Solstice Season

Thus live I my time. If this is not “doing”, then what is? I will buy something for the first time on Monday- emerald tights.

If I were you I would not be in a hurry to exist in the future- read “The Fir Tree” in said Hans Anderson book if you wish to know why. Patience, I believe, is the highest virtue because all other higher feelings are possible through it since it is really a psycho-emotional position, and a conscious one in my opinion. I am very glad to be certain that happiness always waits and can always be created through work and engaging with others. In western culture, drawing close to someone is equivalent to violating culturally erected personal boundaries- I empathize completely with Eli and his need to be in developing countries. In these cultures (and in the rural, mystical island culture I am living in now) the self is not defined in terms of one, but in the interaction with all. If I go downstairs right now, I can tease Anja and Cassandra and Tomas into fits of laughter. I know this. They are playing guitar as I speak and my small cat Sparrow, freshly cleaned and fed our leftover omlette, is sleeping in front of the coal stove, which we clean daily, carrying kilos of coal from the backyard to the porch every other day, and shoveling them into our iron-clad Humphrey, who is ecologically brilliant in comparison to the coal burned to power electric plants, which deliver heat to houses across the US. I LOVE WHAT I AM DOING. Every labor is a work of love and praise. Cassandra’s singing makes my heart soft. Last night as I fell asleep I was attempting the visualisation exercise you suggested. What I saw was a mist in the half-dream-half-wake state and thus was it: I saw the red ribbon and me holding it. It was tied in a knot around Eli’s heart. It tore except for a single nearly invisible thread. After a long while of just hanging in darkly quivering midair, years in fact only compressed in my dream, he followed it back and it was as though I were seeing the journey through his eyes. At the end of the thread was a hand-knitted crimson sweater of sheepswool. I realized when I woke in the morning that I am worried about Eli being cold- both emotionally and physically. Perhaps I will just knit him a sweater. See, sexual love is physically, therefore unbearably temporal, for it threatens our illusion of autonomy (which we create also when we isolate our pain in order to appear self-sufficient). I feel more self-sufficient the more I challenge boundaries between myself and others. Today the Swiss lady Esther dropped by again and remarked to me instantly “O you are One Who Wears Colors. How lovely. Not with the times.” She said it like that- in Capitals that is. I was clad in a sweater of Autumn tones and maroon pants. My pajamas, in fact, but she didn’t know.

Tomorrow at seven AM we depart by ferry for the mainland, where we will board a bus in Rosaveal for Galway. Upon arrival we will deposit our sleeping bags in the Simon’s Community, a household of European Service Volunteers who work with the homeless, and then go into the city for a coffee and to look at the used bookshop! In Java’s, a lovely coffeeshop where they bring you a peice of chocolate (last time embossed with a unicorn!!!) we will write New Year’s Resolutions- mine shall divide themselves into long-term and short-term goals. One I know for certain is to write to my Uncle Jean in Maine- he is the crazy retired Philosophy Professor who loves cats and doesn’t speak except by written letter or occasionally over the phone- he really dislikes technology.

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