On welcoming creature comforts

just a cozy few words this morning, and a poem

It’s black outside on the Cape at 5:49 in the morning. My spouse Janyce is up making coffee in the kitchen and I’m sitting up in bed with the pillows propped and the reading lamp bent, its long flexible neck turned to shine a spot of light against the wall. I grabbed my laptop that was on the floor by the bed and turned on the Coffitivity stream to play the ambient sounds of a crowded coffeeshop somewhere in the world. It’s supposed to help with creativity. It’s science. “Proven and peer reviewed, see the research to learn more,” reads the line at the top of the website.

“Look at that dog,” says Janyce as she walks into the room to hand me a glass of warm water. “She’s doesn’t need to go out, it was all a lie.”

Swirls lies peacefully beside me now that I’ve shut the window and wrapped her in the blanket we put on the bed for her to lie on, so she won’t get fur on the white comforter. It doesn’t work really. She usually gets her way and lies wherever and however she wants. Her head is now on the pillow, which is what she wanted all along, and she is snoring deeply.

I opened my Substack to start a new post this morning and noticed I had some drafts:

Do you know that climate change is threatening the world’s coffee supply? says my spouse Janyce. She’s walking in and out of the living room talking to me. I’m sitting in the dog’s chair with my wool blanket from Scotland in my lap, facing the woodstove, and looking up trips to the Orkney Islands on my laptop. It’s a grey Sunday afternoon in the middle of a holiday weekend and we’ve lit the first fire of the season.

I remember writing that a couple weekends back but I’m sure I abandoned that thread because I’ve written it before. So many of my drafts start the same way, me in a blanket, me with the dog in a blanket, looking out a window, looking at a fire, Janyce buzzing around making coffee, delivering random bits of her thoughts as she walks by. We really do have a cozy life. Maybe a cozy life is starting to mean boring writing.

I have a friend struggling with a major life decision. I get impatient with this friend for the lack of movement, the constant ruminating, what feels to me like the same circling round and round over the same issues. I want something new to happen. Something big. And if it’s not going to be me making big changes in my own life, I want to live vicariously through someone else.

“Right swirls?” I look over at the dog who has flinched a bit under the blanket and breathed a deep sigh. There will be no answers gleaned from my dog today. She is all about her own creature comfort. Reminds me of a poem I read not long ago. A cozy, creature comfort of a poem. Wise in its simplicity. Because everything is moving and changing all the time. Our only job is to notice.

THE TRUTH IS A NIMBLE LITTLE CREATURE by Wendy Videlock

Gratitude, too.
The only flippin’ truth
is everything moves
 
says the moon, hovering
over every mantra,
every sparrow,
 
every dollar, every
Congo, every nation,
every little good intention.
 
The more difficult the world
the greater the imperative
toward blame,
 
toward distraction,
toward impossible heights
and humble strings
 
of twinkle lights.
My love, let us vow
that through the winter
 
we shall pause by the river
where below the frozen surface
surely tiny fish are feeding.
 
Let us make a practice
of coming to bear
the weather,
 
of gathering by the fire,
of reading to one another
as the sparrow wears
 
her feather, as the moon
resolves to move,
as the body knows
 
surrender, as the leaves
believe September,
as rhyme succumbs
 
to reason, as the pause
to remember
descends upon the season.