1. My cleaning at the dentist today went smoothly. My mouth felt fresh afterward. CNN was playing over head. I'll always know right where I was when the future king of England made his first public appearance.
2. I turned the rest of those vegetables I bought at the Farmers' Market into another stir fry, this time with tofu and lo mein noodles. I stir fried the noodles in sesame oil and made them kind of greasy, just the way I like them. I think they're called snap peas or something like that: the ones I bought Saturday are sweet and crisp and combined with the red cabbage, zucchini, mushrooms, broccoli, and celery to make this a heavenly afternoon lunch and early evening dinner.
3. On my mind today: I spent over forty years being taught and then helping students develop what we call in the profession of teaching English, a critical vocabulary. It's a vocabulary used in support of critical thinking. There's nothing wrong with thinking critically. I'm just tired of it. I'm trying to write about the experience I've had all these years with books, poems, essays, movies, plays, stories, and other art, including photography, that a critical vocabulary doesn't account for. It's the kind of experience I always hoped my students would have with Homer or Rumi or Shakespeare and all the other writers I assigned them to read.
I have always been much more interested in reading about the way a poem by Rumi triggered a memory of a moment when Aimee Mann singing "One" from the Magnolia soundtrack was playing in the kitchen while a person was peeling and grating carrots for a green salad at the moment that that person's pet corgi looked at the person with longing for a rawhide chip and in that sweet corgi look of longing the person saw the same longing for union with the Divine and with love that Rumi portrays as living in all of us, and at that moment the person felt temporarily that all is in union with all. What matters most to me is the experience with Rumi, not reading (or writing) an essay that supports a strong thesis by teasing out patterns of synecdoche in Rumi's poems about dogs and love.
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