Fight Club

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.  This is hard for you because you think about fight club all the time.

Your girlfriends talk about their kids and their jobs and their husbands and their hair and you try to be a good listener while you think about choking people.  You think about what it feels like to hit a choke that is purely on the blood.  The words describing that unique form of satisfaction form in your throat.  You look for the same kind of opening in the conversation that you do when you wrestle but it never comes because you remember the first rule. 

It’s okay.  You don’t need to talk about it.  You just want to.

One thing that is cool about the word <fight> is that it is likely from an ancient root that has the sense of “comb, pluck out” (wool or hair).  However it might also be from the same source as the Latin “pugnus” which means fist. 

In Etymonline Mr. Harper uses the word “probably” to describe the presumed lineage between <fight> and the ancient root with the idea of pulling out hair; it’s just a “perhaps” when entertaining the possible derivation of <fight> from the Latin root with the notion of “fist.”  

I’m inclined towards the derivation from the ancient root but that’s because when I started fighting I had been growing my hair out for seven years.  I was hoping to have a baby but the baby never came so I started fighting instead.  

Fighting gave me a reason to cut off my hair.  After a couple months of my hair getting torn out during rolls it was time to choose fighting over hair.  I cut it all off and tried not to care about it but I did.  It felt like letting go of who I thought I would be and being okay with who I am.  

Sometimes my husband and I meet people and they ask us if we have a family, which is what people sometimes ask when they want to know if you have kids.  I say no to these people, no-we-do-not-have-a-family, because trying to explain to them that we are already a family just confuses them.  There’s no space in their brain for the notion that two people who have chosen each other over and over and over again are already whole.

I think the people you fight with and then hug after are your family.  I think consensual fighting builds intimacy like nothing else.  I have brothers from other mothers and I fight with them most mornings.  It’s the single most interesting and empowering thing I have ever done because the foundation is trust. 

Jiu-jitsu is called the gentle art because you can play jiu-jitsu in ways you can’t play other forms of fighting.  In other forms of fighting if you gouge an eye or break a nose your training partner is not going to be able to keep fighting.  There are no strikes in jiu-jitsu; it is submission wrestling, so instead of punching people you are choking them or getting into controlled positions that will break an arm or explode a knee.  

Lately I’ve been spending time thinking about when I first started playing jiu-jitsu, maybe because we’ve had some newer people at the gym but also because I’m finally in a place where I don’t feel totally lost at every single moment of every single class. 

I like to remiss about when I was new with my friend after class.  “Your jiu-jitsu was absolutely horrendous when I met you,” said my friend to me.  “Like really really bad,” he said, laughing at the memory.  

Sometimes my friend says something and the truth of his words takes root like a tree and my hair stands on end.  He’s very rarely wrong, probably because he’s a good wrestler. 

My jiu-jitsu really was horrendous, especially if you look at the etymology, because <horrendous> comes from <horror>.   <Horror> ultimately comes to us from the Latin horrere “to bristle with fear, shudder.”  There is some evidence to suggest (again we see a “perhaps” from Mr. Harper) that <horror> and <hair> share the same ancient root, which makes sense because formerly in English <horror> meant a shivering, like when you have a fever.  It also could refer to your hair standing on end.  

When I started jiu-jitsu sometimes I would get so scared and overwhelmed I would come home and sit outside and cry and shake.  If I’m being honest I still do that but it’s much less frequent.  

I had no context for what it meant to wrestle with boys, to move my body in ways I had never moved, to fight, to want to cut my hair off.  I remember being so frustrated that my brain would not let go of trying to get better at this weird niche thing because a lot of the time it was almost unbearably hard.  

But the grace of jiu-jitsu is that you don’t do it by yourself.  Every class you have people right there in the mines alongside you, grinding through the dirt for the shiny understanding, catching glimmers of gold on the good days and just staying alive on the bad.  The humanity of it is compelling in spite of the weird.  

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if you are horrendous at jiu-jitsu because it’s an opportunity to fight to be better.  It doesn’t matter if you cry and shake and your hair stands on end.  

What matters is showing up to the eternal fight. 

Ice Scream

I know my neighbors have to hear the son screaming but no one on our block talks about it.  The son, as my husband and I call him, lives in the house south of us.  He screams at all times of day. 

I hear him in the middle of the night; I swim out of a dream into his scream.  I hear him in the morning when I am sitting on my back steps with a cup of coffee.  I hear him in the afternoon when I am trying to teach kids math. 

I don’t remember when he started screaming which is weird because I know it hasn’t always been this way.  But his screaming feels infinite, which of course is not just screaming but also all kinds of noise, everything from screaming to whistling to groaning to these really specific whoops.  He has good days and bad days.  Bad days he’s outside screaming multiple times.  Good days it’s just once or twice.

I talk to my husband about it and he offers to say something.  The son is troubled, though, and the woman we assume to be his mother has long mumbled to herself anytime she is outside.  She tries to be quiet but words pour out of her, long convoluted conversations with herself; her car is close enough to our bedroom that I can hear most of what she is saying if I am laying on our bed.  

It’s not that I’m spying on my neighbors it’s more that I usually have a half hour break at the exact same time she typically goes out to her car.  On my break I like to lay on my bed with my heating pad and pet my cats which also means I am also bearing witness to her wordwaves washing into my window.  Some days I hear her more clearly than others.  Some days she’s so quiet that it’s like listening to a radio turned way down as you are driving out of range. 

But her son is not quiet.  There’s also no consistency to his screaming except it hasn’t stopped.  Sometimes he starts whooping and I’m not expecting it and I feel a surge of adrenaline, that run-like-hell-some-dude-is-coming-for-you feeling.  

Such a specific vibe, that feeling.  

It’s not that I think he’ll hurt me it’s just that I’m trying to chill in my house without men yelling, I tell my husband. 

I hear you, he says.  I hear you.  

I think about what to say.  I think about if he can control it or if it’s just his own unique pain inheritance, like a really itchy sweater he can’t return.  Mostly I think about how I am forever trying to solve problems that are not my problem, or more specifically problems that have no solution.  I suppose this is a human tendency, to want to help, to solve, to fix.  The problem is that more often than not you are dealing with a system of nonlinear equations that have no solution.  There are no specific points easily arrived at.  There is only an infinity of pain.

It started raining ice on a Thursday.  It was sometimes snow but mostly ice, unapologetically thick ice, ice that forced the trees and flowers to bow their heads or break.  

When the ice came the son stopped screaming. It was like the storm transformed his voice into the howl of wind and the crackle of freezing rain.  The storm came in waves, lashing around the house, blowing snow under the back door.  I watched my office window ice over as I ran math class in my Zoom room.  During the last hour of class I watched the ice further encase our power cables.  I felt grateful for my classmate who I had made co-host as a precaution.  I knew my internet was on borrowed time.  

We lost power the night before the ice started screaming.  That morning I stood on my porch and watched the thaw, thinking about how the house was cold and getting colder while I was outside.

I thought about how my job is on the internet right now and the internet needs power but I didn’t have power or heat or internet or a job except to bear witness to the ice screaming and cracking and groaning and crashing.  When I got too cold I went inside and used my phone to look up the etymology of “ice” and the etymology of “scream.”  I only had 27% left but like etymology matters and I had time on my hands. 

Both <ice> and <scream> are Germanic and ultimately of uncertain origin.  Sometimes the etymology doesn’t reveal ground shaking universal truth but don’t you dare take that as an excuse not to still look it up, because sometimes the etymology changes your entire life.

I remember the first time I looked up the etymology of “variable” and it completely blew my mind.  Kids are always so freaked out by algebra but as my teacher says it’s arguably the easiest of all math to both teach and learn but only if you get your picture first.  If you understand that <variable> is ultimately derived from a Latin verb that has the sense of “change, alter, make different” it’s pretty easy to see why x can be -7 or one half or 8 or one million two thousand seven hundred twenty three.  The value of a variable changes because that’s its truth.  

What is your truth?  

The truth of the son was something we learned a couple weeks after the ice stopped screaming.  The truth of him is that he has a drug issue and one day it got really bad.  It was a cold day and he was so high.  He was outside half naked with bare feet.  We had gone for a hike and came home to a police officer pleading with the son to stop screaming and go inside.  “You’re really scaring people,” said the police officer.  “Will you accept help from me,” said the police officer.  “I think you should go inside and put on a shirt and pull up your pants,” said the police officer.

The police officer kept offering to help but the son did not want to accept help.  An ambulance came but he did not want to get in.  Another two police officers came but he didn’t want their help either.  He went back inside for awhile.  When he came back out the screaming was the worst it has ever been. 

“I guess I see now what you mean about the neighbor,” said my husband.  “Uh-huh,” I said.  I wanted to roll my eyes but I didn’t because we were both trying our best.

Then another neighbor introduced a new variable called yelling back.  Nick and I went out on our porch.  The son had temporarily stopped screaming and was listening to our neighbor.  “Hey just chill out man,” said our neighbor.  “Yeah,” said my husband, stepping down off our porch.  

“I’m sorry,” said the son, as if realizing for the first time that screaming outside half naked could be considered disruptive.  “You’re scaring my wife and child,” said our neighbor.  “You need to go inside right now,” said my husband.  “Aren’t you cold?,” I said.  

“I’m sorry I don’t know you!” said the son.  “You’re my neighbors, I should know you!  I don’t even know your name!” said the son, close to tears.  My husband walked over.  He told the son his name and that he needed to go back inside his house and not come out again until he was sober. 

Since that night the son has mostly been singing when he needs to make noise.  These days it sounds like he is practicing scales; sometimes he just holds a note until he runs out of breath.  His singing has become a kind of regular incantation, his own personal charm against getting so high he starts screaming too loud and freaks out his neighbors.  

