Middle Season#27

 

Autumn clematis after its brief blooming, raspberries in my garden, New England asters, sweetgrass

Accompanied by her mother

 

Silena Lambertini

A month ago Charlotte asked me to go to senior night for band so that she wouldn't feel embarrassed that she lives in a single parent house.  (or something similar). I was hesitant to say yes for a number of reasons - to begin with...Karrie hates me, won't agree to speak to me about co-parenting (etc.), Charlotte has contempt for me, will only text when she wants something from me.  

A few days ago, there was a sign up sheet for parent night.  Kids wrote who was coming.  Charlotte was one of the last blank names.  This morning, after a challenging day at school/ half-day lockdown after a threat of violence, I see that it has been filled in: Accompanied by her mother, Karrie Lange.

I could have expected nothing else.  There has been no change.  It still leaves me feeling bereft.

Chicago Bird Collision Monitors

Recently found a request on Twitter from Chicago Bird Collision Monitors about turning off lights at night to help migrating birds navigate around Chicago.

We encourage building management and the public to support light reduction in downtown and lakefront areas by turning off all bright display lighting on the top of your building in the downtown area or along the lakefront from 11:00 p.m. until sunrise during spring migration (March 15 to June 15) and fall migration (August 15 to November 15).

The image above is from Birdcast.info.  It's call the Bird Migration Forecast Map. 

NBC Chicago interviewed CBCM and reports:

According to the group, 50% of the birds that use the Mississippi River Valley migratory path from the Midwest and down to the Gulf Coast are expected to make their way through or around the Chicago area over a period of just nine select nights, depending on breed and departure time.

For example, more than 437 million birds are expected to be in the skies overnight on Sept. 24, with the Midwest seeing the highest concentration of activity.

I find it poetic and exciting that overhead at night the skies are filled with hundreds of millions of birds. 

Leanne Shapton

 

I've recently gotten interested in Leanne Shapton's work as an illustrator.  I think I owned, and was bewildered by, a book of hers years ago.  I especially like her watercolors.

Here's her work in the NYT called "A Month of".... Sunday Walks, Friday Swims, etc.  You can see the series also on her webpage here.  Here's "Sunday Walks."

She's art editor for NY Review of Books.  And a journalist.  Here she interviews Jon Klassen who did the cover of an issue. 

Here's a "newsletter" from 'Telluride.

Here's a paragraph from an article about her from 2009

She phoned the legendary illustrator James McMullan, famous for his Broadway and Lincoln Center Theater watercolours, and landed an internship in his studio. She called the celebrated designer Milton Glaser for career advice. She interned at Saturday Night Live – "just a dogsbody and set design" – and reasoned her way into an art internship at Harper's Magazine – "you have editorial interns, why not an art intern?" All unpaid.

Following the voice

George Saunders in "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain," writes about one way that  he produces text (rough drafts here).  He considers a story to be a black box that a reader goes into and leaves in a different state.  "What happens there has to be thrilling and non-trivial."

This approach might be called "following the voice."

An idea for a voice appears, and off you go.  You just "feel like" doing that voice. (And you find that you can.) Sometimes the inspiration for that voice might be a real person. Sometimes it's a tendency in myself that I'll exaggerate (in a story called "The Falls," for example, I gave my main character, Morse, a ratcheted-up version of my own neurotic. worry-prone monkey mind). Sometimes it's a fragment of language that came from elsewhere (like that line from the student paper). The main thing I'd like to say about this mode of writing is that it's fun. When I do it, I'm giving almost no thought to anything but sustaining the voice--not thinking of the story's themes or what needs to happen next or any of that. In the early stages, I might not even be clear about why the person is talking the way he is. My only goal is to keep the energy of the voice high, to keep the character sounding like himself, which means, I've found, that the voice has to keep expanding. Having grasped the approximate "rules" of the voice, the reader will get restless if subjected to a series of sentences that (merely) abide by those rules. So I have to keep finding new ways to make the person sound like himself. The best way to do this is to keep putting new events in front of him, events that are escalatory (new to him), so that he has to find new registers in his voice with which to respond. (If a character, talking along in a certain voice, has never seen a horse before, and I show him one, his voice has to expand, to accommodate the horse.)

