Wednesday, March 6, 2024

 Wednesday, March 6, 2024

 

 In my session with Shelly today, I dealt with my friend, terror. I imagined a world where no one wants to know about the other. We were all looking at each other with sightless eyes. It was a dismal world,  like a grey 

bombed-out Berlin, London, or Dresden after WWII. I had another opportunity to sit with despair. With that came the realization if I expected less, I’d get more. That’s the trick, isn’t it?

   I remember having a similar realization in my twenties. I needed a certain level of connection with people to feel safe. I finally realized a 30% overlap with another person was a high degree of intimacy. Accepting that freed me to be grateful for what I could share with another person. I have to discover this principle over and over in different areas of my life. 

   “We always desire so passionately, if we could only accept passionately,” are wise words a woman I barely knew dropped casually one day. A while later, I repeated the words to her when she was in distress. I hope they helped her.

   I found the remains of the sheet of tiles the contractor had used for the kitchen splashboard. The sheets were useless, but someone could use the individual tiles in a mosaic. I do hate to throw away things that can be used. I boiled the tiles to separate them from the backing sheet and then scrapped off the remaining glue. Both Habitat for Humanity and Goodwill rejected them. I posted them on the Facebook marketplace. I had three takers. Two didn’t pan out. I met with the third at a local strip mall. They gave me $10 for the two boxes even though I offered them for free. The money covered the cost of the ad.

    I went to Ulu Wini after the man came to pick up the tiles. 

I arrived early and did a session with Adolescent D while  I waited for the school bus with the kids to arrive. D is decoding much faster.

    It wasn’t a great day with the kids. Most were resistant one way or another. First-grade K was hungry and tired. He doesn’t use the automatic recall strategy I taught. For him, the other way, systematic decoding, is faster and more reliable. It is hard for him to understand that using automatic recall will ultimately be better. I had difficulty pushing him to do that.  

    Second-grade P just wanted to read to me. When I tried to intervene and teach her something, she was overtly resistant. When I asked her directly if I could intervene, she said no. I gave in. She was probably right. Just reading the books and figuring it out herself was the best thing for her to do.

    When I opened my updates file this evening, I discovered all the entries between February 27 and March 6 had been lost. I opened another file, ‘interim updates,’ which started on March 6. Fortunately, those were saved. I’ll never know what I missed.