Category Archives: Parenting

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All Saints and Scorpios

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Today is All Saints’ Day, a major feast in the Christian tradition.  It’s also Dia de los Muertos.  And it’s also the birthday of two of my favorite people in the world: Steve and my sister.  It’s a fitting festival for fall, colorful and reeking with death and ghosts.  I think that Steve and DKK also have a marvelous blend of color and passion and darkness in them.  And to tell the truth, this scared me about them.  I am a sunny Leo, all bright smiles and pleasing, if a bit manipulative and ego-driven.  Their seething power is something that I can not control or influence, and that used to bug me.

As a kid, I shared a room with my older sister for 9 years.  I used to be frightened of her insistent non-compliance under our very strict father, and so I would nag her and repeat his instructions and try to get her to do what would keep her out of trouble.  I don’t know why I thought my two cents would make an impact when my father’s words were disobeyed.  What do you do with a pestering younger sister?  You beat her up occasionally.  That kept me afraid and convinced that she really hated me.  I did not understand her at all.  She was power and mystery and goddamn smart to boot.  Then we moved and finally got separate rooms.  And we went to the same High School and had some friends in common.  Still, there was a kind of power struggle and competition going on.  She dated older guys I was crushing on.  She was better than me at Italian and spent a summer in Italy — and that was supposed to be MY language.  She was supposed to stick to Latin!  She did me the favor of passing my first love note to a boy in her Senior English class…who became my husband for 24 years until his death.  And I tattled on her and brought the wrath of my father down upon her.  I didn’t see her much for a long time, but I wrote to her, and I prayed for her.

I remember one All Saint’s Day sitting in a church in southern California, thinking about her birthday.  I decided that she was a saint, too, and that I would write to her again.  It was a holy moment, one that I knew might change me, and I was willing.  I think the thing that made me see how much we have in common, how much we really care about each other, was motherhood.  When we both had babies, I had three to her one, and we had lots to talk about.  I began to see her hopes and values and fierce love writ large on her parenting style, and her dynamic became more understandable to me.  She had the same parenting model to work with as I, and we were both fashioning our response to it in our individual styles.  I began to recognize her and appreciate her in a way I never had.  I wish we could spend more time together as we grow older.  We keep growing closer, even though we live half a continent apart.

So that’s today’s version of Favorite Memories of (My Sister), my family’s traditional birthday game.

And now, favorite memories of the birthday boy, still dozing beside me.

I’ve known Steve for 3 years.  Three very important, reformative years.  When we met, I had been a widow for only 7.5 months.  Although sane, I was rather raw and fragile.  So was my family of 4 children.  He’s never been married and has no children.  In the pool of dating possibilities, he was advised against choosing the widow.  But he loves a dark, complex, engaging challenge.  And apparently, he loves me.  So when my youngest daughter, grieving the loss of her father, contemplated the presence of this new man in my life, she became passionately angry.  It terrified me, and I ran away.  My new friend wasn’t scared of her at all.  In fact, he stood up for her saying that her emotions were completely justified.  He cared about her and understood her in a way I hadn’t.  He sat down with both of us and listened as we struggled to repair our relationship.  He offered his observations calmly and honestly and maintained a safe place for both of us.  He made a huge difference in a very critical time, and for that, I will always be grateful…and a bit awed.

Passion is a marvelous hallmark of life.  It is scary in many ways, but adds so much.  I am learning to be open to it more and more.  And I thank DKK and Steve for helping me learn how.  Happy Birthdays, youse guys!

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Happy Halloween!

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Steve and I enjoy an ongoing game of “arcane book ideas”.   Yesterday, it was The History of Halloween.  I wonder if that book’s ever been written?  In our neighborhood, trick or treating was commuted to Sunday.  There was a block party followed by an hour and a half of trick or treating at certain houses designated by orange and black balloons tied outside.  It was a very organized affair.  An informative flier went out a week ago with a tear-off response section on the bottom.  There was even a neighborhood bank account set up to receive contributions.  As far as I could tell, the block party was moved indoors because of rain.  The barricades remain on the parkway and never went up.  But we could hear the children, teens, and parents slogging through the drizzle in the dark.

