2001-05-30 - 10:22 p.m.

I'd be unhappy about the fact that the computer froze before I'd saved any of the entry I was writing, but I hadn't been completely happy with the shape and style of the entry, even though I was enjoying the process of reliving this past Sunday and the details that formed its contents. In short, it's just as well that I'll have to rewrite the entry - but I won't have time to do so until later next week, thanks to one business trip, two deadlines, a sore throat, another allergy test, and the usual fresh hell on top of the chronic mayhem. Not necessarily in that order, but it is all lurking at my elbow and in my planner and on the other end of the telephone wires. . . along with the prospect of wine, pasta, books, hugs, babies, ghosts, coffee and cats. In short, I'm feeling somewhat crazed and overwhelmed at this present moment, but it's still not a bad life by any stretch of the imagination.

In the meantime, I leave you with this quote from Elizabeth Berg's Range of Motion:

And so I am out here on the wooden stoop in my sweater worn thin at the elbows, and it is early morning, and I am looking out at my back yard and at the trees beyond that and at the sky beyond that and I am thinking this: I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of the Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs into the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant. . . where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers' hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint--I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, "Yes, here." I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might.