Book Lovin' Kids and Lap Lovin' Cats

Today was spent at my grandmother's house, cleaning her basement in preparation for the influx of relatives she expects next month when we have our annual four-generation family get-together. My grandmother is eighty-eight, in full possession of her mental faculties, and save for a fluttery heart condition, in good health. She does get tired more easily since two rounds of hospitalizations last winter, and while this is a notable inconvenience for her, it is a blessing for me. I'm the family member who is most available, so I get to drive her to most of her various doctors' appointments, run any complicated errands with and/or for her, and drop in several times a week just to visit and see if there's anything she needs done. The entire family treasures Grandma: her gentle humor, steady love and quiet, peaceable spirit have made her the heart of my father's family. Spending a day cleaning at her house is not usually a chore. Today, though, after dropping the girls off at school, I sat in the car in her driveway and fought tears of dread and a rising migraine.

Full weeks are trials for me, and this week is thickening. Today I was scheduled to clean. Tomorrow evening brings a cast picnic and a double run-through rehearsal for the last two performances of Laura's Memories (after five weeks of no performances or practices), as well, we're told, as a professional taping. Thursday I'm working a book fair at the school all day. Friday and Saturday are performances. Sunday church. I know that for many, many people this is a light schedule. Laughable, even. For me it's overwhelming, not because I'm afraid of people or even because I don't enjoy them, but because being with people drains me incredibly, even when I've had a wonderful time. As I sat in the driveway alternately hoping the migraine would and wouldn't get bad enough to make me either throw up or pass out, and provide a handy way out of my life's obligations, I knew (I know) it will be alright. Today would pass; tomorrow will pass; the weekend will play itself out, and Monday will be my own again. I made myself open the car door and start the day.

The hard part, for today, at least, is mostly over. I'm home in front of the virtual brush heap under which, somewhere, lies my desk. The girls are absorbed in the books they've acquired at the book fair this afternoon, and the cat, The Great Golden Sun Cat, leapt into my lap and settled himself there, purring, the moment I sank into a chair. (He doesn't like me to be gone all day, either; my absence deprives him of his favorite piece of warm furniture.) These are today's light: people (yes, The Great Golden Sun Cat counts as a definite person--just ask him) whose need of me is not overwhelming, people who can just sit and be in a room, without making demands, without having expectations. It won't last, of course. In fifteen minutes the girls will want something to eat, and the GGSC will try to climb my leg in anticipation of kitty treats when he hears the cupboard doors open. But for right now, for this single moment, they are light. Light sufficient. Light in deed.

When Two People With English Degrees Reproduce

Our younger daughter came home telling me about her music class this last week.

Daughter: And when the teacher took role, I answered, "Here, O Mighty Dread Sovereign Whom I Shall Ever So Serve!"

Me: (raising eyebrow) And what did she say?

Daughter: She said, "Where did you learn all those big words?"

Me: And you said...

Daughter: My daddy taught me!

Old Connections

1. I've had this computer for a year and a half, but it took me until last night to install AOL's instant messenger and get my AIM screennames back up and running. I don't usually spend a lot of time chatting, but I'll admit, it felt awfully good to reconnect with a couple of people I'd not heard from for over a year, especially when they zipped me a message within five seconds of my signing on, telling me I was a sight for sore eyes. Bless cyberfriends!

2. And then there are connections that are just flat-out odd. A couple of weeks ago I was Google-ing people Scott and I've known in former lives and ran across the guy who was my first grade "boyfriend", and who remained a friend throughout the rest of grade and high schools--easy to do with a graduating class of 42 people. Finding out what Bledsoe's up to these days was an eyebrow raiser, for sure, but I had to grin (even while wincing). It's such a Bledsoe thing to be doing.

Friday Quote: On Literature

"Literature involves more than literature, or we would not be grateful for it."

--Wendell Berry
from his essay, "Sweetness Preserved"

New Blog of Interest

A new blog has begun. Grumpy Teacher proves himself so far to be, well...grumpy. But maybe if he ever gets to eat something besides frito pie and hot dogs for dinner, he'll come around.

The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!

Today I sat peaceably fiddling at the keyboard beside the dining room window when I heard very loud popping and cracking sounds emanating from outside. I stood up, but before I could get to the door, before I could even take a single step, I was treated to the sight of a very-large-tree-limb falling onto the hood of my mother's car. Thunk.

The sound was definitely a thunk. Not a crash or a ku-tcha or a bam.

Thunk.

Just in case you wondered what the sound of a very-large-tree-limb falling on a car sounds like.

Friday Quote: On Emily Dickinson

"...I was reminded of her painful experience at Holyoke Seminary. . . The worship there was a part of what scholars now call the Great Revival, and often had a highly emotional pitch. Girls were asked to stand, or come forward, as a sign that they declared theselves for Jesus. But at one such meeting, Emily Dickinson, aged sixteen, was the only one left seated after the altar call. She sums up the experience in a flinty remark: 'They thought it queer I didn't stand. I thought a lie would be queerer.'"

---Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Dragonfly Summer: Journal Excerpts

Aug. 29, 2005

“Never,” my snipey little shoulder critic says to me daily, “Never will you amount to a hill of beans. Never will you be any good. Why were you even born?” And I look at the bright blue sky with its lazy clouds, the sunlight glittering on the grass, the shifting, whispering tree leaves, and they all seem to turn their backs, to block me out, to affirm the sentiment. I am nothing but a drain and a burden on this world. Dead I would at least be fertilizer. But I can’t imagine never seeing sunlight across the fields again, never feeling wind against my face. At the same time, going on isn’t exactly a delightful prospect. Why this PUSH, this hang-up on achievement, on the ought-to’s, the shoulds? They annihilate all possibility of the simplest pleasure taking. I am wearied with the weight of my own insufficiency.

Aug. 30, 2005

Dragonfly summer. That’s what this surely is. In the mornings when I’ve walked, I’ve seen two or three flying around my feet at nearly any given spot along the trail. Earlier this summer I looked out the bedroom windows and saw swarms of something flying above the waving grasses, fired by the setting sun to pale glimmering bits of gold above a golden sea. I assumed then it was a butterfly migration of some kind. Just now, though, coming through the opening of one field to another, stepping out of the fence line swath of trees that bracket the lane, I looked to my left, south toward the creek, and saw again the sunlit, airy forms. The whole field is criss-crossed with them, the air become a living thing, filled with floating, dipping, climbing, darting dragonflies, their translucent wings flickering, tipping, tilting, holding their iridescent teal and green, their black and powder blue bodies level with the ground in momentary hovers or propelling them in beelines, lifting them for better views. They flit and jab like miniature fencing foils wielded by invisible adversaries. They rise and glide, soap bubbles afloat, or swoop and bank, kites tugging at unseen strings.

