Rob Brezsny's free will astrology for my sign for the week of July 18 directed me to this wonderful poem by Dara Weir called "A Modern Version of the Way the Rosary was Once Said Throughout Western Europe in the Late Middle Ages." It's lovely! Read it out loud at least twice, taking time to contemplate the twists in meaning afforded by line breaks.
The poem is also absolutely appropriate for my life through the end of July. I am swamped and exhausted. Work is intense, especially since I'm on a reduced work schedule and we're trying to get a new book from the graphic designer to the printer, overhauling the current website, and adding a new children's site.
Plus, I have my last seven days at the zoo coming up and I am trying to wrap up the River of Words poem we spent more than a week on. It's a piece of paper about twenty feet long and three feet tall on which I wrote all the words the kids gave me about water, beginning with the word Mountain and ending with the word Ocean. Then, I spent more than fifteen hours cutting out the words with an art knife. I smooshed the words together at weird angles so that when the spaces were cut away, the words would still link together. Then, I had kids paint the words. Now, I need to go back and outline the words with contrasting paint so viewers can see which letters go together (several words are made up of letters painted different colors, and if you have a couple of those words next to each other, all you see is smush of nonsensical letters), and laminate it by hand. I'm dragging my feet because the lamination is going to be a bear. Each of the letters has the tendency to bend under or curl and getting it perfectly flat is going to be tough. Once that's done, I have to figure out some way to attach it to a blue background. What I think I'm going to do, though, is attach the blue background to the fence where I want the shape poem to hang using grommets and wire, and then hang the laminated poem on top of it using separate grommets and wire. I would like to have this all done by Sunday so I can take it to the zoo and have it hung by the time the kidZone reopens after a temporary closing on Thursday. In addition, I have two other major projects this week. On Wednesday, I'm going to stitch leaves together using pine needles into the shapes of animals and then float them on the African lake. The plan is to do African animals and North American animals and float them next to each other so they can be seen from the bridge into the African exhibits to reinforce the idea that all animals are united by the common need for water. Beginning on Thursday, I will be constructing the wire portions of the giant raincloud mobile I want to make, and asking kids to write WATER acrostic poems on raindrop-shaped paper to hang from the mobile. If I can get that project finished by the time I wrap up my time at the zoo on the 29th, I will be so happy. Plus, we still have to get a videotaped version of me leading the Walter the Water Drop story/adventure. I'm in new territory everywhere with these projects which is both exciting and a little bit exhausting.
The cherry on top is that Portrait Homes, the lovely builder of the community in which I live, is again attempting to wrangle adding those two additional buildings (twelve total new units) on the green spaces on either end of my building. When I thought the homeowners had won a victory a few months back and convinced the big, bad, money-grubbing Chicago-owned development company that Green Space is necessary to our community's wellbeing, what actually had happened is that the developer had been told that they did not actually own the land on which they want to build. The homeowners own it. Portrait has purchased more land on the other side of my neighborhood and is building 98 more units, which will bring our total up near 500. Several residents were upset that Portrait was not building a second pool to help alleviate the pressure of these additional units, so now Portrait is blackmailing us. They want to "give us" a second pool, in exchange for us conveying the two green spaces back to them so they can build twelve additional units. If this were the only issue we as homeowners were having with Portrait, I might be inclined to agree to the trade. But the truth is, there is a long history of neglect by Portrait in our community--though other Portrait developed communities in the area seem to be flourishing--and I absolutely feel this is a bad deal. So I joined eleven neighbors last night for an impromptu meeting, reaffirmed my willingness to chair a committee, and will be gearing up for a vote on whether or not to make the trade at a meeting on Wednesday night. It is really more than I want to deal with right now, but the timetable is obviously out of my hands and I feel an obligation to participate. The thing I find exciting about the whole process is that I'm getting to know my neighbors as a result, and the ones I'm meeting are proving to be caring, articulate, intelligent people who share my sense of justice. I'm trying not to hold too tightly to the outcome of the vote on Wednesday night and just concentrating on the fact that there are improvements to be made in the community and I can be a part of those.
So, even though Dara Weir's poem says she's not doing any of these things, I am on some level trying to keep wolves at bay and I think it would be SO LOVELY to walk through a rainstorm into a cypress grove. In fact, I think I can smell the cypress now....
