Growing Versions

Be a lamp or a lifeboat or a ladder. Rumi

There are two things that my son has mentioned are things  that he is working on to get ready for school. One is jumping.  "You have to jump really far when you go to school." The other is science. He earnestly told me more than a few times that he was working on his science projects this week to ready himself for what he anticipates is in store for him at school.

The other day my son announced that he wanted to make a shopping list.  We cut out lots and lots of food pictures and then he proceeded to make a list. He asked me to get everything on the list. I said I would add a few things from his list to mine. "Will you use pictures or words?" he wondered.

Gone are the spongy bottomed winter boots, staunched by bunched up socks. They have been replaced, dumped unceremoniously in the Sears garbage can on the way out of the store.  After all, this season requires the proper equipment. New boots, that do not leak, have been purchased just in time for river channeling, bridge configuring and rock chucking. This important work is the flip side of ice crunching, slush brook redirecting and snow drift levelling.

When my daughter draws up her weekend "lesson plan" for playing school, she always includes an art class. Lately, her self assigned projects have taken a new turn.  She no longer uses crayons, markers and paints to create art projects. She is more into doing things with objects. Last weekend, she created a "place where teenagers had a party".  She filled a play tent full of empty food containers and cds and discarded hoodies  (because these teenagers are from the 1990s).  "It is really messy in there because teenagers are very messy when they have a party," she explained simply. The other day, I asked her to create art from something in the room.  I told her she could be use garbage or anything she could find and make it into something creative. She chose a log of wood. She made an ipod/iphone carrier. It is not that portable, but I really like its look.  I think the coolest feature of this design is the pencil holder (at the top). It is a blend...

Do not despise your inner world. -Martha Nussbaum

A maxed out tweet contains 140 characters. Along with tweeting, I am learning how to write sentences, sentence by sentence, tweet by tweet. I think tweeting logic helps me write sentences in the real world too.  Tweets corral self-contained thoughts into a small, restricted space.  There is little room for complex structures.  Advanced users can pull off all kinds of things with this format, but I am very much an amateur at both tweeting and sentence writing.   Tweets can be deleted. They can be immortalised. They can ruin a career or make one. They can send chills down your spine or give you insight in ways a whole book might not be able to. The same goes for sentences.  They both can be taken out of context. They do not tell the whole story, but they are structures that build something bigger than themselves. If they are flawed, the whole rest of what they constitute can fall apart. Lately, I find myself reading books scouring them for good ones. Ones t...

Enough deconstruction has gone on for one season and we are only 3 days in. All the once good ideas have been stripped for parts. I very nearly let a pot boil, dry but I didn't. I am ready to plant something, paint something or build something new. Lucky for me, now that birthday season is upon us, fresh construction plans are being drawn up.  This week it has been decided upon that we will construct a fun fair in cake form.  That is the plan. It is not necessarily my plan or a wise one. It is an ambitious plan and it is going to have to involve a flexible vision, bendable candy  and it is not probably going to be accomplished without some panic induced grouchiness, but it is a construction plan. We are going to build it from the gumdrops up.

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance. -Yoko Ono

My grandmother was born in the early part of the century.  She had a baby in the mid-forties.  Jello was just getting solidified (so to speak) as a food of a new generation of parents and kids.  Multicoloured and moldable, jello became a symbol of the new food economy.  In her kitchen, there were 3 tall decanters that were filled with water stained with food colouring.  Those decanters stood as the epitome of modernity for the 21 years of my life that I knew her and likely well before those began.  They were simple see-through refractors of jello-coloured light.  I cannot help thinking of the bowls of jello in her fridge and those flutes of red and green water whenever I think about her.  They formed a wobbly bridge between my perception of her black and white tv memories and the technicoloured ones I could not think without. Jello is still with us, but we are well over the jello salad phenomenon of the 50's.  Now salad has come into ...

*Of or pertaining to yesterday. We've been plunked into a snow drift once again. The first day of spring no less.  We were all so ready to categorise this day the first page of the new chapter of the year. It did not begin as rehearsed.  Technical glitches I guess. Hold on. Hold that thought. We have some precipitation to get out of our systems first. Yesterday was winter. Today is spring.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art, men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. E.M. Forster

...about how I could fly and slide." When was the last time I thought like that? I overhear her talking about how to build a website dedicated to creating fairies.  The project has been rejuvenated. When was the last time I planned a project like that? When will be the next time?

(Bunny ear, a map to treasure, a seed, a newly discovered planet, or something else yet to be named, 2010) This book is waiting for us at the library this week.  I am excited to get my hands on it. Barney Saltzberg  has created an (by all accounts, engaging)  book for kids proving to them that there are no accidents in creating. Oh unintended drops of ink and spilled coffee, pages smudged with peanut butter and eraser tears and drawing marks outside of the lines! How can I embrace you with more love, less dismal fear of failure?  I hope this books helps me embrace you with gusto. Here's hoping the shadows cast over error, are diminished and creative opportunities are more fully realized and seen. I'll let you know how Barney does on that count.

