Category Archives: Philosophy

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Team Spirit

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The world is gearing up for another Olympic Games.  National pride, sportsmanship, individual performance, athleticism, courage, and victory will be concepts that will get much press in the near future, I suspect.  I like to push out the boundaries of concepts and see how they all interconnect and create a bigger picture.  In this arena, I’m going to put all of those issues under one large banner: humanity.  The Olympics give us an opportunity to look at humanity, albeit through a particular lens, and witness ourselves.  What do we have in common?  What are the responses available to us in certain circumstances?  How do role models give us a glimpse into the possibilities we carry in ourselves?  When I was growing up in the 70s, I would glue myself to the TV and soak in all those “up close and personal” stories.  I found them fascinating and inspiring.  Now that I have lived to be (almost) 50, I have lived some stories of my own that have taught me about being human.  One of those is the story of watching my husband die of diabetes.

Human beings experience suffering; that’s one thing we all have in common.  We can learn information and we can gain understanding and compassion by looking into that suffering and asking questions.  What is causing this suffering?  How does it feel?  How can I help?  The Galasso family looked into diabetes for the first time in 1991, when Jim was diagnosed.  After he died in 2008, my oldest, Susan, came up with a way that we could help those who suffer from it.  She organized the first Team Galasso and walked with 2 of her siblings in a fund-raiser event in Urbana, IL sponsored by the American Diabetes Association.  The next year, she moved to Madison and Steve and I walked with her.  Last year, the entire family gathered in Madison (including Susan’s fiance, Andy) to continue the effort.  This year, the walk is being held on Jim’s birthday, August 26.  How fitting is that?!

Team Galasso 2011

I invite you all to participate in this Team effort by making a donation to the ADA via my sponsor page here.  I also invite you to spend some time considering your part in Team Humanity, asking your own questions about being human, about suffering, about living in a body.  Who do you want to be?  How do you want to live?  What will your life model and inspire?  My youngest daughter got her first tattoo a few months ago.  She chose a typewriter font over her left shoulder, above her heart, to illustrate one of her dad’s most memorable maxims: “Pain is inevitable; misery is optional.”  I am honored to be part of this team, this family of humanity.  I want to acknowledge and include every member and recognize that each one is trying to work out the answers to those questions, even though there are destructive results in the process.   I’ve had mine, you’ve had yours.   We can learn and do better.  I believe that.  Thank you for your participation!

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Adventure!

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The season for Old World Wisconsin ends in October.  Steve and I are gearing up for a 2-3 week road trip.  We have about 9 possible itineraries, National Forests and Parks mostly.  We’ve come to call this “our trip to metaphorical Maine” because although Maine is one of the top contenders, it is really just serving as the title of an unknown eventual destination.  This is how Steve prefers to travel, and he is teaching me to appreciate the spirit of living in the moment rather than planning for safety and control.  Not that Steve is an “extreme” kind of guy, a risk-taker for the sake of it, or anything like that.  It’s really more a Zen kind of thing of being aware of conditions as they arise and dancing with them rather than putting on blinders and sticking to a railroad track. 

We recently borrowed the DVD of “The Sheltering Sky” starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich.  I’m sure the book was better, but the film has some terrific cinematic landscapes and brings up a lot of interesting questions.  Like, “What is the difference between a tourist and a traveler?”  A tourist wants the comforts of home.  A traveler seeks adventure.  I recently had a conversation with a co-worker who talked about a visit to France and only mentioned that there were no bugs or birds and that French waiters substitute Sprite for lemonade.  This guy never thought he’d leave the country in his lifetime.  Maybe he shouldn’t have!

I feel like I have been working on my personal demons (neuroses, grief, all that baggage) and have gained some courage and self-confidence since our last big trip.  I did have one memorable meltdown in a rest stop off the highway in the pouring rain from about 2-4 in the a.m.  That was April of 2011, and we were on the road for 4 weeks.  Here’s a shot taken somewhere near the Colorado River in Utah that illustrates one of the many decision discussions we had.  Do you want to take this road or not?  Why? 

There’s no “right answer” and there’s no judgement, Steve told me.  “I just want to know what you think about when you make decisions.”  What are we here for?  What do we call “living”?  Is it “to be safe and have children and grandchildren”?  Is it “to learn to praise God and serve Him”?  There are a million ways to answer that question.  Steve describes his answer to me every time we have a conversation.  He wants to meet life with awareness, engage in nuance and complexity, question and think critically, try to discover delusion, respond in the moment to what is before him, and participate in the adventure of living, as holistically as he can.  Yesterday, I read a short science fiction story by E.M. Forster called “The Machine Stops”.   It describes a futuristic world where the human race is run by Machine and never ventures to the surface of the earth.  It’s eerie how much that could be the life of modern individuals plugged into the Internet with no experience of the physical phenomenons of Earth.   What kind of life do I really want to live?  What kind of courage do I have to face the adventure of living?  Do I prefer comfort to challenge?  These are good questions to take out for a road test.   I’m looking forward to it! 

