[found my favorite poem tonight, and thought i'd save it here. hope you enjoy, friend]

You, my friends, wherever you are,
Whether you are grieving just now, or full of joy,
To you I lift this cup of pungent wine
As they often do in the land of France.
From a landscape of cranes and canals,
Of tangled railway tracks and winter fog,
In the smoke of black tobacco, I make my way
Toward you and I ask you a question.
Tell me, for once at least laying
Caution aside, and fear and guarded speech,
Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night
When we face only night, the ticking of a watch,
The whistle of an express train, tell me
Whether you really think that this world
Is your home? That your internal planet
That revolves, red-hot, propelled by the current
Of your warm blood, is really in harmony
with what surrounds you? Probably you know very well
The bitter protest, every day, every hour,
The scream that wells up, stifled by a smile,
The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall
And knows that beyond it valleys spread,
Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies
And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel.
In you, as in me, there is a hidden certainty
That soon you will rise, in undiminished light,
And be real, strong, free from what restrained you.
That above the mold of broken flagstones,
Above memory and your transformation
Which is like the flight of birds when ice
Crumbles in the traces of hooves – above everything,
It will be given to you to run as celestial fire,
To set sails ablaze with your flame at dawn
When ships trail smoke and archipelagoes
Wake up, shaking copper from their hair.

No, I address you here, from the ashes of winter,
In the simplest words, not to induce doubt
Or to call melancholy, for instance, the sister of fate.
On and on. The heart is still beating.
Nothing is lost. If one day our words
Come so close to the bark of trees in the forest,
And to orange blossoms, that they become one with them,
It will mean that we have always defended a great hope.

How should I defend it? By naming things.
That isn’t easy. I say the word ”dawn”
And the tongue by itself affixes ”rosy-fingered”
As in the childhood of Greece. The sun and the moon
Have the faces of gods. I am not certain
That Poseidon won’t emerge suddenly
From the sea bottom (he wears an earring)
Ploughing the waves with his motor, towing a retinue of nymphs.
And when I wander in alpine forests and meadows
Every cleft in the rock seems to me a gate
Through which one enters the underworld. I wait for a guide.

And space, what is it like? Is it mechanical,
Newtonian? A frozen prison?
Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation
Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend
I know. I don’t know, and if I did,
Still my imagination is a thousand years old.

Jump into the waters with your clothes on.
Such heaviness (deadweight, as sometimes in our dreams).
It’s the same with us. We wear the brocade
Of past centuries or dress in false purple.
Covering our faces with velvet masks,
Classical, playing again what has been played before,
And yet, I affirm, this is the earth of wonder.
It gives us the gift of eternal youth.

To you I lift this cup, here, on the stage,
I, one voice, no more, in the vast theater.
Against closed eyes, bitter lips.
Against silence, which is slavery.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1954

my back just popped for the first time in three years and ooooh, i’m happy, all stretched out in my bed. warm bed, cool house, keep the covers on for a few more minutes happy. adele’s pandora station crooning to me, telling me to stay in bed a few. more. minutes.

empty house. no roommate for the last few days-weeks-month. the house is getting grungy but i don’t wanna clean. but i don’t wanna live in a grungy house, either. somedays, though, i like to pretend i’m a bachelor instead of a bachelorette, and wait until the very last minute to buy toilet paper and trash bags and just make do until then. same with cleaning. can i wait until the very very last minute?

can you tell i’m not feeling delicate and pretty and girly today? its the rain, i promise. makes me feel heavy and hide-y, not at all preen-y and dress-up-y.

it takes three paragraphs to get to the real stuff – i’m not feeling pretty and girly ’cause my heart is heavy and head-y today. i’m always falling in love with the wrong people. you can’t make someone love you back, which is just sad, and mostly results in me staying in bed for just a few, few, few more minutes. listening to adele. you see now? i decided yesterday, though, that while falling in love with the wrong people who don’t want to love you back is sad, it’s really not a bad mistake; my little heart is beating and loving and falling, which is better than the alternative, yes? better than not beating and not loving, i think.

When I was in school, one of my mentors was the director of our opera program. He took a group of us under his wing and taught us so much about opera and art, but even more about life and living it. We would often discuss how his comments about a scene of an opera, or about a particular aria or a character in a play related more to life than they did about the play. He was a profound man speaking profound words.

One of the things he would often say to a student who would get caught up in a prop piece (“Where do I put the phone? Where should the phone be when I enter the scene? Which hand do I hold the phone in?”) would be a swift reminder. “Just do the phone. This is not a play about a phone.” (My favorite was when we were doing the opera, The Telephone, and he still had to speak this line). And the truth is, even in The Telephone, it wasn’t a play about a telephone. It was a play about two people’s relationship and communication.

I once caught my family arguing about a really dumb object and how it had been handled. I had an incredible urge to yell, “This is not a play about a telephone!” Because even in our most intense moments, in our passion about things and objects, it’s never about the telephone. It should always be about people. This life is a play about people.

This is not a play about a telephone.

[Posting here will now be much more personal, and much more often. Really hope you are okay with that, friends. I need to talk to someone sometimes, and a lot more these days than normal. Thanks for understanding that.]

Things I’ve discovered this week that are cheaper than therapy, but work just as well:

*Bleach + a grungy kitchen sink

*Loads of laundry

*Fresh sheets on a bed

*Real ginger ale

*A cry-fest in your car on the expressway

*Krispy Kreme donuts

*Setting your alarm early so you can laze in bed a few extra minutes every morning

*Writing a [soon to be hit] song with your roommate

*Cussing. A lot.

*Paint

*Bread + fresh basil

I’m sure there’s more. But for now, that’s all I need. Back to blogging, now that the dust has settled from some big time life shifts the in the last month. I know you are EXCITED, internet!