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Surprise Me

March 7, 2013 By 2 Comments

One of my favorite books growing up was Cheaper by the Dozen, the true story of the Gilbreth family, 12 children and their efficiency expert parents.  The dad in the story was obsessed by making every task as quick, fluid, and routine as possible in the interest of saving time and money.

I get that.  Particularly during weeks when it seems like everyone in the family needs to be in a different place at once every hour of every day, house projects are in full swing, work is heating up for both parents, somebody needs baking soda and Poprocks for a science experiment,  we are three days behind in practicing one of three instruments, and nobody can remember the last time somebody ate a green vegetable.

But.  I hate routine.

Hate.  Loathe.  Despise.  My personal goal is not to have a fulfilling career, usher my children into self-sufficient, well educated, and happy adulthood so that I can retire, it’s to have a fulfilling career, usher my children into self-sufficient, well educated, and happy adulthood so that I can stop doing the same damn stuff over and over again most days of the week.

Mind you, my job is great in that I am challenged in new ways and there is variety in my work life. It’s the making lunches, finding work clothes, set the alarm, drive here, drive there, meals on the table, do the homework, bed at this time, wake up at that time,  follow the same pattern all the time because there just isn’t room for any meaningful variation THING that makes me feel like I’m going to scream.*

This explains my weather fetish.  I’ve been known to read up on the weather blogs.  Yes.  There are weather blogs.  Not just the weather channel.  Or weather.com.  Or Accuweather.  Yesterday it was supposed to snow here.  And it didn’t. Not even a flurry. Beginning last week, there was big buzz in the weather world about this storm.  The forecast over the past week changed every hour or so, and I tracked every single alteration.  A weather event = change in routine.  A big weather event = big change in routine.  Big weather event = big change in routine = Me = happy.

I was supposed to wake up today to a wintery world, at least briefly changed from the ordinary to something other than that.  Maybe complicated or messy or problematic, but certainly different.

Yet:photo

 

Routine.

 

 

 

*I totally reserve the right to whinge about how much I miss this stuff when my kids are grown up.

Filed Under: Back to Nature, Facts of Life, WRH Tagged With: , ,

The Hardness Scale

April 13, 2011 By 4 Comments
 
 
Walk up to anybody who went to junior high school where I did between the years 1970 and 1985 and say this, “QUICK! What’s the hardness scale! Go!”  Dollars to donuts that person will immediately rattle off this list:
 
Talc, gypsum, calcite, apatite, fluorite, orthoclase, quartz, topaz, corundum, diamond.
 
And fast. 
 
For some reason, still mysterious to me and I’ve been studying education for nigh on 20 years now, we were all required to memorize the Mohs scale of mineral hardness AND compete to see who could recite it, in pairs (my partner frequently spent class throwing our mineral samples at my head), for points that counted towards our grade.  I’m assuming this isn’t what they mean when they talk about the good old days of American Education.
 
These days I worry that my heart is becoming as hard as corundum.  Maybe even diamond.  I like to think that I am generally a pretty soft-hearted person, a talc-hearted person.  Not that I crumble easily, but that I am capable of opening my heart to others easily, and ok, yeah, I might crumble more readily than others, but that’s an acceptable price to pay for openness and generosity.  I can live with that.  I find myself lately feeling the poky edges of something cold and flinty in my chest, though.   I can’t point to any one cause for coronary petrification other than Ben and Jerry’s , I certainly do not feel especially wronged by anyone, other than Volkswagen of America whom I hate with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns and notice no overstrike there, so maybe I’m just getting old and cynical?  I’m sort of over it?  That would be awful.  I’d be a casualty of age and time.  What did Jill Sobule say?  I don’t want to get bitter, I don’t want to get jaded, petrified and weighted.  But I fear it’s happening.
 
Fortunately, spring brings lots of magic.  Yesterday was pretty awful.  My hard and unsympathetic heart was all rough edges and jabby corners and was poking me in all the wrong places, probably poking other people in all the wrong places, too.  I saw insult at every turn.  I was stomping through my day, narrowed eyes doing their best to deepen the wrinkle between them into a scowling crevasse.  Even my lunch offended me.  And then I walked around a corner, a literal corner, and a kindness came from an utterly unexpected place.  The last place, in fact, I would have looked for it.  Unbidden, a hand extended.  “Here,”  it said.  “I have something for you.  Something you need and something that will help you.  I’m asking nothing in return.  It’s just for you because you deserve it.” 
 
This small moment of grace did something that my 8th grade Earth Sciences teacher forget to tell us about.  He forget to tell us about the alchemy that turns corundum back to talc.
 
 
The Weed
I dreamed that dead, and meditating,
I lay upon a grave, or bed,
(at least, some cold and close-built bower).
In the cold heart, its final thought
stood frozen, drawn immense and clear,
stiff and idle as I was there;
and we remained unchanged together
for a year, a minute, an hour.
Suddenly there was a motion,
as startling, there, to every sense
as an explosion. Then it dropped
to insistent, cautious creeping
in the region of the heart,
prodding me from desperate sleep.
I raised my head. A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.
(All this was in the dark.)
It grew an inch like a blade of grass;
next, one leaf shot out of its side
a twisting, waving flag, and then
two leaves moved like a semaphore.
The stem grew thick. The nervous roots
reached to each side; the graceful head
changed its position mysteriously,
since there was neither sun nor moon
to catch its young attention.
The rooted heart began to change
(not beat) and then it split apart
and from it broke a flood of water.
Two rivers glanced off from the sides,
one to the right, one to the left,
two rushing, half-clear streams,
(the ribs made of them two cascades)
which assuredly, smooth as glass,
went off through the fine black grains of earth.
The weed was almost swept away;
it struggled with its leaves,
lifting them fringed with heavy drops.
A few drops fell upon my face
and in my eyes, so I could see
(or, in that black place, thought I saw)
that each drop contained a light,
a small, illuminated scene;
the weed-deflected stream was made
itself of racing images.
(As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
The weed stood in the severed heart.
“What are you doing there?” I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: “I grow,” it said,
“but to divide your heart again.”
                                                               –Elizabeth Bishop

Filed Under: Back to Nature, Facts of Life, Keeping it Real, Synecdoche Tagged With: , , , ,

That Is One Seriously Huge Butterfly

March 13, 2011 By 3 Comments

Lest you forget that on this spinning rock we are all connected, Big Momma sent us a reminder this week.  For some of us, it was ugly, scary, devastating.  For others, just something to watch with growing dismay, grief, awe, and no small amount of wonder.  Mother Nature is not to be trifled with.

The concept of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” in chaos theory is metaphorically known as The Butterfly Effect, which says that even the most minute changes in the atmosphere caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could have an effect that would ripple outward such that they could influence a chain of events altering even the path of a tornado.

While the earthquake in Japan was immediate and obvious to those in Japan, it’s easy to think that it happened only on the other side of the world.  We are all so intricately connected – and not just in such an ethereal and poetic manner as the wispy breeze from butterfly wings – that what happens there, happens in some manner, everywhere.

“The first pressure waves from the Japan earthquake reached the East Coast of the United States in about 13 minutes, arriving at 1 a.m. Friday after speeding through the earth at up to 29,000 miles an hour. You couldn’t feel it, but the energy transmitted through the earth was so tremendous that the ground in this area slowly rose about an inch before settling back down…” (Tom Avril, Philadelphia Inquirer)

They are us, we are them. Do unto others…

Link to the Red Cross.

 

 

 

 

*Thanks, Drew, for the forwarding youtube link.

Filed Under: Back to Nature, Facts of Life, Synecdoche Tagged With: , ,
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