Recalibrating in Texas
An invitation to spring
What a rare thing, to have eleven colleagues who all get along so well, who can endure living in the same excessively mirrored house and sharing rooms for six days, who want to make dinner for each other and stay up late talking about any number of ideas.
A gift!
Went to Austin, Texas; came back with fragments of thought, all of which have merged into a singular invitation to spring, to a new way of thinking and being.
Simpatico relationships, good-hearted, generous “coworkers and coworkers who are also friends”
Long nights talking after dinner, found votives to try to improve the vibe after turning off all the soul-sucking LED overhead lights
The little flights of fancy, the little side arguments, the little jokes that became long running
Compatibility, widening windows of tolerance
The copious grackles, who sound electrified, robotic, precise
“Whales are in your dream center.”
A big year in SXSW fashion for skirts: lots of experimental, extravagant skirts
A red lip every day
“Love is an encounter with uncertainty, with risk, with another universe.”
Remez
Trading ghost stories at midnight standing out in the whipping cold wind
“Ask me a harder question in Chinese.”
A spicy cocktail in a sunny courtyard with two coiffed Pomeranians and one Bernese mountain dog
The panopticon always hovering above you
“You can’t fix the culture if you can’t fix the work.”
A twelve-color screenprint by a Brazilian artist
Wind sending the little live oak leaves skittering across the sidewalk
Language did not give us stories. Stories gave us language.
“Light behaves differently when it’s real.”
Bullet points are all I have right now, and strangely, they feel like more than enough.
Grateful to Guion for holding down the fort, with a valuable assist from Nana, Pax, and Uncle Win; grateful to be home with a refreshed spirit; grateful for a nesting pair of common ravens Felix named Hades and Persephone, an old novel about intellectual love in Botswana, a span of sweaty hours in the unruly garden, a buffeting by strong March winds.
Currently reading
Mating, Norman Rush
Existentialists and Mystics, Iris Murdoch