Not too slender, sturdy as a flower
I guess do yoga
January is a season unto itself. All of winter. All of universe and experience, time and timelessness together.
In Los Angeles the ground is not frozen though I pull my daughter’s arms through a puffy coat while she wrinkles her nose at its necessity on The First Cold Day and on the ones following, accepts it well enough.
We didn’t make our new year’s resolutions yet I’ve started going, for instance, to yoga: quietly, easily, as though I have waited all my life to be allowed to go happily and without obligation to a place where my body moves and then lies flat.
We moved from one coast to the other, motion motion and then stillness, a bad stillness, so still it was a sort of death. Around us was death. Now (I believe in miracles and against all odds and my own assured atheism, Spirit) we are re-animated.
I don’t watch the news and then I do. I don’t go on social media and then I do. Its narrative is bland and unsatisfying, repulsive, dully addictive; I am starving.
But bit by bit I remember how to fill up: with real things, an old, vast bookstore where the offerings are not 12 novels and a fashionable cookbook but whole rows that take up middle-spaces of room after room: “Mysteries,” “Self-Help” (please, no hipper word is needed), “Biography.” In Fiction I pick up Elena Ferrante’s novella The Lost Daughter which I’ve already seen as a movie by Maggie Gyllenhaal. The cover tells me about this major motion picture starring Olivia Colman. I read and read until my companions—my family—tells me it is time to go. I’ve no more minutes in which to purchase so I leave the book open to page 16.
The movie was very good. The truth of all the pages I’ve read sings in my head on the drive home.
It’s still January and everywhere people are suffering and everywhere it must be that people are laughing, uproariously, having a very good time, eating very good food, telling very good stories. Isn’t this happening?
Not the flatness of the technicolored universe but the vibrance of a dress—orange, bang!, red—worn by a woman elegant, not too slender; sturdy as a flower.
Glad you're writing again!