The thing about being a base line depressive, rather than an episodic one, is the weather conditions are relentlessly predictable. I’m thinking about this as I wrestle with another new day and the beginning of a new week, and I feel, as I often do, that I can’t go on.

So, I try and keep it simple and kind and practice what I preach. It’s just a precious little day, I say… a little day in my little life and I can make it through. And because it is so the same, and yet not the same, I find myself thinking about repetition and how over and over again I make the same moves. Every morning is a shock. Every morning I struggle mightily on the hook of waking up. Every morning I say no and life says yes.

In May 2015 I wrote this on Facebook:

Mornings take it out of me
The poems don’t work anymore

I’d like to wake up different
Like women in shampoo commercials
Especially the ones they shoot in Greece
I’d like to throw the shutters open
On that salty, blue, white world
And raise my face up to the sun

Here, in the Kindness of a London bedroom
I wake up wrestling with each new day
Watched over by Leonard The Dog

It describes a repetitive experience, in that it looks like this every morning. It is simply, just like this. And still, every time is new. This is the point I am groping and fumbling with in this postcard. Every time is new… those of you who are kind enough to read me will know I do return to the Morning Theme. Maybe I’ll always be writing riffs about mornings. Maybe the break of day is my muse.

I titled this postcard, The Beat Goes On, partly as a bow to my home/dance group that goes by the same name. And because the beat does go on, until it doesn’t for each of us… we go on doing the things we do, rolling on through life as life moves through us.I am grateful beyond measure to have washed up on the shores of tenderness and found a lot of human wreckage there. I am in good company. I am broken and whole. And the beat goes on, as my heart pumps life through my system and I fall through these days that are faster than they seem.