oh...just me: May 2006 Archives

I wrote about this poet when I heard the tribute on NPR a few weeks ago. Here's the quote from Time:

It seems I just deleted or otherwise erased the entire contents of six years of email. Yes, I did backup...a few months ago?

Wow. Want to start a new life? :-/

And then there are the vagaries of memory. I've been sorting and organizing memorabilia, trying to put things in chronological order. How often did I misdate things? Not sure, but some years definitely seem incorrect. Sequencing? Sketchy. In one instance, there's my written version and someone else's written version of the same event. Different!

I'm a bit numb with the loss. I had envisioned a certain texturing of the written documentation of my life, thoughts, processes, etc. I know it's not ALL gone; just the most recent several months, but gosh - it's a shock. Or, maybe I'm not numb? Wouldn't that be a change! Perhaps the half-dozen deletions of blog comments have inured me to this eventuality?

As Little Brother said upon departure a few days ago, there have been "so many goodbyes." Me too, to people, places, and hoped-for futures.

I leave this space tomorrow. It's been good for me. Who knows what the next one will bring?

Craig Barnes, in the Sept/Oct Utne Reader (1997) was quoted:

"We Americans try to find the principle of a thing, the objective reality, the long and the short term, the height and the depth; we analyze and evaluate the truth of a thing and our demoncractic origins are so far back that we have utterly forgotten that procuess - due process, fair process, all process - is at bottom only a substitute for relationship. In a traditional culture the relationship is the key: It points the way to the truth, it is the source that signals whether a thing is credible or not. When relationship is right, the truth can be known."

Originally in Timeline (May/June 1997).

I am in a melancholy mood, yet I am resolute.

Yes, that is better phrasing than yesterday's version. :-/

Today was the last day of COM375 Section Five. I am sad. There was so much good energy generated among all these students. Yeah, I definitely annoyed them at times (they were definitely not happy I still care enough to penalize them for incorrect punctuation) but ... those who were ready took the horse by the reins and rode this class for all it was worth. As my favorite spiritual advisor says,

Students will make their choices over the remaining days and the wiki will take it's "final" shape. Final, that is, until the freshmen take over in the fall! :-) I haven't decided yet - should I give them their own separate wiki or have them build and add on to this one?

I'm in a melancholy yet resolute mood. There are many reasons, but I'll cite missing Sam, rereading Jonathan Livingston Seagull last night, and hearing a bit of an NPR story on the death of Stanley Kunitz, including a recording of him reading from his poem, The Layers (emphasis added).

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

I'm reading one of my favorite student's essays. She's writing about the hazards of teen driving, actually, the hazards of teen drivers. One of her points of evidence is underdevelopment of the cognitive mechanism for impulse control, the "dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the so-called executive branch of the brain that weighs risks.” Maybe I take so many risks because my dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex never fully matured? :-o

Broughton is visiting and has given me a raft of grief about "overshooting" while driving. If I recall correctly there was the road this morning (two choices, I was trying to time breaks in the flow of oncoming traffic); a driveway into a shop (just drifted a little far ahead); and another turn (somewhere?) as the navigator couldn't decide if I should or should not turn "here".

We speculated on this as a possible personality flaw.

An English irregular verb (!), to overshoot means simply to go too far.

Guilty as charged. :-/

This puts me in dubious company with ecological overshoot (E.O. Wilson has calculated that humanity is currently operating at 120% of earth's sustainable capacity), telecommunications overshoot (transitions that (somehow?) exceed a final value and convective overshoot (dealing with instability, which goes without saying).