Blogspot warns me that the browser I'm using is not supported, and that I may experience "unexpected behavior" as a result.
I'm expecting the unexpected, but I doubt this post will jump up and start tap-dancing while you're reading it.
Lately I've been writing. Only a few sentences, and on a good day a poem draft. But daily, for many days now. (16, but who's counting?)
And I've been reading. Poetry, for the most part. But also, I'm immersed in Lindbergh. First it was Anne Morrow, with A Gift From the Sea during vacation last month. And now, I'm enjoying Forward From Here by her daughter Reeve Lindbergh. That voice is so clear to me. Direct, and honest, and humble without being self-effacing. There's something about the perspective of both women that reminds me of Madeleine L'Engle. I've probably said this before. And there's something about all three of them that will forever remind me of my maternal grandmother, who introduced me to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, with whom she'd shared French class at Smith in the twenties. Is it a humanist quality? It's something beyond just feminist, beyond just New England prose (although there's that, too). But I find it expansive, inspirational and at the same time, so very comfortable and familiar - old friends from whom I've been parted for too long.
In addition to reading more in general, I've been listening to Pema Chodron and to Diane Ackerson's One Hundred Names for Love on CD.
For a few weeks there, too, I was reading The Success Principles.
It was interesting being compelled equally by the exercises suggested by Canfield for visualizing everything you want to be and do and have, and by Chodron's instruction to learn about the traps and suffering that come from beliefs and thoughts. I felt a little schizophrenic! But then the Canfield book had to go back to the library (someone else pursuing success had put a hold on it), while I own the Chodron CDs. So I've traded in much of the index-card affirmation reading and visualization of my new home, slim self, and fat bank account for almost-daily meditation.
Today I moved the location of my iMac. R. was done with her desk and I took it in order to shift my writing perspective as I've wanted to for years. I'm no longer restricted by the limitations of the immovable cantilevered desk D. had put in the office so long ago, when he realized the wide spacing of the floor joists made the floor (and any tower on it) bounce under our weight. Now computers have come a long way, I have this desk, and I can write looking out the window rather than at the wall. My back is still more or less to the door, which isn't optimal - except insofar as it meets my maternal requirements to be able to walk past the room or peek in and immediately see what my youngest might have on the screen during the (increasingly less) rare time she's allowed there. Usually it's still Club Penguin, or possibly My Little Pony. There are worse evils.
The light is about done for the day, which is always depressing on a Sunday. But this time next week, I'll have two (count 'em, two!) teenagers in the house. Yikes!
