I’m not sure I can do it. I was sure from the start that I wouldn’t make it to 365 consecutive blogging days without a break. My previous record was about 70 days, and I thought maybe I could beat that. Now I’m not sure. I’m pulled in too many directions, feeling too worn down. I have plenty to blog about. I’ve read books I haven’t mentioned, thought up ideas I haven’t explored. Material abounds but not focus, drive, or particular purpose in continuing to blog daily when I feel so tired and pulled apart. I promised no one but myself, and that’s a promise that can be broken at any point.
This is day 33. It’s a Tuesday, so I was supposed to write a poem, but I won’t because I only just now remembered that it was Tuesday at all, much less the day on which I had thought I might write poems. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Not today.
I wonder why I would keep going, or why I wouldn’t be more lenient with myself about days off. People even take days off from their vows for Lent. Why not expect or even schedule days off?
No reason at all. I have only the perverse thing inside that wants to assure itself it spends time each day writing. I have fooled that thing, though, by posting pictures or otherwise evading writing as duty. It is not a duty. It is merely a desire.
And so because I am too tired and have too much else on my mind to say much more today than maybe I will quit this tomorrow, or maybe I won’t, I will leave you with this.
Cornbread
Camellia
Apropos of nothing. Except…
I remembered to make cornbread because I mentioned cornbread yesterday in a blog post. That’s all. Not much there to remark upon.
The flowers I saw in the cemetery when I went for a walk this afternoon. I took other pictures, but I don’t want to post them because it seems to me that the losses are too fresh in that cemetery. I don’t want to disturb them. It is not the same at all as pictures from a historic cemetery where the pain of loss is a hundred years or more in the past.
Maybe I should have gone in a different direction today. Maybe I should have looked for something to cheer myself up or calm the stress that I feel. But there in the cemetery among the fresh losses I felt I had no right to even see I also saw the only sign of life I’ve run across lately at all. Where else are the flowers in bloom on February 2 after a cold front has just been through?
