Due to emerge: cicadas and me

I may be wrestling with a whole new round of decisions about how to emerge from Pandemic isolation. But for the 17-year cicadas, emerging is a no-brainer: any day now the soil in my yard will be warm enough to signal: it’s time. And my young apple tree is protected.

You have to love the mystery of them, and how they live up to their genus name, Magicada. I tried and failed via Googling to locate any other living phenomenon that has a 17-year cycle. Perhaps God wanted to avoid adding numerical significance to their appearance that would inspire us humans to assign it any apocalyptic interpretation during a time when it’s really attractive to go there.

This is the 5th cycle in my lifetime, and given how the days, weeks, and even seasons have vastly lost their meaning over fourteen months of pandemic isolation, the cicada life-cycle offers an interesting contrast to other ways of structuring life review: say, by decade, or stage of life, or by event milestone.

In 1953 I was out of Magicada’s range, a nine-year-old growing up in Ohio.

My roller-skating and bike-riding went uninterrupted by small flying objects. I liked Ike, who was president. My first experience of national tragedy, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was a decade away.

In 1970 I was the mom of a 3-year old living in the heavily-infested neighborhood of Mt. Washington in Baltimore.

The many large old trees were one of the attractions of the neighborhood, and from their canopies the male cicadas’ mating calls were so loud that it was impossible to have a conversation in the yard. Traversing the walk from curb to front door meant the bumbling two inch-long critters landing any and everywhere, and the crunch of bodies underfoot. They were easily brushed off, but occasionally succeeded in hitchhiking into the house. By the end of the cycle, it meant using a shovel to clear the outdoor stairwell and even parts of the garden of their empty exoskeletons.

I was four years out of college, house-wifing in a White mid-20th-century way. The summer of the Watergate hearings, spent with my ear to a transistor radio, was four years off. And the feminist wave that was to knock me over in just a few years was not yet gathering on my horizon.

By 1987 I was divorced and remarried, doing anti-hunger work for a non-profit, and living in a different neighborhood.

Plenty of big old trees. And yet to my surprise, the cicada song was significantly less deafening and more musical, and the likelihood of being bumped into by a zig-zagging flying critter was fairly low. I recall spending much of the cycle in speculative contemplation at the number of cicadas unable to emerge because they had been paved over: we live just off a major east-west thoroughfare that was expanded to six lanes during the mid-seventies. Ronald Reagan, in his second term, was just six months away from prohibiting abortion-assistance to federally funded family-planning centers. So much for the feminist wave, as the pendulum of control over women’s bodies began to reassert itself.

By 2004 I was nine years into recovery from burnout, into healing studies, and half-way through an MS in herbal medicine.

The cicadas didn’t interfere with our field days: there was just a lot of swatting the air and one-another’s clothing, and an occasional squeal from a squeamish classmate. I had spent the previous year on an an assignment for People, Plants, and Seasons. My fundamental question: what is the relationship between human nature and Mother Nature? Between the patterns, cycles, behaviors of humans and other living creatures and the whole messy collective that we are? Over the course of that year I filled three sketchbooks with field drawings, botanical and medicinal information, and personal reflections. I took photos, pressed plant material, tucked away quotes that touched me. I lived life, became a grandmother for the second time, and tended my mother through what turned out to be the final three months of her life. It was an unsettling and awe-filed year: the potency of birth and death, the generational shifts, full of feeling and poignancy. The relationship between human and Mother Nature revealed through the seasons. 9/11 had shattered the soul of the America since the cicadas had last sung.

2021: I anticipate Magicada’s arrival, particularly their song…

…and yet with mixed feelings, as I am hoping they won’t be so plentiful that they further delay gathering outdoors with a friend during Pandemic Spring number two.  My sole preparation has been netting the young apple tree we planted last year.  Cicadas lay their eggs under the bark of a tree, and the slits they create to do so are likely to damage younger trees.

I am not laying any odds that I will be around at age 94 to see the next emergence in 2038. I hope you, dear Reader, will be around to observe that we have made progress in racial conciliation through countless changes of heart and law, and as of now unimaginable levels of restorative justice skills. That we are very very close to everyone being housed and fed. That AI has not become one more technology to spawn a plague of preventable unintended consequences. That we will have long stopped new beachside development. That we are happier, and safer,  with less-is-more.

And so I wait and I watch, and I wonder: what’s my equivalent to just-right soil temperature?

Under what conditions will I emerge from Covid-19 isolation?

Will I remember how to behave around people?

Will I find that some old ways of behaving are better forgotten in the context of pandemic and racial reckoning?

What is the “new normal” I want to help shape? Ahh! See above paragraph.

