Alina's Adventures

The month of March...

Flew past. The month of March beat its wings overhead in a migratory fashion and sought shelter elsewhere.

These days fly by so quickly it's as if time, itself, has chosen an alternate nesting ground. I can watch it pass, admire it's movement, make efforts to pull together a shrine to its moments. 

I've always been prone to this persistent tug to preserve those moments at the cost of full inhabiting them. As a child curled beneath the dogwood with her journal, thinking myself Harriet the Spy of Springtime Events, I remember the compulsion to record changing azalea colors, the scent of fresh bark, the way grass turned neon after rain.

The same inability to let time pass without remark.

The same urge (oh unquenchable urge) to make something more of the lovely singulars.

This hunger that leads me to the page, the photo, the collage, the trail, all of it, onward. 

 

A molehill is, in fact, a mountain to some living being. 

And a moment is a monument to this restless mother. I can't help saving what I love. Savoring it as we live it. Holding the words in my head for someone that might seek them later....

Bolted lettuce and border wars.

Lunch is a time for the King to survey garden business.

Reading about the South American children stranded between one border and another, I recognize the jagged edges of their lives. Too much thinking and ponderizing is apt to cut into the responsibility of weeding and tending. 

I let the lettuce bolt. 

Being born in Eastern Europe and raised in Alabama provides an upbringing in which the rules of the road are always in transition. The here and now is continuously juxtaposed against the here and there. The verb of me is hard to translate.

Truthfully, every immigrant and exile lives with the effects of displacement, separation, hunger, and anxiety. If the rules of the road are constantly fluctuating, this is because the the context itself shifts from one place to another, one country to the Other. Do we ask Pakistani Americans to feel like enemies of themselves?

Like a hobo on a high-speed train, the shifting contexts keep me from getting too comfortable- from sensing the ground beneath my feet as something solid, concrete, and reliable. 

I'm okay with this insecurity. I've adapted. Learned to love gardening despite knowing the soil can never be certain- always more metaphor than material to me. 

There are other things I've learned as an immigrant. Learn to upload photos and maintain a digital record of everything you treasure, everything you may be asked one day to leave behind. Plan to find yourself online one day should a panel of experts deem you unfit for the privilege of citizenship. Avoid getting attached to textures and landscapes. 

Never look back because the looking will demand you tell a story of what you saw- and this story will not make sense. In context.

Thoughts on shadows through a shutter.

A walk along the covered overpass to Arcadia Elementary.

Even Aristotle knew that darkness is defeated by that tiny shard of light that squeezes through a small hole in the closed window shutters. 

And that the image of any object standing in liminal space between sunshine and shadow projects itself on the wall of a room, reversed.

We mistake the projections of the camera obscura for something concrete. I guess I'm just not sure yet whether that is the willingness to entertain our own illusions is tantamount to self-delusion.

A nature walk with Diane Kappel-Smith.

Dutchman's breeches in Dublin, Ohio.

All the recent, rather immediate demands of a growing garden have kept me from reflecting on our trip to Ohio- from mining it for tiny kernels of insight.

But this morning, I found a crack, the kind that swells into a crevice, between the comings and doings.

As the kids worked on their book reviews, I flipped back through the photographs of our nature outings with the writings of Diane Kappel-Smith in the forefront of my mind. In retrospect, posting the photos alongside the text makes me feel as if Diane and I walked the woods together.

It's so much easier to write about the wonder and obvious beauty of nature than it is to acknowledge the extent to which it satisfies and cultivates a craving for fantasy. Surely I am not the only woman to have trudged through muddy trails with Thoreau at my side.

Today, I walk with Wintering in my head. Or, rather, I return and revisit under the electrifying influence of a particular writer who has more to reveal to me in all the things I have seen.

Walk with me. 

"I come back to the papery leaves, the spring beauties, the sun which reaches me here, now, unfiltered. The twigs, leaves, and flowers that are on their way are already formed, were made last summer and packed away in scales and sheaths; all they have to do is expand like balloons, and then their branch tips will begin their hurry to make more."

Diane Kappel-Smith

"Trees grown in the open are thicker of trunk because the wind has blown them, and they choose to thicken in the parts of themselves most stressed by their own bending. Trees in the dense woods where the wood can't push them are thin as wands".

I would make an exception for the dense, heavy hardwoods growing in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. Their trunks are as thick as houses, possibly because their location on the side of high altitude mountains demands heftiness as a form of hardiness for the snow-heavy Transylvanian winters and sharp mountainside winds. 

Of course, if American corporations have their way, these old trees will soon be logged to make fancy dining room tables for the rapacious consumers of Hollywood and Aspen. But I hope against hope that something happens to stop them.

BLOODROOT

The large white petals of the bloodroot plant radiate outward, but often only last for one day. One of the ways to recognize this plant is the leaf often looks like it wants to wrap itself around the flower. If you cut the stem or dig the root, it will bleed a bright red-orange juice.

"In these maples and birch and beech the branches reach out year after year, running skyward like the fingers of rivulets when water is poured on dry ground."

Critical Thinking Exercise on Diana Kappel-Smith review (PDF)
A little something I made for the Eldest and wanted to share.

YELLOW TROUT LILY

Trout Lilies like to keep their feet wet and are common, especially along river floodplains. There are both white and yellow species here. The six petals are usually recurved like this. The mottled leaves is a diagnostic character.

I love the way the leaves resemble purple tie-dyed shirts.

A golden goodbye whose shadow is even lovelier than its hue.

Love letter #121: The poetic life of the egg tooth.

Three eggs discovered at a rest area in Kentucky.

The last few lines from Gail Mazur's poem, "Evening", come to mind. The lines in which the elderly woman insists that she wants the blue eggs more than the promise of the bird tucked within them.

If it weren't for the specialized aptitude of the egg tooth, the baby bird might never emerge from the egg. The baby would remain a possibility rather than a probability. 

The egg tooth fascinates me. Lodged in my neural networks, waiting to morph into the perfect metaphor, I hold it back like a pawn piece on a chess board, knowing the perfect exchange will appear to those with the patience to see it. 

Chicks with wings that don't work, those baby birds, ensconced in the protective covering of the portable womb known more commonly as "egg". Since the beak and the claws of the chick are not fully developed and cannot penetrate the egg shell at the time when the chick is ready to emerge, the egg tooth plays it brief, dazzling role. 

Found only in emerging chicks, the egg tooth's purpose is brief and to the point; it serves only to assist the baby bird in breaking through the hard shell in the process known as "pipping".

For a chick, the cost of growing within the egg-womb is a decreased ability to absorb enough oxygen through the pores of its eggshell. Compelled by its natural wisdom, the oxygen-thirsty chick uses its egg tooth to peck a hole in the air sac located at the flat end of the egg. This sac provides a few hours worth of air, during which the chick breaks through the eggshell to the outside. 

Far from being a singular miracle, the egg tooth works in concert with a special muscle on the back of the chick's neck. This pipping muscle provides chicks with the strength to force the egg tooth through the inner membrane of the eggshell.

The chick hatches, leaving its shell behind. Soon it learns to open its mouth expectantly. Finally, a few days after hatching, the egg tooth falls off, its purpose exhausted. 

C.D. Wright admires the egg tooth in "Obscurity and Selfhood", a poem published in 1949. I like the poem so much that I can't bear to parse it, to surgically remove pieces and pretend any life can be left in the dissected corpse. So here it is, in it's entirety, in honor of the marvelous egg tooth.

OBSCURITY AND SELFHOOD

by C. D. Wright

Not far
from a college.
Nevertheless.
A man
living by himself

kept his fighting cocks in plain sight. Each had its own tether and
miniature shed and dish with embossed sobriquet. Their domestication
reserved for battle before the table. Gallus gallus domesticus. A young
male, a cockerel, my husband’s patronymic before the adoption. Some hens
are disposed to poach another’s egg. Once there were teeth. Given certain
conditions they could come back. If not a full set. Even now a breathing hole
has to be pipped for the offspring to break out. This is done with an egg tooth.
Not a true tooth. Love among the chickens involves a circle dance. He is
a wonderful dancer. It goes straight to her brain. Before and after they prefer
to wash off in dust. Ashes will work if no dust. If they aren’t forced into shedding
one another’s blood, they can live until their heart gives out.
The cock
the man
could not
resist
loving.
He withdrew
from
the ring.
Yet
relinquished.
To settle
an unforgiven
debt.

My question is this:
Would you describe yourself
as a wanderer, a friend of the court, amicus curiae, falsely construed as a snitch, a blue yodeler,
   an apostate, a lost cause, a bird in the house, a biter, a common blogger, a contender, a purse
   snatcher, a false witness, a palterer, a silkie, a backyarder, channeler
for malevolent spirits, girt in the loins, figure on a shard of black pottery, moderately active, a fog
   machine, a visionary miserabilist, a chook or a cuckold, a roundhead, a little seditious, a slow-wave
   sleeper, a dead mule, a gongorist, honey on the comb, half goat half god, a white throwback, crossed
   with a mongrel, a genesis, a retired fighting
cock,
a doll
named
Memphis.

