By Monday of next week, if I haven't come back out again, send someone in after me.
For this course, each of us had to come up with a way to organize the degree, articulate the rationale and common thread between the disciplines, and propose a presentation for a final portfolio. I want my final portfolio to be volumes of a little library of books, so I had to turn in my plan for this. (The photos will take you to BookCrafts - "where we do judge a book by its cover" - the slogan alone is going to make them my first choice!)
Someday in the not too distant future, it is going to be very satisfying to look at my shelf and see these five little volumes. "That is my degree," I'll say to myself. "Right there in those books. That's what I did."
And now I'm thinking about book bindings.
Then The Great Husband came home from work ... got his dinner ... heard all my exciting news of the day ... and as I said, the phone rang. It was one of the young giants, saying, "We're at the Walking Man. We'll walk home after awhile."
That just makes me happy. The fact that the two boys together grew up to be two men together, at the pub together right here in their hometown on Thanksgiving weekend ... it just makes me happy.
a rich and comprehensive survey of the historical and intellectual contexts out of which the central theories, methodologies, and practices in the Human Sciences developed.(skippity do dah ... skippidy-aaaay...)
an approach to inquiry in the Human Sciences that is predicated not only on a significant reframing of what it means to do theorizing and researching, but on a radical shift in how we think about what it means to be a human being.(my oh my, what a wonderful day)
I am also certain that there is - in reality - enough time to complete this work. Despite the fact that my autumn's healing of a broken/sprained foot sucked all my life's energy into some sort of chi black hole, and despite the fact that I got a suddenly demanding work schedule from the library as a sub during October... despite the fact that I have a soldier in Afghanistan who is never far from my thoughts ... despite the fact that the holidays are mounting their annual energy and attention onslaught ... I do know I can get this done. I have no leeway - no extra time - but I have enough time.
I.
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind,
This is a view as familiar to me - as deeply a part of me - as my own name. It's the coast of Oregon, where the mountains meet the sea, and it is one of three places where, if I stand within it, I know exactly who I am. I know myself if my bare feet are on that strip of sand; I know myself when I am on my knees in church, and I know myself when I am pouring out my inner life inside my house, lighting candles or dusting and arranging things in the living room, baking in the kitchen, ironing ... or writing. Here. At my desk, with my view outside the window and my computer streaming radio or - finally - when I am all the way, deep inside, when I turn it off because all the sound is coming from inside of me.
This morning I realized that the avoidant silliness of, "I work better under pressure," has a sister who tells the truth. I realized that I work better within, deep within, and I work better when the water is moving. And the water does not move unless it is huge. It has to be large enough to respond to the magnetic pull of the moon - it has to have incoming and outgoing tides. The place where writing happens is a place of enormous power, and foam, and rich salt air, and the inconvenience of sand.
In my worshiping soul, this means increasing practice and skill at becoming "recollected" when I get to that pew you can see in this picture. It's on the right side. The first wooden end is the front, then the first pew behind that, and then my pew behind that. I kneel down, I collect "all that I am and have," and then, just as if I had gathered up the things themselves and put them all into one place, I step aside. I come to God with all of this, I name some of it (the most present, most worrying, or most amazing at the moment), I refer to the rest, and I step aside. Here it all is, Lord God of Hosts. And here am I. "Be it unto me according to thy word."
When I go to the beach, the same gathering - the same recollecting - the same wholeness of self has sandy feet and awareness. When I do the creative parts of keeping a home, I bring my whole self to that too. And today I have realized that the gathering of the whole self is the thing I do when I write. (That photo is from a cool blog I just found called, "Stuff Journalists Like.") Today it dawned on me that it's "the same, only different" when I do this recollective gathering for the purpose of writing.
The schoolish part of writing has been surprisingly hard, and turning in drafts for other people to see has been and is still really hard. Just finding the tide shift and the momentum I need is hard. This, then, is the definition of difficulty for me. Writing - the thing I love best - the task in which I recognize myself most clearly - this is my difficult thing. Crap. Do you know what I thought? I was actually silly enough to have believed that the thing I loved the best should be one of the easiest things to do. Why? Why would I believe such a goofy thing? I can think of no reason at all - other than just because I'm human. Wishful thinking, maybe? Probably. I hate Plank Pose. 
But Plank Pose it is, then. Dolphin Plank Pose for me. Holistic, recollected, deep, deep, deep within. Apparently, bringing the whole self is bringing the whole self, whether I do it in prayer, at the edge of the ocean, or in front of a keyboard. C'mon, cow. We have a hill to climb. There are only a few weeks of the quarter left, and I have a lot of writing to do.
