Morning window view: the dogwood all leaved out, no blossom left at all. It's only 40F now, pretty chilly, but the high today looks like being a very pleasant 73F, which I will TAKE and say thank you.
Yesterday afternoon I went out to buy dog food, and while I was there, I acquired another bag of potting soil and one more of peat moss, plus some basil seeds. Back home, I sectioned off one end of my Rubbermaid-container garden bed, which I've had covered with paper bags and cardboard to kill off the weeds and grass, and covered said paper and cardboard in that section with the potting soil and peat moss, topping it right up with this planting mix. Then I sowed my whole pack of basil seeds in that end. My plan now is to do that bed in sections in this precise manner ---- topping up a section with potting/planting mix, then putting in herbs. I won't do them all from seed, but basil I've grown before and am confident about. It's fast, whereas thyme, for example, takes forEVER to grow from seed. Oregano, too, not that I need any. What I have now was originally grown from seed, and I've just transplanted bunches of it different places over the years. In the kitchen garden I have a big bunch growing around the pecan stump, so I don't need more in the big container. What I do want to put in are cilantro, marjoram, and some more obscure things like chervil, which I would probably have to buy in seed form. I think I still have some winter savory seed as well that didn't grow in the cold-sow format I tried starting in January, so if I do, I'll direct-sow that and see how we do.
Garden thoughts, garden thoughts. In other news, I need to do my regular complement of reading and writing, dog-walking, trampoline-jumping, weight-lifting, etc. In this way the days go by. I'm tired at the end of them, which is good, I think. At any rate, I sleep pretty well and am ready to sleep by about 10:30 every night, if not earlier. Then I get up and do it all again, lather rinse repeat.
I've been watching wrens in the tree outside, and now there's a catbird, first I've seen this year, sprinting along the driveway. They are such very gray little birds, like miniature mockingbirds dipped in ash and thoroughly coated, with an extra-dark thumbprint right on the top of the head. Cue a new season of Where's that cat? . . . Oh, never mind.
Good things on Twitter today:
Simon Knott (who takes photos of churches every day) on the wrecked Tudor ship the Mary Rose.
No end of posts on Shakespeare's birthday, which is putatively today (it's more definitely his death day; his baptism is recorded as having occurred on the 26th).
Requests for prayer --- again, no end of those, always, and I stop and pray for them.
Anything else: not good. I'm sure my fellow Catholics are fighting about stuff, but I assiduously avoid those conversations and mute them when I encounter them. Real life is largely NOT full of the kinds of factions that develop on social media, and if there's a spiritual danger here, it is in being sucked into a faction and held there: forming alliances for the purpose of deriding supposed enemies. I don't think that social media, per se, is soul-corrupting, but that dynamic is, the whole temptation to be a keyboard crusader for whatever cause. The poetry world, or parts of it, is full of same, and I have muted people and conversations so fast it would make your head spin. I'm just not interested in watching takedowns happen and people destroyed. It's enough just to live my life and do my work, one foot in front of the other.
Anyway. By and large I like social media and have made many good friends online over the course of the last twenty years, but I really, really hate seeing otherwise probably perfectly decent people become ghouls when they talk to and about people whose faces they can't see, apparently under the delusion that they're doing something good by knocking down the bad guys. I'll be reading along, enjoying interesting tidbits that surface, and then some nasty snarkpost will appear, and I'll have to mute it, and that in its way, as an ambush, is as much a drag (and very much of a piece with) the pornbots that seem to proliferate now on Twitter.
And if I'm curious and read the thread: well, then, generally I have to put that on my confession list, under "gossip, listened to." Because that's generally what online "discourse" is. It's not discourse. It's gossip. If it's about a person and something they said: gossip. If it brings up other people's names and reputations: gossip. Granted, gossip is a venial sin, not mortal, but it's the kind of thing that if it becomes a habit tends to build up what I think of as tarnish on your soul. It's an ugliness I can do without, even as a passive participant, and it's the kind of thing, the kind of nasty buildup in the soul, that does prompt me to go to confession even when I can't recall anything bigger or worse to report.
So there's always a fair amount of that out there, which I hate and despise, but if you can avoid "discourse," there are good things to be found out every day, such as what the Mary Rose's ship's carpenter had in his jerkin pocket when the ship went down (a comb and a pocket sundial). Those left-behind things are affecting, about someone's irreplaceable humanity.
In other news, wearing today:
*Secondhand Chico's linen button shirt, originally pale blue but redyed Rit "Evening Blue" by me last summer, bought . . . when? January 2023, it looks like.
*Secondhand Cynthia Rowley pink linen wide-leg trousers, bought April 2024
*Secondhand Birkenstock Mayaris, bought April 2024
OK, I really love these linen trousers. They're lovely and unstructured and will be cool all summer. AND they give me a way to wear my whole closet --- an instant outfit of a kind I like, to be made with any of my button shirts and tunics. I think even my pink merino tank top will go with these, as it's just a darker shade of the same cool rose/berry pink.
I haven't really worn trousers in a long, long time, but I like these and will wear them for sure. I like this kind of knock-about pajama-looking outfit.
And because it's still chilly this morning:
Here's an extra layer, my secondhand Anthropologie/Sparrow merino-blend pullover, bought last May for our trip to Norway. We're going again this June, to see and do things we passed last time and thought, "We've got to come back and see/do that," but this year I don't think I'll need to buy anything. I have packable lightweight hiking shoes, I have comfortable walking sandals, I have layers, I have dresses that are good for travel . . . all I need to do this year is pack the backpack I also already have.
Today's Day 4 hair in a claw-clip updo.
Nothing fancy --- I just braided it loosely and folded it up and clipped it.
And now to go about my day, one foot in front of the other, trying to do real things in real time and not to be stressed out by non-real things happening in the non-real space of the internet. I mean, mind you, my own work happens in that same non-real space, as does this blog, so I realize that I'm being possibly a bit hypocritical . . . but anyway.
AFTERNOON UPDATE:
I have
*read a few Janet Lewis poems
*drafted a new poem
*chatted with a couple of friends
*transplanted some cold-sown lettuce to a container outside
*set a couple of pheromone traps for Japanese beetles
*hung out laundry on the line for the first time this year
*aired the bed (code for not having made the bed yet)
*jumped on the trampoline
*done some standing crunches while holding 10-lb weights over my head
All good, real-world things (well, the chats-with-friends were online, but they weren't part of any Big Public Discourse). I need to sit down and read Emily Dickinson/about Emily Dickinson. It's so lovely out that I think I'll move that action to the front porch, as soon as the sun shifts that way a little more. Then Dora can also lie in the sun and maybe not make a pest of herself.