Spit and Vinegar (Thoughts on living from solitude and chaos...)

Noticing

2011-09-25T06:50:00.000-07:00

The sky this morning was incredible. There were wispy clouds running in streaks across it, the cloud forms themselves a light lavender against the blue/black of the sky, and then stars – bright, singular and clustered stars – so that the sky was streaked in the most lovely way. It was nothing garish, but very soft and delicate.

The clouds were more fragmented than wispy, lumpy streaks with gaps that seemed to say that the clouds, like the stars, would soon be gone from view.

I’ve been so tired again that I thought I’d best get back to qigong and did that before heading out with Sam for a walk. The stars were already less evident and at the same time the dark was deeper. It was 6:30 and yet the very first time I’ve ever been out when I lost Sam in the darkness. It was a dull darkness that made everything indistinct and made me question my eyes…a feeling that this is what it would be like to have your sight dim. The loss of distinction was eerie. It wasn’t frightening but it was foreign. I’ve walked much earlier and never lost the dog…and it happened twice.

She too seemed disoriented. It may have been partially the fault of my reserve. I hesitated in this new darkness to go into the deep paths that usually thrill me so. Even on my shortest walk I take to the path to at least, for a moment, reach a point where nothing man-made can be seen. I don’t have to go far to shed the street light glow or cease to see the tops of near houses.

But having stood motionless at the start of the path, contemplating the depth of the darkness, hesitating, I soon decided to take the paved path, and that was where I lost Sam for a second time. Turning around to not see her behind me, I called out to her. I didn’t want to break the silence with too loud a holler, and clapped my hands with just the barest of audible sound. Still no Sam. I walked back the way I came and finally saw her near the street, turning in circles in its muted light. I called again and she looked in all directions, clearly confused.

This was the strength of the dull darkness. I joined Sam again near the street and we headed home, past houses just waking up, their warm glow welcome.

Two hours later it is full day but the light is still on in the cabin window. The Sunday paper has been read in parts, I’ve made an apple panekoken that no one ate but me, and Donny is off to work.

We were disjointed in our coming and going and it left a pall over the wonder of the morning. Once he was gone – gone while I was in the basement futzing with the laundry – I wished I’d said something. Sometimes I feel like attention to the breakfast or attention to the laundry is attention to my husband. It was only after he was gone that I realized that it was not and wished I could have the hour back to do it differently. To notice, as I did the morning, my husband’s mood without thought of food or clean clothes or the shape of the day.

Dilemmas, moral and otherwise

2011-09-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long time since I came to the computer desperate to write. I got so irritated a bit ago over a tire situation with my car – let’s just say it was my fourth trip – over a tire that wasn’t fixed properly in the first place…and that no matter how many times I bring it back, the place won’t admit to any wrong-doing but will only say they’ll take care of it for me for free, as if this is a big gift, when actually they’ve inconvenienced me over and over again.

Of course, this was exasperated by having to get rides. Today, I was awaiting my ride from a woman battling a near 3 years-old over potty training. You’d think the world came to an end because the child pooped her diaper one more time. By the time I got my ride, about an hour later than I’d expected to go, I was rattled by the hysteria and wanting to tell the mother to quit calling her daughter “naughty”…while outwardly remaining calm and serving tea.

So I get dropped off finally to get my key to get my car, which is Still missing the hubcap that they broke the first time I was in, and the guy in front of me is chatting up the service guy, who won’t even look at me. After about 10 minutes, I fish my spare key out of my purse and storm out of there as the guy is calling “Madam,” and when I get home call, half to apologize to him, who had nothing to do with anything, and half to justify my irritation, because I hadn’t yet said a word about their shoddy service, which all hinged on their dishonesty about having broken my hubcap and lug nuts in the first place. There was still no admission coming as I recounted my history with them and why I became so impatient, and it was this lack of admission that had me as riled as the inconvenience.

I’d just read two articles – one on forgiveness and one on young people and moral values. The one on forgiveness was about not holding the grievance – for your own sake – and said “the content” of the grievance didn’t matter. It could be years of a horrid relationship and deep hurts leveled by your mom or the guy who stole your parking space. Either way, the same action, it said, was required: Feel what you feel, then let it go and return to calm.

The writer of the article asked, “But what if it keeps happening?” and it wasn’t until she asked, “How do I take care of myself?” that she started to get anywhere.

In the case of me and the tire, the answer is Don’t go back there. Get the problem solved and never return. The source of the forgiveness article was a guy who’d written a book, and he said, “Life is not fair.”

Okay. Point taken.

The other article, an editorial by David Brooks, was about young people and their take on morals and moral thinking, and even though Brooks found them to be nonjudgmental: “I can’t say what right and wrong is for anyone else. I don’t know how they feel,” he called the results of the research “depressing.”

He said the young folks, when asked to express a moral dilemma, as often as not didn’t speak of things that actually were moral dilemmas.

He concludes saying, “In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”

It was the kind of paragraph that in another context I would have celebrated.

It begs the question of whether or not our hearts, and our feelings, can be our moral compass if we haven’t been schooled or inherited examples of morality.

Can we then know what is wrong or right based on how we feel?

I would have felt so much better if I had said, “You know, forget about the ride. I’ll do it later,” and gotten away from the mother I could only imagine telling gently and privately, not to get hysterical. The tea probably wasn’t the worst thing I could have done, but the hour had become a strain.

I knew I would have felt infinitely better if the car place had just admitted that they could have solved the problem the first time … had they been honest. So honesty became my moral issue of the day.

Life is unfair. It’s ridiculous to get upset over a nail in your tire or with a toddler-in-training, but it happens. Still, I don’t think it’s quite so ridiculous to get upset by simple problems made insufferable…which both of these had become for me through repeated exposure.

But my greatest ire is caused by wanting to “teach” or “preach” or right wrongs. Is this in itself a moral dilemma? Or is the moral dilemma exposed in how I respond…or don’t respond?

It seems to me our hearts could do a fine job, if we listened and acted in accord with them. But dilemmas, moral or otherwise, are not easy, which is why they are called dilemmas.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 9-15-2011. David Brooks writing for the New York Times: Morality ‘It’s personal.’ Really?

The Dog Knows

2011-08-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

I’m in the cabin and need to go in to the bathroom. Sam does not raise her head from her paws or move out of the cabin doorway to let me by. I step past her and say needlessly. “Stay. I’ll be right back.”

I am back at my cabin perch, ready to come in for the day, or needing to close up and go get Henry in the afternoon. As soon as my feet move Sam is on her feet and out the door. She knows.

Habits are a peculiar thing. A routine based on timing is different. That kind of routine finds the cats fighting or worse, (throwing up) to get my attention if I sleep past my usual hour. That routine is Sam whining at the side of the bed. It’s our little parade to the door and welcoming them back in with the standard phrase for breakfast, “Here it is. Here it comes. Here you go.” But the sensing of what is next by mere movement, particularly ones that seem the same as another, is an amazing thing to me. Do I do something differently?

It couldn’t be picking up my coffee cup because I do that almost every time I go in. I’m not shutting down the computer with any particular noise (if I’m shutting it down at all). Do I sigh? Do I square my shoulders and plant my feet just so? Or does Sam know from the minute I begin to think, It’s time to go in?

It’s a mystery of connection, familiarity, something shared between us.

On the other hand, as we head back to the house, she is not so accommodating. This is particularly pronounced when I’m wanting to fly, having stayed too long and in need of leaving post haste to pick Henry up on time. Then she is most prone to dawdle; to stand, halfway between cabin and house, and look at me as I call her. Sam come. Sam!

When I remember this tendency, I run behind her, herding her toward the house, urging her on from behind. But I forget, and even when I don’t, I am often struck by the realization that Sam is getting old. Sam has her own rhythms.

We all have our own rhythms. This is what dogs know.

How far do you have to go?

2011-07-24T03:52:00.000-07:00

It’s 5 a.m.

When I left the house for the cabin I kept the yard light on. It’s been so long since I walked out in the dark that I felt I needed it I guess. I tested first for stars but it’s cloudy. If I’d been able to see the stars I would have left the light off.

On the walk to the cabin I got a full 30 seconds of quiet – which seems like a miracle. I could actually hear the yard pond gurgling. I’m still getting six or seven seconds of quiet at a time with an early bird thrown in. And it’s cool. Blessedly cool. The air feels fresh after two weeks of humid heat, one day breaking a heat-index record. I’d walk out the door and my glasses would steam up.

I guess I’m just awash in the appreciation that comes from absence.

I’ve been going a little crazy with the noise of living by the freeway lately. It started with this one video I did when the cottonwood trees were shedding. The cotton was drifting into the yard so heavily that I went and got my camera. It was such a cool visual – drifty and dreamy. But when I played it back, the sound was so loud – just on an ordinary afternoon in the middle of the yard. I wasn’t even as near the freeway fence as I usually am. I became aware.

Then construction started on the bridge over the freeway that’s about a block away and adjoins the edge of the woods. Jack hammering for two weeks and a lane closed since as work continues up the line. The traffic slows and trucks shift.

The final “awareness” hit me when I looked at two of the videos I did last summer from my new computer. I realized that my old computer had such poor sound that the full extent of the noise of the freeway was hidden from me. Suddenly it blared – a background noise that took over.

I’ve started thinking about moving but I probably won’t. The market is bad and people can be real particular. Who’d want to buy a house with this kind of noise level?

Maybe I’m one of those people who need the extremes before appreciation sets in. I don’t know if I’d ever feel this elation over quiet if it wasn’t rare. I think I would…now…but I could have needed this onslought of noise before I’d feel it.

Appreciation is so sweet. I close my eyes and feel the breeze coming through the window and my whole body drinks it in.

It brings forward all those things hidden in plain view. Like thoughts, and how when you see them they become a background noise that blares. And how there can seem to be as little choice about them as there is about staying in a house next to the freeway.

Once thoughts of leaving the noise behind enter, you start to wonder how far away you’d have to go to escape.

On my walks, I realize how a block would make a difference. Can’t hardly hear the freeway most days when I’ve trecked off to the park – even before I get there it’s lessened. But in my mind, on the noisy days, I think I need a spot at least an hour outside of the city.

The need to go far, far away.

It’s 5:30 now, the time I usually get up, and the blessed dark is lifting. Only a half hour separates me from a spot of quiet in the dark.

Little weasel mind's subtle ways

2011-07-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

The simple ecstasy of not counting time.

It was my first morning out in the cabin before sunrise in a while – and the first one of doing my whole morning routine from here, which I did thanks to the bigger rug finally getting washed. It’s been a wet and muddy early summer and I hadn’t wanted to exercise on the floor of the cabin with or without the rug.

Now Sam’s lying there, which probably means I won’t want my face in it tomorrow, but that’s okay. There’s four sides when it’s folded. I’ll turn it when Sam gets up and put it away until tomorrow. It has become, as of today, my meditation and yoga mat. I know this, but I’m somewhat bugged that I do. It’s hard to explain.

When I got up to go in the house, Sam and the cats were all lying near the door – peaceful – like they’d been enjoying it as much as me. They followed me into the house. I fed them, got some tea, and then – there it was. The clock.

Once I looked at the clock, I thought, ‘okay – that was about an hour start to finish.’ I kind of nodded to myself. ‘Good, this is good.’

A minute later it hit me that I’d noticed the time that way; that I had to congratulate myself, as if I’d made it through a grueling task or done something I ‘ought’ to do. I don’t know how to convey this, but I was noticing another track of my thoughts…a track that seemed like nothing. Simple. Harmless. Just a little fact to tuck away. “That took an hour.”

All I’d really done differently was move my morning stretching exercises and meditation out to the cabin instead of doing them in the house. I already had a pretty good idea of how much time I spent with my new practice of qigong. The ‘hour’ was simply noticing how much time passed when I put the two together.

But I felt that what the ‘thought’ did was try to convince me that it mattered in a way that it didn’t.

The thought was like something I’d think if I started out walking to fulfill doctor’s orders. ‘Okay. I got in my 5,000 steps, that took me a half hour. I can quit now.” I knew it wasn’t like that. But there was some little weasel voice in me that was treating it that way, reducing it, and that part was not me. That part was old, old, old. An old track from an old record. A remnant from another time.

The moving of the rug that allowed me to bring it all together, being there at the time of day I love best, the animals all acting peaceful (instead of clamoring at the door in the house to go out), it all just happened. I wasn’t thinking ‘I should do this’ or, as soon as I found myself held by it, that ‘I should have done this before,’ or ‘this is the way to do it.’ I knew I’d found my way without thinking it. I guess you could say I was fully in the experience … until I looked at the clock and little weasel mind came back.

I guess the weasel may always be there, but catching it – well, all I can say after the sublime experience of my morning was that it was one of the clearest “not me” thoughts I’ve ever had. Simple and subtle – none of that flagrant bashing myself with a brick that I sometimes do, and in it’s own way, more deadly for its subtlety. Let’s just suck all of the life out of a thing!

There are times we need to make big deals out of our insights or experience. I really believe that. There’s times you need to because you have to declare yourself, or times you need to galvanize your passion into a creative force through action, or that you need to make a big deal out of your experience because, if you don’t, if you don’t hold it to yourself and let yourself see that it was a “call” or a message or a way-showing moment, you’ll file it away like last year’s taxes and not let it affect you.

But there are also times you don’t even want to notice what you’re doing because as soon as you notice you’ve brought your awareness a step away from your experience.

When you are the experience, even for an hour, all the thinking about it stuff becomes clear. It doesn’t feel particularly valuable that you see it either, even when you see that you don’t want it, because you get the feeling that, having seen it might make it harder to be the experience again. Oh shit, tomorrow I’ll be trying to be the experience. Damn.

So…I’m going to let it go as best as I can now. I just thought I’d share the insight because hey, I hadn’t seen it before in quite this way, and maybe there’s another person out there with the same weasel mind who will begin to see the subtle along with the flagrant, and to let it go.

PS: I'm writing more frequently now at this address:
http://blog.acourseoflove.com

The grapevines are coming back!

2011-06-20T13:15:00.001-07:00

I just had to tell you that my grapevines are beginning to crawl up the fence once again. If you don't know the story, Donny cut them down last year to get more light to his fruit trees. I wrote a post about it.

I've missed them more than I've wanted to say. They created a mystery about walking back to the cabin and shielded if from view of the house. I felt perfectly sequestered out in the woods when they created their wall between cabin and yard.

It was almost as if they went with the soul of place...or mine.

And now they're returning -- all on their own -- the dears. I've tied some string to help guide them back over the trellis. By the end of summer...who knows? There may well be a wall again.

I've been away from myself, and their return and my own, feel linked, like our twin souls.

Storms of change and choice

2011-06-14T19:16:00.000-07:00

For the last three months I’ve had the kind of time I haven’t had in ages. Angie was looking for a job and able to be with Henry the majority of the time. She took him to school, picked him up, took care of meals, baths and bedtime. I was still present and around enough to get casual time with Henry and a few babysitting gigs gave us some one-on-one, but for the most part, I was free. I was getting used to it. I loved it. It allowed my solo trip to the North Shore, whole days spent on my video meditation, gave me the ability to pick up and go almost whenever I chose.

Angie started a new job today.

Tonight Angie came home too tired to explain her complicated schedule. Working in a salon, I imagine there’ll be many more days like today where, other than for her dropping Henry off at school, our roles are pretty much reversed.

It was a fine day. Henry is at his best one-on-one – or on his best behavior anyway. When there’s three of us (me, his mom and his grandpa) hovering around, he acts up more.

But I wasn’t sorry Angie was too tired to go over her schedule with me. It’s been storming all night – one of those on again, off again storms that make you think it’s letting up just before the thunder resounds again and the rain goes from a quiet pitter-patter to a chorus that rumbles.

It’s been dark since 6:00 and I was in the throws of tricking Henry into an early bedtime when Angie got home, ready for bed herself, and I ran out here to the cabin.

I’ve realized that for years I’ve “run” for my time. A three month reprieve in which I got used to not doing that ought to mean something now, and I have hopes of not getting myself frantic again. That doesn’t mean I won’t come to the cabin, or even run when a busy day is through, but I’m willing to give enjoying where I am and what I’m doing a try. Then it’s a different kind of running.

It's still a little like the storm though. I might not have thought of it if the weather hadn't provided the impetus. It just seems to be the way life is. Right when you think things are letting up on you, the winds of change come around again.

This time, I’m telling myself I have a choice. If the childcare gets to be too much for me, I’ll let it be known. It’s really hard to love a child this much and still not want to be as tied to him as a parent.

I’ve gotten my first taste of grandparenting, I guess…and maybe the first taste of self-care I’ve had in a while. It’s been delicious.

Readiness and The Embrace

2011-06-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

I’m looking out at the green that’s near to full with this morning’s rain. True to form in Minnesota, it follows a week where the weather has been (as they say) “variable.” On Monday the temperature was on the rise and reached the nineties. On Tuesday Minneapolis was one degree shy of the record of 104 degrees. On Wednesday morning the temperature had dropped 40 degrees. This morning I’m back in my hoodie.

Change, change, change. It feels like the only constant in the physical world.

I’m feeling sentimental about this blog this morning and about all the changes that it’s seen me through. Henry was barely speaking when I started it and now he’s expressing his emotions. After being thwarted in his desire to go swimming the other day, he told his mother that she was breaking his heart. Where did he learn that expression?

In recent months, he’s been saying “I’m tired,” every time he gets upset. I’ve been encouraging him to express his emotions and to find the appropriate words, but I swear, I never suggested that his heart could break. I hope that not getting to go swimming was a gentle first heartbreak.

It awes me to see how quickly he’s grown and to begin to see exchanges between him and his friends that could almost break my heart…that knowing that he’s going to find that not all people are kind…and that he’s going to have to learn to take care of himself in whatever age group he enters.

I’ve been pondering “care of the heart” a lot lately and seeing that with all of my experiences, guidance, learning, receptivity, and many years with A Course of Love, I am only now beginning to care for my heart – to become gentler with myself and to let my experience and guidance begin to show me the way.

Even while I say this though, I want to convey my great respect for all the cycles of life we go through.

I’ve become intrigued by the notion of “readiness.” How no one can tell you, no guidance can change you, no experience can irrevocably prepare you for all of the vicissitudes of life or make you ready for a new way until you’re…ready.

I’m ready now. Why wasn’t I before? I’d love to find the answer to that question, and yet, my respect for each time of life (and life change)prevents me from expecting a pat answer, or even one that might specifically address my own long period of unreadiness.

I’ll hesitantly say I’ve been “willing” all along without being “ready.” I’d describe readiness as a specific kind of willingness…something along the line of putting willingness together with action, or maybe practice, or maybe care of the heart.

All of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done have begun as an inner need that I must meet and then the realization that if I have such a need, others may have it too. I needed to create a meditation video for myself, to care for myself, to find a way to be with the words of A Course of Love each day as I begin this new practice of remembering to love myself and care for my heart.

One of my recent actions has been to start a new blog site to go along with this new practice. I posted the meditation on The Embrace from A Course of Love there. I’d like to share it with you and invite you to see it here: http://blog.acourseoflove.com

From broken to blossoming

2011-05-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, it didn’t rain all day (unusual), but the air felt wet, it really did. I’d be walking out to the cabin and get the feeling that I was getting sprinkled on, and yet not have any evidence. Coming out this morning, it’s clear the rain finally came in the night. The day is gloomy and morning slow to come. It’s cool, delicious, somber, joyful.

I feel as if I’ve come out of my cave. I’ve been in that cave, hunkered down, feeling under siege. It’s not quite been the cave of solitude but something else altogether. I was beginning to get the picture at Easter and then went to the North Shore a couple of weeks ago. All those waves pounding on the rocks matched the kind of cave experience I’d been dealing with, but began to lift it too.

I don’t know why we have to go through those under siege times that break us open, but I’ve found there’s doorways in them and that coming out feels really good. Here’s a quote and a link to an interview with Elizabeth Lesser who wrote on this in her book Broken Open.

"The phrase "broken" is a good one to start from. When the stresses of life build up to a certain point, whether it's the loss of someone you love or the loss of a job or a divorce, we all would understand when you say, "That really broke me down," meaning it was a change that ended in making us a little more cynical or scared or unable to cope. But there is this other possibility that after the breaking, we can open up more into who are supposed to be, in the way that a flower breaks out of the confines of a bud into its full blossoming."

I made a pretty simple decision while us “up north”…to quit focusing on other people and start living my life. Just do that. Just follow my own nose and see where it would take me. No decisions. No plans. Just following that inner pull. My energy has increased daily since then and I’ve been doing a little creating. One creation is of a new blog.
On it you can find a video of my trip, or you can watch it here

Spring opener

2011-03-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Written Sunday:

The spring opening of the cabin is like no other time, no other day, no other year. Just like the shadows are never the same, or unfuckupable man, who is, today, eating snow. I’ve got to get that on my way back in.

I swept out a week or two ago, dusted down the cobwebs a few days ago before my visitor from Maine came out, but today is the real opener. I’m here by myself and not to sweep or dust. I’m here with my laptop. The sun is shining and the slats of the chair are shadowing the seat, and I have my camera. Yes, this is it.

It’s toasty warm for the heater having been on since 12:30. Now she’s quietly resting on “auto”, the freeway noise is largely kept out by the closed windows, and the occasional tings that let me know the “auto” is working are just right – soft, like the ticking of a clock but with only one tick per minute. Time is different here.

Oh, all the reasons why we take ourselves away! They’re countless!

Spring!

2011-03-22T05:07:00.001-07:00

Out the front window and there it is – a dark, rain slicked street glistening in the light of street lamps. Out the back door, a train whistle sounding through the morning. All the yard a glitter. Spring – on her day. Everywhere – spring!

read these leaves

2011-03-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

Advice from Walt Whitman from the Preface to Leaves of Grass:

THIS IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air of every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

I found this quote on the website of my friend, the brilliant astrologer Pat Kaluza.

An old board

2011-03-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

I have home improvements going on. One thing keeps leading to another and another. You take everything down off your walls so that you can paint, and first you have to dust and wash. You take down the curtains and you have to wash the windows. Then you wash the curtains. Then you iron them.

It’s the ironing that I had to come write about. I started it yesterday and after about an hour, my arm was really getting sore, so I left it. Later in the day I was at the store and happened to spot ironing board covers.

My ironing board is about a hundred years old – seriously. It came from Donny’s grandma’s house. I’ve seen these wooden boards in antique shops. I love it…but.

All these years that we’ve had it, I’ve put up with this vinyl cover that is cracked and patched. One reason is I don’t do that much ironing. Half the time, if I’m just putting a crease in a pant leg, I throw a towel on the floor and iron there instead of going down in the basement and hauling out the old board.

Last time I ironed the curtains, I brought the board upstairs. This time, I swept the laundry room, moved a few things out of the way, and was doing my ironing there.

Because I was ironing sheers, and a lot of them, that cracked ironing board cover was really a pain in the neck, and so having spotted this austere item that’s not exactly front and center when you’re walking through Target, I bought it.

Today, I took off the vinyl cover. It was held together by ancient metal clips. I hated to throw it, and them, away.

Then I found a pad underneath. Maybe it’s not homemade, but it could have been, and whether it is or isn’t, it’s got these touches – this extra padding – as if Donny’s grandma was a diehard ironer and she had wanted it just so. It’s yellowed from all the ironing she did (okay...and from age). I started imagining all those white dress shirts being starched, and the tablecloths and napkins back before there was wash and wear.

I did manage to toss the vinyl, but for now I’ve kept that pad. I would have kept it on the board but the new pad wouldn’t fit around it.

The new pad is nice too. It made me want to really clean and organize my laundry room so that I can keep the ironing board set up with it’s jaunty blue cover.

It’s been amazing to me the way this thing has spiraled out of control. One minute you’re just ironing. The next you’re shopping, and the next you’re recovering, and the next you’re planning for a spic and span laundry room with neat places to put things. What’s next? Coordinated hampers?

This kind of behavior doesn’t fall into the category of being “like me.” I’m doing this spiffing up because I haven’t done it in fifteen years – and you know what happens when you let things go that long. But I’m enjoying the surprise of finding a side of myself that is happy doing it. It feels like a fresh start, and that always translates…or maybe, as they say “as within/so without,” it could even mean the new start has gotten going inside of me. There’s always much more going on than meets the eye.

Now…if only I knew what to do with that old pad!

Access, technology, and temptations

2011-03-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Daylight saving time has struck again, this time the spring forward part, and I feel happy with it. When I woke up it was dark. My cell phone immediately adjusted, although I didn’t know it would. When I got up at 6:00… it was 6:00… not 7:00 as I thought it would be. The computer adjusted too.

As I sit down in my sunroom for the start of this Sunday, it’s light and bright out my window, a little less dull in that wintery way of mornings full of moisture tending toward the look and feel of fog without the mist. And today, I’m still an ordinary, flawed human being, watching the world out my window as dozens of thoughts dart out in all directions – many of them of what I could write about today – like the earthquake/tsunami that hit Japan.

The images, shown over and over again on television, feel etched in those memory banks that stand behind our eyes like news reels. This force of nature happened on Friday and I watched all morning with my eldercare client, the scenes looking just like the disaster movies and making them feel like predictions of things to come. I wouldn’t have known it had happened if I hadn’t been on the computer early on Friday.

