Shut Down. Reboot. Restart. Again.

Hello, Blog.

Hello, Blog Readers (if there are still any left after my being so neglectful for so long).

See how that period is after the parenthetical expression? I've been in school. I've been citing things in MLA and APA citation conventions, and I've been getting closer and closer to the degree I started in a different life and yesterday and oh my word is it end of term again already?

It is.

It's also end of hiatus from the library, I think. Yesterday I did all the testing for all the levels of library work I was doing when I quit last summer. Was it last summer? I can't remember. I also can't take any seniority or experience back with me in any sort of official way, and this is the third time of testing. The third time of hiring. The third librarian in our local branch to have to interview me before I can have a job under her authority and direction.

Apparently, I am a Repetitive Starter, starting again. Old college degree unaccredited, so I started again. Twice I've been hired for work at the library, never have I had any chance at anything but sub work, thrice I have been tested and I am starting again. My religious life. My writing life. My homemaking life. Start again. Start again. Shut down. Reboot. Clear the cookies. Start again.

Is this why I like to work with kids? Because they are all always at the start of things? See that? See the fragments and run-ons and deliberate mistakes? I've been in Lit classes and wallowed in Poetry. I've become so familiar with The Rules that now we play with each other and make each other laugh and cry and moan and roll our eyes. Our I's. Oh, aye!

But I notice something. Same tasks, same series of skills sets to stack and survey and sustain ... but different me. I am not the same.

I've been thinking about that lately. I'm reminded when I look down at my right hand as it holds the pages of my prayerbook. The part of my hand between my thumb and first finger -- it's wrinkled and starting to look like an old woman's hand. Only in certain lights. Only sometimes. But my hand isn't young anymore.

When I was in the sixth grade, we had an art teacher who came into the classroom once a week. From her, we learned the color spectrum -- and colored flowers with yellow at the center and all the colors in order to the outside points of the petals where they were darkest purpley blue and almost black. The colors blended together where they changed from one to another. A few spikey shards of yellow reached almost to the outside rim, and yet all the colors filled the petals in order.

I have drawn that flower every once in awhile for all my life since then. Spectrum. Blending. Order. Spectrum. Blending. All the colors, all in order, just like a rainbow caught in the fantasy of a flower that could never be but everyone knows it's a flower anyway.

We drew our own non-dominant hands, too. After we learned about perspective drawing, we put our "other" hands into a pose, and drew them with our pencils. Shading. Line. Perspective. Creases and bends and knuckles and nail bed and cuticle. I remember my sixth grade hand, and the one that holds the pages down when I study or pray - it's the same, but it has texture now. My hand is older.

In this moment, on a Saturday morning right before spring, when the fog and the rain are blurred together outside my window, and the quarter is almost over, and my jobs at the library are almost back in my hands again, I notice this. My hands are older.

Rest now, Luke. Rest in Peace.

A huge storm has pounded its way ashore here in the Pacific Northwest. Fortunately, it is not freezing out there. Driving will be hazardous, but not suicidal. I will be out in the elements, keeping my car on the road, avoiding the largest puddles and most splashing trucks, being distracted by the storm outside the car - distracted from the unsettled weather inside my chest.

This morning we will bury Luke.

We loved him. I loved him.

He did not let us know much about his personal life. It had already cost him too much, and he didn't want to bother us with it. He protected us from it, I think. He did not want anyone to pay attention to it.

Luke played the organ at church. He was there for every Sunday and holy day of obligation. He was there for every special service. He worked around the parts that needed repair, using what would work instead of bothering others to fix anything - in the organ, in the parish ... he didn't insist. He worked. He loved us.

I am remembering conversations I had with him. We were friends.

I am remembering the times I was in the choir loft when he was. I am remembering his uncanny ability to move all over that loft in utter silence. He could pass out sheets of music and give directions to the singers and pay attention to the service at the altar at the other end of the church, even though the rood screen and statues hide it so fully from the view from up there. He responded to something in the room. He knew when to do what, and he never missed a step and he never made a sound. We heard only music.

This morning we will pray the prayers of absolution. We will breathe the incense and listen to the music played by his fellow organists and sing the hymns for him. We will sing to God for Luke, our brother. Our friend. Our cantor - the one Luke trained - he will sing the Ave.

And later, in the afternoon of wind and rain and storm and chaos all around, as the last of the leaves blow off the trees and stick to our legs and shoes in the graveyard, we will commit him to the ground and to God. Quiet in the storm. Rest in the blowing rain. It suits him.

At the end of his life he was in agony. A cancer had taken hold of his brain. I have been praying for him every day for months now, asking God to release Luke from his body. It was broken. It was making too much noise.

Today we let him go.

Be at peace, Luke. We love you. I will try to sing this morning. But it may not be quite possible. It will be possible to pray. Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord. Light perpetual shine upon him.

The Party's Over ... Here It Comes

I was up in the Gifford Pinchot yesterday. I saw it. Every year it is different, and every year it is the same. Summer came, partied with wild abandon and fruited everywhere, and brought the animals and berries and trees and streams into a huge riot of color and noise and wildness. The Cascade Mountain Range in the Pacific Northwest is primal and huge and juicy and wet and scented with the heaviness of fir trees all summer long.

