This has been wandering around in my thoughts since Friday, just waiting to build up enough steam and shape to get me to the internet and let me write.
It is lovely and new and very very real to hold conversation with awareness instead of fear or paranoia or irritation, no matter the other person. There is much to be said for the quality of conversationalists in my life, and for that I am deeply grateful. Also, the adorable skinny art boy? Yeah, he totally hung out and read Yeats. Like we aren't in a small town in Missouri. Pshaw, baby, pshaw.
We spoke of Zarathustra and The Book of Kells and going to see Paul and of Martha Nussbaum and of William Goldman and birth rates and living with pets and Community Supported Agriculture and breakfast and cinnamon rolls and graduating and being named 'Sarah' and the challenge of course work that requires reading in almost direct opposition to the reading you'd find more meaningful and potentially more enlightening and the frustration of a longer view than can be seen from safely within the confines of an Ivory Tower, no matter how beloved it is (as a genetic academic, it cannot be otherwise, but that doesn't make higher education infallible) and being a mercenary agnostic and there were chocolate chip cookies.
I ate many of them. Also: zucchini squash & shredded carrot quiche.
As I am still unaccustomed to working long hours, I find that my efforts to reduce some of that fatigue leave me with an equally perplexing situation: what to do with my time now that I'm good and awake and don't have to be in bed for another hour or so. Netflix is always available to me, and relatively consistent, especially if I want to watch Cosmos or don't mind that Primeval will have to be buffered.
None of anything that involves a screen is of much interest to me at the moment. I am content in the world of voices and coffee cups and tables that need to be cleaned and genuine smiles on the faces of people sharing space with my space. The cats are in places they need not be. More books lines my long shelf and the project of a year of missing my friend is moved to a wall instead of the chalkboard it's been protecting from the onslaught of my need to list everything.
This week, I saw a copy of The Nuremberg Chronicle that was printed in 1493. We stood there and I covered my mouth as if breathing too much would alter the sense of the thing, the woodcuts perhaps of Durer, beautiful regardless. On a shelf, my mother noticed a book on a stand, its pages edge-blackened and curled, its shape disastrous. Brother Thomas told us it is Ethiopian, my new brother's face lit up to see the Amharic - he got a picture.
There is much happening in the house these last few days, with spring break happening and none of us actually packing to move, and all of preparing to pack to move and I've opened windows and can smell the world from my bed, resting easily on familiar pillows, contemplating the use of space and how lovely it is to share it with such as are these of my beloveds.
The entertainment and information and connection of screens and networks and characters are all meaningful, and they are real. My eyes are geared somewhat differently these days. The change of world calls them to textures unseen in two dimensions.
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