| [Tags**|diaries, j'y suis j'y reste, journal, mental health, meta] [Current Location** |
Mallorca] [Current Music |
birdsong and a distant road]The Sahara has come to Mallorca on a big brown wind, coursing up from the south laden with dust from the desert. All those fabled Mediterranean colours are muted in the haze and the sun's disk is dull silver on a colourless sky. It's beautiful but it's vaguely unearthly. So my sister and I and the podenco dog went walkies, rising at five in the morning to climb into the ragged hills behind Alcúdia. We rested at a mirador on a limestone crag and talked about our lives and prospects, we savoured the less sultry air among the pine trees, we restrained the dog from his visceral hunter's passion for the feral goats. Much of the rest of the day was spent knocking off tasks that my sister had lined up for me during my visit: fixing some fencing, sorting out a recalcitrant scanner, that kind of thing. Making myself useful in a way that will place no mark on history, or even necessarily on memory, but that's still part of the fabric of my life. I kept a journal when I was young (several in fact, at different times and in different phases of my existence). It's remarkable, when I review those decades-old pages now, how much returns to my recall that would otherwise be lost entirely. I'm no longer young, but then again I'm not old either, and there's much to learn. ( Read more...Collapse ) |