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Advent Day #9 – Sight

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Reblogging my Advent appreciation countdown from 2 years ago: we are rich beyond measure in “ordinary” assets!  Today’s gift is Sight.

The Eyes Have It

I started a little tradition this December as a stand in for the Advent calendar.  I am sending a text message every day to my kids, reminding them of a gift that they have.  The first one was sunshine, the next air, then water, soil, snow, movement, memory, imagination, and today…sight.

I am a very visual person.  I have a visual memory.  A teacher once told me that there is an easy way to assess whether a child is a visual learner.  Ask him to tell you the contents of his closet.  If he looks away from your face and off to a neutral space in order to list things, he’s probably visual.  He’s removing his eyes from distraction so that he can “picture” his closet.  I heard this little trick and remembered all the boring afternoons I spent as a freshman at college picturing every detail of my room at home.  (Yes, I was terribly homesick.  Mostly for my sweetheart.  Finally married that hometown honey on Christmas break my senior year.)  I could still do it 30 years later.  I close my eyes and see my room exactly as it was.  (Where did my mother get that faux velvet wall hanging with the peacock on it?  And why did I bring it to college with me?)

Things I love to see include landscapes, sunshine, animals, trees, the sky…anything natural.  And people.  Faces, bodies, those odd architectural places of form and shadow and contrast that only your intimate loved ones allow you to look at to your satiation.  I can never get enough of staring at people I love.  That’s why I’ve always been fascinated by photography.  My sweetheart bought me a Canon AE-1 camera the second Christmas we were together.  My mother asked me, “Are you going to accept that gift?!”  Hell, yes!  Why wouldn’t I?  Oh, the relationship obligation thing.  No problem; we’re going to be together forever, I told her.  Jim died a year before the camera’s shutter gear got stuck.  So, basically, I partnered both of them for the same amount of time: 30 years.  Now, it’s the digital age, and I can’t afford to get the Canon repaired.  I’m saving for a DSLR.

Visual images are so powerful for me.  I don’t like the rapid, frenetic pace of graphics on TV or in movie ads, though, because they give me a headache.  Fortunately, I don’t own a TV, so I don’t get subjected very often.  We saw the Super Bowl at a sports bar last year and decided that we could make a drinking game based on a few visual cues: something exploding, rotating text graphics, and morphing forms.  Everything was moving.  Whatever happened to the timeless grace of a beautiful still shot?  I get my fix on National Geographic’s website under “The Daily Dozen”.  And I have to say that my sister’s photobucket is also a superb repository of stunning visuals.  Thank you for those “prezzies”, DKK!

Appreciating sight.  What are your spontaneous choices for favorite images?

My sweetheart, courtesy the Canon AE-1, 1980

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Grand

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What is Grand? My first thought was of grand opera, but I’ve got to agree with the WordPress folks.  There’s nothing that beats Mother Nature for being truly big and dramatic.  I love this planet!  I’m betting that there are going to be a lot of stunning photos posted.  As my second post of the morning, this one will be brief.  We’re gearing up for some wintry snowfall here in Wisconsin, but I gotta tell ya, it’s not going to be nearly as grand as what they get in California.  Here’s a shot I took in the month of April at Lassen Volcanic National Park.  Gives new meaning to the line from the carol “Snow had fallen, snow on snow….in the bleak midwinter long ago.”

Lassen

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Advent Day #5 – Snow

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Reblogging from 2 years ago with the rubric of a list of calendar gifts in lieu of Advent brings me to the topic of Snow.  Do you get snow in your part of the world?  I lived in California for 15 years without it.  I’ve lived in the Midwest for more than 30.  This year, Steve will be delivering mail throughout the winter.  He’s going to get out there 6 days a week in Milwaukee weather, whatever it may turn out to be.  This is real life!  I like that he’s not afraid to meet it face to face. 

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Believe it or not, we had a green Christmas here in Milwaukee, and we STILL haven’t gotten snow.  I appreciated not worrying about my kids driving on the roads to visit me, and I’ve enjoyed going hiking in the warmer temperatures.  But I also enjoy snow hiking, even though I don’t own snowshoes.  The transformation of familiar objects and landscapes in winter is always interesting.  Without foliage, the contours of the land come out more strikingly.  With snowfall, they soften and blossom like ripe flesh.  We headed out to Lapham Peak yesterday in bright sunshine.  We discovered that they had created snow for some of their cross country ski trails.  Man-made, electricity-dependent snow.  Because this is Wisconsin, dammit, and we just can’t wait around for Mother Nature; winter break is NOW and it oughta be snowing already!  (sigh)  It’s sad to me that humans can’t slow down to fall in step with the planet.  We keep pushing it to keep abreast of us.  It’s like watching parents push their toddlers to be grown up by signing them up for language, dance and art lessons before they even hit nursery school.  It smells manipulative and inauthentic.  I am sniffing around in the other direction, trying to learn to open up to what exists.

