Galveston

Posted on May 23, 2024 by marybethrew

I attended a training in Galveston in early May, to become more skilled at boat stuff. It just so happens I spent a semester there almost exactly twenty-five years ago. I was quite excited to see it again, this place from my past.

Looking down on earth from the sky – over Seattle, or the Cascades, or the Rockies, or Houston, or Phoenix, shapes organize themselves into assemblages, groups of this or that. Green crop circles or brown crop circles, large or small. Suburban housing, skyscrapers, mountain peaks. Rivers with their feathered fans of tributaries still as statues, the flowing only implied from so high up.

When I got to the Galveston seawall and walked along the beach, the assemblages were spirals. Moon snails, channeled whelks, knobbed whelks, many other snails. Moon snails whole and intact. Moon snails cracked laterally– the spiral exposed. Moon snails cracked on the side – the spiral spilling open. The top taken off a whelk – a spiral self-contained, but having lost its depths. Another with the top gone, only the deep center groove remaining – uncontained and open to the infinite. Spirals with multiple injuries, cracks and gouges, jagged edged and hard like shards, like knives ready to inflict instead of being inflicted upon. Some whose edges are once again smooth, ready to soothe, ready to scoop sand and shimmer. Some broken crosswise, revealing compartments, but the segments taper, the spiral is implied. Windows into spirals, where water and sand can enter, cannot be kept out. But where water and sand can also empty out, can be given and taken, a portal, a conduit. Holes drilled by predators. Neat, symmetrical, belying their violent origin. A whelk unearthed from long buried under sand, where no oxygen reached until the shell blackened. Having risen to the surface where there is all this air to breathe.

I like that birds exist and that birders are a known type everywhere, so that a woman carrying around a zoom lens is quietly accepted as “probably a birder” and I can go on taking pictures of whatever I want, including, sure, some of the birds of Galveston.

On my last day, I asked two of the local women involved in the boat training for the most reliable place to see dolphins off Galveston. I wasn’t sure they’d have an answer, but oh, they did. Go to the ferry, they said. Walk on and ride it across and back. They told me it was free for walk-on passengers, and that you are guaranteed to see dolphins.

My hair was already a tangled mess from the day on the small boats, so I stood on the ferry’s upper deck near the bow, camera at the ready. I started seeing dolphins right away, surfacing and milling and feeding at the terminal. Pelicans, a frigate bird, an ibis, lots of seabirds I cannot name.

I zoomed in on cargo vessel bows coming in and out of the shipping channel, but saw no bow riders on the way across to Port Bolivar. A few car passengers filled in along the balcony rail while the ferry was underway, then they retreated to their cars below as we docked. I stayed on the ferry at the opposite end, walked to the stern which would be the new bow, and watched groups of dolphins feeding at that terminal, concentrated at the end of a jetty. Then I caught one leaping in the distance. I could not stop smiling, alone on the deck.

The ferry emptied out of cars and filled back up again, and we retraced our path. This time we were headed upwind, made more intense by the speed of the ferry, and I felt like I could lift right off the deck. I managed to stay on my feet and keep watching the waves. A tugboat was crossing in front of us in the shipping channel, so I zoomed in on its bow where a dolphin was bow-riding. I caught it leaping and spinning and frolicking in the splashy bulge of water pushed in front of the rounded bow. My whole trip felt complete.

I did not know until I scrolled through my photos later that the tug was named “Dolphin,” how very on the nose. And another kind of spiral, life folding back on itself, like the dolphin spiraling in the bow wave, like reappearing in Galveston twenty-five years later to visit an earlier version of myself.

~thankful thursday~ popcorn seeds

Posted on December 3, 2020 by marybethrew

11/26/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

I am grateful to still be feeling the considerable benefits of this gratitude practice, nearing the end of year five! This year more than any other, it is clear to me that I don’t have to feel great to feel grateful… but purposely cultivating gratitude does help me feel better. I think I will still close out this year’s 30 day challenge feeling like the bedraggled flower I was when I began, but I will also have set aside a good stash of seeds for next season. As for today specifically, I’m grateful for a yummy nourishing meal, a daylight walk in the woods with Rich, some good music, and a piece of pecan pie waiting for me.

11/27/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

I am grateful for good men. It is a gratefulness saturated with grief today. I am listening to the good man I am married to talking to his Aunt on the phone to let her know her brother, his father, passed away today. My father-in-law was the wonderful man responsible for raising the wonderful man I love. I am so sad, and wanted to let tonight be a moment of silence, but I decided to google gratitude and grief… and here is what Brené Brown says:

“Gratitude is vulnerability. I’ve had the honor of sitting across from people who have survived tremendous things. No matter what the trauma was, they said: “when those around me are grateful for what they have, I know they understand the magnitude of what I’ve lost”. So often we’re afraid to be grateful for what we have because we think it’s insensitive to those who have lost. However I think gratitude, in some ways, is healing for people.”

