many nots

I woke up to the gentle patter of rain on a cabin roof.

I guess I should mention that I requested and was granted a week's stay in a currently vacant cabin on the Farm, not far from my own house. This has been an interesting experiment of silence and solitude and a reawakening of my senses. Staying in a slightly foreign (foreign in the sense that I only ever spent minimal time there when TSO lived in this very cabin) place has given me the opportunity of getting used to new sounds: heater hisses, house groans, rain falling on moss and brush; has shown me how different and new the very same stars can seem--maybe it is the very clarity of mind which makes these stars appear more luminous?

I woke up to rain softly falling on said roof, and a tightness in my throat. I have a sore throat and ear ache, and on my day off too! I stopped by the kitchen to do a weekly order and wound up doing some quick dough batches for them because they are short staffed today and just got another call of problems. I trudged over in the coat-slicking rain and gave a dough tutorial of sorts, and now back at home and I just want to go to sleep and wake up when I feel better. At least, and thankfully, I called in already to Alternative U and was lucky enough to get someone to cover my late night shift! Thank you God.

Feeling sick always makes me feel sorry for myself, so I tried to cheer myself up with poetry. It didn't seem to help today, but I will share some of Uncle Walt's lovely words anyway:

"Not heaving from my ribb'd breast only"

 Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only; 

Not in sighs at night, in rage, dissatisfied with myself; 

Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs; 

Not in many an oath and promise broken; 

Not in my wilful and savage soul’s volition; 

Not in the subtle nourishment of the air; 

Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists; 

Not in the curious systole and diastole within, which will one day cease; Not in many a hungry wish, told to the skies only; 

Not in cries, laughter, defiances, thrown from me when alone, far in the wilds; 

Not in husky pantings through clench’d teeth; 

Not in sounded and resounded words—chattering words, echoes, dead words; 

Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,

Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day; 

Nor in the limbs and senses of my body, that take you and dismiss you continually—Not there; 

Not in any or all of them, O adhesiveness! 

O pulse of my life!  

Need I that you exist and show yourself, any more than in these songs.

~ Walt Whitman