Life, you may quote me, is a trip.
We’ve been without a functional well for a month and just got our water system back online today! We’ve got four cords of oak firewood to get into the woodshed before the rains come, and the gutters need to be cleaned in anticipation of that blessed rain.
The tubs need to be planted with potatoes, I’ve fallen behind on my pruning of rampant shrubs, the huckleberries are crying out to be harvested, and soon we must net the apple trees to keep the ravens from filching our crop.
I am finally over a debilitating case of food poisoning that rendered me fairly useless for the last eight days. I’m deep into writing a new novel Poets of Mercy, and we’re in the home stretch of preparing my fable The Dog Who Wanted A Person for publication.
Several new tunes are manifesting on the piano to be recorded in October after I have my piano tuned.
And beyond our little plot of land on the outskirts of our little town, the human world has gone batty with people of questionable emotional stability and questionable intelligence running large parts of the global and national shows and making a shambles of our economy, our healthcare system, our government, and what was left of our democracy.
The natural world is reacting to the excesses of greedy humans according to the immutable principles of Universe. And so it goes.
Here is an excerpt from my novel in progress, the novel’s narrator having a memory involving his Korean grandmother Nari.
I’m fifteen, sitting at the kitchen table having an after-school snack and reading A Tale of Two Cities. Nari looks up from her cooking and asks me in Korean, “Is this homework, Ya’akov? This book you’re reading?”
“No. This is the antidote to homework,” I say, smiling. “This is what I love. I feel like I’m actually there in the midst of the French Revolution. The writing is that good.”
She comes to me and I show her the cover of the book.
“I read this book,” she says, returning to her cooking. “Do you know what the title means? A Tale of Two Cities?”
“Well… Paris and London. Half the action takes place in London, half in Paris.”
“That is not what the title means,” she says, chopping an onion.
I frown. “Of course that’s what it means. Those are the two cities where…”
“That’s the surface meaning,” she says calmly. “Dickens means something deeper. He is speaking of two states of being, two ways of feeling, two ways of perceiving. Sorrow and joy. He is asking us to contemplate how sorrow and joy can exist simultaneously in the same moment. That’s why you love that story and why it seems so real to you because it’s how life really is. We want to believe sorrow and joy are different from each other, separate from each other, but they are inseparable, just as you are inseparable from me and from everything else. If you understand this, then you won’t wallow in sorrow and self-pity. You will accept the duality of existence and be less confused.”
fin
Mystery Memory from Todd’s CD of piano/bass duets Mystery Inventions.