Being patient with myself right now. Putting projects on indefinite hold consciously and without guilt. Considering so much – and maybe for the first time – not grasping for answers.

A man wrote a book about time management. He outlines a lifetime as 4000 weeks. Running yesterday, my attention kept turning to the nearly full moon. The average lifetime (in the West) is allotted 1000 moons. And I have lived through 620 of them, but noticed so few.

The Wolf Moon took full form last night. I read that the it is called that because wolves howl more at the start of a new year. As winter sets in. The nights are already getting shorter, but earth is still getting colder.

My student is researching wolves for a role I wrote for him. He tells me that wolves howl as a form of grieving. I don’t know where he read this, or if it is true, or how we could ever know if it is true. It does make sense to me. The sound tugs up a fear for us because we recognize the vulnerability inherent (probably a prerequisite) in grief.

Loss. Aloneness. It is all a matter of perception, really. The recognition of our disconnection. Nothing is really lost. Except perhaps the illusion of having had. What do we ever have/own/possess? We experience, and cannot possess experiences. We can’t even possess the memory of experiences, because memories are also impermanent: morphing and reassembling, like metal shavings following a magnet.

I am formless at the moment. Even memories of my former selves are formless. I’ll run now and something within me will howl at the moon. Something in me will change shape, pulled by the earth’s magnetic field. Every cell in motion, rearranging, experiencing the morning before dawn.