Fit-ness whims and a poem for rain

On Saturday, the Day of Rest, I used a bicycle pump to inflate an exercise ball that I bought for $5 in town. The ball is a sort of wan, pale purple, with the mysterious texture of silly putty, meaning that if I wanted to transfer the Sunday morning comics onto its exterior, I most definitely could. And I would, if it wasn’t something I planned to sit on. And though I propped my feet up on it this morning while I held myself in a plank (which answers the question I posed to myself earlier, standing in front of the fridge and rubbing my tuchus, “Why is my ass so sore??”), I wanted an exercise ball to take the place of my old wooden desk chair--a practice I had recently heard about from a wellness podcast, which awakened and delighted my inner biohacking nerd. This is the first time I am using the ball in earnest for that purpose, and I am sorry to report that it’s also probably going to be the last.

$5 bought me some wishful thinking.

And though the purple, putty-like, ball-as-chair is just a little too short for writing properly at this desk, and I’m getting a full body workout trying to pretend like everything is normal, I’m living inside a kind of a magical moment right now as the welcome sounds of rain sing out their percussive music from the sidewalk.

And though it may only be my imagination, the temperature in my balmy room seems to have dropped about 10 degrees. How long we have gone without the rain in this, our rainy season. A photographer told me yesterday that the heat advisory the government has imposed is not so much for humans, but for animals who lack the regulatory systems to deal with these unusual circumstances. The air outside has felt like the interior of a wooden sauna.

And though it’s all anyone can take about around here lately—“It’s so HOT!”…“I’m dying!”—I suppose that talking in excess is the way we deal with unpleasant things that are out of our control and which we all share the brunt of. Glancing at the radar tonight revealed that this little rainy system passing over us now is woefully transient and slender. Better to get the rain back in bouts so that the dry earth has a chance to acclimate to being drenched again, instead of one mighty gush. The gush, though, in every way, is what my biology, and likely the biology of this entire region, craves.

In honor of this long-awaited rainfall, I’d like to share a poem from my newest work, Un-Re-Quiet-Ed, and other Poems and Prose Poems. Pre-orders for the printed book unofficially start this Tuesday evening (!!) at Art Lab on the rooftop of the Art Ovation Hotel in downtown Sarasota (if the new rain might spare us a little window of grace).

More info to come!

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My Soul is as the Earth before the rain.

Now it is raining where once it was dry. And when the wind would blow, it would lift up all the dust to make it look like rain, though if you studied the sky long enough you would see that it was not.

The rain did not come for many long years. And the Earth was dry though she was hopeful; she never gave up hoping for the clouds to fill and drench the face that had grown so parched.

Never did the dry Earth think she had been forgotten, even when long years had passed without a drop.

“Our time will come,” the fronds would say.

“Our time will come,” the pines would say.

And when the sun would set over another day, dry as sin, the Earth would only smile to behold its regal display. Never once did the Earth stop expecting of the rain, but knew those dry days as a time to look around in splendid wonder. For the rain would change the fields and the sky, and even the sun would look a different way to them as it set, shining through a veil of wet and not a screen of dust.

Now it is raining where once it was dry, and the Earth has changed. No longer parched. No longer waiting. Her fronds and her pines and the dusty skies have all laid down their smiles and their hopes. No longer waiting for this great love, this wondrous rain, she has laid down to die and been born again, resplendent.