We were going to go skiing but then we did not go skiing

I am not in my twenties any more.


When he's on, he's wise.



It takes me half the day, two walks, a run, and 30 minutes of at-home cardio before I finally settle in for the day.


I have named my collection. All's that's left is to write it.




When I read the literary magazine, which I began reading as soon as it arrived in my post office box (or rather I should say as soon as I picked it up and brought it home from the post office box since I am not entirely sure, actually, when the literary magazine arrived in my post office box)--a fact that runs counter to the arrival of previous issues of the same literary magazine, because they felt so heavy and I have felt so heavy and therefore reading something heavy has felt like it might be the stone that finally sinks me--I am reminded that I am not, in fact, a writer whose work is regularly published in or even considered for publication in esteemed literary magazines. In fact I might be a pretty amateur writer, and yet here I've been thinking that I was worthy of being an esteemed writer even though I haven't been practicing and I haven't been very brave. It will take some time to get up to snuff.


Likewise I think I have thought I had one of the best opinions about everything, when there are people whose whole lives are devoted to serving refugees in camps, if you know what I mean, and here I am writing silly stuff and in some respects not doing all that much of substance with my life.

I am so glad to be going back to school.


I've spent so long telling myself I can do everything that I haven't focused much on doing anything.


He says I should try being kinder to myself.



On the one hand I miss sleeping with multiple people in the week, the titillation of sitting on the bed with a man or a woman friend when one or both of you is considering the possibility of touching or otherwise stepping beyond the conventional bounds of friendship, the get-up-and-go to climb aboard a citibike and ride it all around Georgetown and sing in a choir and read guerilla poetry and have lots of sex with lots of people. On the other hand, life is change.


You're at a different stage in your life. Stop holding yourself accountable to a standard you maintained when you were a different person. 




Did I wring every drop out of them? 

It doesn't matter. It was perfect. 




I think I have a bit of an issue, I say, and I feel a little better simply for having said it.

"Is this leading to a good result?"

The only way to become free is to become aware, to really see that This is leading to a good result, or This is not so skillful, not wholesome.

We forget that the next moment is just as impermanent as this moment, so it’s not going to offer resolution of anything. 

like the flowers, we are all unfolding in our own way, in our own time

  

All quotes from this article

The last Halloween on Earth

"I know bile intimately"


Pop culture is a crutch.

An excessive amount of animus


He's got a lot to prove. He left during patisserie week. 

You're trying to do art; a lot of stuff's bothering you 

Don't hold the pose; let the pose hold you


Am I the first one to think of that?


Hey chef Anna Maria, it wasn't a jambalaya contest. 


We're made of flesh.

Kaya is beautiful and I love her.



Mutated (surrounded by walls)

What if my dad is using doomsday thinking to cope with his own mortality



I believe in teaching that is accessible and practical at the same time that it is challenging, affirming, and uplifting



I can clearly see the flaming embers of hell.


I'm just going to weigh off some currants. 

"The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working."

  ~ Albert Einstein

Hawthorn Ham

So many writing ideas and also I'm so tired. I write for the love of it and I write more when I have concrete justification. Does that make me less of an artist? Maybe. I don't know. But a self-aware one. An artist who leverages her self-awareness to write more, because really that's what she wants to be doing more of, it's just that she's developed so many awfully unaligned habits


I miss our accountability


I had forgotten that I had agency over anything


I understand that our outsides can be a reflection of how we're feeling on the inside and also they can be a mask for it. I have not felt as good as it might look from the outside

I'm sad that none of my friends asked how I was doing when I was living alone.



I'm sad in general today, not sure why, or rather I have so many possible reasons why that I'm not sure which one might be today's driving force. Hanna is restless; we've been inside all day; it's the first day I've spent inside possibly all year. In half an hour I will press myself up off the couch and we will go hike the snow-muddied trails where coyotes prowl at dusk

Mountain lions, too, but they don't make noise or otherwise call attention to themselves. If they don't want to be seen they won't be. Picture the largest housecat you've ever met and multiply it by whatever integer zooms it up to 180 pounds and seven feet from wriggling nose to tail


The last time we were camping together she slept and I laid tense and breathless listening to a fox scream


The last time he and I were camping together our tent froze over in early July. Hanna pressed between us in her den of quilts and we triple spooned for warmth


Computer algorithms create fabricated synchronicities. Is it faith or capitalism?


Starting in 24 days I am really going to apply myself to something for an extended period of time

Also I already have been--for more than two years now I've been teaching something that I love


After driving with my partner to the woman-owned ski shop and laying down a credit card for performance boots so that I can learn how to downhill ski this winter and for the rest of my life, because I live in the mountains where I have since childhood felt I belonged, it occurred to me that in some ways perhaps I am leading an even more remarkable life than I'd expected

"How Wonderful" by Irving Feldman

How wonderful to be understood,

to just sit here while some kind person

relieves you of the awful burden

of having to explain yourself, of having

to find other words to say what you meant,

or what you think you thought you meant,

and of the worse burden of finding no words,

of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person

has found just the right words for you—and you

have only to sit here and be grateful

for words so quiet so discerning they seem

not words but literate light, in which

your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.

How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is

not to be understood, not at all, to, well,

just sit here while someone not unkindly

is saying those impossibly wrong things,

or quite possibly they’re the right things

if you are, which you’re not, that someone

—a difference, finally, so indifferent

it would be conceit not to let it pass,

unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.

And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage

of those high murmurings over your head,

having found, after all, you are grateful

—and you understand this, how wonderful!—

that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,

like a root growing wise in darkness

under the light litter, the falling words.

parallelism

Castanets clicking shoulders spasming stomach contorting the theme is exorcism the theme is embodied the theme is integration hear it Take me to the river dancing grief lakeside can't be me can that gold-bathed warrior really be chest broaden shoulders pull back I have healed my spine she/I walk regal through forest frog rabbits deer lions we pay our respects removes broadsword from sheath redacted swallows me

shoulders arms wrists hands twitching stomach contorting absorbing stillness happens when integration is complete. I found you. Tears roll. Dance in-outside grief exorcism castanets Amazonian warrior woman dressed in leather shining gold fighting for higher consciousness


I bow my blue-grey wings to the great blue heron. I bow my brown-white wings to the red-tailed hawk. I prostrate my woolen sides to the bighorn. I take honored to red-furred fours before the grey fox.


We howl



Like the coyotes before us, three or four on that rigdeline over there, sounds like an army, sounds like they're playing, sounds like they love each other, sounds like part of me anxious to go inside. There cooking peppers onions quinoa chicken and apple sausages on the electric skillet and the hotpot learning how to host we cook for him we listen to the Grateful Dead we laugh sometimes and exclaim over the color purple in paintings


Like an itch like a compulsion anxiety building until the release, get back to writing, you're on the right track, remember who you are


Today's extra hour spent cross-country skiing six miles into the backcountry, back down again knees ankles aching from forcing way through cold-hardened snow

Imagine how much easier in powder. Look how beautiful