I was in Albany this afternoon taking photos of the refugee kids, and I felt quite old. I was hauling my camera bags around, and I just felt spent. Ali, my friend, came up to me and asked me if I was all right. I was surprised, he has never asked me that before.

I asked him what he meant?, and he said I looked tired, sad, he had never seen me look like that before. I drove home to Cambridge, and Maria came back from her belly dancing class, and she said I looked tired and perhaps I could skip blogging tonight.

I can’t do that, I said, I am loyal to my blog but I’ll wait until morning to put up the beautiful photos I took of the RISSE kids in Albany, I can at least do that.

I remember a friend who told me he was tired once, he called to tell me that, and then he died the next morning, he was  young and strong.

Perhaps I am still sick, I thought, perhaps I crashed today and the black dog came to sit beside me. I do that, when there is trouble I am on fire, and then, when nobody i looking, I pull inside like a turtle. I am up so much, I fall hard when I come down. I suppose I am quite predictable.

I read this part of a Hafiz poem:

Since we first met, Beloved,

I have become a foreigner

To every world

Except that one

In which there is only You

Or – Me.

Now that the heart has held

That which can never be touched

My subsistence is a blessed 

Desolation

And from that I cry for more loneliness.

Time for solitude and sleep.