Embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days. The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.
-- Gail Caldwell, from Let's Take the Long Way Home: a memoir of friendship

Thank you dear SparkFriends for noticing my gloom and showering me with your loving thoughts. I continue to struggle. I'm oddly resistant to using the resources I've learned over the years of spiritual practices -- of being kind to myself -- though I WILL slosh through this. Please, please excuse my dearth of SparkParticipation.

This morning I completed preparation of a bountiful vegetarian stew, as well as sauteing a big skillet of kale and turnip greens in olive oil with onion and garlic. I also cut up a late-harvest watermelon a friend grave me from her garden. I have lots of salad fixins' in the frig as well. So I'm set with wonderful "medicine" for the body. I struggle with consistency in aerobic exercise which I still have to figure out, but have managed to continue my strength training streak.

I have also been remiss in feeding the mind via meditation, which I will slide back into easefully and gradually.

As for food for the spirit, Billy Collins lights up my "November heart" with the days growing darker.


Tahquamenon Falls, Lake Superior


NOVEMBER

After three days of steady rain -
over two inches said the radio -
I follow the example of monks
who write by a window, sunlight on the page.

Five times this morning,
I loaded a wheelbarrow with wood
and steered it down the hill to the house,
and later I will cut down the dead garden

with clippers and haul the soft pulp
to a grave in the woods,
but now there is only
my sunny page which is like a poem

I am covering with another poem
and the dog asleep on the tiles,
her head in her paws,
her hind legs played out like a frog.

How foolish it is to long for childhood,
to want to run in circles in the yard again,
arms outstretched,
pretending to be an airplane.

How senseless to dread whatever lies before us
when, night and day, the boats,
strong as horses in the wind,
come and go,

bringing in the tiny infants
and carrying away the bodies of the dead.

~ Billy Collins ~
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