fake smart 8.January.2009

You know, I was going to tell you that I may just take 2009 as a break from blogging.  The pressure of a blog without fresh posts would dissipate just like that.  But that was before I wrote my last post.  I had underestimated the power of writing (and bread dough) to make my world feel right-side-up again.  There is that quiet contemplation of organizing abstract thoughts into words that balances me, soothes me.

Not that I have to blog in order to write.  Justification: (1) my blogging makes you happy (Dude, if it doesn’t, I suggest you stop reading me!), and (2) blogging gives me a little push to finish my thoughts coherently.

Then I read Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.  One of the first points Carr made was that he (and I, admittedly) read differently than ever, especially on the web.  We skim.  I skimmed Carr’s article before I decided to blog about it.  And then I thought to myself:  do any of my readers really read my posts in their entirety?  It’s kind of a depressing thought that readers don’t savor my every word.

But back to the article.

“[W]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr says.  Many of us have lost our ability to sink into a good book.  A few pages may make us anxious for a change of pace.  I wonder, too, if this skipping from activity to activity and from thought to thought has made us desire everything to be bold and flashy at athletic events, at church services, and on television.  It’s as though if we aren’t distracted, we’ll get bored.

Carr seems to agree:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Can I just admit that it feels warm and fuzzy to have someone who thinks like me, who is suspicious of this whole technological surge that revolves around the Internet?  But, as Carr says, sure, “you should be skeptical of my skepticism.”  Maybe Google-style research is mostly good.  After all, reading books isn’t a natural, instinctual activity anyway.  Maybe the way human brains process information can just change, and we’ll come out better on the other side.

But then again, I doubt it.

“If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture…. As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

the beginning of reading 16.November.2008

We have read Pete’s a Pizza at least twenty times this week.  I have read it quickly, slowly, with voices, without voices.

I’ve read to Isaiah from his birth.  I wanted him to love books more than I had, and, yeah… I love them quite a lot.  In the beginning, I would read my own books aloud, letting him hear the cadence of sentences, the intricacies of the English language.  And then I started reading him his own short picture books because I thought it was the right thing to do.  Once he got out of the habit of gnawing off the corners of all his board books, he loved the colorful pictures.  I couldn’t wait for him to sit still for a whole story.  We read a few books every day, and I patted myself on the back for a job well done.

But then I ran across one family’s homeschooling guideposts, one of which was: “2 hours a day of Reading — especially before they are five.“  That did say before they are five?  Well, Isaiah is not five yet, but… well… when do you start that two-hours-a-day thing?  At birth?  If so, then wow, somebody cared about reading even more than I did!

Isaiah is two.  I can’t imagine how much reading there will be when he is three, four, five.  There are times when I need to take breaks from reading to him, and oh!, the fits my voracious little reader has thrown!  I hate to stop; every moment of those stories, with Isaiah sprawled on top of me or perched on a pillow by my side, is pure joy.  We never aimed for two hours (though I did aim for one), but all of a sudden, I find Isaiah and I spending more time, huddled together on the couch, absorbed in book after book after book.  What time used to be a forced twenty minutes has become joyful hours upon hours.

What made the difference?  Not long ago, I read a book called Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt, and I was intrigued by Hunt’s claim that the quality of books determine how much our children love to read.  She has a wonderful list of books for each age group, and I’ve been snatching up the library’s copies of many of her suggestions.  A few are too dull for him, or too advanced; some are too subtle in their beauty.  But between the covers of most of these children’s stories, I am learning the value of what Hunt calls “living books.”  Books alive with characters, quality illustrations, compelling words and sentences, good stories.

Noticing this difference has made me a bit of a snob about books, I’ll admit.  I would like to burn our copies of Dinosaur Lovables: Stegosaurus and Pepper the Puppy (and his pals Poppy the Pig and Poopy — or what’s-his-freaking-name — the Pony).  Oh, I’m sorry.  Who wrote those books?  Yeah, that’s what I thought.  It’s not even worth putting on the cover.  And it’s not worth my time, or Isaiah’s time.  I’ve decided that if you want to make your kid hate reading, you don’t not read to them.  Instead, you read them dreadful books like Dinosaur Lovables (shudder).

