Blue Moon and Other Reminders

Photo used under Creative Commons from Noel Zia Lee

Blue Moon

A full moon will rise at 4:43 pm today. This will be the second full moon of the month, making it a blue moon. Isn’t that cool? A blue moon on New Year’s Eve?

“Once in a blue moon,” people say. It could only happen that one time – a time like no other. It seems a good portend for the New Year. Even if it’s the universe’s way of predicting an unprecedented year, I take it as a hopeful sign.

I like reading the “Weather Notes” in the paper and the “Weatherguide” facts. Back when I was writing mysteries I kept my Weatherguide calendars that I got each year from the Freshwater Society. I figured I could be accurate about the weather, use it as a backdrop to the story.

Remember the movie “Doc Hollywood”? There’s a scene where the young doctor played by Michael J. Fox has gone off to Hollywood and he’s so bored and lonesome, he calls back to the little town of Grady to listen to the weather report. Maybe there’s such a thing as a dial-up weather report but I get the same feeling from the notes and facts in the paper. I feel comforted by them.

Listen to this one about yesterday:

“Twin Cities: Cloudy with flurries or light snow. Winds south-southeast, 8 to 10 mph.

We now have 8 hours and 50 minutes of daylight.

The sun rises today at 7:50. It will rise at the same time through Jan. 4 and then begin rising earlier.

White-tailed deer bucks begin to shed their antlers at this time of the year. Rodents such as porcupines, meadow voles and deer mice gnaw on the fallen antlers to get essential minerals in their diets.”

Isn’t there a tone to it?

Other Reminders

The tone of words, the combination of cloud and snow, wind and daylight and antlers that fall from one nourishing another, gives me a feeling of continuity and the purpose in all living things. It reminds me that nature has a voice that soothes, and that human beings can too. It reminds me that weather is not all about the drive to work, and that sometimes weather reports include blue moons and small miracles.

Time and Risk

I took 21 pictures of Christmas -- 2 of the family as a unit (we never get these, or at least in the last one Henry was still crawling), 19 of Henry with his toys, and I used the remaining three this morning to begin a photographic binge.

I want to capture the fields of Rosemount, those I pass on my way to work. I may become a photographer of snow. There's something about the way the snow, then rain, then snow came down over the holiday that has made some real snow sculptures out there in the fields. Don't even need a tree nearby to get an interesting picture. We'll see how often I get to leave early enough or come home late enough to make a real stab at it.

This morning there was a car behind me at the spot where I wanted to get the horses. There are four who live on a quaintly picturesque farm and they feel like buddies since I see them nearly every morning. Today there was one real near the street wearing a green blanket, but I didn't dare pull to the side of the road.

The thing about being artistic is you've got to have time and you've got to take risks. If I get time, take risks, and capture anything that isn't too mundane, I'll post it. At least it's one way to enjoy the snow!

By the way, Christmas was lovely...full of beautiful people -- a real pageant of every age and color, and brimming with emotion and care, especially for those joining us and those leaving us--poignant and bittersweet and joyous...all at the same time.

Hope yours was all you desired it to be.

This is the moment

This is the moment. Christmas Eve morning. Fresh snow on the ground. Everything done that requires leaving the house. The family still asleep. Quiet.

Wishing you your moments.

Mari

The great gift of Christmas

Decorated our "indoor" tree finally.

I wasn’t going to. We got it in and the lights on and then, when no one seemed interested in hanging the ornaments, I found I didn’t mind. I told Donny we might just leave it as it is and he didn’t go for it, so I brought up two of the boxes. On the top of the first box were two “theme” bags, one with birds, the other with angels. Henry was enamored right away by both, so we put a few on while we were home alone. Later, Grandpa helped and Angie hovered, and we were amazed at Henry’s dexterity with branches and hooks. He did a fine job, and the balls that sparkle were also among his favorites.

Man, I used to be such an ornament collector. I can remember buying $8 ornaments not too many years ago (well…maybe ten). Then a year or so back, my mom quit decorating as much and gave each of us kids some of the baubles from back when we were growing up. Looking at them last night, I felt bad that I’d considered skipping it, and not just for Henry’s sake. I can still remember going down into the really dank canning room in the basement of my parent’s home to gather up the cobwebby boxes of decorations, and now they’re in my own dank (if not as bad) basement room, and when I look at them…well…I love the darn things. There’s nothing like them now. There’s some sort of charm in the old stuff, which I think, when it’s personal old stuff, comes of the way you saw it as a child.

It seems to me like the great gift of Christmas – seeing with the eyes of a child – seeing with wonder.

A light shining in the distance

I practically ran out to the cabin this evening – just before the sun went down – to bring out the little lighted tree that was the last present my dad ever gave me. Mia wanted one for her apartment last year and I bought her one. Angie asked after mine this year, and I said, “No, I’m going to put it in the cabin.” And here it is, December 17, and I hadn’t done it yet. So I ran it out. Discovered that the bottom lights weren’t working and that if I sat it on my desk as I have in years past, not many of the lights would be visible through the window, so I sat it on the desk chair. It’s still not much to look at for being back a ways from the window, but the idea is being able to see it from the house. To know it’s there.

The way it came to be the last present my dad ever gave me was that he was bored one day in the nursing home, back when he still had enough energy to get bored, and he said, “Let’s clip some coupons.”

Working with my elderly male client, I’m getting more practice at being with a coupon-clipper. He was pretty upset the other day when he couldn’t find the zip-lock bag of coupons with no expiration date. He thinks I threw it away, as I’ve been tackling some of his clutter. I might have. (What is it with seniors and coupons? Don’t even get me started on that!)

Anyway, my dad and I sat with the Sunday paper cutting coupons. I saw an ad for the little tree and said, “I’d really like to have a tree like that for the cabin.” He insisted that I take a $20 from his drawer and go get it. I didn’t do it right then, but he remembered as I was leaving for the day, telling me to “Get the $20 and go get the tree.” He was delighted to be able to send me off to get something I really wanted.

That year, Christmas fell a month, almost to the day, before his death, and his little tree was the only one we had. There was no way for it to be a “usual” Christmas or do all the usual things. We just sat it on the piano table behind the couch and said, “Good enough.” It was the next year when I told Donny I had to take it out to the cabin and then shortly afterwards was doing dishes and saw it’s lights through the window. I had to wipe my eyes with sudsy hands. Donny putting the tree out there for me was one of those things someone does for you that you appreciate so much.

And so, the tree is in the cabin again…a little late, but still there.

Now I’m thinking about my proprietary feelings toward it. Usually “things” of all kinds are up for grabs around here…but not that tree…not that last gift. Maybe it’s sentimentality, but I don’t care.

I posted some on grief a while back when a wave of it caught me by surprise. A few readers were surprised by it too – at me still feeling it nearly three years later. So I just want to add here, that I don’t experience grief as something morbid. I don’t have that feeling of grief (that I wrote of then) right now, just the sentimentality or whatever it is. It’s the tree and it’s the time of year too. Certain things about the season are forever different. But that’s okay.

Sometimes grief is like the little tree – a light shining in the distance.

Routine

Simeon, Max and Sam

This is the first morning in a really long time – maybe years – that none of the animals wanted to go outside. Although Simeon hasn’t wanted to go out since it dropped below thirty degrees and snowed, Max was still game. Sam, like a good dog, uses the outdoor facilities no matter what the temperature is. We’re a veritable parade every morning – them following me or me them, a parade of one human, one dog, two cats. Sam’s about seven-years-old, the cats a year older. So it’s a routine of many years.

It was the absence of Sam that made for the change this morning. She’s gotten so she sleeps in. If I get up too early, she doesn’t always greet me as soon as my feet touch the floor as she does otherwise. The cats might have glanced at the door, but without Sam panting to go out, I simply got out the cat food, made my coffee, and didn’t even think of the unusualness of it until I got to my room and looked out the windows at the back yard. Then I thought, ‘Man, I didn’t smell the air or look at the sky, or feel the cold. What’s the day like?’ I can’t tell from here.

It’s a real haze out there, is what it is. The kind of haze that gets you blinking because it appears to be out of focus. I’m settled on my love seat now with the Fahrenheat blowing on me or I’d get up and check it out. But I can tell you the windows aren’t frosted – so it’s not them – not the windows today.

It’s just minutes before six o’clock and lighter outside than you might expect. Everything solid is black against the whitish-pink haze. This could mean there’s a fine mist of snow coming down and I can’t see it. It could actually be foggy. I can make a good guess that there’s fresh snow because there’s areas that are flat and un-trampled by boots or tracked by rabbit feet. The shadows of the apple trees just lay down flat and sublime on those stretches, as if giving up to the season. Totally surrendered.

Yesterday I took my mom Christmas shopping. The day was totally different: clear and bright in that crispy winter way. I purchased the only gift I’ve bought this year when I was with her last. It was a three pack of cars from the movie “Cars.” It was three dollars. It was for Henry.

I came home without a single gift this time, thinking maybe I should shop from inside. Do the internet thing. Don’t go out into it and see what’s it’s really like. Don’t go sniff the air in the aisles or hang out under the florescent lights.

In the store, I am swayed. Even not buying a thing I feel undisciplined. I can just see Henry with that kid-sized Black and Decker tool set with a belt and hardhat.

