Breathing, in and out

It seems like everyone I’m in touch with was just wishing for a peaceful Easter. Also for peace, but mostly first to catch their breath.

The variant velocity of the arrival of the news is fascinating. A failed missile launch attempt in North Korea lands on the front page in ten minutes; in comparison, the news of the terrorists who murdered more than 100 refugees and rebels in Syria takes two days to filter through. U.S. voters have put the nuclear detonation codes in the hands of someone incompetent to guide our diplomacy. We live in a world where, with straight faces, we call a bomb: “mother.”

Three more days of Passover.

The time goes by so quickly. In two weeks the year will be a quarter over.

Lately I feel like the harder I try to concentrate, the more fixed on a plan I am, the less focused, the less graspable the outcome. Maybe it’s the spring weather. At first it was helping my mood but lately I feel agitated. Of course, that may not be the spring’s fault.

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but dooce (Heather Armstrong — one of my blogger idols) reappeared recently. She said something that I learned, too, while blogging: “either by necessity or fatigue or lack of self-care, I abandon[ed] the practice of words. And then things got really, really bad. For a decade and a half, words have been my medicine.”

I guess I’ve known a long time that there’s this weird balance between writing and not writing, also that not writing is bad for me. I hope she returns to more regularly blogging in any case. As I plan to do / continue. It’s like just as I get to the point where I think, “now I can say anything,” some other obstacle appears in my brain. I read something recently about writing where the author pointed out the problem in maintaining a balance between the necessary openness to write and the necessary invulnerability required to accept the response to one’s writing and I thought, I know, I know. Like all art, writing requires that deep care about everything except about what other people say. Maybe blogging is a special case of that. Or, for that matter, writing job application letters. Think of all of the thousands of words of wasted prose.

We are thinking of my mother so often at the moment. I am worried about my brother. I will be relieved when the white bass are finally running. May 1 is coming, too.

[and more writing about Richard Armitage; I’m just trying to clear the decks enough here to concentrate on something. thanks for continuing to read]

~ by Servetus on April 17, 2017.