“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf
The broken heart is a more eager vehicle for empathy where pain is a relay between the individual heart and the world of unknown misery so far away. The local and the global can leak towards each other when grief and sorrow meet an open heart. The proximate and immediate reel in suffering. No longer… Continue reading Despair and Grief – a world at war
Yesterday’s video clips of war. An ugly war and all that came before. “Ugly”—a tired cliche—and true. The shudder of scary weeping as close as this phone in my hands.
On mourning and melancholia. On the loss of friends and lovers. And the loss of women’s rights to abortion in the U.S. so courageously gained 50 years ago. Melancholia must give way to action. Change via feminist transformation cannot be counted on to remain. Stay engaged! The struggle continues!
Experience life just as it is… Sweet June. Is she of Summer or of Spring,Of adolescence or of middle-age?A girl first marvelling at touch of loversOr else a woman growing ripely sage?Between the two she delicately hovers,Neither too rakish nor, as yet, mature.She's not a matron yet, not fully sure;Neither too sober nor elaborate;Not come… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 27/6/22 — “Come into my garden” or Asteya, stealing time
What happens during the war to autobiography by those who are neither warmongers nor victims?
Why did I want to rid myself of this beautiful piano? Newly retired, I wanted to make the house sparser, less a revelation about the material debris. amassed during 26 years in any house. The boxes of papers. The books in piles and shelves. Collected objects, story prompts, dear debris I've amassed in beloved junk stores where I’ve wandered. The things that make a life. I would call this blogpost a dilation. The lens is turned to admit more of a scene that leads us down linked but discontinuous subjects. All of them find a woman in the frame. A daughter. A writer. A political leader. Her mother. A chef. And a cook, me, writing up a storm. A delicious surprise ending.
No Gate No Lock 