© 2014, essay and photograph, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
My December countdown was completed yesterday. I did not have a chance to post about the gift of love because I was living it. My four children plus two “significant otters” came over for feasting and gifting and sleeping over. All six of them ended up on the living room floor under mountains of sleeping bags and pillows and blankets, just like they used to when they were kids in a cousins pile. Except now, they’re all adults — beautiful, interesting, caring, amazing adults who actually like each other. And me. How did I get to be so blessed? This morning, I repaid them all for years of running in and jumping on my king-sized bed full of eager energy at an early hour on Christmas. I dived onto their sleeping bags one at a time and gave them a great big hug and kiss.
We have lived through a lot together. And we have lived through a lot separately. Their lives matter to me in a way that I can barely describe. Steve keeps challenging me to come up with ways to articulate what this is. He has no children, and philosophically wonders why family is esteemed so highly. “Oxytocin,” my daughter replied one day. That explains one level of it, I suppose. My biology has loaded me with hormones that make me love my kids. My religion loaded me with beliefs that urged me to love my kids. My experience of life has loaded me with the joys of loving my kids. And my kids are just plain lovable. I can agree with the reasoning behind his argument that all people are equally valuable, but I just can’t help feeling that my kids are more valuable…to me. Yes, I’m playing favorites shamelessly without really understanding why. Is it possible that evolution favors fiercely loving families? Do they tend to be larger and survive better? This might have negative effects on the planet in terms of population. Would it be better for the world if we were less filial and more agape in our love? Less sentimental and more altruistic?
Table fellowship
I don’t think that I am going to do justice to the topic of love in a scholarly way when I am full of mince pie, chocolate, and happy memories of the hours I just spent. I am starting to sink into that melancholy that bubbles up when all of the guests have gone home and you ask yourself if you can be truly happy without that rush of energy and affection. Of course, I am happy and even more peaceful living without all my children still under my roof. I am in love with the world, in love with my partner, and in love with my children every day. And it is marvelous.
December 20. The 20th free gift of the month is something that can be acquired, but cannot be bought. I don’t think that it can be given, either. The gift is Wisdom. According to Wikipedia, “Wisdom is a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions in keeping with this understanding.” In other words, “To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) However, “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” (George Bernard Shaw) And finally, “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” (Mohandas K. Gandhi)
It would seem, then, that wisdom is something that can be acquired in living with awareness and engaging humbly with experiences. It seems to me, though, that you can’t give someone the benefit of this process. You might point out the process and talk about its benefit, you might set up the beginning of the process, but you can’t impart the journey or the result. It has to be lived. I’m a mother; trust me on this. I wanted to give my children wisdom more than anything, probably for selfish reasons. I wanted to be spared the pain. I wanted to spare them the pain. I asked God to give them wisdom…like on a magic platter descending from heaven…but spare them the pain. Can’t be done. Wisdom is born of pain and suffering and effort and failure. You have to be awake through it all as well. You can’t gain wisdom while you’re anesthetized. I’ve made a great discovery, though. This process is a great equalizer. Keeping Gandhi’s wisdom in mind, my children and I are fellow travelers on this path. We share our stories as friends, we perhaps contribute insights to this process, but we cannot assume the roles of provider and receiver. I try to remember that as I talk to them. It is too easy for me to slip into the “teacher” role and begin to spew language about what they “should” do and what is the “right” way to do something. I often issue too many reminders and begin to sound like I’m micro-managing them. They notice. They mention it. I have to challenge myself to be wiser and trust them to be wise.