In the story mentioned above ("Jon"), what I found myself doing as I sat down to write every day, approximately, was giving myself permission to turn up a certain dial in my head labeled "Level of Inarticulateness:" That is, letting myself be (even) more inarticulate than usual easing up on the self-correction-before-speech we all normally do. I was just, you know, letting it rip, telling myself something like "Okay, do will surfer, part corporate wonk." I was aiming to make sentences that would be funny because of their defective syntax but that would also feel oddly efficient. ("Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads.") 

 This form of writing reminds me of GBV's (purported) style of writing music by going through yearbooks and writing songs they thought THAT group of people would write.

Arnel's Wood Carving at Carmel Art Fair

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The antidote of fear

 

Bees, from the Aberdeen Bestiary, England, ca. 1200 (Rabih A. tweet)

  

Sharon Salzburg (in an Insight Meditation talk) says that, traditionally, lovingkindness is the antidote of fear.  She says in Buddhist psychology, fear is a form of doubt... and there's a range of doubts that include cynicism.  Lovingkindness is an appreciation of simplicity and subtlety.  rather than intense pleasure or pain.  She refers to one LKM practice of imagining there's a circle of people around you, historical and real, sending you lovingkindness; maybe she calls it "lovingkindness circle."   She says there are technical aspects to attention: right aim and modulation.  Both are important.  Why would one want to do any of this?  She says you "get more creative and alive."

She says that generosity comes from an inner abdundance... feeling like we have enough.  It's impossible to be generous if we don't.  Same with caretaking.  If you are overwhelmed, it that's one's own reality, then you really can't take care.  You need to replenish, renew, become resiliant.  

North American Butterflies

 North American Butterflies is a T-Magazine (NYT) feature from 2015.  Check out the whole series.

From a series for T in which the artist Leanne Shapton makes new artworks from pictures in old books.

These works are inspired by “The Butterfly Guide” by W. J. Holland, published by Doubleday Page & Company, 1925.  (The link goes to a Project Gutenburg version of the book.)

Appreciation

 

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Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

-Voltaire

I have been feeling down, sad.   I notice that when I'm in that mode, I am often thinking about the "not enough" of things: time, money, love, appreciation.  I'm thinking about the difference of Thubten Chodron's "It is Enough."

Abandoned Farmhouse by Ted Kooser

 

Abandoned Farmhouse
BY Ted Kooser

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

Ted Kooser, "Abandoned Farmhouse" from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1980 by Ted Kooser.  Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Middle Season #26

 

Sunflower, flower of the hour (sidewalk weed by school), monarch on goldenrod

Hibiscus trionum, commonly called flower-of-an-hour, bladder hibiscus, bladder ketmia, bladder weed, modesty, puarangi, shoofly, and venice mallow, is a short-lived perennial or semi-seen annual plant that flowers for only one day a year. The flower has white or yellow petals with a brightly-colored center. It is considered a weed by some while being cultivated as a garden plant by others.

Botanical Information 7

Hibiscus trionum, commonly known as flower of an hour, is an annual flowering plant that blooms from June to October. It grows 1.5 to 2 feet tall and can be found in various types of soil. The flower is a white to pale yellow with dark centers. This plant earned its name “flower of an hour” because it only blooms for a few hours before wilting

A day at Sunset Park Pool

 

Here's the online version of this Leanne Shapton, the art editor of the NY Review of Books.  

Joy (overflow)

Alma Thomas. "Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze" (1973)

 From A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders.

In other words, voice is not just an embellishment; it's an essential part of the truth. In "The Nose," we feel the narrator to be from that world of functionaries and petty official and we hear that in his voice, and the story benefits from this; told in this way, the story has an extra dimension of truth, and of joy.

It may be possible that, when all is said and done, that's what we're really looking for -- in a sentence, in a book: joy (overflow, ecstasy, intensity). An acknowledgment, in the prose, that all of this is too big to be spoken of, but also that death begins the moment we give up on trying to speak of it. (309)

A couple thoughts: first, the notion that "joy (overflow)" is what sparks life.  Second, that life is complex, messy and joyful, and it's "too big to be spoken of."  Third, that our choice is to speak of that thing that's too big to be spoken of, or else "death begins" that moment we give up trying.

