Writers need respite from words. After a day of wordsmithing, I need to escape the linear chute of language into other symbol systems, other frames of knowledge, other mindscapes and creativities. I’m fine with images or with a film or television program where words may come towards me but require little in return of language.
My body needs to be refreshed from the postures of writing as well. There aren’t that many postures of writing so it usually means sitting. Sitting at my desk is not awfully different from sitting at a café table or holding my notebook on my lap in the living room. I suppose I could get a kneeling chair or write standing up as Virginia Woolf was said to do. If I am the reincarnation of VW (another story), I should take a look at this option (and stay away from rivers).
Walking, gardening, cooking, quilting, and tai chi are my favored relief activities when I am exhausted mentally or physically by hours of scribbling or clicking away at one or another of my keyboards. If I were a musician, I can imagine that playing my oboe or guitar or piano would be another release from the garments of prose.
Walking delivers a cool, refreshing shower of sensory droplets. I see the house with new owners change slightly day by day, smell the tiny white blossoms on this hedge and that, notice the uneven sidewalk blocks and don’t trip, feel the air under this heavy shade, pump thigh muscles with oxygenated blood, suck in that belly, feel a stretched spine reaching for the sky, and more.
Walking is also a meditation on the world outside my head. Writing pushes at my skull from the inside, as if something is trying to get out. Walking equalizes the pressure by exposing me to exterior stimuli: other people, scenery, traffic, little scenarios transacted within my view, wall murals, public buildings, public services, costumes, disguises, and temptations. I step outside my front door and enter the pages of Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? or Richard Scarry’s What do People Do All Day? There is so much bright color and high contrast some days and so much mystical haze other days.
Walking brings worms into my field of vision. I don’t need to see worms slowly drying on the sidewalks every day, but if I didn’t ever see them at all, how much less I would know about my own environment. Like witnessing the death of worms, I see other peripheral stories abandoned in the grass or perambulating through my slice of world. Today it’s a red plastic bat dropped on a side lawn and a man in a white sports jacket entering a cafe. I could pause to reflect on the stories that murmur around them in a tempting nimbus, but then I would be writing!
Walking brings me face to face with the dilemmas of eye contact and greeting strangers. I don’t have a predetermined strategy, so it is a new decision to be made twenty times (or more) on a typical walk. Unlike the confusion of greeting strangers, a clear advantage of walking is spontaneous conversations with neighbors hanging out clothes or planting hosta in a shady corner garden. The threads of neighborhood are spun into fabric by such encounters.
Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole” is one way to sum up the experience of walking. This is an excerpt.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Everyone gardens for their own reasons, too. I garden to keep the wilderness at bay. I’m not even sure that what I do out there can properly be called gardening anyway. I believe that in a past life I was a machete-toting bushwacker of some sort. I have this imagined quest going on inside my head while I am weeding or clearing overgrown brush. Just the very word, quest, feels resonant to me as if Quetzalcoatl was my middle name and jungle was my game.
My “gardening” habit is typically neglect for two or three years while I am writing intensively, and then a year of hacking my way through prolific vines and sharp thorny hedges with sharp tools. I may have fallen and impaled myself on a crude prototype of these tools in one of my lives because I am vividly aware of the potential piercing power of the blades I am holding during battles with sinuous woody serpents.
While sweating and ripping and shredding in my little swath of wilderness, I am in constant conversation with the invasive species. I compliment them on their cleverness of disguises, on their audacity in climbing my house, and on their innocence in being marked for death or disruption when they may have tremendously valuable, but unknown, properties. This activity, taken in small doses after hours at the keyboard, is refreshing and salutary. In larger doses, it might be deemed psychotic. I shower immediately afterwards because poison ivy is flourishing this year.
Cooking might seem to be a merely domestic activity, especially when a woman works at home. To me it is a primitive pleasure. I’ve seen amateur chefs labor for hours with numerous, costly ingredients to present a fluffy, complex amuse bouche that barely skims the taste buds. This isn’t my refreshment of choice after a day of writing. I am restored and rebalanced by chopping and stirring. Risotto, jambalaya, or soup is the best holiday from vocabulary I can imagine.