Vaccination Envy: Won’t Anyone Card Me?

I'm over 75! Please card me. Please!

Vaccination envy. Really.

Having made many adjustments, (and maladjustments!) to Pandemic conditions eleven months ago, the prospect of more change, more decisions, when and how to gain the little bit of “freedom” and “normalcy” that vaccination seems to promise – all this brings its own mix of emotion, reaction, response – Including vaccination envy. 

I am probably not a good judge which of the following are Adjustments and which are Maladjustments

  • Bargaining with myself: how often do I have to cook dinner to not feel like a total jerk – after more than 30 years of Gideon working evenings? If it were up to me we would both just graze as we are moved to. 
  • Changing relationship with clothing: some days I “dress up” for the hell of it (aka to cheer myself up) in an outfit I used to reserve for “special occasions.” Other days I throw on a sweater over pajamas to appear Zoom-presentable. And yet other days – and this would truly horrify my Mom, I’ll wear the same thing two days in a row if it passes the smell test.
  • Establishing a few new sustaining habits: in the morning, courtesy of Trader Joe’s, 2 oz. of cold-brew concentrate with a splash of macadamia-almond nut milk. I drink my 2 cups of green tea later in the day. In the evening: a jigsaw puzzle app where I can choose the number of pieces and whether I want them all right-side up to start with or if i can handle the additional brain challenge of needing to rotate them to find where they fit in. After waking hours without much in the way of dopamine hits, the little “click” the app emits when I move a piece into its right place is just a bit too satisfying.
  • Delighting in having found an outing that is fun and safe: Staples is my go-to: I can browse the various forms and colors of post-its, try out a new style of pen for note-taking or highlighting or coloring. Another dopamine hit.
  • Abandoning my neighborhood post-office the day I went to send a piece of certified mail: they had no certified mail forms and no idea when they would get them. Even worse, the selection of stamps was down to Scooby Doo and Hot Wheels. I’m sorry to be disloyal – the staff is great and obviously under huge stress. Now I go to different post office, where they conserve the certified mail forms by keeping them behind the counter. 

I have made all these avowedly privileged, first-world adjustments in an effort to maximize available pleasures and minimize unnecessary use of energy and  unnecessary provocation of agitation.

What does this have to do with vaccine envy?

I decided to expend minimum energy to capture an appointment. 

I decided that the following would be really bad for my mental health: hanging on the phone for hours, or constantly redialing, or scanning websites during the wee hours in hopes of landing an appointment.

I have been eligible in the over-75 group in Maryland since Jan 18, and I did snag an appointment on that date for February 17.

I was not surprised to get an email last week cancelling my appointment, and clarifying that the slot I had signed up for and had been confirmed for was actually reserved for people getting their 2nd shots.

Gideon got his 2nd shot today. I was relieved that the vaccine was there for him and that the process itself as orderly and uneventful as the first one.

Meanwhile, I am surprised at the mental health impact of not vigorously pursuing an appointment! Disheartened and depressed as I continue to hear daily in the news: get your shot! Along with the continued daily news of no clear path to do so. Emotions are not about “making sense” of course. And it’s not as if my daily activities would change dramatically if I had my two shots.

If you have chosen a different path, I hope your efforts pay off and the search itself brings you comfort. 

I   just    can’t    go     there.

Linear time has lost its meaning, which has opened up other opportunities, as I wrote in my last post. 

So, waiting another month or two, shrug. I hope I can continue to shrug longer if I need to. 

Meanwhile I will continue to practice inviting in all the parts of myself who have something to say on this topic:

  • the one who is ok with the adjustments and maladjustments I have made
  • the one who hopes for some kind of new normalcy post-vaccination
  • the one who suffers from absences – loved ones, hugs, a night out at the movies, a museum meander
  • the one who waits – sometimes with patience, sometimes with disgruntled entitlement – for clear direction on how to get an appointment
  • the one who prays that every shot given goes to someone who has been risking her health as an essential worker or first responder
  • the one who remembers to trust, from time to time, a Wholeness and All-is-Okayness beyond my need or capacity to manage.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Are you a professional, seeker, and/or activist committed to race and gender equity?

Interested in participating in a Listening Group to help design formats to give you the support you need to be both  effective and whole?  Be in touch.

TGiving-2020: Gratitude, Grief, Real History

To give thanks.

A prayer. 

A practice.

A family celebration.

A bow of deep appreciation to  you,  faithful readers through the seasons.

For some, a Zoom Gathering on the 4th Thursday of 2020.

Now that we are somewhat assured that an orderly transition of political power will unfold between now and January, my personal capacity to give thanks has gotten a boost. 

