The last couple of weeks have been heavy with sad news. The kind of thing that when you’re little and you first get a glimpse of, you hope that the world you will grow up into isn’t like that. But sometimes it is. Sad, hopeless, dark. I know enough to know it won’t feel like this forever, or even long, that I’m lucky enough to move on, or back, to the things of the world, the satellite feeling. Where there are people to reach out to and keep in touch with, you just have to keep making the effort and not take those relationships for granted. That’s part of the world of grown-ups I don’t like, the compartmentalization, everybody driving the same route, doing the same thing, too tired to reach out to anybody beyond our immediates. I’m guilty of this. It’s easy to be this way, the hard part is fighting against it. And not just keeping in touch, but being excited about the world, curious–all that cultivates hope, or something beyond hope, just the feeling of being alive and not taking the short time we have here for granted. I think nobody’s too cold or too hot or too bored or too tired, that if we knew an inkling more about the elements all around us that things might be different. So dadblamed entertained. Louis CK has that bit about “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy” that just flat out kills me.
I don’t know what I’m talking about now. This is what this kind of heavy does, leads to doubt and anxiety and perseveration. Not that those things are all bad. But they do take up space. Hard to think on other things. All I seem to be able to do is work in the garden, pull the five different kinds of weeds–”oh hey, you again”–plant seeds, trim dead plant matter, spread mulch. They give my brain stretching out space. Edie comes and likes to help. You can’t fool her. You can sit her down in a patch of the five weeds and she will damn sure crawl outta that patch to the tomato plants and try to pull them up. Today she painted my legs in dirt.
Feels like there’s something or somebody I’m missing but I don’t know what or who it is. If anything. Maybe it’s me I miss. I’ve been here before where I lost me for a little while. But it’s all right. There’s still ice water and The Carter Family.
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June 13, 2011 at 11:35 am
brittateenous
Hits me right this a.m., dear Kathryn Frances. I’m reading this on the heals of Walt being sent to my inbox with: “As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, ”
My coffee was done and I was bored by a conference call. But you and Walt reminded me– just think of all 9 of us in all different towns and cities hooked up over a wire. This is a far-flung reach out too. From the Panhandle. x