the second word from every book title on the brown wooden shelves in my apartment

And
Garcia
Dangerously
Manifesto
Fat
Next
Stories
Esme
Work
by
to
Sunrises
and
Way
Power
Rumi
No
About
Work
Stone
Virgin's
Shoes
Horse
Poems
The
of
American
Master
Beloved
crazy
Sinister
Tao
Open
After
Behavior
Wood
Cloud
children
Nutrition
Bride
Cooked
Poems
Healing
Bums
air
laughing
County
Maps
With
in
Birds
free
Leap
Genius
Economics
Solitaire
Walls
handbook
Rain
Angler
Pleasure
House
Book
Work
Introduction
Building
Reasons
Revolution
Earth
Blues
Nature
Haven
Caretaking
Poetry
Fourteeners
Nothing

the first word from every book title on the brown wooden shelves in my apartment

Neurosis
How
Create
Organic
Gifts
Transfer
Fire
Collected
Homeland
For
Field
Standing
Room
Three
can't
Artist's
Introvert
Essential
Wisdom
Questions
Dream
Teaching
Kissing
Red
skin
Selected
For
End
Best
Junior
Cry
poem
Bend
365
Solace
Week
Flight
Chop
Leaf
Midnight's
Doing
Robber
Who
Two-headed
Poetry
Touch
Dharma
actual
away
Sand
Graphs
Negotiating
Speak
Floating
Field
Feel
Taking
You're
Home
Desert
Memory
Thirst
Earthsteward's
Waiting
Complete
Beyond
Wood-Frame
Sewing
Home
Geosystems
Natural
Good
Kombucha
This
Rock
Lifguarding
Meditations
Creative
Stop
New
Colorado's
There
Enchanted

those sixteen measures

"It is not surprising that in his later years variations became the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities."

(Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)



I still believe in love but I am not sure about romantic love.


I laughed and replied, I've become less whimsical over the years.

Still in the past six months I have returned to flesh and blood. I have returned to being a person who is, at the very least, receptive to whimsy.

Even better, I can receive whimsy and decide whether to act on it, and how.


I have returned to being a person.



I do not miss you all the time, any more, which seems significant. Which is not to say that I do not miss you.


When I tell him about the dog at the shelter who stands up on her back legs and hugs me halfway through our walks, I see that it affects him. It makes me feel hope.



I am imagining two become three,
temporarily,
four pairs of hands and two tongues


To be able to lay down the guitar and step to the marimba lumina. To be able to walk softly aross the stage while your bandmates play around you, pick up your guitar again, and start to play.



On Sunday I road a lift to the top of the mountain and snowshoed three miles into the backcountry. Oh such a wide white expanse, snow above and below. Such quiet, such godliness. The entire time I was completely alone.