Our lives are performed in dramatic arcs that intersect and reflect and repulse and reflex: Are we divinely predestined or merely reflexive? The other day, I was thinking back on when I was a young child and, feeling alone and frustrated, I would climb a cherry tree in our backyard to get away from all the noise and hubbub of earthly living. From my vantage point 20 feet in the air, I could smell the wind and get a sense of a horizon that was far and above my current station.
David mentioned to me the other day that I had broken one the cardinal sins of the internet, in that I had mentioned my cats in a post and had not provided pictures of them.
I introduced Black Momma and Touriga in my last post. These are the matriarchs of the tribe. Next in seniority is Fleabag. Fleabag holds a special place in my heart. His mother Touriga sought sanctuary in the house after a particularly loud and vicious fight during my first weeks here. She arrived meowing on the doorstep with this tiny little scrap of a kitten audibly begging to be let in.
If we are lucky in our lives, we get unexpected windows of opportunity, a chance to do something totally different, to change tack or to travel a different path. Two years ago this month, I was offered an impromptu visit to Portugal – it was to change my life for ever. I knew if I missed this opportunity I would regret it for life. Six weeks later, I relocated here.
I moved from South West England to South West Portugal. As one of my best friends rather quaintly put it, “I moved from the ass end of nowhere to the ass end of the ass end of nowhere.”
From Here to there:
As we continue to mourn the death of Dr. Howard Stein, we are left to ponder the joy of knowing him and, in missing him, we begin the healing process by remembering the important lessons he taught us.
One of the most poignant conversations I had with him in the last few weeks of his life dealt with age and growing older. Howard reversed an important expectation for me, and I appreciate the reality of that sobering.
It has been a long five years since Jens Lekman’s last full length album, “Night Falls Over Kortedala” and it has felt even longer. Thinking back, I don’t recall exactly how I got into Lekman but I believe that it was around 2009. I was looking for something fun and I found it in Jens Lekman. In one of the first songs of his that I heard, he took the traditional advice of walking a thousand steps in someone else’s shoes before judging them and made a joke about how he was now one thousand steps away and judging the person anyhow.
One of the keys to living a human life is equally accepting the joys and the sorrows of our short time on this earth. We love to celebrate good things like birthdays and marriages and births, but when it comes to the sadder side of bouncing on this mortal coil, we often turn inward and inky and ask for privacy, and sometimes, we might even feel ashamed for feeling desperate and undecided. We need space and room to grieve because grief is the price we pay for love and friendship even though we may be reluctant to settle that barter.
How do we become wise? Is wisdom a gift, or is wisdom something practiced and acquired? Does wisdom know any age? Can a five-year-old child ever be wiser than someone who has lived 85 years?
Over the Summer, Janna and I were thrilled to spend another married year together as we celebrated our anniversary. Our marriage is the number one greatest achievement of my life. Sharing your life with someone is a massive challenge and every single day the relationship changes and re-breathes and moves again in sometimes unimaginable ways as once expressed in — Promise Before Dying — published in Urban Semiotic on July 18, 2005:
Then she asked me if I would bury her under a tree with shade when she died.
I promised her I would.
Then she asked me if I would bury her under a tree with shade that had leaves that change colors in the Fall from red to purple to orange.
I promised her I would.
I am completely and totally in love with Adele — in the most honorable and humanistic way — and it is my delight to review her latest 21 album. Yes, Adele is a SuperGenius SuperStar from the UK and, yes, she is only 22 years old. Her voice is a throaty, smoky, raspy mix of the Bluesy heartache made famous by Fiona Apple, Rihanna and Janis Joplin.
Too often, when we place the self in the context of the greater world, we point outward instead of directing the fit inward. Today, I’d like to discuss the idea how learning civilizes you — the self — and not just the greater “ourselves.”
Janna and I aren’t big on formal gift giving. We have a saying that is frequently expressed in our marriage: “Every day is your birthday.” That doesn’t mean we’re wild spenders — or that giving a “gift” to each other requires spending money — but it does change our perspective on the “Mandatory Holidays” that drive greeting card sales and generate increased prices for dining out while lowering prices on consumer goods like clothing.
I usually write 3,500 words a day for publication, six days a week. That daily effort averages out to a million words a year. Those writing numbers are numbing and they don’t include the daily grind of writing emails or crafting shopping lists or the rare, luxuriant, instance of love letter making.
Every couple of years or so, we receive a comment on an article that is both stunning and numbing. That sort of rendering comment reveals a new angle on an aging ideal that is both magnificently enlightening and intolerably human. Twelve hours ago, we received one of those comments on an article — The Uncanny and Homesick Sexual Longing — originally published on November 12, 2007.
We have always enjoyed reading Camille Paglia’s articles in Salon.com, but we have been stupefied the past year or so over her ongoing and irrational public crush on perpetual quitter Sarah Palin.
