So I am in Yellowstone. The first family vacation. Veronica has enjoyed the bison and the other animals we’ve seen.

She does not seem to love the geysers as much as I do,

She complains about having to walk so far, not about the walking itself, but somehow she gets starving on the way.

She likes the visitors centers.

I keep wanting to show her the stars. There are way more stars in the sky here, but there only show when it’s dark.

And dark is late.

Last night she fell asleep.

But I still wanted to see the stars.
There is a meteor shower happening.

So after 10 I left the hotel room alone and walked outside.

It’s funny how much i rely on chris to have a sense of direction. We e been walking Around here for days. It was dark and i Was alone.

It occurs to me that I miss my husband. We should go away for a weekend.

Or I should go away alone.

We are not only parents.

I found my way to the old faithful viewing area. Every car and lamppost seemed an invasion 

Light pollution.

I left the inn and walked toward the steam plume of a geyser. That must be Old Faithful.

As soon as I got to the geyser area, I saw a shooting star.

There were maybe 10 people out there looking for shooting stars.

I was surprised there weren’t more.

But in the dark, staring a the sky we talked a little bit. Mostly about the sky. 

Me and the stars. Us and the stars.

We saw shooting star after shooting star.

We each saw stars that the others didn’t. Shooting stars are quick and unexpected. 

It was hard to leave.

I walked back, and warmed myself at the fire in old faithful inn.

Why weren’t these people outside?

Perhaps warmth is better than miracles sometimes.

I got to see miracles. I will not forget it soon.

 
 
BerryPicking

“Look, Veronica. It’s a berry.”
We are visiting Yellowstone national park this week. It’s our first family vacation of any duration. 
Taking her to a national park is an important rite of passage. I suppose it is uniquely American; it may be particularly western American. Not sure what the kids on the east coast do.
It’s a way to get connected with the land we live on.
We have yet to see the geysers, which are spectacular and addictive.
What we have seen is wildlife. The tragic and awesome bison impressed is all. I would love to legally aquire s buffalo rug! Deer antelope and elk.
Let us not forget the wild plant life. The tall straight pines were perfect for building teepees, as I had seen. The northern sage lent the air its sweetness.
And I found a berry. A raspberry.
I picked berries every summer as a kid. They grew thick and I couldn’t resist.
In our part of Alaska, most people liked to pick blueberries. They taste like Nothing else, and grow very thick. But they are ripe only a few weeks of the year, and it varies because of the weather. My mother was not good with time management like that, so we always missed it. 
My berry of choice was the high bush Cranberry. It ripened in the fall and was so prevalent it made the whole forest smell sour. 
I did not have to drive to the forest. It was across the street. I loved the tart clear red cranberries.They were too much for almost everyone else, but I could pick quarts of them.
Veronica does not have a forest. Her sub desert chaparral landscape does not include berries.
Alaska has a lot of berries. Most places have a native berry. When I travel, I try to look and see what kind of jams they sell in the grocery store. Very often they’ll have a kind of berry jam I’ve never heard of. And berries are so delicious!
I would like to find a place where my daughter and I could pick berries.

r

I went swimming on Saturday. Well, I went to play in a pool with my daughter and her friends.

I don’t swim very well. My daughter is also learning to swim. I bet she’ll be better than me any second. Neither of us likes to put our face in the water.

But the real thing I’m trying to talk about is how I felt after. Swimming, even just playing in a pool, is very tiring. I had hoped that this tiring effect would mean my daughter would be low-key.

It didn’t work that way.

She was full of excitement and plans and activity.

I was exhausted–as if I were neck deep in tar.

Yes, I took a long nap. And I still felt immobilized with tired.

I did not want to be so worn out. I had things I wanted to do. I have plans, projects and responsibilities. I can’t just sit this out.

Although the exhaustion levels had varied, I had spent the last few weeks feeling unable to get things done.

Which was strange, because before I had felt so energized and full of purpose–so recently.

Now I remembered that sense of purpose distantly–like sound heard deep in water.

