Busy days vs. bare days
BRASS RING (daily)
good morning, sunshines.
We All Crave Law and Order:
Busy day: Early wake-up, tough workout, meetings on meetings on meetings, creative work, good work, quality work. Everything planned, everything done.
Bare day: 24 hours of freedom. Nothing planned. And nothing done.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This is known as Parkinson’s Law, and it's what happens when you don't have hard deadlines.
So what works for you? More constraints? No constraints? I'm curious to hear.
"Ask yourself, 'What do I want to say?'"
—Author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin
This is the quickest way to writing fast and clean and furious.
A Poem for a Woman Who Will Be Remembered:
The following is from my friend Carrie Seim, whose dear aunt Nancy passed away this month after a long battle with dementia.
This was written by Julia Connor, former poet laureate of Sacramento, about her sister as she was dying...
momento mori
I keep trying to explain ... for fear you might forget your work here
is done ... over, finis, caput....you bloom in a toothless grin...done
perhaps, except for these days where there is nothing but eyes
and cheeks and hands... days we hold foreclosure at bay, stroke
away peril...as our fingers knit their goodbyes... the way
your hands once drew words across my spine..."c'mon jelly bean"
you'd say... teaching me to spell.... I try whispering into the body
you are busy departing from, that it has lovely ears, that your hair
cropped this way reminds me of certain heroines -- Stein, Emily,
George Sand, which...speaking of books and their authors... the
names I memorized on your book shelves at fifteen...Malraux
Romaine Gary, Ayn Rand, W.S. Auden, Graham Green... each
lined up sideways as I'd fall asleep on the blue love seat you insisted
was a couch in your just married apartment on 3rd Avenue in Murray
Hill..."thirty-three steps to heaven" you called it... then, tell you how
when I was six and you'd put on your lipstick liner with the tiny brush
inside the gold case getting ready for a date I thought you the most
beautiful woman in the world and here, now, by this bed, know I was
right...how you keep cutting paths for me... how even this shaky hand
was learned from you ...oh, we always get so chatty when it grows late
...the doctors have come in to say this can't go on much longer but they
don't know our ways...how many hundreds of times we've been told to
stop...remember trying on wigs in the upscale thrift and laughing till we
wet our pants..."oh, you are just terrible", you'd say and pat me on the head
...rest now...it's okay...go… go on...we'll pick up again...even if we have to slip
into other forms
for Nancy Connor Cray
1930-2017
Thank you for reading.
Love, Kara