August 18th, 2010
So there is the experience of telling someone one of your deepest darkest secrets and having them say “Oh! It’s not just me?” Not once, but twice this has happened to me this week, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. But I am beginning to think that every thinking person I know walks around at [...]
Read the rest...July 22nd, 2010
Tacit.
There are things that exist only so long as they are unspoken. That are torture to the mind that would make everything explicit. Things that defy categories and resist speech. Things I may have so long as I don’t give in to temptation, turn my head, look back. Having being thus conditional. Everything is conditional. [...]
July 22nd, 2010
Or her inversion.
Because I keep noticing how women try to remake their men. Or improve them. Maybe men do this too.
I reach back to myself fifteen years ago, I made changes, gave things up, tried to break my worst habits or bury them. It took a while to really be done with cigarettes, I [...]
July 22nd, 2010
It’s an old dream, the one where I am secure in my sea-worthy box, curled up, my baby boy beside me as the waves toss us, carry us away.
This is one of the things you observe as a mother, the two impulses that drive the human being, the longing for freedom, for exploration, for autonomy: [...]
June 1st, 2010
1) Be disappointed.
2) Let go of the story of how understanding and generous and forgiving you are, because the only thing worse than being disappointed in someone else is simultaneously discovering you are not the person you thought you were and not being able to reconcile yourself. Cognitive dissonance and unnamed, unnameable feelings only [...]
May 28th, 2010
This is unimaginable to me, that as I write my mother is locking up her classroom and leaving for the last time. On the phone last night she said that she had been busy taking loads of all of the things she’s acquired over the years for teaching home so that this afternoon after the [...]
May 28th, 2010
Having turned off comments did (briefly) help with blogging, strangely. I think it had to do with having the sort of convoluted head that wants to manage other people’s impressions of me, that wants to give others what they want from me so much that I can start to lose myself around other people, and [...]
April 9th, 2010
There exists, apocryphally (does apocryphal existence count as existence?) a Suzuki teacher in Portland who uses a squirt gun on parents who cannot keep their traps shut during the lesson. I don’t know how such a teacher would have any students come back, but, I am grateful the lessons my kids get are with teachers [...]
April 4th, 2010
“Forgive them Father, they know not…” Lord forgive me, I have carried this around as the model for forgiveness for, well forever. Somebody hurts you and you see beneficently into their limits and let go of your frustration with their failings. Friend late to lunch, husband says something insensitive, stranger on the street scowls when [...]
March 31st, 2010
And this from the Writers’ Almanac for Tuesday March 30, 2010
It’s the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, born in Zundert, Holland (1853). As a young man, he was deeply religious and went off to do missionary work in a coal-mining region in Belgium. One day he decided to give away all of his worldly goods [...]
It’s that conundrum, how do you sum yourself up concisely for the random, bored web surfer? You don’t really care what I do, or where I live… at least these things don’t set me apart much from the millions of other people on the internet. That is, I “stay at home” with my four sons in Portland, Oregon, and write earnestly about the things I think, identifying as a Bahá’í, a feminist, a St. John’s alumna (though I graduated from the University of New Mexico) and recovering philosophy student, a Suzuki parent, a reader… Is any of that really who I am? How about the list of random factoids?
