More Is Answered in the Asking

A couple of months ago, I asked my Facebook friends what animal they saw me as, and I fell in love with one of the responses:

African Elephant. You are strong and gentle and you have an incredible memory. You are an excellent parent and you are loyal. You go about your business until you are called on to raise your head and your great big tusks and demand they take heed. And it's usually in the defense of others.

I liked it so much, I found this figurine and painted it. This is not one of my D&D characters, this is me.

I wasn't familiar with them until I happened upon the miniature, but these creatures are from the D&D supplement Guildmasters' of Ravnica setting. Loxodon. Descriptions from the book that also resonate (aspirationally, at least):

The humanoid elephants called loxodons are often oases of calm in the busy streets of Ravnica. They hum or chant in sonorous tones and move slowly or sit in perfect stillness. If provoked to action, loxodons are true terrors--bellowing with rage, trumpeting and flapping their ears. Their serene wisdom, fierce loyalty, and unwavering conviction are tremendous assets to their guilds. . . .

Loxodons believe in the value of community and life . . .

Loxodons believe that the members of a group have a responsibility to look out for each other. Once they have joined a guild or bonded with other individuals in any capacity, loxodons devote themselves to maintaining that bond. They coordinate their efforts and are often willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group. They expect reciprocal loyalty and commitment from the other members of their communities and can be severe in their disappointment when their trust is betrayed.

The primary difference between loxodons who join different guilds is their sense of the size of the community they belong to. For loxodons in the Selesnya Conclave, their community is the world and all living beings in it--everything valuable, meant to live in harmony, and interdependent. [THIS IS ME] For Azorius loxodons, community primarily means a society of different peoples who need adherence to law and order so they can function together. For those in the Orzhov Syndicate, community means the syndicate alone, with its interests taking priority over those of any other group.

Although often I feel this one is more accurate.

A recent dialogue with my kids:

"I want to get out and enjoy the woods a bit before the snow starts melting. Boys, you need to get out of the house, so you're going with me."

"What are we going to do there?"

"Look, listen, smell, and move."

They nailed it.

The beauty of snow disturbed only by the wind . . . 

Okay, maybe these are better.

In [Younger]s competition, the goal is to make as many cats happy in one day as possible.

Every time I visit my kids' school I find messages that are widely applicable.

In 50 years, I don't remember ever seeing such clearly defined flakes of snow as the ones that fell the other night. My pictures don't do them justice.

(Full disclosure: the moment wasn't as magical as it might have been, as I was outside only because I was chasing down [Younger], who thought a good way to deal with his anger would be running away for the night. (He didn't follow through, so I was able to let the snow distract me.))

I particularly love this post from Indexed:

The parts of yourself that you're proud of are much smaller than the parts of you that are valuable.

I woke up in a bad mood today, grumpy about everything I saw and thought. Reading this (for the first time) while waking somehow helped.

Lisel Mueller

THE NEED TO

HOLD STILL

Winter weeds,

survivors

of a golden age,

take over the open land,

pale armies

redressing the balance

Again we live

in a time of fasting,

burlap cassocks

monks on their knees,

bells tolling

in an empty sky

among the thin,

the trampled-on,

the inarticulate

clothed in drafts

and rooted in shocked earth

which remembers nothing

fields and fields of them

*

Teasel

yarrow

goldenrod

wheat

bedstraw

Queen Anne's lace

drop-seed

love grass:

plain, strong names,

bread and water

A woman

coming in from a walk

notices how drab

her hair has become

that gray and brown

are colors

she disappears into

that her body

has stopped asking

for anything except calm

*

When she brings them

into the house

and shortens them

for the vase,

their stems break

like old hones,

clean

No holding on

No bitter odor

No last drop of juice

Hers, as long as she wants them

Their freedom from either/or

will outlast hers every time

*

The dignity of form

after seduction

and betrayal

by color

the heads,

separate,

but held together

by an old design

no one has thought

to question

the open pods

that have given

and given again

dullness of straw,

which underlies

the rose

the grape

the kiss

the narrow leaf blades,

shape of the body

the fine stems,

earliest brushstrokes,

lines in the rock

on the wall

the page

This has been a somewhat random compilation of my recent activities. I'll conclude with three recent books I have found wise and insightful.