This is what they do. For this they were made: this play, this flight, this all unknowing livening and lightening of air and sky, of all that lies between heaven and earth.

Sept. 2, 2005

It is enough. For them. For me. It is enough.

Rocks in the Dark

Recently I picked up work on a poem I'd not been able to write previous to this year, a poem about a suicide attempt. It often helps, I find, to read other poets' work touching on the subject matter or the style or tone of whatever poem I'm working on at a given time. Marcus's poem, which I posted yesterday, is one I read when I sat down with his two books, The Broken World and Roman Fever. His books aren't easy to read, certainly aren't cheery little volumes of pert glee, but they are reassuring--reassuring because they address deeply emotional subject matter with an unblinking eye and a calm in the midst of the sorrow and darkness, a calm that speaks to a stable center being possible despite whatever pain or tragedy may come hurtling into our lives to rip them apart.

I've known this center of stability. I've stood there before while huge chunks of my life crumbled and fell from structures I'd once considered unshakable: an area of my identity I'd considered impeccably "normal," my marriage, my ability to choose to do the right thing, my own motivations. The universe blew to dust around me, but somewhere in the center was a place of solidity. It wasn't an island paradise of warm fuzzies, that's for sure. More like a sterile rock in the middle of a frenzied sea. It held, though. It held true.

A large part of me wants to live there, on that rock that feels sterile but is secure. I suspect I'd find it to be not so devoid of life or comfort at all, if I could hold myself there in stillness and acceptance. I'm afraid to try too determinedly, though. The times I've known it most strongly have been through periods of intense pain and personal devastation. Does it even exist without the mind and/or heart's necessity for it? And if it does, is it possible to go there, to dwell there, without hurting at every breath taken?

Tonight Scott is upstairs working in the study; the girls are in bed. I'm sitting in a darkened room at my desk. The windows to my left are open, admitting cool night air, cricket song and the multi-pitched trilling of tree frogs. A fan runs somewhere in the house. The refrigerator hums. The Great Golden Sun Cat has draped his weight across my thighs and lashes my legs lightly with his tail. On the porch, Tongue Depressor Kitty is calling me to come take another look at the little leopard frog she's caught, to praise her and admire her prowess. What more could I want? Why delve into deep places where light grows dim and flickers?

Because. There's something there. There's something there. There's something there.

And it's important.

Friday Quote: Your Protest

"Let the excellence of your work be your protest."

--Dr. William Lane

The Anniversary

Sunday morning Great Scott woke up miserably sick. Miserably sick. (Is it something about our anniversary?!?!) The girls and I left him sleeping and tiptoed out of the house to church, where we arrived (as usual) about five minutes late. My mother pulled into the parking space next to ours. "Your father isn't coming this morning," she said, as she climbed out of her car. "A wrong load of feed got delivered yesterday, and he's taken one of the guys out to the customer's farm to shovel it out of their barn." Not an unusual happening.

I remember thinking that August wasn't a particularly good time to be up in the roof of a barn shoveling grain. Dad's done it lots of times, but he isn't in his twenties or thirties any more, and it would be rough on him. As one of the two partners who run the milling business, and given his age, he really shouldn't be doing any shoveling at all, but I knew my father, and I knew he wouldn't ask any of the regular hands to do anything he wasn't going to help with himself. Mom's call later that afternoon caught me off guard but didn't particularly shock me. "Your father's collapsed. They're airlifting him to St. John's."

The rest of Sunday seems like a month ago. Or a year. Or a lifetime. Not that there was ever any particular feeling of panic, really. Dad was in solid spirits when we got to the hospital. He was calm, good-natured and fairly serious with an occasional mildly mischievious comment thrown in. The doctors confirmed a mild heart attack. An angiogram was scheduled for Monday afternoon. Mom and I didn't leave the hospital until nearly eleven, not for medical reasons, but because we'd innocently granted my dad the pen and paper he'd requested, and he kept giving Mom, his business partner and their manager lists of things they needed to know and take care of. Mom, Jody and Steve stood around in the ICU waiting room grinning, shaking their heads and comparing: "I got seven pages; how many'd he give you?"

Monday's tests revealed partial blockages and signs of another one or more that had likely caused Sunday's problem. Three stents were put in. By the time Mom, my sister and I finished hearing the doctor's report and got back to Dad's room, he was finishing off his dinner, and he showed my sister his favorite trick with the monitors. By breathing in a series of sharp and irregular gasps, he could make the monitor's respiration line leap in a series of jagged peaks and valleys. He found this tremendously entertaining: "Look. I can make it draw Mickey Mouse!" (Oh, alright, I'll admit, we all found it pretty funny, in a warped sort of way.)

Today I'm home and weary beyond bone tired. I've not felt particularly stressed the last two days. No worrying or panic, no what-if's chasing themselves in circles around my mind. Just a lot of waiting, listening, learning and considering. Very calm stuff. Now, though, it's as if all the tension and turmoil that hasn't been emotionally manifested has somehow transformed itself into sheer physical exaustion. Probably not particularly unusual.

And the anniversary? I'm really glad Scott and I hadn't made special plans, that we'd decided to just wait until the next weekend the girls went to their grandmother's. He did bring home a dozen red rosebuds Saturday night, and their slow bloom has been a deeply felt thing for me to see over the past two or three days. Scott's been really uckily ill, and he's taken care of the girls and his own first couple of teachers' days of the new school year all on his own, regardless, without a single complaint. We haven't really seen each other enough to talk, but late every night when I've walked in, the whole household darkened and asleep, these roses have been standing quietly, beautifully opening at my place on the table, bearing witness to his love.

Thank you, Sweetheart. I love you, too. Happy Anniversary.