And then, quietly one night, the guests go away and in that silent breath of time, the celebration vanishes. Where there was noise and every color of green ever created, there is now the whisper of the coming of the snows, and the fire of red and yellow and gold flare up. The hillsides are covered with glowing vine maple and red huckleberry (and now the pots and vases in my house are holding that color in my corners and shelves). Some silent army of servants are beginning to move about, putting away the party. They are making the house ready. The family will pass long dark evenings here. The fir trees are reaching into themselves for power. They darken and deepen and talk to each other about the weight of water. Yesterday, I heard them.

And so, today, on a Saturday of duties and tidying and finishing and readying, some spirit that lives near my sternum has begun to untie the strings and open the boxes of winter. Fall is for getting ready for winter. Autumn is painted in the colors of preparation.

All Saints ... All Souls ... Thanksgiving.
Saint Nicholas ... Saint Lucy ... Nativity.
Saint Stephen ... Saint John ... Epiphany.

The candles are nested in their boxes and they wait for lighting. Fire and ice and water and flame. The party is over, and winter is coming. Again.

My sentiments, exactly

God Save the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

Where There's a Will ... There's a huge inner fight!

What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? This hour, Radiolab looks for ways to gain the upper hand over those forces inside us--from unhealthy urges, to creative insights--that seem to have a mind of their own.

For anyone who's ever tried to break a habit or addiction - and for all who've never heard of radiolab ... You just have to give this a listen!

I have to say it

Okay.

I know, I know. In the face of such horrible human disaster and anguish, it's a very small matter. You get a free pass if you're actually in danger. But for the rest of you?

It's pronounced like this:

NOO~CLEE~ERR

It is NOT pronounced "noo" "cue" "lur"

Are we all clear now? Practice if you have to. Just stop saying nuculer. Seriously.

Uh-oh ... Mommy 'piow?

Yes, Mommy spilled. Again.

When our oldest child was still an only child (a condition of her life she has since suspected was an 18-month stay in her own personal Nirvana), she didn't miss much. Ever. She was born paying attention. She was the child who would stop breastfeeding if her mother so much as looked at an open magazine lying beside us on the couch cushions. She could sense my wandering attention, and the slight shift in her surroundings made her stop and wait to see ... and not continue with her work until my attention was back where it belonged. (notice the facial expression on artist Carl Larsson's wife as she attempts the same thing with one of her own eight children?)

At a year old, our daughter had advanced to a much more verbal processing of these environmental shifts. Still aware of everything, she had now learned to comment.

"Doo lou'!" ("Too loud" - a comment on a passing fire truck when we were out on a walk.)

"Gah!" ("All gone," said with chubby hands turned upward and with a small shrug, to cheerfully and adamantly inform us that her food was "gone," apparently because a magic trick had been performed.)

"Cahfooooh...!" ("Careful!" - her first real word, recited like a mantra while she was learning to walk across the room, nearly never falling down in the process.)

All must be noticed. All must be identified. Aloud. Usually with exclamation points.

And so, there was very little hope that the spilled oatmeal would pass unnoticed. It only happened once, but every morning for weeks afterward, we re-lived the moment.

Mommy reaches into the cupboard and picks up the container of dry oatmeal. Mommy puts the container on the counter and begins to pry up the edge of the lid. And this one time? This one time Mommy spilled. The container fell off the counter, and upended its contents onto Mommy's feet. And the child in the highchair, cheerfully waiting for breakfast in this place of contented confinement, up where she could see the breakfast being made, began her shocked commentary.

"Uh-oh!"
(Mommy glaring at her own bare, morning feet)

"Mommy 'piow?"
"Yes, Mommy spilled." (Mommy begins stepping out of the heap of rolled oats)

"Oapmeoh?"
(teeth gritted, voice calm) "Yes, Mommy spilled the oatmeal."

"Toe?"
"Yep - Mommy spilled oatmeal on her toes." (grrr!)

This was the dialogue that continued for weeks, every morning, and every time someone opened the door to the cupboard with the oatmeal container inside.

I thought about this today, more than twenty-five years after the fact. I thought about it because Mommy 'piow'd again. Not oatmeal, but papers and books. (Uh-oh ... Mommy 'piow? Toe?) Mommy's toe made Mommy's brain begin to process a certain sort of awareness today - the awareness of the spillable piles, and what they contain.

I began to look around. From where I stood, I could see books about cinema, because I'm writing my final paper for History of Film. I could see several notebooks - some empty, a couple of notebooks full of notes, and under other piles are notebooks with only a couple of pages used, either because they could not be found after the first bout of writing or because the project had ended almost as soon as it began.

Here are library books about emotions, brain development, perception, and narrative. There are Newspapers. Magazines. That table holds the latest finds from used book stores. This one has some (more) books and booklets for theological and religious education writing. Interestingly enough, the books about writing and poetry, once I own them, cannot be found in this part of the house. Those books are upstairs, in my office, near my desk, and usually shelved properly, where I can easily lay my hands on them again.

In the main part of the house, between clear-outs, the flat surfaces of living and dining rooms also bear their weight in junk mail, catalogs (both the desired and the where'd-this-come-from? variety), and all the mail waiting to go to places in other parts of the house or in other houses (my mother-in-law's mail, mail for the kids who aren't here, bills, etc.). The piles are ever in danger of 'piowing onto Mommy's toes, and Mommy thinks this morning that the myth of the paperless society is an absurdity too laughable to laugh at.

