Category: Morning Meander

Walked out to the car this morning
in pajamas and a shawl and slippers

It’s mid December.

I am frightened.

this morning,
over and over.
Today is the best!

Icing sugar now out on the meadow and yard.

Just enough.

not because of the music’s shape,
or any allusions; it just does.

I’ve been thinking about spaces after full stops. There should be two. To allow that little pause.

This music is nothing like the smell of pine and hemlock in chemical quality,
but there’s an openness to it,
like an old, sunlit, snowy forest.

bright and early
to get a parcel
which I have been looking forward to for many weeks.

It’s just beads,
but such bursts of color in my hand
on a raw brown-grey December morning
are flowers
from Hades.

There is a level of exhaustion which a good sleep can’t fix.
It takes multiple weeks of obeying the nap and going to bed with the sun.

It takes hours upon hours of quiet and alone and slowly, slowly remembering what our own bodies sound like when they speak to us.

It takes good, long walks or runs or swims every day to make our bodies’ tiredness begin to match our hearts’.

It takes being bored which lets in creativity or mischief, which hold the door open for delight to return.

Even that does not heal all the damage, but helps it to move to the past and scar over and not remain an active, acute thing.

Build up to stillness slowly,
greeting each new distraction, thought, worry, feeling with generous welcome because it is part of the path.

Rest for the heart comes in stillness, as rest for the body comes in sleep.
Not a lack of motion, but a balancing.
Stillness will come in tiny moments; that is enough to be going on with.

I hope that all my Morning Meander friends are celebrating Wolfenoot — a magical and wonderful day to celebrate.

Walk your pets, support an animal shelter, and let kindness flow.

Hangs a diamond in the silk-velvet of pre-dawn sky,
like a message,
like a Silmaril,
like a promise.

If this Morning Star were a promise
made to me by the stars,
what would it be?

Oh.

That promise.

That old promise, the promise which came walking up the shore
carried by a god.

I was just about to turn twelve
and the world had come crushing down and I
felt the weight of living
and would no one take this undeserved pain from me?

He walked up the shore
cloaked in a deep grey
and made the promise,
and for those words I have held on through…

Things

Which have been complicated and painful and exhausting beyond belief
and relentless,
crushing,
crashing,
like the sea.

And lately the Things have changed.
That is inaccurate.
The Things are as they always have been,
but I bear them lightly now.

And I rest between times.

I had thought the promise meant that someday I would die
and all this would be over.

But today it means just what he said,
the god who walked up the shore all cloaked in grey.

I rest.

Promise kept.

Seems to be a regular thing now.
I’m not enamored of it,
Now that I could theoretically sleep until tierce

So I’m going to enjoy what there is —
Special Dog Time —
After walk, after food,
They wait for me at the comfy chair and first Sgiob gets an all-over massage with extra attention paid to ear massages
And then I put my feet up
And Max fits himself between my legs for his nap.

OK, I can handle this.

Sometimes, that’s what’s needful.
the briefest of walkies at 4am,
then back where we belonged.

That I won’t try walking outside barefoot,
That I will try to make a sled run,
and so little snow that I will forget about mittens and I will find myself at the bottom of the meadow with no way to stand but to push my hands down into the white fluff to hoist the rest of myself up.
But that’s not the disaster which some people would shriek about,
It’s fifty yards from my warm home and hot bath.

What’s a moment of discomfort compared to a sled run before sunrise?

and with a turn
she rises again.

The breath goes out on the month,
Just a slip of white left
between the clouds.