Glow.

[mrissa]

yhlee asked for her friendslist (or, I suppose, other people reading her entry) to tell her something luminous. I talked about a moment from last evening. I felt like I just had to stick my hand out to find one, and if I'd put my hand in another direction there would have been another luminous thing there and waiting. Even when I'm exhausted, frustrated, having weird health crap, this is where I live. Not just the streets and buildings and parks from War for the Oaks but the light as well, the glow.

If you think I'm not profoundly grateful for that every day of my life, you're mistaken.

I didn't write much today, but I picked up The Mark of the Sea Serpent and wrote the sea giantesses coming out of the waves around the boat on Distingen, grey-green hair and hands and great booming laughs of frightening affection for their little pinkish sisters, and then I had to do the parallel bit with the sea serpent itself coming up, and I saw why the daughters of Ran had come into it in the first place. And it made me feel as though my entire writing career has been wandering around getting me to a sea voyage so I can do what CS Lewis did to me in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, because I don't think I've ever gotten over the sea serpent there, not for a minute of the last twenty-three years or so. Part of me stopped there transfixed and is there to this day, like the altered Sampo salting the sea.

Do you see? This is like breathing for me, the salting mill in the sea, the daughters of Ran out of the waves. This is how I think, and it all goes together with making sure the mortgage payment goes in on time and the fridge has milk in it, because by the time someone told me it was different stuff, it was already too late.

It was a good question Yoon asked. Where are you finding your luminous bits now?

Comments

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Even when I'm exhausted, frustrated, having weird health crap, this is where I live.

Yes. Hello, neighbor.

Luminous is talcum powder on a humid day and incense lit at 2 a.m. Luminous is quoting Yeats to a friend ("Prayer for My Daughter") and hearing someone else's characters quoting Donne to each other. Luminous is the way my hair swings after being trimmed this morning. Luminous is the sheen of oil on the surface of my largest frying pan. Luminous is Thomas Tallis's canon and Glenn Gould playing Bach and suddenly glimpsing two of my own characters not quite gazing at each other, not yet, but if they were in a movie there would be something from Vaughan Williams surging in the background. (That probably sounds cheesy, but what I'm seeing -- it could wring your heart, if I were to find the right words. . .)

And so on: the poppies didn't make it but the moss roses are blooming every day. My sermon's not yet written but I already know some of what I need to say by heart. I'm tired as hell but I want to stay up reading. I hope you feel better soon.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

When I drive home from work, I cross my river twice. The first time I see the old mill town with its trees and hibernating industrial buildings, and I know that however frustrated I get with this place, it's my home. The second time I see the mountain and the little docks on my side of the river and the dam, and I think of the river going way up into Vermont and down through Connecticut to the sea, and I feel free and happy and not at all trapped.

Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book. It did something to me too.

This week I was writing and revising the September lectionary Bible study at work, and I had big and little commentaries piled around me, hardcovers and paperbacks, older and newer. And I knew that this is the telos of the book fetish I've always had, the love of books as objects to care for and texts to swallow whole and digest, to approach like people: with acceptance first, and respectful questioning second.

I think I've always known it was the same thing as paying bills and keeping milk in the fridge. Which probably explains why, until fairly recently, I was not so good at being motivated to pay bills and keep milk in the fridge.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I had this juxta-positioned in my head last night against elisem's question on making. I won't redo what I had written you before but it is related to the sparkage, and there is a flow and informing here. Luminous--sparkage--making (sometimes!) being, and the flow is a spiral for me. The post you made here has that feel to it also.

And in terms of the last bit, at least right now it seems more like a frame, reminder, connection. I want to say grounding but it is grounding only in a particular way to a place, maybe.

There! Fluffy data dump w/ glowy bits.

--A

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

Outside in my garden, I have the last few gladiolus. They make me happy every time I look out the window.

[pameladean]

The phlox is going to bloom. It's a month late and the garden is a wreck of dead grass and unhappy bellflower and the dried corpses of a million mulberries. But the phlox is going to bloom, mostly a shining white, but from time to time a fine shell-pink that I did not plant and cannot identify.


P.