I always loved to be the one to make Bob a cup of coffee or pop open a beer for him, on the extremely rare occasions he’d indulge in either one. Tonight we toasted him using the glasses he gave us, and I imagine some popcorn will be popped in his honor in the next couple of days. (Yet another divine thing he is responsible for teaching my husband.) I’m posting one of my favorite photos of our dads from our wedding. I am so very grateful for the memories we get to carry forward with us, of this good man.

11/28/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

I am grateful for the solace of our backyard.

11/29/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

I am grateful for light. Back to church we went today, and this time the sun crested like a wave over the ridge, poured itself through great cylindrical columns into the coral reef of fungus arrayed across the layers of ancient trees, and sublimed in droplets from tiny jellyfish mushrooms swimming up a tree limb.

11/30/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

I can tell that the gratitude challenge has had its intended effect on me again this year, because day 30 whizzed right by me without even thinking about writing a post, but was still a day in which grateful thoughts crossed my mind numerous times. I have tried to make a point over the last few years to remind myself that gratitude is not a class I’m taking for a grade, but I really feel that not showing up on the last day of class proves that I’m absorbing this lesson.

If I had a theme this year it might be the seeds of gratitude planted in the gratitude garden, and how they are an investment in my future nourishment. Whenever I notice and appreciate the snuggly kitty on my lap, the warmth emanating from the wood stove, or my hardworking husband coming home from work, it’s another seed in the seed bank. These dormant spirals of potential, storing an idea for next year, waiting it out through the harsh conditions of winter. So many adaptations to fly, float, cling, catapult, shake, or shatter, to make sure they deliver on the promise of future abundance. Many kinds of seeds require a little hardship to germinate when conditions become hospitable for growth; a freeze, some scarring, a soak in some acid, a trip through an animal gut, smoke exposure, or even trial by fire.

Somehow this fire-tested emblem of tiny, vulnerable faith, whispering its wisdom of diversity, became the mascot of gratitude 2020 and that’s just how this magic seems to work.

All of that to say, today I am grateful for nachos for dinner. Thanks for joining me y’all!

~thankful thursday~ take care

Posted on May 21, 2020 by marybethrew

Saturday 5-9

I am grateful for a beautiful day. Rich worked, but he didn’t go in until 8 so we slept until it was daytime instead of “still nighttime” as I describe normal 4:15 wakeups. After he went to work, I meditated, worked on lifelong learner (13^th birthday edition) and then spent an hour in the garden, arranging dahlia bulbs, black eyed susan roots, and moth mullein and chrysanthemum seeds in the freshly weeded yellow terrace. Then I drove to pick up my veggies, stocked the fridge, did some more writing and some more gardening, and got on the video call with Quinn. We read about when the nine leave Rivendell, and their fight with the snowy pass on Caradhras, when they turn back and the men have to carry the hobbits through the snow, but Legolas can walk on top of the snow to bring hope back to all that the journey is one they can endure.

Rich came home mid-day and then we spent the afternoon together in the yard. He mowed while I transplanted pansies, verbena, monarda, nicotiana. I planted some more seeds out in the red terrace – hollyhocks, cosmos, scarlet sage. I found him on his knees in the rhododendron bed we planted a year ago, weeding. I joined in and did the perimeter where lots of new columbines are joining the herd.

Sunday 5-10

While I made breakfast, Rich played George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass disc 2, which we had pulled out because Sheryl Crow played such a lovely version of Beware of Darkness the other night. We hadn’t played George’s version yet, but I woke up with the song in my head, and when it came through the speakers when Rich pushed play on track one, it merged seamlessly with what was already in my head. Synchronicity.

“Beware of darkness

Watch out now, take care
Beware of the thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your head
The hopelessness around you
In the dead of night

Beware of sadness
It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for”

Gardened all day on Mother’s Day. Nothing to do but power through. I added ten buckets of compost in the front garden, where the slugs have been preventing any poppies or nicotiana or lilies from growing. I’ve been on regular patrol, and now I have Lauren’s grape poppy seeds on their way to me in the mail to start again. I had a lovely extra visit with Quinn. He showed up at noon after sending me a Sierpenski’s triangle Mother’s Day card, freshly showered and with a button-down shirt on. He dressed up for me.

Monday 5-11

I am grateful Mother’s Day is behind me.

I gardened hard from 6-8am thinking it would rain any second… got lots more compost spread around and seeds are ready for a good soaking. At 3pm there was not really much rain yet, but a wee sprinkle.

Picked up groceries and filled my tank. Just shy of two months on one tank of gas.

Four wilsons! In the bayou. A whole wilson family! And more hummingbird bayou visits to the twinberry.

Tuesday 5-12

Quinn and I started an email story where we each write one line and send it back and forth. It began,

Once there was a boy who lived in a land where

the only things were a chain of islands and the ocean.

I’m excited to see where it takes us!

I am grateful to be starting to learn not to explain myself.

Rich and I went on an errand date to pick up more garden hose, lightbulbs, cat litter, whiskey, and coffee beans, and put gas in the highlander. Then I made nachos, of course. Always grateful for nachos.

