Showing posts with label Respite Along the Dirt Sacred River. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Respite Along the Dirt Sacred River. Show all posts

08 July, 2015

Respite Along the Dirty, Sacred River

During one of the recent torrential downpours, we discovered a leak in the dining room ceiling.  Like all things built by men, houses eventually spring leaks. We've narrowed it down to specific area on the roof -- which, if the rain breaks long enough, I'll crawl up there and see what needs to be done.

I generally like my more domesticated mode, though the life I've lived up to this point has left me woefully ill-prepared in the "How-Tos" of house repair. Words are my wheelhouse and most everything else is something else I've learned.  I'm part of a generation that either unwisely chose or was given no choice but to develop an expertise... the result that Ralph Waldo Emerson warned against in The American Scholar. I was schooled, but my education has taken a path outside of formal education.  I am always on the look out for teachers, for elders.  And this is a good thing, because while I can put words together in an effective way, I'll have to learn how to make structural home repairs.

Lately I've been preoccupied with my (still-ongoing) war against Versailles, with the political cycle, and with finding paying work. Lately my life feels like the psychological equivalent to being drawn and quartered -- being pulled in all directions tied to forces I can neither control nor really see. Poetry pulls. Work pulls. Family pulls. My need to improve my little corner of the world pulls. Other people pull.  I should be used to this by now. I'm a Pisces, after all, and forever swimming simultaneously in two directions... but my skin has worn thin of late.  I look in the mirror and see more a fool than a knight errant.  But I've learned that these mirages are temporary.  I stay in the moment and move forward because there is nothing else to do and I'm too stubborn to let the bastards win by stopping.

So, I get to learn how to fix a leaky roof. I get to learn how to shore up a badly built foundation (that would be the kitchen.) I get to learn how to do all kinds of things that I was not really prepared for by any of the education I've had. I see that as part of the journey, and I am lucky that on this journey I am not alone.