Status Updates From Light and Thread

this small book is shining a great deal of light. it feels as if it’s guiding me

This house has no external windows that face east. The little study that looks over the inner courtyard, though, does; and the sun shines through that little east-facing window first before striding over to the inside of the front gate to shine through the kitchen window. Every time these slanting streams of noonday sun spill across the wooden floors, I am startled by the sheer force of their resolute speed.

…To stop words from melting in the dark
I read the dictionary, little by little

Keep a journal in invisible ink, and it does not seep
into the desk
I do not record the weather

What was it like, to live in a bright room?
I do not remember, and
I have no wish to go back

Because I have become a north-facing person

Whose light does not change

Thus, in my garden there is light.

There are trees that grow, nourished by that light.

Leaves sparkle, translucent, and flowers slowly open.

Over the past three years, I have gradually come to realize that this work is fundamentally transforming my very constitution. As the gentle warmth of this small place holds me close, quiet. With the rhythm of the light changing each day, each moment, each season.

I must think on the silence of snow.
Think how snow inhales sound,
How it might inhale "my" own voice, too, and the sound of birds.

Only snow, at last, once the wind stopes.
Only snow; completely noiseless, absorbing all sound.

When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands.

Why is the world so violent and painful?
And yet how can the world be this beautiful?