It will get a bigger boost when I log in to Zoom later today to hear Monica’s Thanksgiving prayer before the meal. Monica and Beth and daughter Sari have been guests at our Passover Seder since Sari was a baby. Several years ago we began to say yes to their invitation to join their families and friends for Thanksgiving. I was ready to give up hosting our own. It was an easy transition.

Monica is a soul-ful pray-er, and invokes all manner of blessings received and blessings still needed.

She offers me the real dessert before the meal: a deeper meaning of the day. A day about which I was schooled in cringeworthy myths about Pilgrims and Indians sharing a meal.  She doesn’t pass over either the awful or the sublime. This year, instead of their post-meal ritual of sending home each guest with an individualized set of containers of left-overs, Beth and Monica and Sari made pre-Thanksgiving home deliveries on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Still, I grieve the loss of the “traditional” way we have come together, the breaking of bread together, the assembling of a meal that many hands and kitchens contributed to.

One more loss, one more season now belonging to the Before Times. And for me, one grief seems to tap into another, as if they all feed into one underground stream. 

Grief, love for what I have valued, loved, lost…they are a matched set, grief and love. 

I am not a gratitude practice person – if you are fortunate to find that your natural go-to, wonderful. I envy you! For me, letting in grief allows me to  find  my way to gratitude. It can take a while.

Who lives, who dies, who tells the story?

And this year I also feel a self-conscious pull to enlarge my personal sphere and include a deeper grief historically linked to this holiday. Thanksgiving, 2020 marks a National Day of Mourning, now in its 51st year. This event honors the death of Native Americans at the hands of early settlers and colonists, and shines a light on contemporary issues facing Native Americans. In October, the CDC reported that American Indian and Alaska Native people are 5.3 times more likely than white people to be hospitalized due to COVID-19, the largest disparity for any racial or ethnic group.

The dynamic of celebration by one tribe signifying a day of disaster for another is not unfamiliar to me as a Jew. Israel’s Independence Day is celebrated on May 15: celebrating a safe home for Jews following the Holocaust. Naqba, literally meaning “catastrophe,” is observed to commemorate hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians who fled or were displaced from their homes. I am not making a political statement here or declaring any sense that I understand the historical complexities and realities. I simply wish to acknowledge that there are two sets of lived experiences here, along with some truths and some mythologies, leaving a trail of  unresolved, blood-stained conflict.

The land my house is built on, and where we have lived for 36 years, was home to the Piscataway-Conoy as far back as 800 BCE.

I do not know much of their history or way of life – when I do, I may be ready to write my own “land acknowledgement” – a statement crafted differently by Native Peoples and White people to recognize the original stewards of the lands on which we now live. Naming what is true is the first step in healing. 

I am finding it more and more common on Zoom meetings among activists and seekers to invite participants to introduce themselves not only with their names and preferred pronouns, but also with a land acknowledgement of the place they are calling in from. It feels awkward and somewhat empty, a label on an empty box. But empty because I myself am empty of truthful historical information, lived historical human experiences, and an embodied appreciation to tribal knowledge and governance.

An invitation … to remember the land we live on is in our care, that we may rent or have a deed of ownership, but we are merely the current caretaker: you can enter your zip code at this website to learn the names of the tribal land on which you live.

Then see what you can find about their history – their way of life and governance.

A first small step towards yet one more conciliation that the waning months of 2020 summon us to make.

May our gratitudes help us rise to the occasion.

May we respect one another and do what we can
to keep one another safe, well, and nourished.

Happy Thanksgiving.

THE TIME IS NOW

Engage, recommit, repair, or take your first tentative steps to re-imagine and shape a world where equity is valued and embodied: Radical Inclusion Practice

How de we repurpose the artful for a pandemic world?

’trōv n [alter. of trove (discovery, find)] (2010): a collection of artful objects discovered or found

One more Covid-19-driven closure pulled me up short, and sad: Trohv, on the Avenue in Hampden. This closure has sent me down a rabbit-hole of reflection on Stuff. How I’ll miss browsing and selecting just-the-right-gift for any occasion. Gifted Stuff, Treasured Stuff, Accumulated Stuff. And my own life as a consumer Supporting the Economy, which the US Government  promoted as a civic responsibility to pull us out of the Great Recession of 2008 and since then to  keep the American economic engine humming.

It’s not the first time I have thought about a re-purposed economy

What might come after a consumer economy? In the past I have often, if vaguely, daydreamed about how we could change society for the better. By designing Stuff to last. By liberating our energies from dreaming up and producing and buying Stuff, spawning acres of self-storage units and endless Sundays of garage sales.  

