Finally, a beautiful night's sleep! I slept hard from 9 till 5, then wallowed dozily in bed for an hour, and now here I am, brisk as a new broom, bustling around the kitchen, brewing my coffee, letting the cat out. I'm just like a real live human being.

Yesterday I cleaned the house, then mowed grass and tore out the cherry tomato plants--which was a slow process because they were loaded with green fruit. It took me a long time to strip the vines, but by the end of the chore I had two quarts of tomatoes to transform into faux-tomatillo sauce. They simmered all afternoon with a fresh ancho pepper, a slab of red onion, three big garlic cloves, and some cumin seed. Then I ground the vegetables through a food mill and voila: a quart of salsa verde to freeze for future enchiladas.

So that was satisfying; and though I didn't end up tearing out the sunflowers, I did prune them hard, then tidied up the zinnias, fussed over my spinach seedlings, moved a box of firewood up to the living room, imagined the future.

And in the midst of this flurry I received, believe it or not, a fan letter in the mail.

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Today I'll pause the flurry. It's time to turn my thoughts to teaching, to Rilke, to notebooks, to conversation, to quiet. My goal with this weekend class is to create an atmosphere that will allow the participants to enter and linger in a Rilkean space . . . to tap into their own ecstatic silence. I hope we can do it.

So a good night's sleep was a huge boon. And now I'm going to take a hot shower, and eat a hot breakfast, and go for an amble around the neighborhood, and otherwise prep myself to concentrate and relax. I'll let you know how it goes.