So, what is Mommy going to do about this problem?

(Uh-oh ... Mommy 'pioh? Oapmeoh? Toe?)
Yeah.
Hush up.
There is too much paper and there are too many printed words in this house.
I don't want to talk about it.

But ... wait.

Is that the problem?

Is it a problem that these piles and papers and books and notebooks are here, in my house, all the time? Should I have less paper here? Fewer notebooks and fewer books and fewer projects to generate all of this in the first place?

Is the oapmeoh the problem?

Or ... is this simply the stuff of life in this house?

This is a picture of Gretchen Rubin, writer, and most recently famous because of her Happiness Project and the book she wrote about her year's experiment. Notice, please, that in her New York apartment, where she lives with her husband and children, and where she writes and cooks and reads, and from which she goes out into the world to exercise, or speak, or shop ... where she lives ... she has lined a wall with books. Gretchen Rubin's gorgeous New York apartment has at least as much danger of acquiring piles of papers as my house has, here in mostly rural Stevenson, Washington.

Here is a similar picture of Mireille Guiliano, former CEO of Veuve Clicquot, and author of French Women Don't Get Fat. Another New York apartment. Another wall of books, some vertically shelved, some horizontal, non-matching bindings, hardback and paperback books kept together, not color-displayed ... real books ... lots of words and ideas and pages and pages and pages.

I used to put only a little bit of food at a time onto the high chair tray for the little girl who was sitting there. It was easy to overwhelm her with too much to do - too much to pay attention to - too much to process. (And it's too hard to comment on everything if there are too many things to comment on.) But the answer wasn't to eliminate the food. The answer was to have on the high chair tray only as much as the tiny talking child could pay attention to - and while she was eating (and commenting) the rest of the food in the house was where it belonged.

I need the things in my piles. Although I suppose I could do without the junk mail, I could also probably do without a new container being purchased every time I buy oatmeal. If I haven't sorted the mail at the post office and used their recycling containers, I can use mine for junk mail. If I haven't bought my oatmeal from the bulk aisle and used my own container, I can properly dispose of the purchased packaging on my own. I can fill my bookshelves with the words and words and more words, putting the bound and unbound pages that belong in this house where they need to go, throwing away the stuff I don't need, and filing my course work where I can find it again.

It sounds a little silly, when I type it all out like that. "I can be an organized paper shuffler." (duh) But when a pile falls onto Mommy's toes, Mommy wonders - at least at the first crash - if the contents of the pile need to be eliminated from her reality in some sort of final and definitive way. Today, Mommy has decided again that the possibility of spilled oatmeal is better than having no oatmeal at all, and that it just might be possible to live happily with all this paper in the house.

Now, if you'll excuse me? I have some piles to unpile and a few more books to find homes for. We went to a couple of library booksale places while we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago.

Forced perspective

"Forced perspective" is what painters and filmmakers and photographers use to make things look larger or smaller to the viewer.

Funny, right? (you can click on the pic for a good explanation of forced perspective)

Less funny when your brain is doing forced perspective acrobatics on its own.

It's the end of the quarter, and I know perfectly well that I'm avoiding writing my final papers. I have not been following the wisdom available to me within this mounting anxiety - I have taken no action. (After all, I know what it is. I have the right answer, right? This is anxiety, it's caused by awareness of something noteworthy and requiring action, and I'm feeling it grow and grow as I continue to avoid it. Duh.)

I have taken no end-of-quarter action -- until this morning when I couldn't take it anymore. (Deep breath in ... exhale ... log onto the course site ...) Okay. Any new posts?

No. But here's the drop box for the final paper.

ACK! It's due Friday? TODAY is Friday! Oh no oh no oh no!! I can't write a 10 page paper and make it look good enough for this course in just one day! I haven't even started! Oh no oh no oh no!!!

(panic reaction in full swing)

Due date: Friday, 18 March 2011, 11:55 PM

Wait a second ... what's the date?

oh.

The paper is due NEXT Friday!

Thank you, Anxiety. Apparently the inner jangling, pounding, screaming, and jumping up and down that I've been ignoring has been happening in plenty of time for my attention to be brought to bear early enough for success. The girl threatening to flatten my Eiffel Tower is not quite as large as she's been pretending to be.

What's that you say? Keep a calendar? Hmmmm... interesting idea ....

Befriend Your Anxiety (yes, really)

Sign up!!

Karla McLaren's newsletter just came into my inbox. It's my first one, and I've just perused it with the jaded eye of an inveterate and compulsive newsletter subscriber. Email newsletters are almost universally boring and/or minimally useful. But this one? Wow! Here's an excerpt.

"Befriending Anxiety in 2011"

... Dr. Lamia contrasts procrastinators, who put things off until their anxiety kicks in and makes them do their work with do-it-aheaders, who do their work ahead of time. I’m a do-it-aheader, and we’ve got a joke in our family about thanking Karla from the past. We’ll find some job I finished weeks ago, or unearth finished pieces to a project that is crucial, or we’ll find important papers in my filing system, and we’ll say, “Thanks, Karla from the past, for making things easy on us!” Clearly, this thanking is a great motivator, because in each day, I think of all kinds of cool projects and jobs to do for the future happiness of my friends, my family, and myself. It’s a total win-win. It’s time travel that works!

