The only time that's real is now

I am two days into a three-day workgroup meeting. Which is to say: perhaps tomorrow night or the next day regular blogging will recommence. The meeting has been difficult and at times frustrating, but very fruitful and actually quite wonderful--if that combination makes sense to anyone but me. Tonight after work and a Seventh Step meeting, I ate moussaka, dolmas, and lamb chops with two dear friends--women I both love and admire. And now I am full in every sense.

Which brings me to my explanation of the title of this blog.

"Now more than ever," I know is assumed by many to be a sort of rallying cry. Which I suppose it is in one sense. But the title actually comes from the sixth stanza of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

I am not a huge fan of the Romantics (though Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us" deserves its own post some day), but Keats is a breed apart. The line "Now more than ever seems it rich to die," isn't morose; it's about being so full--the moment being so perfect--that you could just end on that note. (I'm not doing it justice with my labored prose, I know.)

I've been given the rare gift of feeling, presently, like I am doing exactly the sort of work I should be doing and living exactly the life I should be living. If I could change anything, I wouldn't change anything. Not even the rain.