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The Final Frontier

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Today was the final day of my volunteer training.  We did lesson plans about the Moon, Mars, and spent the last 20 minutes in the SkyLab.    As I lay on my back on the floor under that dome of plastic sheeting, I remembered trips to the Adler Planetarium when I was a kid.  Oh, those comfy seats!  I sometimes fell asleep as the narrator talked softly about constellations and Greek mythology, as I’m sure did many young visitors.  Today wasn’t a just a trip down memory lane, though, because science is constantly changing.  Robots are patrolling space right now and taking pictures of stuff we’ve never seen before.  I didn’t know there was a Kuiper belt before this morning.  I didn’t know that there is now a dwarf planet that isn’t named after something in Greek mythology.  It’s called Makemake, and it’s named after the god of creation in the culture of the Canary Islands.

Last night, we watched a Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of Steve’s favorite directors.  Solaris was adopted from the novel by a Polish writer, originally written in French.  We’ve also been borrowing the Cosmos series with Carl Sagan from the library.   I feel like I’m finally homeschooling myself in astro-physics because I never took Physics in high school.  Aside from trying to wrap my brain around conceptual numbers and the nature of sub-atomic particles, I’m wondering about moral and philosophical questions about what it means to be human and what part we may play in any larger community of intelligent life forms.

And then, today, we found ourselves at an estate sale in Lake Geneva where a VERY wealthy family is selling off furniture, antiques, and toys of rather astronomical proportions.  A horse-drawn sleigh and a mounted buffalo head, for instance.  Who has these things in their garage?!

So, now I feel like I’m in the synthesis stage of learning.  Pulling these bits of information and experience together, what meaning emerges?  Who are we and what are we doing here?  We live in a world that is much more vast than our consciousness can grasp, and yet we have this ability to be aware of our conscious mind and how we choose to live with it.  The Approximate Chef sent me a video clip she called “unexpected existentialism of Stephen Colbert” where he jokes about our penchant for knowing the end of the story and being comforted by that expected “happy ending”.  What is the best we can do with consciousness?  Use it to feel happy?  Use it to be compassionate?  Use it to reach toward expanding our awareness and capability?  Use it to gather the most impressive bits of this world into a collection we defend as our own?

I suppose we each have to answer that question for ourselves.  What do you want to do with your consciousness?  I do want to use it to be happy.  I want to use it to learn how to be less neurotic, anyway.  I do want to use it to be compassionate.  I do want to expand my awareness and capability, but I often wonder how much I can learn before I’ll just be forgetting most of it anyway.  I want to use it to make a positive impact in the world, but I’m not sure what that will be.  I want to use it to touch the Divine, if I can.

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.  But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.  The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perseid meteors over a castle in Hungary

Try the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” from NASA.  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

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Awareness, Appreciation, Action

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Today was Day 2 of volunteer training.  Insects and Soil were the topics.  Howard, the second staff naturalist, began the day.  We went through some background information about the Animal kingdom and where Insects fit in, targeting the 1st grade through 3rd grade audience.  Then he sort of stepped outside of the topic to comment on why we teach this stuff.  He said that he likes to keep AAA in mind: awareness, appreciation, and action.  I understand completely that there is a dearth of awareness about the natural world in our urban youngsters, especially as technology advances and funding for enrichment education is continually cut.  They spend more and more time on the computer and less time outside, then they look under a log for the first time and are amazed to find critters living there.   Ta-dah!  First step.  Then comes appreciation.  They wonder and want to know more and are fascinated by what there is to learn.  Animals, plants, rocks, the solar system, cycles, etc., all inter-dependent and inter-active, details and marvels in abundance.  I recognize that my appreciation increases every day and that I have a voracious appetite for more.  I want to spend more and more time outdoors, more and more time learning.  This is a pretty cool place to be, but it’s not the end.  The final step is action.  What do we hope for these young people who come to learn about the natural world?  What do we hope for the next generation?  Well, I raised my hand and ventured, “Responsibility?” because that’s what I hope for myself.  I want to take all this awe and love and turn it into decisions that will make a positive impact.  This is indeed the toughest part of the trilogy to grasp and embody, and it’s where Steve and I are currently stuck.  It’s fine to recycle, buy local food, and support environmental legislation, but is that really going to make a difference?  In order to reverse trends and live sustainably, we need to make more progressive and radical life decisions, and we need to implement them in community with others.  But where do we begin?   How do we find others who are committed to that progress?

