"Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver

Games have a goal; life doesn't. Life has no objective. This is what the existentialists call the "anxiety of freedom."... This is why games are such a popular form of procrastination. And this is why, on reaching one's goals, the risk is that the reentry of existential anxiety hits you even before the thrill of victory―that you're thrown immediately back on the uncomfortable question of what to do with your life. Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What it Means to Be Alive Doubleday, 2011. 141.

The middle of nowhere

Those lovely, quiet, natural-world places, without other-human intrusion. 

Some people say that even now I live in the middle of nowhere. I look out my window at half a dozen in-view dwellings and many more in my local mind-map. Middle-of-nowhere―the moon? outside the communications satellite ring? the space between earth and the satellite ring, where a meteor recently traveled?

Nowhere. What a strange concept. A known place, some place, defined as nowhere. On this big, little marble of a planet we share, how odd and limiting that we consider some places nowhere.

Smells like Spring

Yesterday and again today the morning air smelled like Spring. Daffodils are already pushing up their green tips. Keeping my surroundings tidy (that is, as I define tidy) is up to me. The change of seasons will happen without my participation. I find that wholly comforting.

Myth: the ineffable or unspeakable

Our “myth” is the symbol system out of which we think and operate. It is largely unconscious and pre-rational, which is probably why the word “myth” (ineffable or unspeakable) is used, even if commonly misunderstood. Everyone has a myth, even those who fear the word. We have to have our myth because it creates a sometimes-livable world and it provides the frame of reference necessary for sanity—or insanity if we have a destructive one. Myths create a habitable and meaningful world for us. Richard Rohr

Thus, my poetry reflects the symbol system out of which I think and operate. My sisters all recognized our common heritage in my poems collected in Inherited Estate: A Song Cycle. I suspect that means we share the same myth. Ours in common, but not widely common. 

Thus, our words―all of them, I think, including the writings most math-science-research based―are always merely the finger pointing to the moon.

Lemons

On a day when I have no sugar, I simply place my lemons in my cobalt blue bowl and set them in bright light. I take one, stroke its nubbly skin, inhale it's fresh-scented zest when it's bruised by a small dig. Whole but not round, I push the small, graceful nipple at the flower end into the center of my palm, its firm, pointed pressure. Thumb the pithy nub at the stem end. Contemplate the juicy, tart sections encased within. Lemonade is not the only potential value of lemons.

Here in northern Harford County, Maryland, any groundhog intrepid enough to step outside today at dawn saw its shadow. Six more weeks of winter. We hope.

Rainbows in a sunny day

Various prisms hang in the windows around this house, my home. On a sunny winter day rainbows dance with me around the rooms and through the hours.

Today the sky is brilliant. Snow showers early then clearing, temperatures in the 20s, winds gusting to 45 mph. I walked on the treadmill, not willing to face the winds. The treadmill stands in a large room which is usually kept at about 60 in the winter, and it is in the south-east corner with windows on both south and east. 

I walked in an hour of sunshine. I hope that in such light my aura, too, spreads rainbows around my space and on through the day.