Mining a fallow field for stories.

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.... Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word "unspeakable".... Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried....Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.... When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom....

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992

Yesterday, the Eldest and I sat on the damp grass, writing in our nature journals- his eyes locked on a story he was telling about henbit. But the henbit didn't interest me, not enough, not really. I wrestled with the words that lay sleeping. The colors of the storm-drained day forced me to seek the life around me, to push against the temptation of laziness and lack of color, strain my eyes to find the green on the field.

I turned quietly to the Eldest for inspiration. His nature journaling was notable for its flow state. I felt suddenly self-conscious- the laggard in the long line of people excited about the goal behind the waiting. Why was the wonder absent? How could I retrieve it? 

Nevermind that the attempt to control wonder- to force it to the surface- fails for its willed desperation. It's the babies we most want to conceive- the ones that we intend to fit into the perfect plans for our lives- that give us grief for their refusal to arrive upon demand.

I remember lying on the king-sized bed and talking to my eggs. "Look guys," I said, hoping the Eldest would not overhear, "your job is to get fertilized and give me that baby we want so badly." Ultimately, the conversation ended badly. I didn't get pregnant for another eight months- exactly three weeks after I'd given up on getting pregnant. Prophet, whom I'd hoped to will into existence, eluded me so long as my desperate pursuit retained the aura of a supplication.

I'm the kind of person that fears those moments in which I can't find the story that ties the room together. Like the Dude, I need the rug, my woven waft of words, to anchor everything else.

The uncharmed moments- the ones that don't "speak" to me- ruin plans and turn delight into drudgery. Like a woman holding a grocery-store corn cob, whose perfect rows of kernels add a foreign presence to the kitchen, it seems all there is left for me to do is to add water and boil it. But what's the point of adding to heat to an unhusked object? How am I different from a tool when my only task is to push the right button?

Judith Herman's insights into the transformative, liberating power of narrative resonate with me. For it's not only trauma that requires narrative liberation- the cycles and rhythms of everyday life bud and bloom best when untangled through stories. Yet, we dread the presumed price of honesty, weighing it against our self-concept and pride. I assume being "myself" means being the self I have known and recognized for all these years. I find excuses to keep from telling the stories that threaten this static, unchanged self. 

"I move to keep things whole," Mark Strand reminds me. The true story of a self can only be a quest, a tale in which the protagonist changes and adapts, acquiring the traits discovered in leaves and creatures along the path. Being dedicated to a story about an unchanged self generates its own forms of trauma- the trauma of living in the past and never marveling over how those lines suddenly appeared around my eyes. Under the circumstances, all that matters is getting rid of those lines that make me look "older". Being physically "young" becomes part of the story I tell about the past self, the only one I can love enough to narrate. 

"I move to keep things whole."

So read my nature journal entry for yesterday's 45-minute observation period. The Eldest covered four pages, front and back, with scribbles and scrawls about sapsucker marks on trees and the perfect seeding method of tulip trees. I settled for six words.

But those six words reminded me of the story I continue to observe in the social ecology of American family life- a story woven of many strands, one that looks different enough to obscure the shared loom, the common threads. Maybe the only stories worth telling are the ones that lead us into a livable present. Maybe the only wonder worth engaging is the kind that creeps up on us, uninvited, and reveals the leaf miner at the heart of the leaf. 

"Who Remains Standing?", a poem by Andree Chedid.

WHO REMAINS STANDING?

                by Andree Chedid

First,
erase your name,
unravel your years,
destroy your surroundings,
uproot what you seem,
and who remains standing?
Then,
rewrite your name,
restore your age,
rebuild your house,
pursue your path,
and then,
endlessly,
start over, all over again.

Andree is a Lebanese poetess, a woman well-versed in the art of beginning again. Given the sour aftertaste of an unintended power struggle in lapbooking with the girls today, I found myself closing the books, turning my back on the crafts, and waiting for the howl.

Standing in the room- with the girls and the toys and the half-capped glue sticks, the floor sticky with lemonade, the windows smudged with tiny fingerprints, a sketch I'd started only to find as part of someone's surprise collage- standing still in the center of the chaos, not a word came to my lips.

There was nothing to say.

Or, rather, nothing I said would have shaved the edge from the madness. Nothing would make the cut from the remainder of the well-laid plans any cleaner.

The Prophet wanted to take "portraits". I sat on the floor by the $30 thrift-store couch and gave in.

The images showed me to myself- an immobilized "modern" woman feeling her feminism more intensely with each passing minute- a still life surrounded by motion, by moving life. 

 When I reach out to steady myself, the poems are sturdier than any oak table.

It's not what we know, but what we long to know that keeps us hungry for life. The unquenchable longing is my best friend- the piece of myself I won't relinquish for any man, woman, or child. 

On days like this today, I fold my hands. If I sit still long enough, steadied by poetry, the hubbub dims and narrows, chiseled by words folding one atop the other, thickening to the density of whetstone. I wait to be sharpened. 

Returning to an old love at 35.

My calves ache. Each time I lean forward, a burning sensation tunnels up from my ankle. The small muscles above my knees throb when I bend to pick up a book. My inner thighs feel like they felt after the first time I tried to do a split. 

But my body doesn't ache enough. You see, I can still walk and talk and laugh. I can empty the dishwasher painlessly. I can even car-dance, which is exactly what I did while driving home last night with Lady Gaga's "Do What You Want" blasting from the minivan speakers. 

My first two classes at Ballet Arts and Fitness brought back all the old love for ballet- for the way it impresses your body into the service of disciplined movement and measure. The way the sweat emerges- more like a sheen than a river- after barre. I've forgotten the technical names for the positions, and yet the flowering persists like an inarticulable memory in which I find myself moving without knowing exactly how this movement became so natural.

After ACL and MCL complete reconstruction in my right knee, after herniated discs and years in which even driving a car was impossible, being given the freedom to dance again is such a precious gift that I can't bring myself to stop doing it. So I danced in parking lot of Target with The Eldest. And I danced in the front yard as Angie watched from inside the house. And I danced in the living room as the little folks joined me. And I danced in the bathroom as I pondered whether to take a bath. 

Dancing is a language my body can speak. Unlike the lumbering gait of softball, those days when I stood anxiously in the outfield, hoping the ball would not come my way to find me tripping over anthills to catch it. I was never good at softball. My body didn't do "home runs" or "good throws". But whenever a melody wafted through the air, my mind grew silent while my body responded, beginning a conversation as unique and fascinating as the song itself. 

To be able to dance is to be able able to speak, again. It is to be able to have those conversations with pieces and tunes. It is to lose my own voice while discovering the facile articulation of the arms, legs, hips, ankles, and shoulders. It is something Rainer Maria Rilke might have called "sublime", if the taste for dance pulsed through his veins. It is a wonder and a mystery. And it is the place where I always find the missing pieces to the parts of the day that went awry. I am so very grateful.....

A few memories and a bit of autumn sunlight.

Autumn sunlight on our walk.

Reading the poet Mary Ruefle, who once lived in the Strode home for a brief writing sojourn, always sets me before a blank page, dregding the creek-bed for memories. Sometimes I find a few.

For example, I remember being crushed to find that I could not audition for the part I wanted to play because it was a “boy part”. My pointed comments on Shakespeare’s cross-dressing met with glazed stares. New conventions are born every day.

I remember knowing that the first man I kissed would be the one I married. Then I remember the kiss itself- on a moonlit, muddy path, the crushed steel of braces and the burden of a new language to learn.

I remember some of the specimens that wandered between that kiss and my wedding ten years later.

I remember walking through the halls of my school between classes, reading a book poised just below my first rib. All those hours wasted in school for ten minute intervals in which the knowing took place. Sometimes I bumped into other students without looking up because to look up is to begin the social procedure of mild apology and each social procedure, every single comforting smile extended, eats time from the minutes allotted for my eyes to lick the words from the page. People have been worth less than pages to me.

I remember knowing that God was nothing like the books or the sermons. I kept this secret for so long that it turned into a callous. Sometimes my faith caused me to limp.

I remember that summer in Bordighera. A tiny graveyard perched at the top of a steep hill with aquamarine ocean all around. No one buried there knew death- elevation, the precipitous climb, the vertiginous landscape dimmed the remaining horizons.

I remember the cold, gelatinous skin of my grandmother’s forehead when I bent to kiss her in the coffin during a Romanian Orthodox funeral at Bellu. My family mustered a collective frown but I knew how she appreciated my hovering. My dress was too tight, hiding  a four-month-old baby boy not hidden enough for public taste. Bunica died before my baby was born. How, then, is it possible that I know she was delighted?

Revisiting France with Thomas Merton.

"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."