Henry wants some dinosaurs (and candy) for Christmas. That’s all.

So far I haven’t seen a dinosaur that doesn’t come with a gimmick. They roar or spit water or sense movement and turn toward it or to avoid it (I’m not sure which). I know the plain kind are out there somewhere and that the way to find them might be from home. I can sit right here. Not even sniff the day.

It’s just plain weird.

There’s different kinds of going out and different ways of staying in, and times you get in a routine and it takes you a while to realize you missed it…or might miss it.

The Pursuit of Peace

Watching the sunrise through the frosted windows of my sunroom I became intrigued by the designs. One window’s pattern looked like ski slopes, the one right next to it like a line-drawing, and the one on the other side of the L was all crystals and sparkle.

Obama has accepted his Nobel Prize. That day, the newspaper said that his speech would address the pursuit of peace in wartime. The crowd would be ready with signs of Change with a question mark.

Change?

It got me thinking about how, in addition to your conscience and your temperament, “the pursuit of peace” stands in relation to what you feel responsible for and to whom you feel responsible. I wouldn’t want the responsibilities of a president.

I figured Obama would address not only his reasoning but his feelings. I like this about him. He’s helped me with some personal questions I’ve had by sharing the process with which he works through his, comes to decisions, and takes action.

There’s this great line in A Treatise on the Art of Thought (the first of the four treatises in The Treatises of A Course of Love) about replacing responsibility with response. The way I’ve seen it is as a call to take the obligatory feeling away from responsibilities and to respond truly – from who you are. Man, I’ve had a hard time with this.

Donny and I made a deal about morning childcare since Henry’s mom returned to work two weeks ago. Basically the deal is that we split the hours so that I still get my morning time. We don’t usually do this kind of thing. We’re pretty loosey-goosey about the flow of our days. But faced with losing my morning hours, I had to voice my need of them. It feels so amazing to me to be heard and to have this cooperation.

They say Obama’s did a lot of reading in preparation for accepting his prize: reading the speeches of past presidents who received the Nobel, (Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson), as well as those of Marshall, Mandela and King. One of his speech writers said Obama feels that the award places a responsibility on him…being in that company…wanting to extend the legacy. So Obama does all that reading, takes in all that history, and then delivers a speech that is from his heart and from this present time. Others will listen and respond. The power of the word, of an expression of conscience, combined with a relation to the needs of the time, might just prevail…or so I was thinking.

There’s something about the possibility of true expression prevailing that excites me, no matter the outcome, and that gives me hope in the small area of my own life. I simply feel that we’re all so different – as different as the frost on the windows – but still “frost’ if you get my drift. And it seems that if we were each able to respond truly, the change that’s always happening anyway, would be more aligned with who we are…even if it takes some negotiations.

I am just psyched that I’ve had this one successful negotiation, that it protects my quiet time, and that it makes me hopeful for more of the same. I’ve been downright cheered by it.

Of course, Obama admits that negotiations sometimes fail and that then other measures are necessary. This is always the pits. That my negotiations have failed a great deal of the time is probably why I’ve fallen away from trying, and have ended up so surprised and delighted that a negotiation as simple as this one between Donny and me worked. I thought I’d share it because it’s been such a good reminder to me.

The “pursuit of peace” is one of those paradoxes – the more you “pursue it” – the more it can appear to elude you. I’ve heard this again and again. My favorite quote from a friend of mine is about how when she started praying for harmony, all hell broke loose. I’ve seen it happen more than once…true peace only coming when you’ve walked through the disharmony, or the stale habits, or the friction of a relationship…and how we often are better at achieving peace everywhere else than at home.

But I’m encouraged. Maybe those you love are more prone to negotiation than terrorists too. It’s worth finding out.

Pot-stirring

Don Shelby is retiring from WCCO radio. I didn’t even know he was on the radio. I know him as news anchor of WCCO-TV. An article in the St. Paul paper yesterday reminded me he’s been on TV since 1978 and I vaguely remember him coming and the end of the career of Dave Moore, who I liked a lot. In 1978 I was 23 years old and Angie wasn’t born yet. Realizing such things is just plain weird. But that’s not why I’m writing about him.

He never impressed me as a TV anchor. I quit watching local news almost entirely about 15 years ago, so I haven’t seen a lot of him lately. But he said something in this article that I appreciated. He said, “People have told me, ‘I never watched you on television – didn’t like you at all, but I listen to your radio show, and now I’m watching because now I know what kind of person you are.’”

Shelby talked about how tightly scripted TV news is and says that on the radio, “He’s able to let his personality shine through and connect with listeners.” He said, “After nine years of listening, they can tell what you’re made of.”

I imagine you wouldn’t have to listen for nine years. Sometimes you can listen for nine minutes, when a person is just being themselves, and get that sense of knowing what they’re made of.

In the closing comments of the article, Shelby says, “I have an overall hope that has nothing to do with WCCO radio. I have an overall hope that we bring back gentility, that we take hate out of the equation, that we take fear out of the equation. There are so many pot-stirrers in the business today who say things that are designed only to inflame or designed only to get people on your side … I like when you turn the heat off and say, ‘Let’s taste this and see if it needs a little of that or it needs a little of this.’ Because at some point, you have to stop stirring the pot and you’ve got to serve it.”

Of course he mentions some “celebrity personalities” we all know even if we don’t listen to them – the ones who get way too much air-time stirring the pot with hate and fear.

It’s definitely a pot-stirring time – a time when something new is getting cooked up. You can’t always rush the meal. But you can stir without making a mess, and without banging things around too much. You can stir with love rather than hate. And I guess what struck me was that when you are who you are, and you’re not scripted by outside forces, and you’re not pandering to the dramatic side of things that sells or that gets people “stirred up,” just to get them stirred up, then you can still be passionate and stand up for your views, and you can do it without alienating because they’re your views, and you claim them and, if you’re made of the right stuff, you walk gently with them.

Quotes from “Shelby signing off,” by Amy Carlson Gustafson, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1A, 12-7-09.

Avatars

I’ve had two friends tell me in recent weeks about how good it feels to send things out – letters and emails. One was my friend in Norway who writes me real letters that he posts with a multitude of pretty stamps. He’s said I don’t need to worry about responding. He loves getting up in the morning and putting pencil to paper and sharing what’s in his heart. Then a woman whom I share a lot with had her e-mails to me start bouncing back two and three days after sending them. She said it wasn’t response she needed so much as it was knowing that she was being heard. To send them out into the void, not knowing if I was going to get them, started to get to her.

I don’t have this blog set up in a way that tons of folks know about it and so I don’t get a lot of response, and that’s been fine by me. It’s the act of expressing myself that I enjoy and even require. But I admit that when you’re doing something like this and you take a break from it, and you have a hard time getting back to it, it’s because you start wondering why you do it. Why you take the time to do it is part of it. But there’s a bigger question (or two).

Why do I want to share what’s in my heart – even if not a soul is listening? Why do any of us?

And, When did we quit, and why would we question the value of it?

Those are bigger questions than why anyone starts a blog, but they’re related. When you get started on something like a blog, and you like it, and it takes on a life of its own – that’s just an amazing thing. I mean, maybe you start out to tell a story or write about one situation – the one you faced yesterday and that’s still on your mind today – and pretty soon, something else entirely other than what you started out with is happening. I’d say it’s like going into an antique shop – you never know what you’ll find.

So I was musing on this last night and this morning, being that it’s Sunday and there’s a book section in the newspaper, I went looking for it. I got hijacked by the article on the first page of Sunday Life. It’s about Avatars.

After reading the article, replete with “self-portrait avatar” renditions, I looked up the word avatar.

Avatar: decends from ava – away + tarati he crosses over.
1: the incarnation of a Hindu deity (as Vishnu) 2 a: an incarnation in human form b: an embodiment (as a concept or philosophy) often in a person 3: a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity.

Fascinating.

The article highlights a number of avatar artists concluding with Dennis Calero, who does freelance comic-book art. “He decries today’s rampant “culture of celebrity” and thinks it healthy when “people wake up and say, ‘I don’t want to worship another person.’”

Instead, they want to express themselves, be made known as who they are, rather than as who people take them to be. Like anything else, this can be shallow or profound.

It’s kind of like the yearly self-portraits I mentioned a while back. One year, I was trying to do “literal” art. I first painted a sunrise. It was awful. As elementary as a kid’s would be but without the charm. I was so frustrated by it that I painted a second one. I was bolder and the feeling of “something happening” came in the midst of it. When it was done I liked it.

I decided to do the same thing with that year’s self-portraits. They’re the images at the top of this post. The first was literal. The second was what I painted when “something happened” as I worked on it. I got this feeling in my chest of a sort of excitement/dread/compulsion. I had no idea why I was adding the things I was adding, what the color choices were about, none of it. When it was done my daughter walked by my room and said it was a little scary. It is. But I like it. I see it as kind of cosmic and having some strength and power.

Then the whole process of painting the literal and the non let me see something new about life, and particularly about the process of creating. “Literally” I was standing in my room pacing around an easel or sitting at my desk drinking coffee and typing. That’s all you’d see. But what was happening, especially as I wrote the books of A Course of Love, was not what you’d see. The “literal” had little relation to the non-literal experience.

