I got up yesterday morning, stacked some firewood, and then changed clothes and headed off with the rest of my band members to perform at a wedding on the coast. It was a large and elaborate wedding, in a beautiful building overlooking the sea, and the affair was a strange contrast to my sadness about Paris and Beirut and Syria, and my preoccupation with helping Tom get the firewood finished before the snows arrive, and negotiating a last-minute college application snafu, and dealing with the too-much editing I have to do and the not-enough groceries in my house. I began to wonder how a mind can hold so many levels of worry without self-destructing, but then I began to play music, and the muscle memory stepped in and blithely did its work.

The body rescues the mind.

Go for a long uphill walk in the cloudy cold. Stack firewood. Sing.