Thomas Merton

When I was a young lass, my father took a sabbatical to teach in Nancy, France. Carla and I went along with him and I studied in a French school for the first semester of 7th grade. It was the longest time I'd lived without the sweet Tresor-scented aura of my mom nearby.

From what I remember, 7th grade was the year when all my Catholic school friends started "dating" and tight-rolling their jeans. I was a little bit of a wierdo- the kid who wasn't allowed to watch "Saved By the Bell" or to shave her legs, the one whose mother laughed when she mentioned getting a "perm"- "You don't need all those chemicals in your hair, Alina!"

In a sense, I escaped the pressures of 7th grade girldom in the States and found a whole new world. In this new world, everything you had to do as an American preteen made no sense. My experience with cultural relativity did so much to ease my transition into the teenage years. All those imperatives assumed their proper space within a particular locality and culture. Peer pressure lost its rub on me. 

And my Tuscaloosa friends could not hide their concern when I returned wearing straight-leg jeans and having "grown out" my bangs. The good news is that I found better ways to relate to my friends that by wasting hours "styling our bangs" together. Rather than love them for the way they fit the mold, I was free to love them for the ways in which they were themselves, young girls on the cusp of womanhood with inarticulable dreams and a soft spot for star-filled skies.

My 7th grade class at Lycee Frederic Chopin, where I learned more red-letter words than my parents knew existed in the French language. It was a baptism of fire for me in my puffy red down coat. 

I loved to chew on these anise-flavored twigs for days at a time. I think we were driving through Lorraine on our way to Domremy-la-Poucelle in this photo when the most beautiful storm belly-danced around us. 

Every weekend, we climbed into our car and visited another tiny village. The intensity and rich backdrops of history absorbed me completely. I would just sit with my Walkman and gaze at the amazing stories unfolding around me. It still gives me chills to remember those days and that effervescence that tied me to the soil while leaving me somehow floating above it.

In a park munching on baguettes with Carla and her friends.

Given the sensual awakening of my first love affair with a land, I wasn't surprised to feel a tad of Franc-envie while reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain this morning. When ennui sets in, Merton reminds me that "the biggest human tempation is too settle for too little". To settle for marriage without love. To settle for faith without awe. To settle for life without living.

Merton describes his impressions of Cazals, a small village which even today has an estimated population of 160 people. His description captures certain shades of the meaning invoked by the daily wonder we discover when refusing to settle for commercial voyeurism and, rather, delve deeply into the heart and flesh of human culture.

It was an old, old town. Its history went back to the Roman days- which were the times of the martyred saint, its patron. Antoninus had brought Christianity to the Roman colony in this valley, and later he had been martyred in another place, Pamiers, down in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near Prades, where I was born....

The town itself was a labyrinth of narrow streets, lined by old thirteenth century houses, mostly falling into ruin...

Everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church... The church has been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rouge, to the winding river and the green valley.... and the significance thus imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole world.

And this is exactly how I remember feeling when driving through the French countryside, unassaulted by billboards of girls in bikinis promising that I could look like them if I purchased some product meant to distract me from that trembling little spirit within- the only real and eternal part of me. My parents did more to nourish my heart and soul with these experiences than all the Sunday School sessions in the world combined. By drawing my attention and imagination to history and the varieties of cultural experience, they freed me from an allegiance to "looking good" or "being cool". It's all temporal anyway...

Now, in the present, looking backwards, I wonder how to share this lesson or experience with my children who have been raised in the culture of affluence..... As I plod along, don't be surprised if you find more Merton in the coming days. And don't be too reticent too share how you have found ways to connect your children to the beauty of the eternal in everyday life.

Merton and the mint family.

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

    Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain    

I am so guilty of seeking the superb stimulations to distract me from the marvels which require me to inhabit and live them, rather than just keep that seat warm on the bleachers of life.

Ono Island and private confessions.

A portrait from a few weekends ago at Ono.

The last week flew by in that characteristic blur of the best writing experiences. Pages upon pages and complete absorption my subject matter. I am trying to re-enter the dailiness of life, and finding it difficult to focus my attention on nothing but the objects and people around me.

Still seeking the subtext. Re-reading Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions, appreciating how new things strike me upon second readings. The plot is summarized as follows:

Anna, a vivacious, beautiful, and headstrong woman who rushed into her marriage with Henrik - a marriage that, for her, quickly became pleasureless. She feels how truly stifling it is only when she falls passionately in love with Henrik's young friend Tomas. For the first time, she finds pleasure in love; now her husband's touch, even his devotion, has gone from unstimulating to intolerable.

The guilt, however, is at least as thick and heady as the pleasure. Desperate for some joy in either her marriage or her illicit love, Anna embarks on a series of confessions - to her childhood pastor, to her husband, to her mother, to her best friend - seeking the advice or the absolution that will direct her to happiness.

In light of past lights, Anna strikes me for her measured and constant state of panic. At one point, she says something which still turns aorund in my mind as if there remains a meaning to mine or discover. In her words:

"We act out many roles. Some because it's fun, some because others want us to act out these roles. Mostly because we want to protect ourselves.... then I imperceptibly lose what is not a role. When I keep on living, I get away from what is.... myself."

There is some way in which Anna's confession can still be teased and untangled...

"I Remember, I Remember" by Mary Ruefle.

Excerpts from "I Remember, I Remember"

I remember in high school there was a girl named Lizette. She had black hair and a very pale face and because her mother was French she was an outsider and to make matters worse she was not the best student but was awfully good at art and took all the art classes and we worked on the literary magazine together and I liked her very much but I was afraid to be her friend because after all she was strange and I think I was jealous of her strangeness at the same time as I was afraid of it, and when we were together we read our poems out loud to each other, and in this way, through poetry, it was always safe to communicate.

I remember (much later) wondering what ever happened to Lizette.

I remember another friend in high school whose mother was an artist and their house was full of statues—the Buddha and nymphs—and the furniture looked like it was hundreds of years old and there were paintings on the wall and her mother had a separate apartment called a studio and in it were figures of clay on pedestals and in one corner an old hand-cranked Gramophone and I liked being in there but it was kinda scary too, it seemed forbidden in some way I couldn’t figure out; art was scary, strange, forbidden, and the really confusing part was I wanted it and needed it.

I remember one afternoon my friend and I were in the studio and all the clay figures on pedestals were draped with white sheets and my friend told me her mother did that when she didn’t want to look at them anymore and I was totally confused. 

I remember standing in a field in Switzerland at dusk, surrounded by cows with bells around their necks, and reading John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” out loud from an open book I was holding in my hands, and I started to weep—weep is a better word for it than cry—and I remember the tears slowly streaming down my face, it was that beautiful to me, and I loved poetry that much. I was eighteen.

I remember (later) thinking that it was actually hilarious that I used to read poetry to cows, that they were an integral part of my most serious moment.
...............

I remember, two years later, reading Three Poems on a grassy slope while across the road three men put a new roof on an old house, and I was in love with one of them. I could watch the men working as I read. I remember that everything I was reading was everything that was happening across the way—I would read a little, then look up, read a little, then look up, and I was blown apart by the feeling this little book was about my life at that moment, exactly as I was living it. I remember loving the book, and that it was one of the memorable reading experiences of my life.

I remember reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies again and again and again, until I “got” them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.
....................

I remember that I did not always know authors were ordinary people living ordinary lives, and that an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning ofobscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward. Obscure: not readily noticed, easily understood, or clearly expressed. Which is a pretty good definition of life.

I remember, I remember the house where I was born.

I remember driving by the hospital where I was born and glancing at it—I was in a car going sixty miles an hour—and feeling a fleeting twinge of specialness after which I had no choice but to let it go and get over it, at sixty miles an hour.

I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail’s shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

-------------

I remember, on the first Tuesday of every year, that I became a poet for a single, simple reason: I liked making similes for the moon. And when things get tough and complicated and threaten to drown me in their innuendoes, I come back to this clear, simple, and elemental fact, out of all facts the one most like the moon itself. O night, sleep, death and the stars!

I remember the moon was covered with dust and I used my finger to write clean meon its surface, and my finger was ever after covered with a fine gray blanket, as when you pull lint from the dryer.

I remember more than I can tell. 

I remember heaven.

I remember hell.

I can't get enough of poet and essayist Mary Ruefle these days. You can read the entire "article"/poem here. For more of her word-loving ways, pick up a copy of Madness, Rack, and Honey. It will soon become your favorite book, an anthem of sorts for growing, living, and loving.

Metaphysics: The Spotify playlist.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates the general nature of being or reality, especially the being of the sensible world, God, freedom, and souls. It is sometimes synonymous with "ontology", though some philosphers would shun me for saying this.

