Because I’m running around in the manner of the newly decapitated Gallus gallus domesticus in preparation for flying with the four boys to Albquerque on Saturday, only this is the week one set of boys has camp in the morning another set has camp in the afternoon and trying to keep track of where everyone is/ought to be feels like patting my pockets for keys and phone every few minutes and flying into a panic when things aren’t quite as I think they ought to be. Plus I just got summoned for jury duty and need to deal with that before I go out of town, as well as emailing my parents my children’s dietary preferences (which are varied and contradictory), renting a viola for the second child since violas are technically too big to be carry-on on Southwest airlines, finding performance outfits for each of them, coming up with a plan for the fourth child’s birthday while we are there, and dealing with things like library books due next week and regular lessons and the food in the refrigerator which I am just going to have to throw out.

But that’s not what’s preoccupying me, anyway.

Which is ancient. Actually.

The wrestling that I do is with where one comes up with the humility to strive at the limits of one’s abilities even if one feels completely mediocre?

If you were here sitting across from me, and we were to have the leisure for a real conversation, this is what I would want to ask you.

I have been wrestling with the acknowledging that to apply oneself to a Discipline is to come to terms with the Discipline having degrees, to having better and improved Practicing, which I keep getting stuck with logically meaning some practitioners are better at the Discipline, and with only a little more logic, meaning some practitioners are worse.

And that practicing a Discipline involves wanting to get better at it. And that this does involve both refinements, abrading the bad habits, adjusting Technique for desired results (I somehow see Discipline as being composed of Technique and Expression; I would love for you to digress and argue with me). But all of the incremental bits of improvement may result in the apparently sudden “quantum” ascent from one plateau to another

And because the practice and application of one’s deepest self to the Discipline is Work and sometimes — often, in fact, is something other than rewarding — I mean, tedious, exhausting, precariously doubt-filling, lonely, sweaty, achey or terrifying — it must be driven by a sort of desire. My first identification is that my desires are for glory/respect/approval/acceptance or, (sigh) sometimes ass-kicking competitiveness and Showing Them vengefulness, but I recognize some ‘pure’ desire beyond these little insecure self-based ones. For the Discipline itself. For the smudging of the boundaries of self within the perfection of the Discipline itself, as if the Discipline itself were doing the desiring, and it is no longer the self. I trip over my Ancient Greeks and the notion that happiness is the cessation of desire, and yet believe in the deep happiness of communing with the Discipline.

[Here my religion creeps in, and the closest I can come to defining my religion is as a sort of awareness of the self as created and separate from the Creator, a place where humility lives, the ardor and longing of the creation for Creator, for reunion.]

When I cannot manage humility I remind myself too much of myself as a little kid, really struggling against doing something imperfectly — learning to ride a bike, where there is one major plateau to jump to, and all of the attempts that are not riding a bike eventually are followed by the attempt that is riding a bike; but this little kid in me gets frustrated at doing it imperfectly, wants to kick the stupid bike and go do something safe and satisfying like riding on my old very fast Big Wheels which can make it down to the dead end of our street and back past the frightening dog and no skinned knees, no wobbling, no toppling. The little kid in me is all about “Why should I practice in order to be a mediocre violinist?” This feels almost intolerable. And there’s strategy: if there is something I would be great at and something that all the work in the world would only make me mediocre at, shouldn’t my energy go into the one and not the other? I’m like the Russians x-raying the hips of potential gymnasts to see who is put together with the native flexibility to be a great gymnast, in order to appropriately invest time and energy in THEIR training, rather than some other. I flirt with this discipline or that, wondering if I’m not supposed to be great at something.

But now I argue with myself as if I were one of my children. We do not practice each day for the sake of some future career, we practice each day for the sake of this day’s practicing, and if by some freak roller skating accident one of the darlings were to lose all of the fingers on his left hand this afternoon, I wouldn’t see the time we have spent practicing as wasted. Furthermore, every great practitioner was once a mediocre practitioner, once a beginner.

But another argument occurs to me today, about the trickiness of judging oneself (or discerning, Dana?) However high the plateau one is on, there is no practitioner who has reached perfection. And it’s like math. Infinity minus two is the same as infinity minus nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. The person striving at her seventh appreciable plateau is at the same time closer and as far from some Monolithic Perfect Practice of the Discipline as the child who has just made the struggling leap to the first appreciable plateau.

