I want to record this before it's lost forever: 35 miles averaging 14.7 mph. More bike riding this last weekend and this week. This last trip with my cousin, the 35 miles from Gig Harbor to the downtown Port Orchard ferry dock, was incredible for me. Again roads of my youth we followed, winding up and down, rarely stopping because there are few cars and fewer stop signs. I rode hard, pushing myself all the way. Bob said he was having a difficult time finding the energy that is usually accessible to him, but I felt I could go forever. Much of the route was forested and the high heat was causing all living things to sweat their essence. The fragrance of Douglas fir was intoxicating. I breathed it in deeply, feeling so lucky to be living and able to experience such sweetness. There were many farms and I smelled too the horses grazing on fragrant, baking hay. It was just the same smell as our own farm. Bob and I revisited those memories in unison, talking about things like playing up in the hayloft. Coming round that corner again to the water, this time I thought only of the spinning wheel up ahead of me. The cool breeze though, it was there to renew me when the heat had taken its toll on my body. The sea is my mother: soft, blue, omnipresent like that. She waits patiently for me to come to her side, and when I do she reaches up so softly kissing my face with coolness, soft as a feather and so loving.

There are things that have been collecting in this file where I write my journal entries. It's starting to get crowded in here, so I'm cleaning house. These are things that started and finished or that started and went nowhere quickly. Whatever the case, I haven't felt like deleting them. I guess it's because I want to remember.

Last weekend:

Now the place is truly empty: Bluejack gone for the weekend. I'm struck by how lonely the typewriter looks under the window behind me, so last night I lit the candles to keep it company. Now though, it's morning. It's breezy out, some of it filters through the screens keeping me cool.

This computer set up is not working for me. Sitting on the floor leaning over to a keyboard propped up by its own box is straining my lower back. About every five minutes I fall back and lie flat. I get distracted by my own wandering thoughts, spending as much as ten minutes like that, occasionally rolling over or resting a foot on the window sill. It makes everything I try to do on the computer take that much longer. Everything else not computer-related is postponed entirely. Nothing is getting done.

(Lying flat on the floor, with my chin planted in the carpet, I can look out across the vast plane of evenly shaved fibers. In the distance, arching hairs, large boulders of lint, and even drifting pieces of cardboard make me long for a vacuum cleaner.)

From Before then:

I learned from fingertips not my own that I am not whole.

I approached a wide canyon, the truth of its contours withheld by shallow light. On the very edge I stood, looking in. Then the earth below me fell away and I was left dangling by my fingertips from the new ledge. I thought I might just let myself go, immerse myself. But then I would surely lose my way and besides, the unknown in the darkness hinted too much of peril. I pulled myself up - it was miraculous. Yet here I stand again on the edge, looking over into the deep space below me. The view is too seductive to abandon. I think I cannot walk away, but here I am planting back one foot at a time.

I'm sustained by the kindness of less and less a stranger.