An update

It has been too long and I've written too infrequently for months. It feels impossible to catch up, to even catch the breath... but I did tonight, at dusk, arriving home with a load of groceries and storage containers, only to see dozens, maybe even hundreds of gulls flying over the cottage. I propped myself between our two cars--back against my blue Neon (soon to be junked as it has beyond failed its MOT) and feet pressed to the panel of Kwok's '98 Micra. I tipped my head onto the deep blue metal and watched as clouds in the distance appeared like God's hands--cotton plumes brought together by competing winds--taking a dip in the receding red sky. When dangling a leg, I could not reach the stones below; it was as close as I could come to flying. How surreal it seemed to hear the trees, even the shaking apples across the road, but no sound from the seagulls in landlocked Oxford--so high that only outlines could be noted, vague shadows across swirling blue hues. I watched as they danced, thought of the humpback whales, how the gulls somehow become avian ocean mammals--flocks dancing with each other, not as individuals like the humpbacks, but as units producing healthy and fierce vaulted ballets. It is miraculous... and suddenly I insignificant.

The dissertation long handed-in now (10 days gone), the summer teaching only recalled in secret smiles and steady moments, the house now a disaster in the midst of an autumn clean... it all seems to be everything and nothing.

Kwok and I are sorting through files, through clothes, through our accumulated life--ridding bagfuls of material clutters--matter which clutters the mind and spirit... and in one file folder, I found print-outs, hundreds of pages, of our email communications that we had to send to some immigration officer when I wanted to enter Britain as a wife. How strange that a random man or woman read these messages--saw our longstanding jokes, and if they were literary, saw the epic foreshadows of our future which even we did not foretell at the time of writing. I sat and read Kwok emails last night, in our clutter-strewn house, until 12:30--long past his bedtime. They were beautiful.. and we were beautiful in our words.

I am working not to try, but to just be, that person I loved for spells. The gulls bring me back... to the writer, the painter, the dreamer. They remove me from the adult, the one with typical adult problems: money, time, house chores.

In three weeks, I am back to Michigan--nine glorious days in a northern October--my favorite month, and the first I will have seen there in five years. I will inhale the fireworks of the northern trees, fill my lungs with pine and the scents of the creatures that inherit the woods beyond our house. Following those nine days, it is off to Massachusetts... the US Berkshires... for a month to train as a yoga instructor. I am nervous. It is one of few times I know I will not, cannot, be the best at something, but the reality is that it is not a competition. The point is that it is not a competition. Kripalu yoga aims to speak to the body through the heart, not speak to the heart through the body.

The trip will end with one more long weekend in Manhattan--four days with Elisabeth, whose spirit seems to blend with mine like oil paint, so perfect no matter the season or colors. I last saw her in June of last year--following experiencing my father for the last time standing, the last time speaking--his brain already failing him even then. I sought respite in this city only because she was there--this city that nearly broke me after cancer took a swing in 2004. Now, because it is her home, it is one of mine. And now she is New Haven too. A PhD at Yale to make her one of the most elite people in the world... and yet, not vicariously, it is part of me, because it is her. Even crummy New Haven is me because she is there... and it sounds like she is my lover, but the simplicity is that our spirits merely reach to each other like Adam to God.

I will be away from Kwok and the pets (my other soulmates) for five weeks... but the hope is that I will come back me, renewed, no matter how downcast the British weather.

There are plans in the air. The gulls speak them. The wind carries them. They are in the wispy hands of God.