tuesday, thirteen july: the hermit
Summers with Declan, I try to have a Thing for us to do every day. I mean, sometimes he's in camp, but usually only when we need camp as childcare. Sometimes he's doing something with a friend, or family, but most of our summer time is relatively unstructured, and I've learned over the last few years that neither of us thrives if we have no structure at all.
Yesterday's expedition was the Met, mostly because I hadn't been in a long time and I missed it. Declan was great--there's this way he acts sometimes, it feels like he's practicing being a grown-up. He puts his hands in his pockets and says things like "this is a very beautiful painting." But he's also interested in the museum, and we had a few good conversations about some of what we saw. We started with modern art, because those are Declan's favorite galleries, especially the huge abstracts, but also this one sculpture that he says looks like a giraffe had a collision with a truck. We finished with the Asian galleries, because those are my favorites, especially the rooms full of Buddhas, but also the Japanese nature paintings.
Walking into the section with the Japanese art, we came face-to-face with a giant deer. I've seen it before but it's striking every time, it's a stag made out of plastic bubbles, it's hard to describe but it's very cool. This time, the first thing I thought when I saw it was that it looked just like the picture on yesterday's tarot card. So, patterns everywhere, right?
Today's card is The Hermit. I love the illustration on this one, it's a turtle pulled into his shell, but his shell is also a lamp, radiating light into shadows. The Hermit, as one might expect, is a card about solitude, but considers that a good thing. Disconnect from expectation, turn your focus inward, refocus and reframe.
Today is also, by mutual agreement, the last day that any of us at work are going to engage with Work Stuff for about six weeks. Friday was my last day in the office until late August, but I'm still answering straggler emails. I need to wrap everything up today. I want to stress that this is unusual--it's not that my job routinely requires me to work all summer, but ever since I became an administrator, the time off in the summer has never really been totally off. (See for example the day I was answering questions about honors math admission while my family rode Space Mountain. That was an outlier, but I've done a lot of work calls from playgrounds. I did a work call from the balcony overlooking the entrance hall at the museum yesterday.) I'll certainly have some course prep to do this summer, I'm restructuring the first research project of the year and I want to add a week or two on the Sogdians, but that's fine. I'm not answering work emails for almost six weeks. We all agreed--this only works if everyone sticks to it--and we've all been reminding each other. "End of day Tuesday, set that away message on your email. Everything can wait until August." So now I guess I need to figure out how to set an away message.