In case you are like me and need a special amount of time each day considering metaphysical questions like: Can there be aspects of reality that are in principle unknowable? What is consciousness? Is it purely physical? Do we have those immaterial bodies known as souls? What is intentionality? Could it be a purely physical phenomenon?If so, then what on earth would ethical culpability involve? Is reality determined or does free will have a place in causation? What is freedom under these circumstances? then, here is the playlist to match the mood. 

After the playlist, I added a few notes about each song and its potential as rubric or vehicle for metaphysical speculation. Because I'm crazy like that.

 

"I wanna see the thing in itself, I don't wanna see nothing else.
I wanna see the thing in itself, I don't wanna think no more...
One suchness, ten thousand things"
Akron / Family is serious about metaphysics.

Eef Barzelay makes me wonder how we can feel something as intentional as "love" towards something we declare to be "unknown". Is there anything that is actually unknown enough to give rise to "love"?

The Stars want you to "use that head and stop to think a little, just cause you're crazy doesn't mean that you're free.."

Devendra Barnhart really stumps me with the "eyes are the stems of space" thing.

Rancid ventures into the diving area with their little quip- "nihilistic feelings are movin', if I try real hard, I'll see right through them." I want to keep this at the level of metaphysics without wandering into the realm of superhero syndromes and I resent Rancid for making it difficult for me to keep them separated. 

Willy Mason wants me to think that "the cards are stacked" and that I "don't know what I'm running from". His hard-edged fatalism leaves little room for manuveur. 

Quantic really flirts with epistemology unless you take this song to be about the nature of consciousness. Specifically, is "a presence felt" a way of knowing or is it a symptom of thinking and imagining? How do feelings relate to consciousness?

PJ Harvey's instrumental, "The End", sits you squat face-to-face with the big question- What is the end?

The Pixies make an interesting connection between watching TV and the destruction of the atmosphere. Considering this requires something akin to consciousness.

Goran Bregovic' and Eugene Hutz (of Gogol Bordello) offer their take on utopia. Quantum utopia, like most utopias, lies on the cusp of questions about free will and determinism. Does the setting up of a specific rules system model have any chance of working effectively in the realm of human social and political behavior? Is human free will the penultimate party pooper for social schemers?

The Cowboy Junkies take a hard line on the question of the supernatural. For them, the supernatural does not exist apart from the mind which creates it. Their conclusion: Demerol is more chemically accurate and ascertainable than God. I can think of a few existentialists who would disagree with their method while accepting their conclusion.

The Dave Matthews Band, as suggested by the King, throws a wrench in my speculations since I am now forced to consider how my species' evolutionary history turns consciousness into a spectrum.

Bright Eyes wants to know about time, and he doesn't avoid astrophysics. I like that in a song.

M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel distract me with the ethereal fuzz. I spend a large amount of time trying to decide if my shadow is a separate object with its own existence or merely an adjective to describe the way the light occupies the space around me. 

35.

Laying in the spring-scented grass listening to Serge Gainsbourg slightly amazed at the aftertaste of my 35th birthday.

This is, after all, that year I would never live to see.

Seeing is a variation on being that somehow includes the living of it. And I've been so busy for the past 34 years making these choices you read as decisions, hiding behind stacks of superlatives and notebooks cluttered with secrets not sacred enough to warrant whispers, that all the mining now brings the pressure for a product.

This year, I prefer to be the figment of someone's imagination instead.

I'd like for Serge to invent me, to brush my hair. Or tangle it.

To do whatever he wants in the space between my right ear and my shoulder-blade.

I'm done with propositions.

Take me

as a prop.

[See the Draw Serge Blog, though Rick Tulka deserves credit for the particulars.]

The perfect day that made no promise.

It didn't have to be a perfect day.

One might even say that I began the day by jinxing it. We drove to Alabaster for an herb co-op only to discover that I had mixed up the times. Suddenly, we had three hours to kill in a town sixty miles from home. 

Though I always forget to bring along food, drinks, diapers, and all the necessaries, I never forget to bring a book just in case the right meadow should present itself.

Today, I found Ruth Sawyer's The Way of the Storyteller tucked in my backpack, using the space normally taken by the baby wipes.

Perhaps I needed Ruth more than baby wipes today. Her words reminded me of my own blind spots- the way in which I use stories to "teach" rather than tell, to train rather than liberate, to "educate" rather than elucidate the intangible shaded areas of human existence. Though her book is intended to reframe storytelling as a folk art, Ruth clears many cobwebs along the way. So I sat in the grass, reading Ruth, peeling clementines, and watching the little people turn rusted old pipes into balance beams.

"Storytelling is not for remedial purpose or for training. It is not a mechanical process to be made easy and pleasant. It is not a means of presenting limited material to the minds of children. It is an art demanding the utmost of your capacity and mine for living and understanding ; it us dependent upon our power of creation; it asks for integrity, trust, and vision."

We see different things. They see a perfect line to follow like a thread. Maybe they see something small enough to master.

I see a tunnel running underneath their little feet- a subterranean world with its own songs and arguments, a passage beneath our habitual empiricism, a possibility whose darkness symbolizes comfort rather than cruelty. 

"I think stories must be acquired by long contemplation, by bringing the imagination to work, constantly, intelligently, upon them. And finally by that power to blow the breath of life into them. And the method? That of learning incident by incident, or picture by picture. Never word by word."

"Here is a sad paradox: those musical instruments invented on the pattern of the human body, and stringed to produce the most sublime qualities of the human voice, have so far outdistanced us in resonance and beauty of tone that now we turn to them to get the quality we would like to hear in our own voices." 

The story changes every time I try to touch it with a word- maybe the light didn't hover so much as it haunted, or the shadows moving quickly across the grass left us dizzy rather than lulled. Or my viewpoint went from vertical to horizontal. Where does the story stop changing? 

Ruth might say this is a problem not for the storyteller but for the writer, who must choose one fixed version to pass along. The storyteller never stops spinning or weaving, adding new colors, removing salted ones.

The storyteller is free from the bindings of one weather- free to inhabit the "whether".

What can I say? The story continues. My words don't equal the watching. The perfect day that made no promise also left me with no settled story to tell Patrick.

Maybe when the images finish pickling and I hanker for the salt, my hunger will get the best of me and today's story will hatch, shiver, shake its feather, and wander out in the world unsettled, changing each season, that chick-turned-hen I'd rather follow than catch.

Living in a castle.

I live in a castle with three children, a partner, and a poodle mutt.

I know a castle when I see one. He and I agree that to own a castle we must first agree to be one.

After we got married, we bought a big house. Then we traded it in for a small house- the kind where your power bill makes only a blip on the budget.

If our dreams can go no further (which they can't), then it just so happens that this is our castle.

The spring rains soak the grass, pooling in the driveway, creating the moat once local Prince has dubbed "Pontulia".

The coronation ceremony took place on the New Year's Eve of 2010. I was three months pregnant with a princess, yet managed to catch the King's eye wearing my snug wedding gown. Afterwards, at the royal ball, I danced with the King, the stellar thumps of Outkast's B.O.B. bouncing from the stone walls, the freshly-coronated Prince and Princess tearing books from the shelves with glee. Royal affairs are like that- however you want them to be, I mean.

Our kingdom is a small one, overtaken by privet hedges and plastic components of the larger petroleum empire in which we reside. We are a humble royal family, the kind that directs its energies towards keeping the house and garden gnomes happy and yarn-filled.

So we live in a castle with a moat and various fantabulous creatures- a castle that others might mistake for a cottage. "Fools abound," is a regular saying in the tower. The castle is in the mind of its makers. What story do you tell yourself to justify settling for a McMansion? What keeps you from your own castle?

Two poems by Borges.

TO THE ONE WHO IS READING ME

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver

(those forces that control your destiny)

the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be

your irreversible time is that river

in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read

his brevity? A marble slab is saved

for you, one you won’t read, already graved

with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.

And other men are also dreams of time,

not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust

like you; the universe is Proteus.

Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,

the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.

Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

I think of things that weren’t, but might have been.

The treatise on Saxon myths Bede never wrote.

The inconceivable work Dante might have had a glimpse of,

As soon as he’d corrected the Comedy’s last verse.
History without the afternoons of the Cross and the hemlock.
History without the face of Helen.
Man without the eyes that gave us the moon.
On Gettysburg’s three days, victory for the South.
The love we never shared.
The wide empire the Vikings chose not to found. The world without the wheel or the rose.
The view John Donne held of Shakespeare.
The other horn of the Unicorn.
The fabled Irish bird that lights on two trees at once.
The child I never had.

 

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) first entered my nights under a moon pretending to be a streetlight in Arlington, Virginia. It was a city and time of playing at adulthood and we were fine with the fact that our shadows never lasted in the daylight.

Melting is a possibility for all forms of carbon-based life, even though the technicalities suggest a freeze must occur first. We remain the restless captives of physics and formula.

Tiny things which make themselves known in February.

Life along our street this month.

The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt toward the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes and colors of the past.

Thus Virginia Woolf begins the 24th chapter of Night and Day.