And here, I would like to dispel the claim that anyone can write a children’s book, or particularly, if I, Carrie, want to get started as an author, I should try a children’s book first.  I do not claim to have the brilliance necessary to write a book worthy to be read by children.  A good children’s book is a work of art, and it will play like the Pied Piper to your child’s imagination, luring him into a love affair with reading that will be all but impossible to ever abandon.

*          *          *

A few recommendations from Isaiah:

Pete’s a Pizza, by William Steig

The Little Engine That Could, by Watty Piper (original illustrations recommended)

Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson

Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown

A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog, by Mercer Mayer

courage to create 15.November.2008

Today I’m taking inspiration from my husband, Kyle, who posted a collection of notes and reactions to Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.

I’ve never linked creativity to risk, but tonight it makes sense to me that taking risks may help me live more creatively.  It’s fear that keeps me from living life more creatively and passionately.

This year and probably next, we’re living in a rental house.  But if we ever end up in home we own again, I want to create an art wall.  I’m not talking about a wall where artwork is hung.  I want take a whole wall of our house, and let it be turned into whatever the members of our family want it to be turned into.  Everyone can and should contribute to the masterpiece.  Old things can be covered up (though I’d like to take pictures of the wall — maybe every night — to help me remember how the wall used to be), and any art medium can be used, including the writing of text and the posting of photographs.  Hopefully the wall would always be an artistic representation of what our family looks like at that moment.  It would be a way to relieve frustrations, celebrate joy, and commune as a family.

But it’s risky, you know?  It would mean you’d have to give up the idea that your house can look like a decorator’s dream.  Beige paint, begone!  And then you’d have to admit to yourself that it’s okay if the wall isn’t pretty.  And you’d have to be okay with visitors seeing all your struggles and ideas splashed up against the wall.  Yeah, it’s risky.  It’s scary.  But just think:  isn’t it scary to think that whatever beauty that could be expressed on that wall may never have a chance to be released unless it has a canvas?

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I had ever heard of relactation.  I hadn’t.  But I went home and scoured the internet for all the information I could find about it.  I discovered that I could train my stagnant breasts to produce milk again.  With enough regular demand for milk, the supply could be rebuilt.  I could actually breastfeed our adopted baby!  Though the process of training a baby to nurse when he has only been bottlefed may turn out to be grueling, the opportunity for bonding through breastfeeding is invaluable.  I imagine this is a little crazy to some people.  But even if I face failure, how can I not try to take advantage of something so perfect?

Today on NPR’s Studio 360, green architect William McDonough spoke of the inspiration he takes from nature.  He admits that humans have pretty lame design skills:

“I reflect on the fact that it took us 5000 years to put wheels on our luggage.  So we’re not that… smart as a design species.  But if you look at a tree and think of it as a design assignment, it would be like asking you to make something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, changes colors with the seasons, creates micro-climates, and self-replicates.”

Yeah, my God is creative.  He’s an artsy guy.

I grasp the scrap of paper that is my hope of relactating and breastfeeding our new baby.  It’s a small innovation, a small hope, a humble dream.  But it is my risk; it is my bit of innovation and creativity.  I’ll trudge through weeks of sitting at breast pumps and sopping up leaked milk.  I’ll remember what full, sore breasts feel like.  And I’ll take that scrap of paper and pray for it to be turned into art.  Dare I hope it could become something as complex and beautiful as… a tree?

bananas and adoption 12.August.2008

We graft a child into our family.  The child has always called another country home.  She had another mommy and daddy once upon a time.  She knows the sights, the smells, the sounds of Ethiopia or Korea or Russia.  Her “I am From” story did not include Kansas wheatfields or plastic-packed Walmarts.  If she could speak, she would tell you that America is not “the beautiful” to her; it is a foreign place.  Not home.

Some adopt because they want children.  We want children, too, and to us, it doesn’t matter if they come from our bodies or on an airplane.  We try to adopt with a heart like God’s.  He calls us to care for orphans, and so we follow, thankful that we can be one of the few fortunate adoptive parents.  We adopt because we find it unspeakably exciting to have a global family — so all of our children will know that the world extends beyond our street and our suburb.  We think we want to rescue a child — to teach him about God, and to give him a family again.  We consider the gift of a family as more precious than allowing the child to stay among all that is familiar.  But with all of its goodness and badness, “all that is familiar” is still home to that child.  We hope, that with a lot of love and time, the child will have a beautiful life, and we can be his heroes and his home.

