Friday Quote

"Yar nodded. 'Magic,' he answered wryly, 'is how you use what, in spite of all your good intentions, you learn.'"

--Patricia McKillip
Od Magic

When Asked the Impossible

The Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

---Denise Levertov
from Sands of the Well

I find myself often in positions of more responsibility than I am able to meet. Marriage comes to mind. Motherhood also. Everyday I wake up with the knowledge that I am totally incompetent to adequately execute the barest sliver of what my life situation requres of me. For a perfectionist this is not happy information. Some people cry themselves to sleep. I can remember a time when I cried to find myself awake and in the world of the living, overwhelmed to be yet again doomed to push my personal boulder up a slope too steep.

I love Levertov's poem. It loosens something inside, gives space, gives permission to breathe again. It's a reminder that the most important parts of life--the parts that involve relationships with other people--require not that we have and hand out all the answers to others' questions, but that we allow others to ask their questions and then to seek for themselves, that we stand as witness and encouragement for the searchings of our family, our friends and mentees. It's a reminder that, quite frankly, we need fairly often to keep from closing our well-meaning handfulls of pat answers around fragile wings and crushing them. It's fear, I think, that clenches our fists so tightly, fear of not knowing answers ourselves, or of not trusting the answers we claim to know. I want the grace to live in ignorance in willingness without willfulness.

Open hands, Cindy. Open hands.

Friday Quote

"No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty."

-----Leon Wieseltier

The If-I-Could-Be Meme

I'm way behind on getting this one out. Feebs gave me a list and asked me to complete sentences for three of them (I think it was three.)

If I could be an inn-keeper, I'd hire my brothers-in-law Brad and Roy to sit in the common room sharpening executioners' axes and look menacing and keep the rabble quiet. I would stand for no funny business out back in the stables, and I'd carry a big iron ladle with which to firmly whack the knuckles of any lout who pestered my serving girls.

If I could be a mutant, I'd have the power to discern a person's greatest pain and how to ease it. Then I'd set up shop as a psychologist by day and a writer of inspirational self-help books by night. I would help millions. The sad would be made happy, the suffering of the world relieved, marriages saved, homes restored. Small children would hug my feet and whisper my name in awe and grateful tears!

(Or maybe I'd have the power to eat anything I like and not gain weight. Difficult choice.)

If I could be a bonnie pirate, I'd wear those really comfy balloon-y pants and billowy blouses and decorate the captain's quarters in cabbage rose wallpaper. I'd keelhaul the first landlubber who laughed at me fashion sense, arrrggh, and they'd be eatin' from th' chum bucket fer the duration of the voyage, Matey.

Tag, you're it!
Jeremy
The Way Seeker
Notes on Acting
This Hapax Legomenon
A Likely Story

If I could be a scientist...
If I could be a farmer...
If I could be a musician...
If I could be a doctor...
If I could be a painter...
If I could be a gardener...
If I could be a missionary...
If I could be a chef...
If I could be an architect...
If I could be a linguist...
If I could be a psychologist...
If I could be a librarian...
If I could be an athlete...
If I could be a lawyer...
If I could be an inn-keeper...
If I could be a professor...
If I could be a writer...
If I could be a llama-rider...
If I could be a bonnie pirate...
If I could be an astronaut...
If I could be a world famous blogger...
If I could be a justice on any one court in the world...
If I could be married to any current famous political figure...
If I could be a sorcerer/sorceress...
If I could be a mutant...
If I could be an influential religious leader...

A Book Pass-It-On Questionaire Thingy

Feeble Knees has tapped my shoulder with a chain questionaire thingy, this one about books! Books! Books! Books! Books! Books!

Ahem. Pardon.