By instead becoming skilled at taking care of one another, in sickness and in health, from birth to death. By valuing labor.  By building human-scale environments designed with green spaces. By educating skilled artisans, gardeners, tenders of all kinds. By elevating community-building to the art and science it can be. By shifting our national measure of success from GDP to measures like social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption, and GDP – as set forth in an annual report on happiness issued by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. 

But in August of 2020, in the 24th week of the pandemic by my personal calendar, this is no longer simply a speculative exercise. And it is quite personal.

It got me thinking about re-purposing my life

As I wander around my house, I can see that as far as Stuff goes, it is pieces of furniture, baskets and bowls that are the repurposed items: containers of all sorts. I have moved stuff around for years from one container to another. Books, family heirlooms, bottles of herbs, craft supplies, research papers-forever-waiting-to-be-read.

My life is a container that has been filled with Sara content of one sort or another, a collection of artful objects discovered and found.

Am I ready to be re-purposed for an unknown world?

The world is different. I will be continuing to investigate for some time the ways that is true, and what that asks of me.

This in-between time can be anxiety-provoking, and vision and imagination-provoking.

Unquestionably honesty and kindness-provoking.

My time? My energies? My financial resources? My mind? My feelings?

What am I doing with what I have at my disposal to shift things in my corner of the world?

The creativity and humor and artful eye and attention to artisan cultivation and customer care that went into creating the Trohv experience…that creativity will take some other life-supporting form. 

I have to trust that the same is true for me. And for you.

In free fall? Trust your self-organizing self

When I am falling apart, I have found I can rely on self-organizing wisdom, a seventh grade strategy.

The pleasures of writing began with dodging outline assignments when I was in junior high school. An English or history teacher typically required me first to turn in The Outline, and then use it as a guide to writing the paper:

I Main Idea #1

    A  ….

        1 ….

        2 ….

    B….

II Main idea #2

 

The problem was I am gifted with an associative mind.

Composing an outline drained the life right out of my thinking and ordering processes. My work-around was simple: I did the assignment backwards. I wrote the paper first and then used the paper to construct the required outline. This strategy forced me to front-load hours of homework, but that was relatively easy in comparison to pulling Main Ideas out of thin air. I trusted how my mind works, and how my creativity works.

Fast forward to Goucher College, where I majored in French Lit. I tried to go for a cross-departmental major in English and French, but I was way ahead of the interdisciplinary curve. I wrote my senior thesis on metaphor in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.  A la recherche du temps perdu was published conveniently in 10 rather slim volumes (en francais). This allowed me to read and take notes on one volume per week for the 10-week first semester of senior year, and do other collateral research and write the paper the following semester. 

I took notes on 3×5 file cards. Quotes that stood out. Points made by Proust’s biographers or literary critics. I had several shoe-boxes full by the time I began to write. I spread the cards out on the floor around me and sorted them into piles by theme. Then I began to consider how the themes related to one another, the structure of the whole work, and Proust’s use of language. Metaphor attracted my attention and became the organizing principle. If you had asked me at the time, I would certainly have claimed credit for the whole thing.

 

As a life-long student, it turns out that I have been captivated by self-organizing behavior.

My papers organized themselves. Like animal swarms, neural networks, embryonic and ecological development.

As an herbalist I have likewise come to trust the wisdom of the body. I look for a combination of plants and formulas that will nudge an ailing body back towards health. Typically I offer a combination of restorative herbs and nutrients and encouragement in weaning from habits that make the system work harder. Together these two approaches companion the body in doing what it knows how to do: restore order to its own house. That is to say, healthy relationship among the parts, the body’s functions.

But I still somehow failed to grok that the whole of my own life is a self-organizing process – one that I shape and mold, for sure, but is not, um, in my control. Rather, is guided by an inherent wisdom that is not personal to me at all.

 

It has taken two winters, each with an extended episode of illness, to bring me to my full senses.

Last winter it was dysregulation of my nervous system: sleepless nights, anxiety bordering on panic attacks. None of the considerable inner resources I had cultivated had any effect at all. My friend and master body-worker Johnny had the skill to lead me through a session where the switch flipped and my parasympathetic nervous system – the one responsible for rest, recovery, and digestion, came back online. This winter it was two bouts of flu, each with 7-8 weeks of recovery time. These illnesses, like the previous winter’s, occurred within the context of the unwinding of deep emotional patterns embedded in my body.

Here’s the thing: once the unwinding had occurred, my body knew what to do. I just had to listen. Even the unwinding was my body knowing what to do.When to hold on and when to let go. When to speak up, when to be quiet. When to expend, when to save my energies. This has allowed my whole being to reorganize itself in a healthier, happier way. And gifted me with a greater trust in the falling-apart process.

