such the conditions of our love

On the way back from the gym tonight, Vivaldi's "Spring" came on the classical radio station and we rolled the windows down and cranked the volume.

While I was running, I prayed for all of you who are going abroad this summer. For some reason, the thought that most of my dearest friends will be scattered all over the globe this summer has rejuvenated my desire for prayer. A good thing. Know that I will be praying for you this summer, wherever you happen to be. Let me know how I can pray more specifically; generalized petitions easily sound stale on my tongue.

Favorite song of the week: "Dirty Knife," Neko Case

This is why Woolf succeeds in making "characters that survive," the fact that she gets this:

"It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love."

The desire to shirk this method of seeing people--as being one thing or another, being so stubbornly black or white--is keen in me, re-reading this passage. (From Jacob's Room.)

"I can't believe we're sisters."--Kelsey, to Grace, upon observing the disaster in Grace's corner of our bedroom

Had three disturbingly vivid dreams last night: 1) I gave birth to two African babies in a mud hut on a dirt floor; 2) Emily E.S. had a baby girl named Sophia who was six months old; 3) I had my heart broken by my sister at a water park. And then I went back to school and all of the stairways in our dorm were blocked with piles of armchairs. I woke up startled and anxious, eager to awake in the neutral-colored morning and convince myself that reality was better. It was.

Geese are basically the only five-letter thing that fly in a flock.