He said this with no apparent guile but I still can't tell if it was therapy when he said it or stupidity - that is what he is like, what the whole therapy was like, wide-eyed blunders and pratfalls, like therapy with Steve Martin as The Jerk. And every time he hurt me, he heard all of it and showed he was sorry.

in my meditation tonight I saw a contemporary cathedral out there in the dark, shaped a little like the holy trinity in parnell, but without the eaves, more closed, blank, and seagulls flocking around it, calling together. and then alone, a large ruby cross, foregrounded - very severe, raw crystal bound in metal.

you were a flower, fallen out the door of your church
and I was a bee used your petals for my nests


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126556246

i

part of what sucked me down is the question of what to work on over the 'break'. and having too many urgent projects, and knowing split energies in this way is the least effective for me. 

"But Fionn, contrary to what was being said of him, discovered that his journey, in fact, was an attempt to find the size and the range of his consciousness.
   Then came the day that he understood what language was - a bridge between the flesh and the spirit.
   At the beginning, he'd thought the range of meaning extended to the supple body of the woman he'd been given to escape Aengus' wrath. Then in turn, he found it only covered the little black-nosed shape of the bird he'd taken to escape Aengus' fumbling in the dark and the burden of his love. Now, having on successive days become a doe, a fir and a blackguardly dog, he found that the memory of others contributed to what he now was, a horse quietly steeped in a manmade field on Aran. Around him goats were singing. Each mouthful of grass he knew meant a day's work by someone in the past. The very earth his hooves stood on would have come here by boat from the mainland. The seeds of the grass he now ate would have been carefully fed into the new seaweed-nourished soil one at a time. This, the man he had once been knew. Not only that but all he looked on he considered first as Fionn would, then as the woman did, as the bird, the tree, the doe, the dog and lastly the horse. It was the horse ate the grass but it was Fionn himself had sown it. His consciousness now extended through all he had seen. But there was loneliness in this condition. And that was when Fionn considered Fionn."

A Goat's Song, Dermot Healy. 197-198

I have a cold, a sore neck, blocked sinuses, cold feet, can only find one sock. I know if I imagine that my feet are actually sweatingly hot this may confuse them and make them actually hot.

I watched a documentary interview with a cannibal today, his head the shape of an alien and he said he felt like an alien, catapulted from another planet. In the middle of it one of my colleagues came over with potplants for us to mind. he had been sick, feverish, said he thought this would be good for poetry. he introduced the potplants by name. I said I hadn't achieved that level of intimacy with my own plants and he said yes, but you and N have each other, I only have the plants.

then I went back to bed, the sky was a very milky blue, at some point N came and closed my computer for me and eased off the air conditioning just as I was falling asleep.

I have not been meditating much the last week and I find I am not remembering my dreams in the same way. I want to start again, but maybe just sticking to 10 minutes for a while instead of 20, while I am sick. I feel like too much crying and fighting made me sick. This is BD's theory,  that when one cries or shouts one irritates the mucous membranes and germs get in. I think it is right.

Well, I was doing so well before that. And then hormones and stress came and smashed me up, I dropped all my routines and went crazy and now can't remember where I was. Threw my glasses, broke them, had to get them repaired.

But I had seen it coming and went to see G on Wednesday to try to forestall it. Nearly did, but didn't. It was nice to see G. And I did meditate that night, and went to the cafe to write on Thursday and Friday mornings, just couldn't hold things together over the weekend. Tidal rage.

Began something interesting on soft shroud at the cafe. a frame around it. Back to the cafe tomorrow morning, if I feel well.

G said something so - he said 'I want to tell them to have faith, to keep going, nothing will end, don't sell your girls to sex traffickers, no one will die -'

I stared at him and said 'but people do die'.

He said 'yeah, I know - or, I don't know, I just don't know enough about those communities.'

'People die, kids without medicine...' and then we talked about micro-loans, strategic initiatives, like I was teaching him.

My feet are warm now - it worked, I tricked them. A miracle of faith. Does G get this attitude from church? How come he can be so dense, a child? Like a little kid excited about going to Sunday school and learning stories and praying to Jesus. Last time I saw him I said - 'I don't like happy, comfortable endings or messages in my poems, because it's like - like say as a therapist you were just trying to fix all the problems in people's lives so they could be happy. It's not going to work. So you have to find a way to help people be alive and just... (I couldn't find a word) LIVE and be engaged with what is there and not wait for anything.'

He said, 'Oh! I do? Really? I haven't got there yet, I am still trying to fix everybody's problems so they can be happy...'.

He said this with no apparent guile but I still can't tell if it was therapy when he said it or stupidity. 

(written on Sunday, but I fell asleep before posting it)
today I painted a picture. my brush was cheap and pieces kept coming off in the paint. I mixed the palest green-white I could and layered it horizontally across the page.the colour veered into a bluer tinge in the middle and a yellower tinge at the bottom. I was going to leave it like that - once  I'd covered the page I wanted to do nothing to it.

-but I should paint an actual picture! I've got all this stuff out! 
     -but this is the picture I wanted to paint. I mixed the paint and felt it thick on the brush and covered the whole page. who am I painting for? who will see this? No one, just me, and that is the feeling I wanted.

So then I sat there for a while admiring my painting. I noticed if I lifted it up the light caught it differently and there were blank patches where the paint was thin, so ok, don't lift it up. I was almost out of white paint (memory flash - The White Horse Inn at Berrima).

Then I felt something I wanted to do. I thinned some blue paint into watercolour consistency and made a few patches of that on the page, afterwards wiping away some that looked too much like teardrops. Then one patch on the bottom far right ended up looking like a small blue tug boat churning through a golden-green sea. The tug boat's chimney coughed out paw prints into the sky, as well as a very, very tiny blue matrouschka who sailed through the air, catapulted. I adorned these just a tiny bitt - made them clearer with the very edge of a couple of hairs of my brush