Spotlight Turned Off

Summer                                                    Waning Grandchildren Moon

Thank god, I’m done with the spotlight.  Please never again.  Interrupting people on their journey through the museum, a private journey done under their guidance, is intrusive, invasive.

I had two folks on the Anishinabe to Zapotec Tour, Carl and Carol.  When I said, I’ll bet you’ve got jokes on that over the years, Carl said, nope. We haven’t been together that long.  We wandered in the galleries looking at the kachina, the house screen, the Bella Coola frontlet, the transformation mask, the Nayarit house and the Valdivian owl.  I told them the story of turtle, loon, beaver and muskrat, the pointed out the turtle sign on the Lakota fancy dress.  It was a good tour, engaged and interested.

Spoke with Margaret afterward.  She got me up to date on Sierra Club work and sent me a quick note with a timeline for the legcom process.  I’m also to call CURA and Macalester seeking interns.

Finally got over to Big Brain comics and picked three issues of the Good Minnesotan, a comic done by an MIA guard and her husband. The guy behind the counter shaved his beard and looks like a slightly pudgy groucho marx.  A lot like a slightly pudgy groucho marx.

How to Use Time Well

Summer                                       Waning Grandchildren Moon

Once upon a time a young man, now turned old, began again to consider a quest that had eluded him, eluded him since those days long ago when he left the small village and went off to school.  The quest had always seemed simple.  In each day given to us there are 24 hours.  8 or so of those find him occupied with sleep and dreaming, low focus and imaginative connections.  Another number of hours, maybe 3 or 4, give him nourishment through shopping, cooking, eating meals.  2 more hours pass by in exercise to keep the now older body able to handle the rigors of advancing age.  Maybe a half an hour, 45 minutes, finds him at a mirror or working a toothbrush, showering.  This is 15 hours allowing for things the young man now turns old under estimates as he is wont to do.

That leaves 9 hours, barely more than a third of the 24 hours for creative work, political work, artistic work the kind of things that all that maintenance related activity undergirds.  The quest is this:  how to use time well.  How to get the most out of hours and minutes allotted each day.  This fabled question has befuddled lots of folks over the ages, and it is one the young man now turned old seems not to be able to answer.

The journey has begun again.  As it has and as it will probably yet again, too.  Reorder.  Rethink.  Try again.