Sumer Is Icumen In

Happy Summer Solstice.  If you happen to be in the Southern Hemisphere, Happy Winter Solstice.  And let me know if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, because I have *so* many questions for you!

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” --Plato

Some days, weeks... months... call for musical interludes, this seems to be one of them. Here is where my heart is today.

It's a fun round to sing, written in middle English.

It's a fun round to sing, written in middle English. 

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Semantics

“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” 
-- Socrates

Every ending is a new beginning.  It's the season of graduations, the end of the school year.  Transitions from one (academic) year to the next, one school to the next, one stage of life to the next. We've worked hard to get here this year and victories big and small abound.  

So this week I've been thinking a lot about semantics and the importance of using accurate words with specificity.  At least for some of us.  Especially when our anxiety has spun up out of control.  There is a difference between "done" and "passed." (We're golden).  Words can make a big difference though!  It's what I do all day, and I'm not the only person who gets particular about the words that should be used.  

A big part of my job is helping people determine the words they use for the metadata they describe their content with.  Sometimes it gets changed multiple times before everyone (begrudgingly) agrees that the word set will do.  It's the nature of the role though. It's sort of nice to see that people are so insistent that the right words are used, to be honest.  It always sort of surprises me given how lax and non-specific about language people often are.  

I don't always agree with them, and in fact, once I get some other stuff under "control" (lol!), I need to do a metadata audit and see how many terms have been used 0 or even just 3-4 times.  Over specificity in language is just as inappropriate as insufficient specificity.  It's kind of a Goldilocks thing -- it needs to be just the right level of specificity.  After all, "Words mean something."  Or if you prefer, “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” You can, but they lose any useful communication capablity...

So that's some of the stuff that I've been curiously considering this week.

With love & curiosity,
--Susan

My People

Seven years I spent, feeling like a fish out of water, like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin, the men-lizards looking at me with their cold, dead, calculating eyes.  Seven years.  

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. - Margaret Fuller

It was a blessing to be set free.  Even when it was hard, even when we were scraping.  It was a sweet, sweet blessing.  

This is not to say that there were no people of my own there, but they were a distant minority - often moving along to elsewhere, or being worn down by the same battles I was fighting.  It's an exhausting way to live.

A year of sweet blessings, and now I have a day job again. An office job.  And it is nothing like those seven years.  The team plays board games every Thursday at 4.  We have the most diverse team I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of -- and each of them is a sweet, kind, delight.  Once again, I am asked to do the needful.  An archaic turn of phrase from the British, long gone from their linguistic inclinations, but lives on in India.  We go get lunch, or when it's hot, we find a shaded outdoor location and sip boba tea.  

Our project is something people are excited about, the biggest curmudgeon concedes, "yes, this basically hits the mark of what I expect it to be able to do" making his boss ecstatic because H "is a badass and delights in picking everything to shreds."

Though some discomfort remains -- I'm a perfectionist, and there is so much that needs to be done, and done right, and so much institutional knowledge wrapped up in people who desperately need to delegate... And I want to do it all.  And it takes time.  It's this discomfort that pushes me to do what I do so well though - create order and structure from chaos.  It's why they hired me in the first place. Despite the discomfort of wanting to have it all organized and running the way I'd like to see it running, I am comfortable in my skin. 

It is good.  It feels like I have landed again, for now.

So much to remain curious about, so much to sort and organize.  It is good.  

With love and curiosity,
--Susan

The Stories You Can't Tell

I've been thinking a lot about Demeter and Persephone.  And mostly just Demeter.  And how hard it is to watch someone you carried have to face the steep learning curve of adulting and being in a position where you've literally done everything you can do to help and now it's all up to them and the only thing left to do is hold your breath and see if they can figure out how to fly.

And rich-crowned Demeter did not refuse but straightway made fruit to spring up from the rich lands, so that the whole wide earth was laden with leaves and flowers. -- Hymn to Demeter, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White

I know.  Last week's newsletter wasn't great.  There's a story I'm holding, that I'm part of, but isn't mine to tell.  It's really hard to watch someone you love have a hard time, to be doing as much as you can do for them, and to still not know if they're going to be able to accomplish what had, for years, seemed like a sure thing.  Especially when that person is your kid.  

So that's where my mind is at right now -- holding a story that is an overwhelming part of my life right now, but recognizing that it's not mine to share.  

