I think the combination of this never-ending flu and livejournal being down is a sign to write in here after I don't know how long it's been. The flu has been teaching me how to live in my new apartment. Living with 4 others for the past 3 years is a very different lifestyle. I know longer know how to be alone, to just be at home. But slowly this illness has taught me how to just be slow and reading and writing in bed and meditating and all the slow paced things I used to love. When I lived with others I had to escape so I lost the ability to meditate from being constantly escaping, always being in public view, always "busy". When you are always reading in public you cannot read 12 books at once because you cannot carry them all. Yes, I am reading 12 books concurrently! It is good having so many more ideas coming in at you, I am having so many more ideas, writing ideas, journaling pieces come out of me, I've regained myself but still miss the "public life," reading and writing in public is somehow proof that I am a writer and a reader, an intellectual. How do I prove it now? By creating great works, I suppose. I am no longer a student in cafes but a real writer and intellectual who writes at home. Professional writers mostly do not write in public. The real work is done in privacy where you can eccentrically throw paper and books around in a mad rash of creativity.

This flu has also gotten me in touch with god a little bit more, and this constant coldness in my hands and feet have gotten me back to meditation, it fixes it! God sometimes does want you to go to dark places, dark nights of the soul are a necessary phase in the spiritual life and unfortunately, it is not a linear path, one where step 3 will be over and done with, no it is circular and you repeat all the steps over and over, like reincarnation, I'm not sure you really understand something after you've solved it once, sometimes you will but not everything, you have to keep reliving a situation until you really get it.

My 12 books are: 1 novel: The Girl in the Swing, 3 books of poems: Cummings' Collected Poems, Harjo's The Woman Who Fell From the Sky and Killian's Argento Series, 3 spirituality related books: 2 yoga books and a book called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by the seminarian John O'Donohue, 4 literary criticism books: 2 on Robert Duncan, Whorf's Language, Thought, and Reality, and G. Stein's How to Write, which I'm counting as lit crit because I don't understand her and it goes much more slowly, and an H.D. book of novellas: Kora and Ka.