meditation in the middle of winter

I'll say this about January: the sucker moves fast. Not in a daily sense--every day, it seems, is the same gray slug--but now it's nearly over. All those early nights of Scrabble and homemade dumplings and cold dog walks have added up to a month. This morning I woke to sun, and ate some black beans and cilantro, and made a to-do list.

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One of the good things about a new semester is that it forces me to focus on the immediate problems. I don't have a lot of mental energy to worry about the summer, or the future, when in front of me is a whole set of other stuff that needs work. It's forced triage.

I have been thinking about a move only in the broadest of terms--That would be nice--and then watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother and falling asleep before midnight.

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We leave for the AWP conference on Wednesday night, and it's good timing. I would like a little reprieve, a mini-vacation from the first month of classes. I would like to be in hotel room, looking out over an unfamiliar city, and I would like to wander around and hear a few panels, and I will be sitting at the Spire table on Friday and signing books. So if you're in the area, say hello.

I will not lie: I might skip out on some panels and head over to the zoo to see the orangutans. Ten years ago, I read an article on their Think Tank in an issue of Smithsonian, and ever since they have been on my to-see list.

Oy. I just did a quick search and that article ran in 1996. I have to update my mental math: I was a freshman in high school fifteen years ago. Not ten, fifteen.

I also have a tendency to start new poems in airports, or on airplanes, so perhaps a few poems will come out of the weekend. It's been a long time.

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I don't know how this tradition started, but on Sunday mornings of late, I drink coffee and flip through this site. There's something very quiet and beautiful about his photographs--a good centering exercise, perhaps.

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Here is a photo from this time two years ago. I don't live upstairs anymore, so I never see the sun streaming in this (dusty, filthy) window. I don't think about that much any more. But every once in a while, when I hear my neighbor walking around overhead, I think: That used to be me.