Growing Versions

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. -Oscar Wilde We lived in suspension* last week. Suddenly, there was time, where no time could be found before, to paint and put beads on string. We were suspended in fluid.  Suspended in a fluid called The Atlantic Ocean. suspension   [səˈspɛnʃən] n 1.  an interruption or temporary revocation  the suspension of a law   YES, definitely 2.  a temporary debarment, as from position, privilege, etc.   Yep. 3.  a deferment, esp of a decision, judgment, etc.   At times 4.  (Law)  Law a.   a postponement of execution of a sentence or the deferring of a judgment, etc. b.   a temporary extinguishment of a right or title     New rules definitely applied. 5.  (Economics, Accounting & Finance / Banking & Finance) cessation of payment of business debts, esp as a result of insolvency       er.... ...

 I rarely am in a position where I need to pick out curtains.  I usually go for sarongs (for colour) or drapes (for heat) or nothing (because it is not a top priority).  If I were to choose curtains, I would not choose gauzy, lacy ones.  They are just not my style. But I am so glad that someone did.  Their beauty moved the air around us in new ways all week. Lacy sheer membranes folding back to reveal new light.

Vacation. Time to stop looking at the shadows on the cave wall and start looki ng  at all those people and creatures and things casting all those shadows.

When something bad happens, do you scan the person's facebook profile for clues? Or search your memory for the last time you saw them and analyze what they said and how they said it and how they appeared? Do you think, I should have noticed something amiss, I should have heard that catch in her voice or picked up on the signs? The other day I heard an interview on CBC with Mario Vittone who spoke about what drowning really looks like.  Despite the popular image of drowning as a person flailing in the water, drowning is actually extremely silent and disastrously unnoticeable.  In his blog post,  Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning , he outlines that drowning people are instead, exhausted, and therefore, not screaming and also not flailing.  Their heads bob silently above and below the water.  There have been a number of drownings reported recently and so, I am thankful for this advice as I head down to the pools and lakes and oceans I swim in. But I'm al...

I decided that to retrieve myself from rot due to all the sitting still in a seat I do all day, only occasionally getting up to make coffee or photocopies, I would start walking to get my lunch.  Since my office sits LITERALLY partially inside a fast food restaurant, when I look down from my desk I can see people eating hamburgers, I have even more incentive to move as many kilometres as my feet can carry me within a 1 hour lunch break.  Like I've said before, I need to build up my endurance for everything I need to do to take of myself and my kids. The first few times I got as far as the Public Gardens in our city, but they quickly run out of sandwiches (not just because I ate them), so I have been branching out...first yummy Mexican, yesterday delicious Vietnamese.  I hope the kilometres and kilojoules of exertion outnumber the calories I consume half way through my round trip. At the moment, there have been plenty of days in a row of no rain so I'm taking everyo...

Sweet childish days, that were as long As twenty days are now. ~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"

I got one of those typical emails the other day. The ones from who knows who, who knows where, claiming to have $100000000000000 they need help moving around.  Obviously, I always instantaneously ditch these kinds of emails, ridding my inbox of it like one would of summertime ants or fruit flies, as quickly as possible.  However, if I had the nerve, I'd be curious what would happen if I emailed back and said something like, "Hi there.  What's your real name?  What do you do for fun on the weekends when you aren't looking for people to swindle.  You must do something else? Where do you work anyways?  Do you work from home? What can you see from your window?  Do you have a pet?  Do you believe in pets?" That spam, sitting there, waiting for me is like a long winding string of yarn, winding its way across continents and oceans or just up the street connecting us, lying there inert.  It is waiting for me to pick it up and tug on it.

I stumbled on this term "desire path" in a novel and after a little cursory research discovered it is indeed a thing .  Of course it is one of those things  that I always knew and could recognize but did not realize actually had a name.  It is the path that naturally occurs when enough people determine it is the shortest path between two points.  We had one through our backyard.  That it had been in use for "years" was in no question since its very scrubby existence could speak for itself.  For whatever reason, not necessarily related to actual distance, it was communally, but silently chosen as the quickest route from school to home.  I ensured that it continued to exist for several more years...I wonder if it is still a desire path or if the desire moved elsewhere. Yesterday, in line at the grocery store, I asked the guy ahead of me for a " stick thingy " so that I could put my groceries down on the conveyer belt.  He replied, "certainly, b...

I am not so keen on edible art...so much work and planning and so much requirement for a steady hand and then, BAM...hacked up and eaten...(icing first of course). I am thrilled and awed when someone else can do it, I watch those cake decorating shows with a kind of reverence that I reserve for churches and intricate art. Yeah...so this kind of cake was never going to happen...by my hand. When an idea for decorating a cake takes hold...I go from the extravagant ideal to the plain do-able pretty darn fast.  However, I still have , on some level, for some crazy reason, a smidgen of pride in these matters and wish that I could impress with my cake decorating abilities.  If only I could pull off all of these ideas... Some part of me sighs, if I could, it would  be  a sign to the world that I am capable of so many amazing feats.  Alas, mustering all of my inner resources still results in "creative" results and I end up reckoning that the evidence will be ...

