Upside Down Kris

  50, the new 20 50 is the new 20. I don't know how long it's been since this came about. The shift  probably began in the 1990s when I was 20 in years. It could have been earlier. In any case, I take it for fact in Western society. The other day I stopped dead in my tracks at this realization. My eyes had been following the horizon where the sky met with the sea. The sense of infinity rushed toward me on the tide but everything came to a standstill as an idea balanced like a surfer on a brain wave: "I have a whole life ahead of me." Not my life, not in my lifetime but anyone's lifetime. I mean, think of people in medieval times–they were mature by 20 if they even survived childhood. They were lucky to even reach 50. But now (thank goodness) we cringe at the idea of someone passing in their 70s as being too young (which they are!): "moving on" in their 50s is almost unthinkable.  Wow. I have half of a long life still to live. It's as if life is s...

Fluffy "My brain is fluffy," I gasped through my uncontrollable giggles. It felt good to laugh-to let out the tiredness of the past four days of the Balboa festival as well as pure merriment. My brain was pretty sloshy. Its insides jiggled from the right hemisphere to the left and back again so it was hard to get hold of any thought. Have you ever felt like that?  So many happy hormones were floating around my head from dancing and the excitement of talking to new people. I knew I would miss them, although I had this feeling I would see some again. The sudden break would be weird after sharing such an intense experience with the same people for days. I had gotten used to their faces, their movements, their unique expressions... I tried to explain my sensations to the Frenchman who had said "not to keep my arms fluffy" as we were dancing. "Fluffy arms" stuck me as so funny that it was a catalyst to my irruptive laughter. He started chuckling, too, and agre...

  Spring Sensations I've always had a soft spot for spring. Maybe it's because I was born toward the end of winter and I imagine my first real memory of the world must have been of breathing in spring. I could have been on a blanket in the park surrounded my daises. One of my first spring memories is the bright, all encompassing yellowness of the field of dandelions down the street. I remember loving being surrounded by so much color and the stems that gave sticky milk once picked. I carry the sensation of spring with me, even if I am far from seasons in this tropical climate. I was born in winter, which represents my reflective side, but surely spring must have been my gate into the world. Barefoot on slippery grass, newness, and green represent my connection to the Earth, to my center, to my lineage of color. And I love to explore this connection, and even more so being part of nature, being one with the beginning–the budding buds and my budding mixed in with all of it. So, b...

Too little, too late Preschool teachers have all my respect and admiration. All these young souls to lead and protect who are pushing out into this mind blowing world, where words and actions are a mystery to explore. Preschool teachers have to help these small creatures first understand themselves and then comprehend a world which is hardly graspable to adults. "A case of too little, too late," said my boss. For a short while, I was part of the rank of preschool teachers. How one person can attend a group of 15 three-year-olds who all want to be unique in your eyes but also want to push your limits to the maximum is beyond me. But I was determined. After totally bombing on controlling the toddlers, I watched as many tutorials as I could and read a book on class management. And it worked...for the most part. Rules and rewards (stickers, points, and high fives) had become my mission and method. But there was still the little boy who sat against the wall and would have no part ...

Creatures They were orangey with a tinge of yellow, if I remember well.  Who or what are the they , you may be asking. Well, you'll just have to read to the end! Now, back to the description: they had tentacles and a stick body. They could have been a large insect, but weren't. They could have been prehistoric arthropods suddenly resurfacing on the shore of today. They might have been massive mites, but the shield protection was missing.  But they weren't mites or any sort of insect. They were simply orange algae with white pods, albeit fascinating ones. They were very different from the plant stuff that was here when I first arrived on the island–that brownish seaweedy stuff that could have be served in a salad or a soup. No, this had crawlers like a brilliant red crab. However chameleon it was in its animal likeness it definitely tended toward plant form. Where did this seaweed come from and why? Do seaweeds have seasons? Or have the tides changed and the weeds blown in...

Navigating Language I've got  Spanish on my mind.   Words slush and slosh around if I were a pirate slipping on the unsure decks of my wooden boat in a choppy sea of language. It is a tiny boat for the moment, big enough to contain me and some vocab. The structure of my Spanish boat is flimsy at best, although I keep adding boards every day to reinforce it.  Someday soon I will graduate to a sail boat which will navigate the word world with much more ease. Eventually, I will join my mates on a common ship and be able to understand all their "ayes" and "ts". Oh, how I wish that day were already here! But mateys, let's admit something: although at times it can be frustrating to come up with a blank instead of a sentence, it's exciting. I am constructing a new vessel to navigate in, to be able to dangle my toes off of or even launch off of. The sky's the limit as I swim under its falling stars of knowledge. I get to approach the world as a 3-year-old ag...

  Holograming I find myself doubling back more and more recently at the juxtaposition of who I wanted to be as it flashes back and forth like a hologram over who I might actually be. My image of myself is changing (again). Maybe I've always hologramed–that is, to be at the meeting point of two half loaded images between the sense of striving and reality. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, anyway. Aren't we always changing, becoming something else, hopefully better? Thank the gods that we can become something different and that I have improved in some ways. But this feeling is more than the flimsy flipping back, the flicker of self. I know I have swung back and forth many times, sometimes holding firmly onto the vision I crave and other times reverting back to the old when experiences remind me of the past. The growing is in the middle of dealing with these new/old faces, and determines which of the holograms I see. What if my best hologram self isn't me, though? W...