Halloween is a big thing here in the Midwest.  I lived in California for 15 years and never saw more than a dozen trick-or-treaters.  (Okay, spell check didn’t like that term and offered me an alternative: trick-or-anteaters.  Can you imagine?  Love the visual on that idea!)  Maybe people there are just way too suspicious of their neighbors and scared to let their children roam.  We were.  My husband used to reminisce about trick-or-treating in his cul de sac with the parents following doing their own trick-or-drinking.  Candy for the kiddies, cocktails for their parents.  Very Californian.  My mother was the most unpopular Halloween hostess on the block.  She kept trying to think of low-sugar alternative treats.  Most years, it was little boxes of raisins.  One year, it was balloons.  Deflated ones.  This was before choking hazards got much press.  Another year, it was nuts in the shell.  Again, before nut allergies got much press.  I was always so embarrassed (and disappointed) by our “candy bowl”.  She was adamant about limiting sugar for the sake of our teeth long before healthy choices were fashionable.  She was also a stickler for sunscreen before SPF was displayed on every bottle.  Now that I’m almost 50, I should thank her every time I look in the mirror and a full set of teeth and a smooth pair of cheeks smile back.

In my day, Halloween had very few rules.  You went to school in costume, partied all day, and then trick-or-treated all night (or for as long as your mom would let you).  When my kids were young, that was the initial routine.  Then the village posted trick-or-treat hours, usually from 4-7pm.  Then there was the year that parents and teachers decided that too much instruction time was being lost on this dress up holiday with occult overtones.  So they had each grade level run a study-themed costume and activity day.  The third graders were doing a prairie unit, so they all dressed in pioneer outfits and made corn-husk dolls and bobbed for apples and that kind of thing.  The fifth graders were doing a Native American unit, so they wove tiny patches of yarn onto looms, deciphered symbols, and ate popcorn.  I really liked the idea.  They got to dress up and have treats and play games, but they were very creatively centered on specific social studies units.  I was rather a serious mom myself.  But my kids got candy.  Sacks of it.  And I raided their stash every year.  One year, when my oldest was just a toddler and we were living in California, I bought some Halloween candy (Mounds, my favorite) and ended up dipping into it myself before the big night.  I figured we wouldn’t get many visitors anyhow.  Well, we got a few more than I expected, and I ran out of candy.   So when the doorbell rang, my darling daughter ran to the door to see the costumes.  “We don’t have any more candy because my mom ate it all,” she explained.  Well, at least I taught her honesty.

I enjoyed my part at the Nature Center as the witch.  I’m glad we did it two weeks ago when the weather was a bit drier and warmer.  The prosthetic nose and chin were rather a pain.  My pointy toed boots were even worse, though, after three hours on my feet.  But the wide-eyed little tykes in fairy wings and hockey gear were just as adorable as ever.  I will never get tired of playing dress up…or eating chocolate.

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Functional family time

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I love my family.  I love hanging out with my kids and doing stuff together.  I visited my “twins” (they’re 2 years apart, but they are best friends) in their new location for the first time this weekend.  My youngest was there as well.  We played in the dirt and planted trees, we played on the roof and planted an antenna, we sang, we brainstormed, we drew pumpkin decorating designs, we walked the dog, we ate pizza and drank wine, we watched a Bears game.  And we talked.  About dreams, about their dead dad, about relationships, about farting, about how children learn to talk, and how growing up is an organic and holistic process.  My favorite thing was that my youngest daughter remarked that she is so happy that she doesn’t feel the need to hide anything from me anymore.  We’ve been through a lot together, my kids and I.  Can I say that they are my best friends?  For someone who thought she had no friends, this is a happy epiphany.

Girls play in the dirt, too

I invested a lot in my relationships with my kids.  My youngest was in junior high when I started my first full-time job.  Ever.  I am forever grateful to my husband for making it possible for me to be at home all those years.  The world my kids will inherit will be a different place.  Things are changing, protests are raging, systems will fail and fall.  And that’s all good.  In order to feel “safe”, it seems like options spread out between building a fortress of security and being light on your feet.  Maybe the best of that spectrum is having an inner fortress that includes confidence in being loved and an outer flexibility of skills and adaptability to change.  We are each of us working on building those things, and we support each other in our growth.  The dream we have is to live together somewhere, on some land, in some place and work on that in community.  Right now, we are all renters in 4 different places in two states.  Some day, we’d like to be on a multiple-family homestead supporting  ourselves (and perhaps others) sustainably.

“Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow.  All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground.”  And hard work.  And a dream.  And love.  I am grateful for inspiration and pioneers like the Dervaes family and for reminders to stay open in the process.  We are pointing our canoe and paddling.  We’ll see where we get to.

