Tag Archives: awareness

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The Bicentennial Post

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I began this blog 200 posts ago, and there’s nothing in this world that I don’t know…


Well, that’s not true, but I’m remembering my father sitting in his chair on our wrap-around porch singing old silly songs as the sun went down.  “I was born about 10,000 years ago…” verse after unbelievable verse.   There’s a lot in this world that I don’t know and will never know, and many things that I can know if I pay attention and try to be aware.  One thing I became aware of is that my blog was hard for my mother to read in its old format.  The light text on a slightly darker background was obscured through her developing cataracts.  I hoping that this new look will be clearer for her.

Another thing that I’m becoming aware of is the way that thoughts influence energy.  Life is difficult (opening line of M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled), in other words, living requires effort.  Solving problems, finding food, making money, communicating – all of that takes some energy, but sometimes the energy returns to us if the process is positive and life-giving.  When I feel drained and sad and depressed, it’s often simply because my thoughts about problem solving, making money, and other efforts of living are not positive.  In another Summit with Steve this morning, I asked myself this question, “Are you going to roll up your sleeves or roll up your eyes?”  Steve offered an illustration from our favorite National Basketball team, the Chicago Bulls (President Obama is also a loyal fan).  Rookie Jimmy Butler, brand new to the team, has a life story that exemplifies the effort of overcoming obstacles.  He was abandoned by his father at an early age, kicked out by his mother at 13, raised by a widow with 4 children who remarried a man with 3 more children, and finally made it to Marquette University and the NBA.   He is part of the energy infusion we fans call “The Bench Mob”.  They’re not “good enough” to be starters, but when they go into a game, they roll up their sleeves and get to work!  Another member of “The Bench Mob” who has a totally different physical attitude is Omer Asik.  We love him, because he’s nerdy-looking like us.  He’s tall and skinny and white.  He’s from Turkey.  He is a great basket defender, but he’s pretty new to the team, too, and not as athletic as many players.  He has this comical hang-dog expression when he fouls someone or misses a shot.  He literally rolls up his eyes, instead of his sleeves.

Energy ebbs and flows.  Sometimes I roll up my sleeves, sometimes I roll up my eyes.  Here’s another comic example: Buster Keaton.  Mr. Keaton had a stellar career in silent films.  He’s a little guy, very physically strong.  His acrobatic stunts on camera are amazing.  His comedy is also about solving problems, thinking outside of the box and using his incredible energy.  Of course, he doesn’t squander any energy talking!  His reaction to social situations is great.  He doesn’t let them deter him from going after what he wants, and whenever he fails, he simply tries a new tactic.  See any of the clips from “College” (1927) that you can find…or the whole film!  He makes a great movie star hero, in my book.

So, this one’s for me, my kids and anyone else out there who is putting effort into living.   You are not your thoughts.  If your thoughts of failure and shame are draining your energy, listen to them and then change them.  Are you really ashamed of yourself?  Or is that a perception of what you think ‘society’ thinks of you?  The truth is you are a good person and you desire to be a good person (most likely – granted there may be exceptions).  Roll up your sleeves, Good Person, and play!

A couple of really Good People rolling up their sleeves!

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A Bigger World

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I’ve been thinking lately about my ego and my mood cycle.   Two days ago, I wrote “I feel that expansive, fecund, open sense bubbling up in me, settling me down, inviting me to nurture and set free.  Then, a while later, I feel a feisty urge to grab hold and wrestle with my circumstances and force them to conform to some idea in my brain.”  Right now, I’m in the restless part of my cycle, and my ego is eager to get to work on something.   It gives me a sort of shimmering sense of dissatisfaction, not like something is “wrong”, but like I’ve been sitting too long and want to stretch.  I don’t want to get into the habit of simply indulging my ego with any old thing whenever it prods me, though.   Steve often talks of feeling like he’s “treading water”, too.  He told me this morning that he wanted to work on “pointing his canoe”, which is his metaphor for re-establishing direction and putting energy into venturing forward, so I asked him if he uses some kind of ego energy to address that.   He said, “It’s not like that.  It’s more like gathering your courage and discipline to step into a bigger world.  I think the ego is a smaller world.”