Dusk with Pinka.

While Patrick and the kids shopped for groceries, I dawdled in the backyard with Pinka, sharing a dusk together. Sharing dusk with a dog draws your attention to all the rustlings in the woods- the change from day creatures to night creatures, the secret tidings and tides instantiated by light or its absence. Every time I wish to treat Pinka like a homo sapiens, she insists on being treated like a lovely little canine with her own interests and her own mode of being in the world. I appreciate last night's dusk, where our fascinations, like the colors of fall leaf pigments, seeped into one another, overlapping.

Micah's quest for unicorn juice: An unmade story-bed.

Micah has been my fairy tale muse since she first emerged, clearly unhappy with the post-womb world. Perhaps the whimpering babies are those whose fairy tale remains to be written and, unlike other children, they know it- they are expecting something clear and somewhat magical to bind them to this world and its ways.

The migraines made my past week an rather stiff-necked occasion, so I picked up some colored pencils and drew alongside the kids.

What would Micah's world be like if she could tell me all those colors and sights that coalesce in her tiny head?

I drew a story that remains to be told.

A story that takes place in a land between here and there.

A story which a fancy character named "no no" who always has a reason why Micah shouldn't go there or shouldn't do that or shouldn't see something.

A story with a character named "him", who does all those things that him's do inside the office cubbies in their professional bubbles.

A story in which triangular planes offer a different way of transport across flying barrels and vases.

A story in which the hunt for unicorn juice must continue without a clear reason and without a unicorn to offer assistance.

A true quest, if you will.

I can't wait to see how Micah tells it- and how it comes to life in her mind...

Have you ever doodled an untold story for one of your children? It's a wonderful way to meet them in lands where the rules don't apply- in places where you can be confidantes and partners in dreaming something thick and true.

Somewhere in the land where unicorns roam...

He is lost in a book about unicorns. I recognize the posture, the expression, the heady feeling of running through lines of words woven in such a way that bring imaginings to life.

I love watching him read, watching him get lost. And I love HIM- so much, sometimes I think I will bubble over with joy at his affections and idiosyncracies. As my firstborn, it was his pudgy little face which first revealed my own heart to me. Now his long, skinny fingers stitch hearts and flowers from thread and play Scott Joplin pieces on the piano. 

Being a mother, to me, means making sure that he knows this love as surely as he knows the sun lights his page. It is part of who we are now- the soil of everything we become. I am so grateful for the miracle and the mystery that is Max.

Thoughts on violence and Sandy Hook.

We spent our weekend in Atlanta visiting with extended family- but the story of the Sandy Hook massacre was never far enough from my mind. Every mother who loves her children knows her children- knows in some silent, unspoken way what their challenges and struggles in life might be. My heart breaks for Nancy Lanza and what she feared about Adam- how the way in which she tried to protect him was ultimately undone by her blind spot with respect to guns.

The news media keeps bandying an Asperger diagnosis (a.k.a. high-functioning autism) as if this explains the killer, Adam Lanza's, motives and actions. Unfortunately, the media's ignorance about Aspberger's feeds into a generalized public ignorance at this point which does unspeakable harm to families with "Aspie" kids. Aspberger's is not a form of mental illness- it cannot be medicated or fixed with pills; it is considered a "developmental disorder".

While Adam's withdrawal into this own world may be characteristic of Asperger's, his controlled silence and shyness are not. Most Aspie kids tend to speak continuously on a topic of their choice- their social problems stem more from inability to recognize social cues than from shyness or avoidance.  The likelihood that an Aspie child will turn into a killer is minute compared to the likelihood that they will do amazing and wonderful things in this world.

I am convinced that when the true story emerges, Adam Lanza's medical record will reveal a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoid personality disorder. I am convinced that his mother, Nancy Lanza, kept him under close watch as this diagnosis became evident (schizophrenia usually emerges in the late teens and early twenties). I think she homeschooled him because the public system refused to provide the mental health resources he needed. I believe his reclusiveness was a symptom- not something imposed by his mother. I am convinced that she assumed the medications he was supposed to be taking made it safe to keep guns in the house. (Sadly, she was very wrong.) But I am also convinced that she loved him deeply, that she structured her life around his illness, that she was scared, that she felt him beginning to disappear, that she knew the world he inhabited was so different from her own that she couldn't bridge the divide.

Schizophrenia is a complicated and torturous illness for those involved. Adam Lanza's flat affect is more characteristic of schizophrenia than Asperger's. In sum, here are characteristics of schizophrenia that lead me to believe this is what Adam struggled with (I am not a medical doctor, of course, and do not wish to anger any physicians who worry that I am treading on their turf):

• Isolation
• Showing little emotion
• Flat, expressionless gaze of teenage years (compared with smiles of younger years)
• Inability to carry on a conversation
• Inability to cry or to express joy
• Delusions of grandeur
• Flat affect or speaking in monotone
• Insensitivity to physical pain
• Not responding much to other people
• Inability to care for oneself
• Reclusiveness
• Hallucinations and breaks with reality

If you know someone struggling with this illness, remember that it is not their fault and that they are not "evil"- the way in which they perceive reality is just markedly different and makes it difficult to live in our "normal" world. The absolute best movie I've seen on the subject of paranoid schizophrenia is The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It should also be noted that those with schizophrenia are not more likely to be violent criminals or murders- they are just more likely to feel threatened by perceptions unrelated to what actually happens around them.

I think Adam Lanza's connection to reality was severed and he acted on a hallucination or delusion. I do not believe having more prayer in schools would have made a difference in this outcome. On the other hand, exposure to violent video games and familiarity with assault rifles and weapons cannot have a good outcome in persons subject to hallucinations. The extent to which violence and the celebration of violence permeates our culture never ceases to disturb me. It's time we started thinking about the longterm consquences of a culture in which God is equated with crueltry, bombs, and killing.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families in Sandy Hook devastated by this nightmare, as well as to the surviving members of the Lanza family who are asking themselves what they could have done to prevent this.

Reading Carol Shields.

Milla's morning doll arrangement.

We are painting the dining room wall and the entire house has been shifted off its axis- corners crammed with books and magazines given to me by my sister, the materials for collage. As we wait for the paint to dry, the kids play with their dolls, still snug in spaces amid the chaos. 

Patrick and I sat in the backyard reveling in the perfect weather with our respective books. He is reading Iris Murdoch's The Message to the Planet, an existentialist's closet prophesy, as I linger over the Collected Stories of Carol Shields. Perhaps she, too, has been strangled by the chunkiness of a too-thick plot for Carol's focus is on the rich meanings in the otherwise overlooked aspects of everyday life. Reading her leaves you with a monocle hanging over your eye- a bright attention to detail that persists for a few hours after you put down the book.

Something that brought my Micah to mind in an unresolved, willow-pattern way today:

At the same time, she had to admit that those twin demons, happiness and sadness, had lost their relevance. Happiness was a crock; no one, except maybe Chloe, really had it for more than one minute at a time. And sadness had shrunk, become miniaturized and narrowly defined, a syndrome, a pathology- whereas once, in another time, in a more exuberant century, in a more innocent age, there existed great gusts of oxygen inside the sadness of ordinary people, carpenters, tradesmen, housewives and the like. Sadness was dignified; it was referred to as melancholy; it was described as autumnal in tone and tinged with woodsmoke. Nobody got blamed for the old sadness. It was a real affliction, like color blindness or flat feet.

Excerpted from the short story, "The Next Bess Kiss", by Carol Shields

There's something about those shoes.

An old friend who now lives several states away told me yesterday that she had discovered some of my clothes packed in storage. She wanted to know if I would like to be reunited with these old rags at Thanksgiving. The moment I glanced at the attached photographs, a strange longing came over me. Then an amused curiosity at the hideousness of my shoes- shoes which I remember purchasing a large store in Nancy, France, where I was living and studying in the seventh grade. Why do I care about my old French shoes? I can't quite wait to find out.

8 authors conversing in my head- with images.

IRIS MURDOCH SAID:
“Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom.
We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are.
Or because we’ve been educated – if we have.
But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy.
It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking,
convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever,
that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk
the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.” 

WENDELL BERRY INSISTED:
“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed.
By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion.
People of power kill children, the old send the young to die,
because they have no imagination.
They have power.
Can you have power and imagination at the same time?
Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion
for them at the same time?” 

HUNTER S. THOMPSON QUIPPED:
"Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex."

WILLIAM FAULKNER MUSED:
"Memory believes before knowing remembers.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

JORGE LUIS BORGES REPLIED:
"Reality is not always probable, or likely."

IRIS MURDOCH POINTED OUT: 
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” 

ALBERT EINSTEIN BLURTED:
"Never memorize something you can look up." 

LOOKING BACKWARDS, MILAN KUNDERA OBSERVED:
"People are always shouting they want to create a better future.
It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us,
tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want
to be masters of the future is to change the past."  