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The Shadow Side of Abundance

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I’ve connected a few strands in the cobweb of my mind.  Follow me, if you will.

I’ve been thinking about my shadow side, my dark side, and I’ve located an area that I think could be it.  It lurks in my ego, in the part of me that craves attention for myself at the possible expense of others.  This is where I am tempted to be manipulative and fake.  The origins of this desire are nebulous, but I can identify manifestations in my childhood.  I was daughter #4 in my family, the youngest child for 11 years, the only blonde, with a ski-jump nose and a pouty lower lip.  I was cute (pardon my use of this hated word, Steve!), especially to strangers.  My family used to tease me for being “touched by waiters” because every time we went out to eat, the waiter would pat me on the head or something.  I loved being cute.  I loved the attention because my deep-seated fear was that I was redundant.   With three older sisters, there was always someone near at hand who was smarter, more accomplished, and better than me at everything.  I struggled to find a niche where I could have my own spotlight.  I actually found that in music, so I majored in Voice Performance in college.  My mother was very musical, but a rather shy performer.  I pushed myself to overcome my natural fear of being judged so that I could stand out every once in a while.  This thread leads to….

Salieri in “Amadeus”.  His dark ego leads him to all kinds of hateful thoughts about Mozart and about the God who favors him.  This fear of redundancy gripped him.  He saw the world as a competitive arena.  “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” is a theme in a lot of movies, actually.  Walking to the farmer’s market today, I noticed redundancy all over.  Nature is full of it.  How many leaves gather in the gutter?  How many stands of squash and potatoes gather for market?  How many people, how many birds, how many mice or ants or whatever do we really need?  What is the point of abundance and why is redundancy a bad thing?  Follow “Amadeus” to….

Cynthia Nixon, who played Mozart’s maid and Salieri’s “spy”.  This is the only performance of hers that I’ve actually seen.  I did find an article on her when I read and researched the Pulizer Prize winning play, “Wit”.  I discovered that she is in a lesbian relationship now, and she was quoted as saying that she never thought of herself as a lesbian.  What she did say was that “here was this undeniable person”.  That phrase stuck with me.  I wonder at all the things we find redundant and ask if we are denying them.  Of all the leaves that I encountered on this windy day, did I deny most of them and only notice a few?  I actually picked up only one to look at it more closely.

We don’t know what to do with abundance.  We can’t possibly take it all in, so we deny much of it and acknowledge only a portion.  The rest we call “redundant” because we have no use for it.  But Nature is abundant for some reason.  Could it be that it’s not just for us?  Oh, that’s hard for our egos to imagine.  Think of the use of pesticides.  Why in the world would there be so many little critters who eat vegetation?  We don’t need them. It must be a mistake.  Let’s kill them off.  What’s the result?  Dead soil – no humus, no living matter mixed with the rock, no space for air and water and roots.

Do we need all these beetles? Hey, maybe it's not about what 'we' need.

We live in an abundant world, and we are part of that abundance.  How do we refrain from denial and keep our minds open to more than we can comprehend?  The balance between abundance and scarcity in Nature keeps populations in flux and unpredictable.  Therefore, I suppose redundancy has its place in an uncertain future.  This is an ancient wisdom.  When we eliminate redundancy because it doesn’t make sense to our economic mindset, we are dangerously engaged in hubris.  Why are we allowing our seed banks to be monopolized and diminished, for instance?   Why are we allowing the rate of extinction to skyrocket?  Why are we allowing our denial to be imprinted on the planet?  We act in ignorance because we have no choice, that is to say that we will never understand the world completely.  But we need not act impetuously out of false assumptions driven by our egos.

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Biological Diversity

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Today, a group of special needs adults came to the Wehr Nature Center for a field trip.  They saw a puppet show about how animals survive the winter.  We passed the puppets among them to let them meet the characters before the show.  Afterwards, we passed some real animals around, a box turtle and a snake named Fancy, for them to touch “with one finger”.   Then, we divided the group in half and went outside.  Those that were more ambulatory took a walk around the nature center, the others sat up on the observation deck overlooking the pond.  This was a very diverse group, and I couldn’t tell what they were noticing or taking in.  We tried to point out things that they could see, hear, touch, or smell (we didn’t dare do any tasting!).  Some of them were pretty absorbed by their own selves and other people in the group.  Some were able to engage at times in what was around them on the path.  One man, Charlie, pointed up to a tree covered with Virginia creeper vines that had turned red and just started laughing!  He was so excited!  I loved that reaction.  That made my day.  Lester spent the time pointing out behaviors in the group or hiding behind people.  He held my hand for a while on the trail.  When we all congregated on the observation deck, he introduced some of his friends to the staff, one by one.  Finally, we got them all loaded back on the bus and waved good-bye.  There were 30 in all, including 2 in wheelchairs.  Most were men.  All the caregivers were women.

This made Charlie laugh

I am grateful to have been reminded that biological diversity includes every species and every variation in the species, including ours.  Respecting and including all of life is an exercise in awareness every moment of every day.  I want to be able to be gracious and friendly to every living thing I encounter, and I want to put myself in a position to encounter a wide variety.  I suppose that is my desire for my own edification, but I think that it is advantageous for everyone and builds tolerance and peace in the world.  Observing people in nature is interesting.  Some of the volunteers were talking about kids who react negatively to things in nature.  One girl got very agitated and upset over the sticker-burrs that were clinging to her sweater after a hike.  It makes you wonder how unfamiliar she must have been with the outdoors.  We are often scared by things that are unknown.  As we understand things better, we are able to be more compassionate.  Steve’s favorite Bible verse is “For God so loved the world…” and he stops there.  God loves the world.  Steve loves the world.  What would be the result if more people learned to love the world and taught their children to do the same?  “And it was very good.”

I love Turtles

I love the colors and textures under my feet

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Taking Action, Stepping Out, Making Meaning

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My husband was diagnosed with diabetes after his first heart attack when he was 31 years old.  He died 16 years later from coronary artery disease, kidney failure, and other complications of diabetes.  He was sleeping in bed next to me and never woke up.  I unplugged his dialysis machine, his CPAP machine, and his insulin pump that morning and set him free.  That was 3 and a half years ago.  My eldest child got the idea the next year that she wanted to do something to honor her father and take action to support diabetes research.  She and 2 of her siblings participated in a fundraiser called StepOut Walk to Stop Diabetes.  I was really impressed by her initiative and her civic action.  I joined her the next year with Steve; the siblings had moved west by then.  This year, we are all going to participate together.  All 4 siblings and mom with a few significant others alongside.   Our goal is to raise some money, to honor Jim, and to be involved in positive action as a grieving family.   (If you want to donate money on behalf of our team, go to http://main.diabetes.org/goto/pgalasso)

Team Galasso 2010

Do I expect that our participation will cause this disease to be eradicated?  Well, not really.  Do I imagine that Jim will feel honored and bring some good fortune to us from the spirit world?  Not exactly.  Do I hope that our sorrow will abate and our self-esteem will soar as we pat ourselves on the back for “giving back” to the community and “fighting” for a cause?  Actually, I don’t.  All of those things are ego-based and not very realistic.  What am I really doing, then?  Well, I think of it as “pointing the canoe” again.  I see that people suffer from this disease.  I see that certain kinds of medical technology and education have been used to ease that suffering.   I want to paddle my canoe, make some effort, toward helping those who suffer, not because I believe that I can rescue someone, but because it is how I want to live.  I want to honor Jim and remember him because that’s how I want to live.  I want to work with my family’s grief because that’s how I want to live.  I don’t know if any particular thing will result; I don’t expect to become noble or perfect or anything.  I do know that paddling in that way lets me choose a purpose and work toward it.  I suppose it helps my mind to be directed toward meaning.

So, why are we humans always looking for meaning?  Inquiring minds want to know…

That Steven Colbert report clip from the Approximate Chef suggests that we want to feel safe about the ending of the story.  We tell ourselves, “It’s okay, because it turns out this way; I know it does”.  That gives us, what, control?  Last night I had a dream about  meeting “the woman who owned the house” of the estate sale I went to yesterday.  I don’t even know that a woman lived there.  In fact, it was quite a masculine log cabin, with a boat and a mounted moose head dominating the decor.  What was my subconscious trying to figure out?  Well, I was trying to assure myself that this family was okay.  They were selling all their stuff.  They were letting strangers into their house to buy their belongings.  There has to be a story there.  I just went through the sale of my family home.  I had emotions about it.  I had a story.  I imagine that there are people behind these things with an emotional story, and I want to be told that they are okay.  I want to be satisfied that there is some meaning to the sale of these possessions.   Ultimately, I want to know that I’m okay, that my story has a happy ending.  (Steve always tells me that everyone in your dream is really you.)

