back from my walk in the woods

Poems are words that sit together in a peculiar fashion; they tell stories and make up thoughts but do so with a certain ease and flow that prose, while useful in its own right, can't match. There are days where the flow is poetic and others where it is prosaic. There are, of course, the jumbled alphabet days, too, but in general my mind opens its consciousness upon the day in either a poetic or a prosaic state. Today is definitely a poetic day.

Another way I connect with my mental state is in terms of oceanic moods, something that anyone who has lived next to a large body of water can probably understand. Some days there are waves, other days it's just a choppy mess of little waves whitecapping in the winds and other days it can be expansive and calm. The vocabulary used by people who live by, in and on the ocean to describe the water can just as easily apply to human moods: today my thoughts are flat and glassy.

On days like this I can sit and write code endlessly, but the prosaic frame of mind is more productive for that, I find, in terms of raw line count. Glassy, poetic days are better for communicating and visualizing the paths behind and in front.

The mounting backlog of email has been annoying me these last couple weeks, but today they appear as a wonderful opportunity to sit and write and connect with people. :)

It's also a holiday here in Alberta (and many other parts of Canada) so there's no school for the P-man and the streets are quiet. It all rather fits in nicely.