Quilting is my newest reprieve from hours of lexical maneuverings. I get up from my desk chair at one end of the house and walk to the dining room table at the farthest end where a cornucopia of colors and shapes revives my eyes.
My tools of quilting are so completely different from my tools of writing! What a relief to pick up a rotary blade or a long, cool plank of ruled plastic. The numbers I use don’t beg to be strung together or manipulated; they just want to be obeyed in their most literal sense, no connotation or interpretation allowed.
After working in black and white all day, I am a big fan of purple and red with turquoise trim. Just looking at the juxtaposition of contrasting batiks on my table reminds me of those little Smarties candies, a burst of sugar and flavor right where you need it.
I love the little pieces of fabric spread like gems under the dining room chandelier. They are real; they have textures and shapes. I actually made them with my own hands and I will touch them again to make more out of them.
Like writing, I suppose, these humming bits of excitement will become more meaningful as they are joined with other little bits. The sum will be greater than the parts. But where the protocols of writing impose a linear direction most of the time, these modest triangles, squares, and rectangles will be stitched together along all sides, forming multi-dimensional images, perhaps summoning up a foaming, surging storm at sea.
I can be exhausted by 7:00 p.m. and still turn to my colors and shapes and feel invigorated for two more hours of creativity on the other side of the house. Yesterday when I finished trimming tiny triangles from “little sister” squares within squares, I let the scraps flow through my fingers. What can I do with these fractures of the spectrum? I tossed big handfuls of light, color, and shape, for now, into the litter jar of thread and fabric clippings. Quilting is about deliberately making use of scraps, but where do we draw the line? Is it below an inch? Is it a single word?
Tai chi releases me from the compulsion of words through welcome silence and a shift to kinesthetic sense. Others in my class ask our teacher about where to put their left foot during a repulse monkey move, but I ask her, “What is in your mind when you are doing tai chi?” She tells me to focus on one of the six principles of loosened joints, slow continuous motion, moving against resistance, conscious weight transference, upright posture and alignment, and quiet mindful focus. Even the process of enumerating the six principles helps me relax out of the profusion of gushing language where I live most of the day. Gratefully, I move . . . slowly, continuously, against resistance, and with mindful focus . . . to keep things whole.
For Your Writing
Thinking about what we do as RESPITE from writing is not the same as figuring out what we do to AVOID writing. Make three lists: (1) what you are intending to write, (2) what you do to avoid writing, and (3) what you do as relief after writing. Pick one from each list and do them all today!
Quotation for Percolation:
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg
Monday, July 6, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Feed Me!
We have all heard the expression, “food for thought,” but what does it mean, literally, to be attentive to our mental diet?
I can’t say that I’ve developed a food triangle, or even basic food groups for thinking. I do know that I’m hungry all the time, and I’m determined to take stock of what’s in my pantry and maybe even start a food-for-thought diary. If I look around—on the bedside table, on my desk, beside my desk, on the piano stool next to my favorite chair, on the kitchen counter, I can see evidence of hearty meals and healthy snacks, but also of munchies and sugary sweets.
Books seem like well-balanced meals, but perhaps this is only true if you read them one at a time, straight through. Is a book a well-balanced meal if you get up from the table, snack from the fridge, take a walk, visit a café for a bagel and tea, and then sit back down at the table to finish your steak? A good book can be a steak and potatoes experience, or Cajun blackened chicken and okra, or it can be a three-course vegan extravaganza. Currently, I am (r)eating two novels simultaneously, and I have four additional books warming in the microwave. I’m filling my plate this week with Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and often, after I finish a serving of this entrée, I consume four or five chapters of a murder-mystery manuscript concocted by a dear friend (who is also a terrific cook).
