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Maycember rage
From a Parents.com article titled “Maycember’ Madness Is Real and Leaving Parents Even More Burned Out”:
Much like the month of December, my packed calendar at the end of the school year has left me feeling like there’s not so much joy, as obligation and overwhelm. Instead of cruising into summer with a sense of relief, I’m sweating my way to the finish line—and possibly crying and stress snacking at certain points, too.
Feeling that in our house. Once I heard the term “Maycember,” I knew I had to use it for Friday’s letter: “Maycember Rage.”
3 thoughts while pushing a wheelbarrow
In Tuesday’s letter, I tried to weave together some ideas about yard work, Larry McMurtry, and giving yourself time to feel things, and I managed to articulate something I hadn’t articulated before:
The computer used to mean the world to me. The computer was a portal to the world I wished to be in. Times change, and I no longer wish to be in contact with much of the world that’s in my computer. Yard work is a wonderful distraction.
I was pleased by how much this letter seemed to connect with folks.
Read the rest of it: “3 thoughts while pushing a wheelbarrow.”
We’ll see
Today’s letter is titled “We’ll see!”
“We’ll see” is the refrain in the Charlie Wilson’s War version of the 2000-year-old Chinese parable about the old man who lost his horse. (Bluey used the same refrain, while Alan Watts used “Maybe.”) It’s a favorite parable of mine and one I think about often.
Here’s how Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching puts it:
Alas! Misery lies under happiness,
and happiness sits on misery, alas!
Who knows where it will end?
Nothing is certain.The normal changes into the monstrous,
the fortunate into the unfortunate,
and our bewilderment goes on and on.(I am someone who believes in embracing bewilderment.)
Read the rest here.
Kids ask the darndest questions
Tuesday’s newsletter was all about the wild and wonderful questions that kids ask:
I really think that the best artists and scientists are grown-ups who somehow manage to retain their ability to ask child-like questions.
In Harold Gardner’s Creating Minds, he writes:
“I contend that the creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.”
Read more in “Questions without answers.”
Disintegration
This poem was inspired by listening to The Cure’s Disintegration at top volume in my studio.
I put it at the top of last Friday’s newsletter, “A New Appreciation.”
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