Marchness
To what can our life on earth be likened? To a flock of geese, alighting on the snow. Sometimes leaving a trace of their passage
From 'Remembrance' by Su Shi
It was kind of a March week. The sun was out and from inside the world looked light and warm, with spring only a breath away. But once you went outside, you discovered the cold hadn't lost its teeth. It's the doubleness of March: the tulips start growing in the garden but the trees are still leafless. And the birds are still crazy over peanut butter - although in our case it turned out to be a lone magpie that single-beakedly devoured the jar in about four days.
My inner week was about the same. Life picked up again. I'm back at work, doing my thing. With the pettiness of office life on the one hand and the preparations for the launch of my chapbook on the other, I find it's easy not to concentrate the loss. It's there, almost all the time, but dormant. With the promise of spring, winter is quickly out of the picture. But the thing is, I have hardly realized there has been a winter, let alone accepted it.
With all that, it's hard to tell what goes in inside you. You find out as you go along. This week I noticed that social interactions with loud music and more than two people are still too much for me. I found it hard to concentrate and there were just too many stimuli. Happy talk, jokes, somehow it all doesn't ring true to me yet.
But there are things that do work and have balm-like qualities. Rehearsing for the launch, poetry with music, for instance. The comfort of good friends. And writing. Perhaps not yet the kind of poetry I was on before this happened, but at least there's writing. And this blog.
I guess, like Su Shi's geese, I need to leave a sign of passage.
