documenting adventure

Happy Spring! I'm so glad that it is officially here. And every year I get confused about when the flowers bloom, so I thought this year I would document the progress of the season. Right now the hyacinths by our back steps are just coming up and smelling heavenly and the forsythias are just starting to hit their stride. For some reason I thought they bloomed before the daffodils, but now I'm remembering they come after. In whichever order they arrive, I'm delighted to see them! As well as the blue sky today, when they'd predicted clouds and cold. Along with reading The Red Book for my active imagination class and reading The Faraway Nearby for fun this morning, I'm having a delightful Sunday. I hope you are, too!

meandering adventure

I should have more to report, but I find that even with one class, once I pour my truth into a post for the discussion board, I'm feeling pretty spent. I'm sure to work out the kinks, I mean, at least I'm here and there's a photo and I'll post a couple more below, so you have a trio of daffodil photos. What I can say, because I simply cannot stop talking about her to anyone fool enough to start listening, is that I LOVE Rebecca Solnit! More and more with each page I read it turns out. How can I not love someone who says this:

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small, and I feel that we’ve lost if we don’t practice and celebrate them now, instead of waiting for some ’60s never-neverland of after-the-revolution. And we’ve lost the revolution if we relinquish our full possibilities and powers.

You can read the whole interview in The Believer, by clicking here. I warn you, I predict it will make you want to read everything she's written...

In the meanwhile, Happy Spring!!

imaginary adventure

Just when I thought winter was behind us, we had a crazy ice storm last night that thankfully mostly went north of us, but still kept me home from work today. As you can see, our bird friends were very grateful for the seed Rodg put out and I will be very grateful for the sun coming out tomorrow. In the meanwhile, here are some things I've been enjoying lately:

My active imagination class! I love my dream life. I tend to have pretty vivid dreams and it feels like there's a whole geography to this other world. I notice that I'll have a series of dreams that feel like they're all taking place sort of in the same area or years later I'll come back to a familiar place that I only know in dreams. One night years ago I was trying to fall asleep and thought if I remembered a dream it might put me in a sleepy frame of mind. Instead I remembered dream after dream after dream and could see how they were connected to different places in my dream world, as if it all spread out before my mind like a huge map of years of dreams. So you would know I'd love a class about dreams and a method Jung developed for working with dreams in a conscious and engaged way - active imagination. In active imagination I can have a dialogue with a dream figure or go back into an interrupted dream to continue the action. We're reading great stuff for this class, such as Robert Johnson's Inner Work and the founder of Pacifica, Stephen Aizenstat's Dream Tending. Yum, yum!!

Rebecca Solnit is still blowing my mind. I finished A Field Guide to Getting Lost and highly recommend it! Now I'm reading River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which is also amazing and takes me back to my California roots. I feel like this book should be paired with Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man for a complete picture of the Gold Rush! Still, it isn't as personal as A Field Guide and to be honest I will probably put it down as soon as her newest book, The Faraway Nearby, is ready for me at the library. Described as a "personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy," The Faraway Nearby sounds like just my kind of thing!

And it is so much fun! Now that I'm just taking one class at a time I can watch movies again! Hallelujah! I've seen some great stuff streaming on Netflix lately and my top two picks, no, wait, make that three for those of us who love to watch paint dry, are: The Guilt Trip (all-around fun, feel-good movie), Unfinished Song (heartwarming and SAD), and This is Martin Bonner (slow and nothing happens and everything happens). Enjoy!