by popular demand...

The latest video of Lucy and Bat Girl. (She does have circles with the bat symbol on both sides of her body - very fitting, we think.)

Note the starting position, with the little trouble maker draped across Lucy's jugular.

good work...

My mother always encouraged her four daughters to 'put your shoulders back' - a vehicle for lauding the importance of good posture. I couldn't do it. It never felt natural or right at all. Later, I would hear from others, 'hold your chest high'. Ditto there, for what seemed to me to be artificially manipulating the human body and perhaps the human spirit as well. Then there was 'Picture a string pulling you up from the top of your head'. Well, perhaps we're getting closer here.

Our daughters model good posture for the rest of us, a result of vocal studies. There is a lifting of their torsos out of that place of bodily solidity - the hips/abdomen - that naturally aligns everything in its path as it grows and stretches into proper position. To me, this technique doesn't artificial but rather very organic and natural in its action and result. I do it, when I remember to! And it just feels right.

When our children were young, I walked an inner tightrope between wanting them to know how wonderful and amazing they are - and not overly praising them for good work done or stressing how proud I was as if it is the latter that makes them the former. "I'm so happy for you" would sometimes be on my lips after an accomplishment. I'm sure I didn't balance the implied tension very well at all. But I didn't want them to think of the performing parts of life (from school work to recitals to degrees...dinners prepared and fabrics & paints, sewn and applied) as something that was to impress others or define their worth, but rather as some good work from and for them. Something to relish, enjoy and be grateful for. And also to ponder in that, in the mystery of how it interlaces with life. Something natural. "You're wonderful" was always in my heart because it's true - but in a much more cosmic sense than we know.

Wendell Berry's 'Good Work', (from What Are People For), offers a somewhat spiritual interpretation of good works that puts the natural back into a what is sometime an artificial concept in life:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair. It graces with health. It heals with grace. It preserves the given so that it remains a gift. By it, we lose loneliness: we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; we enter the little circle of each other's arms, and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, and the larger circle of all creatures, passing and out of life, who also move in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.