I just finished reading Are Those Kids Yours?, one of the many adoption books on my list.  It was published in 1991, and its statistics are old, most from the 80s.  The last chapter is called “The Global Family,” and it’s dedicated to turning adoptive parents’ insight to the bigger picture, to see adoption not as a solution to the world’s problems and poverty, but only as a small BandAid over our whole global mess.  In spite of being an old book, I kept getting the feeling that this section had been written yesterday:

“In the account of his son’s adoption, Michael Perlitz referred to Honduras as a ‘banana republic.’  Indeed, it is the prototype of a banana republic.  It was governed by the Spanish for 300 years, and then after a brief period of independence, economically ‘colonized’ in the last century by North American entrepreneurs with the aid of military intervention, in order to keep U.S. markets supplied with food that doesn’t grow in our climate.  Bananas and other export products, such as coffee and sugar, are grown on large plantations, leaving little land to grow food for local use.  Agricultural labor is low-wage work, so the campesinos, or local workers, who pick the crops have little money to buy food….

“When rural Hondurans or Filipinos cannot make ends meet on the wages they earn and have no land on which to grow food, they have great difficulty providing for their children.  Some move to the cities in the hope of better opportunities that may not exist.  Often the father leaves and the family never manages to be reunited.  Relinquishing a child for adoption may be the only way to keep the child fed” (Cheri Register in Are Those Kids Yours?).

Cheri Register goes on to ask a few questions of her readers:

“What does it mean to feel responsible for these conditions?  If the world’s wealth were distributed equitably, what would the common standard of living be?  What would we Americans have to give up?… Can we in our daily lives make principled choices that, in the long run, enable these… families to provide for their children?”

I have bananas in a bowl on my counter.  I just bought them at the store this morning.  I think if I bit into one right now, I would be sick.  How many children have been orphaned because of American gluttony?

When we adopt a child, we will be providing what we believe is the best solution for that child.  But as one four-year-old adoptee asked his mother, “Why don’t the American moms and dads just send money to the Korean moms and dads so they can keep their children?”  We have to ask these questions, not to wrack ourselves with guilt, but to embrace the responsibility that is ours.

I sometimes wonder what God sees when He looks at the world.  Could He teach me how my purchase of a T-shirt made in a sweatshop in Asia leads to the abandonment of a child by its raw-fingered, empty-pocketed, ostracized mother?

I look at the problems and wish I could say, “It is only this sinful world.  There’s nothing I can do.”  But that just doesn’t work when I feel responsible.

three books 28.July.2008

Drowsiness pushes its heavy shroud over my head, but today I will fight it.  If there’s one thing I learned in reading Don’t Waste Your Life (John Piper), it is that work is not a curse, as I’ve often treated it.  In my work I will have pain and trouble because of the Eden curse, but even without work, pain and trouble will plague me.  They are unavoidable.  And so I try to not fight work anymore.  I’m doing my tasks with my eyes on Father-Creator-God, trying to see laundry and cleaning as neutral tasks that can be transformed into God-glorifying actions.

When I read Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, I started to wonder if, at the root of things, the desire for more and more technology came because of man’s view of work being a curse.  In the book, Eric Brende discovers that in the Anabaptist community in which he’s living and working, socialization comes during the lulls between loading the wagon with hay, and meeting new neighbors comes with a barn raising.  Rejuvenation comes with the morning light, from a body fed with healthy foods and exercised through daily work.

Brende discovers that when driving a car, anxiety levels skyrocket even if the driver feels completely relaxed.  Driving horses and bicycling and walking, however, do not result in such unnatural stress.  This idea fascinates me.  How many things that I have invited into my life in the name of convenience are actually tearing me apart from the inside out?

I enjoyed Brende’s book.  Brende’s prose can get a little dull at times, but the ideas in the book were invigorating for me.  Yes, they do make me want to move to the country to farm with motorless machinery and eat the fruit of my own labors.  Yes, they make me want to get a horse in exchange for a car.  Hey, maybe the horse manure could be my main source of fuel for cooking!  I don’t think there’s anything innately wrong with technology; after all, the horse-drawn plow was once a new invention.  I do think that humans need to create with more ingenuity and thought.  Does our technology make us more holistic individuals?  Or does it take away from our person in the name of ease or comfort?