First, an adult nonfiction: On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz.

The title suggests this book might be about vision; I would say it is about attention and perception. It's an exercise in awareness and focus. Horowitz narrates and reflects on urban walks with eleven different companions, each with some kind of specialized focus that gives them awareness of all the things the rest of us normally tune out. They "see" the world differently because they've learned to pay attention to different things and perceive the same things differently.

More than any of the individual walks or reports in isolation, the value of the book lies in it's overall frame and the accumulation of variety and difference. It's not the insight of any of the particular perspectives, but the lesson in learning to broaden awareness and to value more.

Horowitz digresses from each experience during her reflections into various topics spurred by them. Sometimes her writing is poetic, sometimes scientific, and sometimes personal. Many interesting and unexpected subjects pop up.

The eleven "expert" perspectives:

1. A toddler, seeing everything in the world as new;
2. A geologist, seeing all the different rocks in every construct;
3. A typographer, obsessed with signs and print everywhere;
4. An artist, always looking for interesting connections;
5. An insect tracker, seeing all the evidence of their presence;
6. A naturalist, seeing all the evidence of urban animals;
7. An urban space designer, aware of people and their interactions;
8. A doctor and a physical therapist, diagnosing conditions with a look;
9. A blind person, seeing without eyes;
10. A sound designer and engineer, attuned to every sound;
11. A dog and his nose, catching every scent.

I didn't love this book, but I was always interested in seeing what would come next.

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound--but to function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.

We humans share our understanding of "what is out there" in the world, but we are not entirely born into it. We all begin in a kind of sensory chaos--what William James called an "aboriginal sensible muchness": a more or less undifferentiated mass of sounds and lights, colors and textures and smells. When we are growing up, we learn to bring attention to certain elements and to ignore others. By adulthood, we all agree on what is "out there." But let's focus on what we ignore: so much!

Next, the picture book that gave this post its title, The Boy and the Sea by Camille Andros (ill. by Amy Bates). From Goodreads:

In this picture book, readers follow one boy through his life as he returns to the seashore beside his home. The boy likes to think, and his thoughts turn into questions. He brings these questions to the sea. At times, he thinks he can hear the sea whisper to him: Dream. Love. Be.

So he does. He dreams—a young boy imagining all that he might do. He loves—a teenager, reaching out from a lonely place to make friends. He allows himself to just be—now grown, sharing the seashore with his daughter.

The text follows a pattern that repeats three times, plus a coda where the boy is an old man teaching a new generation of grandchildren to listen. The pictures change each time the words cycle through, following him as he ages into new experiences that always follow the same pattern. As he listens over the course of his life, the boy learns to: Dream. Love. Be.

Once there was a boy

who lived  by the sea.

The sea was old and wise.

The boy liked to listen to its whispers.

From time to time,

the was

dark and dangerous.

So was the boy.

Other times,

the sea was

tranquil and tender.

So was the boy.

But, once in a while,

the sea felt

the pull of something more.

And the boy did, too.

The boy liked to think,

and often his thoughts turned into questions.

Some of his questions

had answers . . . 

but many did not.

So he returned to the waves and their whispers.

The boy sat

and he listened,

and he thought

he heard the sea say . . . 

Dream.

It's lovely.

I particularly love the wisdom that not all questions have answers, and that's okay. He only knew more was answered in his asking.

Finally,  What Is Love? by Mac Barnett (ill. by Carson Ellis). From Goodreads:

"What is love?" a young boy asks. "I can't answer that," his grandmother says, and so the boy goes out into the world to find out. But while each person he meets—the fisherman, the actor, and others—has an answer to his question, not one seems quite right. Could love really be a fish, or applause, or the night? Or could it actually be something much closer to home? This tender, funny tale is an original take on the "I love you" story, a picture book treasure for all ages to read and cherish.

It's a question that each person will answer differently. As they should.

More serious topics expected soon.