Growing Versions

The fourth post I wrote on this blog was called  Artifactual Communication .  It came to me one day a couple of days after I started the blog when I overhead my husband listening to a talk about it on the internet.  It started to turn some gears in my mind and I can still remember the rush of endorphins that coarsed through me as I turned an out of context, random idea into something personal.  I knew little about artifactual communication, still don't, but the general concept struck a chord as I began my journey paying closer attention to my surroundings. Since then, that post has been viewed more than any other post I've written.  People in Thailand, Australia, Ukraine, the U.K., Brazil and Indonesia and South Africa have read it and it makes me want to know what they were looking for.  Did they find it in the post? Maybe  or maybe not, but somehow, in a tenuous way, we connected, however briefly. Life got exceedingly hectic in the inte...

Am I a mean mama?  Or am I magnifique?  This article, Is Maman mean or magnifique? , about French parenting (mothering mostly) has been making the rounds of late and it has me thinking hard about my role and how much it is shaped by culture, how much it is impacted by sheer exhaustion and how much I am constantly coming to terms with how difficult it is.   I plumb the depths of my resources daily to keep my voice from hitting too high a pitch, to stretch to meet their needs and my own, whilst providing security within which they can grow and learn.  Sure, I regard my role as important but some days (many times a day) I'm not always so sure what part of my role is the most important.  I'm always happiest when we're all doing an activity quietly together--the sun is shining and we're all happily walking to the park or reading a story or constructing a creation.  Bedtimes are the most trying. Mornings, when we have to go anywhere, come a very very clo...

Right after I posted last week on the connections between haiku and twitter, I came across this interesting article: Twitter: the New Haiku? . It has crossed my mind more than once that it is a real shame that  Mitch Hedberg   died before Twitter was invented. He would have been a master at it! "I was walking by a dry cleaner at 3 a.m., and it said "Sorry, we're closed." You don't have to be sorry. It's 3 a.m., and you're a dry cleaner." "That's be cool if Spider-Man shot hammocks instead of webs. You're not a criminal, but you do need to relax."  "This guy handed me a picture of him, he said,"Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture of you is when you were younger."