How will I respond to this awesome world?

We have a lot of reading material (as you would expect), and Steve is planning to write to some of the authors he’s following: Derrick Jensen, David Orr, David Foreman, etc.  He’s looking to start or join a forum or study group of people with similar action goals.  I know that often, when I sit and think about how to solve a problem, I end up going nowhere because I’m too much in my head.  I find it useful to just get out and do something in that direction, anything, and see if that reveals the next step.  That’s why I’m happy to be meeting naturalists and educators.  It feels like I’m tracking down a clue.  When Howard began talking about action, I got excited.  That’s it!  That’s where I want to go!  I’m hoping that more clues will open up.

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Back to School

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Today was Day 1 of my three days of training as a volunteer at the Wehr Nature Center.

I had a blast!  We had story time, play time, nature hike, and best of all – the PUPPET SHOW!  I got to be the dancing woodchuck!  And the spider.  And the deer.  Okay, I’m a three year old at heart, and so I’m really looking forward to talking to 3 year olds about a subject that I really find interesting.  It has been a while since I had daily interaction with a three year old.  My oldest child was reading before she turned 3.  I wonder what these urban pre-schoolers will be like?  I wonder how much nature they actually see on a daily basis?   What questions will they ask?  What questions would I ask if I were seeing these things for the first time?

In Zen Buddhism, there’s a concept called Shoshin, which roughly means “Beginner’s Mind”.  According to Wikipedia, “It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.”  Shunryu Suzuki says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”   I am a beginner when it comes to teaching about nature.  Here’s my wild idea of a possibility:  this generations of kids might opt to live with fewer man-made or man-influenced constructs than the previous one.  They might actually choose to halt  technology and become truly progressive, moving “down and to the left”, in order to stall the destruction of species and resources.  They might keep their experience of nature in the realm of wonder and respect and not desire to manipulate, dominate or conquer the natural world.  In my beginner’s mind, environmental education might just contain those possibilities.  I do not want to grow cynical.  I can’t help thinking of my son’s reaction to his first banana slug, though.  He might have been 6 at the time?  His grandpa pointed out the bright, yellow slug crawling on the path beneath the California redwoods and told him what it was called.  “How do you kill it?” he asked.  I cringe.  Where does that come from?  He’s not like that any more.

Here’s something interesting I found in the woods today.  Steve and I nicknamed it “the eyeball plant”.  I have no idea what it is, but it kind of makes me wonder if life forms from other planets have already traveled here and are watching us….

White balls with a black dot on one side on red stalks.  Cool, huh?  It’s wild out there.  I hope we can keep it that way.

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Blissing Out

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We were having lunch today at a Mexican restaurant, and Steve asked me,”Where are you, emotionally?  You seem like you’re not all here.”  He often asks me this because I somehow got adept at hiding my feelings, for various reasons.  I ran through the list – mad, sad, glad or afraid – but nothing jumped out at me.  I thought harder.  “I feel glad, but guilty.”  Have you ever been ashamed for being happy or content?  Did you ever think that feeling happy could not possibly be genuine?  That if you were glad, you must be missing something?  The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering.  I do think there’s truth in that, but I don’t think that means you must always feel sad.  I don’t think that if you feel happy, you must be Pollyana with her head in the sand.  Yet somehow, in this world, in this economy, when people are going back to work after Labor Day and kids are getting roused out of bed to go to school, I feel a bit guilty for having a blissful day.  Steve used to say he was amazed at my capacity to “bliss out” – this was when we were dating, and my weekend with him, away from work, away from my lonely home, would be one of indulgent relaxation.  I suppose that I am reluctant to put obvious energy into this stolen pleasure; it would be like gloating.  That’s why it’s hard for me to say what I feel.  But, dammit, I am happy!  I’m having a wonderful day.  I have a wonderful life.  It’s September, and the clarity of the air without the summer humidity dazzles me.  The sunshine is crisp, the colors are bright.  I remember feeling this way out in the prairie one day about 15 years ago and writing this poem:

In September’s Ease

Prairie grasses, butterflies,

Queen Anne’s lace, Black-eyed Susans

Cacophony of winged things

A  chipmunk scurry-stops and sings

Invisible mid-distance of a spider’s web

Or inchworm’s thread

Fur-stemmed sumac’s reddened hue

Feather-wisps in sunny blue

Summer’s heat slowed by a breeze

Reclining in September’s ease

Prostrate between the Earth and Sun

The Artist and the art made one.