There’s a kind of magic in the way he sings.  An incentive to transmute his pain into something else so he can let go of it.

An enchantment against the icy screaming darkness that lives in all of us.

watertrust

Be okay with your mess said my yoga teacher as I sprayed cleaner on the floor of my kitchen during class.

That was over a month ago.  

I am in a mess; I have a mess; things are a mess.  Chaos.  A word that comes to us from the Greek khaos, "abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty.”

 A void.  Dark or light, that seems to depend on you. Reports from people who regularly surf chaos are varied. 

I’ve been thinking about water and trust and how inside your home both need to run in vertical lines.  These lines are influenced by diachronic constraints, like a ten year marriage built in a home with 96 year old plumbing.  

The lines can turn together but it better be specific and clear.

Unless you want your heartwalls bleeding with misdirected water. 

I took some time off so that men who understand how to run water in straight lines indoors could tear my house apart.  It’s the biggest project we’ve ever done and it’s happening during a  pandemic which is totally good, completely fine, folks everything is cool-cool-cool.

It’s not optimal except maybe it also is.  That’s the thing about water, about trust, maybe it’s always happening exactly as it should, a constant flow state that teaches, guides, carves out a riverbed showing the way.  Both encourage self reflection.  Like maybe next time you will watch out for the giant rock, not dive head first, perhaps consider wearing a goddamn life jacket, tell the truth, get consent.

The morning they started the owner of the plumbing company showed me where the plumbers would build an actual water shut off point downstairs in the basement because 96 years ago they didn't make one.  As he was talking he got quiet.  He turned on his flashlight.  He touched the old pipe very gently with the edge of his finger and rubbed it on his thumb.  

Interesting, he said. 

Oh no, I said.  Interesting literally means to be between.  Is that water on the outside of the pipe?

Yes, he said. 

In my head I thought, but what do you even expect?  That things last forever? 96 years is a long fucking time. Think how many people have stood in your kitchen, turned on the tap and trusted clean water would pour out. For almost a century this piped water has washed hands, filled pots, cleaned rags.  What business do you have hoping that will always be the case? Don’t trust what isn’t real.

Everything you do is built and maintained at the speed of trust. 

It took us nine years to save for a repipe. Being a grown up is weird.  Time goes faster and slower than you think it will. Things take longer.  You also become a tired mammal.  You want to crawl into bed and hope your 96 year old pipes will last another night rather than pay thousands of dollars to not have water for a week. 

As my teacher says you can always hope. Hope is free. 

Hope is a word that comes to us from the Old English hopian.  It carries a specific historical sense of trust in God’s word, in the promise of mercy.  God’s promise of salvation: do not be afraid tiny mammals I got you but like probably only if you make sure to do a really good job on this here inhabitable rock spinning through the void. 

Like so many things mercy can just happen but most people have work for it.  Trust is the prerequisite for mercy.  You have to believe something is real before you can really work for it anyway.  You can work for things you don’t believe in, that you don’t trust, but why would you?  

Out of curiosity, if you did, would you expect good results?  

We didn’t have plumbers come to our house and make lines that they didn’t believe in.  They did their absolute best and you could see it.  They sawed deep into the walls and pulled out ancient metal houseguts.  I marveled over the brand new bright gleaming copper attachments and how they looked like jewels in the early morning light, glowing in the dust and debris.  

There is absolutely no way they could have done their jobs online via Zoom.  It’s totally cool if you can do your job online via Zoom.  For example I can.  I can and it’s a privilege that I am grateful for every single day because COVID is real and it is scary.   

But plumbers can’t use the internet to fix your pipes.  They have to show up, on your doorstep, ready to navigate this new normal.  I have to trust them and they have to trust me and that is the only way for some people to do their vital work right now.

Or was trust always the way of it and I just forgot?  Or did I make the mistake of thinking I was all alone in this?

You are not alone in this. I am not alone in this.

You can feel uncomfortable about the complexities but that doesn’t change them. There is no plumb line here dictating right and wrong sides. The complexities are real. They are the void, the chaos, the mess.

The truth is that we are all in this together.  Really.  We are only free when we are all free.  Our collective liberation lies in our togetherness and will be built at the speed of trust.

Some things you have to believe in enough to show up for.  Your work is one of them.  Trust it.

Shelter In Place

You know that feeling you get sometimes when you first wake up?  When the heaviness of sleep starts to abate and your consciousness begins to filter through?  

That first moment when your brain has to remember where your body is before it can grapple with why your body is?  

It’s been twenty-five days since we were ordered to shelter in place.  Each morning when I wake up there’s a precious moment of normalcy before I remember.  Twice I’ve woken up on days I was supposed to fly to California, unable to shake the parallel universe feeling, unable to stop looking at the clock as the day progressed, all like but-I-should-be-on-a-plane-right-now.   

Tomorrow is my third ghost flight.  I will pack a ghost bag and kiss my husband and walk around my neighborhood with him, which is a thing we are still allowed to do.  I will look up at the sky for planes.  I will think about how things exist outside the bounds of space and time. 

Shelter is a word that comes to us from Old English.  It’s in Volume 4, on the philodendron, which glorifies the family of the word endurance. My math teacher gave me that plant. I had asked him for a plant because I wanted one for the word exponent but when he picked philodendron the word had to change.   

Sometimes it be like that. Words change.

Last weekend my husband and I were on the couch in the morning drinking coffee.  My feet were in his lap.  We were listening to the radio.  We listened to an interview with a priest in New York City tasked with trying to connect dying people with their families via video conferencing.  His voice grew thick when the interviewer asked if the inability to exchange physical touch was making his work more difficult.  

The priest replied in the affirmative.  He said that in his line of work touch is a way to communicate when there are no words. He said, “but now words are all we have.”

The denotation of the bound base <dure> in the word endurance is “hard.”  Shit is hard right now, sheltering in place.  Every day I think about how it could be so much harder. How maybe it will.  The truth is none of us know.  

My math teacher had never taught a class online until the shelter in place order.  I’ve spent seven years flying down to Oakland multiple times for something like 578 hours of class (or whatever nerdtastic number I am at) and now suddenly I am taking class in my kitchen, my teacher the big rectangle video and my math friends fragmented into tiny individual rectangle videos.  

Here we are, together but apart.  Look at us technology.

Technology is in Volume 2. I put her on a variety of tree that is often cultivated as a bonsai.  I try to be funny.  I usually fail.  

Technology is a compound, which is to say it has two base elements.  The first is <techn> and it has the sense of “art, skill, craft.” The second is <loge>, which denotes “speaking, science.”  My favorite part of the greater <techn> family are actually the distant Latinate cousins that come from the same root, words like text, textile, pretext, context, texture.  Tissue is a delightful lexical doublet.  

The idea of carefully and purposefully arranged threads is present throughout this word family.  We even get the word “toil” which rolled through French before coming into English, and is not the same “toil” meaning “hard work” but rather the “toil” that means “net or snare” because those were items that required fine weaving.  Adding the diminutive suffix <et> gives us toilet, because etymologically one’s toilet was a finely woven cloth on which one might lay out one’s clothes, hair brush, and other dressing items.

Perhaps this is the connection everyone was making when they decided to fight each other for toilet paper a few weeks ago.  I really can’t say.  Some mysteries are never solved no matter how much technology you have access to.

Other mysteries, like how to teach polynomial long division, are solvable.  Do you have a kitchen and an internet connection and an insatiable desire for truth?   Do you mind taking math classes on weekends?  Are you okay with taking notes until your hands ache and hosting the entire class in your personal Zoom room?  

Technology is capable of weaving us together and shrouding us apart, two sides of the same tapestry, woven together so tightly sometimes it’s hard to see the individual threads from a distance.  

But when you look closely you can see the threads are actually made up of words.  Millions and millions and millions of words: spoken, typed, exchanged, gathered, treasured, saved, understood, rejected.    

Maybe the priest was right. Maybe words are all we have.  

Butterfly House

I have an old book about etymology called Picturesque Word Origins.  The copyright is dated 1933 and the cover is dark green, its edges worn and tattered.  The printing was done on an offset press, which I know because of the vintage but also because after nearly a decade married to my husband (a printer by trade) I can always tell the subtle difference between digital and offset printing. 

This book is clever for lots of reasons but I love it because of the illustrations.  The title page boasts, “With forty-five Illustrative Drawings” but does not bother to name the person who actually did the aforementioned Illustrative Drawings.  The only credit listed is to the G. & C. Merriam Company and a small nod to one B.D. Updike who “electrotyped” the manuscript. 

I see even in 1933 we cared more about typing than art so that’s cool.   

I’m not sure why I’ve been so interested in giving credit where credit is due lately but that particular thought pattern has been bordering on the obsessive.  I thus felt gratified when my internet search revealed a New York Times book review from May 28th, 1933 that named one Louis Szanto as the illustrator of Picturesque Word Origins. 

The very book you worked on for hours upon hours forgot you, Louis, but I’m here to give you a name.  I’m sure you’re dead but thank you for your illustrations.  My favorite one is for the word “bonfire” which despite its rather gruesome etymology you made more palpable by depicting a fire fueled by books rather than bones.  That was good of you, Louis.  It’s always better not to scare the children. 

This past weekend, after checking and responding to work email even after I promised myself I was d.o.n.e., I opened Picturesque Word Origins to a random page.  “Pavilion: from a butterfly,” the top of the page read, with Louis’s illustration of Roman soldiers putting up a tent-like structure on the opposite page. 

The Latin papilionem meant “butterfly.”  Our English word pavilion comes to us via the French borrowing of the Latin, and is so named because in ancient times the cloth used to form the shelter was stretched out, like a butterfly’s wings.  A shelter named after a thing of beauty and transformation.  Isn’t that lovely? 