I immediately got my pencil and notebook and wrote that down.

A bigger world.  A world that is beyond me, beyond my control, beyond prediction.  A bigger concentric circle.  I do think we tend to pull back into our tiny, lower-case universe, the one where we feel safe and comfortable and powerful.  We can’t really help that tendency, but we can acknowledge it and try to point our canoe in a different direction.  I am really inspired by people who do that, and through the network of blogging, I have met a few who I think are paddling away.  Maybe they’re not the people you’re thinking of.  They aren’t the extreme sportsmen.  They aren’t the world travelers.  They aren’t the social superstars.  They are the suffering, the ones who have met their limitations and crossed into the unknown.  They blog about living with their illness, their addiction, their recovery, their brain damage in a way that definitely requires them to gather courage and discipline and step into a bigger world, a world which they don’t master.  And sometimes they whine, and sometimes their posts are incredibly boring, but I keep visiting them because I think they are truly onto something.  I suppose that I am hoping to witness their breakthrough flight, when they will soar high above the rest of us into that bigger world of awareness.  I’m not sure what that will look like, but maybe I’ll recognize it anyway.

I am working on writing a memoir on my husband’s illness and death.  Four years ago, he had his last surgery.

The story of how he came out of anesthesia is perhaps a glimpse into that bigger world.  My oldest daughter wrote about it in her Live Journal that evening:

“When I saw him after the surgery, painkillers and low blood sugar had rendered him almost completely unresponsive. We tried everything—tickling him, turning his insulin pump off, talking to him, poking him—but the most we could get from him was a groan or a slight shift of position. I told him I was pregnant. Mom said they’d called a rematch of the Super Bowl. I even took a picture of him, threatening, I think, to mock him with it later. Nothing made any difference until I had to leave for work. I squeezed his arm and said “Bye, Dad. I love you,” and in a sleepy, submerged-sounding voice, he said “Love you.” We couldn’t get him to say or do anything else, but every time someone said “I love you,” he would immediately mumble it back.”

So, I think of Jim, hovering somewhere between consciousness and death and knowing only one response: “I love you”.   This is the Universe you don’t control.

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New Year’s Eve

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The social tradition in this country is to spend New Year’s Eve with the person who is most important to you, someone with whom you’d like to spend your future.  That first kiss of the New Year is supposed to impart good fortune for the year to come.  For many Americans, then, it’s off to parties to drink up and link up in an attempt to avoid the curse of loneliness for the rest of your life.

Yeah, well, I’ve never seen it quite like that.  You see, New Year’s Eve is also my mother’s birthday.  We always spent it at home, having a family celebration.  When I got married and moved out, my new nuclear family did the same thing.  We dressed up in prom gowns and tuxes (and sometimes like pirates) and danced in the living room, sipping champagne and listening to the weirdest music we had.  Kisses were passed between husbands and wives and fathers and daughters and mothers and sons and sometimes siblings.  Our future was with the family; our past was with the family.  The two were intertwined, and we liked it that way.  We watched the ball drop in NYC some years, and sometimes we just let the kids run outdoors with big spoons and pots and pans and make all the noise they liked at midnight.  One year, we were visiting Jim’s best friend’s family, and the kids had a silly string fight in the middle of the street that afternoon.  They made a huge mess.   Which makes me wonder: who cleans up the confetti after New Year’s Eve in NYC?  How much gets recycled?

New Year's Eve 1992 or 1993?

Who do I want to be next year?  My future is rooted in my past and lived in the present.  I will always live with my family legacy coursing through my veins, pulsating in my brain.  I am my father & mother’s daughter, Jim’s lover, my kids’ mother, and that will stay with me year after year.  I am also Steve’s partner, a writer, a budding naturalist.  I hope to become a home economist & ecologist.  I want to keep on practicing awareness, appreciation, attitude and action.  Ultimately, the person with whom I will spend my future is…myself.  At the stroke of midnight, I’ll look myself in the eye and say, “You and me, kid!  It’s gonna be a great year!”  Hopefully, I won’t feel cross-eyed and alone when I do.  And I promise I’ll clean up after myself.

