Autumn mulch

He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual FuckShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse --the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart.
--Kiran Desai, in The Inheritance of Loss.

I am following Ingmar Bergman's work schedule: up early, tea, write for an hour and a half (or two); walk; tea and breakfast, write for an hour and a half (or two). Done. Then everything else in life.

I took the pocket camera with me on my walk this morning, between writing sessions. I had just been exploring, in a poem that isn't done yet, delusion. I'm moving toward a novel, but I'm warming up with poetry. The sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart was on my mind, and I was thinking about the Boddhisattva Vow: "Delusion is inexhaustible; I vow to end it." I was thinking that I can't take that vow, because although delusion is one of the causes of suffering, it's also wonderfully entertaining, and it lives close to imagination and creation and that mulch Desai is talking about. So I would have to modify the vow: Delusion is inexhaustible; I vow to appreciate it. As I marveled at the tiny prisms and shadows cast by morning sun on the dewy fallen leaves, (more beautiful delusion, more mulch-in-progress) I found I had to photograph it.

I'm taking a break from comments, so I'm turning off Comments for now. I hope that doesn't seem unfriendly. I am very grateful for comments when they come, but I feel it's only fair, if I'm not leaving any, that I shouldn't receive them. For a while. In seeking balance. Barrioboy made a very good case for me not turning off comments. So here they are. On again. But I won't be commenting as much--at least for a while.