GMAGB

Sometimes when I post, I write that I wrote at 11:59 PM or thereabouts. Not this time:

It is already
the morning
of today
but feels
like the night
of yesterday.

My wireless is working so I have the luxury of writing seconds after having regained consciousness. I love that state of still being close to sleep dreams but being awake enough to communicate. I sit here yawning, thinking of Pharoh and Achashveirosh (can you name any other Biblical or literary characters- besides Billy Joel - who woke up in the middle of the night?

I Believe That Not Sleeping Well Always Means Something

2

There's the uniquely human

anticipatory anxiety on one hand

and the carrying of the past on the other.

In between these two arms is a body,

alive as a second hand - thank G-d,

processing, planning, repenting, accepting,

wanting more minutes in the day while

yearning for more hours of sleep.

u

Tonight I have a date after work. These first meetings are always filled with past and future, with anticipation and memory, and hopefully some quality present tense. Sometimes it feels like everything I see/say is a metaphor.

I was speaking to a colleague about relationships in the general sense of the word, because she was in the middle of a thread of lessons on identity and relationships. I was leaving the room and she was coming in and we exchanged just a few words. I told her one of my favorite quotes from the social work master HH Perlman, "Where there's friction, there's warmth." She liked it.

k

Last night at a farewell dinner for Janet Sperling, one of the kindest, most cheerful human beings I've ever encountered, my colleague told me that she shared my quote with her class. Which quote? When quote? It took me a while to recoup and go back to those seconds when we'd spoken, to recall what I'd said. As we processed the quote at dinner, I explained it via Perlman's example.

Two neighbors greet each other for years - "Good morning Bob!" "Good morning Bill!" This is not a relationship. One morning they are each picking their newspapers up off their lawns and as they see the headline about Obama they vehemently disagree. "He's ruining everything." "He's doing a fantastic job." Now they have a relationship. Where there's friction there's warmth.

j

As I shared the anecdote my colleague had an epiphany; "It just dawned on me as you were talking, what you probably already realized, that that saying is also referring to the idea of how when you rub things together (she illustrated with her hands) it makes friction /warmth!"

;

Poetry

was once

how people talked,

an organic speech pattern.

Not trying to be fancy,

it just was what it was.

It wasn't forced on anyone.

A word like "boggles"

followed by "blogging"

was simply

poetry.

j

On page 28 0f an article from the NY Daily News on March 26, 2009 there was a feature entitled Science FUNomena. The unattributed piece focused on tidbits about plants. One section read as follows:

;

Plant Poem: A "diamante" is a special kind of poem that is shaped like a diamond. It has one word on the first line, two on the second in a 1,2,3,4,5,6,5,4,3,2,1 pattern.

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The writer goes on to suggest thinking about plants and then assigns a diamante. He or she says that "the first and last line should be the word plants."

;

I've googled "diamante" and found no-one else that describes it this way. And yet, since this is the way I first learned of it, this is the style of diamante that I am adopting/adapting.

'

Good Morning And G-d Bless

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P.S. The diamante about poetry was inspired by a comment on Anne's blog.

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P.P.S. I just had an idea: E-piphany, a site where people post (or are helped to attain) their epiphanies.