The internet is where most of us, I bet, got the news first. The news came too late for the morning paper. When I arrived at the home of my companion she didn’t know it had happened, nor did her daughter.

In that way it was reminiscent of 9/11, the first news coming after most people had gone to work, read their papers. That morning, nearly ten years ago, Mia called from the coffee shop saying, “Turn on the TV, something’s happened.” I doubt many people first heard of that from their computers. I know I didn’t have a Google page that fed me news as I logged on to get my emails.

In 2001, the cabin wasn’t built yet. When I first got it, I didn’t have access to email out there and once it came available, it changed things – like carrying a cell phone in your pocket does. All those reasons to stay instantly reachable. Available. Even when you don’t want to be.

The access is a temptation. You might miss some news. Or a call for help.

Access and availability/reaching out and connecting. It’s a conundrum these days.

Strangely enough, this very conundrum is the story behind the readings that start Lent. One is the Gospel that shares Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The other is the creation story.

In the temptation story “the devil” (like our thoughts) tempts with the meeting of physical needs, sets the things of this world against of the things of God, and tempts us to put God to the test.

In the creation story, God saw all of creation on the first day and pronounced “It is all good.” Then on the second day, he said for the first time: “It is not good”… “It is not good for man to be alone.”

So it’s technology and access that strikes me this morning – technology, access, and the temptations of them. One idea they breed is that we can be prepared. We can have faith in preparedness, we can be tempted to have more faith in ourselves than in God – to put God to the test. Another is that if we can reach out and touch each other, see what’s going on, communicate, then we will come together and be okay.

Ultimately, the stories work well together. We use everything we know to take care of ourselves and each other, and we also surrender to God – sometimes because we have no choice – and sometimes as a choice.

Frozen Shoulder and "The Yank"

2011-03-09T17:52:00.001-08:00

When you’ve got frozen shoulder you might, after a while, come to appreciate a few “new ways of doing things”. There’s a certain mindfulness that comes of pain. (If only it worked as quickly with thoughts!) Honestly, after mere months of finding that the simplest action – like ripping a paper towel off the rack – causes pain, you quit doing it. You don’t try to yank anything. You don’t attempt to rip the plastic off of a magazine that comes in the mail, yank a towel off the rack, yank the lid off of the Tupperware, yank a car door open – or, for that matter, to slam it shut.

I never thought of myself as a yanker until developing frozen shoulder. I’m a yanker no more.

But there are a couple of funner things that I want to share.

Having frozen shoulder gave me insight about my coffee pot – and maybe yours. For years I’ve kept a red and black checked drying towel sitting on top of the coffee pot so that I could wipe up the spills that come – simply from pouring coffee. I go to a friend’s house and she has the same problem. There seems no way, with a pot built for pouring, to pour without spilling.

Then I started pouring with my left hand.

I have discovered that coffee pots must be universally designed by the left-handed. Try pouring left-handed sometime. You’ll see what I mean.

Another thing I discovered was how to have the “messy hair look.” If you’re a woman, you know what I mean. If you’re a guy, you might need to know that this is the tousled look that appears casual and effortless but that is achieved either through a certain know-how or through total accident. It’s the ponytail that doesn’t look severe. It’s the “hair swept back” that doesn’t look plastered into place. It’s the endearing loose tendril. Some of us, not good with working with hair, are incapable of achieving this look.

Well, just try putting your hair in a clip or a ponytail when you’ve got frozen shoulder. Your arm doesn’t move in the right way for this small task. I like my hair to be off my face, so I continue to try, usually getting the ponytail or clip off to the side. Surprisingly, what I got was “the messy look.”

And, since I mentioned thinking, I will admit that this awareness of what causes pain actually has made me more aware of the thoughts that cause me pain. This is a great thing. But the thoughts haven’t disappeared in the same number of months. I don’t know that they ever disappear. The idea isn’t to get rid of them, but to notice, release, do it again. Anyway, I’ve found my thoughts a little easier to catch. I catch them before they do the yank; before they get a hold of me. A small few of them still seem necessary – as if – if I didn’t worry an issue to death, it would stay alive longer. But most of the thoughts that cause me distress, if not pain, are simply habitual thoughts – old ways of thinking that are clearly unnecessary.

Thoughts “do the yank.” They pull us out of feelings of ease and yank us into feelings of stress.

It occurs to me that awareness tends to come to us in roundabout ways, even when (maybe especially when) we’ve been working at it for a long time.

Across Boundaries

2011-03-07T05:41:00.000-08:00

In David Brook’s editorial: “Culture matters. So do aspirations for dignity”, he talks about a book by Samuel Huntington called The Clash of Civilizations? It was written in the early 90’s and said that there was, basically, no hope of avoiding the clash of cultures with the Arab world because our aspirations were so different.

Brooks’ theme is that the quest for dignity is inherent in all human beings.

I always like it when I see the word “spiritual” in the context of an editorial and he uses it here. Brooks, after saying that Huntington argued that people in Arab lands didn’t hunger for pluralism and democracy, explained, “It now appears as though they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.”

Liberty is a spiritual hunger.

Like many of us with the freedom to pursue spiritual qualities, I spend a great deal of time focused on liberating myself from the tyranny of my own thoughts. These thoughts, too, are at least partially dictated by culture. Our fears, frustrations, and expectations may be different across cultures but when we confront them face-to-face, or begin to see the glimmer of a chance for change, the inspiration and hopefulness is similar across boundaries.

Brooks speaks here as well, of having many authentic selves. “It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations, have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of identities manifest itself, but when those circumstances change, other equally authentic identities and desires get activated.”

Brooks is so kind and nonjudgmental here. He’s not calling former ways of being false, only seeing that circumstances activate equally authentic identities and desires. It reminds me of the practices in A Course of Love that I’ve been writing about in my pubjournal blog. They’ve been reminding me of that. The first belief/practice is in accomplishment. One of the things it says, appropriate to this context, is that you weren’t “wrong” before. You were always accomplished. You’re accomplished right now – even as you struggle and as surely when you’re having new authentic identities and desires activated – and even when they begin with your thoughts.

(David Brooks’ column appeared in my Sunday St. Paul Pioneer Press (3-6-2011, 10B) courtesy of The New York Times.)

Me and My Analogies

2011-03-06T15:38:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, my friend Bob and I were flipping analogies back and forth as we proofed A Course of Love for its transformation to the Kindle. It was sort of a Buddhist/Christian mishmash. He started it. I think the first analogy he proffered was of watercolor painting. Of clouds.

It was kind of fun, but also one of those things you do when you’re proofing. My own personal limit (or so I found) was eight chapters at a time. I’m not sure what Bob’s limit was, or Jeremy’s, another friend who offered a third pair of eyes.

I’ve also just received the proof of the Course books from Create Space, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm. They tell you to proof your new copy three times. Once for layout. Once for images. Once for typos. Since my files are the same ones as used previously, I’m not proofing for typos. This isn’t because the books are perfect, but because they’re in PDF form and to change the few small typos is not doable for me or cost-effective to have done by someone else. That’s the nice thing about the Kindle (at least when you have a little help from your friends). You can go forth with the idea that with three pairs of eyes, you’ll find everything. You’ll get perfection. You’ll use semi-colons when you need to. (I could definitely find an analogy there about going for perfection.)

But you get the idea from which I’m writing. I’m flipping pages. This is a labor of love but the desire to get up and, oh, I don’t know, clean the toilet or make dinner, is almost as strong as the analogy craze.

Since I’ve been so wrapped up in this stuff, my mind has gone kind of blank. I want to sit and just write something fun or creative, respond to the latest excellent editorial from David Brooks, anything that is off this track I’ve been on…just for the variety of it.

But something prevents me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s fuzzy brain. I hope so. It feels almost like writer’s block, that dreaded malady about which you are told Write through it! I could make an analogy out of that too. I’m seeing a lot of analogies instead of friends. We’re getting buddy-buddy. Me and my analogies.

The writing one would look, (as everything else does) like a spiritual analogy. But I’m too fuzzy-brained to make it good, so I’ll share instead my vacuum cleaner analogy.

My son gave me, for my birthday, a robot that does my vacuuming. Great sin of useless luxury, but nice both for my arm and the fights Angie and I have had about it (since it's her chore...oh what useless falderal all that’s been). Anyway, you can’t set the darn thing down where all the cat hair is and have it get it up. No. It is programmed to “find the perimeter.” The theory goes that once it finds the four corners of the room, it will go back and get the middle. This actually works in a room like my bedroom that is virtually a square and has a door I can close. But in the living room/dining room area there is too much openness. I’ve tried blocking the open places but this is like doing all kinds of work to avoid work. (I could make an analogy out of that too.)

I'm not exactly sure I can spell out the robot analogy either, but here’s what I suggested to Bob (which means I’m borrowing from my own e-mail writing to write this blog! …under the theory of working my way through not having anything to write). Anyway, here it is.

This finding of the perimeter seems a bit like what we do in life. We head off to the four corners, defining our territory and thinking we’ll get back and clean up the center. But if we remain open, there’s so much ground to cover we might feel as if we never get back to the shit pile (oh, did I mean the cat hair pile?), and if we create barriers to openness or close the door, we get clean, but we’re closed off.

I’ve become content with letting the robot vacuum the rooms that sit at the outer reaches of the house (it’s a rambler): my sunroom office on one side, and my bedroom on the other. For the middle, the big sweeping “L” of the living and dining room, I do the work myself.

That's it. All I've got tonight!

Beauty inside and outside

2011-02-25T18:12:00.000-08:00

I got out to the cabin for the first time in months on February 16. The whole week had been what some would call a tease. A hint of spring. A preview. I went out after a couple of near 50 degree days and bright sun, and I didn’t even have to turn on the heater. In just those few days, the cabin had lost her refrigerator chill. I don’t know what it is about that particular kind of chill. Maybe, even when you’ve never been in a morgue, it strikes you as a place not fit for the living – and I just don’t like it.

But I didn’t find it! The warmth was the biggest surprise. I was so grateful for it and to be there…in it.

But you know what I didn’t see until today? Until I captured the pictures I took that day? It was the dichotomy between the inside and the outside.

All I really did that day was sit a while, take some pictures, and sweep the cabin out. When I saw the picture of the broom, and the pictures of the snow, it just struck me. It was beautiful outside the cabin and beautiful inside – but the beauty was so different.

I thought – maybe we’re like that.

When things get shaken up

2011-02-22T18:36:00.000-08:00

There's more new snow outside my window today, and like much of the rest of the country, we keep setting records for it. Henry described it this morning (he was home with a cold) as looking like tiny mirrors as he gazed out at all it buried.

Since last I wrote we've had countless inches of snow, two birthdays in the family (me and Henry) and Angie graduated from Aveda school one week and started a new job/training program with Juut Salon the next. In the midst of this her car died and mine, though in need of some major repairs (that I only just learned of when taking her in for an alignment), is momentarily her wheels. Small potatoes in the scheme of things, but it's made for an interesting few weeks.

To keep myself centered through those things, and for other reasons of need for comfort and insight when my quiet time has been less than usual, I found myself turning to the beliefs laid out in The Treatise on Unity and really digging into them as the practices they're stated to be.

Since I've recently posted my alternate blog http://pubjournal.blogspot.com to my Amazon page, I decided to share some of what I'm finding there. So just in case you're looking for something too, I thought I'd mention it. I'm just getting started so there's not much to see, but my intention is to share what I'm finding over coming weeks.

Looking for something is such an odd thing. I don't often know what it is I'm looking for when I find myself vaguely entering search mode. Actually, some really cool things have been happening -- odd feelings of switches in direction, surreal moments of dreaminess, shifts in the flow. I don't know about you, but I kind of welcome the disconcerting. When I feel things starting to get shaken up I get excited. I enjoy the feeling of "What the heck is going on?...Now what's happening?"

I can't really trace why these feeling sent me to The Treatise on Unity and those practices, but as near as I can recall it was as if I suddenly remembered they were there!

Since I don't generally talk about my vocation with A Course of Love too specifically on the blogs, this is a new direction in itself. I'm curious about where it will go. And I like being curious too.

Hubris

2011-02-06T19:26:00.000-08:00

I got a comment back on this quote from my last posting –

“Nothing happens by accident and the observation of this will help to put the responsibility of your life back into your hands, where it belongs. You are not helpless, nor are you at the whim of forces beyond your control. The only force beyond your control is your own mind.” (A Course of Love, 10.17)

What is meant by this – the mind is the only thing beyond our control? Who’s into control anyhow? I told the woman who wrote asking about it, “I liked the quote because that’s the way it feels so often…that the only thing I can’t control is my mind, even pardon the word “control.” I also said, “It’s a quote from early in A Course of Love. You wouldn’t find it in The Dialogues.”

That was this morning. As I’m writing this, here at the end of the day, I’m cracking up about my light treatment of that quote, and about how it whacked me on the side of the head a little while ago.

I was on-line half the day, which had me getting tight around my ears and in my gut and had my back acting up.

This all began because I convinced myself (and with good reason I might add) that it’s time to change a few things I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. Okay? Are you with me…and that certain determination you can get?

Yesterday, I set up a new e-mail address so that I could change the one I’ve had forever (mari@thedialogues.com), the one that gets about a hundred spam messages a day. (The new e-mail is acourseoflove.center@gmail.com.)

Today I figured I had to let people know about the change and started manually writing down the email addresses from my Outlook account. I got to page five of that and I was so bored I could have cried, and pretty certain too that there was an easy way to do it that I didn’t know about.

So, I switched gears for a while to investigate whether to try to move my website (www.acourseoflove.com) somewhere where it would actually get updated, or let it go and build a new one where I can add updates myself.

By the end of the afternoon I was afloat in information.

Meanwhile, I’m aware that there’s a brouhaha of sorts over a 1994 video of Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric talking about the Internet, basically asking “What is it anyway?” In 1994! And now we have blogs, forums, on-line education, internet radio, iPods, apps, Wiis, RSS feeds, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wiki and more words I don’t understand than I can repeat.

Even when I get the information I’m looking for, I don’t know what to do with it, and so after a few hours, I save a page or two of my research to my Favorites and then go take all the photos and magnets and business cards and clipped cartoon frames off the fridge and spray it down with Windex in glad rejoicing. Here is something I can actually do. Here is an idea I can implement. I happily rearrange the photos and put up new ones I got with Christmas cards, and throw away some older ones, and the grocery list written a month ago. When done, I stand back and enjoy the order and symmetry of an idea hatched and carried out in an hour.

Then I go back to my computer.

I have, like most of us, all kinds of ideas. Developing the know-how to implement them is not fun.

I was reading about another media frenzy over the Tiger Mom book. It said that Asian Moms know that nothing is fun until you know how to do it. I immediately started thinking about Angie, just graduating from Aveda school, and how learning to cut, color, set, and otherwise handle hair was no jolly good time, but that she’ll hopefully soon have a job and a fun career.

Then I thought of how my son, now nearing 40 years old, told me recently that I should never have let him quit gymnastics. I still remember fighting to get him away from Saturday morning cartoons and how I finally put it to him one day: “If you’re going to fight me every week about going, I’m going to forget it.” He was probably all of four years old.

So I’m contemplating all this and getting more agitated by the minute.

Without a Tiger Mom breathing down my neck, I’d become my own Tiger Mom. I wasn't giving myself any choice.

But I need to have a choice in my sunroom on a Sunday afternoon -- a choice about how I spend my day. I need to remember that I do…have a choice. When I get myself worked into a frenzy of “have to,” I need to take a deep breath and slow down, even while I keep going. I have to remember, as my friend Mary told me the other day, “One step at a time.”

So I guess I’m just saying that there it is again – in a roundabout, insidious way – all that is beyond my control is my own mind. It’s was almost as if my hubris of the morning came back to bite me.

It’s not always that we’re thinking negative thoughts or that we’ve got chatter going on as we meditate, or that we’re creating scenes of gloom and doom in our future, or that we’re in fear instead of love. It’s far more often about the dumb stuff.

I knew what I was doing to myself, and still, for those hours, just kept right on doing it, as if I was addicted to a video game rather than needing to find that first step that I needed to find. I was not in control of my mind. I wasn’t even thinking.

There’s no real moral or anything like that to this story. Just an admission I guess, and with it, a little lightness has returned. And the computer is about to be shut off for the night.

Learning and listening

2011-02-03T08:00:00.001-08:00

There was an amazing sunrise this morning. I don’t know if I’ve noticed one in weeks. It was spread out across the horizon, from front yard to Thompson Avenue. It was so vibrant that Henry noticed it when he got up and came to find me and we sat on the floor in the dining room, observing. One thing he still hasn’t gotten is how to describe things. He’ll ask, Umma, what’s that? and I have no idea what he’s referring to. This requires patience on both our parts, but it’s interesting when looked at as something you slowly develop – like the way he didn’t say “me” or “mine” until he was two. He referred to himself as Henry. “That’s Henry’s ball.” Then with the two’s came the personal identification of himself as a self, and now, just days shy of four, I guess I’m awaiting his use of descriptors while marveling that this doesn’t yet come naturally to him. He talks up a storm but still isn’t quite able to identify things specifically. Or else he thinks I should simply see what he sees. What else is there but what he’s referring to or pointing at?

It’s gotten me fascinated with the way we learn – not enough so to scour the books that lay it all out, but enough to witness and note what’s going on with my grandson and to ponder it all a little bit.

I notice how I explain things to him too. Just last night, talking of his birthday, he was asked where he came from. I tell him he’s from heaven. His mom tells him he’s from her tummy. We say, “You came from heaven and arrived through your mom’s tummy.”

He told me one day that the second heaven floats.

I listen.

Technology, change, and responsibility

2011-02-03T07:59:00.000-08:00

You know how it is when you wake up one morning and wonder where you’ve been? It seems to me that something peculiar happened to mid January. Starting about at Martin Luther King day and going on to Obama’s state of the union, and including Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt. What the heck happened? It just gave me the feeling like you can turn around and suddenly the world has changed while you weren’t looking.

Technology and change. It’s unfair to bind the Middle Eastern revolts to technology alone, or to lump Obama’s speech, (with so much given over to the new technological world) in there with it, but this theme jumped out at me after having been more sequestered than usual.

I did watch the State of the Union with all that language of “winning” feeling not like Obama but like Obama catering to the America public. There’s that desire to be winners again. To be better than the competition, more pioneering, more innovative, more affluent. To not let the status of our leadership and our image in the world wane.

President Obama’s words meant more to me when he acknowledged that so many of us feel as if we’ve woken up in a new world, and that there’s cause. There’s been this technological revolution. Things are different now. (I’d add, here, that the difference is not only due to technology! The technology that connects the world, is, as my friend Mary pointed out to me many years ago, only possible because it’s happening within us. Our possibilities and dreams become the world’s possibility and dreams.)

And so you’ve got the youthful protestors organizing via Twitter and Facebook.

Egypt’s youth claim a generation gap. They see those governing as only acting to preserve themselves. They claim no allegiance to anything but change. They realize they have to do it themselves.

In a corresponding news article, one official noted that there is no longer the hope in America that there once was – the hope in America as an outside rescue operation.

Could this be a good thing?

This is kind of my conclusion after feeling as if I’m coming out of a cocoon in which in some way the same thing’s been happening within me. I’ve been focused on some things that are important to me with the feeling of “It’s up to me” And I’ve been more diligent about watching where I rush in to rescue those who need to do for themselves.

The feeling of the whole world being caught in a similar time of change is keen…as if we’re beginning to get a new notion of where we are and how to proceed.

It’s harder in one minute with news of protests turning violent and police and civilians being killed, easier in the next with hopeful signs of military sympathies lying with the protestors. As one analyst said, the beginning of a revolt can be exciting and romantic, but it doesn’t last. It gets harder and more violent.

I suppose that’s the thing about revolt. There has to be such a sustained inner desire and hope for change that you don’t give up.

It all reminded me of a quote from A Course of Love (10.17)”

Nothing happens by accident and the observation of this will help to put the responsibility of your life back into your hands, where it belongs. You are not helpless, nor are you at the whim of forces beyond your control. The only force beyond your control is your own mind.

The places that scare you

2011-01-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

I fell to envy the other day.

It happened so innocently.

I’d gotten a Kindle from Donny for Christmas and since then the only thing I’d done with it was turn it on. I get in a slump at this time of year, which I know intellectually to expect, but had begun to make up reasons for. Not doing anything more with the Kindle was part of the general malaise, but then a friend gave me a gift certificate to put something on it, and she’s such an enthusiastic type that I figured it would be a real disappointment to her if I didn’t do it sooner rather than later. Besides that, I was bored for being totally uninspired and unmotivated, so I suppose it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I went from that lowly state to the unlovely envy.

I was going to buy my own books on Kindle, but thought I might have enough for one more, so had pulled up books listed under Spirituality. I was rather weirded out not to have heard of most, maybe not any, that were on the first page. I kept clicking next page and next. Then, at number 30 something on the list of top spiritual sellers was A Course in Miracles.

I know A Course in Miracles is right up there, so this wasn’t exactly a shock to me, it was more as if I suddenly felt the discrepancy between being number 30 and number 300,000. It didn’t seem right! It didn’t seem fair! What the hell was going on? What was it going to take for people to start reading A Course of Love? I shook my head. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

I got out of the “top sellers list” area fast and tried to order the Treatises and Dialogues only to be told I had “one click shopping.” There was no offer to let me use my gift certificate. I shut the Kindle down and went to bed (where I’m still trying to read the 50 pound book Jonathan Franzen wrote and his publishers brought out in a very hard hardcover).

When my arms got tired of holding it up I had time to consider all those envious feelings that wavered between not caring and caring. All those feelings that turn, slowly but surely, into wondering, “What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?” I was a fret with it.

The lucky thing was that today, I picked up a Pema Chodran book. I only did it because I was cleaning my room (what else do you do when you’re uninspired). I was trying not to feel lazy besides. The book was, “The Places That Scare You,” which could have described my room about then.

I’d never read more than a chapter from it and was going to move it out of the “must have by the side of bed” pile. I didn’t even know what it was doing there or how long it had been there, buried and dusty. But I flipped it open and it happened to fall to this chapter on Laziness, which I thought I’d better sit down and read immediately.

Later on (I quit cleaning and kept reading) she said she’d been envious of a friend when her book sold more copies.

I wanted to shout “Alleluia,” and “Hooray, we’re all human!”

I felt like I walked into one of those places that scare me and found a friend.

Sugarcoating and Sanitizing

2011-01-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” will be out next month from NewSouth Books. It will not use the N-word. All 219 times it was used by the author, it is being replaced by “runaway slave.” Political correctness, just like with this past week’s reading of the Constitution, is being extended into the past.

How distressing. As if we can’t admit that we were what we once were.

Is it because we can’t admit what we now are?

There are all kinds of reasons, to me, for finding this distressing, some of them literary. But my main response to this is a feeling of shock and disbelief. Where will this sort of trend take us? What happens when you sugarcoat and sanitize? What are you trying to hide? Is it an avoidance of taking the time needed to place situations in their correct context? An avoidance of understanding? Is it a disavowal that we’re smart enough to read Mark Twain for what he said rather than the words he used?

I don’t know. It just gets to me.

In the literary sense, I can tell you that from the small amount of publishing I’ve done, I have desired at times to reach back and make changes that would grant me to seem less obtuse or more kindly than I was feeling at the time.

When The Given Self came out, one of my friends wrote me that he took the first chapters like the “ding ding ding” at the start of a boxing match. He thought I was picking a fight. Well, hell, sometimes you can’t point things out that are concerning you without placing them in context.

Are there some things you wish you might feel free to change as an author? Sure. Would you want anyone else sanitizing your words? Certainly not. It smacks of sinister stuff to me, no matter how well intentioned, and of the generally dumbing-down of the American public.

And again it strikes me as leaving out those things that we see, perhaps, as mistakes of the past, our fear of the imperfection of human beings. Of wanting to take the good without the bad. Of believing that we can protect the children rather than educate them. Of believing that we can whitewash the American way, or maybe even our souls.

The Vision of our Founders?

2011-01-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

And the Constitution was read…at least most of it.

I’m in my hibernating mood, so I haven’t been watching TV. Maybe this story was on all day yesterday and people are sick of it. I just got my taste of it from the morning newspaper. I love this about the newspaper – that you can get a taste. You can scan the headlines. You can read, or not read, the articles below them.

You can do it at the kitchen table. Your partner’s got the local section or the sports, and you’re having your coffee and the kids or the grandkid (in our case) is eating his shredded wheat, and you can look up and make a comment, which I didn’t this morning, but did yesterday over Bert Blyleven. He’s in the paper again today but I haven’t read that section yet. I got paused by the reading of the Constitution.

I’m not getting terribly well informed by reading the St. Paul Pioneer Press, but I guess I must be getting as informed as I want to be. It’s enough to spark my thoughts or my indignation or at times a tear. I can always search for more when I can’t get enough, but usually it’s enough, or too much.

Anyway, you might say today’s story on the reading of the Constitution points out a philosophy of mine. Actually Rep. Elijah Cummings said it as good as I ever could. He said: “Imperfection is not to be feared.”

He was referring to the sections on slavery that were omitted from the reading. The part where it said slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person. He was making a case that being able to improve upon what the Founders started with was a “blessing.” I might say that if you’re going to haul out the Constitution as a document to live by in this century, then you haul it out – the whole thing – so you have to recognize that we can’t claim to stick by the Constitution (or anything else) unilaterally when some of it is wrong-headed.