Before I heard Dr, Lamia, I would have said that I didn’t do anxiety, but now I’m realizing, “Ooohhhh, I’ve got plenty of anxiety, but I’ve been been responding to it at very early points in its appearance, so it rarely gets to the level of a mood.” I have mistakenly thought of my very subtle level of do-it-ahead anxiety as, I don’t know, conscience, foresight, responsibility, or perhaps just being organized. I missed the fact that I was feeling an emotion that was trying to prepare me for the future. Whoops!! We live and learn, so I’m now taking anxiety out of the shadows and asking it questions, looking at people who run anxiety in its mood state, and focusing on anxiety more clearly.

Go to her site! Sign up for this stuff! Learn to understand the information, messages, feedback, and motivations your emotions are trying to give you!

You may say I am a dreamer

I am a Christian.
I believe the ancient Christian creed, partake in ancient Christian sacrament, read the sacred text, and follow the year's liturgical pattern. I feast on feast days, fast on fast days, and thank God for the example and prayers of the Saints.

I am an intellectual.
I study the minds of the ages in the written work they left us. I grapple with both logic and ethics, I admire both art and technology, and I work with conscious intention to understand and enact a life of educated honor in the world in which I live.

I am a woman.
I believe in Yin energy, and the darkly internal nature of generative power, embodied in women everywhere. I have borne children, and nurtured their years of maturing. I have taken to myself the Yang energy of a husband, and know that he has Yin energy of his own, but that mine is in my body as well as my activity.

I am an American.
I believe that the government of the people is necessary, that it should be done by the people, and that it is for the people. I believe in the public good, provided by the public will. I desire public roads, public parks, public education, and public radio. Where we have worked together for the good of all, America has been a noble and kind, as well as an inventive and buoyantly brash nation.

I am an optimist.

And I pray that the spirit of fear which so easily seizes mankind will begin again to recede from our shores.

The young and determined in the countries of the Middle East are waking to their inherent rights as humans. They are taking to the streets, and daring to believe what our founding fathers believed when our Great Experiment of a country began.

I am imagining what the world could be with free people everywhere, and the common good to guide us.

Eggs in One Basket

Yesterday was Septuagesima. Next Sunday will be Sexagesima and the Sunday after that is called Quinquagesima, which is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent, which is the forty days (not counting Sundays) leading up to Easter.

I came into this antique vocabulary as an adult, and I still delight in it like a little kid. The words sound to me like ballet terms (arabesque, coupé dessous, pirouette) or the names of the diacritical marks on a sheet of music. The liturgical terms mean something to the practitioners of the discipline - in this case, it's 70, 60, and 50 days before Easter (which is odd, since a week only has seven days in it). On Septuagesima Sunday, we enter the countdown to Lent - and the kids in that picture are pretty good representations of the moods present at the beginning of Lent in various years.

The annual season of Lent, more than the beginning of the calendar year, is when I take stock. Somehow, since this time last year (whichever year I'm in), I have invariably acquired random piles of stuff. Duties. Relationships. Distractions. About a zillion zillion distractions. Ugh.

It's time once again to sort mental piles, toss distracting clutter, and only keep the eggs that fit in the one, intentionally filled, deliberately chosen basket. Time to stop living in Multitasking Fantasyland, where the illusion of doing several things at once is sprinkled like pixie dust on all the plants and animals, dazzling the eye and dizzying the head, and all we end up doing is spinning and spinning and spinning. Lent reaches out a hand, and I can grab it and stop.

Just stop.

Cease.

Quit.

One little blog has spread under the soil of my world, and shoots have come up in other places. Now there are three blogs, a facebook page, and a newly opened account on SmashWords, where I intend to put some of my writing into the open market. That's too many eggs. Too many sprouts. Too many metaphors for too much distraction.

One little degree has turned into a sprawling, spreading, lolling about, directionally diffuse, too faint and watery in intention, unchanneled. Instead of a river, carrying me on to a place I want to go, I'm sitting in a swampy sort of landlocked wetland. And wetlands are wonderful for wetland-dwelling species. If I wanted to live here, I'd be home. But I don't. So I'm not. I need to dredge a channel and get moving again because it's getting too attractive to disease-ridden pestilence and I need to breathe freely again. (Translation: I need to FINISH my Prior Learning portfolio, turn it in, and get the credit for it. And that's for starters.)

All in all, it's also time to chuck out some of the eggs that looked kind of interesting, or quirky, or familiar from another place and time. I've been going on too many daytrips back down paths I've already walked. It's like a little check for psychic buyer's remorse. Am I glad I went this way? What if I'd stayed there? When I left that place, I was unhappy (or scared, or angry, or hurt) ... was that a good enough reason to leave? Was I overreacting then? Did I miss out?

(Oh, the lure of "You're missing out ... you're missing out ..."!)

(click on that picture! It came from a very cool site called artsyTIME)

We can only remember things from where we were standing at the time. We can only have seen them through our own eyes, interpreted them from our own personalities, our own assumptions. Along the way, we rewrite the memories, re-form the images, re-remember, and incorporate into our lives what we thought we saw when we saw something. It is not a bad idea to go back and check and look with the eyes we now have. Usually, we find that our view was surprisingly incomplete at best.

And then we have to learn that our current view is still incomplete, at least.

