One of my husband's colleagues in the world of urban planning has a great new blog, live.eat.play.Twin Cities, a New Urbanist's (and new Mom's) take on all that is wonderful about the neighborhoods of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Take a look. If you live here, it will make you proud you do. If you don't, it may help you explain the rabid look of pride in Minnesotans' eyes when they speak of home.
I'm having a wonderful week with poets, fiction writers and other nonfiction folk in Collegeville. The workshops have been enriching and the writing time mostly productive. An introvert's dream.
I was mining past blogs for some essay ideas and discovered I've had a blogaversary!! Two years at this odd practice of journaling online! Thanks for reading! I'll be back to more unedited drivel on a regular basis when I return to normal life.
Well, I've been fresh out of original thoughts this week. Might have something to do with re-entry from a monastery straight into a funeral, kindergarten selection for our oldest, preaching and now 10 days of single parenting lying ahead. Whew.
So instead I've finally updated my typelists a bit. I've tried to keep these short and small, in part because I like the idea of actually knowing most of the people on my blogrolls. I can now say I've met the creator of Journey with Jesus, Daniel Clenendin, who was also at the writers workshop I attended two weeks ago. Good stuff there. And I really do know the creator of the Ironic Catholic, who wishes to remain anonymous. But I can vouch for her Catholic and her theological credentials, and I second her wish that the gift of bilocation be bestowed upon mothers. I mean really, it's wasted on monastic types.
Don't miss my friend Jenell's post about mystery and tragedy from September 10. The willingness to live with mystery is one thing that our media culture doesn't cultivate very well, it seems. Surely the church can do better about creating a place for us to live within the mystery rather than constantly demanding answers out of life.
Billy Collins has a great poem about that. Teaching poetry, he says he tries to cultivate a sense of wonder
"But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chari with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means."
("Introduction to Poetry", in Poetry 180)
A friend of mine confessed recently that she's a bit of a Luddite, and therefore hadn't paid much attention to the blogosphere. I replied that I'm a bit surprised myself to be blogging. After all, we are a household that has one car, a very small TV with no cable and no permanent home, a 3-year-old who saw no videos before the year 2005 (although I think a couple babysitters may have broken that ban), and a general bias against most pop culture. But Will telecommutes for his work, so our current life would be impossible without the 'net. And as an introvert, I have found that email and blogging do have their advantages --especially if you can manage them instead of letting them manage you. That's probably true of most technology.
Nevertheless, we do enjoy being unplugged from time to time, as we will be in the coming days. I won't be posting for a while. In fact, I won't be emailing, calling by phone, driving a car, or doing anything vaguely 20th century for a while. I can't wait. Signing off.