1. Total number of books owned:

Well.... I had to do this by rooms, so:

1,000 in the study. Odd that it was such an even number. Total coincidence, though.
67 in our bedroom. Mostly on the floor beside the bed, as there are no shelves in this room.
33 on or around my desk. Also no shelving
13 in the kitchen
98 in the living room. In a china cabinet instead of dishes and on a cedar chest.
204 on and around a bookshelf in the dining room.
168 in the girls' room. Not counting under the bed or buried.
65 in the playroom.
____
Total: 1,648. But then I found two more boxes in the utility room, and an Amazon order has come in this week, and Great Scott's birthday is Friday, and more will be forthcoming then. Nor does this total include the ones we've loaned out, which are legion. (Happy sigh!)

2. Last books we've bought:

Great Scott:
A Short History of Linguistics by R.H. Robins
Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure by John E. Joseph, Nigel Love and Talbot J. Taylor
Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century by John E. Joseph, Nigel Love and Talbot J. Taylor
Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces

Yes, these are for his graduate classes this summer, but they're also snifty books. :)

Cindy:
The Fur Person by May Sarton
Nurture by Nature by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger (MBTI theory and child raising)
New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver
The Best Day the Worst Day by Donald Hall (just out this spring, autobiographical about his and Jane Kenyon's life together--most excellent book)
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (non-fiction about the Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer who operated in Chicago during that time)
Rumi: Gardens of the Beloved and Rumi: Whispers of the Beloved translated by Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin (I take one of these to church to read whenever the temptation strikes to tear the upholstry apart with my teeth out of frustration.)
A top secret book I can't name because it's for Great Scott's birthday, and he reads this blog. :::smug smile:::

3. Last book I read:

Read as in finished reading? Ten Little Kittens which I read aloud to my niece yesterday.
Read as in referenced? The Bible, which I used in a lengthy reply on a friend's bloga few minutes ago, a reply which was promptly lost in cyberspace glitches. (grrrr--sorry, Beth.)

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
House of Light by Mary Oliver
Prayer by Richard Foster
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Leaf by Niggle by J. R.R. Tolkien (a lengthy short story, really, but definitive for me)

5. Five people to whom to pass the baton:

Beth--Because although I know her literary tastes, she finds new things and educates me.
FieldFleur--Because I suspect there will be tasty things on her shelves as well.
The Way Seeker--Whose blog, which I have only recently discovered, intrigues and greatly amuses me.
PDub--Because I know very little of his reading habits but suspect him of having them.
Steph--Because I'm interested.

A New Tradition

I love Michelle's Shabbat Shalom posts every Friday. Her pictures are always lovely, sometimes breathtaking. While I cannot aspire to such spirit-stirring beauty, I think I'd like to start posting a quote of some sort once a week. So here's the first bit of profundity to see you through your weekend:

"Your hair is a halo of mouse-brown fire!"

---Arthur from the shortlived cartoon TV series "The Tick"

Changes

Last week my younger daughter and I had appointments with our optometrist. As we’d anticipated, she was very ready for glasses, and my prescription had changed. One thing I’d not anticipated was our doctor’s offer to put me in soft contacts. Two years ago, my twenty year run of wearing hard and rigid gas permeable contacts was brought to an abrupt end when we discovered damage to my corneas: a nasty little network of rapidly encroaching blood vessels that shouldn’t have been there, as well as some scarring. At the time, he expressed doubt that I’d ever wear contacts again. However, two years of healing seems to have brought my eyes to the point of tolerating soft contacts, although I’m told the scar tissue is likely permanent and will make my preferred rigid choice uncomfortable at best. So I’m pondering my options while wearing a “trial” pair of softies for a week or two to see how it goes.