I remember the day my father told me that something I said was wise. It felt like a great victory for me. I was 19 or 20. I had been talking to my oldest sister about some article I had read in an evangelical Christian newsletter taking issue with science and carbon dating. My father was eavesdropping from the breakfast room and jumped on the subject by voicing some objection to the fact that the money he was paying for my college education hadn’t stopped me from discoursing like an ignoramus. I was scared of his strong emotion, ashamed of myself, and angry at his insult. Embarrassed and hurt, I fled. We didn’t speak for 3 days. I realized that he wasn’t going to apologize to me or mention the event on his own, so I decided I needed to take the initiative to talk to him about my emotions, clear the air, and try to restore our relationship. I’d never talked to my father about our relationship very much before. He was always right, often angry, and anything that was amiss was my fault. I also knew that he would not show his emotions, that it would be a “formal discussion” on his part, but that I would probably not be able to contain my tears, making me feel foolish and not his equal. I decided to brave the consequences and approach him with Kleenex in hand. I began to talk, and cry, and tell him how I felt. Then he asked me if I wanted an apology. “What do you want me to say?” I told him that part was up to him. My dictating an apology to him would be meaningless. That’s when he said, “That is very wise.” Suddenly, I felt I had grown up and been respected as an equal to my father in some way. What I understood or didn’t understand about evolution and carbon dating and creation didn’t matter to me any more. That I had been able to navigate emotions with my father and repair a broken relationship was far more significant.
Dad & me in 1992. Photo by my 8 year old daughter.
Wisdom isn’t easy to get, but it is available. If you pursue it, you’ll probably get it eventually. It’s completely avoidable, though, if you so choose. I know which way I want to go, so I’ll keep paddling my canoe and checking the horizon. For those of you heading the same way, STEADY ON! I salute you.
Where is there dignity unless there is Honesty? — Cicero
Today I’m parading Honesty around the block, free for the taking – a gift for December. Does it cost to be honest? There definitely are consequences to being honest. Integrity, for instance, but sometimes something much more harsh. Here’s a Socrates Cafe question: is it ever morally defensible to tell a lie? Here’s a Biblical philosophical question: what is truth? (For 3 pieces of cheese, tell me who asked this question to whom? For all the cheese in Wisconsin, tell me why that person never answered?!) *n.b. – My father used to play a game with us that we called “Bible Questions for Cheese”. He would quiz us on our Biblical knowledge after dinner and reward us with bites from his cheese platter as he finished off his bottle of wine.
Which kind of honesty is the most difficult for you and why? Telling yourself the truth about yourself, telling someone else the truth about yourself, telling yourself the truth about another, or telling your truth about another to that other?
Self-deception can be pretty intractable. How do you even know that you’re not telling yourself the truth about yourself? Do you have to depend on someone else telling you the truth about you? How would someone else even know the truth about you? I suppose I approach this by going the second route first. I try telling someone else the truth about myself to see if they can believe it’s the truth. This would seem like madness to some people. Why are look looking outside yourself? Why wouldn’t you trust yourself to know yourself? How could anyone else know you better? I have heard quoted many times, “Lean not on your own understanding”, and I suppose I took that to heart. So now, I’m working on trying to be honest with myself and to trust myself. This takes some courage and a lot of forgiveness.
Telling the truth about myself to others is something that I want to do. It saves me the trouble of having to come up with a lie. It allows me to get that feedback I need to find out if I’m deceiving myself. But sometimes, I detect that TMI reaction. Too Much Information divulged to your own offspring, for example, is not at all welcome. Especially when they’re young. I’ve done that a few times. More often, I told them the truth about things, facts, at an early age that others did not think was appropriate. For example, I told them that Santa is fictional. I told them the correct names of body parts. (My oldest was 4, I think, when she gave a word for the letter ‘V’ that rather shocked her nursery school teacher.) I told them that their father had coronary artery disease. (Again, my oldest could draw an anatomically correct heart from memory at the age of 6.)
Ducks can walk on water. It’s the truth!
Telling myself the truth about another has been difficult only on a few occasions that I recall. Telling myself that my father was not God and was not perfect was one. Telling myself that my husband was dying was another. However, in those situations, the truth was very valuable, and the difficulty was well worth it. I guess that means I defend more delusions about myself than about those whom I love. I believe that shattering delusions about myself will be similarly painful but beneficial, so I’m willing to keep at that.
