February 26, 2006

Sunday is as much a day off as I get, one in attitude if not always in act; it is a day where no work but the essential is scheduled.  Before anything else, with my fingers slowly keying in numbers, I account for my sales and expenses from market; the day after, I can be all thumbs.

As everyday, the sheep must be looked in upon and it's freeing to make sure they're well in the morning.  Sunday is a day of reflections, forward and back, a day to walk around the house in mad dialog listening to my voices talking to and answering them as I enjoy the daylight coming through the windows.

  Today I want to be inside and warmly look out at the bright cold, where I was yesterday.  But eat, we must always eat.  I prepare my bi-daily kichardy with basmati rice, mung dal (cracked beans) and make a curry of spice seeds: mustard, cardamom, coriander, cumin, fennel all fried in onions and garlic with cayenne and turmeric: a grain, a legume and seeds: complementary proteins: a true diet for a small planet.

After my ayurveda brunch and a pre-noon nap, sleep, we must always sleep,I may read if I've talked myself out. I'm well into Nadine Gordimer's 'Burger's Daughter' where the protagonist's soliloquies fascinate by what they leave out (one suspects) as much as what they include as she addresses her lover in absentia about the South African police and their preoccupation with her; and growing up, bound to with her left-respected and right-reviled, imprisoned communist father.

Recently I was seduced by a review in the Times of Deborah Eisenburg. From the library I got her 'Under the 82nd Airborne'.  More than the review, the jacket photo drew me to her as that soft-focus photo had drawn me to Virginia Woolf, the profile, the look, the wisp of Deborah's graying hair and those dark, pursed, anise eyes.  But I like books too. By the fire I picked up Nadine, going with her until my senses were numbed by her diction.  I put her down and got up from the mahogany rocker that has Mara, the Evil One of Buddhist cosmology, the demon who tempted the Buddha under the Bodhi tree with lavish (for me literate) women to turn his back on Dukkha, the 1st Noble Truth that all life is suffering, carved in its back (now impressed on my back?), stretched, stood before the full-length mirror absently—me? I am always me—and I made tea, then rocked back again into Mara's insufferable clinging embrace before the warm fire to open Deborah. I am a polygamous reader among other shameless things.

Eugene Wyatt