Waiting for summer his pastures to change - And some Gloria

For today, perhaps only for this moment since we never know what comes next, it feels as though words I write are my only connection to sought-after miracles, adjustments, magic.  I know the tie is far stronger  than what seems a single strand; my life holds more models for impossible things than I can name.  Crises come in strengths, intensities, or sizes.  This may not even be a crisis and if it is, all manifestations are interior, other than the crying and wild arm waving to say I need to write this NOW, this moment.  Wishing for exterior - or personal, physical - circumstances to be different, feeling let down, even betrayed by something unnameable when they persist is, I realize, a kind of madness and of no help to the cause.  I know better.  I believe we and all aspects of our lives are works in progress, in process, a constant - however slow - evolution from one form to another in growing awareness.  Then we are overcome, overwhelmed by the sense of being eternally stuck.

Some of you may already know this, but it is new information for me.  In creating fiction, besides giving ourselves imaginary friends, we get to pile our uncertainties and, most of all, our process onto another being.  The fictional she wanders the soul's labyrinth while I get to type.  What a wonder.

GLORIA - Episode 5

She thought of him, the reading man, as an inlander though that seemed small-minded.  Of course shore birds, as the natives sometimes referred to themselves, read, they knew literature, their minds retained other information than tide tables, barometric measurements and how to batten the actual and proverbial hatches against the storms that came calling like the big bad wolf.  But he, the reading man, just seemed more, not just inland but indoor.  He was nowhere near as weather-beaten as the men she'd known all her life.  He was just weather-beaten enough, a redwood picnic table and matching benches before they reach the splinter stage.  When she looked at him she didn't think of barnacles or scarred hands, of figureheads who'd spent every day of their sailing lives facing into the waves and the spray as their paint vanished, their features blurred.

As a subject, Gloria had never given much attention to the possible difference between a purposeful life, defined by prediction and pattern, and one less regulated.  It was as though a rock grew up and thought one day it would rather be a kite, believing it had, in its very small bag of tricks, the means to see that dream realized.  THAT was exactly how crazy it felt.

Who we believe ourselves to be, ordering our actions and our days inside the borders we sense, may be a spell under which we've operated all our lives.   The pieces of ordinariness no longer fit together in a logical way.  That the not-too-weather-beaten reading man could begin to unspool someone else's stories and that a combination of letters from an alphabet she learned well before she started school suddenly acquired the power to up-end her was the greatest mystery she'd ever witnessed, let alone experienced.  She didn't realize it was among the Great Mysteries. 

Things she once did by rote now demanded heightened attention.  How did everything suddenly become significant?  Crust is crust.  Peeling, slicing and sugaring the fruit needed the same muscles, the same flexing of fingers and wrists as before but had acquired the urgency of a fading sun with a handful of orbiting planets dependent on its light.  Suddenly, every thought and act had weight and mass.  She wanted to fling her apron over her face, an old family trick for women on the verge.