Tsundoku and as yet unnamed states of existence
My hands feel swollen and my mind caramelized and thick. A pressure on my lungs and my heart. The birds are singing again but I know they'll go silent soon. Once the air begins to shimmer, once the lid closes. There are plenty of places on earth where this is mundane, but acclimation matters.
It's Monday.
This weather won't break t'il Thursday.
The windows are opened now, to let air in before molecules and atoms heat up. The garden hose I punched full of holes spraying some relief. Forty minutes of trickling moisture. But my god do we need rain. Real rain. Sustained, heavy, an hours-long downpour to gorge the soil and feed the roots of the living.
The St-Lawrence river is at its lowest level in years. Docks lay stranded on the beach. I've rarely seen this landscape so parched and aching for water. The grass pricks and cuts when walking barefoot. It's almost hay, now. Horse feed. Yellow-filled greens, yellow like an oil slick spreading across the ocean.
I need to shower to cool my brain.
I need to walk with Watson before the renewed apocalypse.
After coffee.
It's only 06:19 AM.
“Tsundoku (積ん読) is a beautiful Japanese word describing the habit of acquiring books but letting them pile up without reading them.”
The Japanese create words for such subtle, ethereal concepts. I'm fascinated by the mind and outlook this requires. It means observing life from a viewpoint that's hidden to most of us. Because a word isn't trivial. Language is the reality that binds cultures together, the lens through which we're allowed to see, as a people and as individuals. An idea elevated to sounds and letters is an idea made flesh, a truth deemed worthy of communal understanding. Piling up books without reading them... such a beautifully fragile image. So many layers there.
Our western sensibilities never even thought of naming this most human of companionships.
Maybe we need new words to describe suspended states of existence. One for when our body slows as it braces against fire; another describing eyes that long for beauty amidst chaos.
And one for our whispered breath
when a dog sleeps as we gaze at the sky.
