Day by Day Forever

Essence of Eternal Spirit
Always there to speak or hear it
How to frame what never ceases?
Show the whole by showing pieces.

Endless, everlasting ocean
Inexhaustible commotion
How to frame what never stops?
Show the whole by showing drops.

What I Didn't Say

I will be wrapping up this blog tomorrow with post #108, echoing the 108 sonnets in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, which was the subject of my opening post. Last night I went flipping through my notebook to see if there was anything I had jotted in the course of these months that I wanted to put into the blog, and I was surprised to find a dozen written and not posted. Here are their titles (and the reasons I refrained):

Entertainment Value (too self-effacing)
Cute Cute Cute (might hurt someone's feelings)
The Life Everlasting (two points I couldn't quite connect)
Yearning With Gratitude (possibly misleading)
Avalanche (is there really a place for haiku in this blog?)
Tomorrowland (theme essentially covered elsewhere)
Having Their Love (identifies a problem without offering a solution)
Glass-Jar Butterfly (image too heartbreaking)
Modern Martha and Mary (enough Biblical reference already)
Alice Roosevelt's Pearls (couldn't quite get it to gel as a post)
To E.C.F. (too personal)
Involvement (decided to send it as an email to a friend instead)

There are also three stray titles in the notebook (and the reason they weren't posted):

Kissing the Indian (not written)
Duration (no words to go with it)
Cherished Into Form (completely lacked content)

Plastic Generals

The catalog ad for the tub of plastic generals said: "Plastic Generals Will Publically Deny the Existence of Plastic Aliens."

Oh, we already had plenty of plastic army men - plenty - but we had to get those. We had plenty of plastic aliens too, and were ready for the ultimate existence-debate showdown.

Petal-Soft

When the pressure was on and I was getting crushed, I saw that I was going to become diamond-hard, adamant, impenetrable, unbreakable, and I assumed that this was it for me: I was never going to be able to be petal-soft again.

But yes I can.

Houston, We Have a Solution

Memory scarcely discerns between dreams, daydreams, and reality; intensity is what renders events memorable. When something is brought to my attention that strikes me as distasteful, unjust, or wrong in any way, I get busy re-imagining it along more attractive, comforting lines. This is why history and the world look so much better to me than the other reports you may have been getting.

Fairy Godmother-in-Law

I'm an appreciative person and I know how to thank.

Yet there is someone in my life who I have never been able to adequately thank because my appreciation is so immense it stymies me.

I Like Life

When my younger son was eight years old he drew a portrait of a pirate relaxing in his home. It's filled with great little touches, like a vase of flowers set on the dresser, a mouse-hole under the bed, and fancy buckles on the pirate's shoes. The pirate himself is seated on a chair in an attitude of battered dignity, displaying a hook hand, wearing an eyepatch, and with a bloody gash across his forehead. The title is I Like Life.

My favorite thing about it is the living wound, that bloody gash on the forehead. It's one thing to like life after you've sustained your hook-handed, eye-patched permanent damage, another to like it while you're still bleeding.

Spendthrift

The best lesson I ever got in emotional economics was when I was told that we are not here to earn God's love, we're here to spend it.

Peacock's Proposal

In 1810 the comic novelist Thomas Love Peacock visited Wales, where he met and hit it off with Jane Gryffydh. After his return to England the two saw no more of each other and had no communication whatsoever for the next eight years, at which time Peacock wrote her a letter proposing marriage. She accepted.

Usually, by the time a proposal of marriage is made, it's on a pretty obvious "you can see it coming" type of basis. I have to hand it to Peacock for giving Jane Gryffydh a day like few women can have ever known.

The Inner Crone

In my senior year of high school we staged the musical Li'l Abner. I was seventeen years old and wanted to play the ingenue, but got the role of Mammy Yokum instead. Initial disappointment aside, the part was worlds more interesting than the ingenue, and - more significantly - I had to find and get to know myself as an old woman while still a teenager. This experience proved an incredible boon that has given me lasting peace and eliminated all fret surrounding the issue of age. Been there, liked that.

