For Virgo this week: It's Soul-Searching Season: a good time to go in search of your soul. To aid your quest, I'll offer a few lines from "A Few Words on the Soul," a poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. "We have a soul at times," she says. "No one's got it non-stop, for keeps. Day after day, year after year may pass without it. For every thousand conversations, it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence. It's picky: our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick. Joy and sorrow aren't two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined. We can count on it when we're sure of nothing and curious about everything. It won't say where it comes from or when it's taking off again, though it's clearly expecting such questions. We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too." (Translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.)

The post-funeral-trip case of shingles and trip the ER, that was a last straw of some kind. I’ve gone quiet and want to be. Aa finds this very upsetting, and we’ve come to that impasse I knew we would eventually: I am needful of a lot of time filled with nothing, alone. Not always a loner and not essentially; I made three humans and would have kept doing that if possible, so there’s that. But those humans are trained to be alone-with-me. I don’t like the world much, not the human world hardly at all and I'm not big on horseflies either, so there’s a kind of space of quiet between, on the one hand, talking and all similar human noise-making activities (meeting at work and jet skis sum it up, both pointless and annoying as fuck), and on the other hand nature in extremity (think endless months of fucking snow, ugh), and that quiet perfect place between is a nice spring day with nothing at all in it except maybe a book. And the book is a novel in which nothing happens except people think shit like this, about the interminability of workplaces and jet skis, and they too hate everybody and love everything, hate the world in its particulars and/but love an ice cream cone and warbler season. Aa wants to learn enough about baseball to go bet on it at the casino; I want to hold still so my soul will land on my jacket. I remind him that he met me when I assigned him Thoreau to read, I warned him, so it’s not like he didn’t know. True, he admits (but that doesn’t make it easy).