I enjoyed yesterday's class: it was fun not to be the teacher, for a change. Today, however, I'll be forging into full-scale housekeeper mode: first, groceries; then bean pickling, sauce making, canning, and freezing; plus I ought to mow grass and run the trimmer and clean the bathrooms.

Tom spent the afternoon noisily planing cedar planks; he also went paint shopping, so I think today he may begin painting stuff, if the wood has dried out enough from Friday's torrent.

I've started rereading Penelope Fitzgerald's novel Offshore, and I'm finishing up my Four Quartet homework for my Monday phone confab with Teresa. I fiddled a bit with a poem draft yesterday morning, though I don't think it's going to become anything worthwhile. Late in the afternoon, I chatted with a woman who stopped by to look at my flowers; she turned out to live up the street and be the widow of a prominent Democratic state politician, so that was interesting. I listened to the Red Sox play good baseball (for a change), and missed a phone call from my son, and made a very satisfying chicken curry overflowing with garden produce--carrots, peppers, tomatoes, chard, cilantro, topped with roasted-potato coins and a tiny garnish of fried okra.

One thing that Ian mentioned in class was the importance of opening ourselves to flow states: of being so absorbed in an activity that we lose sense of time; that is, energetic concentration; being in the zone. But I also like the notion of flowing from one activity to another, a different conception of flow state: brief bursts of extreme concentration shifting into another burst in another realm . . . writing, then picking beans, then writing, then walking to the library, then writing, then washing dishes, then writing, then folding laundry. This is how I work best, when I am engaged in a flow of thought and movement, the tasks of mind and body intersecting not as distractions but as comrades.