...when it is dark and raining, there is Play-Doh in my hair, and my darlings are flinging themselves off the bookshelves:
What cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson writes in Composing a Life...
It is time to explore the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives, where energies are not narrowly focused or permanently pointed toward a single ambition.
These are not lives without commitment, but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined.
In another one of her books, Peripheral Visions, I was fascinated to read the following about the Philippines:
...on my desk I put a small, carved figure of Christ, one of hundreds detached from crucifixes and sold in Manila as antiquities, usually armless, with their pointed European noses sliced off during the era when Filipinos rebelled against everything Spanish. I wondered sometimes, seeing these mutilated images that redouble the Spanish preoccupation with suffering, about the limits of empathy across cultural lines. This cristo has drops of blood carved in the wood, running down its side.
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