Blessed rain...

It is raining today, for what feels like the first time since May. We often go for months in the summer here without any significant rainfall. But today, it's extra-special, given that we just planted four new trees, and a slew of new perennials around the place in the last few days. And today we get a blessedly soaking rain. The timing is impeccable.

Planting trees inspires long thoughts. Will you be here to see them when they come to full shade-tree status? What will your life be like? What unexpected changes will have occurred? Which goals will have been reached, and which will have fallen by the wayside, outgrown like much-loved old toys? And that naturally leads to thinking about long-term, integrated life goals...

More prosaically, I've been busy packing up the horses for the big sabbatical trip. They are going to visit a professional trainer (Trisha Kerwin, dressage trainer extraordinaire) for about seven months. What an opportunity---I'm so glad it occurred to me to take advantage of it!

And, it was a week of tidying up bits and pieces---getting the car and truck registered and inspected. Oh, and getting the truck fixed. The driver's side front brake had disintegrated. (!) Sigh. When it rains, it pours---seems like all the vehicles are needing work this season. Interestingly, the safety inspection failed to catch this little problem. Huh. But it was squeaking, and I had a little time, so I took it to the brake shop, even though someone had just safety-tested the brakes. More impeccable timing. I could have taken the word of the safety inspection guy!

And we finally got our window shades put on the other two mammoth plate glass windows. We're going to be really happy about those next summer! They do a wonderful job of shading the interior, and keeping the temperature down.

But the thing that's really happening in my head is a general bubbling around of ideas that have needed processing for months. Sometimes, when I'm really, really busy, I sort of throw ideas, thoughts and mental images into a big box in the corner of my head. Then, sometime later, I get a piece of slow time, and they all percolate around. It feels like spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove---good ideas add to the richness, bad ones rise to the surface, burst, and are lost. In this slow time, I tend to spend a lot of time 'puttering around', and arguing in my head with people who aren't there. What I'm really doing is thinking through lots of arguments and counter-arguments, pros and cons, he-saids and she-saids. I'm coming up with complete lists of all possible options (you have no idea how many different transportation scenarios I'm considering for Socorro!), and then methodically weighing pros and cons, and making decisions. I'm thinking through plots for papers, funding strategies for projects, lists of goals, opening lines for public or professional talks, visualizing relationships between various scientific concepts, looking for new metaphors and analogies to bring space down to earth. All at once, in a very non-linear fashion.

Sadly, it looks to other people like I'm not actually doing anything! But this is when I'm at my most creative. When I've just moved the oh-so-decorative teapot from this shelf to that one for the fifth time, or finally figured out how to fit ALL the glasses in the same cupboard, or gotten all the laundry on the line, or planted a tree, or spent the afternoon at the brake shop... that's when I'm most likely to have two different ideas in my head at the same time. And that's when I'm most likely to notice how similar they actually are, and how this corner of one idea fits so neatly into the notch in the other one.

The whole process is like trying to get a skittish horse to come to you in the pasture. If you try to boldly walk right up to it, you will frighten it away, and there's no way you will ever catch it by yourself. Maybe, if you have a bunch of friends, you can corner it. But it will be all worked up and fight you all the way back to the barn. Tomorrow, you will have an even harder time. Much better (and usually faster) to go to the middle of the field, sit down with your back to the horse, and be very interested in this patch of grass with all it's fascinating clover and stems and bugs, and little grains of dirt and sand. Before you know it, the horse comes to you, to see what's so interesting. Give him a handful of grain, and tell him how marvelously brave he is. And there you are. No drama. No trauma. After that, he'll follow you right back to the barn. Most likely, he'll do it tomorrow too.

Sneak up to ideas sideways. Trick them with other fascinations, and they come right to you. It reminds me of those lines from TMBG, 'In every jumbled pile of person there's a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking, isn't thinking of...' Turns out, it's thinking of a lot. You just have to leave it be for a while, and see what it comes up with!