It was also frankly quite a thrill to repeatedly go through the process of unmasking my theatrical oldness and being a seventeen year old girl again.

Five Fine Minds

When I read the Bible I'm aware of the presence of millions of minds reading along, and it can start to feel choked and overcrowded, like Disneyland on a Saturday in summer.

When I read Shelley I would put the figure at roughly five.

Brink of History

There's a gorgeous painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema that captures the moment Antony is about to enter Cleopatra's Royal Barge. He doesn't see her yet, but you do, and you can readily comprehend from what you're seeing there as well as the fame of the names "Antony and Cleopatra" that he is going to be very impressed.

How Wrong You Are

Ben Folds sings:

Well sometimes I punch myself hard as I can
Yelling "Nobody cares!"
Hoping someone will tell me how wrong I am.

You're wrong.

Average Joe

When my older son told me that he was waging war with the Average Joe, I told him to have fun but to be aware that the Average Joe cannot lose. Warring with the Average Joe is all about galvanizing your own opinions and individuating yourself. But the Joe will certainly still be there when you're done. And even if he wasn't, a new Average Joe would rise up to take his place and assist in galvanizing the next war-waging individualist.

Not Necessary

The mystic Julian of Norwich wrote Showings in 1373, making her the first woman to write a book in the English language. Showings is a record of the visions she received during an illness, and these visions are honestly the kindliest and most love-drenched that I have ever encountered in this line of literature. "Many men and women believe that God is almighty and may do everything, and that he is all wisdom and can do everything, but that he is all love and wishes to do everything, that is where they fail," she writes. Her use of the term "Mother Christ" also sets her musings quite apart from the usual, expected thing.

Julian was a contemporary of Chaucer, and English was an infant language, so it's much easier for a modern person to read a "translation" of her writings, even though they're written in English. However, as with all translation, there are pitfalls. "Sin is necessary," the modern translation goes, but that's not quite it. Julian wrote that "Sin is behoovely."

I'm not saying that I know a better word for behoovely. I'm just pointing out that it's not necessary.

Hollywood Life

Hollywood is where people grow fabulously rich by portraying rich people as soulless jerks and poor people as the heart of it all.

Important Anniversary

How could I ever forget September 11th, 2001? My copy of Art and Artifice by Jim Steinmeyer arrived that day. I spent the entire afternoon riveted, utterly absorbed by it. What an excellent book.

Snowbound

I've misheard song lyrics many times; sometimes I like the originally intended meaning better when I learn it, and other times I prefer my mishearing. My very best and most useful mishearing comes from Donald Fagen's "Snowbound." I heard:

For seven seconds it's like Christmas Day.
Then it's gone again.
Then it starts again.

That is not what is being sung, but I value that sentiment and resort to it every time something dear seems irrevocably lost to me.

Sputnik

Russia was "the bad guy" the entire time I was growing up, and nothing represented their enmity more than Sputnik. The evil-doers had undertaken a space program as an act of aggression and hurled Sputnik into the heavens like a hunk of solidified hatred.

A few years ago I had a chance to view a collection of vintage Russian Sputnik-related postcards, and I could not have been more astonished by the Russian-eye-view of the case. The spirit of Sputnik is depicted, over and over again in these illustrations, as a little boy perched atop mechanical Sputnik, his arms wide open and his face all joy. You see him soaring throughout the galaxy, getting waved at by various planets and heavenly bodies, always with the open arms and exuberant countenance. There is even one done in the style of the Russian lacquer boxes, showing fairytale figures on magic carpets and flying horses and ships that sail through the skies, with our open-armed little Hero on Sputnik leading this fantasy crew right on into reality.

Beware! Dreams Come True!

I had "the faith that could move mountains," but at the critical moment I learned that I didn't have any faith in my faith. I didn't think that faith did anything; I just thought that faith was a good thing to have.

Faith does do something, and shock and recoil are a miserable way to greet a dream come true.

The End of Machiavellianism

"Men can't study when women are around." That's the assessment of Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock - but he's not kidding around here. In his early 20th century essay "On the Need for a Quiet College" he details his ideal educational setting. He had me cheering throughout his entire description - until he reached the above-quoted point. Since he makes it his last point, it even comes across as his main point. He argues that the distracting influence would not stop with the students, but that even his professors, who might otherwise devote decades of research to Machiavelli, would inevitably fall under the spell of womanly enchantment, "and good-bye to Machiavelli."