Sunday was come, and the last day of the weekend. I had a committee meeting at church to be part of. I really had to get this stuff together, and so I tried to unstick myself.

I was able to put together my notes during the sermon. What was wrong with me? Why was I waiting until the last minute?

I met with our committee and mentioned how I was feeling stuck in tar.

“Me too!” they all said.

What? How is that possible?

I had assumed that I alone was the one who disappointed herself and couldn’t get moving.

But the other people said that the summer heat and lack of school structure was their reason for lacking oomph.

I still feel like I have a bell jar of tired over my whole body. Somehow, though, it feels better not to be alone.

If it’s not a uniquely personal failing, it’s easier for me to have mercy on myself.

Hopeful self-compassion is a very good place to be in.

Even while I’m stuck in tar.

I am the youngest of four children. Since the beginning I was always the last to learn anything. My brothers were older and always knew a little more–or a lot more–than I did.

Always behind, always thinking everyone but me knew.

There are some advantages to this. If I didn’t know something it was only because I hadn’t caught on YET. With older brothers I had three chances to get the answer.

Of course I didn’t want to admit to my brothers I didn’t know. I would try to find out on my own.

I was so sure that I could learn the secrets to anything if I set my mind to it.

My brothers’ interests diverged from mine pretty quickly. But I never lost the certainty that my questions would be satisfied.

It’s served me well. My career was built on the many many men who took the time to take my questions seriously and help me understand what I was seeking.

So we are all grown up now. I have accumulated some knowledge and I’m finally sure that there are many things I know that they don’t understand.

We each have our areas of expertise.

I’m pretty sure I’ve always been better at asking questions.

So here’s how I like to create art: 
Exactly my way.
The last session I picked an art project (a webinar and course from my book) and started to research all about how to do it.
I got discouraged
And more discouraged
Until I was so overwhelmed I binge watched tv reruns.
I knew I was running away but I needed to not face it.
I heard Krista Tippett interview Elizabeth gilbert today. And Gilbert talked about creation being for its own sake
Side note: I am cynical about Elizabeth Gilbert because I am very envious of her success. Why her? My stuff is on par with Eat Pray Love. Why not me?
And I heard her talk about defending her art. Why create? And I remembered my tizzy about Simon Sineks “what is your Why?” And how I felt as though I’d been depantsed and my creativity was not good enough. Because I didn’t have a Why.
Gilbert gave me back my why. 
Because I can! 
I have no control over whether people will pay me for my art. That’s never stopped me before.
I know exactly how to make the course. And now that I give myself permission to do it exactly my way, it feels light again
The muse never promised me an audience. I’d like one, but I wouldn’t sacrifice future creativity for an audience for my past creations.
Creating makes me happy. That’s my why. Complicatedly, frustratingly, backbreakingly happy.
I might never find a big audience.
Which is frustrating (see previous comment)
People would be better off if they consumed what I produce.
And people often choose things that make them worse off
Nothing I can do about that
I’ll just go my art my way

Off to seek my fortune–it’s a fairy tale phrase. One of my all-time favorite movies “The Princess Bride” begins with the romantic hero Wesley goes to do that exact thing.

It still happens, I think. One way or they other, we are seeking our fortune.

I’m not sure when this quest-phrase was overtaken by “find myself.”

I know it was popular in the 1960s. Flower children ran away to San Francisco to have be-ins.

We are all looking for ourselves, it seems.

I know I lose myself often and quickly. As I immerse myself in some new environment or project I lose my borders and take on what I see the group needs as my own need.

Immerse is the right word for it. I don’t realize for quite some time how I have merged with something that is not me so completely.

I recall this experience vividly when I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. It was a book. It was the story of someone else. And I found myself feeling depressed and hopeless as I read her story.

Where did my borders go?

This definitely happens with friends, family, work and other social group.

Heck, it can happen with the news.

I have found myself wrestling with a mood or a state of mind for ridiculous lengths of time before shaking myself to the realization:

It wasn’t even me.

It’s not always easy to rediscover the difference between myself and my circumstance.