Wednesday 5-13

I have been through the abundance meditations twice now and picked favorites. Number seventeen with the flowing stream and bird sounds, “I move through my days lighthearted and carefree knowing all is well,” is good for me to repeat.

Also cathartic is my walk around the rainy yard sacrificing slugs. I’m grateful for balance. Water sounds always help, even if it’s rain. I’m happy about this rain as it is timed very well to soak all the flower seeds I just planted, though I, and the seeds, will be ready for sun again soon!

Yelling also feels good. Playful laugh yelling at Rich’s mischief, yelling at the butthead deer who eat my flowers. Lighthearted and carefree is easier after a good yell.

Thursday 5-14

Grateful for music and literature. One of Quinn’s favorite bands, Ok Go, put out a new song called all together now, and I love it, as well as what they wrote. The song references Rebecca Solnit’s piece where we are melted down in the chrysalis, which I also love.

“There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

“But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure. But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit.”

~Rebecca Solnit

I’ve been thinking about how being able to live with my choices includes not just my decisions about where I go, how I behave, what I do concerning Quinn and our physical safety and the physical safety of others around us, but also how I speak, write, react, how I treat others. It’s not unique to this time, but right now there seem to be so many opportunities to put this into practice. It helps when I can remember The Four Agreements, to not take personally what is coming from other people. My integrity is based on me being responsible for me.

For me, fear is not weakness; bravery is not absence of fear; delving into emotions is not the opposite of courage. I’ve definitely been swimming in the deep end, emotionally. Anything can make me cry; tonight it was the encouraging note from Quinn’s algebra teacher, for example.

But I know that for me, the alternative to stringing these weekly beads of emotional intensity on a continuous strand, is to let the strand tie me up in knots. There is a certain amount of tension in the line I must maintain; too much slack and snarls start to form. I am grateful for the tool of writing, for the way the strung beads can sometimes reflect light when the sun shines again to remind me when I look back over its length.

Friday 5-15

The sun is coming out, and it lit up every spider web in the woods as I went for an early morning walk. Everything is still wet from the rain, and the wet edges of things allow the light to refract so the edges are visible in a new, crystalline, gossamer way. I love the fresh new beginning of the sun after a three-day rain. I love spotting the spiraling new beginnings everywhere around me, bending the light.

Mercies are new every morning.

~rainbow mondays~ april may

Posted on May 13, 2019 by marybethrew

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

heliotrope

Posted on August 19, 2018 by marybethrew

it hasn’t been the easiest summer for me. last thursday evening rich and i watched quinn in his theatre camp performance, and then we drove to the farm to fill boxes with hand-picked dusty tomatoes by twilight. we passed by the sunflowers waving in the coastal breeze we must have brought out of the west with us, and i was reminded of the ten minutes i spent walking beneath their bright heads a few weeks ago while my parents were here visiting.

friday afternoon following the tomato adventure, i was shouting maniacially in my office that ipads had no business having a date setting of 1970 before ipads had even been invented, and the only reason i was assessing ancillary tech problems at that moment was that the cold room where i was supposed to be running pre-trial swim-tunnel tests on larval arctic cod had a pool of sewage surrounding its floor drain.

i’ve been struggling in the job satisfaction department, i’ve had the engine replaced in my car, the visit with my parents went by way too quickly, and it all just seems like too much to do in not enough time.

on the other hand, i keep receiving a paycheck, my mechanic showed up seconds after my husband when i broke down, directly via providence, and we were so lucky to get to enjoy a full two weeks with grammy and grampy!

the night i felt the worst was the night before we took them to the farm for a visit and a meal in the farm’s restaurant. that night was when my husband shared his wise metaphor of windblown flowers. when we got to the farm, the sprinklers were watering the flower garden out front in the parking lot, and quinn called out, “look! a rainbow!” then when mom needed to rest, she and dad were sitting on a parked wagon in the shade, so i walked across the road to a field with a lot of sunflowers growing along the edge to take pictures. while i was spending time with them, i was thinking about how low i was feeling the day before, but enjoying the beauty of the day and being with my people. i didn’t feel great but i was choosing to move on as though i felt ok, hoping the fake it til i make it approach would work. i realized just then that the way sunflowers turn their faces to the sun was an apt metaphor.

when we went inside, i was waiting for quinn outside the bathroom and read the bulletin board, to which this note was pinned:

“advice from a sunflower:

be bright, sunny and positive, stand tall and proud. keep on growing, drink lots of water, spread seeds of happiness. embrace your natural beauty and always face the sunshine.”

in case i needed the message from the sunflowers spelled out for me.

one of the things i must do consistently in order to maintain my ability to orient positively is to record the sunny memories (as well as the shadows, honesty matters) and integrate my storyline (one unbroken line). i come all undone without that. i know not everyone needs to write to remain whole and intact, but by now i know this about myself. i do need to, it’s not about producing a piece that people will want to read (much of what is written is never posted). i’ve been pondering something glennon doyle wrote about this topic, and as a “recovering everything” she is mindful that for her, writing can be another form of addiction/dysfunction if she is so busy gathering material she isn’t living in the present moment. i want to stay mindful of such pitfalls myself, and so i have turned that stone over in my mind these last weeks and i find that for me, writing helps me to be present in the moments, rather than grinding the gears of my overthinking cap. it’s consistently better for my well-being to write than not to write. it is an act of love towards myself, never one of self-sabotage. but i’m glad that i checked.

