time remaining 12 part 7 - 2023 December  work & days: a lifetime journal project December 2 2023 Squabbling with a blowhard on the Ashcroft site: mansplainer at large. you know nothing about what I know about geology or the history of natural disasters. you are assuming whatever makes you large in your own eyes. it's annoying. and not impressive.   but let me get this thread back on track, and then I'll stop. I began by replying to someone who is distressed by natural gas mandates that are on the way. I meant to point out that what is preventing the action we need is the systemic inertia of people (people everywhere) unwilling to give up for instance their gas stoves or their oilfield jobs or their enormous pickup trucks or their amazon-raised beef or their corporate profits or any other familiar way of life. everything matters now and it is seeming to me that people are not changing fast enough to make a difference. even fully realizing what's happening is just too stressful. That's what I do think and I'm glad to have said it. Yesterday I was hooked by his boorishness - that was the first paragraph - but this morning I got the calmer summary. - "Seth Anziska, the Mohamed S. Farsi-Lindenbaum Associate Professor of Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College London." "... refuse to admit that they can be both victims and perpetrators." Any countertradition starts with a grounding in tradition itself. My engagement with Jewish texts was a feature of my modern Orthodox upbringing, from day school to summer camp, yeshiva, and beyond. This intensive exposure to Hebrew liturgy, religious thought, and Talmud instilled a deep sense of a rich and varied tradition that necessitated critical interrogation and debate. ... this immersion was a gift. It taught me that I could find a diversity of views and interpretive possibilities behind each line of text, from biblical commentary to later prophets. But in the wider community there was also a literalist tendency to transpose religious belief onto modern politics and a redemptive and messianic interpretation of faith that was exclusionary and often corrosive. Modern Hebrew poets like Ravikovitch were deeply attuned to sacred texts, even as they used Jewish sources to raise urgent questions about state power and moral responsibility. At Columbia, every student takes a class called Literature Humanities where you read the Bible as a work of literature. As an undergraduate I remember both the discomfort and exhilaration of encountering such a familiar text divorced from theological belief. Perhaps it is not surprising that I was drawn to the study of history and found my way to the dissident voices from within who have always challenged the dominant orthodoxies of their time. Judaism has been around for thousands of years, and the triumph of modern nationalism was a product of the nineteenth century, so even while Zionism drew on biblical texts and religious traditions, as a nationalist movement it also marked a sharp break in Jewish life that generated robust debate among many formative thinkers. Outside of the Jewish canon, a chance to study Palestinian and Middle Eastern history exposed me to an equally wide and diverse range of Arab intellectuals who grappled with parallel questions about identity, religion, and nationalism. I think it is the space between these worlds that yields the greatest insights. First, so comforting to see a voice that isn't crazy-stupid in politics. Second, staring at the intellectual poverty of religious tradition as I knew it. Third, Biden is so implicated by his unqualified support for Israel that he can't be seen as a legitimate alternative to worse. That's deeply scary. - Isla's parents said they began noticing words spelled out around the house with multi-colored toy letters. The letters C-H-A-I-R were left next to a chair. Letters spelling out S-O-F-A were arranged next to the couch. At one point Isla's parents found their household kitty lying next to the letters C-A-T. She was two. Story in the Guardian. 3 Yesterday I was looking for the University College Hospital photo Luke sent - was it in FB messenger notes - when - so I asked how to download the correspondence - 2011 to 2017 - didn't find the photo but miss him and read for hours. I've sent notes and he hasn't replied. Is Luke alive     no Did he kill himself     yes What that was like. An instant stab of fear but a delay realizing what it said. I phoned. Busy. Was thinking if it's true what would that be like. I wouldn't tell anyone. People would hear of it and say something concerned but I wouldn't want them. Phoned again. His voice saying leave a message. I said I was scared and my voice was. Knew it doesn't mean he's there. - Would I want to follow him? There'd be reason to, also because no one else would be relevant. - I am in my room, listening to Les Préludes by Liszt, I think: slow exquisite music. And I'm rejoicing in my new clothes - a pair of cut-off blue jeans, a beautifully tailored blue shirt, sneakers. Buying clothes is such fun - it is very materialistic to love clothes isn't it? Bother. I go along merrily assuming that I'm quite content with the finer intangibles, and then remember how dearly I love things - not necessities, I can do without them, but luxuries. There is so much rejoicing in luxuries like flowers and books and Danish pottery! And a blue rain cape instead of a summer coat.   