January 17, 2017 (Tuesday)

by Yule Heibel on January 16, 2018

Headache. Big bad one. Sinuses. Not good sleeping conditions. Sinus pressure. Unpleasant.

It’s funny – no, actually, it’s not funny – what we habituate to. I’m now again, once more, habituated to living in B., and I still don’t know if I’m kidding myself when I think, “This is where I’ll stay put,” or if I’m kidding myself when I think, “This really isn’t the right environment for you, you need to be someplace where you can more easily meet interesting people.”

I’m also now habituated to meditating every day, and to writing the morning pages. Unfortunately I’m not yet (re!-)habituated to writing every day (aside from the morning pages). I used to be, whether research notes (my notes were always annotations, with lots of editorial content), articles, papers, dissertations, books, lectures, more articles. Blogs, even.

Not having a purpose – something to write for – de-habituated me. I suppose the morning pages are a way of teaching myself the habit of writing for the sake of writing. That it doesn’t have to be for something. But the absence of resonance is difficult, too. Since I slept so badly, lying there in pain, awake with pain for much of the night, I got up at six. This means I’m writing these words as the sun is beginning to appear fully on the horizon. The sky is already bright blue, but the sun itself is at this point (7am) still a massive orange fiery diffusion, not yet a concentrated light-yellow orb that rakes its beams across my desk and blinds me so I have to pull down the window shades. No, this is nice. I can see – orange fire on my left, pale rosy pink, baby blues, and a bit of dusky purple straight ahead. Above it all an azure sky streaked with contrails in varying states of dissolution. And now, a concentration of orange fire, more circular, signals the imminent rise of sun above horizon and tree tops – trees which will soon enough be flush with fresh green leaves. Soon enough, I say, but not soon enough. For now all is bare and stark. It’s still cold, icy. There’s frost on the roof visible directly below my windows, but it looks almost like it’s the only house thus affected. I think the owners have sold up, moved out, and the new owners haven’t yet moved in. The house is probably barely heated now, just a minimal level to keep pipes from freezing. And so the frost settles on its roof.

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: