Category Archives: Awareness

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Let’s Make Tracks!

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It was tracking day at the Wehr Nature Center for a group of 24 third graders.  They made plaster molds of animal tracks and then went outside in the bright sunshine to find some animal evidence.  Those hearty species who stick out the Wisconsin winter without migrating or hibernating include squirrels, weasels & mink, deer, raccoon, opossum, fox, skunk, cottontail rabbit, pheasant, and a bunch of birds (cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers, doves, nuthatches).  Of course, we didn’t see all these, but we did find clues: tracks, scat, and browse marks where they’d eaten branches and bark.

This is how we draw the kids' attention to a find

Whose little hands have been here?

And then, the sunshine creates lines and angles everywhere.

And the water that isn’t frozen ripples and sparkles, creating more textures of light and shadow.

I’m liking the black and white idea today.  Steve & I are planning to see “The Artist” this afternoon, a new silent film in black & white.  Sometimes, the world seems just too much to comprehend, so we break it down into stylized bits and patterns so that we can wrap our feeble brains around some part of it.   What would it be like to walk around open to everything at once, without compartmentalizing or simplifying?  Would we explode?

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Winter Photos

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So, here’s a pictorial view of my week.

I made almond cookies for Chinese New Year.  Extremely tasty with Amaretto and orange slices.

Honorable Almond Cookie

I supervised a bunch of 4 year-olds (68 of them, actually!) as they played in the Wehr Nature Center’s play space with spray bottles of diluted liquid watercolors.

Like a giant sno cone

I watched the sun setting in the west from my second story bedroom window.

"World turning on the burning sun...." (James Taylor)

And I felt the frost fly up on feathered wings into the morning light…and into my bones.

This morning, I took a group of Kindergarteners out on a nature hike.  One little boy walked beside me, counting excitedly.  “I found a hundred things!” he shouted.  Oh, there so many more than that, I thought.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
secret—into the body of the light!

-William Carlos Williams (from “Paterson – Book One”)
Things…winter things…frosty filigreed, foggy white, cold-packed and angular,  distant and spare.

Ideas…winter ideas…hard and dense, insular, desperate, furtive.

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Freecycling in the Family

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Transitions.  Stuff.  Accumulation and de-acquisition.   Now that I am almost 50 years old, I have seen a lot of cycles of hoarding and purging.  When I was a kid, my mother would periodically declare that it was time for “one great hour of swearing”, meaning it was time to clear out clutter and clean house.  She is a highly organized and tidy person, rarely sentimental about material things.  However, she is also an historian, an archiver.  Things that were deemed valuable were carefully stored.  Sterling silver was always wrapped in the proper cloth.  Her off-season shoes were in a zippered case, so were blankets.  Photo slides and correspondence were kept in carefully hand-constructed boxes of just the right size and shape.  Sometime in the 70s, recycling became a household habit.  She always had her glass bottles in separate containers, according to color, and everything perfectly sorted.  She’d load up the station wagon and make the trip to the recycling center about once a month.  I got to help her throw stuff on the appropriate piles or in the dumpsters.  Breaking glass can be fun!  She’s worked for the past few decades as a museum docent, cataloging the music collections.  She has my wedding dress stored in an archival quality box.  She keeps a full pantry (for earthquake preparedness), but she is not a hoarder.  I think she regularly updates her pantry and donates stuff she’s not going to use before its expiration date.  She’s a great example to me, and ahead of her generation’s learning curve.

Steve’s aunt is delightful and messy.  She thrills for a bargain.  She will go to great lengths to capitalize on a sale.  She knows that this creates problems for her, though, and is somewhat like a struggling addict, trying to quit.  She lives alone in the house in which she cared for her mother.  She’s never been married.  She solicits our help in taming the clutter she has accumulated in that house.  Steve is a willing worker, completely kind and patient, but always clear about his own limits.  He has some professional experience with estate sales from the book business, so he has worked with elderly strangers as well doing similar service.   He can assess and clear out an entire house in a weekend, if he must.  No one boxes more efficiently, in my opinion.

What do we do with stuff?