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As Time Goes By

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My daughter is a certified massage therapist.  This makes visiting her an extra special occasion. Not only do I get the pleasure of her company and hospitality, I get a 2 hour massage as well.  As I lay there thinking about my body, my cells, and the amazing things going on just under my skin, it occurred to me that the whole process that I call my biological life began exactly half a century ago.  Yup, I figure I was conceived Thanksgiving weekend, as my parents celebrated with joy their gratitude for life.   Not that they ever divulged so private a story to me, mind you.

I marvel at how life is sustained over time.  I mentioned this to my kids as I was sipping my post-therapy water.  My youngest piped up, “Yeah, well, half a century is nothing when you think about how mountains grow and change.”  Touche.  I have to get better at taking a longer view, getting a bigger perspective.  I look at my kids bustling around in the kitchen preparing food together, all grown up, and a second later, they are playing a patty-cake game from their childhood.

We are all still so young on this earth; we are such a blink.  What kind of impact will we have on the bigger picture?  What will be the most lasting legacy of this family whom I love so intensely?  The trees that we’ve planted?  The children we beget?  The words we pen? The votes we cast?  The ashes we give back to the soil?  I can’t say for sure.  It could be the love that we circulate, although it would be impossible to document.  I am just grateful to have been a part of it, a crinoid in the limestone, among thousands of others.

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A Magical Bond

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Last night we watched Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man”, an amazing documentary featuring Timothy Treadwell’s video footage of grizzly bears in Alaska.  He spent 13 summers among them, mostly alone, and eventually he and his girlfriend were attacked and eaten by one.   This man was quite a character — often childlike, flamboyant, furious, arrogant, gentle, fearless and completely whacked.  At the core, though, he seemed to be straining toward a connection he deeply valued.  He wanted to bond with the bears, he may have even imagined he could become a bear.  It approximates a desperately unrequited love.  His affection for them (and for the foxes that follow him around and play with him like puppies) is palpable, although sometimes articulated in a corny, self-help guru fashion.  “Thank you, Mr. Chocolate, for being my friend…”  Okay, Fred Rogers he’s not; more like Richard Simmons.  It’s kinda weird.  But, still, he loves them; he would rather die with them than be anywhere else.  The pristine wilderness shots convey the aching beauty of the ideal.  The close ups reveal more reality: flies cover the lens and buzz around the speaker without ceasing.  Then there’s the inherent danger.  Treadwell is aware of the risks he’s taking; he talks about them quite theatrically to the camera, but they do not seem important.

Is he nuts?  Is he an idealist?  Is he wrong?  Is he inspiring?  What do we tell our kids about such passions?

I led 4 small groups of Boy Scouts on nature hikes this morning.  They were earning their Webelos Naturalist merit badge.  I had one directive: teach them about decomposers, producers, and consumers.  I added a goal of my own — introduce the Four As: awareness, appreciation, attitude, action.   For 10-year-olds, I thought this might fly.  I suppose I secretly hoped to see some of that childlike enthusiasm, the wonder and joy that can be ignited by spending a half hour on the trail.  Well, there weren’t many ‘Eureka!’ moments.  I forgot that boys can get more interested in hitting things with sticks and calling each other names than looking at mushrooms and picking up litter.   ‘Awareness’ to them meant “look out for things that could hurt you” instead of “look out for everything because the world is awesome!”  I think I may have impressed some of them by leading them to a decomposing deer carcass.  That may have provoked a “Cool!” from a few.  I wish I could do a one-on-one hike, take more time to slow down and eliminate some of the group social pressures, but these kids come with a program, so I only get one shot with a group of 8 for 30 minutes.   I wish I had taken more time to do this with my own 4 kids.

