I’m not good at math as in not very good with numbers even though my brother is a mathematician.
I’m not sure how things like this happen—for one sibling to think in one particular way and another to think in another wholly different way and another sibling yet again to have brainwaves that point in their very own direction too. Other families have it different I’m sure but this is where we landed, a microcosm of looking for ways to see eye to eye.
I found it more settling to think about black swans this week and whatever they were trying to tell me. Maybe that is why numbers evade me although I love the numbers two and three. And we just celebrated my husband’s birthday on roads labeled 24 and 98 and it was his ______ (who cares what the number is) birthday, we are just so happy he got there. I rarely can tell how old I am, once I was 46 for two years and also Daylight Savings Time has me sleepy this year.
In any event, as the world turns in two decidedly opposite directions and away from logic at all, I jumped into week two of my project of 100 days, aka The 100 Day Project which became more about a jumping in and swimming in the ocean for a full week without drying off. I only reached the shore maybe twice and felt a difficult tug out to sea the entire time. Sometimes it’s like that when you’ve left things for a while, a wall built of welcome mats*.
I began here on Day 8, a picture to the writing where I left off on Day 7…If my art is the land and the words are the sea, I am beginning to feel a little excitement between the waves.
Nine: Far From Home
The words who are children and sent adrift, far from home. First one, then the other, at least one in care of the other, yet still, became the lucky ones in the end. The land sent the root with them, a cutting for the new world to put tendrils into any earth that would take them.
Ten & Eleven: The days after that
The notion that the mother is there always even if the mother for the time being is a stranger.
The notion of losing oneself in the reeds, in the potholes, in little pockets of water.
Twelve & Thirteen: The Waiting
We open another book at first sight of the shore, this one called The Waiting, long chapters devoted to ways of embracing and disappearing and in private hours, practicing what we would be, the sounds of birds chattering in a language we couldn’t speak.
Waiting hours meant to follow the custom and the rules, so knelt by the bedside wishing for you.
The days of becoming new lasted until we couldn’t recognize ourselves.
The very blue days of Spring when for others the world was waking up, but for us, in our strangeness, we were already awake and singular from here.
Fourteen:
Notes: The story is wistful this week maybe because I am simultaneously writing a story about my mother and my grandparents. So it’s almost as if this writing has become its shadow. Or this story is sneaking into the other story’s window.
I think, although I have a hard time with math, this project with words and pictures like shadows is urging the writing of the thing that has taken a long time to find words for. Sometimes I can only think in shadows which is why I’m probably bad at math.
We spent the weekend a few hours north, to celebrate Jim’s birthday, and I found a clue that I was on the right track with my waterfowl obsession in the used bookstore on Friday in Great Barrington, MA, the first book in my line of sight, like the treetops:
And then around through Hudson, NY on Sunday, these amazing sculptures at Ipsum by artist and novelist Anya Ulinich, handbuilt around fragments of porcelain figurines, which made me feel like I won the golden ticket.
One wing down.
See you next Sunday, hopefully not Monday again but sometimes life is bad at math.
Oh so beautiful!
I love your swans, Deb! Happy birthday to your husband! X