Here’s a little something I’d Tweet if I had an actual Twitter account, because I’m quite sure the whole rest of the world *really* needs to know it.
Just My Opinion
While I pontificate and muse
On any topic I should choose,
You can’t be blamed for heading east
When I head west or, in the least,
For covering your weary ears—
Like any sentient who hears
Such foolishness as what I spout—
But don’t talk, too; I’ll just tune out.
When I worked for my uncle’s construction company, the lead painter and I would look at something shabbily built and laugh that we’d been sent in to fix what the carpenters evidently couldn’t, with a mythical substance and/or application process we sometimes referred to as “half-inch caulking.” While a good job of caulking the edges and cracks around trim and other carpentry is an important step in preparing a built object or room for its paint, any gap as large as a half-inch would in reality need more serious care than mere caulking—perhaps even rebuilding—before it was worthy of being painted, and there’s no such thing as caulking truly made for such massive applications. Curing, caulk would soon enough shrink and pull away from the trim and leave a gap nearly as visible as the one it was intended to fill, and no amount of daintily applied paint would make it as pretty as if it had been assembled and prepared properly. Still, on our best days, we amused ourselves with the notion that whatever the previous workers had failed to build or fix nicely, we painters with our magic powers could doll up sufficiently to save.
I think that I am even less fooled, nowadays, by the idea that a vigorous application of fine chocolate to my innards by means of cheerful ingestion can cure anything that might ail me. But I am no less pleased to entertain that myth than the aforementioned one, and don’t mind that any proof in the positive results of chocolate-eating on my attitude is likely a placebo effect, psychosomatic or flat-out delusion. Whatever the truth, I continue to fill in the gaps of my frayed moods with chocolate, and it nearly always helps to smooth over the flaws better than nearly any other restorative out there.
Casa Cortés ChocoBar, our fantastical find of an eatery in San Juan, not only offered a plethora of chocolate treats for the repair and maintenance of body and soul but had a wonderful wall tiled with antique chocolate molds that may well have been used to cover a multitude of sins in the building construction itself. That makes the place, in my estimation, extra potent and all the more inspiring. I may be on the hunt now for chocolate molds with which to tile my next kitchen wall, but I won’t want decommissioned molds, preferring to fuel myself with the contents as I install. It seems the respectful thing to do.
It would be hard to imagine a person who is less the early adopter than I am. Newness frightens me even under the best of circumstances, and I am intimidated beyond words at the idea of trying to learn anything. Worst possible example for anyone’s edification when it comes to scholarship, growth, adventure, futurism, daring, and tireless commitment to progress of any sort. I’m the one you’ll find huddled somewhere in the shady corner as far back of the starting blocks as I can manage to be, while everyone else is already sprinting gleefully into the turn.
Chalk it up, pretty succinctly, to fear. My self-diagnosis, summing up my own observations and experiences with the insights of better educated therapist and doctor supporters over my lifespan, is that the recipe made by my own ingredients of personality, health, situation and resources tends to combine into a person who’s timid and easily defeated. Add a dollop of laziness to my already potent blend of anxiety, dyslexia and other perceptive and receptive oddities, and my lack of physical strength and grace, not to mention of any sort of courage, and you get an unwillingness, even a very stubborn one, to set foot into new territories, whether actual or metaphorical.
Still.
When I feel I can experiment safely and without anyone else observing me at work, I may occasionally delve into something new with a surprising (to me, at least) sense of play and eagerness. Though I’ve resisted the idea of learning to use any new forms of technology, at least until they’re far from new anymore on a general scale, even these can be both useful and entertaining if and when I finally get up the gumption to try them. So here I am, finally, fiddling around with the iPad as an artistic medium. On our recent week’s jaunt to Puerto Rico, the iPad provided a convenient way to reduce the weight and size of my baggage from the old laptop I have lugged around for the last five years, and while I found it slightly irksome to peck at the tiny integrated keypad on it to write posts, it did work for that, and as long as I used newly made images or ones in my stream of digitally stored photos, I could plug in illustrations as well. Photos taken on my iPad or iPhone do not impress me much, and I find both a bit awkward to use at this point. But with a new set of digital drawing/painting toys, I’m distracted from any such photographic and textual shortcomings by the process of teasing out the secrets of each art-related program.
Once introduced to this plaything, of course, I loosen up and lose my inhibitions gradually. Knowing that after years of such untutored play with various iterations of Photoshop, I still only use a hundredth of the possible functions and tools it offers—and those, probably, in wildly incorrect and inefficient ways—I can only imagine that there will be exponentially more things I can learn and do, as well as fail to learn and do, with these newer tools and toys. But at least I’ve managed to wiggle my recalcitrant self into trying them, for a start.
The mystical beauty of the moon and clouds the other night got me to thinking, as I admittedly do so often, about the ephemeral and ethereal qualities of our species and the strangeness of our even existing. When Space looms so visibly vast over us and insists on reminding me how tiny and potentially insignificant I am, my life is, in the grand scheme of it all, I begin to have exactly the opposite reaction any sensible person might assume I would have. I think that, just possibly, if there can be no logic or extravagant purpose evident for the creation and continuation of our peculiar and oddball race, then we can’t have just appeared at random or even serendipitously–we must really have arrived here with at least some intended point. Being a thoroughly sideways creature myself in so many ways right from the start, I find it comforting to imagine that the very impossibility if explaining my reason for existing seems to argue for some small purpose. Foolish dream or actual conundrum, it makes stargazing that much more attractive on nights like these….