So it's clearing-out-time. Remove the eggs and count them. Keep only the one basket. I've only the one life. Eggs that tend toward the rot and disintegration of fear-mongering, contraction, and staying put, contented with conclusions already drawn ... out, out, out. Eggs that still hold the health and life of joy, anticipation, openness and change ... put those in. Keep those.

And maybe in the end, I'll be so sorted out that I won't be conflating eggs in a basket with boating on outa here - with a ballerina added to the cargo. Sheesh! Metaphor muddle: dead giveaway, proof of the need for the annual assessment.

Adding the layers, working on the picture

(Hello, Recollected Life blog ... it's me. Remember me?)

After a sort of foraging expedition of the past few months, I now have more to say on the subject that keeps calling me. Being recollected, about life. What is a person? How do people work? When it goes wrong, what has happened? And why do people unfailingly believe there's such a thing as life going "wrong" or "right" in the first place? Obviously, we have the ability to self-reflect, imagine what is not yet a reality, and change our worlds ...

Gather it in. Collect it. Re-collect it. I do this in my religious life, and I do it all the time with "moments of clarity, attempts to focus, and questions to ponder in the intentional life" I'm trying to live. So ...I've just added another layer. In 2010, Karla McLaren wrote what I think is a fairly important book. The Language of Emotions: What your feelings are trying to tell you. She has addressed the modern, industrialized, socialized, urbanized, thought-laden, enlightenment-hounded, emotionally confused people we find ourselves to be.

I think she's brilliant. She went and studied and figured out and researched and assembled all of the components of this language we're so bad at in our era. (Because she did, I don't have to.) When I assert (as I have for about a decade now) that our emotions are like an instrument panel on a plane in flight, and that they carry information we need, and that we ignore our emotional feedback to our own peril, now I can open and re-open this book, and find the vocabulary and the studies and the research to re-ground myself in the practicalities of the thing. This is good stuff.

And it's another layer for my ongoing (personal) encyclopedia entry.

These models, these languages we all carry - they are the layers of transparencies in the encyclopedias we had on our home bookshelves when I was a kid. Do you remember those old encyclopedias? For the models of the human body or a reptile or an towering office building or anything else with three-dimensional layers, there were layers of clear overlays the reader could peel back, discovering the interconnected systems. (click on that picture of a version still being done - I love this kind of work!)

That is what this book of McLaren's does. It adds another transparency page for my model.

Back when I was taking the Human Studies course, Relationship to the Self, we had to come up with a model of the Human Self. I discovered that the Erickson model of psycho-social development closely paralleled the ancient system of chakras, which itself could be seen in concert with Martha Beck's change cycle (back to Square One at the beginning of all of life's changes, Square Two is ideas, Three is trial and error, Four is maintenance until the next propulsion smack back to Square One). Then there's the ongoing Blue Zones research, being done across the globe, where the healthiest and longest-living groups of people show that they all have the same "Power Nine" things contributing to their lives.

I ended up with Chakra Man ... a really boggling diagram, in which all the layers were present ... so it's kind of over-full of information. But this is what it looked like to me when I was taking that course. (if you click on it, it will be as large as a regular sheet of paper, and you'll be able to read all the parts)

My thinking goes like this. If the most ancient systems and the most modern research all look basically the same, they're probably all observing the same universally true phenomenon. And, within the developments and health of the organism (each human organism, and, I suspect, the amalgam of humans that form a culture) there are interconnected systems that can inform and aid, or can oppose and hinder, all the other systems and developmental curves.

A body has a nervous system, a cardiovascular system, a musculature, a skeleton ... a human has foundational chakra/developmental phase/elements, and life cycle elements that parallel the body's systems ... a society has all of these things too. It's very wheel within a wheel. And it's freaking hard to diagram!! I just might need to design the book of transparency overlays to explain what I'm talking about.

So here's the work I'm working on in my current work.

Cultural transparency: Blue Zones, Philip Zimbardo, and (I think ... but I'm not definite about this yet) Joseph Campbell. Something about the hero's journey is scratchy - but I don't know why or where, so that one's still in provisional status

Childhood transparency: the incredible and delightful currently researching Alison Gopnik and both of her most recent books, the concepts in The Continuum Concept, and Kevin Leman's work on Birth Order

Intra-personal transparency, for the emotional/personality type clarity page: Lenore Thomson, James Pennebaker, Martha Beck, and now, Karla McLaren

There's more, of course. Lots more.

But today, the big news is that Karla McLaren has written a book that explains the healthy, practical, useful, and clarifying use of our emotional systems. Emotions do not need to be ignored or denigrated, they don't need to be our confusing and eccentric masters, and they cannot be commandeered and tamed. Emotions don't work like that. They're out internal waterways, and damming them up or draining them dry are both seriously bad ideas.

Thanks, Karla. I am deeply grateful for your work.

Aim

Oh, $%^*&#!!! Today is Tuesday, and at about 9:00 in the morning, I've just realized that yesterday was Monday, the day of the delayed beginning for the course in Personal Writing I was scheduled to teach. I've realized this fact in the same moment as realizing that I never went anywhere yesterday. If students had shown up (they didn't) they would have had no teacher. I didn't go to my own danged class!!

Brilliant job. Just brilliant. Way to impress the people who make the decisions down there at the Hegewald Center. (geeeez!)