Rusted wire along the Ice Age trail

Reduce, reuse, recycle, freecycle.  Keep it out of the landfill, off the streets, out of the woods and wetlands.  Don’t buy it if you don’t need it; if you do anyway, give it away.  My mother has always had a habit of sending me “care packages” of stuff she acquired, often by mail order, that wasn’t quite what she wanted.  She was always on the lookout for a good home for something she didn’t want.   I would often end up taking some of that stuff to donate to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but it didn’t get thrown away.   We’re working on finding good homes for Steve’s aunt’s stuff.  I’m fixing to give care packages to each of my children from what we brought home yesterday.   Beauty and cleaning products from her bathroom, mostly.   The unopened items will go to a local shelter.   A bottle of shampoo that was used once and turned out not to be to her liking can make some useful suds.  Would you just pour that down the drain?   Somehow, I can’t.

How long do you figure it would take to use up the stuff that’s already been made before we make more?  Depends on the stuff, of course.  But there must be categories of products that we could use up…and then, maybe, discontinue forever.  How many varieties of shampoo do we need?  How many varieties of cleaning products?  You could use Dr. Bronner’s Magic All-in-One Soap (made from hemp and essential oils) in peppermint to clean your entire body (including teeth), your clothes, your dishes, your surfaces, your car, etc., and we’d never need to make anything else.   Sounds like de-cluttering to me.  Of course, there are a million ways to disagree with me and get on your own soap box.  We like choices.  Depending on how old you are, you may be just beginning to explore all your options, and you’d hate to have anyone restrict you.  Wait 50 years.  Then you may be cleaning out your house and wondering, “Why do I have all this crap?!”   You’ll give it to your kids, who want to have stuff but have no money to buy it.  Some day there’ll be a story out there of a family who free-cycled the same object for 5 generations.  Why not?  I’m still using my grandmother’s electric mixer/food grinder.  But nowadays, things are built cheaply according to the economic principle of Planned Obsolescence and the landfills overflow.   It’s a sickening trend.

One great hour of swearing is not gonna cure the planet of its clutter these days.  (sigh)  We’re way out of scale.  Something’s gotta give.  I wonder what…and how… and when.

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Parenting On the Dotted Line and Over the Rainbow

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Steve & I borrowed a DVD from the library called “Between the Folds”.  It’s a documentary about origami, but not just the decorative, brightly-colored little figures that school kids make.   It’s about science and mathematics and art and exploring the fusion of all those disciplines.  To learn more, click here.  One of the fascinating paper-folders interviewed is Erik Demaine, “an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Called one of the most brilliant scientists in America by Popular Science, he received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship at the age of 22. Demaine’s work combines science and art, geometry, paper folding and computational origami.”  The interview also includes footage of him with his dad, who apparently home-schooled him as a single parent and prepared him to enter college at the age of 12.  These two bear a touching family resemblance of soft-spoken, constantly smiling Geekdom, complete with pony-tails, facial hair and glasses.  It is obvious that they have enjoyed sharing a couple of decades exploring the world with bright-eyed curiosity.

I also happened upon a Mom Blog called RaisingMyRainbow.  Its blurb reads: “Adventures in raising a slightly effeminate, possibly gay, totally fabulous son.”  Her son is 4 years old.  She writes with wit and whimsy and a very open attitude, chronicling how their family navigates what seems to be a mainstream suburban life with an emerging non-mainstream human being.  It seems very honest to me, no agenda, no axe to grind, no added drama, just very loving and willing to engage with what arises.

Super Kids (photo by Joe Griessler)

I am inspired by this kind of parenting, and I want this to be what I pass on to my children.  My own kids are already in their 20s, though.  But I figure it’s never too late to model something positive.  After all, they may be parents themselves some day.  My parenting models were quite limited.  Growing up in the 60s & 70s, I didn’t know one kid whose parents were divorced until I got to High School.  My dad’s own parents were divorced, but he never talked about that.  My best friend’s parents had been divorced from previous marriages, but that didn’t seem to impact their family life when I knew him.  I got the strong impression that there was a ‘right way’ and a ‘wrong way’ to do everything, and the ‘wrong way’ was to be avoided at all costs.  Consequently, I complied and conformed and walked the narrow way.  It wasn’t a bad response, but it wasn’t necessarily the right response or the only reasonable response.  The difficulties with my response became apparent as my circle of awareness widened.  Other people were living other responses.  Do I tolerate, embrace, include or exclude those people?  What if some of those people are my own children?

