I’ve gotten a little addicted to technology lately, I think. Or maybe it’s an addiction to “connection.” If you know me, you know this isn’t unusual. I love being obsessive and haven’t much of a yen for balance. I haven’t got it now.
My addiction got me thinking about the two light-hearted movies that portray writing though: “Julia & Julia,” and “You’ve Got Mail.” I loved those scenes in “Mail” where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan jump up, as soon as their partners leave the premises, look around, tiptoe, and then almost dance to the computer. And I loved almost as much the portrayal in “Julia” of when the writing project the young Julia has set for herself, her thrill at the response, and her compulsion to post daily, get her a little goofy and in hot water with her partner.
I subscribed to a blog a while ago. The woman who wrote it had left a comment on mine and was just starting hers. She had kids and was caring for her mother and writing, in a funny way, about “the sandwich generation.” After about a half dozen posts…the first close together…the latter more widely space, she was gone. I didn’t really wonder too much about it. Her theme made the likelihood of her keeping up with the thing pretty unlikely.
There was another one, the postings of a long-distance friend that was more of an interactive blog, with group members who responded regularly. I’d taken part in it sporadically for maybe a year before I started seeing the postings arrive and thinking “I’ll look at that later,” and then never getting back to them. After a while of that I quit getting them and figured I’d been kicked out for lack of responsiveness. I felt a little guilty.
Then I heard from my friend the other day. He was apologizing for his six-month absence. I wrote him and said, “I bet there’s a story behind that.” So he wrote me of financial difficulties and working two jobs for a while, and just not having the time to write.
In my own case, I started my new website for The Given Self (http://www.thegivenself.com) with a Guest Page on it and a forum that I never did get to work. After about a month I had two “good luck” sort of posts on the Guest Page and decided to get rid of the thing. The forum went the way of those good ideas that only seem like good ideas for a day or two.
I can’t say that any of this has kept me from wondering if there’s a way to make this technology “work” for some purpose, but every time I get to feeling tied to it, I get the desire to run in the other direction, and I get a sense that more and more people are feeling this way – not wanting to commit or feel obligated even it we only obligate ourselves (when there’s no need to at all). Who cares if I post on this blog once a week or several times, or not at all? Who’d read them if they felt like they had to, or had to reply if they did? I’m still startled each time someone mentions them and I remember that they are being read here and there.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, really, because I started out to say I’m going to take a little break, and then that had a feeling of arbitrariness and assumption that I didn’t want to make. I guess I’ve just discovered that I haven’t been hanging too loose with technology lately and that the only person making me uptight is me.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
What distinguishes dialogue?
Walked outside today at 6:00 p.m. after having turned the air on about 4:00. I was trying to leave it off, I really was, but coming in from picking Henry up at pre-school, I suppose I was heated from all that in-and-out-of-the-car stuff (we’d stopped at the gas station, his new favorite place), and I gave in to the urge. The cats and dog looked pretty miserable too, and they’ve perked up since. But I mention it only to say how great it felt to walk into the warmth of the early evening, and how, maybe because I was enjoying it so much, I noticed the apples and that they seem to have grown from little olive-pit-sized babies to full-out young apples in a matter of days. These are the kinds of things you notice when you get back from a long weekend at a hotel where the constant, inescapable, air conditioning gives you your first summer cold, the kind that each year’s initial prolonged contact with air conditioning always does.
It’s not a terrible cold, but it was at its worst the day I returned home to get ready to have my Norwegian guests for dinner, and couldn’t keep my nose from running. Having a tissue at your nose is not the way you want to appear at dinner, but such was the way it turned out.
I write of this only to say that I find I can’t go back and summarize the events of the weekend and that I ought to know better than to think I can. It is a shame I didn’t do it as it happened, and I’ve got a yen to share some of what I put in my journal, but still, no matter how charming were my guests or how significant the conversation, it is done and there’s no turning back. This is what I love about the blog.
And so, even though I announced an opening question yesterday, I can’t quite frame it in the context of my guests or my weekend, and it doesn’t need to be set there. It doesn’t need to be responded to. It’s just a musing that came out of the weekend – a musing about what dialogue is. I return to this question every few months or so and I don’t mind it. It’s like it’s in my nature to explore such questions, and it’s in my books too, “dialogue” proposed as the new way that will replace teaching, learning, evangelize and the like.
I took up my questions with a friend the other day and she said, “You know when you’re in it and you know when it ends,” and that’s surely true enough. I can speak of it as “sharing who we are” but that’s not exactly the thing about it, or it doesn’t seem so to me. It seems more as if, when you’ve entered dialogue, something new is born. Something that is not of one or the other but a third something. Dialogue takes on a life of its own.
