I'm exactly like you, valentine, just come outside and leave with me

This weekend, I read tarot on the street for about 50 or so people, mostly kids, before I started losing my voice and needed to take a break. I've never read for teenagers and children before. It was a strange balance of what they understood and didn't, how real you could be, how seriously they took it and the kind of questions and stories they told. 

One of the most interesting was a pair of blind thirteen-year-old girls. They were there with only each other's company, and each helped the other find the rug and sit down. They were beautiful and confident and giggly-sweet. I liked describing in words the visuals of the cards I know by heart. I was reading for free, but the one girl left a dollar on my rug, and the other caught my hand and pressed a perfect little stack of quarters into my palm. Teenagers even tip earnestly. 

Overall,  reading for the young people, I didn't have many goony teen love stories. They wanted to know about their friends who had been mean to them, and talk about their parents, and to hear that I understood correctly that their costumes were of the Bellatrix L'estrange variety. And it sounds corny, but when I told them they were clever and talented, and had everything they needed already inside them, they seemed to visibly glow.

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I have a horrible cluster headache, so instead of running tonight, I locked myself in my room and did chores and upside down off the bed inversion sit-ups and thought about my many shortcomings. 

My new department exhibited all its worst tricks. I had a long meeting with a woman at work today who was giving me advice about a project she'd started but that I'm going to finish, one I'm not sure about. She's pretty, spoke with the softest, barest accent, by all appearances fairly shy and quiet. By the end of it, she had two spots of color on her cheeks and was telling me: Don't let any of them push you around, you're so smart, they're going to try to get to you, but it's not going to matter. 

Maybe it works for adults, too.

so blame it on me; I really don't care, it's a foregone conclusion

I was outside today, waiting, looking at my phone under a crabapple tree, and I realized the apples had finally turned candy red. Last year at this time, I was under the same tree, whipping them at Isaac as hard as I could.

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I re-read some of this blog tonight, mostly stuff from last year, particularly last winter. Even in the midst of it, I left myself such funny little love notes.

But god, I'm so scared about this winter. Last year, I was a mess, and seeing it with the remove of this summer, I can see the ways it might set up like that again, and it makes me want to hibernate. I know that a lot of my circumstances are different now, and a lot of the things I was so upset about last winter have changed, it's just that lingering worry. Last year, I felt fine going in, and then it ran me down like a freight train. I don't know that overthinking and worrying about it before there's anything is really a better approach, but I guess it's what I'm already doing, and the equinox hasn't even happened.

I think the thing that saved me last year, that I have to keep in mind, is to keep my focus on the vast capacity that every person (even me) has for compassion and inclusion. To seek, propagate, and celebrate that in all the forms it takes in my life.

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New moon in Virgo. Virgo is my moon sign, my heart sign, so I always feel a little touched during Virgo season. It's a good excuse to feel the part of myself that aggressively works and doesn't give up, and gets off on it. It's tenacious energy. So I like that, but I also feel like, mildly insane just now.
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I have a little poetry reading at a bookshop in Staunton coming next month. I don't know if anyone will show up, or if anyone much cares--the response among my loved ones has been about the level you'd expect from proudly announcing my plans to re-heat an old burrito (One had forgotten I was a writer, and literally said "I hate poets" which made it awkward to follow up with news of a poetry reading)--but all I ever wanted from my writing was to read in a little local bookshop in my own beloved town.


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At the wedding this weekend, the groom came up and explained how, despite it being a small wedding, the bride wanted to invite me in particular. I met her only once, years ago, when they had come to Legends, stayed for about thirty minutes once, had a bad time, and decided to go, so this was a surprising thing for her to think. (I barely remember it, to be honest, I was on my PC block and distracted.) But he said that she'd told him after they left the game that she'd admired me so much, that I was the kind of woman she dreamed of becoming. I was touched, but incredulous, and my next thought was, "oh no, girl, no, I'm so small and desperate and alone." But maybe it's like that--maybe I exist best as an idea, a template experience.

But anyway, here's a picture from said wedding where I love how I look.

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And some cole crop dreaming. Tonight, in the furtive hours between dog walking and dinner, I bought kale, collards, and butter lettuce, and reader, oh pretty reader, tomorrow, I'll strip another bed of tomatoes for them.

don't do this, I don't do this to you, don't expect me to enjoy it

I'd played with the idea of writing all afternoon, but instead I'm virgo-ing around, tidying my rooms, fussing, furying, sticking my endings and beginnings. I have a pleasant coolness to my energy right now, and I'm painting my eyes "gunmetal." I'm getting dressed up to go to a fancy wedding on Ashlawn in horrible Charlottesville, and I'm in hematite and lace in the hope that their alleged properties of "staying grounded and calm" will work out for me. I'm looking forward to the night; I am, in spite of how tired and done I feel. I can't pretend it won't be nice, though, hours from now returning again to my soft mountain town in the September night, looking at a nearly-moonless sky.

I only take up a little of the collapsing space

...nah.

Too down to write any stupid garbage thing, too down to even feel sorry for myself and drink. I just don't have any spark today, I guess. I don't know if it's the weather, the temperature, or just feeling low and bad at everything. I'm sad and tired, and the house feels impossibly dark.

I should say three good things.