The Ball Starts to Roll...

A busy last couple of days--busier than I'd like, in fact, but they've left me with much to process and ponder and knead into cohesivity (which, I'm sure, is not a word). Let's see if they bake up here on this page or if they're not quite ready today... Do you need a thesis and a preview statement? Life is a paradox--interwoven, interconnected, law-bound yet totally unpredictable--when we remember this, we stay connected to beauty and joy and wonder. In the last several days, I've been reminded to seize the inconveniences and ride them out, bend like a big old Cottonwood with the breezes, and keep working toward whatever it is that feels real and true and right. Here's how.

Body paragraph 1 (for the students, but remember, this is a rough draft that will likely never be carved into anything else): Thursday night, my colleague friend KL left some frantic messages on my cell phone, triangulated the connecting people we know (whose connections we know about only through the magic of Facebook) to track down G's number, and emailed every account of mine she could find because the speaker we were bringing for a day-long three-audience tour of our township and the state IB Symposium this weekend was likely to be grounded in the two-punch snow maelstrom that pounded NYC. Luckily for me (but not for KL), I was comfortably calm, reading the sooting words of Deepak Chopra while Katie tried not to freak out and sought alternate ways to contact me. Long story short--I finally realized she was trying to reach me and called her back, and we set off on a silly three-day rollercoaster of a cancelled township tour and a last minute Skype-ification of the conference keynote. Thursday and Friday were fight-or-flight--and by the time we sat down to test out Skype with the speaker on Friday night, I had missed dinner and couldn't remember at all what I had or hadn't accomplished in the previous 48 hours. I was holding on (white-fingered) to a clipboard with a long to-do list and autopiloting my way through the minutes. Is anyone still reading this?--I'm about to get to something here. And then and then and then--there she was on the video screen--our speaker, a woman who has become famous among a certain international group of teachers for founding a course about ways of knowing and living and breathing the philosophies which underlie her work. She's in her eighties, maybe, a retired teacher who writes international textbooks and speaks around the world, and it was her first time using Skype, which she had installed and set up all by herself (she was quite proud). I have no fancy words for this, but the utter child-like glee she exhibited when we heard each other's voices and saw each other on screen instantly refilled my cup--she reminded me that inconvenience can lead us to great discovery. This was something I needed to see just then. The stars aligned and we Skyped our way through Saturday's keynote, showing 200 teachers the possibilities for thinking of themselves as "knowers," connecting with other teachers as "their people," and using technology to tear down the classroom walls. And on a more personal aside, I sometimes edit down my positive, hippie-dippy thoughts because I think I will sound like some naive, rose-colored glasses gal; I fear of the Ethan Hawkes of this Reality Bites world will think to themselves, 'Her bravado is embarassing.' The speaker reminded me that the world needs people like me. I just might have to let that freak flag fly a little higher.

(I am really fighting the urge to edit this down, but A2 is asleep and G and A1 are at the barber shop--who knows when I'll find time for this again.)

Body paragraph 2: So we stay open for the child-like wonder and bend like the trees (and the cliches are cliches because they are true). After the Skype-makes-the-cup-runneth-over moment, I packed up the clipboard and the nametags and drove across the city from Ben Davis to Lawrence North for conference set-up and found myself right in the middle of one of those NPR moments. It was T. Gross and Johnny Cash and it started me thinking about my step-dad, M, and the songs he sings when he's cooking or in the shower or just walking or sitting or planting something. Maybe you heard that interview? And if so, maybe you heard Rick Rubin talk about what it was like when Johnny Cash sat down to dinner with a Hollywood bunch and asked them to hold hands around the table while he prayed. Maybe you heard Rick Ruben say that even the athiests at the table felt a sense of awe and respect at being near someone who believed so strongly in something, whatever it was. Well, anyway, I left the door open at the gas station so I could keep listening while I filled the tank, and Johnny Cash sang one of Max's shower songs--that southern Gospel piece "I Shall Not be Moved." "Just like a tree that's planted by the water, I shall not be moved."

Body paragraph 3: And so it was with these thoughts of tree-bending and cups-overflowing-in-the-aftermath-of-inconvenience that I swam through a long Saturday of conferencing, catering, projector-configuring, miscommunicated babysitter pick-up times, dinner with friends, misbehaving munchkins, and an unplanned nighttime drive through drizzly snow/rain/ice to Franklin and back. And I won't bore you will all of the instances, but once I picked that tiny little color of a theme out of life, I kept seeing that thread everywhere and everywhere and everywhere.Even cradled in the big waves that rolled toward Australia and Hawaii. A last-minute room change for which I apologized and the facilitator said, "We are like the trees, we bend," for example. And then last night, sleep, and this morning breakfast. Conversation about collectives followed by a serendipitous 4-way tile-saw purchase.