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl comes to mind.  I read parts of it.  Is this how we keep ourselves sane in “stressful” circumstances?  Is it just a game?  If it works, does it matter?  If I am not dogmatically asserting that my actions are ultimately meaningful, just saying that I find meaning in them and that is useful to me, does that make my position more authentic?  Can I make up a satisfying story about the family in the cabin and then say, “I know it’s not ‘true’, but I like to tell myself this story to calm my neuroses” and still be considered ‘sane’?  Do most of us do this anyway?  Does that make it ‘normal’ then?  I suppose I could give that up and face the fact that I won’t know every story.  Perhaps I would be far more sane to learn to live with ambiguity and uncertainty and meaninglessness.   What do you think?

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It worked for the cat…

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One day, while Emily’s cat, Pinkle Purr, was living with us and I was out grocery shopping, Steve heard a crash in the attic.  He thought perhaps a stack of books had toppled over, so he went to see.  The cat was curled up at the bottom of our bed, and nothing looked amiss upstairs in the attic.  A few hours later, the cat was still there; she hadn’t moved.  Curious as to whether she’d taken food or had lost her appetite for some reason, I brought her bowl upstairs from the ground floor to see if she was hungry.  She was very interested in eating, but showed great difficulty getting up.  In fact, she wouldn’t put any weight on either of her back two legs.  She ate, but did not get up.  Steve ended up sleeping on the floor of his office that night so as not to disturb her.  I fretted about whether we should call a vet and what the cost might be.  Steve suggested that we just give her time and that we ask a vet some questions about what they might do if we did seek medical care for her.   One vet was willing to make some diagnostic guesses without seeing her.  Two others refused.  Little by little, she gained movement and returned to her former self in a week.  She did not seem to be suffering or in pain, she just slowed down and slept and healed.

sleeping at the end of our bed - the miracle cure

Now, the debate about our health care beliefs begins.  What do we do when we recognize that we don’t feel entirely well?  Do we race off to the ‘experts’ to get tests done to find out what might be wrong and then entrust those experts to doing something to fix us?  Well, that’s what I used to do.  When I had insurance.  Pinkle doesn’t have insurance.  For that matter, neither do Steve or I.  So now, I think a bit about my options.  If I go to the expert, what is s/he going to be able to tell me?  Will s/he demand tests be done first?  What information can I find out on my own?  Can I live with the situation as it is without risking further danger?  Can I trust my body to heal itself if I allow it quiet time, nourishment, and rest?

Watching Pinkle heal herself over a few days was enlightening.  Could it be that much of the time, rest and recuperative care is all we need to heal ourselves?  I liked feeling that she felt comfortable in our home, that she trusted us to give her a peaceful place to heal.  My youngest daughter visited us this weekend.  She was stressed, unhappy, and despairing when she arrived.  She was peaceful, content, and happy by the time she left.  We didn’t take her to any ‘expert’, we just provided food, quiet, supportive talk, a place to be in nature, and cuddles.

taking refuge in a wildlife refuge

I remembered a time when going to the hospital was such a frequent event that I hardly thought twice about it.  I know when it is warranted to save a life.  I’ve lived through that.  I am learning to live like a healthy person, on no medications whatever.  My daughter is, too.  It feels very good.

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Home

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My son and daughter are moving back to Illinois from Oregon.  Today, they’re staying at my mother’s house.  My daughter is probably sleeping in my old room.  They are probably going to church with my mother and then to the Farmer’s Market.  I close my eyes and see them perfectly.  I see my mother’s house in detail.  I can close my eyes and see each house I grew up in with the sharpest clarity…except maybe the one I lived in first and moved out of when I was 4.  I know the smells of “home”…my mother sauteing onions in butter and vermouth at suppertime, the rosemary in the front yard and the lemon tree out back, and star jasmine.   I remember the faint mildew smell of the basement of the old house, and the smell of the dirt in the crawl space beneath her California home.  “Home” has always been accessible to me through my senses and memories, even when I felt very far away.  I knew what I longed for and where it was.  Today, my youngest will escape her city apartment and come visit us.  She has had a rough few weeks and feels the need for “home”.    I wonder how to provide “home” now that I’ve sold the house they all grew up in.  I wonder how and where we will gather as an entire family.  I am so excited that we will be all in the Midwest soon!  I’m hoping for a Team Galasso outing on October 2 for the Step Out Walk for Diabetes.  (more about that later)  I’m hoping for a Christmas gathering.  It is up to us to redefine “home”.  What are the essentials?