So there's other possible descriptions of the avatar -- could be a stylized likeness of an Internet user, or could be a non-literal expression of an experience.

Quotes from "A Face in the Crowd," St. Paul Pioneer Press, 12-6-09, p. E1, by Julio Ojeda-Zapata.

Writing through

I figure I ought to say a word once in a while about why a person might write through something they call a crisis. I don’t really know why I write, and I don’t know exactly why I stop when I stop. I don’t stop very often. That’s a clue, I guess, to the crisis heating up.

But I know why I read people who write through crises. I read them for the company. It’s a lot like visiting a field a geese. You listen to them talk. You don’t know what they’re saying, but you feel as if they’re speaking your language. You feel as if you’re visiting. You feel as if you’ve pulled to the side of the road with them and that you’re waiting, along with them, for repair, and that it’s going to come. You know it’s coming because you’re hearing the voice of the one who lived through it to tell the tale. Doesn’t matter if the crisis is inner or outer or both, if it’s the same as your own in any detail. It matters that the feelings are the same though.

The words of crisis matter more than the conclusion. In fact, you’re kind of relieved if the crisis doesn’t get summed up and solved, although you can’t say why. You get a sense of the on-going nature of living with change, and of the way it feels, and an appreciation of the days, here and there, that it doesn’t feel front and center, when you rest.

Thanksgiving

It’s a month till Christmas Eve. Saw my first Christmas tree lot yesterday. I am just like my mother – don’t buy me anything – take care of yourself/your family.

But I’m in the cabn wth the "i" sticking terribly. Minor annoyance when you can be n your cabin in the low light of a Tuesday morning at 7:10 two days before Thanksgiving when you were ready to sit insde and decided at the last moment to see what it’s lke outside and find that even though you thought you turned the heater off, expecting the cold to come like the weather people said it would, it’s not here yet and you must have hit “low” instead of “off” so that it’s 49 degrees and balmy.

I was reading The Dialogues yesterday – the end. I’d brought it along when I left for work, and I parked on the side of the road across from a field full of geese. It was drizzling again but I rolled the window down and listened to the geese talk as I read and let it fill me with a sort of hope about myself. Forget hope for the world. I needed that hope for myself.

I’ve noticed the geese in this particular field for about a week. It’s a plowed field but all kinds of stalks stick up from it so that it’s got this pattern and texture and if you weren’t looking with observant eyes, you wouldn’t see the geese dotted throughout the field like so much more texture or so many more reeds. There had to be a hundred of them. One day they were there and another flock – one of the biggest I’ve ever seen – was flying over head, taking so long to come together that I never saw them enter formation. There was so much to look at that it was dizzying.

I walked at the park the other day and the cat tails at the side of the lake were so thick and there was something about them, their multiplicity, the things they hide, the sheer visual impact of their tall standing number and muted colors that I wanted a camera for Christmas, just like I have as I visit the fields. They’re speaking to me as much as The Dialogues are, and if it’s not about hope, it’s about home in some way. I relax with the fields and geese I visit. I breathe. I stop. I pull to the side of the road.

I thought of changing my pubjournal blog’s theme from writing a book with a non-traditional publisher to writing a book in crisis. The first line would be: the crisis rules.

Then last night, cleaning my office, I found this piece I’d written last Thanksgiving when I was doing PalTalk. It was about Ed (my father-in-law) and the fried chicken breakfast he liked to have on Thanksgiving, and then it morphed into being about the beauty that you see in hard times. I thought of reading it to the family Thanksgiving morning.

I was working so hard, just then, to be in crisis, to be honest about it, and to find ways to relate it to A Course of Love. I’d forgotten completely that I was doing that at this time last year. Which means I did it for at least three months. Probably four or more. That is so bizarre to me. It feels like a lifetime ago. Makes me realize how long I’ve been in crisis. In change with no let up. And how a course about life and love and heart has to get you through the rough times or otherwise you might as well call it a crock. Yeah, you want instant relief, but if you get the strength to endure, and to not close your heart and get bitter, that’s a lot. A lot to be thankful for.

Down

What a glorious day. I started out the door in my down coat once again – but the front door – not the back. It’s garbage day. I don’t mean to brag. In the household division of chores, I get the recycling and garbage ready, Donny brings it out. Even though I’m up earlier, I’ll often let it sit in the front hall and not take it to the curb. But he was hunting yesterday and I wondered when he’d wake up, so I made a few trips. It’s enchanting. A frost covers the lawn like a glazed donut.

In my down coat, I am not cold for one minute. I highly recommend, if you live in North country, that you have – not a sweater – but a down coat on the nearest hook. If you don’t walk out and get chilled, you don’t rush. This is worth the price of down, but there is surely last year’s down or ten years ago down hanging somewhere. You don’t have to leave it hanging over a chair or one of those decorative hooks. Mine’s on a hook leading down to the basement. A hall closet hook will work. The point is, have it handy. Just grab it. Just go outside. Be so warm you don’t fear to breathe deeply. It’s really been an amazing discovery…this wearing of down to write in a cold cabin…or to take out the recycling in a November that’s breaking records for warmth.

Is that smile on your face real?

Read the most wonderful book page interview. Here’s the headline:

"Wipe that smile off your face!"

The title of the book is: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a play on the phrase blind-sided. Must be. Silly to think anything else.

This is so cool. It mirrors my idea of how “the relentless promotion of positive thinking” has undermined spirituality. Undermined is a great word. In this context, it means to subvert or weaken.

Why subverted or weakened? Because it’s not honest.

Ehrenreich traces this trend to the 1980’s business world when it was used as a way of “calming people down during layoffs.” Then it became the ideology. “You could not raise criticisms or doubts because there were policies to fire negative people, those who brought other people down with their skeptical thoughts.” She speaks of Lehman Brothers and of “feel good” mega-churches too.

Why subverted or weakened? Because when it becomes an ideology, it becomes one of those ways you’re “supposed to” feel, and if you feel otherwise, you might not dare say it. It’s subversive and weakening because it’s deceptive. It hides things that need to come to light.

Asked, “What’s the worst thing about all this forced optimism?” she responds, “It silences people and quells dissent.” Gosh, I love this woman. She talks as well of being told to have a good attitude through disease. She says, “I should write a book called, “I Snarled My Way Through Breast Cancer.” Another great word. “Snarled.”

I don’t mean to get so gleeful when I see this kind of thing, I really don’t. I have a friend who has the most graceful attitude toward a life-threatening illness that I’ve ever seen. It’s not fake. If you can come by that honestly, more power to you. If you feel like snarling your way through though, I’m still with you. I figure it’s your right. I figure it’s our right to not be silenced.

I saw the tail-end of a Deepak Chopra interview on Oprah one time, years ago, and all I remember from it was him saying that positive thinking was about the worst thing you could do to yourself. I only have two of his multitude of books but I wouldn’t have expected him to say that from the content I recall. I read an editorial once by a European who said he felt oppressed by the drive to happiness. I thought, “He’s a European – he can say that.” In America, we must cling to our inalienable right to happiness.

It is insidious, although I’ve never thought of it in regard to the business world before. Businesses being positive thinking icons? Really? Yet my daughter wonders if she might have lost a job once because of responding honestly to a company questionnaire asking for employee opinions of their way of doing business.

I still receive emails almost daily that are full of positive thinking. “This and this and this bad thing is happening…but hey…I’m fine…it’s all a blessing in disguise.” I fall that way myself on occasion (rare, but occasionally). You get to know, as you mature, that the “bad things” often turn out all right or bring about a change that needs to happen. It’s the way many of us are feeling about the world situation: Okay, it’s lousy, but things have to change, and if this is the way the change is going to come, then it’s not all bad.

“It’s not all bad,” and seeing the bigger picture, is different than putting a happy face on during the worst of times. That’s more like denial.

In America, we must cling to our inalienable right to happiness. In too many spiritual circles, we must cling to our highest thoughts, our positive intentions, our attitudes of being blessed. We must not subscribe, for even five minutes, to feeling sorry for ourselves, or feeling wronged, or considering ourselves to be swamped by challenges.

I told a therapist once that I was feeling sorry for myself and she said, “That’s okay.” Man. I could have kissed her. “Far better,” she said, “to feel sorry for yourself than to feel responsible.” Isn’t that interesting?

The thing is, if we don’t complain or say what we feel, we never get to hear someone say it’s okay. We never get to hear that feeling sorry for ourselves is a step up from self-blame, criticism, guilt. If we never admit how we feel, we can keep beating ourselves up in private and spending a great deal of our time concealing the black eyes and bruises we give ourselves. Just get out the whip and apply a few more lashes. That’ll keep us in line. Stiffen the upper lip.

Okay. I’m a champion at complaint; not so good at claiming blessings. I admit it. My faith, my trust, says there’s a reason for everything. I accept that, even when the reason doesn’t have much to do with me having a gay old time. I usually feel like the hard times show me something I haven’t been seeing. Sometimes they call me to new actions; sometimes to greater surrender. Right now, I feel like I'm "in it" with everyone else. But I believe that a person can rail about these things. You can even argue with God. You can question. You can engage in dissent.

This can become a complicated spiritual issue if you think about it too hard. But if you don’t think about it, it’s pretty simple. You feel what you feel.

