Post Two
I know I keep playing the melancholy, rather haunting medieval Yule music because it fits. Fits the temperature, the hunker-down & survive mentality, the overriding quest for heat here, with the malfunctioning central heat. No, there's no snow drifted deep outside, & this cold won't last but a few days more. Still, numb fingers are numb fingers, & no, I can't type with gloves on (I tried). I catch myself with shoulders chronically hunched in a pre-shiver, & have to remind myself to relax. I know with my conscious mind that it's not medieval Europe, that I'll have a bath before spring.

Still, what this obsession that takes up so much space in my mind (what shall I bake to justify the oven's being on; how can I cover ALL the glass when the sun is not directly on it (except for the window I have to sacrifice so that the plants in the dining room can receive some light even after the morning sun moves on); what additional layers can I wear; how can I make myself leave the warm bed to make the heat run for a bit in the middle of the night (& STILL I got up this morning to find the thermostat needle off the left end of the gauge, somewhere in the 40s)?) is teaching, reminding me, is of how very hard it is for anyone in a subsistence, survival mode to do anything else. Impressing upon me what a true miracle it is that anyone so situated still creates. Anything a homeless person, a refugee, a primitive farmer, a beggar produces that transcends, even marginally, necessity, anything of beauty, is transcendant. Because in the most literal sense they have transcended their conditions. Because, evidently, that really is a basic need, too: to do more than just survive, given the tiniest opportunity; to create, to express oneself, to form something that is more than just bare breathing, eating, sleeping.