Weekend's past. We face another week of days.
Pond still spills, leaks. But it holds.
The llama pasture increasingly is flooded from this. The meander from the overflow becomes a wetland.
Surprise Valley Sally visited yesterday. We had such a wonderful time, or I did, anyway. Catching each other up on lives and events. For hours. But not long enough. Never enough.
Saturday night: rain. Rain most of yesterday. But this morning (it's 4:50) I see a sky full of stars, and I realize my bones don't hurt. It really is a barometer thing, then.
Coherent remembered dreams have been remarkably rare this past month or two. Coincidentally I feel almost stable, almost ready for the world. I really felt like the dreams reflected some ferocious mental repair work.
***
My cat Leo's pitiful cries awoke me at 3:30--he escaped out last night during last call for dogs--and brought me out of weird dreams I might not have recalled otherwise: At a memorial mass for--Ted Kennedy?--while the other attendees prayed quietly I scurried up and down the pews picking up garbage people had left from an earlier service, as in a movie theater after the crowd leaves. It wasn't my job to do this; I just wasn't comfortable kneeling in trash. Then a lengthy dream of maps--topo-scapes coupled with voiceover history narrative. I think this may have been triggered by Dana's map page. Actually, the entire series of dream imagery probably jumped off from my study of his book as a completed work yesterday afternoon before Sally arrived; the collaged images there juxtaposed have a powerful impact. The final dream bit, just before waking, was bizarre--a National Geographic-type documentary to do with a population of small Chinese people, a mysterious community long shrouded in secrecy, walled-off, locked away from the world. For centuries they were used exclusively as mine laborers and had evolved extremely short legs and a forward-curving backbone that kept them in a permanent stoop to better negotiate the tunnels. Our cameras and personnel trying to get past guards and great wooden doors in a mountainside to the city of these workers--hmm. Something Tolkein-y there.
***
But we're in the waking world now. 5:15 and the sky brightens. My mind does not. I'm torn between making another cup of tea and trying for another hour or two of shut-eye.
The moon's waning crescent is centered now in my southeast-facing window. The sky behind is a deep and luminous blue.
...
The moon's moved out of frame, sky greening and whitening, threadbare clouds visible, purple-gray, coming apart at the joins, moving south.
...
5:40 the geese awaken. Two pairs fly past honking, excited, to one another. Greta, who had been awake with me these hours, impatient for me to come away with her Somewhere, finally takes to the windowsill to watch the world come to.
...
6:05 the purple clouds move south and west and north, joining and flattening, with the lower fringes and wisps and frayed edge going pink-orange, glowing like the mantle in a camper's lamp.
Clouds thicken and link. Sitting up, I'm sleepy. Lying down, I wake and watch. Stomach growls.
Out there songbirds stretch their sweet-reeded throats.
...
6:48 we're officially Up. Dogs out. Cats at food. I shut myself up alone and eyes-wide-open now I see where the sun's been shining full-on just the other side of the ridge, but we remain in shadow, just the brilliant reflection of its happy light off the eastern cloud-wisps. Won't be long.
Magpies arrive, with their odd ripped-taffeta calls.
I assemble a brown breakfast--tea, toast, dates. Pull forward the keyboard.
...
7:22 sun full in my face.
7:48:16 AM 
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