Like smoke suspended in the calm

Here, a cluster of stone red-roofed cottages, and more of those trees with the art nouveau branches.

There’s a rock—huge!— out, away from the shore. It looks like a great fat sleeping bear. The mist hangs above the land in swaths, like smoke suspended in the calm of an afternoon pub.

Some beautiful old stonework houses with white wood trim. Fairy story houses in a patchwork land. A hilly autumn country of greens and golds, rich brown fields that roll and dip.

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My mind wanders– the slipping of eaves after a great storm; laden and bowed under the burden of water and other insatiable forces. 

How I have slipped, in the writing of my dreams; it’s a muscle, and muscles not worked regularly will atrophy.

Look.
There are pictures in my head, stories— well, not stories, exactly, but beginnings; threads to be followed. Observations. My biggest challenge, always, is to discern and allow true things to come through. But the most impassable wall there is not the readiness of the stories, but me, the one telling. 

Fear causes inaction; that’s the obstacle.

The radiators have awakened for the new season; that moment when the smell of dust, of time, fills the apartment along with the warmth.

The steam-driven, radiant heat of old buildings is so specific— It feels sounds smells different than modern heating solutions; it’s too warm, too cold. It is by its by nature difficult to control; there’s no efficient way to temper it. I love it, and I hate it.

The soft rain has returned. It sounds soothing out the darkened window, and the neighbors have all gone back inside. No one is talking, no cars driving past.

I’m looking forward to a nighttime walk after a day spent indoors in front of the machine, collecting words against a self-imposed deadline.