Fifteen Years Ago

On August 14th, 1990, Scott and I stood under the spreading limbs of an old tree in Phelps Grove Park in Springfield, Missouri and were wed. Fifteen years is a long time, I suppose. Sometimes it seems like forever. But sometimes I look at him and wonder who this man is standing in my kitchen helping himself to my Nuke Loops. Then I remember, "Oh yeah. He's the guy who pays for the Nuke Loops!"

Last year our anniversary celebration was preempted by my having the flu. This year we have no idea what to do. He's finishing up work from last school year and begins his new year on Monday. Today is the first day since last Monday that I've not run a fever, so I don't feel much like getting out yet. Most likely we'll take a nap tomorrow. Maybe there's something sad about spending one's fifteenth wedding anniversary at home napping, but part of me finds the idea pretty cozy.

I know we'll make a point of going out to eat in a week or two, and we'll probably end up in a bookstore somewhere, each making appreciative noises over what treasures the other finds. This is how we began--making faces at each other over the table in a restaurant and prowling Springfield's used book stores (once he convinced me to go out with him at all, that is). It was a good start.

After fifteen years, it's still good.

Friday Quote: Poem Excerpt

From "Dogfish"

. . .

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story--
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

. . .

---Mary Oliver

Toasted!

Great Scott!: (tapping his extremely well toasted--i.e. hard and very dark brown--sloppy joe bun) "Yeah! Ummm Hmmm! Just the way I like 'em!"

Cindy: (gratefully) You are such a good man!

Great Scott!: (cheerful and matter-of-fact) "I'm a lyin' coward! :::big smile:::

I definitely married the right man.

Summer Cold. Just Shoot Me Now.

Sniffles.
Achy ears.
Sore throat.
Fever.

Self-pity. The best symptom of the bunch.

Friday Quote: On Purpose

I believe that every one of us has a personal mission--a mission to contribute something positive through being who we are. Woodrow Wilson said, "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand."

. . .According to George Bernard Shaw, "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

---as quoted by Sunny Schlenger
in Organizing for the Spirit

This is SO Not Politically Correct!

But it's a whole lot of fun!

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Mushroom Cloud of Tranquility. What's yours?

Sister Mushroom Cloud of Tranquility. . .I really like that.

Keeps to the Rabid Galadriel theme, too, come to think of it...

Uh....

Tonight I played with two different personality doohickeys for fun. The results are faintly discombobulating...

You are Galadriel!

Possessing a rare combination of wisdom and humility, while serenely dominating your environment you selflessly use your powers to care for others.

Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

And then there's this:





You Are Rabies!

Also known as Hydrophobia, you tend to be exciting
and spontaneous. Energetic and daring, your
friends value your ability to eat things after
the five second rule has expired. While you are
greatly appreciated for your ability to take
chances, you have been known to "bite the
hand that feeds you." You have a great
sense of humor when you can manage to wipe the
foam off of your mouth.

What Disease Are You?
brought to you by

I'm So Envious!

An author of one of those fluffy-little-books-that-have-a-lot-of-wisdom-in-them-for-such-a-fluffy-little-book recommends making a list of the things you'd be jealous of in your own life, were it not yours. The idea being that we take a lot for granted. Given my present circumstances, it seems like a good time to tackle the assignment.

Reasons why, if I weren't me, I'd be envious of me:

1. Her marriage, her only marriage, has lasted nearly fifteen years and is stronger for past struggles.

2. Her husband is a funny and thoughtful man. (He is! Yesterday he brought home a copy of the Weekly World News with a story about giant bats attacking airplanes, just to cheer her up. Now that's self-sacrificing for a man who teaches journalism for a living!)

3. She has beautiful children who worship the ground she walks on ("Oh, Mommy, you spoil us! You are the best Mommy in the world! Mommy, I luuuuuv you! Can I have a snack now?")

4. Her cat sits on her lap when she's on the computer.

5. Her library--she has exquisite taste in books!

6. Her monstrous oak rolltop desk.

7. She lives in the middle of nowhere, complete with birdsong, fields, woods, creeks, and wildlife. (She saw two humongous deer this morning on her walk, as a matter of fact, and an owl yesterday.)

8. She gets to stay home while her husband works, and he's ok with that.

9. She has lovely hair (long, dark--not really greying yet, soft, thick, and generally well behaved).

10. She talks to God as if He were a real person, one close enough to be vulnerable with and to be slightly (ok, sometimes more than slightly) sassy with.

11. She and her husband share most of their passions (books, spirituallity, books, chocolate, books, language, books, words, books, outdoors, books).

12. She has a solid family and good relationships with its members (thinking extended family, here: her amazingly gifted brother and sister, her parents and her grandmother).

13. She has good relationships with her in-laws and is sincerely fond of them (especially the two warped brothers-in-law and Lauren).

14. She has a quirky sense of humor.

15. Her friends are the oddest and most fascinating collection you'd ever wish to run across, and all of them incredibly exceptional people.

16. She has a lot of knowledge and curiosity; she's interested in and researches nearly everything.

17. She often has unusual insight into people and situations.

18. Her yard is full of flowers and huge, old trees.

19. She has a green thumb with houseplants (african violets, geraniums, cyclamen, orchids, begonias, ivy, anthurium).

20. Her writing.

As I'm writing this, I'm seeing that I really do take most of these things for granted most of the time. Furthermore, I'm finding it's the simplest things that give me the most pleasure and comfort when I'm down: the yard, the woods, the cat, the husband (I'll be in trouble for that remark when he reads this. Ah, well. It adds spice. ;) )

Taking Steps

Sometimes I don't know if I'm going forward or backward. Often I suspect doing both simultaneously isn't beyond possibility. Like now, for instance. My moods have been increasing in intensity lately: restlessness, drivenness, sentimentality, teariness, emotional exaustion, false guilt, self-condemnation, discouragement sliding toward depression, pressured. I hate this. In such moods, the mere fact of their existence becomes perceived confirmation of my complete failure as a human being. Sheer hogwash, of course, but knowing doesn't alleviate feeling, unfortunately.

There are things I can do that have proven effective in lessening the severity of these moods and/or decreasing the length of their existence. Things I've been avoiding but that I have to admit have become necessary. So this morning I got out of bed much earlier than has been the norm this summer, and I walked for an hour. Hard. Tonight I will try to go to bed around ten instead of the 2 a.m. average I've been running for the last two weeks. I am trying very, very, very hard to stay away from sugar, corn and wheat products, and I am trying to focus on the very simple, very ordinary tasks of the everyday variety: laundry, dishes, bedmaking, bathing, putting in my contacts, brushing my hair. Yes, these things take enormous focus right now, believe it or not.

