From my journal for Saturday, May 13
So much color in the world! Flowering trees — dark pink flowers with dark red leaves, white flowers so thick they hide the leaves — alas I saw no bees today. Tulips, so many varieties from the simple cup — two color, open with striped petals, double flowers. Then all the wild things enriching the grass: dandelions, violets, lots of plants with a variety of foliage. At the same time I’m aware that the lack of bees is a disaster, that the overwhelming abundance of white flowers may signal a tree getting ready to die. There are trees which have only a few wide open leaves and mostly bare branches. They have worried me. Now it looks like they are filling out, but again I worry that the tree may be near its end. I look at Mocha and know that she is on her way out, and feel how much I love her. Saw the waning crescent without any trouble, I just looked up and there it was. I feel like I am in the place Etty describes: Things are both very good and very bad at the same time.
Note: Etty Hillesum is a Dutch Jew who died in Auschwitz in 1943. Her complete journals and letters were published in 2002. The quote about good and bad is in a letter to a friend, An Interrupted Life, p 254
Didn’t say how odd I felt watching A Man Called Otto in a friend’s apartment. I was in her recliner and Mocha didn’t come near me, ended up on the couch. My friend was at her computer playing a game. I felt so strange. Maybe a sense of a lot of beings in a room together and not connecting. A sense of not being met.