There are tons of ways to share. Storker and Tone demonstrated a way of receptive listening that was truly beautiful. I can’t deny that it had something of the same effect – as if when one shared and the others quietly listened – something more was in the room. There was a powerful feeling of presence, as if by being fully present ourselves, we created both a spaciousness and allowed a fullness.
Perhaps the only thing missing was a feeling of movement. And the movement – the tumbling, jostling, being carried by a new current movement – is the descriptive feature that distinguishes dialogue.
It’s not a terrible cold, but it was at its worst the day I returned home to get ready to have my Norwegian guests for dinner, and couldn’t keep my nose from running. Having a tissue at your nose is not the way you want to appear at dinner, but such was the way it turned out.
I write of this only to say that I find I can’t go back and summarize the events of the weekend and that I ought to know better than to think I can. It is a shame I didn’t do it as it happened, and I’ve got a yen to share some of what I put in my journal, but still, no matter how charming were my guests or how significant the conversation, it is done and there’s no turning back. This is what I love about the blog.
And so, even though I announced an opening question yesterday, I can’t quite frame it in the context of my guests or my weekend, and it doesn’t need to be set there. It doesn’t need to be responded to. It’s just a musing that came out of the weekend – a musing about what dialogue is. I return to this question every few months or so and I don’t mind it. It’s like it’s in my nature to explore such questions, and it’s in my books too, “dialogue” proposed as the new way that will replace teaching, learning, evangelize and the like.
I took up my questions with a friend the other day and she said, “You know when you’re in it and you know when it ends,” and that’s surely true enough. I can speak of it as “sharing who we are” but that’s not exactly the thing about it, or it doesn’t seem so to me. It seems more as if, when you’ve entered dialogue, something new is born. Something that is not of one or the other but a third something. Dialogue takes on a life of its own.
There are tons of ways to share. Storker and Tone demonstrated a way of receptive listening that was truly beautiful. I can’t deny that it had something of the same effect – as if when one shared and the others quietly listened – something more was in the room. There was a powerful feeling of presence, as if by being fully present ourselves, we created both a spaciousness and allowed a fullness.
Perhaps the only thing missing was a feeling of movement. And the movement – the tumbling, jostling, being carried by a new current movement – is the descriptive feature that distinguishes dialogue.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
An Opening Question
I have had an unusual week.
First, my visitors arrived from Norway. Then visitors arrived from Colorado.
The visitors came because of A Course of Love. Storker and Tone from Norway. Dale and Michele from Colorado.
Storker wanted so much to demonstrate the way A Course of Love is shared in Norway. Tone followed an urge to come along. Both are at work translating the course into Norwegian. We spent the weekend together. Much was demonstrated.
They have now come and gone. They are in the air as I write, but I left them (or them me) Monday night after dinner here. About 9:00 they asked that I sign their books and I went into my sunroom to sit quietly enough to say something more than “Love, Mari.” After a few minutes Tone joined me. We talked until nearly 11:00. She told me, “I like your family very much. They are very strong. I can see why you get exhausted.” She also told me to tell them that I see and admire their strength, that I’d like a little bit of it, and that maybe they’d like to be a little like me. It was a kind suggestion but she could have stopped at saying she sees why I get exhausted around my very likeable family. I call it drama and commotion and she sees it as strength. I don’t know if I ever realized that I am simply surrounded by strong personalities.
Today Michele and Dale came for being in town anyway. Still, they were the second set of out-of-town guests to join me in the cabin (so odd...these two sets of visitors in less than a week). I’d cleaned earlier, so all I had to do was sweep her out. Coming back in tonight, there is a light design on the desk that I’ve never seen before, the sun falling through the side window and casting one of the lace cut-out designs onto the oak. Made of small circles around an almond shape, it looks like an eye.
Here…I notice everything. I feel as if I share of myself so intimately when I have people out here. Without saying a word.
Much of the weekend, and today’s visit too, concerned the ways in which we share.
I had another demonstration of dialogue’s spontaneity – a natural flow as I waited with Dale and Michele for a local friend of theirs to join us. We stood in the front yard tossing the ball to Sam until it was dripping with slime, and then moved in to the kitchen table where the conversation continued in a round-robin way, everything being said hitting the right note like musicians playing in the same key.
Eventually the local friend arrived, we went out to the cabin, and after some acclimation to the stillness and the art and appreciation for the awesome feel of the place, the talk changed into the kind that happens when someone new arrives and there is more formality, and the talking, as well, feels like a definition of why you have gathered: “This is what we are to do. We’ve sat down to talk.” It was fine, just not quite the same.