I think of the elements of my home visits,  like looking at photographs.   The snapshots and albums I have are in storage.   The accessible photos I have are on a thumb drive I can plug into this laptop.  How about singing around the piano?  Marni’s piano, which is now Susan’s, is in the home of one of her college friends.   The big family bed?  That’s in Emily’s apartment.  Well, dang.  Ah, but here’s the very thing.  The dining room table.  My grandmother’s cherry table is here, waiting.  Being together at table is one of the most essential “home” activities.  The chance to nourish our bodies with food, our minds with conversation, and our souls with love and acceptance is what wanting to come home is about to me.  I was invited to Emily’s home for Mother’s Day this year.  She had just moved into her apartment and didn’t have a table yet.  You know what?  We don’t even need the table.  The meal, the talk, the physical connection, maybe that’s all “home” is.  The stuff in our lives keeps changing.  I have given up trying to keep that together.  I want always to provide the experience of being “home” nevertheless.  Maybe it’s just being present with each other.  Being as aware as we can of ourselves and the “thou” across from us, being honest and authentic and paying attention, and holding space for each other, respectfully and lovingly.

Dining sans table

So, what is “home” to you?  Is there meaning in that word?  Is it one of those “values” we made up so that we can find ways to be guilty or judgmental or isolated or needy or consumers?  Is planet Earth a “home”?  What would that mean?

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Follow Your Bliss

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“Do you care what’s happening around you?  Do your senses know the changes when they come? Can you see yourself reflected in the seasons?  Do you understand the need to carry on.”  I was humming this John Denver song yesterday as I walked around the neighborhood with my camera, looking for signs of autumn.

I noticed something peculiar about some of the maple trees.  I had seen this from my bedroom window a few days before.  Black spots on the leaves, as if the rain we had the other day had pelted them with something corrosive.  I took these down by the city pool.

And this is my “treehouse” tree, the one outside my bedroom window.

I wanted an answer to what made those mysterious spots, so I took my camera with me to the Wehr Nature Center where I had volunteered to sort fliers for school groups.  I went to one of the staff naturalists, who referred me to another, Mark, who knew something about plant diseases.  Mark said that it was probably a fungal disease and mentioned one, verticillium wilt, that is deadly to trees.  He told me that I should look up a plant pathologist from UW Madison, Brian Hudelson, on the internet who diagnoses plant diseases from samples, for a fee.  With visions from my childhood of elm trees felled all up and down the street for carrying Dutch Elm disease, I went to my computer looking for this tree specialist.

I found out that Dr. Brian Hudelson is the plant pathologist on the NPR show “Garden Talk”.   His website contains instructions for taking samples and a fee chart for services from the diagnostic clinic he runs.  Since these are city trees, I wondered if he’d answer my question based on just photos.  I pulled my best Nature Center Volunteer card and wrote to him as a good citizen concerned about the health of our village trees.  He responded immediately with a pdf information page on Tar Spot fungus.  Fortunately, it’s not fatal to the tree and can be treated.  I was so relieved that I sent back an immediate “thank you”.  This was his reply:

Priscilla:

Glad to help, and please don’t worry about misspelling my name.  I really didn’t notice.  I tell everyone that I respond to pretty much anything (including expletives).  Everyone really just calls me Brian.  If you want to call me Dr. something, call me Dr. Death.  That’s been a nickname and radio handle for years (and DOES tickle the evil little boy in me).

Definitely let me know if you need information in the future.  Happy to help.

Brian (:))

I am so excited to be working with people who are passionate about what they do!  Susan called me from her orientation day at UW Madison that afternoon.  She was wondering if she should have her head examined for paying for a master’s program in linguistics by working full time.  I told her that she was finally doing something about which she had always dreamed, that she was doing exactly what Joseph Campbell (author of The Power of Myth and professor at Sarah Lawrence for years) had advised all his students to do:  Follow Your Bliss.   This is the way to true happiness.  I want to see myself, my children, everybody get to fly.  What is life for, anyway, if not to live it passionately?

This morning at breakfast, Steve read me this poem.  We both had tears in our eyes afterwards.

