Jackdaw's Pocketbook

1)I officially slunk back over and dusted off my tumblr today.

It's not the first day I'd malingered there lately. I stumbled my way into a renewed Star Wars obsession last year, and have lurked intermittently on a number of writers' blogs. Over the last month or so, the desire to interact properly has grown, so I dove back in. Right out of the gate it's heartening to see old pals come out of the woodwork to say hi. I am cautiously optimistic.

As it tend to do, engaging with tumblr directly causes me to consider all my social platforms. Which leads to Thing the Second-

2)I've been avoiding dreamwidth because I feel like I've forgotten how to interact here.



Something I really strive to do with my public posts is share something... well, not necessarily uplifting or optimistic, but definitely things residing in the same postal code. I want to share more positivity than otherwise, to maybe inspire or just offer a Shiny. Maybe 'sharing' is key - I want to participate, to bring my own dish to the potluck. Well, I lean more towards metaphorical cookies versus covered dishes. It's best to play to ones strengths and I have an excellent chocolate-pecan-oatmeal cookie recipe. Definite potluck star, that is.

Anyway.

What I don't want is to just share the bad. I've done so in the past. Heck, there were times in the past when it seemed all I had to share was the bad. It's taken over a decade to really claw my way past the situations and mindset held me in that seeming. I want to focus on other, brighter things. But sometimes there *aren't* brighter things.

This is why I get squirrely about posting, or vanish sometimes. It's why I didn't talk much about Cancer Life During a Pandemic. I mean, there was so much Terrible going on in the world, I didn't want to add to it. And I didn't have the spoons. Honestly, spoons are still in short supply. I tried to muscle past that, to pull some Bright out of a pocket the last time I re-surfaced here, and it felt like I got my tone wrong. So I vanished again.

The truth is, while my physical health is better, the mental/emotional/spiritual end of things isn't. The chemo kicked me firmly into menopause too, which doesn't help on that front. Mostly, everything is hard, but I don't WANT it to be. Want only gets you so far though, and this isn't a carefully curated Instagram account. Curation has really tweaked my ability to exist online. Between Instagram and tumblr, it's easy for the lines between privacy, politeness and personal curation to blur. For me, this most often has led to self-censorship and silence.

I've spent the last few years as a recluse. I am so over silence.

So here I am, again. Because I love this place and I love you all, and miss you terribly. Please bear with me as I grapple with self-censorship. Thanks.



3)Tumblr reminded me it's National Poetry Month. I am embarrassed to admit I forgot. This one seems appropriate:

Shot Tower
~Bert Almon

I want to think of poems as if made in a shot tower,
a tall building where molten lead poured through a sieve
drops a long way, with surface tension forming
perfect spheres, annealed by the plunge
into the cold water tank of reality at the bottom.

Instead I confront a bored detective
digging a misshapen bullet out of a wall
after it missed the target. A leaden clot
dropped into a plastic bag but marked
by human choice. Pure gravity writes no poetry.