Hi. I'm Marco's sister. Those of you who don't know me can call me Pearl. When I was nineteen, I bit into a pearl in a fried oyster in some linoleum-floored crab shack on Cape Cod.
I'm a recovering graduate student, high school Spanish teacher, unrepentant history geek, and budding mystic. I've traveled to four of the seven continents. I always love to discuss politics, religion, history, and philosophy. In my other life, I'm also a wife with really poor housekeeping skills. But I can cook.
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This has been a crazy, stressful week at work. First quarter grades were due. Bigwigs from the International Baccalaureate program were visiting our district. It’s close to Thanksgiving break, and everyone, teachers and students alike, is feeling a little burnt out. People have been on short fuses.
Then yesterday, at the end of the day, a kid walked out of his classroom, playing a ukulele. I have no idea why, or where it came from, or if it was related in any way to any of his classes. But I didn’t care. For some reason, just hearing that silly little stringed instrument made everything better. It’s like it had some happy magic — all of my stress vanished, and I started smiling ear-to-ear.
I propose we hire that kid to play his ukulele at the end of every day. Work that happy magic!
Stupak-Pitts passed not just because a group of Catholic bishops bore down on Democratic lawmakers. It passed because it could. Maybe because our cultural memory is short; because our fantasyland nostalgia for a world of stay-at-home moms and gray flannel dads is too great, because when push comes to shove, in tough times, there’s still a willingness to throw women under the bus.
In the morning, after you have cleaned and straightened up your house, and in the afternoon, after you have worked in the garden or watched clouds or gathered flowers, prepare a pot of tea to sit and drink in mindfulness. Allow yourself a good length of time to do this. Don’t drink your tea like someone who gulps down a cup of coffee during a workbreak. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life. Don’t be attached to the future. Don’t worry about things you have to do. Don’t think about getting up or taking off to do anything.
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(via bethlehems) (via tsunamis) (via closertotheocean)
My colleauges are always shocked when I tell them how early I wake up in the morning. I always explain that it’s becuase I need to sit and enjoy a cuppa tea before I start getting ready for the craziness of the day. Without this time, without this tea, I fear I would be a madwoman.
Nothing would give me greater satisfaction in this particular moment than to be able to just throw on jeans and a t-shirt for work.
Sigh… but not to be. Heels and pantyhose it is.