so, in the spirit of orienting sunward, one night i was typing moments-to-become-memories while grampy was playing guitar and singing amazing grace in the kitchen. rich was looking at baseball scores with lisa kitty on his lap, grammy was having hot cocoa on the couch beside me, and quinn was re-organizing his entire pokemon binder in his room. these were some of the bits of this summer i managed to put down on the page:

driving down the coast to spend sunday at country fair with rich, it was like the bay was filled with fog.

while i was at the outer gate waiting to get in, a guy behind me in line was playing his banjo and singing a line that matched perfectly the words i had been reading the night before. “it’s time to reunite your soul, and your mind, and your body…”

like with music and fairies and beauty and nature and sunshine? oh, country fair, how i love you.

rich and i heard the rainbow girls at 11:55 on the main stage. gorgeous three-part harmony, guitars, harmonica, upright bass, other cool obscure instruments. one of the babies dancing in the crowd had on a shirt that said “love is a rainbow.”

a lesson in impermanence. the man who made my ring traded me for a new one of the same design, and asked if it’s okay if he melts the broken one down and makes something new out of it. it wasn’t easy but at the same time it was easy. it’s just a thing, a ring, something impermanent that will pass away… it’s the love that it represents that won’t fade! i like to think it will be part of someone else’s love story, and the yes yes yes energy going out to that other love story from ours… the spiral continuing outward.

at one point i let rich know that i hadn’t brought enough backup items for my period, and i was eyeing the bountiful moss on the trees to make him laugh. then he pointed out that if there is a place for finding alternative items for such a purpose, this would be it (there is at least one actual red tent-inspired zone set aside for women at fair). about 2 seconds later i walked by a booth where a mom was selling off her gently used cloth diaper stash, and i bought one with butterflies on it. definitely another case of providence. (and tmi! but you should know by now that i don’t believe in that.)

rich bought me a new pair of spiral earrings. a little girl named sailor pearl at the spiral jewelry booth bonded with me, because she loves the ocean and is a self-proclaimed mermaid.

looking for a souvenir for quinn, i found “peace in every language” pendants, and got quinn an egyptian hieroglyph green pendant of “peace”. he loves it.

driving back home, the sun was a single smoldering ember touching down in the ocean.

country roads… you know how i feel about that song.

my heart threatened to burst multiple times throughout the visit, as quinn would emulate things he’d observe grampy doing. he started sprinkling pepper on his food, presumably because he has come to realize it’s what the men he looks up to in his life do, so he now does it, too.

i introduced quinn to spirograph, one of the childhood treasures lovingly extracted from the attic and delivered from new york by my parents. it is the perfect time in his development. he is into mathy drawing and patterns, and deeply appreciates the awesomeness of creating spirally flowery scallopy mandala shapes. also, he is capable of all the fine motor coordination required, but it is still just hard enough that it’s a good discipline for taming the inner perfectionist. there was a hilarious moment when we discovered my younger handwriting indicating how “dumb” that one really, really difficult spirograph design was that i so desperately wanted to master back in the 1980s when i was working on my own inner spirograph perfectionist.

also in that tote was my great grandma rew’s italics typewriter. the ink was dry but i ordered new ink ribbons. quinn loved pushing the keys and seeing how the mechanism works. once the ribbon came a few days later, we started typing! some old technology is so beautiful, it’s worth holding onto.

dad talked all about his memories of the farm when he was a kid, of how all the farms in the “neighborhood” (which included my great grandpa’s and great uncle’s farms) would get together to make lighter work of the oat threshing. grandma (his mom) would make a big meal for everyone, and then they’d all go to the next farm the next day. dad remembers being 5 and getting introduced to pumpkin pie, which he thought he wouldn’t like because it didn’t look good, but one of the farmers from one of the 10 or so farms said he should just try a taste, and he has liked it ever since.

another topic we discussed was musical talent in the family. i never knew that nana sang in the u.s.o. in new york city (a soloist!) during wwii! we were all laughing because mom would tell nana to shush so she could hear poppy sing his silly songs in his tuneless bronx accent.

friends of all ages hitting it off at a nacho potluckaversary.

tenderness towards a tree indicating the right emotional switches are being flipped in my human child.

i was a bit grumpy about having to go to work and cut fish for two days while grammy and grampy were still here, but my dad was undaunted and made himself an ambitious errands list. i heard later that they almost lost quinn at the library, where they went to do research for dad’s book. he and quinn had gone downstairs to nonfiction, but quinn wandered off and was reading diary of a wimpy kid on the floor behind a couch in the juvenile section. dad only found him because our favorite librarian said, “hi quinn!” just as dad was getting worried he’d have to have him paged. thank goodness for librarians, and for 4 out of 5 librarians being on a first name basis with quinn.