New prescriptions mean new glasses, so after the appointment the girls and I headed to an optical shop. Here our eleven year-old was struck with pangs of unwelcome change as she watched her little sister and mom try on frames. At first she heartily approved her sister’s choice of pale metallic pink frames, but as we wandered around the store (the younger one wearing her frames “just to“see how they feel”), the older grew increasingly dissatisfied with the way the younger looked and began making comments: “I just don’t think they look like you.” “They just don’t look right.” “I don’t think I like them after all.” When I asked her opinion about a pair I tried on, she shook her head sadly. “You just don’t look like you, Mom,” she said. When pressed, she finally explained, “You look like a movie star or a teenager.” I resisted simultaneous urges to burst into laughter and to assault my own child (if you have children and a sense of humor, you understand perfectly; if you have children and no sense of humor, you are likely the sole caseload for one of your local social workers). After much gentle encouragement, she was finally able to say unhappily, “You just look more Mom-ish in your own glasses, and I like you to look Mom-ish. I don’t want you or [her sister] to change.”

I tried to reassure her, but I know how ineffective anything I had to say must have been. On the hour-long drive home, while the girls catnapped in the backseat, phrases from Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Spring and Fall” ran through my head.

Spring and Fall
to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, no spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Some of us don’t deal as well with change as others. Change to us, whether it be new glasses or the changing of seasons or even new clothes (I used to hate shopping for new school clothes as a child; I wanted to wear my old ones forever!) reminds us that there is an end to the comfortable things we love. I understand that all endings are actually beginnings of new things ahead and as such should be celebrated. I think, though, that sometimes in our almost rabid pursuit of happiness, we don’t give ourselves and each other permission to mourn the little things, to acknowledge their importance to us, and express our grief, however transitory, before turning with a spirit scrubbed clean to face the beginning we’re now prepared to face, the past decisively behind us. The time needed, I suspect, will differ for each person.

I didn’t scold my daughter for making a fuss about nothing. I told her I understood, that I hate change, too. I told her it was ok to be sad. I told her that regardless of what her sister or I look like throughout our lives, her sister will always be her sister, I will always be her mother, and we will both always love her very much, even if she, herself, changes. These things, I assured her, are constants. Unwavering. Forever.

She’s seemed to be coming around, although each morning when I put in the contacts and lay aside the glasses, she lets me know which she prefers. Her tone has become matter-of-fact, though, not laced with longing. A good sign

Summer Vacation

After weeks of waffling--my waffling--Great Scott and I decided to keep the girls home from summer school this year. This summer, I decreed, was the summer they would learn to better pick up after themselves, to learn to wash dishes and to do so after every meal (we don't have a dishwasher of the non-human variety). This summer they could help in the garden and spend lazy afternoons at one of the two creeks on either side of the house, dabbling their toes in the water and catching tadpoles. This summer they would learn to ride their bicycles and run "wild in the backyard". The first week was wonderful. Both girls did dishes religiously and executed the related chores (wiping the table, countertops, stovetop and sweeping the floor) with commendable precision. Then they went to their grandmother's for a weekend. During that time, things fell apart. Not because the girls weren't ready to resume their jobs upon their return, but because I, Mommy, didn't have the dishes done up when they got home. I am a worm! I am a wretched, mewling, pitious pustule of parenthood! I writhe upon the crumby kitchen floor.

What I'd been doing was playing Dungeon Siege, a game my vice-encouraging brother-in-law, Brad, gleefully sent home with me after we had dinner with him and his significant other, Lauren (my pseudo-sister-in-law, as I fondly think of her), Friday evening. This game differs from the last game to which he attempted to addict me (Dungeon Keeper II) in that the game operator is in the position to be a hero rather than the evil overlord of one's own underworld kingdom. A step down, in Brad's opinion, most likely, but a vast relief to me. For one thing, Great Scott worries a great deal less about my immortal soul now that I don't have to summon up an icky-looking demon to conquor the sunlit upper worlds. For another, I am most sadly not cut out for evil dominion. Alas, I have no knack for the stylistics of evil dungeon keeping! My first attempt to possess one of my dungeon creatures and force it to do my nefarious bidding ended up with me being eaten by one of my own wizards. (Perhaps I should have experimented on something other than a chicken.)

