What can I do in an hour

What did I do in the hour before? Walked with M and found cool sticks for hanging necklaces from, then went to Lichter & Levin, which was giving away free sandwiches if you have an EBT card. Met the neighbor’s husband, who gave us stickers for his band and stickers he made because he loves the 90s Super Mario Bros movie. We were listening to one of the CDs we got from the library before the walk and now after. It’s called “Even A Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973.” I don’t know what Fluid's “Rokudenashi” is about, but it’s still moving me, or moving things around inside of me. I’m imagining that movement being like one of those soft silicon spatula things (light googling suggests they are called mixing spatulas) being used to fold scrambled eggs. I’m the eggs and boy do I need folding. Before the walk: texting pics of quilts, squirrels, clouds, and cicadas back and forth with Jess. I’m sitting in the rocking chair we got for free from the fancy complex in another part of the neighborhood. The mail wasn’t anything. We took the sticks inside. The sandwiches were chicken and tuna salad, respectively. The rough day I had yesterday is still living in my body, but much of the raw matter of emotion feels moved through, moved out, smoothed out. Today, after the full moon, which Sarah called the “split beaver Mamdani moon,” there is a gentle energy. I really believe this: that the day has energy and we have energy, too, and these things influence each other. I’m always so susceptible to whatever the moon is doing. The feeling today is of a fever breaking or a sore, hot to the touch, and full of pus, drained, cleaned, healing. I’m teaching to share pleasure and wonder, and also to make friends. I woke up with a dream of doing an in-person Threshold Academy symposium in June and inviting the friends I’ve made who are in this thing together. An hour can contain anything because of memory and imagination. For instance the books: I just wolfed down Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Black Flame. The intro to Maki Asakawa “Konna Fu Ni Sugita Iku No Nara” feels hopeful; not like jumping and shouting in the streets, but like a hard-won sunrise after a night spent wrestling on God’s bony wing. I can’t bear to send the emails, or, I send the emails and I can’t bear to read the reply, however urgent or innocuous. Then there are the ones I’m saving up, my little treasures. I keep them in a folder like a vitrine or a Joseph Cornell box. Saving for what, though? When I’d rather have living sap of friendship rather than the hardened resin as a souvenir of a living moment. I dropped a jar of stew and a piece of cake in the other neighbor’s foyer. I’m not fasting, I’m flickering between perspectives. But wanting to have enough and holding and relaxing into being held are not mutually exclusive. My therapist says its okay to work it from the outside in by tending to the body. I mean, to my body. All I had was this hour and I gave it to me and you. Damn, Akai Tori’s “Takeda No Komori Uta” is beautiful, too. I’m wearing my “chicken with a pearl” earrings. I like when a song has a snippet of field recording inside it. The book before that was Piranesi, finally, because it began to glow with significance, even though my mom bought it for me a few years back. I love when a book begins to glow with significance because a person or in this case a project activates it. My reading book I think is a kind of dwelling place. A dwelling place for the Muses, a mouseion, or a place of healing, an aesklepion. A dwelling place and a being, like Never Angeline North’s SEA-WITCH. Or as Susana Clarke’s ingenuous forgetter says, “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” With building blocks not just of citation and allusion—my bricolage house—but with occult reception and invention. A sigil I drew, etc. In reproduction, forms aspire to their continuation, but something new also slips into being.