I came upon this quote the other day from Jeffrey Wilhelm, a professor of English Education who has written several books on kids and writing:

“Students now need more time to immerse themselves in curricular topics, more time to read, write, and reflect; they need more informal writing, they need more exploration, and they need to do things that really matter to them…When I refer to informal writing, I mean writing that is used to explore and express, writing that is for trying things out, for bricolage, for practice that is risk free, where taking chances is encouraged and rewarded.”

Hard as it is, I’m going to completely ignore the fabulousness of the quote in general and focus on that one little word that glittered in the middle of the paragraph, calling for my attention: bricolage.

I didn’t know what it meant, but I was intrigued. So, word geek that I am, I looked it up.

My gargantuan “Compact” Oxford English Dictionary–ten volumes in one, to be read with magnifying lens!–didn’t list it. But Wikipedia did.

“Bricolage (pronounced /ˌbriːkɵˈlɑːʒ/ or /ˌbrɪkɵˈlɑːʒ/) is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts and literature, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.”

Interesting.

“The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, ‘fiddle, tinker’ and, by extension, ‘to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)’.”

Ooh, fiddling and tinkering! Two favorite verbs! And you know I like the idea of making creative and resourceful use of things…

“In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.”

Leave it to the French to have such a poetic way to say DIY.

But it was reading the rest of the entry, and the wildly diverse examples used to define bricolage that really blew my mind. Listed there is Michel Gondry, who happened to be one of the first filmmakers to captivate H., with his eye-exploding visual style. (And how I love Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!) There’s Seymour Papert, whose ideas about kids and computers and learning captivated me years ago. The term is also used in biology, cultural studies, philosophy, information technology. There’s mention of instruments made from tea chests, and Improv, and how the safety pin became the symbol for punks. Oh, and MacGyver is mentioned as “the paragon of a bricoleur”.

All references to one word.

One minute I didn’t know the meaning of the word; a few minutes later I realized that it’s a concept I embrace in education. There’s little I love more than watching my kids take bits from their worlds and craft them into something new and utterly unique to them. The other day, Mr. T was sketching a crowd of  characters for a new story he’s been dictating.

I asked where he got the ideas for his characters.

“Oh, Mario Galaxy. And Medieval myths. And nature. And Artemis Fowl. And Egyptian myths. And Pokemon. And…”

Made my heart sing. Maybe bricolage should be the ultimate learning mode for the post-modern kid. Kids do it naturally, but it might be useful to point out when they’re using bricolage, and help them see the value in it. There’s so much information out there and accessible these days: the thinkers and shakers of the future will be the ones who can pull it all together and make something compelling of it. Remember Daniel Pink, and his sense of symphony? Or that quote from Michael Chabon that I love, from his Lego essay?

“Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble upon along the way.”

May our kids all become paragons of bricolage. Bricoleurs for the 21st century!

(Last night we watched Micmacs, a film by yet another wildly visually-inventive filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He also made Amelie, which I adore. This particular film revolves around a troupe of bricoleurs –actual French ones–who live in a trash dump. If you like creative, visually stunning films, this one will fascinate you. Isn’t it crazy how once you stumble upon an idea that’s new to you, it suddenly keeps showing up?)

“Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images.”

This line comes from a thoughtful essay by Pico Iyer called The Joy of Less.  It’s a wonderful essay on living simply, but it was the line above, which is rather tangential to the essay’s theme, that made me catch my breath, like something had appeared from nowhere around a corner.

Are words really coming to seem like accessories to images? The thought saddens and terrifies me, the same way yet another local indie bookstore closure does.

I’m constantly chiding myself, when posting to this blog, for being too long-winded. People want pretty pictures I tell myself. And they want just a little inspiring text to go with them, to take along after they click away. I read several blogs like that, and am often charmed by them. They read like poetry.

But as much as I love and admire and learn from poetry, I’m not a poet. I think of myself as an essayist. And essayists are wordy. They stalk their subjects, like Annie Dillard with her muskrats. They let paragraphs build with rhythm and surprise like Joan Didion. They circle around what’s transitory in life and try to trap it for a moment, like E.B. White.

