Yes, there are always the feelings and the aching desire to hold them and keep them. To become one with them, to cherish them forever.
I apologise for the cliches, but they seem the closest to right words I could come up with.

There's this specialness to things, inside me there, that seems powerful yet fragile - powerful in desire for things, fragile in the face of the reality of life, the difficultly of holding on to things.

Maybe it's not so difficult, I've just never managed to spend the necessary time.

Keeping these things is difficult because it involves being able to stay with them enough to experience them and then turn them into the right words.

Maybe.

Then again, the round about ways of keeping them could be more important - the way that some art evokes these things just by being about lots of things rather than trying to hone in on this singular feeling.

It feels like this poem I read once that said something about the worm of feeling in the heart...It was a strange image, using a literal worm, but ended up being so powerful. I'm going to go find it.

Found. Read the whole thing and ended up touched less by the worm part than all the rest of it. Going to reproduce here because I really love it, and I could be wrong but I think Bob might like it as well. Or at least some things about it remind of her. Unable to find it online so will type it.

Middle of the Way

Galway Kinnell

1

I wake in the night,

An old ache in the shoulder blades.

I lie amazed under the trees

That creak a little in the dark,

The giant trees of the world.

I lie on earth the way

Flames lie in the woodpile,

Or as an imprint, in sperm or egg, of what is to be.

I love the earth, and always

In its darkness I am a stranger.

2

6 A.M. Water frozen again. Melted it and made tea. Ate a raw egg and the last orange. Refreshed by a long sleep. the trail practically indistinguishable under 8" of snow. 9:30 A.M. Snow up to my knees in places. Sweat begins freezing under my shirt when I stop to rest. The woods are filled, anyway, with the windy noise of the first streams. 10:30 A.M. the sun at last. The snow starts to melt off the boughs at once, falling with little ticking sounds. Mist clouds are lying in the valleys. 11:45 A.M. Slow, glittering breakers roll in on the beaches ten miles away, very blue and calm. 12 noon. An inexplicable sense of joy, as if some happy news had been transmitted to me directly, by-passing the brain. 2 P.M. From the top of Gauldy I looked back into Hebo valley. Castle Rock sticks into a cloud. A cool breeze comes up from the valley, it is a fresh, earthly wind and tastes of snow and trees. It is not like those transcendental breezes that make the heart ache. It bring happiness. 2:30 P.M. Lost the trail. A woodpecker watches me wade about through the snow trying to locate it. The sun has gone back of the trees. 3:10 P.M. Still hunting for the trail. Getting cold. From an elevation I have an open view to the SE, a world of timberless, white hills, rolling, weirdly wrinkled. Above them a pale half moon. 3:45 P.M. Going on by map and compass. A minute ago a deer fled touching down every fifteen feet or so. 7:30 P.M. Made camp near the heart of Alder Creek. Trampled a bed into the snow and filled it with boughs. Concocted a little fire in the darkness. Ate pork and beans. A slug or two of whiskey burnt my throat. The night very clear. Very cold. That half moon is up there and a lot of stars have come out among the treetops. The fire has fallen to coals.

3

The coals go out,

The last smoke wavers up

Losing itself in the stars.

This is my first night to lie

In the uncreating dark.

In the human heart

There sleeps a green worm

That has spun the heart about itself,

And that shall dream itself black wings

One day to break free into the black sky.

I leave my eyes open,

I lie here and forget our life,

All I see is that we float out

Into the emptiness, among the great stars,

On this little vessel without lights.

I know that I love the day,

The sun on the mountain, the Pacific

Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,

But I know I live half alive in the world,

Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

***

That poem is amazing to me. The way it perfectly balances all these things to make everything wonderful: mundane with profound, micro with macro, inspirational with sad. And just these piercing insights and beautiful images.

I think that if I write this on here I can own that feeling. Or if I print it in the perfect formatting and stick in in the perfect spot in my room. these days I think perhaps I look to outward things like that too much, as a direct response to my former exact opposite tendency. But it does seem to work often. It shouldn't, but it really does. I feel more at home in my room now that I've got a light that actually provides good light, and some pictures around the place, and a bit of organisation on bookshelves and floor space. I feel more at home at Jared's when I get there and clean it all myself. Then it feel like I can be there. These things I've always thought of as in truth internal things are so effected external.

When I click publish will all these feelings leave me because I'll feel like there right there on this blog for me to retrieve at any time? I'm going to go with yes; so, I have to take measures. This was supposed to be a measure, but it feels that more are required.