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Another night of not recalling dreams. New place, new bed, new patterns. Especially staying up late and getting up early. Yes, I did get up again and take the dog for an early morning (really early morning) walk.

Continuing to mull my plans and situations. Trying to come to some resolution, some form and structure. What is it I really want to do? That is the key element, the one that escapes attention. Where I do I not go.

I want to be healthy, creative, alive, writing, supplementing my income from writing, living in a place that I find comfortable and supportive, and on and on. I want to be in a close relationship; I don't believe I want to live alone and in isolation. I want to be more in connection with my kids and grandkids.

I've been down this list so many times before. The list never really changes. What's missing? Follow through. Picking a starting point and moving ahead with actions instead of thought experiments. Decisions in the place of worries.

My time here at L's is opening up a window onto the landscape that know I inhabit, but refuse to see. It is an empty, barren scene that presents itself to me.

Last night or evening, I kept getting what seemed like a glimpse into a set of actions. What to do centered around not being so conservative with my current resources. I was seeing myself being more expansive, extended, engaged. I guess what I've noticed over the past few days is how small I'm playing, how constrained and locked into rigid, tight actions that have more the effect of ritual than substance. I know this sounds obtuse, but it's really quite simple.

I've ritualized getting my laundry done each week. It gives me something to do on Friday between 9am and 10am, and around 4:30pm. It's a concrete set of actions that reside on my internal calendar and provide me with reasons--to get up that day, early; to do something just prior to yoga; to do later that day when I pick stuff up. How important is this set of actions--not very in the larger scheme of things. Doing those things take the place of doing something really vital, really worthwhile.

It is like marking time. I'm in a marking time loop. Really came to the forefront when I settled in here at L's for 14+ days. What am I doing here? Watching the place and caretaking plants and animals. That handles 1+ hours per day. What about the remaining 23 hours? I suddenly find myself marking time, big time.

Since I have a kitchen, I no longer have to run out and forage for each meal. Can pull together something here, which leaves me with even more free time. More time to mark. It was more noticeable this weekend (long weekend with a holiday) and with no dances, dance classes or yoga to fill in the gaps. I'm suddenly faced with huge blocks of time and no clear plan as to what can be done with that open resource. There a few ritual groups of time, but nothing that fills up the suddenly wide open stretches of empty minutes.

Blogging helps, but it too only absorbs just so many cycles. I keep looking up and seeing my face in the mirror. And there is the deafening silence--no one to talk with, no one I need to say anything to as the days unfold. Except, perhaps, this dialog with myself, this conversation that rebounds from a distant wall, like standing alone in a racquetball court and playing against myself. It can be a cooperative or competitive game, but the result has got to be the same. Score 0-0, forever if I don't change the rules, alter the strategy.

Just finished a story by Munro, Family Furnishings. It was about a person who became a writer and used some of her family's history in a story. The aunt, whom the story was based on, saw the story and was incensed at the violation of familial boundaries. The whole piece had an Escher-like quality about it--writer writing about her family in a story that was about her family, and so on. Left me with a sense of dislocation, or a highlighting of the dislocation that I'm experiencing.

I realize I have considerations, holdbacks, as I write--even here in the blog. I'm not fully expressing all that's going on with me, within me, and I don't want to put more on the table--even though the content of this blog is worthless. I am using the convenience of the blog to help me with Writing Down the Bones. My scribblings continue to cycle back and forth between my whining and my careful emptying. So not much is happening except bins are being filled with words--words without focus, words without end, Amen.

I find that I want to amend or edit some of the above. The content of the writing is worthless, but the act is not. I know that, for a fact. The act of writing and doing it consistently is worthwhile. Whether or not it leads to anything of meaning is in another domain, another field of argument.

So with that puzzling profundity or profanity, as the case may be, I continue on with my time marking and what I may discover in making such marks.