Legitimate strangeness

The French writer Rene Char, from Partage formel:

 

‘A new mystery sings in your bones. Cultivate your legitimate strangeness.’

The days of stifling heat knock me off balance. I get up before dawn and work, sleep through the hottest hours, the traditional siesta time, and then get up again to work in the late afternoon.

 

While I sleep the house fills with insects even though blinds are drawn, curtains pulled close. There are dragonflies, house flies, bees, wasps, sugar ants, cicadas, tiny lizards and geckos, spiders and butterflies, white and black.

The street with its oaks and catalpas, thrums with the noise of cicadas, known locally as ‘Christmas beetles’. I think and move inside a golden humming cacophany of tiny sounds, insect limbs threshing together, wings whirring.

 

I long for snow and ice and mist. And utter silence, that arctic quiet after snow has fallen.

Untying a knot

So I gritted my teeth and got through yesterday and finally went to bed and woke up feeling much better. The bloodknot of anger and anguish is still there but I am going to just live with it until there is clarity and the knot slips loose. I trust in grace and the mercies of time.

 

I do feel it is important to want to feel grateful even if the precise emotion escapes  me. That it is important to want to forgive even when consumed with bitterness. To keep reminding that obdurate self that there are other options and a way forward out of any self-created enclosure.

 

The bottom line for me is fairly basic. Not to drink. Not to act out. Not to isolate or indulge the moods.  Just live with them  while gently and firmly asserting that this will pass. To keep reaching out to others and offering what little service may be possible.

 

Asleep I dreamed that my writing hand grew into a flowering thorn bush, spiky  but with great crimson blooms. O ambivalence!

 

There are great slices of chilled and sweet watermelon, that delectable pink and green, on a white platter in the fridge. My puppies are moving shoes around the kitchen. Beethoven’s symphonies playing in the living room, with bowls and vases of blue hydrangeas on tables and atop bookcases. I am reading Joseph O’Neill’s Netherlands and thinking about making a light elegant pasta with smoked salmon and creme fraiche. I should be down on my knees whooping with gratitude for my life.

 

Sigh. So I go through the 12 Steps in the bath and let the familiar stuff sink in again. Letting go, letting go.