three

I'm building a house. 

Today was perfect weather for squaring out and setting concrete forms, but I made gate handles instead. The weather proved dry and mostly sunny low forties - perfect for drawing, cutting, carving, and sanding outside, my preferred location.

The first set proved too heavy - elaborately carved four foot sections hand cut with 3 cross sections attached with dowels all cut from a red cedar struck by lightning and split into the zodiacal sign Aries. Curses my incredible creativity. 

This second set these started as a Torii gate about an inch thick (eyeball cut with a chainsaw) and about 1.5 - 2 foot long. Modest. functional. But as I was trimming the outside edge, the circ saw clipped off a side and poof, these stunners came to "rest" in the graveyard of earth from whence they came. C'est la vie.

Meanwhile, in my head...

All my past personal experiences of gossip have been based on a mental image of a "you" rooted in a superior identity of me. My ego only ever imagines a "you" through an image it has created for you, and in turn imposes on you. Imagination - by nature - is vacuous, insatiable, and never ending. A promise of satisfaction that, when acquired, is simply met with another demand. Madness. 

My antidote: Starve my ego. Other people's stories are not mine to share. They are not currency to feed imagined insecurities. Other's lives are sacred scripts meant to enhance human connection, making those people both knowable and worth knowing.