It's hard to readjust from our full full weekends to weekdays when C goes off early to work and I'm facing the blank computer screen. This morning I made myself coffee and made substantial progress on the essay about Alan. I worked until the tears came, and then I blinked them away, surprised that I still had so much feeling after we've been split up for 14 years and he's been dead for three.

I suck at transitions, shifting gears, moving on. Look, it's even hard to say good-bye to the weekend and start over although there are things I love about my work life too. I know life is change; it's just hard for me to do it. There's a part of me that's absolutely fixed and immutable. I still love everyone I ever loved, no matter what has happened. I could say something dramatic like "Soul marriages know no divorce" (which I've typed three times here, and then deleted, because it sounds so ridiculous) but be that as it may, in the real world, of course everything is always shifting. Still, (and this is not necessarily a recipe for mental health,) there's a way in which emotions are preserved in amber inside me, like the prehistoric mosquitoes stored in hardened Jurassic sap that reconstructed a whole lost world in that movie that was so scary I ended up spending half of it out in the lobby with a couple of ten-year-olds.

And of course relearning the steps of intimacy--like riding the proverbial bicycle--brings it all up again. Right this moment I am trying to master the part where you come so closely together your souls touch--and then you come apart to live your separate lives. Both steps are important, like the opening and closing of wings, or inhaling and exhaling, or the contractions of a woman's vagina in orgasm or childbirth.

I am trying to relearn that because Saturday was a day of extraordinary closeness, vitality and intimacy, and Sunday was a day of cleaning house and taking a psychic step back. Both are good and necessary. I'm just so much more comfortable with one half of the equation than the other.

We went to see "Argonautika" last night--it was held over at the Berkeley Rep--another gorgeous, huge, Mary Zimmerman production, mythic and contemporary all at once. I loved her version of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," which I saw several years ago at Zellerbach, and which moved and changed me Among many other things I love her chutzpah--like that of Julie Taymor, another idol--to put her big fresh woman's vision up on the stage, intimate and archetypal, physical and spiritual all at once.

And Saturday night, after our lovely, knee-shakingly intimate afternoon, we went to see Rebecca Riots, an all-women's folk trio at The Frieght & Salvage, a local club. Eve decker, Andrea Pritchard, and Lisa Zeilor, on guitars, vocals, mandolin, percussion and a little harmonica, singing original songs about spirituality, politics and love--and sometimes, at their best, all three at once. Delicious and inspiring, they brought my energy back from the sexual whirlpool down to earth, where there's homelessness and environmental crises and not just all this love love love stuff.

I got to play tennis with G this weekend also--he's back on his feet again after trouble with his ankles. Exercise is the best anti-depressant for me--though Prozac helps too. I've been slowly getting back into shape, one step forward, one step back, and Saturday I felt strong and clear, blood pumping, legs nimble. I even jumped rope. Sunday of course I was tired and my butt hurt.

Today, several rejection slips--one from Poetry magazine, (why am I sending stuff there, anyway?) and one from one of the places I sent the children's stories. I'm trying to develop the discipline to just turn around and stuff the pieces into new envelopes and send them out again without getting emotionally involved in the process. Easier said than done.