So Crotchety behind Her Crocheting
Does this seem troubling to you? All grans aren’t tiresome, it’s true,
But this old lady nurses ire as if she kept eternal fire
Cooking for gleeful roasting of all who would dare to fall in love,
To be successful, find delight in anything, morning to night,
That is not hers, and hers alone; she glowers as if from the throne
Of Empire, threatening with doom all who would dare challenge the gloom
With which she paints her own worldview; I find her hideous, don’t you?
The only worse soul, I should think, would be my own, if I would sink
To wishing others ill because they weren’t as awful as I was.
My mind is one place. My body is elsewhere. Isn’t that just the way of things?
Today, it’s not problematic, signifying only that I’m privileged to be on holiday with my beloved and friends, yet attempting to keep a small corner of my normal schedule in the mix, i.e., posting to my daily blog. (So, Hi!) The way that any holiday’s events, from traveling exotic and remote lands to a simple ‘staycation’ involving no travel, only a change of pace, change our entire thought pattern almost instantly right along with the alteration of the days’ expectations, and that makes it easier to find change of spirit and attitude. That’s the real reason to take a holiday of any sort in the first place, isn’t it.
So I’m beginning to feel a seeping sense of the lassitude and restful forgetfulness that I always find so welcome on such breaks. But there’s still that edge of wariness that comes with fearing I’ll forget or fail to do something essential at the required time. This, too, is the way of things in real life. Letting go is harder than we think.
This week, the only essentials in actuality are being present at the right times and places for wedding-related events today and tomorrow, our primary reason for being together and on holiday with this group of dear friends. So I will endeavor to let the other stuff happen however it does or doesn’t happen, including that if I should slip up and fail to post every day in the coming week, and know that when the wedding has been properly feted with all of its events and all of the players in them equally joy-filled, then what was necessary to the days has been fully accomplished.
The important lesson that I most need to learn, however, is that the same is true when I’m not on holiday: I should sort out the essential from the non-essential and not obsess over things that only fill up my hours and days, not worry that every small item be crossed off the list perfectly without regard to its actual value in bringing joy to my life, let alone anyone else’s. It’s perfectly fine to let down my guard and simply revel in knowing I’ve seen to the true essentials: fulfilling genuine requirements, yes, but first and foremost, spending time with those who matter to me most.
Another day, another rehearsal. More study, more practicing. And for all but the most independent and reclusive researchers or out-and-out hermits, this means work done in company. We need each other. The best progress is usually possible only with the support and aid of collaborators and fellow workers in all kinds of related tasks. We build on the work of our predecessors and colleagues; we stand on the shoulders of others.
Nowhere is the necessity of such mutuality, of working very literally in concert, truer than in choirs and orchestras. I have written here plenty of times about the privileges and joys of my life in being able to attend not only so many wonderful concerts but the rehearsals where they are prepared. Beyond that, though, I feel fortunate to have the example and reminder constantly before me of an approach that can be tremendously beneficial in all kinds of life’s activities: surrounding myself with all of the resources that smart and able and collegial, supportive fellow laborers can bring to the task.
Time alone is valuable. It offers all sorts of useful room for quiet reasoning and planning, uninterrupted cogitation and problem-solving, and the mental and emotional space to put all of those aspects to work for me. But there would be little in the way of material with which I can do any of that if it weren’t for the rich stores of fact and imagination prepared by all of those who have preceded me in any task I choose, and there can be only the kind of progress that my own limited stores of wisdom and experience, skill and talent and imagination can cobble together if I don’t work in tandem with others. So I am happy to enlist all of the company I can, and aim for working in harmony toward whatever purposes we can dream and achieve. Then, perhaps, my projects will have a chance of culminating in choruses of satisfied approbation.
The Royal We
We wish the world would so improve as to fit with us in our groove,
But while we grandly sit and wait, and yammer and pontificate
On all the failings, all the fuss of people being unlike us,
So stupid and so retrograde as to be differently made
And to espouse another thought than the superb one that we’ve got—
How troublesome! Noses aloft, we deem them worthy to be scoffed
And cringe in horror that they’d dream of doubting that we are supreme—
All ills, in fact, could be foregone if others could be counted on
To shape right up and so improve as to fit into our great groove.
Biting Remarks may be Rewarded in Kind
Do not call me a scaredy cat or other catty names;
Don’t have a cow, but I refuse to buy into your games
Of calling me bull-headed, big fat cow, a silly goose,
Or loosey-goosey, bird-brained, or a dumb sheep. What the deuce
Do you think you are doing? For—sheepish as I may be—
I’m not so woolly-minded as your image is of me,
And once you’ve riled me up enough with childishness so tryin’,
I may just turn around and bite you hard, and I ain’t lion.
Sing Now & Always
To celebrate at breaking of the dawn
Or close of evening, or the stroke of noon,
There is no sweeter pleasure than a tune
Well sung by everyone, an antiphon
To peace, to sorrow, or to happiness;
No matter what the poetry or text,
It truly matters most that what is next
Is choral concord to renew, redress,
Resound through all the unseen years ahead,
A clarion, an anthem or motet
Grander than any ear has heard as yet,
And run to distant history, a thread
Of melody and harmony so strong
That no one can resist joining in song
Art-Colored Glasses 