Shut Down. Reboot. Restart. Again.

Hello, Blog.

Hello, Blog Readers (if there are still any left after my being so neglectful for so long).

See how that period is after the parenthetical expression? I've been in school. I've been citing things in MLA and APA citation conventions, and I've been getting closer and closer to the degree I started in a different life and yesterday and oh my word is it end of term again already?

It is.

It's also end of hiatus from the library, I think. Yesterday I did all the testing for all the levels of library work I was doing when I quit last summer. Was it last summer? I can't remember. I also can't take any seniority or experience back with me in any sort of official way, and this is the third time of testing. The third time of hiring. The third librarian in our local branch to have to interview me before I can have a job under her authority and direction.

Apparently, I am a Repetitive Starter, starting again. Old college degree unaccredited, so I started again. Twice I've been hired for work at the library, never have I had any chance at anything but sub work, thrice I have been tested and I am starting again. My religious life. My writing life. My homemaking life. Start again. Start again. Shut down. Reboot. Clear the cookies. Start again.

Is this why I like to work with kids? Because they are all always at the start of things? See that? See the fragments and run-ons and deliberate mistakes? I've been in Lit classes and wallowed in Poetry. I've become so familiar with The Rules that now we play with each other and make each other laugh and cry and moan and roll our eyes. Our I's. Oh, aye!

But I notice something. Same tasks, same series of skills sets to stack and survey and sustain ... but different me. I am not the same.

I've been thinking about that lately. I'm reminded when I look down at my right hand as it holds the pages of my prayerbook. The part of my hand between my thumb and first finger -- it's wrinkled and starting to look like an old woman's hand. Only in certain lights. Only sometimes. But my hand isn't young anymore.

When I was in the sixth grade, we had an art teacher who came into the classroom once a week. From her, we learned the color spectrum -- and colored flowers with yellow at the center and all the colors in order to the outside points of the petals where they were darkest purpley blue and almost black. The colors blended together where they changed from one to another. A few spikey shards of yellow reached almost to the outside rim, and yet all the colors filled the petals in order.

I have drawn that flower every once in awhile for all my life since then. Spectrum. Blending. Order. Spectrum. Blending. All the colors, all in order, just like a rainbow caught in the fantasy of a flower that could never be but everyone knows it's a flower anyway.

We drew our own non-dominant hands, too. After we learned about perspective drawing, we put our "other" hands into a pose, and drew them with our pencils. Shading. Line. Perspective. Creases and bends and knuckles and nail bed and cuticle. I remember my sixth grade hand, and the one that holds the pages down when I study or pray - it's the same, but it has texture now. My hand is older.

In this moment, on a Saturday morning right before spring, when the fog and the rain are blurred together outside my window, and the quarter is almost over, and my jobs at the library are almost back in my hands again, I notice this. My hands are older.

Bigger Pot Please

A quick glance through the images for re-potting, and I found a whole site called

Repotting house plants - Why?

This cracks me up. It's such an unadorned invitation, catering to the whiners among us. I'd be one of those lately. Why? Why? My inner voice is about two and a half years old these days.

I need re-potting. I can tell. I need it for so many reasons, and I feel exactly like this philodendron (is this a philodendron?)
It's root-bound. Its previous pot was good and meet and right and perfect ... until it wasn't. That's me. Prior Learning Assessment at Marylhurst was perfect and good and wonderful and satisfying ... until it wasn't. My current employment feels cramped and stuck and new opportunities are materializing at last. My household routines are gradually finding new reasons and fresh structures, now that we are in a permanent two-person household. Resting and recovering from nearly a decade of one health "event" after another has taken enough of my attention. It's time to stop convalescing and be convalesced! I need a new pot!

The starchy no-nonsense writer at Repotting - Why? says,

Let me give you a word of advice, and if you follow it your plants usually do well.
GROW GOOD ROOTS and the foliage will follow.

Yes. It's time.

I am turning in my Prior Learning Assessment final portfolio. The process of turning it in, completed, ready for final evaluation, should be a straightforward march to victory, but for me, it has not been.

I let it go too long. I didn't just move into the process and then through it to the other side. I stopped in the middle, pitched a tent, and worried. I did a full-on Jonah after Ninevah routine. Wah wah wah. Poor me. I wrote my essays and they were good and I was successful at getting credits recommended and then I wanted to pout about it. Fuss and fret and sit.

And sit.

And sit.
Turning it in has become just as exhausting as anything else. (Root bound. Definitely root bound.) My final portfolio contains essays for thirty credits. Not forty-five. Saying that aloud feels like admitting to laziness. But the truth is that any amount is good. Forty-five is the maximum allowed. I have written for the maximum desired. I only want those thirty. I'm done. How odd that success feels heavy. This accomplishment feels like laziness. (Root bound. I'm just root bound. I need another pot.)

I turned in my portfolio on Thursday. On Monday or Tuesday of next week, I will find out if there are any last minute details to tweak to satisfy the accreditation people. Then I will wait for the official decision about the credits I've earned. Then I will need to find a way to pay for transferring them to my transcript. And then I'll be done with that part of my life.

My leaves feel dusty and crinkled at the edges. The first part of my degree-getting needs to transition into the last part. I need to write more and work at the library less. I need to spread my decades of experience into new (offspring-free) household routines and pleasures.

