Reflections

"Puddle", I say to myself, "puddle, rivulet, river, creek, brook, stream, lake, canal, tributary, delta, rill, runnel, watercourse, tide, rundle, channel, passage, lagoon, current, torrent, estuary, firth, strait, reservoir, tide, torrent, wave, Niagara, cataclysm, cataract, deluge, ocean, outpouring, tide, torrent, ripple, wave, waterfall, old sea".

The voice is not strident — it is soft, plangent and tentative, but the first few words are as taut as a whole warehouse full of piano wire. There's a looming iceberg of distress here, most of it hidden just below the surface and waiting to hurl itself out and into the air. Is that me speaking?

Greyness at the cusp of the seasons, ongoing health "stuff" and an unexpected visitation from Lady Influenza - the three formed an unhallowed trinity which has been doing an excellent job of thumping this old hen for the last several days and filling her with doubts too numerous to mention. All (or most) of the usual things have gotten done somehow, but I've been on automatic pilot much of the time, and my heart has not been "in it" (whatever the vast amorphous cosmic "it" happens to be).

For the last few weeks, wordlessness has been ambushing me at the darndest times and in the darndest places. I sit looking at a blank blog screen here for several minutes first thing in the morning before tapping anything in at all. I owe many of you thoughtful messages, but the right words have been evading me, and when I try to write something, the words just don't come. I'm sorry. . . .

My swirling thoughts are turbulent, stormy and scattered — they are baffled and despondent, and I have often been frustrated, curt and impatient with myself. When something does make it onto the screen and thence out onto the web, it looks and sounds like a croaking discordant cacophony utterly bereft of melody and tunefulness — never a symphony, a ballad or even a few lyrical bars of Scarlatti.

At times like these, the inner predator or naysayer is hard at work and stitching her sordid scraps into a veritable blanket of gloom. The old strumpet rubs her hands together in glee and cackles away in her thin voice — she points a bony finger at me in accusation and enunciates a long list of failures, errors, omissions and shortcomings, a whole lifetime of them in fact. She lurks in every shadow and tries to impose her countenance in places where she doesn't belong: morning clouds and spruce trees, the steam emerging from the throat of my tea kettle, a darkened window where only the moon's perfect face should appear.

The cure for these monsoons is something I call my "water meditation" (or litany), a long slow thoughtful recitation of names for waters wild and untamed, all the ones I can think of. If I can just remember to do the meditation at the right time, my thoughts are full of clear streams, tumbling water and liquid music when I finish, and that nasty shrill strident old woman has laced up her boots and stomped off somewhere else in a huff. After she goes, there is perfect blessed stillness for a moment or two, and then another voice speaks in a wise and loving benediction. "Stillness, my daughter," it says, "balance, reflection, flowing. . ."