just a speck

Is anyone out there anymore? I know I have been absent. I keep thinking its time to let this little experiment go. Sending these words out into the electronic cosmos. But I keep it here for some reason. I remember telling a friend who recently started their own blog, that the reason I did it was to force me to formulate my opinions in a clearer way. Nothing helps me do that better than writing them down with the knowledge that someone else will read it and will want it to make sense.

I recently finished reading Weight: The Myth of Atlas & Heracles. Of all our book club reads, we discussed this the least. I am not sure why. It may have had to do with the fact the we had not all seen each other in quite a while and so our usual chit chat went on for much longer. I don't think it was from lack of discussion material the book gave us. I read this book at a time where I am not feeling myself. Thoughts are clicking around in my head and not settling easily these days. I am not holding up the world, but a little mystified about how to navigate it. Winterson's book is brief, funny, witty, and graceful. She accomplishes a lot with an economy of words. She tickles at ideas without being heavy handed. How we bear our burdens, how we take on burdens we could just let go of, how to relinquish control with grace, grace under pressure, what we learn from consequences, how little we understand patience. All these thoughts reel through this book. Maybe they just reel through me and I am superimposing them.

I realize, rereading what I have wrote, that I used the word 'grace' multiple times. When I was little grace was a word for princesses, in my teen years it was about trying to find God. It seems to me now that grace is what Atlas did. He held the world carefully so that we would not fall off, and in this book, when it was time to walk away, he did so, without looking back, and without causing so much as a tremor on this ball of blue spinning through the universe.