See also: raisingchildren.net.au/newborns/behaviour/common-concerns/overstimulation "A stimulating environment to play in and explore helps your child learn and grow. But sometimes too many activities add up to overstimulation, so downtime is important for your child too. It’s all about finding a balance that’s right for your child." Raising Children - The Australian Parenting Website
Kid in the candy shop. World is your oyster. Opportunity knocks. Sky's the limit. The stage is yours. Cash prizes. 50% off everything. Buy one get one free. Bring your own beer. One day only. One day only. One day only.
See also: raisingchildren.net.au/newborns/behaviour/common-concerns/overstimulation "A stimulating environment to play in and explore helps your child learn and grow. But sometimes too many activities add up to overstimulation, so downtime is important for your child too. It’s all about finding a balance that’s right for your child." Raising Children - The Australian Parenting Website I wouldn't mind shrinking down to the size of a peanut, say, so this baseboard would seem like the corner of an immense room. I look up and over and around and then I set out. I tread carefully, wondering: will I meet other tiny beings like me or will most of my fellow travelers be insects, crumbs, and dust? How will I eat? What will I drink? At night, I wonder, will it be scary dark or just regular? If I'm there a while I bet I'll want to read and write a little. I hope that will be possible. I wonder about fluctuations in weather. I wonder about sounds and I wonder about vibrations. Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, I'll return to my actual size. Then I'll think about what it was like to be the size of a peanut, say, and the new insights, the new feelings, I have.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that it's not about the finish line, since we are all consumed one way or another in the end. Let's add that it's not about difference, exactly, either, since one way or another we do have our differences. So, accounting for individuality and mortality, what's left? Well, maybe what's left is ambition for ambition's sake. This is a very ambitious grape here. The other grapes were content to do their grape thing and leave it at that. This grape, though, this one little grape, spread its wings, puffed itself out like a bird looking for a mate, got all cushiony and fulsome, though never sacrificing ambition to symmetry or completeness. Tufted, almost complacent, yet somehow modest, too, just there with the others. To their credit, the others didn't shun this grape. They all hung together on the ends of their stems. And all, in the final moment, I'm a little ashamed to admit, were delicious. No, that's not true. They were exceedingly tart. We ate them anyway.
Sometimes I feel too big and too small at the same time. Vulnerable in my own home, and heartbroken in a way that's like an itch I can't reach. This morning, the fox grabbed one of the squirrels that comes to our door for peanuts. I can't tell yet which one because for the moment only the birds are begging. We haven't seen the fox here for a while but now he's back. For the past several days he comes bopping through. Yesterday he was already carrying a meal. Once, he stopped long enough to lift his leg and pee on the feeder pole, as if to say he's got this, life.
Swaddled by impulse
pressed in necessity we wait, wait then leap! – wings (or what passes for wings) spread as if flight were one option alone among many. See also: "Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse |
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