Monday morning with no work at all, since I finished that copyediting last night. I've been let out for two whole weeks and it's a strange, tremulous feeling. Too much hangs on it. No plans, and too many. The weather's fine too - greyish this morning, but warm and dry, with more sunshine forecast.
No plans, just a list scribbled on the air of chores practical and cultural, names of friends I ought to phone, would like to see. Home leave from prison, I've always thought, must be very difficult. Freedom it's not, when you have to go back. Who can live in the present, not project forward in every moment to the prison gates clanging shut again? Few. Not me.
Birdsong: quiet chirruping and a pigeon's insistent bleat. Cars, just quietly too, in the parallel street that takes almost all the traffic. Between these small sounds, space, but space already shrinking. Seize the precious space, then, and stuff it with activity? Stay here in stillness, let the space be, feel it, be it? Or let sleep, the compelling, thwarted lover, beckon me back? I'm sick of myself already, wincing at the voice I ache for when too busy to hear it.
6 comments:
'wincing at the voice I ache for when too busy to hear it' - oh I so understand this and experience it so often myself. As ever, Jean, you find a brilliant way to express a fleeting but powerful concept.
breathing space rather than freedom?
much fellow feeling on the question of what to do with the unstructured time and how to 'make the most of it' or 'not waste it' as the inner voices say. Rest. Take care of yourself. Sleep if you need to. Don't be hard on yourself.
I agree with Fire Bird - don't be hard on yourself. You take such original, artistic and emotional photos - a big achievement.
Yes, be kind to yourself and indulge in sleep if you need to. Otherwise, just give yourself over to the moment without so much as a thought to waste, because that would be a waste of time.
This post and so much else I read and saw tonight remind me that I need to visit here more often.
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