And so…amidst the gratitude for my visitors…there is the question, a question about what we share of who we are and what makes it happen. An opening question.
First, my visitors arrived from Norway. Then visitors arrived from Colorado.
The visitors came because of A Course of Love. Storker and Tone from Norway. Dale and Michele from Colorado.
Storker wanted so much to demonstrate the way A Course of Love is shared in Norway. Tone followed an urge to come along. Both are at work translating the course into Norwegian. We spent the weekend together. Much was demonstrated.
They have now come and gone. They are in the air as I write, but I left them (or them me) Monday night after dinner here. About 9:00 they asked that I sign their books and I went into my sunroom to sit quietly enough to say something more than “Love, Mari.” After a few minutes Tone joined me. We talked until nearly 11:00. She told me, “I like your family very much. They are very strong. I can see why you get exhausted.” She also told me to tell them that I see and admire their strength, that I’d like a little bit of it, and that maybe they’d like to be a little like me. It was a kind suggestion but she could have stopped at saying she sees why I get exhausted around my very likeable family. I call it drama and commotion and she sees it as strength. I don’t know if I ever realized that I am simply surrounded by strong personalities.
Today Michele and Dale came for being in town anyway. Still, they were the second set of out-of-town guests to join me in the cabin (so odd...these two sets of visitors in less than a week). I’d cleaned earlier, so all I had to do was sweep her out. Coming back in tonight, there is a light design on the desk that I’ve never seen before, the sun falling through the side window and casting one of the lace cut-out designs onto the oak. Made of small circles around an almond shape, it looks like an eye.
Here…I notice everything. I feel as if I share of myself so intimately when I have people out here. Without saying a word.
Much of the weekend, and today’s visit too, concerned the ways in which we share.
I had another demonstration of dialogue’s spontaneity – a natural flow as I waited with Dale and Michele for a local friend of theirs to join us. We stood in the front yard tossing the ball to Sam until it was dripping with slime, and then moved in to the kitchen table where the conversation continued in a round-robin way, everything being said hitting the right note like musicians playing in the same key.
Eventually the local friend arrived, we went out to the cabin, and after some acclimation to the stillness and the art and appreciation for the awesome feel of the place, the talk changed into the kind that happens when someone new arrives and there is more formality, and the talking, as well, feels like a definition of why you have gathered: “This is what we are to do. We’ve sat down to talk.” It was fine, just not quite the same.
And so…amidst the gratitude for my visitors…there is the question, a question about what we share of who we are and what makes it happen. An opening question.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Monthly Baseball Update
I don’t know what it is. It seems that once a month or so, I’ve got to mention baseball.
This time it concerns the flap over the perfect game Detroit’s Armando Galarraga got robbed of by Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a bad call. You could hardly miss it. It was all over the news. I was one of those yelling, “Unfair!” and feeling so bad for Galarraga. Then, in coming days, I felt kind of bad for the ump. And then today, I got hooked by Joe Soucheray’s column with it’s headline that said, “It’s the flawed humans who make baseball so perfect.”
For those of you who don’t know Minnesota newspapers, Joe writes for the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a regular guy columnist. He’s not a sports columnist. He’s got a following and it seems to me I’ve seen T-shirts that emblazen his theme of “garage logic.” Anyway, he’s a regular guy writing about the beauty of the game, complaining about the people “pecking at each other with a 140-character limit” and calling baseball the last sport to be so “beautifully flawed.”
You can maybe imagine that I liked that description.
I’m not even sure I agree with him. I don’t see why umps can’t call the game and still use instant replay for rare and soundly questionable calls. I don’t see this as the end of baseball or umpires. Joe feels otherwise.
But I got taken by him seeing “the game’s intrinsic magnificence.” He calls baseball lovers “hopeless romantics.” With this move that he foresees happening, he says, “You will have removed the game’s ability to deliver forgiveness and redemption, integrity and responsibility.”
He called the behavior of all involved “exemplary.” I don’t know if I could have been so gracious in such a circumstance, and I have to agree that this is something you can learn through the game and being part of a team, and that you don’t see too much of, and that I wouldn’t like to lose. Joe calls this, “Wonderful stuff, just wonderful,” and says, “only baseball, which has survived every attempt man has made to ruin it, could have delivered such a passion play.”
It is exactly the kind of thing you want all young players to see. But what really got me was Joe calling it “trust in people.”