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN CONCLUDED:
"I don't know these people and they aren't my flowers."  

Love letter #39: Fabrickaz.

 little rucksacks and details with floss

potholder perfections

ornaments that won't go away

click on this image to see oh so much more...

My ersatz Harper's index.

Who doesn't love Harper's index? Who doesn't secretly salivate with anticipation of the month's statistical jambalaya? I decided to indulge in the highest form of flattery this morning and communicate via index. 

Chance that gazing at a beautiful landscape helps a person experience awe: Pretty large

Number of bathrooms in the Rennert private dwelling which inspired the novel that Kurt Vonnget called "the greatest book ever written": 39 bathrooms

Percentage of computer programmers who were women in 2011: 20%

Chance that watching Fox News or MSNC will make you mad 

Percentage of questions about domestic events answered correctly by watchers of MSNBC: 32% 

Percentage of questions about domestic events answered correctly on average by watchers of John Stewart: 36%

Percentage of questions about domestic events answered correctly by watchers of Fox News: 
26%

Percentage of questions about domestic news events answered correctly by those who watch no news at all: 31%

Amount invested by China for renewable-energy deals in the US in 2011: $264 million

Percentage increase in this amount from 2006: 100%

Percentage of preschool-aged kids not taken outside by a caregiver or parent every day: Over 51%

Percentage of parents in this study who "believe their neighborhood to be safe": 93%

Percentage of 18-24 year olds who believe the US economy favors the wealthy: 73%

Percentage of 18-24 year olds who say modern-day Christianity "has good values and principles": 76%

Percentage of 18-24 year olds who say modern-day Christianity is "anti-gay": 64%

Age at which US Olympic runner Lopez Lomong first came to the United States: Sixteen

Year in which Lopez Lomong was naturalized as a US citizen: 2007

Year in which Lopez Lomong represented the USA in the Olympics: 2008

Percentage of Asian voting age adults who say they didn't vote in 2008 due to "registration problems": 78%

Percent of African-American men who cannot vote due to criminal records: 13%

Number of votes cast in US general elections between 2000 and 2010: 649 million

Number of UFO sightings between 2000 and 2010: 47,000

Number of Americans killed by lightning between 2000 and 2010: 441

Number of credible cases of in-person voter impersonation in the US between 2000 and 2010: 13

Number of days for male Gulf pipefish to be exposed to human birth control pills in a lab before developing female traits: 10 days

 [Sources: Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, JAMA, "A Generation in Transition" by Public Religion Research Institute and the Berkeley Center of Georgetown University, Lopez Lomong Foundation, Wikpedia, National Center for Women and Information Technology, Craig Connects, Mother Jones]

How to "deal" with the intractable issues.

The solace.

Being a person who likes to see everyone happy- the kind who runs from one person to another to make sure no one's feelings are hurt- leaves me stranded when it comes to sorting through those intractable conflicts posed by the human ego. The solace lies next to me in bed at night and reminds me, "You can't please everyone, Alina... Some people are just haters. Stay away from them or you'll be hated too." Patrick, our marriage, our family, is not intractable- it's an iterative process, a learn-and-grow-as-you-go, a wonder and a joy.

The truth doesn't suit my hopes. The truth is that there are angry people in the world who get a kick out of being angry and acting as if the world is against them. You can't get anywhere in that kind of discussion- the kind of discussion I've been having far too much for my taste lately. Someone whose identity and self-image is warped by being mad ends up a perpetual victim of their own cognitive choices.

When in doubt, whip out the Kurt Vonnegut. Sure enough, he's got it covered:

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Have you confessed your happy moments today? Though most people seem to bond over complaints, especially political ones, sharing happiness seems like a stronger foundation for friendship. So I'll admit it- I'm happy that Orion magazine exists, that poetry still soothes and untangles the stuff too skewed to touch with ordinary language. I'm happy with the little ditty I scribbled in my journal today- a true story still reeking of macroinvertebrates and water. I'm happy to know that the ebb and flow is as much a part of me as of the world, a rhythmn to which I can dance.

Love letter #53: Edith Nesbit.

"I couldn't help wondering as we went down to the garden, why Father had never thought of digging there for treasure instead of going to his beastly office every day."

E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers

I love Edith Nesbit and the way in which her writing for children illuminates the imagination. We are reading The Story of the Treasure Seekers, which you can enjoy for free online, and find myself guessing which passage Max must be reading when I hear his amused guffaws and chortles.

A sketch of Nesbit from the Kitchen Sink Dramas website.

Nesbit was a feminist at a time when most women were content to remain "the angel in the house". She even sported a Liberty dress, chucked her corsets, and made fashion statements supporting The Rational Dress Society (which I've always secretly admired as the forerunner of upcycling and Etsy-dom). Trying to convey what it is exactly that makes Nesbit's books such a treasure at the Coryell Castle is no simple task. But I think Gore Vidal sums it fairly well in his by-no-means-current review for The New York Times Book Review:

As a woman, E. Nesbit was not to everyone’s taste. H. G. Wells described her and Hubert Bland as “fundamentally intricate,” adding that whenever the Blands attended meetings of the Fabian Society “anonymous letters flittered about like bats at twilight” (the Nesbit mood if not style is contagious). Yet there is no doubt that she was extraordinary. Wanting to be a serious poet, she became of necessity a writer of children’s books. But though she disdained her true gift, she was peculiarly suited by nature to be what in fact she was. As an adult, writing of her own childhood, she noted, “When I was a little child I used to pray fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered then.” With extraordinary perceptiveness, she realized that each grown-up must kill the child he was before he himself can live. Nesbit’s vow to survive somehow in the enemy’s consciousness became, finally, her art—when this you see remember me—and the child within continued to the end of the adult’s life.

E. Nesbit’s failure in the United States is not entirely mysterious. We have always preferred how-to-do to let’s-imagine-that. In the last fifty years, considering our power and wealth, we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies for theory and invention. Our great contribution has been, characteristically, the assembly line.

I do not think it is putting the case too strongly to say that much of the poverty of our society’s intellectual life is directly due to the sort of books children are encouraged to read. Practical books with facts in them may be necessary, but they are not everything. They do not serve the imagination in the same way that high invention does when it allows the mind to investigate every possibility, to free itself from the ordinary, to enter a world where paradox reigns and nothing is what it seems to be; properly engaged, the intelligent child begins to question all presuppositions, and thinks on his own. In fact, the moment he says, wouldn’t it be interesting if…? he is on his way and his own imagination has begun to work at a level considerably more interesting than the usual speculation on what it will be like to own a car and make money. As it is, the absence of imagination is cruelly noticeable at every level of the American society, and though a reading of E. Nesbit is hardly going to change the pattern of a nation, there is some evidence that the child who reads her will never be quite the same again, and that is probably a good thing.

The only disagreement I find with Mr. Vidal is his assumption that only the child "will never be quite the same again". This woman finds herself quite un-same and rather tickled with joy. 

One of those eerie Tuscaloosa sunsets.

The clouds fight translucence and add to our world's losing battles while I find myself worrying, as I have frequently done since the 2011 tornados, about what this spirited breeze and 80 degree weather might bring by way of storms tonight. The birds are keeping mum- an odd silence after a week of constant twittering and singing.

Music for Lent.

Bucharest Score by Alina Coryell, 2011.

In response to Natalie, whose lovely Lenten tunes are currently ripening the rooms of our house, this is a playlist which we imagined might hustle a grin from a headphone-wearing girl walking the snow silken streets of American cities.

The songs she might meet on the street at the beginning of Lent. 

EMMYLOU by First Aid Kit

P: She walks up to a rack with scarfs, coats, sweaters, and hoodies hanging from metalic hooks. Various miscellaneous items sit on top of board over the rack, a holding place for coins, the daily mail and books to be read. She pulls away a scarf from one of the hooks and wraps it around her neck. She pulls a coat on, takes a book underneath her arm and opens the door.

THE BOOK OF LOVE by The Magnetic Fields

A: The stairs smell of cold, wet conversations and cheap science toys. A boy in a blue pea coat snaps a photo of a beaming man embracing a woman trapped by the same beam. The glow surrounding them is as fake as the light from the flash. She takes the steps down two-by-two.

WHY'D YOU COME IN HERE LOOKIN' LIKE THAT? by Dolly Parton

P: Billboards for jeggings and extra-diet soda.

 SPARROWS AND SPARROWS by Malcolm Holcombe

A: Handpainted Russian eastern eggs in the window of the newstand which serves Turkish coffee.

CLOUDBUSTING by Neil Halstead

A: Stopping to sit near a small duck pond and count clouds as their reflection passes over the still water. 

IF A SONG COULD BE PRESIDENT by Over the Rhine

A: A super-ribboned woman wearing a green ribbon, a rainbow ribbon, a pink ribbon, and a yellow ribbon tries to tell her about the new campaign represented by a mauve ribbon. Her friend says J. Crew is creating new colors to keep the world from running out of ribbon campaigns and small kindnesses.

