An eye for the extraordinary

Annie Dillard died yesterday. I was looking for Bird by Bird on my shelves yesterday (by Anne Lamott). I know it is here — because there is no longer anywhere else — but I kept bumping into Dillard. The Writing Life. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That weasel essay. I gave it up for the day.

Today I tried again. Book by book. But no Bird by Bird. Instead I pulled Dillard's The Writing Life off the shelf. Its bristling with sticky notes, notes from past Michelle to present Michelle, I suppose. Or a note from the universe to remember Annie Dillard's gifts to me.

I gave the reading at the undergraduate commencement this spring. Traditionally the choice of reading is left to the person giving the reading. And of course, it should be short. The students I had taught in the first year writing seminar were graduating and I wanted something that might reach back to that class (titled  “Women who see through walls” and reading women poets, mystics and scientists — and some people who crossed those lines). I decided no wild life from Mary Oliver . “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by the late Becky Elson (an astrophyscist and poet) felt a little too dark for this event. Annie Dillard’s weasel essay called to me, but also felt a bit violent..stalking your calling? But Dillard? Yes, Dillard! I used a piece from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek written when she was young (though not quite as young as the graduates.) There is some stalking, but no blood.

"For the scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, humanists, poets, writers, for all of you who have peered through the walls of the universe, dug under them, clambered over them, taken them apart, and made something new…stone by stone. From Annie Dillard, “The Waters of Separation” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time…unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock…they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock—more than a maple— a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.” 

(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harpers, 1974, p. 269)

 

Monk mode

64A distraction-limiting lifestyle trend 
MONKMODE 

— NYT Crossword Sunday, 13 September 2026

A friend sent me an article yesterday about the sale of a Trappist monastery in Colorado. The community had grown too small and so the remaining monks were returning to the community that had spawned them. The author wonders about the ways in which the vocation of a monk and the yearnings of those who go into the wilderness parallel each other. She quotes Douglas Christie  in The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, who describes the “desire to be immersed within an immensity—to become endlessly, hopelessly lost in it, tumbling down, out, into a vast space, borne along, carried ever deeper by love—is itself endless.”

To me the call to the monastic life is the antithesis of a trend, however trendy it may seem at the moment. Nor am I at all certain that "distraction limiting" is the best description of a monk's life. Having never been a monk, I can't really say, but immersive would be one description I might reach for. Attentive. Still. Mindful. Simple. Extravagant. Open. Cloistered.  

Whatever it is, it's not an antidote to a loud and chaotic world. Martin Laird OSA in Into the Silent Land suggests, "This is why most people don't stick with a contemplative discipline for very long; we have all heard all sorts of talk about contemplation bringing inner peace but when we turn within to seek this peace, we meet inner chaos instead of peace. But at this point it is precisely the meeting of chaos that is salutary, not snorting of lines of euphoric peace." 

Perhaps the call to the monastic life is like a rickety ladder leading into the unseen depths. At times you may cling to the ladder for dear life, too terrified to go down another rung.  Or breathlessly, you dart up until you see the feet of the monk above you,  to be sure that you are not alone. Then there are the moments where you simply wait, drawn neither up nor down. The ladder shakes and creaks. And whatever is in the depths is calling your name with such intensity that eventually you will continue to descend.

Magic decoder

I have been blogging in this space for more than 22 years. Almost a third of my life? When I began in 2004, blogs — online diaries — were having a moment. People wrote about science and parenting and hobbies and teen-aged angst. MySpace was a year old, and reaching a global audience. I ended up on what was then Blogspot and is now Blogger for reasons that now escape me. There were monetized mommy blogs and science blogs and hobby blogs and blogs that started and after two posts stopped. There was WordPress for the blogger who wanted to micromanage every aspect. There were readers that tracked the blogs you read, letting you see updates at a glance. And then there weren’t. MySpace had a meltdown and lost more than a decade of users’ content. (Always back-up!) And a couple of years ago, MySpace became read only. The rise and fall of blogging. 

Now there are Substack and Medium. Blogs by another name.

And here I am, still blogging. Still on bare-bones Blogger. I have written 2140 posts, 300 of them remain in draft. A total of 653,464 words. How do I know that last? I learned Python and wrote a few hundred lines of code to take a feed.atom file (what Blogger gives you for a back up) and turn into a tidy Scrivener project, each post in its own document along with any images, tagged with its publication date and carrying its metadata along. I can pull up all the posts from 2015 and turn them into a cleanly formatted file (PDF or Word or RTF or…). I can collect all of Barnacle Boy’s adventures. [His comment: “My whole childhood is on there.” Not quite, see below!] Or everything I tagged “Ignatian.” I can mine my own data. How many em dashes have I used over the years? It’s like having a magic decoder ring.