The Writer — Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

I am thinking of my kids; Josh and Becca will be driving back to Illinois from Oregon beginning tomorrow.  I wish them a lucky passage.  I wish all of us a flight that follows our bliss.

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Hope for a recovering perfectionist

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Western thinking is set up in a dualistic manner.  We have pairs of opposites: good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, body and soul.  Things are separated and put into boxes.  I was raised on this philosophy in my Judeo-Christian upbringing.   Human nature or sin nature is in opposition to divine nature.  We are told to die to sin and human nature and live out of divine nature.  It’s an either/or proposition.  And it’s impossible to do.  I simply cannot stop being human – and I don’t really want to.  When I think I ought to because of some person’s judgment, then I end up hating my humanness, and hating myself.  I feel guilty for being imperfect and human.  It is a cause of suffering.   When Jesus comes along to take the blame for my sins, the system isn’t really undone, it still seems like we are the Bad Ones and he is the Good One.

Eastern thinking is not dualistic.  It is both/and.  Good and bad are not separate.  Nor are right and wrong, body and soul, etc.  Every decision is somewhat good and somewhat bad.  Joseph Campbell talks about this in The Power of Myth.  The great mythic tales often point out this seeming ambiguity and emphasize that this is the real nature of life.  Yin and yang are not separate; two sides of a coin are not separate.   I am not separate from my human nature, from my mistakes, from my less effective parenting episodes.  They’re all me, and they do not need to be separated from me and judged.  We tend to get all up in arms about issues and pick a side, thinking that this is the obviously correct side.  Really, things are about 60/40 at best.  I often bring this up when one of my children is fretting about a decision and terrified that they will make “the wrong” choice.  Nonsense, I say.  You will make “a choice”, and if things don’t go in a way that seems beneficial after that choice, then you can make other choices.   Steve told me that when he was a kid, he had a plastic bowling set and used it to play a game that he made up.  He’d set up the pins in the usual pyramid arrangement, then bowl the ball and scatter them.  He would then set the pins up exactly as they had fallen, and bowl the next frame in the new arrangement.  Each time, he would just set the pins up where they were and start from there.  He never knew how the game would play out…I suspect that his pins were all over the yard after a half an hour.  I suppose the object of the game wasn’t the traditional “Knock ’em all down, Daddy”, meaning knock ’em all down at once.  It became more “Knock ’em all down eventually”.  After all my years of living, I rather think this new model is more like how life plays out.

So Steve & I have adopted a metaphor of decision-making that we call “Pointing the Canoe”.  We make good decisions, I believe, ones that take some time and try to consider many aspects.  They are not perfect decisions that knock all the pins down at once, but they are decisions that we hope will bring us closer to the light on the horizon.  I don’t know how to make a perfect decision, and if I live in fear of that, I most likely won’t make any decisions at all.  I make a good decision, and then I look up at the horizon.  If I’m not heading toward the place I want to get to, I make another decision.  I point my canoe and paddle on one side or the other, and I get there eventually.

Every week, we get together to have a Summit Meeting.  This is where we discuss the decisions we are making and how to point the canoe so that we’ll be living the life we want to live.   We put our values out on the horizon and see how we’re lining up.  We want to live more simply and sustainably.  We want to be spending most of our time, not on “small fires”, but on things that we find very important, like Spirituality, Music and Nature.  We want to be kind.

Today, I got to live out of a decision I made last week.   I interviewed at a county park that has a Nature Center.  I wanted to volunteer to be an interpretive trail guide and be involved in educating people about nature.  Today, I spent 5 hours at Astronomy Day telling kids (and their parents) about NASA’s Discovery program and the Dawn Spacecraft that is sending back information about asteroids.   I don’t know how long I’ll be doing this volunteer work; it’s not a perfect answer to “what should I do with the rest of my life?” (because it’s not paying me anything and won’t sustain me), but it’s closer.   I am also a Certified Teacher with TakeLessons.com now.  This means that a music lessons match-up organization in San Diego is trying to get me private voice students.  I’m not sure if that’s what I want to be doing with the rest of my life, but it is teaching and it is music, so it might bring me a bit closer.  I have yet to get my first student.

I still spend a lot of time wondering about who I am and what I “should” be doing.  It feels good to be in the canoe and moving toward my horizon, doing my own paddling.  I have been so fearful about how to live my life after being widowed.  Not so much any more.  Recovering from perfectionism helps.