Maybe this past winter of our discontented sogginess is ready to be made glorious summer by the sun of Work. New work. The next work. Where I live, it started raining in October of last year and didn't quit until last week, in the middle of May. I started my PLA process three years ago, and didn't quit until last week. I'm ready for a bigger pot and wider work. I've been root bound, over-watered and soggy for long enough - at school and everywhere else.

Repotting why? Because it's either that, or mulch me.

The clivia is repotted,
hopefully in a pot that is not too big, not too small, but just right.

Life's Little Ironies

Today's task: write a PLA essay for the course, Interpersonal Communication. Today's challenge: write, dammit! Write! It's all uphill today. I can feel it beginning to gather momentum, though. I remember how to do this. It's taken me all day to get to this remembering. Ugh.

And I want the library to send me a copy of the book, Improv Wisdom : don't prepare, just show up, by Patricia Ryan Madson. It has suddenly hit me that what I was talking about was "improv" - the way musicians and comedians think about it.

Okay. FVRL. (Fort Vancouver Regional Library)

Log in.

Title search.

Good. There's a copy on the shelf. Maybe I can get it by tomorrow when I'm working at the library anyway. Super.

Place hold.

So ... need to go back to the essay now. Really don't have any extra time here. Already running late.

Hmmm ... so ... what is near it "on the shelf," in this search engine?

Oh good grief.

Confused about communication and life skills? Maybe this is part of the reason. These are the books next to each other in the library, which means they're about the same subject.

Book #1: Improv Wisdom : don't prepare, just show up

Book #2: Today matters : 12 daily practices to guarantee tomorrow's success

(I shouldn't have looked)

Prior Learning ... Assessed! (almost)

After a miserably long time of inactivity, THIS is going to be the quarter. This one. Spring. 2011. Before this year's summer, I will have turned in a Prior Learning Assessment portfolio with forty-five college credits in it. 45!! Maximum allowable amount, changed my mind over and over on whether or not to do the maximum amount, and now I'm all set up to sprint to the finish. A whole academic year's worth of credits, credited to me, because I actually know this stuff, and I can prove it, and it can be added to my transcript.

On this page, there is a link to Janyce Andre's story. Her narrative goes like this: Wondered about it, looked into it, wrote for it, and in "less than two years," finished her degree. (Wow!)

My narrative, on the other hand, goes like this: Got an unaccredited degree, decades went by, wondered about an accredited degree, looked into it, wrote for it, took other classes along the way, never went more than 2/3 time, usually only 1/1 time, changed my major three times before settling down, started PLA work, did a bunch, let it languish ... got overwhelmed at a silly little snag that amounted to nothing .... made ridiculous attempt to finish without support (not recommended), and now, finally, yesterday, admitted my need for help, made appointments, and THIS QUARTER I'm going to finish the thing.

(And what did we learn today?)

Well, we learned several things, Sergeant.

1. We learned that sometimes the "easiest" things need the most community support. I'm not sure why that is, but it often is - for me, anyway.
2. We learned that for the willing learner, there is a teacher. Always. And Jackie Fowler is just what the (slow-to-be-)willing learner needed! Marylhurst's instructors are the best.
3. We learned that the circuitous route will get you there eventually.
   

We're deciding to let that be okay.

Poetry Paint Play

Ever heard of Marla Olmstead? The 2007 movie, My Kid Could Paint That, is a documentary about this child prodigy and the adults who go a bit nuts around her and in the art world.

I discovered it just a few minutes ago - when I was looking for images of "playing with paint." I wanted images of playing with paint because I have been thinking about Anon.'s comment about my absurdly difficult time with my Poetry final. (I've been thinking about the comment whilst writing the paper - I'm almost done - a short concluding section, and I'll be ready to let it rise overnight so I can punch it down tomorrow)

See the kid's face on the movie poster? That's how I feel when I'm immersed in this poetry. I'm having a good time. I feel exuberant. I love love love what poetry does. I like to play in it. But ... well ... writing a paper about it means someone else will watch me playing. I'm being caught with a brush in my hand. It just feels ... weird. I'm a little chagrined. (It helps to bleed off some of the energy and nerves here, on my blog. And that's weird too. Because I need words to get onto the paper, I also need to bleed off a whole bunch of extra ones. I get all jammed up.)

But I do love these poems. Rosmarie Waldrop's "Conversation I: On the Horizontal," from her book, Reluctant Gravities, and Anne Sexton's "Her Kind." I don't think my kid could paint like that. I'm pretty sure I can't either. But it sure is fun to play with the paint.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Stupid

This is so stupid.

Inexplicable.

Idiotically frustrating.

I love school.

I love poetry.

I love writing.

And yet grinding out this final paper for my Poetry class.
One scratchy, sticky, reluctant word
at
a
time.
Is.
Agony.

WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO DO???

Forced perspective

"Forced perspective" is what painters and filmmakers and photographers use to make things look larger or smaller to the viewer.

Funny, right? (you can click on the pic for a good explanation of forced perspective)

Less funny when your brain is doing forced perspective acrobatics on its own.

