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Perhaps it is laziness, this tendency of mine towards physical inaction.  I half-reproach myself with the thought as I sit by the wide open window, feeling breeze after breeze -cleansed by last night's rains- a cup of tea in my hands.  I realize that I have no desire to move.

In the garden, thyme, mint, and lavender plantings sit in flimsy pots -probably buffeted to the ground by an especially robust breeze by now- awaiting their home in sturdy ground.

But I remain at my roost by the window, drinking more tea, letting my mind wander where it will, while a poem  I've just read lingers in the crevices of consciousness.  It is a pleasure I am reluctant to part with, even if the alternative has its charms.

The clouds shift, momentarily muting the light that plays glancingly at my feet.  Stray words from the poem return, and this time I hear them differently.

Before the Rain

The long grasses
wave on the crest of warm breezes
rising from the lake
falling on my skin
bringing together the softly bleared stalks
and the sand-dusted gulls
their cries ebbing before the rain.

I Should Get to It

A reminder from Carlos Fuentes:


When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.


Read the entire interview here.

The Voices

Drinking Alishan

I am perched over a sea of green
repeated in the unfurling tea leaves.
They murmur all along
reaching my ears now and again.

Mid May

It is while waiting for the storm

that I sit with the evergreens

tipped with a softness

made more luminous by the waning light.

Momentary Distraction

I note my train of thought during the morning meditation and feel the brush of a mountain breeze.  It's Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain again, moving along the trajectory of my chattering mind, in which Hans Castorp and his tubercular gang idyllically quarantine themselves in an Alpine sanitarium.  They tramp over paths overgrown with wild flowers during the daily constitutional.  Well-used alpenstocks and trickling vernal streams rise up.  The mountainside vibrates with the friends' philosophical meanderings on topics which would seem  outdated or even airy fairy nowadays.  I no longer remember the content of these endless discussions, but can easily summon up the gestalt of a world where together, their spirit can soar above the malady of the body.