I posted the previous musings - the very New Year of it - in spite of having held them two days - as has this one been held a day or two now - held, studied, chewed over (even though each posted by the date originally drafted). A particular strain ran through the first that did not quite accomplish what several hours more would have provided. Okay, might have provided.
Might indeed not have provided, in which case said post would have joined others that dawdle in draft mode, eternally waiting.
But sometimes it is as much the desire to see these words transformed into the colours of passeres as anything that moves me to hit that button, publishing to be read.
After all, draft mode is plain black letters on unassuming white. How much more restrained might I be if only I could see the draft in the colours of my blog and then discard it - or hold until it were more suitably retiring!
For the present post, yesterday, exhaustion finally took over. Enough emotion! Pensiveness, be gone! I saved the draft that one last time & signed out of passeres. Wandered away to my warm bed and TV's lame offerings for the night. I would eat yoghurt (I make my own now) and a slice of banana bread (see below) for supper & count it sufficient. I'd frozen the pot of bean soup finally, earlier in the day. It remained the possibility - but somewhere in the midst of all I popped corn.
Whole grain, after all...but I have segued now into the yesterday that, in real time, is the day before the 'today' which is actually yesterday's post...which is to say, as I addend it the following day, confusing.
Let me begin again, without the additions of this later 'today' - and return to the post as originally summoned...
I am sitting here, the day that is usually vanquished by chores & shopping, sans both. My marvelous kitty is in my lap - purring, no less - I am wishing I had a cup of hot cocoa. I even have whipped topping. But not enough milk, and what little I have is made from powder. I ran out at breakfast, and was serving a quick brunch of oatmeal (the five-minute kind), boiled egg, a slice of banana bran bread (homemade - I adapted the recipe from several to get the bran in) and a glass of juice (he chose orange; I had vegetable) to a friend who has made a habit of helping with said chores & shopping each week.
I served it on bamboo trays, as my apartment is small & does not have room for a table or chairs. I had lost all but one to broken bamboo then found a cache at a thrift store at the precise time I was looking for them.
Sometimes my thrift store visits are like that. Rather eerie, to find exactly what I'm looking for, when it had not been there before the exact week I needed it.
If you try to buy them new these days, you really shouldn't. Neither the workmanship nor the material is worth your investment. A disappointing matter, when I went out shopping for one. Finding the cache was quite pleasant, and not purchasing the entire batch showed great restraint.
Great restraint is a new thing.
Problem is, I always wish I hadn't shown it. Remember things I passed up forever.
But here I sit, intent on writing a post, since it is too late now to pull the one I put up yesterday: folk have read it. I am rather pensively remembering the afternoon, when I decided to go on & post, instead of spending the rest of the day in edit mode, as I normally would.
I'd decided to accept an invitation I'd spent the several days since it'd been proffered pretending I'd decide the day in question...
Knowing I'd already decided. And, indeed, following through on my necessity, had finally refused. But would I ever after wish I'd accepted? Could I accept, given the nature of knowing things finally had ended...
Just laugh & fall into the delight he always brings me, even in the sadness of things that can never be more than they are - a moment here, a moment there...
How much pretending all is glee can a life take? I have been a mere pup, wagging my tail & loving no matter how casually he views me - no matter how many times he forgets to walk me. I wait by the door, leash in mouth.
Always hopeful. A dog never faults his master, you see.
A dog loves forever.
He'd proffered lunch & 'an afternoon doing whatever I wanted.'
Such largesse has never been mine before. And to have offered several days before: he is purely a last-minute petitioner - who knows if something else will turn up that is more fun than what he planned with me - or what mood he'll be in if he's made plans in advance & gets in a funk...
Better to wait & see.
But as a dear friend quotes often, every camel has its straw...
And that one curiousity of camels - they never know how close they've been - or as that same friend also said (was it a poem?), "Some people never know an ending when they see one."
Posts are usually best done in the early hours, which left the day long ago. So why write now. Some things there are the universe can't be told - the personal nature of this new thing called 'blog' (which a private journal does not forfeit, even if it later is published) is too close (i.e., that thing claustrophobics run from) for reverie...that dividing line between 'personal' and 'created' and 'okay because it's universal & sometimes somebody out there just might need to hear' is all too skewered these days.
I'm listening to the soundtrack from The Constant Gardener. Took an hour to finally coax a rambunctious Miss 'Ti (her shortened name, with title) to curl up in my lap - she will do so when I'm watching TV but this is quite a first for sitting here at my computer. And to purr, too!
She is not much for purring. Cat, music, sunlight just barely remaining - it is almost four. Very cold in Atlanta today. So why am I writing.