Conclusion: All of this, and no words here about the logistics of the grant work, one might think. But this is the meat, the marination, the thoughts that churn and turn until they spring forth (yes! like Athena) from the mind and the page into pots and poems. Where to put those logistical updates? This is the problem with the five-paragraph essay and with setting me loose with unlimited characters, a blank screen, and a sleeping child. The conclusion isn't a conclusion after all.

1. The breakfast ladies and I have made plans to spend a weekend in April in East Tennessee just in time for the dogwoods (I hope). KG has purchased a camera, and once I order mine we will indeed be quite dangerous.
2. Since Deepak says I don't have to choose, I have decided, well, not to choose--I will use the plants of both East Tennessee AND Indiana as inspiration. It's about *my* places, after all, isn't it?
3. I am so grateful to have so many friends who bend like the trees and open themselves to change and wonder and inconvenience. I'm looking forward to this journey.
4. The check for the grant should arrive mid-March, and I've been doing some deal-hunting. So glad to have KG on my team when it comes to this.
5. I need to start cleaning that garage and making room for the workshop.

For next time? There are still those deferred dreams to talk about...

Here we go...

Munchkin 1 stayed home with a fever and sore throat today, and it was my turn in the stay-home-with-the-sick-kid rotation. I've been trying lately to have realistic expectations for what I will accomplish between leaving school in the afternoon and lying down in bed at night, and this means I've been leaving my gigantic bag of "to-read, to-grade, to-do" in the office. So that's how I found myself at home today with nary a paper to grade. After some laundry, morning news shows, knitting, and last night's DVRed American Idol. After putting A1 down for a nap, falling asleep for a little while myself, drinking some coffee, picking A2 up from school, fulfilling sick munchkin's wildest food dreams (Chick-Fil-A), coming back home, putting Sesame Street on for A2, etc., I finally settled down for some thinking about the grant work. I called my Dad-O, who is equaled only by my big brother when it comes to project-planning-sounding-board-and-problem-solving-guru-ing.

I would like to resolve something in print right here/right now--I will write. I will not edit. I will post. I will let the pragmatist win the smackdown against perfection. In the past five minutes, A1 has asked for bedtime snack, and A2 has unraveled an entire ball of yarn and found my cell phone and called someone (if that someone is you, I hope she provided you with some scintillating conversation). If I'm looking for perfection, there will never be any words on the page. So consider this my apologia for anything uninteresting or ill-written. What's a working mom to do?

So, the conversation with Dad yielded a few ideas. First, my original plan was to use metal frame kits for the framing and cut my own mats. The frame kits would cost about $150 for 10 frames, though, and Dad mentioned that he would teach me how to make wooden frames and let me borrow his saws if I decided to go that route. If we did that, I could re-purpose the $150 to a nail-gun-type-thing to help with the framing, learn a new skill, and keep using the framing gun even after this project is finished. I'm considering it.

Second, I am going to need to add a ShopVac to the supply list.

Third, I signed up for free email coupons for every craft store and art shop in the greater Indianapolis area while I was on the phone with Dad. Those 40% off Michael's and JoAnn coupons could come in handy, especially now that I learned from E that Michael's accepts competitors' coupons.

Fourth, if I can save money by buying some items on Craigslist and using coupons, I want to buy a digital SLR. With the camera, I can take nice-quality pictures of those native plants, frame them with my mad framing skills, and add the inspirational photos to the poetry and pottery show.

(G just realized that the reason our house has felt so cold the last few days is that one of the munchkins opened the front window about 2 inches at some point.)

After talking with Dad-O, I sat down to watch part of a DVRed episode of Craft in America for inspiration. Wouldn't you know that the episode began with pottery in the Carolinas, then progressed to a glass-blower who uses native plants as inspiration. I'm considering this TV-watching official research. A little dilemma bubbled up, though. While I'm interested in learning about native Indiana plants and using them as inspiration, the summer plants that are most cemented in my memories are those in East Tennessee. And I have poems about East Tennessee I could use. Should I drive on down to Sharps Chapel and use those plants? Should I stick to Indiana? Should I do both? I foresee a few weekend road trips in the spring to take some photos. Who's up for some plant-watching?

I wondered, when I sat down to type, whether or not I would have much to say. I haven't even gotten to the meaty stuff about deferred dreams and Willa Cather, and my friend M and her guitar, and the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great Gatsby, and my former student C, and this little thread I've been following for the last few weeks, considering harnessing and putting into a poem or a pot. More on that later.