In the early morning write

Gordon Lightfoot has a song that begins "In the early morning rain ..."    Was up by 6:00 A.M. as usual.  No rain this morning, only clouds, and a bit of sun pushing through.  I stopped by some fellow bloggers' blogs and saw that a few more "morning people" had already posted the day's words.

Check out this haunting Armenian melody played on the duduk by Djivan Gasparyan over at Bob Arnold's July 31st Longhouse Birdhouse  (posted at 6:22 A.M.).   (Mornin', Bob!   :)

and Tom (The Middlewesterner)  Montag's latest "Three from the Old Poet",  posted at 4:37 A.M.   (An excerpt:

As if I've
worked my whole life
becoming someone

I can admire.

Or poet/writer/blogger Linh Dinh, whose political essays, astute comments and ongoing State of the Union photo documentation of America in decline; the homeless, disenfranchised, tent cities, urban blight, etc. telling you far more than you'll ever get from CNN. (He posted today at 1:57 A.M.     I'm guessing that's not when he got up and that he's really more a "night" person.)

Another morning person, up by 5 A.M. with a new poem, is William Michaelian, reminding me that thought-out poems that don't get writ remain just that: words in transit, not yet extracted, much less parked.

Today we have the annual family picnic, again this year out in St. Louis-de-France.  Last year, about 40 people came, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, in-laws, significant others, and friends, and it lasted from early afternoon until nearly midnight, the evening spent on the patio to the sounds of guitar and keyboard, everyone singing along to old, familiar tunes.  It poured rain pretty much the entire day but nobody left, and when the downpour subsided, the mosquitoes came out. 

This year the weather promises to behave and allow a more pleasant time of it, the barbeque taking place outdoors (instead of in the garage) and dips in the pool.  Last time people brought about 8 different salads, and of course a big pot of Michel's famous baked beans and the usual grilled delights (even salmon burgers  for the semi-vegetarians).  (Our local supermarket last week carried imported frozen fish-kebobs from China--something I'd not seen there before.  Why this particular local market offers only imported Chinese garlic and not the fresher, more readily available and less-expensive-to-transport garlic from neighboring farms, is a mystery.)

Back to the writing thing again. This, of course, is no excuse--activities in general, social obligations, daily tasks, etc.--for not writing. It's perhaps cyclical, or so it seems at times--more time spent this summer on reading than writing, more hours internally absorbing, mentally archiving, "saving up", almost, for when the time is right, which for me is Fall and Winter. But this is absurd, the writer self argues. Sounds more like an excuse, chimes the neglected pen.

They may be right, and it's not a question of season, or intervening activities, or habitual proscrastinaton but something more baldly basic: simple discipline. I envy poets who can come up with a new poem every single day and offer it, in finished form. And then there're those naggy fictional characters nagging, nagging, nagging at you to finish their story, the one you've been working on for months--YEARS--and have put aside, like unfinished paintings waiting for the most conducive lighting, the right color mix, the optimal circumstance, the perfect conditions. This has got to change, scoldy self says to lazy self. I mean, really. Why are you blogging, instead of writing?!!!

My fingers have no answer. It's like being stuck in ... the Waiting Box--waiting. But for what?

The Place Who We Are

Is home a place?  Places change.  We change.  What is it about particular places, though, that inhabit us (not, as is usually the case, we them)?  Last autumn I revisited a town in which I'd lived for 13 years and barely recognized it.  The memory of it, over the years, was far stronger, and much more real.  I no longer feel "at home" there, though in some sense I never left. 

Ruminating this morning on the idea of satisfaction with the whatness of now, of acceptance, of the embracing of where you are and what your life has become (in light of a friend's complaint that five-plus years and still stuck in the "same 'ol, same 'ol").  And then I came across this little poem:

New day. Same sun.
What you get is

what you've got, and
it is enough.

[Posted three days ago, at 4:37 A.M., by Tom Montag over at The Middlewesterner]

For those readers not familiar with poet Tom Montag, he's from the midwest and a number of years ago he became an intentional vagabond, driving from town to town, trying to grasp what exactly makes people "middle western".  But this poet's attempt to understand "who we are and of what are we made", I think,  transcends geographical boundaries:

~ ~ I saw the shadow of crow fly into me.

~ ~ Why am I so moved by this landscape, these scenes, that old farmhouse with windows boarded up? What previous life did I live that I have this intense connection? All the old cottonwoods talked to me like friends. Was I a cottonwood once?

~ ~ Why have I had to come so far to be home? All day the land spoke to me as I drove, this land of which I'd write. Every grove of trees wanted to whisper its story, every old house invited me inside to meet its ghosts.

~ ~  The symbols of ourselves rise above the line of earth - the windbreak, the water tower, the elevator, the church steeple. We are mere mortals yet we would be little gods of the earth, each with his own habitation, his own local place. We set our markers on the earth as if they would be shrines, places to pray for rain, to give thanks for good harvest. Places of refuge. Markers that say: "Mine." Yet as earth-bound as these symbols are, how they reach for the sky! How they fashion the light that swaddles them.

[From Vagabond in the Middle", #5 and #6]

 Long after the original journey has ended, Tom Montag continues to look, to listen, and to wait with patience, reporting, on his blog, on what he finds as true.

I want to share his poem with my friend:  "New day/same sun"  (in reverse:  same 'ol, same 'ol, but it's a new day!), and "what you get/is what you've got."  It is "enough."

And if it's not--then a different journey must begin.  Within or without, we all arrive there eventually--though, absurdly, may not yet realize we're already there.

Thanks for the insightful little poem, Tom.

______________________
*photo by awyn, "on the road" last weekend.