After posting about these
I have to be ready to stir! And one of the fastest and easiest ways to get ready to do anything is to listen to the right music for it. Music begets inclination, inclination begets planning, planning begets list-making, and list-making begets shopping. And shopping must happen before stirring.
***In the Anglican Church, the Collect for the Sunday before Advent, or the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, which occurs some time in late November, commences ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’, and all over the country this has given the day the colloquial name of Stir-Up Sunday. Brand reports a verse recited by children: ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, The pudding in the pot, And when we get home, We'll eat it all hot’. The day was taken as a marker to advise the housewife to start her Christmas preparations, and the grocer to see to the Christmas stock of his shop (Sussex Archaeological Collections 33 (1883), 252-3).
He understands food, eating, recipes, taste, and love.Mr. Keller leads with his heart. He dedicates it to his brother Joseph and lays out in loving, exacting detail the recipes for the last meal he made his father. He reminds readers that life is better when you eat together with family and friends.So I started looking around a bit. Well! No wonder I liked listening to Keller talk about food! He's yet another person connected to Michael Ruhlman, "the food writer who has been Mr. Keller’s voice on paper in each of his cookbooks."
He talks about food that way - he says that you have to let go of fear, feel the food, love what you're doing. Never mind the burns, you'll learn. It's okay. Touch it.
Knows, weeps ... and accepts because you have to let go of the fear, and never mind the burns, and go ahead and love.
Now both my feet are on the same level (unlike walking in one Velcroed-on removable cast and one hiking shoe), and they're all strapped in, and my footwear is not falling apart more and more with each step. Of course, at this speed, it would take a thousand years to wear out a pair of boots, so they won't be falling apart any time soon. (I feel like I've been thrust into therapeutic shoes after a ballet accident. LORDY, I hate heavy shoes.)
Goodwyn: "Although you might think that an Army post is full of soldiers with loaded weapons, that is not the case. If a soldier is not on a training exercise, they're not armed unless they're M.P.'s. And as you might expect, the base's reaction was immediate.
"Sirens went off, a woman's voice began warning over loudspeakers that this was an emergency and it was not a drill, that everyone should take cover. Fort Hood was locked down and the area surrounding the massacre sealed off - and those buildings remained sealed, although the base reopened last night."
Montagne: "And I've also heard, Wade, that the other soldiers in the room, after the chaos and the initial shooting really jumped in and helped the wounded and the fallen."
Goodwyn: "Yes. There were reports that the soldiers came rushing to the fallen, tearing at their uniforms, taking them off and tearing them into strips, and bandaging the wounded. The military police responded very quickly. Without the speed of the first responders and the willingness of the soldiers and the expertise of the soldiers in treating the wounded, I think it could have been a lot worse."
and there are lots of families who think a good time is had by all when they're all outdoors with maps and compasses. Orienteering is one thing I would put into our days if I had homeschooling to do over again. At the time, I didn't feel like I could find my own way down the hill and back with 100% accuracy, but I made the classic mistake of the homeschooling mom. I thought I had to be the expert before I could do something with my kids. (forehead slap goes here - and I wonder why I had to learn this basic truth of homeschooling over and over again. Somehow, I could never remember from one subject to the next that we learn with our kids more than we ever learned prior to them.)
I think I started this habit for myself on the pivotal, now ubiquitously mythical, and rude awakening that oriented the whole country on September 11 a few years back. Our country's map before that was rather frayed and fuzzed at the edges, with whole chunks coffee stained or missing altogether. We were living in Pleasantville where the end of Main Street was just the beginning again. Oddballs like military people or members of the Peace Corps had been bringing home stories from off the edges of the map, but nobody had to listen to them - before the towers fell, we didn't have to listen.
Those, my friend, are shallots. Yes, shallots. Aren't they wonderful? I want posters and paintings and a volume of food poetry when I look at Donna's work. There's lots more - go on over and look. It'll do you as much good as a trip to a gallery - or Sur la Table - and it doesn't cost a penny to look.
The dark print san serif font words ("prioritize family," "move," etc) are from Blue Zones. It's fascinating to me that the newest scientific research shows that when we pay attention to each of the areas of the human recognized by the human sciences and also by the Eastern notion of chakras, we live longer and healthier lives. No matter which path I take into the model, the results can be overlaid and they line up wonderfully. I haven't quite figured out how to overlay the personality type theories, but I want to. This is fun!
But I think I completely squandered it somehow. Nothing deep or meaningful here today. I can't stop yawning.