An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend of mine, someone I know only through our mutual blog posts and a handful of emails, the exchanges of notebooks and weaving… lives in a deeply red community of a deeply red southern state, the one blue dot in a red sea. She has found herself in situations where people say what seem such outrageous things that she is too flabbergasted to respond and in situations where she knows she is being deliberately baited. Walking around blue becomes an act of courage.
I get that.
This is probably not the best way to come back from a month of silence. I meant to write about wood carving and jam jars and a train ride, our bivalent booster and books. I’ve started that post. Instead…
Since I began weaving in earnest, I’ve been rewatching television online, shows I’ve already seen, or tried to see, when they first aired. Monk. Psych.
Just now, it’s Grey’s Anatomy.
How this tree had grown. Sometimes a log drifts onshore and is just too incredible to ignore.
But I’m not really all that interested in these shows or even in telling about the weaving I am getting done, though that will surely be part of my post today. I’m interested to see what else…
Blue skies and pouring rain have alternated all day today so we did not get our walk. We were too busy yesterday and needed a break that not involve wind-driven rain. It was meant to be a peaceful day. Driving rain and sunshine pouring past my window at the same time. And then… the news.
Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder’s most famous book Mountains Beyond Mountains, has died. I taught that book for years, linking it to the Pacifica Projects that all students at my high school were required to complete for graduation. Service and research were significant aspects of that project.
Dr. Paul Farmer grew up in poverty with a huge family and bullying father. Nevertheless, he attended and graduated from top universities, slept on a cot until he married, became a world renowned disease specialist, and devoted his life to serving the “least of these.” He was a good man.Continue reading →
2. The monster sentence. Begin with a simple short sentence—“I baked bread”—subject verb object—and then turn it into a “monster sentence” of at least 100 words. This exercise is straight out of Stanley Fish's playbook. Use every trick you know to ensure that the sentence is grammatically correct and not a run-on, use long dashes (em-dashes), semicolons, lists. Then explain what you’ve created, reviewing what you’ve written, phrase by phrase. NOTE: The explanation should be longer than the original sentence. Write nonfiction, then explain your work.
My assignment grew long, I mean reeeeealy long. I only needed 100 words and I have considerably more words… and that’s after I edited and carved it back a little. Then I revised and cut it back into shorter (but still with monster) sentences. And that’s when I found the point of it all.
In Seattle, especially while I was a student at the UW, people would ask, “Is the mountain out?” They meant, could you see Mount Rainier? Locally, it’s Castle Rock, 0.6 nautical miles offshore, that sometimes disappears behind a cloud bank or fog.Continue reading →
Despite my better judgement, I have been reading The Washington Post news articles and comments about the shooting in Michigan. People keep asking why the school didn’t do more. I wish the answers were simple. This is not a day I am supposed to post, and you probably do not want to know.
I figured we all deserve a pretty picture in “challenging” times.
My husband has repeatedly commented that I “dodged a bullet” when I retired in 2019, months before the pandemic. I wish it had been that clearcut: good then bad, Before then After. I wish that before the pandemic, my duties as a high school teacher had never required actions I found awkward or dangerous.
Students threw chairs at the wall (twice) and a padlock at me (once), they yelled at me and at classmates, fell asleep in their chair from lack of sleep and drug overdose. Kids worked long and often illegal hours to support family or pay their own dental bills, and parents called them from school to put in a shift during school hours, which violates state laws. Poverty was the overarching threat to their education, but there was no escape for kids from more affluent homes: One boy put hashmarks on my whiteboard for six weeks. I did not ask him why until he came in one morning and gravely erased them all: six weeks sober. A homeless girl who was welcome elsewhere was sleeping on dirt in a backyard shed in order to protect her mentally ill mother she refused to leave alone. It was a bad choice, but a compassionate and loving one.
The sky was beautifully pink yesterday morning and after a mile of walking, I ran an unofficial 5k on sand without wetting my feet. I was out of breath but not breathless at the end of my run. I felt light-headed and bent over for a couple breaths. It is not the first time I have wondered if my blood pressure might have gone down closer to what it was when I began running in the 90s. Decades ago, when I told my mother my blood pressure was 90/60, she said, “That’s ridiculous. You would feel dizzy when you got out of bed. ” Well, yes I did. Often.
This was not the photo I was looking to put here, but it’s pretty and in seasonal colors. Two of these weavings went to a dear friend on the birth of her baby. One is at home here in Portland. It’s significant that the warp included skeins of lovely Koigu merino wool in day-go “mistake” colors I had not meant to order. Goodness come sometimes, not because we planned for it or earned it or even necessarily deserved it, but just because. Continue reading →
I received a recruitment email for a teaching position in another state, which shall remain nameless. I nearly tapped the link. I would love to visit that state and I miss teaching and I enjoy working. But no. The public schools in that state are in bad shape. To establish myself in a new place would take tremendous energy. At one time in my life I might have been up for that struggle, but 70-hour work weeks are behind me.
What we see entering our newer home. Yes, it is “real city living” where we are walking distance to everything we need. Work, for me, might be one of those needs.Continue reading →
The package contained only the book and the note. It’s true that my classroom Bible had vanished, a New International Version, but that would have been at least six years ago before I retired from teaching full time and had to clear my classroom book shelves. I usually kept a Qur’an on my shelves too. I am interested in scripture. I am respectful of sacred text.
Left to right: the carpet on the painted floor, and on the table is the returned NIV Bible, the note quoting a blog post, the postcard from Toni with a bit of Dorothy West showing, and my current journal with a pen.Continue reading →
I played around with other WordPress themes yesterday and managed to completely misplace the one I started with. Gone. The sidebar with personal and site information now appears way down at the bottom of this page. That is not convenient. I could pay the “Happiness Engineers” to help me, but I am so offended by that title (not to mention the cost) that I will put up with this ugliness. [Why did I ever think it was a good idea to leave Blogspot?] I do not like this layout, but it’s the best I can do.
Discuss.
[NOTE: Managed to find a “theme” with the sidebar, but now the header photos do not show on the home page and are overlaid on their own page. Better, though. imo. Yours?]
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 