form & substance

The fog this morning seems right for the second day of a new year: a reminder that I control nothing but how my mind paints the images in front of me.


It feels a disappointment for there to be warmth in winter. The air should be colder in respect to the calendar. This is New England and reputations are more than sacred here that is until they're not.


I know there is a line of trees beyond the ones just outside my window though I can make out only a gray purple blur through the pines and maples and oaks. The woods look like a mountain range though that clearly isn't so.


I spoke this morning to an intimate friend and through the words that passed between us there was more that I didn't grasp than understood. I accept that whatever was taking place has her best intentions as it had mine--or so I like to believe.


Last night the cat woke from a nap (a cat nap) and barked at me. His expression wild with confusion and insistence, he barked again and I began talking to him as though he were a friend seated next to me at a bar: "Hey, pal. What's up with you? Something shaking you? Need a friendly ear?" He meowed once again. "OK, Dude. Come on up here and rest yourself near me. I'll give you four or five minutes of chin scratching and if that doesn't soothe you you're on your own." I control nothing. I don't know if being present has any effect and I am not sure whether being where I am is where I'm supposed to be. But, there you are.


I rely on totems to get me through the tough stuff. The easy things allow for language and a smile or frown but the difficult parts need statues and mantras and prayer. Once I believed in a particular god but that's changed and these days, though I still send my pleas out there, I don't think they're landing anywhere but in the air around my head. That's fine; the air around my head is rich with ghosts and angels and memories and particles of people alive and dead. That space is fertile for something; fecund, as poets like to say. 


So here it is a new year (the second day of a new year) and how I see myself remains the issue. I am looking out but seeing myself. And I don't understand what I'm seeing. And I feel that, like all of last year, I'll continue to construct messages and lay them on my doorstep or give them to a friend to look at and explain why they're inadequate to some standard I can't imagine and getting word back I don't recognize the person for the friend I asked to comment.


There is beauty everywhere. There is art and there is beauty and there are opinions and there is cruelty and there is loving kindness and there is work and there are the results of work and all of these things are measurable somehow but none understood. It's only possible to experience and accept that what I make isn't mine to understand and what I feel or see or taste or touch isn't mine to think about if I'm going to remain true to my limited time here.