A willingness to look

Okay then ... up before 5:00 in the morning again. Sheesh! What is it? Sun spots? Moon phases? Midsummer? Midlife? Pretty silly to be up at this hour if you ask me. But here I am. Not exactly rarin' to go, either. But definitely not going back to sleep.

Last bit of "class" today. The class meetings are over, but this last bit is a meeting with the instructor. Each student receives the instructor's recommendations for using (or not using) PLA as a way to obtain credits for the degree the student is pursuing. I'm looking forward to hearing what she has to say. And of course, I am also wishing that I could find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow so I could pay for the whole thing.

This is a good day for this appointment. It will be nice to have someone tell me what I am capable of, and talk to me about possibilities. I'd like to see some more pieces of this back-to-school puzzle, even if I can't figure out how to put it all together yet.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the car broke last night! It just ... stopped going. After using this car for the 50 mile drive into Portland and the 50 mile drive home (with a couple of stops on the way), the thought did occur that the timing could have been worse. At least the car made it all the way back to our own town and the bottom of the long hill up to our house before it got into its mood.

And we still have no financial aid letter from one son's college for the fall, and the other one - for the other son - was pretty lousy. It won't stop them, though. They're going to do what it takes.

And I had an appointment with the Chinese medicine people yesterday, where I will be getting as much acupuncture, herbal, and advising support as I can, both before and after the surgery I will have to have next month. Surgery - not good news. Chinese medical support for the whole thing - couldn't have it any better. I am grateful to live here, where the different ways can help each other.

And I got an answer to my request for a particular bit of music I heard on Ancient Faith Radio. "This music was recorded by Sts. Constantine and Helen Orthodox Church in Colorado Springs. The bad news is that it is not commercially available. The good news is that Fr. Anthony Karbo at the parish has given us permission to make CDs if people request it."

That's how it goes these days.

It's funny to me sometimes. A couple of decades ago, the "bad news" part of the "I have good news and bad news" routine seemed to me to weigh slightly more. It seemed to be a warning - or a punishment - or a sort of day of reckoning. My life couldn't be as good as I thought it was, right? See what happens? Aren't happy all the time, are you, Miss Smarty? See? This is real life. Not that dream world you live in. For awhile there, my childhood's habit of happiness seemed merely childish.

Eventually, though, I remembered a few things.

I remembered that the "bad news" of the rough practice sessions for choirs, or the backaches at the piano bench, or the sore leg muscles of a long hike are not signals of errors. They are signals of work. And in this life, some things (like Faith, or Hope, or health or creativity) have to be worked at. That's not a bad thing.

I remembered that it's silly - and selfish - and really childish - to complain when when a gift is being given to me, just because I wanted a blue one instead of a red one. The bad and the good together, the easy and the hard, the expected and the unexpected ... why would I think it would be other than that?

And would I really want that? Would I really want a life where I already know every challenge or difficulty ahead of time? Well, no, actually. First of all, there's the obvious fact that we can't "handle it" until it is in our hands. Trying to anticipate "handling it" would make me stay in bed forever. We cannot know our strength or our weaknesses ahead of time. It just doesn't work that way.

But there's this other thing.

You know what I'd miss out on if I needed all my news to be good news?

The sheer joy of the surprise view. That's what I would miss.Sometimes the beauty of the unexpected view just about knocks me over. Every once in awhile, I come around a corner in my life, and POW! There it is. Glory. Exquisite beauty. There is no way to prepare for life's changes and chances - the bad ones or the good ones either. There is only the question of building a life that is willing to look.

Midsummer's breath

Today is the last Monday in July. This morning, I felt it. Did you feel it yet where you live? It's the air. The light. Every summer there is a day when the morning is cool enough for me to wimp out and make the pellet stove go for awhile to take off the chill, but I've left a few of the windows open for freshness. The day will warm up to nearly too warm by the afternoon, and then settle down in the evening again. This first breath - it's not going to stay. It's not autumn tomorrow or anything like it. This first breath is a promise.

