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Author: Anne Cassidy

Further Thoughts on Humility

Further Thoughts on Humility

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Re-reading yesterday’s post (yes, I do this sometimes!), I realized it might sound as if the only error in the magazine is the one I intentionally left in. I wish that were true! The problem is, I know there are errors, but I can’t always find them. Proofreading is an art, not a science. It has clear rules and expectations, but also a bit of the mysterious. How else to explain my ability to look right at a mistake and not see it — until it’s in print.

What I was trying to get at yesterday (and which deserves longer treatment later) is the process of letting go that accompanies creative work. At some point you must come to terms with the fact that the essay/painting/song/magazine will not be perfect. Otherwise you will never finish. Humility can be of some help in this endeavor.

Humility Block

Humility Block

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For the last week I’ve been in “crunch mode,” editing and proofing the magazine, reading pages over and over and over again looking for misplaced commas, extra spaces and other minutiae. There comes a point with every issue when I must let something go, when the cost to fix the error is too high or too risky, because it could result in a mistake more grievous than the one it hopes to repair.


It is at this point that I think about the humility block. This is the practice of making an intentional error in a quilt — turning a block the wrong way, for instance — to avoid perfection. Only God is perfect, the theory goes, so it’s presumptuous to create something that rivals the divine. Rug weavers do the same thing, slip in a odd thread or two to mar their creations and avoid the “evil eye.”

Sounds good, but from what I’ve been able to learn, it’s not true. It’s a lovely story, a myth; the mistakes in antique quilts are just that — mistakes. But I like knowing that deep in the class notes section of the magazine is a boldface comma that should be Roman. It’s my humility block.

Photo: Courtesy of Etsy.com.

Red Buds

Red Buds

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In the first stirrings of spring, reminders of autumn. Not only from the chill air we’ve had these last few days (and Sunday’s dusting of snow), but also from the auburn halo of our budding trees, which shimmer like fall when viewed from a distance. I’m not sure of this, but I strongly suspect the buds are making my eyes water, too.

But all is forgiven because it is spring. And the red buds that stand out against the blue sky, that scatter themselves across the greening grass, they are just part of the bounty and the beauty of the season. A season that tips its hat to the work of nature that made it possible.

I.S. Monday

I.S. Monday

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Today my thoughts lie across the frosty Allegheny Mountains, hundreds of miles north and west of here to a small town in Ohio where a silly parade will step off at 5 p.m. Students in costumes and face paint, at least one mannequin head on a stick and several kilt-wearers with near frostbitten knees will be led by a bagpiper and an administrator dressed as a Tootsie Roll. The pipes will drone “Scotland the Brave” and the jolly band will weave its way through the College of Wooster campus.

The celebration is all part of I.S. Monday, the day Wooster students turn in the independent studies they’re worked on for months (in some cases years) and receive in exchange a Tootsie Roll and a parade. It seems like only a few months ago that Suzanne was writing us about all the excitement when she witnessed the festivities her first year in college; now it’s her fourth and final year — and she and her fellow ’11 classmates are the stars of the show.

A parade to honor academic achievement, what’s been described as “an academic Mardi Gras” — that’s an idea that appeals to me. To say nothing of the Tootsie Roll!

Photo Credit: The College of Wooster

Taking to the Pavement

Taking to the Pavement

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Among the many advantages of walking in the suburbs is this one: It is difficult to read a newspaper while doing it. Am I the only one who feels that there is almost too much bad news to absorb these days? Chaos in the Mideast. Nuclear peril in Japan. A humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

Today’s only good news (Kentucky’s two-point win over Ohio State in the final seconds of the NCAA “Sweet Sixteen”) happened too late to make it into the Washington Post. And so, I close the newspaper, lace up my walking shoes and take to the pavement. It’s my way to make things make sense.

Walking in Darkness

Walking in Darkness

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I walked this morning before the sun rose. It was cold, and the flashlight in my hand was heavy enough to double as a weight. The moon was bright but waning. I heard an owl in the woods.

To walk in darkness diminishes landscape but broadens possibility. I could be a walker in the city or the country instead of the suburbs. I could be almost anywhere.

But because the traveler takes herself wherever she goes (Montaigne?), I was most of all in my own thoughts. I was pondering the freedom of darkness, how not knowing what lies ahead can liberate us from the here and now.

A Seed to Water

A Seed to Water

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Our parish Lenten mission has me thinking about hope. Not the dusty old hope I remember from parochial school. This is a green ribbon, a shoot, a new leaf. It is born of letting go, and it is fed by reading, prayer and quiet meditation. It is not the answer to everything, but already it has loosened the shoulders, smoothed the brow. It is a seed. I plan to water it.

The Willow

The Willow

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Every year at this time I think about the order of spring colors. The yellows come first — forsythia and daffodil — followed by the pink of the flowering cherries and the blooming oaks. If we’re lucky and it doesn’t warm up too quickly, spring in these mid-Atlantic climes will last six to eight weeks. The light hues will give way to vivid purple and fuschia from the tulips and azaleas. Spring is a three-act play of color. And one of its opening scenes is the willow tree. It is the billowy curtain that sways in the March sun. Push it aside, hear the hum of summer in its bended branch.

A Pond

A Pond

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In a passage about landscape and writing in her book American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever describes Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It was one of many ponds in that area created by the uneven melting of glacial ice centuries ago, she writes. It was surrounded by thick forests, and went from being a few feet deep at the shore line to 100 feet deep in the middle. It was beside this pond that Henry David Thoreau built his tiny house.

Thoreau was 28 years old. His brother had died, and the woman he loved had married another. He had also lost the prospect of both a teaching and a writing career. ” Now his work could begin,” writes Cheever.

“I went to the woods to live deliberately, so that I might front the essential facts of things, and might not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau wrote.

More than 150 years later, we still count those lines as among the finest written by an American author. “Although no one in Concord … would realize it for decades,” Cheever wrote. “The shimmering surface of the kettle pond named Walden would be the mirror of Thoreau’s genius for generations to come.”

Closed Wounds

Closed Wounds

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Spring may be here, the trees may be budding, but branches are still gaping open-mouthed from their winter wounds. Split, shorn and lightened by a snow storm that happened almost two months ago now, the trees are ready for new life. Ready for their camouflage of green. In a few weeks the damage will be obscured. But I will remember the broken places. I will feel tenderly toward those trees.