Just the Right Amount

A sister to M & L, 
and a cousin to I. 

Especially after false labour way back in the first week of August, it's been quite a holding-pattern of a month waiting for our newest (third) granddaughter: 9 lbs and 9 days late! I'm so impressed by my daughter's resolve.  

But she's finally here: another M, her name a nod to my Grandmother and her middle name for my daughter's grandmother. Imagine being so fortunate to be named after two grandmas...that seems to me like just the right amount of grammatude, and I can't wait.   

Parched?

Flowers? Collectively adored. 

At his film's release, director Michael Angelo Covino, said this about his latest project (Splitsville) and the theatre-going experience: "it is so important that we [have spaces to] laugh together." 

That resonated. 

When was the last time you laughed together with a group of strangers? 

Thanks to our phones, it seems to me that modern collective experiences are typically fragmented, often encountered alone. Plus, they seem predominantly negative, rife with distractions, misinformation, political upheaval, and disasters, thus the modern desire to withdraw, isolate, and protect ourselves...alone.

A Gen X kid I definitely grew up alone, but I also recall sharing most of life's emotional experiences collectively, both positive and negative. We all watched the same weekly TV shows and imitated them. We all knew the Vulcan salute and said, "Nanoo, nanoo." I grew up loving The $6 Million Dollar Man so fervently that most of the playground stunts my classmates and I did, were in slow motion. Even outside my grade, these behaviours were common to my entire school community, and I suspect some of you reading this can relate? That's a key difference between then and now: community. 

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my adult son if we could watch Happy Gilmore 2 together. He grew up on Adam Sandler movies and, back then, we watched many comedies together. The film, as expected, was delightfully stupid, a genre we can both get behind. But the point of that experience? Nostalgic bonding.  

It seems to me that the modern world is sorely parched for bonding opportunities, especially among strangers. This made me wonder: what do we all collectively adore? Flowers? Kittens? Will Farrell? Silent Book Clubs? Hockey-playoffs?...?

And how might we bring back bonding? 

Things one should never outgrow:

Itchy for kitschy?

 

 

recess.

I've heard it said that travel is like recess for adults. You don't have to go far to enjoy recess, do you? 

Are you enjoying a recess (staycation) this year? 

A Field

Cindy Revell

On impulse, I bought a little painting. The artist is someone I grew up with. We lived across a field from each other. This field. Or so it seems to me. As soon as I saw the painting, I remembered biking along my childhood road looking across the yellow to her house.

There can be much ado about a field. As poet James Hearst says in Truth, "How the devil do I know if there are rocks in your field? Plow it and find out."

It seems to me that when you leave a place—especially that first place—you carry it with you: the sky, the soil, its rocks (turned and unturned), the light, the heavy, the love, and the pain. 

It seems to me that art carries all this too, that interiority, acting as a kind of proxy for the told and untold stories, and ultimately a means to plow a field in one's heart.