Good Things on Mondays

My friend Catherine had an idea this morning: use Mondays as a day to remember and look forward to Good Things. As one of the many who has a normal workday Monday, I want to implement this idea. Even if I can't come up with something to write every Monday, I want to at least make a mental list.

Right after reading Catherine's post, I came up with my own mini-list:

• Dancing barefoot with the pug to hits from the '40s. She thinks the samba is foot-tag.

• Flowers and leaves EVERYWHERE! Spring has splashed itself on every single plant right now. Stunning.

• Liturgy. I'm getting some of the tunes memorized, so I can think about the words while I'm singing instead of focusing on hitting the right notes. And the words are good.

• Ideas. My head's full of them, and I like that.

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Idea: read at least three short stories each week.

Idea: find a book of Mary Oliver's poetry, and read a poem before sleep each night.

Idea: get kombucha going by Mother's Day.

Idea: continue editing my list of science fiction to read, making it useful for deciding both if and how I could design a Master's program I'd love.
  SubIdea: religious ideas seem rare in sci-fi. But is this a good thing? Is it merely a sign of our cultural divide between religion and science, or does it also serve to increase their opposition? 
  SubIdea: if sci-fi tends to function as a questioner of the status quo, would/should the role of religion in sci-fi be different now than it was in, say the 1950s?

Idea: form some sort of structure that will a) ask me to write, and b) hold me accountable to some form of regular sentence-making. 
  SubIdea: try to post weekly here?
  SubIdea: create a new space (wordpress?), and share it with those who will read it, and call me to task if I write nothing. 
  SubIdea: but what do I want to write? To get going, I think I need a trigger, something to trampoline the ideas out of my half-consciousness.

Idea: find a time-machine, and go back to the 1800s to listen to George Eliot and her friends converse.

Idea: dance in my room more often. To this end, put more music on my computer. And let the pug in more often.

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It's Monday, and it's often hard to be with Mondays. But my Monday evenings are usually mine alone, and it's not Monday's fault it got stuck at the beginning of the work-week. I want to start out the week well, with gratitude, with rest, with fun, with a good dinner.

What will this week bring? I'm not sure. Probably some of it will be frustrating. Some of it will be beautiful. Some of it will be side-splitting laughter. Some of it will be poetry. Some of it will be music.

But Spring is here at last. And somehow that makes everything alright.

it begins

FIRST SNOW!

Lovely. Driving down 128, we exclaimed when it started, and our driver was so excited he honked the horn. We almost stopped by the side of the road, too. Snow falling through headlights - glorious.

Winter has opened its eyes. Still groggy, it will close them again before it is ready to be wild. But its gaze cooled the air just enough, and its yawn breathed just enough moisture that its first awakening dropped snow.

Autumn's dancing has tired her. We've watched her losing bits of her cloak, leaving them plastered to the pavement by her rain. The warmth of Summer is gone, and Autumn hasn't much of her own heat left to keep her going. I wonder: which comes first, the sleep of Autumn, or the waking of Winter?

Either way, the snow whispers of stillness, and silence, and rightness. And so I smile.

beginnings...

The beginning of a (mostly) fictional blurb inspired by my recent time in India. More writings from India will follow, I am sure, but here is just a piece.

One thing led to another, and I found myself suddenly outside of the city. A lonely windsock rippled over an empty airfield, and on the other side of the curling road trees shielded laughing children from my curiousity. Underneath the crumbling bridge I stood on, water sidled more than flowed - sidled and stunk. But then, all the waterways stank here. That was just one more thing I had learned to deal with.

My feet were tired, too, tired, dusty, and hot. It would have been refreshing to rest on the bridge, sitting on the edge, enjoying the wind... and breathing raw sewage. So I kept going, keeping to the shady side of the road. Surprisingly, there were few travelers here. It always surprises me, in cities, how one block away from scuttling crowds will dwell silence. No cacophonous autorickshaw horns, no shouts, no hacking motors ran this street. Occasionally a lone biker bounced past me, but other than that, I was alone.

I wasn't supposed to be by myself - the standard procedure was to go out in pairs at least. "Don't wander off by yourself," our leaders warned, "it's not safe, especially for women." One part of my brain knew this - and knew that an isolated, quiet path was the perfect place for something terrible to ruin my trip. But another part of my mind, and most of my heart, revelled in this - in the green, the distant laughter, the silence, just me, the sky, and a bit of country in the middle of the city.