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ever dumbening
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So often unexpected and unknown: the where and when of the next kernal. Last evening, as we sat drinking sparkling wines, eating herbed cheeses, my brother's father-in-law says to me (after he learns I turned thirty-five the day before): What you do before you're thirty-five doesn't matter; it's what you do after that's important.
Accomplishment. Accomplishment and learning, in every possible combination and even lack thereof.
And so I've been thinking about this idea, this imaginary border I've just crossed. An escape valve for guilt of past deeds and undeeds? An edict for necessary future greatness? I have passed many hours introspecting on my source and destination and the stream I ride right now that connects the two. Recently, as I've stumbled upon and consciously worked for a more forgiving and confident self-image (more or less "successfully"), I find that occasionally I get lulled by false plateaus: "Now I've got the sculpture path ..." or "Now I've got the studio space, soooo ...." So, what? Yep, there's nothing more to learn here, just get to executing. No. Of course, each time we hit upon something new we are reminded of that "no," that simple message of the endless revelation. But we often soon forget, and it's those very moments of "Holy Shit!" that are so necessary for continued openness to the infinite unknown (and the, at this point almost-trivial, concomitant accomplishments).
My brother-in-law is a teacher of history at the Stevenson School in Pebble Beach. We all assembled there for Thanksgiving this year. Learning flowed all across the two days. My one-year-old niece has axons and dendrites spreading like weeds, like a time-lapse image of frost on winter glass. My eyes, the muscles of my right arm, and all the other contributors to lofting a Bocce ball learn from the repetative weight, the sloped lawn, the knocking sound, the silence. We stand together before the large meal and learn what Abraham Lincoln had to say in October of 1863, as he made a proclamation making Thanksgiving and official national holiday (the date being of significance as the rough halfway point of the Civil War).
The thing that slayed me, though, is what I saw today. After a brief snack of leftover turkey, and discovering a hilarious new game with a football with my brother's dog Tux, my sister and I made our way down to the beach. We cut across a golf course that costs three hundred dollars to play, once. We laughed at the idea of having your entire yard be a sand dune, of telling your son to shovel the lawn. We poked at anemones and hermit crabs in the tide pools, the clean cold water catching our unaware, shoe-clad feet off guard. On the way back we stopped to look at several Monarch butterflies alighting on bushy clusters of bright, orange-tinted yellow flowers. I lean in, my face less than a foot away from one. For a fraction of a second I think the one I'm looking at is a fake (placed to attract others?). There is a tiny rounded rectangle with numbers on the rear right wing (a price tag? made in China?). But then this "fake" one moves, and I now know that this tiny piece of information was a tracking tag, placed by someone interested in learning. Who knew? I certainly didn't.
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