At a distant second though, I've been thinking a lot about Demeter and Persephone.  And mostly just Demeter.  And how hard it is to watch someone you carried have to face the steep learning curve of adulting and being in a position where you've literally done everything you can do to help and now it's all up to them and the only thing left to do is hold your breath and see if they can figure out how to fly.

And back to the the lesson of the concert a few weeks ago - realizing the need to let go and let things unfold. It may not be what I wanted, or expected, of this time, but this is where we are and I can push and pull and try to make sure the right things happen, but in the end, what is going to unfold is what is going to unfold. 

And.

In the end.

We find our way.  (Most of the time).

When one door and path closes off, there are many to replace it, the only question is really which one to take?  And in fact, just because there is a door or path open, doesn't mean that it's the right door or path to take.  No matter how much "easier" it might appear.  Or even in fact might be.  Sometimes it's just not the door that you're going to go through.

Some of us are stubborn that way. (Ask me how I know. Or don't). And it's still hard to watch from the other side.

There are many pathways to success and they don't all look the same.  Life is a complicated, messy thing.  Kind of like birth.  But really drawn out. And (mostly) not as outright painful (just sometimes).  What else can we do?  You can't go back and change the past, but you can always choose a new way forward to change tomorrow.  Each second is an opportunity.

I don' t know where I'm going with this.  I don't know how to do this, I've never done it before. At least not on this side of the equation.  And, I will sort out what I can sort out, and what will be will also unfold and be what it is. 

I'm not sure this was any better than last week, but it's somewhat more accurate to 'what I've been thinking about' anyway.

With love and curiosity,
--Susan

Like No Big Deal

Sometimes things feel like a big deal.  Sometimes in retrospect things don't seem like the big deal they seemed at the time.  And sometimes looking back, those things are pivotal.

And you never know until later. In the meantime, it's all, are we going to squeak past by the skin of our teeth or no?

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” --Anais Nin

I'm not feeling full of bright wisdom right now. My brain power has mostly been focused on untangling the knots of making information accessible and some other stuff going on. Today we graphed out multiple dimensions of documents - primary and derived research sliced by static and dynamic/living and how our particular model worked within this framework.  Earlier this week we were creating the lifecycle of an insight.  It's all very interesting but... tonight I feel like I do not have two brain cells to rub together.

So this one is short, mostly to say what I've said.  Well, that and...
 
With love and curiosity (even when everything seems very complicated and like it might actually be a big deal),

--Susan

No Name

One of the things I've been thinking about is how names give shape to meaning.  Have you ever had a feeling but couldn't quite make sense of it and then it dawned on you what the feeling was, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of stuff started to fall into place and make sense?  That.  

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. -- Wittgenstein

It's been quite a week here for various reasons.  One of the things I've been thinking about is how names give shape to meaning.  Have you ever had a feeling but couldn't quite make sense of it and then it dawned on you what the feeling was, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of stuff started to fall into place and make sense?  That.  Until you know what to call something, it is hard to make sense of.  There is always the danger of giving things names that aren't the right names - that can cause a lot of problems!  

Why am I thinking about this?  Because it's my job.  Basically.  Dealing in metadata all day, we have a very limited scope of terms available, but we're working with a really responsive team, and they ask for the terms they need.  Or sometimes they ask why we want to add a term.  I wouldn't say every term leads to an interesting discussion, but a good number of them do.  

Besides being in metadata, it's metadata and content about research - so it's studies literally about identifying and naming insights, experiences, and recommendations based on that.  How to represent experience in these little weird black squiggles on a screen or page is a daily discussion that I never seem to tire of.  

How to represent experience is how I started off this week with Mother's Day.  We went to see U2 live as they are touring behind the 30 year anniversary of their album, Joshua Tree.  

(We *could* have been higher up in the stadium). I'll admit, it wouldn't have been how I would have chosen to celebrate the day.  I'm a pretty classic introvert and my idea of a good time does not involve literally thousands of people, pretty much ever, much less stadiums. As it all got closer, I resolved myself to the fact that this was going to be a thing that was going to happen, and it would make my little family happy.  

We got there, we eventually got to our seats, as I settled in, it was a pleasant spring evening, though there were dark clouds that threatened rain. I'm happy to say it didn't rain.  The opening band was nice enough.  A good opening band for U2.  Solid. 

