Rare Meat

05.19.20

A swim this time of season is a sensory tonic. I emerged from the ocean this evening for the first time in six months, the water glassy and cold, a virginal bath.

05.16.20

For breakfast this morning I bought a loaf of spelt and a mason jar of fresh garlic dip. I tore from the loaf and ate about half the jar.

Material intelligence: a connective tissue

“If you don’t have a sense of how an object was made, then it’s very unlikely that you’ll have a sense of what it was like to make it, and therefore you’ll have a poor sense of what the person’s life was like that brought that object into the world.”

There’s an ethical charge to material intelligence.

05.15.20

Trails have reopened, and at the most convenient time. I’ve been harboring stress, sleeping minimally, and winnowing out old items, and so the energy exerted each day has been fragile. Emotionally wobbly and supremely heavy the past few days.

I needed a trail that would split me open, and Hosp Grove complied. Visiting it for the first time in three months was a glorious reunion as I anticipated, it’s path covered in garlands of weeds and shavings of dandelions. Monarch butterflies also seemed to have inhabited the park while everyone was away, which I admired starry-eyed, wispy air under their wings.

It’s challenging to behold that kind of woodland beauty and sift through your shit. I stopped to gasp for breath a couple of times and then latched onto another graceful shape in the plants off the trail. At one crossing a tree had toppled over, dense but passable, and as I went to hobble over it my kneecap kissed it’s jagged bark, leaving some skin in it’s teeth. A shallow scrape that bloodied my shin, but a seductive temperament for a good hike.

The splitting open occurred when I got back to my car. I put the key in the ignition and reclined my seat, the wind blowing at my windows (feeling like it was blowing through me), and I cried, reasonably for about ten minutes, in the bosky parking lot, tears of sap.

Skin is rarely understood as a site of intelligence, but it is more active than passive.

• ”gives us individual shape, protects us from invaders, cools us down or heats us up as need be, produces vitamin D, holds in our body fluids” self-healing, waterproof, washable, and elastic.

• Our experience of our bodies is our primary experience of our minds

Skein: (noun) a V-shaped flock of wild geese or swans in flight

04.22.20

“I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.”

Pendulous; a flowery canopy

Susan Stewart, On Longing + Mourning Jewelry

Relic/Souvenir: desire to reinhabit the past, route back in time. Treasured because it connects back to something lost, “events whose materiality has escaped us.”

Memory being collective, a relic is a way of anchoring our place in time.

Miniature: objects or experiences that condense the world as it usually appears to us (doll houses, Japanese tea ceremonies which are confining in scale and precise in its specifications)

• “The dollhouse’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within.”

04.09.20

Seems I’ve trained my body to solely accept twelve hours of sleep because at the recommended eight I’m yawning repeatedly. Maybe instead of accounting for them as a bunch of yawns, the earlier entirely separate from the next, it could be the same yawn recycled? Nice, that should speak to the drowsiness I’m feeling right now. A peculiar strain!

04.07.20

Tonight I’ll sleep with my window open, and the mist that lingers in the air from today’s rain will drape itself on the corners of my room and cover the furniture inside of it like a damp cloth. I’m feeling defeated, in bed at eight.

Thawing; a gentle persuasion.

04.03.20

Recompense vs. Endowment

Recompense: “compensation or reward given for loss or harm suffered or effort made”

Endowment: “a quality possessed or inherited by someone”

“Intuition is no endowment, it’s recompense.”

04.01.20

What is it about being held that is so pacifying? I’d imagine there’s some answer to who God is in that question itself. Flesh to flesh, enveloped, warm. Because surely it isn’t the knowing that someone else is physically holding you that gives it it’s soothing properties. Where does that longing to be held, and that open-chested fresh breath when we are, come from?

03.29.20

I’m always thinking about tomorrow morning’s cup of coffee.

01.29.19

I’ve taken this silent train ride one too many times for comfort. The car squeaks and moans, tugged along or dragged.