Yesterday's weather was truly nasty, and I spent too much time driving around in it, mostly because T has to borrow my car today so I needed to get my errands done while I could. As a result, grocery shopping in a nor'easter. Ick.

Thus my house felt particularly pleasant after a morning spent wrestling with ice and sluice and gale and grocery bags. I simmered minestrone, I made strides on a new poem draft, I read Virginia Woolf beside a wood fire, and meanwhile the roof creaked in the wind and rain dashed against the panes. I'm guessing a few trees came down around town last night. It was a wild storm.

But all is quiet this morning, and I have a peaceful day ahead of me. There's nothing on my calendar except my writing group tonight. I hope to keep working on the poem draft, make a batch of Christmas cookies, go for a long walk now that the ice and slush have washed away, discover another novel to read.

My editing hiatus arrived just at the right time--not for my financial well-being, of course; but given the uproars of November, these few loose days have been a kind of cloaking device: a cover for convalescence disguised as idleness, thought disguised as blankness, work disguised as self-indulgence. My long slow hours, mostly spent alone in these rooms, have been both medicinal and expansive. There's been no television or radio chatter, nothing to erode my inner concentration, nothing but the click and shift of house and body. And now I am writing what may be a long poem. I am reading The Years, one of the great books of my heart. I am living inside an ebb and flow of thought and feeling, that mysterious tidal sensation of making.

[And I think over again]

 

anonymous Inuit poet, translator unknown

 

And I think over again,
my small adventures,
when with a shore wind I drifted out
in my canoe,
and thought I was in danger—
my fears,
those I thought so big,
for all the vital things
I had to get to and reach.

And yet, there is only one thing,
one great thing—
to live to see in huts and on journeys
the great day that dawns,
and the light that fills the world.