So what are our children doing while they wait for me to catch up on the dishes? The discovery of a cottonmouth snake frequenting the southern creek has put unescorted excursions to its banks on hold, but the girls have been playing outside this morning, planning a picnic for lunch, and the older one is now reading J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan aloud to the younger amid the shifting sunlight and shadows beneath the big tree of paradise in the front yard. The inflections of her voice rise and fall, accompanied by birdsong and the distant drone of the neighbors' haying equipment. This, I'm reminding myself, is why I'm here, puttering barefoot through the house instead of walking the halls of academia in heels. This is why my blogging has been sporadic of late, why I have neglected returning phone calls and emails, why, at least for a few hours, I'm setting aside even the new game addiction (sorry, Brad!). There's a kingdom right here, rich in gold light and bright eyes, a kingdom of the mundane that I far too often undervalue and overlook.

Sometimes I wonder, looking out the window at the trees of paradise in the yard, if man was barred from only the physical location of Eden, or if our exile is actually enforced by our own inability to accept the possible Eden we've been given in our everyday lives, striving as we do to create one of our own conception and choosing.

Staring at the Ceiling Fan

I've been here, thinking, pondering, running errands, cutting grass, avoiding housework, taking children on field trips and attending elementary school award ceremonies, welcoming my sister and her little family back home from halfway across the nation (a joyous event, especially since her 8 month old daughter has taken a liking to yanking on my hair and staring at me in perplexed amusement when we're together), eating anything that crosses my path, washing storm windows, chauffering my grandmother, attending a wedding shower, struggling to post something--anything--on the messageboards for which I moderate and/or to post something here, working on a new poem, and staying up into the wee hours playing computer games in a desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt to turn my brain off or at least exaust it into giving me some peace. No deal.

What I want is to lie on the floor in a cool, dim room and stare at a ceiling fan for a few days. What I want is to be perfectly still without the constant background "noise" of restlessness, that pushing, guilt-inducing mental patter that incessantly steals every moment of peace and rest that might be possible. Why, praytell, does the human brain not come equipped with an off switch? !

Relearning How to Swim

One of the first poems to raise goosebumps and send chills down my back was Mary Oliver's "The Swimming Lesson". I was only seventeen and had no idea who Oliver was, but I instantly knew she'd been some of the same places I had and she'd come away with the same unwelcome knowledge about life. The last stanza of her poem reads, in part as follows:

". . . none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all
About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace, --
How to survive in any place."

Lately I find myself in the position of regathering what I threw away earlier in order to survive --dreams, pity, love and perhaps most especially grace. It's a frightening prospect, and as often as not, I'd rather turn and run away than pick up the shards of these things and hold them in my hands. They were my undoing once.

Or perhaps they weren't.

Could it be that the substitutes I used in their places were my real undoing? Self-injury, a locked heart, a refusal to trust? These things kept pain at bay enough to allow me to function in the outside world, but the cost was high: broken relationships, crippling self-hatred, the isolation of emotional exile to a desert isle of my own making.

I've never been a good swimmer.

Complete Winx Club Lyrics

Odd things happen. One of the latest bemusements in my life is that a very high percentage of Quotidian Light's visitors from search engines come here evidently looking for the theme song lyrics to The Winx Club cartoon series.

If I were so inclined to ponder this, I would no doubt find it disturbing.

However, in good cheer and because I do so hate to disappoint anyone, I have here, for all you searching readers' musical animation satiation, the official Winx Club lyrics!

Close your eyes and open your heart
Believe in yourself, that's how it starts.
Dreams will come true, just wait and see,
'Cause the magic's in you, and the magic's in me!

Chorus:
We are the Winx! We are the Winx!
Come join the club!We are the Winx!
We are the Winx! We are the Winx!
Come join the club. We are the Winx.

