•a prayer for good enough•

A candy cane.


Natalie's sweatshirt.


Salt dough.


Handmade.

May we continue to find joy in simple things, respect for what is, and comfort in not knowing. xox

Time II

I think I'm beginning to learn that the surest way to slow time down is to stop thinking about it and get busy doing what I love. Time passes. I forget. And then I have to learn all over again.

•"So are we ready?" "No!"•

One morning at work, I found a manila envelope in my inbox. "To Julie and Debbie," it said. It was a series of thank-you notes and drawings from a third grade classroom we visited in November. Since they did such a good job of drawing me (the glasses, the green kerchief, the enthusiasm)... I forgive them for getting my name wrong.

It's pretty hard to find fault with something a kid specifically hand-made for you.



xox
debbie

•geometry•

Shut your eyes and squeeze. Do you see honeycombs and parallelograms? An Aztec blanket, years in the making, pulling the wool over, from inside the inside? xox

Winter Here

There's sunshine, for the first time in days, and through the window, Meyer lemons, fully ripe; lemon verbena, gone wild with the rain.

Dream

The dog was a gentle great Dane, with emerald green fur at its belly, and a face unlike other dogs. So big it had to drink from the bathtub.

(It occurs to me that this little stone for the river actually sounds like something that should be over there on Toddlerblog...right beside the pterodactyl story.)

Time

I think of months as if they’re long, as if it’ll be more than a pile of short week upon short week until the fog seeps from the orchards, replaced by buds, blossoms, fruit.

Bird of Prey

There's something about looking through a camera lens that's like meditation: The pinpoint focus on one being, one object, one element. Here. Now.

•on collections•

When you get a bunch of things together, don't you just love looking at the set? So many sets in our lives. Leaves on the ground, under a tree. Mushrooms poking up. Fog, seeking nooks and crannies. Visible stars.

We spend so much of our lives arranging and rearranging. Clustering, to make sense. How exactly I got the hang of it, the ability to regard things as whole, I will never know. (Just because I have the hang of it doesn't mean I can always move on. I'll still be tetris-ing certain "sets" for years to come...) Almost everything in life is unfinished. Incomplete. In my early thinking years, I heard this a lot: such-and-such is never finished, only abandoned. I heard those words, and understood they were important, and still--I was dissatisfied with everything I did. Every project, every flippin' cairn. Nothing was ever good enough, nothing "done." My censor was so very, very loud, it's a wonder I'm not deaf today.

Now, I dump out the contents of my green bag (dare I call it a purse?) and marvel at the bits and bobs. Sand. Empty jars of orange peel and cardamom. Sharpies (that's where they went!). A walnut. A cloth napkin, featuring a duck in a shiny red helmet. An uncharacteristic bottle of hand sanitizer. Gathered together, they make a whole. A snapshot. Some kind of story, someone's actual life. I see the set--and, mind you, it's just a pile of crap I'm talking about--and I see that it's complete. As done as done can ever be. Maybe this is a piece of the action/non-action paradigm. Wu wei.

So, I've got some Zen going on, here. About as much Zen as one can pack into a pile o crap with no less than five--5--different lip balms. Huh. This really turns my former aw-shucks-I-suck attitude toward things like, say, my recorded music, on its ear. If I can empty a bag and find magic in crumpled receipts, then.... I can certainly put on an old album and love it for what it is. A set. A snapshot. A done thing, wholly separate from my self, with a life all its own. xox

Annie Laughing

One dog races around the house at top speed, letting off steam. The other dog watches her, excited, ears up, eyes big, mouth open in a wide doggy smile, looking from the racing dog to me; as if she's laughing, as if she knows I'm laughing too. We're laughing together, my dog and I.