My philosophy of imperfection isn’t about correcting mistakes of the past or condoning them. It’s more about how flawed human beings can still be leaders and poets and parents. How people without the personal constitution to succeed in the world as it is are still people. How the poor might not be so poor if they weren’t counted as overly flawed and in need of fixing, or due to enjoy three-fifths or less of the benefits of Constitutional freedom. The poor, of whatever race, religion, or sexual persuasion are in my view the new minority, those oppressed and denied what the wealthy can claim as their rights.

My point is that if you’re going to see slackers and the vulnerable and even the working class as so imperfect – imminently flawed for needing help once in a while – then lets start seeing the greedy that way too for causing the need. If you want to repeal health care reform…fine…start taking away the million dollar salaries of the CEO’s and the “right” of the medical supply companies and the pharmaceutical companies to make a fortune. Let’s call our leaders to lead, even while they hang on to their money and let’s point out the flagrant imperfection of 1 percent of the population controlling 40 percent of the wealth.

I hardly think that was the vision of our Founders.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, Reading of the Constitution triggers tussle. Jim Abrams, Associated Press. 1-7-2011, 4A.

Getting the picture

2011-01-07T07:49:00.001-08:00

In 1973, on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, I married for the first time. I was a month shy of 18.

I wasn’t interested in the Feast of the Epiphany when I chose it for my wedding date in 1973. Charlie, my husband-to-be had joined the Air Force and was about to go off to basic training. He’d cut his long, musician’s hair already. He didn’t want it to be too big of a shock when the Air Force did it for him. I suppose the date was chosen around that timing and perhaps the first open Saturday of 1973.

My sister made my dress. My sister-in-law was helping with my hair. We were standing in my mom’s bedroom and I was looking at myself in the mirror over her dresser. I was crying. It’s the moment I remember of my wedding day, as if suddenly, I looked at myself, maybe in somewhat the way Charlie might have looked at himself with his short hair, and wondered what I was doing. I don’t know if I doubted my love. I was thinking of making a commitment for life.

Today, I’m reading about Bert Blyleven finally getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve got tears in my eyes again. I feel like a sap for having tears in my eyes. I tend to get this way with success stories, especially someone recognized after a long time of waiting for it. Or the story of anybody coming from behind and breaking through. Or the girl who gets the guy in the end.

I got a trial membership to Netflix a month or so ago. I picked movies for my que. Then Netflix suggested some. One was the old Hayley Mills movie, “The Parent Trap”, another was “Singing in the Rain.” I don’t know that either would be considered coming from behind, triumphing in the end stories, but they were both old favorites of mine. It spooked me a little bit. What could be seen about me from the movies I chose?

I signed on for the trial membership because I wanted to see a documentary film called “Food Matters.” It had been recommended to me. I was in the mood to watch it. I put “84 Charring Cross Road” in my que, and “Cannery Row.”

For Christmas I got three new books. Barack Obama’s “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters”, Kevin Klings “The Dog Says How,” and Jonathan Franzen's novel “Freedom.” I wanted each of them for different reasons. What did that say about me? Were these thing superficial…or not?

So back to crying over Bert. Maybe it’s that he’s been the commentator of Twins ballgames for as long as I’ve been a fan. He’s been up for Hall of Fame entry for 14 years. Each year he didn’t get in, he had to face that disappointment publicly. Last year, when asked how he felt about failing to get in one more time, he said, “I feel like crap.”

I liked that. Anything else, any of those “good sportsmanship” platitudes wouldn’t have appealed to me. That’s what it was, I figure. Having him admit he felt like crap, and knowing that this year, he doesn’t.

I meant to watch the news coverage of his selection yesterday. I turned on the TV a few times to do so but it wasn’t the right time and I missed it. I could see the emotion on his picture in the paper today though. He’s quoted as saying, “I was born to throw that baseball.”

He was born in Holland. His parents spoke Dutch. His dad got a job driving truck for his uncle’s molasses company. They didn’t have a lot, but when he needed shoes or a glove, he got them. His dad came to all his games.

He doesn’t read. His favorite cartoon character growing up was Fred Flintstone, he thinks “Field of Dreams” is an “outstanding” movie and likes Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, John Wayne and Westerns.

Are you getting a picture of Bert? Do these things matter?

I like to think they do.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, Blyleven had curve to remember, Charley Walters, 1-6-2011, 2D. Associated Press Photos: Erik Kellar

The coming of quiet

2011-01-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

January 2, 2011, a calm descends. It’s been so long that I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like. I’m awed by the quiet that seems to bear a sustained quality. After a few minutes, I’m amazed it hasn’t gone away.

I’m taking down the tree ornaments. Henry was excited to help me begin the project. Mia was not. She went down and got the boxes I couldn’t reach though. I took the candles and centerpiece off the coffee table, laid it with a towel, and for a while Henry had at it, taking down his favorite ornaments and lying them gently on the towel. Then his mom came home and whisked him off for a couple of hours at the Mall of America and gave Mia a ride home on the way, and after a few minutes I felt the quiet of the empty house.

I kept at it for a while. I wanted to be sure the ornaments from my childhood got boxed right away. The rest were safe enough on the coffee table, but there was always the chance of one of the cats hopping up to sniff an angel or a bird, and so those cherished baubles with their memories had to be wrapped in tissue straight away. Then there was the one I had made after my dad died, the sappy Merry Christmas from Heaven that met a need for sentiment that year, and that was engraved. I had the box and it seemed as if every ornament was off the tree, but I couldn’t find that one.

I stood back, in the quiet, and looked top to bottom, side to side. I got up close. Finally I picked up lesser boxes – the ornament my mom gave me at the book-signing luncheon in 1997, the three kings from 1987. Each time I walked from coffee table to box, I searched the tree with my eyes for the engraved ornament that belonged in a thin rectangular box, maroon in color. It felt odd that it was the last one, the only one I couldn’t find. That it was still within the tree…waiting.

It kept me there, with the tree and the snowmen and the Santa faces and the doves for a few minutes while the house settled down with me, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. About then, the silver of the pewter showed itself within the boughs of the Frazier Fir, and I boxed it up, without reading the inscription, simply happy to have it back where it belonged.

Then I heated my cool coffee in the microwave, and spent that 60 seconds finding another ornament that matched another box, and when the microwave dinged, brought my coffee here as I do each day, and have done, all throughout the spastic tremors of the end of 2010, but without the quiet so long that I’d ceased to miss it, and thought I’d had it in bits and pieces, and realize again now, that I have not, and drink it in. Silence.

The Blur...A Disconcerting Miracle

2010-12-29T09:47:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, my Andrew Harvey book, with his name authoritatively carved in capital letters across the bottom, turned into “When Harry Met Sally.” Don’t know how that happened. Just looked across the pile on my office coffee table, with its candles and coasters and camera and cashews, remotes and mouse pad and chocolate covered raisins, and there, amidst the twine and tape, (maybe it was the HA) “When Harry Met Sally” suddenly appeared, clear as day, and I thought, What’s that doing there?

Everything has broken down or run out, as if from over-use. My mouse is shot. I pulled the thumbdrive thingy that makes the mouse work without a cord out of its port so that I could plug in the camera, and the insides fell out. Both printers are out of ink. Even the furnace blinked off two times in the past week.

The last few days are a blur of socializing. Now Henry is sick. Rain is predicted and the chance, afterwards, of freezing rain and you might as well say it: just plain ice. Donny is contemplating getting some of the four feet of snow off the roof before the rains come and I’m contemplating getting out to the cabin before the ice.

Mary and I were wanting to get together, to have friend time in that way that normalizes life in these periods when you don’t know what day it is. She’d e-mailed me saying, “I think after the holidays no one is quite themselves.” I replied, “Yikes, is that ever true.”

But neither of us had a quiet house in which to get together. Her husband had the week off of work, and my daughter and grandson the week off of school.

But there was the cabin. So, using the broom handle like a cane, I took myself out there, Mary in the lead with the coffee pot. I hadn’t planned to even attempt it until Donny headed out to feed the birds. Then I said, “Hey, while you’re out there, see if you think I can get to the cabin without slipping, and if you do, turn on the heater, please.”

I’m feeling a little more like myself now but I don’t discount the blur. That there are days on which “When Harry Met Sally” replaces Andrew Harvey, Tuesday feels like Sunday, and normal life is distant, is still a miracle. Disconcerting, but a miracle.

A Christmas Message

2010-12-23T18:27:00.000-08:00

Set your compass to what is brilliant in you. Don’t worry about where you’ve been or where you’re going. Just find and follow the brilliance.

Remember the brilliance of the new moon. The brilliance of a star that shines in a clear dark sky. Be clear. It is time. Let yourself shine now with brilliance --. Head in that direction. Follow the star.

Don’t look for the brilliance of a distant guiding light, but follow the brilliance in yourself, the shining part of you.

Walk with brilliance out of the haze.

Snow

2010-12-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

I was heading over to my mom's to help her make the meatballs for the annual Christmas spaghetti (she's Italian), when I realized that as long as I had my camera in my bag, I might as well take a few pictures of the snow.

I don't have much to say about it. I just know that for those who don't get this kind of snow it's a bit of a marvel, so I thought I'd share. It's hard to put it in perspective though. Half the world (my friend in Vietnam heard of it), know of the snow collapsing the Metro Dome and as many of the spectacle of the Vikings football players sliding on the ice of Gopher Stadium. All the world knows that Minnesota has had snow.

It's funny to be the focus of attention in this way. Like the photos of the snow, it's the kind of thing where you need to have your visuals stand in contrast. Here's the big fish. Here's the guy's hand holding the big fish. You can't tell a big fish is a big fish unless you take one of those photos like in the movies, where they show the guy who was kidnapped with the current day's date on the newspaper. Okay, that wasn't a photo of him taken last June.

So many things are like that -- comparison providing the defining features.

As Christmas draws near, I imagine what the world would be like without comparison. Would it be less known? More clear? Less harsh. More gentle?

Off the path

2010-12-19T05:29:00.000-08:00

When I wrote the poem I posted a week ago, the one that ends on there being no more paths…there were no more paths. That was the reality after all the snow and I was okay with that in my own way. I’m one of those people who get excited about the idea of forging my own path, at least in the sense of going beyond where paths have previously led.

Then I drove by my neighborhood park where there are several paths and trails – a main one that is paved, level, out in the open – and a half dozen or so that zigzag up hills, into ravines, and are narrow enough swaths through the trees that you can get the feel of being alone in the world, and where there hasn’t been a bit of path clearing since the first minor shows.

Suddenly…there out my car window…were paths, and ones that are, at least momentarily, almost manicured. Along the paved path, white walls have arisen on either side – not the lumpy mess of shoveled sidewalks but a clean and compact wall left and right.

I haven’t walked the snow-walled paths yet. I was so surprised when I saw them that I laughed out loud. “Just when I was thinking there are no more paths!” This one was so striking! There it was, the one and only path. The clear path. The clean path. There was really no other choice available, no way without heavy hip boots or snowshoes to get off the beaten path at all.

This still cracks me up because, of course, I wasn’t thinking about metaphorical paths when I started the poem. I was thinking literally of all the paths the snow had obliterated, including the one to my cabin, but especially those at my park.

The malls, I have heard, have pavement heaters, giant things that clear their parking lots so shoppers aren’t inconvenienced, and the maximum number of vehicles can still deliver them to somewhere near the door.

Now I’m perfectly aware that some of the very things that I like to complain about are conveniences that I’m happy to use. Freeways are a great example. When the city streets are still treacherous with parked cars plowed in, plows making second swipes, cars spinning their wheels and gliding through stop signs, pedestrians and children and school buses…the freeways are readied, faster than any other routes, for safe traffic. I’m happy that there are plows. I’m really happy that there are paths through difficult times, however they come.

But I’m also happy with those things that stop it all once in a while – like blizzards – and unplowed paths. And I get thrilled by where writing even the most mediocre poem takes me into the path of my feelings, that thrill at “being alone in the world” that makes me tremble, that “stepping off the path” feeling that makes me feel inspired and curious and happy, and most of all to want more of it. Oh, how I’d like to live in that place! How glad I am that I do now and again.

Longing and Armistice

2010-12-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

At this time next week – Christmas morning.

I was looking back yesterday, remembering dissimilar things about the year just passed. How Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize about this time last year, and that it’s been about the same time since they put the street light in that shines it’s bright green and red circles all the way through the woods and into our yard. I wonder what I’ll remember next year about this year.

Maybe I’ll remember the snow.

I spend my time looking out at the cabin. It sounds almost like a joke to not dare walk out there because of frozen shoulder, but it’s the way it is. You don’t realize how much your arms balance and catch you until a time like this and then you become so aware about how all the “parts” of the body work together in mysterious ways.

Donny’s been plowing too much to spend time shoveling a path to the cabin and even with it, I don’t know that I’d make the voyage. It feels like crossing an ocean of snow about now. I asked him if there wasn’t something I could use – something like a push lawnmower that would drop sand ahead of me while I lean on it.

I’m mainly content with looking out at the cabin, but some days I pine for it. My cabin season ended so abruptly I didn’t even clean her out, there’s a few things I wish were here rather than there, and I wish she were all clean and tidy for the next time I get out there.

One of my favorite views of her is through the dining room window where the Christmas tree lights from inside reflect against the outdoor scene. It makes me think of all those songs and movies that croon over being “home for Christmas.” I’m not sure why, but for me, (and it must be true for many as these songs are so popular) the sentiments speak to a longing that’s not necessarily about going back to a childhood home, or returning from one side of the world to another, or even being with family. I’d guess the feelings they arouse are about a yearning for a peaceful place …one in the world but not of it.

In the true story out of WWI (1914), when the soldiers spontaneously called an armistice for Christmas, that longing for home is quelled by a bit of peace and good will in such an extraordinary way. The British soldiers were in trenches filled with water and mud, about 80 yards from the enemy Germans. Here’s one letter from that time:

You need not have pitied us on Christmas day; I have seldom spent a more entertaining one despite the curious conditions. We were in the trenches and the Germans began to make merry on Christmas Eve shouting at us to come out and meet them. They sang songs (very well); our men answered by singingWho were you with last night? and of course, Tipperary (very badly). I was horrified at discovering some of our men had actually gone out imbued more with the idea of seeing the German trenches than anything else; they met halfway and there ensued the giving of cigarettes and receiving of cigars and they arranged (the private soldiers of one army and the private soldiers of the other) a 48 hours armistice. It was all most irregular but the Peninsular and other wars will furnish many such exploits; eventually both sides were induced to their respective trenches but the enemy sang all night and during my watch they played Home Sweet Home and God Save the King at 2.30am. It was rather wonderful: the night was clear, cold and frosty and across to our lines at this unusually miserable hour of need came the sound of such tunes very well played, especially by a man with a cornet who is probably well known. Christmas day was very misty and out came these Germans to wish us “a happy day”; we went out told them we were at war with them and that really they must play the game and pretend to fight; they went back but again attempted to come towards us so we fired over their heads; they fired a shot back to show they understood and the rest of the day passed quietly in this part of the line, but in others a deal of fraternising went on. So there you are; all this talk of hate, all this firing at each other that has raged since the beginning of the war quelled and stayed by the magic of Christmas. Indeed one German said “But you are of the same religion as us and today is the day of peace! It is really a great triumph for the church. It is a great hope for future peace when two great nations hating each other as foes have seldom hated, one side vowing eternal hate and vengeance and setting their venom to music, should on Christmas day and for all that the word implies, lay down their arms, exchange smokes and wish each other happiness.

(from http://www.christmastruce.co.uk/article.html Christmas Truce 1914)

In 2001, Aaron Shepard wrote “The Christmas Truce” for Australia’s “School Magazine” (April). It’s a fictional letter created out of the many actual ones. He ends the letter this way:

“One cannot help imagine what would happen if the spirit shown here were caught by the nations of the world. Of course, disputes must always arise. But what if our leaders were to offer well wishes in place of warnings? Songs in place of slurs? Presents in place of reprisals? Would not all war end at once?
All nations say they want peace. Yet on this Christmas morning, I wonder if we want it quite enough.”

Not here yet?

2010-12-14T04:25:00.000-08:00

Is it snow or sky?

And winter isn’t even here yet

This is said in mid-December
after a blizzard
in Minnesota

Things get finished up
and begun
on timetables that do not belong
to seasons not your own

Quick quick slow slow
who is to say
quick or slow
when the snow lies flat around the swing set
and ski jumps the slide and
casts irregular shadows
and lays across the yard some more
with the tree limbs mirrored in it and one star overhead

What is there
that is not yet here
when there are no trails left to walk?

The Blizzards of '91 and 2010

2010-12-12T16:29:00.000-08:00

I don’t know what date it is lately until I type it. But I know it’s Saturday, exactly two weeks before Christmas. Mia and I were going to go Christmas shopping today but we got snowed in by the worst blizzard since 1991’s Halloween blizzard. We were talking about it and Mia said that she couldn’t believe we took them out in that.

I said, “Wasn’t it the most fun Halloween ever?”

“Yeah, for us,” she said. “But what about for you?”

If I fretted over it at the time I sure don’t remember it. We weren’t driving. We walked from our house up toward Cherokee Park and there was a feel of such camaraderie from everyone we ran into – as if we are feeling like a bunch of fools and at the same time like hardy mid-westerners.

Today, I haven’t been out. Donny decided to give it a try and got stuck at the end of the driveway going out and coming back both. There’s about three feet of snow outside our door (and everyone else’s) and I think he plowed just about the whole street in whatever little vehicle he has – which has no cab.

Five hours later, I’m so tired from baking that I can hardly make it to my room to sit down, and Donny comes in frozen, saying he’s not sure he’s going to make it downstairs to the shower.

We are at that age where we don’t know our limits until they’re suddenly confronting us. “Okay, can’t take another step.” It sounds dumber when the activity is baking, but nonetheless it’s the fact of the matter.

Like the sky dropping all this snow on us, we don’t know when to quit and it’s not quite as fun as the blizzard of ’91, which was, even though it seems impossible, nearly 20 years ago.

It’s okay though. Mia and Angie helped. It didn’t start out real smooth but the more tired we got and the more things went wrong the more fun it was.

That was really the beauty of the blizzard of ’91 too. It was just plain wrong to get a foot of snow on Halloween. You can get giddy with that kind of thing.

The gift of shared experience

2010-12-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

Have been making bread machine bread for a week or so. The first one – Henry said it was the best bread he ever had – then what could I do? He’s also loved decorating and tells me how pretty things look. He’s so excited about Christmas – the tree, the lights, the little fawn that sits on the wine table beside a ceramic tree with a garland of snow. He dances around in his excitement.

I know it’s the season to be jolly, but for some reason that felt like cellular memory as it began, I dug out the writing I did during my dad’s illness and death. I say cellular memory because it was as if my body just did it without me thinking about it. And then some of the first scenes, being as I was re-reading the tales of October and November days in October and November, were eerily the same. Like the nice fall giving way quickly to winter and a bright sunny day that followed when the trees had gone bare from the wind and all the leaves were piled against the curbs and rustled and stirred and followed my car along as I drove.

We had a notebook going during Dad’s final days – one of those where people can sign in like a guest book and write notes. Initially I wanted to record the gifts people brought, thinking I’d do thank you notes, which I never did. Later it became a way to let the other shifts know what had gone on during the day. I typed it up after Dad died because it was so amazing to me – all the people who had visited and the short comments they left. Some of it boring as peas but other parts sweet, and as a whole it became one of those treasures that says more than the individual parts.

It’s like when I was a kid and we’d get Christmas cards by the dozens and tape them over the archway that separated the living room from the hallway. My Uncle Jack and Aunt June always sent one that listed each family member: Jack, June, Judy, Jeff, Jill, Joy, JoEllen, Jan, and Jackie. I memorized that list of names as if it was a ditty. It never left me. My mom, who sees the cousins rarely, will ask, “Which one is that?” and I never hesitate.

There’s things like that in the notebook.

Dad died in 2007 and in 2008 I put the notebook and my journal entries of the same period together. I don’t know if I ever had a real purpose in mind for it. It was likely just part of processing my grief. But I got that call back to it a month or so ago and started thinking of giving it to family for Christmas, and then maybe sharing it as a book. But I began to question who, other than family (if even them) would want to read it.

Anne Lamott wanted to write a funny book about cancer because there wasn’t one when she needed it. You wouldn’t think of a thing like that unless you needed it. I wrote about my life with my dad as it happened because I needed to.

William Stafford has said that his writing style is his plight as a human being. That’s the way it is for some of us.

I don’t know why you’d want to read anything on death and dying before it shows up in your life, or how you could read anything during the experience, which only leaves “after.” Here it is for me, almost four years later, and I don’t know why I’m doing it and keep wanting to put it away, and can’t quite. I can tell it affects my mood and I don’t honestly need a darn thing extra to affect my mood and yet it’s kind of like Henry and the bread. Once you get started you can’t stop.

But again it struck me today, as it did when I was writing The Given Self, that the full immersion into the experience of death and dying (no matter that it comes with meds and bedpans and nebulizers and family fights) is about the closest thing to spiritual experience that I’ve ever come across. It came of thinking of sharing and deciding there’s no way anyone could read something like this compilation while in the midst of the experience.

Hospice workers give you things like short verses of poems, scripture, or prayer. You might be able to read that much, focus that long. There’s no comfort that can be had (at least not for long) from anything that comes apart from the experience. A smile from your loved one is comfort. A moment of peace in your day is comfort. Meds coming on time is comfort. It all feels like emotional overload but there’s so much more going on, such a rich depth of feeling, such profound change.

So it’s after – after – when you want to know what hit you. It’s after, when you feel the let down from that immersion, that fully focused presence of experience. It’s afterwards that you begin the decompression and maybe want some kind of company.

I couldn’t read as I received A Course of Love. Couldn’t hardly read anything else when I first discovered A Course in Miracles either. It’s that total immersion that can let you know that so much more is going on. And in the same way as after a death – that’s when I, at least, needed the companionship, the people with a similar experience to talk it over with, or just some feeling of solidarity of the type that says, “This is what it’s like.”

I don’t know what I’d do without friends and authors and correspondence from people who share their experience. Sharing our experience can be a gift…and I guess you have to trust that somewhere within yourself you’ll know when the time is right to give it.

Freezing, frozen, thawing

2010-11-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

Here's a photo of me with my short hair, taken with my artist friend Dan. I was wincing a bit from putting my arm around him!

It’s Tuesday morning and things are back to “normal.” Thanksgiving “week” with its days off and school closures and feasting is over. Angie, who’s in school Tuesday through Saturday is off for her day, Henry for his. I’m beginning mine without having to go out into the cold – a big deal because it pretty much rained all day yesterday before we got a little slow and I’m being really careful about slipping these days.

My shoulder, they say, is freezing.

I hate to claim it and say “I have frozen shoulder” but frozen shoulder is the name of the condition that’s making me extremely cautious about slipping these days. I slipped a week ago Sunday and the pain, as I tried to catch myself, was unbelievable and the spasms went on and on.

I’ve had one physical therapy appointment and will have another today. I was thrilled with the first one, basically because I was told, in a descriptive way, what’s going on.

I’d been to an ortho guy for a consult and an x-ray, and then, two months later for an MRI. I’d seen my internist twice, ounce to have him pronounce me as having fibromyalgia after looking at me for five minutes and touching a few tender spots, and the second time for a physical because I didn’t want to accept that “I have” fibromyalgia” either, and in none of those appointments did I ever hear a single description of frozen shoulder.

Now, what I liked about the description that I got from my physical therapist was this sort of relief I felt right away. I’d already cut my hair because I was finding it too hard to braid and, if you’ve ever had long hair, you know you can’t have it flying loose all the time. I’d already gone out and bought a few button up and a few zip up tops because I couldn’t get things on and off my head without causing myself anticipatory anxiety even before the actual pain came.

I was a little proud of myself for these proactive steps. I’ve had long hair for nearly 30 years and to cut it so that I’d be more comfortable was the kind of taking care of myself action I haven’t always done. I bought the tops after standing in front of a display of gloves and hats I was thinking of buying for Henry and deciding his mom could buy them and I’d get myself something that didn’t make dressing torture.

But it wasn’t until I saw the physical therapist that I quit thinking of myself as a “big baby.” That’s when I found that this freezing business (the first of three stages that also include frozen and thawing) really is extremely painful and that it can hurt to cut your own meat. You can see where the “big baby” thing came from when you start feeling like you can’t dress yourself or eat your dinner without assistance.

I’d had a friend tell me a little about his own experience with this shoulder problem but he didn’t tell me in advance of my being diagnosed how painful it was going to be. Afterwards he said it was one of the most painful things he’d ever experienced, and that too was a relief.

It’s the relief, I suppose, that people get from support groups.

It’s one way of looking at what I attempted to offer in The Given Self, a type of support group for spiritual people who haven’t had too many confide in them about the confusion that enormous inner changes can bring.

I find myself looking for the description everywhere lately. I don’t want the step-by-step or the instruction or the “after you’ve moved through it” knowledge. I want the inside scoop of what it’s like to be “in it.”

I don’t often write up to that challenge but it’s the writing I like to do when my shoulder isn’t causing even typing to be difficult.