BOOGERS by David Rovics

A: She rounds the corner. A schoolbus stops and out swarms a gaggle of elementary school students with yellow-tinged crystals hanging from their noses.

YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM by Sonic Youth

A: One short, well-dressed teen saunters past wearing a pro-life tshirt with a photo of an aborted baby on the front. He laughs as he tells his friends about the new submachine gun he just ordered online. The combined laughter resembles the chorus of a gospel choir. 

HOLIDAY (Green Day cover) by Hayseed Dixie

A: The handsomely-dressed mother reaches down to smack the hand of the toddler pulling at her linen skirt. Her voice narrows to the sound of a needle meant to remind the little person that disobedience and dirty hands hurt. The hairstyle resists intimacy.

DOWNTOWN by Destroyer

P: People flow past in a torrent as if escaping from a coming storm. The buildings sway in the breeze like trees of glass while the cement underneath crumples like dried balls of Georgia clay. Life teems and writhes over the sidewalks of this fish-bowl city. All looking for a crumb.

PEOPLE ARE CRAZY by Billy Currington

A: She passes a honky-tonk, the neon half-lit and twinkling like an eye tic. Maybe mud-riding offers a palpable background for theology. The rain turns God's play dough, our clay-made bodies, to mud. Melting is unavoidable.

DORS DAN MON SANG by Karkwa

A: An elderly Korean lady sweeps a tiny cement step again and again, tracing shapes and memories over something so hard.

NO PLACE TO FALL (Townes Van Zandt cover) by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan

A: A wild-eyed man wearing black motorcyle boots rummages through a trash can calling his diary in various dimunitives.

HANDOUTS IN THE RAIN by The Cowboy Junkies

A: She drops some change and a gift card into the bowl of the old homeless veteran who frequents her subway stop. He laughs and explains that he doesn't remember anything anymore- not even what something is worth. Or how much a candy bar costs. Values change too quickly these days.

Enjoying my insomnia with Nabokov.

The last lines of Nabokov's poem, "An Evening of Russian Poetry".

Vladimir Nabokov, or VN for short, shared his autobiographies with me last night in the form of collected, bound words entitled Speak, Memory. Originally, he considered titling the book The Anthemion, which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament consisting of elaborate interlacements and budding clusters, but it didn't resonate as richly with his friends or editors. 

Memory speaks to him in "comets and eclipses" (see this excerpt for details). I'd forgotten how thick and tactile VN's descriptions can be- the heady, scented details of childhood conjure everything except the adult version of the moment. When he describes in intimate detail the horrors of bedtime, the thudding fear of the moment when his nanny would finish her reading and turn out the light in her room thus transforming his world in the terrors of pitch black, I remember a grade-school, flannel-clad Alina fearing the moment when he dad would turn off the hall light- the wide-awakeness of the interval between that first darkness and the assurance of his slumber which allowed her to sneak out and turn the light back on. My childhood bedtimes, like VN's, stand out for the vivid demons and shadowed strangers, undistracted by chains of prayers and guardian angels, those messengers of restlessness which selected me as medium while ignoring everyone else in my family.

VN revisits his childhood terrors with the sanguine complacencency of an adult who has grown accustomed to his "bedtime ordeal":

"All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest enthusiasm; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wretch of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me...."

Dear VN. You can imagine how comforting this was to read at 1:30 am last night if you are the kind of woman who finds sleeping pills and their attendant hallucinations more uncomfortable than a cumulative sleep deficit. Maybe I'll have time to catch up on all that sleep I missed when I'm comfortably nestled in a coffin. How to explain or understand this insomnia which only disappears as if by magic when I am pregnant? Does the existence of a sleep-loving life within me affect my sleep cycle? In the world of bedtimes, pregnancy makes me like you- a contented member of the go-to-sleep crowd unmolested by strange messengers and dim fugues. Having known both worlds makes it impossible to choose between them.

The business side of leaves.

"On every stem, on every leaf ... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

How to make a digital memory quilt.

Reminiscing about our trip to Romania last October and realizing that what the photos lack is a common texture. Imagining a way to create a design board for a Romania-nostalgia memory quilt led me to playing around with Picnik, which will be closing in April and has therefore opened up its premium photo editing software to all of us for nada.

I uploaded a few inspriring Romania photos into a collage and then played around with effects. Specifically, I used "textures" under the effects tab to play around with different underlying textures, include cement and letter paper.

Using the "advanced modes" in textures allows you to overlay and bring out "difference", which adds to the psychadelic aged effect. (Did I just write "psychadelic aged"? I hope that's how my kids describe me when I'm growing dim in the years.)

Visualizing the colors in an upside-down sort of way revved my imagination- I could see patterns and opportunities in the images that were not available to my visual eye prior to play. Choosing textiles for this quilt will be amazing- I see now that I can even include tshirts with script, perhaps dying them for a contrast effect. Embroidery will be a must. So far, so beautiful...

Plato's pole.

Last night, Patrick, Tino, Cam, and I stumbled across Plato's pole. Suffice it to say that this esoteric and oft-overlooked aspect of Platonic thought now forms a strange bond between us. I can only describe the night with the assistance of aphorisms- a conversation between ancients, moderns, and misfits, if you will.

"Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him."

William James

"Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live."

Arthur Schoepenhauer

"Grub first, then ethics."

Bertolt Brecht

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Love is imminent in nature, but not incarnate."

Garnett

"For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first."

Aristotle

"One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular."

Soren Kierkegaard

"As he knew not what to say, he swore."

Lord Byron 

"In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed."

LEC

"Only with those we love do we speak of those we love."

Jean-Paul Richter

"Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn't work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness?There is only one place to start: the place where man's singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute.That singularity is language..."

Walker Percy

Insomnivorous.

I should be sleeping. The day unfolded in such a lovely manner that I find myself running my fingers over the creases, trying to find how what began as a blank white sheet ended in a complicated, tightly-bound parcel. Retrospect doesn't make sense of days like this, days so perfect that everything flows into everything else, the ideal watercolor effect present in my life but never present on my papers.

Max fell asleep reading about sea shells, while Micah fell asleep in our bed with Patrick reading to her. Milla, of course, passed out while nursing, as she does every night. Part of me knows she will continue stirring until I creep back into bed with her and Patrick.

Her tenderness is like nothing else in this world. During the night, she will soothe herself back to sleep by lifting my shirt and running her tiny fingers along the skin of my stomach in a rhythm all her own. Like an amulet against nightmares, Milla turns my usually-fitful sleep into sweetness. I cherish these days when little people still inhabit our bed, little silk fingers and soft sighs weaving a cocoon. A family cocoon. 

I need to let this day go. To let it blow away. To embrace the pretense of sleep. So long perfect sunshine. Sweet dreams to my croupy, laryngitisy munchkins. Goodbye overwhelming cupcakes and somersault races in the grass. Farewell building blocks and giggle-fests. Sleep tight Max's sheep. Tomorrow is another day I cannot wait to meet.  

The first haircut I ever gave Patrick set to poetry by Vasile Voiculescu.

CLV

by Vasile Voiculescu

Forget my humble ilk, retain my type,
One tastes the fruit, and not the gilded stem The pitchfork did my forefathers supply,
But I the quill, much heavier, I claim.
The purest proof of my ennoblement
Is your allowing me to love you more
Than mere friends, with passionate excitement
Reserved for the beloved you adore.
I celebrate my luck with hymns and chants,
And for the coronation I avow
Azure and rays and roses from the branch,
To braid with glory and adorn your brow:
My country’o’thoughts, dreams, senses, body, soul, I now proclaim you king above them all.

FROM: The Last Imagined Sonnets of Shakespeare, In the imaginary translation of V. Voiculescu~in the hyper-imaginary translation of Cristina Hanganu-Bresch via the incredible Fantasy Pieces

15, 7, and other significant numbers.

Muchos gracias to Happy Whimsical Hearts for adding me to her list of 15 and giving me the opportunity to tip my hat to 15 other inspiring blogs.

The Rules of the Game

• Thank the person that nominated you with a link back to them.
• Tell 7 things about yourself.
• Pass this award on to 15 newly discovered blogs and let them know that they've received an award.

Seven Things About Alina

1. I was born in Romania and raised in Alabama. I come from the breed known as "globalized mutt".
2. I am a hopeful (as opposed to hopeless) romantic.
3. Rather than be an expert at anything in particular, I have chosen to be a dabbler and a dilettante who keeps her fingers in as many pies as possible and maintains a hearty appetite for more.
4. Just because you scare or coerce your child into proper conventional behavior does not make you a good parent. "Goodness" is a process, a mode of being, not a result.
5. I am captivated by different countries, cultures, and folkways.
6. Poetry fills the cracks in my days.
7. No one could have told me that my feminism would lead me to being a home-schooling, stay-at-home mom. But it did. I am still learning so many things...