Birds Sang from Blackened Trees

 

Tucker Nichols, a California artist, wrote and illustrated this "article" in the New Yorker.  I love the artwork, the layout, and the text.  In the online version, the format is different.  Some of the images are bigger; there are two more paintings.

Last year, the Caldor wildfire burned through a wide swath of California’s Eldorado National Forest, an area in the central Sierra Nevada that I hike every summer. I returned in August, exactly one year after the fire started, and found a Pompeiian landscape: charred stumps, sooty ponds, thick drifts of ash. A firefighter told me that clifftops a thousand feet high had glowed red from the light of the flames. In a meadow, I gathered pieces of burned willow to use as charcoal for drawing. A clear creek cut through fresh growth. From behind the branches of a thicket, a deer stared at me, unmoving. Birds sang from blackened trees; the wind scattered seeds. The sky was as blue as ever.

Self-Determination Theory

From "Do Hard Things" by Steve Magness

In the 1970s, Edward Deci and colleagues gave what appeared to be wooden three-dimensional Tetris pieces [I later find these to be Soma cube puzzles, above] to a group of twenty-four college students and told them to build a shape out of the blocks. For three days, the students who returned to the lab were shown a new shape and went to work on the blocks sitting in front of them. For half of the participants, day two brought a pleasant surprise. For each puzzle that they solved in the allotted time, they’d receive a monetary reward. Motivated by something beyond simply killing time for the fun of it, the participants upped their work ethic, spending longer stretches on solving the puzzle.

But when the participants returned for day three, the monetary reward was gone. It was back to making the shapes for the sake of making shapes. Not surprisingly, with an external incentive gone, their motivation dropped. Participants spent less time attempting to create new shapes and were more apt to quit playing with the

blocks and simply sit there. The phenomenon we now know as extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation was born. Other scientists soon repeated the experiment in a range of different tasks and ape groups. Before too long, researchers had replicated the effect in schoolchildren drawing and athletes playing sports. When some external reward or punishment was introduced, it shifted people's motivational habits.

Deci, along with another psychologist, Richard Ryan, had a radical idea. 'Their findings on what motivated people didn't apply just to doing homework or solving a problem, but to something far greater; their well-being, Deci and Ryan expanded their work on intrinsic motivation, declaring that we all have three basic and innate psychological needs. If we satisfy these needs, our well-being will improve, and we'll be self-motivated for growth and development. Self-determination theory (SDI) was born. It include the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Or said another way, to feel in control, like you can make progress, and to belong

Since the introduction of SDT, it has been investigated and applied to everything from parenting to teaching to substance abuse. And supporting Deci and Ryan's original hypothesis, net satisfaction is linked to better health, ratings of well-being, and performance in a variety of domains. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness serve as our basic psychological needs. And fulfi our basic needs helps not only with well-being, but also with to ability to persist.

Exhaling a rainbow

 this peony

exhaling a rainbow

while opening up    

Buson Yosa

Be with what's here

 

Koson Ohara

 

Tara Brach, in "Opening Our Hearts to Life As It Is" (on Insight Timer app). 

These phases:

• Be with what's here
• We're here... with these sounds, sensations
• Tender and clear presence.
• The immediacy and vividness of presence...not trance of thinking
• If there's something challenging, open to what's here with interest and care... 
• when it's not there, continue to collect and settle with your known bases (breathing, listening, sensations of your hands from the inside)

It's beautiful but I don't like it

 This is from Kleon:  playwright Sarah Ruhl’s terrific book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write.

Here is the essay in full:

Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: “It’s beautiful but I don’t like it.” And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it meant to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism

Not suppressing it, Not Pursuing it

 

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. 

William Butler Yeats

Jon Kabat-Zinn shares this line in meditation episode #37.  He also says, "There will be a madness... can you keep your mind in the hurricane?  Can you reclaim it? Not lose it?"

As thoughts and emotions come up, you can let them go... "not suppressing it, not pursuing it."

