The past couple of days have been cool, if humid, but now the air feels thick and summery. My new haircut is all of a-curl, and the garden glows a tropical green in the early morning light.

I finished up my residency-app judging yesterday, so that's one more desk job to tick off the list. And I felt safe about my haircut, too, which was another plus to the day. Today there'll be more Zoom meetings, more editing, a Rilke phone call with Teresa, a truckload of soil delivered for the new flowerbeds. 

I'm still cradling my finalist news like an invisible baby. Probably it's wrong to feel so joyous about it. But I do. There has been so little joy in our communal lives; maybe that's why the private ones seem extra bright.

Do you remember the Rilke sonnet I posted yesterday? To me, it still feels like a personal message delivered straight from the divine--a prescription for living, along the lines of Whitman's instructions in the preface to Leaves of Grass, that passage that begins "This is what you shall do."

Rilke holds my face in his two hands and he tells me:

In this night of fire and excess, stand
as magic power at your senses’ crossroads,
be the meaning of their strange encounter.

And I say to him: Okay. I'll try.