also, it is august, so i, right now have::::::::;
A Modest Proposal for Myself!
Be kind to others.
And be in time and space!
Actually really—
Happiness Maps// ///Half-birthday Ten Day Experiment
August 14th through 24th
(For on August 24th I will be thirty-five and a half)
Nonetheless here I am in the storm of my brain
A small hole here that you carve out of a map
And peer through the map to the other side
I will do experiments with maps in these ten days
And remember those poems you assigned me last summer?—
Oh, I will work on those
I will be on a poem vacation, by which I mean,
These ten days are my vacation and my poems are taking me on vacation
I will be influenced by the collected poems of Laura Riding and I will indeed quote from that book in a few minutes here
I will also be influenced by the book The Way of a Pilgrim and the pilgrim continues his way (which is, I am told by the front cover, “a classic of Russian spirituality”)
Also the book of Mary Ruefle’s collected lectures Madness, Rack, and Honey will undoubtedly be around And what else?
I will hopefully take a one day pilgrimage myself,
walking all day on the hiking-biking-woodsy trails that go all around this city of Des Moines (“some monks”) And really I hope to just keep having some days of exploring this city--
I will write down one thing I am grateful for at least every day perhaps along with my family—a grateful list, a journal—
And in lieu of a real vacation we will spend the day at some point on Saylorville Lake, at the beach—
And I will of course also be readying my syllabi for the teaching I shall be doing starting August 24th. . .
Oh, I hope to sing songs and learn one or two folk songs via tablature on the internets—
And all of this, and to share bits of it with you, on this blog!
Obviously I am experimenting with happiness and my days and creations
and the thought of this, itself, makes me happy—
And the thought of hanging more things up around this new house,
Snuggling in and painting and drawing
Trying deliberately to catch my bad thought cycles of anger /fear /shame / blame
—trying to catch them and nip them in the bud, at least re-direct them
Trying to set a daily intent of one small good thing
Each small thing—
Oh, Concentrate
Make my bed
Do nice things for those I love with no expectations
And you should know these thoughts today right here are very influenced and inspired by this list on apartment therapy right here :::::::::::
And influenced also by these ideas from the introduction to The Poems of Laura Riding:
“Laura Riding understood, and said repeatedly, that there is only one way for the world to change, to become ‘better’, and that is for ourselves to change, individually, and to do so now, not in some tomorrow, our world being a multiple of ourselves, each. This is the principle governing her poetry, her work in its entirety, and her relationship with her fellows.”
And this next thought from Laura Riding (in which she refers to her own “deliberate stepping out a high window in 1929 in the attempt to end what had become an impossible situation”)—made me think of you Melissa, what you said about how we have it all figured out in our poems, at least so it seems, even if really our lives are chaotic:
“Standing in that room was a quick result—I left that room, by the window of course, and poems came with me. Or rather I went out with poems. I hope you will understand about poems. They are why I am telling this, because as life it reads all wrong but as poems all right.”
And, lastly, again from Laura Riding:
“Poetry bears in itself the message that it is the destiny of human beings to speak the meaning of being. . .”
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