Magical flowers, digital powers,
Rhythms and tunes, the sun and the moon.
Keep on searching far and wide
for that fire burning deep inside!
We've got the style and we've got the flair.
Look all you want, just don't touch the hair!

Repeat chorus

Playing Catch Up

Here is where the girls and I spent weekend before last. Actually, we stayed in a hotel in Jacksonville, but the Air Force base is the reason we were there. My brother was there for a class, and my parents invited us to go with them for the weekend to visit him. Jacksonville, Arkansas is a whole lot closer than Tucson, Nevada. We went. We saw. I miss him.

This is what's going on in our neck of the woods at the moment. Great Scott teaches journalism and a few other English classes here. His classroom sits right on the commons area the gym could fall into if it collapses. It (the now-off-limits classroom) is full of the Macs and internet connections the kids need to do their classwork for their pub classes. Great Scott is not happy.

Have been mowing the grass a lot lately, although my husband assures me there's no big hurry. "When it heads out, Hon," he told me this morning, "it isn't going to get much taller."

Interview Questions for Michael

I apologise to Michael for being so tardy about getting these questions up. Not a chance that I'd miss the opportunity, though. Stick Poet Super Hero is a blog I read regularly (although not quite regularly enough, or I'd have known about the Snodgrass reading in Spfld. more than two hours before it started---grrrrr).

So, Michael,

1. How did you "discover" poetry? At what age did the lightbulb come on for you, and what poem/poet flipped the switch?

2. Which poet and/or poem (or collection of poems) most accurately (or accutely) hits you where you live now and why?

3. What is your biggest struggle with your writing?

4. What is your favorite factor about the same?

5. If you could have a conversation with any poet living or dead, who would it be, list three questions you'd ask them, and then tell us why that poet and those questions.

Many thanks for volunteering! I very much look forward to reading your answers.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a killer. It kills fun. It kills joy. It kills anticipation. I cannot remember a time when it wasn't looking over my shoulder, nudging me and saying, "Not like that! Do it this way! Do it right!" Sometimes it used the voice of a teacher or a parent, sometimes a friend or a mentor. Eventually, horridly, it's come to use my own inner voice (or one of them) against me, pushing, prodding, demanding, always having a better idea, a better way of doing that to which I'm currently setting my hand. I hate it. I despise it. I would like to strip it naked and abandon it in a blizzard somewhere in a wilderness so bleak and barren there are not even wolves around to shorten its dying agonies.

The problem with attacking anything that has wormed its way into becoming a part of us (or our perceived and/or operational identities), is that we can't do it without taking a bloody hunk out of ourselves. Every withering word we chuck in the direction of that snobby little shoulder critic cuts a curve like a boomerang and whacks us in the back of the head, usually wounding some more vulnerable self-aspect that didn't deserve it at all while the perfectist snickers, "That's what you get, you bumbling fool."

There is a way of unmanning the little bugger, though.

Cindy: (Rolling out biscuit dough for the girls' breakfast)

Perfectionism: You should be feeding them bacon and eggs. This is little more than paste with lard in it.

Cindy: They don't eat eggs; bacon takes too long.

Perfectionism: You're rolling that dough too thin.

Cindy: (Humming, picks up biscuit cutter, pauses thoughtfully, then poises it over the middle of the dough and begins to lower it.)

Perfectionism: Wait a minute! You should start at the outside edges!

Cindy: (Smiling, continues to lower biscuit cutter.)

Perfectionism: No! You'll waste dough that way! You're doing it all wrong! The edges! The edges!

Cindy: (Widens smile, very deliberately presses cutter into center of dough.)

Perfectionism: (Near hysteria) What are you doing?!?!? You're doing it on purpose!!!!

Cindy: (Gleefully and enthusiastically cuts biscuits totally at random.)

Perfectionism: Arrrrgh!!! (Runs screaming from room.)

A most satisfactory way to start the morning, I assure you.