“There are as many different ways to be a Christian as there are Christians”, my spiritual adviser told me one day.  He was a former Jesuit priest, born in India, married to a former nun, both still very active in the Catholic Church.  I couldn’t have been more astonished.  My father would never have said that.  There are as many different ways to be a parent as there are parents.  Those ways may be judged according to certain values.  To make any kind of distinctions, you really have to look at those values.  Do you value conformity?  Okay, then call it ‘conformity’.  Do you value love?  Okay, then look very closely at what you think ‘love’ is.  Does love punish?  Does love shame?  Does love reject?  Do you value certain beliefs that you respect?  Why do you respect them?  Because someone told you to?  Because they support something you’ve experienced?  There are so many good questions to consider, but it’s hard to find a safe place to consider them.  As a parent, I felt attacked, judged and defensive.  Competition crept into my parenting way too much.  I own those as my issues, but I also believe the suburban environment supported that.  Parental support groups I was in may have effectively reinforced the competition rather than offered support.

Hindsight.  I was 22 when I became a parent.  I didn’t think about a lot of this stuff beforehand.  However, I have four totally fabulous children nevertheless.   I give them credit; I give me and my husband credit; I give the Universe credit.   In general, if I lighten up on my ego, I can avoid creating stuff that’s FUBAR.  Instill wonder, curiosity, creativity.  Play alongside the kids, and step back.  We are all learning and growing up together, folding rainbows into the process.

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Stressed for Success?

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My very astute sister once pointed out to me that all stress is not created equal.  There’s daily stress, the normal result of a body functioning without rest for 16 hours or so, which is alleviated after 8 hours of sleep.  There’s distress, which gives us the feeling of being overwhelmed or upset by the amount of stress we experience, and then there’s eustress, which according to Wikipedia is “a term coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye which is defined…as stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feeling. Eustress is a process of exploring potential gains.”  Examples of eustress could include climbing a mountain, running a marathon or sky-diving.  Or surviving a nautical disaster.

I was intrigued by a comment I read from one of the survivors of the cruise ship, Costa Concordia, that sank in the Mediterranean this past week.   ABC News reported:

‘Australian miner Rob Elcombe and his wife, Tracey Gunn, told Melbourne’s Herald Sun Newspaper they booked a spot on the Concordia as a last ditch effort to save their marriage.  Instead, the couple found themselves trying to save their lives when they boarded the very last lifeboat to leave the ship with survivors. “This has made our bond much, much stronger,” Elcombe told the paper. “Who needs couples counseling, when you survive a Titanic experience?” ‘

An adventure.   Stress worked into a feeling of gain.  Is it possible to turn your distress into eustress?

Peace like a river

Another news story I ran across came under this headline: Wife Slips Into Madness As Husband Dies of Brain Tumor. (ABC News)  Catherine Graves wrote a book called Checking Out: An In Depth Look At Losing Your Mind describing the distress of caring for her husband.  The headline rather sensationalizes an experience of overwhelming stress that is shared by a lot of people who find themselves in the role of caregiver.  I can relate.  I went through depression and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome during my husband’s illness and after his death.  Like Mrs. Graves, I was widowed at 45.  But did I lose my mind?  Not irretrievably, I don’t think.  Maybe what I’m doing now, being unemployed, slowing down, is my way of turning that distress into eustress.

There’s an old hymn that I’ve affectionately heard referred to as “The Playtex Hymn” (after the girdle).  The first line is “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent Word”.   It was written by John Keith in 1787.  My favorite verse goes like this:

“When through the deep waters I cause thee to go,
The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee thy trouble to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.”

For some reason, singing that verse always causes me to choke up with emotion.  I know how it is to feel like I’m drowning.  I have a gasp reflex that reminds me of this almost daily.  It shows up lightning fast in moments when my reptilian brain senses danger.  It first became noticeable when I was trying to teach my kids to drive.  I would gasp and grab the handle above the passenger side door at the slightest correction of the steering wheel or touch of the brake.  It happened to me again just this morning.  I was stacking packages on the table and the tower toppled over.  I gasped.  “I must be drowning!” I laughed.  It’s probably a rather annoying habit for those who live with me.   I appreciate their patience.

