Dear lord, I may have had it. This last month has been more than I could've envisaged. We're still weeks away from the complete film and days from setting up the next project. I've finished the last of three releases at work. Reconnected with old friends, mostly online. Turning proceeds apace. Still there's no ribbon to wrap this day with.

Spent some part of this evening waiting for Jason outside of his building. He's in the same building that Michael Kinsley is in and I could see Kinsley in his office clearly from where I stood. He's leaving Slate to tend to his poor health. He was packing tonight. Slowly moving from the bookshelf to box. I felt sad and eerie watching him. Jason came out so that we could walk through the cool rain and smell the sodden trees. It was a relief to have him near. We talked about a million things. I listened too, feeling nostalgic for the times we spent when we first met each other - wandering over Washington at night - both of us at loose ends and too alive to sleep.

When we returned, Jason mentioned that Kinsley had hundreds of books outside of his office, all up for grabs. He suggested that I go up but I hesitated - Kinsley was still there and it felt like an intrusion. After hemming and hawing, I went upstairs. A calm man was stacking the books in the hallway, looking at them one at a time. He said he felt like a kid in a candy store. He left with just two books after searching through the last stack Kinsley dropped off. I looked through the books and picked about a half dozen, stopping to smile at Kinsley before lugging them back to my office.

I am jammed full with feeling - stay away from me with pins... I feel impatient and fretful and tired like a small child. I want to stare, just stare - watch rain slide down windows, be silent. Or work. This work right now is great for clearing my mind, forces me to be communicate effectively. But what of work that shapes one's life? I could stand lugging those pumpkins back and forth across the field again. cold air in my lungs and tired, heaving muscles. Clean tired. Instead I'm stewing, I can feel it.

Tomorrow Dan and I will meet to finalize budget details for this next project. I'm hedging on asking for what I want. What's it worth to coordinate and to make sure things are as they should be? What's it worth to photograph a ceremony. It's looking more and more like I will be turning in the ceremony... Another quake - insides clashing against one another.

We turned two nights ago. First there was zikr. Breathing perfumed air into a cyclone - shaped into Ross and a woman whose name escapes me and then around the circle. Then up again for the careful spacing and constant maneuvering of the turn. There were around a dozen people to fit in a fairly large room. Each of us taking up scads of space. The point of dignity is finally driven home to me. That it makes sense to allow each person their space. Not that I have the lesson down, by any stretch of the imagination.

While I turn, I imagine my heart growing strong through the axis of my body. Unnerving when I misstep. I struggled a lot with balance Monday night. Thinking I had it nailed, some part of me would wander out of the centrifugal motion to break my moving meditation into separate pieces, leaving me surprised and grimly focused on returning to the turn.

The point of this work, this absurd, graceful and enigmatic work, is to toughen one's heart for life. I am an inveterate softy. Having been exposed to senseless violence and it's aftermath as a child, I swore off it and kept swearing off it until it actually meant something, all this swearing. And now that I've got that out of the way, it's time to keep going past the point of comfort. Life is so vast and I'm so curious - tough is my only hope for enduring. So I'll practice and probably will be in the Sema this year, not photographing it like I thought.

I've wanted to write about the days spent concocting the plan for the Pumpkin Piper. How little clues as to what was possible led to strategies and plans with friends. How lists were formed and torn up at the last minute and moments built into moments that required more strategy than I had planned. But that will have to wait, it's time to go home.