online: 10 january 2010
modified: 2, 10 january 2010

1 january 2010 outdoor cafe


new year

...15:10 starting the new year with a resolve to be patient, trusting self/other and universe*... as i suppose is the robin that is hopping about near my feet while searching or waiting for crumbs from these tables of the relatively rich... for apart from the 10 to 15 minute queue to get food and drink this is a privileged place to be... even on a public holiday when it's crowded...

...but it's a relief to look up from the business of eating outdoors in the winter to see the clear pale blue sky with no wind and to feel the diminished heat of the winter sun getting less as the earth radiates heat back into cloudless space and the cold air on one's skin is just bearable...

...walking here today through the woods after a busy midnight preparing the next daffodil and a morning of exchanging gifts and shared interests with a daughter and her husband to be... i was thinking how well things can go yet how easily they can collapse into unhappiness...

...now the air begins to shake at the approach of a jumbo jet in the sunshine and in a minute or two it is gone over the rooftops and trees in this hilly location that today is directly beneath a line of approach to an airport...


2 january:

...reading this now i notice separation of things social from things physical and the presence of conscious thought not in judgement but in enjoyment of what happens... which after those events is preserved in the writing as words less as thoughts than as things being described as realities... (i.e. words and thoughts being as real as are the things referred to...)

...a long pause...

...yes there is something being sought in this writing, some reality different from that of common sense or science or even literature as each becomes something less than mind as the addition of each word or phrase shifts the purpose or meaning from those of the words already written... and as i pause again i realise that this process occurs perhaps un-noticed in each everyday speaking or writing of everyone...

...just now i remembered a voice on the radio referring to the two thousand nerves of the face and i remembered the small number of these that are employed in abstract or academic speech or in writing on a touch screen and the many more nerves that can come alive when one is talking or handwriting more directly...

...at which i take a sip of thyme tea from a white cup and saucer as i prepare to put this on line as the first piece in the new year and decade that we share and which we might never have been born to and are able to transform as we live it...

...no, not 'it' but as our selves and as parts of each other and everything...


* such terms as 'self/other' and 'universe' as philosophical elements, or as poems in themselves, came to me through the early writings of Edwin Schlossberg, as yet unpublished, i think... they occur quite frequently in this website...



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