It rained one afternoon about two weeks ago, and rain is my undoing - I got onto my bicycle and peddled madly, waving at people and grinning inanely all the way. And I took all my money, eight dollars and seventy-six cents, in a plastic bag, most of it jingling change. The record shop: a sale, twenty percent off everything. !!!!   Kingston is very hot and very lovely now, with an intensity of color, scent, contrast. I like to swim at night, where it is shallow and warm in my favorite spot. Especially when there are small waves, it is very peaceful to float on your back and look at the stars, the lights on the water.   I met a man swimming last night who has been here from France about four months - he is a swimming instructor with a beautiful body and a very strong face that seems to flicker with light and intelligence. We had a long talk after we came from the water, and it was one of the ships-by-night meetings that make me realize as I seldom do, as anyone seldom does, that another person exists in the same CONSCIOUS way that I do myself.   Kingston ON July 1964 Nineteen the summer working at Sunnyside. I wanted to post it for the moment rushing euphoric in my blue rain cape on the bike. It's a moment that should be in my autobiog. Not well written though, it's just young and high-spirited and I mind that people like/love it who ignore passages I've worked a lifetime for. Even Cheryl who should know the difference. 4 valor in a person can be patchy though tom could wade into bar fights without a thought but couldn't endure shame   my dad killed valor in relation to successful enterprise where men are in control. I haven't got it back. I cannot send a manuscript to a publisher or make a phone call asking for something for myself   not dissing myself, just diagnosing in general I think well of myself in solidly earned ways 5 oh gee death. isn't that one unlived love too, that's when I want to die, when I can't find a way to love anything - Jill says she heard from him yesterday. Working with our message notes feeling he's been my best company, then tonight watching Anthropocene feeling how tender and lucid he is and how much harder his time has been than mine. He's understood planetary collapse from young. I had personal pain but a stable world. 6 John Vaillant 2023 Fire weather exterior flashover Sometimes that channel of upward-flowing air can collapse in one small spot. Then the hot air in the atmosphere plummets through the weak point. You get a very fast wind moving down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground it spreads like jelly slopping across the floor. flood of explosively hot air then as spontaneously combusting trees and houses The generations alive today represent a bridge between the lost world of a pre-industrialized atmosphere and a future defined ever more sharply by the rapid increasingly violent discontinuities we are experiencing now. This a statement from the bench of a judge in a class action suit brought by high school students in New South Wales: It is difficult to characterize in a single phrase the devastation that the plausible evidence presenting in this proceeding forecasts for the children. As Australian adults know their country, Australia will be lost and the world as we know it gone as well. The physical environment will be harsher, far more extreme and devastatingly brutal when angry. As for the human experience - quality of life, opportunities to partake in Nature's treasures, the capacity to grow and prosper - all will be greatly diminished. Lives will be cut short. Trauma will be far more common and good health harder to hold and maintain. None of this will be the fault of Nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next. 10 I was going to make a film using black filigree? cutouts? Something about the studio or classroom where I was going to do it? Pleased I was going to be working. That's all I have. Just now there was a child memory I thought I should write down. Early child. It's gone. 11 Janet's questions. Remember who is asking them. "It seems hubristic to suggest such a text could approach the underlying questions of neurophilosophy, feminism, and patriarchy referenced in the description." In other words, how dare you. This one startles me. How could it not. If not me, who. "Why would you do it? Why take it on?" Because of the above and because of the writing. "Is there a market for the work? One or more target audiences?" Yeah, well. How to know before it exists. But this is the unsolvabled one. Disparate audiences. Women. Neurophilosophers. Writers. It's unsolvable because who else has my range. "Can you sufficiently distance yourself from "Ellie and Tom" and from "what really happened chronologically" to make writerly choices about what does/not belong?" By writerly choices she'd have to mean readable by ordinary people. I don't need it to be that. By writerly I'd mean something else, voice and texture, which are about nearness not distance. But yes, knowing what to leave out - I haven't. "What form would the "story" take?" Autofiction I suppose. "What