"Parents need to teach their kids to balance human doing with human being,"  Paula Bloom (Clinical Psychologist) ...but first parents need to learn how to be a being and not just be a doing being. I struggle not doing stuff.  I feel lazy and unproductive and guilty.  However, the more I do, the less I know about myself. I excuse myself from asking myself difficult questions and making icky decisions by keeping in perpetual motion.   I am trying to try less.  I am walking more places, making more decisions in the shower, sitting down and reading a book when I feel like it, especially when there are a lot of demands being made of me. Stopping what I'm doing and taking pictures of a stack of painted rocks. In a recent Highlights magazine that my daughter got, there was a great story called "The Lazy Day".  The parents (and the grandparents) and the kids did not do ANYTHING. They did not even read or watch a show or play a game or garden or do chores....

When I was about 10, music video as an art form was in full swing.   There was a famous show on in the afternoons called Video Hits and it highlighted all the newest music videos.  Early on, in my childhood eyes, they seemed so naughty and modern.  Dramatic stories steamed in sexy mystique, longing and rejection all set to catchy pop. The very first one I permitted myself to admit was catchy was "Sunglasses at Night."  The once audio only radio hits were being animated right in front of our eyes and everything changed.  Their creation spawned an entire perpetually visually-ravenous generation, that in turn replicated itself as digitally hardwired progeny. Now, it is relatively rare for me to see an actual video. If I see them, I don't sit through a whole t.v. show anymore to watch them.  I wait for them to spread like a virus on the internet. One at a time. Only the most spectacular filter through. When I came across this recent video by Tegan an...

Just a second... ...I'll be right there... ...in a minute...

Without fail, each time I go to look for the same file in my computer, I see the intersection beside my son's preschool.   When I start a basic multiplication question in my head, I see the gymnasium at my old school.  The image sits there patiently in my mind's eye as I (slowly) work out 12 x 12. When I try to remember which vaccine my kid needs next, I see the lush green soccer field, then I see it. When I think about my password for one of my accounts, I see the same mailbox, jutting out of gravel. How does visual thinking work for you? Sam and Friends: Visual thinking (Jim and Jane Henson, early 1960s)

I really enjoy the conversations we have on the way to school, on the way to the bus stop, on the way to anywhere.  Unlike a lot of other times, talking while we walk is when I can be most present. Distractions are held at bay and I can more attend to listening. Sometimes though, I'd really rather not talk at all. It's funny, but often times the kids cease talking too, especially these days, shrouded as we are by winter wear and scrunchy rain hoods blocking sound, obstructing the easy flow of back and forth banter. We are hushed by the expanse of the sky, the swoosh of the passing buses, the rotting snowbanks being broken up by mud and growth. While we walk there is no radio or t.v. droning out our thoughts. We can turn within.  Some days our attention is very much turned outward by crusty icy bits or unusual sticks or new developments along the route. Nothing is blinking or demanding handheld attention. Speaking involves repeating ourselves too many times. Silence ...

Everything has to be a contest. Taste testing, costume parades, spelling, cleanliness. On the weekend it was announced that I would be the presiding judge (who was forced to announce 1 winner only, like a real contest you know) for a costume parade.   The compromise was creating three prize categories.  1st category: best super hero costume (won handily by Spiderman magician man) 2nd category: Royalty (won by the girl dressed up to the nines) Best Overall: (awarded the candelabra trophy) Overall winner?  Girl dressed up 

Spring, come now and release me from the darkness. I am weary of making slides, of conducting classes in my living room and courting cool ideas, only to let people down by sagging with mental exhaustion into the mattress to read one more chapter.  I am tired of mediating struggles about what makes a better slide and caring about education and exclusion and beautiful things and good ideas. My responses are adequate. I respond, but only just. My kids, more tuned into my tone than anyone else in my life, gauge my responses and shield themselves from rejection by phrasing their suggestions in particular ways-ways that (hopefully) elicit something more than a flat, monotone response from me, and limit the utterance of the word no. I am in need of soil and light to lean into. The dreams of being sucked below the surface keep coming.  I need to warm up out on crumbly arid sand. The only thing that releases this stress is "spring cleaning". 3 weeks before it arrives. ...

I have not failed. I've just found 10, 000  ways that won't work. Thomas Edison. So, we still haven't made a twirly slide, but it hasn't been for lack of trying.

Against the Sky Lyrics by Vashti Bunyan Whatever pulled the wind that night It had it bring a tree down Untidy lime tree holding tight To the end of my last garden One of five against the sky An elegant surrender It broke the wall and bent the gate And warmed us through the winter Whatever pulls the wind tonight Will have the roof slates fly But rows of chimney pots don't wave Like trees against the sky The hill behind the old house I can trace it with my finger Against the sky I see it still And draw it down on paper Whatever pulled me over here You were the main contender And with the tress against the sky Another life's remembered Some evening skies are yellow And over my head they're blue What happened to the green between It happened to me Too