I sprayed my mom's bike chain in WD-40 this afternoon, pumped the tires full of air, did this in our backyard, in the sunshine. The sun beaming, making everything brighter, more brilliant. The noticably (after being in a towering city) gigantic blue sky and the white clouds floating through it were made especially brilliant by the intensity of the light.

This little light of mine, I am going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

The chain already is looking a lot better than the rusty state it was in earlier today, and now the bike is in the backseat of my mom's car, waiting for the car ride we will embark on tomorrow. You have to leave or lose something to fully (or, at least more so) appreciate the absent object. Distance allows for either objectivity or nostalgia. A weird mixture of both, with nostalgia being the really flavorful ingredient in the mix, the cinammon you know was thrown in there. And there are things about urban life I miss, and I am already preparing to miss the breezy indolence that being in Northern Virginia allows. I appreciate them all, am grateful for each setting, and with each shift in location, I know that the slight fit of nostalgia felt for the departed place, the ebullient sadness is a sadness felt not only for the just left place but a sadness steeped in premonitions, the awareness that there will be more left places, that all of these are just preparations, ways of getting ready for when at some point there will be a leaving of all places, a residing in no places. And this is there always in departures, and so I take joy in the fact that I can will my departures, know the results of them, get on a bus and in four or five hours time end up in a place I know, a place I wanted to go back to, and that I can just as easily leave that place (at least, physically) for another place. Leaving a psychic space though is another matter and that too, is part of the joy in shifting around through physical spaces, learning that you can shift from place to place and yet will still occupy the same psychic space - and this, this seeming permanence of thought, is the source of joy in departures, that maybe there is a permanence to it all.