august and its rivers of crows
Posted by Daniela Elza on Aug 29 2013
It has been raining all day. I woke up to the tender fingertips of rain on my window. I stayed in bed for an extra hour or two listening to the rain leave its fingerprints all over my dreams. Yes, I missed yoga, but yoga will have to understand. So will my reading and all the other things I could have done in those couple of hours. I will make it up to yoga somehow, and I will make up the missed work. But it is yoga that teaches me this shivasna pose (dead corpse pose) and I practiced that this morning.
August was a month in which I tried to slow down. Funny how much there still is to do when I make an effort to slow down and purposefully not schedule things. These are the times when you can see how many threads you are still holding on to, that keep pulling on you. In the last five years I have spent a lot of time doing volunteer work and this year I had to let go of a few threads though I picked up a few more.
We just celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Summer Dream Literary Arts Festival. Over the last four years the literary awards gala night has turned into a lovely happening (about 120 people gathered at the CBC studios). I was so proud of the speeches. This is community gathering where we celebrate each other. How many people are involved in these events and how we all have to trust each other that it will come together. How everything comes together in the last minute. How people pull through, everyone does their part. There is something so beautiful in that.
Another thing I focused on was reading and writing. I must have read well over 1000 pages of poetry. And in the last couple of months probably written close to 90 pages. That was pretty intense. And I thought August will be slow. And yet, it has been. A lot more slow that the last six or 12 months. The slow feeling was enhanced by my daily time spent on the roof top patio. No matter what happens in a day, as long as I am not out for an event, after 6pm you will find me with wine and books on the roof patio holding audience with the sunset and the rivers of crows overhead. Religiously. If there is a religion like that, I belong to it.
So I guess expansive might be a better word than slow. It has allowed me time to expand and make me feel a little more at home in it.
October and September will get more intense with travel and readings and presentations again. I am grateful I had the chance to recharge my batteries in the August sun, in the pages of poetry, and the words I tinker with on the page. Oh, and I also took a month off FaceBook. I cannot recommend that enough. FaceBook is good for somethings, but I have to watch out what it does to my brain. I found it really scattered and fragmented me. Now, going back to it I have to practice what I learned by not being on it. We will see how that goes.
September 17th will be the last chance this year to see me read in the vicinity of Vancouver. I will be reading at Spoken Ink Reading Series (with the Burnaby Writers Society).
All the rest will be up north in September (Prince George, Smithers, Terrace) and out east in October (Montreal, Toronto) with one at Planet Earth Reading Series on October 11th in Victoria. I have not been to the east coast at all so those will be a first.
And I have not been back to Prince George since 2009, since I launched 4poets there with Al Rempel. So I am quite excited to go back after four years. So much has happened since. How life keeps me on my toes. How sometimes you just need a morning in dead corpse pose.