quiet

The kind of quiet time I usually don't expect on a Monday... I used it for a midday hike with L and reading what she's reading (Olive Again).

easy like Sunday afternoon

For decades, the best summer afternoons have always been about lemonade, chatter, cards, snacks, sunshine, novels... Now I have puppies underfoot to make it even better. (And it's not even officially summer yet!)

(I needed this interlude today--I made an impulsive grocery trip to get some ingredients for Big A's Boss Day dinner and OMG all the unmasked people.)

Over on Scroll, a shortlist of seven philosophers who can help us build back a better post-pandemic world.

passing/passage

The blue blob is me with Scout's face wedged into my hip and what seems to be his preternaturally elongated body is actually part Huck. 

At went to Alma to visit friends (he's post vaccination and also an adult ¯\_(ツ)_/¯); Big A went to work; Nu had been irritable and took themselves off to bed early.

So this was me for the rest of the evening as I started and finished a novel--Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half--in one long gulp. I read the parts about passing breathlessly--racial passing + gender/trans passing. And it began to feel like being an immigrant is also somewhat like passing--in the sense that you leave an old self behind, propelled as much by necessity and accident as by some form of selfishness/self-centeredness. 

conflict

Sometimes it's called a "conflict," but it may look like people asking for their right to live.

[Pic from At's protest outside Rep. Elissa Slotkin's office this week.]

scene

these flowers are alight
opening in hemispheres
my mind skips out of context
out of focus, a confused state

I am eaten by the earth
I am circled by the eddy
my breath swells with longing
my heartbeat meets in collapse

[Pic: MSU Walled Garden, 5/17/2021]

context

breath is a hymn 
accomplishing joy
surfacing tree brown
I come back to my body
through the sacred,
absurd landscape
of patience

[Pic: Scout and Huck hanging out with me in puppy pose.]

perspective

I'm reeling today from finding out that someone I knew as a kind and overly chivalrous person is in prison for sex crimes. Multiple 16- and 17-year-olds had accused him and I absolutely believe them--I'm just shaken (and shaking my head) about how different (and misleading) my experience of this person was. 

He was famous/semi-famous, and I expect the case was media fodder in the UK for a while. I feel awful that I've sometimes used his early English music ensembles in classes... I will not do this again.

(Pic is of our only east-facing window; I wish we had more. The tradescantia and pothos cuttings I pinched off and stuck into candleholders have rooted and are taking off. Funny how that works.)