Am I able to feel this joy and also be aware of the suffering that is always around?  I am aware of the impermanence of everything, but I am enjoying this moment.  I don’t want to get too attached to it, so I’m not jumping up and down, but I am smiling.  Thich Nhat Hahn writes about smiling in a lovely way; I am reminded of smiling Buddhas I’ve seen.  I hope you smiled today, too.

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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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That Bwessed Awwangement

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Today is my parents’ wedding anniversary.  They were married in 1955, and my dad died in 2010.   My mother was 20 when she got married, not even legally allowed to drink the champagne cocktails they served.  I was 21.  We wore the same veil and the same hooped petticoat when we walked down the aisle.  We said the same words from the Episcopal nuptial mass.  We are both widows now.  Time and society have changed Marriage quite a bit, and I’m sure that will continue.   We redefine our social institutions, and why not?  We made them up.  Kind of like the bowling game Steve invented (see my post “Hope for a recovering perfectionist”), your experience grows outward into broader concentric circles.  If you’re a linear person, you may not see it this way at first, but imagine an aerial view of the game as it progresses, and that may help.  So, what is marriage for?  When I was 21, I was absolutely thrilled to be getting married.  It had been a goal of ours for 5 and a half years!  Jim and I wanted to marry and “have lots of sex and babies” (best Alan Rickman voice there).  We wanted to merge our lives, our fortunes, our fate, our names, the whole bit.  And we wanted to do it in the context of a social community that we had become invested in: our families and our church.   This commitment to our relationship, the larger circle of people supporting us, and to our belief in a personal God who was also invested in us, was a very spiritual thing.  It was central to our lives and how we lived them out.  I didn’t think very much about the legal arrangement; it was rather swallowed up and incorporated in the religious ritual.  I enjoyed a very successful, loving marriage for 24 years.  And I don’t want another one.  My experience has shifted into another circle.

I have always and will always value relationships very highly.  I have a wonderful relationship with Steve.   We started talking about getting married in December of 2008.  My previous experience was that when you talk about marriage with a boy, you’re engaged and then you get married.  Well, when Steve talks about something, he really explores it deeply.  We now laugh and recall that what he really meant to communicate back then was that he was not afraid of marriage.  He is willing to marry.  But what kind of marriage would it be?  How would we define it?  How would we want to live it out?  What is the purpose of a legal marriage?   How is our personal ‘contract’ with each other different than a social contract?  What part do we want ‘society’ to play in our life, including family, the state, the country, the world?  At this stage of my life, I’m not about setting up a family that will interact with society.  I am about developing a committed, working partnership that will support our growth into deeper living on many levels.  We may encounter some legal situations that would give us good reasons to get married…like if we travel internationally and find that married couples navigate the system more easily, or if we start filing taxes as a family business or something…and we may decide to marry then.   I definitely wouldn’t want to change my name.  I want to have the same last name as my children.  Besides, I would rather die than give up the only thing that may possibly give me an Italian identity!

What about the giddiness of being in love, of beginning something special that you share with your friends and family, of having a big party with presents?  Well, we’ve talked about that, too.  Speaking of “Don’t Super-size Me” (my last post), have you ever been to a wedding that wasn’t out of scale in some way?  There is so much going on in weddings.  Traditions upon traditions upon social customs upon personal expression, etc.  Steve and I are often confused by those layers of social business, and we prefer to communicate one-on-one.  So maybe, when we have a place that we feel will be our settling place for some time, we will want to invite people who are part of our social contract to hear more about our partnership in that place and celebrate it with us.  Actually, we are doing that anyway every time we invite people over for dinner.

Committed partners

And then there’s dancing.  I didn’t have dancing at my wedding.  I don’t think my mother did, either.  Steve and I are going dancing tonight…at Old World Wisconsin in a barn with a bunch of strangers and their children.  This will be our third time.   I love dancing there.  I feel connected to my body, to people, to music, to my thoughts, my emotions, to the prairie and nature and the wooden floor, to history and to life.  For me, that’s a blessed arrangement indeed.  So, like the song says, “I hope you dance.”

