Random thoughts from Ballard

I am afraid I am missing Spring. I think it is possible to blink and wake up in August.

I have three more weeks of preschool classes and then I will no longer work at the center where I have taught for the last 8 years. I've had some of my students that long. I am sad.

I’ve spent so much time with grief the last year I feel like she owes me dinner. Happiness and peace are like new shoes which hurt my feet when I walk but I know they will get me there.

The book and I are almost done. I think after four years we understand each other. What have you done in four years? I have 50 pieces of myself that are as close to perfect as I can master. I am close.

Ancient mystics believe that to communicate with god one must begin with a sound. There are no silent religions. Chanting is merely breaking up the pattern of words. I sound far more mystical then I am---this morning I am going to Walmart to pick up flowers so that my new therapy groups can plant Spring in the clay pots they have made.

If we, as people stopped for one moment pretending to know what we wanted and were still, what would the universe look like?

I want cake for breakfast or chocolate croissants.

Billy says that we must create our “identity” as writers, our illusion as an author; that one sentence has fucked me up for a long time. I do not want an illusion. I don’t write to talk to you. I am speaking to the gods…not the pale boy kind but the gods who have six heads, the gods with breasts and puppies hanging from their teats. I am talking to their anger, fury, grief, joy. I am speaking into their sex and they are listening. I hear them.

But I still want cake.