I know it’s no comparison, but every “live” human being I get on the phone lately, I tell them, “Please tell your manager that customers want to talk to people.” At the grocery store, I tell every cashier that I do not want to use the self-checkout and to tell their managers that people are indispensable. (They actually shut down the self-check out counters when a person isn’t available to supervise their use anyway! And they shut down all the express lanes because that’s what the “quick” self-check out is for.) This stuff drives me batty.
Like Joe, I’ll take a flawed person any day.
Quotes from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, B1-6
This time it concerns the flap over the perfect game Detroit’s Armando Galarraga got robbed of by Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a bad call. You could hardly miss it. It was all over the news. I was one of those yelling, “Unfair!” and feeling so bad for Galarraga. Then, in coming days, I felt kind of bad for the ump. And then today, I got hooked by Joe Soucheray’s column with it’s headline that said, “It’s the flawed humans who make baseball so perfect.”
For those of you who don’t know Minnesota newspapers, Joe writes for the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a regular guy columnist. He’s not a sports columnist. He’s got a following and it seems to me I’ve seen T-shirts that emblazen his theme of “garage logic.” Anyway, he’s a regular guy writing about the beauty of the game, complaining about the people “pecking at each other with a 140-character limit” and calling baseball the last sport to be so “beautifully flawed.”
You can maybe imagine that I liked that description.
I’m not even sure I agree with him. I don’t see why umps can’t call the game and still use instant replay for rare and soundly questionable calls. I don’t see this as the end of baseball or umpires. Joe feels otherwise.
But I got taken by him seeing “the game’s intrinsic magnificence.” He calls baseball lovers “hopeless romantics.” With this move that he foresees happening, he says, “You will have removed the game’s ability to deliver forgiveness and redemption, integrity and responsibility.”
He called the behavior of all involved “exemplary.” I don’t know if I could have been so gracious in such a circumstance, and I have to agree that this is something you can learn through the game and being part of a team, and that you don’t see too much of, and that I wouldn’t like to lose. Joe calls this, “Wonderful stuff, just wonderful,” and says, “only baseball, which has survived every attempt man has made to ruin it, could have delivered such a passion play.”
It is exactly the kind of thing you want all young players to see. But what really got me was Joe calling it “trust in people.”
I know it’s no comparison, but every “live” human being I get on the phone lately, I tell them, “Please tell your manager that customers want to talk to people.” At the grocery store, I tell every cashier that I do not want to use the self-checkout and to tell their managers that people are indispensable. (They actually shut down the self-check out counters when a person isn’t available to supervise their use anyway! And they shut down all the express lanes because that’s what the “quick” self-check out is for.) This stuff drives me batty.
Like Joe, I’ll take a flawed person any day.
Quotes from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, B1-6
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Women
I wrote about this group of women from Colorado a few posts back and today got the photo.
A couple of weeks later now, I was on my way back to my car after an appointment when the lyrics of an old song, "I Am Woman" came to me. It was one of those weird moments. I hadn't thought of the song in ages and it lengthened my step. I didn't walk to my car, I strode. It made me feel happy that it sprang up in my memory.
So I thought I'd put the two together:
(Helen Reddy and Ray Burton)
I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back an' pretend
'Cause I've heard it all before
And I've been down there on the floor
No one's ever gonna keep me down again
Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to
I can do anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
(partial lyrics, with thanks to Helen and Ray)
Some damn thing
I’m worried about my computer and the sun is rising. I woke up early, reached for my cell phone to check the time, and discovered it wasn’t there. I didn’t want its alarm going off elsewhere and waking everyone, so I figured I’d better get up right away. I was still tired, but once up, I felt I might as well come out in full dark, which I’d swear it was at 4:45, and besides that, I had to check to see if Simeon was out here, since he wasn’t in bed and didn’t follow Max and Sam to the door.
About the time I first walked out the sky was my favorite brilliant backlit blue, and then I got to the cabin and realized Simmy wasn’t there either. So I’m worried about Simmy and worried about the computer, when for the first time in a pretty long time, I’m seeing the dark give way to light. Since the pre-dawn blue faded, the ground got darker and the sky lighter and the view over the fence golden. I’m probably going to get in on a spectacular sunrise by accident.
Yesterday, Donny had guys over rather unexpectedly. He'd forgotten about his birthday dinner – just us and his mom – and I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere between leaving home pretty upbeat about 4 and coming back at 6:30, he got crabby, or he got crabby once he got here with having to drag his gyros machine up, or with the rushing, and so all evening, he was either distracted, or later, out at table with the guys, (where you got no feel he wanted the rest of us to be).
Katie didn’t get here until late and maybe that figured in. My 5:30 phone call didn’t wake her; my 6:30 phone call did. She told me later that she wondered, ‘Who is calling me at 6:30 in the morning?”
