Blogging while playing scrabble…

it just isn’t happening. SO I think I should leave you with my favorite youtube video of the moment. I want a hurdy gurdy, I tell you. Except that the video of one being played badly (not this one, you’ll have to look for it yourself), oh, downright scary.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DwUqKbqIA4]

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 30, 2007 | 1 comment

Blockage

At fourteen I thought Douglas Adams’ lesson on flying, to throw yourself at the ground and miss, was about the cleverest thing ever. Now, when I have a day when a grocery list seems like a tremendous creative stretch, I find myself trying to figure out what it is I am so actively not writing about as I jump up to re-fill my coffee cup, wipe the spattered bathroom mirror, start another load of laundry. But that writing should come about by just putting down whatever it is that I am not writing about seems as slick a trick as flying by missing the ground. There’s this feeling of something missing, and I try to imagine what it is I most want to read. Were I to click on a blog of erised, which shows you what you most want to see, what wisdom would be...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 30, 2007 | 0 comments

Life Without Glossy Magazines

I am still thinking about non-materialistic acquisitiveness, the little pieces of identity we take pride in and clutch. In a phone conversation with my best friend about what magazines we are each subscribed to (currently, only Brain, Child which I love with an evangelicizing passion, though I happily will pick up the Believer and Bitch when I feel like a treat while shopping in the local upscale, organic markets, and wouldn’t complain about a subscription to the New Yorker). But there was a time in my life I loved fashion magazines, and then weaned myself off them with Real Simple and Oprah magazines, with their cheery message of self-improvement. They all, though, whisper to me “you are not enough,” and out from their thrall I am so much...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 29, 2007 | 4 comments

The Satisfactory Apology

Leaving behind, for the moment, the proposition that forgiveness does more to comfort the forgiver than the forgiven, there is nothing like the eye-rolling “sor-reee!” of a six year old to make you think about the neccessary and sufficient conditions of apology. There came a point when I had to lay out for a child, given to unrepentant and insincere sounding apologies, the things I needed to hear in order feel apologized to… I realize that one has to spend only a short time on any playground to hear mothers and other caregivers demanding that their charges “say you’re sorry!” but I want my kids to get the art of the apology: 1) It helps to express concern for the person you’re apologizing too — an “are you...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 26, 2007 | 1 comment

thinking about it…

In Western theories, the hope is always that emptiness can be healed, that if the character is developed or the trauma resolved that the background feelings will diminish. If we can make the ego stronger, the expectation is that emptiness will go away. In Buddhism, the approach is reversed. Focus on the emptiness, the dissatisfaction, and the feelings of imperfection, and character will get stronger. Learn how to tolerate nothing and your mind will be at rest. — Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart The house does feel really empty after the kids are in bed, and I am not finding easy comforts, too late for phone calls to anyone east of here, I am really not hungry, nor interested in television nor reading nor… in any...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 25, 2007 | 1 comment