But - the thing is - there were no students either. (I'm having an existential crisis with the two reactions. I screwed up. I wasn't ready. ... And ... No one needed me to be. No students. No one came.)

So I called the nice lady in charge, and she was ready for my call. She's even more disappointed than I am that no one showed up! (Knowing this from her is calming to my angsty moment.) She has ideas and proposals, and would like me to find a way to offer it again in the spring. Heartening. This is heartening to me.

It was not a bad target, but my aim was off.

I'd sure like to know, from anyone who reads this little blog, what would you attend? Pick one of the following, or invent something else, and help me figure this out. I've got good stuff, and I want to give it to people. So ... here are some options.

• Getting To Know You: a one-day seminar in self-discovery through writing

• Saturday Self-discovery Series ~ on the third Saturday of each month, gather with others to gain clarity, optimism, and a sense of purpose through guided writing and discussion

• Express Yourself! ~ Would you like to have clearer thoughts and the right words for saying what you really mean? The writing exercises in this course are adventures in self-discovery.

See, that's what the director thinks would work - to offer this information as self-discovery rather than as writing. The target we're trying to hit is the passing on of some simple, basic writing techniques, all of which are found in some easily accessible books and materials currently on the market, that can give anyone who uses them some wonderful benefits. The benefits are things like:

• more resilient immune system
• greater clarity of thought
• better problem solving
• clearer direction in life choices
• emotional release
• self-knowledge
• release from defensiveness
• release from resentment
• and a lot of other things

This information is gleaned by me (because I'm me and can't help gathering and experimenting with it), organized into a course, and offered so that a student could use it as it is, or branch out from what I've offered and find paths of his or her own. As you see, I've got my perennial problem - a huge, multi-faceted Big Idea, and a serious need for focus. I need better aim.

Any of you readers have any feedback at all? I can use anything you can give me.

Ducks in a Row

Somewhere between the nearly flowering bulbs on my kitchen windowsill and the dead and soggy "garden" outside ...

Somewhere between ducks in a row, and ducks with their butts in the air ...

Somewhere between flourishing and fallow times ...

That's where I am.

Again.

ugh.

At least I know that this is part of how it goes. Life is like this. It goes along for awhile, and then we start to chafe at the sameness, and we remember more interesting days, and the mud sticks around or ices over, and nothing blooms, and no one can see our heads because our butts are in the air -- and then chaos looms and finally hits -- and then we get to start over again. Not until then. Forcing the bulbs on the windowsill doesn't mean I can have spring in January. Those bulbs are just the promise of spring.

Now, if jobs applied for become jobs to go to, and if partners chosen become partners legally joined, and if trees standing become trees felled, sold, and financially helpful ... if classes prepared for become classes taught ... if the well laid plans and the puffy ephemeral dreams become reality ... then the next thing to do will be finding stability in chaos. But I'm not there yet. There's nothing to adjust to yet. Sameness is passing, chaos isn't here. Not yet.

I
hate
this!

I know how this goes. Martha Beck is right - there are four squares to the human change cycle, and Square One is chaotic and untethered and deeply disturbing to some people. Square Two is where you start to think of ideas again, Square Three is where you try them out, and when you finally find a way to operate with your new reality, you get to Square Four, which is maintenance.

Okay. Okay, I get it.

And I prefer being in Square Two, and I loathe Square One, and I know I'm about to slip down the ridge between Squares Four and One, and that's when all hell breaks loose, the piles on my desk get mingled because they all get knocked off at once, I get bumped and bruised and don't know what I'm doing and can't tell which end is up, and I usually overdraw my bank account because I lose track of the balance.

Aaaaaaagh!!!

Get on with it, Universe! I know it's right around the corner, so could we just move on?

Choosing again

One of the blogs I keep in my reader had this poem posted today, and honestly, I do not know a better one for the beginning of a new calendar year.

The Wild Rose
by Wendell Berry

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart.

Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

That's it, really. "Choosing again what I chose before" and being able to feel in my bones and skin that this is the path for me. Sensing in the soles of my feet that I am walking on ground that wants me here, and seeing with my eyes and breathing deeply into my body the air of a place that knows and loves me as much as I do it.

In this year of our Lord, two thousand and ten, I turned fifty years old. I have been on my path for half a century. Every time I say this fact, I try very very hard to say it soberly. But I can't! It makes me laugh! The fact that I am fifty years old makes me want to throw my arms in the air, and reach into the vastness of space, and laugh so loudly that the echo comes back to me from the mountains on the other side of the frozen Gorge I can see from here, where I am, indoors, and in my own living room (throwing my arms in the air, and laughing). What a glorious and marvelous thing it is to be so ridiculously old, and so hilariously young at the same time. And I'm not the only one to be nuts in this way.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you.
Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976)

See? Me and Agatha. Aware of a second blooming.

Now, I still have more in common with the child playing on the floor than I do with the incessantly talking heads on the television (now more than ever, since the apparent fashion du jour is a combination of tortured colloquialisms and Barbie and Ken hairstyles on people too young to know what they're talking about). But I know I'm not a kid anymore, and I'm finally free from wanting to be.

And I do not want to be a teenager either.

Or a twenty something, or a thirty something, no, nor even a forty something.

Or a superhero.

I do not want to be a spy.

I do not want to eat meat pie.

