"Non-squad Goals"

I joked about this on Twitter. One of my friends on there posted this .gif:

And I responded to it, and reposted it myself with the joke "non-squad goals."

Partly because I don't really have a "squad," as much as I would kind of like to (though maybe at nearly 50, one is too old for that sort of thing, I don't know). And partly because events of the larger world have made this sort of thing seem much more attractive to me than being IN the world:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree - WB Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.


WB Yeats reading his own poetry! The first one - the Lake Isle of Innisfree - is the one that kind of inspired this post.




But yeah. Part of it is, the immediacy of tending bean-rows and watching over bees would take a person out of the ugliness of the world: having something that is so immediately useful (I presume that without the beans produced by the beanrows, the speaker will not get to eat) to do is necessary and important, and makes you forget other things.

(That may be part of my distress; the way I earn my living is in many ways so removed from the actual kind of useful work farmers and the like do....)

And part of it is being out in a place where there's beauty. And being alone. I don't know that I could literally be a hermit (though maybe, with no access to "news of the world," I could be - I mostly need other people to ground me when I get overwrought about things but if I don't HEAR those things...)

I don't know. I'm in one of those moods where I'd like to build a big blanket fort and hide in it but I know that wouldn't work....