a nice drive along the coast with frequent stops at overlook vistas resulted in my parents getting to see a few whales!

family boating! quinn and i attended this free local port activity with camp boss and it was completely rad and awesome! i had on my schooner hat and so was deemed qualified to sail a 15-footer. quinn and i embarked. he decided he didn’t prefer sailing because you’re never level. he switched to a kayak and paddled around like a boss. it was awe inspiring to watch him maneuver and be so strong and capable. i took photos of everyone from shore and then i took koala out in the little row boat for a while. he wanted to get out at one point “see mama” and swung his foot up onto the gunwale. he did not seem to be concerned about disembarking while we were underway. luckily little kid life jackets are made with a built-in handle to grab the scruff of their neck like an errant kitten and plop them back inboard. genius.

one night i made chili for dinner and dad said it should be renamed hottie, so now i may have to always call it that.

hummingbirds in flower garden.

(that was a pretty note. i’m not sure what it meant other than we must have sat around watching hummingbirds in the flower garden. i took these photos a week or so after their visit.)

the penultimate afternoon of grammy and grampy’s visit was when quinn went back to his dad’s. that night after they went to bed, quinn the eskimo/the mighty quinn played on the radio. i admit i felt a little vashnicken. but mostly happy and full of love.

and now the tomatoes are tucked snugly into their canning jars, just as the memories are now tucked here in their cyber canning jars, the tastes of summer preserved to lend their flavor to a colder month.

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ enfolded eggs part 1

Posted on June 19, 2018 by marybethrew

camp boss informed me that comments were inadvertently closed on the previous lifelong learner post. i have updated it so commenting is back on, and can only assume wordpress is punishing me for my 5770-word verbosity. i have not reformed myself, in fact this post is split into parts because it got out of hand again. (another cup of tea is in order if you actually plan to read this one.)

the past few months have felt like a surge in quinn’s intellectual life, in the same way that the fall and winter months felt like a time of extreme vertical growth.

now he is flexing his mind muscles… hexaflexing them, that is.

if i had to point to a day when the current intellectual surge began to sweep us along in its current, i would say it was after seeing the movie a wrinkle in time. it was spring break, and since i was working, quinn was with me at work most of the week. on wednesday, we left work early and went to the afternoon matinee. his class had seen the movie the week before, but he had been at home with his dad nursing a cold, so he had missed the field trip. they had read the book in class and we had both re-read the book at home (it sat beside the bathtub for when either of us was soaking) in preparation for seeing the film. after the movie, it was incredibly fun to share our points of view on how the movie triumphed in ways that only movies can, and ways in which it failed to honor the book we hold very dear. we agreed point for point.

near the beginning of the movie (this would only constitute a mild spoiler, but just in case: spoiler warning), there is something not from the book, but which quinn and i both felt was a good visual representation of the feelings between meg and her parents. she holds a paper hexagon that folds into itself, and one of her parents says, “my love is there, even if you can’t feel it.” meg folds the paper, and a new design appears, having flipped inside-out, and one final fold surprisingly reveals yet a third image of a brightly colored rainbow heart galaxy (quinn’s description). meg murmurs, “not gone, just enfolded.”

when we got home from the movie, i wanted to show quinn what that paper hexagon was all about, so i looked on khan academy for a tutorial on hexaflexagons, and was not disappointed.

vi hart, the author of this, and 49 other awesome videos under the heading “math for fun and glory: doodling in math,” is now a hero to quinn. and between that day and this, he has watched all 50, most of them multiple times. our hexaflexagon journey began that very day, including both trihexaflexagons like meg’s, and hexahexaflexagons which can flip to 6 different faces. i highly encourage you to watch some of vi’s math for fun and glory videos, as they are both educational and witty. some of our favorites from the hexaflex section included her warnings in the safety video concerning possible ways in which hexaflexing can go awry, warning us against, amongst other things, the danger of hexaflexaperfectionism. we started asking each other to please pass the “interdimensional void” when we wanted the black marker. probably the most quoted line by quinn has been, “perfectly healthy snakes may turn into snake loops; or worse, become decapitated. either state is fatal for the snake, as having no head can lead to starvation.”

another favorite safety concern: “a change in chirality could be a sign that your flexagon has been flipped through four-dimensional space and is possibly a highly dangerous multi-dimensional portal.”

we made our own version of meg’s hexaflexagon, as well as a pile of others with rainbow colors, snakes, celtic knots, and mandalas, each enfolded with love, of course. enfolded isn’t just a collapsing of geometric shapes upon themselves… it’s a swaddling blanket surrounding a babe in a mama’s arms, a protective cocoon around the transformation of a youngling, a container underneath the overflowing emotions of a pre-teen whose gangly limbs can relax against the sides after that which needs to spill out has receded and what is left is love.

