Storms, Plath, The I-Ching, and More Weight Lost

Storms are interesting creatures.  Tension builds and builds in the atmosphere until it has to be released.  Then, when it does, there are some explosions and wind and things get pushed around a lot faster than they usually would.  But then peace returns and the birds are chirping as if nothing ever happened. Life goes on and nobody blinks an eye.  I don't know why I like dark skies in the early morning when there should be light.

I am about to go to the gym right now but thought I should say a small hello since I haven't written anything but poems for awhile.  Gonna ride through the tornado-potential-storm and hope the power stays on there.  It's a great feeling waking up lighter.  I'm down to 211 pounds now; that's 38 pounds down and 46 to go.  My short-term goal was 210 pounds by May 1st. Almost there with 17 days to go. One day at a time, one pound at a time- Fataholics anonymous.

I am reading Ariel by Sylvia Plath right now and find it intense, intelligent and a little macabre.  She wrote several poems everyday before her death by suicide in 1963, according to Robert Lowell, who wrote the forward for the book.  As I read, I see she had a masterful way with words that express her pain beautifully and concisely.  Expressing and facing pain through poetry is a great way to become purged of it, especially when you're going through challenging periods of your life.  She, however, appears to have had no intention of becoming free of it but instead, seems surrendered to it from the get-go as if taking her own life was already a by-gone conclusion.  Anyway, I feel for her suffering and pray she is in a better place right now.  As for me, I am expanding my influences beyond all the lyric writing that I was brought up on and Plath's Ariel has been a great place to start.  

I threw the I-Ching yesterday for the first time in several years and remembered how I really liked it.  It is a conservative and somewhat eccentric oracle that sometimes seems a little more tight-lipped than my sometime impetuous personality.  Still, it strives to enlighten the user and make he or she a better human being.  I do think it stresses society a little too much for my comfort as I am strongly independent-minded and don't give much of a rat's ass about what society thinks about me.  Still, as a divination tool, it gives one insight about what kind of energies one will be dealing with in life and you can't ask for much more than that from an oracle, in my humble opinion.