It's the end of the quarter, and I know perfectly well that I'm avoiding writing my final papers. I have not been following the wisdom available to me within this mounting anxiety - I have taken no action. (After all, I know what it is. I have the right answer, right? This is anxiety, it's caused by awareness of something noteworthy and requiring action, and I'm feeling it grow and grow as I continue to avoid it. Duh.)

I have taken no end-of-quarter action -- until this morning when I couldn't take it anymore. (Deep breath in ... exhale ... log onto the course site ...) Okay. Any new posts?

No. But here's the drop box for the final paper.

ACK! It's due Friday? TODAY is Friday! Oh no oh no oh no!! I can't write a 10 page paper and make it look good enough for this course in just one day! I haven't even started! Oh no oh no oh no!!!

(panic reaction in full swing)

Due date: Friday, 18 March 2011, 11:55 PM

Wait a second ... what's the date?

oh.

The paper is due NEXT Friday!

Thank you, Anxiety. Apparently the inner jangling, pounding, screaming, and jumping up and down that I've been ignoring has been happening in plenty of time for my attention to be brought to bear early enough for success. The girl threatening to flatten my Eiffel Tower is not quite as large as she's been pretending to be.

What's that you say? Keep a calendar? Hmmmm... interesting idea ....

McLaren on YouTube

Click here for a YouTube recording of Karla McLaren, talking about the difference between being empathetic and empathic, the problem we have due to our "professionalizing" of emotional difficulties, boundaries (the difference between you and me), and her new book. (What a shiny woman!)

The video is clearer than the book, in a lot of ways. Highly recommended, perhaps as an introduction to what she's doing.

She's also a fan of The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, which I discovered in some of my research recently.

This stuff's not easy - but I'm so deeply grateful for her work. I need to write her a letter.

Eggs in One Basket

Yesterday was Septuagesima. Next Sunday will be Sexagesima and the Sunday after that is called Quinquagesima, which is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent, which is the forty days (not counting Sundays) leading up to Easter.

I came into this antique vocabulary as an adult, and I still delight in it like a little kid. The words sound to me like ballet terms (arabesque, coupé dessous, pirouette) or the names of the diacritical marks on a sheet of music. The liturgical terms mean something to the practitioners of the discipline - in this case, it's 70, 60, and 50 days before Easter (which is odd, since a week only has seven days in it). On Septuagesima Sunday, we enter the countdown to Lent - and the kids in that picture are pretty good representations of the moods present at the beginning of Lent in various years.

The annual season of Lent, more than the beginning of the calendar year, is when I take stock. Somehow, since this time last year (whichever year I'm in), I have invariably acquired random piles of stuff. Duties. Relationships. Distractions. About a zillion zillion distractions. Ugh.

It's time once again to sort mental piles, toss distracting clutter, and only keep the eggs that fit in the one, intentionally filled, deliberately chosen basket. Time to stop living in Multitasking Fantasyland, where the illusion of doing several things at once is sprinkled like pixie dust on all the plants and animals, dazzling the eye and dizzying the head, and all we end up doing is spinning and spinning and spinning. Lent reaches out a hand, and I can grab it and stop.

Just stop.

Cease.

Quit.

One little blog has spread under the soil of my world, and shoots have come up in other places. Now there are three blogs, a facebook page, and a newly opened account on SmashWords, where I intend to put some of my writing into the open market. That's too many eggs. Too many sprouts. Too many metaphors for too much distraction.

One little degree has turned into a sprawling, spreading, lolling about, directionally diffuse, too faint and watery in intention, unchanneled. Instead of a river, carrying me on to a place I want to go, I'm sitting in a swampy sort of landlocked wetland. And wetlands are wonderful for wetland-dwelling species. If I wanted to live here, I'd be home. But I don't. So I'm not. I need to dredge a channel and get moving again because it's getting too attractive to disease-ridden pestilence and I need to breathe freely again. (Translation: I need to FINISH my Prior Learning portfolio, turn it in, and get the credit for it. And that's for starters.)

All in all, it's also time to chuck out some of the eggs that looked kind of interesting, or quirky, or familiar from another place and time. I've been going on too many daytrips back down paths I've already walked. It's like a little check for psychic buyer's remorse. Am I glad I went this way? What if I'd stayed there? When I left that place, I was unhappy (or scared, or angry, or hurt) ... was that a good enough reason to leave? Was I overreacting then? Did I miss out?

(Oh, the lure of "You're missing out ... you're missing out ..."!)

(click on that picture! It came from a very cool site called artsyTIME)

We can only remember things from where we were standing at the time. We can only have seen them through our own eyes, interpreted them from our own personalities, our own assumptions. Along the way, we rewrite the memories, re-form the images, re-remember, and incorporate into our lives what we thought we saw when we saw something. It is not a bad idea to go back and check and look with the eyes we now have. Usually, we find that our view was surprisingly incomplete at best.

And then we have to learn that our current view is still incomplete, at least.

So it's clearing-out-time. Remove the eggs and count them. Keep only the one basket. I've only the one life. Eggs that tend toward the rot and disintegration of fear-mongering, contraction, and staying put, contented with conclusions already drawn ... out, out, out. Eggs that still hold the health and life of joy, anticipation, openness and change ... put those in. Keep those.

And maybe in the end, I'll be so sorted out that I won't be conflating eggs in a basket with boating on outa here - with a ballerina added to the cargo. Sheesh! Metaphor muddle: dead giveaway, proof of the need for the annual assessment.