There is nothing quite so humbling for a Very Intelligent Person as having one's mind stage a coup that leaves one nearly incapable of tasks even the dimmest person can perform with ease. Grrrr.

Friday Quote: A Conglomeration

This week, a collection of oddments heard in the Lawson household over the past couple weeks.

"I can now say with utter confidence that Bubba Ho-Tep was a triumph of cinema compared to Kill Bill." ---Great Scott
(Note: Neither of these movies have the Lawson recommendation for discriminating viewers. Not whilst the viewers are sober, at least.)

Great Scott to younger daughter: "Come here and let me paint your nose yellow with this highlighter."
Younger daughter: (lighting up with glee) "Oh yes! Then I can tell Pat and Teri [her directors] I have a disease!

"But my little elves need a place to go! They're getting inbred!" ---Cindy apologetically taking over her brother-in-law's territories in a heated game of LOTR Risk.

"She has weapons of mass destruction! I can prove it! I must make the world safe for democracy!!" ---Great Scott accusing the same poor little inbred elves in said game of Risk. This particular comment got him dubbed "George" for the rest of the evening. I think he was proud of it.

Little House Play

Part of the reason my blogging has been so sparse and shallow lately is that the girls and I are involved in a musical and have been in rehearsals most of the summer. Well, the girls have been in rehearsals. I've been making costumes.

Laura's Memories is a musical about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who authored a popular series of children's books, Little House on the Prarie being probably the most recognizable title thanks to the television series by the same name. This is the musical's 15th year of production, my mother's 12th year of being its costume mistress, my girls' 2nd year of acting in it, and my 1st year of actively helping out with something other than wrangling children backstage. The cast numbers over 50. There are 11 scenes in 2 acts with 10 musical numbers, all told.

All last week we had dress rehearsals, in temperatures in the 90's and 100's. I sat in the pit of our little outdoor theater taking notes for Pat, our musical director, and watching everyone struggle with finding breath enough in the heat and humidity to say their lines, let alone belt out songs and dance. Period costuming with its boots, stockings, high collars, long sleeves, shawls, hats, long dresses and pinafores, does not lend itself to enthusiasm when the temperature is 102 or 104, as it was on opening night last Friday and on Saturday. "You positively glowed!" said our director to one young lady afterward. "It was sweat!!" came the breathless reply. I guarantee she lied not!

I've acted before and can do a fair job of it, but I want my daughters to be in the limelight, not me. This is a chance for them to stretch their wings without me being in their space, so I'm doing what I actually prefer: I'm working in the background, helping my mother with costumes (making two dresses and four pinafores thus far, as well as several repairs and alterations, and keeping track of who's wearing what), taking notes for Pat and coaching the little girls through the finale each performance. This is both a busy and an oddly restful place for me to be. I'm happy.

A note: For anyone who's interested, my daughters are, indeed, in the picture linked above. The older one, who plays Mary in two scenes, is sitting on the ground in the center, in blue. The younger one is the farthest standing on the right. The picture's too small for you to see well, but take my word for it: they're dangerously gorgeous and gifted young ladies!

Not Quite Sure How to Take This

Therapeutic Writer at Cheaper Than Therapy posted her Advanced Global Personality test results. They looked so interesting I had to hop over to similarminds.com and try it for myself.

Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion 30% Stability 53% Orderliness 36% Altruism 70% Interdependence 56% Intellectual 70% Mystical 90% Artistic 83% Religious 90% Hedonism 10% Materialism 10% Narcissism 50% Adventurousness 36% Work ethic 56% Self absorbed 23% Conflict seeking 10% Need to dominate 16% Romantic 36% Avoidant 63% Anti-authority 43% Wealth 10% Dependency 36% Change averse 50% Cautiousness 43% Individuality 43% Sexuality 30% Peter pan complex 50% Physical security 90% Physical Fitness 10% Histrionic 10% Paranoia 43% Vanity 63% Hypersensitivity 43% Female cliche 56%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

My trait snapshot had this to add: introverted, secretive, messy, depressed, does not like leadership, somewhat nihilistic, observer, does not make friends easily, unassertive, feels invisible, feels undesirable, hates large parties, does not like to stand out, leisurely, suspicious, submissive, abstract, unpredictable, intellectual, likes rain, likes the unknown, negative, weird, not a risk taker, unadventurous, avoidant, strange.

Introverted, yes, but I make friends very easily when I choose to; I prefer to call it reserved rather than "secretive"; I'm not usually depressed; I enjoy being invisible (and that gold ring on my finger has nothing to do with it); I doubt Great Scott has noticed any particularly pronounced submissiveness on my part ever; I don't see how one can like the unknown and be unadventurous simultaneously; it's not called nihilism--it's called black humor; and large parties almost always have a quiet corner somewhere from which one can take notes on what idiots people in large groups can be--always good writing fodder. So I take umbrage with these things.

As for being messy, an observer, leisurely, abstract, unpredictable, intellectual, liking rain and the unknown, being weird and strange...well, ahem...maybe it's possible.

Heh heh heh

The girls and I got in from opening night of the Little House musical at eleven tonight. Great Scott mentioned he ate a half a bag of M&M's while we were gone.

That means there's a half bag of M&M's somewhere in the house.

And it's nearly 2:00 a.m.

And Great Scott is asleep.

Friday Quote: On Finishing

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...

---Erica Jong

Friday Quote: On Sleep and Writing

...if you keep a depressed patient awake all night, his or her mood will improve significantly. (Unfortunately, the benefit only lasts until the first nap that contains dream sleep.) Most (but not all) antidepressants suppress dream sleep, and some researchers have speculated that this property might be essential to their effectiveness...

Writers who are feeling too manic and hypergraphic, with too many scattered ideas, may benefit from a sleep regimen opposite to that for depressed or blocked writers. Sleep deprivation doesn't calm down overenergetic writers, it often only disinhibits them further. They may find that their writing becomes more organized if they are forced to go to bed two hours early. Some have speculated that an all-nighter may help writer's block by using sleep deprivation to disinhibit the writer...