on quinn’s next foray into math for fun and glory, he tackled spirals, fibonacci, and being a plant, in which pinecones, and other things that begin with pine-, are examined to find that their spirals are arranged according to numbers in the fibonacci sequence. i’m kind of into spirals, but this is all new and magical math to me, so it’s been inspiring to learn about it alongside my kiddo.

i wore a spiral necklace for the last month of pregnancy, and on through quinn’s babyhood. i have a pair of silver spiral earrings i wear pretty much every day. i had a fancier pair of silver spirals made for my wedding day. my wedding ring is also a spiral of sorts, and i’ve explained the meaning behind that. i resonated with midwife ina may gaskin’s descriptive writing about how babies spiral into the world head first, facing down, then turning and facing up. each time i think of spirals, i think of birth and of beginning again, always having an opportunity to return to myself, return to a grounded place. the spirals quinn started drawing when he was barely 2 years old jumped off the page at me, but then having a child is a great way to rediscover everything you know and love about the world as they hand it back to you again and again. this verbose quote from one of the parenting books i read years ago with an emotional intelligence angle uses spiral imagery to describe the normal course of human development.

from: giving the love that heals a guide for parents

by harville hendrix and helen hunt

(quoting edward edinger ego and archetype): “the process of alternation between union and separation seems to occur repeatedly throughout the life of the individual, both in childhood and in maturity. indeed, this cycle (or better, spiral) formula seems to express the basic process of the psychological development from birth to death.”

hh and hh:

“there are two rhythms that move through the developing child at the same time: oscillation from the center that expands and then returns, and progression through stages of growth as the child moves through his preordained evolution toward adulthood. the interplay of these rhythms shapes the spiral pattern of healthy growth.

oscillation begins with attachment, expands into exploration and differentiation and then subsides back into attachment again. the baby internalizes this rhythm during the first years of his life and repeats it naturally as he progresses through the stages of growth. he is born emotionally connected to his mother, and as he feels that this connection is becoming secure, he cautiously moves out (still attached) to explore and connect with his nonmaternal environment, regularly returning to his mother’s presence for reassurance.

if this first and most basic rhythm is supported and allowed to follow its natural course without impediment, it will be repeated successfully later when the child falls in love with a romantic partner- or a job, a cause, an idea, or his own child, when he becomes a parent- and then learns to express his unique self within the context of a romantic relationship or other important life experience.

in fact, all of the primary tasks of childhood recur in coordinated rhythms throughout the individual’s life. the newborn child has within him all the impulses that will later flower at their appointed time. he falls in love with someone or something. he explores it and crafts a new aspect of his identity with it; he develops new skills; he manifests caring for others. he comes to know the rhythm very well and will repeat this cycle over and over again. the degree of his success depends on how well he has completed his basic evolution during the first eighteen to twenty years of his life.

perhaps you are aware of this rhythm in your own life. think for a moment about how it shows up in your experience as a parent. when your child was born, you fell in love with him. with this marvelous and mysterious creature in your life, you began to explore the world of parenting. that may be why you are reading this book. as you cared for your newborn and got used to your new role, you acquired a new layer of identity as a “parent.” with increasing experience, you learned to handle yourself more confidently as you expanded your competence. perhaps you also sought the support and guidance of others who shared your experience, your peers in parenting. and recognizing your participation in the preservation of the race, you became interested in the welfare of others and the quality of life in society. this expansion outward is a natural cycle in our lives.

the child’s growth depends also on the other rhythm that propels him forward, even as he comes back around to revisit previous tasks. this rhythm is not just an oscillation but also a progression through distinct developmental impulses. the seeds of them all are present at birth, but each blossoms in its own time in response to an inner impulse and the readiness of the environment. if his parents have nourished the first flower appropriately, the next bud will open. each time he responds to another developmental impulse that pushes him forward through the developmental stages, he returns to his primary connection with his caretaker for the emotional security to move to the next stage. each impulse solidifies and then dissolves, one into the other. it is as if the child were being blown unerringly toward the gates of maturity by the wise breath of nature. his life flows from one transformation into another and continues to do so even after he arrives at adulthood.”

~~~

“these two rhythms of oscillation and progression move together in a pattern that is both circular and progressive, suggesting, as edinger says, a spiral. think of a spiral staircase: each step is a progression upward in space and is also a revisiting of a particular point around the circumference of a circle. we spend our lives walking up our own spiral staircases. at each turn, we get the same view we had before at the same spot, but because we are higher up, the view is broader.

