Perfect Enough

I am unable to tell how surprising it was to see - a a thin bowed sliver of moon setting into the trees out my west window. My moon gadget says it is a 4% waxing crescent moon. But the sliver is on the bottom of the moon, not the side.

It has been a lovely spring day, and I am already jaded with crocuses. It was not as balmy as I like, but then, it's still March! Breezy. I took a walk after hours of getting twisted up writing, and ran into this phenomenon. It was still, so I would let down the hood on my light jacket. Then the breeze would come up. Breeze on my neck and head isn't good for me, so I pull my hood back up, tie the strings. The breeze dies down. Hood off. So it went. I took my camera but didn't find anything I felt I had to memorialize. Yet I can go back to certain places in the walk, in particular looking at two kinds of lichen and moss on a ragged-bark tree, and wondering what the tree was, and whether there's an app for tree ID on the iPhone.

I am also tossed between Writer's Mind and Blogger's Mind. It does not seem possible to have them both. Blogger's mind goes about seeing short bits, cultivating the Daily Eye. Often blogs are not about anything seen or done, but about thoughts. Thinking. Thought tangles. I find, maybe because it's spring, I'm not very interested in thought these days.

Writer's Mind. When it gets going and I sit down and let it, it picks me up and drags me pretty much like a horse, me with one foot in the stirrups. It did that this morning. I wrote over 3000 words on a piece whose genre I can't say. Nor where would it be published, or how. Or what would I or anyone else get from it. Writing is emphatically not like chipping away at stone, which is a good in itself, or say an act that is complete, producing a thing that is there. But a manuscript is not really there until someone reads it.

If I do anything - besides love the people I love - it is write. It's the most identity I've ever had. It is nice when it sticks its head up like that and demands that I do it, even as I am asking But what about the unfinished novel? and But what about the poetry reading next week?

Also, today I washed my hair. And this evening I made a small pineapple-upside-down cake from scratch (It was delicious). These were the most Zen things I did, I suppose, though I almost left the soda out of the cake because of careless procedure. Ed Brown would have been mad at me, no doubt, working in a mess, humming, thinking about how I felt sort of like a college student in there, making a mess of the kitchen.

And what to do for a picture today? You're probably tired of Spring already. Here: my very own oxalis plant, returning from a near-death experience. Water every two days, that's the secret, it turns out; and I put it on a bed of wet pebbles to add humidity. It is not a shamrock and has nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day, a holiday that was much beloved by the habitual drinkers I was once surrounded by, and that still makes me a bit uneasy, even if I don't go near a bar.