I look back over the last week and it's a fog and I'm not sure why. I know I was too preoccupied and distracted on Tues. through Friday to post 3BTs and, shoot, here it is Saturday and I'm playing catch up. Well, here goes. I think I can draw some beautiful things out of the fog that shrouds my mind:
1. I had this time in my life about four years ago when I said every day I was going to eat either sushi or cinnamon or both. Every morning I bought a cinnamon scone at Starbuck's and regularly I bought sushi at the Sunrise Asian Market or at Market of Choice or I'd go for sushi at Sakura. Now I swear I want to eat ginger every day. So, Tuesday, I dropped by Yi Shen for some ginger chicken and later dropped by Sunrise Asian Market and took out about ten Korean sushi rolls. Sadly, the little packet of ginger was not sufficient for all those rolls -- I need to remember to buy a small container of pickled ginger and keep in on hand to munch from and to have on hand when I get sushi to go.
2. So, Coleman Barks, tells this story about the Ditch Frog and the Ocean Frog as a way of illustrating living in a limited reality and an expansive one. I suddenly realized that the central metaphor of this story is a great way to understand poetry, both reading it and writing it. So, today, in Intro to Poetry, I invited the students to see, say, Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Salt" as an Ocean Frog poem. By the end of the poem, Neruda invites us to see a grain of salt as a part of infinitude. The salt is infinitude. Salt resides in infinitude. It's a mystical insight, a picture of mystical reality. I really like this Ocean Frog way of thinking and imagining.
3. Out of the blue, on Wednesday, a knock at my office door, and it's Ariel! We had a really good visit and I learned more about her studies at the U of O and her reading of Virginia Woolf and her struggles with Spanish and her work as a writer for Eugene Magazine. Ariel refreshed my day.
4. I don't think S, expected to see her four source shorter research project projected on the screen in class as an example of a job well done and she was really happy and then K., who had been in my office earlier for help with her writing, came to me after class and told me how much S.'s paper had helped her. We had a fist bump... well-deserved.
5. The tree/shrub guy came by and all the front yard shrubbery will be gone...in about 10 days...prelude to a back/front yard renovation.
6. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. YouTube. "Won't Back Down". "Runnin' Down a Dream". "Free Falling". Multiple videos of "You Wreck Me". And others. For variety: a couple of Chrissie Hynde tunes, "Back on the Chain Gang" and "Tattooed Love Boys". Then midnight came. I went to bed.
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