Growing Versions

There were two falls a few years ago when my son was obsessed with chestnuts. The pre-school had an enormous chestnut tree in the backyard and it yielded dozens of beautiful chestnuts to collect and to carry in pockets and buckets. Wordlessly, that tree introduced my son to the word chestnut.   "This thing here I am giving you, that thing you are smoothing with your thumb is what they call a chestnut." The glossy brown sheen of chestnuts entered his lexicon of childhood in a way that it had never entered mine. Now, as I walk to work and pass by chestnuts on the ground, I pick one up so that I can rub my thumb over its smooth surface for the rest of the way. I remember that time of his learning about chestnuts. I learned the word chestnut at the same time.

Can you rocketship me? Or should I ballet all the way there? What verbs are not verbs yet, but  really really should be?

dendriform (adj.) tree shaped; resembling a tree in form and branching structure

You know how you don't think of someone for ages and ages and then you do and they show up shortly after? Or how you don't ever hear a word before and then you hear it more than once in the space of a week? Well, that happened to me this week. The word was ossify*.  I did not know what it meant. I had never read the word or if I had, I had glossed right over it. However, the second time hearing it prompted me to look it up. It means * to harden like bone. These parenting, multitasking days keep me rubbery I tell myself.  I keep thinking this about myself until I encounter a missing shoe, or a pokey child or an unexpected road block and then I ossify like the dickens. My son pointed out the bird's nests he made on the playground. Maybe we can catch some birds and bring them home, but we'll need to put the cats in a cage or maybe the birds. We pick up a glop of grass and sqish it together so that the birds might decide to lay their eggs in one. I reckon...

I gape*on a regular basis. If I am lucky, that is. It is not easy to give over to slack jawed amazement. I arm myself with a rigidly clamped jaw. My mouth is a set of muscles rigged to tell the same anecdotes over and over to police what comes in and out. It is when I gape, though, that the passage is eased. The flow of words tumble out unguarded, but more importantly, the connections, I usually do not let myself see, come flooding in. *to stare with open mouth, as in wonder

This weekend we spent a lot of time getting reacquainted with our daughter after she was away for a whole week at camp.  I say re-acquainted because it was her first experience of re-entry. You know, that period when you return from a trip or from an intense experience, and you see things slightly differently than you did before you left? I knew enough to be low key when we picked her up. I have a bad habit of being too demonstrative at reunions and overwhelming her. Slowly but surely, she told us about her experiences. At the end of each day, they had vespers*.  She insisted that it wasn't church, it was a fun, kid's version of church. You sing a song and do a skit around a fire. Although we grew up in the church, we don`t regularly go now. It was reassuring to me to know that she had time away from electronic devices, tv and media. She had time to be outside under the stars, sitting around a fire, and having a chance to listen to nothing but her own voi...

Accentuating. Throwing. Shoving. Rolling. Muzzling. Softening. Warming.  Charming. Blanketing. Frustrating. Delaying. Curtailing. Accelerating.  Quieting.  Blocking.  Stopping.  Starting.  Suppressing.  Protecting.    Transforming.

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 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...

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.

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

WifeMotherExpletive  extended an invitation I could not refuse: " Write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking" on the word, Real . real is what I always strive to be.  in a hurry to be as real as possible, I've overlooked so much.  I have denied myself things that would have helped me understand things better.  real, but real for who? as I age, I want to be more real to me because I suspect that there will be many surprises. hard to believe that I will be surprised since I have lived with myself for 36 , going on 37 years, but I don't doubt it for one minute.  Honesty is where I falter.  I can achieve "real" (does it qualify as real if it is in quotation marks) but it may not be true.  In general, I want things to be tied up in a package and smooth even it is too jagged to fit.  I want this, I know that to be real, it cannot happen but I think true is what I need to really aim for.  I know some things are tru...

