dancing adventure

This is another busy weekend full of a reception at work yesterday and getting a couple of mid-term papers done, so I thought I'd share one of my recent school assignments with you. We were asked to do some active imagination on a dream to create a 300-word story. This story is an accurate rendering of my dream through the end of the 4th paragraph - the last 2 came out of my imaginative work. I think you'll all be amused that I have a dog in this dream! Enjoy!

“Idiot!” shrieked the ping pong ball-sized spider sitting on my bathroom counter.

My immediate impulse was to try squishing it, but that seemed very messy, plus I’d taken a vow of non-violence and anyway it seemed to have something to tell me. The spider ran past me, down the hall, taunting me along the way.

I caught up with it in the kitchen, where it was sitting on top of my stove. “You’re a stupid fool!” it cried again in a surprisingly menacing, squeaky voice. This was one mean spider.

I managed to catch it in a small glass bowl and saw my golden retriever by my side. “Here,” I offered the dish to him, hoping he’d get me out of this mess and gobble it up. He looked at me like I was crazy and I wondered if maybe he couldn’t see the spider – it was a glowing yellow color – or maybe dogs just don’t like eating bugs.

Normally I practice catch and release with household pests, but they don’t ordinarily talk to me. Not knowing what else to do, I asked the spider if there was anything more it wanted to tell me, besides calling me names. At that point he clammed up, crossing some of his arms, pushing his lips together, and turning his head to the side. Clearly this approach wasn’t going to work, either.

Maybe he’d like something to eat? But what do you feed a spider? I guess they like other bugs, but I couldn’t find any around. So out of desperation I thought maybe I’d just put on some music. There was a reggae album by the stereo from the night before, which I put it in the CD player and the spider climbed up on my shoulder and we started to dance.

student adventure

[I wasn't supposed to be in this, obviously, but for some reason it's my favorite one of the batch - go figure!]

So I am completely loving being a student again! One of the biggest things is that I love the structure it's helping provide for me. There's rarely a question of what I should be doing these days. If I'm not working or taking care of us and our home, I should probably be reading or writing, or maybe making something although not a lot of time for that. But I did find one more little corner of time for more learning this past week. A friend had recommended a Coursera class on Modern Poetry and even though I knew time would be tight this fall I still signed up - it just seemed too irresistible. The first week came and went and I didn't even log into the class, but then this past week when doing my morning Nordic Tracking I ran out of Eckart Tolle videos to watch in my monthly subscription and I remembered ModPo (as it is affectionately called). So I pulled up the class on my phone, started watching the intro video, and I'm hooked. Every morning I get to immerse myself in wonderful videos of classroom discussions of close readings of poems, starting with Dickinson and Whitman. Yum yum!!! The setting reminds me so much of the seminar room in the English house at Trinity - taking me back to an ideal version of what education can be. So the last piece of the education puzzle is now in place. I have my amazing depth psychology/creativity curriculum with some incredible poetry thrown in, a vibrant online cohort that I'm really clicking with, and now a window into a classroom filled with a super engaged professor and his teaching assistants. As Joe Z. put it: "I'm in hog heaven!"

I'm reading the July issue of The Sun these days and am blown away back the late Jack Gilbert's poetry. Thought I'd share part of his "A Brief For The Defense" here. Enjoy!

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

busy adventure

This was such a busy week that I'm just going to post this photo from a fun dinner a couple of weeks ago and look forward to a real update next weekend. Have a great week!

balance adventure

Things really seem to be falling into place these days. I'm grooving on the fun balance between the reading, learning, and writing I get to do for school and the amazing body practice of Kundalini yoga. I love them both and feel so lucky that they're in my life right now. I was encouraged to explore Kundalini yoga by Debra Silverman in my amazing reading and she was so right on about everything else about me I knew I needed to at least give it a try. There's a really sweet studio in Nashville with the loveliest instructors, but it's hard fitting a class like that into my life right now. So it's been an amazing development to explore classes on DVD and online - wow! It's the best feeling to come home from work, change clothes, and work out the craziness that's been trapped in my body during the day. On the weekend I love starting my day with a class and I know I bring the benefits to all the mental/spiritual work of school. So grateful.

I've even started writing and putting visuals together for a creative project. This one may be just for me - we'll see. But it definitely feels like the next thing that needs to come out and given how dry the well has been, it's exciting to be bringing up a pail of water, however that first bucket will be used...