My kids are grown and I am too,

And I know what I want to do.

I do not want to go back there,

I even like my graying hair.

It's true! It's as if I curled up with a book when I was about 10 years old, entered the magic palace inside the fairy tales pages, and fought the wicked stepmothers and monsters, and broke the spells, and got imprisoned and freed over and over again ... and while I was in there, even though I didn't even realize it at the time, I drank the elixir of radical acceptance. I have swallowed the cupful of Goodlife. I am full of the light-bearing liquid of Yes.

And the funniest part of the whole thing is that this ridiculous surefooted sensation probably looks to the rest of the world like the most wandering, goofy, purposeless saunter anyone ever took. It couldn't be any further from a "purpose driven" life if I were -- well, if I were still a child, curled up with a good book. This is not "the secret," and it's not the "power of positive thinking." I'm not reciting affirmations to myself either, although that can be a good tool to use. I haven't climbed a corporate ladder, or even bothered about an uninterrupted employment history, for that matter. My life has often looked (especially to the more - uh - linear people who've had opinions) like Billy's shortcut home from school. Trajectory, it is not.

But life, it is. It's not "all good," but it's also not nearly as distracted as it looks. This is my path. Mary Catherine Bateson is right. Life is Improv. It's freestyle, even if there are compulsory events. The artistic merits weigh at least as much as the technical ones, and I don't care any more if the judge with the unibrow is glowering at me. In fact, I think I just might twirl on over there and blow her a kiss.

Goodbye, 2010. And thanks.

Standing Close By

It's the twenty-third of December. It's my grandpa's birthday. Last year, I found a YouTube recording of I Jesu Navn, and the year before that I had just discovered the fire and ice of the Trio Mediaeval. This year, a friend asked me about Grandpa Les, and I told her that he was the grandfather who cried (for happiness) at my wedding, and who told me when I was a girl that I had beautiful handwriting, and that the reason his tie was colored like that was because he had once stood too close to a rainbow.

I typed those words to my friend - that my grandpa told me he had once stood too close to a rainbow - and I started to cry. I miss him, of course, but not in any regretful way. I miss my girlhood, too. And I grew up, and he passed on, and that it as it should be, and that is a life I love, and today - on December 23rd, Grandpa Les is standing close by, as much a part of my girlhood and my selfhood as my handwriting.

He gave me my first roller skates, and the joy of roller skating on a summer afternoon is the joy of a granddaughter. He built us our stilts, too - and the thrill of the danger and the height and the practice and the sound of the butt ends of 2x2's on the sidewalk are the gifts of a grandfather. My cedar chest was built by his hands. My Norse identity was offered to me by his grin.

The taste of buttered and sugared lefse, rolled up into a tube and always slightly messy to eat, and the taste of Kringla, soaked in melted butter out of the oven, kept nice and cool between the sheets of waxed paper inside grandma's wooden container and then spread with more butter by the uncles when they finally got some, and the taste of blue cheese salad dressing on iceberg lettuce ... these are the flavors that came to me from my Norwegian grandfather.

Today, in this December after my girlhood and before my own grandmothering, Grandpa Les is as near to me as a rainbow and that's why my life is colored this way.

Linen Closet

This isn't a picture of the linen closet in the house where I grew up, but the closet in the picture is definitely of the era. It's the same idea.

Have you ever lived in a house with cupboards in the walls? We had one upstairs that had the sheets and blankets and towels and things in it. Our linen closet was on one side of the center square of space on the second floor of the square house. The bedrooms were ringed around it.

Across that little center room of the second floor of the house was the cupboard where we kept the vacuum cleaner, and next to that was the door that opened to the dark stairs that went up to the attic.

The stairs that came up through the middle of the house from the first floor opened into this space, and so we had to pass through this center square whenever we went to our rooms, or to the upstairs bathroom, or to the attic.

Downstairs there was another cupboard in the wall, near the kitchen, in what we called "the playroom." That cupboard was also in the center of the house, on the main floor. It butted against the back wall of the front coat closet in the entry hall, across from the front door. That deep, deep front closet reached under the stairs at the back, where it gathered old coats and mittens into its belly, and gave us a good place to hide in a game of hide-and-seek. There was one long winter and slow spring when opening that closet would show you the box - right at the front - under the coats hanging on the rod - the box that contained my new roller skates. Grandpa Les gave them to me for Christmas, and oh, it took so long for spring to arrive so I could go outside and skate on the sidewalks! (Mom wasn't all that tolerant of indoor roller skating for some reason.)

For me, a home is a place you go into for shelter. Within the shelter - at its center - there are stairs to go up or down, and in that center space, in and under and near the stairs, there is a cupboard in the wall. In the cupboard are clothes for the beds, or favorite puzzles, or vacuum cleaners sitting like fat pigs with hoses extending from their noses and metal tubes leaning near them against the closet walls.

Recently, I've realized that this is not only a description of the house where I became a person, but it is a description of me as well. I wonder ... are we all shaped by our homes in this way?

I don't want to live a life open to the street, for instance. Our house was above the street, and our folks removed the stairs that once led up from the sidewalk (which I would keep), and so it was necessary to walk up the driveway to the front porch steps and then up to the door. That's the right amount of privacy for me. I want a public face exposed to the world, and also a separation, but with a way through so that I can go out and come in when I want to.

