Process XXX

CHOICE

How can I be so active and yet feel like it’s all rushing past me. Last week we went out of town for a brief vacation at the out-laws. And yet, I felt like I had barely a moment to rest. There was rest, but my mind? My mind was active. And yet, I was not doing anything with it. No projects, no writing, no drawing, just trying to read, or rather re-read, a book.

What I wanted to do was sit on the porch (the newly painted porch, it’s beautiful) at my mother-in-law’s house, and just read. It’s not a thing that really happened. I mean, it was a bit too cool. But so what? I could have bundled up, it could have happened.

I had rushed out of town on Saturday, just as I had completed and turned in my poetry assignment for the week. I had spent all week planning and plotting a “declaim and exclaim” video, analyzing works by Philip Freneau and Phillis Wheatley. And then I spent the weekend fretting about my grade. Fretting about my grade? There’s a first.

The thing about a summer course (which I realized too late) is that it is sixteen weeks packed into six. So my work, on a weekly basis, must be more detailed, and there is less room for error. This is the end of week three.

Today, this day, a Saturday, I will spend luxuriating in romantic and sentimental poetry, which is just what I think I need right now. Don't we all?

Process XXIX

And we’re back. That’s it! That was my summer break. Just kidding, I will get one later. For now, I am taking one, six-week course in early American poetry. Already I am dead chuffed, inspired by the works of Anne Bradstreet to compose a poem about selling my mother’s house.

Tuesday, my son turned sixteen, and I rose early to make him a special breakfast, to celebrate him. By eight I remembered I had not done my morning pages, and it was at that moment that I chose not to.

I chose not to. I wanted to exercise, and then to get right to my work, and not to sit and write. I chose to break a six hundred and eighteen day streak of writing, writing every morning. Because doing so had become a burden. I had to write. I was no longer choosing. It was about the record, not about the process.

Siri tells me that six hundred and eighteen days from now it will be late January, 2023. That is far into the future. Six hundred and eighteen days ago, my mother was still alive, and the pandemic was only just starting, on the other side of the world.

I have been working, I have been writing. I have been moving and I will be writing. We begin again, every day, as we all must begin again. And it is with this in mind, that I compose verse about my mother’s belongings.