Surfeit & Dearth

It's been a week+ of almost no writing, neither here nor in my serious and more focused poetry-writing, which casts me into a state of agitation and fidgets. Gotta write.

On several occasions, I've begun a blog piece, and then word by word I delete it. Bye bye bloggie.

And then I remember just how much is going on in my work-world, my home-world, my everything-world. Still reeling from the recent violence in the glass factory. We hired new help, a young woman who is beautifully blessed with grace and intelligence, but is only available two days a week. Not enough! My mortgage went up in price by more than I would prefer, eating up a significant portion of my raise. (But very grateful for the raise.) Sigh.

Love life is in the garbage dump, festering amid a pile of rotting whatever. My parking-strip vegetable garden, on the other hand, is growing crazily — I've gardened most of my life and I've never experienced anything like this. I like to think of this summer as the result of — instead of global warming—global charming. This abundance is a short-term bonus to the perils our planet seems to be surrendering-to.

Everything appears to be patched together with thin and fragile stitches, when upholstery thread would certainly do a better job of it. But at the moment, my needle is threaded with the finest of filaments, finer than spider's silk and certainly without that tensile strength.

In these past few weeks I've witnessed a man pull himself back from actively choosing death by the bottle to embracing all of life's possibilities. I've witnessed a psychotic break, a personal assault and the destruction of thousands of dollars of glass. My heart has been shattered, people close to me have spoken of profound depression and devastating regret. I successfully rebuilt a loving relationship with my brother, something that, a year ago, I would have said was not salvageable.

I've re-established order in the production line at work, and was stunned by the realization of just how profoundly negative my former co-worker's impact was on every minute of my working day.

Relief! — amid the rising panic, when I see again the look in his eyes the moment before he swept $4k of inventory to the concrete floor.

My ridiculously amusing cat who, in complete darkness, takes a crazed running leap from the edge of the roof to the deck railing: ta-da! Lands upright and, if cats laughed, she'd laugh until tears flowed.

All of this.
All of life.
Spinning, grinding, swirling, singing, erupting, corroding, shining, falling apart, and, sometimes, if we're paying attention, we notice when it all begins to come together again.