I was still thinking about the connections between shelters and butterflies yesterday morning on my walk to my jiu jitsu class.  Transformation in general has been on my mind, mostly what a messy business it is, and how frequently the light of whatever destination you are trying to reach sometimes isn’t even visible through the darkness of change.  Do caterpillars think they are dying when they are in the cocoon?  What’s the best way to manage the pain and anxiety caused by change?  Do you always know exactly who you are or are you sometimes unrecognizable even to your own self? 

When I got to class and Professor Bill was teaching a type of butterfly sweep I laughed the laugh of a crazy woman who studies etymology and consistently sees it echo throughout her life in ways that are unexplainable.  I tried the butterfly sweep and thought about how I’m definitely a caterpillar.  To be precise I’m a caterpillar having an existential crisis about if I even deserve to be a butterfly, since I’m not that pretty or cool or interesting or naturally talented at jiu jitsu.  

Can you become a butterfly even if you are not sure if you deserve to be one?

Jiu jitsu gives you very compelling reasons to want to be a butterfly, though.  If you are a butterfly then you are the one who can sweep and end up on top.  You can make your own body a shelter for the most valuable part of you: your Self.  You can learn how to live with the certain knowledge that while the pavilion is always temporary your Self is not.

Mostly you can learn that even if you don’t feel ready or deserving the transformation has already begun, and that you might as well pretend you already have wings, because one day you will. 

Black & White

Yesterday I scribbled on a sticky note, “The only way the beginning makes sense is if you consider the end.”

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for months but my writing isn’t linear.  I know my writing now, how to trust it, so I feel less frustrated than I did as a dyslexic kid with a barely started essay due the next day.   

Now I treat my writing like a pool of deep water. The secret is to wait until the words are ready to flow.    

I write so I can understand and because I understand I can write.   

This morning at jiu jitsu my training partner and I were practicing arm drags.  Catch the wrist, internally rotate the shoulder, cup the tricep.  Breathe.  The simplest movements in jiu jitsu are infinite in the same way that common written words have infinite depths and derivations. 

Just because you don’t know the moves or the words doesn’t mean the structure isn’t there.  The only way to understand either is to be aware of meaningful structure and to be capable of play.

This morning I noticed that my training partner, a person new to me, had a tattoo of a quote on his forearm.  I was close enough to read the words and I was already staring at his arm because I was moving it around so it wasn’t much of an invasion of privacy when I read his tattoo. 

Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth

“Archimedes,” I said.  That’s a weird coincidence I thought. 

My teacher in France, a man who is arguably ultimately responsible for the small group of us who actually understand how English spelling works, reminds us of that specific quote all the time.  Without a shadow of a doubt he is a black belt when it comes to spelling.  The lineage of understanding that he has fostered and nurtured speaks for itself. 

You can’t get a black belt in spelling but it’d be a lot cooler if you could.

What would be the coolest, though, is if we could stop expecting eight year olds to have already mastered all aspects of English orthography.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me or if anyone else has also stopped to consider how goddamn insane it is that we expect children to be literate by third grade. 

When I started doing jiu jitsu I learned immediately that absolutely no one expects me to ever be a black belt.  In fact I am pretty sure that if I am still showing up in five years with a white belt around my waist no one is going to call my parents and tell them that really I should be making more progress and maybe they should consider medicating me for ADD. 

When I am on the mats I get to be exactly where I am.  I am striving to be better every time, but my timeline for understanding gets to be my own.  There are no standardized tests or report cards or poorly designed homework that requires knowledge far beyond my current understanding in order to complete.  

There are only my teachers and training partners, generously reaching out their hands to help me.  There’s Dan who knows exactly how to best give tiny hints and encouraging birthday presents during a roll.  There’s Ali who pauses when he knows I’m thinking about what to do next.  There’s Ace who matches my pace perfectly every time and pauses right before he takes my back in order to remind me I’ve once again made some poor life choices. 

The upper belts don’t punish me for my poor choices born from my vast ignorance.  They just gently remind me of the consequences.  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  Balance must be upheld.  It is the only way.  

What would our world be like if we gave children the same luxury when they learn to read and spell and do math that we give grownups learning jiu jitsu?  How much trauma could be avoided if we allowed children to be wherever they are rather than quietly demean them for not being on some arbitrary level by some arbitrary date? 

Teachers cannot exist without students.  Two ends of the same spectrum, two sides of the same coin: the beginning and the end.  The black belt needs the white belt as much as the white belt needs the black belt.  Those that are the most skilled are best equipped to help those that are the least skilled.  The system only works when taken together as a whole, when it’s respected for what it is and what it is not.

The only way to stand is to know where you are.

The best way to move is to play.  

The only way to live is to understand you will die.

Four

When your parents are not nurturing it just feels wrong.

Really wrong.

Like: what does that say about you?  The person they were supposed to nurture?

The truth is it says nothing about you.

The first time she was abused she was four. 

I’m listening to a friend speak truth in my backyard.  I sit outside every single day.  I watch the birds and plants and (if I’m being honest) my laundry drying.  It’s such a satisfying task, hanging laundry up to dry.  I watch the water drip off my clothes and think about how many millions of humans have hung clothes to dry over the centuries. 

Laundry is a human experience with diachronic depth. 

I listen to my friend and I want to hug them.  Four.  Their mother was four.  She was four when people started hurting her.  And then later she hurt other people, including you, my friend.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry for your inheritance of pain.  That is a return to store inheritance.  That is a fuck-that-while-throwing-your-hands-up kind of inheritance. 

If that inheritance was a ripe nectarine lying on the table I would give my cat full permission to knock that shit onto the floor. 

When I was outside this morning I noticed the seasons are changing.  Four.  There are four seasons.   I’m doing Volume Four of Truer Words because if I do then I have forty cards, yes, 40, and that is immensely meaningful to me. 

Forty is enough cards for a teacher to do one card a week for the entire school year.  

Actually, since a school year is roughly 36 weeks, a teacher could do one card a week and even have….four left over. 

When my graphic designer/illustrator/creative midwife sent me our contract for Volume 4 she left a note in the bottom corner:

PS: In Western culture there are four seasons, four winds, four cardinal directions, four elements…In Hindu culture there are four tattavs: animal, mineral, vegetable, mind. Four is totality: plentitude, perfection.

The number of tattavs, or truths, is actually completely dependent on the particular spiritual tradition counting them.  My spiritual tradition has five.  My spiritual tradition that I joined four years ago today, because turns out everything is connected and meaningful and now we have Facebook memories to both remind us of that and further cloak everything.  AWESOME.  How is spiritual life going?  It’s going fine.  Yep.  Just over here trying to dig a tunnel with a needle, usually while muttering four letter words. 

My teacher has said that if you think about the meaningful thing you want to attain as a mango, but then you go to him and ask him for one of his mangos, he’s going to hand you a seed and a shovel and tell you to start digging. You are likely to be real confused at first, all “but where is my mango?” 

We are conditioned to think we deserve things or that working to obtain them means they are in sight the whole time.  That viewpoint is demonstrably false.

Seeds go into the dirt.    

The task is to go get dirty seeking truth. Go put in the work.  You aren’t going to get a mango today.  You are going to start digging a hole today.  You might still be digging four years from now, trying to make the best place for your tiny little seed to grow. You probably won’t even have a mango seedling four years later but at least you are trying.

In November I will have made some more seeds, enough for an entire school year. 

I’m going to try to not be attached to if they grow.  Making the drafts this time, the amount of creative energy involved, wow.  I think I cried at least four times.  It took so much out of me and I wondered more than once why I was even bothering at all. 

But I know why I am bothering.  I am bothering because this work matters especially when it is hard.  This month marks four years for me as a one woman small business. 

Four years of trying to plant seeds and keep them alive.

Four years of finding my own way, always with the help of generous friends.

Four years of contemplating my own inheritance of pain, of seeing schools do to my kids what they did to me, and trying desperately to process that pain with them before they too have to pass it on.

Four years of digging.

All I can do is continue to dig.  And pray.  And then dig some more.

Conversation Vector

Coach Travis likes to talk about force, catch wrestling, how there-are-no-white-belt-moves-or-black-belt-moves-there-are-just-moves, and the importance of living in your exhale.

One day in class he gestures with his fingers as he describes different types of force in jiu jitsu.  I listen. Coach Travis talks about physical force, the kind applied by your muscles, momentum, and gravity.  Understanding how to navigate and apply these forces will help your jiu jitsu.  I think about how it’d be nice to have a better understanding of force.  I know that would help my jiu jitsu. I’ve noticed people who have a lot of jiu jitsu talk about their jiu jitsu like a precious thing they must keep safe and fed. 

My jiu jitsu is hungry.

My mind also pings on the word gravity.  I put gravity in Volume 3.  It’s the last card.  The denotation of the bound base <grave> is “heavy,” and the same base shows up in words like aggravated and gravitate.  The word grief is a French cousin.

I’m putting that down as proof that truth is both beautiful and heavy.

Force represents as a vector, which means it has magnitude and direction at the same time.  The word wrestle is related to the word conversation.  And words, Douglas says, often have a certain gravity.  You see words cluster, bump into each other, share an orbit.  They carry force.

Professor Bill, the head instructor where I practice jiu jitsu, has an enormous amount of jiu jitsu.  He says that doing jiu jitsu is like having a conversation. 

In the beginning you are an infant with no speech just trying not to die.  You can’t say much with your jiu jitsu when you are really new except please-don’t-hurt-me-I-have-no-idea-what-I-am-doing or sometimes HEY LOOK AT ME I’M ROLLING ABOUT HAHAHA AM I DOING IT?!  People see you are a baby and they help you, because in the dōjō you are really just playing with friends. 

Maybe if you take good care of your jiu jitsu then later you will be able to say something people will want to listen to. 