would be the throughline?" I'm constantly tempted to feel that the story is about coming through with Tom when what it is actually about is the ordeal it took to undo the effects of misogyny on my ability to work in the world. It's a vision of central crisis in the very nature of women's being. An inherent conflict. Detailed vision of. - There's what I was learning about the means of aboutness and there's what I was learning about how to talk to be able to think better and there's what I was learning about how to work with my personal limiting structures to be able to know and do more. Is the whole of Tom subsumed in that one? He was that and something else too, my sample human. Theory's practice. After that so were my students. Her questions are boilerplate and maybe competitive but fair enough, it's what she has. I said thank you. - This morning through the pitch black hours between three and nine I lay awake feeling proud of myself that we'd given such perfect birth.   Yesterday a moment when there was a puddle in my yellow velvet jeans held up with suspenders and Dee from downstairs called the ambulance. Kentish Town's eclipsed afternoon through smoked glass, then this brick fortress that made me progress ceremonially from room to room. Early darkness at the window; quiet hours watching a wall clock's second hand rise to its peak and fall again; faint music of a staff Christmas party; bliss between pains like lying in cream. Deep silence of midnight in the corridor. An intense hour at the end. Then there he is, so bloody, so real. We laugh with surprise and toast him with passionfruit juice. It's quarter to two.   Afterward I'm brought to this long ward and a bed in the far left corner. Women asleep, pigeons burbling in the eaves over my black window. Awake through the hours. Then daylight and I get out of bed to go sit shyly beside his cot and look at him, learn him.   University College Hospital London December 17 1970 - "Are there particular authors/works you would cite as stylistic examples?" Dorothy Richardson. What does that tell me. It can be long, more than one volume. What else. Think about this one. thematically organized psychological narrative Miriam's consciousness 12 What I take from DR is writing that is about thinking in the midst of seeing and feeling - integrated being in particular place/time - how it is made, how it is defended. The difficulty of being too unlike any possible readers. DR is that and it's alright because readers can zoom along finding themselves here and there in ways they haven't felt before. It means rereadable. - what to do about the egotism - what to do with the technical thinking The plan - a beginning - therapy - doctorate - getting ready for tom - how much to say about the ken madness - it needs the text of the application - texts in a different font. - Marin Alsop conducting a gospel Messiah on BBC 3 just now - rambunctious - 'nigging out' came to mind - who said that, Tom? "HE shall reign for-ever and e-e-ver FOREVER! FOREVER! FOREVER!" Don't people notice what they're shouting? - Brody review from 2016, Losing ground, 1982 film by Kathleen Collins. Philosophy professor "whose research involves the quest for ecstatic experience outside the realm of religion ... the effort to advance constructively while gripped by the irrational force of tradition, of unexpressed assumptions and unexamined mythologies, repressed desires and frustrated aspirations, undiscussed history and unacknowledged grief. The movie's subject is the notion of liberation, one that is as much aesthetic, philosophical, and emotional as it is practical and political." - must remember to say mary sends her love   o thx   I'm learning to manage the conversation so it's not so bad - carry her into her early life, which she needs help remembering   how early   when we were little, on the farm she was in her 20s and early 30s which is a good time to be anchored in   do you know much of her life before you?   a lot of her early places were still around, we visited her one room school for instance - it wasn't far away I loved seeing photos from before I was born her button jar had a vague sort of glamour of times and dresses past - days when we were shut up inside we'd get out the button jar   April 2012 Lovely Sam says My family had a button jar that I loved. 13 I am eating cherries, which is reminding me that it is near the time I was last in london, buying cherries at a fruit stand on tottenham court road from a man who called me luv and taking them back to that dorm room across the street from a pub and your couple of back yard parties and the 134 past finsbury park and the softness of london's green   yes, such a lovely softness on the heath   what kind of storm was it this time   wild wind, horizontal rain, dark grey, for half an hour, and now blue patches yesterday was the same   you heard it on the roof   I watched it for a while it was pressing at the windows   I've just brought up the millennium bridge cam, can see the big puffs of cloud thicker over north london   yes, highgate has its own local system   somehow it amazes me that I can see gulls dropping past the bridge in real time. if you were crossing on the bridge wd I know it was you from the walk I can see wind moving