Why have I kept up the blog all these years? The tag line at the top of my blog says (in Latin , because everything always sounds more profound in Latin, right?): Tenet insanabile multo scribendi cacoethes.“An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many.” It besets me and certainly the blog scratches my itch to write, the need to wrap words around what I notice.

Writing is thinking through your fingers, said Isaac Asimov. I write to think through things, to clarify and sharpen my ideas, my arguments. It’s what was so devastating to me before I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, when my typing mysteriously became glacial and writing by hand impossible. Denied my usual tools to write, I felt stripped of my ability to think. Ideas swirled around, but it became harder and harder to capture and refine them. (Note the absence of posts in early 2024. Note also my gratitude for the diagnosis and the medication that has given me back so much.)

The blog is a seed bed for my writing over all. On occasion it has led to opportunities to write for print, more often I can pull a phrase or return to an experience years past in a new piece of writing, the details kept fresh in a post. I certainly could have kept a private journal or written some version of morning pages, but the discipline of writing cleanly and clearly for a public audience, no matter how tiny, made those bit and pieces richer.

Because the blog is public, and not anonymous, I have tried never to write anything I would be ashamed of seeing on the front page of the New York Times. Or to write about students or colleagues or family in a way that embarrassed or denigrated them. (So, no, my kids’ whole childhoods are not here, and there is not a juicy academic roman á clef to be dug out of the posts.)

I have met some amazing people through the blog, some have become incredible friends and colleagues outside the confines of the interwebs, some who I only know as a screen name on a comment. What is a writer if there are no readers? 

I have enjoyed having this space to think aloud, to wrestle with ideas that had no other place to go. I hope to continue to enjoy it for years to come (and yes, I back up regularly!). Thank you for reading!

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The interface keeps suggesting I “correct” blog to blob. 

I have eaten of the tree of knowledge

A couple of years ago I went around the corner from my back yard to find a substantial snake coming the opposite way. The snake quickly headed under the forsythia and I decided to go around the other way. I hadn’t seen any snakes in the yard since, though I’d seen snake skins on the sidewalk, and earlier this week a large snake on the side of the road nearby. So I knew they were here. Somewhere.

Today I was doing a bit of yard clean-up. I tidied up my pile of kindling, ready for the first cool night and a fire. I thought I’d deal with a raised bed under the apple tree, and the old tarp that was covering it, weighted down by some bluestone pavers.I stacked the pavers, pulled up the tarp and there was a tiny snake, not even a foot long and no thicker than my little finger, wrapped into the top of an upturned pot. Whoops! 

No picture, alas, by the time I went in and got my phone, it had decamped. Also, alas, my snake identification skills are non-existent. The picture with the post is from an encounter in the Maryland mountains some years back, and this one I could identify. I am certain that the little one I disturbed was not venomous.

I have eaten of the tree of knowledge (even if the apples are long gone), the knowledge of good and evil. Or at least the knowledge of snake habits, and decided that perhaps today was not the day to turn that pot over, particularly with my naked hands.

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.” Genesis 3:15

A Tale of Two Offices

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..." A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The office was full, the office was empty. I have everything packed, I have nothing unpacked. I once had two offices, now — incredibly — they have collapsed into a single reality. Things are still jostling for space, the beakers of bright colored markers and sharp pencils patiently wait for me to decide whether they get tucked into a drawer or live on a desk. I sometimes despair of taming the chaos. 

Everything remains before me, even as nothingness blooms on my calendar. I have new projects hatching into those empty spaces: I'm learning to code in Python — my 7th coding language, a retreat to prepare and give, some exploratory noodling around for a new book. Older projects are simmering: two books in various stages of completion, a couple of talks on tea coming up. 

And there are tendrils of grief. I watched the Bryn Mawr back-to-school reel on Instagram and realized how deeply I miss the brightness of my classes, their energy, their curiosity that drove my own. I miss having that other space on campus to call home, where I hung my keys in the little cubby by the door and like Mr. Rogers donning his sweater, draped Dr. Francl across my shoulders. 

I ran into a former student this morning at the pharmacy waiting to get my flu shot (and my Covid vaccine and my shingles vaccine...I got my tetanus shot a couple of weeks ago thanks to the epic altar crash, I am awash in immunity). She came over, offered me her coupon reward for getting her vaccines and then vanished before I had a chance to catch my breath and ask her how she was and what she was doing. I miss the students.

"(Be)comings all involve goings. I keep musing about how Christ holds all these things in tension: birth/death; emptiness/fullness; light and darkness; dance and stillness….and perhaps that’s what it means to be fully human, to live in death and life, light and darkness?" 

I am going, so I must perforce be becoming? But what and how and when? Where I know — my study!

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Images: My office shortly before I packed it up, and right before I closed the door on it. Last photo is of my space as a first year graduate student (a corner of a windowless office on the 3rd floor of what is now Rowland Hall at UCIrvine.) Until very recently the black and red organic chemistry textbook on my desk was still on my shelf.

The quote is me, which someone else captured and tagged as wise.