Telling ‘your’ truth about another to that other is what Steve likes doing the most in relationships. He doesn’t usually “tell” so much as he questions in order to draw out an opportunity for the person to tell the truth about him/herself. He calls it “being challenging” or “being intense”, and he considers it a supreme act of love. And he does it kindly, in my opinion, but more importantly, he is conscious of trying to do it kindly. It isn’t always received that way, though. Sometimes, no matter how tactful and kind you try to be, that ‘other’ is not going to want to hear your truth. Hopefully, that reaction is only temporary. Getting to the point of engaging with truth in a relationship is an important step to intimacy. It’s what being ‘truly loving’ is all about. It takes grace to invite someone to that point in a way that is non-threatening. I appreciate therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists everywhere who take up that practice in the name of love.
Companions. The gift of friendship, togetherness, to know we’re not alone.
Steve brought me breakfast in bed this morning. I am having one of my cyclical let-downs, when I have wearied myself in contending with life and death and love and loss. We were discussing E.M. Forster’s novel “A Room With A View” when this came on. Hormones, of course, have everything to do with it as well. Lucy Honeychurch gets “peevish” when she plays Beethoven, and I get “peevish” reading Mr. Emerson’s speech on life and “muddles”. Steve gets Slavic and moody listening to Mahler, or perhaps he listens to Mahler when he feels moody and Slavic. We are beginning to know each other’s moods better and better. And I really believe we are lucky, blessed, in a state of grace in that we accept those moods and are not threatened by the most peculiar of them. That’s why he’s my best friend.
I’ve never had a lot of friends, and all of my best friends have been male. Maybe that’s because I grew up with 3 older sisters. I am a little suspicious of females. I have a feeling it’s because I compare myself to them far too much. A sly competitiveness creeps in and makes me uneasy. I pull away. With guys, I don’t compare. I can be ‘other’ and so can he. It seems simpler. It’s a mindset that should apply to females as well except for my own perverse insistence that it can’t. Growing up, I played with a boy who was a year younger than I and lived two doors down. We were best friends for 9 years. We played in the woods across the street. We played house and wedding, and he was always the bride. He had older step-sisters who kept being married off, and I think he found that really enchanting.
Brother & sister and best of friends
Friends to suffer with your moods, enjoy the stuff of life, travel with you through adventures of all kinds. Old friends, new friends. Situational companions. Steve likes to imagine how he’d be if he were stuck in an elevator with a few people for hours. He would definitely skip the small talk about the predicament and enjoy a captive opportunity to get to know them really well. He’s kind of intense like that. Scares some people. Yesterday, I saw a news video about a policeman who crawled under a bus to hold the hand of a 24 year old woman who was run over and pinned. The photo of them together on the asphalt and his interview afterward just filled my heart. I know what it’s like to be so afraid and just to cling to another person for the reminder that we are never alone in our fears. We suffer together. We are interconnected. And if anything is God, it is there as well. Presence. Abiding. Being with each other. It is the ultimate ‘yes’ of living. Which brings me back to Forster and Mr. Emerson. “In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:
“‘From far, from eve and morning/ And yon twelve-winded sky/ The stuff of life to knit me/ Blew hither: here am I’
“George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.” Miss Honeychurch assented. “Then make my boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes — a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
Ah, Yes. To love one another and work and rejoice. Companioned. Who could ask for anything more?
I have an image in mind as I parade out these gifts for each day of December. Described beautifully by D.H. Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent, it is that ritual wherein the devout remove the icons and statuary from inside the Catholic Church, bedeck them with flowers, and hoist them onto portable platforms so that they can move about the throngs of people and allow them to worship, touch and reverence these symbols of their blessings. So here is the thirteenth symbol of a holy experience – we write it ‘touch’.
It occurs to me that taste involves a certain amount of touch. Foods caress your lips and taste buds. That involves direct contact with substance, as opposed to sight, hearing and smell which seem more indirect. Touch is all about that direct contact with substance, and it can happen anywhere on your body. Fingertips are often the first touch sensors that come to mind. They are sensitive and yet resilient. They detect temperature, pressure, texture, shape and probably a million other bits of data. The temperature sensors are interesting. I remember an exhibit station at the Exploratorium in San Francisco that alleged that you could not tell the difference between intense cold and intense heat by touch. It sounds like nonsense, but here’s how they proved it: two metal coils were intertwined evenly. One coil was extremely cold. The other was vaguely warm. When you touched them individually, that was evident. When you touched them together, you immediately drew your hand away because it felt like it was burning hot! Apparently your brain combines the intensity message with the heat message and warns you right away to back off. Of course, I wanted to test how long I could endure the sensation, knowing that I wasn’t being burned.
