Invisible work. Another one of those kinds of weeks at the house. Picked up a flood light for the electrician to install, and identified a couple things that didn’t follow my original spec: a missing outlet, and six-inch recessed cans in the kitchen instead of four-inch ones. In regards to windows, the interior and exterior trim are both finished; we’re just waiting for a clear, warmish day (highs were in the low 30s all last week) to paint. The small upstairs deck also needs to be finished: railings installed; the wood door repaired; part of the floor replaced. Some of these things may have already been done! (I usually stop by the house two or three times a week to check in on the progress, but I’ve been busy.)
Metabolizing. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading around the second storyline. A couple days last week I didn’t commit any new words to the page, and felt guilty about it, but I tried to remind myself, as always, to trust the process. There are reasons I’m metabolizing.
Quoting a quote, from Jenny Odell’s essay in The Creative Independent :
[I]n his book Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, David Abram proposes that it is not we who are thinking, but rather the environment that is thinking through us. Intelligence and thought are things to be found both in and around the self. “Each place is a unique state of mind,” Abram writes. “And the many owners that constitute and dwell within that locale – the spiders and the tree frogs no less than the human – all participate in, and partake of, the particular mind of the place.”
- It was my birthday on Saturday. J. planned an outing for us: We started off at Dilla’s Donuts in Downtown, then went to the Belle Isle Aquarium, then to a hot tub spa in Ann Arbor before, coming back for dinner with my mom and brother at a new restaurant/butcher shop in our current neighborhood in Detroit. Here is a photo of your happy author, right after having eaten his first donut of the day:
Yum. Onward …