Conversation entered our written record in the mid 14th century but it didn’t mean “informal exchange of thoughts by spoken words” until the 1570s.  Etymonline tells us that before the 1570s conversation meant, “place where one lives or dwells” and also, “general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the word.” 

Turns out the way you talk comes from the way you walk and where you choose to sit.  That’s how come you can have an entire conversation with someone without uttering a single word aloud. 

Sex is a conversation, by the way, especially etymologically. 

The elemental structure of conversation denotes a turning together.  That <verse> base element shows up in words like universe, anniversary, version and subversive and lends an inherent sense of turn.  The word wrestle comes from the same Proto-Indo European root as conversation, but the best part is that the <wr> grapheme in wrestle, “typically pertains to turning or twisting, and bears an etymological relationship to the Latinate twin base element[s] <vert>~<verse>.” (LEX Grapheme Deck, 3rd Edition)

Once Coach Travis showed a move in class, saw my eyes get wide, grinned, and said, “I know, it’s just wrong.”  He has a wry sense of humor and is a huge fan of wrist locks. 

Another time he said that wrestling is older than yoga and I disagreed.

Everyone wants to believe their thing is the Original Thing™.  Lord knows I sure do.

But it’s hard to argue that people have been trying to discover the path to enlightenment longer than they’ve been trying to kill each other.  Especially when nearly every human culture has some kind of folk wrestling tradition.  Needing to survive long enough to ponder the reason(s) you exist is a thing.

If you are lucky you will survive because your teachers reach out their hands to you and help you up.  If you are really extremely lucky you will survive long enough to write prose about trying to understand all the twists and turns.

And if you are the most lucky person ever you will get to have on going conversations with other humans, conversations about force, conversations about humanity, conversations on vectors with their own unique magnitude and direction.

Radiation

She walks in and throws up her hands in a gesture of frustration. 

“Now we are doing circle stuff, like area.  There’s this thing he kept talking about today in class, like…it’s in the circle, it’s like…important in the circle.”  She puts her head in her hands.  She sighs. 

She explains she doesn’t even know what it is but in any case she doesn’t get it.  Apologizes to me for “doing a bad job of explaining.”  Oh sweet baby girl.  It’s not your job to teach yourself no matter what they tell you.   

There’s a thing and it’s important in the circle.  Let me tell you something right now. Very few people or actually no one will remember all the content but she’ll never forget how you made her feel in class today.  Do you want to know how you made her feel in class today?  You made her feel head in hands.  She’s so little still.  Why are you making her feel head in hands?  Last week you asked them to solve variable proportions and to derive linear equations from graphs.  At the same time.  For reasons that remain unclear but are likely connected to either your total inability to understand how math works or the fact that you like to torture children, IDK which man and I’m tired of both emailing you and guessing. 

I’m not here to judge you but I do have to clean up your mess every week so don’t hate me for speculating. 

First I will make you a cup of tea, child, and then I will start at the beginning.  It’s not your job to remember all these things.  It’s your job to think. Learning does not go in a straight line.  You probably won’t remember everything I am about to tell you.  We’ll need to circle back to this circle stuff.  That is normal and okay.

The origin of a circle is called the center.  It’s supposed to be marked and labeled as a point but they don’t always do that.  They aka the People In Charge of Things.  The people in charge of things you have to put up with starting from now until you die. These things range from this stupid math curriculum to what you are legally allowed to do with your own female body. 

I don’t say the last part but I think it.  I think about that last part a lot as I watch my girls turn into women before my eyes.  Everyone says it happens so fast. Everyone is right.

Once you understand that every circle has a center you can feel grounded in the next term, which you absolutely must have your picture for.  The next term is “radius.”

I say “radius” and her eyes light up.  YES EMILY.  YES.  THAT’S THE THING THAT’S IMPORTANT IN THE CIRLCE.  I laugh.  Okay so but like what does radius mean, though, young woman?

Because you are only going to be able to work with something if you know what it means.  What do you notice about the spelling?  Do you see anything at all?  Take your time.  We are not in a hurry. 

She notices there’s probably not a prefix.  Well done.  She knows every word in English either has a base or is a base so that’s also helpful to verbalize, which brings her to the suffix.  Is there a suffix?  She thinks there might be, and I can tell she is already noticing that if there is an analyzable suffix in the construction “radius” it’s non-productive, meaning we can see the Latinate bones and we can analyze them but no native English speaker is going to be able to form a new lexical item from them. 

Sometimes all you can do is look at the bones.

I congratulate her for being both a scholar and a lady.  She beams. 

She’s noticing that <us> in radius for a really good reason.  She can see the bones.  This kid spots the default Latinate connecting vowel letter faster than I can put on pants, and once you notice something true it starts to stand out.  I explain that there is a classical <us> suffix, just like there’s a classical <um> suffix. 

We haven’t even looked it up yet.  For whatever reason we’re both in the mood to savor just sitting with this word for a moment.  No reason to rush off right away.  I’m not here to pound terminology in.  If I can get her to make a picture for this word she’ll be in business and that my friends is the goal.   

Get your picture first.  Just like when they tell you on the airplane to put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting other passengers.  You’re of no use to anyone if you are trying to do a thing while suffocating. 

Breathe first, do second.

By the time we get to Douglas she is ready to notice more things.  She zeros in on the Latin.  It’s the same as the English, she says smugly.  Yes my dear.  It’s the same.  Isn’t that lovely?  We’ve seen this before: often math and science words are just plucked from Latin, gliding into English unchanged.  That’s why you are seeing that <us> suffix.  You’re so smart.  How did you get to be so smart?  You are the smartest girl.

She jumps up and writes “radius” on the board, next to my drawing of a circle with a clear center point.  She loves writing on the board. 

Let’s talk about what this word meant in Latin before we talk about what it means in English.  I don’t always go this direction when it comes to meaning, from Latin to English, but with this kid and these terms sometimes it helps.  The way it was used in Latin will inform how we understand it in English, especially in this context.  She comes back around to me so I can show her on Etymonline that in Latin the word radius meant, “staff, stake, rod; spoke of a wheel; ray of light, beam of light; radius of a circle.”

I get up and go up to the board without a word.  I gesture for her to watch.  I take a red pen and dramatically place the pen on the center of the circle like I am throwing a dart.  Now watch, I say, even though I don’t need to say that because she is a 1,000% with me.  I draw a firm, straight red line from the center of the circle outward to the circumference.

She smiles.

The radius radiates out from the center, my friend.  It’s an old old old word that has a collection of senses, but the mathematical sense has been with us for a very long time and for good reason.  It makes sense. 

We find a whole collection of words from the Latin radius, words like radiate, radium, radiation, radial, radio and ray.  I do a small yelp of pleasure when we find ray, with its evolutive derivation through French from the same Latin etymon.  Radius and ray, a pair of lexical doublets.  Woulda look at that.

Later I find the word radiolarian, which seems to be the scientific name for a type of tiny single-celled aquatic organisms.  Their spherical bodies seem to have spikes radiating outward; I spend far too long looking at the black and white images on Google.   

Days pass and I find myself in a jiu-jitsu class.  It’s my third class.  I’m fully getting my ass handed to me.  I have no idea what I’m doing and to make matters worse people are trying to choke me, which frankly feels remarkably like trying to run a one woman small business trying to help the dyslexics, so while I am deeply uncomfortable I also feel oddly at home. 

At least people are up front at jiu-jitsu.  In the rest of my waking life sometimes you don’t even know you are being choked until it’s too late.  At least at jiu-jitsu you can usually see it coming.

The thing about the radius is that it’s also a bone.  It’s one of the two bones in your forearm.  I realize in class that because I understand what radius means I thus understand what the radius does.  It rotates the forearm from the elbow joint.  Your job in jiu-jitsu is to neutralize and then control the movement of your opponent. 

I realize in class this is most effective if you understand where movement originates in the body. 

We are working on immobilizing the radius because if you do that then the forearm of your opponent cannot be used as a staff or rod against you any longer.  Pin their radius, control their light.  Learn words, understand life.  Breathe.  Learn alongside children.  Focus on truth.

Most of all?  Circle back.    

Lycanthropy

“Is there a word for when a person thinks they are a dog?”

I had asked if there was anything she wanted to share about school.  There was something she wanted to share.  She wanted to share about a girl in her class who believes she is a dog.

 One of the things I love most about children is their desire to understand, to name, to make sense of the world.  Hey-is-there-a-word-for-this is such a human experience. 

Language is human.

I told her I had honestly no idea but that we could look it up?

She clapped her hands together excitedly.

We started our search with Google, of course.  No shame in using a noun so powerful it verbed itself.  Hold on let me google it!  She googled it.  OMG did you even google it?!

I typed in is-there-a-word-for-when-a-person-thinks-they-are-a-dog.  Google told us in less than a second that there’s totally a word.  The word is lycanthropy, a noun defined as, “the supernatural transformation of a person into a wolf, as recounted in folk tales” but also as, “a rare psychological disorder in which a person thinks they are an animal, usually a wolf, or that they can transform into an animal, also usually a wolf.” 

We hit the voice to text button so we could listen to a pronunciation of “lycanthropy” a few times.  Note I did not say the pronunciation. My dyslexic ass has still (despite repeated intervention) not yet mastered her phonology so voice to text is thumbs up. 

I noticed the medial <y> in the spelling and immediately thought, “Hellenic?”  I turned to my study partner and said, “Well, would you look at that.  The word is lycanthropy.  And how interesting that the girl in your class believes she is a dog.  Because a dog is not that far away from a wolf.”

My study partner considered our discoveries.  She wanted to know if Douglas had an entry for lycanthropy.  Turns out he totally does.  And his entry for werewolf?  Mind blowing. There is a secret link in that one.  I love his secret links. Go find a secret link I dare you.