 

It feels like a free fall, and it’s a time to reach out for help. But this wisdom is there to catch me. And you.

That wisdom is God’s longing to be in this world with us and through us. In Come Healing, Leonard Cohen sings it: the “longing of the branches to lift the little bud,  “the longing of the arteries to purify the blood.”

 

If I had to, I could turn this story into one heck of an Outline.


PS  Wishing you all a summer with enough of the weather, fresh veggies and fruits and outdoor life that most delight you.  Over the next few months I will be posting just once a month. Something is afoot that wants more time: for reading and research and conversation and listening and quiet absorption and integration. It’s my way of “going to the beach” or, as we Marylanders say, “down-ee o-shun.”


Banner photo  Burning Through, by Mary Lansman. Hillsborough Gallery of Art, Hillsborough, North Carolina.

 

Ardent reader, Pt 2:  stories & wisdom across cultures

More good stories: from middle America to Africa and the American South

The Honk and Holler Opening Soon, Billie Letts (1986). A sweet, quick read that lifts my faith in humanity every time I read it. Caney Paxton is a Vietnam vet who runs an Eastern Oklahoma diner from his wheelchair but hasn’t been outside since the place opened twelve years ago. The diner is peopled by a mash-up of locals who rally to help one another at every turn. Crow Indian woman Vena Takes Horse blows in the door one day with an injured dog in a cardboard box, upsetting the order Molly O has established as her way of watching over Caney and managing life with and without her wild and estranged daughter Brenda. Meanwhile Bui, a homeless Vietnamese immigrant finds a home in the local black church and surreptitiously restores it even beyond its former glory, while working as short-order cook and handyman.

In here he knew what to expect. The smell of hot grease and stale beer, the flicker of red and blue neon, the taste of ketchup on fries, the clink of spoons against coffee cups. Days as predictable as…Suddenly, Caney grabbed the wheels of his chair, gave them a powerful jerk and popped the chair over the threshold. Clearing the door frame, feeling the heat of the sun on his face, he squinted against the glare.

 

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (2016). When I got to the end of this absorbing novel, I turned right back to the beginning and started over. I can’t say that about any other book. Gyasi’s heroines are half-sisters Effia and Esi, born in different villages in 18th century Ghana. Married off to an Englishman, Effia lives out a European colonial life, one of the many native women the British take as second wives. She does not know that her half-sister Esi is imprisoned in the castle dungeon below her palatial quarters, about to endure the agonizing Middle Passage. In alternating chapters Homegoing then traces the sisters’ parallel stories generation by generation. The unfolding of tribal warfare, control of the slave trade, and colonialization on the one hand. Plantation life in the deep South, the Civil War and Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance on the other. On my second pass, I read Esi’s story straight through, and then Effia’s, and absorbed more details of the finely-rendered characters, times and places.

…two long moans meant the enemy was miles off; three quick shouts meant they were  upon them…Esi did what her father had taught her, grabbing the small knife that her mother used to slice plantains and tucking it into the cloth of her skirt. Maame sat on the edge of her cot. “Come on!” Esi said, but her mother didn’t move…”I can’t do it again,” she whispered.

 

Non-fiction: the power of recognizing yourself in the text

Running on Empty, Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, Jonice Webb, PhD, with Christine Musello, PsyD (2013).  Webb’s book was life-changing for me.  For this book among many things I am ever grateful to my healer Brenda Blessings. In Webb’s cogent analysis I recognized my own life – the way I experienced the world and behaved in response. If anyone had ever asked me straight out if I was emotionally neglected as a child, I would have responded with a puzzled yet definitive “no.”  But Running on Empty helped me to see the relationship among what to me had been unrelated fragments. Feelings of isolation while real life went on in Technicolor on the other side of a barrier I could not breach. A capacity to speak up, and passionately, on behalf of others, but not for myself. A disconnect between “work” and pay, cause and effect. And other mysteries of my life. Five years later, the these fragments have softened and integrated – still around, yet no longer running my psyches and my life. Such as…

Signs and Signals of Alexithymia

–  you have a tendency to be irritable

–  you are seldom aware of having a feeling

–  you are often mystified by others’ behaviors

–  you are often mystified by your own behavior

–  when you do get angry, it tends to  be excessive or explosive

–  sometimes your behavior can seem rash to yourself or to others

–  you feel you are fundamentally different from other people

–  something is missing inside of you

–  your friendships lack depth and substance

 

