I can weigh the difference of a day
I doubt most resurrections--yet
the rhizomatic tenderness of your banks
are prayer: lilting, tidal, endlessly
old / done / enduring--but
even in the porous ecstasy of freeze, I know
the delirium of loss, know you won't
take me any place to call home
SO much sunshine today, everything seemed automatically brighter and easier. Clear skies all day... and stars and moon right now.
Temps were in the teens, but it didn't seem to matter--two long hikes--one with LB and another with BS; chats all day (fam, KB, EM, JL); and quality time with Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, which is a trippy trancey delight and I'm sad to be near the end.
I took today for myself and loved it; back to work tomorrow.
while I keep walking
everywhere.
Silence sings here, shame too--
like a mosquito hymn
in my ear.
Perhaps I'm a savant of fracture
on an enraptured
exiled page--
perhaps I've siphoned my love
into stories just a little
or too late.
I'll rearrange for my fingers to speak
to the clouds
unfolding like a migraine confession
I mean, I mean
You've cried so much, your eyes
drop like pebbles
and wait to show you a way home
I try, to free
the mistakes I made as a parent
then I draw you,
my love, as a silent self-portrait
***********************
A detail from a mural in the Children's Garden (early morning walking date with L!).
Big A was mostly experienced as a napper in various settings around the house (he's coming off a spate of nightshifts).
This "Beam-Me-Up" action in the sky is from a long walk with Nu and B.S. and it made us chuckle. Lots of talk, sharing, support, and a huge, delicious loaf of BS's banana bread that Nu and I loved (i.e. have almost finished) this afternoon.
Rumpus Room sleepover tonight with Nu, Scout, and Huck, because At left for college this morning and this is how we cope.
Most years we're already back at school before Pongal comes around and the usual celebration is something hurried when the sun is no longer high in the sky.
This year, we got to celebrate in the sunshine and make our offering at a reasonable daytime hour, with fragrant narcissus and paperwhites rounding out the pongal rice and jaggery laddu on the offering tray. To the millenary vedic sun salutation sloka*, which I was translating for the kids as I went, I added a prayer for enough Vit. D to help us through the pandemic.
Cousin P had sent the cousin groupchat a set of truly lovely pics of their traditional celebration replete with sugarcane, outdoor hearth, and silk-clad kids. So I sent this pic back to balance things out.
Not pictured: The very un-Pongal looking kids, one in the Phoebe Bridgers limited edition Punisher sweater they got from their older sib and the other human kid in the pink Mean Girls/Karl Marx mashup tee I gave them.
Tamorim Sarva Paapagnam Pranathosmi Divakaram
[You radiant as the Japa flower, heir of Kashyapa, the creator of days
destroy my darkness and all corruption I pray to you, O Sun.]
is better than none; I am human,
I love as a reversible history.
You already know
If you call me "sunshine," I will answer
also: "they who love sunshine," try--
I've called prayers into every reverie.
Oh my little girl
All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm
In my head, the "little girl" became a reference to Nu who had just told their first lie and had been reprimanded, and was now sad.
Anyway--I was reminded of this because Tommy Raskin's life (yes, I haven't moved on) reminds me not of my own weltschmerzen, but of my children's and students' joy, their yearning for justice, for full lives, how the pandemic is the chief thief of joy RN, and their frustrations with the world... and it terrifies me.
(Pic from walk this afternoon with LB; Red Cedar River--the mallards followed me around!)
Kinda like I did with this holiday card, which I had printed but didn't mail... and probably will never mail at this point.
Apartment Therapy's astrology section forecasts that I will have a "fruitful social life" this year, so perhaps not all is lost? Ha.
for L.B.
Every day seems an apocalypse
clouds plant their borders in beds,
these immense struggles go by
*
In the harvest, the friend is a forest,
the friend who walks into the snow
measures beauty yawning in mud
*
Gathers our indecisions into words,
into seeds, reimagining the drought
of tongues, scattering in floods of fear
*
Here is apotheosis--we can lie down and
not die, we can let ourselves be carried
away by love, becoming transformed by it.
_______________________________________________
"what didn’t you do to bury me/ but you forgot that I was a seed" Dinos Christianopoulos
“They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.” Protest slogan in support of the Ayotzinapa 43 /Families Belong Together.