I always look at physical stuff in broader ways and the physical therapist helped there too. As usual, the condition comes from the body trying to protect itself. My upper back muscles apparently weren’t strong enough so my body started creating scar tissue to bind things together (or some such thing). In a less physical sense I imagine things like “shouldering” too much worry, and I imagine it as a call to quit – to quit with the worrying and with the tendency to overdo. It becomes an example of the kindness of the universe, everything working together to take you where you need to be, even if you’d rather it didn’t while you’re in it.

In thanks for art

2010-11-26T13:06:00.000-08:00

A news story motivated me last week.

It was another story from that world my family and I entered twelve years ago as we worked our coffee shop on University Avenue. The avenue is aptly named the “central corridor” between St. Paul and Minneapolis and in lieu of the “central corridor light rail” that is about to begin construction, a building that housed some of our favorite artists from that five-year sojourn, has been sold. The new owners, with an eye toward the future, plan to develop market-rate apartments. The artists, who considered themselves part of a casual co-op, and part of a community that has dotted the former industrial warehouses with studios, particularly near the area of University and Raymond, are being displaced.

Dan Mackerman, who has been housed there twenty years and who was one of our most popular regulars, told the reporter that he remembered when there used to be two coffee shops (among other businesses). I felt sure that memory referred in part to us, and took it personally. It made me want to say, “Thanks, Dan, for remembering us,” and to feel this catch in my chest, the kind you feel when a casual acquaintance like him is about to disappear after years of enjoying that feeling that you knew where he was – no matter that you never stopped by to visit or planned to.

My cousin Nina visited from Louisiana one year while we were still in business. Mia and I were working the shop. Angie had moved into an apartment over an art gallery a half block up on Raymond and worked there as a part-time receptionist while going to school. My cousin thought we were all “living the life,” that we were sort of bohemian I suppose. We took her to visit the building now condemned to this new fate – the building all the locals call the C and E building, and to see Dan. I was afraid we might be a bother but he was as gracious a host as someone who might have invited us into his living room. He was in his element, just being himself.

Dan did sculpting too and he’d come into the coffee shop a real mess – as dirty as a construction worker at times. Finally I asked him why and he pulled out the Harry Potter head he was carrying from under his arm. He was sculpting a show for a Dayton’s (or Macy’s…or Marshall Field’s) Christmas display – the kind that attract crowds who walk through this enchantment on their way to visiting Santa Claus.

I used to pine over the idea of being like those “small artists” I came to know from the C and E building. They were simply doing what they loved to do and making a small living from it (the reason I called them “small artists”).

There’s something you have, an aura you have about you when you’re doing what you love to do and you even have a little of it when you’ve taken the risk of it and it hasn’t turned out as you’d hoped. (As Cher says, “Mistakes are vastly underrated.”) When you take the risk of expressing yourself, in whatever way moves you, you give yourself a chance to be your own person at the same time that you can find yourself blending into a community of some like folks, so that you are – (even us in our coffee shop) supporting an alternative way of life.

There was, being surrounded by artists, an element of something like surprise. I’ve not been in too many places like it – because it wasn’t just the artists who were unique and surprising but most everyone who came in the door, as if the area bred folks who weren’t so on a schedule that they still had time for the kind of conversation that makes for interesting exchanges and the feeling of a common bond.

Being at the shop was like living in the world in a way I’d never experienced when I was taken care of by a boss and a payroll and was kept, quite literally, sequestered away from the environmental/political/social effects you feel when you’re making your own way.

There are those who say creativity on demand is as much of a grind as anything else, and I suppose they’re right, but it’s a different grind, and that’s what shows. You see it in the eyes. It’s kind of a look that says, “I’d rather be who I am and be poor than live any other way. You can’t do anything to me worse than I’d do to myself by not living my life this way.”

The article included a notice that the artists were having their last open house. I went to see Dan. He’s superbly talented. (www.danmackerman.com) He was so funny. He talked in this ordinary way (when we were conversing) of such profound things, and then ended on the note that the key to being an artist is low overhead.

I talked with Bob Donsker, who is doing a photographic collection of abandoned buildings in the Twin Cities and thinking of a coffee table book. There’s such a story there – full of pathos and history and insight.

I told Dean Lucker, who recognized me (and didn’t…Where do I know you from?) that I thought of him and them as “small artists.” He said, “Then you got it long before I did, but that’s what we are.” He started in his direction, (mechanical art) he said, by taking apart toys as a child – none of them his own. I love hearing that kind of thing.

I guess the main thing certain people, and even areas of town can give you, (until they get sold-out anyway) is a glimpse of another way. I know I shouldn’t romanticize it…like the people did who thought we were “living the life” when we owned the shop, but I still do, and there’s a reason for it. Someone has to keep up the lost art of alternative and artful living.

People who give off that aura of simply being who they are, have figured out a few secrets. Like “low overhead” some of them are practical. But those aren’t the ones that help you keep your dreams and not feel undone by your difficulties. It’s just them; just the people; the individuals. They’re the ones who remind you of what is possible and who keep a certain style of living from ceasing to be.

On this day after Thanksgiving, I’m thankful to all artists everywhere, and especially to these local ones.

A Western Way

2010-11-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

John’s gospel is the most Western. John had Greek and Roman influences and the others Middle Eastern. In John’s Gospel – Jesus is always in charge. He doesn’t show weaknesses. In the others, a more human side is shown.

It’s like this reminder – there is a Western way.

There is a lot of evidence that the Western way is passing. What is the way coming? A friend recently quoted a new book (“Frequency”) as saying the information age is passing and the intuition age is here. A Course of Love says it’s time for the way of the heart (which is also an intuitive knowing). I’ve seen time and again that the clarity is never in the details. When I go there, it’s because I think I can manage them, and that if I don’t, they’ll manage me.

Yet the more I get away from managing and being in charge, the more I find myself drifting into the new.

And the more I (and we) drift into the new, the more our human side is revealed.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Snow...and the trees drop their arms

2010-11-15T05:11:00.000-08:00

Had a peculiar day yesterday with the nice fall giving way to the first big snow, one so heavy that it downed power lines and we were without electricity for most of the day. It’s amazing how one such day shows you how addicted you are to the usual. I kept turning on lights, putting my coffee in the microwave, even bagels in the toaster. I had Henry all day and he had to have asked at least a dozen times for me to turn on the TV.

So it was a day of full engagement. I knew the day with Henry was coming…just not the shape of it. We played dinosaurs and cleaned out some cabinets – the ones under the china closet. They had enough interesting stuff in them that he enjoyed that for a while. I’d forgotten what was in there and little of it was precious. I let him un-box a Japanese tea set with a bunch of little cups, and play with those little appetizer/butter knives that come in a boxed set with Christmas trees for handles (all the while wondering where these things came from and what to do with them). I did a few reduction things like take the four crystal glasses that were still good out of a big box and throw away the box and the chipped glasses, sniffed sachet that had been in there forever and threw it away, and I found candles for the latter part of the day.

Donny was out shoveling and plowing and helping neighbors who had no heat. I envy him his usefulness sometimes. He’s such a “can do” guy.

We were in the middle of making chicken and dumplings with the cabin’s lantern sitting on the stove when the power came back on.

Around me today – outside the cabin – there are bangs and thumps, thwacks and great whooshes, as the heavy snow drops and branches shift. It comes down on the cabin’s roof like the foot steps of bears, and snow showers pass by the windows. The clumps that hit the ground make plopping noises, and holes in the surrounding snow.

Power lines and tree limbs come down with nothing more than the weight of little crystals of snow all piled on at one time.

I feel solidarity with my trees as they go through this enforced dropping of their arms and the release of weight that is too heavy a burden for them to carry.

Crossword puzzles and the coming of light

2010-11-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

I do the crossword puzzle most mornings. This morning I got stumped on the name of the “Star Trek” doctor. All I could think of was “Bones.” An hour later I revisited the question and “McCoy” flashed right into my brain. This happens all the time. It’s why doing the crossword puzzle delights me. So many mornings I start out thinking, ‘Oh this is a hard one.’ I can’t get it started. But almost invariably, if I keep going back to it, the old light bulb comes on over my head, one answer leads to the next, and at some point while doing it this way – basically five minutes at a time, it gets completed.

I’m really fascinated with the creative process and how I see it mirroring spiritual practice. This morning, the crossword strikes me as similar too. If you don’t try to figure it out, if you wait, if you keep going back…the light comes on.

A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love

2010-10-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

A Tale of Four Books and a Few Friends

I missed a visit from a Course of Love reader who was visiting Minnesota just recently. I did so for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I’ve been in one of my hermit moods and, when I’m in a hermit mood, I’m not as diligent as usual about checking my e-mail.

Sometimes the hermit mood comes on in a way that is simply a call to honor my nature – as if I’m in need of my time for my very soul. At other times, it is caused by an urge to create. There are too, such times that come for me feeling low, or stressed. But really, in the end, they’re all kind of the same thing.

This man I missed visiting with sounded very interesting, and wrote me after getting back home to Maine, that he wanted to ask me about what it was like to hear God the way I had. He also told me about the way in which he heard God in his own life.

I wrote him back, and as part of my reply said that he might want to watch this video I’d just put up.

(Click on "up" to view.)

This isn’t one of my cabin videos. For a long while now I’ve been thinking about doing something to reach out to ACIM readership. Every time I put action with that thought though, what I created did not turn out as I wanted it to. I would sound as if I was trying to be convincing about the value of A Course of Love. That kind of thing (someone trying to convince me of the merits of their book or course) never is effective for me, so I kept abandoning whatever work I did.

Then the other day I had this idea.

This is the thing…for me. The “God thing” feels like an idea, or an intuition, or an inspiration. Like a different way of knowing. So I had this idea of doing this video as a “Tale of four books and a few friends,” and I starting running around the house with my camera photographing my stacks of books and thinking of my dearest friends, writers and otherwise.

I had barely completed the video when I decided I had to have this signed edition of a William Stafford book that I became certain I needed as I photographed Stafford’s powerful old face on the cover of “Early Morning” (one of my favorite books, written, actually, by William’s son Kim). The blurb about the autographed book said that he’d signed it to “an Irish Lass,” which is something I could qualify as.

Why this kind of thing is such a big thrill to me…who knows…but I got the book (published in 1990, Stafford is dead now), yesterday, and was enamored by holding in my hands something this hero of mine had once held. His signature is the scratchy signature of a man nearing the end of life, and I found it just so dear.

It’s a book on writing and, I swear, the way he writes about the dawning of the idea, and the thread you must follow, and the way a poem (he’s a poet) makes you FEEL, as if it touches you and calls for a response even if you don’t understand and particularly for that reason at times…it all was more descriptive of what I felt “hearing the Course” and what I’d suggest is, for me, like “hearing God” than anything I’ve written myself.

And strangely enough, it made me feel more pleased with my little video, and to want to share it with you, and to invite you to let me know if it is as welcoming (or not) as I hoped it would be.

It’s one of those things that isn’t exactly about anything in a direct way, and because of that, I hope it may speak with the kind of voice from which a person might hear whatever it is that might be awaited by her or his heart.

The title is A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love: A Tale of Four Books and a Few Friends.

Here's the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wATWoztD7vw

Underdog...and not

2010-10-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

The ground is getting hard beneath my feet, baseball season is over for the Twins, and the season is nearly over for the year.

I have to get one last baseball idea into the mix.

I’ve been meaning, ever since the Twins lost so handily to the Yankees (again), to write about it, and how the newspaper was full of it…but not in the same way it was when the Twins lost to the Yankees (or simply lost) in post-season play in years past.

In years past, the Twins have always been the underdog. The Twins had one of the lowest budgets in baseball…and they had to play in the worst stadium in the majors…the awful Metrodome.

This year that changed. The new outdoor stadium, Target Field opened and came with high expectations. Joe Mauer got the largest contract anyone on the team ever got. Jim Thome was added as a power hitter. It was a great season and we won the division, as we have for several years. And then…went down without a fight.

The guys had no spit, no fire. They seemed to have no drive at the end. It was almost as if they gave up before they played. They were, after all, playing the unbeatable Yankees.

Even for all that being true, I was surprised by what I read. And I was surprised by Tom Powers, a regular sports columnist, that he mentioned A. J. Perzinski. A.J. was replaced by Joe Mauer and now plays for the White Sox. A.J. is a character. I always liked him, but he’s such a character that he’s about the only guy who comes to the plate in Minnesota and gets booed. He gets booed because he’s not always nice. We’ve got a thing in Minnesota called “Minnesota nice.” And the Twins organization has had a thing, for a long time, of getting rid of the characters. Oh, we’ve had a few bigger than life guys, but always in that “nice” way.

But the main thing that surprised me, because it was true and I hadn’t really seen it, was that we’re not the underdogs anymore. The team’s not underpaid and under-housed. The fans aren’t holding low expectations.

I’m finally writing about it because when I was watching the Rangers beat the Yankees one of the commentators said, “You can’t hope a pitch; you’ve got to convict a pitch.”

This all spoke to me, the way baseball often does, creating some kind of a metaphor for my life.

Oh, how I identified with the underdog Twins. Them and me. That’s what we were: the underdogs.

Things change. Times change. And the thing about me is that I’m slow. I’m slow to see the changes that actually happen as they happen. Something has to spark me to notice. Maybe this is true for all of us. Maybe it’s the way it happens. You have some inner change take place and then a month or year later, something calls your attention in that direction and you say, “Gosh, I’m not like that anymore. When did that happen?”

Somewhere in the last year, or maybe the last month – I don’t really know – I quit being the underdog. I quit on the inside anyway. My actions haven’t quite caught up yet. I’m still doing the Minnesota nice thing, and I’m still hoping and not playing with conviction. But now that I’ve seen it, I’m ready for my actions to catch up.

Oomph...actually

2010-10-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

Henry’s always trying out new words and one of his newest is “actually.”

He asked about his yogurt this morning, “Do you think this is cherry or strawberry?” and then he answered himself, “Actually, I think it is cherry.”

“Actually” sounds so funny coming from him – like in that movie, “Love actually.” Maybe he’s got a little British flavor to the way he says it. It’s a redundant word and I actually like redundant words. They give flavor, like spice to a hot-dish. Nothing fancy, just a dash of something that makes for a little oomph.

I’ve been lacking in oomph lately but it’s started coming back.

I’ve gotten this idea, living next to the freeway as I do, of the freeway as metaphor for the busy life. For a while now, I’ve been taking pictures of the freeway fence – the sunrise against the fence, the afternoon shadows against the fence – that kind of thing, and I came up with this idea of doing a video with these images and thoughts on the busy life.

Then one morning, I had a ladder up against the fence, and was standing on it taking pictures, when the light came on in the bathroom window, signaling that Angie was awake. I thought how peculiar she’d find it, if she were to look out the window, and see me up on a ladder hanging, in the just-after-sunrise hour, over the fence, with my camera.

It made me smile, and I thought – this is the way I’m like my dad, a thought that filled me with pleasure.

My dad was a character, even an eccentric character. I’ve said it all before. He was particularly this way later in life when he became what I call a gentleman farmer. Who knows what those two words together mean – and yet – they call up a certain image: a farmer, but not completely of the earth; not too rustic; not so earthy that he couldn’t also be charming; not so practical that he was tied to neat rows and a productive yield. Not so homespun that he couldn’t get all dressed up and go out on the town polka dancing and kissing ladies’ hands.

I saw an old friend/arm chair cousin of his this summer. I was telling him how I had this one picture of dad when he was the boy, and he had the kindest look on his face. I said, “Even then, he had that kindness.”

Marty said, “Oh, that Joe, he was a tricky one. He had his wild days.” He was saying, “Don’t fool yourself. Joe was more than nice.” He was more than nice, more than a dad, more than a farmer, more than a gentleman. He was no saint. He was a character.

As I thought of Angie catching me on the ladder, I thought how neat it would be if she delighted in my quirky ways. And then I thought, ‘Maybe she will; maybe she won’t. She might…someday. She might not.’ And then I thought that it’s enough, more than enough, actually, if I can delight in myself.

When you're feeling low...

2010-10-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

The first edition of The Dialogues.

I have this one friend who, whenever she doesn’t hear from me for a while, checks out my blog. Then she e-mails me and says, “I can’t tell where you’re at.”

I realize that sometimes the blog allows me to just write some little oddity, like the one I last posted about the push lawn mower. That kind of writing relaxes me. It’s like looking at the small stuff. What my friend sees, I suppose, is that “smallness” … too small a picture to tell her what’s going on with me.

I wrote, in The Given Self, about the wisdom that is there right within our hard times. How our hard times aren’t just a bridge to better times. That there’s something deeper in them…something, maybe, for our souls. My own writing prompts me not to hide out, to go ahead and be vulnerable, to seek wisdom (of any sort at all) in what I'm going through...for me...maybe for you too.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

There. I’ve said it. Do you think poorly of me? Have I become lower in your estimation of me?

I doubt it.

It’s tough, when you’re feeling frazzled and frayed, depressed, or even “not on the top of the world,” to be public about it. It’s so bizarre – all the things that run through your mind – the sort of loop it gets on when you’re feeling low, and how you can get yourself real confused about that. Wonder if you you’re really missing the mark, need to do whatever it takes to get still…or whether there might be something there that you need to listen to.

When you listen, I feel at least, you begin to get clues to how you need to move. But I’ll admit: it’s a different kind of listening.

Here’s one that really got to me. I wasn’t at home, and didn’t have any books with me, and suddenly remembered that I had my old copy of The Dialogues in the trunk of my car. I don’t know how many of you have that version. It’s white, and it has a painting called “Flood of Compassion” on the front. It was the first edition of The Dialogues and I designed it all myself. It’s smaller than the “blue books”…like a trade edition paperback. I’d decided not to put the numbers on the paragraphs or to make it look like the other books, because I felt it was so different. This one, this third volume of A Course of Love, just wasn’t the same. By then we were to be done with studying. What did we need numbers for? By then, it was personal, equal, a dialogue. I didn’t want it to look heavy and scholarly.

Anyway, I went out and got it.

I wrote an introduction in it, and when I went to bed that night I read it. It was the weirdest thing. It sounded like something I could have written now, even though I’d written it eight years ago.

Next morning, I’m reading how my favorite editorialist, Leonard Pitts, is about to turn 53. He’s writing on the first, second and third arcs of life. He claims the first to be finding yourself and getting your education, the second the rat race, and that the third is for “having some fun, trying something new, for being of service, and for doing some of those things you always said you’d do, someday.”

It reminded me of what I was writing at 47 but the arcs would look a little different in that I’d put “finding yourself” in the third arc. I'd written about the change of life during menopause as described by Christiane Northrup:

“Many of the changes she was describing as menopausal mirrored the changes I’d been feeling as a result of The Dialogues. Northrup spoke of menopause as a transformation, as a giving up of illusions, as a crossroads where an old way and a new way merge and must be chosen between, and as a rekindling of youthful fire, spirit, and creative drive.

“She also spoke of menopause as a time marked by impatience and intolerance with “life as usual.” As a forty-seven year old woman, I suddenly became aware that my body, along with my brain, my mind, my heart, and my soul, were all undergoing similar transformations. It was no wonder that my experience of The Dialogues felt so total and all encompassing, as if there wasn’t a corner of my life or psyche that had not only been touched but rewired.”

Change. Transitions. Irritability. I didn’t know whether to see an old pattern, to feel as if I was stuck and hadn’t changed in years, or to feel as if I’d gotten something I needed. But that was my mind talking. My heart felt comforted.

These are the things that can bring me joy when I’m low. Getting up to close the window and spotting a bright crescent moon in the dark 4 a.m. sky, finding an editorial that mirrors my thoughts, reading something surprising.

Then I was on-line, researching something, and found this amazing little paragraph in a blog that I can’t remember how the heck I got to:

House of Prayer Blog

I’ve been thinking about our spiritual work…. There seems to be a kind of shift going on amongst us. A movement into the depths is the way it feels. I know it means letting go of pet beliefs and even "orthodox" ones sometimes. This is often expressed, however, by uneasiness or discontent. This reminds me of what Jesus said about us becoming “as little children” in order to enter into the Kingdom of God. I suspect this is also what Meister Eckhart means when he emphatically teaches that IF we are to come to an experiential knowledge of God, then we also have to come to a place of “unknowing.” How does one do this? How do we go back when we’ve come so far? How do we become “little” again? How do we “unlearn” when we’ve spent so much of our lives seeking intellectually, believing rationally, and holding tightly to our so called “truths”? It feels to me that this is what is being experienced by many of us. We just don’t know things the way we once did. We are no longer clinging so tightly to our belief systems and entrenched positions. There’s a loosening of sorts; a release from the moorings of security. We’re launching out into deeper, unknown waters. And we’re also feeling the cost of that . . . “coming to an unknowing” place.

Ward Bauman, House of Prayer Blog, Episcopal House of Prayer

"Feeling the cost of that." Feeling the "unease and the discontent."

I call this kind of thing intuitive listening, sort of going where you’re led. Getting reminded of what you know. There’s nothing quite like it to make you feel gifted and heard – as if a power greater than your own, or a bigger ear, is listening and even answering.

This is not about heart alone. This is about the combining of mind and heart, and I swear that once in a while, when your heart is feeling in the dumps, your mind can shed a little light on why this is so. You might not want to hear it, but it’s there…rattling around amidst the rubble.

You’ve got to do something else then, to start the movement, and that is, for me, the hardest piece to find when I’m low, and that's what I was feeling tonight when this arrived in my e-mail in-box:

Come to me all you who labor and are burdened
and I will give you rest.
-Matthew 11: 28

"Rest refers to interior quiet, tranquility, peace, rootedness
of being one with the Divine Presence.

Rest is our reassurance at the deepest level that everything is okay.
The ultimate freedom is to rest in God in suffering, as well as in joy.
God was just as present to Jesus on the cross, as on the mountain of the
Transfiguration."

-Thomas Keating, Reawakenings

Sometimes, when you’re low, you’ve just got to rest. Message received.

When push comes to shove

2010-09-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve been taking new routes on my forays about town lately. Well, they’re really not drives about town; they’re short treks around the neighborhood running errands for my elderly companion or, just recently, driving to my friend’s where I’m house sitting.

It maybe grew out of one part irritation in the beginning.

You know how you go to make a right turn on a red light and the street is so narrow you can’t get around the people going straight or making lefts? I had this great idea of taking the side street a block before the light and then turning more easily onto the street that was my destination. In this case, I was turning on Haskell, a very low-traffic neighborhoody-looking street with a small white house on the corner. The house is for sale. It also has a short white picket fence and a narrow white garage. Everything white – not a dot of trim painted green or black. I got kind of enamored by the little house and then noticed another all-white house down the way where even the steps and cinder blocks were painted white. It was another small, older home and I was, in a word, charmed by this short block I began to take toward the major intersection and thoroughfare of Robert Street.

Generally, I’d get to the corner of Robert and Haskell and make a right-hand turn onto the busier street, but today, there was no traffic in either direction, so I scooted across Robert and continued on Haskell.

The reason, generally, that these small side-streets aren’t taken, is that there’s a stop sign on every corner. But today I drove slowly and savored the new view. It was almost as if I’d entered a small town. I noticed the names of the streets at each stop sign and began to enjoy the flavor of the corner at Winslow and the one at Bidwell.

Just before the street dead-ended at Charlton, I saw a skinny elderly man setting his push lawnmower on the curb with a Free sign on it.

I’ve wanted a push lawnmower for a long time. Don’t ask me why.

I drove on by and continued to my friend’s house, fed the cats, did the litter, and wiped up a few anxiety messes on the floor. I walked through the downstairs and then went up, where I had spent two days this week taking a nap on her loveseat while meaning to read in the peace and quiet of an empty house.

I’d slept as if drugged. I kept trying to keep my eyes open and appreciate my chance to read undisturbed, but my body simply would not cooperate. It was a woozy sleep that felt tremendously deep even though I felt as if I’d been wakeful enough to keep trying to open my eyes. But today was the first time I’d been by in the early part of day, (it’s my day off), and I ended up passing on the couch and its invitation to sleep if not read.

I headed home.

I had already driven past Haskell as I started off going my more usual route on auto-pilot, when I started thinking about that push lawnmower and doubled back.

From the opposite side of the street I saw it had mint green handlebars and a yellow blade. I kept straining to see how rusty the blade was, and finally got out of the car. On closer observation, the yellow blades were speckled with orange spots of rust and I turned around, even though I could see grass in the blades and a narrow swath where the man had cut a little as a demonstration. I got back in my car, but I hesitated.

Haven’t you always wanted one, I asked myself? The Free sign, written on a piece of typing paper, and taped between the handlebars with their black rubber grips, waved in the breeze. The sun shown. I told myself that Donny would call it a piece of junk, look at me over his glasses, and ask me when I was going to cut the grass. I asked myself, “Do you really plan to cut the grass?”

Then I got out of the car as if it was inevitable. I mouthed a thank you toward the windows where I imagined the old man watching, then wheeled the thing across the street. Already in love with it, I hefted it into the back of the Cruiser and the grass fell from the blades. Some maneuvering was required before I could get the trunk to close. The Free sign, hanging from the handlebars, waved jauntily over the back seat.