My sister and my daughter are both certified massage therapists. I think they are perfectly suited to this profession. They are caring, intuitive, kinetic, and highly skilled. They are also whip smart at math and able to comprehend systems and memorize terminology. You probably don’t think about that as you enter a spa, and maybe you have stereotypes of “massage parlors” somewhere in your consciousness. That’s the mystery of the grace of touch. It transcends all that scientific knowledge and meets you on a very intimate level. “How’s this pressure?” they ask you, and you only need to respond by relaying your comfort. “I don’t know what you’re doing or why, I just know that it feels good.” And I’ve also learned that it feels good to them, too, in a different way. They get in touch with their own bodies, how they perceive what’s going on beneath the skin, how they balance their own weight against you, how they move down a long muscle or manipulate fascia. It’s very rewarding work. It’s also tiring. Schedule a massage, enjoy the experience, and tip your masseuse well! If you live in San Francisco or DeKalb, I have one to recommend.
Intimacy. Touch is a wonderful conveyance of feeling and thought. It may take a while to trust it for many of us. It’s sad that in our society it is often manipulative, dishonest and damaging. The touch of someone I truly trust can instantly change my mood. When I was in labor for the first time and about to deliver, I was approaching a very intense experience of the unknown. I knew that I would have to surrender my control in order to get through it, but I was scared. Jim was very interested in all that was going on down at the doctors’ end, the episiotomy, the vacuum forceps, the bells & whistles. I felt a bit abandoned by my “coach” until he came close to my face and laid the back of his hand on my cheek. I relaxed completely in that instant, and Susan was born. I will always remember that touch. When I stand at the sink washing dishes, I love it when Steve comes up behind me and kisses the back of my neck. It sends a shiver through me every time. To be in contact with someone I love gives all my labors meaning. My body doesn’t live in a vacuum; I am interconnected with everything in the universe. I like to be reminded of that.
Pinkle Purr: warm, furry, soft, silky
With all the holiday greetings being sent around the world this month, it’s nice to know that people “reach out”. It would be my hope that we also get the chance to really touch. I’d take a hug above a twitter every time. And I miss having a cat to stroke, big time. I admire animals for the way that they instruct us humans in some basic lessons in touching when we are often too uptight to understand what they know instinctively. For all the cuddles that they elicit from us reluctant brain-heavy types, I am in awe. Especially from men who are often not permitted to indulge in touching. I love seeing my son being physical and affectionate with the dog and cat he lives with. It reminds me of when he was young enough to have stuffed animals. He had quite a collection, and he enjoyed their softness openly, frequently nuzzling into a huge plush dog named Buster. Today, he is interviewing for a job at a kennel. I think it would be great for him to have an opportunity to spread that gift of loving touch to some lonesome boarders.
I am grateful for the ability to feel the universe around me in so many different ways, externally and internally. Thanks be!
Star Wars Day at Discovery World museum is this Saturday. I’m the OLDEST female guest service team member; most of my colleagues weren’t even alive when the first movie came out! Yoda is going to be my alter-ego for the day. I’m old, wise, and I know what an introductory adverbial clause is!
“From birth we have been conditioned by different events and people — our teachers, parents, country, culture, neighborhood, friends, and peers. Everything we cherish — our positions, attitudes, opinions, all of our attachments, all the things we think give our life identity — is found in our conditioning. Now here we are, decades later, trying to live our lives out of this random programming we call “my life”. We feel so strongly about parts of the program we are ready to die for it. And it is all created in our own mind.
There is no escaping the fact that getting beyond this accumulated conditioning is a long process. Thirty or forty years of programming takes time to work through. We look at the thoughts, acknowledge them, let them go, and come back to the breath. Day by day, we uncover what is underneath all of the conditioning. What we discover is called freedom. It is called human life. It is called wisdom and compassion. It’s the nature of all beings.”
scillagrace 