It's ok to not be ok sometimes, right? I'm sure I've seen that somewhere during this pandemic. Even with all that is going on in the world I sometimes feel like my life is this idyllic perfect thing, but also at the very same time I also think everything is just terrible. A little cognitive dissonance never hurt anyone, right? At least for me a decent night's sleep is still enough (I think) to reset the levels to the "happy" side of the dial.

During my mornings where I try hard to be a writer, to mixed success, I have been rereading some of the classic writing books, trying to glean inspiration and better my technique. The current book is Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. One of the writing prompts she suggests is to steal a line from  a poem and write it down, continuing from there. And for me, the single line that has really resonated for me (other than all of Gojira's lyrics lol) is the line that, though written by Roethke, really belongs, in my mind, to local writer and photographer Shawna Lemay, from this post. The line is "you are required to make something beautiful". So I wrote that down and then just continued and this is what I wrote, with the plagiarized line omitted :

You must tend to your soul like a garden

Lovingly, with tenderness, be the guardian

Against all that would exploit, consume, destroy

And that is not enough: you must encourage

growth with water and all the sunlight you can find

No one blames the garden for weeds or pests

It is the gardener who is responsible for the garden

Ah, but this metaphor breaks down when one points

out to the poet:

The gardener and the garden are the same, here

But are they, though? As the poet in question, I’ll say plainly:

I don’t fucking know but I wish that I did 

The metaphor holds up in another way, though, I think:

You won’t know what you have until the end of the growing season