The third book I’ve recently read is The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule.  It was a natural sequel to Better Off, and it was a much more practical resource to boot.  I didn’t want the book to end.  It is chock-full of ideas to help you and your children be creative together.  Soule recommends using nature and natural materials in play.  Plastic toys need not apply.  Sewing, dressing up, creating art with the best quality materials possible, enjoying nature, journaling, gardening:  these are activities that I want to make thrive in my household.  Had I read this book before writing my post on gift-giving on the Crunchy Domestic Goddess blog, I think my list of ideas would have been twice as long.

Back to Don’t Waste Your Life:  This wasn’t an “ah-ha!” book for me, but Piper did help me direct my focus back to God.  He is constantly preaching that God is to be glorified, and that we are to be joyful in Him.  His sections on taking risks, letting go of materialism and riches, work, and spreading the message of the gospel were the ones that impacted me most.

These three books have been inspiring for me.  They make me want to face my day with energy and enthusiasm for work and creating.  I’m excited to teach my children the wonders of living.  My greatest fear is that through mere habit, my ideas will not be transformed into actions.

the beast is glaring 9.July.2008

Tonight, I loathe the machine that drew me back in to its white-blue glow only to laugh in my face: “No new emails! Mua ha ha ha!” (I have never used the term ”Mua ha ha ha” before.  What a guy thing.)

I started reading Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology today.  I’ve only begun the book, but I’m already so enthralled.  Eric Brende (a Topeka, KS, native and Washburn, Yale, and MIT graduate) and his new wife move to a electricity- and motor-free community for eighteen months.  Brende talks about how technology takes so much energy to sustain itself that sometimes it doesn’t improve the quality of life at all.  I know — we all say we know this.  But why, as Brende did in high school, do we continue to work our jobs to pay for our car… just so we can get to work?  In his year and a half of isolation from the modern world, Brende hopes to figure out what balance of technology is healthy and helpful.

In a way this is tied to our need for the therapy of nature, as Richard Louv talks about in Last Child in the Woods.  Our mental, physical, and spiritual health, our ability to imagine and discern — would these be all the more agile if we worked with entire bodies in the living, breathing world?

When I am sucked back to the computer to feed my checking-email-and-blogs addiction, I hope to gain some new bit of information — perhaps a book recommendation, an idea for dinner, warm greetings from my family.  I guess I’m trying to expand my mind, finding fuel to feed my passions.  But in all the checking and staring at the flashing screens, am I actually damaging my mind?  Am I turning it into a stagnant button-pressing machine?

A couple weeks ago, I wondered how much it would matter if I let my blog go to pot.  No more guilt about not posting on a regular basis, no addiction to the comments from readers.  What if I wrote in a notebook instead?  Wrote a book or a journal?  Maybe someday, I’d still have readers — those who were patient enough to wait for me to arrange and edit and publish any good bits of writing I may have churned out.  Maybe it’d be a better use of your time, too, than to watch me muddle through my questions.

the lowdown on going raw 8.June.2008

I have wanted to write this post for a long time.  I have started and stopped, written a few paragraphs, and erased the whole thing.  I can’t understand why the subject of my raw diet is such a difficult one to tackle.  I  really want to do the topic justice.  And yet I feel ill-equipped to explain all the intricacies of how raw plant-based food just blesses the body.

A raw diet is extreme around these parts.  I’m a farmer’s daughter — a beef-raising, corn-growing farmer.  I love my dad.  I love the culture of farming, and how it compels a person to live a slow-paced life, dependent on rain and sunshine and God’s grace.  But it also seemed to come with a certain plate of food: meat, starch, cooked vegetable, salad.  I love those foods.  Vegetables were essential to the meal, but not the main event.  Since they were not the star of the show, I relaxed into a more dangerous standard American diet when I moved away from home.  Convenience foods, if affordable, were my indulgences.  An Arby’s Beef-n-Cheddar sandwich, a juicy bacon cheeseburger, Cheddar Peppers from Sonic, McDonald’s ice cream, a DiGiorno pizza, a Barq’s root beer:  these were my poisons of choice.  And then there were the things I cooked: chicken fried chicken with cream gravy, butter-fried omelettes and buttermilk pancakes, queso, beef roast, mashed potatoes, apple crisp, cookies.  Oh, how I love those foods.  Comfort foods, they call them.

