Not the actual flu after all.
Still, it knocked me back for most of a full week. Exactly when I’d planned to go offline and shut out the world in general, and wrestle the first dozen or so ragged chapters of Book 5 into something smooth and satisfying.Â
I’ve been back at the office the last couple of days, but not actually useful in any real way. I’m still coughing, and running at less than full power. So, just reading, musing, and managing to play some guitar (but not singing, due to the coughing). I’m trying to learn Frank Christian’s “From My Hands.” I’m working from the live version on the Fast Folk Musical Magazine Volume 4, Number 4, which I love, rather than the title track from his album, a version that makes me wince. Even though the live track gets a bit over-accelerated, that’s the version that has all the crazy juice. The studio version was been sanitized, metronomicized, and light-jazzified away from any semblance of passion.
Meanwhile, out in the world, Mary Oliver has passed away, and everyone is talking about that. I so wish that I had found her work decades ago, instead of just recently. I can’t help but wonder how I would have taken her work when I was young, and how (or if) it would have influenced me and my own work?
“Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?
Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the house, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?
Have I not thought, for years, what it would be
worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,
to gather blueberries,
thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?
…
Here is an amazement– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
From West Wind
And now, of course, the big storm is sweeping in upon us, to do to New England what it did to the other parts of the country that it hit. Four to eight inches of snow, they’re telling us. It’s just started falling here now. I should get home.
