My dearest, I'm at the end of an afternoon, after a day comprised of wholly mundane moments, fixed in the here and now of the house behind the hedge on a dead end road, my mind a teeming (at times) mix of glancing in not quite belief, a state of can this be happening, about the news from Japan, reflecting on, trying to parse out any meaning from the annihilation, reflecting on God and Nature, and on Man and Nature, reading too, in bits and pieces, T.S. Eliot's Koyaanisqatsi of a poem (or poems), The Four Quartets, in which he rolls up the universe in a ball and rolls it to an overwhelming question and I, reading along, accompany him on his visit. That last bit is actually a paraphrase of his Prufrock poem - but it's what comes to mind as I try to make sense of his poetic leviathan.

I google Koyaanisquatsi for the proper spelling and see that the word means "life out of balance." What I was thinking of initially was that in my first read-through of Eliot's Quartet (it took me a couple of days), the imagery, epic scope and rhythm reminded me of the 1982 film with the Philip Glass score.

My darling, how are you doing? In the midst of all of this - plus asparagus trimmed, pot of rice set up, steaks thawed for D to pan-fry (long tradition - he does the red meats) - I think of you. I got the dishwasher to work on the first go. I'm up here now, in the aerie, sun bursting through the gray occasionally only to vanish again, the light, and perhaps my mood in reflection as a result, in daylit savings flickering as well.

I enjoy these quiet moments - so quiet that the radio was too much, I tried a couple of CDs and their music distracted me. So now it's just silence, except for the whir of the machine, the clacking of the keys, outside the occasional rumble of, I suppose, a passing truck.

Sometimes when I think about what Japanese culture (of which admittedly I know very little) means to me, I think of an individual who knows how to savor a moment not so different from the one I'm enjoying now. A peaceful hour, contemplative mood, thoughts of love towards a beloved, a sleeping cat, birds twittering outside, mountains in the distance, silence.

All those individuals, the survivors, in Japan now, as I sit here so peacefully, ripped away from what they're so exquisitely gifted at - finding the peaceful, the eternal in the here & now. Dailiness will be a long time coming for many there. I can't imagine, I really can't.

I'm not mooking out on you, it's just that I'm almost pinching myself, willing myself to be conscious of this moment, while at the same time more acutely aware of what a luxury such a moment would be to someone else, who used to enjoy much the same in his or her home.

In America, we give our lives to our jobs. It's time to take them back.

Dailiness. Home.

***