Red Cedar

This has been one of those weeks where I’ve had a lot of inputs and not much leave to output or process anything. Not only did I have a run of meetings that kept me tied up last weekend, I’m leaving town again on Monday for ten days which somehow necessitates seeing everyone I know this week. Dinners, drinks, poetry readings. All wildly social. And to think, this summer I couldn’t scare up a friend to save my life. Cycles, I suppose. October is always such a frenetic month with April being its spring correlate.

This busyness frustrates me a bit because although I am awash in ideas, I am at the same time exhausted of my ability to execute them. Particularly where it comes to writing. I am sure the upstairs neurons are maxed, for they seem to be colliding at a much slower pace than normal. Rather than snapping around, they are mushing and melding together lazily. Think oatmeal rather than bouncing balls and you get the idea of what it feels like when my mind checks out.

What I really need is a day to sleep in and do nothing except pitter patter around the house – which fortuitously, comes tomorrow. It’s not exactly a weekend of doing nothing, but it is a one of sticking very close to home, something I am craving even as I pack my bags to leave. (Especially as I pack my bags to leave).

In other minor life news, my winning poem is now posted at the Pandora’s Collective website. Additionally, this photograph will be coming out in print next month in Souls Journal which I should receive some copies of (I just confirmed the publishing timeline last week – they say first week of December). So despite my inability to work right at the moment, I have at least these small accomplishments to remind me that I can pick it up again.

I’m not complaining though. I am actually feeling very very good about things in general even though I’m a bit sleepy – as though the various pieces of my life are fitting into the right places; as though parts of me are finally coming together even as my life stretches itself out ever farther.

A nap is all I need and more words will come.

I’m tired tonight, having finished 6 days of union training and meetings, but remarkably sanguine at the moment having just finished a drink with Jess. I think it must just be the giddiness before the fall – for soon I will surely collapse in my bed. I am processing a lot just now – from all the things that have been thought and said and written into my life in the last week. It’s been another time of grand input and I’m feeling a lot of gratitude for the state of my life and the people who comprise so much of what is important to me.

I am…

• thankful for Michael for calling me on my momentary lapse of ethics.
• excited for Anna who is due to birth any day now.
• at home with Jess who is a reflective girl friend.
• grieving for the losses of people around me.
• proud of my friend who is making his debut as a speaker this week at a big conference.
• so unbelievably glad that Kyla has become so close in the last couple years.
• honoured by the trust that Darren has shown for me.
• intrigued by someone who is new in my life and a so far worthy addition.
• frustrated about another missed phone call.
• pleased with myself for being able to recognize the truth when it is right in front of me. and for doing the right thing even when I don’t want to.

It’s just a partial list, really. Because I’m also glad that I got music in front of me that I can eke out of my guitar and a voice to go with it right now. What strangeness to contain all of it at once.