in these vast hours

float the ghosts of ease 
ascend the essence of sweetness
mysterious peace has brushed me
where light echoes soft darkness
where stillness distills silence 
and the certainty of sleep

___________________________

I may get more than two hours of sleep tonight. (But all my grading is done!)

Pic: NM's busy bird feeder.

midterm thoughts

It's like clockwork how I adore my students by the midterm mark, and this term is no different. And perhaps requited in a small way? One of them wrote, "YOU'RE A GEM" after we'd resolved some tech issue. (I wanted to shout back, "I KNOW!")

Just finished a ton of midterm grading. There was some reminiscing in the answers about funny moments in class like when someone thought the squiggly lines in a document were redactions (à la the Epstein Files) and awesome ones when the class got someone to change their mind. 

When I write exams, I always worry if the instructions are clear. The only person who didn't get the assignment (as they say) was Big A. Huck has some troubling symptoms that could be a UTI (or something more serious). I went looking for reassurance... "It's not serious, right? It's just a UTI, right?" Big A: "Right. Or it could be bladder cancer." Facepalm. StraightLineFace. We have to collect more puppy pee for tests.

Off to the second half of the semester... summer (break) will be here in seven weeks. 

Pic: Sunset with Nu.

memoriam

Baby sis (whose birthday was in Jan) and I didn't feel we could bear to celebrate our birthdays this year. So we've put them on hold.

Starting Saturday, I'll be spending a week with United Way of Sarasota County (FL) cleaning up after Hurricane Milton as part of a college service break with students. It'll be filthy work all day and bunking at a local church shelter at night.

My mom would be slightly horrified at spending a birthday this way--she so loved luxury and soft things. 

But somehow it feels right to me. Not quite a celebration, more as a way of comemorating the gift of this body she birthed. 

In any case, it'll be different.

Pic: Mallards on the Red Cedar. Walk with AS last week.

"I trust"

Thanks to J and Big A, I started the day with a yoga practice that urged me to trust the journey.

I'm trying.

One of the things I think about a lot as my birthday approaches is how this will be the first time I'm here without her in this body she gave me.

At the pow-wow this afternoon with LB and EM, as I watched the dancers in competition completely lose themselves, it made me want to tie my bharatanatyam ankle bells on and whirl until my feelings centrifuge away. 

I love this meme by "Notorious Cree" where they play the "wrong Indian music," (i.e. my kind of Indian) but dance anyway.

Pic: One of the Ojibwe dancers today.  

lining up

Grief has been crippling lately. Meditating at the altar in the middle of the night, seeing Scout and my mom side by side, I found fresh regret for not knowing that mom was going, for not being able to say a final goodbye--the way I was able to with Scout. If I had known ahead of time, I could have flown to Bangalore. 

Past me must have decided that I needed to do more things, because my calendar has been jam-packed.

But current me had to deal with an Urgent Care trip for Big A on Tuesday (Long Covid is no joke) and an emergency vet trip for Huckleberry on Wednesday (waiting on results) and had to cancel some previously made plans.

But I still got to see Lucas Zelnick perform today and see the world premiere of Sally (based on the experience of Sally Hemmings) yesterday. 

Pic: A bunch of us at Sally; I'm nicely nestled between friends.

Dial F for flaky

It's the middle of the night so I can't text to apologize, but I just realized that I absolutely flaked on Saturday yoga with J! I didn't even remember when I texted her today about something else. 

And I somehow napped through my alarm for my video call with dad and sis. I blame the "Oscar Mule" I had at the cinema with my galentines for that. 

(We went to see Wuthering Heights, which ended very disappointingly for the literature nerds amongst us [kinda halfway though the book before Heathcliff does the more Heathcliff-y things]. I think there has been some buzz about casting a white person as Heathcliff [he's supposedly Roma/Lascar]. But also they cast an East Asian and a South Asian in leading roles and the songs were by Charli XCX [who's half Indian] so it's not malice, at least?)

Pic: Dial M for Murder with Big A at Williamston Theater yesterday. It's so tiny intimate.

playback

I know when that note sounds
and I feel touched everywhere
that anything could happen… 
anything bad

unbothered, not hiding its shape 

it is the obviously-wrapped gift
--a rock, a key, a boomerang
you already know

so I am this stranger crying until
it makes me stranger--becomes
my first experience of myself 
as only a memory

__________

A note apropos of nothing: It made me so sad to hear that James Van Der Beek who played Dawson in Dawson's Creek (a comfort watch back in the day that I started dipping back into during the pandemic) died yesterday (so young!) from colorectal cancer. I'm horrified to learn that two years of cancer treatment have left this successful celebrity actor's family needing a GoFundMe to pay for their children's education. The US healthcare system is brutal. [Also brutal, the look Big A gave me when I said Dawson had "battled cancer" because every obituary I had just read used that phrasing. I should do better.]

________________

Pic: The frozen Maple River. The temperatures look like they're going up--gloriously--so all this is going to be melt and runnels soon.