But I worry, like Iyer, that we’re losing our patience for such carefully crafted writing. Or at least we’re setting it apart as something different, something to read in a book now and then. I worry about how the internet is changing writing. We can say so much to so many so easily. We don’t craft our words–we let them tumble out of us and then we hit publish.

The effect this is having, I fear, is that we’re becoming a society of skimmers. There’s so much blather out there that we don’t have time to linger over words. We tack across paragraphs looking for what matters and move on. And often it’s only the accompanying photograph that stops us and makes us pause. Precisely Iyer’s point.

And I’m like anyone else: I click on my blog list and I skim and I tack. I envy the blogs with pretty photos and pithy posts–and large readerships. And I kick myself for being wordy here and wish I wouldn’t care so much when the horizontal line on my blog stat graph looks more like foothills than Alps.

But then I look at the tagline at the top of my blog and I remember why I started writing here: where a mother tries to cultivate creativity and a sense of wonder in her kids–and does a whole lot of wondering herself in the process. A whole lot of wondering. That’s what I’d always planned. And wondering isn’t pithy and pretty: it’s a path with many forks and turns and a final destination not immediately visible. The hope, I suppose, is that I’ll find a few readers with the patience to wander that path with me. And those readers will talk with me as we wander, and make the trip entirely worth it.

So if you’re amongst the handful of readers who have made it down to the bottom of this post, I thank you humbly. If something stopped you from skimming and you went back and read paragraphs word-by-word, I wish I could give you a hug. There may not be many of you, but I’m deeply grateful for my little handful. And grateful that there are people in this world who think of words as more than mere accessories, more than dangly earrings or platform shoes for images.

P.S. I realize that the title of this post isn’t entirely accurate. This isn’t an image-less post, it’s a photo-less post. There are a few images here, but they’re rendered in grey font, and require the reader’s attention to animate them. If you saw them dear reader, once again, thank you.

A few things that got me all worked up this month:

A Series of Unfortunate Events. I listened to several of these books on tape with H and Lulu way back when, and have only just started listening again with Mr. T.  I’d forgotten how brilliant they are. They’re hilarious, if you have the warped sense of humor that my family has inherited, for better or for worse. I wouldn’t even consider reading them aloud–not when Tim Curry does it so much better, Mr. Po’s hacking cough and all. And if, like I am, you are a wordlover—a term which here means someone who takes a slightly odd pleasure in the sound and meaning of words–you will appreciate Lemony Snicket’s tendency to employ words and phrases not typically found in children’s books, and also to explain their meanings. You would not believe how these words and phrases managed to creep into Lulu’s vocabulary when she was younger; now I have a seven-year-old son whose conversations are embellished with gems like, “with all due respect” and “dwarfed in comparison”. (Do I recommend these books for other seven-year-olds? No, I do not. As you can see in Mr. T’s drawing, they’re full of death and darkness and malevolent adults. But if you have a seven-year-old with older siblings who is twisted already–enjoy!)

It’s kumquat season. I love having these beauties sitting in a pretty bowl on the counter, and popping them into my mouth as I pass by. An acquired taste, I suppose, but I find them irresistible.

Studying India. Such a fascinating culture, and I’m enjoying every minute of it. We were lucky enough to start our explorations just as the fabulous Story of India appeared on PBS–hopefully they’ll replay it if you missed it. The kids have each come up with a project–Lulu is planning to make an Indian dollhouse, inspired by this stunning Frida Kahlo studio dollhouse. And Mr. T is thinking about making a model of a banyan tree out of Model Magic, with creatures in and around it. Should be fun…

Taking a break from an endless knitting project. So I’ve finished the sleeves and the back of my Sweater Coat with Lace Pattern.

I’m generally a ridiculously monogamous knitter, but I’m taking a break to knit myself a pair of Toasty mitts. I’m adding thumb gussets because I think they look nice and adapting the pattern is good for my math brain.

