Frozen landscapes

             A coat of ice rained over the area yesterday, which makes this morning’s sunshine all the more brilliant. There is just enough snow over the top of the crust to make perfect paw prints, so I followed fox tracks all over the back fields this morning. I worried about my old doggie friends navigating the ground cover, but the crust is thick enough so they don’t break through. It was a lovely morning walk.
            Sitting inside at my computer, I feel a resonance with the ice. Those flowing animations that inspire life in me feel frozen, inert, waiting, like the frozen world outside my windows, for something to thaw, allowing motion. Towards the end of last semester, contemplating this time off, I worried about how I’d do with no requirement to summon up performance mode twice a week. I do have deadlines, but only fuzzy ones that allow late-sleeping, procrastination, and Saturday scruffies every day. Do you ever scan your interior landscape for motivation, for interest, for heart, for direction…and come up empty? When my soul is a frozen landscape, I try to be patient and not despair or rage against it, though that is the initial response. One advantage of age is having lived through this a few times. Eventually, there will be a thaw.
 
My 60th year in 60,000 words
Day 166: 216 words, TOTAL = 27,148; 32,852 remaining