Day 93

When I got up, I stood in the garden and toyed with the idea of just writing self-censored four hundred times and leaving it at that, and giving Aggie a rest. Then I went back into the house, and emptied the cat litter tray, did some back stretches, and had breakfast. The glamorous life of the writer.

There’s a cold edge to the sun this morning, a feeling that it will only take a minute shift in something, anything, to change this still and sunny morning into something altogether more malevolent and threatening. M saw two lights moving very quickly and noiselessly across the night sky the other evening. We forget too easily that we are surrounded by folklore and mythology wherever we are in the world. There are roots of truth in all these passed-on stories. We don’t really know what is beneath our feet, even in the most suburban of gardens. Everywhere was a wild place at some time in the past, and the traces of those places will linger forever, no matter what happens. Everywhere is goose bump territory. My hackles rise as I write.

I measure time in lost moments. We lost so much when we disconnected from the land under us, when we stopped wandering and stayed in one place. Perhaps that’s why I keep wandering. This is the 27th place I’ve lived in, and I get the feeling it won’t be the last. A connection to the earth and its stories doesn’t mean staying in the same place forever. We can put down roots anywhere, and pull them up again when we move on. To stop moving is to stop breathing.

Just as we turned the lights out last night, my mind scurried off to that place (I’ve used that word a lot this morning) where it turns over thoughts at an alarmingly rapid rate and then stops on a random idea like a spinning lottery wheel. This time is was There is no reality. I had arrived at the conclusion that we live our perceptions, nothing else, that what we see as reality is just our view of something that’s living itself out in front of our biased eyes. It’s a pretty obvious conclusion, and not a new one, but it’s interesting to muse on how this plays into folklore and myth and religion. Even putting any philosophical conceits and concepts to one side, we have left so much unexplored by concreting our cities and roads over it.

Each word is an effort this morning, in an odd masochistic way. It is odd to be sitting down after spending the last two mornings broadcasting standing up. Perhaps that’s where the sluggishness comes from, and I should have standing-up desks for everything I do. Something else to ponder.

The sky still has some blue in it. The sinister day has not yet come for me. Perhaps it never will.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 50