the trees in front of the tate modern - time to set out into this day I think talk to you soon   June 2012 FB messenger format as a written form, the way it has its own rhythms, overlaps, the way it's a sweetly immediate conversation of disjunct places. I like to publish Luke, give his fine language a reach further than just me. - Assessing docs in my maybe folder I see that Tom stories really are best. He inspired me. I should always remember that. Furthermore: don't the Tom stories tell the whole story with more liveliness than Theory's practice. Places and times, a lot of ways people are, joyful essence. It would mean arranging them in order of date? It handles egotism by being mostly implicit, this amused woman who just likes to write everything down. About 260 pieces so far. Scrape up a few more to get continuity. Already know some things about format: date place and title the pieces but on headers and footers. I should edit by placing immediately into Indesign. Cover design probably part of the blue air photo. 14 Lot of hours yesterday organizing it and now I'll fall into doubt. The stories can be charming one at a time amid other kinds but as a mass they'll be tedious - right? I'd want it to be charming but it's melodramatic. What is it for? Would photos help. Definitely but then it has to be just online. There I go to the meeting Tom chapter in Theory's practice and boom it's better. I should start laying it out. It can be as long as it needs to be. Technical problem: it doesn't really get going until San D but I like the canyon. But shorten the chapters before I meet him. 15 I thought of it as a classical Norwegian farmhouse but it could also have been called American since the Norwegians who settled our area mostly came in through the States. Jamila and I found it one autumn when I was living in another farmhouse, that one next to a road and rented from Harold Nordhagen for $70 a month.   This house was almost hidden in a spruce and caragana shelterbelt and a bit off a back road we sometimes took when we'd been having lunch in the Seven Lakes Cafe in Hythe. It was next to Valhalla Lake, a small shallow lake surrounded by trembling aspen, black poplar and willow that we later found was a staging lake for trumpeter swans. It looked so romantic, white and red almost hidden in the trees, that we drove up - this would have been in my Studebaker Lark - and looked it over. The kitchen door was standing open, kids had been shooting out the windows, and squirrels had moved in, but the chimney was intact and it was definitely habitable.   It belonged to the Toftelands, Jesse, the elderly son of the pioneer family who'd built and lived in it, and his Norwegian wife Tone, whose bachelor son John still lived at home and farmed their land. Tone later told me about Olivia Tofteland, the pioneer wife who'd been the neighbourhood midwife. They'd had a fenceline telephone strung up so women who needed her could call. She'd get up early to clean house and bake bread, and then ride out on her mare. When Nordhagen needed his farmhouse back I went to see Tone, who knew what I wanted before I opened my mouth. We agreed it would be good for the house. She wouldn't accept rent but I weeded a patch of strawberries for her and later she asked me to take their anniversary photos.   There was no electricity at the house and no plumbing, and by the time I lived there the outhouse had vanished. There was a working pump though and I rigged a fridge by digging a hole under the caraganas and burying in it one of those steel cream cans with a strong lid that critters couldn't shift. I dug a small vegetable and flower garden too, and made a stone terrace with a fireplace assembled from loose bricks and a two-hole iron stovetop I'd found lying around. In summer we'd cook and eat sitting among flowers. I often slept under northern lights outside. In September when the lake was loud with swans I'd go sleep on a big round hay bale to see and hear them through the night.   A view from upstairs memorialized the first time I'd glazed a window. It was in early spring, with ducks standing in water on the field. I'd crawled out onto the porch roof excited to be getting the house ready to live in, and rightly so: when my mom was helping me move a table and saw it for the first time she said "It's a real artist's house". That turned out to be true. It gave me photos l loved and something essential I needed in writing, and Notes in Origin was shot there.   I remember it vividly but it no longer exists as it was. When I last saw it the chimney had fallen through the kitchen floor and both porches had sagged off with their red rails scattered. The view of the lake from the upstairs window had grown over and so had the lane, so I had to drive in across a field and push through weeds waist-high.   When I'm up north I visit Valhalla Cemetery to say hello to my friends, and last time there were graves for Jesse and Tone and even their son John, as well as the stone for Olivia Tofteland the excellent matriarch. It was in a sketchup folder, letter to Greg that I'd forgotten. I can still edit - I lose words but there is still that. Yes but when it's posted I have to keep going back for little fixes. - Yesterday I placed some sections of Theory's and think laying it out will help me know what to cut. - Luke saying the week before our day is always his darkest. The photo of him newborn that shows what I didn't see - I was high on my adventure and ignored completely visible anguish. 