It just occurs to me that what humility means to me here is a sort of longing for the Discipline’s perfect expressionso  that one puts forth one’s best effort with a sort of detachment and longing to keep struggling and even though it’s never going to get all the way and it’s not futile, or if it’s futile, the futility is beside the point, it’s the longing of the lover for the Beloved who loves the Beloved for the Beloved’s sake and not his own.

Not that I come back to the blog and think everything I want to say fits neatly here. Some (but, we note, not all) of my favorite blogs have been dormant or nearly so recently, and not to be one of those annoying people who thinks that whatever their friends are doing is a trend, I’d wondered if blogging had peaked for me. That the best part of blogging has been the sense of deep conversation. (And as I compose this over-long entry on an overcast Sunday afternoon when I have isolated myself from my family, one of the friends who has been faithful with his own blog emails me a question, saying he would get my “inner blog going.” Which reminds me that the conversational responsibility flows this way and that.)

A few weeks ago my domain name registration lapsed and for a few hours I had the ambivalent relief of thinking it might all be gone, which, oh, I’m attached to some of what I’ve written here, but oh, the fresh start — the fresh start has all of the mendacity of any good fantasy, the gauzy glamours obscuring harder reality. That even the fresh start still requires a first sentence and a second, that it might in fact be no easier to open this window and frame a first entry than it is to open it and note the one sparse entry for June, the space between that one and the one before, the quiet.

Not that I don’t appreciate some quiet.

But I want to skip the awkward apology or over-explanation or even the presumption that anyone notices the frequency of the blogging or not. I would just skip to the recent preoccupations.

First off Infinite Summer, and that Infinite Jest is that great a book, not a silencing, dwarfing sort of greatness, (except maybe the silencing “Oh, dear, I’m incoherently spouting the same appreciations that I’m sure other people have already done better elsewhere…”) but a compassionate, self-aware greatness that makes connections between aspects of the modern condition, as if there were such a thing as a monolithic modern condition and I weren’t hopelessly self-conscious trying to talk about it or my perceptions of it — and yet, in reading Infinite Jest, I am again and again noting to myself “Oh! Exactly that! Yes!” and have become attendantly No Fun at Parties for it has left me prone to a babbling. Which I try to cut short out of consideration and so on.

In fact, if you aren’t already reading it, if you have felt put off by its legendary thousand pages or the fact that one of its themes is addiction, which is, admittedly, a downer, or have — I’m trying to think of all the reasons why I had put off reading it for as long as I had — annoyance at the hype? the fact that if it was going to be so great, then wouldn’t I have the same sort of possessiveness over it, over my experience reading it that I do over, say, Salinger, thus rendering the reading it as part of an anonymous internet-organized reading micro-movement like Infinite Summer as perverse and — more, a little like NaNoWriMo — somehow less special and no less work, because look at how thousands of people I don’t know are all doing it together on-line and it makes no difference to anyone but me if I am somehow a “part” of that and when have I ever been a joiner? Give me The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner over the Boston Marathon any day. And yet. If you have these, and better reasons for not reading it and make time to follow this here, I suggest you go read that instead, really I’ll understand. In this morning’s journal I note that there are certain types of action and description I’ll skim every time (the list starts with use of illegal substances, goes through hand-by-hand descriptions of poker games, any sports sequences, combat scenes and battles — even on-screen I mostly just want the skinny: who wins, how it all comes out.) In Infinite Jest I don’t skim. I care about every word, every sequence, every character. It means reading a little more slowly and neglecting a lot of other things, but it’s savorable.

So yeah. The journal. I still fill those up. Only I find myself annoyed that I want to remember how I phrased something to myself two weeks ago and wishing they were searchable, because I am never patient enough to re-read them, and, frankly, my handwriting is atrocious. Which is another reason to try and at least capture the highlights of the journal electronically, the stuff that, if it isn’t written to entertain, or explain, or meet my anticipation of other people’s expectations, is at least not going to be offensive or hurtful because I’m trying to work out why I don’t feel the things I sort of think I’m supposed to feel which are always so much worse unarticulated and stuffed down than when they are exposed to air and sunlight.