Adding the layers, working on the picture

(Hello, Recollected Life blog ... it's me. Remember me?)

After a sort of foraging expedition of the past few months, I now have more to say on the subject that keeps calling me. Being recollected, about life. What is a person? How do people work? When it goes wrong, what has happened? And why do people unfailingly believe there's such a thing as life going "wrong" or "right" in the first place? Obviously, we have the ability to self-reflect, imagine what is not yet a reality, and change our worlds ...

Gather it in. Collect it. Re-collect it. I do this in my religious life, and I do it all the time with "moments of clarity, attempts to focus, and questions to ponder in the intentional life" I'm trying to live. So ...I've just added another layer. In 2010, Karla McLaren wrote what I think is a fairly important book. The Language of Emotions: What your feelings are trying to tell you. She has addressed the modern, industrialized, socialized, urbanized, thought-laden, enlightenment-hounded, emotionally confused people we find ourselves to be.

I think she's brilliant. She went and studied and figured out and researched and assembled all of the components of this language we're so bad at in our era. (Because she did, I don't have to.) When I assert (as I have for about a decade now) that our emotions are like an instrument panel on a plane in flight, and that they carry information we need, and that we ignore our emotional feedback to our own peril, now I can open and re-open this book, and find the vocabulary and the studies and the research to re-ground myself in the practicalities of the thing. This is good stuff.

And it's another layer for my ongoing (personal) encyclopedia entry.

These models, these languages we all carry - they are the layers of transparencies in the encyclopedias we had on our home bookshelves when I was a kid. Do you remember those old encyclopedias? For the models of the human body or a reptile or an towering office building or anything else with three-dimensional layers, there were layers of clear overlays the reader could peel back, discovering the interconnected systems. (click on that picture of a version still being done - I love this kind of work!)

That is what this book of McLaren's does. It adds another transparency page for my model.

Back when I was taking the Human Studies course, Relationship to the Self, we had to come up with a model of the Human Self. I discovered that the Erickson model of psycho-social development closely paralleled the ancient system of chakras, which itself could be seen in concert with Martha Beck's change cycle (back to Square One at the beginning of all of life's changes, Square Two is ideas, Three is trial and error, Four is maintenance until the next propulsion smack back to Square One). Then there's the ongoing Blue Zones research, being done across the globe, where the healthiest and longest-living groups of people show that they all have the same "Power Nine" things contributing to their lives.

I ended up with Chakra Man ... a really boggling diagram, in which all the layers were present ... so it's kind of over-full of information. But this is what it looked like to me when I was taking that course. (if you click on it, it will be as large as a regular sheet of paper, and you'll be able to read all the parts)

My thinking goes like this. If the most ancient systems and the most modern research all look basically the same, they're probably all observing the same universally true phenomenon. And, within the developments and health of the organism (each human organism, and, I suspect, the amalgam of humans that form a culture) there are interconnected systems that can inform and aid, or can oppose and hinder, all the other systems and developmental curves.

A body has a nervous system, a cardiovascular system, a musculature, a skeleton ... a human has foundational chakra/developmental phase/elements, and life cycle elements that parallel the body's systems ... a society has all of these things too. It's very wheel within a wheel. And it's freaking hard to diagram!! I just might need to design the book of transparency overlays to explain what I'm talking about.

So here's the work I'm working on in my current work.

Cultural transparency: Blue Zones, Philip Zimbardo, and (I think ... but I'm not definite about this yet) Joseph Campbell. Something about the hero's journey is scratchy - but I don't know why or where, so that one's still in provisional status

Childhood transparency: the incredible and delightful currently researching Alison Gopnik and both of her most recent books, the concepts in The Continuum Concept, and Kevin Leman's work on Birth Order

Intra-personal transparency, for the emotional/personality type clarity page: Lenore Thomson, James Pennebaker, Martha Beck, and now, Karla McLaren

There's more, of course. Lots more.

But today, the big news is that Karla McLaren has written a book that explains the healthy, practical, useful, and clarifying use of our emotional systems. Emotions do not need to be ignored or denigrated, they don't need to be our confusing and eccentric masters, and they cannot be commandeered and tamed. Emotions don't work like that. They're out internal waterways, and damming them up or draining them dry are both seriously bad ideas.

Thanks, Karla. I am deeply grateful for your work.

Wondering What the Winter Weekends Will Bring

Registration for winter term is finally here! Three courses at Marylhurst this winter - one online (Poetry), one that takes three Friday/Saturday sessions and online work (History of Film), and one that takes a Friday evening and a Saturday (a workshop introduction to Art Therapy).

And here's the advert for the course I'm teaching. See it? Click on it to make it bigger. See? There I am! Second one down from the top, and so so so excited about this! This course is a toe in the water, testing what might be the beginning of another career for me, and one that could last for a couple of decades or more.

Winter weekends filling up and all sorts of possibilities are right 'round the corner.

When I get there, "the holidays" will have come and gone. The decorations that are not yet up will have been taken down. The meals will have been eaten. (Standing rib roast this year, I wonder? A goose maybe?) Advent, and St. Nicholas, and St. Lucia, and Midnight Mass (carrying in it all the other Midnight Masses we've gone to) will be over for another year, and I will spend January wondering why I feel a little depressed but this year I will be too busy to think about it. By the end of February, I'll be done with all my weekends at school, I'll be done teaching my courses, and I'll be much more than ready for our annual getaway at the beach.