One thing to be aware of at Wehr

How do we bond with nature?  Will we ever fit in?  Are our brains just too big to allow us play nicely in the sandbox with the rest of the world?  Will we always be too distracted, too confused, too technological, too exploitative, too manipulative, too dominant, or too tasty?  I have to admit that to survive for 13 summers in Alaska among grizzlies is probably about the best record on that front.  Jane Goodall’s 45 years spent among chimpanzees is another monolithic example.   Will there be anyone like that in this next generation?  I can only hope…and volunteer to take as many as I can out on the trails.

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Encounters

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I went for a walk on Saturday morning.  Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I didn’t bring my camera.  The day was sunny and warm enough to be autumn.  On greyer days this week, it seemed more like winter.  Consequently, many of my fellow suburbanites were outside exhibiting their leisure preferences.  We are an odd lot, I think.  Some quirky, some staunchly mainstream seeking credence for their peculiar habits.  If you have a dog or a bicycle or Spandex athletic gear, you are allowed to be out on the paths.  You fit in.  No one stares.  If you’re wearing a mink, a wedding gown, or sitting in the lotus position on a fallen tree, you’re a little more suspect.  I have a story about all three of these.

At the end of my block lives an elderly lady with a cocker spaniel.  She takes him out to the sidewalk on a leash regularly.  The last two times I saw her, she was wearing a midi-length fur coat about the same color as her dog.  As I walked down the street, she faced me full on.  When I got within about 20 feet from her, she called out, “He’ll jump on you!”  I stopped.  “Would you like me to cross the street?” I asked.  “I don’t care what you do.  If you come near him, he’ll jump on you.  It doesn’t matter to me.”  I crossed the street.  “My, your hair is very long!  It goes all the way down to your waist!” she called.  “Yes, it does.”  “Do you live with Scott Peterson?”  “No, I live at the end of this street, at the corner.”  When I am older, can I make blunt comments out of the blue at passers-by?  I hope so.  I like the directness.  No little niceties required.

When I got to the park, I saw a bride, a photographer and a small entourage.  It seems like every weekend someone’s getting their picture taken in that park.  It has a nice bridge, and the fall colors are pretty.  High school seniors and brides and families who send photo Christmas cards love it.  This bride was picking her was across the grass with four people holding up her skirt.  Her shoes were whitish-gold strappy heels adding about 5 inches to her height.  Her hair was in a blonde up-do with tiara and veil.  She might have been a fairy-tale princess except for the odd way she was walking…and her voice.  Despite the outfit, she was a rather pedestrian pedestrian, another modern bride having her day.

I made my way toward the woods.  Just outside the parking area for the pool is a bike trail and a train track.  A speedy middle aged guy in a helmet wheeled in front of me up the path.  When I got to the crest of the train trestle, I saw an older woman in sweatpants stooping over to part the fallen leaves with her hand.  She wasn’t a biker, didn’t seem like a hiker, either.  I think she was looking for mushrooms.  An Old World forager.  I walked past the golf course and headed into the woods.  I didn’t recognize any trails, so I simply made my way across a dry stream bed and found a fallen tree.  I wasn’t too far from the road, but I was surrounded by trees and leaves and moss.  It was pretty quiet.  I flung my coat over the trunk and sat atop it.  From where I was, I could spot a paper wasp nest, woodpeckers, squirrels, and single leaves spiraling gracefully to the forest floor.  I looked up and breathed a sigh.  This is how I recreate.  No Spandex necessary.  One solitary walking man and two men and their dogs eventually strolled by, crunching their way through the underbrush.  They looked at me.  I looked away.  One of the dog walkers went by quite close and made eye contact.  I said hello.  He greeted me and kept his head turned toward me as he walked away smiling.  What?!  I’m sitting in the woods; you got a problem with that?  I suppose I can be defensive in my head.  I often feel awkward socially, perceiving judgment when there’s no reason to.

Later that day, we went to the top of Lapham Peak in the Kettle Moraine park.  The day had turned cloudy again, and smoke from burning leaf piles gave the atmosphere a mournful grey haze.  Our species has its own way of living on the land.  I find it interesting, diverse, idiosyncratic.  Almost as fun as watching squirrels.