It wasn't until between sets that I really settled.  While they were breaking down the opening band set and getting ready for U2, on the screen they scrolled poetry.  Poetry that spoke to the themes of Joshua Tree, and to U2's core value set.  I sat there and read the poetry as it went past.  As I relaxed and allowed the moments to unfold as they would unfold, letting go of expectation and desires for something else, I relaxed and allowed myself to be open.  

I thought I was prepared.  I've seen U2 before.  Like their opening band, they put on a good solid show.  They know how to put on a show that is both intimate and scales to the size of the crowd they're working with.  It's really sort of amazing to pull that off.

I was not prepared.

This is the backdrop of the show.  It was really quite stunning.  But, that just added to it all.  They actually started out pre-Joshua Tree with Sunday Bloody Sunday from their 1983 album War, which is a song in part about the Bloody Sunday incident in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1972 where, per Wikipedia,

British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a peaceful protest march against internment (imprisonment without trial). Fourteen people died: thirteen were killed outright, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to his injuries. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers and some were shot while trying to help the wounded. Other protesters were injured by rubber bullets or batons, and two were run down by army vehicles. - [Bloody Sunday (1972)]

It also harkens to the1920 Bloody Sunday.  Both were escalations of hostilities between opposing forces in Ireland. In a time when it feels very much like everything is polarizing and escalating in ways that are explicitly explosive - from #blacklivesmatter, to Standing Rock/#nodapl, to the slap in the face of democracy that is the Trump administration nightmare reality show, to Syria, to Russia, to Afghanistan, to so many so many so many places.  

For reference,here's the song...  And this is how it starts out - 

I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes
And make it go away
How long...
How long must we sing this song
How long, how long...

And here we are, continuing to sing this song.  And so I cried because sometimes what else is the proper response?  (There is no proper response). 

So to say I was unprepared is wildly an understatement.  The entire concert was really just sitting or through waves of emotional response that I was not prepared for.  Joshua Tree, the album is (more wikipedia),... influenced by American and Irish roots music, and through sociopolitically conscious lyrics embellished with spiritual imagery, it contrasts the group's antipathy for the "real America" with their fascination with the "mythical America".

So, very resonant for the times.  The song Where the Streets Have No Name refers to a story about Belfast where a person's religion and income are evident by the street they live on.  Which brings us back to naming showing or hiding attributes that mean many things can fall into place, and how the absence of naming can not only mean that thing that you can't quite put your finger on, but can provide freedom to create your own story, to give something a new and different name, a new identity, undefined by what has gone before.  
 

There is power in naming.  There is power in words.  There is power in knowing when it's time to let go of what you think you want and power in letting things unfold.  There is power in taking direct action to change things.  We must remember and do all these things.

With love and curiosity,,
--Susan 

Puttin' On My Top Hat

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.
-- Isadora Duncan

What have I been thinking about this week?  A lot of stuff.  A lot of content strategy, project management, more content stuff, more project management stuff... and how hard it is to watch a loved one go through something difficult.  

Some how this results in me watching a lot of dance videos.  I dunno.

Cinco de Mayo

Sometimes it seems like celebrating too often is sort of frivolous, but celebrations are an expression of gratitude and love.  Gratitude doesn't get worn out when you express it.  Love doesn't have any less meaning when you tell someone you love them frequently.  Joy likewise.  Why should celebration be any different? 

Some things have to be believed to be seen.
― Madeleine L'Engle

Happy Cinco de Mayo.  RIght around this time of year there are a handful of celebrations marking the passage of time and that's what I've been thinking about this week.

May 1st is May Day (Beltaine if you follow the Celtic agricultural calendar) and International Worker's Day.  May 4th is... I mean, May the Fourth be with you.

And of course Cinco de Mayo.  

Sometimes it seems like celebrating too often is sort of frivolous, but celebrations are an expression of gratitude and love.  Gratitude doesn't get worn out when you express it.  Love doesn't have any less meaning when you tell someone you love them frequently.  Joy likewise  Why should celebration be any different?  

Not a long newsletter this time, mostly I've been thinking about creating structure and organizing so that I can track and get things done and trying to figure out how to express what I think needs to be done in a way that will get it done.  It's the funny little things that make me tick.  I have been, perhaps, a little too absorbed in that this week. Then again, I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere so the absorption is paying off.  And I sleep *well* at night... :) 

With love and joy and celebrations and curiosity,

--Susan