Off the top of my head, I do feel on the brink with: the inexorable pandemic, all the feelings uncovered by the Tommy Raskin tribute, the impending crush of work, and my lack of control over any of this.
Surprisingly, I was offered the Pfizer vaccine today--not because of teaching but because of my child advocacy gig; I said yes.
I saw the cutest snowperson when I ambled over to L's house earlier today! Their bangs are like mine, but even that detail couldn't detract from their quintessential cuteness.
Nu's back in (virtual) school today, so everyone is back to waking early so we can have breakfast together and build each other up... apparently, we do this with cuddles, and riddles, and jokes, and teasing putdowns.
Speaking of school... I miss my students. There're lots of meetings starting Wednesday and I started today by writing to every one of my advisees. It's re-entry time for all of us although classes won't start until after MLK Day.
Speaking of days... It's my Boss Day! My dinner pick was poke, which we made together; my entertainment pick was Veep... again!
After everyone headed off to their rooms, I found the tribute Rep. Raskins and his spouse wrote for their child Tommy and I weep to think that someone who brought so much joy and goodness to people didn't feel enough of it themselves.
(Related: I think of Aaron Swartz frequently. Sometimes I think about them multiple times a week--especially when my students are doing internet research. I resent that I was introduced to Aaron Swartz through his obituary--it's a particularly downhearted way to learn about an extraordinary person. I thought I'd written about this before, but a quick search revealed nothing.)
But... it's At's 'Boss Day' and he picked a really simple dinner--but we didn't have enough bread to make veggie melts for everyone, so I put on my big girl winter clothes and set off for Whole Foods.
(Yes, it was just down the street to wish TB a happy birthday before curling up cozily for most of the evening--but I'm counting it as a tiny win for today.)
As we close out 2020 (with LB's food exchange, SD's Zoom party in MD, and calls and texts from all over the world), I want for all of us to rise up in every way in 2021.
And I'd really, really like to see my sister and parents.
A long yoga session on Mirror, hours of reading, syllabus prep, an adoring Prince retrospective online, and then stringing a video-list of Nirvana-Bikini Kill-Foo Fighters for Nu (the Nirvana and Bikini Kill were kinda for the WGS class). Nu has very limited screen time these days, so accompanying me on rabbit holes of 90s nostalgia is ok with them. (Evil parent laugh.)
Big A's "Impossible" spaghetti sauce for dinner, some Veep with At (from whom I received this puppy pic) and now I'm going to give Bridgerton a try by myself.
2) Nu announced it was National Card Game Day, and we played Rummy, Coup, and Smart Ass at various times in the day to observe it 'properly.'
3) A couple of weeks ago I gave myself some terrible bangs, but I must have decided they weren't terrible enough, so I gave myself more bangs around 1 or 2 am. Big A worked last night, and when he came home this morning, I spent like 20 minutes repeatedly yelling "Don't LOOK at me; DON'T look at me." He offered to cut my bangs next time, but we're at least four-five weeks away from being able to attempt repair. I miss going to the hairdresser, and I'm bored with my hair.
4) I can't believe I haven't brought in the hammocks and throw pillows from the backyard yet... it's not that I'm that lazy, I'm just awfully prone to wishful thinking.
In lieu of our usual Christmas Eve candlelight service we drove through a nearby luminaria display...
Nu and At are in bed/their rooms with their new jammies and all of their book presents...
I've prepped the breakfast pudding and the (store-bought) cinnamon rolls...
A Zoom is set up to open presents with the grandparents at 10:00 am tomorrow.
10:46 pm
Time to get back to my novel now...
Made a winter solstice meal (stew, roasted veggie salad, biscuits, and apple cider hot toddies with brandy) to share with BS and EM for good cheer. We'd planned to build a fire in the firepit, but it began to hail, so we lit some candles indoor instead.
LB and TB were having their own solstice celebration and I was supposed to head over after dinner, but I stayed home, had a long boozy chat with EM and then Zoom-ed into JL's book club meeting of Mexican Gothic. I hadn't read it, but no one was talking about the book anyway. We haven't met in so long and everyone's hair was SO long!
I'm inordinately excited about yoga, and hangouts, and the two minutes of extra daylight we'll get tomorrow.
