two hundred. forty.

||

The constant darkness began to absorb her, at first. It wasn't just behind her eyes; it was seeping into her pores. The darkness was eating her so that there was less of her than when she had begun. The saturation of darkness meant the absence of Maia.

 Down by the lake she’d find delicate fish bones or pieces of driftwood with her fingers and imagine them sun-bleached and refined by the water. She would wish in desperate moments to shrivel there, to lend her bones to this landscape and be bleached and refined. Because that’s what light felt like – smooth.

The darkness was clumsy, was rough around the edges.

||

Everyone knew light. Everyone was created for and into the light. The light was certain and straightforward.

We are shaped by it and pattern our lives after it, our waking and sleeping and eating.

There was no rhythm to darkness. It was tumbling and fumbling and graceless. 

two hundred. thirty nine.

You'd think I'd one day grow tired of writing about the same things
[and perhaps one day I will]
but every year I still write down autumn things.
Surprised & delighted again at the way autumn makes every good thing the best thing.

When it turns colder we put away the air conditioner and keep the window open while we sleep. We keep it open for as long as we can, through September and into October, before begrudgingly shutting it and bringing out the finicky space heater.
It's open these nights. Mornings are delicious. I've added an extra blanket to the pile and sleep with my socks on. Often I'll peel them off in the middle of the night, unless I'm very cold or very tired.

[On the word "very" - whenever I use it I always think of that quote about it being a lazy word.
But sometimes I like it better.
For instance, I could have said: "...unless I'm frigid or exhausted."
It doesn't seem as nice in my head though, so I suppose I'll be lazy.]

Other autumn things happening:
-Drinking loads and loads of tea.
-Waiting for mail & sending out letters.
-Knitting rather poorly.
-Making soup.

All of the good things are all so very good right now. Chuffed to bits.
Hope you're doing all sorts of autumn things too, like walks outside and cooking hearty foods with friends. Hope you're bringing your sweaters out of their boxes and breaking them in with bonfires and pipe smoking under the stars.

two hundred. thirty eight.

"Do you mind if I smoke here?" she asked in a beautiful French accent.

 I knew she was French, somehow, before she spoke. It was her shoes, maybe, or the way she shifted her body before she turned around. Something in the angle she held her head and shoulders. 

She pulled out a long, thin cigarette and tapped it delicately, almost impatiently. 

"Go right ahead!" I responded, as coarse and unrefined as can be, my posture slumped and remnants of lunch scattered on my table. 

This is one of the moments where I wish I would have tried to bum one of her cigarettes off her, so we could have been classy and smoked together and talked of Paris. 

I don't, of course. I remain uncouth and messy at my little table. 

Continuing to decipher notes from class. A single page in my notebook looks like this - all these random bits to remember:

|| Life as Poesis. Vocational. Filling it. 

|| "Damn" as Claudia jumps to reach the top of the chalkboard she's already filled with Knocknarea and Ben Bulben and Newgrange. What a funny thing to see! 

|| Violence a kind of impetus.

|| Thumos - furnace, force of being, spiritedness. "Even the wisest man uses violence as an impetus, as a force, as a means for knowing himself."

|| [Like a bulldog, she way she snarls and woofs.] 

|| John says he goes to pubs with friends - talks for 5 min on politics, 5 min medical reports, 1 hr fun & light-hearted.

|| [Reading before made me doubt him, but reading now draws me to him.]

|| But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you...

|| in the deep hearts core - like the innisfree poem. and we shall find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.

|| Eros = that which draws you towards that which drives you.

|| Truth is founded in the beggars heart. The beggar is the one who has nothing to lose. 

two hundred. thirty seven.

[at the end of the day we turn our backs to the sun and walk towards the long shadows we cast.]

Just finished camping in Michigan. Let's go back already - yes? A few moments ago I finished dumping all of the sand out of my bag. Missing the water and the woods and sleeping in the hammock. We camped close to a road, but I still thought of that Wendell Berry poem:

Ask the world to reveal its quietude - 
not the silence of machines when they are still,
but the true quiet by which birdsongs,
trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms
become what they are, and nothing else.

Coming back to learning days. It is good and growing. All of my days are learning days, it seems. But I'm grateful, most grateful.

Back to work today. We have a table [fondly called The Kitchen Table] sitting at the front of the shop, and family sits there. Not related by blood, but family by familiarity - they've all been coming to the coffee shop for ages. They welcome newcomers and new staff and Margaret always introduces people to one another so that the family grows larger day by day.
It was sweet to come in today and see them again, curious to ponder the people that make places feel like home.

LASTLY.
Translated this from the aforementioned notes, if you're interested. It's a fragment of a much lengthier jumble of thoughts:

I was struck by many things in class, including a confirmation of my love for Ireland and all of its folklore. 

Additionally, we were discussing at one point how available Yeats was to emotion, to expression, to sorrow and that lovely melancholy. Part of that was due, I'm sure, to his mystical and occult interests. But the surprise comes when you consider his age - the knowledge and scope he was able to realize while still so young. 

I was reminded of the lecture at Newgrange, how the woman said we were so sanitized from death, so removed. We don't let it touch us. Yeats was always walking in the woods and among the people in those early years, listening to their stories. I daresay if we Americans did that today we'd gain quite a bit of knowledge as well. It's not necessarily, I think, that Yeats was some profoundly in-touch soul. Perhaps it's that our souls are so out of touch and so removed from the things that make us human and grant us experience & gravity & wisdom. We live for distractions & pleasures, placing ourselves in the midst of convenience, which lends no depth at all to our perception of the world. His genius is certainly to be lauded, but I think surprise at his experience points more towards our lack thereof.