wilderness

in autumn i am a wandering thing
in broken-in boots
on horseback
rambling

through country i do not own
(and why should we
own what is wild?)

if i disrupt the forest
with hoofprints
between aspen
it will make a change
(in some way)

this country is a gift
and i am not to misuse it

but it keeps calling me out

or rather, in

how do you roast a beet?

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.


- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

on being productive:

have coffee out with Eric
buy a birthday present
buy thread for sewing
clean kitchen
clean office
hang new curtains
laundry (two loads)
get rid of all of the dead plants (there are eight)
stir the compost
put away gardening things
try to hang new shelves
bake sweet potato muffins
make dinner (even if it's breakfast food)
start sprouting a pineapple
watch a classic movie

These things happened today. Eric mowed the lawn and raked half of it. And he vacuumed the floors and displayed his strength and manliness by holding two six foot wall shelves up on the wall at once so I could see what they'd look like.

This is a start.

fall

today the air was crisp
and i was out in it
i learn more every day
how to appreciate it
the beauty of it
the gift of it

a truth

This is the truth of it: I feel sad.

I had a lovely weekend with my best friends on our annual pilgrimage to Spruce Meadows to sit in the sun together and watch beautiful horses jump incredible courses. It has always been a carefree time where we can be ourselves and be involved in something we've always loved, and the thing that brought us together as friends in the first place. I am grateful for their company. I am buoyed by all of the laughter this weekend, and the fact that this trip still delivered on its promise of being wonderful.

But going there always makes me re-evaluate my life with horses (which used to just be my life). What am I doing with my horse? Will I ever show again? Who will coach me? Will my friends come too? Will anything ever be the same? Am I truly alone in this, after so many years of doing it together?

I often worry that I am truly incapable of letting go of the past and moving forward on my own.

Mostly I just miss her, and that is a truth that will remain forever. A sadness that seems to stretch onwards out of sight.

on the grasshopper and cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
-- John Keats

duldrums

some days
you must trade
data entry
for riding
on a sun-dappled lane
with a friend
you've had for a while

today is not
one of those days

value

Lunch today with my sisters downtown.

This is unproductive, but valuable none-the-less.

I will be productive this afternoon.

things that are wrong (and right)

I am having some problems.

There is the headache. It has been there, in varying degrees of ugliness, for three weeks. Mostly it's neck pain radiating up the back of my skull. Sometimes it reaches my temples. One awful night, it made it all the way to my eye sockets and down my jaw. When Eric pressed on a muscle on the back of my neck, I felt pain radiating up through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

But this is not the worst pain. What is worse:

I have not felt like a writer.

No poems. Or anything.

After seeing so much, there are not any words. I think my heart has absorbed the great wilderness I have seen. I am grateful for those wild places, but although I've been inspired to appreciate, I have not felt inspired to write.

And I thought I would.

This summer, I don't recognize my own voice. After I write something, I know that it doesn't sound like me. The thing that distinguishes one writer from another, that most important thing: voice. And when I read old poems of mine, the ones I liked enough to make books out of, I feel foolish. Foolish and I don't know what my own voice sounds like.

And I have regrets. I pictured myself in my little home writing studio: the rolltop desk, the pussywillows, the clear light through the window, me in there operating my own little business. Going to work in the morning to that back bedroom. Sitting on the weird, clunky futon to think things over between bouts of real work.

But it's too cluttered. The futon's covered in junk and the desks are a mess. The pussywillows remain hopeful and sweet on the windowsill, but that is all. The peace lily languishes in its desert pot.

It is true that I have paid bills with money from writing and editing, but it isn't enough and my words do not sound like me. I find this disturbing.

And I have struggled with productivity.

I didn't cut the peonies when they were blooming outside in the front bed. I didn't even support them. I just let them bloom, droop heavily to the ground, and die. I could have relished their enormous happy faces, but I let them turn to the ground. They're hard as rocks, now, the dead blossoms. Like brownish-red softballs of my own neglect.

I have two new potential freelance jobs, waiting at the other end of the phone I haven't picked up. I have no reason not to call. To introduce myself (and we've already spoken through emails) and be a grown-up with a real job and life and everything, but instead I've just flipped aimlessly through cookbooks on the couch, thinking about soups that take all day and an endless parade of baked goods. What is wrong with me?

The insomnia which plagued me off and on all winter has returned in summer form. I am sending emails to people at 4:30 in the morning, because I am too anxious to sleep; I am anxious about all of the things I should have been doing when I whiled away half the day lying in bed, telling myself "thirty more minutes" over and over.

And I worry about not doing the right things to make Eric happy.

And the idea of tidying the house every day is inconceivable. And the sheets need to be washed. It seems this summer something always needs to be washed.

These are mostly problems that could be fixed. If I could just make myself have some more ambition, or if I could at least exhibit some control over my own sloth-like behaviour, or something.

I cannot remember the last time I submitted anything anywhere to anyone.

However:

I have ridden horses through green fields at a full gallop, I have gone swimming in prairie lakes and the Atlantic ocean, I have seen stars against the blackness of the sea and sky together, I have felt sun-saturated and sleepy in early evenings, I have baked pies for my family and felt pleased with myself, I have been married one summer, and most importantly, I have felt blessed.

And these are things which I truly love.

But something has to change this fall, or I will wither away in our little house, voiceless and unproductive in such a messy bed. This cannot be the nature of things.