The snow-making machine looks like a lunar landing module.

The boardwalk through the wetland has buckled and twisted in the process of freezing and thawing.  It reminds me of the changeable dynamic of a journey, a path in constant flux.  It tells me that my progress was not intended to be in a straight line, that meanders are natural and meaningful.  And that makes them interesting and challenging.  They invite me to adjust my balance, to pay attention, to dance with them.

 

 

I have no idea what is around the bend.  There’s a new year coming up, full of mystery and thrilling movement.  I am feeling less afraid and unsafe in this realization, and more eager to take the fun house walk.

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Advent Day #4 – Soil

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Reblogging from two years ago is not as synchronous as I thought it might be.  Two years ago, the fourth of December was a Sunday, and my post was very Sunday-related and had little to do with the Advent gift of the day, which I designated Soil.  So, I went looking for another post from that year.  Luckily, I found one.  My parade of gifts from the Universe has featured Sun, Air, Water and now Soil.  The four elements of our natural world, if you will.  Here’s the post:

As Time Goes By

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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Advent Day #3 – Water

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Reblogged from 2 years ago:

Handmade, Naturally

Today I had an opportunity to get into the holiday spirit by doing some arts & crafts with kids at the Nature Center.  Unfortunately for fundraising but fortunately for me, not too many people showed up this morning.  That meant that I got to play with the materials myself.  I was at the wrapping paper station with an array of washable paint colors and objects to dip into them.  Leaves, cedar boughs, fir needles, spruce branches, feathers, pine cones, sponges and whatnot.

Years ago, I went into the prairie with scissors, came back with leaves and seed pods, spray painted my treasures in gold, silver, and clear varnish, and decorated a mask with them.  That hung on the wall of the den for ages.  I’m always looking for ways to decorate indoors with pieces of the outdoors.  And all for free, essentially.  (Cheap & Weird – my kids’ nickname for me)  That reminds me of the dried macaroni gifts I gave the Christmas I was, what, 9?  Too funny.  Spray paint macaroni, glue it to a box, call it a gift.  I suppose I could get away with it as a kid, but what is it called when I’m almost 50 and still messing around like that?  Okay, call it messing around.  I have fun.  Here are a few examples:

Imagine me gleefully slapping a piece of butcher paper with a paint-soaked cedar branch ala Jackson Pollack!  I tell you, kindergarteners should not be having all the fun.

The best things in life are free.  So far on my December countdown, I’ve received Sunshine (Dec. 1), Fresh Air (Dec. 2), and Water (Rain – today).  Each day I go outside to receive some miraculous gift, and there’s always something.  No need to wrap it or trap it.  Martha Stewart or Andy Goldsworthy, I’m not.  Just a kid in a fabulous universe, trying to stay happy with what there is.

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Advent Day #2 – Air

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Look!  Up in the sky!  It’s a bird…it’s a comet….it’s ATMOSPHERE!

The second gift in my December calendar of counting blessings is air.  The blog entry I posted two years ago is about an encounter with duck hunters.  Ironically, I met a duck hunter yesterday.  He came into my daughter’s home with a mallard drake dangling from his fist, took it out to the back yard, and began to pull back skin and feathers to reveal a dark red breast.  If you’ve never eaten duck, this may conjure a shocked response.  If you have (and enjoy it as much as Steve does), you may shrug your shoulders and think, “Okay, that’s how we get duck meat.  Yum!”  My daughter came into the house minutes later with a collection of feathers in a plastic bag and announced, “Everyone’s getting feather earrings for Christmas!”  My daughter makes and sells jewelry.  Her designs are beautiful, I think. 

So, natural resources…we use them, we share them with everything on the planet.  We breathe something like 19 cubic feet of oxygen each day.  Our air quality affects every breath we take, every bird and animal and plant as well.  There’s an air quality exhibit at Discovery World where I work, so I am reminded of this several times a week.  We will use the resources; we will affect the web.  The question we must continue to ask is “How?”  Are we mindful?  Respectful?  Wasteful?  Grateful?  Entitled?  Do consider before acting.

Now, the reblog…

Make Way for Duck Hunters

I’m new around here.  To Wisconsin, that is.  People here shoot animals at state nature areas.  And the DNR is okay with this.  They post helpful signs that indicate which recreational activities are allowed and that includes the hiker dude whom I recognize, and a hunter dude whom I don’t.  Well, I recognize him now.  I’ve been seeing more of him lately.  He’s up there next to the binoculars.  I can’t figure out how all these things coexist, though.  If you’re in a wildlife refuge area to view wildlife and hike around, and other people are there to shoot at the wildlife, what’s the etiquette for getting along?

