Sometimes, the words find you...

I just found a poem that someone gave to me years ago. Reading it again now touched me in the same way it did when I first read it aboard a ship in the middle of the ocean.

Funny how words can find you and make sense of the messes we find ourselves in from time to time...


The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not modeled sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? We said, because we knew
It was the spirit we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air;
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of the water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

-Wallace Stevens

If You Can't Take the Heat...

So yes. Today is hot. Even hotter than yesterday, if that's possible. It MAY even be hotter tomorrow. Who knows?

But I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of this: IT'S SUMMER!! Remember how positively MISERABLE we all were this past winter?? "When will it stop snowing and blowing and freezing and raining?" was all we could ask each other. All that slush and traffic and wind and cold...sure, it sounds appealing now that it's 100% humidity and 94 degrees. But before it even hit February, we were all hoping and wishing for summer to come. Now it's here, and we're all complaining! I just find it amusing, that's all. I'm not really mad. I swear.

I, personally, LOVE the summer. I really do like the heat and the sunshine and the tickles of the cool breezes that grace our sweaty exteriors once a day if we're lucky. I love drinking lemonade, and eating ice cream, ooh, and especially going to the beach and jumping into freezing cold lake or ocean water - it's the sort of thing that makes you really feel alive, doesn't it?? I think that as we grow up, we forget to have picnics and take field trips and chase fireflies and play games outside like we did when we were kids. Too much else on our minds...we have places to be, and things to do. And I guess there aren't really many fireflies in the city...

Anyway, I think we should all try to have a little bit of summer vacation in our summer, don't you? I want to be a kid again for just one day, and do something positively silly and fun. So I think I'll do that this week. If you see someone hooking up a Slip 'N' Slide on the Comm. Ave. mall, don't be surprised. Just grab yer' swimmin' trunks...

Raining Dogs and Dogs

7.8.05 - 9:08am

And so we meet another rainy day in early July. If you want to look on the bright side, at least it's not snow...

Things are moving right along nonetheless. I've officially quit my day job, and the freedom is nice. I took the liberty of electing the first few days of my unemployment as a sort of summer vacation. Which would have been great, had the weather held up a little better...

On Wednesday, I decided to follow Jake on his dog walking route. All of our trusted weather sources claimed that the rain was going to hold off until the afternoon. Lo and behold, about 3 dogs into the day, it was POURING. Luckily the humidity kept things warm enough at the start that it was fun to be stuck in such torrents with big friendly dogs who liked the rain. We were soaked in seconds. It brought me back to times in grade school when you'd have a field trip and get stuck outside at the zoo or something in the pouring rain and have no choice but to jump in puddles and make the best of it. So that's what we did.

Most of the dogs we walked didn't really mind the weather, they just kept shaking themselves out and kept on walking. The big labradors and retrievers loved it, and the little ones just blinked a lot and looked uncomfortable. But they were all pretty well-behaved and entertaining at times. I was impressed that most of them didn't really care. They just went along and did their business and it was just a little soggier than usual.

People can really freak out when it rains like that...drivers get reckless and impatient, people without umbrellas dash under awnings and into doorways. And the people with the umbrellas inevitably end up clinging to the lifeless and fractured remnants of nylon and metal, hoping to fend off the rain from at least the tops of their heads.

So despite some really sopping clothes (and a water-logged and now broken cell phone), my first (and only?) few days of bona fide summer vacation turned out to be really great.

There's nothing like the company of loved ones and dogs on a rainy day to make you smile.