Saturday Mashup

Librarians are wonderful, and so are their children, and also the blogs which give us these surprising discoveries! Today a lot of shiny bits and pieces appeared out of the chaos that is daily life, and with patience and attention I might get to highlight a few of them. Until next time, here is a belated Easter image from Biltmore Village --

Oh, so maybe you wanted to see the McDonald's a block away, the one that sits by the entrance to the Biltmore Estate and mirrors its style? Be good and hopeful, and maybe I'll take a couple of pictures there. While you're waiting, listen to a child talk and read a good book and remember that while change is constant, the really good things don't change.

I'm quitting trying to be "with it," technologically. The last straw came in today's funnies, when the dad in Zits announced he's started a blog, and the teen kid told him blogs are over -- now it's vlogs. What's the point? Blogger spellcheck doesn't even recognize the word "vlog." Better to put your attention on the children and the books. Maybe I'll listen to my own wisdom.

April

Sometimes it helps to see a big blue circle. This is why we need art, to take us out of our mental hamster wheels, out of our inward gazing and into the air of possibility and delight.

Going into nature, afield or in the back yard, does this too.

And when we go into a garden and find a big blue circle

and are allowed to touch it

and to find that we can turn it on its base

and we feel as happy as a child under the sky

then life feels a little better, a little more grounded.

Cloudscapes

When you use gmail to let someone know you're going to have a colonoscopy, then use the spellchecker, the word "colonoscopy" is not recognized. But gmail helpfully offers you "cloudscape" and "kaleidoscope." So, tomorrow is my day to enjoy a cloudscape. (The real fun, of course, comes the evening before, as the actual procedure is not bothersome.) In the usual way of the world, the air has been full of cloudy mentions of late. The news that a friend who is only 35 has colon cancer, front page news about the detection procedure, and several other mentions in the media of the disease. Not a good week for clouds or people. But maybe if you live out in the Pacific Northwest, things are different; no one has ever heard of such a thing. They live their happy kaleidoscopic lives out there, filled with oysters and geoducks and beautiful cloudscapes over the Pacific. (With very sincere apologies to Porter, if he see my words, because he knows that this is not true. Maybe it's only in GoogLand that there is no disease.)

P.S. Those folks at GoogGroundZero must be too busy having fun at the mothership, because they apparently don't know about geoducks either.)

March Comes In

... with its brezzes loud and shrill, and the etagerie on the front porch falls over, startling the cats indoors, while a long branch of white pine clanks onto the roof of the car and the windsocks are flying straight out. Suddenly, it seems, the bulbs are all blooming -- iris reticulata, snowdrops, daffodils, crocus, two colors of grape hyacinth, and one Forsythia blossom. The Old Farmer's Almanac announces St. David's Day, St. Piran, St. Perpetua, Daylight Savings Time, then Pure Monday, Palm Sunday, the vernal equinox, and Easter. Surely the non-Christian world has observances in this month as well, but they're not in the OFA. There's a lot going on in the world, but it's good to look at what's happening in right around you.

Social progress?

I was walking today in my neighborhood, on some of the streets closer to the main drag and alongside a park, and picked up some trash, till my hands were full: two beer bottles, a crushed soda can, a Styrofoam food box, and then -- oh joy! a plastic grocery bag to carry it all in. And the trash made me think about class and race and neighborhoods. And it occurred to me again that maybe what people in this country really care about is class, not race. My neighborhood is racially mixed and mostly clean and peaceful, and that's part of why people enjoy living here. (The trash is an aberration and is a result of this particular street's location in the traffic flow.) I think most of us don't care about the color or gender preference of our neighbors: what we care about is how people behave.
And then I thought of Obama's rising popularity as a candidate, and how amazing it is that suddenly we've made this seemingly huge leap to what might have only recently seemed years away -- a non-white presidential candidate, wow! Later in the evening I read this NY Times article and thought, yeah, they like this guy because he's -- well, he's okay! He's good! He's like us! He shares our values! (Sure, there's vestigial racism in the remarks of some of the citizens reported on) but man, this is progress.!) And so it comes down to economics, getting people out of poverty and into the middle class. That's not to speak out in favor of a dreadful conformity, and there will always be some who want the heady mix of, say, the City, and those who prefer the quiet of the lone prairie. I'm just saying that I think we're maybe evolving and entering a state where it's not your race that matters so much as your fit with your community and the consensus of the greater society. My Kenilworth neighbors, for instance, value clean streets, quiet evenings, and within their houses the freedom to do what they want without disturbing others. For the most part we don't care what the race, political preference, or gender orientation is of our neighbors: we just want them to behave relatively decorously in public. We love the existence of New York City and other big cities where there's much more noise and variety of lifestyles, but for middle America I think more and more that middle class values trump the racial and gender divisions.