Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon
I have a much more plastic week ahead, one with more time here at home, space to plant vegetables, care for the newly hived bees. Weeks with a lot of activity like last week wear me out, I begin to feel frazzled, as much from too much people exposure as physical weariness. Without weeks like that, though, I feel disconnected from day to day life, so I need them, but it’s nice to have a more leisurely pace the next week.
Translating Ovid gets left behind in those weeks since it requires a block of time for concentrated effort. The same thing is true with Missing. I have allowed my life, again, to become ragged in its rhythms, often a sign of vitality in my docent, Sierra Club, Woolly world, but a sure barrier to the creative work of writing and the detailed focused work of translation.
Mark and I were coming back from getting the bees and he asked me if I had any regrets. Up until a couple/three years ago I would have said, “Yes, I didn’t get a Ph.D.” Now though I have let that go, a part of my past, not regretted, not celebrated. Just a part of my past.
What good are regrets? They chain you now to things you didn’t do or wish you had done differently in the past. There’s no going back there to change them, no way to erase or re-do. Instead, I have the life I have, one I’ve chosen, sometimes with sound, well thought out choices, sometimes with impulsive, creative choices and sometimes with stupid, petty choices. It is though, my life, and it is the synergy among all those choices that makes me who I am. So, no, since I do not regret who I am, I cannot regret.
Have I lived a perfect life? Far from it. Two divorces, a struggle with alcoholism, estranged from my father, not the hallmarks of a perfect life by any means, yet at this point it’s the life I have, complete with mistakes, bloopers and bone-headed errors. Gotta say I’m fine with it. A life I’m proud of at this point and that I hope to extend as long as the flesh is willing.
hummed in the back, a pleasant noise.