Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

They came from different places . . . different as much in how they lived their lives as in where they lived them.

Debbie’s cousin, Laurie, cancer survivor, came from Hesperia, CA.  Better here than in fire country.  And Debbie’s twin brother Jim, a lawyer, and his new bride Nooshin came from near the La Brea tar pits.  So there was some tension about back home.

Robyn was supremely thrilled that people came from Oregon.  Her sister Jan, a cardiologist from Corvallis, and Jan’s son Ian, newly graduated from Santa Clara and embarking on an internship in PR with the University of Washington athletic department, and Robyn would see each other for the first time since 1993.  They were all younger back then.  We were pretty much different people on that occasion.

And there were some amazing women and men, who happen to be friends, who had been invited.  There could be . . . and will be . . . a paragraph (and more) written about each and everyone of them of them, but not here, and not now.  These people were Debbie’s and Robyn’s colleagues at Bloomfield College, their family at this time in our lives, their new cousins and brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.  And there were a couple of students, one of who was taking the ‘official’ photos (which have not been received yet, but which will be shown when they become available), witnesses from another viewpoint…another world.  And they brought with them children from still another. 

Learning was going to take place.

It has been my custom to post the essay portion of Teacher’s Lounge here at Docudharma an hour or so after posting Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos.  That’s about when the conversation slows down a bit.

I’m modifying this one a bit because it really is specifically about Daily Kos in many ways.  Or maybe it’s not.

I’ll let you decide…

I suppose I was real when I was born.  I assume so, though I can’t remember that far back, since I doubt that I had the capability to understand that being real is something that society does its best to stamp out.

Soon after birth however began the seemingly never-ending subtle, and too many times very unsubtle, messages from those around me about how I should behave, how I should act, how I should be, and who I should be.  There were so many “shoulds.”  And I learned that in order to get along with the world, being real, being who I truly was, was not the order of business.  Being who and what other people wanted me to be was what must be done in order to survive.

As time passed these messages became more and more vehement, sometimes to the point of violence, more often via a caustic remark, a devastating rumor, or the isolation of ostracism.  Perhaps just the threat of these was sufficient to make me bow to the pressure and conform.  And submit to the pressure was what I did, allowing the world around me to build my identity.  But I knew that identity was not really me, but rather a shell that I had allowed to be built around myself for protection.  I so desperately wanted to be part of the world around me that I walled myself off from it, hidden within that “acceptable” shell.

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Crossposted at Daily Kos as part of Teacher’s Lounge.

School stopped.

For me it was at 8pm last night, except for a visit to campus to pick up a midterm project…which didn’t actually happen because the student had an error she needed to fix.  Yesterday I learned that there was a silver lining in the 4 bomb threats we have had in the past 17 days.  Evacuating the campus wrought havoc on midterm exams being given, so they cut us slack on turning in the midterm grades.  I’m taking advantage of that and passing on some of that beneficence on to my student. 

She’s doing the class the hard way, by individualized instruction.  And I’m taking a constructivist approach.  She says she’s having fun.  Cool.

Anyway, school does not exist except as a place full of people for the next 60 hours or so.  Neither will the web, except for brief moments.  The world is stopping for a little all-about-me time.  Or maybe all about us.  And the Us will certainly vary depending on one’s point of view.

Debbie and I have our ceremony on campus tomorrow.  The college’s chaplain is going to officiate in his best Presbyterian mode.  Always best, I figured, to let an artists work in their own medium.  We each will have family present.  Debbie’s twin brother and his wife and her cousin came from Southern California.  My sister frosti has come from Oregon.  And we have friends who are coming.  I expect to cry at some point.

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…