So, if you are not sure what Baby split with company means, you are not alone.  Perhaps it is because you are not a serious enough bowler and even if you are, perhaps you learned to bowl in a different jurisdiction than where this term is used.  It seems, upon a preliminary research quest, that even in bowling language there are dialects. Fence posts: The 7-10 split. (bed posts, goal posts, mule ears, snake eyes) I love bowling.  I love bowling alleys more.  Like many things, I've become reacquainted with them since having kids.  I have been reminded of their charm and their elusive je ne sais quo that persists even as I experience them as an adult.  With a few exceptions, bowling alleys, while many of them have been outmanoeuvred and have been supplanted by storage facilities and pubs, have, if they have survived, endured largely unchanged.  What exists already works fine and is functional enough that they don't need to be replaced. ...

"Understanding means throwing away your knowledge."  Thich Nhat Hanh Just woke up from a dream in which I could not find the words but knowing I must.  I woke up wanting to start fresh and say words I hold back and hold back words I say too much. I need to let go of what I know about myself and others so I can understand both better.

I am not known for being direct. I'm known for being so circuitously indirect it pains even my closest friends.  In fact, I have taken great care throughout my life to take the indirect route.  Rather than telling someone my opinion outright or deal with conflict head on, I've practically devised an art-form in feeling my audience out and saying, maybe not what is only expected of me, but saying it in the most palatable way possible.  It's down to culture, partly, and gender roles and family dynamics. However, all this changed when I had a child in my life.  It did not change completely, but substantially.  Almost right away and especially when I returned back to work, I noticed that I no longer skipped around the bush quite so automatically.  I suddenly did not have time for that any more. I literally had a fixed set of minutes within which everything had to begin and end.  There was no more time to pull taffy answers out of myself and others, I ne...

Johnny don’t fight at school. Your mother is waging the war on cancer. Your father has his battles everyday at work. Your sister has to attack her studies. We just can’t have you fighting at school. (example made by M.J. Hardman  Language and War  in the International Humanist News, 2002)* I decided to make an effort recently to take note every time that I hear language that denotes violence or war.  It did not take long for that list to get very long. body wars battleground battle cry A bomb went off Blew him out of the water tug-of-war This means war! go to war over it war against cancer I have also started to catch those expressions in my throat and try and hold them back.  However, since they are so pervasive and automatic,  I have had to do a lot of swallowing. I called the movie theatre the other day to find out what PG means.  We were debating whether or not to take our kids and a few of their friends to a movie with a PG...

I read over the posts I have written so far and was struck by how many times I use the word  realize .*  I'm pretty sure I'm overusing it but I also began to wonder what its use tells me about myself right now and my thought process.  I catch myself "realizing" things all day long. It is not that I do not know some things already. It is just that what I know and how I know those things are constantly being watered by realizations. That same water also floats things I don't know and do not understand up to the surface so I can see them for the first time or in a new light.  How about you? definition of realize v. (from dictionary.com): 1. to   grasp   or   understand   clearly. 2. to   make   real;   give   reality   to   (a   hope,   fear ,  plan,   etc.). 3. to   bring   vividly   to   the   mind. 4. to   convert ...

The clear bead at the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now. I've heard it said there's a window that opens from one mind to another, but if there's no wall, there's no need for fitting the window, or the latch. - Rumi  Quoted from "Open Secret Versions of Rumi" by John Moyne and Coleman Barks (1984)

There was a time when  Amelia Bedelia's ridiculous adventures in misunderstanding were my favourite.  I am gaining a renewed appreciation for the brilliance of these lovingly rendered books.  My six-almost-seven-year-old daughter thinks they are so hilarious.  She'll recount all her favourite bits each day, only half understanding the jokes, but knowing that there is a joke to be understood.  She stands on the precipice of getting her head wrapped around double meanings.   "Do you remember when she thought a sponge cake should be made with sponges?" "Do you remember when she drew ON the drapes, when they asked her to draw the drapes ?" "There is the one I think is so funny, when she trims the tree  with scissors instead of ornaments." Each figure of speech comes with a very long winding explanation as she talks out the possible reasons why it is such a crazy predicament that Amelia finds herself in. She is just this side of n...