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Don’t Super-size Me

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I attended a leadership conference at a famously successful mega-church in Northern Illinois a few years ago.  This church always astounded my small-town Episcopal sensibilities.  I remember growing up and going through Sunday school with only one other classmate – the rector’s son.  This church has a youth program that has more high-schoolers than a city high school.  The “sanctuary” was actually a stage with jumbo screens all around it, two balconies, and seating for, oh, 15,000.  Definitely not an Anglican atmosphere.   Also, they have a food court and cafeteria.  It’s quite a production.  During this conference, one of the speakers (who was a missionary to an Asian country that I can’t recall) talked about the American Church’s view of success.  He pointed out that it is basically the same as our economic model.  On a grid or graph of production over time, our goal is always to go “up and to the right”.   Think of your classic board meeting cartoon with a graph on an easel.  Sales, attendance, production, whatever, we want to see that arrow climbing up and to the right.  That’s progress.  And we want it always to go in that direction, with no cap or end point.  His point was that in building churches, you build relationships, and there is no “up and to the right” measurement or trend necessary to success.  Success can be in another direction entirely, like deeper.  I got to thinking that we have adopted that “up and to the right” philosophy across so many categories, and failed to think critically about whether that trend is beneficial or not.

The movie “Zeitgeist Going Forward” addresses the global economy and makes the same point.  We keep inflating supply and demand at the peril of our planet, and we make no moves to slow down or stop.  Why do we do this?  What ever happened to the concept of scale?  Who said that ‘bigger’ or ‘more’ is a better value for everything?  Think of all the restaurants that you know that serve much more food than you can comfortably eat at one sitting.  Think of all the super-stores that you have walked that have more brands of cereal than can be shelved in a 10-foot rack.   Think of the buildings and monuments that we erect that are larger than any of the previous decade.  Think of the businesses you know that have merged and of the mom-and-pop places of your childhood that have folded.   Where do you buy your coffee?  Where do you go when you want to buy a toilet plunger?  How many TVs did your family have when you were growing up?  How many TVs did the next generation of your family have?  Or cars?  Think of food availability and population.  They are always linked in the natural world.  When there’s more food for a certain species available, that species always experiences a population boom.  Think of mice in a granary.  Mice don’t plant and harvest grain, but think if they could.  Their population would boom and then they’d work to make more food, and then their population would boom again, etc.  A never-ending cycle, if nothing interrupts it.  Eventually, the resources are exhausted and the population corrects itself.  Wouldn’t the same thing apply to humans?  How do we feel when populations in Somalia are dying because of resource scarcity?  Is that a tragedy or is that nature correcting an unsustainable trend going “up and to the right”?

I’m not about to say that I have a “correct” approach to any of these issues.   I do want to think deeply about the scale of my life, and to adjust it according to changes in my situation in order to achieve balance.  For one thing, I now shop and cook for a household of 2 instead of 6.  That took me a while to adjust to.  I don’t have any closet space here, so I’ve stopped buying clothes.  I like that I can walk to an Ace Hardware store that has been in the village for 90 years in the same old building.  I don’t even know where the StuffMart is.  Steve & I don’t own a TV.  Downsizing is really satisfying to me.  It feels like a relief.  There’s less that I feel I “need” to do and have, and I find myself more involved in things I want to do and have.   I feel like my home economy is something that I can sustain, not something that is going to overwhelm me.  Right now, I have no debt at all.  That’s something I really like.

How do you feel when you see something that is outrageously out of scale?  Do you laugh?  Do you judge it and get mad?  How do you feel about waste?  Do you think that you have those reactions because of the way you were raised?  What kind of messages did you internalize?  Did your mother ever mention starving children in China when she wanted you to eat your vegetables?  Did that make sense to you?  Where do you see life as abundant?  Where do you see life in terms of scarcity?  (we’re probably mixed in these attitudes; I don’t want to set up a duality)  I like to be frugal in lots of things, but I also buy opera tickets.  I like having the responsibility to make these choices.  And I’m glad they don’t kick you out of the Lyric if you show up in an outfit from Goodwill.

Dressed up to see "Hair"

P.S.  I just logged in to Yahoo news and read that President Obama has stopped the EPA’s proposed regulations on ground-level ozone…in order to allow American industries to go further “up and to the right”.  People!  Can’t we come up with a less destructive way to live?

