Thank Goodness

Another month has slipped by since I last posted. Not for lack of trying, mind you. The trouble is I cannot seem to post positively. Sad, dark thoughts crowd in every time I sit at the computer and find their ways to the ends of my fingers. I type out tales that would make paint crack and toes peel. I stop midway, pinch my lips, bend my brow and furrow in disgust. Who wants to read such stuff? Well, maybe somebody does.

 It's the environment. My family is away, and solitude encourages these sad thoughts. A mind set on itself quickly realizes its own limits, of which mortality is the greatest of all. Now, a sad thought, well-tended, can be the most delicious sentiment. Wallowing in self-pity when alone is as satisfying as a pint of Ben & Jerry's on an empty stomach. But public displays of such sentiments are rightly met with rolling of eyes and heavy sighs. Oh, he's in one of those moods again.

 But cast off these dun rags. Or are they sad rags? I forget. Maybe there's something about the sun in there too. But yes. It silly to mope and write self-indulgent glop, for writing is an act of communication by its very nature. So I've taken positive steps to dispel this gloom.

 First, I've stopped playing my Gillian Welch an Joy Division albums and instead have Pandora.com supply me with Glen Miller, Artie Shaw and other great big band tunes. Now I make breakfast to "String of Pearls" and that one about moonlight. OK, there are several about moonlight, all equally good. You know what I mean. The two-step to the refrigerator is lightly tread. The dirty dish is no longer tossed in the sink but scrubbed right then and there. And I've been shaving before leaving the house. The difference is everything.

Yesterday I spent the morning sawing logs into lumber. Cloudy and cool, it was just the right weather for hard outdoor work. Many hours and much sawdust into the morning, a thought occurred to me. Take a rest. So I took off my hearing protectors and lay down on a plank I'd just sawn. I stared up into the sky for the first time all day. Above me was a near-perfect hole in the forest crown. The oak I was milling had occupied the space above before it fell in a storm. On my back I could see the exact outline of its former crown, a near-perfect circle fringed by the last branches of the surrounding trees. 

Then a meandering insect came into sight, hovering quite high above me. I refocused on it. A gnat? Mayfly? Hard to tell. Then another. They flew an unintelligible pattern back and forth, the circle of light gray clouds their backdrop. Bugs on errands, living bugs, working bugs, unemployed bugs, criminal bugs. I watched them for a bit, took in the lovely shape above my head and laughed to think I'd been there all day without seeing the beauty above me, without knowing the little dramas of bug life playing out above the roar of my saw. So obsessed with what we sense, the unperceived overwhelms this planet with beauties born and dying beyond us. Thank goodness for them.

Distracted by fleeing time, I got back to work.