I had this realization that because so many things I read online have convenient little “share on facebook” buttons that I could use FB almost — not solipsistically — but as my own personal record of what I was reading and responding to, and if anyone else wanted to have a conversation about anything, that was just icing on the cake. Only I started wondering if my link to Sandra Tsing Loh’s sad Atlantic Monthly piece on the dissolution of her marriage or the reviews of Christina Nehring’s Vindication of Love were going to give people the wrong impression. And then suddenly I felt all scopophobic on facebook, the ancient fear of being seen in ways that I had no control over, without full space to explain or make myself clear. I’m not sure the blog is better, but if you care enough to wade through all of this, then I’m less worried about you making a hasty judgement.

So other preoccupations. In the journal, strangely where things are most personal, I find myself freely enjoying the use of the third person “one finds” which, one notes, is almost an antidote to the narcissistic third person of FB where, in the third person, one feels like the star of an endless series of fascinated headlines, a singular tabloid. The voice, here, one fears is precious or affected sounding, and yet, oh the liberation of being able to make observations without it being all about the endless, wearying “I” or the presumptuous “you”!

Also, it now amuses me in the journal to insert notes to the literary biographer, having perhaps read too much literary biography this spring and summer. My favorite note — oh I paraphrase because, in the last hour I just wasted much time reading entries from a month ago which are still painfully vivid but do not contain the bit I want:

“Dear Literary Biographer, this morning I rather resent you for knowing how all of these ambivalences get resolved, for having an aerial view while I blunder through my labyrinths. Maybe one could find a sort of comfort in thinking that what feels painful and difficult from right here will be seen in retrospect as the shaping force that led to all sorts of growth and development. One could, maybe, but one doesn’t.

I would like to remind you that retrospect lies. That when one is past the stage of being dewy and having countless strangers extolling one’s “potential” one forgets that all of that possibility we see for someone just starting out tends to be the good possibility, the success following success. One ignores the fact that when one was twenty the possibilities seemed to include living in cardboard boxes and embarrassing not just oneself but one’s family and friends as well as the possibilities of greatness and producing stunning works. In fact the only possibility one seems to really overlook are those of the not-so-notable ordinary life, the nice kids, the functional marriage, the bake sales for the PTA and the endless driving (the minivan!) — perhaps because at twenty one has the harshest condemnation for the selling out and the compromising and the complacency one detects in one’s elders.

So maybe I don’t just resent the future ghost of my literary biographer, but also I resent my twenty year old self. All a little Dickens for me, sorry.

On an unrelated note, but among recent preoccupations, I wasn’t just going to blather on about Infinite Jest, but one of the bits I most appreciated was a character commenting on the state of “humble frustration” that allows one to proceed from one plateau of development to another, and the character was talking about tennis, but I could immediately see it in music and in writing, and the friend I have who teaches yoga sees it in yoga and dance, and her husband in aikido practice and this tiny remark was one small thread in a lot of really great conversation last night, and I was happy to see he had written about it here.

I know that that I have a tendency to get promiscuous with the metaphors, to lose track of tenors and vehicles, referents and antecedents, but — beyond gratitude for people we can have dinner with who don’t look uncomfortably away, re-folding their napkins on their laps and glancing at their watches as I get excited about an idea, I love that they got excited about parallels between their own passions and disciplines and my specific ones, and being struck by this notion that the work of being a human being again and again boils down to the same stuff, and it’s not that one just does Rocky-style training (cue the inspirational music and the running against different backgrounds, doing sit-ups and punching a punching bag montage) it’s that humble frustration is the only way to get anywhere, the slow learning of the things I’m working on with my kids, ideas of patience and generosity and compassion and persistence, can be developed with a pen or a tennis racket or yoga mat or the wedding ring or the football that Aodán and I throw at each other when all other communication fails us — and it’s not that there aren’t great violinists or great tennis players or great writers who are assholes, it’s just that the work required of us in our various disciplines puts us all up against the same obstacles, and that seems to me to render open and honest discussion of these obstacles as especially important and helpful.