Bad food is slow poison.  It fills your belly and your arteries.  A young woman like me can continue to look healthy, keep from getting sick most of the time, and enjoy the flavor of foods meal after meal without serious consequences.  I was tired and angry and had pimples, but, hey, doesn’t everybody have those problems?  I think I would have continued, just for the pleasure of tasting food.

And then one day, after a lecture on health during a MOPS meeting, I realized I had not been treating my digestive system as a temple.  I wondered for the first time what eating only healthy, whole foods would look and feel like.  I had been reading snippets about raw vegan diets, and how plants that haven’t reached temperatures above about 110 degrees Fahrenheit still have all their enzymes intact.  (Wikipedia’s description of raw foodism explains the concept well.)  In essence, an apple uncooked has all the enzymes necessary for digestion.  Therefore, the body’s store of digestive enzymes doesn’t get depleted when the apple enters the body, and there is more energy left for other things — like playing with your one-and-a-half-year-old son instead of wishing for an early and long naptime.

As is my nature, I jumped into the diet full force without a lot of forethought.  I knew I wanted energy to be a mom and wife.  I knew I wanted to honor the body God has given me.  I knew I didn’t want to support the corrupt food industries in the United States with as much frequency.

In short, I wanted to know everything that is in my food and how it effects me.  I have ditched the vegetable oil for olive and coconut oils.  I have traded my distilled apple cider vinegar for an organic, raw, undistilled version.  For salt, I’m using Himalayan pink sea salt which has not been exposed to high heat and is therefore still a good source of sodium.  I buy organic vegetables when I can.  I have tried sprouting my whole grains and legumes to get their full nutritional value.  I try not to buy dried fruit unless it is free of sulfites.

I had one very tough week of side effects — detoxification, if you will.  I was very groggy while my body seemed to be ridding itself of all the filth I had been feeding it.  When I thought about eating yet another salad, my gag reflex set in.  The next few weeks were more of a roller coaster, as I ate raw during the week at home and then ate cooked food socially on weekends.  On Mondays and Tuesdays, my body would go through detox again.

But then a week or two ago, I began to feel physically whole.  Salads sounded refreshing again instead of making me want to gag.  I became a morning person.  Last Sunday I shared some frozen custard with my family, and the following day I had to take a nap, but besides that, I have felt… terrific.  And I never use the word “terrific.”

Here and there, I have run into advice from other raw foodists that reminds me to be gracious with myself.  This is a hard balance to keep, so I try to be gracious without allowing myself to gorge on unhealthy foods.  Instead of forcing myself to eat 100% raw and vegan food, I am probably 80% raw.

For now, I have decided to include occasional scrambled eggs (from organic, local, pastured chickens), local raw honey (from Round Rock Honey) , and Straus Family Creamery yogurt.  These are my non-vegan indulgences.  At restaurants, I get the healthiest salad I can to go along with the seemingly unavoidable chips and salsa.

I have chosen to buy meat as a special occasion treat for my family, but I buy it at a nearby farmers’ market from Rehoboth Ranch, a family farm that raises its animals with sustainable practices.  Either that, or I use the pork that my parents butchered, or the beef that my dad raised.  I know these animals have not been abused or unhealthily nourished; they have not been pumped full of antibiotics or raised on a bed of manure.  Meat, though, is not the centerpiece of our meals anymore.  I probably eat meat a couple times per week.  I am convinced that nuts and another plant-based products can supply the protein and healthy fats necessary for a human diet. 

Oh, what a learning process, though.  I want to know what vitamins and minerals each vegetable and fruit and and nut has in it, so I can create a balanced eating routine for myself.  Right now, I’m doing a lot of guesswork until I get my hands back on my favorite raw food resource so far: Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods, a guide and cookbook by Renee Loux Underkoffler.

As I learn to be gracious with myself, God has been all the more gracious to me.  If, of an afternoon, I give in to the bag of Fritos, God has given me the strength to stop after a small handful.  He has sustained my appetite for salads and vegetables, and slowly, slowly, my cravings for processed foods are waning.

