February 24

The February rain late in coming lands soft on the roof, plunking mute into the tilled soilbeds, rolling from the waxen wing of the raven spying the coop. Here, a weather commensurate with my mood. There is a lesson in the relative, the way more dire circumstances have of illuminating the ordinary. Of a sudden, I contend with fear, with anger, with my self in ways I’ve avoided for as long as I can remember. Against the backdrop of the present—these plans yet inchoate, this swaying back & forth like a wind-blown bough between hope & cowardice—one sees writ large the themes that underpin the most mundane of experiences. Every day we war with ourselves, grasp after our small dreaming, patch our hours. Every day impulse & normative behavior collide, or expectation & reality. Ourselves our own & only servants. But to know always this cusping, this limned breath; that we navigate a circumference to glimpse its center, bivouac beyond but edging towards our desire. It takes a small crack, a distending rupture that widens to reveal ourselves to ourselves. I am taking weight & measure. I am glimpsing Possibility. I am finding breath. & of more vast significance, these are the texture of my days, palpable, under my finger. What we wield against the world or carry into it in surrender. & so to live.

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