The first rule a medical resident learns is "Sleep when you can, eat when you can; you may never get a second chance." But the resident's life, while tiring, is also pleasantly loaded with call-room beds. What about writers whose work situation is not so well equipped? In my first job after my residency, I had no office and took naps under a very deep desk. I stopped when I woke up one day to find a colleague borrowing my computer, her shoes close enough to my face that I could have tied her laces together. She stayed for what seemed like forever, as I tried not to sneeze. Afterward I found a convenient closet to sleep in, an arrangement that lasted until one of the departmental adminstrators came to look for paper plates. He screamed, and later told me that he had been sure I was dead. So naps are problematic productivity stategies for people who have to write in public places.

---Alice W. Flaherty
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

Tagged! Miscellaneous Questions

Seeker tapped me for this meme. Thanks, Seeker.

1. What were three of the stupidest things you've done in your life?
(Things to which I'll admit in wide-open cyberspace, that is. )

1). Left an "n" out of the second word of the phrase, "the annals of history" in a university research paper.
2). Put one end of an electrical cord in my mouth to lick off cake batter after it fell out of a hand-held blender. The other end was still plugged into the wall.
3). Learned the Spanish Panic dance routine from Once Upon a Mattress (a musical) two days after biopsy surgery on a lymph node from my groin. (Pulled stitches are no fun!)

2. At the current moment, who has the most influence in your life?

Great Scott, my dad and Rumi, humanly speaking.

3. If you were given a time machine that functioned and you were allowed to pick up to five people to dine with, who would you pick?

Jane Kenyon
Mary Oliver (who is still living)
Rahab
Kathleen Norris
Jesus (although the whole time I'd be worrying about whether he'd beconsidering himself to be dining with a Pharisee or a woman of questionable reputation. And desperately hoping for the latter.)

4. If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

1). That people would listen more to each other.
2). That I didn't secondguess my every thought and breath.
3). That our girls will live wise and happy lives. (Assuming the two are not mutually incompatable.)

5. Someone is visiting your hometown. Name two things you regret your city not having and two things people should avoid.

Things lacking:
1). Any sort of artistic cultural activities.
2). Pizza delivery.

Things to avoid:
1). Cowboy. (Cowboy is a 30-something year-old guy who rides his mountain bike around town. He used to drive a lawn mower, but the cops got tired of pulling him out of the ditches when he'd get soused on Friday nights.)
2). Literary discussions. Unless you like romance novels or Hank the Cowdog.

6. Name one event that has changed your life.

Getting married.

7. Tag five people

It's been so long since I've blogged, I don't know if there are five people who read this left to tag. If you're reading, consider yourself tapped. How's that?

Weariness and Friday's Quote

I am weary, heavy with unfinished business, inner and outer, with the death of my step-grandmother and the dread of attending graveside services in the morning, with having stayed up until 3 am the last three nights in a row sewing costumes for an upcoming musical, with the knowledge of all that is undone around me in our home: the unmowed yard, the stacked dishes and increasing heaps of laundry. Tonight I walked in the door to discover that lightening ran in on my computer and has evidently fried it. It will not start. (I'm posting from Great Scott's). I want to walk into the dark fields until I can walk no more, then lie down in the wet grass and sleep like a wild creature curled tightly against the world in the warmth of its own fur.

I've been on my knees in front of the bookcase looking for just the right quote for tomorrow: something comforting, something soothing, or perhaps something terribly witty with enough of an edge to hold at bay the crash I feel is impending. I've flipped through the poems of Kenyon, Norris's non-fiction, Chris Fabry's Spiritually Correct Bedtime Stories and Adrian Plass's humor but cannot find exactly what I want or what I need. Very likely the two are mutually incompatable tonight--what I need and what I want. But maybe not. I think I've found something after all:

"...it always seems that just when daily life seems most unbearable, stretching out before me like a prison sentence, when I seem most dead inside, reduced to mindlessness, bitter tears or both, that what is inmost breaks forth, and I realize that what had seemed 'dead time' was actually a period of gestation."

--Kathleen Norris
The Quotidian Mysteries

The Skippy List

My brother is in the Air Force, and occasionally he passes on small tidbits of military humor. This morning a link to The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army was waiting in our inbox. Now, granted, some of these are a little over the top, but there were so many fun (and disturbingly educational) ones that I'll pass it along with my kudos to all our military people who manage to maintain a sense of humor in the midst of mayhem.

While we're on the topic of the army, go pay Ben and Ann a visit and leave a note of encouragement for their soon-to-be-in-basic son.

Overheard Tonight in the Living Room

Older daughter to younger:

"Oh yeah!? Well you should be glad you've got me, 'cause otherwise you'd be the oldest, and then they'd experiment on you!

Logic: It's What's for Breakfast

Great Scott and I want our girls to grow up thinking critically, not just accepting whatever fluff drifts over them. Because of this, we very deliberately point out not just literary techniques, but logical fallacies and loaded arguments when we watch movies or read books with them. In other words, we talk back to the television a lot (especially to Katie and Matt, but don't get me started). Teaching the girls to recognize rhetorical strategy is not the same as teaching them to use it, however, and when an opportunity to begin training them in the fine art of argumentation presented itself in the grocery store this weekend, I thought it good to take advantage.

We were walking down the cereal aisle, besieged by rows of sugar cereal, a purposefully non-existant foodstuff in the Lawson pantry. The fault was mine, I admit; I slowed, seduced by a bag of generic Fruit Loops--Nuke Loops or some such thing. Anything that brightly colored has got to contain nuclear waste. The eleven year-old looked at them longingly. "They look good," she said sadly.

I nodded, "Yes, they do, don't they? They're probably sheer poison."

"It's ok Mama. I know we can't have them."

I paused. The radiation must have been affecting my brain. "Talk me into it," I said suddenly. She stopped in her tracks, wide-eyed. Her jaw dropped. "Talk me into it," I repeated. "C'mon. Give me some reasons I should buy Nuke Loops."

"They taste reeeally, reeeally good..." she began slowly.

I cut her off. "No. Not good enough. That's a good reason for a kid, but you need to think like the person you're trying to convince. In this case, me: a grown-up, a mother. What would convince a mother to buy her children Nuke Loops?"

"They're good for you?" she offered, her brow creasing in thought.

"That's better, but you'll need to be specific," I told her. "Here. Look." I picked up the bag and showed her the nutrition facts box on the back. "Say, 'Look Mommy! Vitamin A! Vitamin C! Riboflavin! And one whole gram of fiber!'"

A grin of comprehension creeping onto her face, she repeated each phrase carefully after me with increasing enthusiasm. I turned to the eight year-old. "What reason can you give me to buy Nuke Loops that would appeal to an adult?" I asked her. Her reply was prompt.

"They'll give us energy!!!!!" (This spoken by a child who could power the eastern seaboard if we could just find a way to hook her up and get a meter on her.)

I gasped in horror and shuddered. "No! That is exactly what grown-ups don't want! Hmmm... Let's see..."

Thus it was that upon our return home, when questioned by an incredulous Great Scott about our purchase, he was answered by a cheerful chorus of, "But Daddy! When we come down off the sugar high, we'll sleep for hours!"

He didn't mind too much. After all, it's educational! (Not to mention we brought him chocolate.)

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.

Questions for David

Volunteer victim number two: David!!

1. On your blog you've mentioned living in rural Vermont, St. Louis, and New York, and you're now in Portland, Oregon. If you're up for it, list the places you've lived, what you liked best about each one, and what each has (positively) contributed to the person you are now.

2. About what are you truly passionate, deep down in the quiet places?

3. You've mentioned several former career pursuits (writing, education and photography, for example). What have you learned from each one that has been an asset to your life? What is acting teaching you?

4. What is your favorite place in the world?

5. What literary writers did you most enjoy/appreciate and why?

Interview Questions for Bruce

Bruce has most intrepidly volunteered to be my first victim...er, interviewee. Ok, Bruce, here are your questions:

1. You've mentioned St. Brendan as an inspiration. What is it about his life that speaks directly to your own?

2. What do you most like about science fiction as a genre?

3. What are some of your favorite sci-fi books (and/or authors) and what about them makes them so?

4. What things do you do in your everyday life that you've found helpful in reducing bipolar symptoms if they're implemented consistently?

5. You've written about humans as being creatures who were created in their Creator's image in order to create. In what ways (traditional and not-usually-thought-of-as-creative) do you find your own creativity most satisfactorily expressed?

Interview

Rae at A Likely Story is just full of questions, and not all of them easy to answer. I've done my best below, though, and am now ready to find my own victims. If you'd be willing to let me ask you five random questions to answer on your own blog, let me know. I'll love you forever.

1. Do you ever have sudden and almost uncontrollable urges to frame a situation with words? How do you keep those thoughts until you are able to get them recorded?

My life IS an uncontrollable urge to embody everything in words. If I’m lucky, there’s a scrap of paper and a writing instrument somewhere around. Clipped coupons, church bulletins, my children’s school papers, abandoned gum wrappers, catalogs, the edges of checkbook registers, torn corners of napkins, backs of bill envelopes—they’re all immediate fair game to jot a note or two that I hope will jog my memory later. Honestly, though, often I’m frustrated by the intrusion of the put-it-in-words urge. It can detract from the experience, the impact of a situation. For example, if I pass a wreck on the highway, part of me begins praying immediately, but another part of me begins considering how to most effectively capture in words the glittering of glass sprayed across the midday asphalt. I hate that. Unless it turns into a good poem. Then I like it. Then I hate that I like it.

2. You paint such lovely pictures with words, I am curious, do you have other creative outlets for your "vision?"

I assume you’re asking about “artsy” things? Long, long ago in the misty past of high school, I was involved in absolutely everything the choir did: musicals, concerts, recitals, and contests. In college, I role-played, which, although I didn’t consider it so at the time, was actually a very creative outlet. I can play piano a little bit, embroider, sew, make Bedoin tents with a kitchen table and some sheets, get recalcitrant houseplants to bloom, and convince my children without a shadow of a doubt that I am a real, live dragon. Of all of these, the ones concerning the girls and the houseplants are the ones most closely related to the "vision” I'm currently squinting to make out more clearly. I’m also dipping my toes into the scrapbooking waters (I love unusual papers!) very hesitantly, and in the past two months have begun working with beads, which is good when I allow myself to just play instead of trying to Create. Writing, though, has remained a constant since I was old enough to carve my name into the keyboard cover of my grandmother’s piano. Prayer, also, has become for me a major creative outlet, oddly enough. It sounds strange to me to say that, but it’s true, especially since I’ve begun allowing myself to pray in images rather than words.

3. Which writers have moved you, inspired you, the most in your life?

Formative childhood years—Fairy tales, fairy tales, fairy tales,
Jr. high through high school—J.R.R. Tolkien, Patricia McKillip, Ray Bradbury
College—Sharon Olds, Annie Dillard, Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson
Onward—George MacDonald, Jane Kenyon, Kathleen Norris, Mary Oliver, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Madeleine L'Engle, Richard Foster, Therese of Lisieux

These are cumulative, not sequential influences and inspirations. All of them still speak to me in a language deeper than words. Each of them puts a finger on a specific area of who I am, who I have been created to be, and challenges me to move further into that being.

4. You say on your profile that you are interested in incarnation. Tell me more.

Incarnation is the embodiment of a spirit or deity. I believe in the Judeo-Christian God. I believe he meant it when he said his Spirit would live in us. I believe incarnation is our intended state of being. Kind of a big deal, that, walking around embodying a deity every day, each of us in our specific, totally individual and often unexpected way. It’s in the unexpected that I most appreciate incarnation: it gives me new glimpses into what he’s like and stretches my comprehension, takes me beyond pews and altar calls, Vacation Bible Schools and the jargon of Christianity that has long since lost its potency for me. I don’t think I can limit my understanding of incarnation to being expressed only in Christian believers, either, since I see him so clearly throughout the whole of his creation. (As a matter of fact, often I struggle more to see God in Christian people than I do elsewhere.) Am I saying that everything is God? No. Am I saying I see the joy of his Spirit embodied wild in dancing tree branches before an approaching storm, as well as in the people around me? You bet.

5. If you could change one thing about Anne Lamott, what would it be?

Anne Lamott wouldn’t be Anne Lamott if I changed one thing about her. She IS one of those quirky, unexpected “incarnations” that I love so much!

Walden U.

Note:  The following was written in my late undergraduate years.  Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.  Yes.  Really...

Walden U.

(With apologies to my good friend H.D. Thoreau. . .)


I came to college because I wished to live independently, to face only those issues which interested me, and not, when I come to die, discover the reality of an outside world in which people have actually to labor. I wanted to live deep and suck all the beer from the can, to experience life through such a haze of drug-induced hallucinations that it should seem effortless and appear to be kind. And should life prove after all to be mean, I would surely know it, for it would back me whimpering into a corner until at last I should be forced to don a Wal-Mart smock and join those who live lives of quiet desperation, stocking shelves 38 hours a week without promotion or benefits.

Perhaps these pages should most properly be addressed to poor students like myself, who will no doubt glean what useful thoughts as they can from these writings. All others may like it or lump it, each according to his own tendencies, as his character dictates. I wish to assure my readers that I would not burden them with an account of my means of living had not many of them expressed an interest in university survival, often voicing curiosity as to how I spend my time, procure nutritional substance, and as to whether or not I fear that my chosen way of subsistence may at any time prove impractical. Nor would I so much concern myself with an account of my own existence were it not that I am the most interesting person I know.

It has come to my attention that for the most part you who read these pages are in fact slaves to the obligations society would have you believe are yours. I have seen students without number studying late into the evenings, the dim glow of a lamp in a dorm window standing witness to a laboring individual within whom strives the spirit of a free man oppressed by the expectation, nay, the demands upon him, that he should devote his life to furthering the aims of his society for good.

Obviously, I am not suggesting that one should expend his energies in order to contribute time and effort toward good, as good is defined by the majority of society, who would have us all giving away our own clothing to those who could never appreciate them. [If, however, by some sudden attack of beneficence, a man should donate his money or material possessions to charity, he would do well to be sure he acquires a receipt for it, and see that it is not merely abandoned without adequate proof of its contribution, in the unhappy event that his parents should betray his cause and refuse to claim him as a dependent upon their own taxes, leaving him thus exposed to the evils of the Internal Revenue Service and need such proof in order to shorten the length of his most conscientiously provoked incarceration.] If you were to inform me that a man was on his way to my abode with the express intention of doing good unto me, I would surely load my gun and meet him at the threshold. A man is not good in my opinion simply because he professes to have my best interests in mind, invites me to the religious institution of his choice, and warns me of the eternal damnation I tempt every moment of my pagan life. I can find you nearly any fundamental evangelical who would do the same. As for doing-good, I have tried it, have thought often and seriously of joining Greenpeace or PETA or of driving my ailing grandmother to a doctor’s visit, and can honestly say that I am satisfied it does not agree with my constitution.

Perhaps the most generous action a man can take without the risk of doing good and compromising himself in such manner, is to permit his fellow-men to have an interest in whatever enterprise he sets forth to undertake. This I accomplished by promptly borrowing at least the half of my mother’s dishes as I set out upon my new life at the prestigious educational institution of my choice, assuring her as I departed that I would return for the remainder on a later date. Because I had decided to live as simply as possible, I immediately discounted the purchase of an automobile and instead located a structure within walking distance of a friend whose sole ownership of such vehicle would otherwise have surely been a heavy burden upon his conscience. As I told my father, the swiftest traveler is he who borrows rides, for surely he reaches his destination swifter even than the vehicle’s owner, since whatever time the burdened owner spends in feeding his meager coins into the parking meter, the traveler has gained in happy distance toward his goal.

The structure in which I had determined to live was a simple two-story dwelling, myself to be the sole occupant of the second story, the ground floor being leased to a hamster and four other persons of doubtful reputation. I was to take possession of my apartment at eight o’clock the morning of the fifteenth, and indeed, at eight met the downstairs inhabitants, who were moving their belongings into a car, having been evicted only the previous evening for disturbances of the peace. One car was sufficient to hold the whole of their belongings—beanbag, blender, two weeks’ worth of soiled laundry and three cases of leftover beer—all except the hamster. He took to the wall spaces behind the paneling and became a scavenging hamster until, as I later found, he trod in a trap for mice and so became a dead hamster at last. I watched the former residents of what was now entirely my abode begin their journey down the street and considered the number of articles they were obliged to carry with them. I was sorry, not because they had so little to relocate, but because they had an abundance in excess of the necessary. I would have been glad to relieve them of their beer.

My housekeeping experiences soon proved my theory of simplistic living to be one of great value. Those who own quanities of furniture soon find themselves slaves to their possessions, it being necessary to dust and clean such property daily. My own scant inventory consisted of a kindergarten nap mat, a folding chair for the use of my company, a desk, and an aged, rusty, milk can, should I ever endeavor to put the desk to use. I had three textbooks on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they tempted me to read them when I had not yet finished my nap, and I threw them out the window in disgust.

Because I have found that few can give an accurate account of the victuals with which they have sustained life, and I wanted to prove the worthiness of this undertaking, I attended to the matter with the watchful eye of the ever-vigilant vulture. Here is a record of the sources from which I made purchases to maintain robust health during the first week of my liberation from our society’s extravagances:

McDonald’s …………................$20.85
Taco Bell……………..................$11.09
Domino’s Pizza………..............$43.57
Wendy’s……………...................$8.93
Dine-In-Delivery…….............$17.46
China Garden Buffett.............$38.29

Yes, I did eat $140.19 all told, but I should not so admit it did I not know that the majority of my readers are at least as guilty as myself on this account. The final day of the week, my resources being depleted and another check from my parents not yet having arrived, I went so far as to remove a package of frozen hamburger from the refrigerator and devour it, partly out of hunger and partly for experiment’s sake, but though it afforded me momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding the fact that I’d neglected to first cook it, I would not advise the general populace to make common practice of its use, at least not while it should remain frozen.

All told, I consider my college experience to be a great success in the practice of self-reliance. For an entire week I adequately provided myself with food, clothing—for I made the sacrifice of using that worn in previous years—and water, which I procured at public fountains whilst campus security guards were otherwise occupied in issuing tickets for expired parking meters. My laundry is the only matter not yet finished, and as soon as my mother should complete her three hour drive to deliver it unto me, that too shall be accounted for. Indeed, such has been my success in this endeavor that I do heartily recommend it to anyone seeking a respite from this sorry world’s most self-absorbed and unreasonable demands.

Inhalations

1. The budding amaryllis on my kitchen windowsill, the way it bends toward the light each day, the swiftness of its rising stalks.

2. My grandmother's return from the hospital, safe, stronger.

3. An eight-year old whose violent cough has lessened this week, who can now breathe herself throughout the night without fighting respiratory convulsions.

4. The white and purple speckled orchid my mother gave me for my birthday, its seven blossoms filling the curved stem beneath them like migrating butterflies resting before resuming flight.

5. A friend whose comment in a discussion forum ("... breathing is so wonderful. I, myself am an oxygen addict! Can't get enough of the stuff!") made me laugh today. (Thanks, Kat.)

6. This quote from William James: "I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capilary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride."

7. Entering my name in this name generator and being given the honorable moniker, "The Bitter Swami". (Black humor is the best humor, and laughing at oneself is ten times as restorative as laughing at someone else.)

8. The gold of our cat's eyes, the slide of his fur against my fingertips.

9. The silence--blessed silence--of our home right now, both girls asleep upstairs as I sit up and wait for Scott to come home from his work at school, the push and bluster of the wind against the house, the quiet hum of the computer.

10. The glitter of the beaded dragonflies I've been learning to make, hanging in the kitchen window like a promise of the summer to come, a promise of lighter air and singing creekwater and quickened hope.

I'm thinking. . .

Breathing is a highly overrated activity.

Mid-Dash

On my way out the door to spend the day at the schoolhouse working the bookfair. Yesterday younger daughter sick and home in daytime, guidance and counseling advisory committee in the evening at school. Monday was at hospital visiting my grandmother (flu caused heart complications).

Snowing outside. I love the quality of the light when it snows. Everything is softer inside the house. I can hardly bear to turn on the lights, it's so peaceful looking in the morning. Sometimes I think I could live my whole life in snowlight.

Lovely.

Off,
Cindy

Excerpt from "Laundry Law of the Mama"

Thou shalt not send thy child to school attired in ivory lace upon Picture Day, shouldst Picture Day fall also upon the Day of the Burrito. Nay, nor shalt thou send thy child to school in ivory lace upon the Day of Nachos. Shouldst the Day of the Burrito and the Day of the Nachos fall both upon the day the administration hath chosen for Picture Day, woe unto thee, yea, and unto thy child also, shouldst thou dress her thus in ivory lace, yea, even ivory lace unto her ankles and send her forth. For it shall come about that as she is gathered with the assembly at noon, the burrito and the nachos shall spill forth their contents upon the lace, and thy child wilt come home stained and full of grief.

But if thou shouldst, in thine ignorance and vanity, send forth thy child in ivory lace upon the Day of the Burrito and Nachos, verily there hath been a way provided for thee and thy child out of thy misery. Behold, when thy child arrives home, remove her dress from her body, and unto the lace, even the places thereon of staining, shalt thou apply the Stain Stick. Makest thou then an offering unto the washer, pouring forth the laundry detergent mingled with thy tears, and turn the dress such that its inner parts are outermost, and place it in the washer until its alloted time is complete. Then it may be that the Lord your God shall have mercy upon you and your child and shall forgive thy ignorance and vanity and shall cleanse the garment of all stain and restore unto it its former glory.

Then shalt thou raise thy voice and apply thy fingers unto the keyboard and spread forth the praises of Him who has delivered thee from thy woeful state, yea, even thee and thy child. And it may be that others will hear of it and be forewarned and tremble, and shall in reverence turn from the ivory lace on the days it is forbidden and so shalt be saved, yea, they and all their household.

Alien

I have recently discovered that if one sits in a bathtub half full of water, stretches out one's legs until one's feet are flat against the front of the tub and then arches one's feet, keeping the toes against the tub's side, the water level even with the base of one's toes--if one keeps one's legs and feet in this position and stares at them for some length of time--one begins to morph into a two-legged giraffe-type alien creature.

Furthermore, if one allows the pondering of this transformation to continue after one has exited the bathtub, perhaps even going so far as to stand on the rug on tiptoe, one will lose one's balance and fall into the sink.

Amid Fluctuation

The funeral was held last Friday. The name of the church where it was to be held sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it until that morning. I'd been there once before-- last spring, when I was matron of honor for a friend's wedding. During the entire funeral service, I sat struck by the juxtaposition of memory and present reality: wedding boquets and funeral sprays, flower decked altar and flag draped casket, formal wedding attire and the uniforms of the military funeral honors team from Fort Leonard Wood. The same walls, same windows, same pews and aisles, doors and carpeting. Joy and sorrow are not so different as we think.

Even without Justin's death and funeral, I'd been slipping steadily, finding myself edging into the place every spring takes me, a place of heightened emotional sensitivity, where even the smallest sorrows press heavily on my heart, and joys are so intensified as to be overwhelming in their lovliness. I spend every spring in a perpetual mixture of simultaneous grief and rapture, a sort of incolsolable elation. You'd think it would be old hat by now, that I'd expect it, have become used to it, would be adept in the handling of it, able to casually brush it aside at whim. I've found, however, that if I try to avoid it or ignore it, the result is usually rising irritation building into agitation and anger.

All fun isn't swallowed up in moods here at Possum Box Lane, though. Last Saturday Scott and I went through his students' entries for an upcoming language arts fair. We sat in the living room floor, sorting and reading aloud to each other, and I laughed until tears ran down my face. When it comes to being made grateful for the distance you've traveled in your life, there is nothing quite so effective as love-sick adolescent poetry. "Oh, the poor thing!" I would find myself gasping out between paroxysms of helpless laughter--and meaning it completely.

Abba God, I am a wreck. But I'm not the wreck I used to be. Oh no! You and I together have reached whole new levels of wreck-ed-ness! Just think what we might accomplish in the future, Lord! Seriously, I've no clue what You're doing with the whole mood disorder business in any of our lives, but I'm trusting there's a purpose, that it's Your purpose, and that it's going to be good. Ultimitely, I have to; the alternative isn't really an option. Not and keep breathing, anyway. If You do get the impulse to let some of us in on it all, though, I doubt we'd be terribly adverse to listening. Or maybe we would. Yes, actually, I think we would, knowing the way You work. So strike that. Just slide a nice, soft, black velvet hood over my head and walk me to my fate in blessed ignorance. I like ignorance. Today I am most sincerely and contentedly grateful for it. Amen.

In chosen bliss,
Cindy