There’s another hymn that follows this theme.  “It Is Well With My Soul” was written by Horatio Spafford in 1873.  The story behind it is quite amazing.  In brief, according to Wikipedia:

“This hymn was written after several traumatic events in Spafford’s life. The first was the death of his only son in 1871 at the age of four, shortly followed by the Great Chicago Fire which ruined him financially (he had been a successful lawyer). Then in 1873, he had planned to travel to Europe with his family on the SS Ville du Havre, but sent the family ahead while he was delayed on business concerning zoning problems following the Great Chicago Fire. While crossing the Atlantic, the ship sank rapidly after a collision with a sailing ship, and all four of Spafford’s daughters died. His wife Anna survived and sent him the now famous telegram, “Saved alone . . .”. Shortly afterwards, as Spafford traveled to meet his grieving wife, he was inspired to write these words as his ship passed near where his daughters had died.”

And here’s the lyric:

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

I am trying to re-train my brain to believe that my deepest distress can be sanctified.  I don’t think this is an exclusively Christian perspective at all.  The Noble Truths of Buddhism are all about addressing the suffering (distress) of this world and how we think about it.   I hope that as I “explore potential gains”, my drowning will become floating, and all will be well with my soul.

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Existential Sunday

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I mentioned yesterday that I was moody.  I come around periodically to a place of existential crisis, and I’ve come to believe it’s good for me.  When I was raising children and nursing a sick husband, I rarely got this privilege.  I always had someone to pour my heart and soul into and frequently felt that my existence was thoroughly used up on a daily basis.  Trouble is, this way of living was often an unexamined habit that I could go through sleep-walking.  I kept my head down and convinced myself that everything I was doing was noble and important.  It may have been, or it may not have been.  I wasn’t really paying attention that closely.

Living with Steve is different.  It’s challenging.  He doesn’t want me to pour my heart and soul into caring for him.  He wants me to fly on my own.  I blink, open-mouthed.  Fly?  On my own?  What the heck does that look like?  He redirects my attention from outside of me to inside…all the time…and I keep imagining an empty room.  What if I don’t have any inner life?

So I sit with that.  Emptiness isn’t a judgment.  It can be the beginning of openness.

I went poking around on the internet, looking for an answer (from outside, again…old habits die hard) to “what is important in life”.  I actually found something kinda cool:  this community project.  An abandoned building in New Orleans is covered with chalkboard paint and stenciled with the prompt “Before I die, I want to ___”.  Chalk is provided.  People approach.  Existential assessment goes on, and the sentence is answered.  I imagine myself standing there…clouds gather, rain falls, people pass, children grow up…and I’m still scratching my head.

I thought of re-phrasing the question, changing “What is important in life?”  to “What are two things you cannot live without?”  They’re not exactly interchangeable, I discovered.  I also discovered a great irony: I lost the two things I thought I couldn’t live without, and I’m still living.  So, either they weren’t that important, or I’m not really living.  Or I didn’t answer that truthfully.  I thought I could not live without my husband.  I thought I could not live without my Christian faith.  I was wrong.

Okay, dammit, what IS important in life?  What about the obvious answer…’life’?  As in, “Before I die, I want to Live.”  I want to live, be alive, be awake, be aware, spend myself, give my love, explore my autonomy, visit that inner room and see what’s there.  But not in an ego-driven way.  In an open way. The Western way prompts me, “Yes, but what will that look like when it’s all finished?” as if there’s a finish.  It wants a goal, a check list with little boxes to tick, just to keep track so that it can say, “Good…I’ve done it!”  That’s ego talk.  The Eastern way says, “Forget the goal, the check list.  You don’t need to keep track; keep open.  Engage with life and have a relationship.”

That’s where I’ve gotten to so far today.  How about you?  What is important in your life?

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Give Us This Day

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The temperature is finally dropping and the snow is falling.  I’m rather in the mood to be snowed in; it’s been a long time coming.  The anticipation of winter without the actual characteristics is a little unsettling.  What would you think if your region just “skipped” a season?  What do the animals think?  “Do we fly north now, or not?”  “Is it time to wake up?”  Migratory animals get confused by light pollution.  I’m sure a host of species are getting confused about climate change.  But then again, they probably don’t worry like us humans.  They adapt.  Or they don’t.  They take it one day at a time, looking for warmth and shelter and food just like every day.