Etymonline helped us understand that the word lycanthropy is not new.  In fact it is an old idea, this transformation of human into wolf, and we see the mark of ancient human experience in its spelling.  The <y> does mark a Hellenic element.  Lovely.

Apparently the Greeks were writing about wolf-men thousands of years ago.

Lycanthropy is a compound. The first base element derives from the Greek lykos “wolf.” I found myself circling back to this etymon by myself, later. I found words that I’d never heard of before, like Lycoperdon (a kind of mushroom), lyceum, and alyssum. That last one is a “perhaps” and then a “probably” from Douglas, a move I always interpret as him grumbling, “well if you are going to take that first intellectual jump you might as well take the second.”

“Wow,” said my study partner.  “The girl in my class who believes she is a dog barks at squirrels on the trees outside during class, and she also rolls on the ground sometimes.  This week she came to me crying at recess because some other kids told her to stop pretending to be a dog. She said to me that she’s not pretending to be a dog she’s PRETENDING TO BE A HUMAN.”

These are the exact moments in session I want a fucking guidebook for, okay?  Like can there be a guidebook for working with kids that has a whole chapter devoted to “Exactly What To Say and Do When One of Your Kids Shares About A Self-Identified Wolf-Girl in Her Class at School and You Find Out That Might Actually Be a Thing Because It’s Been Written About For Over 2,500 Years And You Are Lowkey Freaking Out.”

There’s no pre-made guidebook but y’all already knew that, didn’t you?

There’s no pre-made guidebook but there is the guidebook you make yourself with your own hands and heart and brain.  You have to make it carefully one page at a time, and you have to go back all the time and update it.  You have to update it more than your goddamn iPhone.

My guidebook now says this in really big shouty all caps:

Don’t dismiss the experiences of children just because they don’t make sense.  Life doesn’t make sense.  Listen to children and study with them, follow their lead but offer your own grounded understanding of what you know to be true.  Most of all keep learning and don’t ever think you know everything because you don’t.

After my study partner left I kept thinking about that word.  I murmured “lycanthropy” and felt the points of stress beat like heartbeats.  I kept studying, kept thinking, kept circling back.  

There’s some connection here, or some confusion here, between wolves and light. But think about it: full moon. Lunar/lunatic. Lycanthropy is a kind of madness; werewolves are bound to their transformation during the full moon in particular. I could keep going but you can also look things up and connect the dots. There’s a lot of them scattered here like stars.

There used to be a Greek word, lyke, which meant light.

I found a Greek myth about Lycaon, the son of Pelasgos, who angered the god Zeus when he offered him human flesh. As punishment, Zeus turned Lycaon and his sons into wolves. 

I read parts of the Icelandic Volsungs Saga.  Wolves show up throughout that Saga, but one example is a father and son discovering wolf pelts that have the ability to transform them into wolves when worn. 

There’s also the whole entire concept (and cult obsession) of werewolves, which pretty much fits right in with this.  Plus in Old English wulf forms compounds in names. 

Think Beowulf. 

It’s a full moon at 5:11 today. 

Feelin cute, might go howl at it.

ghostwriter

Gina took us to France in 2017.

Last weekend was the 7th Etymology conference.

The word <convent> has seven letters.  It’s related to the word <coven>. 

And the seventh letter of the English alphabet? 

That would be <g>.

 As in <ghost>.

Let me take you on an adventure. 

The moment I walked into that big old house I knew it was haunted.  I extra knew it was haunted when I tried to turn on my bedside lamp at 2 a.m. after traveling all day and blew the fuse for all the lights on our floor.  

Gina and I went down into the basement in complete darkness to find the breaker. We were lowkey terrified but strong, independent women who get shit done are used to navigating terror.  The key is to put your fear aside and go down into the scary haunted basement anyway. 

Feel free to use that as a metaphor because it totally is. 

The etymology of <ghost> is beautiful.  Our present day form comes from the Old English gast which meant, “breath; good or bad spirit, angel, demon; person, man, human being.”  If you go to Douglas, which you really should because he’s brilliant, he will tell you that in Christian writing done in Old English the word ghost was used in place of the Latin spiritus.  You can still see an echo of that in the construction Holy Ghost.  The <a> in the Old English form gast makes complete sense to me now, probably because I just spent three days studying things like how a long <a> in an Old English form generally yields a long <o> in a Middle English form. 

The <h> in our PDE <ghost> was slowly breathed in by humans who were busy hustling print.  Their native Flemish gheest still haunts our spelling in the same way that several ghosts are still playing pool in the billiards room of the Dayton Masonic Center.   Sometimes there’s not a clear reason why things stick around. 

They just do. 

That first night, after the scary trip down to the extremely creepy basement, I was almost asleep when I felt a distinct pressure on my forearm.  I was wide-awake in seconds.  It’s okay it’s okay you are safe you are safe you are safe I thought to myself.  I lay there in the darkness reminding myself ghosts can scare you but they can’t hurt you and waited for sleep to drag me back under.  I was just slipping into the dream world again when I heard and felt a long, deep sigh.  It sounded wistful, like an exhausted person remembering the feeling of falling sleep.

I woke up thinking about my dreams, which were dark and scattered and full of ghosts, bits and pieces of my consciousness scattered around my brain like driftwood flung up on a beach.  Of course the word <ghost> came up during the weekend, mostly because there are no coincidences but also because it’s such a rich word to study.  I’d looked at the entry for <ghost> before but every time I circle back I notice different things. 

That’s how scholarship works folks.  You notice what you are ready to notice. 

Learning does not go in a straight line.  Learning cycles.  Put that word on a cyclamen and study it my fellow word nerds.  You won’t be disappointed. 

It wasn’t until the morning after a ghost sighed in my ear that I realized the Latin spiritus and the Old English gast share a meaningful connection to breath.  The words are distinct but they both carry an inherent, historical sense of breath.  After all breath is the thing that animates, that governs the moment of transition between the realms of the living and the dead.

It made me think about breath as an echo of life and ghosts as an echo of lives lived.   

Maybe ghosts are just a collection of complicated exhales, extra inspiration that your soul can’t carry on and that your body is no longer able to sustain.  A thing left over, like the old battered doors and broken furniture and dusty boxes lying forgotten in a basement. 

Just an echo, like the way footprints are echoes of steps.         

The 7th card in Truer Words Volume 3 is fate.

That word comes to us from Old French by way of Latin.  Of course it carried the sense of a person’s destiny, literally what had been spoken by the Gods, but it also had the sense of “one’s guiding spirit.”  Like your fairy Godmother, the force responsible for making sure you don’t make a mess of the threads connecting you to this life.  The women who are responsible for weaving you into a tidy existence before snipping you back into the spirit world. 

The last day of Etymology we looked at Douglas’s entry for “text.”  It was another entry I’ve looked at multiple times—it’s one of the words on the bonsai in Truer Words Volume 2—but somehow I had no memory of the quote Douglas offers in his entry. 

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns—but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.  The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact.  After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

Robert Bringhurst, “The Elements of Typographic Style” via Etymonline  

Our individual threads are only so long but human life gives us the opportunity to weave them into text.  The fates may govern our expiration but study affords us the opportunity to make something meaningful together while we are still breathing. 

When you understand the deeper connections and broader patterns in our written language you secure an invitation out of the house of disembodied sounds.  The house of disembodied sounds is a ghost house.  The shiny packages of phonics are like bodies made up by funeral directors: they may pass for the living on the outside but they are dead as doornails on the inside.  Those bodies are designed to reassure you that death isn’t messy. 

Don’t kid yourself honey it’s just as messy as birth.

Don’t deny your own humanity because you feel more comfortable with carefully designed packaging.  Put the body of your loved one on the dining room table. Study it. Understand soon it will be your body.  Care for others like it is your last act of service because it might be. 

Teach children the truth.  

Get rid of all those boxes of lie binders down in your dark basement.  Listen to the ghosts sigh but know they have no real earthly power.  Put down your suitcases full of heavy lies.  Life is light and breath and connection, not phonograms and nonsense words.  Those things are dead.  Real study is alive and full of friends.    

You are the architect of your own life.  What is it you want to weave?  And how long are you going to wait before you start?    

conte de feés

Sometimes you have to break the world with words.

I didn’t say that.  Lidia did. 

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was a witch.  The little girl was born to a family of witches whose magic was deep and strong.  They named her Rowan for her rosy cheeks.

The family of witches lived in a village.  The village had a school for children.  All the children in the village, even the witch children, had to go to school when they turned five.  As Rowan grew her parents noticed her magic was different.  At three she could walk between the realms of the living and the dead but couldn’t correctly pronounce the word “year.”  Rowan’s mother assumed maybe she was just a late bloomer. 

Soon Rowan is six years old and in first grade.  It is expected that she go to school every day.  No one knows that Rowan is afraid of the books in school.  Specifically she’s afraid of the words in the books.  She’s also really extremely afraid of the face her teacher makes every time she tries to correctly pronounce the words in books.   

Even worse is when Rowan tries to spell, because she absolutely cannot and no one at school can teach her that magic.  The magic of spells and spelling does not fit into the school’s scope and sequence.   

Rowan hates school but she hides that fact like a good girl.  Sometimes she pretends to be a unicorn at recess.  The other kids think she’s weird. They are right.

Every morning Rowan’s teacher hands out sheets of white paper covered in black swiggles.  Rowan slowly crushes the worksheets into tight balls under her desk.  Crushing paper makes her feel better.  Afterwards she carefully puts the balls of paper inside her desk for safekeeping because it seems like paper is of immense value at school.   She thinks about how there’s no possible way the crushed paper balls are going to help her learn how to cast spells.

At least not the kind she’s interested in. 

Rowan wants to understand spellings like autonomy and interdenominational and subtraction.  She doesn’t understand the vast majority of what seems easy to other children, like long division and geography and Writing A Perfect Five Paragraph Essay™. 

