Last night I turned off my phone and stayed up late reading a book for the first time in what seems like a long time. Taking the time to make a dent in my ever-growing TBR pile feels like a good thing, even though I keep telling myself that I don’t really have time.

This time, book is Braiding Sweetgrass. The author is Robin Wall Kimmerer. The first chapters are about an indigenous creation story, about the mysterious synchronousity of pecan fruiting seasons, about picking wild strawberries as a child in upstate New York.

I picked strawberries, as a child, in upstate New York. That was a good time.

This morning I am slowly but steadily working through all of the Astronomy work that I get to do. I learned today that there are spots on the surface of the sun which are three times the diameter of the earth. I genuinely cannot wrap my brain around this kind of scale, and I am reminded of that one Douglas Adams quote about space being… big. Like, really big. The exact words are escaping me in this moment, but some of you might actually remember them.

These labs are tricky. If I get a C in this class, I’ll be okay with that. And I haven’t felt this way about anything in academia in a long time.

Just glad to be here.

After the Astronomy stuff there is the Art History stuff. This is straight up general education, and honestly it could go a handful of different ways. I could just plow through it and get it done without slowing down enough to take any of it in. I could probably do things this way and still get a good grade.

But, since I’m here…

I’m just trying to remember that time when I was lucky enough to walk through the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, with a cousin and a woman from Morocco that we met that morning at the hostel. I’m trying to channel that feeling into this classwork. If I remember correctly there were some actual tears.

More goes into art than paint and canvas. There’s a human element. This is just another medium for storytelling, if you’re paying attention. And stories are powerful things.

General education feels like a good place for me to be visiting right now. Like it’s – centering, to try new things. To push myself in a different direction. It helps me to practice being open to things that are just a little bit random. They inform my brain that there is more out there in the world than the handful of things that I struggle with, the weight of things that seem impossibly wrong.

There is more, out there in the world. More than you can ever possibly be aware of. And some of it is beautiful. And a whole lot of it genuinely matters.

I hope it’s a good Tuesday.