Daily living, daily choices, daily bread.  What do you learn from now?

In the eclectic jumble of my brain, a song is emerging.  “For Now” from the musical, Avenue Q (Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx).

PRINCETON: Why does everything have to be so hard?
GARY COLEMAN: Maybe you’ll never find your purpose.
CHRISTMAS EVE: Lots of people don’t.
PRINCETON: But then- I don’t know why I’m even alive!
KATE MONSTER: Well, who does, really? Everyone’s a little bit unsatisfied.
BRIAN: Everyone goes ’round a little empty inside.
GARY COLEMAN: Take a breath, Look around,
BRIAN: Swallow your pride,
KATE MONSTER: For now…
NICKY: Nothing lasts,
ROD: Life goes on,
NICKY: Full of surprises.
ROD: You’ll be faced with problems of all shapes and sizes.
CHRISTMAS EVE: You’re going to have to make a few compromises…For now…
LUCY: For now we’re healthy.
BRIAN: For now we’re employed.
BAD IDEA BEARS: For now we’re happy…
KATE MONSTER: If not overjoyed.
PRINCETON: And we’ll accept the things we cannot avoid, for now…
ALL: But only for now! (For now)…
Only for now! (For now there’s life!)
Only for now! (For now there’s love!)
Only for now! (For now there’s work!)
For now there’s happiness! But only for now!
(For now discomfort!) Only for now!
(For now there’s friendship!) Only for now!

(Sex!) Is only for now!

(Your hair!) Is only for now!

(George Bush!) Is only for now!
Don’t stress, Relax,
Let life roll off your backs
Except for death and paying taxes,
Everything in life is only for now!
NICKY: Each time you smile…
ALL:…Only for now
KATE MONSTER: It’ll only last a while.
ALL:…Only for now
PRINCETON: Life may be scary…
ALL:…Only for now. But it’s only temporary
PRINCETON: Everything in life is only for now.

I saw Buddhists discoursing in a documentary by Werner Herzog once.  Periodically, they would clap their hands together like crashing cymbals.  I was told that was a symbolic gesture aimed at bringing the speaker and listener into the present moment, no matter where the conversation was going.  For NOW!…..and NOW!

This breath…is only for now.  These words…are only for now.  I appreciate now, right now.

 

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Art, Music & Myth: The Deeper Story of Being Human

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Are human beings the only animals that weep?

Charles Darwin noted that Indian elephants weep.  There have been many books written on the subject of animals’ emotions, and I haven’t read any of them, so I’m not going to venture an answer.  What I do know is that I weep.  And Steve weeps.   When we weep —  not cry, but weep — it seems to come from a sacred place in our soul, a place that has been stirred by something far greater than our selves.  Of course, we can make efforts to wall off that place, if we want to.  Bombarding ourselves with distractions often works to activate those shields.  We can also choose to be curious and try to understand that feeling better.

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” – Mark Rothko

Tears can be a sign of “religious experience”, then.  Fair enough.  Something spiritual is going on there.  What?

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.” – Mark Rothko

That loneliness, that “pocket of silence where we can root and grow” resonates deeply with my partner, Steve.  He calls it being moody or refers to his “Slavic melancholy”.  It’s not a sorrowful thing only; it is just as brightly tinted with joy, like some of Rothko’s paintings.  The combination, the totality is what hits home with him.  He says, “The deeper story is to face all of life.  Jesus and the Buddha are heroes of that story.”   They are not conquering wartime heroes interested solely in winning.  They do not struggle and strive.  They embrace all dimensions of life equally: the suffering, the love, the sacrifice, the elation.

Rothko - Untitled Red and Black

In the book The Power of Myth based on Billy Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell, I read:

Campbell:  “The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.”

Moyers: “Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans?”

Campbell: “It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today.….”

