Dear People Who Follow My Blog,


I must apologize for my long delay.  That last post kind of took all the blogging energy out of me for a little while.  That, and I've been concentrating on the new novel and the dancing and really neglecting everything else.  We have a show coming up next week, so I've been writing in the mornings and then tearing off to rehearse like mad.  The consequent pile of sweat and bandaids and sore muscle rub which is myself does not feel much like blogging.  But rehearsals have turned the corner from the "it's going to be an epic disaster" phase, and are now on to the euphoric "it's all coming together" phase, and that's splendid!


So last night, a little after midnight, after a long, convoluted dream that seemed to go on forever...I got up to make breakfast.  I don't know why.  I remember looking at the clock, but the numbers didn't register.  My brain just said, "make breakfast" so I did...well, started to anyway.  I'd just embarked on the toasting and the slicing when Aaron walked into the kitchen and asked what I was doing.  I paused, knife in hand, said, "making breakfast" like it was the obvious thing, and then looked at the clock.  I was awake enough at that point to understand what the numbers were trying to tell me, and shamefacedly set down the knife and returned to bed.  And now I know what I would be like as a zombie.  I'd be the zombie you find in your kitchen in the middle of the night frying brains in an iron skillet.


Speaking of zombies, I must offer my congratulations to Victoria Dunn, of the awesomely snarky blog Handmade By Mother (the link should be on the right side of my page) who has recently scored a publishing contract with the Canadian publisher The Workhorsery, for her novel, Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies.  I'm not always up for the zombie craze, but this is a book I will be buying.  After all, it takes place in Wales, and involves bog-snorkling!


Cheers!

Belonging

Song lyric of the day, from Deb Talan's The Gladdest Thing:


Doesn't each of us have a place where we belong?  Could be a sidewalk crack or a sad song.


The song came up on Pandora this morning at work, and that line caught me.  Everyone can think of a place like that, somewhere they felt at home, at peace.  Elizabeth Goudge, in Green Dolphin Street, referred to it as one's own "special country", as a state of mind given shape as a place.


For me as a child I found it in the branches of a particular tree.  Since then I have found it many places, from the banks of the Teifi in Wales to an empty parking lot, a full auditorium to a dim cedar grove.  They are the places and the moments when I feel I have most truly lived, times and places where doing was not required, when simply being was enough and more than enough and the distortion of life as we know it was gone, when action became superfluous and speech banal.


To live always in those moments would be to live in heaven.