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Half Way Around

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Traveling ’round the sun, it seems we’re always half way done.  Imagining the opposites, the contrasts, the dualistic ideals.  If what is happening now is somehow unsatisfying, we’ve only to think that on the other side of the globe, things are completely different.  Somewhere, life is cool and peaceful while we struggle with heat and violence.

If we expand our thinking, though, we realize that everything is…always.  It is cool and hot and peaceful and violent and slow and fast and everything in between.  It is then and now and never and always.  The distinctions and boundaries are simply concepts in our brains like the lines on the map that don’t really exist when you walk the earth.   All is.  Particular conditions arise and manifest particular things of which we become aware, but those materials have always been and always are in the world.  There are no beginnings, no endings. 

‘Tis a gift to be simple; ’tis a gift to be free; ’tis a gift to come ’round where we ought to be…  When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.  To turn, turn, will be our delight; ’til by turning, turning, we come ’round right. – Shaker song

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Friday Night

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What do you think about on the drive home?  (What can I make for dinner out of what’s left in the ‘fridge?)  How do you get comfortable?  (I take off my corset as soon as possible!)  Do you eat first or relax first?  (I eat and have a glass of wine.  Then I put my feet up.)  How long can you go before you fall asleep? (Not very long.  I often nod off by 8pm, and then I have to wake up to brush my teeth and REALLY go to bed at 10pm.)  Man!  Do I sound OLD!?! 

I have to be at work again by 8am tomorrow for an All Staff Meeting.  It’s gonna take me 45 min. to get there, too.  No boogieing for me tonight!  

My prayers to the Universe tonight include appreciation for the cooler weather today (a fleeting phenomenon…in the 90s again tomorrow) and a deep grief over the violence in our culture, a hope that kindness and respect for all life will prevail some day.

 

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Barometric Change

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I fell asleep next to the open window, listening to the deep, distant rumble of thunder.  The sky flashed like paparazzi bulbs in the south.  Finally, finally, after 4 weeks of drought, the rain came all the way down to earth.  In the morning, it hung in the air like a smothering wet blanket.  I dreamed that I was sitting in the bottom of a sleeping bag, zippering the top over my head.  My sinuses were heavy, and I couldn’t open my eyes.  My body felt a sea change that I had anticipated since yesterday when my temper flared unexpectedly at a chaperone scolding a young child.  Tension gave way; I sank to the bottom.  I could feel Steve beside me like the earth feels the sky when it finally comes down in a shower of healing touch.

In 33 more days, I will turn 50 years old.  I feel more connected to nature than I ever have.  I am more aware of my nature, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and more aware of the Universe around me.   I am more aware of my partner and my children.  I feel peaceful and mature, young and ancient at the same time.  I feel good.  Really good.  I am in love with my life…at last.

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Too Darn Hot

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I have been given the day off from my job at Old World Wisconsin.  When the heat index is over 100 degrees, we expect few visitors to the outdoor living history museum.  With my time, I imagine accomplishing all kinds of things, but in truth, I am simply sitting in front of a fan in the living room, drinking cold water.  I am surrounded by books.  “Savor” by Thich Nhat Hahn is right at hand, bringing mindfulness into my view, but what I am mindful of is the sun beating down on the roof next door, angling through the windows despite the mini-blinds, heating the air so that any breeze coming in feels like the blow-dryer set on High.  I imagine all the sweet corn that I want to be eating next month shriveling up in the fields.  The loss of that treat – roasted in the husk, dripping in fresh butter and seasoned with salt and pepper – is probably not as devastating as the loss of an entire crop to a farmer.  Dust Bowl conditions may be just around the corner at this rate.  We are all connected to the changes and conditions on this planet.  How can we be mindful and act compassionately as a community?  How can we become “solid, peaceful, whole, and well” and improve the well-being of the world through collective compassion?  And can we cause a sea change on the planet before our brains are so baked that we can’t think at all?  I retreat into distraction and immediately think of this song…

Drops of sweat tap dance down my trunk…

Conscientiousness melts into individual survival…

When will the healing rain fall?

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Pointing Your Canoe

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Who do you want to be?  How do you want to live?  What do you want to do with your life?  Where do you want to point your canoe? 

Doesn’t matter where your canoe came from…Steve found this one at a garage sale

Strap it down and get ready to roll…

Set a course for your adventure and enjoy the ride!

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Interesting Inconsistency vs. Efficiency

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People are inconsistent.  We must be; we’re alive, living, responding, changing.  Funny thing is, in the West we’re often taught that this is a bad thing.  It isn’t efficient.  It isn’t dependable.  It goes against all kinds of Protestant ethics of order and purpose and such.  But in Eastern cultures, it’s often celebrated.  “If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.”  When the Buddha becomes a monolith, a never-changing dogma, it is no longer a life-giving source. I look to historical information and try to understand why people did what they did for a living now; I’m a historic interpreter.  I keep fighting this penchant for landing on the “right answer”, the one that describes order and purpose and makes sense.  I’m learning more that the joy of interpreting history is found in saying “we don’t know why”.  We’re quirky; isn’t that marvelous?  We change, we evolve, we digress, we’re capricious.  In many cultures, gods were like that, too.  It was acceptable, maybe expected.  But in Western theology, that became a bad characteristic for a god, and immutability became important.  We want something dependable, something stable, so much that we’re willing to construct it and enshrine it.  Why?  Because it allows us to stop trying to be responsible in the world?  The effort of responding is perhaps a constant drain, and we are lazy by nature?  I think of cultures that are resilient, flexible, responsive to the environment, and I think that consistency is maybe not that important or beneficial after all.  

