LXIX.

“It’s always important to distinguish between chastity and impotence.” – Mae Jemison quoting molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner

Jemison’s TED talk is only okay: she’s focused on big ideas, integrating art and science, breaking down the false dichotomy of analytical versus intuitive. But I wanted more specifics. What’s her vision for how to do this?

Better is Elizabeth Gilbert on the nature of genius and a new (old) way of looking at creativity.

And that led me to three videos from the UK that investigate kids’ ideas about creativity: do they see themselves as creative, what advice do they have for adults about creativity, and then – teachers, this time, not kids – how can we help adults nurture their own creativity?

LXVIII.

From Hafiz. Via my yoga teacher. Found here, after class, when I hadn’t quite got it memorized.

And

for no reason

I start skipping like a child.

And

for no reason

I turn into a leaf

that is carried so high

I kiss the sun’s mouth

and dissolve.

And

for no reason

a thousand birds

choose my head for a conference table,

start passing their

cups of wine

and their wild songbooks all around.

LXVII.

From the new preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William H. Gass, a book recommended to me in the spring, searched for in used bookstores for months after, and found, tonight, on a table in the Strand, just when I’d forgotten all about it:

Perhaps it is the case with many fabrications, but I am struck by how easily they might not have been at all; how really unreasonably provisional their entire existence is. The same for us all, you say? aren’t we accidents of genes and conditions of acidity ourselves, of elemental woove and wovvle? the product of opportunity and inclination, simple negligence and malice? Yes. O. Yes. Of course. But we burgeon as easily as water falls. We grow meanly like a cancer. Wasted acres testify to the undiminished requirements of our needs. Suppose it were otherwise, and a mother had to make her child’s every cell. How many of us, in that case, would reach complete existence?

LXVI.

Lately, all I want to do is decorate, and throw dinner parties. Really.

Never mind that my intuition for decorating is about on a par with my soccer skills (but I scored a goal yesterday! so maybe this time I will get things looking nice).

I want deep, rich colors for winter; I have lovely light green and robin’s egg placemats and matching taper candleholders but those ought to be retired now in favor of scarlet or ruby, turquoise, chocolate.

I am in search of a few serving platters, an end table that will hide a litterbox, a table lamp to sit on the end table. I wandered around Crate & Barrel tonight just taking in tall bookshelves and glass-doored cabinets, a bamboo bedside stand, bright batik-y duvet covers and lighter, Japanese-inspired duvet covers with a pattern of pale silver leaves. Two-tiered serving dishes, dishes with three small square compartments, trestle desks.

A cozy little home in a village surrounded by all my friends on an island just a ferryboat ride away from the big city… wouldn’t that be perfect?

Dear god.

LXV.

Broadway-Lafayette, nearly 8 pm, slim tall girl, blond hair, facing the F tracks, headphones, tracing out dance moves with her toes on the platform concrete, a little shake of her hip every so often. We all stare — me, a Chinese woman with multiple shopping bags, a twenty-something man in a cowboy hat and a red muppets t-shirt.

LXIV.

I scored a goal today, in soccer.

It was an accident, but lucky accidents are still lucky.

I had lost my interest in soccer, thanks to being so sick and missing last week’s game and then not exercising at all this week. I felt lumpen, slow — and so easily winded. But I made myself go, anyway — how often in life do we just have to make ourselves, and then everything turns out all right — and when the game was over, I wished we had another 30 minutes to play.

(That despite forgetting to bring shorts, which necessitated an emergency trip to Strawberry. Thank goodness for New York City, where buying shorts at 5 pm on a Sunday was absolutely possible).

LXIII.

Black humor. Time to hide the money under the mattress, we joke. I went shopping after the crash, we joke. It’s better than people killing themselves. A friend says there’s an awareness that panic creates panic, that’s why people aren’t killing themselves this time around.

