Let’s give her something to write about…

There are likely a series of posts I could do stemming from my trip this past week to the West Coast, but I’m finding I just don’t have the distance I need yet. Still having trouble sleeping, mostly due to the time change, and feeling generally spent. The short rundown is that I spent a week visiting two relatives who are both fighting cancer… as you might well imagine, this has left me a bit dazed, to say the least.

In the mean time, my focus is on writing, not the blog, for the moment. I’ve got to get my groove back before I start pondering long posts again. And as for the podcast, unfortunately my husband has the computer where the latest installment of Alderpod is sitting… and he’s in Florida. So, that’s not going to happen until next week.

At the moment, however, I breached the third chapter of The Ward of the Rose, which is super awesome funtime. The writing  of the sequel is coming swiftly, when I have time for it, and it’s definitely a dark little journey. Unfortunately, though, it’s full of spoilers, so I can’t share much. But even what little I wrote while away I found quite satisfactory, which considering the hard time I usually give myself for anything I write is quite a step in the right direction…

At any rate, currently pondering Keats. I promised that by the time I reached the age he was at his death, I’d have completed a book. Thankfully I did that. But still, he is lightyears away from me in the sheer elegance of his thought and language. The following passage is quite apropos to my experiences as of late. From April 21, 1810.

I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive–and yet I think I perceive it–that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible–I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read–I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity–As various as the Lives of Men are–so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence.