Rain on the way this afternoon, so I will plant tomatoes and peppers and eggplant this morning, now that yesterday's blustery wind has died down. We're forecast to get more than an inch, which will be very welcome as I've been watering every day. But despite the slight dryness, the garden is in remarkably good shape--no groundhog damage, little insect damage, no frost. Something will go wrong soon; something always does; but for the moment things out there are kind of edenic.

I'm hoping to take this entire day away from my desk. My lofty ambition is to mess around for a few hours with dirt and leaves and then clean up and go out for a beer with Tom. Tomorrow I'll be back to teaching, but I'm free all next weekend, and T and I might take the canoe out, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Still, my brain won't let me off the hook. I dreamed last night about playing the violin. I know I need to take it out of its case soon. I know I need to start organizing poems for the next collection. But I'm frozen, for some reason. 

I tell the students in my manuscript classes that compiling a book is as creative a process as writing the individual poems. I believe that; I know it's true. But also, as with writing, there are fallow periods. I suppose that's where I am right now. I can make poems, but I can't move myself forward into seeing them as a larger conversation.

The thaw will come eventually. I've stopped being terrified about not writing, and I'm also not terrified about this hiatus. I'm now old enough to recognize that every mind requires rest, and my not-making periods are important and necessary. They aren't laziness or procrastination. I do have many faults, but those two aren't among them.

Yet there's a weariness. There's that familiar "what's the point" glumness . . . the acknowledgment--again, and again, and once more again--that what I do in this world is nearly invisible. You all know what I mean. You have your own weariness.

I am not repining, or complaining, or sulking. I know how fortunate I am. I know I have purpose. It's not an either/or proposition but one more both/and. I have a vocation, and that vocation means almost nothing to the larger world. I have a sweet and solid life, but the edges crumble away. It's just regular human happy-sadness.