(no subject)

So thanks to the peculiar form of exhaustion I'm dealing with, I've spent much of the weekend talking with ghosts and shadows (for the very literal: not "real" ghosts or shadows, but speaking with & listening to the various things in my disoriented brain), and had the sudden urge to look something up in the King James Version of the Bible. Picking up an old copy here in my room and opening the front cover, I discovered something I might have known once but hadn't realized since moving here--

the building where my parents met is less than a mile away from where I live now. I was sure they'd met elsewhere, but it looks like it was right about here. Coolness.

Poem of the Moment

The Seven of Pentacles--Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

doing your worst

"You've seen me at my worst now, so..." said the man to the woman. They walked off and I heard no more of the conversation, but I started thinking about the times someone has said to me that I've seen them at their worst. Is that statement ever true? I mean, is it true in the way the speaker intends it? It seems that most of the time, what people mean by their worst is how they behaved when they were drunk or sick or severely stressed out, when they were irrational for one reason or another. But aren't our worst behaviors the things we do when we think we're completely justified? Not the times when we tell ourselves later, "I don't know what came over me," but the times when we can state with perfectly clarity all our reasons for what we did? Sure, sometimes we realize later that what we thought perfectly rational behavior was really driven by greed or fear, but it may take us years to get over our self-righteousness and by then it may be too late.