who only by moving can balance

Item the first: I turned Rilke's Briefe an einen jungen Dichter into an ebook. Here's the epub; if you'd like other formats let me know, because I can trivially do conversions (with calibre) and upload. (There's a free translation into English as HTML; if you want that ebooked too, get the translator's permission and let me know and I can do that for you.) A favour request: Rilke's letters aren't up on Gutenberg, hence making the conversion myself. I'd offer my ebook to them but, er, they appear to require signing up to a forum to go "here I made you a thing", and I absolutely cannot face that, so if any of you are already involved with them, I'd appreciate it if you'd pass this on? (And, you know, if they wanted to compile it into a volume with the rest of his letters, that'd be nice too, but I'm not going to bother doing that til I've decided whether I get enough value out of this set for it to be worth it.)

Item the second: I've taken a small pile of not-terribly-good photos of entertaining/otherwise pleasing bits and bobs in my area. (I am... getting used to my point-and-shoot. The last one I owned took 35mm film, didn't have any ability to zoom, and I haven't used it in, er, A Very Long Time.) ( Seven photos below the cut. )

Listen.

Find someone who adores what they do
and ask them about it.

Watch sunsets and rivers and slow change
and make space in the hours of your heart
to observe beauty
to honour compassion.

(Notice gifts offered shyly and in passing and in silence.)

Learn to apologise and
to accept apologies and
when it's best to do neither.

Test your limits. Find your boundaries. Press
against them, yearning, but only sometimes, and only while they obliging yield:
don't, if you can help it, burst through
encouraged by the stridency of shame or of its many siblings-
at least not more than once. But when you do

Give yourself whatever space you need to heal. Dare
to trust, and trust again, and hope. Above all else
oh, darling -- dare to wisely sweetly hope.

1. My strategy for dealing with my insomnia last night (leave main light on, read book until can't any more, pretend is afternoon nap) was good for 4 hours' sleep, which I think is more than I'd have managed otherwise. Hurrah for coping strategies.

2. I have now finished the first Mary Oliver collection I borrowed from the Saison Poetry Library, and it's amazing and I love her (You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.).

3. I need to be in work this afternoon (and building steam has been turned back on, which means that the clean lab isn't at ambient outdoor temperature, hurrah). I was starting from Oxfordshire, via Paddington. I had my wheelchair with me. Paddington is conveniently just north of Hyde Park, which is just north of work. I had an absolutely fantastic explore along the Serpentine - ridiculous waterfowl, several types of snowdrop, narcissi, silver-fern bramble (one of my favourites), a whole pile of beautiful gradated dogwoods interspersed with salix, gorse in flower, birches with pink bark peeling, a tree with astonishing pink catkins, hellebores and mahonias and...

4. ... and yesterday afternoon I visited the Oxford Botanics with That One Lady. They are tiny and adorable and have a whole series of beds organised by which medical discipline the plants were or are used in. Also, lots of my absolute favourite iris (they're predominantly a sort of pale sky blue in person).

5. The 1am bugfuck nuts appears to have been followed by starting a bleed. Thanks, body, for your utter predictability; on the plus side, in the middle of going "EVERYTHING IS SPIDERS" I did at least manage to spot that that was likely what was happening.

6. Actually, one of the other ways I dealt with the insomnia was putting together a tentative setlist for the 10-minute poetry reading I'm doing as part of a General Evening, in late May. I'm going to have to think a bit carefully, because I've selected 9 poems and put them in a coherent order, so that + patter is clearly going to be too long... e-mail to the organisers time, I think.

7. In fact, the General Evening is a monthly event I performed at with Lashings last night. I remain absolutely astonished by my ability to make a room burst out laughing via the medium of improvisation on an approximate theme of my lines; perhaps I shouldn't be, because after all I've been managing that for nearly five years now, but hey.

8. The Situation with the Partner continues to Make Progress. We've managed another several good & useful conversations; things aren't fixed but we are stubborn enough that we're pretty sure we're going to manage, at this point, and we've got a stopgap in place.

9. It's nearly 5pm and the sun hasn't finished setting, yet; currently it is painting the sky gold, and it is glorious.

10. Thank you to, like, half the Internet for taking care of me during meltdown last night - so, so grateful that you will make the time for me. <3 Special shout-out to flippac, who handled the brunt of it solo with no warning. ♥