There was an excitement and alertness about her which men show before a battle or a struggle, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life, those moments when a man shows his worth once and for all, and shows that his whole past has not been in vain but has been a preparation for such moments.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 5, section xix
It is today. Today is today. It is an end rather than a beginning. Leaving Little. Back to Boston. No wedding or white dress. It is a gentle day.
I have eaten the chocolate and glanced most briefly over the rose petals. The traces of V-day, gone. I have been alone. I have been alone with friends. I have smiled easily and laughed. I have read of sorrows without feeling them. I have worn the ring around my neck with fondness and familiarity. My heart has ached with strenuous activity alone. I feel calm and am confused by it.
I could tell myself (and I have) that we wouldn't have gotten married today anyway; we had decided not today before I decided not ever. I could layer calm upon calm by telling myself that today is not a time to mourn because we are not dead and hope still lives. But my current hope is different from the hope I felt earlier; I now hope for goodness that fits me, not for his goodness to fit me.
He was like a pair of shoes that pinched just one foot. A little bit all good. A little bit all bad.
I have learned that no one is perfect enough that you won't have to choose them.
I have learned that agency is really all that holds this life together.
I have learned (again) that pain often signals a wound and should not be ignored.
I have learned that I must eventually choose to follow my gut or choose to become someone else.
I have learned that I desire to be myself above all else.
I have learned that even if I am not understood, I desire acceptance and respect.
I have learned that I am the judge of my own emotions and needs. No one else can interpret myself to me.
I have learned that I did all I could, that I wanted it to work, that I tried, that I am not to blame.
So yeah. Today is today.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Kitty discovered 'what was important', which until then she had not known.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 2, section xxxiii
I spoke German last night. It was Dutch-mangled German, but he understood me. It filled me with energy and life, even at 2 in the morning. Plus he was super nice. And then he left, promising to maybe come visit the museum...and I never got his name! We HAVE to watch the World Cup together, in the same bar. Germany vs. Argentina and there are so many Latin Americans around... I can find him. There are only 150 people on this island.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 2, section xxxiii
I spoke German last night. It was Dutch-mangled German, but he understood me. It filled me with energy and life, even at 2 in the morning. Plus he was super nice. And then he left, promising to maybe come visit the museum...and I never got his name! We HAVE to watch the World Cup together, in the same bar. Germany vs. Argentina and there are so many Latin Americans around... I can find him. There are only 150 people on this island.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
'No really, how do you manage not to be bored?' she said to Anna again. 'All one has to do is look at you to see a woman who can be happy or unhappy--but never bored. Show me how you do it!'
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 3, section xviii
...And I'm painting a coconut palm on a wall in the museum. This, here, is a picture of the tree outside my hotel room door. It is the tree that I'm using as inspiration because of its interestingly kinked trunk and nice proportions.
What follows are a series of images depicting the painting of the tree. I started yesterday afternoon and painted most of today while listening to Within Temptation. I was dealing with some unhappy, and the painting and the music provided some much-needed fiber for the soul. Ready, set, go!
I have a bunch of detailing still to do, but the bulk of the painting is done. I'm going to back off for a few days; set my creative juices on simmer. The rest of the museum installations are moving right ahead, so there is a never-ending supply of stuff for us to do! I'll catch y'all up on it later. Now is time for bed. xo
He felt that in the depths of his soul something was settling down, adjusting and arranging itself.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 1, Section xxvii
Speaking of arranging, the museum is coming along really well! We hit a couple setbacks, minor ones, really. The paint on an entire wall peeled off, for instance, once the wallpaper primer was painted on. Watch this:
Whole square feet of paint peeled away from the wall because no one had sanded or dusted the sheet rock seams. Amazing. So our wonderful Jack the handy man and his son sanded down the wall and painted it afresh with Kilz. Now our wallpaper is up, and *bonus* it won't fall off the wall anytime soon!
Woohoo! Isn't it beautiful?!?!
Also, we have the amazingly professional museum logo up!
Here is Julia as we unpacked the sea turtle:
And here she is putting everything up:
Et VOILA! We are a MUSEUM!!!
Speaking of arranging, the museum is coming along really well! We hit a couple setbacks, minor ones, really. The paint on an entire wall peeled off, for instance, once the wallpaper primer was painted on. Watch this:
Whole square feet of paint peeled away from the wall because no one had sanded or dusted the sheet rock seams. Amazing. So our wonderful Jack the handy man and his son sanded down the wall and painted it afresh with Kilz. Now our wallpaper is up, and *bonus* it won't fall off the wall anytime soon!
Woohoo! Isn't it beautiful?!?!
Also, we have the amazingly professional museum logo up!
