post-election

There is a hollowed-out feeling that I've only ever felt through reading.  It's like there is a vegetable peeler contoured perfectly to the shape of my stomach, and it is working working working its blade against my flesh.  Why, you ask, would this feeling be so pleasurable as to be among one of the very best sensations I can imagine?  I have no idea.  But it does seem like when it happens, when the words begin to carve at my belly, I have a sense of getting closer to something primal.

Some piece of the very basic places where I began:  My little girl fingers, thick and clumsy, my little girl knees, bruised and knobby, my little girl heart, fresh and plump and eager.  

I read The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo this morning.  Cover to cover in one great big heavy sigh.  It is one of those books.  It began in the very first page to work at my stomach and by the end I was crying. Not because it is sad--though it is--but because it was so right.

Then I found these images, created by theatre artists Watoku Ueno and Makoto Takeuchi for the Long Island City Community Library in Queens.  They are beautiful, don't you think?  Ah, happy hollowed-out day.