Inspiration and guidance from many cultures

Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott (1994). I was a fan of Lamott’s from the time I first read Traveling Mercies (1999) – captured by her plain-spoken struggles with faith in daily life. It was many more years before I began to have any thoughts at all of myself as a writer. Writing was just something I did, and loved, whether I was journaling or writing testimony for a legislative hearing. If you think that none of this could apply to you, take my word for it: good writing and a good life both follow the same instructions, as Lamott’s title indicates. She opens and closes Bird by Bird by calling us to truth.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, but we do…But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

There are so many things I want to tell my students in our last class…Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

 

The World has Changed, Conversations with Alice Walker, edited with an introduction, Rudolf P. Byrd (2010). This volume was a sale-table find at Red Emma’s, where I was browsing while waiting to meet my friend Lisa for lunch. In these nineteen interviews and conversations with Walker from 1973 – 2009, she is often asked the same questions. What changes and what remains a steady thread in her responses is the instructive nourishment of this compilation. Then there is the sheer power and magic of her speaking.

On writing fiction:…there’s that wonderful, playful quality of knowing you have dreamed up people who are walking around and who have opinions…You’re dreaming people, creating people, they do surprising things, but it’s only because you have given them that freedom in creating them.

On Possessing the Secret of Joy: I learned about genital mutilation twenty years ago in Kenya, and it was just so completely beyond my experience at the time…that I didn’t, I literally didn’t understand what they meant…But by the time I actually started [the book] I was in such a state of grief that the only thing that sustained me was that I could go outside and just lie facedown on the earth. And I really understood…that the body of a woman is the body of the earth, and it was the same kind of scarring, mutilation, control. You know, “If you’re gonna have a crop, it’s gonna be my crop.”…And the same where they cut the woman and they sew her up, and they say, “if you’re gonna have children, it’s gonna be my child.”

 

The Book of Joy, Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with Douglas Abrams (2016) Two of the wisest men on the planet are in conversation, and their love for one another and their warm and playful friendship, displayed in photos and verbal exchanges, bring delight, though Abrams as narrator sometimes got in my way. My friend Greg loaned me this book, accurately sensing that my spirits were sorely in need of upliftment. Joy, in fact, remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Abrams did redeem himself in my eyes by including this definition from Brother Steindl-Rast: “Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens.”

The Dalai Lama: After 9/11 you would have suspected that those who hated America would have been gloating. But there were very, very, very few people gloating, People were deeply, deeply distressed. Had the American President not hit back, we might have had a different world. We will have a different world of course, eventually. But just look at any tragedy…There is compassion that just springs up.

Archbishop Tutu: You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others…God created us and said, Go now, my child. You have freedom. And God has had such incredible reverence for that freedom that God would much rather we freely went to hell than compel us to go to heaven…And God weeps until there are those who say I do want to try to do something.


For Part 1 for Ardent readers:  http://alifeofpractice.com/musings/ardent-reader-pt-1-good-stories-perennial-wisdom/

 

 

Ardent reader, Pt 1: good stories & perennial wisdom

stack of books

As an ardent reader, I relish both good stories and perennial wisdom. This week I share a few of my favorites with you.

 

Thankfully, Dick and Jane did not quench my love of reading. I lose myself in a well-told story.

I read to find heroines and role models, to understand villains and evil. See the world afresh.  Escape.  Time travel to other places and by unfamiliar means – horseback, sleigh, trans-Atlantic steamer, dragon- back (Anne McCaffrey’s specialty). Drench myself in strange tastes, smells and dialects. And find myself anew, with widened eyes and a wiser heart, some enhanced capacity to be more human. Enchanted by language. Refreshed to return to my own daily “story.”

Hefting a book in my hands, I treasure the tactile – the feel of the binding and texture of the paper. I’ve kept notebooks of quotes, even extended passages. I’ve underlined and scribbled in margins, highlighted and tabbed with post-its.

I love being pulled forward page to page…and if the story is a good one, I ration the pages to slow myself down and savor the experience.

 

Winter comfort reading…fiction to be savored with afghan and tea

Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin (1983). The language and imaginative scope of this novel still absorbs me on my – 10th? 15th? rereading. Peopled by outrageous underworld characters, a master mechanic, a consumptive heiress, an epic competition between high-minded and low-minded daily newspapers, an elusive bridge-thrower, a howling White Wall, and a powerful white horse, all in the roiling streets of Manhattan during some time that never was but we dream of. Especially now that Helprin has engraved such a city in our minds.

All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

 

The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett (2007). Trailing her yapping corgis around a corner of Buckingham Palace, the Queen of England stumbles upon a traveling library. I revisit the life-changing pleasures of reading as she discovers her own. Full of Britishisms and good humor.

’The Queen has a slight cold’ was what the nation was told, but what it was not told and what the Queen herself did not know was that this was only the first of a series of accommodations, some of them far-reaching, that her reading was going to involve.

