This is the first new bathing suit I’ve had in years. Its retro style reminds me of Marilyn Monrow, the ’60s, bathing caps covered with rubber flowers. When I put it on, I feel curvy and lush. It makes me think of deep blue swimming pools, deeply tanned lifeguards, the smell of Coppertone and a transistor radio somewhere playing Bobby Darin singing “Beyond the Sea.” I’m often drawn to clothing that evokes some kind of eerie sense memory, and usually it’s those purchases that I hang on to the longest. Like a leather bomber jacket or a black velvet dress that makes me feel just a tiny bit louche. When that happens, I’m not just wearing a piece of clothing, but also an era, a state of mind, the music that haunts it, the yearning to be transformed.

I’m sure my neighbors think I’m a bit nuts when I wander along the sidewalk taking pictures of the sky. I love trying to capture clouds…if there were a job on Weather Channel for a Cloud Chaser instead of Storm Chaser, I would apply instantly. I never tire of their infinite variety, especially cloud mountains that seem like a Shangri-La just out of reach. Most of the time my eyes and mind are firmly grounded on daily minutiae or my small, human-sized sorrows and worries. I’m staring down when I walk or straight ahead and I forget to look up.   To see a squirrel tightrope walking a power line, a redtail hawk chasing small prey, a red tin roof against an eye-of-god blue sky. My photos never seem to catch that perfect cloud moment, just like I have a hard time doing that in life, but I’ll keep trying and failing and trying and failing and looking up.

I have several sets of prayer beads that I wear as bracelets, and this turquoise string is my particular favorite right now. The beads are heavy and it’s just a bit too long to wrap neatly around my wrist, but that just makes them feel more exotic. I’m not religious so they don’t connect to me to any belief system and I don’t use them like a Catholic or Buddhist would, but the concept of prayer beads makes me unreasonably happy. And lately I’ll take any little scrap of happiness I can find.  This string is literally like a touchstone — the weight and the clicking sound that the beads make when I move my wrist is a reminder of some lost holiness, some ground that has not been profaned, some tiny curl of incense in a faraway, forgotten temple.

Looking through my photos this weekend, I realized that I’m drawn over and over to images of windows. This one was taken from inside a house in Sienna and it’s my favorite because the cloud seems to bleed into the window casement. It also reminds me of the paintings of  the Madonna in a room or tower with a long view out the window behind her. I’m fascinated by windows and mirrors…the former teasing me with a glimpse of freedom just beyond my grasp, the latter reflecting my constant and frustrating search for some kind of bullshit cosmic enlightenment right back at me.  An over-simplified explanation of their appeal, but I suspect they are two poles of my personality, both tugging at my attention. Right now, though, I need to cut a window in my life. When I remember the wide open feeling of the day this was taken in Italy, I’m hungry to live in a place of possibility, to be a foreigner, to have to learn a new language and a new me, to fling open the shutters every morning and see the world freshly made, waiting for me to step into it.

Coming face to face with your Shadow side in the dark alley of the soul means you might not recognize yourself when you emerge. Sometimes I long for that transformation and sometimes I dread it. Who would I be if the outer layer of me that greets the world were shed like a snake wriggling free of its too-small, worn-out skin? What version of me is struggling to be born? The risk is great, the outcome uncertain, the prospect alluring.

I’m going back in time this weekend to attend my high school reunion, the first one I’ve gone to even though it has been a million years since I graduated. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. On one hand, curious. On the other hand, I wonder if it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. It wasn’t that high school per se was so horrible (although it was bad enough), but rather that my family life was supremely unhappy and grim, and I don’t know if I want to revisit that. Even though I’m much older now, going “home” means I glimpse that sad teenager everywhere I look. Too many landmarks of misery are still standing and even where they’ve disappeared, ghosts walk. Knowing now what lay ahead of me after I left home makes those apparitions even more poignant. I always think I’ve confronted and confounded those lingering memories after each visit, but they still have the power to overwhelm me and pull me under. No matter how much I’ve aged, 17-year-old me is still waiting there to be wounded all over again.

