I just started a book called Kon Tiki that Jeremy bought me more than a year ago for Christmas. I can't wait to raft along with Thor Heyerdalh and his men, across the wide, windy sweep of the Pacific. I've mentioned that one of the things I love most about winter is that it allows an expansion of thought, departures to the great other. Spring, Fall, and Summer are jealous seasons; they make you feel guilty for taking a nap, or for dreaming of other places, because they are so comfortable, so inviting, so accessibly beautiful. Winter...She is as beautiful as any season, but part of her beauty lies in her humility. Is there anything better than watching a snowfall, sipping tea, and dreaming of pluvial steam, and harbour cities? Winter is beautiful through juxtaposition, through afterimages, through longing.
I've turned inward - but not in a bad way. I love the quiet house after school. I've had to cut down my time with friends (and I'm sorry - there's nothing at all vindictive in it - it's not that I used you when I needed you and now that I'm happy, go away; it's just that my mind is all rafts of the sea and tripplanning happiness, and I've decided to swim in that direction). I've been writing, and have gotten so deep it's hard to come out of the stories.
There is a global turning. Love is the answer. I've found it in so many places:
With Patricia, who's won my heart.
With Lavinia, who is fat and vibrates when she purrs.
With the excellent writers (jerks) who are my best friends.
Within the silence of a moonlit house.
With my students, whom I adore.
On a raft in the Pacific.
With Jeremy and Merdith and Zack (after I killed Jeremy in Nintendo Ice Hockey).
With my family, even though we annoy each other.
I am so lucky. Is there anything funnier than horses boxing?
Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote recently - a winter melody. (I want to go.)
My home is a quiet home, its only neighbors the clouds, the endless miles of water. The villagers who live near me seem to have been etched from this quiet, for they move through their lives without sound. I am not sure if I sleep or wake now. It is late afternoon, and promising another storm. Luckily the storms break on the facing edge of the atoll, and the lagoon will shelter our small house. I stare into the flashing towers, these thunderheads of the equatorial Pacific, so like mushroom clouds from atomic tests, their crowns rising to an impossible 35,000 feet. In all directions lies the fathomless vast, nearly a thousand miles to the nearest land of any kind (and that little more than a treeless reef some 850 miles to the northwest). My home is a small home, and I can walk east to west in less than two minutes. South to northeast takes a bit longer (nearly an hour) but is by no means a hard go. This atoll, like all atolls, will sink (is sinking) to the waves from whence it was so long ago born; it shall be reborn (violently, as all are reborn) and trumpet its reemergence with noisy outbursts (as all who are
reborn).
I've turned inward - but not in a bad way. I love the quiet house after school. I've had to cut down my time with friends (and I'm sorry - there's nothing at all vindictive in it - it's not that I used you when I needed you and now that I'm happy, go away; it's just that my mind is all rafts of the sea and tripplanning happiness, and I've decided to swim in that direction). I've been writing, and have gotten so deep it's hard to come out of the stories.
There is a global turning. Love is the answer. I've found it in so many places:
With Patricia, who's won my heart.
With Lavinia, who is fat and vibrates when she purrs.
With the excellent writers (jerks) who are my best friends.
Within the silence of a moonlit house.
With my students, whom I adore.
On a raft in the Pacific.
With Jeremy and Merdith and Zack (after I killed Jeremy in Nintendo Ice Hockey).
With my family, even though we annoy each other.
I am so lucky. Is there anything funnier than horses boxing?
Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote recently - a winter melody. (I want to go.)
My home is a quiet home, its only neighbors the clouds, the endless miles of water. The villagers who live near me seem to have been etched from this quiet, for they move through their lives without sound. I am not sure if I sleep or wake now. It is late afternoon, and promising another storm. Luckily the storms break on the facing edge of the atoll, and the lagoon will shelter our small house. I stare into the flashing towers, these thunderheads of the equatorial Pacific, so like mushroom clouds from atomic tests, their crowns rising to an impossible 35,000 feet. In all directions lies the fathomless vast, nearly a thousand miles to the nearest land of any kind (and that little more than a treeless reef some 850 miles to the northwest). My home is a small home, and I can walk east to west in less than two minutes. South to northeast takes a bit longer (nearly an hour) but is by no means a hard go. This atoll, like all atolls, will sink (is sinking) to the waves from whence it was so long ago born; it shall be reborn (violently, as all are reborn) and trumpet its reemergence with noisy outbursts (as all who are
reborn).
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