While I haven't been here, I have been here.

Busy with a new school year, all of my energy is focused outward to students and Emily.

This is good. I am better when busy. I am happy when I am busy, even when that exhausts me in other ways.

Many things don't change, for despite my fearlessness in many aspects of my life I remain a creature who needs stability. I struggle against the dailiness that I need, but don't want to need. My rebellions become small, nearly imperceptible to outsiders. Yet they are there. I nurse those tiny coals, keeping them in my mouth like Raven.

I change my sheets every Saturday and sprinkle lavender oil over them. I patch the duvet that should, by rights, be at the end of it's life...but I keep it. It is grounded in a different time. I ignore the feathers that creep out and into my hair every night.

I make small steps into a social life. I befuddle and dazzle others who have no idea what the whirling dervish I become means, and I am unable to explain my need to be liked, to be understood. To be Known.

I fret about the research I am not getting done, but console myself with the quality of my teaching and service to my department.

Summer is easing. The dreams which crowded me in the summer have let up enough for sleep.

The cicadas were singing tonight. I find the buzzing cacophony soothing.

I age. I realize that I know nothing, and that the totality of my experiences are so small.  My body betrays me in small, intimate ways.

I wrap myself in decorations and continue on. There is no other direction. Backwards is my Ragnarok and I have been exiled.