Now for my favorite part...

Fifteen Newly Discovered Blogs (in no particular order):

1. Resweater
2. Passengers On A Little Spaceship
3. Mommy Labs
4. Chalk in My Pocket
5. Smile Monsters
6. Sew4Bub
7. My Delicious Ambiguity
8. Filth Wizardry
9. Domestic Goddesque
10. Baby-making Machine
11. Teaching Handwork
12. The Lucky Ladybird Craft Blog
13. Echoes Of A Dream
14. The Dainty Squid
15. A Merry Mishap

An imaginary conversation between Matt and Sarah.

These photos are from their visit for Patrick's birthday- we wish we had time to see them this weekend and celebrate Sarah, but Atlanta visits are always a whir. Anyway, I stumbled across the photos and thought they looked like a conversation, though I can't imagine the content and therefore leave it to them to fill in the gaps.

(Mysterious caption 1.)

(Mysterious caption 2.)

(Mysterious caption 3.)

The science of human hearts.

Milla peeking, taken by Constantino.

"I saw one day... that science can say so much about things, objects, books, or people, but by its very method, by its own definition, by its own self-imposed limitation, the scientific method can only utter a statement about a single object, a glass or a frog or a dogfish- or a man- only insofar as it resembles other things of its kind. If you want to make general statements- which scientists recognize; that's the nature of science, insofar as one dogfish resembles another dogfish- that is what science is interested in- making general statements about certain kinds of things and certain kinds of responses and reactions and changes. Well, I suddenly realized that when you apply this to man, you stop short at the very point where it matters to man. Science can say everything about a man except what he is in himself."

Walker Percy, explaining why he decided to pursue a career of fiction writing after completing medical school. From an interview conducted by John Carr at Percy's home in Covington, January 1970.

This past week's beauties.

Using the Romanian couching stitch to outline various plants in our wildflower-pressed fabric.

Fall leaves as inspirations for skirts.

Max and Ellie set out on a fall scavenger hunt. They found almost everything... plus, a trail in the woods behind our house.

Constantino's delicious Guatemalan chicken soup to soothe the sore throat we so lovingly shared with him. And all the moments we get to have him in our lives.

A little treasure for our weekend. Robot dance party within.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.

Or something equally profane in meteorological terms. We took a few minutes to watch the cars and clouds and dogs strut by. Max did some journaling about an incredible letterboxing cache he is planning. He looks so much like 7-year-old-Alina in this photo because that Alina always bit her tongue between her teeth when writing in her journal.

My Grand Bunicu used to tell me that I'd get "a nest of flies on the tongue" if I didn't put it back in my mouth. Little did he know the amazing images my young mind conjured when the words "a nest of flies on the tongue" were uttered in the magical Romanian language. Compared to English (or American), the language of Sunday school and multiple-choice tests and reasonable expectations, Romanian was the secret, magical tongue- the language in which there were words and places and feelings that could not pass over the border into my America, the language of romance and history and smoky rooms. I wonder if the children will pick up a smattering of Romanian when we visit next month. I wonder what they think- what Romanian evokes- when it slips over their auditory nerves.

Max works on his letterboxing acrostic.

Micah and Milla and their latest debate.

Today's favorite toy.

Linear thinking is a dull spear.

Love letter #18: Anna Botezatu.

I love beauty in its most raw, unadulterated forms. I love the way it enthralls and confuses me- makes the world taste a little different at second glance. As we pack our dreams to include two weeks in Romania next month, the texture of tuica and lace curtains distracts like long eyelashes on an old man. What new art will I find? What will Alice and Remus reveal in the Bucuresti underground? Are Carpati still cheaper than water?

I love Anna Botezatu- her art, her vision, her Romanian mix-and-matchiness, the way the streets smell like peaches and diesel from her windows. I love how she captures the crossholds of tenderness, the way in which even love forces our hands. I love how she takes Romanian folk traditions and rethreads them with pastels too sentimental for the punch required by propaganda. I imagine she makes beautiful flower crowns.

All the pictures and daydreams in this post hatched in her head. You'll have to fish through her blog to find meanings, places, purpose, and lighter fluid. 

Hanging out at the Dublin Village Tavern.

We played Chat Pack and ordered beer and easygoing Irish food.

Max invented a new birthday tradition, which requires you to replace the blowing out of candles on a cake with throwing a root beer bottle at the candles and then licking the bottle and drinking the root beer without stopping. Something tells me Max is going to enjoy "college".

 

 

Micah wearing the dress I upcycled for her. The Indian tattoo on her arm is fading.

Micah is my fashion muse...

Coloring with tendrils.

As dad and Pam paid for the food, I took Max and Micah out onto the sidewalk so they wouldn't wear bouncing holes into the restaurant chairs. Armed with my journal and pen, sitting on a stoop worthy of honor by the National Register of Historic Places makes even the ants seem scenic. Beech nuts tumble down onto the cobblestone sidewalk where poverty is what happens to those who cannot afford a second bottle of wine. The munchkins marvel and save the nuts for squirrels.

Little legs skipping along the sidewalk with jokes about breaking a mother's back just distant enough to provoke giggles until Max says, "Hey, I don't want to break mom's back." Micah plays hide-and-seek like an ostrich, lying right next to Max on the ground as he counts and she presses her fingers hard over her little eyes. 

An elderly couple with a dog grins at the kids, tossing a smile between themselves like a secret. The young couple carrying iphones on their chests like shields from the world looks around frantically for the awful parents who are letting these kids act so crazy in the middle of such a distinguished sidewalk. They pay good money for this distinction. And good money for the therapy which helps them put off children until some day in the future when they can afford the Pottery Barn furniture that allows children to truly thrive. 

A dude on a motorcyle waves at the kids. They wave back and laugh. I fight the urge to dissolve into the scene with my journal and a blanket of beech nuts knit by the joy in my children's laughter and discovery of life....

Ripening on the porch.

Max interviews Bunicu on the porch.

The flowers and golden sun prove distracting in a luscious sort of way.

Children are playing outside and girls are walking with young men along the walk. All that seems over for me. I am a pomegranate hanging from an invisible tree with the juice and movement of seed within my hard skin. I dress slowly. I hate the smell of clothes. I want to leave them off and just hang in the sun ripening.... ripening.

        Meridel LeSueur, Annunciation

Exploring historic downtown Dublin with a flock of kids and the undead.

There are moments in life when Bob Dylan sits across the street on a park bench. There are people in life who are easily mistaken for stage props. And there are places in life that sit like onions with hundreds of eye-watering layers waiting to be peeled. Everything is solved by a hat parade.

So we put on some hats and set out to explore historic downtown Dublin, James Joyce without the hangover, a place where witches hang out in hot yoga rather than covens. 

We actually set out to find a candy store where the munchkins could cash in their travel tickets for sticky sweetness. Sadly, the candy store shut down, replaced by a wine-boasting restaurant for those who like to sniff and sigh over dates and barrels and remote vineyards in green valleys. 

There are doilies hanging in the windows of a quaint tea shop that no one ever enters except ladies looking for company in a past brighter than cemeteries. There are neat little shops stuffed with colorful yarns and boutiques for babies who want care deeply about pecking orders and status hierarchies. There are beech nuts all over the sidewalks and beautiful old trees that surely acted as awnings for joy and tears. I can't wait to dig more deeply....

VARIATIONS ON A THEME #1: Dots.

 Teak wood and green dots necklace

"Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots."
                        Johann G. Hamann

Polka dots cut from assorted fabrics and hand-stitched to linen or burlap... bamboo dotting a frame... disposable placemats covered in dots... "Connect the Dots" poem for kids... a dark disco frame brings back the 70's penchant for dotdom.... a life begins as a tiny speck magnified into a dot on an ultrasound screen... DOTS is a strategy used to reduce the number of tuberculosis cases... there are dots to be discerned in the current political milieu... a single dot tattooed on the hand is perplexing.... a three-dot triangle tattoo on the hand is fraught with meaning... pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors... something that is "beside the point" is only rarely "beside the dot"...

So many things to smile about.

Like the little bird in our garage that talks to me as I do the laundry because she wants to make sure no one disturbs her baby chick in the nearby nest.

Or the moonlit gray which Patrick painted our kitchen this past weekend.

And that way Micah's face lights up when we drive through the minivan train to get Max from his Summer Enrichment Workshop as if the Pope himself and all his minions deigned to climb aboard our crazy car.

The way our bed looks in fresh, white sheets with baby Milla on top.

Max's love for his pet apple tree, which he named Johnny Appleseed and which he waters ferociously. When Johnny Appleseed almost died a few weeks ago, Max shed tears and those tears must have healed Johnny's broken trunk.

Those olive and goat cheese burgers Patrick grilled on Sunday still make me drool.

Sunshine and the scent of roasted grass.

What doesn't bloom will be reborn.