THE STRANGE INTERNAL SHIFT

 27 of #100daychallenge

I gave today a sincere try, getting up at 6:45 to get to a yoga class. The waves of time were against me though. The kitchen clock, set by me, was slow while I thought it was 10 minutes fast. Okay then. By the time I got into the car I had ten minutes to drive 12 miles and I thought the better part of valor was to just not interrupt class and/or stress myself trying to get there.

This did not make for a productive day however as I have been so tired. I suppose I deserve one day a week to not run around like the young maniac that I am. Oh wait. I am not young, but there you go. After a 2.5 hour sojourn to another world, I have not been able to fully re-enter this one. If I were a dog or a follower of Carlos Casteneda, I would be walking around in circles, trying to find my place and thence to come to some level of consciousness. Not happening. 

I am loathe to do much now as I am a bit ditzy. I do have to clean the kitchen and probably feed my mom. She never got dressed today, only drifting between watching television and napping. My 30 minutes of dedicated reading turned into long-enough-to-finish the Kathy Valentine book. I also set a 30-minute alarm to work on the garden which got in some columbine plants, a very expensive and small clematis, and some anemone bulbs that probably won't grow because that's how bulbs roll with me.

Sub-gardeners.

I am taking this early opportunity to write as I could just fall out asleep at almost any time.

I ran into the young man who lives next door, Randy. He said hello which kind of surprised me. I took a moment to apologize again for losing my temper. The situation described earlier pushed my buttons very hard and I can see why they were upset at a reaction from me they didn't understand. I don't think they see my point of view, but I felt I could at least acknowledge theirs. 

“I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.”

I reckon they won't see my side of it, but at least I won't be carrying around my lack of acknowledge, knowing that my behavior was out-of-some line, maybe not quite as they described. The cruelty in not acknowledging my anger would be cruelty to myself and possibly some dry tinder for another mis-expression of my frustration. 

The cat enemies, Vera and Idrisse, are both sitting over my desk feeling that I should be letting them out or, if not that, feeding them some dinner. So I will pause in these proceedings to address their dinner as it is coyote time outside.

11:18 p.m.

I woke up enough to clean the kitchen, including the floor and then prepped asparagus to be roasted tomorrow. All while listening to a new audio book, The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste. Beautiful beautiful writing, tenderness with a tough subject. I have a desire to space out in front of some television, (I started watching Ewan McGregor in Halston on Netflix today which ironing), but sleep is likely the better option. 

WEAK FORCES

I enjoy an accumulating

faith in weak forces—

a weak faith, of course,

easily shaken, but also

easily regained—in what

starts to drift: all the 

slow untrainings of the mind,

the sift left of resolve

sustained too long, the

strange internal shift

by which there’s no knowing

if this is the road taken

or untaken. There are soft

affinities, possibly electrical

lint-like congeries; moonlit

hints; asymmetrical pink

glowy spots that are not

the defeat of something,

I don’t think.

SHARK’S TEETH

Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark’s-tooth-

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of a city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned,

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of a tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It; New and Selected Poems, Grove Press, New York, 2010

McCoy found a worm.