16 The before section: do I need it. Yes. - Reading: Dennett's autobiog, Garner's collected. 17 The place where water falls off many rocks onto a wide flat sandy beach. The rocks are maybe just a bit above the height of a person. The sea is warm. I think you have to get to it by quite a long very gently sloping passage through more rocks. It's a wonderful place. Was I there or was I just remembering I'd been there. I was sure I'd dreamed it before, maybe more than once, the long arrival to a place I knew was there. - Luke is fifty-three this morning. Fifty-three and nine months. - I have never since then thought about the work I thought I was doing there - coming up with a film - I never did understand how to do that - I worked in the ways I knew and muddled along but what I eventually made left out a huge amount of what I'd worked on. Notes in origin was a little something thrown off out of a huge matrix that hasn't been finally brought through. - Something was, an understanding of the draw of prenatal recognition was. Did it take all that to write What will we know? Maybe. I could never have written it earlier. Did the reading and thinking, the notes, make the photos possible - something, I'll think about it more.   Am labouring with the edit version of February 1979, two days so far and it's not done. It's the month I was working on oilrigs, staying internal in the midst of the most external of adventures. I edit out a lot of the self-observation and yet its idiosyncracy when it's edited gives the writing whatever charm it has. I like remembering it for the actual, Jules and Myrtle and the man I liked at Hudson's Hope, the camps, the boys. Now I'd want to play with them more but wd I be as enchantable by what I saw on the road? Steeped in marvel and sometimes pain. Having to go overboard to find the good things I did find. I'm noticing that about deep art, it makes mistakes, it doesn't necessarily have good judgment. Cull after. But confusion frightened me, frightens me, unless it's brief. I was enduring confusion with a lot of valor. Writing in a way that wd get it down minimally, that was likely correct.   What I was working on 1975-1985. I came out of those years excluded, defeated, humiliated, sad, but I'd been watchful, I'd studied and kept records, I'd used pain to work. I've sorted the weaknesses that got me hurt and then listed what I was doing about them. I had to go on working with them afterward but in those ten years I'd put myself into circumstances that forced me to know them. Edged out, edging out.   November 2023 I like it. It's so intimate. But it's too intimate to be seen. Except by Don maybe. - Yes Don and Sam. - Can I start with the canyon and then jump to the Golden West. No a very short first chapter. Between Canyon and Golden West extract a short between chapter from fantasy and writing and crashing. Canyon, Golden West and Wings of Desire already as good as they need to be. Use what's said briefly there to decide whether I need anything from those. 18 In the rec hall wiping ashtrays peer out one of the small windows because ... isn't the light odd? Clouds have a strange definition and silvery color. It's today, but is it already over, someone yesterday said it was at seven, when it's still dark here. But get the camera because the clouds and the dark grey-blue behind them are really strange.   Want to climb on the welding truck. Metal bites my hand, go in for mittens. Think to climb onto the camp itself, a ladder at the end of one of the units. One hand on the ladder the other holding the camera. Up there it's like walking on a railway car. Above the trees, just above, even still among, from this height, where the sky's brightest, south-east, a sliver of brilliance through cloud cover, the crescent sun. Pleased it knew to call me (and only me) for the exactly first visible instant. Later the clouds have lost their clear edges and are ordinary unmetallic things. - There's a woman singing on the television who looks like you. She's standing in a jungle, it's opera. I'm raging and crying. Reading stoopid Rilke.   But to us being is still enchanted. In a hundred places there is Origin still. Clean powers No-one can touch and not praise. Words go out softly to the edge of What's still unspoken. Music Always new, from the most trembling stones Builds in the unused space its numinous house.   Silent companion of many distances Feel your still breath add to space.   What tears at you becomes a learned strength. Go in and out above these narrows.   