1900.
4. (attempt to) balance your checkbook.
5. look up statistics about how people die if they do not sleep.

while some of these things may seem obvious enough, my recent bout with a severe lack of sleep has had me try all manner of things, none of which were done well...with the possible exception of the making coffee, but i'm fairly certain that that only made the problem worse.

in the truest sense of hope, i will go to bed now. good night.

promo for Living Springs

don't worry...

...this won't be another, 'i hate summer & all is unwell in the world until the snow arrives' tirade. but the fact that it is summer, and at times unbearably hot, for some reason, makes writing all that much more difficult a dark, blustery day, good cup of coffee, and sweater weather somehow makes me feel more myself.

that being said, i have a tendancy in these summer months, to skim over the top of life in an effort to get as quickly to fall as possible. as if, not really living the moments will make them go by so much quicker. basically, i become the antithesis of thoreau's desire to 'live deep and suck the marrow out of life.'

well, last night, when i wasn't even looking for it, that all changed, with the reading of a blog by someone i hadn't even heard of before. in his blog, mr. berryman talks about beauty, and basically what it means to those of us trapped in a materialistic, consumer, busy society. take a few minutes & read it. you won't be sorry.

(http://jeffberryman.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/too-busy-for-beauty/)

"We are a culture of glancers. I include myself in that assessment, and frankly find it both hard to believe and incredibly disappointing that I have given away so much of my life to the impoverishment of spending days merely glancing. We need to look. To see. To engage deeply."

there is so much power in what he says, but i have to admit, that as beautiful as the whole thing is, the thing that caught me most was the last line of his blog, "...trying to wake up..." in many ways i feel as though i've been asleep for a long time, if not asleep, then the place where you're so tired, that you can barely remember what you had to do through a day, let alone what you wanted to do.

crazy, when you stop to think about it.

ick.

i know i say this every year, but let's just get it over with: i hate summer. i hate heat. i hate humidity. {end of tantrum}

maybe it's the heat. maybe it's something else, but i want to write...i feel as though there is something that i need to say...but as i sit here, there is nothing.

perhaps what i really need is sleep.

paying attention

wow, it's been way too long since i've written here. time really does fly, whether you're having fun or not...and the sad reality is, that if you don't pay attention, too many days can go by before you even realize you haven't spoken to that friend, read a book, or written a word.

what's happened since i last wrote? hmm... i have a new nephew, a little red-headed dragon named Jayden who has stolen my heart. i got to meet him in may...as well as hang out with my megan & my nicholas, all pieces of my heart.

apart from that, nothing really momentous (that i can think of). oh, i found a new favorite poem. it's called, 'Monet Refuses the Operation,' by Lisel Mueller. it's been a long time since i was so moved by a poem.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

how brilliant is that? seriously!