 

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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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Music, Art, & Bodies: Graces & Commodities

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Steve just got a new CD.  You know how many books he has?  Well, he has almost as many CDs.  One of our projects this summer has been to take them all out of their jewel cases and put them in sleeves, to save space.  Then, we have to file and categorize them.  Classical music (in the broad sense) makes up most of the collection.  Jazz, movie soundtracks (he’s a big Ennio Morricone fan), world folk/country, singer/songwriters, and novelties are other big categories.  He has very little Rock/Pop, and no Punk or Grunge or new genres like that.   So, the latest purchase was Cecilia Bartoli’s Sacrificium.  I love this artist.  She is thoroughly Italian, with a wild animation in her face that makes you wonder if she is controlling her voice or if it is controlling her.  Watch her on youtube and you’ll see what I mean.  She specializes in the works of Rossini and Mozart, and in this new CD, she takes on the vocal fireworks of the premier castrati of Napoli.  The melismas and ornamentations are phenomenal.  Close your eyes and imagine a castrato singing the same thing.  It’s tough for us in this century, but in the 1600s, there were about 4,000 boys a year in Italy alone who sacrificed their bodies to achieve this sound.  The liner notes contain an article entitled “Evviva il coltellino!” which translates as “Long live the little knife!”  Imagine shouting this in the opera house instead of “Bravo!” after the leading character’s aria.  Why was this such a hot trend?  Well, the Catholic Church forbade women to perform in churches or on the stage, but paid good money to the composers and performers of Baroque pieces for alto or soprano voices.  Could it be that the Church condoned or actually supported mutilation of the body?  Oh, yeah, this is after the Spanish Inquisition.  (Another fascinating book Steve has is on the instruments of torture used during the Spanish Inquisition.  With illustrations.) Well, they did and they didn’t.  “The castrato mania even rages in Rome and the Papal States, where indulgence in these rare flowers occurs in up to forty different theaters at one time.  Although castration is forbidden there, on pain of death, thirty-two popes over the centuries delight in the singing of castrati in the Sistine Chapel.  In the Holy City, ecclesiastical dignitaries frequent the theaters in droves.”  The manufacturing of castrati was a big business for two centuries, and didn’t die out completely until the beginning of the nineteenth century.  The Italians were willing to sacrifice their progeny for their art.

Cecilia as a castrato

When I was in 6th grade, I asked my dad if I could get my ears pierced.  His response verbatim has now been memorized by my children as well as myself: “That is mutilation of the body for purposes of vanity, and I will not subscribe to it.”  What about for purposes of art?  Or livelihood?  Or to exact the truth from a tight-lipped prisoner?  (see Dick Cheney).  So far, I have no piercings or tattoos, and I think one of my children can say the same.  I don’t want to be judgmental or dogmatic about what choices should be made for what values, but I do want to support thinking deeply about it and taking responsibility for your choice.  I want to treat myself and every living thing as a “Thou” and not an “It”.  Your relationship with a “thou” depends on respect and communication and understanding.  As I understand myself, I know that I value honoring my father, not because his judgment on ear-piercing is “right”, but because of the relationship we had.  I don’t want to pierce my ears as much as I want to honor my father.  I do wear clip-on earrings on occasions when I want to dress up.  To me, this represents making a choice based on “The Middle Way”, one of the practices of Buddhism.  Music, art, our bodies, land, food, water…so many things can be seen as a grace and as a commodity.  Political arguments are made all the time about how we regulate or deregulate our use of these things.   We wonder if we can legislate morality so that people make the “right” decision.  Often, we get stuck and find ourselves drawing lines in the sand and treating each other like “Its”.  What would happen if we made a stronger commitment to treat ourselves like “Thous” and worked toward respecting, communicating, and understanding?  Would we be able to make decisions along “The Middle Way”…and then make new decisions in light of new understanding?   Trying to adopt this practice has made me a better mother, I know that for sure, especially since my children became adults.  Perhaps the hard line I took on some things was beneficial when my kids were little.  I don’t regret the standards I set, but I sometimes regret the way that I went about trying to enforce them.  I don’t agree with James Dobson, the author of the very first book I read on parenting.  I remember him saying that in conflicts between children and parents, it was the parents’ responsibility always to win.  I think that sets up an “It” relationship.  Steve has a quote from Carl Jung tacked on the refrigerator: “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.  The one is the shadow of the other.”  I want my relationships to be loving, above all else, and I want to make decisions with”Thou” in mind.  That includes the thou that is myself.