April 18, 2023
Gleanings
- And then, “I ask myself constantly….why do you return again and agin to Woolf? It is because the text made me!” And isn’t that a moment of joy for us all, to be in the presence of such a wonderful engagement with a text.
- The objective of the exercise is not to look for life balance, but to look for movement towards the things you love, those things that uniquely define and delight you, then tilt madly towards them.
- Oh, right. Duh. Public schools are basically the most complex kind of community there could possibly be–a crew of people from different racial, religious, and class backgrounds, who didn’t choose one another, coming together with pathetically limited resources to try to care for one of our most precious, insanity-inducing assets: our kids. Some eggs are going to get broken with that collective recipe.
- There are some things I just can’t enumerate, like the peanut butter and honey sandwiches, cheese sticks, and protein balls we ate on the road. Or the long stretches of beautiful or non-descript highways we traversed. The patches of wildflowers on the roadsides. The few scary traffic situations we endured, and frightening bridges we drove over. The laughs and the catching up about family and friends from way back. The discussions about childhood in which my sister and I just don’t remember things the same. The times I just wished we were there already.
- And I wondered to myself, when did my need for validation transition into a desire for affirmation? It was an aha moment; I felt like I had discovered something new.
- It’s probably ridiculous, how much I love an HB/2. It’s simple. And it’s forgiving. I can be most creative, and try and be wrong countless times- until something comes out right, when I’ve got this guy in my hand
- Okay, so there’s the obvious impracticality of spilling mouth wash all over your vintage Guatemalan textile, but really, who doesn’t love to floss over a bustle of fancy fabric?
- In summer we will swim in the bay that is hung with mist. Small boys love the shore for the starfish, the crabs under rocks, the anemones pulsing in the tidepools. Looking up from the water, I’ll remember the lilies in their damp moss, the decades of seeing them, how the sea rises and falls, rises, falls, generations of ravens in the trees, and the oyster shells on the side of the path.
- If you are a bird person, it’s hard to have a favourite bird, but if I was pressed, I would have to say that Dark-Eyed Juncos are among my favourites. See what I did there though? I didn’t commit to having a favourite, but I acknowledged that Juncos are one of my favourites. See? Hard.
- Despite the algorithm that can apparently now predict language — I couldn’t predict the way that my heart would leap when I heard a friend call his teen son sweetheart on the phone yesterday, or expect a machine to know the feel of her heart thumping against my palm while cuddling on the couch, Blake’s howling laughter in the background.
