Wellness after Illness shows me my Wellness

Kai and I have been reading Frost out loud. Reading poetry with this child renews poetry's influence on me. Having never read Frost, Kai reads without prejudice or opinion. He reads innocently hardly with a past or a future. Each word is new to him.

Astrometaphysical
by Robert Frost

Lord, I have loved Your sky,
Be it said against or for me,
Have loved it clear and high,
Or low and stormy;

Till I have reeled and stumbled
From looking up too much,
And fallen and been humbled
To wear a crutch.

My love for every Heaven
O'er wish You, Lord, have lorded,
From number One to Seven,
Should be rewarded.

It may not give me hope
That when I am translated
My scalp will in the cope
Be constellated.

But if that seems to tend
To my undue renown,
At least it ought
to send Me up, not down.

And when we continue reading from an Anthology of Love poems, he doesn't wince at any overly sentimental, in my view, line. He simply reads.

I don't remember what's it's like to read without prejudice or opinion. I tend to turn away from what seems too difficult or complicated to read or understand. I quit short stories when their complexity mirrors my life's own complexity. Move on to the next one hoping for simplicity or staccato or limited viewpoints.

I've spent four days 'in bed' having contracted some cold or something or other. My system down, I got off the merry go round. The first three days I resisted getting off, but today has held me close to bed and the rain made sure to lull me down to rest. I am grateful to my friends who have supported me being sick and getting well. You can't change sickness to wellness overnight and you can't wish it away either. I've been sick and it's only this afternoon as I am fully on the mend that I feel like myself again.



It's this way:

The birds eat from the fence, seed, so provided with love and ache, the way he thinks of them and cares for them from the inside of himself. The rain is wet outside giving the grayness a wetness too. And then there it is: feeling more like myself. Standing downstairs, apart from my bed, powerful, moments ago in the kitchen, looking out the window, watching these bird eat his seed, thinking of my dinner and realizing I wasn't carrying the burden of being sick so heavily. I felt more like me. Well. Not quite fully, but on the mend.

Cheryl called it the upswing.

I noticed how nice it is to have gotten off the merry go round this whole day. I haven't done anything like I do when I am well, and being sick has me realize how well I am doing when I am not sick. How fun is that!!!???

And all I got to read short stories, (here's the school by donald barthelme) poetry, and baking blogs, this being my favorite, smitten kitchen (you won't believe her photography, especially the granola bar recipe).

I got to settle into the astrometaphysical upside of being down. Thanks God.

Pleasures, Sorrows

Below is a quotation from a book ( The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton ) I'm reading with Kai, one of the students I tutor.

"I left Symons's office company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fullfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are."

It's a book about eight difference professions and the characteristics, descriptions and actualities of such a job. It's cool. Kai is imaging new possibilities for himself instead of being beleaguered by math problems.

1 poem I wrote as a Poet :: I'm quiet sure there was pleasure and sorrow while writing it.
Sheila didn’t want to die on Thursdays anymore.
She wouldn’t buy paper towels if that would get her off the hook.
She knew their effects on chickens.
They were squished already.
No one heard them anymore.
And no one cleaned up behind them.
They were alone in a world that ate them all up.
Wednesdays enlivened her to the future, so you couldn’t count on them.
Sheila likened the mid week to bacon, full of fat and juice and crispness that grounded her body in death.
She knew her kids well by that day.
Still no one cleaned up behind them and her husband laid waiting for her still.
She couldn’t get out alive so instead she wrote fiction and listened to the harmonica her neighbor played on Friday mornings before his gigs that evening.
In dark bars where she knew her longings could never be quenched.
She wallowed in the dark enough and grew silent late at night checking her locked doors.

What do you do in the hope of full pleasure no sorrow?

Eliot and Williams evoke Spring

I'm not a scholar but I admire them. Their ability to relate one thing to something else surpasses stimulus response thinking and weighing that day to day life demands. Scholars think deeply and compare unlike things finding in them the connection, the connectivity between the material and the abstract.

My favorite novel is Middlemarch by George Eliot. Published in 1874 it was Eliot's seventh novel. It impacted literature everywhere. Every year, it is the number one book in England, while two other classics, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice switch positions for second and third place year after year.

Zadie Smith in her book Changing My Mind writes about Eliot's grand feat in Middlemarch: "What is universal and timeless in literature is need ---we continue to need novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity. In Middlemarch love enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge. It's love that enables [Fred] to feel another's pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another's lesson, one another's duty. Middlemarch is a dazzling dramatization of earthly human striving,...satisfaction here, like all the satisfactions Middlemarch offers, is not transcendental, but of the earth. Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from ...metaphysics...what she wanted and left what she couldn't use. To make it work, she utilized a cast of saints and princes but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between."

If you want a book that intoxicates and nurtures, read Middlemarch....it may take you from now til summer, but that's what spring is for. ...bursting, blossoming, renewing your big project self.

Here's a poem foreshadowing Spring:

This Is Just to Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

& these words evoke newness, too:

"By taking the time each day to check in with ourselves, we begin to rediscover the voice of our instincts, and this is the path to taking charge of our health. By developing daily and seasonal patterns and rhythms based on adding simple drinks, breakfast routines, home food stocks, silence, meditation, and stretching, we can more easily monitor the voice of the body and discover optimal health." Sean Kelly