Monthly Archives: October 2011

Oct26

the ham of god

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I took this picture at the Putney School Harvest Festival two weeks ago.  I want to sleep like this.

I fell asleep last night laughing out loud listening to Anne Lamott’s Plan B:  Further thoughts on Faith.  Laughing into sleep is a great way to wake up.  When she talked about receiving a providential gift ham on her birthday at a grocery store, I lost it.  She wondered if it was “the ham of god.”

I am finding more ways to soften before sleep, and to soften into waking.  I find that it makes for a more fluid, creative day.  Abraham calls it “getting into the vortex.”  I have been listening to Abraham for about two years now, driving everywhere.  It is the best way that I have found to release resistance.

Resistance is on my mind as I am reading The War of Art. More about that tomorrow.

Abraham says find something to make you happy.  Last year, Emily Jones, the head of the Putney School encouraged students to look at something beautiful and let it make you happy. I have a long list, that includes horses’s noses, cat’s fur, my  daughters’ and Pam’s faces.

What makes you happy today?

 

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Oct25

the geese, the spiral

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M.C. Escher “Day and Night”

Outside this morning with the dogs, and heard the geese from far far away.  Phalanxes of them, high then arcing into slow drifting circles disappearing into the mountain and then reappearing as the light struck their pale chests, and then spiraling, floating down onto the lake.

A second flock approached, and the  spiral downward toward the lake suddenly bloomed into another spiral and then another, each cancelling our the other until finally the whole group seemed to decide on a trajectory and disappeared over the crest.

I thought about spirals.  About DNA.  About the simple spiral of turning to look upward and over my shoulder at someone I love.  About teaching students how to get up from the floor on the refreshing breath of a spiral, with its change of scenery along the way, rather than the jerk and pull default.

I thought about my forward facing-marching-driving-data entering selves.

Today’s question:  Can you find a spiral?   Can you ride a spiral?  And how does that change your point of view?

Oct24

skip

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Skipping

by Robert Morgan

A carburetor skips, and rocks
will skip along the surface of
a pond. A fugitive will skip
the country if he can, and crooks
will skip the payment of their debts.
And one can walk content or run
with joy across a summer field.
But why omitting steps is such
a sign of pleasure’s hard to say,
as if the gap and shift, the quick
eliding interruption of
a stride, reflects the shiver jolt,
releasing dance; accentuates,
as heart is said to skip a beat,
the lift, arrhythmic, breathless gasp
and rush and reach of crossing first
one threshold then another in
the vivid hop from foot to foot,
the hurrying toward and with delight.

“Skipping” by Robert Morgan, from Terroir. © Penguin, 2011. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

This is from The Writer’s Almanac.  Sent to me by my friend Suzanne.

Can you find a skip today?

Oct23

inversion

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Ellen Sebring and I made a short video called In the Woods.  She shot into the water, and created this wonderful sense of upsidedown-ness – an earthly world reflected and refracted by water.

This is my take, shot during my canoe on the Moose River.

I love the feeling of dissolving and materializing all at the same time.

How are you dissolving?  How are you materializing?