It's quite cool this morning--only 54 degrees: lovely weather for sleeping and waking, and hot coffee tastes like nectar. Outside the crows are noisily waking up; a cardinal is singing. Through the kitchen window I see that a raccoon must have been galumphing around in my birdbath again because the dish is now upside in the garden bed.

I'll be teaching all weekend, so today will be a catchall: mowing grass, washing winter hats and scarves (finally), cutting herbs for drying (finally). I am very behind on some basic homestead tasks, but so it goes.

Every time I sit down with my fall calendar and realize how crowded it's becoming, I start to feel a little pale. I'm not sorry that August is fairly quiet. I've got one radio interview coming up as well as a trip to Vermont to see my family. Otherwise, the big bang will start with our son's wedding over Labor Day weekend, quickly followed by an onslaught of jobs, events, and obligations. New car, new car, I keep reminding myself. But the amount of travel remains daunting.

Last night I went out to write, and that was a good thing: two messy drafts that probably won't amount to much, yet they were a stab into real work--thought, feeling, sound coalescing into language that shocks me. I hope I'll be able to keep that sensation alive during the weekend class. I love poetry as a surrender of the mind: the sudden visceral drop into a kind of borderland, where I am both aware and unaware; focused, with the edges blurred; a dreamy, bubbling, reckless, ruthless state; ears tingling with unheard music.