Quietly eventful Wednesday

It is the kind of a day that shows me the dust on the screen of my laptop like so many grains of the finest glass-making sand.

It is a day for thinking of Disaster Fatigue and how it is possible to approach such overwhelming chaos with gentleness and very deliberate energy allocation and love. Joyfulness is not merely the desperate laughter of morbidity overload, it is not the decision to turn pain into art. It is correct to find joy where it is to be had. It is correct to love and to be loved. It is correct to stop and to think of the plight of others and to think of your own life and to think of how it is lived and to decide if it is how life is lived best. It is correct to face tomorrow's headlines without fear or anxiety or hopelessness. The language of energy and resource responsibility extends to emotion and to thought and to personal action. If it does not, then we are entirely without agency, living at the mercy of a world that does not acknowledge or recognize compassion.

The breeze of an unexpected spring blows over my shoulders and through my hair and I think of Coleridge and his prose and his observation that many shoemakers are philosophers and poets and I think of Daniel Day-Lewis and a shoemaker made old before time began by the ceaseless demands of princesses careless of his craft and his hands and his supplies, who must have shoes, whose shoes are the stuff of tragedy, doomed and made more exquisite for it. There are no elves in this story, the requirement drives the work, the credit is paid for the supplies, the workshop is clean and the shoemaker is left in silence serving an unseen destroyer of craft. One pair only, made of the last thing in the house on a day of bereavement and loneliness, the pair made from a carpet or a wedding dress or a child's blanket. A night spent sleepless watching without movement the shoes self-constructing, slicing through the remnant of a love, of a life, the heart of the shoemaker brutalized and made vengeful long years before the end of his life searching for the shoes that disappeared as every shoe did, before the fullness of morning, before his hands could find them, to touch, to examine, to steal and hide away.

I wonder if this is a story I can bring myself to write. Perhaps this is the work of character development - the character never known, only recognized as an archetype, but the actor has the story, and it is more than you will ever articulate, though it is all there for you to read.

The house is welcoming house guests these two days, and I am glad of the company and the weather and the adventure of visiting. My window is open and the blankets pulled from their winter's home still creased with folds or crumpled from the dryer. Gentleness finds me here, hands on keyboard instead of rushing about. The world's gravity does not have to be heavily borne.