Defrosting, near at hand, I have The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz for my next book group. I’m keeping three other books warm and ready for instant refreshment: Blink (signed copy) by Malcolm Gladwell (a Christmas gift from my daughter), Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily by Maria Messina (on loan from my sister), and The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh (perpetually warm and nourishing; comfort food). Within my sight lines as I write this, I can see five or six more meals ready to be brought to the table.*
If those books are the meals in my larder, what am I enjoying as snacks for thought? This may be more literal than I thought, since I love to read and eat at the same time. There should be a word for this particular bliss. The sounds of crunching and munching are accompaniment and condiment to the euphoria of feasting on words. I reach for a magazine or newspaper with breakfast, lunch, and afternoon refreshments. What could be better . . . not even vitamins. This conversation on conversation inside my head fulfills a whole range of nutritional needs.
We have a subscription to the local daily newspaper that I read standing up in the kitchen, cannibalizing it for the weather, headlines, University highlights, and photos. When I sit down to breakfast or lunch, I seek a broader palate of flavors, one of the weekly or monthly magazines we receive. For light fare, I prefer Newsweek. The photos go well with toast, granola, soups, and sandwiches. For more sophisticated food, The New Yorker provides a richer, deeper experience for the palate. It also engrosses me for longer, stretching lunch right into afternoon snack or possibly all the way into the cocktail hour.
Some weekday meals are leftovers from Sunday’s New York Times. It’s certainly enough to last three or four days! Other classic snacks are FastCompany, any cookbook or food magazine, health newsletters, and, on rare occasions, the catalogs that typically pass through our house in the twenty steps from front door to recycling bin.
If I don’t (r)eat for several days, I feel grumpy and flat. This morning, I located my new issue of FastCompany under my husband’s pile of nutritious reading, and I had it for breakfast. I got calories and energy along with two or three jolts of inspiration in the time it took me to eat a small bowl of granola with walnuts and 2% milk. I clipped a grid of football statistics to discuss with my husband, and I made note of a potential contributor to one of my writing projects. I learned about some new products and trends. Now, after ingesting this food for thought, I am ready and awake to begin the day. Still, I can’t help thinking, “What’s for lunch?”
*Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, Tim Cahill’s Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Per Petterson’s In the Wake, Liza Kerwin’s With Love: Artists’ Letters and Illustrated Notes, and Top 10 Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, & Ghent from DK Eyewitness Travel.
For Your Writing
Keep a food-for-thought journal for several days, making note of reading material, music, conversation, TV, or other stimuli that jolt you into thinking. After you have kept the journal for awhile, choose one or several entries to develop. What thinking arose from your snack on an article in the Sunday paper? Did you sip on an overheard conversation? What thinking arose from the taste?
Quotation for Percolation
“How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.” Vincent van Gogh
I can’t say that I’ve developed a food triangle, or even basic food groups for thinking. I do know that I’m hungry all the time, and I’m determined to take stock of what’s in my pantry and maybe even start a food-for-thought diary. If I look around—on the bedside table, on my desk, beside my desk, on the piano stool next to my favorite chair, on the kitchen counter, I can see evidence of hearty meals and healthy snacks, but also of munchies and sugary sweets.
Books seem like well-balanced meals, but perhaps this is only true if you read them one at a time, straight through. Is a book a well-balanced meal if you get up from the table, snack from the fridge, take a walk, visit a café for a bagel and tea, and then sit back down at the table to finish your steak? A good book can be a steak and potatoes experience, or Cajun blackened chicken and okra, or it can be a three-course vegan extravaganza. Currently, I am (r)eating two novels simultaneously, and I have four additional books warming in the microwave. I’m filling my plate this week with Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and often, after I finish a serving of this entrée, I consume four or five chapters of a murder-mystery manuscript concocted by a dear friend (who is also a terrific cook).
Defrosting, near at hand, I have The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz for my next book group. I’m keeping three other books warm and ready for instant refreshment: Blink (signed copy) by Malcolm Gladwell (a Christmas gift from my daughter), Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily by Maria Messina (on loan from my sister), and The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh (perpetually warm and nourishing; comfort food). Within my sight lines as I write this, I can see five or six more meals ready to be brought to the table.*
If those books are the meals in my larder, what am I enjoying as snacks for thought? This may be more literal than I thought, since I love to read and eat at the same time. There should be a word for this particular bliss. The sounds of crunching and munching are accompaniment and condiment to the euphoria of feasting on words. I reach for a magazine or newspaper with breakfast, lunch, and afternoon refreshments. What could be better . . . not even vitamins. This conversation on conversation inside my head fulfills a whole range of nutritional needs.
