Tonight is just a ticking time bomb.  The house an absolute disaster; I want to clean it desperately.  But, B and A are away,  there is a glut of dishes that have to be done before I can start, and dollars - to -donuts M will wake up before I've even filled the sink.  Plus, I have a sermon to write. Plus, I have two dissertation chapters to finish.  I know, I know, why waste five minutes on this stupid blog?   I just am overwhelmed by tasks that absolutely can't ALL be finished in this current space/time continuum.  And, to make matters worse, I am the most scattered, ADD, flighty mess of a women in the whole entire world!  And, to make matters slightly more worse, I am not one step closer to actually learning grammar, and I can't find my lost library book.  ARGHHHHH! AND ARGHHHHH! AND ARGHHHHHH! 

I went sailing today.  It was really, terribly lovely.  The warm sun, the rocking, the wind on my face.  It was relaxing and very comforting and, yet, invigorating.  The line from Mr. Tambourine Man was brought to mind.  

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Yes, to not particularily thinking. I realized today that I need to cultivate more times of holy silence.

 

Incessant they spurn and spin

and move in time

to their

own (they say) drums

and 

I am spinning

keeping time 

my eye on you

wondering  

the beat.

and 

I am spinning and my eye slips

Could it be easier?  

Is there some rhyme I miss 

and if I knew it could I  move

could I move my eye?

You don't answer. 

Never

NO Oracular only spectacular 

and I have had enough seeing 

and would like 

to believe

I started to write, "I must confess I wasted the day."  But, I should reconsider.  Eggs Benedict with a friend hardly counts as waste.  Taking care of a necessary doctor's appointment--waste?  Chatting with a friend, waste?  No, these experiences were not wasted time.  Nor, was eating dinner with my family or even watching a rerun of Little House on Prairie.  But, the 3.5 hours I could have worked today were squandered, and for that I am disappointed.  But, I need to remember that school is not the only work or activity that counts.  I am in a cult.  It is called the academy and I am in constant need of an attitude adjustment.  

I feel like I have been untying a particularly tedious knot.  I have been pulling and teasing and twisting to no avail.  The knot is wet because I attempted to get some leverage on a particularly nasty tangle.  This had made the untying even more difficult.  But, wait!  I think I may have untwisted something crucial.  Is this the first knot.  I hope.  I hope that I can begin to unravel some problems I have been working on with plodding frustration for a while.  

I must remember that there is always a stage of any kind of work professional or personal where exertion seems meaningless. It always require a special kind of wisdom to know when one should just lay down the entire knotty mess and when you should keep struggling a long.  You might be working towards the solution....or you might be making the problem terribly worse.   

I woke up this morning with Timothy Dwight in my bed

 I woke up this morning with Timothy Dwight in my bed...

Or, so I might sing if I was a blues singer.  It is better than my mother-in-law or butter and eggs.   It might just be the unfortunate kickback of too much dissertation work.  I have to admit that I am captivated by these 19th-century folks.  They are so earnest and so serious and so profoundly immune to the ironic.  I, of course, actually live with someone that would make fast friends of William L. Garrison.  I am proud of that.  I am beginning to love my work.  Even though it feels like it is going to be rather professionally infertile.  I like these haunts and spooks and grave souls skulking around my mind.  I like the way their seriousness and optimism challenges my jaded half-heartedness!  I want to go take down some monstrous and impossibly inviolate institution.  (I just need to take care that I don't build a bunch of prisons and asylums along the way. )

Last Night

Last night, in a space of about 30 minutes, I went from trying to convince someone with a legion of problems including: addiction, physical disability, abandonment, loss, and a violent past, that their life is not meaningless-- to feeling that I was a wretched failure because of a few academic setbacks.  Why can't I seem to accept that there is grace, too, for me?