Fencing Bear at Prayer

The end of an exciting week and I'm celebrating by sitting here with a cat by my side, wondering how long my foot is going to keep hurting and thinking about what to say. Should I tell you about the conversation I had this afternoon with one of my colleagues about what it is that makes fencing "physical chess" or should I share the reflection I had yesterday, driving to fencing practice and listening to a recording of Kirtan as sung by the swamis of the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers? It was a beautiful day here in Chicago today, warm and sunny with only a little bit of wind, but it's cooling down this evening and looks like it's going to rain. My husband spent the last three days at a meeting in NYC and by accident the DVD of the movie that I was thinking about watching this evening is with him, still in his laptop. This would be an excellent time to write, but I am still so tired from my adventures in Atlanta, it's hard to think about anyt...

One of the more comforting things about confessing one's anxieties so publicly (or, given my current rate of hits, semi-publicly) as on a blog is that one almost immediately begins to wonder, having posted, whether things are quite as bad as they seem. Falling back on my usual habit, I started making a list in my head while I was doing footwork this afternoon, tallying blessings in my life against misfortunes and disappointments. My parents' divorce and my father's parents' deaths the same year loom large in the narrative of my childhood. The usual adolescent calamities and frustrations (being "fat", losing friends, falling in and out of love), my own divorce after three years of marriage in graduate school, my mother-in-law's death three months after my son (with my second, not my first husband) was born, having a skating rink built outside my office window while I was writing my first book (constant construction noise for over a year), being pillori...