April Medley

Another Monday! Only 4 weeks now. I'm exhausted, again, but I feel happy about the weekend, and refreshed. I got to spend a good deal of time outside in my yard becoming a mud baby. It both wore me out and reconnected me to Earth.Time got away from me, and on Sunday I ended up spending all after noon outside. I had gardened 6 hours before I was finished installing all the plants and bulbs I'd purchased Saturday and called it quits.  

Zach had left on a plane before noon on Sunday, and I'd had to take the dogs to their daycare, so when I got home I was all alone all afternoon. It was kind of surreal, we'd switched positions in a way, and now I was home in our house alone to fend off my demons myself. It bordered on getting the best of me a few times, and there were a few gasping moments when I saw something out of the corner of my eye only to see nothing was there, or heard something strange, and realizing it was only the gusting wind. My sleep was moderate at best, and after such a long day tilling through the clay and dirt, I really needed better sleep  than the sporadic jumpy type I got. It was better being there though than being here alone. It was peaceful and full of the smells and feelings of home. I love our house and home. I look forward to going to and dread leaving it every week and weekend. This learning experience and challenge is almost at an end, and we've already sworn we'll never do something like this again, never live in separate places. The poem following is something I remembered reading in high school and managed to find upon a brief Google search. I remember learning about it's meaning and realizing it was about the strength and deepness of a love between two people. What I remember most about this poem is the metaphor about the compass. It's about the metal mathematical compass to draw circles, not the magnetic N/S/E/W type of compass be the way. I didn't realize that at my naive age of 17 when I first read this, and it didn't make much sense until I put that together.

 A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away, 
    And whisper to their souls to go, 
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
    "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."                     

So let us melt, and make no noise,                                       5
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys 
    To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant ;                              10
But trepidation of the spheres, 
    Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love 
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit 
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove                                     15
    The thing which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is, 
Inter-assurèd of the mind, 
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.                           20

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
    Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 
    Like gold to aery thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so                                          25
    As stiff twin compasses are two ; 
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show 
    To move, but doth, if th' other do. 

And though it in the centre sit, 
    Yet, when the other far doth roam,                                30
It leans, and hearkens after it, 
    And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,                                    35
    And makes me end where I begun.  

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. Web site:  http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php. Accessed April 4, 2011.