2/1/12 that nameless ecstasy

It feels like being boxed in with cardboard, and it smells like rain. it is freely offered by almost everyone you meet. It hits you like a velvet mitt in the chest and doesn't make you double over, but makes you want to stretch wider. The nameless ecstasy calls out to you low from the bare branches of frozen trees, and it follows you home in the dark, protectively. The nameless ecstasy will not let you go, will not let you go hungry, will assert its right to meet with you again and again.

1/27/12 The weight of a cat

I can't believe I've gone my whole life till now to relax and feel the weight of a cat on my lap. They drape like big bean-bags, settling in so the weight sinks on your thighs to the extent the cat's skin will permit...they sink and drape...is it luxuriantly? And you feel the presence of those little bones in there somewhere, but the bones give a little and allow the drape, the heaviness like a sleeping baby.

01.26.12 Frankenfeet

This isn't truly an ecstasy, more like a modest comfort, but so what. Wore hiking boots to work. I don't know why this invention tickles me so much, but it does. The hiking boots immobilized foot and ankle, precisely like masonry bricks, and my legs like posts rising from them. I felt like a Karloff Frankenstein monster, my well-protected feet falling like stones with each step. Feet snug and cozy like they're in bomb shelters with provisions enough for six months post-apocalypse, feet like they're in bank safes padded with walls of ridiculous paper, feet like they're in an isolated cave in the arctic, waiting to be revived by a foolish, journal-keeping physician-explorer. My feet were Frankenfeet--comfy, padded, remote.

01.15.12 The Yertle thing

Declaring myself an expert on all that I see, all that I do, all that I am. Recently looked up a few websites for locals who may or may not have more or less experience on being themselves than I have. What I find is that people can set up structures and barriers to getting to know people, people can set themselves up as experts, teachers, elders, superiors, website controllers, and still have little portions of their hearts closed off from the people they might want to connect with.

Therefore, it is with awesome tenderness, starstruck affiliation, obsequious utterances and nimble ego-pandering that I declare myself an incomparable expert teacher, reminder, CEO and webmaster, of all things ME! And all things that I see, intuit, feel and know! I am the queen of all I survey (okay, but I'll have to modify that, and say that unlike Yertle, I'm not squishing all the poor shmucks stuck underneath me....I have more like a levitation thing going on, or a hovercraft, yeah).

Ecstasy, declaring oneself an expert on one's own body of knowledge.

This is the first (& only so far) time that I have been brought to ecstacy by a piece of music. The winding path of notes formed a golden color for me that started to break down the barriers between compartments in my mind & body. Like how I imagine, when I am giving someone a deep tissue massage, the correct, sensitively given pressure breaks down "adhesions" in the muscles, helping the client feel lighter, freer, released. In this piece of music, my adhesions were broken down, the clanging bars of filaments between recesses, between cells of being. The constructed walls of separation, the plaster and mortar and bricks crumble. I am again and again on the edge of ecstasy, with each rapid-fire note, and I stay as long as I can bear it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyFwwIHw6nw&feature=related

11/19/11 cute kids

The most adorable kid in the world--my 4 1/2 year old nephew, coming to wake me up with his bright, conspiratorial smile at 6 am. Hi sweetie, I say, his little head at eye level where I'm sleeping in the basement guest room. I'm not ready to get up yet, but I will be in about an hour. Can you come back and wake me up then? And then he agrees, goes back upstairs. Puts me in mind of all the people I would do things for, any time of the day or night. Puts me in mind of all the bother that people create for each other, and how precious it is. How I would love being awakened at any time, for any need, for love. Of course, he plays with blocks or cars or something above my head, and things are dropping on the floor/ceiling and I'm ready to get up within ten minutes. And he laughs and he's happy and little and a small armful to pick up.

10/4/2011 - horse manure
Great honking piles of it, black and fly-ridden, at the Bunker Hills Stables, and the groundskeeper Jim opens the gates to the paddock and lets me in. Round, greenish brown and ripe-smelling, flakey, I scoop shovelsful into my plastic tote bins to haul home to my garden. Keeping all the car windows open, I drive home with my dark, delicious mess. Here's what I think of--the ripe, green mats of grass on the underside of lawnmowers, a little of the sweetness of shit, like that guy smelled in the outhouse scene in Ulysses by James Joyce...the end of a romance...and something else. As I'm driving home, it doesn't smell so awful, more like band-aids, and I'm wondering if that's just the perpetual dose of worming meds that horses have to take...smells like a cross between band-aid and cunt...innocent and forthright, like it can't help smelling like the inside of a horse's colon, and what all it's been through. Katharine's raspberries all tasted like a mild, fruity version of the horse's colon, now that I know the smell, cause she mostly uses horse manure. Sensible, it smells like (unlike the oratorical version of horseshit), and willing. Horseshit smells like a future garden like lettuces and parsnips and tomatoes yet to come, smells like the pieces of clay soil and humus that blend and melt with it. I love the compost, love the dark manure as much as if I had expelled it myself.