Each day, a new one —

— and also an old one, but in new colours:

Some mornings, looking out, I am at a loss for words to tell of how beautiful this world is — the flowers, the visitors, small and large:

I’m reading Alison MacLeod’s Unexploded right now, a novel set during the second World War, in Brighton, and it’s full of the heat of summer as well as Virginia Woolf — the main character is reading The Waves and even attends a lecture by Woolf.  My own writing is at a standstill for reasons I am attempting to parse — the density of the materials I’m trying to bring together, my own unwillingness to go as deeply as I need to. I sit at my desk with a box of family papers and maps, photographs, messages written in languages I don’t understand. So I’m thinking of Virginia Woolf this morning and hoping for some inspiration from that most graceful of muses.

“In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.”

And there it is.