dear comrades, family, loves, kin, strangers and fellow witnessers of details,
i hope this seventh of may finds you well. maybe you’re marveling at all the colors wild violets come in. maybe you’re cheering at the orange-black-white of orioles landing on an orange skewered to your backyard birdfeeder shepherd’s hook. maybe you’re just settling in to bed with a cat curling up alongside you. whatever it is this moment finds you doing (or seeing or thinking about or listening to or watching), i hope you can feel my well wishes landing in your hair, your heart, your hands.
i’ve tried multiple times to think about saying this or attempting to articulate saying this and i’m still not sure how to besides: i have unintentionally quit the detail collector. (it’s been a good several years now since i’ve had consistent months of 20-some posts or more). i think i haven’t known how to say because i’ve been caught up in what it means or what it is or how to move forward or – i’m not sure. i always imagined that i would declare that i’m discontinuing the practice and then ending it, but instead, my showing up less and less to the details has been very unintentional. and i just don’t like that. but i think it’s partly because i could just never get myself to declare that i’m quitting. (i’d dream about it but then get another wind and have a good run of posts for a while, until it would fizzle again.)
don’t get me wrong, i’m still collecting details. these days, though, they just go straight to my spirit/heart and sometimes i’ll draw another human in to witness them too and sometimes i’ll write some in extreme shorthand in the square reserved for that day in my planner.
“what happened?”, you may ask. i think that while some people were cranking out new albums and whirlwind-writing new novels and prolifically creating scores of paintings at the start of the global covid-19 pandemic, i went the opposite direction. my brain got frizzle-frazzled and i floundered and it was all unfolding just as some toxic elements started revealing themselves at the microcollege i was on faculty at.
i don’t want this blog to die, though. but i got tired of doing this practice via a digital interface.i guess that’s another reason i wasn’t sure how to articulate all of this: because i don’t have a clear sense of what going forward means. i also don’t want to close the door the details should i get energized and excited to return to this practice on this site.
so, instead of try to nail any of that down or figure any of that out, let me just tell you this:
today i held the still-warm still-soft body
of a just-killed squirrel in my hands in the backyard
the heat of the sun was finally cracking through the morning’s fog
i held her, belly up
carefully in both hands
my heart crumpling
when it appeared to me
that she’s in the nursing phase
or about to be