We didn’t sit down to eat inside until 7:30 and afterwards she wanted to go out by Donny, and I wanted to bring the cake out for grandpa to blow candles with Henry before he went to bed. It was after 8:30 and I felt as if we were interrupting the conversation, and I think Katie felt left out. Or maybe it was her longish walk over to the side of the house to pick grape leaves, which got her tired out but excited and planning a grape leaf picking afternoon for us today.
The evening passed, Donny and I passing at the end of the night like weary travelers at a bus depot. If he wanted birthday sex at that point he was out of luck.
So just an altogether ornery sort of night, that I don’t know if anyone was too happy or unhappy about – just one of those nights.
Why am I writing about this? When I’m out for sunrise? And the candle’s been lit in here since Mary came yesterday morning. And Simeon’s not around. And the computer is acting up. And I need to run back in for more coffee and the bathroom. Ah, hell.
Back in the house, I’m thinking, “Where could Simmy be? If he wasn’t stuck inside somewhere, he’d be at the door now that I’ve been in and out a couple of times." Which leads me to think of the garage, where thankfully, Simmy is found. He meows in his loudest voice to protest the indignity of spending the night locked in strange quarters, and I feed him and Max, and have one less worry as I head back out.
I think the thing is that, after semi-quiet days full of time and a relaxed feeling…the busy, less relaxed ones, are more jarring. I see how many things I do because it’s the way it’s been done before, or the way someone else wants them, or the way I think they want them, and I get mad at myself for putting myself through it all. Often I see that no one particularly enjoys the thing. And yet, I don’t know that I care enough to change it. Maybe some day I will. Maybe some day I’ll reach the “Okay, no more birthday parties” point. But there’ll still be the cat and the computer or some damn thing.
And the sun will still rise.
About the time I first walked out the sky was my favorite brilliant backlit blue, and then I got to the cabin and realized Simmy wasn’t there either. So I’m worried about Simmy and worried about the computer, when for the first time in a pretty long time, I’m seeing the dark give way to light. Since the pre-dawn blue faded, the ground got darker and the sky lighter and the view over the fence golden. I’m probably going to get in on a spectacular sunrise by accident.
Yesterday, Donny had guys over rather unexpectedly. He'd forgotten about his birthday dinner – just us and his mom – and I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere between leaving home pretty upbeat about 4 and coming back at 6:30, he got crabby, or he got crabby once he got here with having to drag his gyros machine up, or with the rushing, and so all evening, he was either distracted, or later, out at table with the guys, (where you got no feel he wanted the rest of us to be).
Katie didn’t get here until late and maybe that figured in. My 5:30 phone call didn’t wake her; my 6:30 phone call did. She told me later that she wondered, ‘Who is calling me at 6:30 in the morning?”
We didn’t sit down to eat inside until 7:30 and afterwards she wanted to go out by Donny, and I wanted to bring the cake out for grandpa to blow candles with Henry before he went to bed. It was after 8:30 and I felt as if we were interrupting the conversation, and I think Katie felt left out. Or maybe it was her longish walk over to the side of the house to pick grape leaves, which got her tired out but excited and planning a grape leaf picking afternoon for us today.
The evening passed, Donny and I passing at the end of the night like weary travelers at a bus depot. If he wanted birthday sex at that point he was out of luck.
So just an altogether ornery sort of night, that I don’t know if anyone was too happy or unhappy about – just one of those nights.
Why am I writing about this? When I’m out for sunrise? And the candle’s been lit in here since Mary came yesterday morning. And Simeon’s not around. And the computer is acting up. And I need to run back in for more coffee and the bathroom. Ah, hell.
Back in the house, I’m thinking, “Where could Simmy be? If he wasn’t stuck inside somewhere, he’d be at the door now that I’ve been in and out a couple of times." Which leads me to think of the garage, where thankfully, Simmy is found. He meows in his loudest voice to protest the indignity of spending the night locked in strange quarters, and I feed him and Max, and have one less worry as I head back out.
I think the thing is that, after semi-quiet days full of time and a relaxed feeling…the busy, less relaxed ones, are more jarring. I see how many things I do because it’s the way it’s been done before, or the way someone else wants them, or the way I think they want them, and I get mad at myself for putting myself through it all. Often I see that no one particularly enjoys the thing. And yet, I don’t know that I care enough to change it. Maybe some day I will. Maybe some day I’ll reach the “Okay, no more birthday parties” point. But there’ll still be the cat and the computer or some damn thing.
And the sun will still rise.
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