The view from below Olana

Notes from my journal this morning...
Good morning darling. I'm sitting in the car with the radio on. I went along for the ride to the vet across the river in Catskill. Rafe has a recurring condition that inflames his gums so he yelps in pain when he eats - steroid shots help.

It's a beautiful day in its way, cool, misty, rainy. Rain pounded the tin roof in the solarium overnight. I love the sound of rain. I got up in the middle of the night (as I do most nights) to take a few steps in the dark to let in the cats. I tap on the window and two dark shadows appear. I open the door ajar and they dart past my feet. I tap the window again to see if there's a third or fourth cat (I lose track of who's in or out). Last night it was Gwynnie and Penelope waiting to be let in. Good. Maybe alone together in the night they're starting to get along.

I love you, darling.

I've been thinking about how my sense of theology has shifted and developed in - I don't know how long. Since our correspondence, and all the songs, and strange occurrences, and a realization that on occasion I enter an ecstatic mode. It's hard to describe and maybe it's best not to. But let's say that I have an entirely different sense of scale than I ever did. On some level, I don't believe (if I ever did) that Man is the measure of all things, that the buck stops with us, that we're at the top of the pyramid. I feel that we're at one level, one scale in the midst of everything else that's going on at other levels. Sort of like the way we watch cinema - someone's watching us.

And I'm finding it important to externalize and try to pin down the evanescent, the memories, the sensory impressions. You awakened my thinking on that. And why? Almost as though in heaven that's what will be left to look at, to enjoy - the films or other art products of our lives that can be returned to again and again, or that have an independent existence, are given a form and not just escaped through our fingers.

Wow. It's so hard to write about this stuff. Sort of the way one blogger mocked a biographer for writing about Daphne DuMaurier's mystical creative process.

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Back home now. This post barely makes sense. But I'll let it fly. Sometimes it's best not to be too fussy.