Sylvia's Journal

It is not a good idea to try to get sand out of your ear with your finger. By doing so I had packed it in hard. Someone was going to help me get it out but never got around doing it before I woke up. It was one of those complex and gauzy dreams that disintegrated as soon as I let daylight into my eyes. It left me wondering about the sand, another one of the five Chinese elements (minerals). Although harder than water, this element is, in the end subdued by the soft and flowing water. Or was the image of sand in my ears about something I am not willing (or able) to hear?

We had breakfast in bed for the third morning in a row. These slow paced and drawn out mornings are the best parts of my days off. But the vacation days are slipping fast through my hands, like wet sand. I am dreading the moment that the alarm has to be set again at 4:30 AM.

I am in limbo regarding my travels. I am supposed to leave in less than a week and have no ticket (not even an itinerary to look at), no passport with visas, no approvals and no designs. This is nothing new but on some days I have less tolerance for the overload of ambiguity. I have more trips, equally vague, on the horizon. They are like planes stacked for landing, all up in the air, none cleared to land.

We visited our friends the St. Johns yesterday to wish them a happy new year and give them their supply of Christmas mustard. They were off to a skiing weekend in Vermont. I can’t imagine alpine skiing anymore but they still do. We haven’t even tried cross country skiing yet despite the perfect snow for such an activity. We went for a late afternoon walk in Ravenswood and noticed the myriad of ski tracks, remembering our many ski outings there. Something is holding us back from bringing the skis out from the barn. Maybe it is better to have the fantasy that we can still ski than trying it out and discover we can’t.

We have been rather negligent on exercise since the winter started. There are weeks that go by with us mostly sitting in front of a computer. To start the new year I brought the rowing machine that we picked up at a yard sale last summer up from the basement, where it got no use. It now sits in my cleaned out office. I am combining a 30 minute row with a 30 minute Dari (Farsi) lesson which makes the rowing less boring and me more concentrated on the Dari lesson. I hope to enhance the taped lessons with a real teacher sometime soon. That way I will be more clued in on the conversations around me when I am back in Afghanistan, a trip planned for later this year.