Which all comes out as a little more facile and easy than my thinking abut it. But music has gotten more hours than anything else this summer, the kids being out of school and all wanting me to be part of their practices still and finding someone to do duets with for myself and finding myself — because the kids are involved maybe? willing to — not settle, exactly but willing to be a struggling-competent-often-frustrated-by-the-limits-of-my-ability-as-a-musician (oh to call myself a musician is even more uncomfortable than calling myself a writer) — and yet in the process of learning to treat myself with the gentleness with which I would treat them, it’s that struggle that seems to have value, to leave lasting marks more than the ringing of a note very nearly in tune. And still the terror of being a dilettante forever, of standing on the edge of all sorts of disciplines able to appreciate them without ever approaching any mastery of them for myself…

Finally — seriously, this is like doing laundry, after a month of the washing machine being broken, and discovering things one has forgotten owning, much less wearing. Some preoccupation lately with the subject of miracles. There was discussion between Bahà’ís and non-Bahà’ís on the occasion of this Holy Day this week, the Martyrdom of the Bab, which is probably the only miraculous thing to get much play in Bahà’í history. And the thing is there were the miraculous sorts of things in the lives of the Bàb and Bahà’u'lláh, but they weren’t supposed to stand as proofs. In an age of special effects and sleight of hand, we are supposed to rely more on the integrity of Their teachings, to be convinced that a religion teaching the agreement of religion and science, the equality of women and men, the oneness of humanity, the oneness of all the religions, is more persuasive than watching somebody fly around the room. There’s even a lovely story of Bahà’u'lláh offering to perform any miracle that a group of clerics asked that would constitute proof to them that He was who He said He was and their subsequent utter failure to come to any sort of a consensus n the matter.

Sitll. In my experience as a Bahà’í — more than once I’ve gotten to sit and listen to people tell stories of things that happened that couldn’t be explained by science or the laws of chance or whatever, feelings of being guided, or having significant dreams. And I get sort of ambivalent about this. One of my friends turned to me and said, “Surely there are things that have happened in your life that you cannot explain!” and I was surprised at my prickly response. I didn’t say anything rude, but I paid attention to the prickles because I wondered what bothered me.

It’s not just that I value my skepticism, because that would not lead to a sort of defensiveness I suddenly felt. Maybe it was like our friend sitting there who wasn’t a Bahà’í, but has been coming to these discussions since last fall — that on hearing that there were miracles suddenly seemed to take seriously the notion that this really is a religion we’re talking about and not just a nice philosophy? I think the notion that the people who have these inexplicable things land in their laps as a sort of proof might then have some greater degree of certitude or faith may be what makes me a little bananas — that the absence of such an experience might be saying something about me?

So I affirm for myself that the absence of miracles is not the same thing as the absence of wonder. The explicable and orderly is enough for me, golden means and Fibonacci sequences, titrations where measurements conform exactly and uniformly to the numbers predicted by the rather abstract molecular weights, complex ecosystems, and the dance of light through leaves and the smell of fresh air — harmony! the circle of fifths!And in the human-er realm? Courage and sacrifice and kindness, a good joke, a nice turn of phrase? Not so un-wondrous either.

The curious thing abut a skylight is that the sky reduced to a small rectangular patch suddenly seems so much further away, so much further up. I lean back and am nearly overtaken with vertigo. How different this is from lying on one’s back in a broad and grassy meadow where the world seems evenly divided between earth and sky, where the same breeze pushes clouds from horizon to horizon and passiving waves of sunlight along the bowing tips of tall grass.

Only it never worked. I got dry and empty too soon and it was no good trying to force the tears and the observation of myself crying was not conducive to getting good and worked up.

But this twelve-year-old stuff is different, because I look at my kid and I see myself at that age, remember this as a place where the divide opened up between my insides and my outsides, between the way I intended things and the way they actually came out. This is the age where I would try to be sweet, try to be good and be so irritated that minutes later I was again fighting with everyone in my family, the age where labels of “sensitive” and “princess” were sort of teasingly given, only they still chafe like scratchy tags sewn inside tight shirts. This was the age when it felt like something was really wrong with me, that things weren’t ever going to be okay, the age when I ached with being misunderstood. It was the dawning of self-consciousness, of looking around at how everyone else was doing things and realizing I didn’t measure up, that my clothes were wrong, my body awkward, the braces, my skin…

So when my sweet first-born does start doing the things that are tormenting his brothers — teasing or taking things — it isn’t that I see him as blameless. I see his threshold for tolerating them acting like, well, themselves, doing things that shouldn’t bother him, but do, tremendous crimes like chewing wrong or licking their drinking glasses, lowered, see how this builds up into the explosion when he tells a brother to stop, the brother screams in indignation, it escalates. And I haven’t figured out how to make the conflicts, torturous as they are, go away. But I know that I cannot tolerate how much it hurts him when he feels like everyone in the world is against him. I don’t want to endorse his prickliness, but I think he needs someone on his side. Of course he seems to recover much more quickly than I do, I’ll still be brooding over a conflict when he’s moved on to another mood entirely.