Steve and I walked in the Vernon State Wildlife Area on Wednesday.  This was our fourth visit.  We’ve seen so many different kinds of animals there: birds and frogs and turtles and fish and muskrats.  I wanted to see how the place was changing with the season.  We walked down the gravel trail alongside the railroad tracks and heard 3 shots.  When we got to the other parking lot, we saw 4 pickup trucks with gun racks.  One of them had a sticker that said, “P.E.T.A. – People Eating Tasty Animals”.  Gun deer season was just over, I thought.  We walked out on the dike and saw decoy ducks on the water in several different places.  As we got nearer, people in camouflage gear appeared in the cattails.  I had my binoculars and my camera.  They had guns and a dog.  Steve and I were talking in low voices, wondering to each other, actually, what the protocol was for this seeming conflict of interests.  Were the hunters harboring ill will for us, thinking that we were maybe scaring away the ducks and geese?  Were we harboring ill will for them, thinking that they are killing the wildlife we’ve come to enjoy?  Were the water birds harboring ill will for all of us, wishing we’d just let them be?  We nodded greetings.  At one point, some birds flew over in formation while the hunters tooted away on their duck call devices, but apparently, they were too high up to shoot.  If they were any lower, would they have shot anyway, while we were standing there on the path??  I just don’t know how this is suppose to work.  Are we supposed to stay away during hunting season?  It’s not posted that hikers can only be there on certain dates.   We heard shots as we walked back to our car.

I’m still puzzled about this.  I have heard a few more stories from folks I’ve met about deer hunting.  People have great family memories about hunting traditions.  I imagine my favorite postal employee out there in the field, waiting 8 hours to spot a deer, and I suppose it’s kind of like fishing.  You get to sit quietly in nature and forget about business at the post office.  No one bugs you for hours at a time.  And if you see a deer, you aim and shoot.  If you hit it, you get to be all physical and field dress it and carry it away.  Sounds like a complete departure from stamping packages all day long.  I appreciate that.

As if Andy Goldsworthy had been here

There’s a particular stark beauty in the late fall landscape.  Trees are skeletal.  Light is low and angled.  Ice forms in geometric patterns.  It’s rather post-modern feeling.  It makes me moody.  So does the hunting scene.  In a way, it fits, though.  I guess I’m coming to a kind of ambiguous acceptance of it.  Survival, mortality, an uneasy coexistence with everything.  In the summer, this same drama is played out, except it’s covered in fecundity and green light.

Still, the universe is a complicated tapestry, as Steve said last night – a magic carpet stretching in all directions forever.  I look for a perch from which to see as much of it as I can.

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Re-inventing Advent

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Two years ago, when I first started blogging, I ran a series of posts every day in the month of December.  This series was in lieu of an Advent calendar, which had been a big tradition of my family.  Back then, I had only a handful of faithful blog followers, instead of more than 400.  So, I intend to re-gift these entries.  After all, I am in the resale business! (Check out Scholar & Poet Books – there’s  a link in the side bar.) For my family and for Helen (God bless you!), these will be repeats.  For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy opening your daily presents!

‘Tis A Season

When I was a kid, I always had an Advent calendar to count down the days from the first of December until Christmas Eve.  I had the same tradition with my own kids.  The secrets hidden behind each door were often Scripture verses.  It was important to tell the story of Jesus’ birth and make sure my kids knew that was “the reason for the season”.   There are other little treasures we could open each day, though.  When my son was taking German in high school, they sold Advent calendars with chocolates in them.   My father used to make us calendars out of magazine pictures and various old rotogravures with fortune cookie strips for the daily message.  We made our own calendars for each other, too, with simple crayon symbols behind the cut out doors.   The season has multiple images in my mind, and now I’m trying to figure out what it means to me at this point in my life.

I will always have respect for Jesus and the Christian story.  They were supremely important in my life for many years.  My spirituality was formed around them.  I think it is good to examine and re-examine beliefs, though, and strive for genuine and authentic expressions of experience.  My experience is expanding as I age, and I want to include more of those experiences in my belief system.  I want to include respect for other cultures, other religions, other parts of the planet and the universe.  I have a sister who is Sikh, a son who identifies with Buddhism and Native American spirit stories and a father who once taught science.  There is a lot going on all over the world in this season.  What do I want to acknowledge or celebrate?