That's what keeps going through my head. In a few more weeks - one winter - which I know goes in a flash - so much of what I am now planning will have become part of my past. I'll be the person who did all that. The planning, the dreaming, the wondering, the wistful wishing and the memories of days gone by ... the moment ... everything after the moment.

Remember these? These wooden mazes with the knobs that make the two inner boxes tilt up and down or side to side? The little metal ball bearing to keep balanced on the line by resisting the temptation to over steer, stopping the momentum, or looking too far ahead?

Every once in awhile, you could get the metal ball into one of the corners along the way, and you could re-gather your focus and get more calm and determined.

But it's not a good idea to try to stop the momentum to try to balance the ball in the middle of the travel sections. For those, you have to stay in the game all the way - you have to keep your eye on the rolling ball and the line, and you have to feel the way the knobs move in your hands. Most of the game is always going to be before or after where that ball is at any moment - and the game happens at the spot where the ball touches the painted line, and it happens in motion. One moment at a time.

More notes

I've just spent a few minutes looking around at images, trying to find a pile of rubble with a surprised yet gratified person standing in the midst. There are no images like that. Rubble is depressing or terrifying or wearying. Rubble follows in the wakes of disasters and wars and attacks.

But I have happy rubble! There aren't any pictures of happy rubble. My rubble is what happens after a concerted and deliberate effort to push over a wall. Bruises and scrapes and blood and tears of frustration, alternating with highly Zen periods of 's-all-okay, and more impatience and more blood and tears, and a rock fell out now and again, but the wall held ... and now, all at once, crash!!

Me: A Timeline

• Child stage: complete.

• Adolescent stage: complete, with amendments* made at a later date.

• Young adulthood: complete, despite necessary catching up (*see above).

• Active motherhood: done, and done! No really. Seriously. I'm not kidding. Pay no attention to the adult in the bedroom. And, no, actually, I am NOT fussing about things over which I have no more control. It was an excess of sugar that gave me insomnia, okay? (shut up)

• Transition into new phase of adulthood: geeeeeeez! Y'all? Transitions suck!

• The year of turning 50 in A.D. 2010

1. Soldier daughter home from a year in the Middle East.
2. Older son graduates from college.
3. Pairing off happening, prospects very happy-making.
4. Course work at school serving as a means for focusing intent.
5. Heard Mary Catherine Bateson speak - remembered that I am still me. I am the me I have been becoming my whole life.
6. Literature of Resistance + Nazareth House Apostolate + finding out how to be a person in a specific and disciplined practice of a traditional faith ("see the person, not the ideology")
7. A conversation with Andrew Pate, the painter and community activist
8. An accepted proposal, and now getting ready to teach my first session of Voice Lessons

That's what I want to do. I want to offer Voice Lessons. The walls fell down, and the stones rolled all over the place, and I think the entire decade of my forties was a process of birth-giving -- of life composition -- of learning not to be afraid of improv.

I'll call the series (something like):
Hearing Your Voice (lots of shared reading aloud + free writes on prompts)
Finding Your Voice (journals, poetry, letter-writing + intentional self-discovery)
Using Your Voice (poetry, records of personal experience + testimonial literature)

... and in conjunction with local artists? Things like, maybe, but I don't know because we haven't talked about it yet ...
Word Streams
Imaged Narratives
... words fail ... this will be a team effort, and it's not time yet to know these titles

Now that the rocks have rolled away and I stand in the midst of the rubble, blinking and a little stunned, I have started to laugh. This is the old dream - it's here again - this is the Art Therapy dream (from February of 2007), but I don't have to do the "art" part!

For ME?? THANK you!!

Transformative Language Arts Concentration

The low residency MA in Individualized Studies Program offers a 48 credit concentration in Transformative Language Arts with masters degree.

The Transformative Language Arts concentration is for students interested in the intentional use of the written, spoken, and sung word for individual and community growth, development, celebration, and transformation. Students choosing this concentration ...

Third Day Thoughts: That Thing I Do

I need to get this stuff written down.

Yarn fibers and hanks of thread.

Twisting maybe strands of belts or straps and
I cannot figure out what it is and
I know it is important
because it was given
to me
this past weekend.

I keep teasing the strands apart
running my fingers through it
like hair I'm trying to braid
behind my head.

Embroidery thread. First,
pull apart the strands.
Lay the threads against each other
so that their spun nature aligns

It is impossible to attend (be attentive, be in attendance) for a weekend of Testimony, Night, Woman at Point Zero, The Little School, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Death and the Maiden ... the palpable answering pain of my fellow students ... without being permanently changed. I was right. I'm back from The Village, and everything here is the same, but I am not the same. So everything's different now for me.

It's becoming a theme for the year.
2010: The Suffering of Others.
2010: The year my soldier came back from Afghanistan.
2010: The Year of Nazareth House. (Give if you can. Please. Click on the link and give if you love the people who love without condition of litmus tests. Color, creed, politics or past - none of it matters to these people. All they do is love.)
2010: The year I heard the pain of men whose women are destructive - several such men, concurrently and all in this year
2010: The Literature of Resistance




Pull apart the strands and feel
the places where it grabs
every tiny scratch or hangnail or rough
place on your fingers.

