orthogonality and good craic

i read an article about the santa fe institute that has me once again, in fits of longing for intellectual company. founded back in the 80s, they have created an intellectual environment par excellence. they have a number of scientists, researchers and humanists in residence at all times and every conversation that takes place must be an interesting one. their founding premise is "that intellectual vitality arises from people interacting across a wide range of disciplines." they have even coined a term for it: orthogonality.

i think i have long known the value of orthogonality and even used it in my work - there is great value in bringing together people who don't look on the surface like they have much in common and seeing what kind of sparks fly. i've had quite a lot of workshops where people were skeptical of the group i brought together - from ship captains to cartoonists to flash developers to learning specialists to gospel singers - but sparks always flew and magic ALWAYS happened. so there IS something to orthogonality.

in the article, novelist cormac mccarthy, who spends a lot of time at the SFI, says he does so because of the "good craic." that's another thing i'm craving - good craic. craic is a gaelic word meaning lively chat or conversation. husband and i have great conversations on a daily basis, but it would be nice to have some others, some fresh blood, so to speak. let's face it, after 15 years of knowing one another and having these discussions, husband and i are pretty much on the same page.

a friend sent me an email about a conversation group she started - it features wine (always a plus) and meets approximately monthly. each member submits an article that the other members read and then they get together and discuss over a glass or two of wine - sort of like a book club. hers is more career/business-oriented, whereas i think i'm looking for something quite philosophical. it doesn't need to be a formal think tank or have fellowships and high-powered macarthur grant recipients like they have in santa fe - i just need intellectual stimulation and input. good craic.

that's a lotta palaver

i have spent my entire day getting to oslo. you'd think that would be quite difficult, in light of it being under an hour's flight away. sadly, it wasn't. everything that could go wrong did. metro issues, rebooking of original flight due to missing first one (see aforementioned metro issues), my bag (containing absolutely everything, since i didn't feel like carrying anything but my purse) took the flight after mine and i had to wait for it at the airport (during which time i almost collapsed from lack of food and latte), delays due to tracks under repair near the station i was going to once i got to norway....i could go on, but it's still too depressing and there's no sense all of us being depressed. at least it gave me plenty of time to do lots of processing (aka scribbling of thoughts in my little notebook) of the wonderful blog camp weekend. so i hereby totally change the subject to that.

on twitter, TFM dubbed BC 1.5 British Blog Camp or BBC, and we loved it, so it will hereafter be referred to as BBC, at least by me.  i was reading gail collins' column in the IHT this morning and she said something that resonated with me as i bask in the afterglow of BBC, "whenever anybody asks you to do something off the wall, you should try to do it - unless it involves being unethical or a two-plane connection." from all that i learned at BBC, i would have to wholeheartedly endorse this as a kind of general life philosophy (especially the two-plane connection part).

because if you think about it, going to a stranger's house in another country for the weekend is a bit off the wall. although we don't feel like strangers here in the blogosphere thanks to the very personal nature of blogs, there is still  chance that someone might present themselves as other than they are. however, i felt certain that i knew bee and that we had a lot in common and that she would be as i thought she was. and indeed it was true, only of course, even better.

from the moment i arrived and we greeted one another like old friends with a big hug, we didn't stop talking. i told her that the only thing on my agenda was to spend a bit of time in a bookstore. so we did that, after we had a lovely lunch and a long walk along the river in a town not far from her house. the whole time, we talked and talked. we told our stories. it was a bit like opening a floodgate for both of us. the words tumbled out. we hardly paid attention to our food, which was excellent or even our coffee, which was lovely.

when i think about it now, it was quite astonishing how much we both had to say. and how urgently we seemed to need to tell one another our stories. in person. i'm not sure why it was. in one sense, it was like a rush to catch up. even in the bookstore, i hardly wandered around, we spent a bit of time by the cookbooks (oops, bought four), but even then, we didn't stop talking and laughing and talking some more. it was quite extraordinary. a real palaver.

we'd had a late lunch and when we got back to bee's beautiful home, i settled my things into the cheerful orange room (which oddly enough, i failed to photograph, tho' that's for the best since it belongs to her very private daughter, tho' i will say it had a gorgeous orla keily duvet cover that practically leapt into my suitcase) and we had a cup of tea. as we chatted away about being mothers, the mysterious behavior of teenagers, the delightful behavior of tweens, schools, books, laura ingalls wilder, cookbooks (i bow to bee's collection, she beats mine by a long shot, tho' those four i bought helped a little bit). of course, we also talked about blogs and the ones which inspire us. funnily, enough, the blogs the two of us tend to read don't overlap that much, so i can tell you, i have a whole new list of wonderful places to discover.

while we chatted, in the back of my mind, i was thinking about the ways in which bee had both retained a lot of her americanness and also had absorbed a lot of englishness--the tea, the public (which are private) school talk, the driving on the "wrong" side, vocabulary. i found myself wondering in the back of my mind how much americanness i retain (i suspect it probably came out a bit in bee's presence) and how scandinavian i have become. because i think it's hard to tell about ourselves. we're so inside of ourselves, aren't we? how do we know? i was a little disturbed by the thought of exactly how far i now am from americanness (and how far i feel inside of me from danishness), because it leaves me with that strong, melancholic sense of what i always call that mid-atlantic feeling - adrift in the middle of the atlantic, not belonging (by choice) either place.

but that makes it sound like BBC made me sad, which is far from the truth. being together in person with these amazing women gave me so much energy (that was lucky in light of today) and so much inspiration and much to write about in the coming days. so stay tuned for more.