Here is Julia as we unpacked the sea turtle:
And here she is putting everything up:
Et VOILA! We are a MUSEUM!!!
Sunday, July 6, 2014
There in the unattainable heights above some mysterious change had already taken place... The sky had turned blue and bright; it answered his questioning look with the same tenderness, but with the same unfathomability.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 3, section xii
Wednesday night was the birthday of Yesi (pronounced Jessie), the front desk supervisor at Little Cayman Beach Resort, where we are staying. Julia is her friend, so she was invited to her birthday party, and I tagged along. I wore my sweet new altered maternity dress from Target (yay for Target and maternity dresses that can be altered!) and felt breezy and cute, so that was a plus. I think I had even washed my hair all special. (I'm not entirely sure since moments of getting wet, either in the shower or the pool or the ocean or with sweat, have started to run together...)
Anyway, the party was at this girl's studio apartment three stories up; basically a large box on stilts with porch around it. It has an amazing view and the sky gave us quite a show of heat lightning on all sides. We ate food and danced to a very short playlist of songs over and over and I won the limbo contest and the birthday girl's husband, Jose, danced merengue with me. He started slow, but I've done some partner dancing in my time, so when I followed his lead in all the turnings, his eyes got bigger and bigger and we danced faster and faster with spin after spin after spin! And at the end he declared me a marvelous dancer.
And by that time (which was after midnight), Julia and I were sweaty and pooped, so we walked back to the resort (which was all quiet and dark) and then jumped in the pool, party dresses and all. We felt so movie-scene-esque. ^^ The water was cool, the stars were out, my dress was swishy in the water... We giggled and splashed and did handstands. It was marvelous.
Soon, though, the night sky lured us beyond. We pulled ourselves out of the pool and dripped a path down to the end of the dock. We climbed to the lookout porch and stood in the ocean breeze, watching the heat lightning glow behind huge piles of majestic clouds and light up the tips of choppy water. My dress slapped against my legs. I stood on a bench to get closer to the constellations, and I spread my arms wide, breathing in great gasps with laughter slipping out that tried to express the awesomeness of everything.
We walked to the very edge of the dock, out where the next step would send us into the water. It was silent beneath the wind, a silence of great empty spaces like the sky and the sea. With the roiling mountains of distant storm cloud and the flashes of bright light in our eyes, and the dark moving ocean at our feet, I imagined that we could have walked right out on top of the water, through the night, like a pair of elemental goddesses. The sea and the air couldn't help but hold us up. And then there was a shooting star, larger than any either of us had ever seen. It streaked a gold path through the sky, so distinctly a ball of burning matter and so big that we half-expected to hear a splash from where it winked out on the horizon.
There just isn't a way to describe how this magic of the moment swirled around me and tried to fill my lungs to bursting. I felt like a paper person in a whirlwind of light and sound and air. I felt like my common self had no business inhabiting such an intense moment, like I didn't have a place to put it, like I would have had to break the skin of my self in order to assimilate such an outpouring of universal attention. I was there and took it in with each breath, but I can't help but feel that I should have burned right up and been reborn a phoenix with all that latent magic crackling in the sky.
Eventually we meandered home and climbed into bed sometime around two in the morning.
In holding on to this memory, I want to forget that my life's dearest wishes are yet unfulfilled. Because I am granted such a moment. Shouldn't that be enough? And I cannot help but be grateful.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 3, section xii
Wednesday night was the birthday of Yesi (pronounced Jessie), the front desk supervisor at Little Cayman Beach Resort, where we are staying. Julia is her friend, so she was invited to her birthday party, and I tagged along. I wore my sweet new altered maternity dress from Target (yay for Target and maternity dresses that can be altered!) and felt breezy and cute, so that was a plus. I think I had even washed my hair all special. (I'm not entirely sure since moments of getting wet, either in the shower or the pool or the ocean or with sweat, have started to run together...)
Anyway, the party was at this girl's studio apartment three stories up; basically a large box on stilts with porch around it. It has an amazing view and the sky gave us quite a show of heat lightning on all sides. We ate food and danced to a very short playlist of songs over and over and I won the limbo contest and the birthday girl's husband, Jose, danced merengue with me. He started slow, but I've done some partner dancing in my time, so when I followed his lead in all the turnings, his eyes got bigger and bigger and we danced faster and faster with spin after spin after spin! And at the end he declared me a marvelous dancer.
And by that time (which was after midnight), Julia and I were sweaty and pooped, so we walked back to the resort (which was all quiet and dark) and then jumped in the pool, party dresses and all. We felt so movie-scene-esque. ^^ The water was cool, the stars were out, my dress was swishy in the water... We giggled and splashed and did handstands. It was marvelous.
