All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered, "yes."

--Tzu Yeh

The big room that opens out onto my weathered gray deck. From this room I can see the pointy tip of Sharptop Mountain, though it's more obscured by treetops than in the past. From this room I can watch finches and cardinals eat seed and at night I can see the traveling phosphorescent dots of varmint eyes as they come around for compost. There are stacks and huddles of books in this room and sometimes they feel overwhelming but I love having them around. From here I can see Barry Lopez's beautiful book Home Ground, Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake, the Best American Short Stories of 2008, Rosamund Purcell's Book Worm, the 2008 Photographer's Market, a couple of old issues of Parabola Magazine, an old blank book I filled with other people's words in 1995, Rosalind Solomon's strange and hefty book of photography Chapalingas, and an old Spanish textbook, Poco a Poco. And so many others.The hearth is one of the most sacred spots in the house though it often gets cluttered with resin and incense dust and bits of wax from old candle stubs that I've used to get fires going. There's a little clay saucer with a charcoal disk and some copal resin on it now and there's an old metal owl luminary off to the side that Ron gave me. I like to light  it up on Hallowe'en. I love its wonky scowl and the silliness of it. This room is really a dining room too. The table is big and heavy and round and made of dark blond wood. The captain's chairs around it are shaky and in need of repair, some of them. This is the table of my childhood snacks and suppers and it's older than I am. It's home right now to a couple of stalks of bright green bamboo rising up from plain glass jars and  to a huddle of Granny Smiths in a locally made bowl the color of Georgia clay. Wherever I am there are pens and post-it notes and old postcards of Scottish standing stones and blue herons and Edward Weston's shells, and I like having these things here on the table along with candles and matches and sunglasses and such. Over by the doorway leading into one of the bedrooms there are a couple of old canvas tote bags full of photographs and sketches and images cut from magazines for me to use in the collage art I keep saying I'm going to do. Right now I'm honestly too busy so I just go over to the pictures from time to time and look at them. They remind me of what I see and what I want to show people.
This is a busy room, full of old shells and patchouli sachet tucked into rectangles of gingham and jigsaw puzzles and old issues of the New Yorker. It's a silly room, with water pistols tucked away under an old table off to the side and a little book of sea turtle stickers hanging out next to a children's book about the sacred places of the Cherokee. This is a room of whimsy and clutter, of sincerity and things half started, of remembrance and the suspended sometimes revisited momentum of works in progress. Overflowing and generative, a bit short on simplicity at times, but very much alive.

Enlightenment is: do what
   you want
        eat what there is.

----Jack Kerouac

Something like these......

I don't think I've been there yet. It's not utterly remote but has a sort of collective sense of the importance of living consciously and kindly and so it isn't a city. It's not too cold nor too humid. It doesn't have any sort of tourist industry turning it cynical and kitschy around the edges. There are eccentric folks there who don't have televisions,  who (like me) let scared little snakes that wander into their houses hang out in the walls. I don't know what the landscape might be like. Sometimes I think of Flagstaff, Arizona. It seems closest to my sense of where I'd like to be (if I had to pick one place) but then there are greener places that appeal to me too. I miss Athens, Georgia, where I lived for many years, but I don't want to live there particularly. Sometimes too I think of moving overseas, perhaps to Australia or New Zealand. I'm glad, though, that this is a mystery. It will be fun to see how things go, and where.

Two mirrors facing each other. There is no image in between.

--Zen proverb

I think I need this CD. I haven't been buying new music for awhile, but I like the sound of this.

I don't have time to be bored, but even if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't feel that way. I can't remember the last time I did. My mind doesn't seem to want to let me. Even when I'm standing in line or stuck in traffic, my mind always finds a way to create stories, to remember things, to suppose and conjecture. (This can be problematic at times, actually.) I can get cynical, restless, pensive, eager for change, indignant, pissy, wistful, but not bored. There are too many friends and family members to catch up with and see, too much music, too many books, too many films, too many photographs to take, too many things happening, too much change to help along, too many stories to hear and tell. The issue for me has more to do with making choices about which book? which road to drive down? which film? which music? Life is rich and full, and boredom doesn't suit it.

A friend recently gave me a copy of Louise Gluck's book of poetry A Village Life. I have had mixed feelings about her poems in the past but I love these. She creates a simple, luminous world with and in these poems and I like going there.
 

Twilight

All day he works at his cousin's mill,

So when he gets home at twilight, he always sits down at this one window,

Sees one time of day, twilight.

There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.

It's as his cousin says:

Living---living takes you away from sitting.

In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape

Representing the world. The seasons change,

Each visible only a few hours a day.

Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness---

Abstractions from which come intense pleasures,

Like the figs on the table.

At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.

It goes down late in summer----sometimes it's hard to stay awake.

Then everything falls away.

The world for a little longer

Is something to see, then only something to hear,

Crickets, cicadas.

Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.

Then sleep takes this away also.

But it's easier to give things up like this, experimentally,

For a matter of hours.

I open my fingers---

I let everything go.

Visual world, language,

Rustling of leaves in the night,

Smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.

I let it go, then I light the candle.

--Louise Gluck

.....there are always two paths to take; one back towards the comforts and security of death, the other forward to nowhere.

--Henry Miller