It’s a hell of an issue in business too, and in politics, in economics, in environmental issues. Who can afford to complain? Who can afford not to?

Quotes from Zinta Lundborg interview of Barbara Ehrenreich, courtesy of Bloomberg, in St. Paul Pioneer Press, 6E, 11/15/09.

Redemption

The smell out in the woods is amazing this morning. It’s damp and just beginning (on my second cup of coffee) to mist real softly. You couldn’t get better conditions for the smell of fall…in the woods…where no rake has ever been. It seems to be the wet leafs that make for the best pungency of this smell. It permeates – like when you’ve got a pumpkin pie in the oven.

I’m so sorry if you’re living in one of those states where the seasons don’t change – just about as sorry as I will be jealous a month from now. Even today, I’m sitting in my down jacket. It’s red and has a hood with black fur. It is not called for. It’s just that I’ve had this cold, and the worst symptom of it has been that I can’t get warm. I walk around feeling chilled to the bone all day. So I haven’t been here in the cabin for a while. I miss it. I know my time (before it is truly too cold to be here) is limited. It’s Saturday morning. How can I resist?

Yesterday, I had the down jacket sitting out so that I could wash it before I really need it (yeah, I know, it’s one of those chores you’re supposed to do in the spring). I wore it out to test the weather in the yard. Today, it’s made it possible to be out here. You feel so dumb about stuff like this. Dumb to wear your down jacket in the cabin so that you can write. Dumb to think it matters. Dumb that you didn’t think of it sooner.

I was in a shop yesterday – one of those convenience store kind of places. I was stopping on my way home from work and as I sat in the car checking my cash, realized I’d left it in the pocket of the last coat I’d worn (a hazard of this time of year – one day you’re in down and the next in a hoodie). After debating going home and coming back, I entered the store. I asked the guy behind the counter, “Do you take charge cards?”

He leaned over the counter, a big Arab guy, and asked quietly, “Why are you whispering? Yes. We take credit cards. It isn’t a big secret.”

I hadn’t realized I was whispering. We both laughed (real quietly). I said, “I left my cash in my other jacket.”

He says, “Everybody uses charge cards.”

I say, “Well, yeah, I know, but I don’t usually use my charge card for this kind of thing. I guess I’m feeling guilty.”

He says, “That’s good. If you don’t feel guilty you’re a perfectionist. If you feel guilty, you’re open for redemption.”

So I guess I’m open for redemption.

It was such a gentle, personal, exchange in an unexpected place that it kind of made my day. Sometimes it seems to me that it doesn’t matter what your philosophy is if you deliver it in a gentle way, in the time and place where the opportunity arises. I thought of it because it’s like feeling dumb for wearing my down coat. These mornings are when I have the gentle exchanges with myself: “You do what you’ve got to do. There’s nothing dumb about it. You’re here. Relax. Savor. Enjoy.”

The Mix Up at the Berln Wall

I’m sitting at the table taking the heads off of a dozen bunches of green onions (Donny’s cooking again), when a news story comes on about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the anniversary celebrations. I don’t usually get tears over green onions, so I think it was the story. The PBS news program didn’t say anything about the accidental nature of this occurrence, but that’s what I read in the paper this morning: that it was an accident. The evening news showed the routine press conference where Guenter Schabowski announced the opening. The Associated Press article said this, “Years later, Schabowski told a TV interviewer that he had gotten mixed up. It was not a decision but a draft law that the Politburo was set to discuss. He thought it was a decision that had been approved.”

It would have happened eventually anyway, but Schabowski got mixed up, and it happened that day. If you ever need hope in what comes out of getting mixed up (or your vision getting blurred, or the accidental nature of things), remember his. Whenever you find yourself getting fixated on your plan, remember this mix up.

There was probably somebody out there, on one or another side of the wall, who couldn’t have waited one more day.

As if it is morning all day

Photo used under Creative Commons by Algo

It’s Sunday morning. I was walking out to get my laptop so I could use it inside when I saw the Edgar Allen Poe sky: clouds forming a light V shape in the dark sky directly over the cabin, the moon sitting inside of it, the clouds moving through it, trees waving over it so their black branches hung and swayed in the glow. Very haunting. I opened the door and saw I’d left the heater on. I still debated. I’d been imagining myself curled up on the loveseat of the sunroom. But I went in the house, got my coffee, and came back. I swear, all you’ve got to do most days is get out the door.

The sky is mottled. Mainly midnight blue with poke-throughs of indigo and slate and powder and gunmetal -- all in one spot where the sun’s about to rise and the glow of the sun is floating up, so that a thin strip beneath the blue is golden. The sound of a barge horn carries from the river.

The good days and the bad days don’t feel any different out here in the morning. I can’t dredge up a thought of worry. I wonder…someday…will we all live as if it is morning all day? Face the day with wonder? And stillness? Watch the light come but not be afraid of the dark?

Do our passions – those hours/people/trees we love – restore us? Lend us sympathy? Let us see past the reflection to the actual lone leaf falling?

A train whistle blows three times. The blue sky has grown flat and uniform. The sun’s glow is pink.

Blurred Vision

Falling Through Twilight

I’m sitting before my cabin window looking out, thinking of what it would take to paint what I see. I started close in, realizing I see my glasses. My thumb was beneath my chin and my curled fingers in view of my eyes too. Then I looked out and thought how to paint it, you’d have to start at the freeway fence and work your way back in layers: The sky would be the first layer, then the fence, then the trees that are growing toward the morning light so that they literally hang over the fence, as if they’re drunk and need support. Then back up ten feet or so to the two tall, straight trees. One has a buffalo skull on it. The other a hanging copper owl. Below one is a bushel basket. Below the other the leaning frame of a birdhouse. Then the path. Then the half moon of chairs I can see gathered around the fire pit, along with the edge of the rocks and branches. Then the few greens in the window box. Then the window, the table with its lamp, the computer, my coffee mug. Then me.

I got started thinking of it because it struck me funny how I was seeing parts of myself as I looked out. “I” was part of the picture. How seldom that happens.

I paint a self-portrait once a year. That’s different. The portraits are always a little weird. Last year’s was called Falling through Twilight. This year’s After the Storm (haven’t taken a picture of it yet). They’re abstract because I have no idea how to do realism. Which reminds me of another memory I had when I was remembering the clarity of my vision after my first pair of contact lenses a few posts back. Because I thought, even while I was writing about it, that there’s something to be said for blurred vision too.

My first “vision” if you want to call it that, occurred in church on Holy Thursday. There’s this tradition where you keep vigil with the Blessed Sacrament on the evening of Holy Thursday, generally after the reenactment of the washing of the feet. I always think of it as sitting outside the jail cell where Jesus is held before he goes to that day’s version of trial and punishment. I discovered this tradition about the time my spiritual journey was heating up, and it floored me to get to sit in a quiet dark church and just “be” with Jesus. Some emotion came over me that first time, and I had tears streaming down my face. I took my glasses off. Half a church away were the votive candle rows that sit on the side altars. While I was looking at them through the blur of the tears, a face formed. I felt that the face was telling me I was not alone. It was the first of many such small occurrences that told me, basically, the same thing. They often came out of blurry times if not always blurred vision.

I got bad news today. “Bad news days” might as well be called blurry vision days. It was moderately bad news when I started writing this, which is one reason why I was pensive. You get moderately bad news and you go into a pause mode. There’s a certain “looking out the window” time you spend when you get the “warnings.” It’s like you know something’s on the horizon but it hasn’t come into view yet. It’s not even blurry. You know so little that you can still escape into other lines of thought or memory. I often feel, in such times, that if I can get into my creative zone, it’ll be the best thing for me. I don’t want to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop. Sometimes I rake or wash dishes. “Warnings” often bring on a restless energy that doesn’t allow you to sit. But today, I sat.

Then the second part of the news came.

When it comes, you feel like you’ve got a bigger picture, and in some ways you do, but in another, you’re more shocked or startled in that way that doesn’t allow you to think of anything else. The news fills your mind and heart; takes up every bit of room. Being unable to think of anything else, being in that churning, anxious place, is like a signal that you’ve got all the information now, but not the whole picture. The main fog is an internal fog. You’re just beginning to discover how you feel about the news you just got.

No, I don’t have cancer. My kids are fine. It's news about someone I love but not my immediate family.

Yet it's something that concerns me and that I must give attention to. This is just the way it is. The actuality of the thing. In my day of not doing anything, I’ll be open to all the guidance that I can get – the internal flow – the kind that takes all these feelings I’ve got going and does something with them. It works somewhat under the same guidelines I have about writing. If you write long enough, you might discover what you have to say.

So I can’t help but notice how funny it is that I started the morning with the idea of writing about blurred vision and in remembering how the idea was birthed alongside the clear vision of a beautiful fall day less than a week ago. As if something was saying to me…don’t get too enamored by clear vision. Remember…blurred vision has something to tell you too.

Where's wisdom coming from?

The heater pushes air in blasts that feel like opening the oven door when it is set at about 400 degrees. Open it and that blast feels so good in a cold house. Close the door and the blast is over. A second later you’re just as cold as you started out to be. That’s my heater. It turns on and off. It’s called (quite cleverly) a Fahrenheat. I hear that they’ve invented new heaters and new names for them. They are quiet. They say the heat is even. Some look like little radiators and are on wheels. I may ask for one for Christmas.

