Adding Insult to Intellect

How could you not love a woman who refuses to be "boxed in" as a feminist and thus in her bumbling, folksy way makes a mockery of feminism, not to mention intellectualism. Meanwhile, the rest of everyone (okay mostly men) can help but talk about her "sexiness" whenever they can. Ugh. Oh, and geewillikers. Dick Cavett presents a them there downright good story of sorts of the New Palinism.

I'm With You, Emmylou

Lately I have been a little lost among the long stretches of the unknown. That vast and empty country in which there are no others like me, in which my prayers circle the canyon and are returned unchanged.

There is a line in a song sung by Emmylou Harris, who is a genius, that is perhaps the most honest and true of all the lines in all the songs sung. The lyrics speak her heartbreak after the death of Gram Parsons, to which she reveals that "the hardest part is knowing I'll survive." Oh, boy. Surviving means moving on and moving on means giving up and giving up means letting go of that which I want the most.

I cannot possibly know what lay in waiting before me, here on the plateau or on the canyon floor, or in the wind that sometimes whistles right through me as if I were an afterthought of the atmosphere. But I do know (most of the time) that within the absurdity of love there is a speck of something so blindingly beautiful that every material aspect of life becomes invisible. Oh, boy.

Picture is my own of Dead Horse Point, Utah, 2005.

Never

I am mourning
something
I never had

How can that be?

There is this
soundtrack
playing in my head

That changes

And I skip to the beats
and fall
with the rhythms

Yet I am silent.

The air,
liquid,
evaporates around me
and through me

The lights
grow, then dim
then grow again
The wind shakes
and shivers.

And reminds me that

I am missing
something
I never had.

How can that be?