And what sad dreams...
I've been dreaming (for any who might 'follow' authentic in-the-night sorts, and their dreamers) (and yes, a whole lot of folk do: almost a science pulled up around it now) a lot again about small creatures. Couple nights back, an orange cat - for whom my dream did the unforgivable: it named the poor creature, "Patty-cats."
The indignity of it all! But the dream was easy to translate - my dreams rarely tell me secrets. And rather than weight the universe with the full tale, suffice to say that for a few moments, I began to cross a dangerously bad neighborhood in the middle of the dream-night, and as I set out, abruptly, all was black. Pitch-black.
I could see nothing.
Never had that in a dream before. Or perhaps, for just that moment, once before.
It is very telling, to be sure. Any dream analyst would start at such a dreaming.
But Patty-cats - a truly joyful creature, bounding more than running along - and I got through safely & came to this dilapidated park with a small pathway circling something - perhaps a fountain or small pool; I can't really remember.
Blue sky & sunlight. I walked the path, kept calling Patty-cats not to run away. You know dream time. Mere moments - the telling always is longer than the dream - and the small white stone pathway became small boulders, set now above any hope of flat pathway. They rose sharply for perhaps four feet, maybe five - all the stones were broken.
And at the top of the small rising, a broken wall.
But a wall. Path ended there. I turned back. Walked back around the small path, still calling Patty-cats to keep up. We returned to the previous segment of the dream - back, quickly, through the bad neighborhood.
Minus the pitch-black night.
Last night, I dreamed about a tiny baby. Dressed her in pink - a small outfit that belonged to my own wee girl almost thirty years ago now. I was going to put her in shoes, too, but I noted she'd already grown too big for the pair the dream gave me.
I gave her to someone to watch for me for a moment & she put her down in the floor. The wee thing crawled over to the door and before anyone saw, the baby had pulled herself across some planks with rows and rows of exposed nails. I remember seeing her lying there on top of them, crumpled.
It was frightening, and sad.
Fauré's Requiem plays now. Pie Jesu. I stopped in the middle of all to make hot cocoa after all & it was as bitter as only made from scratch can allow. I know dreams. And I know what it means when small creatures, and babies and wee things are the stuff of them.
They are often representative of the dreamer's heart.
And I know why.
But my dreams do not proffer answers - nor futures, though once, a fortune teller imperfectly did. Still waiting her telling to come true - and not so sure now that the one true thing of my life is really...
So very true at all.
That inconstancy that interrupts the minutes - yes, no - stop, go - stay or move on...sitting there yesterday, that long & impersonal conversation - a conversation any could have. The history of Christianity, as I recollect.
Usually a favourite of mine.
And it was cold, and I noted the cold more than the conversation. And noted my reacting to things he said. Searching for The Answer, always. And one minute it was yes, and three minutes after, no - I knew it was no. How could it be anything but no...
And then yes again. And then he was leaving - and that one chaste embrace - and then, okay, two. The first got interrupted by something he saw sitting on my table.
But they were most chaste. I would not allow more. Funny, how a hug can involve all of the embracers - or just...
Umm.
Half.
Perhaps one should not tell secrets to the universe. Even on a quiet and pensive afternoon...
[Editor's notes. Line quoted from 'Always Did Like a Cheap, Tinseled Thing.' ©1975 Isobel Freer.
For any interested in the other CDs I listened to through this afternoon, they included the soundtrack listed above, La Belle France and Bella Tuscany, two in a series of classical meanderings on the Telarc label.
In reading back through the post of concern in the opening paragraphs of this proffering, I find that distance allows a better read. Whether that pulls from the excessively 'personalized' view of a woman - after all, that place of acute me-ness is both gift & curse in being female - or merely from the distance a writer needs sometime to forget all the thoughts that crowded into a piece as it is brought into proper order - is not something I can definitively say.
However, I find today that the only image that really might have left a reader hanging is that of the soap bubble. So I addend as follows: it is the nature of a soap bubble to pop. The weight of the air will finally overpower.
But when - and how - and where - and why - and sometimes even who...
Those are not predetermined. Nor are we. The intricacies that create our choices - our free will - are more than we know - and when those [additional choices] of the folk whose choices made affect our choosing - some of whom we never meet nor dream - it is not so much a 'random' universe as the common understanding of the word allows.
And that one last moment, waiting until a new decision is made, from which a great many actions and reactions and reactions again will spiral out...but certain grave realities are as set upon us (they are our nature) as the battle of the soap bubble and mere air.
Yet God watches, and waits...]