It makes sense that people might need to leave their circumstances completely to “find themselves.”

One of the things I love best about fairy tales is their uncomplicated lack of psychology. Fairy tale heroes do not have inner voices. They take external action. They seek their fortune, an external pursuit.

Our new quest to find ourselves has appeared only in the last hundred or so years. It seems our fortune–meaning our wealth and our fate–is what we find inside our hearts and souls. To seek our fortune, if we are so blessed, is to find ourselves.

One of the aspects of my 8-5 job is that I get to have headphones on my head. Most of the time.
Not every job lets you do that.
It kind of means that there is noise distractions in my environment. It also means that my job is mostly not that challenging. I can put some of my attention elsewhere as I plow through emails and databases.
I don’t always listen to music. A whole lot of the time I am listening to someone talk. I like to learn interesting things I didn’t know.
It’s a special balance, listening to something that is interesting but not so engrossing that I can’t have part of my brain chugging away on answering emails and data fields.
This week I have found something that fits the bill perfectly:
A recorded college class on classical mythology.
On iTunes U, there is a video recording of a class that was taught in the University of Ohio more than a decade ago. It is exactly like being in a college class. Which means that it is not at all engrossing. It is barely interesting enough that it required a threat of failure to keep the students paying attention.
That threat doesn’t work on me. I hear the professor threatening with weary humor his audience with what may or may not be on the test.
He repeats himself so often, that even though the subject matter is fascinating to me, it’s dreary.
I’ve talked before about Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I fully believe that teaching is an art, and learning is an art. This Ohio class is not high art. I am sure that the professor is far better at teaching than this snapshot would showcase.
His teaching was captured, and it’s pretty sad. It could be so much better.
Khan Academy flips teaching on its head. The subject matter can be consumed in a form that the student likes best-video, written, audio, you pick. Then a teacher can come in and interact.
Watching the dumpy teacher slowly slowly working through his subject is like cave drawings.
Teaching and learning can be so much better than that. It already is.
This class is about classical Greek mythology. At least the part that I’ve listened to so far.
Those Greeks made quite an impression you know. One quasi mythological man springs to mind when I think about this topic—the art of teaching and learning.
Socrates had a famous style he used. They named it after him, the Socratic Method. Here is how Wikipedia explains it:
a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions.
That’s what I’m talking about. My Ohio lecturer really tried to get his students to ask questions. And they were not having it.
Why?
The system as is currently stands does not reward questions.
Learning for learning’s sake is nowhere in the curriculum.
It didn’t disappear though. It just went outside the system. I bet my Ohio lecturer whose name I don’t remember would be delighted to hear that I was listening to his recorded class.
I’m not the only one. Not his class, but all the ways that knowledge is being consumed.
I bet you that the other headphone-wearing cube dwellers