 

The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver (1988). Taylor escapes Kentucky “in a ’55 VW Bug with no windows to speak of, and no back seat and no starter.”  Headed west, she stops for a scant meal and leaves the bar with her “head rights” to the Cherokee nation: an abandoned, abused toddler. Taylor and Turtle end up in Tucson at Jesus is Lord Used Tires, which houses an auto repair shop and a sanctuary for Central American asylum-seekers. Full-bodied and warm-hearted characters, each down on their own hard luck, take care of one another, creating their own miracles along the way.

We looked where (Turtle) was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. They looked as much like beans as anything you’d care to eat…It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees.

 

Perennial wisdom … dip in, savor, open at random and contemplate

I take on a different reading persona with these works of perennial wisdom.  These are not cover-to-cover reads. I do start with forwards and prefaces and introductions for context. I often read the acknowledgments at the end: I enjoy getting a sense of the lineages to which such books belong and the village that may have surrounded an author’s or translator’s work. Then I read I-Ching style: open at random, read a few passages or pages, close the book and reflect on what light the words shed on any given current personal or world predicament.

 

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, translation and foreward by Stephen Mitchell (1984). First published in 1929 by Franz Xaver Kappus, recipient of these 10 letters from the Bohemian-Austrian poet. Kappus was a 19-year-old military cadet and aspiring poet. While addressing a life in poetry and art, Rilke’s words remain rich guidance for a vibrant inner life in the 21st century.

…it is clear we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.

 

Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita, Ram Dass (2005).  This volume is built around talks I first listened to on cassette tapes as I was running a gingerbread-baking business out of my kitchen. He spoke about the “mellow drama” of his own journey. And he mixed his personal stories with commentary on the themes of this ancient scripture, “themes…that touch on the various yogas, or paths for coming to union with God.”  The 700 verses of the Bhagavad Gita originally appear among some 200,000 verses of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata. This “song” takes the form of a conversation between the warrior Arjuna and Lord Krishna, his charioteer, as Arjuna is about to go into full battle with his own family members.

Again and again the Gita turns our perspective upside down…It shifts our sense of what our lives are about. So as we begin to adopt the Gita’s perspective as our own, we’ll notice that our focus starts to change. Instead of always preoccupying ourselves with trying to get what we think we want or need, we’ll start to quiet, we’’ll start to listen. We’ll wait for that inner prompting. We’ll try to hear, rather than decide, what it is we should do next…we’ll discover that we’ve lost our lives – and found them.

 

The Instruction Manual for Receiving God, Jason Shulman (2006). This slim volume offers more than one-hundred “seed passages”  for contemplation, along with commentary and suggested practices. He lays out an open-hearted path to accepting the wisdom and limitations in our human imperfections, and to encountering God at every turn. I have been studying this nondual work with Jason for over twenty years. He is the real deal.

There is a Japanese saying: The elbow does not bend outward. It is a smart saying. The freedom of the elbow, the wonderfulness of the elbow, is precisely because of its limitations. This is our awakened attitude. We are free to be completely human. We are not free to be aliens or cartoon creatures. We are free to be ourselves, with all of our imperfections and bruises.

 

An invitation: pay it forward and add one of your titles and why it makes your own list of favorite books!

 

Watch for Part II: fiction and non-fiction for writers and cross-cultural explorers.

 

Hitting the jackpot looked different from what I expected

Our household has always been full of treasures. I have learned this has nothing to do with market value. Still, I had hoped to hit the jackpot.

The sorting process began in April with the easy-to-let-go-of stuff – one drawer, one shelf, one closet at a time. Shredding went out of the house to a post-tax-season event. Clothing and useable household items – there were  three trips to the Wise Penny with donations.

On to the basement, where vintage and antique dolls from four generations, my maternal grandmother’s to my kids’ – were wrapped in yellowing paper. China, Effanbee, Madam Alexander, Storybook Dolls. Dollhouse and furnishings top to bottom – including a built-in bookcase for the livingroom, a navy leather chair, and an old-fashioned school-desk (with my kids’ names scratched in under the lid) I had made myself.

Cookie cutters, candy molds, and materials for making large panorama Easter eggs from sugar, all materials for my gingerbread business, Confections Unlimited. Boxes of Christmas ornaments going back to my and my kids’ childhoods.

Real wooden toys from before Playskool went plastic. A bin of stuffed animals – the still-collectable Steiff, all missing the distinctive ear button that increases their value. Eddie the estate liquidator said kids tend to bite them off. Hand puppets. Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore. Paddington and an assortment of other bears. All this was a pantry of memories.