It was a "single-family" dwelling, and I don't like apartment living. I also don't like too much time spent too near to too many people, and have a few close friends even though I'm hospitable to many in my life.

We invited people over, and my parents still love to invite people over, and I wonder ... all of those nights when I was up in my room, listening to the sounds of grownups together downstairs in that house ... did that form in me my deeply abiding longing for the writerly life of observation more highly valued than participation?

Lots of things about that house seem to me like pieces of myself. Today, I do not know why, it's the linen closet that pulls and draws me. I remember that I used open the doors to stand in front of it. Sometimes I would pull boxes down from the deep, top shelves and open the boxes to see what was in them. Photos, sometimes. Mementos. Bits and pieces of gift-giving or vacation-taking, hidden here. Baby books and a box of buttons. The things to be found inside a closet which is inside the middle of the inside of our house ... they were not hidden. But I had to go looking for them to find them.

The Thermodynamics of Family

In Thermodynamics, a closed system can exchange heat and work (for example, energy), but not matter, with its surroundings. In contrast, an isolated system cannot exchange any of heat, work, or matter with the surroundings, while an open system can exchange all of heat, work and matter. For a simple system, with only one type of particle (atom or molecule), a closed system amounts to a constant number of particles.

That's what wikipedia says.

And what I say is this.

I used to be the mom in a closed and simple system. We had a constant number of particles (five). We kept things closed, but not isolated, and simple for the sake of strength. Little particles do better when not disturbed by overwhelming matter from their surroundings, and so all our heat and work had limits. Overwhelm was something I was pretty vigilant about.

We even homeschooled our kids - but we rejected the isolated system. This is the "homier than thou" homeschooler type who grinds her own wheat for making her own bread (and buys the wheat from a Good Christian, who probably also homeschools), has all her babies at home, and has church at home too, with all the anachronistically dressed children sitting straight and tall while they participate with a whole heart and a willing spirit. (feel a little ill yet? ... you should ...) We wanted our kids introduced to the wide world - not kept away from it, in a sterilized place where no immune system can develop.

Get the idea? We parented consciously. There are at least as many ways to be a fully conscious parent as there are parents to be conscious, and we did it in our way, and we chose to be a closed but not isolated system while the three particles were developing.

But they are all developed now.

And they've blown apart my system!

I resent this!

I resent the blast of the brightest supernova ever, and I resent the flying particles and heat and light and matter and exchange with so unexpected a set of surroundings, and I resent the apparently endless Are You Kidding Me? moments!!

I liked the closed system, okay?

I liked it.

There is a theory that at the beginning of the universe, the blast of heat and matter spun the solar system into place. This, so goes the theory, is how the earth spun about, like a drop flung from a hot spoon of boiling sugar accidentally dropped off the stove, and in its perfect distance from the heat source of our sun, and after a few little scrap meteors crashed into it and broke up the surface and put the right minerals into the shell, we had a fertile planet.

I hope I put all the things they'll need into the three particles, but in any case, they're on their own now. The spoon has dropped, and the drops are flung, and what they make of themselves is up to them now. But in the meantime, I seem to be living in a permanent meteor shower, and the novelty is wearing off.

Is there hope of a new, closed, stable solar system for spent Big Bangs, I wonder?

Wondering What the Winter Weekends Will Bring

Registration for winter term is finally here! Three courses at Marylhurst this winter - one online (Poetry), one that takes three Friday/Saturday sessions and online work (History of Film), and one that takes a Friday evening and a Saturday (a workshop introduction to Art Therapy).

And here's the advert for the course I'm teaching. See it? Click on it to make it bigger. See? There I am! Second one down from the top, and so so so excited about this! This course is a toe in the water, testing what might be the beginning of another career for me, and one that could last for a couple of decades or more.

Winter weekends filling up and all sorts of possibilities are right 'round the corner.

When I get there, "the holidays" will have come and gone. The decorations that are not yet up will have been taken down. The meals will have been eaten. (Standing rib roast this year, I wonder? A goose maybe?) Advent, and St. Nicholas, and St. Lucia, and Midnight Mass (carrying in it all the other Midnight Masses we've gone to) will be over for another year, and I will spend January wondering why I feel a little depressed but this year I will be too busy to think about it. By the end of February, I'll be done with all my weekends at school, I'll be done teaching my courses, and I'll be much more than ready for our annual getaway at the beach.

That's what keeps going through my head. In a few more weeks - one winter - which I know goes in a flash - so much of what I am now planning will have become part of my past. I'll be the person who did all that. The planning, the dreaming, the wondering, the wistful wishing and the memories of days gone by ... the moment ... everything after the moment.

Remember these? These wooden mazes with the knobs that make the two inner boxes tilt up and down or side to side? The little metal ball bearing to keep balanced on the line by resisting the temptation to over steer, stopping the momentum, or looking too far ahead?

Every once in awhile, you could get the metal ball into one of the corners along the way, and you could re-gather your focus and get more calm and determined.

But it's not a good idea to try to stop the momentum to try to balance the ball in the middle of the travel sections. For those, you have to stay in the game all the way - you have to keep your eye on the rolling ball and the line, and you have to feel the way the knobs move in your hands. Most of the game is always going to be before or after where that ball is at any moment - and the game happens at the spot where the ball touches the painted line, and it happens in motion. One moment at a time.