Rowan has a lot of questions that no one is interested in answering.  Her questions begin in her head and then spiral down her spine. 

The unanswered questions throb inside her like heartbeats.

Eventually Rowan goes deep inside herself, into her lumbar spine, and stores her magic there because she doesn’t know how to use it yet.   All she knows for sure is that schools are not going to help her.

 Year after year Rowan holds her magic deep in her spine.  She feels shame for holding something as precious as her magic so deep inside herself but she doesn’t know what else to do.  She does her best.

Then one day Rowan sees a post on Facebook.  She follows the post to a website, and then to a store.  Inside the store there are classes for sale taught by a wise woman.  There is even a class called “How to Use Your Magic.”  When she reads about the class Rowan feels her magic, long stored at the base of her spine, begin to stir.  Rowan signs up for the class.

On the last day of the class Rowan is the only student.  All the other students are busy or forgot or have already made up their minds about their magic, which is to Rowan’s advantage because now she can talk to the wise woman alone. Rowan asks the wise woman all kinds of questions about words, spells, and spellings.

The wise woman is patient.  She listens carefully to everything Rowan asks, and then she says, “stories are made of words but every word has a story.  Now is the time for you to use your magic to understand the stories of words so that you may weave your own stories.  If you promise to be honest and think for yourself I will be your guide.  I can see the magic in you.  It’s time for you to learn how to use it.”

At the wise woman’s words Rowan felt the deep pressure of her magic begin to release from her spine.  She sighed.  And then she rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

Extemporaneous

I’ve been studying a word family that denotes “stretch.”  I’ve also been thinking a whole hell of a lot about friendship, writing and time.

It’s partly that goddamn calendar in my office again.  I can’t decide if I’m crazy or if my calendar is psychic.  It’s probably the first thing.

The word for February is “attend.”  Even before I turned the page to this month and noted the word that <tend> base element was already stretching itself into my subconscious.   

The base <tend> yields words like tendency and tendon and attendance.  You may not intend to cause harm but everyone still does anyway.  How might you cause less harm?  One way is to pay attention.  Another is to notice your tendencies.     

The larger word family of that base includes words like tension and intensify, maintain and tenacity, but also extemporaneous, which is a word one of my kids asked me about recently. 

It’s always a good sign when your kids bring you words to study that you don’t even know.  It’s my job to put myself out of a job and somehow seeing kids collect words like “extemporaneous” reassures me, like I’m somehow doing okay at these things that I set out to do, like teaching dyslexics how to do things and being an honest friend.

Extemporaneous denotes, basically, outside of time.  It’s actually an example of a compressed Latin phrase, ex tempore, which in Latin described things done in an offhand fashion, at that very moment, without taking a stretch of time to prepare. 

When I was studying extemporaneous with my kid we stumbled across the word “tempest,” which surprised us both.   What does a violent storm have to do with time?

Storms are temporary.  If something exists here, in the temporal realm, it’s only here for a stretch of time.  Everything on this temporal plane is, as my teacher says, here today and gone tomorrow.  

Even you.

And all of your contemporaries. 

And every tendril currently stretching tenderly up towards the sun.   We’re here to grow, folks.  Once we’re done growing our temporal existence is over. 

You can pretend that’s not how it works.

But it is.

This morning another student of mine and I continued our study of Charlotte’s Web.  It’s one of my all time favorite books to study with children.  There is so much there: life, death, and a great deal of stretching.

Do you want to know how Charlotte (a spider) saves Wilbur (a pig)? 

 Day after day the spider waited, head-down, for an idea to come to her.  Hour by hour she sat motionless, deep in thought.  Having promised Wilbur that she would save his life, she was determined to keep her promise.

Charlotte was naturally patient.  She knew from experience that if she waited long enough, a fly would come to her web; and she felt sure that if she thought long enough about Wilbur’s problem, an idea would come to her mind.

Finally, one morning toward the middle of July, the idea came.  “Why, how perfectly simple!” she said to herself.  “The way to save Wilbur’s life is to play a trick on Zuckerman.  If I can fool a bug,” thought Charlotte, “I can surely fool a man.  People are not as smart as bugs.”

Charlotte’s Web, pg. 67 

She saves him by writing, which is a bit of a stretch for her because she cannot spell super well.  Being a spider and all. 

Charlotte knows she doesn’t have very much time but she’s not afraid of death.   She sees no reason not to do as much as she can while she is here and so she stretches herself across her web again and again, dancing out messages in spider silk in order to save her friend.

And so it is that the large grey barn spider saves the pig even though she knows she cannot save herself.  She is not afforded the same about of time in her life cycle and she knows it.  She’s incredibly brave up to the very end, and yes, every single time I finish this book with kids I cry.  I can’t help it.  

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte.  Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.  She was in a class by herself.  It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.  Charlotte was both.

Charlotte’s Web, pg. 184

Bonehouse

Yesterday a smart word nerd friend of mine posted an article from the New York Times about Old English kennings and how we don’t have them anymore in Modern English and how that’s sad. 

Specifically the author of the article, Josephine Livingstone, asserted, “We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able as our forebears to create lyrical, associative, figurative meaning in poetry. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary. Old English speakers can treat metaphor as an occasion to innovate; Modern English simply tries to describe. Their poetry can turn skeletons into exploding nation-states; we have to focus on keeping our adjectives in the right places. But to our immense good fortune, Old English poetry has survived, and we know how to read it. The kennings are out there waiting for you — so beautiful, so different and so very, very old.”

Eyeroll.

Sometimes I wish I knew in advance what my brain was going to decide to become obsessed with so I could, like, plan for that in my day.  Dedicate time.  Rearrange schedules.  Carve out space. 

Creativity and time aren’t linear.  Happy New Year?  According to whom?  Thank God for calendars but they’re completely artificial.  Who decided January 1st is the beginning?  Who decided there’s even a beginning at all?    

Time is cyclical just like nature, your life, all learning, every creative endeavor humans have ever pursued and—oh yeah—love.  Things come and go, ebb and flow, feel fast then feel slow, seem easy and then are suddenly the hardest thing you’ve ever done except absolutes are dumb because keep trying long enough and you’ll need the superlative again.  I promise.

Have you noticed our tendency to romanticize the past or is it just me?  Old English kennings are freaking cool don’t get me wrong.  But they actually haven’t left the English language, not even close, and how rude to assert that Modern English only describes rather than innovates.  We haven’t lost anything.  There’s nothing to mourn.   No need to light your bonehouse on fire quite yet friends.  We good.

Just because you aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.    

I found Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water in my little sister’s bedroom one day in late summer years ago.  My sister had just left for the University of Wisconsin on a swimming scholarship; I have a habit of trying to understand why people leave by looking at what they leave behind. 

The book was on her bedside table and it completely changed my life. 

Lidia Yuknavitch burned my bonehouse to the ground with her words and wasn’t even sorry about it.  Lidia Yuknavitch doesn’t give two shits about correctness and her book was like a giant FUCK YOU LOOK AT MY ART NO LOOK AT IT.  Her words have always been magic to me.  Her songstory is completely her own and it breaks all the rules and thankfuckingGOD for that because angry women don’t scare me. 

Songstory is a kenning and it’s not mine.  That’s all Lidia.  Homegirl creates kennings and nests noun after noun after noun in noun phrases and uses nouns to modify other nouns like she’s pouring gasoline on your languagebonehouse with one hand and lighting a match with the other.  She don’t give a fucc about your rules but you better believe she know all of them. 

That’s how come she can break them so easy while also taking your breath away.  I think homegirl break rules like some people eat breakfast. 

My favorite kenning in The Chronology of Water is boyfish.  It’s just as powerful as anything Beowulf came up with and homies she published her memoir in 2010.  Anyone who thinks Modern English doesn’t still accommodate kennings just hasn’t gotten soaked with one of hers yet:

“And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own…every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from.”

“Weren’t you getting a little cocky about it too, your beautiful recovery, your distancing yourself from yourselfstory.”

“But my Miles—there was a deathmother, and there was his life.”

There are more, so many more, but they’re like pomegranate seeds: they taste better if you have to work a little to find them.  Go peel the cover off something and find some jewels.  I dare you. 

And for the love of God stop saying that we’ve lost something that’s been right there all along, under the skinsurface of you and our shared languageriver. 

Language is fullness.  You can take all you want from fullness but fullness still remains, pulsing in your blood, flowing in your veins, ready to bleed the songstory of you out onto the page.

City of Light

Three things that are true in this moment:

1) it is very dark and very windy outside

2) this time last year I was in France        

3) I have been thinking about light

My house gets very good light.  The light in my house changes throughout the day, as I suppose it does it your house, too, but in my house the process of illumination feels meaningful.  Morning light is best enjoyed in the kitchen.  In the evening the sun beams into my bedroom and dances on the walls.   If you want to catch the sunset step out onto my covered porch. 

Between 11-12:30 pm my tiny dining room has a very pleasant glow.

I decided to teach my Truer Words class in my dining room at my dining room table.  I wanted optimal light.  I used my husband’s computer because mine has started crashing randomly; one second my screen is lit up and the next second it’s black. 

I should really back everything up but I put it off.  I refuse to consider the suddenly black screen as my computer’s own personal memento mori.

In Truer Words volume two I put the word “memento” on a sunflower for a few reasons.  The word that card strives to illuminate is “museum.”  The Muses hung out with Apollo, right?  He’s the god of sun and light in Greek mythology.  If you wanna shine you gotta get with him.  

There’s a rather dashing white marble bust of Apollo in my mentor’s attic.  I’ve seen the light more times than I care to admit in that attic.  In fact I’ve seen it so brightly at times that I’ve been temporality blinded by tears.  