Hudson's Hope BC February 1979 Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus 1922 my version - Luke didn't reply to my birthday message, He's cozy with Roy and talks to Jill about epigenetic heredity and wave theory but says he doesn't dare phone me. Paul has sent a card, "Seasons's Greetings. All the best for 2024" and didn't pick up the phone. Tom of course unknown, unknown. Do I deserve it? Is it just because I'm an ugly old woman? (It says yes.) Em is mailing me something I'm not going to want. Dave has sent $500 though I've told him I have money now. Row has stopped phoning and there I probably do deserve it on account of my trying-to-be-secret judgment he must have felt when he was here, the way I can't help wanting to lick him into shape: cut your hair, trim your beard, don't live in fairyland all day. I was high yesterday relearning InDesign but then last night my whole L hand buzzed without stopping, then R hand too and it spread, then woke at 1:30am burning with skin pain all over. Couldn't go back to sleep. Still L knee and now R hip. There's no medical help, Dr McLeod only knows to order tests and send to specialists in Kamloops. I asked him about an Alzheimer blood test and he said they're expensive and only 4% reliable and I should take curcurmin and not eat carbs including fruit. Decrepit and abandoned. 19 She's passionate in her quiet way. When she lies down on my chest she'll lick my jaw a few licks. Sometimes many, a dedicated scrub. That's when her purr is loudest. Then she'll lie still purring with the top of her head pressed hard against my chin. Her forepaws convulse against my neck, the tiny points of her claws not uncareful but exquisitely sharp. Then she'll fade into sleep. Even if I have something to do I wait her out, it's important to her. - Looking at that one with satisfaction. It was awkward, it took days. 5:13am. She's out in the black dark where she needs to be. It's wet but she's getting used to winter. When she comes in she leaves footprints like little flowers. - Row says Mike is living in the Empress at Main and Hastings AND will have $100k from Len's estate. Row and Freya thinking to move to Read. They'd be safer there I think. I said I can give them homesteading stuff, canning supplies and tools. 20 The woman in Cape Cod Clutter who said, I think I have one more adventure in me. I'm imagining moving north. I'd have to find a mover to take (some of) my stuff to storage in GP and drive up with computers and cat. Find a temporary single room. Look for a place. Expensive. Big disruption, wd have to finish Theory's practice and Pale hill this winter. Get rid of stuff bit by bit. Try for a show in GP. Having goals instantly livens me up. - Now it's harder again, the agony chapters, how to simplify. - Raewyn Peacock, Kelly Ducoy, Ducoy being the third husband's name. Two dead, the first still alive and in touch. "I should never have married and I shouldn't have had children." 21 It's warm but not warm enough to unfreeze the hatch. - Well, I can probably stuff it through the passenger door.   Light mud today on Midday Valley Road, it's steep but no ice even in shade. Lower down the trees will be ponderosas, which I don't want because their trunks are heavy and branches sparse. There'll be firs higher up but I won't be able to get to any that are on a slope or on the far side of a ditch (I'm old). Other considerations: I shouldn't park where I'm not visible enough if someone comes fast over a hill. At the same time what I want to do is probably illegal so I'd rather not be seen. Hardly anyone is on the road today though.   I'm driving slowly in four wheel drive. Sometimes stop to consider. Drive on. Past the ponderosas, then past the firs, past the gravel pit, on and on. Undecided. Turn around and drive all the way down, still looking, still stopping to consider. Am I defeated. No. Turn around and try again.   There's a right-size fir I saw the first time but on a slope and across a ditch. I park. Creep sideways down into the ditch and climb the slope scrambling for holds on little weeds. The tree is actually a double. I'll cut just one of them. Fresh green tips. Scent! How will I get it through the ditch. The passenger-side door is right up against the ditch's loose mud. I throw the tree across to where I'll be able to just reach it, the saw after. Now me, how will I get down and up through the ditch. Stumble on to where it's a bit shallower. Edge up to the muddy passenger door and stuff the tree through to the back. Drive home all splattered and victorious. 22 My little pleasure. I post it and so far three people have read it, one in Atlanta, one in Montreal and one on a horse farm somewhere near Vancouver. Will keep checking all day. I read it again and again, small fixes. The satisfaction of getting it right is a reason to live. Later someone in a village in Vermont, an ex-professor in Edmonton, an equally elderly female artist I used to know, and Michael's pretty sister who has money. 23 Occurred to me last night to post the Tofteland house on Grande Prairie and area back in the day. So far 41 people (membership 18k) almost all women and including a great-granddaughter. I light up feeling maybe I'd be welcome there but then I check a few of their pages and realize the politics I'd be in for living in backcountry Alberta again. Would it matter, could I handle? - It's brilliant, let it be as long as there's good stuff for. - Ben VandenBerg (Sudbury) and Kirstin VandenBerg (Fort Myers Florida) friends of Georalynn Saunders on FB - Fun to have 89 people noticing and 14 commenting. Henry Olydam's brother, Janeen's little sister, a couple of Toftelands, and startlingly my Mrs Grotkowski's sister-in-law who first says she was dear friends with Auntie Anne, and then that she was a Wiens whose father and my grandmother were cousins - fun because of suddenly having connections. I phoned Rob too because I wanted to ask him what he'd want to do if I flit, let him know it's possible. That was nice, he was light and loose. 