When I was 17 and first married right out of high school, I educated myself. I read with a hunger that  couldn’t be satiated. I haunted the public library because we had NO money to buy books. I read everything from bodice rippers to Madame Bovary–not really making a distinction between them then. If I read a trashy novel set in France during the reign of Louis VI, I would start an obsessive exploration of everything I could find about the history and culture of that period. I enrolled in a University of One, and although I was thrilled that I could start “real” college when I was 29, nothing could equal the beginner mind I brought to my indiscriminate reading during those years when the world of knowledge was revealing itself to me. Now so many decades have passed and I can afford to buy books, but thanks to computers and email and writing in paragraphs and sound bites for my work at Skirt! and my hobby of a blog, I find myself unable to settle my mind to read difficult books or even long articles in magazines that require concentration and mulling over. I start to read a dense novel or nonfiction, but I’m embarrassed to admit that my interest dwindles and I skim or simply put it aside. I feel as if technology has rewired my brain in a very discomforting way. So I’ve decided to re-enroll in the University of One, to try and rediscover my original joy in learning, to retrain my brain. And I have to admit that it is horrendously hard! I have more time since I stopped watching TV cold turkey last September (and for a Bravo addict, that was a huge step), but I haven’t really filled it with a more edifying activity. My first stab at University of One curriculum has been learning by trial and error to make linoleum block prints (a botched example is the swimmer above), because after all, art classes are an important elective.  I’ve gone back to a book called At Day’s Close to learn and feel more about living in the dark before electricity. I’ve had it on my bedside table for months and months and just dipped into it here and there, but now I’m reading it with more intention. I’ve discovered the fascinating On Being site for an NPR show we don’t get in my area. It explores a main topic and then branches off onto deliciously related paths. It reminds me of browsing an old card catalog when one book led me to another and then another and on and on and on.  I feel like I’m caught up in a conversation I wish I could be having with my friends. I’m also wrestling with Proust…I’m not sure who will win.  I bought a Kindle Singles essay by Jane Hirshfield on Basho and haiku, and it’s inspired me to try my hand at the 5-7-5 form again. I’m fumbling around in iTunes to mend my ignorance about classical music, and I’m falling in love with Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne’s poems years after first being introduced to them. It’s as if I’m finally ready to appreciate them. This new University can never duplicate the excitement of its predecessor, but I’m so tired of Twitter time, of absorbing information but lacking wisdom, of living at the speed of light that I’m ready for some continuing education.

I can’t remember where I took this photo, only that I was drawn to the imperfection, the cracks, the geometry of it. I always have my iPhone with me and so rarely remember to be on the qui vive for tiny scenes and quiet landmarks of beauty. I think it’s because I’m not an artist at heart; I’m focused on self, self, self and have my lens turned inward instead of outward. Maybe that’s a result of dealing with words, being lost in a book or mentally writing an article all the time. Or maybe it’s just the result of being narcissistic, self-absorbed. Whatever the cause, I wish to be more visual, to cultivate (if it’s even possible) a painterly eye or at the very least to be alert for lurking beauty. How much do I miss every day?

Life looked good enough to eat walking through Central Park in almost-spring. Gazing up  up up into this ethereal sight made me agitated because how to describe it without resorting to every cliche ever written. But then why describe it, why not let the photo stand for itself? Or going further, why not let the ephemeral moment exist for itself instead of my camera? But everyone that day was gawking as if the trees in bloom were celebrities caught by our papparazzi lenses. Greta comes out of seclusion! Jackie O takes a walk! Spring sighted in Central Park! And I suspect some of the people taking photos weren’t even tourists like me, but city slickers who let down their sophistication long enough to be star struck by the earth birthing itself again.

Sitting in the orthopedist’s waiting room last week, I suddenly realized everyone, including me, was wearing some sort of cast or appliance on one or more  of their limbs. Our wounds were right out there in the world, visible to all. I started wondering what it would be like if we had the power to peer into strangers’ lives and hearts and see all the emotional traumas they had sustained over a lifetime. The window cleaner on the corner who doesn’t have the money to take his mother to the doctor.  The waitress at your favorite restaurant who never reveals she lost her only child a long time ago. Your child who still remembers waking up and you weren’t there. We are all stitched up and patched together and sent back out into the world after every majoror minor psychic surgery, limping along, doing our healing mostly in private. Wouldn’t it be a relief if we could wear a warning that said “My heart is broken so please handle with care” in the same way we make allowances for someone crossing the road on crutches?