Hey - if the presence of women is that much more compelling than Machiavelli, then the hell with Machiavelli, I say.

Being Fooled (Doesn't Matter)

I marvel at the fear of being fooled that many people seem to have. Do they dare to be sincere? They might be fooled!

Being fooled doesn't matter at all. A person of integrity gets something valuable out of everything that happens.

Clockwatching

I was driving through the desert; my gas tank was reading as empty and the signs told me that the next town was twelve miles away. I made it, but what a heart-thumping ten minutes that was, every second of it dilated and intense.

Later in the very same journey, I suddenly became aware that I had traveled 250 miles without really noticing it. Several hours had passed in a blink, barely registered by me.

This lends credence to my older son's theory that clocks do something, mechanically and accurately and usefully measure something - but that it has nothing to do with time.

Jumbo

Part one. Barnum wants the biggest, smallest, fattest, thinnest, shortest, tallest - Barnum wants extremes. Barnum wants Jumbo. The London Zoo says Jumbo is much too popular, not for sale, no. Barnum notices that Shakespeare's birthplace is falling to seed, purchases it outright and announces his plan to move it to his museum in America. The British public is outraged, demands the return of this national treasure, and Barnum says he'll do it - in exchange for Jumbo.

Terrific story. There's probably even a grain of truth in there somewhere.

Part two. Jumbo thrives and appears to love circus life, until the tragic mow-down by a runaway train in the middle of the night.

Very touching. Poignant. Poetical.

Part three. Barnum stages a parade featuring "Double Jumbo" - the skeleton and the hide, side by side.

This type of thing is where Barnum loses me.

Ovid in Exile

I first met Ovid through The Art of Love, the classic guide to "how to pick up chicks," ancient-Rome style. I grew to love him through The Amores, his pantingly passionate love poems, and I grew to honor him through The Metamorphoses, his poetical codification of Roman religion. In many ways I felt that, although it took some time to play out, Rome fell when Ovid was exiled. He was the life of the party, and they didn't know it.

Or rather, they did know it, and they didn't want Rome to be a party anymore. Once Ovid was out, Rome went dark and stayed that way for centuries, until Ovid was rediscovered. Then the Renaissance started, and the party was on again.

Supremacy

One thing I can't stand is being around people who view intellect as the horns with which we battle for supremacy. I like being around people who see intellect as a fun hobby which invites and allows the thrill and excitement of observing ideas at play.

Guardian Angel

It's nice to imagine having a personally-assigned guardian angel who takes a keen interest in all you do and always stands ready to assist, but I don't think it works that way. You really don't need that much help, and such an angel would get bored.

I believe that "Guardian Angel" is an idea or energy, and that the way to engage with it is to participate in it. All you have to do is agree that you're "one of the crew," and - without even trying or often even knowing - you find yourself in the right place at the right time, with exactly the right thing or words necessary to save the day. Then, when your day needs saving, one of the crew is magically there for you.

When I say that I "believe" this, I mean that this is how I experience it.

Tahitian Lagoon

I had never snorkeled before, but when we took our trip to Tahiti our over-water bungalows had snorkel equipment right there in the bathroom and I knew I was going to give it a go. The first big challenge was to circumvent the hard-wired internal command to never, ever, ever take a breath when your face is in the water. Once I got the hang of that, the next challenge was to avoid gasping for joy at the sensation of being face-to-face with sea creatures. I found it emotionally overwhelming and had to keep lifting my head just to get a grip.

One afternoon the guys took off in an outrigger canoe and I was poking around the lagoon all by myself. After I had spent some time marveling and having my soul charmed by the lagoon-world, I selected one particular fish and followed it wherever it went. When it stopped to nibble something, I hovered above it. When it glided away, so did I. I experienced the entire lagoon at fish-pace. There was no toil, of course, and no sense of time, either. Just the moment-by-moment expression of fishness.