Parched Places

Today is the Chinese New Year.  I don't have much connection to this holiday, but I do like it because it reminds me of the AWP I went to in D.C., and I went to an offsite poetry reading.  As I walked back to the Metro, I saw interesting celebrations, including a dragon dance.

Yesterday I decided to ground myself by baking bread.  I ran out of flour, so I went to the store to get more. It wasn't until I got back in the car to drive home, in the pre-dawn light that began to fill the sky, that I realized that I still had the cross on my forehead from last night's Ash Wednesday service. Ash on my forehead, bread dough under my fingernails-- I wrote a Facebook post that posited that a poem is in here somewhere.

And by afternoon, I had written a poem.  I had also rewritten many parts of a spreadsheet that I had written and rewritten on Tuesday and Wednesday.  That creative process, the wrestling with the spreadsheets, doesn't leave me feeling as nourished.

I also checked in on Facebook periodically.  I wrote this post:  "Back when I was in high school, in the early 80's, when we didn't have mass shootings at school, we had much looser gun laws. I don't think that stronger gun laws will help as much as some people hope. I'm not opposed to trying, but I think it's like getting stomach surgery without addressing the underlying psychology that led to the obesity that necessitates the stomach surgery. Something has come dangerously unmoored in a chunk of the population, and I'm not sure how to repair that breach."

That language from Isaiah, about being called the repairer of the breach, has spoken to me before.  I feel too exhausted to ponder how to repair all of our breaches.  I feel parched, in need of water. Thus, my sketch for this year.

I put one small green bud on the tree.  I need to remind myself that even when life resembles nothing but a pile of dried bones (yes, I also reread T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"), there's hope.