~~~

the beauty of the spiral is that we will always get another chance. encountering the step again at the same place on a higher level, we can learn to do it better the next time. we can become more surefooted as we get older.

so, having fibonacci spirals delight my eleven-year-old is not so out of left field, and serves to bring me back to myself yet again.

one of the delightful revelations of the fibonacci videos was that music notes also correspond to fibonacci numbers, and it is beyond me whether this is mere magical coincidence or something more tied to the rules of nature or mathematics. what was magical coincidence, was that quinn and i were exploring the piano keyboard at nearly the same time, as it relates to his percussion and musical training. while we watched rich’s son play his alumni basketball games, i taught quinn how to draw piano keys and he kept busy for many octaves. recalling the miles of piano key doodles of my own youth, i was yet again returned to myself, this time to the sound of basketballs dribbling down the court, sneakers squeaking on the polished floor, and the scratch of a pencil across a piece of graph paper.

when making math doodles, it’s hard to avoid sometimes making a don’t-dle, but i’m excited for quinn to be launching back into drawing, a form of creativity he has always ebbed and flowed with a bit, due in part to perfectionism. the math doodle genre seems to have really struck a chord with him, and he bounced from pascal’s triangle to sierpenski’s triangle and soon he was inventing quinn’s triangle.

the compass and protractor set he got for his birthday from his aunt and uncle have been handy during this math drawing phase. one of our new favorite math shapes is a cardioid. as vi explains, a cardioid is the inverse of a parabola. but i just learned from wikipedia that a cardioid is also an envelope of a pencil of circles (enfolding them!) and, get this, a cardioid is also part of a family of curves known as sinusoidal spirals!

starting to embrace nerd metaphors: parabola, because i cardioid you. (translation: smile, because i love you.)

after watching vi hart’s story about wind and mr ug, a tale woven along a mobius strip, quinn began to ponder the interesting form of a mobius strip in a more abstract sense – he postulated that the shape of the universe might be a mobius strip, and that there is always an alternate reality for every reality we experience.

another most-frequently-watched candidate was how-to-snakes! (one greeted him in his car seat at pick up time, cradling a fibonacci pinecone… more were hiding in his room when he got home. that way he could make an oroborus; snake knuckles; baby snakelets, supersnake; borromian ring snakes; snake spirals; and a many-headed hydra snake! of course, all of this led to graph paper drawings of many different configurations of snakes.

if you peruse the list of videos, it is easy to see how a guy like quinn got sucked in, given such titles as “doodling in math: dragon dungeons” and “infinity elephants” and “are shakespeare’s plays encoded within pi?” i was finding phi angle-a-trons tucked into his homework folder that he had ostensibly constructed during class time, and he spent the duration of his parent teacher conference drawing this:

quinn even watched every episode of thanksgiving math multiple times, learning about such culinary wonders as green bean matherole, borromian onion rings, apple pi and pumpkin tau, and turduckenen-duckenen.

speaking of food, quinn has helped me immensely in the kitchen recently, cheerfully offering help or asking if he can be involved in meal preparation on a pretty regular basis… some things he has been up to: prepping and making pancakes; making broccoli soup (operating the blender); meatball/sauce prep (can opener, garlic press). he became a certified muffin baking technician, because after he got past being “not good at eggs,” he decided, “i’m going to do all of the steps in the process myself,” right down to putting in and taking out of the oven. the filling of cups with batter got frustrating, and he was getting increasingly agitated, but i made jokes. he said you could smell the frustration in the air, and i said, no, that’s just the fish frying you smell – our neighbor had given us a lingcod fillet, and we were having fish and chips for dinner. i said, “it’s confusing because they sound alike. fish frying, frustrating…” and then i’d purposely use the wrong word in every sentence thereafter. he giggled, worked through the fish fry, got a cup of water to put the rubber spatula in after each cup was filled so the batter wouldn’t be sticking to the spatula so much. problem-solving in action.

vi warned us about hexaflex-mexican-food-cravings…

quinn had bought a goose egg for $1 at farmer’s market, and he had requested that we use it for something very special involving lemon (that was after i broke the news that he could not incubate this egg and hope for it to hatch, that these were for eating.) on a saturday morning i told him my idea was to use it to make lemon filling, which we would roll up into crepes and top with whipped cream.

“ooh, can i help?”

this was after his muffin adventure of the previous evening, so i was pleasantly surprised that he was ready so soon for another kitchen marathon.

he got to work, beginning with zesting an entire lemon, about which he was extremely thorough (the recipe only called for half, but we like it zesty). then he measured all of the lemon filling ingredients into the saucepan. while he stirred, i whipped up the heavy cream, and by then the filling was simmering. i took over stirring it while it thickened, and quinn measured crepe ingredients into the blender. he sliced strawberries and then arranged them on our plates while i sliced oranges and flipped crepes. then we worked together to enfold lemon filling into each crepe, top them with whipped cream (and a sprinkle of sugar, he settled on as a final touch) and he arranged everything on plates to serve.

later that afternoon, quinn’s 5’1” frame was enfolded into my lap, curled into a ball. he pulled the fuzzy owl blanket up over his head, and said, “you find an egg.” i laughed… and said how surprised i was to have found an egg, i had only ever found one billion other eggs since giving birth to quinn. “you find an egg” is the beginning of one of the most-frequently-played pretend scenario games of the boy named quinn, a boy who has played a higher than average number of pretend scenarios in his time on earth. i never know what creature may hatch out of the egg i find, and the main narrative arc of the game revolves around my suspense and anticipation of the secret that awaits me curled inside the egg. it could be a puffin, a penguin, or an owl. it could be a dragon or a dinosaur. it could even be a pokemon character, as it was today, once we finally got back on track after my teasing about always finding eggs i’m not even looking for. that day he was spheal, and i hope my teasing did nothing to discourage him from going on having me find an egg one billion more times, even though he can’t sit on my lap curled in a ball anymore without inflicting some small amount of pain.

