Dawn in Red Hook

We are making the transition. It's working. Tomorrow we're probably even going to buy a car. More posts to come, once I get rid of this cold.

Decisions

Tallulah's eye view of mom copyediting for a living

Our lives have been, over the past--forever--frequent confrontations with our options. There might be an infinite number of paths if you know how to look at the whole thing right.

And they may all lead somewhere entirely different. Literally. Our boat life: in half an hour we can be on our way to the other side of the world. Slowly--but anything’s possible.

For now we have tumbled toward St. Thomas. Fatefully, maybe, back toward some of what we left behind. Time sort of coiling on itself--the process of trying to make sense of life, trying to see some kind of order, seeming stupid and futile, if irresistible. 

And yet things do seem to have an air of adding up to something. To taking all this learning, stewing in a crucible-shaped vessel, and doing more with it.  

Professor mom works here

Tallulah's projects

Cat Coming Home from Work

Octopus and Roses

Elephant

The underworld of unfinished novels.

The toil of writers like the coal stokers on great steamships, with smudged faces. This world is not normally visible, below the sphere of accomplished things--the manifested. And yet this striving is the  work of dreaming.

Wait. Does that metaphor work? Are these toilers and dreamers really making a huge machine go? Are they indeed working for some greater good? Does their mostly unrewarded labor help everyone else up there--those who don’t see them, who only feel the movement of the ship? Stoking coal. A task that probably no one would choose, all things being equal.

I’m trying to give some contour to a desperate exercise. Another metaphor: Grabbing a vine, and swinging out over the jungle. And laughing so hard while you do it that you almost let go. Because this daredevil act is exhilarating, and meaningless, and somehow--ineluctable.

New anchorage

Weekend in St. John

Father's day