to you all but I don’t have that much to say these days…
Except that these summer days are glorious. I wake up before 6 and lay in bed listening to the birds. They sound like diamonds sparking off bits of light every few seconds. After I rouse myself from the inbetween sleepy state of being no one to being someone, I realize: Oh, I woke up. It’s another morning on planet earth! Lucky me to still be breathing.
I look around the room—Matt is usually up and out in his office by then—and start taking in what I see. Color, shape. After that, the labels: Chandelier. Painting with girl and bird. Blue ceiling. I sense my body, right foot then up the leg. Left foot, left leg, all the while sensing the life force that is moving my blood, breathing me. Nothing is wrong as long as my mind doesn’t grab hold of what I didn’t do yesterday or need to do today. Nothing is wrong as long as I don’t pin myself to the wheel of correction, as a friend says. And nothing is wrong even when I do pin myself to that wheel, as long as I don’t think I shouldn’t be pinning myself to the wheel.
At some point in the morning, I pad my way outside. Foot on ground, body meets air. Oh, the air on the skin! I pass by flowers—have I seen them today? I notice the spiral succulent that looks like it’s from another planet. And the huge succulent that my friend Barbara says should have been in the Willy Wonka film because it seems like it should have chocolate between its leaves that you can slurp whenever you feel like it. (Am I noticing those as well?)
Then to my studio. And then to the book I am working on. Yippee. (It will be out in March. It doesn’t have a title yet.) Here’s a sentence I’ve been working on this morning in the chapter called Heavenly Bodies:
“Even if we spend ninety years treating these bodies magnificently, they will wear out and die. Yet as temporary, fragile and vulnerable as our bodies are, they are the most direct portals to the only forever there is.”
Heavenly indeed.