I hear you. I can feel you here
in the palm of my hand
and along the inner edges of my own touch
You are no longer

Softly faded into the neat and woven
threads of destiny and the history channel
is not pausing for a commercial
and I hear you now.



I find myself wondering if there is anything in the natural world that has its layers peeled back over and over, and yet neither dies nor hardens. Are cork trees like that, I wonder? Cinnamon, perhaps? I know why I was not peeled to this depth before now. I would have died in some way. I think the sounds of this sort of pain would have caused me to turn away in self-protective need ... and maybe that is what happened. Maybe we can stop our ears and block the sounds if we are not yet strong enough to hear them.

But now I've heard them. I cannot un-know, and I cannot un-hear. I got back off the island, left The Village again, I'm back at my flat in London, and I have no idea what to do about what I know and heard. How do I give this into the safe keeping of another?

I think this is becoming a "thing I do." A few weeks ago, my adult daughter called me from the army base, and asked, "What 're ya doin?" I was not yet fully back into the room in which I'd answered the phone -- I mean to say, I was still in the last clutches of my thoughts. And so, to give myself a few more seconds to become conscious again, I said, "Ruminating." She laughed and answered, "Yeah - because that is a thing - that you do." I suspect now that finding ways to help people hear is becoming a thing - that I do.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden
in the cool of the day
and Adam and his wife hid themselves
from the Presence.

The knowledge of good and evil
the innocence of not hearing
and now it's gone
and there is nothing left to do but listen.

I heard Your voice
in the garden and I was afraid
because I was naked.
And I hid myself.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Aftermath

On Thursday I went into town in time for the midday Mass, and afterward I met a friend for lunch. He went back to work. I tried to study - tried to get ready - to focus my attention at least. But I couldn't do it. The course to start on Friday morning was The Literature of Resistance, and my theory book was fascinating and my poetry book entrancing, and the lyric mourning of Elie Wiesel's Night almost too beautiful for sorrow, almost too sorrowful for beauty ... well, I just didn't have it in me to read The Little School or Woman at Point Zero. I think perhaps I'd already gone as far as I could go without company. I needed my classmates with me for the rest of the material.

Because I'm still me. I'm still the me I've been becoming all these years, and I was once the me who could not witness verbal arguments without beginning to shake like a sort of nervous purse dog -- or survivor. And what did I have to survive? Who could be sad in Pleasantville? Sadness is just so very unpleasant, and I'm sure it was not allowed.

Thursday night, I walked to another neighborhood eatery. The places for meals and conviviality are as thick as the falling leaves in that neighborhood. A visitor once asked some of us if there was a place close by where he could get a good beer - and we laughed at him. "Go out onto the sidewalk," we said. "Throw a rock, and head to whatever building it hits. There's probably a good beer in there. A burger too, if you want one."

It's been a long time since I met people for a 6:30 dinner and didn't leave the restaurant until 8:30. One glass of wine - Prosecco, actually - because Prosecco goes with nearly everything in a pasta place. One meal of Rigatoni Zuccati. Only a couple of pieces of bread. And the conversation flowed, and the food took me an hour to eat, and it was good all the way to the bottom of the dish, and perhaps if I ate every meal that way, I would always sleep like a contented baby, safe and quiet inside, safe and quiet surrounding me.

Because I am still me. I am the me I have been becoming my whole life, and I was once afraid to be. To be in the moment. To be at the party. To be without performance or presentation. I've learned at last to be, and to be happy at dinner with people who are interesting because they're interested. (It's even more fun when they're in love.)

And Friday morning came. What is the speech act of testimony? What is it for? What does it do? How do we listen and how do we try not to listen and why?

The boy who wanted only to be his father's son and never can forget the sounds of his own fear as they beat his father senseless - never can forget the sounds of his father's death. The woman screaming about the chimneys and the fire and made silent by her fellow prisoners in a cattle car, who even then could not imagine chimneys and fire and silence. The Plague crept in and stole the people away. They did not stop it before it closed their town. Plague could not happen. Not now. Not here. They could not imagine it. We cannot imagine it.

Because that is what it is.

It is us.

We. You. Me.

We could not imagine it, and so it happened.

And we're still us. We are the us we've been becoming our whole lives.

L'chayim.

A free man

Nervous.

Jittery. Jumpy. Twitchy and unable to settle.

There are moments in a life lived consciously, when awareness seeps in under the door and through the cracks around the window frame, and just before losing consciousness you know. Now. It's now. From here on out, all of my reference points and indicators and familiar protections will be altered or gone.

I am choosing - and I know it. I am choosing to stand before the masked faces of my inner jury and make an argument. The changes we have in our lives - the big ones, I mean - they make us Number Six, taken to The Village, held captive there, and finally making our arguments to our own masked faces.

With a few exceptions, each episode begins with a repetition of some of the opening sequences from the first episode--McGoohan resigns; his file is dropped by a mechanical device into a filing cabinet labeled "Resigned"; he is gassed; he wakes in "The Village" and confronts (the new) Number Two. This beginning is followed by a set piece of dialogue:

Prisoner: Where am I?
Number Two: In The Village.
Prisoner: What do you want?
Number Two: Information.
Prisoner: Which side are you on?
Number Two: That would be telling. We want information, information, information...
Prisoner: You won't get it.
Number Two: By hook or by crook we will.