Unreality: some people are really suffering, but they aren’t people I know. My kids’ families were too poor to have bought houses — though perhaps some who moved away moved because they had a new mortgage in the suburbs, and I hope beyond hope that they keep their houses — and my friends either don’t own or are responsible, good-credit buyers.

Interconnectedness: over and over again, I see that this is where people can’t get it right. Things that are very big, very small, totally isolated, those we understand. Things that happen on the scale of organisms, days and weeks, those we have so little grasp of: weather, human health, ecology. And now financial markets. If you know we’re all connected, you can’t let the banks fail. But you can ask how things got to where they are now, with all of us at risk, and why some rich people might still benefit, in the longterm.

Third choices, and fourth: What struck me was the lack of something to be for, when the country was considering the bailout. Bailout, or don’t, were the only options presented. Where were the thinkers coming up with another idea, something you could be for and still feel okay about your stance?

Now what?

LXII.

Writing every day has the not-hard-to-predict effect of making blogging on one’s own time a bit less appealing. But I’m still here. Many quotations that I wanted to post, a handful of pictures, a few small stories. In the end, I’m more a do-er than a chronicler. Would rather be in it than observe it. And this despite spending 1/3 of my time writing and reflecting, all my life.

LXI.

I’m getting my haircut on Thursday afternoon, and Stacy asks about life, how the new job is, what’s been going on.

I tell her about the flow chart in my head, the one that begins in a year or two with the blog going well or the blog not going well, and then branches off in a half-dozen directions from each tine of that fork.

Going well: keep at it. Going well: leap to the next opportunity. (That one’s fuzzy).

Not going well: back to teaching. Not going well: grad school. Grad school: administration, become a principal. Or grad school: cognitive science, bridge research and practice.

The brain is endlessly fascinating. It’s right in the middle of everything that interests me, learning, evolution, biology, teaching practice, policy.

Then again, becoming a midwife has also seemed like a good idea for a day or two after I watched The Business of Being Born, so it’s good to sit with the crazy new ideas for a bit.

That’s just a thumbnail; the chart in my head includes places, New York, Maine, California, includes moving overseas, includes falling in love and the overturning of all best-laid plans. I’m pulling for that one, but you have to give it up to the universe, I’ve learned.

“I need a life coach,” I joke.

“One of my clients is a life coach,” Stacy says. “What do they do, anyway?”

I tell her what I think life coaches do, uninformed by any kind of actual knowledge. I think it’s like having someone help you pack when you’re moving; they don’t have to re-read all the old love letters, they’re not attached to the knick-knacks and throw them out without sentimentality, they don’t try on old clothes.

Dispassion, in considering options.

I leave with much shorter hair, it’s above the shoulders now, a way to go back to a simpler haircut, because I’m not good at managing layers.

No one really notices, though.

LX.

This week has been… a lot.

A friend wrote to tell me she had a miscarriage. A colleague has been really sick. Another friend left for graduate school. My best friend in the world will likely move to Maine very soon. I never thought she’d be here forever but I still don’t want her to go.

New anxieties replace old ones. I fear that I will write something that will make me look foolish, that the gaps in my knowledge – which are vast – are not filling fast enough. These are easier fears to put to bed than the incessant worries about children that came with teaching. But then there’s this: I wonder if I’m making any difference in the world.

I make resolutions. I will list places to go and things to do and I will not wait for someone else to be with me in order to embark.

I feel restless.

Is this what the end of summer feels like when it is not marked by a return to school?

I feel like something is about to happen – something big – like it must happen for me to keep going. It makes me jumpy.

On the other hand, I am so tired all the time. The gym is gone from my routine. I never cook anymore. I don’t keep up this blog and I’m hardly ever writing except for the all-the-time-writing that is my new job. I can scarcely believe the level of activity I kept up when I was teaching.

So I make more resolutions.

Summer is ending, accelerated, perhaps, by the early arrival of fall air, wind blowing my pen off the picnic table when I work outdoors, nights chilly. It’s already getting dark earlier, my friend said to me on Monday night.

Restless, restless.