I got to see Garrison Keillor perform his Prairie Home Companion Show at the Hollywood Bowl last Friday.
Keillor has been doing his show since I was a child, on National Public Radio. There were three radio stations I was permitted to listen to as a kid: the two Christian radio stations and NPR.
The one Christian radio station was very very old fashioned and heinous. The other Christian radio station would play Amy Grant and her ilk, and was therefore close to acceptable.
NPR has mostly heinous, but sometimes it was ok. Prairie Home Companion was ok. He told stories and was silly.
In the media desert that was my teenage years, Garrison Keillor was worth listening to on Saturday and Sunday. He talked about the people in his fictional town of Lake Wobegon, I saw a real humanness that was completely missing from my church. Forgiveness, sadness, soft delight, all the feelings that ordinary people feel in ordinary life.
He was a staple. I still enjoyed listening to him as an adult, although I was not such a loyal listener as I had been.
I live here now, close to Hollywood. I’ve been to the Hollywood Bowl. As a teenager, it was inconceivably sophisticated (literally inconceivable. I had never heard of the Hollywood bowl, and would have thought it was a football stadium that could house a super bowl).
I understand how Garrison Keillor would chose to have his show at the Hollywood bowl. It’s lovely, with an amazing history of entertainment.
Just like him. Prairie Home Companion is so authentically Keillor that’s it’s inconceivable to imagine someone else taking.
Just as inconceivable to imagine it ending.
So I sat and watched (WATCHED!) this radio show. And I realized he’d made it, and he’d kept making it. Just the way he wanted to, like nobody else, for more than 40 years.
I thought, Hey! I am like him. I have made my blog just the way I wanted to, like nobody else, for years and years. I haven’t stopped doing it! We are alike. I’m 14 years in, not 40. But give me time.
I watched him up there, with his team. And I realized he does something I do not do.
He showcases other people. He invites musicians and artists to participate in his creation.
At one point, he was talking with one of his singers. She said “You are singing lead. I know you like to sing harmony, but you are the lead on this one.”
He did like to sing harmony. Even when he was SUPPOSED to be the lead, he fell into harmony.
Perhaps because of the upbringing that demanded self-denial to the extreme, I am afraid to harmonize.
In this Hollywood area I live in, “acts” abound. I am friends with directors who do great work, and I am amazed at their ability to lead a team of people to realize their vision.
I don’t trust the team. I have a vision of what I want to create.
Even this blog post, I know what I want it to be, and I don’t want anybody else tainting it.
I also know that it’s possible
Just possible
That contributors could add to the outcome. Collaboration can mean the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
It’s just
It’s just that collaboration has meant that I have to cut pieces of myself off and leave them behind to fit the mold.
It’s too high of a cost.
Watching Garrison Keillor work with his team, I was so struck at his longevity. He did it.
He showed up and did it for years until decades until it is his legacy. He said this was his last performance but I don’t believe it.
He loves to harmonize.
I would love to find some collaborators. I have to crack open my tight doors and see if I could find some trust to extend.
It’s so powerful to be generously creative. Probably the greatest power there is.

They had a pet adoption near the grocery store. We don’t need another pet, yet we are hard hearted enough to enough to play with the cute doggies while they are available for petting.

While we were there, a family came by with a poodle. The volunteer referred to it as a “surrender.” They could keep the dog sand these volunteers would take the dog and find a remand the home for it.

Doggie was dumped in the pen with the other orphan dogs. My daughter was holding as many on her lap as would come in the pen.

Poodle stared into the corner. His family was gone. He didn’t know what was going on. The other dogs left him alone.

He began to growl softly. He didn’t know what was going on but he did know he didn’t like it.

“You don’t like this do you?” I said to him. “It’s ok. You will find new people.”

He was not comforted and continued to growl. I thought about how alone he must feel. What was his place in the world?

Dogs are pack animals. I thought I was help him remember he had a place.

“Sit!”

He was not listening to me, put I insisted. I pointed at the ground, and repeated the command until his fuzzy bottom was planted on the ground.

He felt secure, because I reminded him of his place in the world. His place was in a pack.

A workshop I am taking was recommending coming up with categories for blogposts.

Oh I did not like that idea at all. I don’t Want anybodY telling me what I have to write.

Don’t fence me in! I have a topic, it’s “wonder.”

I would like to believe I am a person of infinite variety, however that is an illusion. I do more things habitually than not.

I heard an interview that Leonard Nimoy gave, in which he advised a young actor about typecasting.

After he played Spock, he said, he never lacked work. People knew what to do with him. Typecasting worked out for him.

So that little poodle, growling at the world, had an idea of what his place was. Except his family was gone and like it or not he had a new place. Clinging to false hope made him unhappy.

And so. I am going to put some categories around my posts. It will help everybody if I do.

I’ve heard it said that writing is far less about inspiration than about time spent with your butt in the seat doing the work.

Categories are another form of doing the work. It helps people know what to do with me.

We saw Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory at the theater yesterday. Not sure I’d seen the whole thing before.

On the ride home, I said to Veronica, “There is a saying “Love to hate”…Which of those bad kids did you hate the worst?”

She was quiet for a while then started muttering. “what kind of crazy saying is that? That doesn’t make any sense..”

it doesn’t. I have a sensible child.