Rambling #21

A different kind of morning pages

Horrific sleep last night has me in all sorts of wild affairs with reality. Not infrequently, I find myself awake at night out of sheer enthusiasm. Maybe there’s a different word for it, but I am thinking so many thoughts that I couldn’t possibly go to sleep. And there’s a lucidity there, a looseness that promises that my tether to consciousness certainly isn’t exactly strong. Yet awake I remain, off and on, until it starts getting light and then I trickle off for a few hours to find it further light when I finally drag myself out of bed.

I don’t particularly enjoy starting my days late. I think if I didn’t so enjoy the evenings quiet and still as they are that I’d be one of those people waking up for pleasure at five in the morning each day. But unfortunately, time works such that you can’t really have both.

I’ve spent today editing and arranging my second manuscript of poems. I feel a bit odd about them. On one hand, they were written so varyingly far apart that I don’t have nearly as much attachment to them as my first manuscript. Additionally, my first manuscript I devoted so much research, depth, and life into knowing intimately. These feel like such incomplete sentences. Literally I wrote books on the subjects and I’ve condensed them into two sentences. I have devoted years and continue to devote years into learning about how to best protect our wildlife and ecosystems such that bears will exist in the future. The question I lead into the book with, “How would you explain bears to someone after they’ve gone extinct? They can eat anything, so how did they die from lack of resources?” This second book is more the result of allowing something of myself to have more of a voice. It’s odd and strange, and I can see how even in writing it there are techniques and holes that I’ve found to try and hide myself within. But ultimately, I believe it’s a book based on my experiences, my perspectives, the evocations of poetry I’ve been able to strum up.

And most of today I’ve found myself listening to a collection of music from a Taiwanese band called ‘Cicada.’ I’ll write more about this music later, but with album titles like, ‘Seeking the Sources of Streams,’ and ‘Coastland Revisited,’ I hope you can imagine the type of comfort and calmness they evoke.

Noteworthy to me about this is that in trying to find this band online, somewhere, I discovered four other bands with the name ‘Cicada’ or ‘Cicadas’ or ‘The Cicadas’ all vastly different from each other. EDM, and indie rock, and melancholy synth. Even an R&B singer. It was tremendously hard to track down any sort of presence online for this band, which I suppose after getting more acquainted with their music, does in fact make sense. After all, there’s really no need for online when you’re seeking the sources of streams.

What streams do you seek the source of, in life?

I wish I could find the source of all the streams that seem to be populated with crayfish. It seems like it would be a fun place.

I wish I could find the source of all the streams of cool air on too-hot days.