SHHHHHH

I have a secret...

lists, anxeity

I am making lists; lists of Max's food, needs, clothes, sleep; lists of packing to dos; lists of work to dos; ways not to be anxious, ways to be anxious, ways to sleep, ways not to sleep... the world will go on without me.. list or none.

Oh, and by the way, it is day 29 of my cycle, negative pregnancy test this morning but no period. Would be nice to know before I take off for Israel...

I am roasting...

red bliss potatoes in olive oil and sea salt. Everyone should have such a simple moment... the kitchen is warm, my nanny left early for Good Friday so Max and I chased the dinosaurs at the AMNH and came home to our dinner, (breakfast for dinner!) bath, bedtime routine. Now I await T's arrival home from work, making our dinner, drinking pinot grigio, snacking on Pennsylvania Dutch pretzels and piave vecchio, cooking tandoori chicken breasts and the aforementioned potatoes. Mellow, domestic and calm. The house is silent, save the drone of CNN on the TV, low enough not to understand, just to offer company.  Needed to stop and chronicle this moment of red bliss. 

Measure This!

"If we really want to do work that makes a difference...then we have to know whether it's working. And if you really do it well, you don't only want to know what works; you want to know how it works." -- Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin ("For Good,Measure." New York Times Magazine 3/09/08)

Just not so sure how I feel about this ... the pro-measurables movement often makes me nervous. I have been in the identity building field and have been asked to assess success for donors and it is very hard, bordering on junk science. Yet, have been told that it is better to make it up than say that we don't know. I do not believe that. Some things defy the ruler, some things just are transformative without needing statistics.

Poem for South African Women

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands

by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land

into new dust that

rising like a marvelous pollen will be

fertile

even as the first woman whispering

imagination to the trees around her made

for righteous fruit

from such deliberate defense of life

as no other still

will claim inferior to any other safety

in the world

The whispers too they

intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit

now aroused they

carousing in ferocious affirmation

of all peaceable and loving amplitude

sound a certainly unbounded heat

from a baptismal smoke where yes

there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers

raising arms

and heart high as the stars so far unseen

nevertheless hurl into the universe

a moving force

irreversible as light years

traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up

and the ones who stood without sweet company

will sing and sing

back into the mountains and

if necessary

even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

from Passion: New Poems, 1977-80, by June Jordan