Prisoner: Who are you?
Number Two: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
Number Two: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man.

Number Two: Ha, ha, ha, ha....

With few exceptions, this sense of knowing has preceded a profound and seismic change in my life. Although (I may at last have learned) "it" will all be the same when I return to my life at the end of the show, I will not be the same. I will have been a Prisoner in the Village, silenced at every turn, unable to make an argument or bring awareness - or find it.

The difference this time is that I have hopped onto the the helicopter of my own volition. I choose this change.

I choose this change - I choose this course in narratives born of pain - I choose this awareness. I choose to be the living clay on which the Literature of Resistance may be written, and I choose it for all of the Prisoners who have been silenced. I choose it for the silencing of gas chambers and columns of smoke, and I choose it for machete amputees and fearful children.

And I choose this next stay in The Village for the smallest darkling spot of confusion in the mind and soul of anyone I might ever stand before as a teacher. I do not compare our privileged lives and times to the unmaking of the Holocaust - the erasure of voices and unreality of a nightmare made corporeal and then snuffed out so easily. But I see that the planting of one healthy tree is an answer to the fire of mountain ranges, and I choose to plant the trees.

I'm afraid.

I've been here before. I've been drugged and captured and taken to The Village when I did not want to be and no one warned me and the panic of it nearly unhinged my mind and stopped my body.

But this is different. I know the white balloon is here, and I know it will not let me leave until it's time to make an answer to the masks in the gallery. But this time, I choose it.

I wonder which one it is?

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Aaahhh... good old Robert Frost. I do love him. I thought of him today, and of this poem that caught my imagination for the first time about forty years ago. I have thought of "the one less traveled by" a lot of times in my life, and apparently, it's come 'round again. Two things, here before me, unexpected, obvious, and both branching off to parts unknown. Which to follow, I wonder? Which one is the one less traveled by? (And - poetic heresy, for sure - do I want to be on the one less traveled by?)

Road the First:

• my still fascinating rock-paper-scissors model of the human person. Somehow, I still want to include it in this degree I'm composing and assembling. We are what we are (the "rock" part); we cover ourselves in socialized behavior (the "paper"); and we choose and can alter our socialized selves (the "scissors"). Our social selves can alter the very composition of our "what we are" selves -- at least, to a point. Our core selves can be used in such a manner as to bend, or even to destroy our wills (prison camps, torture, or the child raised with no limits or guidance ... of these things mess with our basic composition and can smash our will so that we have a very hard time with our choice-making).
• This idea sits like a paper weight on the desktop of my brain, waiting for the best place in the arrangement of things. I still don't know where to put it, but it's just too attractive to throw away.

Road the Second:

• I have only just this weekend discovered that there is a new literary model emerging in the academic world. It's called Darwinian Literary Theory or literary studies.

• (background: I've finally hammered out what on earth the discussion actually says when it comes to evolution and the resistance to the idea of evolution in the natural world (thanks to a class that forced me to find these things out for myself if I wanted an A ... which I did ...). I suspected I would find out that I'd been handed a straw man to defeat, and this was true. Christians really and truly need not fear anything with Darwin's name or the word "evolution" attached to it.)

• Here's are sentences that makes me just about come to pieces in excitement:

  Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study.

• and this bit here, too:

  Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive “play” that enhance pattern recognition. In company with Ellen Dissanayake (Art and Intimacy, 2000), Boyd also argues that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity. Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll (Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated form to the relations among the elements of human experience.

Is that gibberish without some kind of background or a little reading? I'm not sure I would have been able to see this even just a year ago. But I see it now.

My degree is called "Composing the Human Experience." If there are people who are currently figuring out that narrative is as vital to the understanding of humans as more traditionally quantifiable science is, and if I can get in on the discussion ... well, I think sparks have started to fly out of my scalp, and words have failed me.

So ... which road?

Or, better yet, do these two ideas converge?

Swallows return

The miracle of the "Swallows" of Capistrano takes place each year at the Mission of San Juan Capistano, on March 19th, St.Joseph's Day. As the little birds wing their way back to the most famous Mission in California, the village of San Juan Capistrano takes on a fiesta air and the visitors from all parts of the world, and all walks of life, gather in great numbers to witness the "miracle" of the return of the swallows.

Each year the "Scout Swallows" precede the main flock by a few days and it seems to be their chief duty to clear the way for the main flock to arrive at the "Old Mission" of Capistrano.

With the arrival of early dawn on St. Joseph's Day, the little birds begin to arrive and begin rebuilding their mud nests, which are clinging to the ruins of the old stone church of San Juan Capistrano.

And every September, I find myself circling my academic pursuits once more, my thoughts like scout swallows, looking for viable nesting grounds in familiar places. I've been elsewhere for weeks now. I migrate in the summer. I think while I'm away from school that maybe I don't want to return. But then the end of August comes, and I find myself in the air again.

