It's so much of it, isn't it? The press of the day and hours against what comes next, neither wishing to dismiss it but also, not quite claiming it the way it ought, because the savoured hour waits.

And what a day it is.  The air is cool, rushing, the light changes from gold to white to blue on a whim.  All of outside feels like the ocean.  I stepped out this morning, on to the front step, the damp from the rains the night before soaking into my socks, and I spread my arms to it.  Soon, too soon, the hot summers will come, heavy breathed and and in some element, relentlesss.  But these flickering seasons, fall and spring, which seem to be growing briefer and briefer here in my small corner of the world as the the big blue marble warms, are precious to me.  Fall always makes me restless, makes me long to run long distances, to move, to migrate. Spring drives me out, into the fresh, into the air, filled with ideas and moments.  I throw open the doors to the cool moodiness of it just as I put on a sweater to guard against the intermittent chill.

Tonight, I want to lose myself in music and motion.  I don't want to drag my expectations and run into those curdled, half formed feelings of frustration.  What is that anyway?  It's not an expectation anyone has crowned me with, it's the thing I do for me.  And yet inside me is that part that will always drive harder, want the extremes, want to do well, do well, and it's never enough.  It's why I think I will never be a winter or summer person, but always a fall and spring, enamoured of the changes, fascinated by the most ardent, difficult parts of process.

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I haven't had the sensation of falling in love in a long time.  Too long. But this return to something I care about has all the hallmarks.  I am at the sixteen week mark and I find the milkman is coming up the stairs, waking me.  I find the coffee cooling in the cup, I find that progress is more difficult now that base skills have been regained.  I will have to work harder, attend to the growth part of things.  I'm old enough but not so old I don't remember the pain of growing quickly as a teenager, the way the bones stretched and the muscles screamed to catch up.  There's a bit of that now. But pretty masochist that I am, certain kinds of pain are not a deterrent.  I hate being conqueored but I long for a leadership that is stronger than mine.

So I fight against what I don't know, what I can't master.  I don't feel fear or self consciousness, as the fight is so genuinely with myself and always has been.

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For all of this, you'd think I was good at this already.  Had some mastery.  I am not, like many things I'm forgettable as a sound once it's ended.  I don't stand out in any way in my skating, nor do I expect to.  However, there are private things I wear and do just for me and this is in many  ways, part of that small garden of things I keep that give me joy, regardless of skill.

I'm evangelical about this feeling.  I want you all to have it too.  I want to urge you to find the way life feels like this but it's a tidal wave, it's always too much - I am so frequently too much- that I come here and leave it on the page.

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My life is rioting around me as I write this.  It is time to go, time to slip into that liquid sunlight, time to tend to the children, time to attend to the very big project.

But each night, the door opens and I go through a forest of gold, of silver, of diamonds. I dance all night and I am sleepy in the morning and it may be that my slippers through but I have no desire to wake or be saved.  

Don't save me from the dreams that give me the fire to do my other work so well.  I would never have wanted the Beast to change into a man.  I'm the mother who hunts the wolf that ate her mother and scared her child. 

I'm the woodcutter who heard the call and answered, with his axe.

I need these things to feel alive.

I suspect you do, as well.

yours, verbatim,

Queen