Sun Came Out, Machines Started Up

A few weeks ago, looking across my yard and over the tops of the lilacs, there was this yellow arm of a huge machine coming up the driveway.

Now ... after weeks of rain and snow and cold and wind and more snow than we've seen in ages and more rain to wash it away ... when both the guys have the same day off for once, out came the "D7" -- which is not this thing in the picture - and which I know the name of only because one of those guys keeps slapping his forehead and saying, "we coulda had a D8." (I'm surrounded, and there's nothing to do but surrender to this sort of thing.)

Today, the D7 which is not a D8 is moving back and forth and back and forth, up behind the barn. I've tried twice to get a picture, but instead I get an "error." Maybe my very cheap camera has died. But the D7 has not died. There's sun on the grass, and machinery noise in the yard. I think winter might end this year after all.

Van Gogh's "The Raising of Lazarus"

Not a painting of a moment in time, but a painting of an emotion. I hadn't seen this one before, and I think it's got a very surreal dream-like power to it.

Time for a full frontal assault

Damn. Damn damn damn and blast it all! I really really didn't want it to come to this, but here it is. Right in the middle of the road, and there's obviously no way 'round it. I have to scale it. Go OVER it. Climb and conquer it.

I've TRIED everything else ... including doing nothing but sitting here. Guess what? It doesn't work. Neither does floating around near it, or trying to go around it, or climbing high enough up a tall tree so I can see over it. I need to be on the other side, and there's nothing left to do but figure out a way to go over it.

And what is "it," you ask? What is this metaphorical rant really about?

An anonymous commenter asked me the question. What are you doing about going back to school? And now, all of a sudden, all the flippant answers I usually use, and all my contentedness about waiting, and all the scenarios for all the possibilities that might happen someday have gone up in a puff of smoke. Anonymous poster, I don't know who you are, but you woke me up today, and I'm on my feet. I'm not happy about it, but I'm up. I have to figure this out and make it happen.

And to make it happen, I have to get past the one huge rock in my road. I have to figure out how to make the curriculum my husband and I sell (it's traditionalist Anglican religious ed curriculum -- we've got a customer base that would fill a whole ... uh ... well, we probably couldn't fit them all around the dining room table at once, but pretty close). Our customers are tired tired tired of waiting for us to send their orders, and we are tired tired tired of never having enough time to fill orders when they do come in, and I know perfectly well that there is a way to sell downloads from our website.

But I also know that my overworked husband has NO time to figure this out. So that's what I have to do to get over that rock. I have to figure out how to do computer stuff well enough to be able to make a website that can sell downloads. Not just write ad copy. (That's easy.) Not just do design work. (I love design work.) No, no. I have to do the hard part.

Do I want the income I could be generating? Is this something that is right in front of me to do? Do I believe that "he who is faithful in small things" can be trusted with more to oversee? Yes. Yes. Yes. So it's fallen to me to figure out the computer sales thing, and I just have to do it, that's all. I've already spoken to someone who can help me, and I'm just going to have to make it happen. Me. I'm going to have to do that. I know our part of Christendom is a little splash out of one of the puddles at the edge of the whole ocean of Christendom, but I also know that we're the only ones who have what we've got at our sadly neglected, gasping for breath, barely alive Littlefarm Publishing. There is a little dribble of income to be had if we can get better at selling it. And then - if we don't have to spend all that time just trying to collate, bind, and ship (not to mention the printing press that can suck up eons and ages and millenia for one little project), then maybe we can WRITE for it too! Have something new to offer people!

Dang, I hate computer stuff.

Consent

"One doesn't discover new lands
without consenting to lose sight of the shore
for a very long time."
Andre Gide

All I ever need to know ...

...I learned in choir.

You know the series of books and spin-offs, right? It all began with the outrageously popular Robert Fulghum book. Last spring, the theater class at our son's high school did a spring play based on this book - vignettes of the stories it contains. Lessons like "share" and "listen" and "love" -- good, universally human stuff - with song and dance and the energy of high schoolers. It was a good play.

Well, I've been thinking about it a lot lately - and I think that it's true - all I really need to know I learned in choir.

1. Pay attention at rehearsal.

This is a biggie. See, at rehearsal, parts are assigned, and you find out about things like the place where you're supposed to stand, and you get information about when to shut up. You learn to listen to the other parts, if you're paying attention. In fact, you learn "the music" - as in, music itself - as a universal language of emotional expression - becomes part of who you are. It's worth it to pay attention at rehearsal.

Last year at about this time, I had a Braxton-Hicks evening. A rehearsal for days to come. A practice session. This evening, I said that day, in the soaking rain and February chill, my husband will come home from another long day away. When he gets here, we'll have another practice run at living in a nest from which the offspring have sprung. It won't last long, but it's a genuine moment of preparation for a new day ahead. Today is a day when the breath in my body, the understanding of why my joke was funny, and the place where my tears find equal and answering emotion comes home to me - and only me. Today it lasts for a few hours. When our new life is born (due date, sometime this year), today will have been good practice.

I anticipated the date a bit ... that life still hasn't been born ... but it's on its way, and all the moments of "just me and you, we two" that happen between now and then are rehearsal days.

2. Make your mistakes out loud.

This one's a two-edged sword. If you don't make your mistakes out loud in practice, you WILL make them out loud at performances. So you have to be willing to make mistakes in the venue in which they can be corrected. You have to get over yourself. You have to see that the choir together, and the music made by a choir, are far more worth working for than your own face-saving perfectionistic desires. Good choir members make mistakes - and they do it in rehearsal so that the performance of the group will not be marred on the big night.

3. Some folks are soloists, and some aren't.

It's true, you know. And the fact is that if a soloist will not do his or her part (and all the practice and hard work and taking criticism and finding the personal voice and interpreting the music itself), then the choir is poorer for it. And if someone comes up out of the group to sing the solo who really shouldn't, all the choir and audience cringe a little. The soloist without the choir is poorer for it ... and the unintentional solo (see #2) is the worst of all - and worst of all for the one what did it.

4. Pay attention to the director.

Have you ever gone to a choral performance of any kind and had one of those oddball, disconcerting experiences of observing one member of the performing group in a moment of wandering attention? Every single time this happens - if the opera member's attention wanders to something off stage, if the choir member's attention suddenly wavers to see who just walked in ... no matter what the audience was looking at in the fraction of a second before it, the wandering attention draws all attention away from the music and the performance and the story and the progress and arch of the emotions. It's just not fair to anyone for a member of the choir to do that.

Distracted parents can't parent. Distracted writers can't hold the interest of readers. Distracted drivers cause wrecks. And sometimes it takes a lot of effort to hold one's own attention to the task at hand.

5. Get enough rest - don't eat phlegmy foods - don't lock your knees.

In other words, in a choir, the support and communion of the group doesn't remove each member's responsibility for himself. I gotta take care of me, and you gotta take care of you, or the whole choir goes down when the guy in the back row faints on us.

A choir is good rehearsal for life.