Skip to main content

Free To Be....

The Rabbit, on hearing Mama needs to work to make money, started to come up with reasons why she should be more of a priority -- and why Mama should work less.

So she came up with a list of things that, after all, all free. Although shocked that My Little Ponies and cookies actually did cost money (the horror), she was psyched that I did agree with many of them:

air
clouds
colors
dreams
outer space where all the planets live like Jupiter
planets
whole wide world
laughing
teeth and eyeballs

Given my state of mind in recent days, I was so taken aback by this, and taped the little list to the wall over my desk. I forget how much my mind has been shaped and molded to stop seeing the world this way.

So today I'm noticing the crisp red crane near a construction site down the street, and the dawny pink flowers of my blooming african violet. And even though the city is blanketed in a thick humid fuzz in an desperate (and pathetic) attempt to prevent fall from trumping, I know that tonight the moon will come, shining from its perch in outer space where all the planets live like Jupiter.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

A thought

Perhaps sometimes a gift can be delivered in the guise of a tragedy. It's just a matter of perception, after all. I suspect that the talent lies in looking beyond the surface to what lies beneath and beyond. And, of course, being able to make sense of it all and going on to apply that knowledge to building a productive way forward. Here's hoping.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

A friend recently emailed me to say that her big memory of her stay with us last year is that she had a great birthday, one of the few where she didn't 'act like a spoiled grumpy princess'. She tried to give me all the credit but as I explained to her, it was all down to having a fellow female organising the birthday fun rather than leaving it to her partner. Her email got me thinking about birthdays and how very different men and women are in their attitudes to celebrating special occasions. It also had me thinking about my birthday two years ago when I threw a major tantrum in the Carrefour car-park after being told that we were off to do the weekly shop, kids in tow, which was simply the final straw at the end of a very uninspiring day. In contrast, my birthday last year was rather lovely (a morning on my own in a spa with no mobile coverage, pure selfish bliss). This year - in a few short months, eek! - I'll be hitting the grand old age of 38. This will be my las...