We go for walks. He talks about feeling excluded at school — not actively excluded, just more, not-included, and this one I remember too, feeling like everyone else was spending all of their time with everyone else outside of school and I never got to see anyone. That I was safe, sure, invisible, on the fringes of a large group of safe friends, but it was not the same social order I had known before and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it. I wish I could hand him the books that helped me survive it all, but he hasn’t found his way back to books that way yet. (Anne Frank that’s what he needs! And then maybe Catcher in the Rye before it’s assigned in school and an English teacher has the power to ruin it for him.) He’s got music. I miss him when he retreats into headphones, but I’m so grateful he’s found something he needs there.

At his cello recital I watch the high school seniors play, seeming like grown-ups next to him, five years older, the assurance they project, their comfort with themselves up on stage. I sort of long to see him safely through to that point already, to skip all of the agony between here and there — except, of course I keep being hit with how quickly it’s all going and how I don’t want to miss a second of it. It’s the knife-twist of birth order, everything is the most intense with him, his capacity to surprise me, my anxiousness about the next stages, the blind spots I’ve got, the tremendous amount I still have to learn, the difficulty in untangling myself from him.

I write things down, partially I want to convey this amazing unfolding to the grandparents, aunt, uncles who don’t get to witness it first hand, but also for myself, knowing I take it all for granted but I won’t remember this stuff clearly by the time I’ve been through it three more times. He’s so quick-witted, he notes a traffic sign “Construction Zone Fines Double” and says “Sometimes life is like a giant board game.” That he combines a wit( which I’m not completely recapturing here) with a serious-mindedness, a commitment to justice and projects and idealism seems to me the loveliest combination of qualities. I am simultaneously charmed and exasperated by his insistence on wearing the same corduroy jacket and hat all year, regardless of the weather. And touched that he wants to wear fingerless gloves like one of the cellists in the band Apocalyptica, which — oh it seems like the marker of a new kind of having a hero for him. A year ago everything was superlative “best movie ever” “favorite place to go for dinner” and since his birthday it’s all just “it was okay.” He is cool. Or he wants to check what all of his friends think. And yet he does think for himself, is independent-minded. None of this captures him, of course, but I don’t stop trying. I hold on in order to let go.

What I think I fear most is having the exuberance carry me to the fabric store and pick out yards of gaudiness that I can get home and be too inspired to even find a pattern for before I find myself weeping in the scraps of cut-up fabric, each representing the age-old feeling of having a notion of a finished product that I don’t have the skills to quite manage, the picture in my head that my hands cannot fit to paper, the idea I don’t have the words to express, the sense of being mired in patterns of amateur ineptness, the paint turned to mud, the paper wrinkled and distressed and overworked beneath my grubby, sticky hands. What was in my head was so glorious, and what is in my hands so tawdry.

And sometimes it occurs to me that mood is a wind, and that with a little knowledge of my own sails, beating to windward is possible, I can sail close-hauled and advance against the wind, something that seems impossible to my land-lubber’s mind. If the exuberance is a running position for the sailing, almost dangerous in its speed, then to despair is to be in irons, and all I can do is “push push pull pull” easing myself into a position to catch the next wind with a small daily discipline, a walk, some music, another attempt, a fresh piece of paper.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of Aristotle, either, when I started classifying the way objects get invested with meaning, rising up, as it were, out of the sea of functionality to be briefly invested with symbolic value before sinking back into pure functionality. I have a pair of socks whose meaning ought rightly to be, you know, they keep my feet warm. But the ways they get invested with meaning seem to me to be these:
1) origins: The socks are made from wool of sheep grazing on my grandfather’s farm
2) intention: My grandfather worried about my poor cold feet and gave these socks to me telling me he wanted my feet to be warm
3) sacrifice: My grandfather gave up his morning cup of coffee from Starbucks for a month to buy me this pair of socks
4) star power: My grandfather saw a pair of socks like this on Kate Winslet and decided they’d look good on me, too.
5) association with an event: I wore these socks the night that my grandfather and I went to dinner and he met my future step-grandmother.
6) flattery: My grandfather told me how the color of these socks set off the color of my eyes so I feel pretty every time I wear them.
7) irritation: These are the socks my grandfather keeps leaving on the floor that I have to put in the dirty laundry whenever I am straightening the house, and man does it annoy me.
8 ) guilt: These socks are itchy and I only put them on when my grandfather is coming to visit and he asks if I like them and I lie and tell them they are the best socks ever and then he knits me another pair.