My youngest daughter has always loved this season.  She used to go to the local Hallmark store in the middle of the summer to look at the Christmas village set up there.  What was that about?  Sparkly, pretty, cozy, homey, yummy expectations of treats?  Possibly.  Peace, love, joy?  Possibly.  Emotions?  Definitely.  Why not focus on pleasurable human senses and emotions?  Up in the northern hemisphere, we are spinning away from the sun and plunging into a cold, dark time.  Light becomes more precious, warmth becomes holy, food is life itself.  Why not celebrate that dependence?  We are sustained by the sun and the producers of this planet that make food from its energy.  Evergreen trees remind us of that.  Gifts remind us that we receive from the producers; we are consumers.  Gratitude is the attitude of the season.  Giving is the action that sustains us.

Vernon Marsh, sunset (click to enlarge)

I sent a text message to each of my kids this morning saying that the gift for Day #1 this season is sunshine.  The sun is shining here, showering us with Vitamin D and all kinds of other goodies we need to be healthy and happy.   We are blessed, saved, sustained, given life in this universe by an amazing set of circumstances that we did not originate.   However you acknowledge that and whoever taught you to acknowledge that deserves attention.  May you be happy as you think and act in awareness of this.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Let There Be Light!

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“…Propelled into the furthest arc, forsaken by the sun…” (from a poem I wrote, published in Living Church magazine)  What do we do in the Northern Hemisphere when we feel bereft of light and warmth?  We make HOLIDAY!  An excuse to gather together and eat and light candles, replenishing the light and warmth we feel we are lacking.  Yesterday was American Thanksgiving, so I hosted a dinner for Steve and his mother and aunt and sister and brother-in-law.  We love our home and spend far too little time in it lately.  We have been neglecting our home business (Scholar & Poet Books) for some reliable capital gains in the form of outside employment and losing touch with our domesticity.  Thanksgiving was a good time to settle in to cleaning and cooking and re-stacking books and music.  Puttering around the house while listening to good music is a nesting paradise. 

And It Was Good.  Good Will yielded some great finds in table decorations.  The turkey turned out moist and delicious.  Everyone brought side dishes to contribute.  We even had a family political argument!  (What holiday is complete without one?)  I really enjoyed serving Steve & his family out of the love and joy I feel in my heart…not out of obligation or duty.  The best part was just remembering why we are working so hard…so that we can get back to living out the life that we want to embody: slower-paced, inner-directed, aware & appreciative.  

So…..light.  Candles on the table, ready to dispel the darkness when the sun sets.  Sunlight streaming through the south window, illuminating the sideboard, laden with olives and nuts and good, stinky cheese.  And sherry & gin.  The darkness will not overwhelm us!

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Unexpected

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Surprise!  It’s not what you expected.  How do you respond?  Laughter.  Disappointment.  Curiosity.  Do you set it ‘right’?  How did you come to have an expectation about this, anyway?  Expectations produce emotions.  They set you up, mostly for suffering, if you become attached to those expectations.  If the discovery that you have harbored some expectation takes you by surprise, but you’re not emotionally invested in it, it can be funny.  “Oh, yeah, I guess I wasn’t expecting that.  But there it is.  How interesting!”  Steve’s favorite story about this goes something like this:

A Zen master who had recently had a mini-stroke was invited to perform a traditional ceremony of calligraphy.  He had practiced this art for years and participated in the ritual often.  He calmly took his place and lifted the long, slender brush.  Carefully, he dipped it into the ink and raised it above the thin rice paper.  The assembly was silent.  His hand was still.  Moments passed.  Gradually, a wondrous smile spread across the master’s face.  He laid the brush aside and beamed.  “I’ve forgotten how!”  he laughed. 

May you know delight in all that unfolds.  Peace, my friends.

unexpected

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Layers

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Complexity.  Wow.  There’s an important concept that we’ve invented to describe our Universe.  It’s based in observation and experience.  We can feel that our world is complex and give myriad examples.  And we often have a reaction to that complexity.  Awe.  Anxiety.  Does simplifying make you feel more comfortable….or uncomfortable?  Does digging deeper or looking wider make you feel more anxious or less?  Does acknowledging the limitations of your grasp bother you or free you? 

I actually feel both.  I like to be in control, and I like to be reminded that I’m not in control.  I often set out to “fix things” and then realize that they don’t need to be fixed, and so I let them be.  “How does it work?  Oh, never mind.  It’s amazing.”  I have seen a few David Copperfield shows, and I laugh at my reaction.  I’m not content to be entertained; I want to figure out how he creates those illusions!  And then I give up and admit I’m amazed.  Visual aides of this complexity concept are always engaging to me because of that dynamic.  Here are a few examples: my photo and a link.  First, the photo…

cone headNow, the link.  This is a Science Project created by two 9th-graders, and it is absolutely outstanding!  I may have posted it before, but I don’t hesitate to do it again.  Enjoy The Scale of the Universe 2!