We listened to opera in the mornings: play the women’s arias, my visiting friend said.
We discussed and compared notes every day for about a week.
We moved onto German operas, and one had a guy quietly muttering in the background for several minutes and I wondered what he was talking about.
He is probably disgruntled or dying, friend said.
This was our visit, through conversations.
Fitness, lifting weights, we like it.
The triceps are the best muscle to work out emotions and aggression. Also, it’s a beautiful muscle.
Sure, I love working this one… but how does it work out emotions and aggression?
Because it’s the force of defense, a move to strike out, to defend and protect.
What about vulnerability? I thought that’s what we needed more?
Forget about that, she said.
One morning we got up and a short dream report was given:
She said, I had confrontational dreams last night; we talked about feelings a lot and sometimes that opens a wormhole.
Here are horse pictures (and an eagle):
Once mid conversation I had to go do something outside, and I said, hold that thought… and she replied, there is no topic you don’t have a thought about. That is you as well, isn’t it? She said no, no, I really don’t have a thought about everything. And I said well you report all throughout the day. And she said, yes, she did do that.
Sitting in my back yard:
Now if you look at this perspective (through the gate toward the front yard) it looks kind of hippie-ish.
Well, you said you needed more Bohemians in your life, right?
Yes, yes I did, and I do.
Under the crescent moon:
I love the moon. But I wish they wouldn’t leave trash on it.
What trash?
Oh you know they leave behind things like the moon mobile and stuff.
At the hotel:
We tried and compared pillow loft and comfort and discussed windows vs AC (we turned off the AC and opened the window).
Out to eat:
The brownie’s surface area is large enough but it’s thin. It has spray-on whipped cream.
A different day out they gave our food to another table who accepted it and so they gave us beer to drink while we waited for them to prepare our meals again.
While in Ashland during my massage, I tuned into the sweeps of motion over my connected framework. It felt like dirt and sand and fossils were being swept off my skeleton. I remembered recently hearing someone say that we might treat ourselves with sensitivity like archeologists, gently with brushes, carefully sweeping off debris to find our shape, our bones, ourselves. This is a better approach than a sledgehammer they said.
After the massage we soaked in a hot pool then plunged in a cold pool. People should do this all the time, said my friend.
We got into random fits of extreme laughter around nothing all that funny but it was visceral punch funny. You know when you laugh at something and then that laugh builds into another laugh while you laugh at the laughing of the other and it becomes a cascading uncontrollable laughter that results in one of us almost choking on watermelon.
Even just thinking back to it causes another bubbling up of hilarity and my stomach and chest tighten and shakes out rumblings of giggle echoes, choppy haha’s, stacks of boxed up laughter that open up like a flash flood in a dessert.
We had to think about the word for remembering, to reminisce, because we were doing that.
This is how I remember times with people, by little bits of conversation.
Reminisce is defined as “to talk or write about past experiences that you remember with pleasure.” First used around 1589. Other new words at that time were chops/ waggish/ caw/ despairing/ police/ sodden/ mouthy/ anagram.
I can reminisce about a view, an angle of light, a burst of laughter, a story told to me, waiting in lines, or driving in the car talking.
Sometimes I reminisce at the time of the experience because I want to memorize it.
Thanks everyone for the good conversations. I love it.
I like that the singers are wearing normal street clothes while singing like angels.
Summer visit