The cumulative effect of the Fahrenheat is a warm room, though. I can’t deny it. And I like the blast of heat.

My other heater is not so cleverly named. Tall and black, it sits out in the cabin. I’ll turn it on before I leave for work. It’s supposed to be warmer today than yesterday. Yesterday it got in the high fifties. I was driving my client on a spate of errands when I noticed this. His car has a dashboard that makes that announcement – like the black heater in the cabin. I don’t know why this isn’t welcome news.

A box at the side of my computer says that it’s 57 degrees and partly cloudy. I do not believe it. Is this the average from yesterday? The notice sits below an ever-changing box that has pictures in it. A grassy hill, the tail of a whale. Below it, there’s this record of what I did 20, 21, and 22 hours ago on the internet. Below that there is a “To Do” box that I can enter things into and above the whole line-up a place where I can type notes that looks like a little notebook. I don’t know how it got there or how to get rid of it.

I do appreciate the read-out of the time. It’s 6:04 and the sky has just lightened enough that I can see my trees against it.

As evidence that the room has warmed up to an acceptable temperature, the little white Fahrenheat is quiet. When it is on, it churns and chugs. It rattles. The heating coils glow orange.

I dream about the new and cling to the familiar. Makes you wonder where the new comes from.

Read about some research the other day. It was about jam. How would the sales of jam differ if you had six choices or two dozen. I was gratified to know that far more people bought jam when there were only six choices. As soon as six grew to twenty four, the choice was overwhelming.

Read about Minnesota writer and poet Bill Holm the other day too. He died what is called “an untimely death” over the winter, and was about to be celebrated.

Milkweed Editions publisher Daniel Slager said, Bill thought the “best of literature was for anyone who could read.”

“I think of that as something fundamentally Minnesotan, democratic with a small ‘d,’ this understanding of people. It’s a very decent, humane legacy…”

“Holm never had a television set or computer in his home, and Slager thinks that “wirelessness” gave depth to Holm’s writing. “Bill was really hostile to wiring. That’s all over his work. There’s a fine line between being misanthropic and being critically intelligent. More often than not, Bill was on the right side of that line.

“That’s where his wisdom was, coming from a long tradition that goes back to Thoreau, Emerson, Thomas Paine, Whitman, wonderful artists with language but profoundly critical of mainstream thinking and values. To me, it feels like Bill might be the last of the line.”

Where’s wisdom coming from?

A bright light blinks behind the trees. I watch it several minutes to determine if it is a plane or a star. Determining star, I smile. The sky is a light slate blue above and a coral wash below.

Quotes on Bill Holm from ‘Chain’ Reaction, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mary Anne Grossmann, 11/1/09, 6E.

And then you awaken...

A friend and I were both at our wits ends the other day over individual and group conversations that weren’t inclusive. “You and I exchange,” she said, doing this circular movement with her hands. We were sharing our recent situations with that glee you get of knowing you’ll be understood.

Then she told me about an article she’d seen called, “If you feel like you’re going crazy, maybe you’re awakening!” We nodded our heads knowingly. We got the “going crazy” part at least.

I told her how Donny got crabby the night before and then asked me in the morning if I was still crabby.

I said, “I’m not the one. It was you.”

He said, “You didn’t have the day I had.

My heart melted with that and I said, “You didn’t even get a chance to talk about your day, did you?” He’d picked Henry up, and as soon as he got home we were in the throws of dinner with his mom and getting ready to can turnips. Turns out he basically had the same problem, or nearly: too much talk, too little said, too little listening.

So I rubbed his shoulders and neck for a minute and then went about my business. Don’t need a lot of words to explain how too many drive you bonkers.

What is it that makes for the exchange, the dialogue, the conversations that aren’t endless monologues with no connections?

A friend of mine is teaching English in Vietnam. He told me this story about an exercise the children were doing:

"I noticed that question number one remained blank on every workbook. All the pairs had bypassed it and had begun working from question two. The first question was:
While you are standing in line at the checkout do you, (a) get nervous and impatient or, (b) wait patiently. Eventually everyone completed the questionnaire, except for this first question. Finally one of the students raised a hand. "Excuse me teacher, what does this mean?". What had stumped everyone was the phrase "standing in line"! It's a concept that is completely unknown here. I tried to explain that in Western countries we stand in an orderly line at checkouts etc., but they could only shake their heads in wonder at this strange way of doing things."

So maybe “awakening” is like shaking your head in wonder. You didn’t before see the strangeness of this way of doing things. You didn’t notice when the best of your daily conversations became like standing in line: you take your turn; I’ll take mine. The awareness builds slowly. Then it starts to make you feel crazy. And then….

And then it’s morning again, and the sun’s coming up, and the sky is golden along the horizon, and you’re not sure any of it matters.

It’s like the carpet. Got cleaned last Friday. Two days later, Henry walks through the living room shaking his sippy cup of purple juice. We scurry like mad to get up all the miniscule spots before they dry. In the general commotion, Henry stares from his space on the floor between chair and couch, aware that he’s done something wrong (maybe for the first time ever “aware” of it). After the cleanup he follows me to my bedroom doing the toddler version of small talk. I know he needs assurance that I’m not mad at him. I love him up. His mom takes him for a quick walk. When she gets home Donny plays with him.

If you could have seen the look on his face. That “Oh, oh, what’s all the panic about, what did I do, I’m in trouble” look. It makes you think, “What does it matter? Who cares about the carpet? This is crazy.” But you care. We didn’t scream and yell (except for Donny’s initial “Stop!”) but our actions conveyed that we cared. It was just one of those crazy things – after nearly three years of no sippy cup shaking of purple juice in the living room, it happens right after the carpet’s cleaned. What are the chances of that! I said something along those lines to Donny as we cleaned.

He said, “It always happens.”

It does (although usually it’s the dog or cats). It just seems like you can have a hard time sometimes (or I can), sustaining the level of caring. Something is always happening. You think you’re going crazy. Then you awaken (at least to a new day).

Seeing Clearly

All hallows eve. The VA, Halloween 3 years ago. Cub flyers announcing flu shots whipping around the cold parking lot. Dad up on a high floor where the sky was both dull and wild. Calling Lou from there…upset or with an update…I don’t know.

Back in the sunroom again. It’s nearly 7 and there’s no distinction yet outside the window.

On my way to work yesterday, getting off the freeway and beginning the drive to the country, there was this patch of fall trees, all different colors in a row: yellow, magenta, goldenrod, rust, and it was one of those moments when you can be nearly overcome by the multitude, every little leaf colored so different, and each one either moving, falling, swirling, or waving. So this memory of one of our last family trips to Georgia comes to mind. Wish I could still say exactly how it went but it went something like this.

My mom and little brother (about 7 years old) are in back sleeping, dad driving, me keeping him company. Dad was a truck driver. He loved to drive. I do too. It was late. The song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” comes on the radio (remember that one?) And I get inspired to ask my dad for contact lenses.

This was not something one usually did. Big purchases went through Mom. Dad was, in her words, “cheap.” He was cheap on practical matters, generous on the frivolous, or with the “good times” money. I was a vain fifteen-year-old who wouldn’t wear my glasses.

Who knows what it was – the drive or the song – the got him to say yes.

A month or so later, with my new contacts in my eyes (the hard kind they gave you back in the 70’s), I took a walk to my neighborhood park where I walked so much it was like my second home. I had this feel for the place, sort of like I do now for my woods, maybe because it was where I took my emotions for safety (even if it wasn’t always safe). And that’s what the fall leafs along the highway reminded me of – how I walked into that park that day and could not believe what I was seeing or what I’d been missing. The details! The singularity! The abundance of each thing when seen with clarity. All was crisp in a way it hadn’t been in so long. Crisp and clear, dazzling, dizzying.

I was so grateful to my dad. I was getting tears in my eyes with that gratitude, and thinking how I’d tell him about it, about my walk, and about how stunning it was, and knowing he’d appreciate it. He’d think the money (and it was a lot then), was worth it. He wouldn’t chide me that I could have seen it all along if I’d only worn my glasses. He wanted me to look pretty as much as anyone.

I get to my client’s home and he’s not there. I call the office and they suggest that I walk down to the shed. There’s several sheds, and a big barn and a boat house, a patch of roto-tilled soil as richly black as any I’ve ever seen. The ground is almost boggy with moisture, clods of dirt everywhere. Raise your eyes a moment and your foot gets snagged as if by seaweed. Swollen fruit is hidden in the tall grass, and droppings from big animals laced with corn, and along the sides, abandoned cars, and up the hill tall pines. I call out a few times and then fall silent and follow the trail around the barn and out into the field. Coming back, I leave the trail and climb the hill beneath the house, feeling as if I’m walking where no one’s walked in years. I call in to the office to report and head back a different way.

When I hear a car on the gravel drive I return to the house. I tell my companion what a lovely walk I had and how grateful I am.

The Wild Things

This morning, Angie is at Mia’s helping her pack for a weekend move. I went off to work and left Donny to get Henry to daycare. I half expected they’d still be here when I returned. They’re not. I have the house to myself. I have the house to myself for the whole day unless Donny comes home unexpectedly. I thought of running out to turn on the heater in the cabin, which I did yesterday only to never get there, and with the house empty, I don’t really want it. I want to be here in my quiet house alone. I can’t hardly believe that I am here in my house…alone. Praise be.