The thing that gets to me though, is that if a pair of socks can be brought up out of the sheer functionality that makes them socks to be given meaning, we do the opposite thing with people. They may wander through our lives with all of the story and associations that would make every single individual worthy of long contemplation of just the sorts of questions you would ask to unlock all of the stories that this person has inside of them, but pragmatically? The story needs to recede into pure functionality so you can get the check deposited and the line of twenty people waiting behind you for their Friday of evening to begin can move forward, even though the bank teller might be able to tear your heart open with the story of the first time they lost a pet.

It’s harder, maybe, being the mother, and feeling consumed by my functionality in other people’s lives. I don’t expect my children to wrap their minds around my full personhood, even though I was delighted when my twelve year old did ask “What music did you listen to when you were my age?” Maybe that particular question felt laden with my awareness of his awareness of the divergence of our stories: I had a story before my children existed, they are developing their own stories in which I hardly figure.

I guess were I feeling more rigorous about filling out my own personal philosophy I might question the opposition of function and symbolic meaning, thinking à la Virginia Postrel, that the best gifts are both useful and have a pleasingness, of aesthetic and symbolic dimensions. chilled, I put on the socks from my grandfather, noting like Pablo Neruda how my feet seem unworthy of the “woven fire of those luminous socks.” I end musing about books, which carry all of the externally-granted symbolic aspects — my grandfather recommended it! and just looking at the cover I can feel the prickle of grass under my legs, just starting to sweat, smell the freshness of the mowing, see the shadows of leaves dancing on the page as I lay under the tree at my grandfather’s reading it — and then build worlds of inner significance, too.

It’s a semi-serious joke that I’m homeschooling myself towards the MFA that I won’t go into debt for (and this makes me wonder what value it would have) while Raven’s trying to get a new business going, but I am not required to write a term paper (nor for that matter, to grade it!) Still. Watching the world go a little nuts over swine flu this week (maybe not the world, so much as the social media that are my portal to the world most days) I am still sorting my response to a semester of imagining the end of the world.

Honestly, the feminist writings threw my kilter just a little more, becoming lenses for examining my own choices, the compromises that have re-shaped my world view since the last time I read a lot of feminist theory fourteen years ago. And part of me wishes I did have to write a term paper just to get my responses all sorted out. I think the thing I find most frightening is thinking I have made decisions out of honest consideration of our circumstances, of what is in my children’s best interests as well as my own, only to find out I was frightened of trying for something bigger, or that it was the path of least resistance in the face of institutional sexism so deep that I was merely reinforcing it. I have an unwritten blog post on not being defined by reproductive status that I am afraid remains unwritten while my children and their schools consume a good part of my energy for thinking, for writing.

What about the end of the world? The lens I haven’t been able to set aside is the Bahà’í promise that we are part of an ever-advancing civilization. I worry this sounds completely implausible in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the sense of environmental, economic, or medical doom looming. Honestly, I love living in a community where sustainability is on everyone’s lips, where ideas of peak oil and reducing your carbon footprint are given serious consideration, especially if it’s the only alternative to living as if the world were created for our rapacious consumption. But I also try to balance that against the ease with which I could slip into fear and hopelessness.

The most recent copy of the parenting zine hip Mama had an article, “The Year of Living Fearfully,” by Erica Etelson that broke my heart, about having spent a year of her young son’s life experiencing such anxiety about peak oil that she couldn’t be the parent to him that she had promised herself she would be, that she experienced the pain of seeing her kindergarten-aged son worrying about her.

It resonated with a conversation with my father about the reversal in the expectation of each generation that the next will somehow have a higher standard of living. I suppose I don’t feel capable of calculating which generation has had it best; I might envy some of the freedoms my parents or grandparents had, but I also am impressed at all of the knowledge that lies at my children’s fingertips and their skills at accessing it.

