There are so many things that I want to do. I want to meet the members of my bloggity inner circle in person. I want to do a collage page a day in my book. I want to spend more time with my kids doing things that are fun for all of us. I want to go to bed early with my husband. I want to put together a book of my writings and publish it. I want to live closer to my sister, and my brother, and my mom. I want to walk a half an hour every day,...
Good: my favorite colleague back after a 2-week vacation Not So Good: crunchy, undercooked rice in my sushi lunch *bleah* Good: finding a Reese’s Fast Break bar that I had stashed away and forgotten about Not So Good: Anders being gone overnight Good: feeling like my to-do list at work is back under control again Not So Good: still haven’t gotten Karin’s passport renewed Good: yearly bonus money making buying plane tickets for my brother’s wedding completely painless Not So Good: listening to Tracy Chapman over and over so I can memorize the song I will be singing at the...
In choir we are practicing excerpts from Stabat Mater, an Easter mass concert that we are performing together with the Lomma Women’s Church Choir. It’s the first time since I joined the choir a couple of years ago that we’ve done religious music (apart from a couple of pieces in the big 3000-member choir concert we performed in Stockholm last year). Today we practiced from 10 to 4 in the chapel of the congregation house in Lomma, and it struck me again how much more majestic music sounds in a church with the open space and high ceiling. We worked...
When you find a great new blog do you go back and read through the archives? Why or why not? Does it make you feel like a stalker if you do? I am so unmotivated at the moment I’m amazed that I finally (after sitting and staring for what felt like forever) managed to actually start writing even if it was to cheat and ask a question of my readers thereby putting the onus of providing content on someone else. I’m curious, though. When I find an author I like I want to buy every book they’ve ever written and...
This is one of the first poems I ever copied down in a journal. It made me see the world differently. It made me start paying attention to and looking for the beauty in the details. It changed the way I wrote and the way I thought about the world. Read it slowly. The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of its mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and...
Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you know what you wanted to do with your life? Did you have a plan? Have you followed it or has it veered unexpectedly? I never did. I still don’t. It’s not that I don’t like who and where I am, but these days I feel I have lost a way I never knew I was on. Or else I’m veering.* Which way is the real question, though. Which way? Really Great Writing Out There Right Now: On End *or else I’m tired.
Wild swans are winging by overhead; the third time in as many days. They call as they fly and I wonder if they are just having conversations with each other, like we would on a long car trip…the younglings honking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” and the elders threatening to turn this flock around and fly home if the kids don’t behave. Are they commenting on the things they pass at 70 miles an hour, or is it the waterfowl equivalent of buzzing the natives? “HONK HONK NYAH NYAH! Can’t catch us, boo yah!” If they’re trying...
Having a work laptop at home is not good. Well, I mean it is good for getting WORK done. But here it is Saturday night at 10 p.m. and I have been working since 1 p.m., nearly nonstop. With only mini-breaks for a load of laundry, dinner and a walk to the nursery to buy potted purple tulips and a glorious golden-orange begonia, and to write this journal entry. I have had a headache for nearly 24 hours because I picked up new eyeglasses yesterday. I was not amused last November when I finally got new glasses after 4 years...
I fight my inner packrat constantly. I can’t remember if it was before or after my father died that my mom told us that he, a notorious and shameless packrat of the First Order, had refused to throw away, among other equally horrifying things, boxes of moldy college textbooks from the 60s that had been caught in a basement-flooding years ago and 10-year old road maps and box after box of computer cables and ports and parts. Boxes of pens. Boxes of paper. Boxes of old magazines. I don’t think my father ever threw anything away that he thought might...
The Animal That Drank Up Sound by William Stafford One day across the lake where echoes come now an animal that needed sound came down. He gazed enormously, and instead of making any, he took away from, sound: the lake and all the land went dumb. A fish that jumped went back like a knife, and the water died. In all the wilderness around he drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountainside and folded a quilt over the rocks, getting ready to store everything the place had known; he buried— thousands of autumns deep—the noise that had used...