Choosing
Friday, August 17th, 2007
As I gather opinion from my subscribers about switching from my e-newsletter to more frequent postings on this blog, I decided to share the essay, Choosing, and a photo I sent out yesterday with the newsletter:
These are the things that make getting up (I could say “arising,” but it is hardly anything that elegant) in the morning worthwhile for me: a handmade coffee mug, chocolate milk in my coffee, my swiveling/rocking deck chair, my grey fleece bathrobe. We are not talking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness here. We are talking what makes me roll out of bed, put my feet on the floor and start another day.
I sit on my second-story deck and I am surrounded by August green, from the pale miscanthus zebrinus swords on the slope below the deck to the black-green recesses in the thick leafiness of the shagbark hickory trees.
I hear goldfinches, robins, the fading away “Auk, Auk” of the crows. The sun came up red and is slowly burning the fog out of the hollows and dips.
This morning I choose to ignore the neighbor’s barking dog, the drone of cars on the road to the west and the planes overhead, and the dryer vent humming on the side of the house to my left.
This hour is as precious to me as any tool, any material, any book in my studio. My day may turn out to be a triumph of creativity, energy, and creation or it may become a day of false starts, inertia and disappointment. Sometimes it seems as though I have very little conscious control over the trajectory of my speeding days, weeks, and months.
But every morning, I choose this space, this quiet interlude of green and birds; an indulgence, a necessity, a gift to myself.