  “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1830

What made me think about this?  I was looking into Wisconsin history, and the history of the Upper Peninsula, and came across the story of Henry Schoolcraft.  His first wife was half Ojibwa and helped him in his scholarship of Native American cultures.  His second wife wrote a popular anti-Tom novel in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book and disapproved of mixed-race unions, thereby alienating her stepchildren completely.  Why would the same man be married to both of these women?  “I don’t know why.”

Bookshelf at the Raspberry School, Old World Wisconsin

I recognize in myself a tendency to try to put my partner in a box, to figure out the consistent rules that will help me predict his behavior.  There aren’t any, really.  But he is hardly a sociopath.  He simply wants to be allowed to communicate his thoughts and feelings as they arise, to be understood in the moment, known intimately for the authentic and complicated man he is.  He is more than willing to talk and reason and explain honestly and even to make promises and act on them in order to gain my trust.  Perhaps it is simply my natural laziness that wants to put labels on him and save myself the trouble of paying attention.  Truly caring about a person requires great effort.  It is hardly efficient.  It necessitates all kinds of little adjustments.   And that is a valuable process, a craftsmanship of sorts.  Which reminds me of this clip my brother-in-law sent me which he titled: Precision East German manufacturing in the workers paradise.  I’m not sure if he was trying to be cynical.  I think it illustrates a very authentic part of human process. 

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Going With the Flow

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Change and the movement of life – flow and motion – energy passing through places and phases.  Here I sit in an old house with the shades drawn and the ceiling fans going fast, aware that the heat index is at a level that prompted my employer to call most of the staff and direct them to stay at home.  It’s hot and humid…but only for now.  This is what my street looked like in February:

I have been reading through some letters and journal entries that I wrote in the year 2007, the year before my husband died, when my teenaged girls were in serious distress and the entire family was in deep pain.  Here’s a list of feelings I wrote about:

depression, disappointment, hurt, shame, guilt, disgust, loneliness, despair, anger/frustration, regret/sorrow, fatigue, pain, inadequacy, fear, fragility, helplessness

Here’s a list of feelings that I decorated with a jagged black boundary and labeled “Off Limits, Not Allowed”:

Beauty, Happiness, Joy, Love, Health, Excitement, Passion, Rest, Pleasure, Peace

I wrote: “What do you do with feelings?  They’re supposed to have ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end’, but when you’ve had the same feelings swirling around you for a half a year, a year, several years — they aren’t just feelings anymore.  They become a way of life.  I feel like Job — afflicted with boils.  These hives on my legs itch like crazy, and I have no clue why I have them.  I just keep hoping they’ll just go away.”

When you attempt to stop the flow of energy and movement and turn your present feelings or thoughts into a way of life, it may seem like you’re taking control and choosing something you want.  It may turn out to be something that mires you in suffering, however.  That’s something of which to be aware.  You could apply that to the physical environment: attempting to regulate the temperature and keep it at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit as a chosen way of life may cause you to suffer inordinately whenever the temperature is much lower or higher than that.  Aversion and attachment causes suffering.  Letting go of them allows the dance of life to swirl you into new places.  If you find joy in the movement and change of life, you will not be disappointed.  If you insist on sitting in the same pile of ashes for years, you will inevitably feel itchy and uncomfortable.  You can hope that changes miraculously, or you can get up and move.  As Jesus said to the man sitting at the Sheep’s Gate Pool complaining and making excuses, “Wilt thou be made whole?” (John 5:6)  Do you want to enter the flow of life?  It’s your choice…

Here endeth my sermon to myself.

 

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The Root of the Issue

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I love this fence.  It’s made from the roots of trees that were cleared to make farms.  It’s in the Finnish area of Old World Wisconsin.  I wish I had photographed it earlier in the season before the roadside weeds grew so tall.

Tomorrow, I have a day off, and I’m looking forward to being able to spend some time with some issues that have surfaced (again) in my inner life.  Grief is always there; I had another dream with Jim in it that made me wake in tears.  Existential angst is there; today, I found myself embroidering “Alle Menschen ist der Grasse” on my sample cloth.  And the differences between me and my partner Steve are always there.  I had a vision of this a few days ago where I saw him as an archaeologist in a deep quest for something, sweeping away at an artifact to remove bits of dust and reveal some very important discovery.  I saw myself as a widow who had lost everything, sitting among shards of broken glass, saying, “Oooh, sparkly!” to whichever bit caught her attention.  To be honest, I attribute some of this mood to the hormonal cycle that still influences every month.  However, cycles are natural, and to be brought back to a place of regular introspection is a good thing, I think.  Anyway, I may have something more poetic and cohesive to say about the meaning of life….later.