We have a subscription to the local daily newspaper that I read standing up in the kitchen, cannibalizing it for the weather, headlines, University highlights, and photos. When I sit down to breakfast or lunch, I seek a broader palate of flavors, one of the weekly or monthly magazines we receive. For light fare, I prefer Newsweek. The photos go well with toast, granola, soups, and sandwiches. For more sophisticated food, The New Yorker provides a richer, deeper experience for the palate. It also engrosses me for longer, stretching lunch right into afternoon snack or possibly all the way into the cocktail hour.
Some weekday meals are leftovers from Sunday’s New York Times. It’s certainly enough to last three or four days! Other classic snacks are FastCompany, any cookbook or food magazine, health newsletters, and, on rare occasions, the catalogs that typically pass through our house in the twenty steps from front door to recycling bin.
If I don’t (r)eat for several days, I feel grumpy and flat. This morning, I located my new issue of FastCompany under my husband’s pile of nutritious reading, and I had it for breakfast. I got calories and energy along with two or three jolts of inspiration in the time it took me to eat a small bowl of granola with walnuts and 2% milk. I clipped a grid of football statistics to discuss with my husband, and I made note of a potential contributor to one of my writing projects. I learned about some new products and trends. Now, after ingesting this food for thought, I am ready and awake to begin the day. Still, I can’t help thinking, “What’s for lunch?”
*Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, Tim Cahill’s Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Per Petterson’s In the Wake, Liza Kerwin’s With Love: Artists’ Letters and Illustrated Notes, and Top 10 Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, & Ghent from DK Eyewitness Travel.
For Your Writing
Keep a food-for-thought journal for several days, making note of reading material, music, conversation, TV, or other stimuli that jolt you into thinking. After you have kept the journal for awhile, choose one or several entries to develop. What thinking arose from your snack on an article in the Sunday paper? Did you sip on an overheard conversation? What thinking arose from the taste?
Quotation for Percolation
“How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.” Vincent van Gogh
Thursday, January 8, 2009
My Mistake; Your Mistake
William approached my study where I was absorbed in a manuscript and said, "I messed up."
William (not his real name) is a completely reliable craftsman who has done a lot of work for us over the past several years. Being nearly incompetent ourselves when it comes to repairing, painting, electrical work, tile, and almost anything else around the house, we have been so pleased to have someone who is careful and competent to take care of these things for us. William is easy to be around, always returns phone calls, and seems to take care of our little jobs as if they were in his own home.
I followed William to the kitchen where we looked at the situation together. When my husband and I decided to purchase twelve double-cell blinds to insulate our windows, we first asked William if he had the time to measure the windows and install the blinds for us. If he didn’t have time, we might not have undertaken the project at all. I created a spreadsheet of the windows with a name for each one and William measured them all and wrote the measurements in large legible numerals on the list.
"I think I wrote the wrong number on the sheet," said William. "This blind is one inch too narrow." William had not yet put the shade into the bracket he had just installed within the window frame next to the stove.
"Let’s see how it looks when you put it up," I suggested, postponing any conclusions until we could see the full effect of the discrepancy. What was going through my mind at that moment? I tested myself to see if I was thinking that I should have measured the windows myself. Nope, I wasn’t thinking that. Was I thinking that if William made the mistake, he should pay to fix it? No, even though he offered to do so immediately, I wasn’t thinking that I could let him do that. Was I angry or upset? No, I was calm and sure that the situation wouldn’t be bad, and if it was bad, it would be fixed easily.