the following day was sunday, so i made pancakes, which we topped with strawberry rhubarb sauce and maple syrup. quinn’s weekend consisted of studying math for fun and glory and computer programming on khan academy, adding turrets and reinforced walls to his minecraft fortress (i love finding the page in the book open to portcullises), making math doodles, dabbling with his robotics kit, planning out how he is going to make a bb-8 and a lin-v8k droid after i showed him a make magazine video of a homemade bb-8 using many cheap hacks (like old speaker magnets and cut off tops of roll-on deodorants for parts of the mechanisms; making the body out of paper mache using a dollar store beach ball). he couldn’t fall asleep by bedtime. he is just in one of those spongey phases, absorbing absolutely everything and asking for more and blowing me away with how much he already knows.

quinn: tau is bigger than pi! it’s 2 pi! it’s approximately 6.28!

me: um, ok, if you say so…

quinn: mo-ommmm, you didn’t know that?!?!

continued in part 2

~rainbow mondays~ may wei

Posted on June 4, 2018 by marybethrew

there is a whooshing sound that always seems to accompany the passage of the month of may.

i spend my weekdays pouring large volumes of water from one vessel into another, and while that is an oversimplification of what i do for my paycheck, it is how i choose to look at it when i am in good spirits about my employment. somewhere between the zen wisdom of “chop wood, carry water” (read: rich, me), and the taoist concept of wu wei or purposeful non-doing, i am most in the flow when i am doing the least amount of overthinking and pouring the largest volumes of water back and forth.

now that it is june, a photo recap seems in order; a pause to reflect on the poetic beauty of a month heralding the coming of summer. so take off your overthinking caps, and put on your heart-shaped lenses.

white: in may i sprinkled lots of flower seeds (and leftover wedding favor seed bombs) all over the yard like an overgrown fairy. dried poppy seed heads are particularly satisfying magic wands for seed dispersal.

white: snowballs!

pink: speaking of fairies, my dusty rose fairy gown columbine survived a deer eating all but one of its flower buds this spring (exposed as myth: deer don’t like columbine) and put out new buds and flowered beautifully.

pink: i’m not the only one who thinks so. i’ve caught sightings of hummingbirds enjoying the fairy gown flavor, but this is (so far) the only photo i’ve been able to capture.

pink: right after that image was captured, i discovered that hummingbirds also drink from bleeding hearts! i had no idea, and it was so captivating to watch her reach into each of the hearts and drink in the sweetness.

red: the red native columbines have been feeding sweetness to the hummingbirds lately, too, as well as providing a fun snack for the local deer pests.

orange: caledula, its vibrant color a balm for the eyes as much as its medicine heals the body.

yellow: western tanager eyeing up our cherry crop from the top of a locust.

yellow: the blooming of yellow roses reminds me that at this time last year i was trying on my wedding dress that was just arriving in the mail…

…and doing selfie photo shoots for the benefit of bffs and mom while my fiance wasn’t home.

yellow: symbolizing friendship, something i’ve been feeling particularly grateful for lately.

green: following up on her fairy gown/bleeding heart feast, my hummingbird friend sipped from the comfrey flowers for a while. the bees are also quite fond of the comfrey, which have grown up a nice weed barrier zone around two of our apple trees.

green: maple suncatcher kaleidoscope.

green: trout lily seed heads bobbing in the bayou.

green: i brought home a stray strand of shepherd’s purse in my bunch of beets last week from farmer’s market. i have a special place in my heart for this little plant with its heart-shaped seed pods. it aligns perfectly that i was buying beets to juice in order to combat anemia, when a tincture from this little stowaway played a key role in stopping my post-partum hemorrhage. i replanted this one in my garden after snapping this photo. such a trusty botanical friend could never be a weed in my book.

green-blue: violet-green swallows have taken up residence once again in our nesting box.

green-blue: i love their masks. “it’s just that they’re terribly comfortable. i think everyone will be wearing them in the future.”

blue: a house finch has been visiting the forget-me-not patches as they go to seed.

blue: i bet 0% of my readers will be surprised that a “magic fountain” delphinium found me just after my previous rainbow post entitled delphinious.

blue: it has found a home in the blue level of the rainbow terrace garden.

blue: these blue pansy seeds i planted last spring have become a thriving patch of vibrant blue flowers.

blue: this knapweed volunteered in a corner of our yard where my husband has been diligently reclaiming space from overgrown shrubs, ivy, and blackberry. last year it produced one flower, and this year it has several blooms so far.

purple: the resident fairy has been known to wave a columbine wand or two around each fall, and i think my efforts are starting to pay off in the purple columbine patch in our front yard. there is a single (not pictured) and a double ruffled variety whose areas have expanded substantially.