“Would you consider what I call the “inner eye” which opens for some of us, though not always when we want it or expect it – would you consider the inner eye as one of the sensory nerves?”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels

Too early, awake. Thinking about my poem, workshopped twice within this week. Had an idea about reordering the stanzas. Thought, I’ll do it when I get up. But, I knew the impulse would be gone later, so I turned on the light and opened the poem and made the changes and was glad. Now I am extra sleepy from having risen so early. But this also allowed me a very early walk with my friend and our dogs, and we met at the old hospital grounds for a long wander. So many wildflowers and weeds in bloom along the trails and the other side of the Charles as truly lush and lovely as my side of the Charles. I have swerved and shifted my reading and listening quite a bit this past week. Gave up on The Luminaries. Tried and tried and it didn’t grip me. Tuned back in on audible to Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, and I’m finding it quite compelling. She reads it herself. PLUS, reading at bedtime the hard cover copy of Lucia Berlin’s short story collection that I’ve had for years and am finally digging into and loving it: A Manual for Cleaning Women. PLUS, I bought a new biography by Hermione Lee of the English novelist (whom I haven’t read!) Penelope Fitzgerald. But I’m a fan of Hermione Lee’s biographies. Summer at Oxford, my senior year of college, I got to take a seminar with her on Elizabeth Bowen. I will always remember sitting with her one July day on the fine mown green of Trinity College to review my paper on the Bowen novel, Death of the Heart. I remember none of her critical comments about the paper except her urging me to make the revisions and then publish it. Quite an intimidating thought to me at the time. I graduated and decided to go to graduate school to study psychology and become a counselor and never did the revisions, of course. Two roads diverged. . . .