Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Misty Mountain Morning in the Rain
Now, just when I thought it could not get more wonderful here comes this morning laden with cool sweet rains, shrouding the mountain ridges outside our window in a thick cottony grey fog that render the mountains themselves totally invisible....the house is totally quiet except for the electronic hum of necessary things, and Stephen C. and i share the spacious living room for an early morning of...well...living! Peter and Paul are still fast asleep and it is the perfect morning for that as well. Sleeping fast.
Our family plan was to go to Dollywood today, but , no matter the number of umbrellas, we would be foolish to do so. There would be fewer crowds of course, but we would all get terribly wet and our enthusiasm for the adventure would be literally dampened.....in fact soaked into something very unlike enthusiasm....i vote for staying home, snuggling down, sleeping , reading and writing...but let's see what the rest of the group wants.....I am easy with whatever...
I am especially easy this morning, as I am especially worn out from the trek we all took through downtown Gatlinburg last night after dinner....it was like some lurid Joycean dream: blocks and blocks of garishly lit, insistently selling, terrifically tacky stores and restaurants and shops and malls filled with cheap, useless and poorly produced goods...sidewalks filled with families, one looking more miserable than the last for being made to walk up and down these tacky blocks....everyone attempting to convince themselves that this is what family fun is all about....quite an American street scene.....bleary, exhausted, crushed detritus of commercial crap all around us...i felt i was in the middle of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, unable to recall the perfect words to describe the horror, albeit man-made and self-fulfilling , horror of it all.
THere was a time i would have had to buy things from various stores on this walk...when I would have returned to our car with bags filled with newly purchased goods....and been delighted for a short while at opening each bag and re-discovering what I had bought....but there was not one single item i saw, smelled or touched last night that I wanted to come close to , not to mention buy...and yet...it was not depressing, as you'd think it might be...no...rather it was fascinating....I am in a place in my life (is wisdom finally coming to me in some form or other??) where such wretched scenes as Gatlinburg at night fascinate rather than hurt me....and we did walk and walk and walk...looking for nothing but looking at a lot of things....so i am tired this morning.
And grateful for the morning rains that are keeping us from rushing to Dollywood!
Stephen is reading aloud to me from GILEAD, a book by Mary Lynn Robinson...gorgeous writing. Perfect thing to do: read aloud from a lovely new fiction.
I sigh with contentment.
The worm of worry sneaks its head out from the thick clouds of happiness that are my climate right now: do i really have to go back to work ? Even though I love that theatre and I love my multi-levelled job there...i am not ready yet to even think about going back there.....and since this is mid-week of a vacation week, i dont have to do that thinking yet. Good. Good. Good.
When a thickly tense working time, in which activities are dictated by demanding jobs, is replaced by a released, free-floating time of rest and emptiness, people seem flung off high cliffs, with wings unused to flying. A slight ( or large, depending on the person) panic sets in and one wonders: now what? How do I behave, how do I think? Who AM I???
This is a natural reaction to the disappearance of tasks....the letting go of certain demands and roles one plays in the daily world....YIKES: Who the HELL am I if I am not my job?????
And I welcome this in my husband...which is why these past few days feel like I am beginning to actually know him again. And i welcome it in myself as well: the place I always return to is the place in me where my writing comes from. No one may ever read it, but as ever, I need to write it...whatever it is...and this is a part of me that has been a part of me for so long, it's probably my most trustworthy part....the writing me. One day, I want to go live there. In the writing part of me.
I love this particular vacation for reminding me of that.
Our family plan was to go to Dollywood today, but , no matter the number of umbrellas, we would be foolish to do so. There would be fewer crowds of course, but we would all get terribly wet and our enthusiasm for the adventure would be literally dampened.....in fact soaked into something very unlike enthusiasm....i vote for staying home, snuggling down, sleeping , reading and writing...but let's see what the rest of the group wants.....I am easy with whatever...
I am especially easy this morning, as I am especially worn out from the trek we all took through downtown Gatlinburg last night after dinner....it was like some lurid Joycean dream: blocks and blocks of garishly lit, insistently selling, terrifically tacky stores and restaurants and shops and malls filled with cheap, useless and poorly produced goods...sidewalks filled with families, one looking more miserable than the last for being made to walk up and down these tacky blocks....everyone attempting to convince themselves that this is what family fun is all about....quite an American street scene.....bleary, exhausted, crushed detritus of commercial crap all around us...i felt i was in the middle of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, unable to recall the perfect words to describe the horror, albeit man-made and self-fulfilling , horror of it all.
THere was a time i would have had to buy things from various stores on this walk...when I would have returned to our car with bags filled with newly purchased goods....and been delighted for a short while at opening each bag and re-discovering what I had bought....but there was not one single item i saw, smelled or touched last night that I wanted to come close to , not to mention buy...and yet...it was not depressing, as you'd think it might be...no...rather it was fascinating....I am in a place in my life (is wisdom finally coming to me in some form or other??) where such wretched scenes as Gatlinburg at night fascinate rather than hurt me....and we did walk and walk and walk...looking for nothing but looking at a lot of things....so i am tired this morning.
And grateful for the morning rains that are keeping us from rushing to Dollywood!
Stephen is reading aloud to me from GILEAD, a book by Mary Lynn Robinson...gorgeous writing. Perfect thing to do: read aloud from a lovely new fiction.
I sigh with contentment.
The worm of worry sneaks its head out from the thick clouds of happiness that are my climate right now: do i really have to go back to work ? Even though I love that theatre and I love my multi-levelled job there...i am not ready yet to even think about going back there.....and since this is mid-week of a vacation week, i dont have to do that thinking yet. Good. Good. Good.
When a thickly tense working time, in which activities are dictated by demanding jobs, is replaced by a released, free-floating time of rest and emptiness, people seem flung off high cliffs, with wings unused to flying. A slight ( or large, depending on the person) panic sets in and one wonders: now what? How do I behave, how do I think? Who AM I???
This is a natural reaction to the disappearance of tasks....the letting go of certain demands and roles one plays in the daily world....YIKES: Who the HELL am I if I am not my job?????
And I welcome this in my husband...which is why these past few days feel like I am beginning to actually know him again. And i welcome it in myself as well: the place I always return to is the place in me where my writing comes from. No one may ever read it, but as ever, I need to write it...whatever it is...and this is a part of me that has been a part of me for so long, it's probably my most trustworthy part....the writing me. One day, I want to go live there. In the writing part of me.
I love this particular vacation for reminding me of that.
Post a Comment