When I got home I forgot it was there and didn’t take it out until coming home with Henry later in the afternoon with the handlebars resting not too far from his head in his car seat. I told him he could help Grandpa cut the grass and he was eager. Grandpa came out the door as I took it from the trunk and seeing the sign asked, “Where did you get that for free? These sell for $75.” The neighbor, Mr. Mooney was out, and he said, “I might have to get one of those.” I wasn’t totally sure if they were kidding me or not as Henry and I attempted to push the thing. We weren’t doing so good. Donny got behind the bars and made a visible path, like shoveling through the snow. Then it started to rain and we left the poor old girl there in the grass. Tomorrow I’ll find her a home in the garage.

I never did tell him I got my push mower on Haskell Street.

Tellers of Time

2010-09-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

Went to a church festival yesterday. Any of you do that? Or remember them? Raffles, games of chance, bake sales, a familiar face or two from the past? I bought an Oliver Towne book circa 1958 for me and six books for Henry (most on fish – “Finding Nemo” instilled an avid interest); small yellow and orange rooster salt and pepper shakers; a choir boy figurine, and a necklace. At $2.00, the vintage necklace was the most expensive item. My mom was with me. She bought a paperback or two and a glass shoe for her shoe collection.

We bid on a few items at the silent auction, with numbers 13 and 14. I bought her the taco dinner because her birthday’s this week. Father walked through, smiling; the deacon cut in front of me in the taco line; the one old friend I ran into waited a few people behind me and the woman between us joined in our conversation.

Here in St. Paul, there are fall festivals (at least two at a time) every weekend for six weeks or so. It’s a very Catholic city and most, but not all, are hosted by Catholic churches. There was a full-page spread on them in the paper last week. My sister-in-law said she was disappointed she’d miss the one associated with her grade school, because she could give the kids money to go play the games and just stand and talk to one old friend after another.

The Saturday night crowd that Mom and I encountered last night is not what the Sunday crowd will be today and the crowd today will not be what it was a few years ago, at least not at my inner-city parish where music played in an almost deserted parking lot, few took advantage of the brats and beer, and cop cars dotted the curbs. The last newsletter bore testimony to the change with a picture on the front that challenged readers to guess what year it was taken. One of those giant bubbles where kids jump amongst colored balls was in the parking lot and it teamed with people. Mainly by the hairstyles of the women I’d guess it was from the 70’s. I’m at that age when that doesn’t seem all that long ago.

It was a beautiful night with a half a moon wavering in the cloudy sky and it got me reminiscing about changes. A few years ago I was all for such things ending. Okay, it wasn’t a few years ago, it was in the 80’s when I felt overly involved in festivals at my husband’s church and thought to myself that all of us volunteering would be better off to just give money.

But you become aware, through such events, of the changes in atmosphere and culture and climate that you can miss much more easily without them. It’s not all dismal. There’s a sweetness to the pie booth with only four pretty sad looking pies set out, and the garage-sale nature of the stuffed animals awaiting kids, and the memories of the desire to win the bike or the doll being raffled and the way the impressions of your youth stay with you.

Likewise in church, the nature of the sermons change. A week or so ago I wondered what I was missing in the news when Father spoke of how communion is the right of everyone. I wondered what ornery cleric was refusing communion to a politician known to be pro-abortion, or to obvious gays.

And likewise in books.

The Oliver Towne book, a collection of the stories written in the “Oliver Towne” column of the St. Paul Dispatch between 1954 and 1958 feels familiar even though I’ve only seen the yellowed copies stuck in the photo albums and cook books (where all clippings seem to eventually end up) of mothers and grandmothers around town. I opened to a page where Oliver cleared up the mystery of my side of town, know as the West Side, being not west but south, and how it came to be called that because of old steamboat captains for whom, he said, there were only two directions – the west bank and the east bank – of a river.

So there you are, living on a side of town called “west” all your life, only giving it a little thought when an occasional visitor from Minneapolis asks “What’s “west” about it?” and then you find out that it was steamboat captains who were the source of this name that is a lie to us (directionally speaking) and a truth to them.

It is strange and pertinent to me this morning where you can find tellers of the times and the truth, and how even the truth, given your view of it, and your language, and the way you interact with it…changes.

Small puddles and Big characters

2010-09-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

These are the only photos I've taken recently that made me think of the beautiful in the ugly (besides the dozens I've posted of the freeway fence). I was just going to do the one, but Alec is famous for his "people" photography and so, in that spirit, you also get this one of me, taken on a cool day in the cabin in my hoodie.

My favorite photographer, Alec Soth, was on the front page of the paper Sunday. Not the "Sunday Life" section that is devoted to books, music, art and entertainment, but the Front Page. I guess he’s now the most sought after American photographer, the equivalent, the article said, to “an art rock star.” I was beaming with pride over having discovered him before he was all the rage, and felt as if I knew him when. His studio is just a bit up from where we had our coffee shop, and…gosh…it must be five years ago now when I wanted to use one of his photographs in a presentation I was giving and actually exchanged e-mails with him. He was so gracious.

I felt such a thrill of discovery and delight to find him in the first place and then again to see him on my front page. And that’s before I read the article, which reminded me of what drew me to him in the first place, which was a previous article and the words he spoke as much as his art.

I wasn’t having the greatest day when I found this article. I’ve been feeling so stuck in a puddle and as if I want to be swimming in a bigger pond. Actually, I seem to go back and forth – looking at the small things in my own back yard as if they are amazingly beautiful and significant – and then pining over feeling fenced in. In other words, it’s not all about the broader picture, but sometimes capturing the small picture, like the small truths, takes you toward bigger stories and finds you wanting to spread your wings.

And then you read about a guy you feel you kind of know.

I saw him give a talk at the Walker Art Center about five years ago, and he set my whole vision of how I wanted to give talks in a new direction because I’d seen something that excited me. I’d seen this way that you get out of “teaching” by simply talking about your process, which for me, with him, was like listening to somebody tell what it was like to climb the mountain from his own experience. I was so utterly fascinated and inspired!

Here’s two of the things I remember from that previous encounter with him. He talked about finding “the beauty in ugliness” and about “the isolation we’re sharing.” Can’t you just see why I’d love him?

What he says in this article about photography itself (which seemed to have little to do with the previous article I read or the talk he gave), was again speaking to me.

“Photography is the opposite of living in the moment. It’s trying to preserve, capture a moment. The act of doing it can be like that, but there’s something desperate about wanting to hold it, and there’s something about being in the world but out of it simultaneously. It’s a big psychological disorder. If I’m good at it, it’s because I can really sink my teeth into that disorder. It suits my character.”

Then he says, “But I’m not proud of that – I’d much rather be a yoga master.”

It’s kind of a joke, but I felt as if I “got” it. Most of the creative stuff I do feels like a psychological disorder. I got (at least in my own way) everything he was saying, and that’s one of the best experiences of life to a person of my character.

A final quote that also resonates with me is this: “I’m interested in weaving an arc – giving things shape and meaning and making connections. Giving people a place to imagine things.”

Oh, yes, yes. What a lovely man. How glad I am to live in that same world…because I do, I really do. In our own small-puddle ways, don’t we all?

St. Paul Pioneer Press, “Art Sensation,” Amy Carlson Gustafson, 10A, 9-12-2010.

New Videos and Small Truths

2010-09-06T05:41:00.000-07:00

I really like this Minnesota writer Kevin Kling. His was one of the websites I looked at before developing mine (for The Given Self, www.thegivenself.com). His is kind of whimsical and silly, like he is (in a profound way) and that’s terribly difficult if not impossible to achieve in your work if you’ve got a serious bent (as I do), and just as hard to achieve in a website if it’s not there in your work.

Anyway, he moved from writing, to being on Minnesota Public Radio, to participating in an off-beat theatre venture that goes on here every summer called “The Fringe Festival.”

There’s a way certain people can be a little like “secret mentors” to you, and he’s one of mine. Him and Steve Almond have got that silly obsessiveness that I find profound. Others of my secret mentors are merely profound.

When I saw an article about Kling recently I felt hopeful that doing photography and video might make me a little more playful, and I experimented a little with playfulness here. I call it having some serious fun. (It’s the best I can do for now.)

(Click on the underlined word to go to the video.)

A few weeks ago, Dominic Papatola, who writes a “culture” column I also like reading, reviewed Kling’s Fringe performance:

“It’s difficult not to bifurcate Kling’s work along the fault line of the 2001 motorcycle accident that nearly cost him his life. His pre-crash stories were personal in the sense that they were first-person accounts, but they also spoke to the more universal foibles of Minnesotans and of humanity. After the accident, Kling’s work took a more contemplative and introspective turn, as he delved into realms of spirituality, able-bodiness and the natural world.

Both bodies of work were well-written and well-told, but they sometimes seemed to be the efforts of two different artists. …

Five years ago, he was talking about the difference between the disabilities one is born with and the disabilities acquired on a life journey. In this show, Kling observes that, “some gifts we’re born with; others we find during our life.”

Papatola concludes: “And though Kling retains that essential piece of the kid’s goofy giddiness that propels many of his stories, he’s rediscovered a way to embrace the ambiguities of an adult life.”

Well….

Maybe that’s where my challenge has been…with embracing the ambiguities of adult life. I talk of something similar here as “small truths.”

Maybe meeting that challenge is what turns disabilities into gifts and most importantly (probably) lightens your heart…makes you light-hearted and not so serious. There are times I feel that’s the alchemy of the spiritual path…the blessing of a life well lived…and yet, I don’t know.

Since starting this experimentation with video I did a personal movie of Henry’s spring and summer. I could see things in the people I captured that I hadn’t seen before. I began to understand my friend Mary’s fascination with video for seeing the way a person’s heart can speak to you in a look when you’re moving slowly, frame by frame.

The whole gist of why I did the “seriously fun” video was wanting to be honest somehow about what I’d seen in myself as I’ve done these things. I am light and serious and peaceful and confused…and not one of those images is my “true self.” That doesn’t mean I’m being false or that I am incapable of being true. It’s more like viewing a moment-by-moment or at least week-by-week exploration of various encounters with life and the feelings and movement they produce.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, “Kevin Kling does it again,” by Dominic P. Papatola. 9-13-2010, 9A.

Joy

2010-09-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

Fahrenheat, the friendly little heater

The only picture I could find with a glimpse of the cabin's peak

The winter ceiling

Donny put up Styrofoam to seal off the cabin peak yesterday. I stood under him and handed screws. I think it’s made a difference. We were losing heat through the top.

Man, all these things going on are such metaphors. Everything rising to a peak and going through the top.

I can report with joy about sealing off the leak. The energy drain is leaving. I didn’t want to do it. I liked my peak(s). I wanted heat without losing the heights. Now it seems that life is about keeping the heat closer to the ground.

I’ve switched back to the desk today. It fits my body better than the table. I can feel it already. I’m once again gazing out at the Mooney pines. Just a spot of rooftop keeps the family abode in view. The freeway fence is off to the side, dull anyway this morning without the sun. We slept in and the sun is already high in the sky, the earth standing still.

Donny’s making breakfast. He says, “You’re going out?”

I say, “It’s my morning practice.”

Words are getting put on things never before uttered.

What’s important to you? Heat in the cabin.

It has begun. The Fahrenheat’s days are numbered. Next there will be a furnace. I have declared myself. This is what’s important to me. I am claiming my life.

Joy. Joy.

Pumped up

2010-09-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

Oh hell, who cares about anything else? I’m inspired again this morning! Oh, the long dearth through which I’ve sat so impatiently. I’m already feeling it in the kitchen, as I begin making pancakes, see there isn’t any milk, and then chuckle about why I’d be making pancakes anyway on a day when no one’s around. Next I’m eyeing the paper and start reading it. I don’t have to rush to get my time because, as far as I know, there will not be anyone home ALL DAY. Then I read about the Twin’s latest win that came from a pitcher making his major league debut. I love debut games. Love debut stories of any kind.

Matt Fox left in the sixth inning after giving up a run-scoring single that tied the game. He was upset and he slammed his glove around.

I still don’t know much about the 27 year-old pitcher – his history or any of that, but I was bowled over by what coach Ron Gardenhire said about him:

“A lot of young guys in their first start would probably sit back and go, ‘Wow, I’m glad I’m out of there.’ But he was frustrated because he gave up that run and that tells you a little bit about his character and that tells you a little bit about his heart.”

Man. How cool it would be to have a coach like that. To have your frustration seen as character and heart. That frustration that comes of really, really wanting to do your personal best.

Mia, bless her heart, is the reason no one’s home. Angie and Henry spent the night at her place last night, and she’s babysitting there, keeping Henry for the day. She was over yesterday to pick some things up in preparation for the weekend stay, and told me she’d been crabby. I said, “Me too.” I said, “I think you get crabby when things aren’t right in your life and you want to set them right.” She didn’t seem too excited about that observation; thinks her life is going along pretty well at the moment. Maybe it’s just me.

But I let Coach Gardenhire pump me up and I’m not going to fret over the need of it today. Don’t we all need to get pumped once in a while?

I can just imagine how this rookie had to get pumped up for his debut game, how he would have that feeling in him of all the preparation he’d done, and of his own readiness, and how he’d feel he wouldn’t know if he was ready until he did the thing, and then how frustrated he’d feel about giving up that run that got him pulled…not because he failed…but because he’d seen what he could do.

This is what I love about baseball and life (sometimes).

St. Paul Pioneer Press, Fill-in gives Twins a lift. Kelsie Smith, 9-4-2010, 5B.

Book group

2010-08-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

Last night I was a guest at my sister’s book group. They read The Given Self. “They” were her friends from high school. I had memories of each one of them and, of the six gathered – Mary Pat, Char, Chris, Barb, Maureen and Janie – five of them had siblings who were friends of mine: a brother who’d car pooled to the U of M with me, a sister who was my first friend (they lived two-doors up), a brother who was in the same school from 5th through 10th grade, a sister who was a best friend for a year or two, and another who I hung out with in the 7th-8th grade years. The one who knew me least (not having a sibling who gave us a little more knowledge of each other), asked for a little of my history and that of the books I speak so much about within The Given Self.

Because of who they were, I began this history from when I was a teen, talking about how much things changed between when they were teens and when I was. I spoke of the difference in the spacing of our family. My two older brothers are ten and twelve years older than me, my sister Susan five years older, and my younger brother eight years younger. I told of how I admired my hippie brother who was graduating from college in the pivotal 1968 while I was graduating from grade school, and how I watched my sister go to a dozen proms, thinking I’d have the same fairytale-like experience. And then how I didn’t have either.

I do think it made a difference. Seeing the whole changing of the culture play out in my brother’s life and my sister sort of missing it and living the version of the teenage years you see on TV. I felt my draws to both but didn’t really want to admit that things like proms held any attraction. I openly coveted my brother’s experience and secretly could have gone in for a little more of my sister’s.

As far as I know, they were all “good girls.” My sister was up for homecoming queen and Janie won the title. You get my drift.

So there I am, the little sister sitting in on the gathering of the big sisters, separated by five years, but feeling pretty comfortable. In a certain sense, having your story “out there” gives you the freedom of not trying to hide anything.

So I spoke of how, by the time I was a teen, dating wasn’t much in style. The free love of the sixties had caught on but the meaning factor separated my brother and his generation from mine, and the innocence factor my sister and me. I spoke of being a rebel in the sense of always wanting to escape expectations and being somewhat adamant about not wanting to fit in.

Later in the evening my sister said, “I don’t know if this book was written for us.”

One of her friends lightly told me, “This is the way we talk,” as they discussed ailments, jobs, lawn-cutting, pets, parents, children and grandchildren. I believe I made a few disparaging remarks about this sort of conversation in the book, but I asked after my old friends and was interested in the details. It was sincere and pleasant conversation and some of the best of it came before we sat down to “discuss the book” as always seems to happen.

One of the women said, “Everything happens for a reason,” and later in the evening I brought that up and said, “Sometimes I feel as if my rebellious nature is my nature for a reason.”

Another of the women said she thought my husband and me were brave to live an alternative kind of life. One nodded her head at certain sentiments as if she shared them. You get a sense sometimes that more could be said but that the “more” is held in check by the group.

Maureen actually told a hilarious story about sitting on an airplane where the most horrid noise was scaring all those in her section and how none of them said anything. “I was thinking,” she said, “that if the plane went down, I was going to be sorry.” She’s a nurse, and went on to speak of the training they get – so often someone, she said, is uneasy or fears a mistake is being made and doesn’t say anything. I knew she “got” the underlying theme (of sorts), the one that’s about stopping with the reticence we have about saying what we really want to say (and living the way we want to live). Giving ourselves that freedom.

When I left, I felt as if the others might be happy to get back to the comfortable conversation.

This was all okay. I didn’t fret over any of it for a minute – not before or after.

The friendship among them was evident. They’ll be there for each other. And the book wasn’t written for them as far as I know. But you never really know, do you?

2010-08-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

Walked out to the cabin in the dark tonight. Haven’t been out nearly as much in the evening dark as the morning dark and tonight it was really really dark. Last night, or maybe two nights ago there was full moon and it’s still out there. I can see it from the cabin window. The trees canopy the path pretty good though and the tree tops shield the moon.

With my new video craze I was out taking pictures of the moon the other night – about half to capture the moon and half to record the sound of the crickets. They almost overtake the noise of the freeway. I had to walk out into the thick undergrowth to find a break in the trees where I could find the moon with the camera’s lens. Then, as I was recording, clouds went over the moon and swirled like mist and blurred the round edges and covered her over and then moved on so that she popped back out again. I was so excited – thought I’d really caught something magnificent, but then, being the amateur that I am – I couldn’t focus in on the moon and it looked like a golf ball sitting on a black tarp.

Despite the moon tonight, there’s a different quality to the darkness. I know the path out here like I know Henry’s got his mother’s neck, the neck that used to make me almost weep when she was a little girl – this skinny little neck so fine and fragile. Still, there was a shape at my feet that I paused over as I walked around it…just a dark shape. There wasn’t enough illumination to define the edges of anything. It was a swampy mess of darkness.

There was the place where the tree branches hang low and I walked automatically around that, but still it was odd. Odd when the place you know so well feels suddenly unknown.

I could use the yard light, but I don’t.

What are you afraid of?

2010-08-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

I posted two new videos today.

The first is short and different (and different for more reasons than being short!). It's of the "shadow" pictures I've been writing of taking lately. I swear, when I'm feeling rattled, I've been opening this file of "shadows" and doing a slide show. There's something so quieting about them. So that's basically what this is: a slide show called "Light and Shadow."

A new "Hello from the Cabin" (number 8 believe it or not) caused me to want to write a note about the strange segue at the end. I go from talking about taking a year off from “outside help” to talking about reading Melody Beattie on codependency. There was a reason that Melody followed on the “year off” idea that I didn’t say! In talking of care giving, she said that if you’ve been a caregiver for a while you might want to take a year off from giving. That idea felt really good to me and that’s the connection that I didn’t make as I ended the video.

It’s a connection I’m finding hard to make in life too!

Honestly, you could say my whole problem in my family boils down to an inability to say no.

People ask me, “What are you afraid of?” I don’t feel that I’m afraid of anything. Then I might say I don’t want to disappoint the person asking, so I guess you could say I’m afraid of disappointing. I’ve been a mother since I was 18 and meted out a lot of disappointment in those years. I never liked it. It always seemed like life was disappointing enough. Your kid waits all year for the field trip to Valley Fair and then it rains. Or they don’t get invited to the birthday party. Or they’re not as pretty or smart as they’d like to be. Whatever!

But it's more than that because sometimes I really want to say no, and I don't care if my "no" disappoints anyone, and I still don't say it. I guess it’s become such a habit to say “yes” that I’m challenged to break it. You think such things should be easy and can really get to worrying over your psychological health when they aren't.

But a few days ago I told Mia I’d rather not host the party and she invited me to the bar with her and her girlfriends, so I’m getting somewhere slowly, and even giving my adult "kids" a little more room to be understanding. Whew! That feels good.

I can do it

2010-08-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

Henry is into do-it-yourself projects.

I bought him a ball of twine at a garage sale. It was .10. I have not seen a ball of twine anywhere else – not that I’ve looked (and where would they be? – a hardware or craft store?) and have no idea what they might cost (1.95? 2.95)? I only knew as I bought it that he’s been into rope since his grandpa let him bring in a rope from the garage and would likely enjoy the twine.

Henry immediately set about to throw the ball as a way of unraveling it, so I see that a little instruction is necessary and start by holding the ball while he walks with it, then “Can you walk to the tree?”

Once he got to the tree it was a done deal. He can’t tie yet, but he knows if he wraps the twine around the tree enough times it will stay. Then coming back, I had to suggest the cabin doorknob for a second tying place. From there we were off and running, making things open and close. When grandpa got home he quickly threw more twine over a tree branch to make a pulley and left again. Donny and I both thought Henry would play contentedly with the pulley for hours. But Henry says, “I can do that Umma,” and spends the next hour not playing with the pulley, but trying to do what he’d seen grandpa do – throw the twine over high tree limbs.

Then he asks, “Umma, can I get the rope out of the tool drawer in your desk?” I’m surprised he knows I have one and don’t remember him exploring it or a rope being inside. I go look. It’s a synch – one of those rubbery tools with heavy ends that hook, the kind you use to hold down the trunk of your car when you’re carrying something that doesn’t fit. With instruction in how to use it, he takes off by himself, leaving the woods and climbing the swing set to work on the little tree-house-like portion that sits atop the slide, throwing the “rope” over something more manageable than high tree limbs.

I’m worried about him hitting himself in the head so I intervene once again and we end up synching onto the top piece of lumber and using the line to climb the slide and then to repel. By the time the rest of the family is home and he proudly wants to show off this new feat, he’s too excited (or maybe tired) to do it the way he’d already done it a dozen times, but he’s still proud of himself.

He’s in Montessori school and the motto on the door says to never do something for a child that he thinks he is capable of doing himself. Within the limits of preventing injury, you encourage the “I can do it.”

It got me wondering about myself and the things I run away from. The feeling of “I can’t do it,” or “I can’t say that.” Henry does it too. He gets frustrated with one thing and moves on to the next. He’ll return to the one he got frustrated with when his skill set (or his size) is a little bigger. He can do more when he’s fresh than when he’s tired. I don’t judge it. He doesn’t judge it.

Being off

2010-08-16T20:05:00.000-07:00

Can you tell…any of you who’ve been reading this blog a while, that I’m a little “off”? I don’t even know what I mean by that. Maybe it’s the video. Moving into a new way of expression.

What makes you do that kind of thing?

I had a friend try something new and then tell me she felt foolish after and I thought, “It must be universal.” There’s a glow from it at first…from whatever the initial creative impulse was, and then that fades, and then you feel foolish. The nice thing about hearing something like that from a friend, is you quit feeling like it’s a big deal. You remember, “Oh yeah, this is the way it is. This is the way it is when you take a risk.”

There always seems to be that element of risk taking in “putting yourself out there.” It’s the kind of thing you feel when you have a conversation and wonder afterwards if you “said too much.”

When you put something “out there” over time, like you do with a blog, you get more used to it, but then, every once in a while, you realize that, over time, you’re telling a story and you wonder what it’s about, what it says about you. And you wonder if people can tell when you’re “off.” Or maybe they just get bored.

But I’ve realized that if I thought about it as I was doing it, I’d likely never do anything, and if I did, I’d never say anything real. I’d censor too much. I’d always be thinking, “I can’t say that!”

And I realize that when I tie myself to a schedule I get something like writer’s block. I know that no one else cares about my self-imposed schedule. It’s one of those things that become a figment of your own imagination. So “my plan” to do video on Sunday’s is now defunct. I feel better already.

On our own two feet

2010-08-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

On my way to the cabin

As I was walking out to the cabin this morning, the coffee pot in one hand, my coffee cup in the other, and my camera bag slug over my arm, I thought, ‘The reason women need purses is that we’ve always got two hands full.’ It seems sometimes as if men travel lighter through life, but then again it just cracks me up that I’ve got to make two trips most days, just to sit for an hour or so. Last night I left my laptop here, so today I didn’t have to make two trips. But then, as soon as I got here, I had to go to the bathroom.

I’ve just started bringing the coffee pot and have been thinking about getting a coffee maker. But then I’d have to bring water. I could get a dorm-sized refrigerator, but I’ve less need for cold drinks. I’d like a more comfortable place to sit, but then, with any of those things, I feel as if I’d lose the charm or the simplicity. Walking back to the house isn’t a big deal, it’s just that, other than for in the early morning, I know I can get stuck there. If Henry wants to see me, if a meal is being made, if I notice something that needs doing…I feel that conflict between coming back out and staying inside.

I had another one of those mornings when I woke up early, about 4:30, and thought how lovely it would be to get up and have a little more time out here in the dark. But I stayed until I realized my cell phone wasn’t on the table next to my bed. I didn’t get up long before its alarm would go off, or get out here much sooner.

The cabin door creaks like one of those in a scary movie and Simeon just came in and creaked it as he came.

The sky is white and the ground dark back here at nearly 6:30, but when I look out toward the yard the day is evident, the stucco of the house visible, the tall yellow galardia a spot of color in the green.

I’m slowly realizing people won’t change until they’re ready. You’ve got to feel the pain of being disorganized enough times before you’ll get organized. You’ve got to feel the pain of the sedentary life before you get moving.

I’ll walk today. It’s Saturday. I take Henry (and Sam) on an adventure early on Saturday mornings. We go to the neighborhood park and walk the trails. So far Henry’s not keen on the mud but he knows mornings are wet and that the ground will dry. I ask him how it will dry and he says “From the sun.” That thrills me. He wants me to carry him over the muddy places and I tell him that explorers have to stand on their own two feet. When his grandpa came with us one morning he whined about being carried practically the whole time…when it’s just him and me he doesn’t keep that up.

