Birch Island Books

I just heard that one for the first time.

Well, then.
An afternoon to prepare enough ingredients for six stews, stowed in the freezer.
A day for clothes to dry on the line.
A week to enjoy the farm share and the bread share. Perhaps this winter I’ll take on a baking day.

That takes a day. Mid morning to make the sponge, noontime to complete it, early afternoon punch it down, mid afternoon shape it, late afternoon bake it, just before five, take a third of it to The Diagonal Family and a third of it to The Angel Next Door. At suppertime, eat it. Yes. I will add a baking day to my attention economy and eschew probably five hundred advertisements in that time.

Market that, manipulative strangers.

And in between these acts of love? While the sponge rises? Knit a sweater, one loving row at a time. That will take a month or two or three.

I choose to spend my attention on these acts of love.

Today I am grateful for the words
Which flow from pen and keyboard
And often from voice box, but not so very many of them are connected to one another and that’s all right

Today I am grateful for the words which flow so quickly that I do not need to think and what is important is reading them afterward to see the message from the hinterlands of my brain or even from someone else’s story.

Today I am grateful for the words whereby I learn the stories and tell the stories and share the stories and wait for them to come back around, changed yet constant.

Today I am grateful for the words.

I apologized for the sound of thunder and the fire gently crackling and offered to turn it off — canned noises which I had turned on for comfort.

The friends gathered electronically into my one-room cabin from across the globe said, “No! Please leave it on! We like it.”

We like feeling cozy by the fireside and we like knowing the rumbly storm is out there. It’s the perfect condition for cuddling up with a story,

even the blank page kind.

I cannot remember seeing the moon so very fine and slender a sickle, though I must have done.

It is dark later and later, though, and there is always tomorrow. Let us hope the clouds stay away.

Not peacefully still, but waiting
to see
what will be made out of last night’s
dreams and words and breaths and workings and promises and realizations.

I managed to sort out some of the tangle in my head.
I’ve accumulated tools over time:

A speaking stone, so that each thought knows when it is their turn to speak — a stone smooth and spherical and a deep plum color which rests in an amethyst geode atop a stone plinth;

A coffee station, a sandwich station, and a dessert station which distracts the thoughts enough to spread them out a bit (sometimes all they want is some warmth or nourishment or sweetness. don’t we all?);

A comb, mother-of-pearl (mother-of-moonlight?), with the magical property of smoothness to untangle the thoughts as they lie sleep-mussed in my mind. I have noticed that the simple act of combing the thoughts can quiet them and give them peace.

I have stories in my head
and words
and I don’t know which ones to write
and which ones to simply enjoy as they flit through my head
and which ones to let go
and which ones to share.

Last night’s rain drips still from the living roof onto the front step.
Sgiobalta is woofing in her sleep.
Max dozes between my feet.
Coffee drips.
Sky lightens.

Val rustles,
Grace gets up briefly and stumbles back to bed.

The heat comes on briefly, and the fridge, and now the coffee maker is hissing its way to life.

The fog is thick enough to hold the colors of leaves as daylight seeps its way in.
Soon enough.
Soon enough.

I am grateful for this time of stillness and isolation.
I am grateful for peace and plenty.
I am grateful for the companionship of good dogs.

I am grateful to the Great Spirit of Love and Mystery
and the gods of my ancestors.

All woods are One Wood
from the first.

Do you do this as well?
Focus on a sensation in the moment and then after the moment and then after the day to try to set the memory?

Good luck to both of us.

Good morning, friends.

I meander on traditional Koas Abenaki lands.