Steve weeps when listening to Mahler.  And “Puff the Magic Dragon”.  Slipping into his cave, searching for that place to root and grow, he feels the poignant essence of life, the crescendo and decrescendo, and resists exerting his will against the flow.  I think that I have a different sensibility.  Maybe not so expansive, maybe more interior and visceral.  I identify with a lonely pocket of silence for rooting and growing…the womb.  I feel womb-love, the ache, the swoon, the exchange of life blood.  I see colors inside my eyelids, sunshine through membrane, the tragedy and ecstasy and doom of flesh.  Okay, I am in the grip of my biology this week, so this makes a lot of sense.  I have given birth four times and dream of my grown up children regularly.   The story that trips my tear ducts is “Homeward Bound”, anything with a reunion.  The deeper story for me has something to do with connection.  Maybe that’s the Gaia story.  I think she’s like Jesus and Buddha in that she also embraces all of life without struggling or striving, but in her own way.  Perhaps I feel more in my Sacral Chakra,  Steve in his Heart Chakra.

The deeper story of being human is told from inside this skin.  It is not the only story in the universe, however.  There is the elephant’s story, the asteroid’s story, more stories than we can imagine.  I would hope to know many more, and to weep at all of them.

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Home Economics

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It’s ALIIIIVE!!!   It’s in the kitchen, and it’s growing!  I’m waiting for it to double in size, then I’ll screw up all my courage and give it a good punch!  I’m gonna break it in half, then I’ll let it alone for about an hour while the two halves grow again.  It sounds kind of like an amoeba, but actually it’s whole wheat dough.  Yup, I’m making bread.  By the time I get it baking, I’ll be making split pea soup as well, but I have to take a walk to the grocery store to get some dried mushrooms for that.

We have about 4 cubic feet of cookbooks in the dining room.  I often just look up a recipe online, but that makes Steve cringe.  He thanked me this morning for asking him to direct me to one of his books.  So I am celebrating my participation in lower-tech food preparation.  I will not get into my car and drive to Panera for bread and soup.  I will make it myself.  And I don’t want to pat myself on the back for this.  This is not a revolutionary step.  This is what almost every woman was able to do 100 years ago.

I’m not exactly sure what the comparative benefits are to this approach.  I haven’t researched the whole economic picture of Panera restaurant vs. homemade.  I just know that I’m not making an income (aside from being paid for giving one private voice lesson a week), and so I don’t want to spend much.  Is it possible in this day and age to live without spending?  Well, just yesterday, I ran across this news article about a grandmother in Germany who hasn’t used money for 16 years. http://wakeup-world.com/2011/07/18/happy-69-year-old-lady-has-not-used-money-for-15-years/     I really like that idea.  Capitalism isn’t my best friend.  WalMart makes me shudder.  I read about theft in my town paper every week.  What would happen if more of us were able to get off that treadmill somehow and live without using money or coveting goods?  Would we be able to scale back on damage to the environment?  Would we be able to scale back our population?  I know all these issues are intertwined, and I’m still wondering how they effect each other in the big picture and in my personal life.

Steve & I have been thinking about going to a conference on Population that will be held in Telluride, Colorado over Memorial Day weekend.  It’s called Moving Mountains Symposium: Population.  It’s a film festival as well, and features Dave Foreman (of The Rewilding Institute) as one of its keynote speakers.

So all this is just rising in my consciousness as the bread is rising downstairs.  I’m not quite ready to present it all sliced and buttered for this blog, but I like to think that IT’S ALIIIIVE in me in some way.  Stay tuned!

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The Rose

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I think I have a pretty active dream life.  I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening.  Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure.  Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake.  Well, fine for you, then.  I blink my eyes open and forget where I am.  I need decompression time every morning.  My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years.  It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality.  Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place.  Is that weird?  Oh, probably.  I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing.  I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head.  This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back.  I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.  Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.  Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need.  I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition?  I thought about that for a while.  Then I began to cry.  This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit.  For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love.  I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed.  My youth was engulfed in loving him.  I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit.  Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too.  I feel that for my kids as well.  I call it “yearning”.  I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are.  It’s a visceral thing.  I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb.  Womb-love.  God “wombs” us.  I “womb” my kids.  I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to.  “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached.  It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion.  Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.  It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.”  Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post).  Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again.  So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.”   At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics.  Good job.  I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow.  It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin.  I love the idea of hope and new life.  And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse.  The seed of love isn’t a person.  It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail.  He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want.  “Why do you want to have land and grow food?”  I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids.  I loved because they lived.  I want to live life loving.  Whatever I do.  It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers.  Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on.  Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you.  There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love.  I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”.  That’s where I think I’m getting stuck.  I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There.  Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better.  Hope you don’t mind.