Swimmingly Nice Afternoon

I go to the pool with my neighbors and their two boys. We stand on the steps. I hold their baby and swing him back and forth in the water until he laughs. The water is warm. We practice different strokes: backstroke, butterfly. Brenden learns how to float. Then we head over to the hottub. They are scared of yellow jackets and I am not. They are very tender with both their sons and it is beautiful to see.

Roller Skate Heaven

A group of roller skaters lives in an underground cave. Their world has been taken over so they live down in the cave, work on computers and wear roller-skates. They are an intimate team. One day one of their members decides to go back to Earth to fight the blight that drove them underground in the first place. Her mission: how the power of vision can restore what has been torn on earth.

Listening Project

I am practicing this intensive listening project and instead of finding that I come closer to those around me I find I hear dissonance. I've usually reacted to the dissonance but now I am even more aware of it. The way that people don't listen to each other is apparent in conversations. I feel angry and I feel the need to calm myself down. I have never heard before how much in my mom's speech that I am always to put myself first. This doesn't fit for how I live, that community is the most important. It is too much to deal with, this darling, ambitious, first place seeking, wonderchild that she roots for me to be. She wants the world for me and she wants me to have the world. I feel extremely unmotivated to live to her standard, especially since she is a workaholic and doesn't put the same "be number one" requirements on herself. Forgiveness is not living a life of rebellion but rather one of stability. It's forgetting about how much I do not like constantly being pressured to be Number One, but to realize I am already living inside a different life and that I am still committed to my listening project.

I don't know which way to turn

Someone I am dating has started to make demands: slow down, enjoy the roses, you are too busy. I here comes this lubber, masterful, advice swinging guy and I guess I have to admit I am less than impressed. Great! Aren't we supposed to be in this together, helping each other to do "stuff." He has had a beautiful relentless patience in sitting on his ass waiting until the exact right time to tell me that I am too busy and too ambitious. Oh, I despise myself for being this irritable. It is going to be a long week until the drugs are fixed. It really didn't help to feel smashed last night. Forgivness means standing up again and not just Xing the person out of my life. Forgiveness means I don't feel threatened anymore.

Cambrian Rock

I found out that the rock I took back from the campsight is from the time that little things living in oceans moved from being little sticks of cells hovered together to little swimmy things with shells and claws. There was more oxygen in the water at the time and so animal's bodies could have a bigger surface area without having to gasp for the oxygen they needed. Thank you to the New York Natural History museum. I remember sitting in a room, overhead hearing the sound of lapping water, being surrounded by paintings of tiny creatures and watching an animation of Cambrian creatures. It was that that gentle introduction that first got me interested in the life stages of the Earth. Now I have a real rock from that time. Incredible!!

Camping Trip

I slept last night under the stars. The big dipper, or the Drinking Gourd as it was know to African Americans following the North Star to freedom along the underground railway, poked its head out among the stars first. Then one by one others made themselves known to me. I felt a voice whisper would I come with Him. I said no. I'm a sinner through and through. I am baptised by the Milky Way, by no other church. Now, I feel ready to live my life. It was a tiring night - I didn't even stay awake long enough to see the Milky Way in which I was baptised. My tiredness came from the day. I had spent the day on the shoulder of a Mesa doing trail restoration. In my path were Cambrian Rocks (lava rocks from the time of the dinosaurs), dust, wild roses, and sometimes at the top of the trail a view of the Uncompadre (stinky, dirty) river and mountains in Utah.

Avatar

I finally saw Avatar. I am back with my credentials as a full card carrying American in my society. There's a lot of good messages about alternative ways to go through life. There's messages about courage and beauty. I won't write about the plot of the film, since everyone here has seen it. I will say that I really like the main character and his video logs. I hope that literacy learning for my students can be as interactive next year as it was for him. Especially for those boys who seem to be locked into their minds as much as that character was locked into his body. As a teacher, and now an Avatar junkie, I have to see myself as a native of the forest. Guiding and living.