Their Hurry Infected Them

Repentance, depicted in a 15th cent Russian Orthodox painting, possibly from a Siberian cathedral, featuring Jonah and the Whale (from tweet by Rabih A.)

In The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin talks a lot about the corrupting effects of money.  When he walks in the city, he notices that the chase for money makes people anxious and guilty.

They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness, and he felt very much alone among them.

While he wants to find some good people to talk to in the city, perhaps some unwealthy people, he's unable to.  

He had vaguely imagined wandering about the city and getting into conversation with people, members of the unpropertied class, if there still was such a thing, or the working classes, as they called them. But all these people hurried along, on business, wanting no idle talk, no waste of their valuable time. Their hurry infected him.

It's like anxiety, worry are first-order effects of capitalism.  But there are second-order effects, too, like "sameness" and "hurry."  It affects/infects them.  It dulls them.

The dulling is a kind of imprisoning.  The pursuit of needing money, wanting more money pursues them.  And the possessions possess them.  The main character contrasts the Anares world with his world saying that people on his world have happier, spirit-filled faces.  

"We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!"

There are Birds Here by Jamaal May

There Are Birds Here
BY Jamaal May

For Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.
Jamaal May, "There Are Birds Here" from The Big Book of Exit Strategies. Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.
Source: The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016)

Middle Season #25

 

Blue Cohosh (?) Bluebead Lily (?), Autumn Clematis (or Jasmine?), Common Evening Primrose, False Solomon Seal berries

crab apples turning red; notieable

The bird without a word flew away

Sakai Hoitsu, Edo Period

the bird

without a word

flew away

Hosai

Background and Foreground

 

Hoitsu Sakai

Today is going to be the 10th day I've biked to work this year.  One of the benefits involves a slightly jarring switch of my attention.  Maybe not jarring, maybe "startling."   If I'm taking the car, I'll trudge from house to car; immediately tend to driving and probably listening to radio, adjusting the ventilation, check to see the garage door is going down, and beginning my usually distracted commute.  If there is something happening outside the car windows, I'm noticing it probably just to avoid it.

On the bike, every morning, I'll be noticing things immediately -- the temperature, the remaining sounds (crickets? frogs?).  As I turn out of the driveway begin my slower-than-driving trip, I'll scan the sky for the remnants of the moon, I'll notice sprays of birds winging from trees, I'll hear odd bird vocalizations.  In general I'm in noticing mode for awhile.  I'm more likely to notice other things - hawks overhead, slants of light, early-falling leaves.

Soon enough, I'll lose this mode and be more deeply in my head -- planning the day, rehearsing the day, navigating traffic.  But for the short period of time, the "background" of nature becomes "foreground."

I'm visualizing a diagram of a circle, representing a head.  Start putting dots inside, representing your awareness -- mental notes about lunch, about that conversation from last night, wondering if your child will wake up. with more or less of a cough -- these things would go inside the circle.  (and maybe be represented in a specific color...). Then there would be other dots representing what you perceive when you're more mindful of your environment... these dots would be outside the circle -- tree frogs, wind in trees, distant lull of cars on highway.  

I'm also visualizing a percentage... what percentage of the time do you go around with the dots inside your skull?  Today, I was 99.99% inside my skull.  

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Marcella Giulia Pace, Italian astrophotographer who took ten years to capture 48 colours of the moon 

Some things to remember from Dispossessed:

About his world

on schooling

Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, carpentry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, roadmending, playwriting, and all the other occupations of the adult community...

Learning centers taught all the skills that prepare for the practice of art: training in singing, metrics, dance, the use of brush, chisel, knife, lathe, and so on. It was all pragmatic: the children learned to see, speak, hear, move, handle. No distinction was drawn between the arts and the crafts; art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech. Thus architecture had developed, early and freely, a consistent style, pure and plain, subtle in proportion. Painting and sculpture served largely as elements of architecture and town planning. As for the arts of words, poetry and storytelling tended to be ephemeral, to be linked with song and dancing; only the theater stood wholly alone, and only the theater was ever called “the Art”—a thing complete in itself.

on the division of labor

“All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?” “What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following. “Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said; Shevek added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit. “Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work, they make rotating lists. 

on property and dependence on others

We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. 

on sex

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience. This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.