No one said light was always pleasant. I mean look at Lucifer. Carrying light doesn’t always work out but that’s no excuse not to try.

Last year at this time I flew into Paris.  Paris, France, the City of Light.  It was a long dark flight that I did alone.  It was followed by some of the worst jet lag I’ve ever had plus three nights in a real weird airbnb that turned out to be in a somewhat sketchy part of town.   “Maybe don’t go over to those streets right there, especially not at night,” said my taxi driver, as I stared out the window in a total daze. 

Thank God everything looks better in the morning light. 

I went to visit my mentor in November, a month with a name that bears a historical relationship with the word nine.  There are nine Muses that embody the arts, and the denotation of the bound base <techn> is “art, craft, skill.” 

I know that seems random but it’s not.  Remember my class?  The one I wanted the best possible light for?  Yeah.  The card we spent the most time studying was the “technology” card.  Man some faces really lit up during my class you guys.  It was pure joy to see raised eyebrows and smiles and laughs and nods.   

Technology is what allowed me to become a word nerd.  It’s what connected me with not only my teachers and these teachings but a community of scholars scattered all across our world the same way stars litter our night sky.  

Technology is also what allowed me to record my class for a couple people who had things come up.  Things like horrible wildfire smoke and illness and time zones.  I figured I needed to actually see if the technology worked before emailing the recording out, and since I didn’t have immediate plans I ended up watching myself talk about my cards right after I finished teaching, while my husband and father-in-law fixed two of our lights.   

When you can see and understand real and lasting structures it all becomes connected.  You start to see the world as one big interconnected turning wheel of light aglow with meaning.

You see yourself as a spark.   You feel small in the beginning and mostly just pray to not be blown out. Then later you pray to find other sparks.  And finally you pray for the kind of knowledge that will ultimately illuminate your heart. 

Because that, my friend, is how to become a luminary.

Patience

My husband is in printing.  When we met 13 years ago he was running a press at night but now he’s in charge of a department at a local family owned print shop. 

Any job that a client wants mailed goes through his department.   He corresponds with the Post Office at regular intervals, at least weekly but often more.  The intersection between printing work for clients and then making sure that work gets mailed out on time can be sticky.  Like the time a few years ago when it was a Friday and I had just picked him up from work and he got a call that a 17,000 piece mailing job that had to post that day had just been rejected because the letters were facing the wrong way in the letter trays. 

I helped turn some around once we intersected the backwards mail.  Somehow the job still got out on time.

Patience comes into English from the Old French pacience, “patience, sufferance, permission” which is from a Latin adjective patientem which meant, “bearing, supporting; suffering, enduring, permitting; tolerant,” but also, “firm, unyielding, hard.”  In Latin this adjective described persons as well as navigable rivers. 

Of course all of that comes from Douglas, who is utterly brilliant and tremendously entertaining.  I like to look up words in Etymonline when I’m in lines, and lately I’ve been in line the most at the Post Office.

I looked up the etymology for “patience” right after I finished filling out a Customs form on the lil waiting table they have, the same table a dude was aggressively drumming his fingers on only slightly down from me.  Thump-thump-thump / thump-thump-thump / thump-thump-thump / *sigh, *looks around, *sigh / thump-thump-thump / thump-thump-thump / thump-thump-thump.  

DUDE I thought.  Chillllll with the finger drumming.  You walked in maybe two minutes ago anyway.  These are the same people who made my husband and I literally turn around 17,000 pieces of mail that was still going to need to be processed by hand anyway just because they could and were feeling salty. 

And my dude I hope you’ve packed snacks cause there’s two people in front of me and I’m sending some Truer Words to Dresden, Germany.  It’s going to be a second.  Instead of asking everyone around you to tolerate you, why don’t you see your line experience as a way to practice tolerating us?   

Until I looked closely at the etymology I always had the sense that the word “patience” denoted the kind of happy waiting that could be described as soft, feminine, agreeable.  Over the years when I’ve answered the inevitable, “what do you do for work?” with, “I teach kids who have learning differences,” I’ve often gotten the response, “wow that must take so much patience.” 

It depends on what you mean by patience, but yes.  It does.  It’s a lot more about cultivating the kind of enduring firmness that will allow you to navigate a river even if it’s up to your neck and full of storm water than simply remaining agreeable when things take the time they take.  Patience in my work is about actively bearing the weight of time on your shoulders, consistently supporting your kids with the long game in mind while also balancing their constant immediate needs.  It requires unyielding endurance.

Patience demands strength.

Reframe

“I’m sorry. I’m so bad at selling things,” I muttered, slightly flushed with shame.

Wendy paused.  “How about we reframe that, Emily,” she said.  “What if we said you’re not totally sure how to sell your products…yet?”

I smiled as I handed her a deck of my Truer Words cards, still feeling twinges of oh-my-God-I-own-a-business-and-made-a-thing-but-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing as I watched her rummage around for cash.  

Wendy had wanted to pay me for my cards with “Cash App.”  That is capitalized and in quotes because I literally have no idea what it is, even after I tried to quickly look it up on the iTunes store in order to install it on my phone. 

Turns out it’s some kind of magic thing that lets people give you money, but my hopes of installing it and thus appearing to sorta know what I was doing were dashed when I remembered I can’t ever remember my iTunes password.  Like ever.  Thanks dyslexia. 

When I don’t understand something I shut down.  I feel dumb.  I get a tight feeling in my chest and a sinking feeling in my stomach, the exact same sensation I felt when I had tests on long division in 6th grade.

Reframe: I’ve spent my entire life figuring out how to do the thing in my own way, at my own speed.   My brain is a good brain. 

The funny thing is that so often when we grow up we expect to somehow leave behind our child selves.  We forget that just because someone is an adult doesn’t mean they can read. Or spell.  Or do math.  Or know what Cash App is and how it works. 

Reframe: everyone can learn if they are taught.  You can even teach yourself if you’ve learned how you learn and can set aside your anxiety and fear.

I decided this weekend, after meeting Wendy at her rad Women in Business seminar at Mercycorps Northwest, that I was going to start this week by setting aside my anxiety and fear surrounding selling the things I’ve made. 

I woke up this morning and figured out how to make a store on my website.  I have some things for sale in there.  I’m proud of these offerings and myself. 

So what if I never thought my super dyslexic self would be capable of making a printed resource?  How is it serving me to be convinced that I don’t belong or aren’t good enough to have my own store?

 Reframe: I created Truer Words Volumes 1 & 2 because they help me and will help you.  They are beautiful.  They are true.  They are some pieces of my heart on really nice paper that I paid extra for. 

Thanks for the invitation to reframe, Wendy.  I needed it.

Tide Pools

We crawled out of bed just after 6 am to catch the 7 am low tide.   The day before I had heard the ranger say to a group of people that the morning low tide was the better one. We got coffee on the way, in those disposable paper cups lined with wax that I recently learned take 20-30 years to decompose.  Cups that almost certainly comprise part of the "great Pacific garbage patch," a known oceanic trash vortex three times the size of France. 

All those cups and empty plastic water bottles and nets and old Barton binders and tsunami debris tangled together forever in a never-ending trash ballet.  It’s really hard to do no harm you guys.  At least it is in my experience.

Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area has an array of attractions, but chief among them are the tide pools.   Tide is an interesting word to study.  It comes to us from the Old English tid, which according to Etymonline originally had the sense, “point or portion of time, due time, period, season, feast day, canonical hour.”  Y’all I had no idea what “canonical hour” meant until this moment.  It means “the times of daily Christian prayer as appointed in the breviary.”    

I’m afraid you are on your own for breviary.  Time and tide wait for no man.

My teacher said this morning, in class, that a way to understand English as a stress-timed language (rather than a syllable-timed language) is to consider the points of stress as pulses.  Since the ocean is still in my ears I started thinking about how the waves pulse as the tides ebb and flow, and how stress pulses in individual lexemes contained within the greater ocean of our grammar.  My teacher observed that in English the pulsations of stress might even signal the grammar, like proJECT and PROject.  One stress pattern might signal a verb, the other a noun.

Spending time near tide pools will teach you that the waves in relation to the shore signals the tide.  Don’t go too far out when it’s high tide cause you might get swept away.   The intersections between land and sea are often not real friendly environments.  The intersections between knowledge and action, truth and lies, movement and paralysis often aren’t either.  

We traversed the loose rock and slick, seaweed covered boulders to deep saltwater pools.  Nearly every tide pool held hermit crabs in chipped turban snail shells, gorgeous soft green anemones, and spiny deep purple urchins, some as large as a clenched fist.  There were orange and purple sea stars, countless navy blue mussels, many tiny brown fish and gorgeous purple crabs, the latter seemingly cautiously optimistic that these humans were not the same threat level as the circling gulls.

We also saw chitons, creatures who bear a name that was first recorded in English in 1816, from the Greek khiton “unisex frock, tunic, chainmail coat.”

Gazing into the tide pools made me think about the risks and rewards of ongoing scholarship, the feeling of sinking yourself into such deep intellectual water that you are at moments certain that you’ll never dry out, that you’ll surely drown before the light of understanding shines and the tides recede.  

So many of us in service work feel overwhelmed by the constantly churning ocean of need before us, an ocean which requires a skill set that can never be static.  You can’t teach out of a binder and encounter the kind of depth of life that one finds in a tide pool.  Kids should not be made to wait until Level 6 before having an opportunity to understand the potential, single, final, nonsyllabic <e>.  That’s like taking a kid to a tide pool and telling them they’re not ready to know and understand what they can plainly see.  That’s an urchin, that’s a sea star, and that over there is a chiton.  Names have tremendous power.  Use them yourself and teach them to children.

It’s two weeks before the school year starts here.  The first day for most of my students is on a Monday, the day named in honor of the force that governs our tides. 