When it was installed, sure enough, the shade was an inch too narrow, but it still covered all the glass of the window, and if you didn’t know to look right at that gap between the shade and the window frame, you wouldn’t notice that it was narrower than the others. I persuaded William to leave this shade in place only by promising that I was going to install drapes that would cover the space along that side. It was so easy for me to see this as a slight miscalculation with minimal consequences. William confiscated the order form for the shade so he would be able to purchase a new one for us if we had a moment’s hesitation about this one.
William’s error was specific and minor, easily forgiven and forgotten. Not so when the situation was reversed and I made a mistake just a day or two later. I’m not talking about pouring warm decaf hazelnut coffee all over myself by tipping the cup toward my lips before I secured the lid. That made a thorough mess, but no one seemed to notice, and I was reading a new book on Buddhism at the time, so I thought of it as my first test.
No, the mistake I’m talking about was more "public, like a frog." Even telling it elicits waves of recrimination! I phoned the oil delivery and heating company where we have a service contract to report that one of our heating zones wasn’t working. Some variation of this has happened enough times over the years that they know my name and address well. I think they dread my calls. Well, I dread having to call, maybe even more! In the conversation about the current issue, I got into a little tussle with the service manager about when they provide yearly maintenance and whether “bleeding” the radiators is covered in our policy. My point was about preventive maintenance versus servicing our furnace in the middle of the night on a weekend because the filters were clogged causing the temperature to plunge to below fifty degrees when we were away for a few days. Enough said. We agreed that the situation on this particular morning was not urgent and could wait until the next day. Several hours later I received a call that they could come immediately because of a cancellation. Great!
The two service men checked the furnace and found nothing obviously wrong. One of them came to the door and asked to see the thermostat from the non-operative zone. Ugh! He switched it on and the furnace began to purr immediately. My mistake! I had changed the battery recently, and in the process of prying the cover off and snapping it back on, I must have switched the lever to the “Off” position.
I’m still not over this mistake! In fact, I doubt if I will ever call this company again for service. We will either have to change service companies, wait until spring to get warm, or it’s going to be my husband’s turn to call from now until the end of time. Why is it one of my most dreaded occasions to make a call for help only to find that I don’t need it? Like taking a feverish child to the doctor, and by the time you get there, the child is jolly and cool.
Stepping back in perspective, even this mistake is simple, specific, and minor, though definitely embarrassing. Oh, but what about those serious errors in judgment years ago that potentially could have derailed a life or two? Learning to forgive myself is apparently one of the essential principles of Buddhism, but I was raised Roman Catholic. Mortal sins, I was taught, leave a dark smudge on your soul. How did I accept this belief so firmly and lose sight of forgiveness along with everything else about this brand of faith?
No, about these personal failures, I have not yet forgiven myself. I am horrified to look back and see the smudges still there, turbulent with emotion. Regret doesn’t cut it, and divine intervention isn’t currently available. William came to me and said, "I messed up." It was so easy to let it go, a feather drifting through my consciousness. When it comes to my own mistakes, I’ve got the whole live albatross struggling in my arms.
For Your Writing:
Achieving compassion and forgiveness can be a major accomplishment involving months or years of reflection and personal growth. Focus first on times when you have forgiven someone else for "mistakes" both big and small. Stay with this for awhile, starting with the easy forgiveness occasions and working up to some that were more difficult for you. Is it easier for you to forgive a stranger or acquaintance than to forgive someone close to you? If you feel open to more heavy lifting on this topic, reflect on several small, recent mistakes or accidents of your own. Can you achieve compassion and clear your conscience on these? Early adulthood is a fruitful time for making mistakes that matter. If you are looking back on your twenties or thirties, perhaps you may have one or more of these complex behaviors to write about. Forgiveness is a lifelong process.
Quotation for Percolation:
"Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings."
Jack Kornfield (peacequotes@livingcompassion.org)
William (not his real name) is a completely reliable craftsman who has done a lot of work for us over the past several years. Being nearly incompetent ourselves when it comes to repairing, painting, electrical work, tile, and almost anything else around the house, we have been so pleased to have someone who is careful and competent to take care of these things for us. William is easy to be around, always returns phone calls, and seems to take care of our little jobs as if they were in his own home.