But even if we were to bomb ourselves back to the stone age next week, I think what I feel is a responsibility to improve my children’s ’spiritual’ standard of living, by which I suppose I mean a degree of self-awareness in interacting with others, a rootedness in how deeply loved they are, a degree of reverence for the mystery around them, and a host of qualities like compassion, kindness, generosity, patience, perseverance, and an ability to think for themselves balanced by the expression of respect for authority. And while my valuing of all of these things are rooted in my own Bahà’í identity, seeing those values reflected in most of my parenting cohort does give me hope. My reading of the Bahà’í notion of an ever-advancing civilization is that material progress has to be balanced by spiritual progress, and that the two together will enable us to solve the problems that we face as a global community. More, that the equality of men and women (and the eradication of racism, and the elimination of the extremes wealth and poverty) is seen as part of the spiritual advancement of our civilization helps me throw my belief behind it.

And I have veered away from the specifics of the post-apocalyptic readings, the way that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland immediately threw me into skepticism of any utopian project and whether the Bahà’í project is a utopian one, to musing on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker’s storytelling as an unreliable transmission of culture. Skipping entirely Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and questions of sincerity of belief in one’s own utopian project not protecting one at all from its aftershocks. Or the two Californian books, Carolyn See’s Golden Days and Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest which were both so perfectly set in California that they reinforced my hypothesis that we like the apocalypse as the last remaining frontier when one can go west no longer, not to mention both having qualities of the Lifetime movie vicarious experience of the unthinkable that we watch and cling to as if they were evidence that we would be among the select to survive. It was Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men read right before Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress that convinced me that I lap up the post-apocalyptic eagerly as metaphor for feelings of inexplicable desolation and isolation, sometimes finding the fresh start and sometimes mere survival of hopelessness.

So no term paper, but a quiet celebration that I have made it through all of the readings, often with no one to talk about how it was all affecting me (for example, cleaning out the pantry in a battle against pantry moths, I would look at a can of food with an expiration date last summer and think that after the apocalypse I wouldn’t give a damn about expiration dates.) But noticing friends’ Facebook statuses reflecting real anxiety about swine flu, I think I have gotten something else contemplating the end of the world as we know it, a reinforced sense of how I can consciously choose hope, and also compassion, not out of naive optimism but because that choice matters. Very little in the post apo reading was more horrifying than Dave Egger’s account of the Sudanese war refugee experience in What is the What. We sort of know that the world cannot continue indefinitely as we have known it, but the unknown aspect of how it will change is frightening. The fact that a car accident is more likely to kill one than the swine flu is small reassurance, given all of the different ways that human beings inflict suffering on one another. But the only way I know to fight against the horror is to try and bring my children up with kindness and compassion.

The problem I encounter is how nothing strikes me as particularly skiey. The sky is so much its own thing, the closest most things get to resembling the sky is in color, but then it doesn’t take much attention to realize that there isn’t a single color by which I’d characterize the sky.

Maybe, I think the problem is that I am a person who scurries, eyes downcast, generally lacking the spiritual wherewithal to contemplate vastness or meteorological temperament. It could be that the sky is lately representative of all the directions from which grasping talons could without warning descend.

(This shows up in my morning pages and I am delighted to have something that is neither laundry list nor complaint, that doesn’t worry about one of the boys, that reminds me I like words as words even before they are freighted with things to tell. Raven, sitting next to me on the bed where I use a lapboard to write in my journal has reached out, maybe tentatively because I have been a little prickly the last few days, and in one of those startling moments when you realize how you are feeling first of all by noticing your own body language, I realize my shoulder has relaxed, muscles melting under the warmth of his hand: the prickliness isn’t there this morning!)

Skiey, has this other dimension then, possibility and boundlessness, the limits on possibility are as laughably small as my own scurrying figure. The changes of the sky carry the astronomical regularity of the sun’s minute by minute, month by month, tracing out the planes of the ecliptic, but also the chaotic change of dramatic switchings from dark to light and back again as winds from far off gorges chase clouds down the valley where this city perches. I resist with all my might the cheap metaphor, the unforgivable conceit, but note that I can relax where the sky touches my shoulder as if it were my husband’s hand, reassuring me of this connection, not scared off by my prickles.

I worry about words facing extinction, wish someone maintained lists of endangered species that I could do my part for by bringing them slowly back into more common usage, but consideration of skiey makes me think that I wouldn’t want it to be too common, exactly either, that the things I want compared to the sky are rare, special.