This video is is at once profoundly beautiful and concisely truthful! I kind of wish is was called The Mundane Secret to how Most Amazing Things are Made. Okay, that's not a great renaming, but watch it anyway!
Only Thing I'd change would be the name...
lessons from a seal
Just a few days ago, I got to witness this seal demonstrating how to utterly relax and immerse one's self into one's surroundings. Since our return from Monterrey Bay I have been holding this vision of the seal in my mind, a liquid shimmering beacon. I, all to often, tend to resist, grapple with, and attempt to reshape my world. Sometimes I want to be the seal, basking unabashedly on the rocks.
a perfect birthday
I know, from personal experience, that avoiding structured birthday plans can be risky. On past birthday's I've ended up regretting that I didn't schedule a special lunch date or an evening gathering. I've found myself feeling that melancholy wistful birthday self pity. Yesterday though, I took that risk. These past few weeks have been so filled with traveling, visitors, and organized gatherings I just didn't feel up for an event. Spring Break was over. It was a monday, back to work and I felt barely equipped to embrace the mundane multiplicity of my day. It turned out to be full of small unexpected pleasures.
NPR started my day by revealing to me that I share a birthday with one of the members of Salt and Peppa. Who knew? And she is older than me by nearly a decade! Josh cooked me breakfast, and brought me tulips at the end of my class. Fifteen fourteen year olds sang happy birthday to me. After work I had an hour to myself. I sat at the piano and rather clumsily plinked out Musette by the great Johann Sebastian Bach. I stitched a little. I received the many facebook, email, telephone, and texted birthday wishes and felt profoundly cradled and loved by the amazing community I get to be a part of. I had a planning session with a coworker and rode my bike home along the bike path breathing in spring and feeling genuinely excited about the classroom plans we made. I opened cards from my family and sat down to dinner with them. I read a chapter of Harry Potter to my youngest and kissed her slightly sunburned now pealing (from our recent California adventures) forehead goodnight. All the little gestures, interactions, undertakings, and visions that insert themselves into my days, like a string of multicolored beads I get to wear.
Feeling Grateful
It is such pure joy to fix myself a cup of morning coffee, shuffle across the yard and open the door to my waiting work space. It smells so good in there to me, when I first open the door. Is it the smell of solitude and intention? I cannot hear the phone ring, or access my computer screen. I build a fire, put on some music or a podcast and work in my down vest and wool slippers until the fire heats up the room. By 11 am I am usually in a tank top with the door cracked a bit. The routines and rituals that spring from my new work place feel almost holy to me. Wadding pages from last week's Weekly to start the fire, turning on the little electric kettle for a cup of tea, sweeping the bare wooden floor, stoking the fire, moving from sewing machine to ironing table to hand stitching in the rocking chair. I imagine time lapse footage of my work movements. What shapes am I making across the wooden floor? I hope one day there will be worn paths in the soft fir planks.
the beautiful brain
My daughter is currently participating in a study that requested she do an MRI scan. When I picked her up from the UO lab last week she handed me this photocopy. It made me a little whoozy and substantially awed, like starring through the lense of a powerfultelescope aimed at some vast unreachable spanse of stellar bodies. I can't read these pictures in any real data collection terms. I don't speak brain anatomy, but I am an artist, and the patterns, pathways, and beautiful symmetry of these images stun me. Like I am just now meeting a hidden part of this human being I so love and admire.
Other People Making Great Art...
This is such a LOVE love poem. I should have shared it two weeks ago but I'm a late bloomer.