Too bogged to blog

Does the holiday season hit everyone this way? Like a speeding wall?

My only salvation this season (and I mean that in a religious sense) is reading poetry. Every morning, a little bit from a favorite book, and a few deep breaths. And then the day goes by in a freeway blur. Here's a poem that made me breathe this morning:

Of Being
-- by Denise Levertov

I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery: