Hunting and Gathering

In line with my Cherokee ancestry (on my daddy's side) I spent much of Friday hunting and gathering for launching my paper dyeing project this weekend.

Where I hunt: Goodwill and other thrift shops; a new venue (thanks to Kate) the Restaurant Supply Store on Fredricksburg; grocery stores, the ground upon which I walk.

So I have the pans and strainers, canning jars (HEB), tongs, papers, and vegetables.

Next step: a walk to gather leaves for botanical-infused paper.

Rose leaves and other leaves, a few flowers, etc. are pressed between layers of paper, then all that is bound with twine and boiled and simmered for a while.  When you open the bundle, voila! You have paper with imprints of the leaves and flowers.

I did learn something new yesterday: if you spray leaves with water and then freeze them flat in Tupperware containers, you can use them throughout the year to use for botanical-infused papers as well as gel prints.

That way, when it's snowing (which never happens in my neck of the woods anyway) you can still make impressions with leaves.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood--at 72 degrees and sunny!

Kate and I just met at Juicy Burger on McCollough--and it was delicious, even the chocolate chip cookie filled with pudding that the devil made me buy.  You have to park at Tuesday Morning and there is no sign yet, but it's nestled in between the cleaners and the liquor store.

I'm home--between one Goodwill stop and another--for a nap.  I shouldn't need one, I slept until 8:30, but I'm going to take one just because I can.

I'm all set up for paper dyeing after my run on Goodwill's pans and dye-able vegetables and flowers from Central Market: purple cabbage, red onions with half a bag of extra skins pilfered from underneath the onions, hibiscus tea, and eucalyptus. (I've already done blueberry, black and green tea, cabbage and avocados.)  Kate advised getting canning jars to put the colors in, and I'm going to get me some today so I can up all these vivid colors.

Butterbeans and Cornbread

A couple of days ago, as I was leaving Charlotte's, I stopped by Honeybaked Ham to buy a ham bone.  A big chunky ham bone, it turns out, with lots of ham left on it.

I knew I had some of those fresh-frozen butterbeans (y'all call them lima beans in Texas)e in the freezer that you get in the produce section at Central Market. And a pint of buttermilk.  And some Bob's Red Mill medium grind cornmeal.

So I--who had just announced at Charlotte's birthday party that I'm retiring from cooking--made myself proud and cooked a pot of butterbeans and some cornbread hat would, as we say in Georgia, "make you want to slap your grandma."  If there's one meal that makes me homesick, this is the one!

My parents always made cornbread with self-rising cornmeal, buttermilk, oil and egg.  I can still see them standing there in the kitchen together, my daddy making cornbread, my mama stirring butterbeans--or vice versa.  Then they poured the batter in a cast-iron skillet and cooked it and you slathered butter over it while it as hot--and YUM-MEE!

For the cornbread, since we don't have self-rising in Texas, I used Bob's Red Mill and followed the recipe on the bag except I used the whole pint of buttermilk.  It also uses flour and I followed the recipe and used it--though Southern cornbread doesn't use flour.  Next time I'm going to try it with all cornmeal, no flour, but this recipe is great just as it is.

So I guess I'm going to postpone full retirement from cooking just a little longer.

Cooking Papers

It's 2:00 in the morning and I just finished an online class that was SO much fun!

Roben-Marie Smith taught the class: Easy Bake Artisan Papers.

I learned how to dye papers with avocados, eucalyptus, purple cabbage, red onions, tea, turmeric, etc.You need to have large aluminum pans for boiling each item individually.  As they are boiling, you add some salt (she uses Himalayan pink salt).  They you pour the water into a pan, dip your papers, and bake them in a low-oven for a couple of minutes.  The colors are surprising and the textures really cool!

Then, she taught us how to make botanical-infused papers--by making paper bundles of leaves and flowers and stems, tying the bundles with twine, and boiling the packets for about an hour and a half. When the packets are boiled, you separate the papers and remove the leaves--and voila!  you have papers with the imprints of the botanicals on them.  They are beautiful!  (Hers, not mine--as it is too late right now to start boiling my own.)

After learning these two techniques, with variations, we watched her make little mini books out of her papers.

The pages are crinkly and crunchy and textured--in various shades of purple, yellow, brown, and turquoise, as well as bright yellow if you use turmeric.  Using loose tea (especially herbal teas with lots of texture and color), you can also make pages that looks like handmade paper.

The papers of choice: Blu-Ray Construction Paper, Marker Paper, and just regular copy paper.  Once you've boiled and baked it, you'd never guess it started with such cheap paper.

Next Concert: March 12 at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church

Monday

After a weekend with two of my favorite kids on the planet, today was a shifting of gears, back to the life of a grown up person with no giggling in my house or bed....

A birthday lunch for Charlotte at Liberty Bar--with Janet and Kate and me....where the coconut custard is such that you forget everything but it while you're eating a spoonful, and where the room we chose was hot pink with red lights (Janet said that would make us all look beautiful and it did--though I forgot to take a picture to prove it).

Paying experts to detail my car instead of doing it myself at the do-it-yourself place as I usually do....

A long afternoon nap.....

A pedicure with a new person at the salon who really wants to be a singer of Vietnamese music, but whose father "hit her everyday" as a child so she would stop singing.....

Reading The Best of Us by Joyce Maynard (me crying) after finishing her earlier memoir, A Place In The World.

Nathan, almost 13, was reluctant to go to a concert of three women "just singing without instruments." At the last minute, he even suggested he stay home alone while Elena and I go.

I insisted.  And from start to finish, you couldn't have budged either of them, or their grandmother.

They picked front row seats.  Jan and her brother Bob came in later but sat mid-way to the back, so we only got to talk to Jan during the intermission.  This morning, Elena said she dreamed they came to her school to sing!

Three beautiful sisters from Kenya performed  in their third-from-last concert in San Antonio before moving to New York (where they already have an agent) and becoming, no doubt, stars in the music world. Their talent is mesmerizing!  Not only do they have amazing voices, they have very entertaining performing styles and warm interactions with each other and the audience.

I had to fight back tears on several songs. They performed medleys of spirituals and show tunes, a Kenyan folk song, and Mary (who serves my morning coke at McDonalds) a classical solo.

They met the musical director at Christ Lutheran ((also a professor at St. Mary's)  while studying music there.  He invited them to sing at his church and they have been members of the choir there for several years, often singing at weddings and funerals.

To earn money for their trip to New York, they are working at McDonalds, Shipley's Donuts, and Smoothie King, yet their talents are going to take them places few fast-food window people could dream of.

There will be two more performances this spring--and I'll post dates and places as soon as I get them.  I'm pretty sure that one is March 12 at a church near the medical center.

Moving Stuff Around

A couple of years ago, people started talking about"death cleaning," a morbid moniker for purging extraneous things in our houses so our kids won't have to decide what to do with it all when we die.

I'm going to call it first-page-of-next-chapter cleaning.  As I haul things from the house to the casita and organize it in baskets and carts, I can honestly say that it's a satisfying and relaxing process.  When I move one thing, everything else changes.  Space opens up.  Clutter vanishes, piece by piece, as I deliver bags of formerly useful things to Boysville Thrift Shop.

Tonight, Will and Bonnie came over and Elena went straight to the work table and started drawing.  She found the drawers for different kind of markers and immediately began playing with them. "I think we should turn the tree house into a studio for me," she told her dad. "But of course, we're going to need walls and electricity and tables."

I saw an Ugh-Oh look cross Will's face.

The kind of cleaning I'm doing, moving and re-organizing correlates with the natural process of aging, a time when we are less interested in acquiring and more interested in simplifying. We don't want to be slaves to stuff that no longer brings pleasure.  May Sarton in her journal At Sixty said, "I am no longer acquisitive...."

And yet, I find that I am acquisitive--just of different things: pleasure, learning, art supplies, moments I want to capture with a camera, and freedom.

According to an internet search I just did: The death cleaning method bears similarities to that of the tidying-up guru Marie Kondo: Keep what you love and get rid of what you don't. But while Kondo tells people to trash, recycle or donate what they discard, Magnusson recommends giving things you no longer want to family and friends "whenever they come over for dinner...."

Or, I might add, putting them on the curb for neighbors and passers by to discover.

cheesecake and card stock

I have a terrible neighbor.  Terrible in a good way.  Her name is Jan.

This morning, she came over and delivered the most incredibly delicious slice of cheesecake straight from heaven. I planned to eat half this morning and half later, but you can imagine how much is left on my plate!

You will be seeing it soon on my hips!

While we visited we sorted little tiny squares of colorful card stock into two piles--deckled edges and straight edges.  There were enough to wallpaper my entire house!

I had bought two boxes of these years ago at a garage sale, but this was before making things was quite the obsession it is now.

Last night, I watched a video in which the teacher did cool things with them, so I got up and found them and started sorting.

It would have taken me twice as long if my terrible neighbor named Jan hadn't appeared at my door with cheesecake. Now I shall waddle out and about and do my Saturday errands, come home and take a nap, then go to Adelantes and a concert with Jan after we both take naps.

"I gotta go now," she said.  "I have to work on my art."

Maybe this art-thing is contagious?

The Art in Heart

Happy Valentines Day--or as Jan put it this morning in an email: "Happy GALentine's Day!"

I had so many plans--few of which I accomplished: making valentines for everybody I love.  I started with my family, then made journal covers for my writing group,  then made envelopes for the cards I was going to make, then transferred art supplies to my new play room, then pooped out.  My intentions were good.

Joy and I have been emailing back and forth about our journey to and through loving art.  Just after I read her story this morning, I heard a podcast with Elizabeth St. Hilaire--which I'll link below.

Delilah, the interviewer and podcaster, told about her grief in losing a son a few years ago.  She was completely numb when she saw one of Elizabeth's paper paintings.  She loved it and took a picture of it and began searching for Elizabeth's work online.  Then she said, "I began stalking you."

They are now friends, and both talk about how making art healed them after heartbreaks, how it changed their surviving children and friends, and then extended into the world.

https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vZGVsaWxhaA&episode=YmU0ZWI4MjItMzY1YS0xMWVhLTkxYTgtNWI1MWQzOGE2ZjU2&hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwizw4H8_cnnAhUCnawKHXVDAvAQjrkEegQICxAG&ep=6&fbclid=IwAR0hYL6Pu3N1b_JHCMvKgzafxx0P0QfY-r_KDp600GBiITKJuJKQ_Xl5rEw&mc_cid=1528a0b7eb&mc_eid=de3775d945

Temptations

       FYI:  I mentioned earlier that I had signed up for all-access (1500 classes) of Creative Live on art, writing, photography, etc.  It's a good bargain with 1500 classes, but ultimately I decided too many classes for me at this time.  The one I played a bit of for my writing group was met with ho-hum reception, so I opted out during the 7-day trial period and got a refund.


       Yesterday I watched an hour-long tutorial by the author of Joyful.  Ingrid is a designer who believes that we can create more joy by choosing textures, smells, sounds, and bright pops of color into our living environments--which is the focus of her book and yesterday's freebie class.

At the end, she did a promo for a 36-module class on making houses more aesthetically joyful, and yes, I was tempted.  Pam watched it on her computer at the same time and sent me a text: "Don't sign up for this.  You could teach this class!"

She knows my temptation to keep learning til the cows come home, and she kept me away from the SEND button with her generous compliment.

So she saved me some money and time and exposure to plenty of pointers, I'm sure, that I don't really know and couldn't teach.  But I'm glad she did.

Long online classes are seductive and interesting, but I don't want to spend my entire life watching videos.  I prefer short snippets that get me off the couch and into the paint, or the words, or the spaces that need spiffing up.  You Tube has what my Mimi would call "a gracious plenty."


       A live class, however, with other like-minded creators/learners, is another matter--if you're absolutely sure that the teacher is a good fit.

Birgit Koopsen's classes, whether in The Netherlands or New York--that's  another kettle of fish.  In a live class, you get the teacher's expertise along with interactions with other students in real time.

Day and I will be taking an early-November class with Birgit in New York.  I so look forward to three or four days learning and exploring New York with Day!

Then, next summer, who knows?  We may fly to Amsterdam and take a three-day workshop in Birgit's amazing studio!

Concert update

For those of you who may be interested in hearing the Kenyan Triplets (don't actually know the name of their group or if it's a larger group that they are part of) on the 22nd, it's at Christ Lutheran on Broadway, no advance tickets, entrance by donation only.

Mary, Maggie, and Martha

As you all know, my first go-to every morning is my Diet Coke run.  I either go to Whataburger on Austin Highway or McDonalds across from Central Market.

As you all also know, I have sweet pals at both locations, one of whom calls me "his girl" when he's on window duty.

If the line isn't too long, we chat--so I have come to look forward to my first visits of the day.

At McDonald's there is a strikingly beautiful young woman I assumed was Middle Eastern, but she and I have only exchanged warm smiles and good mornings.  I've been curious about her, but the lines are too long for conversations at McDonalds.

This morning, I did an unusual extra stop--at Shipley's Donuts across from Whataburger, suddenly overcome with an urge for a chocolate frosted donut.  The window woman was the same as the beautiful one at McDonalds.

(The line at Shipley's is non-existent at five in the morning.)

"Oh, you've moved from McDonalds!" I said.

"I've never worked there," she smiled.  "That's one of the three of us triplets.  I'm Maggie, she's Mary, and Martha works across the street at Smoothie King."

So, mystery solved, but more to come!

The triplets came here from Kenya to study music at St. Mary's.  On February 22nd, a weekend I'll have Nathan and Elena, they are doing a concert of show tunes and spirituals at a church in San Antonio!

I'll find out more details later in the day and let those of you who might want to go (with me and Nathan and Elena) at 7:00 on the 22nd.

Wholeheartedness

I used to listen a lot to David Whyte's audio books, "Clear Mind, Wild Heart" my constant companion on road trips until, finally, I felt I'd absorbed it enough to stop listening for a while.

In one scene, he tells about a time when he felt "totally exhausted," so much so that he staggered into a room of other people and asked, "Has anyone seen David?"

Since he himself, the asker, was David, his friends looked at him as if he might have misplaced his mind!

He went home to rest and have a glass of wine with an older friend.  As they visited he told his friend about his exhaustion.  "What is the cure for exhaustion?" David asked his friend.

Without missing a beat, his friend responded, "Wholeheartedness."

On that note, thanks to you, Pam, for sharing this morning an excerpt from a book by Pema Chodrin this morning!


"Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following that path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It’s simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life."

Time is of the essence

How many times have we heard "Time is of the essence"?  How meaningless those words sounded when we were young and the Hill of Time loomed ahead!  We had all the time in the world, we thought, plenty to fritter away a year or two....

After we reached the top of the Hill of Time and beyond, those words began to make sense. Time on the planet being finite, how do we spend our "wild and precious" minutes and hours?

When struggling with a decision  that involves the spending of a week or a month or even a day, I always ask myself this question, the last two lines in Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day."



The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Pico Iyer's Birthday

Thanks for this, Freda!

Pico Iyer said: "The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger."

Personality

This old relic of a song came to mind this morning:

....You've got personality

Walk, with personality
Talk, with personality
Smile, with personality

Charm, personality
Love, personality
And plus you've got
A great big heart....

        I realized something last night at writing group.

        I used to covet personality!  I listened to all the Fifties songs and watched the Fifties and Sixties teenaged movies, studying the moves of older girls on screen. I  practiced the toothpaste smile of Miss America and the flirty flipping of the hair of movie stars. I watched Gidget and Tammy (remember them?) being all cutesy and clumsy.  (I didn't want to be cutesy and clumsy, but the big screen stars made it okay to be just adorable.  

       Everybody gleans different subtexts from the music and films of an era, especially during teenaged years when our aspirations are being formed.

      In the years that formed our collective psyche, we Baby Boomers had few female role models of intelligence, activism, strength, accomplishment, courage....

       We had Gidget and Tammy and Miss America.  And we aspired to be the desirable object of male attention like the ones in the soundtracks on our 45s playlists. (We didn't have the word, playlists, back then.).  The media gave us a mold to either pour ourselves into--if we wanted the real prizes--or to measure our failures by.  I tried to cultivate the charm, walk, talk that would give me Personality's twin sister, Popularity.

        I wanted to have a. bunch of boys' names in my diary--whether I liked them or not--to prove my mettle as a girl with personality.  

         A ring on the finger was one reward--after which we could be Donna Reed or the forgettable and deferential mother in "Father Knows Best." If we played our cards right, we could be some house's wife and worry about other rings: "Ring around the collar, Tells a tale on you."  Careers were optional, limited, and secondary to those of our men with the shirts we laundered and pressed.

         Years before social media came along, we all wanted "likes."

         Maybe it's my age talking, but now I see personality differently.  I care a lot less than I used to about "winning friends and influencing people"--as the title of the best seller of those years taught his readers to do.  I'm not a bubbly extrovert, never was, never will be. At this age, I know who I am--undisciplined; moody; random;  curious;  a lover of color, my family and friends, and backroads. 

        The competition for prizes is over.  What I love--in myself and other people (like the women in my writing group last night, like all of you)--is not "personality"  but character, authenticity, zest, humor, honesty and--je ne sais quois--a few other ingredients, plus or minus a few. 

Boredom

When I grew up, I thought "boredom" was a bad word--because if I ever claimed to be in that state, Carlene, my mama, would always offer an unsavory cure: like hanging out the clothes on a cold day, or cleaning the bathtub, or bringing in the dry sheets on a summer day.  So I learned to find things to do that weren't boring, anything but complaining would do!

As it turns out, one of my favorite things to photograph--though it's rare to find one--is a clothesline with colorful clothes hanging on it, or a string of drab trousers even.  In Amish country on Mondays--that's a good place to find clotheslines.

This morning Carlene, still my mama, still Carlene, sent me an apt passage from one of Fred Buechner's books:

BOREDOM OUGHT TO BE ONE
of the seven deadly sins. 
It deserves the honor. 

You can be bored by virtually anything if you put your mind to it, or choose not to. You can yawn your way through Don Giovanni or a trip to the Grand Canyon or an afternoon with your dearest friend or a sunset. There are doubtless those who nodded off at the coronation of Napoleon or the trial of Joan of Arc or when Shakespeare appeared at the Globe in Hamlet or when Lincoln delivered himself of a few remarks at Gettysburg. The odds are that the Sermon on the Mount had more than a few of the congregation twitchy and glassy-eyed. 

To be bored is to turn down cold whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment. It is to cast a jaundiced eye at life in general, including most of all your own life. You feel nothing is worth getting excited about because you are yourself not worth getting excited about. 

To be bored is a way of making the least of things you often have a sneaking suspicion you need the most. 

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

Grand Prix

My brother sent me this picture this morning--A Grand Prix that could be yours or mine for $1700.

However, that's not why he sent it.

Bob has an incredible memories for details--including a conversation in the car one day in Macon when we were kids.

I saw this car--or one very much like it--and commented on it, pronouncing its name like it's spelled.

Bob recalls our daddy's response:

“Linda, don’t use that word” after you proudly announced as we drove through downtown Macon,  “There’s a red grand pricks...” 

But he was seemingly at a loss for words when you asked “Why? What does it mean?” 

Sunday Night

Tomorrow night's writing group will be the first to meet in this hybrid (still messy) space.  I'm jazzed about it for several reasons: the usual reason (it's an amazing group), the timed writing idea (each person brings a treasured object that happens to be round and we write about round things in turn), I made gel print covers for composition books for each of them; and I purchased a course in writing by Joyce Maynard that I'll share snippets of at tomorrow night's meeting and all future meetings--if they enjoy it as much as I am.

Actually, I didn't just purchase the one class.  Since she is teaching two classes and since there are hundreds more classes I'd like to take, I purchased a year's pass to all their classes which I can watch at any time--for less than the price of two classes.  If you're interested, check out Creativelive.com.

I'm finding that this passion, any passion for that matter, re-invigorates me for all of them.  I have so much energy when I go into that space and start making mistakes and happy successes--because I'm a learning junkie.  While making, I'm often watching (or listening) to background sound of You Tube tutorials.

One of my favorites is a Dutch woman named Birgit Koopsen.  I love her gel prints and her ideas and she really gets my juices going!  She and I have been emailing about workshops she's giving in The Netherlands this summer and I toyed with the idea of going there (and am still toying with the idea of going next summer, hopefully with Day.). But since Jackson is graduating in June and since Day can't go this summer, she and I have decided to take a November workshop from Birgit in November--in New York.

Until we see where the coronavirus is going from here, Will and his family have decided to postpone their trip to Japan for another year.

Off now to an Oscars Night party of four at Linda's house--Linda from Indiana who lives two streets over.

from The Art of Stillness, Pico Ayer

     So I got into my car and followed a road north along the California coast from my mother’s house, and then drove up an even narrower path to a Benedictine retreat house a friend had told me about.  When I got out of my worn and dust-streaked white Plymouth Horizon, it was to step into a thrumming, crystal silence.  

     And when I walked into the little room where I was to spend three nights, I couldn’t begin to remember any of the arguments I’d been thrashing out in my head on the way up, the phone calls that had seemed so urgent when I left home.

     Instead, I was nowhere in this room, with long windows looking out upon the sea.

     A fox alighted on the splintered fence outside, and I couldn’t stop watching, transfixed.  A deer began grazing just outside my window, and it felt like a small miracle stepping into my life.  Bells tolled far above, and I thought I was listening to the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

     I’d have laughed at such sentiments even a day before.  And as soon as I went to vigils in the chapel, the spell was broken; the silence was much more tonic than any words could be.  But what I discovered, almost instantly, was that as soon as I was in one place, undistracted, the world lit up…. 

     Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

Tuesday

A sweet day this was, capped off by a most delicious spontaneous solo meal--at Cappy's.

I got to eavesdrop on a conversation at the next table, four Democrats--all of whom will "vote for anyone who gets the blue ticket"--as will I.  Their first choice, just for the record, is Warren.

One of the women at the next table--a decade or so older than me--said, "I'm so proud of our party right now, partly because of Mayor Pete."

Cappy came over and talked to their table and then to me.  He's cancer free now and he looks great! The throat and neck cancer that he had is caused by the HPV Virus; according to his physician,  85% of us Baby Boomers have the virus in our systems.  Six of his friends have had the same cancer he had, all caused by HPV.

While HPV virus is sexually transmitted, it's also (according to his doctor) transmitted in many ways besides sex. Fortunately, young people can be vaccinated against it between the ages of 9 and 11.

When I left, he personally handed me a take-home bag of two desserts!

"You're contributing to my next five pounds," I said.

He grinned.  "Life is uncertain.  Eat dessert first."

Geometry and Grammar

The only math I came (remotely) close to loving was geometry.  The teacher was adequate but not inspiring, but the course itself had tangible parts: protractors and compasses. The concept of congruency appealed to me.

While I can't remember now how to compute congruencies and make two triangles match, I can now just trace them. Or print them out.

My math muscles are punier than my upper arm muscles, which are actually quite strong from moving furniture.  Except for keeping account of my income and expenditures, though, math isn't really a muscle I miss.

Diagramming sentences, however, is another matter.  I couldn't grasp it in seventh grade until Carlene told me it was like a game.  She was a way better teacher than my English teacher, and I got to be a hot-shot sentence diagrammer.

From time to time, I used to pull the dusty relic out of my teacher bag and use to to show 18-year-olds why a string of random words might not be a real sentence.    ("It has to have a verb," I said.  "What's a verb?" someone always asked.)

All those little rockets and dotted lines, all those submarine clauses and phrases--there's beauty in well-made sentences.  When I read a really good one, or hear one in a speech, I sometimes mentally diagram it to extend the pleasure.



   

Adventures in Going Nowhere

Three poems pop into my mind all the time:

Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility"
Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
and Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese."

To those of us who travel, who have access to more information in a single day than Emily might have encountered in years, we can barely imagine dwelling in one house for an entire lifetime, rarely going anywhere, yet "dwelling in Possibility."  While her possibilities were smaller in the outside world than ours, she had a vivid inner life and an expansive mind to travel in.

The speaker in Frost's poem looks and looks down one road, then the other, making his choice about which road to take.  He chooses the one "less traveled."  The title suggests that the road he didn't ' take always haunted him a little.  Was one road really less traveled?  What might have made all the difference in the one he chose? Reflecting on what his older self might say about his young-man choice, he guesses that, really, both roads are "about the same."

Mary Oliver opens "Wild Geese" with the startling assertion: "You do not have to be good."  This statement flies in the face of everything we learned in childhood and beyond: You have to be good for goodness sake, and not only morally and behaviorally but good at everything you do. But no, Oliver says, we don't always have to be good for or at anything. What a revelation!

I read a small book by Pico Iyer this weekend (The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere)--a book that touches on his friendship with Leonard Cohen who spent decades in a monastery: meditating, cleaning, and taking care of one of his senior abbots who lived to be 106. Cohen describes these as the happiest years of his life.  After years of reflection (and occasional drives to McDonalds), Leonard Cohen returned to performing.

Iyer muses on why his album, Old Ideas, written when he was 77, was a best-seller in so many countries and why his concerts were packed. 

"Why were people across the planet reaching out for such a funereal album...? Maybe they were finding a clarity and wisdom in the words of someone who'd gone nowhere, sitting still to look at the truth of the world and himself that they didn't get from many recording artists?  Cohen seemed to be ...talking to us, as the best friends do, without varnish or evasion or design."

"And why were so many hastening to concerts delivered by a monk in his late seventies? Perhaps they longed to be taken back to a place of trust--which is what Nowhere is, at heart--where they could speak and listen with something deeper than their social selves and be returned to penetrating intimacy."

"In an age of speed, nothing can be more invigorating than going slow."

"In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention."

Poets and philosophers push into the cracks of conventional thinking. They sometimes contradict each other and themselves. These kinds of truth are not so much answers but echoes of the kinds of questions we're all asking, questions that poke holes in what we're certain about.

"I dwell in Possibility"

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –