Dear You,
I worry that I waste your time. I don’t have a recipe or a strong answer about how to live.
Last week it was warm and I noticed the bluebird again. She likes to sit on my passenger side mirror and shit. The male, when he shows up, likes my back window wiper. He shits there. They have this thing for my car that other birds don’t. I don’t know what this means. I may be seeing things all wrong.
Winter is my time for considering that I may have seen things all wrong. So many branches to read and errors remembered. This week it will be cold. I am a student again. I have textbooks. I won’t see the bluebirds. I will walk into a building where all I’m asked to be is unknowing.
I read a good book this fall that has a chapter about love I’m still thinking about. The chapter ends with a question:
How do we intertwine the demands of the ordinary with the summons of the extraordinary?
This is a good winter question.
I like that the writer (Mari Ruti) doesn’t answer it. Or use the verb “balance” instead of “intertwine.” “Intertwine” indicates a more determined ingenuity is involved.
Winter. Time for sitting by the window with questions. Time for conservation and no false moves.
I know the bluebirds will shit on my car come spring and I will have to clean it all up but I suspect they are emissaries of the extraordinary. My heart will quicken to see the drab blue-hued female and the brighter male zipping around.
That’s all I know at the moment.
Love,
Elaine
Heart illustration by Joey Votto, former second baseman, Cincinnati Reds. Used without permission.
The question is from The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within by Mari Ruti and appears in a series of questions at the end of the chapter “The Sublimity of Love.”
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