Donny feels like he is here to meet the needs of his family. That’s been a pretty tough job and he’s getting worn out. Men have their burdens too.

But we’re all on an adventure and have to stand on our own two feet. That’s what I’m discovering anyway.

Fluttering movement

2010-08-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

The sun coming in my window

Now this morning, it’s truly beautiful. It’s been so hot that it stinks outside like things rotting. I can hardly sit out here for the heat and humidity. I’ve had the fan going for a week or so, and sat here anyway…sweating. But in the mornings it’s still lovely and today the sun has been slowly rising, climbing the rectangle of my window, casting her lovely shadows. I take pictures and feel better. Like I feel better as soon as I walk out the door.

I wrote a whole thing last night on expectations – the expectations I feel are made of me in certain relationships – all of them of the type that I’m supposed to accept things no one else in their right mind would accept…because I’m a mother, daughter, sister, or wife. It’s one of those things when you look at it that is so ridiculous that you want to either laugh or cry – or both really.

Yet there’s some movement. Yes, there’s movement going on and I’m grateful for it. Awareness brings movement. I don’t know where it’s taking me but I feel a sense of being guided in how to be with it, to move with it, to find my contentment with what I have and to be grateful. And to accept some changes too, damn it!

The shadows are alive with movement. All is a flutter.

Friends of Dan Odegard

2010-08-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

I attended the “Friends of Dan Odegard” event last night. The thing Dan said that I took away was that he liked helping people do what they’re good at. Isn’t that a great thing to be able to say? Isn’t that a tremendous recognition?

And he’s been reading memoirs about cancer and says how each one of them says the cancer was a blessing. He feels the same way.

Everything else melts away in such times…and I don’t only mean times of life threatening illness…. I mean any of those times in which you surrender and find grace.

Small Change

2010-08-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Trees hung with last night's rain

It’s Sunday morning and now that I’ve got a little library of videos, I’ll likely settle in to doing them on my Sunday mornings. I have no idea if this is a good idea or not, but I kind of wanted to get the big “video announcement” off of here, and so thought maybe on Sunday’s, I’d just share something that relates to the day’s video.

I think I look and sound kind of tired in the one I did today. It made me wonder if it was good enough to post, (no – it made me wonder – did I want to post it!) and then I thought, heck, we all look and sound tired once in a while. I’m not going to try to get into looking good! If I did that I’d be sunk. But sounding tired is probably worse than looking tired. You might get bored. The words to go with thoughts weren’t exactly coming at the speed of light.

Today’s video is about ideas and inspiration (oddly enough), but it’s also about process. I have to consider where I’ve got time to sit and do a video and Sunday mornings are the most consistent. So what happens when I come out on a Sunday morning and I’m uninspired?

Here's where you can find it on You Tube

Today I looked out the window at the rain from last night that still hung on the leafs outside, and that lead to one thing and another and pretty soon I knew what I wanted to talk about.

I used to have this Zen saying on my wall. It came from a calendar Mary gave me. It said, “When you know one thing through and through you know everything.” You get those kind of catchy things that come from an idea like that once in a while. There’s the one about “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” and there’s one about “everything I need to know I learned from my cat.” They’re usually pretty good too. I’ve felt at times that I’ve learned “everything I need to know from A Course of Love,” and lately I’ve been feeling as if I could discover everything I need to know from my cabin.

Getting this new camera and taking pictures has been a big part of it. I’ve got a whole series now of light and shade. Doing video, I’m more aware experientially of how things change, especially that light…but also my own mood. One day it was so hot. I still have the fan out here, and I’ve never in any summer for the last five years needed a fan. And I was in a mood. I got to imagining doing a video about moods and then the next day the heat broke and the whole thing lost its impetus.

I’ve been so aware, for so long, of big change and, I’ve become aware lately, of small change.

Charmed

2010-08-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

The St. Paul Pioneer Press prints “Weatherguide facts” every day. They’re provided by the Freshwater Society. Today’s sounded so beautiful to my ears that I wanted to share it with my friend living in Vietnam. When I think I know heat and humidity I often think of him and the appreciation he feels every time I write of what’s growing in the garden or the coolness of the woods. I don’t try to describe it very often because I can’t. I can’t find the words for the feel of the cool air on my skin or the musty wood-smoke smell. I often don’t know the names for what grows around me. I used to save the calendar the Freshwater Society puts out to aide me in my descriptions of the times of year in Minnesota. Maybe you’ll see why. Maybe you’ll find this about as boring as reading a box-top.

“In southern Minnesota, much of the field corn is being pollinated, small grains are ripe or ripening and the harvest of sweet corn is underway.

Gladiolus is blooming in gardens across the Twin Cities. Up north, evening primrose and pearly everlasting are blooming along roadsides.”

In my yard, the fruit trees are hung with plums, pears and apples.

The heat wave has broken for a two day let-up. The dew point has fallen. Here’s a statistic for you: We have had 108 hours of dew points at 70 or more this summer compared to only 17 hours all of last year.

So we’ve been out in the yard again. Henry wondered the other day where the morning glories went and now is fascinated that they open and close.

Life feels charmed on such days.

Cabin Videos

2010-08-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

I talk kind of wistfully in the first "cabin video" about the loss of my grapevines to Donny's fruit trees. So I thought it only fair to put up a picture of his apples.

I’ve been working on these cabin videos. I’ve done three. So far I’ve only been able to get one to post to The Given Self website: http://www.thegivenself.com. That’s what I’ve been doing rather than writing. They’re almost like video blogs but they’re too big to post here. I can’t write short, and I guess I can’t talk short either. I start out feeling as if I’ve got nothing much to say and then this whole stream pours out of me once I get going.

There’s a woodpecker tapping on the side of the cabin. Henry calls them peckerwoods.

This break from the usual to work on video has been a strangely happy time. Doing something new is so engrossing. When I did the first two last weekend, I was so focused, in a creative way, that there was stillness everywhere else. Then when I finished them and saw myself looking relaxed and happy, I felt as if I’d accidentally captured “me” – I mean the real me, the person who I feel myself to be. It was so weird. It was so…inspiring!

Maybe that sounds narcissistic or something but I mean really…when do you ever “see yourself”? How many “family entertainment” videos have you been in that make you cringe and vow to run each time a camera ever gets turned on you? You never again want to be put through watching yourself scowling as you give a feeble wave when someone tells you to say hello into the camera, or even worse to see yourself eating or even standing around looking bored.

After I got that excited, happy, “Holy cow how did that happen” feeling of “seeing myself”… I felt as if I could never do it again. It was just a happy accident that I got what I did. And yet it suddenly felt like a standard. The whole zone of that experimental feeling of doing something new left me as soon as I got to thinking about how I could do more videos that were like the first two.

I find that really profound and confounding – how in doing something “new” there is this pure creative energy, and how trying to “do it again” causes that same energy to fly the coop. It’s one of those things you know happens, and yet when you experience it happening it always surprises you.

I had to wait for that energy to wing back before I could go for a third. But it did. It came and lighted softly. I’m truly amazed. If I’ve used that word (amazed) sixteen times, I apologize, but there it is. I am amazed.

Here’s the deal with what I set out to do. There was a little bit of that “should” feeling in it.

“What’s the next step?” Oh. Video.

Then I had this weekend open up in which I had time. I wondered if I could “do it myself” and just wanted to see if I could. I’m not very technical but I figured if I needed to wait for someone to help me I’d not ever do much of anything with it. I never expected it to be fun, but it was a gas.

All I’ve got up so far is the one introductory video. I tried doing a short one for posting here but I kept running over by about 30 seconds. Then after I’d done it five times trying to shorten it, it lost some of its spontaneity and appeal. So that’s the state of affairs at the moment.

Each video somehow turned out more like Course of Love videos than I intended – or I guess I should say I really didn’t intend anything. I just had this thought of doing “cabin videos” and the natural starting point seemed to be telling the story of how I got the cabin, and that…and then it seemed everything else I had to say…did relate to A Course of Love in one way or another.

That’s just the way it is and I’m not going to fight it. I’ll probably end up posting them to the Course of Love site once I get it all figured out. For now, this is simply the way it happened.

In a certain light

2010-08-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

Shadows on the infamous freeway fence.

I had some friends from Colorado out here a month or so ago. I’d never taken pictures of people who visited me in the cabin and I thought, “It’s time.” But it was 1:00 in the afternoon. I don’t know if that’s the reason – but the pictures felt like they could have been taken in a hotel room. In those photos, the cabin didn’t have a touch of the wonder you can feel when there’s shadows, or that kind of light you can’t create or fabricate.

In a certain light, even the freeway fence looks beautiful.

Friends of Dan Odegard

2010-07-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

In September, 2000, in his introduction to A Course of Love, Dan Odegard wrote: "Through your reading of this text, you are invited to become what you have always been, and the longing you have felt your whole life will find its fulfillment."

"We are called to remember the reality of our selves. ... The truth is not relative nor contingent nor arbitrary. It is absolute -- and it is yours. The relief is that the time for seeking is over. The time is now."

Dan is ailing. I received notice of it a few weeks ago (and have posted it below.)

I haven't seen Dan in a number of years and the last time I heard about him through a mutual friend, that friend and I had a disagreement. Those of you who read this blog know me, so I might as well be frank. My association with Dan was intense and confusing and I still make no claims to having sorted it all out.

As I sat with this news...Dan has plasma cancer, I didn't know quite how to respond.

We've all got people in our lives with whom we have relationships that are awkward. We maybe had a strong connection in the past but don't know quite where we fit within their lives in current time. Would our presence be welcome? Is it appropriate? What do we do with our concern? How do we forget our selves and respond to the other's need? Or should we even try? What is our heart telling us?

When I have such questions, I write. I hope those of you who know Dan, and those of you who know of him through your association with A Course of Love, might not mind me sharing my memories in this awkward way. It gives me something "to do" in a time when I don't know what to do, and maybe it will call you to share in some way as well.

My first thought on hearing the news was, “I don’t have the rest of my life to heal this.” My empathy for Dan's suffering, and the memories of my relationship with him stayed with me. For days my thoughts laid heavily against my feelings of something in need of healing besides his health, and yet they also stood in relief against that very issue. Less than a week later, when he wasn’t on my mind at all, this thought bopped into my head that said, “If you went to Dan and talked of healing, he’d ask, “Of what?”” I laughed and the whole thing eased.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing about human frailty and later the thoughts that spurred that writing came in and applied themselves to Dan and me. Yes, we were both flawed and fragile and what had grown out of our frailty was okay. No cause for angst. I sent him a note of concern and felt as if I needed to do nothing else. But the thought of him stayed with me and reminded me of his niceness and my chafing against it until I felt as if I had to put some of it to paper if nothing else.

Another thought cropped in still later about how he’s been one of those people “bigger than life.” One of those people you always expect to be around. One of those whom you’ve been aware of for so long that you have the feeling as if they’ll always be there. His “bigness” was, for me, firmly attached to his influence on my writing life: first as agent, then as publisher, then as colleague. Each of these relationships were hung with the weightiness of thick drapes over a window.

An additional aspect of the bigness came of him being the Odegard name behind Odegard Books, which, if you were an aspiring writer in the Twin Cities a few decades ago, was a name kind of like Johnny Carson was back then. “Odegard’s” was the high point of literary book events; not a book store, but a lightening rod and an attractor and an event. There was something dignified and substantial about it. It held up its end of Grand Avenue and Hungry Mind held up the other like two citadels that would keep out the riffraff.

I didn’t know Dan then; only knew of him. I read about the demise of Odegard Books as it was eulogized by Mary Ann Grossmann, book editor at the Pioneer Press newspaper. This wasn’t a business closing but more like a part of St. Paul fading away and taking something significant along with it.

Not long afterwards I saw mention in her column that Dan was making the move to being a literary agent and inviting manuscripts. I had one. That’s how we met: over coffee, at a Grand Avenue coffee shop. I’d written my first mystery and had dreams of being the next Sue Grafton. Dan Odegard finding my manuscript to be good enough to represent made it feel, in my mind, like a done deal. This happened just before my fortieth birthday and I celebrated it with the feeling that I was on my way to being a published writer.

Before anything had come of that arrangement I saw another book page announcement that Dan was being named publisher at Hazelden. I was devastated until a spiritual experience got me writing in a new direction and there he was, ready to take me on again. The Grace Trilogy was published in 1997, which was about the peak year for spiritual books, but these books I’d written with my friends, Mary Love and Julieanne Carver were a departure for Hazelden. They didn’t have much to do with recovery unless you looked at recovery really broadly, which Dan did. He was that kind of forward thinker and it didn’t always bring him success.

Another shift in the winds of the times left Dan unemployed and me bemoaning the state of affairs that had left my first published writing, and me, languishing. We got to e-mailing and meeting from that vulnerable place. For many reasons, both of us were brokenhearted. We were each other’s confidants; holders of each other’s secrets; intimate in that way such dreams and longings unfulfilled bring about.

Then a course of love came into that void we both were feeling. It was inspired writing, the kind that made me feel doubly vulnerable. I didn’t know a great many people who believed in such writings but I was certain, in a rather innocent (or naïve) way, that what I was receiving was significant. I shared it with Dan. He agreed.

We fell into a partnership of the sort we couldn’t define, and when the time came that we were forced by practical matters to define it, we stumbled. We were both earnestly serious regarding what we were about, and yet our ways of experiencing what that was diverged. I was a mess, feeling overwhelmed and too sensitive to live. He moved into his natural role of taking charge. He had my intense gratitude for doing that for a long while…but that gratitude eventually gave way to a time when I had to let go of his hand.

I was likely obnoxious and scattered in my confusion. He appeared so certain that he frustrated me. Where was my friend with the bleeding heart and an inner turmoil that matched my own? His dedication ran toward being the stabilizing anchor, mine toward a quest for freedom from all anchors.

And so we parted ways only to be, much later, the friends we are today – friends who carry the ties of a significant past – each in our own ways.

Which left me pondering the simple note I’d sent with the feeling that it was enough. Maybe it wasn’t. In one moment our connection got blown up into a furor. There we were – two names that would be forever tied together. At another, we seemed blessedly distanced like the ex-partners, spouses, or estranged siblings still regarded with concern and love and yet better left in that place occupied by the ex.

There ought to be a name for it more dignified than ex. Ex-wives and husbands share children for crying out loud. It’s not exactly a thing that goes away. There’s historical meaning to certain pairings that are often least recognized by the “pair” or seen so inaccurately by their closeness that someone with more distance has to shed the light on what occurred.

It seems almost as if the more import and influence a relationship has, the more complex and many-layered it becomes. Then at some point, those same relationships become simple, and that point often comes when there's a time of essential need.

The simple story is that Dan and I came together at critical junctures in my life, and that from the last of these, A Course of Love – a work that I firmly believe will outlive both of us – came to be. I at least imagine Dan feeling his contribution to it to be among the most profound of his life. I’d bet A Course of Love stands with the other great loves of his life, its content a solace to his longing, and providing a unifying connection to all that joins this life of physicality with that in which it rests.

I could see, finally, that our coming together was no more holy than our drifting apart. We've both walked our walk into shadows and sun. The dark and the light exist together, prodding us always to stay in touch with both and to return, as often as we need to, to finding ourselves ... and finding each other.

In the sweep of time, all that is significant has a life of its own. That significance touches one life and then another and another. It lives on….

Further quoting Dan's introduction:

"You will become the person you have always known you were and yet that you somehow, ironically, felt distanced from. You will finally and truly remember your self."

That's my wish for Dan, and me, and all of us.

Below is the information that I received and that you may want to have and to respond to. There isn’t much of a structured Course of Love community, but I felt that what there is of one – that those I might be able to reach – might welcome this opportunity to remember Dan. Some of you have spoken or corresponded with him or, back in the early days, participated in groups that he facilitated. He may have touched your life as he did mine.

The Notice from Friends of Dan:

Life is full of surprises. One of those surprises came on January 25th when our friend, Dan Odegard, was living life trying to figure out how to deal with the new economy after the elimination of his job and loss of health insurance. A week later he was trying to figure out how to deal with multiple myeloma (plasma cancer), which has led to bone erosion and fractures and to kidney failure.

Dan's love of literature and strong ties to St. Paul have guided us, the Friends of Dan, in planning an event in his honor to help offset the unexpected and significant costs of dealing with his disease. With special literary and musical guests, we invite you to an evening of celebration:

August 10, 2010 at the Landmark Center, St. Paul
6:30 p.m. (social hour & silent auction)
8:00 p.m. (program)
tickets $25*

Dan is a friend of many, it would be an honor to have you join us, so please save this date on your calendar. If you would like to find out how you can help further, please read the attached donation letter and form. We are looking for both financial support and silent auction contributions to make this evening a success.

Please forward this save the date to whomever you think would be interested. We will send a formal "e-vite" as the date approaches.

Sincerely,

The Planning Committee
(please direct specific questions to this email address deanna.ekholm@marquettere.com or by contacting Deanna Ekholm: 612-816-2188)

E-vite:

Ø http://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?inviteId=DRIWXNWFVAMALBUSCKXD&src=email

Something coming

2010-07-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

There aren’t any shadows this morning. None. I’ve become enamored of them since taking pictures of the cabin shadows a week or so ago, and have been capturing more and more of them. One day I was really upset about some I lost in the transfer process. The thing you realize quickly about shadows is that you’re never going to catch the same ones twice.

I just came in from the cabin. My reason is that Henry is sleeping in and Angie leaving for school. The cats followed me though. Their reason, I suspect, is the weather. There are no shadows because the day is uniformly clouded-over. As I was walking in, the cats still sitting on the chairs outside the cabin, I heard the first roll of thunder. I hadn’t really thought it looked stormy. Just a dull day. Then when the cats followed the thunder I figure there’s something coming.

I think that's the way the shadows make me feel ... that there's something coming, something mysterious, or maybe that there's something already there behind what is usually seen.

It's okay to have a morning with no shadows though.

After the storm

2010-07-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

Dad's mound

Unfuckupable Man

Storm damage

There was a storm last night. It seems as if there’s been one every other night. It’s the big danger with storm “warnings.” The sirens go off three or four times a week or three or four times a night, and you get complacent. You think someone in the house must be paying attention. When I came up from watching TV in the basement, where you don’t know what the hell is going on, the siren sounded for about the third time. I did stop and listen. Then Mia said she was heading home and I told her, “Be careful out there.” She said she’d just tuned in and the storm was moving beyond us.

This morning I walked around checking the yard. As far as I can tell, only one smallish limb fell – not that it wouldn’t have been dangerous if you were standing where it landed. I took a picture of it and, while I was at it, I took a few more. Being able to capture those pictures of the morning shadows yesterday got me really jazzed. Now I’m probably hooked.

I think my photo of Unfuckable Man is going to be really good. He guards the entrance to the woods and looks really different when he’s wet. This morning he’s soaked through. My friend Terry sculpted him and sent him to me, complete with the name. He said he’d just started working on him when he gouged the wood and thought it was ruined. Then this thought he didn’t think popped into his head and it was that the wood was unfuckupable. I got the gift the morning after I’d returned from a presentation on A Course of Love that I thought, kind of in that same way, that I’d “ruined.” I was lying in bed in a mood of regret and feeling sick when Donny came home and carried in this huge package. He said, “Who’d be sending you something from Florida?” He opened it up for me and I read the note. It was one of those laughing and crying at the same time moments.

The other one I took was of Dad’s mound. The summer before dad died, my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway and asked Donny if he’d like the dirt that was getting plowed up. It got put out behind the fence near the cabin and the idea was that I’d shovel it around the area and then maybe plant some seeds. The mound was what was leftover when I got tired of the project.

After dad died, I kept looking out at that mound that looked just about like a recently filled grave and decided it would have to stay. It became Dad’s mound and I plant it with moon flowers (for his love of the moon).

I’m still really lazy about that kind of thing. I added a little fresh black dirt before planting this year, but not enough to really make a difference. The moon flowers were having a pretty rough time of it anyway, and today they’re pretty battered by the storm.

I thought afterwards, “These are all storm pictures” … not just in being taken “after a storm” but by being of those things that come to you in stormy times. You place them and plant them and make them into subjects rather than objects. They have meaning to you and you really, really love them. They also remind you not to get too complacent. Maybe love and complacency just don't go together.

Shadows in and out

2010-07-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

I got to standing outside under the trees in front of the cabin today. I remembered how, when it was getting built, a friend who had a cabin of her own came over and said “The one thing I’d recommend is cutting those trees back before you get going on it. It’s a pain in the neck to have to do it later.” Five years later, well, I mean to tell you, it’s really cool out here. I went in for the camera to get a picture of the shadows on her but the darn thing was out of juice. I plugged the battery in for about two minutes, checked if the shadows were still there, unplugged the battery… thinking, all I need is thirty seconds. The camera turned on, tantalizingly close, and then turned back off.

The shadows were about as perfect as they could get – like a reflection of what I was seeing when I stopped on my way in and looked up – but then again not really. The shadows were like a painting of ivy and tendrils where looking up it’s a mass…so much it blurs together. The shadow…oh, no, only each one distinctly.

The cabin now appears to have been here all along; the woods to have grown up around us. When I look up, the feeling comes for the impossibility it would now be to plop the cabin down where it is. We are surrounded. She is canopied. “They” were here first, but she and I feel as rooted now as everything else.

You could feel, at this time of year, really embraced, or just about choked out. Confined or liberated or both at the same time. I was reading this book review the other day and the writer described the book as inspiring and devastating. It is like that out here, and my soul knows it. And I keep coming back for it.

How you get in a mood to clean a closet

2010-07-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

I have a closet in my dining room. My house really has a lot of great storage space. Today I began to clean out this closet. I don’t know about you, but the closet-space doesn’t seem to help me stay organized.

When we moved into this house fifteen years ago (nearly to the day), we put the liquor bottles on the top shelf. Almost all of them are still there. The girls have complained bitterly about this. “Why do you have them if you’re not going to use them?”

“You don’t,” I have said, “get the concept of a liquor cabinet.”

On the shelf below this are the vases whose number keeps growing. A few more “special” days and I’ll have to throw some away.

On the third shelf are the giant trays that Donny uses when we have a family gathering or he caters someone else’s massive affair.

Here’s where it gets a little dicey because below this are two shelves of “paper work”…in other words, bills and whatnot…and I say dicey because the paper has begun to leak upward onto the tray shelf and downward onto the floor. On the tray shelf there is also a napkin holder that is stuffed with those receipts you save when you pick up a prescription and in another receptacle of some sort (a short tub-like vase?) are address labels. The list could go on and on.

I only just started cleaning and I’m finding stuff there from the coffee shop days. It closed five years ago, but there they still are: ledger sheets and even the cash box where I’d keep extra change.

I really did a great job with my house until the coffee shop days. The first year we had the shop we didn’t even decorate our Christmas tree. I mean there was no time for anything. I’d work twelve hour days and then come home and sit at the dining room table to do the deposit, and then do the writing that I was compelled to do besides. As embarrassing as it is to say it, there is still a sheet of sandwich labels taped inside one of the cupboard doors. I have cleaned out those cupboards many times since and somehow couldn’t shed that reminder of the “chore” that put me over the edge: making sandwiches with bean sprouts, (do you know how fast bean sprouts go bad? I do) and sandwiches with hummos and cucumbers, and turkey sandwiches with carrot shavings on the top for crying out loud. But I digress. Or maybe not.

I’m telling you all this because I threw out a ton of paper with sensitive information on it and Donny doused it with lighter fluid and set it ablaze in the fire pit outside the cabin. It’s been raining a lot and so it’s been a weak fire … just poofy tendrils of smoke that drift past the window and give me that feeling of something different out there. It startles me from time to time the way I get startled when someone unexpectedly walks down the path.

So the smoke reminded me of the cause and the cause got me writing about cleaning out the closet, and it makes me wonder about how you get into a mood to clean a closet.

What I’m talking about is the mood that hits from a place beyond the circumstantial, one that just comes over you without having thought about it in advance, or having set aside the time, or after having put it on a list or any of those things. When you suddenly simply find yourself doing it.

I figure it’s got to have something to do with all my feelings of late, those feelings of turning toward a new time of life.

It’s time to get rid of a few things. Maybe it’s even time to drink some liquor.

Maybe it’s even time to take down the list of sandwiches that remind me to never, ever, not in a million years, get myself into something like that again. You have no idea how often Donny or one of the girls will dream about it, some new “owning our own business” venture that makes me want to pack up and run for the hills.

Maybe the list of sandwiches will have to stay. (Let me repeat: I am not a food person. Not a food person. Not a food person.) I don’t want to start anything that ties me down. I’m living and dying for freedom here (in case you haven’t been able to tell). Yeah, yeah, you can say freedom’s an inner thing…just don’t say it around certain folks, like small business owners.

I suppose this owning a business background (among other background stories) is one of the reasons I’m not one of those who believe that your circumstances shouldn’t matter to your state of mind. In my view, they matter like hell. You can find making sandwiches pushing you over the edge into insanity, and you can find yourself cleaning out a closet on the spur of the moment for what may be no reason at all or one that sneakily and tediously links back to the sandwiches and a time of life that dragged on too long, that now is over, and is over for good reason.

