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.

When I was getting dressed this morning for work and rummaging through my closet hoping to find something wonderful I didn’t know I had, I actually did. A beautiful DAY Birger skirt of net embroidered with aqua yarn. I splurged on it about three years ago in a fit of optimism that I would fit into it one day. Three years and 30 fewer pounds, I do! At first I decided to save it for a special occasion instead of putting on the Ritz just to go to the office. But then I realized that every day I’m alive should be a special occasion, that whenever I walk out the door there’s a chance I’ll meet my soulmate, that this skirt needs to be lived in instead of left in the dark. Waiting. That’s what I spend so much time doing–waiting for the future, waiting until I have the perfect tools before I start an art project, waiting for an idea to find me. So I’m wearing the skirt to work today, feeling like I’m the special occasion I’ve been waiting for.

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?

Before Fridaville, I had a daily blog called Muse to Muse with a friend living in Prague. Each of our posts was a complete surprise to the other, but they often ended up being similar in tone or focus or content. Daily posting became more a chore than a choice when babies and moving and life intervened, so after a year and a half, we closed it down. But now we’ve started a new project — lower tech but just as satisfying. My friend is living in London, and we’re both hungry for something creative to occupy our hands and minds, so we’re making and mailing weekly postcards to each other. For my first one, I cut up a linoleum block print I’d done of flowers and on the back wrote a “Summer is…” list. Maybe we’ll tire of this more quickly — it requires more hands-on work and stamps — but right now I’m happy to have a creative goal. I realized I’d been waiting and waiting for ideas and projects to materialize instead of doing and doing. If I’m going to stumble on a new calling, I have to prime the pump, and this is just one way to start doing that.

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?

Tonight there was a much-awaited, chatted-about fat golden moon coming over the treetops. I tried to get a close-up photo, but my camera is either not powerful enough or I don’t know how to set it–the same frustrating story I encounter again and again in tech-world. All I got for my efforts was a streaky misshapened blob of an image. Why do I persist? I’m convinced that if I capture the moon on “film,” I will know Something once and for all. While I drove to the burned-out bridge near my house to try and photograph the moon, I listened to Lucinda Williams singing “Sweet Old World.” The litany of things given up squeezed my heart with each refrain. At the same time, her honey-coated, slack-jawed  Southern diction made me think of home as it never was and never will be. Earlier in the day, I was single-mindedly searching for an Andrew Marvell poem to illustrate a point I wanted to make about a blog post. Tonight, I only wish I could open my heart to the moon instead of worrying about whether I capture it in words or take a close-up photo or make a telling, sophisticated connection between the moon and my soul. I want to curl into that big apricot-colored luscious, chewy, sweet orb hanging over my driveway at 10pm. No photos, only sense memories. No documents, only dreams. The moon is close to us this month — send your longings up to meet it halfway.

Dear Local Hardware Store,

Don’t think you’ll lure me in this year to your newly stocked garden center with the burlesque displays of overblown geraniums and the promise of Edenic juiciness waiting to be coaxed out of heirloom tomato plants. I know your game. I just came in here for a garden hose nozzle because mine is broken again the same as every spring I will not pause at the bags of mushroom compost or rich black manure or reliable old pine straw. Don’t even bother to push the marigolds forward to say hello with those big sunny smiles. This year I’m not going to be whipped into a buying frenzy by cart after cart of plants being loaded into Hummers and Volvos.  I’ve been through it with you so many times. The glib promises that our love will grow and ripen. That the thyme I plant between pavers will spread out like eternity. That raised beds are lush breeding grounds for summer’s dinners. No, no and no. Because I know how this love story ends. The heartbreak of nemotodes. The failure to thrive. The wilt, the black spot, the mildew growing on my Martha Stewart roses like jailhouse tattoos. I’m stopping my ears to your siren song of foolproof upside-down tomato planters, ingenious soaker hoses and Earth Boxes. This summer my yard can go wild, my soil can fail the county extension test, and my vegetables can come from the Farmers’ Market two blocks away. Including the cucumber I’ll use to garnish the Hendricks Gin I’ll be drinking on the porch instead of pruning, pinching back and pulling weeds.