Valentine

If one is mindful one can wake up on Valentine’s Day and be grateful for the abundant loves in one’s life. I go reflexively into an abstracted third person doing it, as if superstitiously deflecting the evil eye, because there is no rationale behind how tremendously fortunate I have been in love, a husband who is my other half, the boys who are better than reflections of the best in the two of us, an extended family that we couldn’t have chosen better if there had been choosing involved, friends that inspire and support and understand. So how is it that in such a profusion of love the love that I find astonishing on this day commemorating romantic feelings is the love that exists in the writing and reading of a book? It seems almost metaphorical, this love....

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 22, 2010 | Comments Off

Autobiography of an Abstraction

Mostly at yoga I am not overcome by words. The words Dana uses to guide me, the custom images she fits me are tools, means to an end, and I feel released from words; I feel a little guilty today that I finish with her and grab a notebook to scrawl. It is what it is. The triangles of my knees and legs are fleshy and real, not Euclidean partless points, and this suddenly is not contemptible or sad, it is joyful. Since my first reading of Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I was caught by her using the theological expression “the scandal of the particular” which I would carry around rolling it like a pebble across the tongue, how it captures some aspect of what it is to inhabit the body, to be particular in this way. This body and no other, this...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 9, 2010 | Comments Off

Life After the Cookie Jar

I think I need to turn the comments off on my blog for a while. I was talking about this with my friend Sarah, today. She doesn’t have comments on her personal blog, and she told me that some people don’t consider it a real blog if you don’t have comments. But then she blogs for a living on other blogs and the comments there are enough to erode one’s faith in humanity, long ad hominem arguments, people getting entrenched in their own positions and so on. That of course of has never happened on my blog. My readers, both of you, are much too civilized for that. In fact, the joy of blogging has been the thoughtful comment, the delicious conversation. So turning off comments feels perverse and self-sabotaging even by my own crazy...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Feb 2, 2010 | Comments Off