The week that totally was

I'm not making this up. We really have a new President. Traci really got a client. Shannon really got an Oscar nomination and Lucas really got a gig at Humana Festival. 

There isn't enough money between Traci and I to have a significant trip to the grocery this week, but there is food in our bellies, a world full of staggering change, and warm nights to share at home where we can shake our heads, look at each other and say, "Can you believe this?"

Inauguration Day

Yesterday I woke up in a place I could have killed myself in. I was feeling the age in my bones and thinking that every decision I'd made in the past three years was wrong. It took most of the day to recognize that I was only thinking of the choices I'd made that were unfortunate. They were piled like dirty clothes on the wrong side of my bed and they were the ones I rolled myself into when I woke. But I wasn't thinking of all the choices I had made. Some of them haven't sucked. 

The last line of the Hopi poem says, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." In the new year that started at 12 noon, I would hope that these words can be appreciated without a) sacrificing the whole of the poem they came from or b) being taken, mistaken or assumed for a slogan of arrogance. This Is about Inheritance. It is the work of the responsible to articulate all that can be imagined, and turn dream to action. These next few months are shaping up to satisfy those who can think freely. The searchlight for new ideas may not likely be this bright again (...one speech cannot sway nearly half a life of guarded cynicism...) or it could keep getting brighter.

I listened to the man speak, kicked myself in the ass once for the times I checked out and didn't continue to apply myself, and then resumed the uncharted program. 

The end always feels near if you feel yourself nearing the end. 

I spent Inauguration night with people who had been checked out of the system longer than I've been. Every one of us found reason to take a step closer, and reach for more in our thinking. 

A mouse walked into a hole...

This morning there are holes in the new snow that covers the sidewalk on Goodwin. These drops of nothing in the pristine white reveal dark wet concrete beneath, glistening like lizard skin. I think today that I could be the snow, boundless and insistent, or a hole, which I'd describe as an absence of something expected that is more remarkable for what it makes room for than what it is.  I'm definitely not the ground under my feet.

No, today I am a hole. Definitely. I make my footprints respectfully, and with caution.

In the shower I heard a quote from a Monk who once lived in Bolognia. He said something like "in the world of todays poetry there are many mice who, when dusted with flour, consider themselves millers."

But the holes in the snow are what speak loudest.