Ahhh ... yeah ... right there ....

You know that feeling when someone scratches that place on your back where you can't quite reach for yourself? That "aaaahhhh....." feeling where the itch finally stops? Yeah. That's what this is like for me. I'm a big, furry, itchy grizzly, and I've found a perfect tree for scratching on.

One of the first assignments in my Human Studies course is to find an academic resource for our research into the questions of the human "self." Well, I found this very cool article about meditation. This is the abstract at the top of the article called "Meditation and the Cohesive Self," by Judith Blackstone, Ph.D.:

This article looks at the dialogue between some relational and intrapsychic models of psychoanalysis, regarding the autonomy of the self. The article describes how certain types of meditation—in particular, the realization process—can facilitate both the experience of internal cohesion, the sense of oneself as a separate being, and the experience of participating in a fluidly reciprocal self–world matrix. The article discusses how the experience of interiority that can be cultivated through meditation leads to the emergence of a subtle, qualitative sense of self and other; enables creativity; and increases one’s openness to other people.

And now I know I'm in the right place at the right time! Why, you ask? Because there are so many brow-wrinkling terms in the abstract alone, and yet my reaction is excitement instead of depression, I don't wish for a self-induced coma, and I'm not frustrated. I'm the bear! I'm the tree! I'm the whole forest, and I can feel my leaves unfurling. Aaaahhhh... yeah .... right there ....

Gretchen says Dag says so too

Yesterday, I posited an antidote to disillusionment. Others have done the same. Gretchen Rubin has posted a quote from Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish diplomat, author, and the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, who reached the same conclusion.

“Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddied? You are the one who must grow up.”

Antidote

Not what I expected.
I'm so disappointed.
I knew it was too good to be true.

Archer sits on a bench in the square and looks up at what
he surmises is her apartment and imagines what's going on inside.
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he finally realizes.

A friend sent me a NY Times article today. Elaine Sciolino writes about Edith Wharton. (click on the pic or the link to get there) The article is about autumn in Europe, and Paris, and romance, and the power of imagination. And it got me thinking. It got me thinking about all the thousands of warnings I have received during my lifetime, from very frightened and often well-intentioned people, all trying to get me to imagine less. Hope for less. Avoid the cruelty of disappointment and disillusionment. Stop being so happy, because I was just setting myself up.

Today, while I was thinking about that man sitting on a bench beneath the windows of the apartments, and his powerful imagination, and his knowledge that reality doesn't measure up ... while I was thinking about how bad that's supposed to be - that we can be disappointed and disillusioned and wrong about our projected outcomes ... I got to thinking ... Why? Why is it bad to get a reality that uses a different script from the one we expected? Why is that bad?

I have a plaque here in my messy office. On it is a quotation from Proust. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." I believe that. I think the antidote to devastating disappointment is not to be found either in fixing up the narrative so it matches my first draft, nor in writing less and less imaginative life drafts in a vain attempt to avoid the surprises. The antidote is in having new eyes with which to see, new ears with which to hear, and a wider and wider prospect from which to take it all in. Revising a draft doesn't mean you wrote the first one "wrong;" it means you're still writing. Sometimes it hurts like hell - but sometimes, if you'll use the

• new generation orthographic & grammatical checker
• 10 dictionnaries
• 10 linguistics guides,

then you'll be able to revise your draft and make a narrative that's really good. Really, actually, truly good. The antidote is revision - not a cessation of writing.

After nearly fifty years on this planet, lots of stuff in my life has been a surprise to me. I am not unscathed. I have wept over my shattered elbow, my life-saving hysterectomy, and a spine torqued in a car accident ... and I have wept over my own sin and failure and weakness and helplessness ... and I have wept over my kids. I've got the scars, in my body and my heart. But it would not - I declare this unequivocally - it would not have been better not to live. It would not have been better not to dream.

October wardrobe

So ... lemme see .... what shall I wear this fall? Oh, I know. How about a huge, hulking, black, velcroed-on boot? Not two - that would be excessive. I'll just wear the one. For the whole month of October. Nothing says Autumnal Sartorial Pinache like one hulking black boot, don't you think?

Better than a plaster cast. That's what I'm going with. Better - because I can take showers this way and not end up with sodden plaster.

I'd never even heard of an avulsion fracture before today. But that's what I've got. Three of them. It's when your tendon is too stubborn to tear, and your bones too hard to break, so your tendon pulls a piece of bone OFF! Apparently it's more common in children. And elite athletes. (Stop laughing.)

Spoon Sisters rock!!

A friend at work showed me this site yesterday. I have to pass it along to my readers. Readers, meet the Spoon Sisters. (Spoon Sisters, these are my readers. Thanks for coming.) There is so much laugh out loud, ingenious, amazing, brilliant, useful stuff on this site that I'm considering asking for a thousand dollar gift certificate. I mean, seriously. How brilliant is this? Brownies, and every piece is an edge piece!

And this is intriguing as well. I can't quite figure out what these are made of. Silicone maybe? What an interesting idea. (What do you do with them when they're all used up, I wonder? Seventh Generation makes a fabric softener sheet that's actually a sheet of brown paper and can be recycled like any other paper.)

I love the Spoon Sisters! Straining ladles, and can strainers, a "Happy Birthday" cake mold and dipping spoons, stuff for babies and parents and weddings and holidays ... it's all good. And since they've dared to sell it (and Anish Sheth, M.D., a gastroenterology fellow at Yale has dared to write it in the first place), and because I really do think this sort of information can be helpful, and because I laughed out loud when I saw it ... well ... here it is: Oh, c'mon. That's funny. And useful. And funny. (I think I'm always going to be eight years old.)