The green surrounding me now is dark and lush and deep. Spring came and went, and this is high summer. Nothing looks tired yet. No color has faded. Right now, the land is just pregnant enough to be big, but not uncomfortable. This is what growth feels like. After a few more spates of real heat, and after a couple of spectacular thunder and lightning storms and perhaps a day or two of huge, splashing raindrops to really soak everything before the autumn comes for real, then we'll feel the real thing. This isn't the real thing. This first breath is just a thought. It's midsummer now. This is midsummer's breath.

I wonder ... do the generations of the Norse who came before me still pulse in my body's veins? To stay up all night - into the midsummer's midnight - to

head off to a lovely summer party under a Nordic sky that never quite gets dark before the sun rises once again.

... this seems to me to be a thoroughly good and sensible idea. There is something of the earth and the sky and the sun and the seasons crying out to be celebrated. No. Not crying out. Whispering. Breathing. Tempting.

Last year and the year before, I don't think it hit me like this. But this year I've started a blog about our adventures in homeschooling, and I think that's made everything come back to me in a rush. I can almost smell newly sharpened pencils. Ghostly visions of stacks of filler paper and new books accumulating in readiness float past my mind's eye at random. It's the air and the light - it's time. Get ready. Here it comes.

When I was a kid, this weather was camp weather. Little kids went to camp in June. Older kids in July. By this time of the year, it was high schoolers, and I was one of them. Every year, I was a camper. And I really do not like camp life. I don't like showering at the pool house, or sharing a sleeping cabin with eight people I don't know, or hearing another mosquito in my sleeping bag where I'm already suffocating and sweating with the top pulled closed in a vain attempt to get away from the nasty things. I don't like the smell of the bathrooms or the persistent dirt under my fingernails. I still feel the place in my back that was hurt when I fell wrong on the trampoline one day.

Nothing about camp as camp was the least bit happy-making for me. But every year, I was a camper. I took pictures, and I did love riding horses, and I can still go a little glazed at the smell of certain paints and solvents because they're the smell of the craft room. I made friends, and took an autograph album and/or an address book every year so that I wouldn't lose them when the week was over. And I would like to get back on a trampoline ... after all, it feels like flying.

And midsummer is about new clothes, too. This is the weather for fabric and pattern shopping. Perhaps it is the time of year when she had enough time to devote to it -- or maybe this is when she didn't have enough time to put it off any longer. Or, maybe this is the time of year close enough to the fall for it to be at least a little likely that I was the size (translation: height) I was going to be for the school year. Whatever the reason, this is the time of the year when my mom and I spent hours and hours in fabric stores, choosing the materials and patterns for school dresses and skirts.

We had a system. We looked at patterns together, and then we looked at fabrics together or apart (to cover more of the store), and then at Notions. (Do regular, non-sewing people know what Notions are? -- They're things like zippers and thread and trims and hem tapes.)

When we got home, we washed the fabrics, and then she laid out patterns on the fabrics, and I cut things out. She sewed and clipped. I clipped and took out basting. Sometimes I also ripped things out and she sewed them back together the way she'd meant them to be in the first place.

During high school, I did most of the sewing myself - but mom always did the zippers. I still remember some of those dresses I made for myself. At this time of the year, the sewing machine (the old one, from those old days, that now lives here in my house) joins the whispered hints of the coming autumn. I walk by, and I can almost hear it.

Midsummer's whispers woke me this morning. Can you hear them where you are? I'm sure it's different in different parts of the globe, but here, this is when it happens. This is the morning. Today. The first day of the year when I woke before everyone else in the house, and wondered whose voice I had heard in my sleep. On the way back to consciousness I realized I was fully under the covers because it was just chilly enough for that. And then I opened my eyes and saw the light. The earth is full and almost ready to spill over, and I feel my arms opening to gather it in.

Truthful US

Americans detest all lies

except lies spoken in public

or printed lies.

Edgar Watson Howe

Edges

Currently in my living room:
Father and son watching In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session, a 50 minute documentary on the making of the film's music.

Currently in my kitchen:
"You instilled in your children a great love of the artistic process."

"mm-hm...?"

"Normally that would be a compliment."

"ah."

We have a very small house when it holds a TV show someone in the house would rather not watch.

Opportunity

From this rather remarkable book about Writing ...

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Edison