rivers and tides

dear pumpky,

where do i even begin? how about with practical matters:

1) you've had a birthday! you're one!
2) you got very sick on your birthday. you were miserable for days and we had to cancel your party. when monday rolled around and the doctor was finally open, i learned that you had bronchiolitis and an ear infection. you had a 10-minute mist treatment with albuterol in the doctor's office (for wheezing, which i couldn't hear with my bare ears, but the np heard with her stethoscope), and got a prescription for an inhaler and antibiotics.
3) you are feeling just fine now and i'm really, really glad.
4) although you've been cruising around holding onto the furniture for months, and taking a step or two on your own for a few weeks, as of yesterday you are officially walking
5) you've been talking up a storm. some of your more recent words: bird, dirty, diaper, uh-oh, star, night-night, piggy, gobble, book, yeah
6) you've gotten to be pretty good at getting food in your own mouth with a spoon, and you have fun with it if you're not in a big hurry.
7) i love you.

and now on to philosophical matters:

daddy and i watched a documentary last night called rivers and tides, about the scottish artist andy goldsworthy. i ordered it from netflix, and when daddy heard what it was he teased me about ordering a "physics lecture." he said i would fall asleep in the first five minutes of watching it. so i wish you could have heard all of the "wow"s out of dad's mouth as we watched the movie.

i have seen pictures of goldsworthy's work before and i always liked it. but it is completely different to see it alive, in motion. a chain of leaves snaking through a stream, a stack of rocks drowned by high tide and then re-emerging as the tide recedes, a line of sheep's wool capping a long rock wall, the wool, in sunlight, a brilliant illuminated line curving up and down and around the line of stones at the top of the wall.

today i keep thinking about this artist's pieces, and the look on his face as he worked, and how sometimes when he was almost done with a piece the whole thing would come apart and he'd have to start over. that happened a few times, and it became clear that that is just part of the nature of his work.

i hope you will watch this documentary one day and listen to this man talk. then you will know something about what it is to be wise. i don't know if he is wise about other things besides the art he makes, but when he talks about art and about making things, he is deeply invested in what he is saying, consumed with undersanding how the elements of his work affect and are affected by their surroundings--wind, water, light, etc.--and time. listening to him talk, i learned something about what it means to look, to pay attention, to understand, to be.