Outside this window, the day is awash in colors. Henry’s plastic play house with it’s green roof and red swinging door. His climbing cube: orange slide, with yellow and blue and green side panels. His swing, hanging from the arbor, in the middle of the path to the woods: red seat, yellow tray, blue connecting straps. The glass topped table and green chairs that go with it. The green grass full of yellow leafs. The golden wood of the cabin becoming visible through a break in the foliage. It feels like a wild, wonderful day.

I am here in my house alone.

The only animal moving in the yard is a lone squirrel. First on the ground, then up the tree, then sitting on top of the bird house. Gathering with a frenetic energy. That is what I’m like. This is the necessary balance. Ah.

Raise my eyes to the sky and it is the opposite of colorful: dull, no color, no movement, no clouds, no sun. A winter sky. A bit of rain has fallen. The street sweepers are out in force. A before-winter clean-up has begun.

Driving out to visit my client there are dots of “settlements” amidst the wild country. The settlements are flat, or at least leveled, and groomed. The streets are paved, the houses are neat, there is order. In the wild country no such taming has occurred. The hills rise and fall. A deep depression becomes a watering hole. There are sheep and cows.

A sign at the athletic center near the open fields announces, “No horses allowed.”

In my gentleman farmer’s driveway there is a gallon jug of Tide stuck to the top of a street cone. It is the reflector that announces the split in the driveway, the turn to the house. It reminds me of my dad. His reflector was a gallon milk jug. The jugs announce: this is where the wild things live. Don’t need to buy our reflectors at Menard’s. Don’t need to worry about the neighbors thinking we’ve got eye-sores in our driveway, junk piled down the hill. Plastic chairs toppled by wind and left where they lie. Towels over the stair rail. Black garbage bags split open serving as well as tarps.

This is “making-do” land. This is my yard, my dad’s yard, the wild yards.

Someone once said that manicured gardens are restful to the mind. I think the wild things are restful to the heart.

Thinks Change

It’s a minute before 7 and still dark on the ground even though there’s a tint of sepia behind the treetops. I’ve had the heater on long enough that I could turn it off. The chill is out of the room. A blanket is around my shoulders. A candle is lit.

There are advantages to my sunroom office. It is warmer. I can get a fresh cup of coffee a lot easier. The bathroom is just down the hall. And the windows still look out.

It’s Monday morning. Friday the carpet was cleaned. Saturday, putting furniture back in its usual places, I liked the look of the flat dusted surfaces so much that I didn’t put back every nicknack. I took down the dads shrine. Sunday, my nephew Tony, who rents out at Dad’s place (still called that even though it’s ours) had a party.

Dad’s driveway was lined with cars and lights were shining brightly in the early evening dark. We brought Donny’s mom, Katie, and as I walked slowly up the path to the door behind her I could see Pam and Gloria in the window and others gathered around the table. Once inside, there were camps, as there usually are. One family was in the living room. Another in the kitchen and dining room. We were having spaghetti. Donny brought the meatballs.

I said, “It’s nice to be here for a happy occasion.”

Later, Angie brought Henry, and still later, we played on the stairs as the family kids have done. Dad would sit up a few steps from the bottom and bounce down with them.

When the house got too full of noise I told Donny I was ready to go. It didn’t take so long as usual, and we came home to our quiet house, where Donny unloaded the drum set that was moving from one family’s basement to ours. Henry came in shortly and banged, then bathed, and then screamed to be allowed to return to the drums rather than go to bed.

He went to bed. It quieted down again.

I had a sense, as I took down the Dads shrine that it was about more than nice looking wood and neatness. It went up after Donny’s dad died. Just a collection of pictures, and the ribbon from the funeral bouquet that said, “Dad.” After my dad died, I added his pictures and ribbon, petals from his flowers, a candle with his picture on that the funeral home had made, and a small blue statue of the Blessed Virgin I found out at his house. All of this sat on a chest of drawers under the wall of old family photos: grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides.

At Dad’s, Angie asked if it felt odd. I said, “No, it feels good.”

Donny said, “Things change.”

Doing The Days 2: Transition

I’ve really wanted to finish Andrew Harvey’s book “The Hope” and maybe write a real review of it. I promised myself one, more or less, when I began it. I was highly hopeful. So far it’s been good in that way I was anxious for it to be. It’s got a lot of Andrew Harvey in it. But other things break in like the smell of Earl Grey tea. Like grief. I guess I’m not quite done with either of them yet.

I’m fully stuck on my old-friend book “Early Morning,” now, but before that it was "The Dialogues," and then the feeling of needing to read a snippet or two of Elizabeth Lesser’s “Broken Open.” Today I remembered that I wanted that book for hearing Elizabeth say on the radio that she loves grief. It came back to me in that same way grief-related things have been doing. The last few days.

The last few days.

When I put down Andrew Harvey’s book he was talking about suicide, a sort of living grief that makes you want to die, and the danger it can be to the activists who come to know too much about suffering. It’s one of the reasons he chose to add “sacred” to activism – the idea of being really grounded in the sacred before you take on too much. If you take on too much without that grounding you can grow bitter, angry, despondent, or just plain hurt too much to go on.

The thing is, when a wave of grief hits you almost three years later, about a year-and-a-half after everything started to feel less raw and tender, you wonder more about it and if it has something to do with the present.

You wonder, What’s going on inside of me?

That kind of question can get too heady, almost like a means of escape from feeling what you feel. “Let’s root out the source. Let’s understand it and be done with it.”

Maybe I’ve already done some of that. Maybe I’ve said enough or too much. It feels gentle though, and I say that because of a letter I got today: a Course of Love reader asking me how you know. How do you know your feelings as they are? Without thinking about them? I said, in that way that surprises me sometimes, (as if I’ve found the right thing to say by accident), that you can tell by the gentleness.

A feeling like grief can feel awful and still be gentle…even when you’re thinking about it.

So I’m re-visiting grief. Or it's re-visiting me. Gently. That’s what I’ll say. We're sharing a visit. And I’m aware that we're visiting for a reason. I don’t know what it is, (even though I’ve had some clues) but I’ll accept that I don’t know.

I hope the grief doesn’t have anything to do with the fights I’ve had with my daughter the last few days, but it might. How do you know (when you don’t know)?

We suffered a loss the other day because of our general financial situation. Our finances seem all intertwined and that gets to you for one thing. But a loss is a loss. My husband, with more Course of Love-like language than me, says it’s no loss. My daughter doesn’t see it as much of one either. Me, the perennial worrier – the “spiritual” person who shouldn’t be this way – is feeling the losses.

Transition

So tonight “The Dialogues” joins the list of signs (or whatever they are). Doing another day of the 40 Days, what do I notice? All the talk about transition.

At this point, all I can say is that “transition” sounds a lot better than change and loss. We go through what we go through for bigger reasons than appear to be. This much I know.

In appreciation of rain, stones, and people

I’m writing with my hood up for the first time. The keyboard has a definite chill. I may have to draw the line at gloves.



It’s raining. When I first walked out the rain was very fine. I had the yard light on and I saw it in the one brightly lighted spot, a thousand needles of rain. Each drop looked shiny and sharp, so I put up my hood and hurried through it. When I got to the woods, the leafs were luminous in the dark, wet, light. I smiled, hurried on, unlocked the cabin, turned on the light and the heater, and turned around.

I brought back two cups of coffee this morning. I thought of a thermos, but by the time I get through two cups I’ll need to go in to use the bathroom anyway. Coming out the second time the rain had already changed. It had grown bigger and more ploppy. Who needs a yard light on when you want to enjoy the dark, so I wasn’t so much seeing it as hearing it. Sam came with me. The cats stood at the door but decided against it. They’re not fond of rain.

So I get sat down with my hood still up and I notice right away I feel a lot warmer. I can see my reflection in the dark windows. What a stitch. Hood, glasses, indistinct nose, lips. It’s already warmed up to 52 degrees and the heater blows the air up inside the hood. This is good.

The hood made me think of my nephew, a spoken word artist who wears all the hip rapper clothes, and how I’ve always thought of having an in-depth conversation with him but never have. I’ve had my difficulties with the groups that grow out of resistance to the culture and then all dress alike, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. What’s your uniform if you’re my age? Probably jeans, like mine. I used to think a good-fitting pair of jeans was the most comfortable thing in the world. Now I prefer sweats.

The girls and I went on a rock- and jewelry-buying trip to Arizona once when we still had the shop. There were tons of old ladies in sweats and jewelry – aqua sweat suits and tennis shoes with big strands of turquoise or lapis beads, silver finery. I told my daughters, “That’ll probably be me in a few years.”

“No way! Don’t even think about it.”

I’m sure they thought I’d keep the jewelry and not pick up the sweat suit, but it’s turned out the opposite way. Not that I don’t still have my rocks.

Now Henry knows all the stones: rhodocrosite, carnelian, malachite. I’ve got a box full here and a tin there, and a group in a small fountain that sits on the back of the toilet. Since he’s potty training, he spends a lot of time with those. He even knows that the shiva lingam came from a river in India. Before he knew that he called it a penis. It looks a little like one.