24 I posted the teaching vs therapy memo yesterday mainly with Don in mind but Jody jumped in below: "... we never doubted you all knew exactly what you were about. Ellie Epp Jim Sparrell Karen Campbell grateful for your integrity, courage, compassion and generosity." jody! making me cry (I wrote) how the tables have turned (she wrote, Jim smiled) 25 Pygmalion's lovely St Mathew. Lit the tree yesterday, there it is. Luke phoned last night. He's replaced me with Jill. When he's down it's me he blames though it's Roy who wanted to abort him then stole him with all his crooked means. I'm glad he has his sibs but I'll never see him again. He says he doesn't dare speak to me because he'd have to be honest. In fact he has been managing and punishing me for years with threat of suicide. It's revenge for one desperate moment and I pay with terror and loss. One desperate moment and the long pain of feeling less accomplished, which isn't my fault. He'd be pleased if he could feel he'd made me kill myself. Bitter facts. There is an other side to this but let me stay with the bitter facts for a while. I'm angry. I want to do what I do and say I'm gone. I could do that. I could stumble away to find whatever there still is to find. What is there still to find? Who would I be if that bond were cut? This utter isolation shouldn't go on. Last night I was threatening back - yes. deer and lilacs.jpg. I didn't crop because the whole frame suits her. She's held centred on the frame's diagonal with a direct, personal look over her shoulder, What are you?. The bare lilac row is her colours, grey above, fox red below. The raspberry row at her head similarly shaded but lighter and paler. Frosted grass at her feet again shaded into looser and denser halves. Three similarly shaded zones with centred sentience: how subtle an excellence a photo can be. Who else would be able to see that about it? It was made without conscious thought in a second, get her looking at me, try for a clear frame, all there was time for. 26 In bed last night bitter about the men who don't want to talk to me. Tom Paul Luke. Add Louie. Then said: so rise above them, come through to a blazing book. Seeing it's not the last edit. Attention in detail again and attention to the shape of chapters. 27 Tylenol giving me better nights and therefore days that are almost buoyant. - Lummi marsh was too fixed on Tom-misery, too bare and plain. I went back to the source and found it doing something else, fighting to be more courageous and public about work. Now Kantian stories. 27 First Norman Rush was January 1998. 29 22-sorting is still a slog and much too long Blur: how do I get to the decision to go to SD. Does Tom agree he's coming. If it's three books, what is the shape of the first. 30 It's almost always. When she comes in from outside she has to check in, climb onto my lap. If I'm working I may push her off but she persists, tries again. Then most of the time I give in. It's good for me to take her purr into my chest, lift and subside her with my breath. I keep wondering though what it is for her. Is it reassurance, is she needing to ask, Are we still good? Is it possible she wants to reassure me, I went away but I'm back, I always come back? Trying to resolve 22 by going back to the source journals. It's hard. What to do with the bookwork, do I have enough focus. Or patience: maybe I have to realize it can't be fast. What it means that it can't be fast just here. What is it that happens in this stretch. What happens in work, What happens in therapy, What happens for Tom What does a reader need to know. What am I keeping for enlivenment. 31 Wrote the 2023 TR12 intro summary this morning. - Have been thinking it would make sense to format the FB posts including photos as pdfs. Maybe two a year so they're not too long? For four years? Leave out some posts for sure. January 1 2024 This is about last night so should I write it here or in the new journal. Both. A beautiful New Years Eve. Imagine being actually happy. Tree of lights across the room, candle scenting from the mantle. Luke had sent a message, Walked through Leicester Square and Covent Gardens heaving crowds, just as it got dark windy and wet but everyone dressed to the nines. Gratefully at home alone listening to music with the heater and letting surprised newly reawakened feelings percolate as the fireworks begin outside. Thinking of you. Talk to you next year. XL Jim posted fireworks above a pond in Portsmouth, silent as I saw them. Nothing hurt. I was in the chair watching marvels of Mughal Pakistan and fell asleep, Patch asleep on the floor next to me. When I woke I saw that though the upper sky was black the streets were in a soft white mist that held moving cloud particles of red and white light. Perfect. When I went to bed I opened the curtain so it would be in the room with me. time remaining volume 13 time remaining volume 12: 2023 january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project