What’s that you say? It looks like the same yarn as I’m using in the sweater? No, Silly, the sweater is Sublime Kid Mohair, while the mitts’ yarn is Rowan Kid Classic. But it would seem that I’ve fallen into a slate blue, mohair rut and I can’t get out.

Making yogurt. This was my first try, inspired by The River Cottage Family Cookbook. Lacking a pilot light in my oven, I tried to make a “warm place” by putting my crockpot on low, and lining it with several cloth towels. That still seemed to keep the milk too warm, though. The finished yogurt tastes good, but is very runny. My Danish, yarn shop-owning friend–who ought to know a thing about making yogurt–suggested wrapping the warmed milk in towels and just keeping it in a cooler to insulate it while the bacteria develops. I’ll try that with my next batch.

New blogs. A couple of particularly beautiful ones: good + happy day and the habit of being.

So what has you all atwitter this month?

Back when I started this blog, I asked the family if they wanted me to use their real names. My oldest, never one to be delicate with words, replied, “That’s stupid. Anyone who wants to find out who we are can figure it out.”

True, but what we didn’t consider was the fact that the family surname appears in my web address. Combine that with the kids’ first names in my posts and anyone doing a google search for my kids’ names will get a direct link to Mama’s blog. Not so cool if you’re a teenager.

So, the family is going undercover. 

My oldest is henceforth to be referred to as H because he simply won’t tolerate anything cutesier.

My lovely daughter is now Lulu. When she was at theater camp a few years ago, a director visiting from New York complimented her stage presence–and accidentally called her Lulu. I think of it as her stage name now.

I’ll refer to the little man as Mr. T, since I call him that half the time anyway.

And my charming husband shall now be referred to as My Charming Husband. (Funny: I tried to use a search-and-replace plug-in to change all these names in my past posts. But when I checked back to see if it worked, I saw that every mention of Christmas was now “My Charming Husbandtmas”. Ha! That won’t work! So My Charming Husband will keep his name in all the past posts. I don’t think he’ll mind. He’s not a teenager.)

I first heard about the idea of adopting a word for the year on the Creative Mom Podcast last year, but I never got around to choosing my own. But then I was reminded by this post on Handmade Homeschool. Prairie Poppins has some intriguing musings, photos and links.

I was surprised how quickly a word came to me. It walked right off my blog tagline.

Cultivate.

It fits into so many of my goals for the year.

I want to continue trying to cultivate my kids’ interests. I just stumbled upon camp creek, which is a blog all about project-based learning. How is it that none of you mentioned this one to me before? It’s already providing inspiration, since we’re big on project-based learning around here.

I want to cultivate my garden this year. My garden is one of my favorite places in the world, yet last year it went all but neglected as we had work done on our house. But we had some gorgeous weather here on Saturday, and were able to get out there and make a better start for this year.

I want to cultivate my writing. I’ve already started on My Year of Excellent Essayists. I’ll share that with you soon.

Any of you have a word for the year? Care to share?

Stole this button from my friend Emily. Cause that’s what friends are for. Check out what she did with it. I’m proud to have friends who do such noble work.

My focus for this blog is learning and creativity. I’ve never planned to discuss politics here. But listening to our next president’s acceptance speech the other night brought to mind some past conversations with my kids.

A few years ago, when we studied the Civil War era, we read speeches and quotes by Lincoln. Oh, I thought then, to have a president who could speak with such wisdom and eloquence! It seemed like something from a bygone time. The kids and I talked about this.

Listening to Obama speak, I remembered our conversations. We’ve elected a president who can move people with his words. He may not be another Abraham Lincoln, but can you listen to him without being stirred? After his speech, as the newscasters yammered on, some talked about his gifts as an orator. They said that in a time of soundbites, he is “bringing back the spoken word”.

Can I tell you how much that excites me?

The history-making reasons for Obama’s election move my heart. But the fact that we’ll have a president who can speak with eloquence thrills my mind. I’m delighted that we’ve elected a president who seems so, well, presidential.

For fellow word-lovers, check out this short yet inspiring post on the power of words in this election.