May you constantly seek the richness of understanding that lurks in deep tidal pools. 

May you know when to retreat for your own safety, and may you also know when to bravely stay the course of the tide. 

Seeds

I’ve been mailing seeds: San Francisco, California.  Culpeper, VA. Oregon City, Oregon.  Oakland, California.  San Mateo, California.   Louisville, Kentucky. El Cajon, California.  East Greenville, Pennsylvania.  Kennesaw, Georgia.  South Bend, Indiana.  Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Freeport, Ohio.  Culpepper, Virginia.  Langhorne, Pennsylvania.  Cluis, France.

Seed: noun/verb, which means that it’s both a thing and a thing you can do, but in our written language it was a thing first.  It’s rare in Present Day English for <seed> to surface in a construction where it means “offspring, children” but originally it also had that sense.

I bet you can guess why.

My seeds are called Truer Words.  No one gave me permission to gather my understandings together and self publish them.  I don’t have a PhD.  I’m not endowed with shiny certificates and endorsements.  I’m just a dyslexic person who finally understands her own writing system because I had the good fortune to study in good company, which afforded me the opportunity to weed all the phonics lies out of my brain. 

Do you know what feels weird?  Seeing your ideas and creative energy in tangible form.  The moment you get to hold something you have only previously thought about (obsessively, for months).  Here I am.  Here are my seeds. 

I am a dyslexic, big picture processor who is predisposed to connecting distantly related things at the expense of fine detail.  You don’t need to feel bad for me and no for the love of God I do not see things backwards.  Please stop asking me that.

Recently someone asked me why I’m so angry.  Let me tell you why, internet: I’m angry because our greatest resource is our seeds and phonics is like Monsanto.  Do you guys even know about Monsanto?  Did you know the dyslexia industry is corrupt? 

The Center for Food and Safety wrote a piece entitled, “History of Seed in the U.S.: The Untold American Revolution” in August 2012.  It’s a sobering read.

Over the past 40 years, the U.S. has led a radical shift toward commercialization, consolidation, and control of seed.  Prior to the advent of industrial agriculture, there were thousands of seed companies and public breeding institutions.  At present the top 10 seed and chemical companies, with the majority stake owned by U.S. corporations, controls 73 percent of the global market.  Today, fewer than 2 percent of Americans are farmers, whereas 90 percent of our citizens lived on farms in 1810. This represents perhaps a more transformative revolution than even the Revolutionary War recorded in our history books.

Hopefully you are a person who has been taught how to read so you can dive into those history books and make sense of them.  If you’re dyslexic let’s hope Orton-Gillingham works for you, because if it doesn’t we’ll probably just blame you for that failure to germinate. 

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.  They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” (Notes on the State of Virginia, Paris, 1785)

Thomas Jefferson would be bummed if he knew just how much agricultural biotechnology has chipped away at the liberty and independence of those who grow our food.  You would be bummed if you knew just how badly teachers are prepared to teach every type of seed, not just the genetically engineered ones, how to read, spell and do math.   The 1990s gave us an explosion of seed and chemical mergers and phonics.  2001 gave us No Child Left Behind (aka No Child Left Untested But Even More Left Behind) and J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a case in which the Supreme Court upheld the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office practice of seed patenting.    

Nearly all genetically engineered seeds are sold by Monsanto and are resistant to a single herbicide (glyphosate).  You can only understand what “herbicide” means if you look at the structure: herb + i + cide à herbicide, a compound with base elements denoting, respectively, “grass, weed, plant” and “killing.”  It’s on my <herb> card in my deck.  Monsanto’s herbicide-resistant seeds and glyphosate—marketed as Roundup Ready by Monsanto—are sold together as a highly profitable, packaged system.

Kinda like how the same few educational publishing companies are lining up to provide scripted curriculum, standardized tests and special education materials.  Yessir, we can totally reduce English orthography to seven syllable types and a bunch of spelling rules, trust us, this is research based.  Oh you need something to measure the kids who don’t grow?  No problem, we got you covered there too.  No need to save your own seeds folks, just buy new workbooks each year!  You don’t need a real understanding of our orthography to teach it, just research based materials! 

Restricting and influencing independent scientific research is yet another result of consolidation of the seed and chemical industry.  Many believe that the legacy of the land grant universities and research institutes initiated during America’s development have now become tainted as these institutions often function as handmaidens of agribusinesses.  Seed and chemical companies now partner with these public institutions by providing funding and sometimes personnel.  The seed industry sees this as a win-win—it provides additional resources to these institutions and, in turn, the research benefits the public.  Yet the companies seem to derive the largest piece of the proverbial American Pie as they use the technology and research, much of it paid for by U.S. citizen tax dollars, to generate private profits.

We’ve spent millions researching phonological processing to death, and proved without a shadow of a doubt that dyslexics tend to have innate difficulty manipulating disembodied phonemes.  Okay.  Call me crazy but that task also falls under the “has a hard time with meaningless details” umbrella.  Call me crazy but why are we trusting the same people who sell us boxes to present an unbiased view of how English orthography functions?  Call me crazy but why did everyone decide to assume that our writing system is most coherently understood as a bunch of sound/symbol correspondences? 

The same person who asked me why I was so angry claimed some teachers just need a script.  If you need a script then you should not be a teacher.  If you can only grow one thing that you also have to spray with literal poison then you should not be a farmer.    Not everyone can farm or teach.  That’s not a moral judgment.  It’s an observation.

Promoting homogenous seed stocks via seed patenting and industrial agriculture has resulted in a dramatic loss of plant biodiversity. Attempting to teach children how to read without considering morphology and etymology first has resulted in a dramatic lack of real understanding.  A 1983 study by the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) found that over the course of eighty years, the U.S. lost 93 percent of its agricultural genetic diversity.  RAFI’s report concludes that 75 percent of today’s food calories worldwide are derived from just nine plants.

In 2013 the U.S. Department of Justice reported that 85% of juvenile offenders have reading problems.  When you have trouble blossoming things typically don’t end well for you. 

Gee I hope nothing goes wrong with one of the nine plants that feeds the majority of the human race.  I'm also praying that the big picture processor whose more diverse neural structure holds the potential cure for cancer doesn’t end up in prison because her teachers are only equipped with a script, which (when the Tier 3, 2 and 1 don’t work because they are all different versions of the same script) eventually lands her in tutoring that claims the most meaningful way to understand the word “action” is to divide it into ac/tion.   

Orton-Gillingham programs and courses claim that our gorgeously diverse orthography can be boiled down to seven syllable types and a bunch of spelling rules that all have exceptions.   Their premise is false, but somehow that isn’t supposed to matter because they are trying really hard to help the dyslexics and are such nice people, and besides they might even mention at the end of their course or workshop about how there's another type of understanding one could cultivate that happens to be true.

The thing is? You reap what you sow.

Stress

I woke up at 4 am again today, this time thinking about stress.

I haven’t been sleeping well.  Stress is part of it.

Yesterday Dr. Michael Hart, a man who I both respect and admire, interviewed me and I don’t think I mentioned stress even once.  I’m not sure though.  I was nervous (if we’re being honest) and so my memory of what I said (and did not say) is fragmented, broken into various random sound bites and images. 

I know I spelled at least two things wrong. 

So in case I did not mention it yesterday, English is a stress-timed language.  It is not a syllable-timed language like French, and thus it is not helpful to assume that the best way to teach reading or spelling is to try to isolate an individual’s spoken syllables and connect them with written syllables when considering a given lexical item.  For example: boil, loyal, chocolate.  I promise that is not a spell.

Do you want to know something really rad?

In Old English the noun spell had a form identical to the one we see today.  Its sense was different, though, and at that time spell meant, “story, saying, tale, history, narrative, discourse, fable, command.”  From 1200 onward spell gained an additional sense of “utterance, statement, remark.”   Spell meaning, “set of words with supposed magical or occult powers, incantation” is first recorded in the 1570s. 

Obviously this information comes from the priceless contributions to the field of truth and beauty by https://www.etymonline.com.

Go there and gain knowledge about your language, all ye who wanna help.

In the 14th century spell is realized in the written record as a verb.  This spell began in French and, because both language and life are messy, “merged with or displaced” (side note nothing in material life is eternal either) the word in Old English that meant the same thing.  The meaning of both the French and Old English form of spell the verb was, “read letter by letter; write or say the letters of.”  You know.  Like what we try to teach kids.

The best part of this whole story I have not even said yet.  Are you ready?  As my teacher says, do you have a strong beverage of your preference nearby? 

Both <spell> (the noun) and <spell> (the verb) have the same Proto-Germanic root: *spellam, which had the sense of “say aloud, recite.” 

These words were born together, spell and spell.  How do you cast a spell?  You say some important things out loud, with a high degree of accuracy and meaningful intention.    

Everything makes sense.  You just have to know how the system works.  If you are casting a spell you need a book of spells and a teacher.  If you are teaching spelling you need to understand the structure of how English spelling really works, which also means you need some books and a teacher.

I kinda know how the system works.  I have carved out enough of an understanding that I at least have a place to stand.  The thing is, the system is actually a river, and learning does not go in a straight line.  We are never done.  Language is not static.

Yesterday, during the Very Important Interview in Which My Expectation For Myself Was Perfection, I forgot to mark the position of stress when I analyzed and then resolved the word <inspire> using the lexical algorithm.   My spell might not work, but I wholeheartedly believe in a magic that is living and breathing, ultimately forgiving and open to do-overs. 

So here we go:

<inspire>

in + 'spire --> inspire

You cannot be perfect all the time.  But you can aspire. 

Also I promise you that English spelling making perfect sense is not a conspiracy.   Cross my heart and hope to die.  In fact, if you dig a little deeper and spend time with our orthography as it really is, you might just end up a lot less…stressed.