enthusiasm is contagious

The Mount! American Woman Authors! on Flickr.

O boos!
One of my best pals is in India and so I keep thinking of her and eating Indian food to feel close to her. This morning on writer’s almanac I learned that:

It’s the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). His roommate in college was the poet W.S. Merwin, who once woke him up in the middle of the night and read Yeats to him until dawn. After that night, Kinnell devoted himself to writing poetry in the style of Yeats. He eventually found his own voice as a poet, but he named all of his children after important figures in Yeats’s work.

This reminded me of a time I sat on the porch of friendship county and read Neruda’s poems about bicycles and the beauty of girls to SLS. Earlier that day we’d hiked a mountain or visited the home of a famous lady poet, I can’t recall which it was. Maybe we just walked around and smelled trees.

Lately J and I have been getting all teary with gratefulness, and feeling so tender is a strange way to walk around in the world, isn’t it? But it is also a real way to walk around. I am grateful for the abiding friendship I have with my lover, but also grateful for the abiding friendships I have had with women who make me laugh heartily, and women who encourage me to be alive in the moment. SLS is one, yes, but I wish to honor all of them for the ways that we grow old and we grow different, but our heart and minds can come again to a place of hello again, friend! And what has been happening?

One of the troubles that scholars have in parsing the relationship between ladies in earlier times is that ladyfriendships are sometimes so fierce and loving that this love could be misconstrued (or properly construed, depending on the ladies) as sexual. Letters are rife with passionate friendship. And hell yes, I say, to passionate friendship! It could fuel my heart and mind forever, amen.