There's a beauty to drizzly gray days. I love them in the same way as I love Steinbeck and Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad: they are wonderful and glorious, but oy, they make me miserable.
High school literature anthologies can make any piece of writing seem dreadful, but I found Longfellow's Rainy Day in one of them, and it was exactly the medicine I needed. It told me that the soul has a weather of its own, and that with the right help and mentoring I could weather it.
Longfellow has been a good mentor to me. The library had a lovely collection of his work, without any of the soul-crushing comprehension questions. From there I moved on to e. e. cummings and Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. I am incredibly grateful. Poetry creates a space to experience emotions to the fullest without being destroyed by them. Reading poetry helps a lot, writing poetry helps even more.
Reading poetry is the best way to learn to write poetry, and writing poetry is the best way that I know of to learn how to live.
All that to say that today was a pretty blah day, and that's okay. Some days are like that, and that is as it should be.
(This photo is definitely NOT from today, by the way. But today is most certainly the day that I needed this oil. The diffuse light today is perfect for a different kind of photo. Perhaps today I will get some good pictures of the oils that I use on sunshiny days. All the different days prepare us for one another, weaving into a single interdependent whole...)
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