I began eating raw as an experiment — just to see what would happen and how I would feel.  I hate to admit it, but I don’t want to let it go.  As socially odd as a raw vegan diet is, its benefits have made my life so much more joyful.  I have felt like I can be the woman God has created me to be, now that my body is functioning like He created it to function.

I am a beginner as I write this post to you.  I write this testimony as an expression of thankfulness for all I have learned during this transition. 

nature longing 2.June.2008

“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours,

Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children,

as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned

from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively

an interaction of man on man.”

(Henry David Thoreau)

 

I’ve been feeling compelled to limit my screentime again (i.e. time spent on the computer).  In my rush of blog posts, I’ve gotten a bit haughty and proud over the increased traffic (though it may be the same ten people checking my site time after time after time).  We need to get outside.

I have to admit that my copy of Les Miserables is once again sitting alone, unread, as I’ve started my library copy of Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.  I started Louv’s book with such intense sadness over the plight of modern American children.  They are a generation proficient at technology — video games, remote controls, mp3 players, and the like.  A season to them is not winter, spring, summer, or fall, but a series of episodes on TV.

At once, I feared for Isaiah, perhaps not having the most precious memories I have had as a child.  I remember wandering all over our farmyard.  In a fenced, grassy area, I was someone else.  I kept house with rocks and rusted tin cans I’d found.  I walked over acres of pastureland, alone and completely unafraid.  My sisters and I decorated bark with weeds and grasses.  I had a friend named Christy who lived under the ground; only she truly understood me.  To go barefoot on the rocks and on the grass was life.  To find the skeleton of a dead bird was not disturbing but a natural lesson in science.

If my children have all this taken away, it is I who is to blame.  If they are more captivated by our indoor conveniences than with the expansiveness of nature, I have stolen from them what God meant the world to be.

Louv writes: “Nature — the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful — offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot.  Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.”

Just as I have been convinced lately of the dangers of the standard American diet, and how it can lead to terminal illness in the forms of obesity, heart disease, and even cancer, I am convinced today that many medical problems in children are exacerbated by their estrangement from nature.  Louv argues that attention-deficit disorder could be offset by giving a child time to be alone outside.  And childhood depression, now at record levels, could be cured by sending our poor little children outside to feel the grass and the sun and wind.  If they could only smell the morning, feel the bark of a tree, they could be more whole.  I forgot that they don’t have this.  We have all forgotten that nature is not something outside our window; it is something to be experienced with all of our senses.

I will conclude with one more quote from Louv:  “Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees.  What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family’s garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by morning sun, like bumblebees quivering on harp wires?  What then?” 

monday funk 2.June.2008

I don’t feel inspiring today.
And I don’t feel inspired.
I feel tired.
It’s a Monday,
and the house is a mess.

I’m whispering,
“Isaiah, please, please, please
go back to sleep.”

There’s probably something
I could do
to lift the doldrums.
Enjoy nature –
but it’s too hot.
Read a book –
but I don’t feel like thinking.
Write a good poem.

I write a bad one instead.

two inches to go 24.May.2008

Having polished off The Ragamuffin Gospel yesterday, I thought, “Hey, that’s wasn’t so bad.”  I told myself I could tackle the other books of which I’ve been in the middle forever.  So I picked up the next-best one: Les Miserables.  Should I tell you it has 1463 pages, or should I just tell you it’s three inches thick?  It looks downright obnoxious sitting on the counter beside me.

I love the story behind the musical; I love the movie — even the severely abridged version.  Ever since my high school choir teacher introduced the songs from the musical, I’ve just wanted play the part of the hopeless, beautiful prostitute Fantine and fragile little Cosette and spirited Eponine.  When I’m alone in my house, I’m a remarkable actress, you know.

But I just wanted to give credit to the mind behind the story.  Victor Hugo produced with intricate detail this astounding story of forgiveness and second chances and revolution and broken hearts, and for the most part, we just shorten and modify it without giving his work much more than a head nod.

I do question Vic’s sanity, of course, when I’m in the middle of a hundred-page description of a convent or a city, when I’d really just like to get back to the main plot.  And that’s why I ended up setting the book down for, uh… two years.  It’s just a marathon to read it.  But, you know, one chapter at a time.  There is a last page.  I’m only two inches away.