Soon, though, the night sky lured us beyond. We pulled ourselves out of the pool and dripped a path down to the end of the dock. We climbed to the lookout porch and stood in the ocean breeze, watching the heat lightning glow behind huge piles of majestic clouds and light up the tips of choppy water. My dress slapped against my legs. I stood on a bench to get closer to the constellations, and I spread my arms wide, breathing in great gasps with laughter slipping out that tried to express the awesomeness of everything.
We walked to the very edge of the dock, out where the next step would send us into the water. It was silent beneath the wind, a silence of great empty spaces like the sky and the sea. With the roiling mountains of distant storm cloud and the flashes of bright light in our eyes, and the dark moving ocean at our feet, I imagined that we could have walked right out on top of the water, through the night, like a pair of elemental goddesses. The sea and the air couldn't help but hold us up. And then there was a shooting star, larger than any either of us had ever seen. It streaked a gold path through the sky, so distinctly a ball of burning matter and so big that we half-expected to hear a splash from where it winked out on the horizon.
There just isn't a way to describe how this magic of the moment swirled around me and tried to fill my lungs to bursting. I felt like a paper person in a whirlwind of light and sound and air. I felt like my common self had no business inhabiting such an intense moment, like I didn't have a place to put it, like I would have had to break the skin of my self in order to assimilate such an outpouring of universal attention. I was there and took it in with each breath, but I can't help but feel that I should have burned right up and been reborn a phoenix with all that latent magic crackling in the sky.
Eventually we meandered home and climbed into bed sometime around two in the morning.
In holding on to this memory, I want to forget that my life's dearest wishes are yet unfulfilled. Because I am granted such a moment. Shouldn't that be enough? And I cannot help but be grateful.
First of all he decided that from that day on he would no longer set his hopes on the extraordinary happiness that marriage was to have given him, and therefore would not belittle the present so much.
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 1, section xxvi
I read that piece several weeks ago, and I thought it had a charming ring, despite the fact that the character it describes doesn't actually remain in that zen-like state of present-ness for very long. Nevertheless, it is a sentiment that I am often told would do me good if I adopted it, so let's put it at the head. And let's move on.
I got here on a Tuesday night. Let's see... On Wednesday I got a driving tour around the island and a technical tour around the museum I'm helping to install. There was also a trivia game at the resort bar. On Thursday we got down to work and then attended a birthday party for one of the resort staff and danced the night away! More on that night later. On Friday we worked the morning and then took off for the beach for some fourth of July snorkline. More on that underwater adventure later. That evening we fell in with some ne'er-do-wells who bought me ginger ales at the bar and then convinced us to look for hatching turtles in the middle of the night. More on that later. On Saturday we slept in and then worked all day and then had a quiet night doing laundry and falling asleep to the first LOTR movie. Sunday is today, and I took the day off and went to church. I have two weeks exactly until I fly home, and there are less than two weeks until the grand opening of the Little Cayman Museum! We have to hustle!!
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 1, section xxvi
I read that piece several weeks ago, and I thought it had a charming ring, despite the fact that the character it describes doesn't actually remain in that zen-like state of present-ness for very long. Nevertheless, it is a sentiment that I am often told would do me good if I adopted it, so let's put it at the head. And let's move on.
I got here on a Tuesday night. Let's see... On Wednesday I got a driving tour around the island and a technical tour around the museum I'm helping to install. There was also a trivia game at the resort bar. On Thursday we got down to work and then attended a birthday party for one of the resort staff and danced the night away! More on that night later. On Friday we worked the morning and then took off for the beach for some fourth of July snorkline. More on that underwater adventure later. That evening we fell in with some ne'er-do-wells who bought me ginger ales at the bar and then convinced us to look for hatching turtles in the middle of the night. More on that later. On Saturday we slept in and then worked all day and then had a quiet night doing laundry and falling asleep to the first LOTR movie. Sunday is today, and I took the day off and went to church. I have two weeks exactly until I fly home, and there are less than two weeks until the grand opening of the Little Cayman Museum! We have to hustle!!
Preface To A New Adventure
After spending a day in the air and way too much money on airport chocolate, I find myself in the Caribbean. Two months ago, I was expecting to be in the final stages of planning my wedding right now, but, you know. Best laid plans of mice and men, etc. I suppose the Caribbean is as good a place as any to find myself unexpectedly.
In fact, I've had some downright magical experiences already, and I intend to write about them, interspersed, perhaps, with some Leo Tolstoy since my 'light' summer reading this year happens to be Anna Karenina. Do join me.
In fact, I've had some downright magical experiences already, and I intend to write about them, interspersed, perhaps, with some Leo Tolstoy since my 'light' summer reading this year happens to be Anna Karenina. Do join me.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
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