Yesterday’s general strike concluded without further agression – thank you to whomever had sense enough to cool the hotter heads in the room. Now begins the media battle, and probably some sort of legal battle.

To make sense of the right-wing response from Madrid (“Mine! Mine!”): at 20% of the Spanish GDP, Catalunya leaving the federation would be a bigger economic blow to the Iberian peninsula than if California, Oregon and Washington State joined to declare their independence, becoming some glistening, insane, ephemeral digitocracy, poised to shake into the sea with San Andreas’ next rumble. Catalunya has a history as an independent State, so a “bipartisan” Congress’ hard-line response would have the greater force of law.

It was not the first bottle of milk, but one of the first. His mother begins work in a few days; today is a welcome to the world for this five-month old boy.

What he wanted: Milk, Mother, Maternal, to receive ’til sated, to sleep on the breast. What the world offered: his mother’s milk, father’s arms, to accept or not accept the blessing available, to be sated or not sated, to sleep satisfied or not sleep.

Entre los varios sueños que me visitaban ayer noche, este fue lo más problemático. Perderme, tranquilo; sufrir una pequeña accidente de coche, aguanto; llamar a casa, encuentro mi pareja cansada, sin tiempo hablar conmigo, está bien, está bien.

Pero cortando esta paisaje cinemática, como la voz del narrador, unos pocos palabras: “Tienes veinte-y-cuatro horas para vivir. Disfruta-las.”

Lo que pasa en el sueño es tan real. Quién estaba hablando? Dios, ángel, diablo? Tengo veinte-y-cuatro horas. Se ha hablado. Puede ser?

The study of impermanence both demands and cultivates a steady mind. You would wish some of that learned gravity on our shrill leaders, whose gaming is driven at least in part by their fluttering avoidance of mortality, a blindness adopted to ward away their own short time upon the planet.

Politician or citizen, this week we are offered a lesson in humility. Not two weeks ago, observers in one of the world’s scientific groups detected a small asteroid far out of the normal plane of heavenly bodies, whose orbit around the sun carried it in the direction of the Earth. You might imagine the observer who first detected it:

Stars that have lit our little night, also fall.

Would I keep them in the heavens? I can’t catch a star. Would I keep their light from halting? All light flickers, falters, fails. I can’t breathe them higher; or should I, blowing on a candle flame, that wind might burn them brighter, but also burns them faster, gutter, gone.

I guess, embrace the failure (which is not failure, only gravity-graced easing down to earth), learn tearful laughter, joyful departures, let my heart be beautifully marred, so love is written on it while it beats; so beating it repeats that name, these names, this worldful of names, one moment at a time.

"… only perchance remembrance breaks the heart"

You won’t find that phrase in any Internet search engine – at least not until I post this page. You won’t find it in a book in the library, or on a video clip; buried, maybe, in a tattered notebook in some out-of-the-way cottage, hidden in an attic box or gathering dust under a bed, with pages as weathered as last season’s leaves. Probably the ink will have faded, if that notebook exists, or the pencil-line will have by friction and time been dissipated, so the words once alive in thought will have been undone, like a whisper in the wind.

Last night the wind picked up and, as I gently dropped into sleep, it not so gently opened its mouth and blew and blew and blew through the branches-spread-wide summer forest dark.

This morning, the alarm woke me. Wait: was it the alarm? Dream-dazed. It sounded like an alarm. No, it wasn’t the alarm. It was further away, it was down the stairs, it was the phone ringing.

Sign; groan; whispered curse; first thoughts. Who calls at – what time was it – 7 a.m. on a Saturday? The phone stops ringing. The body relaxes. Long, slow breath, like a yawn but not a yawn. Imagine an hour’s more sleep.

Some of the hardest physical work in recent memory is 72 hours on the Improv dance floor.

Also, the most rewarding. I haven’t built a house, or surveyed for a map, or planted a garden. But by listening listening listening I’ve followed the sprite of movement, and on her scent traced the outline of home; through repetition memorized (in the body’s threads and cords) the navigation lines I might follow to get there; and inadvertently collected in these outstretched arms so many wild foods along the way – fruit of this adventure – that I am fed.

In response to a friend’s question: “What kind of Mark would you like to make on this world?”

I was selected to participate in a poetry workshop some years ago, with British war correspondent & poet James Fenton. He held strong opinions, no doubt informed by atrocity and explosion, and his work ranged from doggerel to deep, from limerick to libretto. His writing was always clouded by a shadowy lining, even when he was being flippant. I was riding my old BMW motorcycle to an event down the Mississippi river road, and he – not being much for tame avenues – thumbed a ride. Indochina, he said, rode bikes a tenth the size of mine, with three times the cargo; I had spent time on Java, so I shared his appreciation of smooth pavement, limited traffic, and 900cc of German engineering.

She lay like fallen leaves. As if a breeze brushed them, her wings fluttered odd angles; and I watched them reach for my breath, through the glass she thought was air.

The sound of her impact had stopped my work. Odd sound: where had I heard it before…?

…?

Oh… ?  Oh… oh, no: the unexpected crush of accident, as the sound of two cars colliding at some distance, muffled by the safe walls and windows of your home. Muffled by the fog of trauma, an uneasiness slowly rises in the heart; it becomes urgent as the memory becomes clear.