Frames

I am stalling, and I know it. I think. … I’m not looking forward to summer. I am looking forward to things that are happening this summer: B living here from next week until August; visiting Baby C; Glen Workshop; Alaska. But now that I’m coming out of that lull-whatever, I am turning around to […]

Slowly more interested

So one of the exercises in my personal-dev class folded in some writing with the non-dominant hand. My instructor used it as a way to better ask one’s body what it wants to do, which I approve of more than the “access your creative right brain!” version that’s usually discussed. That’s a right-hander essentialist approach, […]

shakes head

Yeah, so today has actually gone in the way that makes me comfortable managing myself. Facet 1: I ditched the box of danish twists in the student common room without regret, and ate meals that my current thermogenic profile supports*. Facet 2: I put in a good three hours of work on one of my […]

Some things I know

If there’s no deadline, there’s no point in making poor work. It’s like cheating when you’ve already earned the A.  Creativity is not interested in, “This better be really good-!” At best it walks off, which is a reasonable response to bullying. But sometimes it sulks. If I binge on something I don’t approve of, […]

Atlanta

I like it when my dreams’ metaphors are straightforward. As someone with a complicated brain whose primary work is metaphor, I use my dreams a lot. Not for creative work per se—why is that? <shakes head musingly>—but as an additional news feed into my own inner workings. My intellect tends to be last to figure […]

East Coker / T.S. Eliot

  I     |   II   |   III   |   IV   |   V   I      In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old […]

Misplaced

They cast Hamlet as a young actor; they hand T.S. Eliot to high school students. I’m sympathetic to both dilemmas. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as young, the role reads young…but it’s extremely difficult to understand how those words and that mindset enfold upon themselves while one is actually that age. It makes much more sense in […]

Shortcuts

A few weeks ago I was listening to a lovely piece of music—the worship band has an interlude as we pass old-school wooden offering ‘plates’—and paused as I heard Anna’s light, lilting soprano sing “depravity”… That word gets me every time. Not in a good way, either. And you may be thinking, “Didn’t she already […]

Selling pony-bead bracelets on Etsy?

I’m annoyed: I feel ill/wretched again-still. Saturday I got rid of much of the oak pollen that had drifted around our yard, and Thursday’s worrisome sore throat never returned in force, but I’m still mentally vague and have a dust-cough…that is, a cough that starts when the back of my throat feels as if powder […]