Endings are harder on me than beginnings.

Limitations and Possibilities

2010-07-14T04:38:00.000-07:00

The sun is orange this morning. I’m no earlier really, but it feels earlier.

I’ve moved from the table to the desk and took one stick pin away from the shawl making up the curtain over it. It’s the pin in the middle and I’m surprised I didn’t think of it before. It’s just right. I can’t see my house to the right or the neighbor’s to the left, just the tops of the trees. I had to make the move to the desk for my arms, particularly my right. I don’t sit at a comfortable height at the table.

It’s good to switch around.

Last night I slept in my bedroom all night with the door closed. I’m trying to think if this has ever happened. I try to remember if I closed the door in my last house…ever. I don’t think so. We’ve had an open-door culture in our family. I suddenly wonder about this in other people’s homes. I remember it was an act of defiance to shut my door when I was a teen in my parent's home.

Angie’s had a habit of closing her door when she goes to bed. But Henry rooms with her. It all starts when you’ve got kids, I suspect. You leave the door open so you can hear them.

I would have shut mine some in recent years except for Simeon. Usually Sam sleeps on my bedroom floor too. But it’s Simeon who, whenever I’ve been arrogant enough to shut my door against him – even for an hour – has thrown his body against it until you’d think he’s trying to wake the neighbors.

Simeon did not bang last night and the door stayed shut until morning. I’d just woken up and realized it when Sam burst in, which clued me to the fact that it hadn’t been latched tightly. This was even more amazing. Simeon could have come in and didn’t even try. By the time I got out of bed, both cats and Sam were waiting and I led the parade to the kitchen.

It’s so funny how change comes.

I’ve tried shutting the door a few times in recent weeks for going to bed as early as I have. It’s one thing to leave the door open when you’re the last person awake and you’re crawling into the darkness with the house swathed in thick quiet. It’s another to get in bed to read before the rest of the household is down for the night. Then you close the door. The night before Henry burst in after his bath and his mom tried to keep him out, but I was delighted to have him come over with his wet hair and his towel, which he let drop from his naked body. There’s nothing like a grandchild almost ready for bed and doing anything to delay it. He was very sweet and attentive and I got kisses that were like rain as his freshly washed hair dripped onto my face.

There are reasons to open your door and reasons not to.

I know I wrote recently about my friend becoming an elder and me seeing myself reflected in what was happening to her, but it’s more like a turn toward it. Like opening the door to it. Like going to bed when you’re tired or you want to read lying down with a soft light and no noise…and you realize there’s nothing stopping you. That’s part of it anyway. Like switching the locations where you type because your body rebels against the repetition.

Working with the real elders I see the slow acceptance of limitations and new possibilities every day. I guess change is change because it takes some getting used to. I get up early to watch the morning change. The sun is now higher and more gold than orange.

If you could see yourself sometimes

2010-07-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

It has a feel today of the beginning of fall. I know that sounds bizarre, but there you are. It’s lush and jungle-like and green, but there’s a certain hint to the coolness, by my guess about 11 days early. It’s not the end of summer, just the turning, ever so slightly.

Other than for the birds, all is still. It’s Sunday, and there have been a few seconds without freeway noise before the steady stream starts up again, and then another pause. Three seconds, and then a loud motor and the whir. Such a rhythm to it – cars approaching, arriving (right below the fence), passing. It’s hard on these mornings to tell if it rained or if it’s morning dew making the ground wet, but the freeway speaks of rain having fallen. There are clues everywhere.

Yesterday, Angie got home as I was taking garbage out. She turned from her car and asked, “Are you okay?”

I said, “Yes. Why?”

She said, “If you could see yourself sometimes!”

I was at a Native American ceremony all day – the grandchildren of my friend Lou were given their Indian names. There was feasting afterwards and preparations galore beforehand, but the meaning of the day was never lost. It was for the children, but I saw a turning point for Lou too. I saw Lou being honored as a grandmother in a way that expresses the power of the grandmother, and of a woman becoming an elder.

My shirt was stained with coffee after all that kitchen work and, though I hadn’t changed my shirt, I’d put on a pair of navy knee-high sweat pants and had on my navy knocking-around shoes, my hair pulled back. I imagine I looked frumpy and disheveled and that my white legs glared in the early evening sun. I’m sure I was listing to the right with the handle of the garbage bag thrown over that shoulder and the weight of it knocking against my side. I’m no good at all-day events. I was weary.

But I couldn’t see myself. If you could see yourself sometimes!

(Angie laughed and kissed me, poking gentle fun.)

I think I did see myself in the reflection of my friend…as if I visibly witnessed her arriving at that turning point at which I too stand. How nice to have a culture (or to witness one) that honors such times for young and old and where the symbolism isn’t symbolic only. There are such times in white culture. A baptism is a naming ceremony. There’s graduation. Marriage. Maybe retirement is meant to fulfill the passage into elder…or could.

I just know there’s something you feel when you see such honoring of passages. When you pick up on the clues. When you get a glimpse of something that isn’t imposed or bestowed but acknowledged as already there.

New legs

2010-07-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Simeon...casual and elegant

It seems all it does is rain this summer. How can it be so dry? Rain. Sun. Dry. I guess that’s the cycle, but still. It seems incredible. It’s the first year I’ve had any trouble in the cabin with mosquitoes, or flies, or gnats. Got them all this year. Just a few, most stuck in the front window looking for release, but that’s awfully near my table. If they’re not hovering over me they’re there in my peripheral vision.

I’ve sat outside more, but when I do, the flying insects drive me in. It’s okay. In or out feels so nearly the same. When I stay out, it’s usually for the smell and the touch of the breeze that’s different from when it’s coming through the window.

Simeon is sitting on the white chair across from where I sat a few minutes ago, looking elegant with one paw hanging casually off the seat. After his few nights outside, he seems like a different cat. He is not so clingy. Maybe he’s mad at me. I am good now for opening the door and I no longer open it at night. He’s gotten his alley cat legs under him. I always knew it would happen. “Simeon,” I have said, “is not to be trusted outside at night.” I knew he could turn – step out of being a “house cat.”

I feel kind of like Simmy. Like I’ve gotten some kind of new legs under me.

I’m surrounded by people who will do sweet things to please me that aren’t exactly what will please me…you know? It’s hell to be such a loner within a “togetherness” family. Sort of like waiting to be let out the door. It constantly makes me feel bad. I swing from “I deserve my time alone” to “they deserve to have me engaged.” There’s something really skewed about that and I’m ready to get out of it. I want sweeter thoughts in my head if I’m going to have thoughts there…you know? I’ve been praying for that lately.

Simeon’s been the kind of cat I have to push away, always in my bed, on my table, at my elbow, clamoring for my lap. Now he’s not. I’ve thought, several nights, that he must have gotten outside, because he’s not on the bed. But he’s been in. Maybe sitting in a window looking out. Pining in a cat way for what he hasn’t got.

He’s changed. Maybe it’s seasonal, but for the moment, he’s a different cat. I kind of miss the cat he was; kind of don’t. I do know I don’t want to do the thing that will make him happiest – let him roam.

He’s come in the cabin now and is sitting on the small wicker table that holds a conch shell. Not bugging me at all. Independent.

Angie is on vacation from school and she’s off with Henry. The blue eggshell is still sitting on the path. I kind of like the feeling of being connected but not so involved…and kind of miss the way things were.

Life is like that lately… an exploration of autonomy…of having new legs.

The things that affect us

2010-07-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

A turquoise blue egg, fallen (or stolen) and halved, sits on the path. I leave it for Henry to come upon.

The wren seems to happen to be where I’m going right before I get there and to fly out at me and then pass me up, lighting on, usually, the telephone wire or clothes line, where she trills away, agitated but still lovely sounding. She is the mama bird who lives in the birdhouse outside the back door.

A robin lives in the plum tree. Twice I tried to sneak peaks into her nest, thinking she wasn’t home. (Honestly, there was no sign of her. How does she flatten herself into that small nest that way?) As soon as I got in close, out she’d fly, a quick dash – first right toward me – and then away. She lights on the ground and screeches, very clear about not liking me there. I apologize and go on my way, smiling.

I just love the birds.

The weather, in the last week, has gone from sultry to beautiful. Donny had a friend from Nevada sweating his way through the sultry week. He told me, “In Nevada, we have 1% humidity.” He pulled out his phone, or blackberry or whatever it was and said, “The humidity here is ninety one!”

So the humidity has lifted and the mood has changed in the yard and I think of all the things that affect us. I feel for the people out east.

Then the smallest, most delicate looking baby bunny hops onto the path. The sun was behind a cloud as she emerged but then comes out, leaving her caught in the brightness. I wonder if she’ll hop off but she doesn’t. She’s eating something – stands right up on her hind legs to the green tops of a weed. Then she’s off and I watch her travel to where the two big elms stand close together with a lot of brush in between. I’m so glad she has places to hide.

The Happiness Survey

2010-07-07T08:58:00.000-07:00

There was a sixteen paragraph article in my newspaper yesterday devoted to “A first-of-its-kind global study” that finds a link between money and happiness.

Is this a no-brainer, or what?

“Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall—whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages, the survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries found.”

One of the interpretations the researchers made was that when people are asked about income and satisfaction, the first thing they do is take stock of their lives, and that involves comparison. They check to see how their lives compare with “the Joneses” (an expression I haven’t heard in years). I suppose this could be true to some extent, but I doubt it’s a major cause except maybe among those who only “see themselves” as not having enough. Truly not having enough money to survive, or to do things like keep your house and still eat, or not having enough to avoid bankruptcy due to the loss of a job, do not involve comparison. “Times” they say, “are hard.” You don’t too often hear, “These are unhappy times,” but when you say “times are hard” you are generally saying that a lot of people are under a lot of stress.

Many other factors that contribute to happiness were spoken of in the article – as if to downplay the finding about income (in my view).

I’ve had arguments about this with people – about it being easier to be happy and peaceful when you’ve got money. I get it that people can have a lot of money and still be miserable and vice versa, don’t get me wrong, but I truly feel that this could be a great opportunity to look at this issue (or truism) head on. In a world in which poverty is growing so rapidly, how do you ignore it?

A young man I know was just told by his employer – a major bank – that he had to take a $5 an hour pay cut or lose his job. With the CEO and execs making what this bank’s CEO and execs do, how can you reconcile the need for the bank to take such an extreme action against its already low-paid tellers? This is a huge amount of money -- $800 a month – suddenly gone from a young guy’s budget. For what reason? On top of the anxiety of having to figure out how to meet his expenses, the unfairness, the arbitrariness, the “they’re doing it because they can” feeling of it, eats away at his happiness. He is not alone.

This survey was taken before the world economy took a nosedive, so I can only imagine that the answers would be even more strongly in the affirmative concerning money and happiness now, but it’s not just that life is harder and more stressful when there are survival types of financial concerns, but that there is such an overriding feeling of unfairness in the great divide between the rich and the poor, the highest wage earners in a company and the lowest, and the lack of choice. This is not a matter of comparison with the Joneses as I understand that phrase to imply – a keeping up with the neighbors kind of thing. This is more of a feeling that something has gone terribly wrong…and it’s being felt up close and personal by a ton of people.

One percent of American people control 40 percent of the wealth; 5 percent control 60 percent. As non-violent peace activist Marv Davidov says, “Whoever owns it; runs it.” It is not a mystery where this has taken us. It does not bode well for democracy.

It seemed to happen overnight or somewhere out there in the dark reaches of the last few decades, to sneak up while nobody was looking and change all the rules. It’s like we were the last to know. Like we were duped into believing there was still an equality and an American way of doing business that wanted everyone to benefit in due measure.

In the end I figured the word “happiness” was the problem, but no matter what word I'd substitute – like well being or fulfillment or satisfaction – I still find income being a major contributor because, with a feeling of the threat of doom and few options hovering about you, that sense of happiness that comes of ease and freedom from anxiety is going to be hard to come by.

And what I came up with was that, at least to me, happiness has some connotation of contentment with the status quo. If you’re not content with “the way things are” you are challenged to change, to live differently, to find some other way. I figure you gain lots of depth and fulfillment from that challenge and start appreciating your life and its different aim and you might even, if you’ve got some breathing room, feel happy about that. But in terms of what the Gallup corporation means by happiness, I don’t know if this would apply.

The other thing I came to was that, while you might not be happy with the way things are, you might ultimately become happy with yourself. You might feel a greater sense of purpose and come to recognize your strength and resiliency. Your relationships might, when you’re in a financial crisis, (as in any sort of crisis) have that chance to evolve into something richer than they were (if the stress doesn’t tear them apart first). You are almost forced to become a little more aware of what really matters.

Which all leads back to the fact that we’re in a world financial crisis and no matter anyone’s individual financial status, the suffering it’s brought, the obscurely blatant causes of it, and the need for fundamental change, creates its own unhappiness with “the way things are” and those concerns can eat away at you like dread.

It’s still perfectly possible to get up in the morning and greet your day and your trees with love and appreciation…even really heightened appreciation and gratitude…even appreciation that doesn’t hold dread even while it does hold concern. You’re amazed at the ability of the earth to sustain the human family and the sun to warm it and the freeway noise not to drive us all crazy.

I don’t know, I guess it’s just that the ability to find happiness from those essential qualities of self and relationship that sustain us – I don’t want to see them being used as an excuse for not changing this elitist culture. You could call this a belated Independence Day acknowledgment that a “ruling class” was not what was intended in the creation of this nation, and nor was an acceptance of greed as good.

We can maybe rejoice that more people are concerned, even if their actions are not yet skillful and, besides carrying a handkerchief, let our empathy and outrage grow hand-in-hand.

Jimmy Buffet is due to give a concert on the gulf coast. He said it was what he thought to do after feeling the rage that all people who feel “as if the coast is in them” can’t help but feel. You feel the rage but you can’t live there.

One spiritual person, the mystic and writer Andrew Harvey, recommends sacred activism in his book The Hope. He combines our spiritual heart and desire for soulful change with a reclaiming of our heart for social change.

I am still, like so many people, stunned by my family’s decline of the last few years. On the one hand, I feel grateful that we get by, and on the other, I rail at the freedoms lost. But I guess at some point I quit beating myself up for my sense of unhappiness with the way things are. I’ve realized that the general milieu of hard times and even a direct association with its hard edge, don’t deprive me of joy in all those things that still touch my heart or lift my spirit and that it is those same things, and that same joy, that call out for concern and attention to the great change we’re undergoing, socially as well as spiritually.

"They say money can't buy love -- but what about happiness?" by Rob Stein, Washington Post, as reported in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 7-6-2010, 1A.

Cackling

2010-07-06T14:10:00.000-07:00

It was an “Old Country Buffet” day. All the older women of the church meeting for lunch. This lunch starts at 11:00. They are feisty and laugh loudly, as if telling dirty jokes. We do not arrive until nearer to twelve (my elderly companion and I) and this is what we hear as we enter – the dirty-joke-laughs. The women causing them are not just feisty but gleeful, as if they say, “Here we are…sure of ourselves at last…and no one around to tell us what to do.” Some tables look like “Lonely Hearts Clubs.” Not this long one where the women gather close to the food and cackle.

Two hours later I’m a little frazzled. I am seriously too young for the group. I do not fully cackle just yet. I excuse myself, and walk out into the sun feeling happy to be released from the ice box chill and the noise. I meander down two doors to the pet store and buy two cans of dog food. I meander slowly back.

Like musical chairs the women elders move around. There’s a slightly different configuration when I return, but no movement toward breaking up. A bit later I tap my companion on the shoulder and suggest it might be nearly time to go. I feel cruel, but not so cruel as an 85 year old who keeps threatening a 92 year old with having to walk home because of her sass.

When I get home myself, I’m relieved beyond measure. I pick up my mail and head out to the cabin. One of my Norwegian friends has sent me quotes from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Gayatri: If our intention is authentic and yet our actions are not skillful, what should we do?

Sri Sri: Carry a handkerchief.

It sounds like something the women would have said. Then they would cackle.

The flawed and the woozy

2010-07-02T18:03:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been feeling particularly great the last few days. I got my summer cold, (what I call an air-conditioning cold) a few weeks ago while hanging out with the Norwegians. Nothing fierce, just the usual coming and going of a head and chest cold. The last few days, it’s felt like a feverish cold. I’ve been able to get up and go about my work day, but when it’s over I’m hot, or cold, or chilled, or my eyes won’t stay open. A couple nights in a row I’ve felt my own head more than a few times. While it didn’t feel particularly hot, I noticed that my body did. I mainly ached. No major sore throat or anything else, just one of those fevers (possibly) that will put you in a certain mood. You might feel a little as if the ground shifts beneath your feet now and again, or that you’re seeing things out of the corner of your eye. I am definitely a big baby when it comes to pain, but this hasn’t been about that, and so has actually felt mildly interesting.

This morning, after spending two nights passing up dinner for bed, I got up as usual to come out to the cabin, debated, took a bath first, and then came because, I thought, ‘It always makes me feel better.’ I wouldn’t ordinarily put it that way, but when I got here I knew it was the comforting thing to do even if it might seem to make more sense to stay in bed.

I can’t tell you exactly why, (maybe my body not being quite “right”) but it got me in the mood of thinking about all things flawed. I’ve been seeing it everywhere lately…people (well, writers anyway), admitting to the flawed nature of human beings in all kinds of different ways. I blogged about the “perfectly flawed” nature of baseball (one of the first places I saw the theme developing came from baseball talk). Then there was this great editorial about the change in the media in the last 50 years. The old assumption, it said, was that people were flawed and reporters looked the other way as much as they could. The flaws weren’t the most important thing – and didn’t always prevent good leadership, or skill, or heroics. Then I saw “the flaw” in a couple of articles spurred by the 75th anniversary of the founding of AA. Then in a You Tube video. All in that haphazard way that gets called synchronicity.

It felt like seeing that we’ve traveled from an assumption that human beings are inherently flawed and that their greatest acts are acts of overcoming, to an assumption that “we should not be flawed.”

It’s what I was feeling when I wrote The Given Self. Damn. Who said that perfection was in reach? That we can all be above reproach, never make mistakes, never show any weakness? Always be smart? Or centered? Or healthy?

So it all got me thinking about AA, and how I’ve kind of liked the model and wondered if it wouldn’t translate into other areas where people meet around the idea of change. What Bill Wilson did wasn’t to zero in on drinking. He accepted the weakness, flaws, and fragility of the human person and, by working from that admission and surrender to a higher power, sought a change in identity that came from the very core.

AA is not always successful. No one can figure out why it is for some and not for others. No one can map human traits out on a grid and predict anything with certainty. We’re too complex as people, and our circumstances and situations hold another layer of complexity. Even so, AA, as flawed as it is, is a good thing.

Another thinker (whose video was sent to me by a friend) spoke of a new human narrative of empathy, stating that empathy is not needed in a utopia. It makes you wonder if this quest for perfection isn’t behind all kinds of ills. In the utopian mindset… “It’s a beautiful world, all is perfect”… what need is there for empathy? A human narrative of empathy accepts the fragility of human life and the non-utopian nature of living.

What rises out of such ideas is an acknowledgement that there is no straight path, and that there’s a tyranny that comes of the idea that you can do everything “right” and, when you do, then everything will turn out great: you won’t get sick, or lose your job, or your mate; you won’t fail, or if you do, you won’t be crabby about it.

The whole question of why bad things happen to good people is natural and poignant but arrogant too. It arises out of the idea of it being possible to be perfect (or at least to define and manage being “good”).

Maybe this tyranny is why you can get the feeling that, “The imperfect need not apply,” and that it doesn’t only reference the job market. And maybe releasing this tyranny is about the healthiest and most “good” thing we can do. But I’m not sure. I’m still a little woozy.

Addicted to...?

2010-06-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

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.

What distinguishes dialogue?

2010-06-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

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.

An Opening Question

2010-06-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Monthly Baseball Update

2010-06-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

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

Women

2010-06-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-03T04:38:00.000-07:00

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.

The Itch

2010-05-31T05:24:00.000-07:00

The funny thing about stepping outside of your “regular” life for a while, even a period as short as a few days, is that it feels like stepping outside of your regular life. I’ve felt a little schitzoid since getting back from Colorado – all mixed up inside with these different views – sort of a “life on the mountain top” view, and a “life at gound-level” view.

It felt, for a while…these two views, like the life I’ve got…and the life I want to have. But it is all one piece now that I’ve settled a little. This life here – sitting in my cabin – getting my quiet hours in before I go out to the old church where my dad was an altar boy as a kid and where I touched his stiff hair for the last time (and regretted it), and before I go to the cemetery where just three years ago I ran like a crazy woman and cried out my grief, and where the year before that Dad led the Memorial Day ceremony as he had for forty years – this life here, and that life there – they’re the same life.

And I was thinking – maybe in life you can treat everyone like you’re in the emergency room together (an Anne Lamott idea that I like), but in writing you’ve got to treat yourself like the patient who is there to get some relief – and let yourself scream or cry, rant or bellow. You describe your symptoms – whatever they are. “Hey, is there anyone out there? I’ve got this itch I can’t reach. Haven’t you got some cream I can put on? Could you scratch my back? Could you listen to me complain?”

After a while, the itch that was making you feel like pulling your hair out feels adequately attended to. You didn’t ignore it and pretend it wasn’t there and you didn’t scratch till you bled. It’s been relieved to the point where you can sit with it, attend to it, and still be present in your day, feeling the cool morning starting to warm to full day.

And you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else at all.

The Possible

2010-05-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

From a slow and very hazy place, I realize that the life I’ve had is the life I’ve asked for. I don’t mean this in some cosmic sort of “before I was born” way, but in an ordinary, slogging my way through life way.

One of my most fervent prayers has been for my work and my life to be one. I hated the feeling of working for the man, the work that had me setting my life aside to go spend half my day in the employ of someone who had the right to tell me what to do.

I didn’t always feel this way but began to with the first great work experience I had…one that didn’t feel that way…one full of friendship and collaboration and spirit. “This is the way to live,” I told myself. “I want to live without that separation of work and life. I want it all to be of one piece.” I didn’t think of it as being what I needed to be happy. I merely saw that it was possible. And if it was possible once, then it had to be possible again, right?

Fast forward to twelve years after leaving the great job where work and life were one and I got paid for it – paid to get up and go there, to be exactly where I wanted to be – not in terms of place (University of Minnesota) or the work, which wasn’t exactly of my heart and soul but was at least from someone’s (my boss, Vernon Weckwerth, was passionate about his work and the program he created).

Character sketch here: Vernon is a self-proclaimed maverick, a pain-in-the-neck or worse to his faculty colleagues, ahead of his time, brilliant (a bio-med statistician), always out for the people in the field doing the thing and a melding of the theoretical with the experiential. A great role model/mentor who’d say, “If you’ve got lemons make lemonade” and ask you to “make it happen” without telling you what to do, and who didn’t care if you “made it happen” in twenty minutes or two weeks as long as you got it done competently.

His person fit his role and he had no concerns for prestige or advancement at the cost of staying within the system, and so he morphed into looking the part he played in his own way – no 50 year old turned hippie stuff for Vern, just a wearing of the same old polyester pants for 20 years, and the same tired wife-beater-t-shirts, under the same dingy white shirts and jacket that belonged with the pants, or in summer, over his Hawaiian shirts.

He had a bump in the middle of his forehead that we called his extra brains, thinning hair he combed around in a circle, a lurching kind of walk that after my grandson started walking I saw as the full-bodied, throwing yourself forward walk of the toddler, and he wrote screaming notes on post-its in capital letters and could sputter and bellow with the best of us.

Vernon’s program was where I wanted to be because there was that certain freedom that allowed something else to go on between me and my colleagues, Mary and Julie. We’d begun our spiritual journey and it had given each day and our every encounter the feel of possibility and of something essential happening. We could do a mailing and just by the act of being together our time still had that feel. I felt as if I was growing into my life. As if suddenly, at age forty, I’d begun to find myself, and my life was taking on some meaning, some significance, and some joy.

So when I left that job, I began to pray to live in such a way that work and life was of one piece, and at a certain point I thought it was the writing life, and at another thought I could create it with my own coffee shop, and finally, after years of non-wage earning grueling work and failure, thought it was what I found by caring for my grandson after his birth and my dad as he died (for no wage) and moved into eldercare (for a small wage) when a wage became absolutely necessary (after a foray back into short-term “desperate for the money” corporate, soul-killing work).

Then one day I began to wonder.

I began to wonder if this prayer had created this life where my work and my life are one in such a way that I have no life that isn’t work, and no work that is supportive of any life apart from it. I began to wonder if work and life are meant to be separated, at least a little, so that you know the difference between them, and so that the part of your life called “work” actually does provide for the rest of it that is “not work.”

That’s how I began to explore the possibility that I get what I ask for.

Floating and Fabulous

2010-05-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

It is such a lovely, lovely day. I have some unexpected hours free and as much as I’d like to feel inspired just now, I don’t feel as if I have a creative bone in my body. Sometimes I feel like that’s the way it all works out best. With no intention, no striving, no wondering about what creation is, or who I am, or what I ought to do. Letting it all come as it comes. Or not even letting. Not even a single feeling of allowance. Floating on the wind.