In the past year of birthdays we have had two very different versions of "Pin the tail on the donkey." The first one was "Pin the hat on the barbie." The second one was "Pin the Spider on the middle of the spiderweb." What's your version?

We played "art school" yesterday.  I was the teacher, but as usual, the students led the way and heavily influenced the curriculum.  Here is the work we produced.  Materials: tissues, food colouring.   Method: layer (dribble and spill) food colouring and fold tissue to make patterns. One child was really into layering. The other was more into experimenting with patterns.   Uses: Tissues will be used to make cloth for Barbie clothes and decorate the front window.

We were pleasantly surprised yesterday to come across a "splash pad" half way along on a long hot walk home.  The water refreshed us as you would expect and gave us the will to go on. The kids darted through sprigs of water. My so n looked dow n a nd discovered that the spurti ng water created  a giant surface under which there were all kinds of cracks and a holes that whe n played with i n a certai n way allowed you to churn the water downwards into little crevices.  The colour of the concrete bathed us in a turquoise light that intensified our relief and insisted on how different this day was from all the wet and chilly days that preceded it. It cast a shimmery light that backlit  new possibilities.

When my daughter was about 3, she started referring to adults as "normans".  She would say that something was a "norman drink" or a "norman show".  We watched this clip yesterday.   This particular norman show has multi-generational appeal because it makes fun of normans and how seriously they take themselves.   I had been too little myself to know about SCTV the first time around, but it is clear to see now how influential their work has come to have on the current style of humour that we all take for granted.  Although, it is pretty innocent in comparison. Although she doesn't get all the jokes yet, she especially hooted when Andrea Martin says the tea tastes like dirty socks.  Silly normans and all their norman ways.

Writing down words, typing them, has really helped me say things out loud. Writing has broadened my vocabulary and like doing scales helps improve ones music, writing has strengthened my communication abilities. Those solid words, sometimes spurting out in rivulets, other times squeezed out in pebbles, give the words spoken into the air more shape. The audible ones are uttered with more confidence and chosen with more care. Words always used to trip me up, hold me back, create nets in which I would get tangled, and block communication.  Words would shroud me in heavy cloth that muted my real intent. By allowing myself permission to write through mistakes and sift through what's left, I'm also allowing myself to talk in the ways I want to, not out of fear or for purposes of crowd control or to manage my audience, but to speak, to communicate, to represent myself.

"This is the way to China. This is the way to Spanish. This is where Jesus was born. This is not where Jesus was born." The first step to learning how to navigate a map is to understand that lines represent streets and intersecting lines make up cities. Places and locations can be stars or circles.

My son got a hold of a little teeny flashlight several months back.  It has a tiny elastic attached to it that allows you to put it on your finger.  He immediately named it a pogon (po-gone).  From then on, he keeps tabs on the pogon.  He finds it and plays with it non-stop for a few days and then it goes missing again and then it is re-discovered.  When he re-finds it or sees another version of it somewhere, he knowingly identifies it.  He earnestly states, "ah, there's the/a pogon". I like knowing what a pogon is. What words have been invented by you or your kids?

See that the whole existence is celebrating. These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious. The rivers and the oceans are wild, and everywhere there is fun, everywhere there is joy and delight. -Osho

As I zone out and prepare supper, I always flip the radio on and listen to the drive home show or the news.  I find it really relaxing to let someone else do the talking.  I've had to re-evaluate this practise a bit since I've had kids for two very different reasons.  For my son, he seems to have a knack for picking up little snippets that he hears and launching into surprising lines of questioning. The other day, he exclaimed, "I just heard him say "they cannot find his head"".   In my daughter's case, she not only tunes out the radio, but also, ever since she was little, me turning the radio on, was like a challenge to her to begin speaking or to speak louder.  When we are driving she prefers that if someone is going to talk, it should be us doing it not someone on the radio. My son, on the other hand, will exclaim with delight, "Canada day! Mama, they just said Canada day on the radio" or incredulousness, "sell-off-vacations????...

My daughter brought home her portfolio on the last day of school. Each piece was revealed one by one.  It was a delightful surprise to have so much art to look at all at once after not seeing much of it from her time at school.  What struck me about this reveal most was her ability to wholeheartedly identify herself as a maker of art.  It is a part of her.  She takes pride in it, sure, but more than that, there is no question in her mind that it is a part of life.  Our son, making sure we didn't miss his work, proceeded to unearth little pieces of paper that we had hitherto overlooked. It was great to see it all together and see for myself versions of the year that just happened when I was not looking. The art that was first imagined, then envisioned and finally produced and now looked at. Each piece is filled with unwavering belief in arts' ability to communicate  in ways that are not simply not possible through other methods.