New Blog--Inscapes

Inscapes is a new blog that I would find worth a daily reading for the literary quotes alone (Gerard Manley Hopkins is the best!), but given the fact that the author(ess) has been sharing particularly good insights about the church and depression, as well as other matters, well...I just don't miss it. We don't agree on everything, granted, but any friend of Hopkins is a friend of mine--even if she hadn't already been a real life heart-friend for the past seventeen years.

Check it out.

So That's Why!

This quote from Kay Redfield Jamison's book, Exuberance, made me laugh right out loud. Startled the cat.

"An individual in a positive mood tends to see the forest and the pattern among the trees; an individual who is in neither a positive nor a depressed mood picks out the trees. Someone who is depressed focuses in on the bark (and then notes, as well, where it is peeling)."

Some trees I can identify by the bark in winter when they have no leaves. I'm not joking. (But I am still laughing.)

Book Review--The Jordan Tracks

I will be honest. When I hear the term “Christian fiction”, I cringe. In my experience, most fiction selling in Christian bookstores amounts to little more than (as Great Scott so eloquently puts it) sanctified bodice rippers (whose protagonists--usually lonely women--find all their problems solved most satisfactorily by walking an inviational aisle and perhaps marrying the preacher) or eschatological thrillers with characters about as deep as an episode of Fear Factor. Blessedly, Christian fiction writer Steven W. Wise’s The Jordan Tracks fits neither of these categories.

Set in small town mid-Missouri in 1968, The Jordan Tracks chronicles the spiritual crisis of Ernie Bates and the friends and family closest to him when his son, an only child, falls victim to a sniper’s chance shot in Vietnam. Thankfully, Wise doesn’t use The Jordan Tracks to tell his readers that Christianity makes everything instantly spiffy, hunky-dory, and if a believing character tends to become a bit didactic once or twice in the attempt to reconcile the story’s unbelievers with the God in whom they doubt, it is at least done in lingo that wouldn't sound strange in the mouth of a rural Missourian. (I swear I know these people first-hand; they’re pure gold, through and through.) The Jordan Tracks is not a literary masterpiece in terms of academic crafting, perhaps; we are sometimes told more than we’re shown about the characters and their motivations. Nevertheless, Wise demonstrates especially keen eyes and ears for the subtleties of detail in which relationships are revealed and nurtured. From the social interactions of backyard barbeques (“pig pickin’s”) to the work line of a small town turkey processing plant to the county fairgrounds, Wise knows his people, their storytelling, their friendly baiting, their companionable or respectful silences, the extremes to which they may be driven in grief, and how slowly and carefully hope must be breathed into existence if it is ever to kindle into steady flame within a broken human spirit.

National Poetry Month

In honor of National Poetry Month, Borders has priced their poetry at 10% off.

:::sound of heavy breathing:::

Ongoing Blog Phenom at ETC.

The blogosphere is a bizarre place. Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Everyday Thoughts Collected blogger, Randy Thomas has an ongoing situation that is one of the more amusing (or pitiful, depending on your perspective, I suppose) happenings I've witnessed.

Randy made a post about ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition over a year ago. The comments continue to come in, much to his interest, amusement and chagrin. Thought you might enjoy a peek. Just be aware it may take awhile.

Spring Break

Our daughters are home on spring break this week, it's tax season, I think I'm doing Easter dinner for my family this weekend, and the car once again is refusing to start. For these and other reasons, I'm taking a blogging break until (most likely) next week. I shall return, though, with fascinating news and reviews, including a response to author Steven W. Wise's new book, The Jordan Tracks, which I am currently pondering in stolen moments between plucking magnetic Barbie clothes out of the carpet and trying to convince two room-cleaning-resistant children that we can really have our very own ABC Extreme Edition Home Makeover right here in our house--all they have to do is pick up their room, and they won't even recognize it!!!

I doubt it will work. Probably would have to call in Ty to convince them.

Check out the latest interview questions below and enjoy!

C.