In less than an hour Eddie and his buddy carted it all away, writing me a modest check, which allowed him to forgo charging me to also haul away old luggage, a slightly bent metal file cabinet, a hardly-used trampoline, a 1941 Royal typewriter,  a movie projector, old insulation, and more.

Eddie wasn’t so interested in the vintage books, so I drove out to Gramps’ Attic in Ellicott City, where I had purchased several of them. In 10 minutes “Gramps” had deftly picked through the four boxes in the trunk of my car, offered me $100 for 15 books, and placed the cash in my hand.

More than anything, even the dollar gap between my hopes and the reality, it was the transactional nature of these encounters that jarred me.

The coins I took to Mr. Merrill – I tracked him down online because I had remembered the small friendly fieldstone building that he had occupied for years, and I always told myself he’s the one I’d go to when the time came.

There were some silver dollars my grandfather had given me as a kid, a handful of Indian-head pennies, a stash of Soviet coins, and envelopes of coins from countries around the world that I had never visited.

Like Gramps, he quickly and deftly sorted through the items, separating out the ones he would buy from those he recommended passing on to a kid. He told me that’s how he had gotten interested in coins – fascinated by what they taught him about history and place and economics.

Here’ s the thing. Mr. Merrill was interested in stories.

He wanted to hear about my great uncle William Newman, who had traveled by train and buggy and early automobile, taking colored glass slides, and returning to the US to tour Masonic Temples with his travelogues. He wanted to hear about my trip to the Soviet Union, how I met up with refusenik families to deliver photos and letters, how my wallet was stolen in the Hermitage Museum and the danger that posed for them, considering just what combination of foolish and courageous I was.

Every item that went out of my house had a story attached  to it, dusty with childhood and motherhood and entrepreneurial memories. I had hoped to hit the jackpot, something that would put a large chunk of cash at my disposal.

The real jackpot was that one transaction that was more than transactional: the one that was alive with story.


More on expectations: http://alifeofpractice.com/daily-practices/the-healing-i-needed-not-the-one-i-wanted/

 

It’s not about anything but love

It’s curious how I’ve been drawn back repeatedly to an area in the Catskills that I have visited regularly for close to forty years. Clearly it has been home to me in some way I have not been able to name.

There is a “there” there, but what is its nature?

Spiritual initiations and awakening, weeks of study and following ashram discipline, Jewish Renewal retreats, gatherings with healing colleagues, meditation and prayer and practice – and family events. For the past eight years the family events have included pilgrimages to Stagedoor Manor, a camp for serious theatre geeks from which my grandson will “graduate” in a few weeks, then head off to college.

But what is it really that has drawn me back over and over again?

As I drove south through Sullivan County a few days ago, returning to Baltimore after a camp performance week-end, I once again considered this question. When my daughter and I arrived on Friday afternoon, we had been greeted with a double rainbow. The weather had been sunny and pleasant with a few heavy downpours. As we left were still under the influence of Saturday evening’s gloriously silver full moon. Nature was certainly at its kindest this trip.

And we had been inspired by six shows from Friday through Saturday evening, full of gifted and spirited acting and song, and enjoyed the particular dance that happens every summer as various family members and friends disperse go to different shows and come back together to exchange “wows!”

….and then I heard these words spoken in the voice of one of my teachers:

It’s about love.

It’s always been about love.

It’s not about anything but love.

When I thought it was about wisdom, it was about love.

When I thought it was about skill, it was about love.

When I thought it was about duty, it was about love.

And what is the nature of that love?

The nature of that love is action, not sentiment.

In Hebrew, the word for love is Ahava, which has a numerical value of thirteen. The word for One is Echad, which also has a numerical value of thirteen. Coupled, in relationship, their value is 26, the numerical value of the Unpronounceable Name of God.

And so it goes: we think that we travel, we think we gather and disperse, we think we study, we think we perform on stage or off.

While what we really do is love.

Receive and give over and over again.

Express the One – endlessly and concretely. Humanly, that is to say imperfectly.

Sing the Unpronounceable with our imperfect human actions.

 

 

Refresh yourself, or sulk, in my garden – apparently I’m on spring break

Come on in. You are welcome to refresh yourself  – or  sulk, as you wish – in my woodland medicinal garden,  nestled under a sky-ward leaping linden tree. My writer’s mind and hand are apparently on spring break,

In Perpetual Spring
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.
Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

Source: Bitter Angel: Poems (1990)

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Shade canopy: Linden tree

Top row: Black Cohosh, Greater Celandine, Solomon’s Seal, Wild Ginger

Bottom row: Twinleaf, Dwarf Comfrey, Golden Ragwort, Black Cohosh