I’ve also taught him that Obama is president. He gets Joe Biden and Joe Mauer (Twins catcher) mixed up sometimes though.

The naming of things has begun. Can’t really do without it. We have a bag of letters I cut out from some blue packing material and we work with those too, but the stones probably interest him the most. It comes partially from them being tucked away and my insistence that they stay where they’re tucked. He knows they’re not toys. I make a big deal out of how not one of them is the same. Shape, color, size: all different. One looks like a whale. Another like a penis. Within the category of agate, how much more variety could you find?

I hope it translates to an appreciation of people. I think it will.

When That's All There Is

I look out the window at the fire pit, with its empty red box of pampers lying under the most recent addition of twigs, and some kind of palate beneath, the limb that fell in the last storm – not yet broken and placed there – but nearby, and I know there’s more leafs covering the ground and that they’re brown, and that fall really is here and in two months or two weeks it’ll be winter. But today it’s sunny, and the leafs are still green and some yellow and dazzling, and definitely hanging on. There’s still a canopy.

It’s not like this grief stuff didn’t really happen, or like I didn’t have this feeling today…once again…as if it’s a continual kind of thing that I don’t often notice, and that I may be grieving the “old life” as a way of moving into the new.

There’s a lot of change going on. How could there not be when everything is in flux and you’ve moved into a place with your whole family, and at times it seems like with the whole world, where you’re aware of it. That’s the thing. You can go through so much of life acting as if things don’t change when they are always changing. Like your life day-to-day will stay the same when it never does.

Then you hear yourself say things.

“How is everything?”

“Uncertain.”

Okay.

Sometimes I’m glad for the awareness. Sometimes I wish like hell it would go away…or that something really stabilizing would appear out of the mists. It seems natural enough to me.

I walked out here in the dark this morning to turn on the heater and the light. There was a bright star hanging over the freeway fence. I went back in, made my coffee, my peanut butter and honey sandwich, fed the cats. When I came back out, the star was nowhere to be seen. But on my second walk, there was a light in the cabin window and I was filled with joy and hope and all things peaceful.

I guess what I’m saying is that being aware that change is here and coming and all of that doesn’t have to be like it was last week in the storm and wind and cold.

You need a break. You don’t need it in your face. And sometimes, when you notice a star, or a light in the window, or when the sun is shining…that’s all there is.

The Thread

Couldn’t think of much of a way to finish off the theme of the last few days: Peace and grief. Most posts I don’t need to finish anything up. But you know, when you write raw, you figure you should say you weren’t too much the worse for wear in the morning, sort of like if you’d reported on an evening of drinking and need to mention the hang over. There’s a bit of that feel to an episode of grief. A remnant remains.

So I was thinking of this thread of events that ran from the memories of the peace event to the grief, and the way I didn’t, at first, see the line that was forming so that the wave that hit me was a surprise. It’s the way grief comes. A wave of grief. A wave of nausea. Like that.

The wave also had something to do with a movie my daughter invited me to watch with her. I didn’t think it looked like a very good movie, but the invite was sincere, and so we cuddled up on the couch under a quilt and watched “P.S. I Love You.” I left that part out but it was the emotional whammy. I always hate to admit it when movies affect me. But this one did. It was a movie about grief.

The progression then, was memories of the peace event, the return of the book “Early Morning,” the movie, the grief, and finally the way that my love affair with that particular event took a twist as I connected with Kim Stafford’s grief and began wondering if the quality that had made it so remarkable in the first place came from that precious place. Maybe even that all poetry and peacemaking does. Grief just doesn’t stay confined.

Then I opened my just returned copy of “Early Morning,” holding the dear old friend lovingly, and found the first of many poems laced through Kim Stafford’s memoir of his dad.

That’s the way the book strikes me. It’s a memoir. It’s about the memoirist’s dad.

Here’s the poem as printed in “Early Morning,” which is, as I thought I remembered, a Graywolf Press book (a name I misspelled when I mentioned it two posts back, something that I did when we had the coffee shop too. Funny how memory works. The misspelling reminded me of the calendars I used to print with “Latte’s of the Day” named after the various businesses on the block. It was a little embarrassing, me being a writer, when the head of Graywolf, a lovely woman named Fiona came in, and said, “You know you misspelled our name.” If you’re out there, Fiona, I apologize again and hope I have your blessing on posting this poem.)

This invisible thread propelling the action.

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

Tender man and gentle boy

I don’t know how we live through grief, I really don’t. One of these days, maybe even today, I’ll get a picture of my dad posted. I’ve got one of him when he was a boy, and I swear, you never saw a gentler looking kid. The look on his face is sheer kindness. The other one in this room of mine is a blow up of one of those square black and whites with scalloped edges. It’s framed over my bookshelf. The garage of our old house is in the background, my dad’s shirt is hanging over the clothesline and he’s bending under it, or maybe under my weight. I’m about three years old and my body’s slung over his back and my head’s laying on his, and my chubby fist is beneath his chin. I’m wearing a dress with puffy sleeves and he’s got on his work pants that always hung low on his hips, and a wife beater undershirt, and he’s pointing at something off in the distance and I’m looking where he points.


It was just a favorite picture before he died but after my daughter blew it up for me the Christmas after, and all the minutest details were revealed (the clothes pole in the background, the cyclone fence, the vines growing up the side of the garage, the kitten on the narrow sidewalk beneath our feet) and that finger pointing — mainly that — it grew into something more. He’s pointing. I’m looking. That whole way-shower thing. Someone who might tell you to do exactly what you want to do. He was like that.

But what do you want to do? What do you want?

Of course, that’s not what starts the grief on a night when your dad’s the furthest thing from your mind and it opens its jaws like a shark and bites off one of your limbs, not swallowing you but leaving you feeling like you’ll drown. And then like every happiness is still touched with bittersweetness. And you just want to say “this is what grief looks like,” and you don’t know why or what you’re saying, or what you look like.

I don’t understand my grief. Can’t say why I feel it. Don’t mind when it comes really. Don’t mind when it’s gone either.

It’s just that when it comes it feels so big and broad, as if it’s totally about my dad and more total than that, and like there’s nothing more total than that. Than death.

I didn’t think of him when I wrote about Poets for Peace this morning. Didn’t think, “Dad was still alive then.” He’s gone almost three years but I didn’t think of that when it came to mind – that it was before Dad died. I was being my usual self. Irritated over a small thing. Or so I thought.

Later in the day I retrieved one of the books I bought that night from the friend I borrowed it to – Mary. I lent it to her after her dad died. It’s called “Early Morning.” Kim Stafford wrote it after his father William died. I didn’t have it this morning so I’d pulled out the book of poetry, “All Wars Have Two Losers.” I opened it. Under the heading Editor’s Note I read:

“In editing this unusual book, I have chosen in many instances to represent my father’s unpublished writings exactly as he penned it in the early morning, alone with his thoughts. The language is sometimes very compact, the thought line intuitive, and the effect both intimate and challenging. The poems are represented as revised and published them, and most of the interviews he had a chance to review. Some of the Daily Writings, however, were never revised, and they live here with you in their native form. I invite you to read these as they were written: attentive, deliberate, in a spirit of welcome as thoughts come forth.”

Was that it? Was that both what it was that night all those years ago when I was moved to feel so lucky to be there? Where the poets read for peace and Kim read his grief? Was it the heart of a son still mourning his father? Saying the words, “My father” as if he was still alive? That tender heart of his? Did it fill me then like a prescience of the broken heart of grief and of the child, so innocent in it, and so ripped open?

So that this morning I did not know that tonight I would be awash with grief again?

May I Never Solicit

A few years ago, I attended one of the most classy (in a good way) events I’ve ever attended. By classy, I think I mean generous, gracious, hospitable, and also deeply touching. I’m certain it was free since it’s been so long since I’ve paid for events, but I bought a few books that night. It was not only classy but a first-class, five-star event, (sorry for all the clichés), I just mean to say it was one of those events where you can’t believe afterwards, that you were lucky enough to be there. It was called Poets for Peace and it celebrated a publication by a fine small nonprofit publisher, Milkweed Editions, and if I recall correctly was co-sponsored by Grey Wolf Press, another fine Minnesota press that happened to be housed down a few doors from our coffee shop. Kim Stafford was the host and the new book was “Every War Has Two Losers” by his dad, William Stafford, who has since become my favorite poet. I have extensive notes on the evening somewhere, but the memory of it will suffice for now.

I went alone. The affect may have had something to do with my attentativeness and the way each small part of the evening felt as it seeped into me.

There are about 65 things that come to mind that I could write passionately about off the memory too. Now that’s a good event. Senator Eugene McCarthy was there, and the soft voiced poet Wang Ping, and Mel Duncan.

But here’s how I got to thinking of it. I got an email from Nonviolent Peaceforce that said on its subject line: Honor Mel Duncan and David Hartsough. Without my notes I can’t say for certain if he read poetry or, if he did if it was his own. But honoring him…hell…I’d honor anybody who’d been at that event.