Talking on Annares

They talked about the spatial representation of time as rhythm, and the connection of the ancient theories of the Numerical Harmonies with modern temporal physics. They talked about the best stroke for long-distance swimming. They talked about whether their childhoods had been happy. They talked about what happiness was.

With immense pleasure, and with that same sense of profound recognition, of finding something the way it was meant to be, Shevek discovered for the first time in his life the conversation of his equals.

Difference Between the two worlds

He had not been free from anything [on his own world]: only free to do anything. Here, it was the other way around.

world he visits is one of ownership, property.  The city is beautiful, but: 

things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting—all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby’s teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement.

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

“No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!”

“Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.

Effect of Money on People

They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness, and he felt very much alone among them.

He had vaguely imagined wandering about the city and getting into conversation with people, members of the unpropertied class, if there still was such a thing, or the working classes, as they called them. But all these people hurried along, on business, wanting no idle talk, no waste of their valuable time. Their hurry infected him.

Concept of Cyclic Time

It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this city had all been part of his present great happiness, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now. Takver saw no such obscure concatenations of effect/ cause/ effect, but then she was not a temporal physicist. She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.

The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid.

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity.

But Anares is not a perfect Utopia

every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this is the way

Page 329 ·

You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking.

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“No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind. Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul—convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being free! Well, never again. I learn slowly, but I learn.” “What are you going to do?” asked Takver, a thrill of agreeable excitement in her voice. “Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate. Print the Principles, uncut. And whatever else we like. Bedap’s Sketch of Open Education in Science, that the PDC wouldn’t circulate. And Tirin’s play. I owe him that. He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

You can have power or a connection

 

Hasui Kawase

About a month ago I reached out to Charlotte's old therapist for a referral for myself.  I did the the third session with the new therapist today.  At the end he said, "well, where do we go from here?" which I took to be a kind way of saying "I've given you the help you need."

The nugget from this session involved how I struggle when Karrie and Charlotte both exclude me from any information about themselves, including medical and school-related things.  And then ask me for money.

Therapist said, "You can probably force them to be compliant."  I could force them, with legal help, or whatever, to "have a conversation with me."  But I can't force them to want to have a relationship with me.  So, I have to choose.  Maybe he said it like: "you can have power or you can have connection."

He says that Henry may turn around when he's 25 or 26, "when he needs a dad."  Charlotte maybe never.  Karrie never.

Be kind to your future self

 

Angie Lewin, British printmaker working in linocut, wood engraving, lithography and screen printing 

ELL Twitter person Katie Toppel writes this Nothing like the last day of summer to motivate me to do all the things. 

I listened to an audio book that talked about being kind to your future self which I am trying to embrace by being more organized.

Serenely gazing up at the mountain

Koson Ohara

Serenely

gazing up at the mountain -

a toad

             Issa Kobayashi

Share Rituals of Connection in Fall

 

From Gottman Institute:

Making plans to share time together as a family, and being intentional about it, can help you grow closer to your loved ones.

Rituals can help us to process our feelings as we move through life’s transitions and to stay connected despite the pressures of everyday life. If you neglect to come together in a regular way, you may miss out on the feeling of being emotionally connected. 

With the autumn season almost upon us, it's time to make new memories and share rituals of connection. Give these fall activities a try or come up with your own ways to celebrate this season together.

Where do you find beauty?

(from Van Gogh Museum tweet)

The places that Vincent van Gogh visited were not always attractive. And yet he tried to find beauty wherever he was. In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote: ‘find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful’. 

Where do you find beauty?

Woman Work by Maya Angelou

From French artist Helena Hauss' contemporary ceramics series ‘Hell Hath No Fury’

 Woman Work 

by Maya Angelou

I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The cane to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine
Rain on me, rain
Fall softly, dewdrops
And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here
With your fiercest wind
Let me float across the sky
'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes
Cover me with white
Cold icy kisses and
Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky
Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone
Star shine, moon glow
You're all that I can call my own.