Can it really have been so long since my last post ? As mentioned last post, in my car, in the morning, I think of many things to say here. Alas, it is still a really hard time. I am trying to generate some options, job-wise, and pursuing them as well as tending to the one I actually have, is causing all kinds of complications. I am so tense as of late that I haven't done much of anything without all the details of everthing hanging over my head. To make matters worse (?), in spite of years of experience in one practice of this field (here we go with the ambiguity again), I still have to complete training to do what I do now. Not that I don't know how to do it, but I need the proper credentials. This is taking up an enormous amount of money and time, and, I fear, as I fall asleep at night, taking me further and further away from what I'd really like to be doing.
On a happier note, I am raising two new cats, my previous pair lost to old age over the last three years. It is funny and charming to have all that kitten energy (they are 10 months old) in the house again, a welcome bit of life and innocence, affection and play when needed most. They are/were shelter cats, sisters to boot. A good reminder that life can be renewed and remade. The question is whether my middle-aged self can endure the process. I have been so tired and stressed these past three years that it was hard to imagine being more tired. But here I am, all the more fatigued. Just when a moment's respite seems to appear, another complication (= bad thing) snatches it away.
We are all complicit in our own entanglements, our own failures, aren't we ? Are we ? There is a quote from the Letters of Abelard and Heloise pushing its way into consciousness, but it is not there yet. Metaphor will have to do, the res/imago problem ( rerum ignavus imagine gaudet to slightly misquote Vergil): is anyone out there familiar with the paintings of someone named Nancy Witt ? I found a book of her paintings, very strange, very lovely. One is called Hestia, and I would like, I think sometimes, to be in that rocking chair, and I even have a plant like that. Perhaps I fear that that is what will claim me, Hestia, the hearth, the call to slumber, dream, but also security. If you know the painting, yes, I see that there is a mirror where we might expect the hearth to be, and a brazier is foregrounded in the shadow. I want to be, feel I have been: Fire Lilies. The hearth, respite, fire, creativity, change: it's all there.
If you are a praying reader, please ask your god/dess to look kindly upon me this week; I really need it. If you are not, please light a candle and think of me.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
The Mail, II
So, the mail, the package sent out bearing its symbolic little chocolates. In the mail, in my mail, comes a note, the daffodil stamp matching the beautiful sketch of a yellow bird on the notecard within. Thank you, she says, for thinking of me ---and I wonder, does she mean of him ? She had forgotten about that until the package arrived, she says, and I feel bad for a moment that I reminded her and maybe made her sad. But that's not what she's telling me, is it ? What I realize is how much I had waited for some response, how I waited, in small and subtle ways, the ten days between sending and receiving, holding potential rejection in abeyance, how the return card means so much. It will be too hard, soon, to risk writing at all. She had phoned once, so had I. Too many things we don't or won't risk talking about; could mean the little notes are gone forever.
I dream of it all sometimes, tea and watching his hands, my office and the trees, the way we'd all talk. Then I get up in the dark, make my espresso, and drive to work, so much to say, so much lost, between dawn and the sea.
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