I’m in the cabin. Henry runs for it, and me, every afternoon when he comes in from school. Yesterday we had a Tootsie Roll while we sat on the stoop and agreed it was a wonderful thing to sit on a cabin stoop and eat a Tootsie Roll. He’s worn shorts the last week and Grandpa decided we needed a path through the woods considering his little legs. He got the lawn mower out here and made one. Then Ian came for a talk and Henry cried at being kept away.

How often I forget what “the little children” are actually like. They’re so easily disappointed…and not always easily distracted…especially from routine.

And a Tootsie Roll is a fabulous treat.

Shock Waves

2010-05-25T04:45:00.000-07:00

It’s 5:46 and the sun’s topping the fence. As I walked out the cabin was glowing red, and I had to look back and see – is there something special making her glow “red?” But it was / is an ordinary looking sun, blinding if I look into it, beautiful shadows getting created against the back cabin wall. I’ve already thought of Tone and Storker (my Oslo visitors coming next month) and what special sweet thing I might do for them -- like leaving a welcoming gift in their rooms.

It would be truly frightening (I think) how well someone would have to take care of me, and then I think, “my God, how well I was taken care of in Colorado!” Did I create that (in that weird way that I’m wondering if I created “a life where work and life are one”)? Did I set the conditions for it with who I am now? Have my desires go out and meet the desires to host so generously that I found?

Man, I’m stuck on this creating business. If there was a “theme,” represented in a dozen different synchronistic ways, that was it. I’d guess I’m just so full of everything I’ve experienced that I can’t quite get to my quiet space. (So maybe it’s not meant to be just yet?) I’ve got one thing just behind me and another coming up and they’re good, out-of-the-ordinary things. It’s not so bad that I’m thinking of Tone and Storker in my early morning hours. Or of creation. Why is it that I want to quit and get back to “normal?” A norm I think of as “free” mind if not quiet mind. I feel a bit as if my mind’s been taken over by all the ideas that have touched on mine from the people I’ve met. They’ve influenced me. I’m excited with these embodied ideas. I went somewhere new and everyone I met informed me in some way. I’m still full with it.

There were these artists “living the life” (the artistic life), in community, in the mountains…with spirit! Meeting them and seeing them interact with one another in their own environment, a place they’re used to, comfortable with, it was like getting a view into another way of life. And not just a view – an experience of it. I was invited “in.” It was a simple gathering, hosted impeccably, and yet without the feel of formality for not being so different than the way they gather weekly. My hosts and I were the strangers invited into their midst. I love that whole feeling. It was the general feeling of the weekend. I was invited into the midst of something already happening and became a part of it. What a wonder. I was let “in.” And being “let in” I was touched. And here I sit with that part of me that was touched still reverberating. It’s like shock waves being sent out into my own little environment in a somewhat gentle way – coming home to roost in my space, being “let in” here, where I’ll sit with them.

It’s hard to imagine that anything I gave might be having the same sort of effect, but what if it is? What if, a part of me has remained there, setting off similar shock waves? I am amazed still, awash with the feeling of these possibilities…of what can happen when people join together in a real way.

Getting Serious

2010-05-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

Me and one of my new friends, Colorado ACIM/ACOL teacher, Earl Purdy

I’m less than a week home from Colorado. Tomorrow night it will be a week strictly speaking. Since getting back, I’ve been having to deal with the feeling of “getting serious.” I can’t exactly tell you what I’m getting serious about. I wrote a friend eight pages in two emails trying to answer that question for myself. I spent the day today pondering it in my cabin in between the hot spells that I spent cleaning.

Before I left for Colorado it was about 40 degrees in the morning, 60 by mid day if we were really lucky. Today the high’s in the 80’s and the low in the 70’s. And I picked today to clean my office and the patio it empties onto. It’s one of those things you do when you get serious. You start cleaning up.

You always have to do it after a big creative push anyway, or at least I do, and at least one of my friends is the same way. While you’re creating you let it rip. Books and newspapers and the crusts from peanut butter sandwiches and coffee cups and water jugs and pop cans and pens all pile up. The stack of papers near the printer starts to look like a ream. The dust gets thick.

On top of one of my bookshelves I’ve got a memory box. On top of it is a bamboo plant and a P E A C E thing made from nails. You could hang it or mount it, but I never did. It just sits there. When I cleaned today, the word P E A C E was clearly etched in the dust. I thought of taking a picture of it. Before and after pictures of cleaning would be a kick at such times. But I didn’t take the picture and I’m not done cleaning yet.

Two cockatiels sit in the corner of my room – it’s a four-season sun porch with windows on three sides. Any of you who have, or ever have had birds know they create a bit of bird fuzz. I’m not sure what the proper name for that is, but it added to the dust. The rags still sit on the floor. I got too hot to keep at it and went down in the basement to get the fan and stayed to watch the end of “The Breakfast Club” with Donny. Now I’m back in my semi-clean room and it’s still hot, and I still don’t know what I’m feeling so serious about.

I really stopped the clean-up because of the filing though. I shoved everything from my trip in an expandable file (a used one – also from the basement – I think the heading I crossed out said “Election 92” but I can’t tell for sure anymore). Then I looked at the rest of the paperwork and left the room. I did throw away a lot of paper, but the stuff I’ve got left is that annoying – “What should I do with this?” kind.

When you get serious you start thinking of all those things you don’t do, like file stuff away so that when you need it you can find it. You start thinking that kind of thing is important. It’s as good a reason as any for retreating from “serious.”

But I want to write about the feeling because it’s so damn paradoxical or something. If you’re somewhat aware and listening you get these feelings once in a while that tell you something like, “This is important.” Such feelings are never straight-forward. You can hardly ever answer the question about just what it is that is so important. You can ask and pray and get still and ponder, and still not have a clue. There’s no proof. No evidence. Oh, you could say my gathering was a success if you wanted to, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not a feeling like that – none of that – “Oh this was so great I should get a few more talks scheduled” kind of thing. No. It was broader than that, and at the same time more personal. It’s got that thrilling, sort of excited, sort of confused feeling energy…an… “I don’t know what’s coming but I’d better get ready” feeling. Cleaning your office is what you do when you don’t know what you’re readying yourself for.

It’s a fine feeling, though. It really is. Sort of like stepping off of a cliff. That kind of fine. A tolerable, weak-kneed, mystery-in-the-making. The unknown.

I’m an advocate for letting ourselves feel the big deal nature of things when that’s the way they feel. Again…the big deal wasn’t the event. It’s the feeling itself. Not a thing, not a circumstance, not a culmination of things. It’s nothing more than a subjective feeling…well…with a few ideas attached that haven’t formed up yet.

One of the things I’ve gathered keep us from calling our feelings what they are, especially in times like this, is “What if I’m wrong?” What if this intuition, gut instinct, sense that I’ve got, is not the real deal? You don’t want to disappoint yourself. Or don’t want to share the “getting serious” feeling because you imagine you’ll disappoint someone else if they expect something to come of it. Or you just think you’re making too much of the whole deal – a mountain out of a molehill.

I got this journal as a gift while I was in Colorado. I don’t know what it is about me and journals that I get as gifts. It’s like I take “them” seriously. They get to me. Make me put pen to paper. This one has three words on the cover. It says, “Make something happen.”

I just don’t know if you’d ever do that, if you’d ever create, in any of the many ways we do, if you didn’t get a sense every now and then, that it’s important that you do.

On the Mountain

2010-05-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

Boulder, Colorado

It’s amazing that humanity can be so still – so still that I can sit here in the mountains with the sunrise and for as much as 30 seconds at a time hear not a sound of the man-made. The sky is a different blue above the mountain ridge. Over on the horizon it’s doing that ground-white I so often watch at home, as if the blue is taking on its color from the ground up, and on the mountain it is already there as if it came from on high.

I came to Colorado as if something was going to happen.

I gave a talk. Met so many living human beings in the flesh. I was filmed. The young man filming asked about duality. I spoke of paradox. I feel it again, so funnily aware for the first time this morning of having come to the mountain in the flesh.

In my Course of Love we go to the mountain. There’s also a lot of talk about both/and. Someone asked me about that once too:

“Aren’t “both & and” the same thing?”

I said, “And” is like there’s “this” and “that.” "Both" is different – like the two existing together.”

That’s the paradox of my morning sitting on my mountain perch looking down on the valley.

Something is happening.

I was nervous as all get out about coming here. Some of it was “speaker nerves.” Could I be real, be “me,” have heart, and still express those words and ideas that allow us to share.

And then there was a “we” that formed. Heart energy filled the room. There was ease.

Some of my “nerves” was the nervous excitement of feeling “something is happening.”

I talked a lot about the change to our way of knowing that comes with our spiritual experiences. But it became clear to me again…this time sitting one-on-one with a new friend:

It’s not about what we know but who we are.

A way of knowing isn’t about “what” we know, so I’m not saying I talked about the wrong thing, only that of all the profound insights and deep feelings that were shared – that’s the one.

It’s not about what we know but about who we are.

Later today I go home. On the schedule for tomorrow, in the work I do there, my elderly companion will be having her carpet cleaned. I will move the small things. Set up fans. Put elastic socks on swollen feet. Continue what was begun here in a different way. It’s not all from the ground up or from the top down.

This is the new I’m seeing. It’s in us.

I suppose now that it might have been a good thing if I’d blogged my way through this – the preparations for coming – everything from choosing my clothes around the factor of comfortable shoes, to borrowing my daughter’s big purse for a carry-on, to fretting over what I would say and how I would say it. I maybe could have shown the whole dichotomy between something big coming and something big having occurred.

I’m not sure how to recognize that something big did occur while at the same time acknowledging there’s not really much in this life that is either big or little and that it’s all of one piece.

The only real comparison I can make of it is birth. So much is already done before the birth takes place. But the birth is the manifesting of new life.

That is how this feels – how I feel this day on the mountain.

Contentment

2010-05-02T04:45:00.001-07:00

It’s getting pretty hard to get up before it’s light out. I woke at 5:00 so happily this morning, so glad it was dark. Then I kept lying there. I had some kind of idea about how I’m always trying to express something that can’t be expressed as if it was something new—a new idea. But shoot, maybe it was. I was so happy. Then that crowd of less and less happy thoughts and finally getting up about 5:30.

6:04 now and the sky is white below, blue above. Walking to the cabin the smell and sounds are so intense. Coming in, shutting the door, the Fahreheat on, all noise is drowned out. Sensory deprivation and over stimulation. No really, the Fahrenheat has its own rhythm like a heavy breather or a snorer. Two ducks flew through the high light blue wilderness where they appear like two black beetles whizzing through the trees.

I just stood up to get lip balm from the desk and standing, noticed the yellow glow and shadows against the far wall and turning back toward the window, the sun where it’s risen but not yet visible when I was sitting.

Oh this is joy, even if it’s not dark out. A robin and a blue jay hop the ground nearby. There’s a yellow flower, probably a weed, but a lone one, and pretty, on dad’s mound.

Yesterday I visited Aunt Mary Ann at the nursing home. Uncle Owen and Dee were there too. We’d arranged to meet. He called ahead to see if he could wear dad’s hat, the black cowboy hat I’d given him with the flag pin on it. He said Kitty always said that when she entered a room she always looked for Dad’s hat, and when she saw it she knew she had a friend. He was like a little boy in the innocence of his pleasure over thinking of it; shy and proud.

Mary Ann held my hand a long time. Us three older women were all touched by Owen’s sweetness and his nervous pacing, and the way dad’s hat didn’t exactly fit his head. Dee said, “Your dad’s the only guy I knew who could wear a cowboy hat.” As they left, Owen had the tilt wrong and she adjusted it.

Mia was along and sat on the floor that was dotted with cat food and let Mary Ann’s tabby cat Binky rub against her sleek black pants and shirt and hair. She was like an exotic bird, one of those black ones with the long bills and bright splashes of color, the aliveness of her unmatched and out-of-place in the room; both welcome and jarring. She entertained Henry, who was first shy and then ready to explore the halls, and yet not out-of-place.

Mary Ann says she is content. She doesn’t lie and you can see that she’s not now. She’s cocooned in the little room. Lilacs are blooming and she has a bouquet: lavender, purple and white. Photos of grandkids dot every surface. A pile of newspaper and mail sits in a chair. The oxygen tank gurgles. The hat and these little things remind me of Dad’s final days but no longer of his death. I can’t draw up a feeling of grief. The room is alive with his presence. Mary Ann says she talks to him all the time.

Instantly, as the sun tops the fence, the floor of the woods darkens. The fence-top-level leafs glow translucently

I crack the window and bird song spills in, light spills over the fence in a narrow strip. It makes light appear to be rising from the ground up, as if leaving the ground and returning to the sky.

As I walk back into the house for more coffee, it seems as if everyone should be awake, the day is so bright. But they’re not. And the sleeping family fills me with contentment.

Like the little children

2010-04-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

I didn’t know it was raining this morning until Henry pointed it out to me. It must have started just after I let the animals out. I heard it in the fan over the stove but thought it was wind. Then Henry told me, “It’s raining, Umma.”

I said, “It is? Let’s see.” We looked out the dining room windows that are about floor to ceiling and low enough for him, and then went to the front and stood out on the stoop while Sam retrieved the paper. In the back, it was hard to see it was raining. In the front, the whole length of the wide strip of street jumped and popped with rain.

I said, “Doesn’t it smell good?”

Then the thunder rolled over, and Henry asked, “What’s that, Umma?”

Life with a three-year-old grandchild is pretty amazing.

At 10:30, when Henry left to spend the day with his Uncle Ian, it felt like it should be 1:30 at least. But neither Donny or me let him go easily. This is the first time he’s gone to spend the day with his uncle. All morning Henry was getting mad at me (in that toddler way) for anything I said that had a hint of non-togetherness. He wanted me and Grandpa to go with him.

Once his uncle arrived, he warmed to the idea, and it was me who was saying, “He’s just getting over a cold. If he’s not feeling good later or wants to come home early, it’s okay.”

Ian says, “We’ll be fine.”

Yeap. We’ll be fine.

Oh how like Henry I am, and how often we forget what a kid is really like when we hear, “Be like the little children.” There’s a combination of precision and wonder, an “it has to be done the way it was done before” firmness: his routine, his chair, sometimes his “way.” (One night I let him wear my Twin’s ball cap while we watched the game and the next he had to have “his” hat.) Then, on the other hand, there’s a little anxiety about the unknown and a way you have to warm up to it. Then you’re fine.

After they were out the door, I told Donny, “This will be good for him.” I meant, “this will be good for us too.”

Donny wondered if Ian knew how to work the car seat. I said, “He’ll figure it out.” Donny hollered through the door anyway: “You okay with the car seat?”

“Yeah, man,” Ian says.

I pick up Henry’s toys and start the second half of my day, not noticing until then that it’s only 10:30.

The thing about affirmations that I've never gotten

2010-04-19T05:11:00.000-07:00

It’s windy – every few minutes. Like a snorer – there’s quiet in between rattles. I’m in the cabin facing the freeway fence. The green tarp (heavy with continued yard clean-up) is trying desperately to fly out from underneath the twig pile. The flag is waving in one direction – south. The wind chime knocks against the exterior logs of the cabin. The maple tree’s new little shoots quiver and the thinner of the tall trees sway.

I have the Fahrenheat on but might not have needed it if I hadn’t left a window open a crack yesterday. It was beautiful in a whole different way then: warm as summer, green with fresh rain. I sat for an hour with the door open.

Today Donny visited. I tell him I need a break. “I need so much patience to get through my day,” I say. He tells me how much worse other people have it than us.

I pause. “I’m not saying things are so bad; only that I need a break.” He lies on the floor to ease his aching back until he gets his next phone call. Then he’s off.

For a while I wonder about what we said to each other, and the feel of two trains passing in the night washes over me. What does a person hear when you say the simplest of things? Did he hear an admission of impatience as, “Things are so bad?”

For a minute, (okay, a little longer) I make up the story that he’s using the word impatient against me. Impatience is not generally one of my “beating myself up” words. Hell, most of the time I wonder why the whole world isn’t bursting with impatience.

I’m talking about the kind of patience that has you walking through your day like you’re spending the whole of it sitting with a toddler learning to put on his shoes. Anne Lamott calls it “the emergency room” – treating people as if that’s where they are. You sit with those toddler-like or emergency room-like situations out of love and respect and because it’s the right thing to do (at least half the time). You’re okay with it, but gee, there are times you long to sit at your window with no needs to meet staring back at you, and let’s face it: we all need those moments.

I know I need a break as soon as I’m sitting like a kid in a classroom at the end of the day waiting for the bell; when I’m ready to bolt from my chair; when I’m watching the clock. Then, I admit to it even if the impatience feels childish, as if I can’t abide being thwarted. “It’s time to move!”

I’m not saying it’s a virtue not to bolt or that it would be better to run when the urge strikes. I just figure a kid would forget about it the minute she was released. I’ve got to work at it. Take a break to slough off the feeling. To excuse myself for feeling the way I do. That’s what the kids don’t have to do. They’ll sit wiggling and toe tapping in their chairs and leap from them with glee. They know they’re being thwarted. We adults see toddlers and emergency rooms and have to take a deep breath, plant our butts, still our feet, and call on patience to still our minds. “Here Patience! Come girl!”

You want to never feel the sting of wanting release, of wanting to run off…free! You want to be free right there – right where you sit with the shoes or the socks or the crisis or the minutes ticking by. But you don’t feel free. You sit as still as if you’re hand-cuffed and breathe deeply and call yourself impatient and go somewhere after to shake it off.

I discovered a lot of acceptance for my experience of life through A Course of Love. I’ve been on that acceptance path a long time. “Okay. I’m impatient. Big deal.” I admit things like that all over the place, just as I did to Donny. But I’ve been realizing lately that acceptance has made me a little lazy or maybe imprecise about my words. What if I’m accepting being impatient when I’m really calling on grace?

You could replace “impatient” with “I call on grace,” if that’s what you do. Maybe that’s the thing about affirmations that I’ve never gotten. Maybe they are meant to tell you what you really do rather than to fake you out.

Change is good

2010-04-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

Watched Joe Mauer get his first hit of the season yesterday. Missed his first home run today. But I saw this cool column by Tom Powers about my hometown boys (The Twins) and our ballpark, the new Target Center.

Target Field replaces the old Metrodome, which, bless its heart, at least didn’t have a corporate name attached to it. I could go on and on about this kind of thing, but I won’t except to say the corporate sponsor was probably needed to replace the old dome with the new open-air stadium. One with no retractable roof. In Minnesota. I suppose we would have needed a half-dozen corporate names in front of a stadium with a retractable roof. I can see it now: The General Mills, 3M, Kentucky Fried, Univac, West Publishing Target Field.

Anyway, this blog isn’t about the new ballpark. It’s about the unexpected (and a little bit about my continual revere on the rising of the sun).

Powers begins his column by saying:

“Imagine a world where nothing ever changes. A world where people do the same thing at the same time in the same place day after day.”

(I have to admit that there are days in which that would be a pleasant imagining to me.)

Anyway, he goes on to say, “That was the Twins world at the Metrodome. And it was mind numbing.”

The Twins opened Target Field with the loss of an exhibition game against the St. Louis Cardinals. But it was before-the-game chatter that Powers reports. One of our pitchers, Matt Guerrier saying, “It was tough going to the Dome. It was bam, bam, bam. Nothing ever changes. We stretch at this time. Do something else at the next time. Today, it was raining. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“The chain was broken,” Powers says. “Ooooh, this is what it’s like to live dangerously. … The Twins were like little kids wondering what the rain was going to do to the rest of their day. The answer was that it would bring changes. Batting practice was canceled. The pitchers didn’t have to shag balls.”

You get the drift.

Everyone concerned couldn’t seem to work up a care in the world about the loss. They were giddy with change, with living dangerously, with being like little kids.

I haven’t been a big fan of a ballfield without a roof as backup for bad weather. I’m not a big enough fan to want to sit in the cold or the rain. But the giddiness was infectious and the sentiment heartening.

Change is good.

Quotes by Tom Powers, “Rain? Ooooh. Now what are we gonna do?”, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1B.

Go GREEN

2010-03-31T13:25:00.001-07:00

The last day of March. We’re setting a record here. The first time in 132 years that we haven’t had snow in Minnesota in March. I still hang on to the idea that there must be one more snow, if not snowstorm. Donny does too. This was too easy. An Easter week that blesses all of us who didn’t go out of town for spring break. 70 degree afternoons. Not even any mud right now. Rain predicted and yahoo! Ten minutes of rain, and the dry, early-green will pop and be verdant in that way that will hurt your eyes and just about make you cry for joy.

I remember this one year when I traveled south in early spring when all was still a mess here: leftover snow and bare trees. The landscape had gotten stripped of color and everything was looking dirty. When we got to Kentucky and started to see green it was like balm – not a jump up and down joy – but a relieving joy, a grateful joy, a "soaking it in with starving eyes" joy.

We’ve got this beautiful conservatory in St. Paul at Como Park. When the winter gets too long and you can’t take a trip, you go there to feast your eyes. Your nose doesn’t mind either. Rows of garden-like flowers set around pools under a dome, humidity high, lavender and pink and yellow and blue and GREEN and spicey-sweet frangrance. Then you walk to the next room and it is jungle-like beauty and there is moss and ferns and more GREEN almost, than you can bear.

Most mornings lately, I can’t start the day the way I’d like. One thing or another lingers that I “don’t know what to do about” and I feel I’m starving for movement. With the sun falling across the greening grass, such uncertainty coupled with purposefulness feels like more nonsense than it does at any other time. Who cares!

Who cares! You calm down. You start believing that everything comes to you in the right time.

I’d like to say that’s the end of the story but I’m not sure it is. There’s something in that “starving” feeling. There’s something in that I “don’t know what to do about it” feeling that is like a starvation diet where you’re not getting what you need. You feel as if you’re withering away, losing yourself to things undone or matters unresolved, and so the need is there to take small steps…but which ones?

In the lonesome-feeling monochromatic days of the end of winter/beginning of spring, there’s something that makes you go find the beauty your eyes crave. You’ve had enough drab. Your whole system needs an infusion of color. You feel like you’ve been in an Army barracks and surrounded by cement and olive green too long. Or simply in the house with a dog, two cats and two birds and that certain indoor smell that’s not fully relieved until you can throw the windows and doors open and get a cross breeze that refreshes the whole place. You need a CHANGE and you need it bad. You need to walk where the ground is padded beneath your feet, or where the flooring is slate and put together like puzzle pieces of white and pink and gray like it is at the Como Conservatory.

Maybe you can’t rush the change to spring but you’ve got to do something for yourself. Got to feed your soul as well as your eyes. Got to get a feeling of movement going if only just because you know you need it. It’s not that it makes any sense to fret about it, I’m just saying that there’s legitimacy in the feeling.

You let yourself admit your anxiousness for things like the coming of spring, but sometimes don’t admit to yourself those other matters that are also cravings of the soul. You want to say pshaw...let it go...it will come when the time is right.

But there are times when you know you need to do something and, even if you don't know what, you know that action is part of the craving. You need to get yourself where it's GREEN. Get on a green branch (as my friend Mary says). Get going. Get on with things. And it helps to admit it.

The Small View

2010-03-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

My eyes got hooked by the waving of the flag this morning. It filled this one corner of this one windowpane, and after a while of regarding it from that angle, there was something marvelous about it: the small view.

Now my flag is a poor specimen of a flag. My dad would not be pleased. The flag is one of the few things he had that “there’s a right way and a wrong way” attitude about.

We had a flagpole in our front yard growing up but not right away. I think we got it about the time I was ten ‘cause I remember him taking me out there – right out in the front yard in full view of the busy street, to learn to fold the flag, one triangle at a time. The wave-able nylon flag was already floating overhead and it was a military issue flag, the cotton kind that they put over the coffins of veterans, that we practiced on. He kept telling me to pull it tight the way you have to do your sheets if you want to put them on your bed without wrinkles, or fold them in your linen closet in that neat way that you see in other people’s homes. I still have to lay mine on the bed to do my folding since I don’t feel the need to call someone to help me pull them tight. But I can remember doing that now and again with the girls when they were young, and the way the sheets would get pulled out of their little hands when I’d try to snap them taut, and that’s about what happened with my dad and me in the yard, and of course, you’re not supposed to let the flag hit the ground.

We’ve got a finer flag pole than my dad ever had and I had a real intention to keep a flag waving in his honor after he died, but for some reason I can’t get too upset over my flag’s frayed edges. The pole stands too close to a couple of spindly trees that nonetheless grow taller every time Donny cuts them back. Then the flag waves and catches on the edges of the branches.

The flag didn’t catch once this morning, just waved and waved, sailing this way and that with what seemed as if it must be a high strong wind even though the trees themselves weren’t doing much swaying. On the ground, eye-catching in a lower pane of the window, a green tarp full of leafs flapped and wiggled like a giant lizard.

It was mesmerizing to watch the day dawn through that one windowpane with the undulating flag, its movement like a symphony. I’d never done it before. I liked the look of the stringy edge, like one of the fashionable silk scarves designed with a trail of fringe, probably for that very feel of movement and lightness.

After a while Henry came in and sat with me. Since the time change he’s been watching the dawning of the day with me fairly often. He bursts into my room announcing that the day is here and then, still awash with sleep, does about the only cuddling he still does, and the only quiet sitting, and he notices when the sun comes up like a ball and when it doesn’t. This morning he, too, noticed the flag.