Too poetic? A bit sappy? Yeah, well the beginning of September is like that. Mothers around the globe mourn over their young, newly (and apparently suddenly) old and ready and expansive -- but these mothers feel proud, too. Pleased. Teary-eyed and pleased. College freshmen don't know whether to laugh or cry at feeling so lost and so ready to be. Harvesters feel buried under good harvests and groan under getting what they wanted the most. There's always a bit of the melancholy in September's excitement, I think, and you don't have to be a mommy to feel it.

So, here comes fall quarter. I'll be reading for a course in The Literature of Resistance this quarter. It makes me afraid to think of, but I want to do it. I've already been forever changed by a course called The Psychology of Transformational Narrative. Nice bookend courses for this degree, I think.

See, my degree is supposed to be about Composing the Human Experience. This is a writing and psychology degree - a literature and philosophy degree - a degree about people and the words they use. To this end, and in some sort of trick of the light (on the path I'm trying to follow), I keep discovering books within courses, but also outside of them. I am acquiring a library of compositions of the human experience.

Books from inside my courses include heavyweights like Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Opening Up have changed my life forever. I wrote a PLA essay for which Sonja Lyubomirsky's The How of Happiness was one of the texts, and this led me to the research being done by Gretchen Rubin for her recent book called The Happiness Project, which has led me to bring home piles and piles of books from the library about happiness research. Most of them aren't worth much. But I am just now finishing one that has glimmers of things I want to use. Little flickers of light. The path twinkles with books like this one. It's called bluebird: women and the new psychology of happiness, by ariel gore.

There is a lot to recommend this book. I take issue with some of her trains of thought, but still ... there is a lot of good stuff in here, all the way through. And now, near the end, I find a quote I must use when I write my senior paper. Because I'm assembling a rock-paper-scissors model of the human being, in which the rock is the human inborn natural self, the paper is the socialized self, and the scissors are the human will ... and because I believe that the thing that defines the human being as unique in the world of critters is that "humans choose" ... this quote from a holocaust survivor is a little nugget of pure light for me.

Do you know him? Have you heard of Viktor Frankl? His book, Man's Search for Meaning, chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate - not exactly light, attractive, bedtime reading, right? But look at the conclusion he finds:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Yes.

Yes, I'm ready for school to start again. Rebuilding my mud nest. Composing my own human experience. Using my scissors to shape the paper that covers my rock. Ready.

Some other beginning's end

Okay ... I know ... it's a bit over-played. But it's perfect for this time of the year. We can see the another beginning's end from here. Right now, outside my window, I can hear a chainsaw biting into some logs. I can see the hay that was too poor to bale, lying brown against the greener field, and smell ripening blackberries. Summer is at the height of its aerobic workout. The sweat is rolling off, and the air is panting hard in rhythm, and everyone knows that the next part in the routine is the cool down.

I know that it's easy - and completely honest - for mommies to feel pensive when the summer starts to listen for the next song. I understand the sentiment. I do. After all, every new beginning is some other beginning's end. And so we grieve. At least a little, we grieve over the end of a beginning. I think this must be one good thing about celebrations for transition times. If you throw a party when your son is weaned, or give your daughter a Quinceañera, everyone's celebration can help the mommy a bit. She can weep and she will be understood.

But at the end of summer I am never far from grade school and new pencils and unopened packets of paper. The light at this time of the year reminds me of new clothes on a sewing machine. My own breath quickens with the increasing breathlessness of the air as the song's beat grows stronger.I know, you see. I know what's coming next. I know that when the air mellows, and the colors - colors even now beginning to fade from the outmost edges of the summer's juicy, lush glow - after this song - it will be after this song - the breathing will smooth out. We will stretch. We will cool down. We will lie still. We will find "corpse pose" again, and with the colors in the leaves, we will recede into thoughts again. School. Writing. Thinking. The scent of piles of leaves and sundried evergreen needles in the dust. Here it comes. It's after this next song.

• 1. Finish and submit a completed PLA Portfolio
• 2. Take three CLEP tests and don't put it off any longer
• 3. Online: LITERARY AND CRITICAL THEORY

LIT 321E, 3 crs.
David Plotkin
This course examines the history of literary theory while focusing on significant contemporary approaches to literary interpretation. Students will explore the relationship between literature and various other critical approaches, such as in philosophy, linguistics, political-economy, historicism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Core requirement for major.

• 4. Weekend: THE LITERATURE OF RESISTANCE

LIT 352A or CLS 352A, 3 crs.
Perrin Kerns
This course focuses on literature from around the world that testifies to political or social injustices, and, through the act of testifying, poses some form of resistance. In reading fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, students will look atmany of the issues that surround the act of bearing witness: the erasure of identity and the break of narrative sequences that adheres in surviving and/or observing traumatic historical events, and the healing (both cultural and individual) that can come through bearing witness. A World & Ethnic Literature course.

• 5. (DANG it!!) I just figured out that the Philosophy course I wanted has a prerequisite I haven't taken. #5 ... to be determined.

Here it comes ...

A will, a way, and a wondrous story (especially for unconventional parents and educators)

Imagine the back seat of a big rig as your high school classroom. For Kerry Anderson, who was home-schooled as her truck-driver mom made deliveries across the country, that was reality. Anderson eventually got through community college and received a full scholarship to Harvard University. Michele Norris talks to Anderson, now 26, about her unconventional education.