Tides, times, summer writing...

Last night I woke up with heat around me like a thick blanket and I thought, it's going to storm.  The air was too Florida-like to avoid lightning and sure enough, sometime around 3am I woke to a huge flash outside the window, the first of many, and then low tremble and growl for the next hour or more.  There is something so satisfying about sleeping through storm like this.  As a child I remember feeling so safe when I'd wake in the night and hear a thunderstorm.  And last night was the same. Not that I hadn't been feeling safe, but there's an extra layer of weather around the house, around the dark room, around my body as it lays beneath the sheet listening for the distance between flash and thunderclap.

It was a temporary break in the gathering heat.  And I woke up this morning thinking of the word 'gathering' and how I seem to be using it a lot lately when I write.  Yesterday was the first session of Tidemarks and Timelines, Fawzia Kane's Poetry School course and I'd signed up months in advance, looking forward to writing about water and sky.  On my way home on the train yesterday, just as the sky was gathering the day to a close, I thought about darkness and light, about how I wanted to write about darkness and the comfort in it, about night.  So it was apt timing to wake in the dark and hear storm last night.  Around 5am I even got up, or rather, took a moment to find my glasses, heave the cats off of me and crawl out of bed to the window, to see light paling the sky to a whitish-grey like chalk sometimes can look.  But the storm had gone and the sky was too full of cloud to get a good look at any thing.  So I went back to sleep briefly and when I woke up, and gathered the energy to get up, I came here to the screen, to put down words, to start thinking about the themes we will explore in the course, but also to continue thinking about other themes in my writing.  So, here's a step toward that...