I got up late again. Somehow that sentence has the starkness of the opening line of L'Etranger. Little did I know until now that there was an entire article about this here.
The sun is out but it is still chilly by southern California standards. Janet has the tv blaring which always makes it challenging to work in the front part of the house. My impulse is just to stay here in bed with Vera Paris and read, but that doesn’t get anything accomplished. And you know from reading this blog, that list is long.
Writing yesterday’s post was hard and time-consuming. I am not sure there was adequate coherency to the admitted incoherence. The practice is attention and focus, just like yoga practice. Just showing up.
"Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections—language that hears itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who and what we are. It begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration.
By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. The quality of consciousness, though not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described it as the moment the doors of perception open; James Joyce called it epiphany. The experience of concentration may be quietly physical — a simple, unexpected sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, amid thought “too deep for tears.” Within action, it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends, and a person’s every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection. … In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.”
Jane Hirschfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, New York, Harper Collins, 1997
Yoga the word comes from the Sanskrit yuj, which is to yoke together, unite. (Now I lost that train when Vera Paris came bounding across the bed.)
I must be really writing because this is getting harder.
After a good long chat with KH, I feel calmer.
I feel very clumsy and insensitive in negotiating the reality of this pandemic. The not-so-gentle gravity of the situation continually pushes, sinks deeper and deeper to the layers of my constructed reality. I think I have avoided outright panic because panic requires or, at least, requests immediate alleviation and palliation. And there is none to be had. There are too many unknown unknowns so trying to figure out and thereby control reality is a no sum loser's game.
We are all sitting here in limbo together.
Sitting here in limbo
Waiting for the dice to roll
Sitting here in limbo
Have some time to search my soul
— Jimmy Cliff
Here's a tasty Jerry Garcia/David Grisman version.
That about sums it up for those of us not able to contribute more than the not-unsubstantial love, good will, and consciousness to think of the greater good.
Overcast and colder here now.
How can I still be in bed at 1:30? Well, I am not in bed as much as on bed with Vera now curled at on my feet.
CORNERS
All but saints
and hermits
mean to paint
themselves
toward an exit
leaving a
pleasant ocean
of azure or jonquil
at the doorsill.
But sometimes
something happens
a minor dislocation
by which the doors
and windows
undergo a
small rotation
to the left a little
— but repeatedly.
It isn't
obvious immediately.
Only toward evening
and from the farthest corners
of the houses
of the painters
comes a chorus
of individual keening
as of kenneled dogs
someone is mistreating.
— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010
Yoga the word comes from the Sanskrit yuj, which is to yoke together, unite. (Now I lost that train when Vera Paris came bounding across the bed.)
I must be really writing because this is getting harder.
After a good long chat with KH, I feel calmer.
I feel very clumsy and insensitive in negotiating the reality of this pandemic. The not-so-gentle gravity of the situation continually pushes, sinks deeper and deeper to the layers of my constructed reality. I think I have avoided outright panic because panic requires or, at least, requests immediate alleviation and palliation. And there is none to be had. There are too many unknown unknowns so trying to figure out and thereby control reality is a no sum loser's game.
We are all sitting here in limbo together.
Sitting here in limbo
Waiting for the dice to roll
Sitting here in limbo
Have some time to search my soul
— Jimmy Cliff
Here's a tasty Jerry Garcia/David Grisman version.
That about sums it up for those of us not able to contribute more than the not-unsubstantial love, good will, and consciousness to think of the greater good.
Overcast and colder here now.
How can I still be in bed at 1:30? Well, I am not in bed as much as on bed with Vera now curled at on my feet.
CORNERS
All but saints
and hermits
mean to paint
themselves
toward an exit
leaving a
pleasant ocean
of azure or jonquil
at the doorsill.
But sometimes
something happens
a minor dislocation
by which the doors
and windows
undergo a
small rotation
to the left a little
— but repeatedly.
It isn't
obvious immediately.
Only toward evening
and from the farthest corners
of the houses
of the painters
comes a chorus
of individual keening
as of kenneled dogs
someone is mistreating.
— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010
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