or is it Mandelbrotschooling?

I've mentioned before how our life- and learning-style is much like a romp through time and space on James Burke's Connections. The unexpected connections happen wonderfully often, sometimes in rapid succession for a short period of time and leaving us breathless, like a fireworks finale. Except there's nothing final about it.

The past few days have been just mind-boggling with the a-ha! moments and fun with friends and new experiences and joyful surprises, each leading to more to be explored. The intertwined quiet times are providing the perfect balance, some of which was spent visiting with a friend who took to knitting in a heartbeat and went home with yarn, needles, and ribbing in progress for her first hat.

We bounced from fractals to lava to pirates to David Gilmour to sharks to the Waltons, then Leah settled in to make a dream swatch headwrap as a gift for a friend's birthday.

We are raking and baking, decluttering and chattering, playing and creating, listening and watching and learning and growing...and every step branches off to more paths for possible exploration. With one eye on the exciting things to come, we're also taking time to focus on unfinished projects from the past, like Leah cutting her first steek on my handspun cardigan as it nears completion.

To top it all off, this weekend we were gifted with a set of framed Storypeople prints chosen by someone who gets it/us, each print fitting one member of this family especially well. My favorite, of course, is mine:

feels like some kind of ride but it's turning out just to be life going absolutely perfectly