The e-mail’s opening paragraph read as follows:
I come to you with a unique and exciting opportunity to honor two visionaries of
peace while expressing your own commitment to their dream.
A decade has passed since David Hartsough and Mel Duncan forged the partnership
that gave rise to Nonviolent Peaceforce. Their steadfast support of the cause of
unarmed civilian peacekeeping created what has been called "one of the most visionary
and realistic alternatives to war in the world today.”

What flashes through my mind is, “Okay, he’s retiring, they’re going to have an event,” and that’s what pulls forth all the memories of the Poets for Peace. Then I find out it’s a solicitation.

I don’t mean to be unfair. I can imagine just about anybody stepping down from a cause dear to their heart saying “Skip the hoopla,” and even “Send money” instead. They’d rather you support their cause than honor them. I get it. But drats if it wasn’t a disappointing buildup and double-drats that they’re missing the opportunity to feed the souls of peace loving sorts. A really good event can inspire you to action you’ve never taken before and still be having effects years down the road.

There’s something that happens when you get people of good heart together, when you get peacemakers together, and you’re not soliciting anything but the feeling of togetherness and passion and compassion. The book-selling in the hallway comes like a gift afterwards. You can’t wait to read that poetry, know more of what’s in the hearts of these people, and you somehow know that their book is going to give it to you.

Of course, I’m thinking of all this too because of having a book coming out. It’s hard to imagine creating an event that does what that one did. But what you hope for is that what’s in your heart speaks to another person and that what you do might feel generous…and that it will never be an act of solicitation.

Doing the Days

Practicing Acceptance?

Had to follow up on my last post and give a new weather report. The snow came today. October 10. Doesn’t beat the earliest snow I remember (September 30, year somewhere near 1962), but it beats most first-of-the-year snow falls by about a week. Besides that, it stayed all day, even though it was only a dusting. Donny went out and picked the rest of the apples off our trees and when he came in said he’d remember that – how cold it was as the snow fell on him each time he pulled one.

I knew I had to write about the snow but then I realized I had something else I needed to add, a sort of additional addendum to my last musings on complaints.

I’ve got a few e-mail buddies and one of them is a woman who wrote me after seeing an article I’d written that had one sentence in it on solitude. She wrote saying she wanted to hear more and we’ve been friends ever since. It’s been nearly a year now.

Recently Chris wrote that she was starting the Forty Days of The Dialogues and wondered if I’d “do the days” along with her. I said I would. I’m pretty sure it was the 9th day when there was this one paragraph about acceptance that really spoke to me in a new way. I knew all about it (ha ha!) for having written the thing, and more by way of it being among my favorite ideas – one that says acceptance isn’t about accepting the way “things” are, but about accepting how you are – how you feel in the present moment.

It was after that when I got this startling idea that complaints might just be about accepting the way you feel. Try that one on for size, I told myself. Oh, I know that when you feel wonderful you’re not going to call it a complaint. I, at least, don’t have too much trouble accepting my wonderful feelings. I’ve got that down pretty good.

But I don’t always feel wonderful. I’ve got things that bug me. And they’re not all like the early fall of snow that you might complain about while secretly enjoying. Some of my complaints are about how I feel when I’m not secretly enjoying something and just grousing for the sake of grousing. These complaints usually get admitted amongst friends. “Man, when that happened, I really felt…lousy” or troubled or worried or frustrated.

If you’ve ever done what you call complaining and then felt like you shouldn’t have complained, try my idea out for yourself. What if you’re practicing acceptance?

Grouse and Grumble

It’s my sister Susan’s birthday and so cold in the cabin already (I say already because it’s not yet even October—okay, it’s only shy by a day, but still…) that I want to go in! Can’t quite yet because the sun’s casting this really cool golden square of light on the back of the cabin’s wall, and besides that, it’s moved already, so that it’s not shining in my eyes and, with the heater pointed at my neck, and sitting on the chair beside me as if we’re not just friends but lovers, I can survive an hour. I actually love my life. Love it. I love sitting here in the cold; in the morning; by my heater. Sometimes I love grousing about it.

It snowed once on Susan’s birthday. It was probably in the early 1960’s because I remember it as a mad rush to find boots before school. Usually we get our first dusting of snow mid-October. When the snow comes early you grouse you about it. Then you remember it with a kind of glee.

I’ve got to quit feeling that I complain. I grouse. I grouse about this life I love. That’s another expression of my dad’s, one that, as far as I know is pretty unfrequented these days. It actually means to complain or grumble. Grumble’s good too. Grouse and grumble have a silliness about them, a lightness. Much better than complain.

As Dad got older, the grousing fell away. But one Christmas, about nine years ago, I noticed it, and all the words that my mom (who when I was 17 divorced my dad), used to use for him, came back to me. “Bullheaded” and “ornery” were her words. He had this way of setting his jaw that I’ve inherited. You set your jaw and your lips disappear. Even if you don’t say a word, all a person has to do is look at you and they know you’re feeling bullheaded and that you probably won’t be cheered up. Sometimes Christmas and all the hoopla can do that to a person. Sometimes it’s about something else.

I remember that Christmas fondly, I really do, and how we (my siblings and I) carried on around it – as if – yeap, that’s Dad too, a side of him we’d forgotten but that’s still there, and remembering it was kind of pleasant in a weird way, the going back to childhood memories, having those old words spring up again: bullheaded, ornery, grouse.

Moon Yet

It’s that time of the year again—time to adjust around the cold. A huge wind blew in late in the day yesterday and kept up all night. I good sized tree limb, although not large enough to have done any real damage had it hit the cabin, and that looks a fine and hardy fellow except for being rather pale, landed between the fire pit and the cabin. As I look out the window, it sits as if pointing to St. Francis, who sits beneath my window, part of an idea (like so many I have that don’t come with a plan), of creating a shrine.

It’s almost October and the 50 degree weather in and out of the cabin is normal, perfectly appropriate for a Minnesota Fall, and I wonder if it was working half the summer, precisely half if you think of summer as June through August, that makes the change more unexpected than usual. It was, for all it’s shortness, a perfect July and August. I was so appreciative of being “out” (as if I’d escaped prison).

I had a vision three years ago. The shrine “idea” came from that. I speak of “vision” and “idea” newly since listening to the stories of Sandy White Hawk (with appreciation and also some envy). My friend Sandy was adopted away from her family and put in the “better” home of a white, Christian family. Her work now, her sacred activism, is in welcoming adoptees back to the tribe. It started with what she called an idea – the idea of having a song to welcome them back. She told her spiritual leader about this idea and he said, “That’s not an idea, that’s a vision.” Sandy told me how things unfolded after that. She was responsible for the vision – the resources of her small tribal community were there to support her. She’s brought this vision to fruition.

My vision, like all else in my life, was not so specific. It was about joining lands of peace, creating sacred space, and creating sacred friendships. It’s written in Creation of the New (which I’m only now adding to my website, so if you’d like to see it, check it out in a week or a month – I started this blog partially because website updates take time and money).

Although the word “shrine” came to me within the vision, I didn’t make much of it until my dad was dying. In one of those awful nursing home days when I was trying to get him a new bed after his quit adjusting for sitting and laying positions, and he was a little less than fully himself, and there were three of us “Perron” women in the room and in a bit of an uproar, he said, “Make a _______.” I must have asked him three times what the final word was and I thought at first it was “stink.” “Make a stink.” But it turned out it was “Make a shrine.”

Back track a year or so to when Donny was finishing up work on the cabin and my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway. A bunch of dirt was being dug up and he asked us if we’d like any of it. Donny decided it would be a great idea to make a little more of a yard around the cabin and had it dumped along the edge that joins our two yards. I was going to shovel it – distributing it evenly over the weedy growth between where it landed and the cabin. I did shovel some, but what was left was a mound about the size of a grave. After my dad died it became “Dad’s mound,” and his shrine.

St. Francis and other notables were going to dot its edges and flowers were going to grow like a blanket of snow across it. I got about as far with that as I did with the shoveling. St. Francis still sits in front of the cabin because I always thought I was going to do more with the mound – more planting, or more work around it. I didn’t, although my husband, just this year, planted moon flowers. Again this was about as good as it gets as my dad was enamored by the moon and would call me a few times a year to ask, “Did you see the moon yet?” After Henry was born, I’d take him out at night to see the moon and one of his first words was “moon” which got morphed into “moon-yet,” as we’d go out so often before full dark and I’d say, “No moon yet.”

You might say these cool outcomes came of a habit of allowing things to come, and it feels great, absolutely perfect, even divine, especially over time and with time’s ability to bring that “just right” feeling that tells you it turned out perfectly without your interference…until it begins to knock up against a feeling that you need to do a thing or two to help a vision along. Then “needing to do something” and “letting things happen as they will” begin to duke it out.

That feeling is always hovering in the background and it’s come to the forefront now for a lot of reasons: a new book coming out (and so things that need to be done), a desire stronger than ever before (since working, briefly, in the corporate world) to have a real vocation, and the way Andrew Harvey’s vision reminded me of my own.

Yet, if I know anything, anything at all, I know that this is the time to resist defining anything too specifically, to resist like hell the organizing/institutionalizing principal that has fueled the way we all once got things done. My constant question is “How do you do things newly?”

I suspect it’s like waiting for the moon. When there’s no moon yet, there’s no moon yet and, when there is a moon, you might need someone to ask you, “Have you seen the moon yet?”