I followed William to the kitchen where we looked at the situation together. When my husband and I decided to purchase twelve double-cell blinds to insulate our windows, we first asked William if he had the time to measure the windows and install the blinds for us. If he didn’t have time, we might not have undertaken the project at all. I created a spreadsheet of the windows with a name for each one and William measured them all and wrote the measurements in large legible numerals on the list.
"I think I wrote the wrong number on the sheet," said William. "This blind is one inch too narrow." William had not yet put the shade into the bracket he had just installed within the window frame next to the stove.
"Let’s see how it looks when you put it up," I suggested, postponing any conclusions until we could see the full effect of the discrepancy. What was going through my mind at that moment? I tested myself to see if I was thinking that I should have measured the windows myself. Nope, I wasn’t thinking that. Was I thinking that if William made the mistake, he should pay to fix it? No, even though he offered to do so immediately, I wasn’t thinking that I could let him do that. Was I angry or upset? No, I was calm and sure that the situation wouldn’t be bad, and if it was bad, it would be fixed easily.
When it was installed, sure enough, the shade was an inch too narrow, but it still covered all the glass of the window, and if you didn’t know to look right at that gap between the shade and the window frame, you wouldn’t notice that it was narrower than the others. I persuaded William to leave this shade in place only by promising that I was going to install drapes that would cover the space along that side. It was so easy for me to see this as a slight miscalculation with minimal consequences. William confiscated the order form for the shade so he would be able to purchase a new one for us if we had a moment’s hesitation about this one.
William’s error was specific and minor, easily forgiven and forgotten. Not so when the situation was reversed and I made a mistake just a day or two later. I’m not talking about pouring warm decaf hazelnut coffee all over myself by tipping the cup toward my lips before I secured the lid. That made a thorough mess, but no one seemed to notice, and I was reading a new book on Buddhism at the time, so I thought of it as my first test.
No, the mistake I’m talking about was more "public, like a frog." Even telling it elicits waves of recrimination! I phoned the oil delivery and heating company where we have a service contract to report that one of our heating zones wasn’t working. Some variation of this has happened enough times over the years that they know my name and address well. I think they dread my calls. Well, I dread having to call, maybe even more! In the conversation about the current issue, I got into a little tussle with the service manager about when they provide yearly maintenance and whether “bleeding” the radiators is covered in our policy. My point was about preventive maintenance versus servicing our furnace in the middle of the night on a weekend because the filters were clogged causing the temperature to plunge to below fifty degrees when we were away for a few days. Enough said. We agreed that the situation on this particular morning was not urgent and could wait until the next day. Several hours later I received a call that they could come immediately because of a cancellation. Great!
The two service men checked the furnace and found nothing obviously wrong. One of them came to the door and asked to see the thermostat from the non-operative zone. Ugh! He switched it on and the furnace began to purr immediately. My mistake! I had changed the battery recently, and in the process of prying the cover off and snapping it back on, I must have switched the lever to the “Off” position.
I’m still not over this mistake! In fact, I doubt if I will ever call this company again for service. We will either have to change service companies, wait until spring to get warm, or it’s going to be my husband’s turn to call from now until the end of time. Why is it one of my most dreaded occasions to make a call for help only to find that I don’t need it? Like taking a feverish child to the doctor, and by the time you get there, the child is jolly and cool.
Stepping back in perspective, even this mistake is simple, specific, and minor, though definitely embarrassing. Oh, but what about those serious errors in judgment years ago that potentially could have derailed a life or two? Learning to forgive myself is apparently one of the essential principles of Buddhism, but I was raised Roman Catholic. Mortal sins, I was taught, leave a dark smudge on your soul. How did I accept this belief so firmly and lose sight of forgiveness along with everything else about this brand of faith?
No, about these personal failures, I have not yet forgiven myself. I am horrified to look back and see the smudges still there, turbulent with emotion. Regret doesn’t cut it, and divine intervention isn’t currently available. William came to me and said, "I messed up." It was so easy to let it go, a feather drifting through my consciousness. When it comes to my own mistakes, I’ve got the whole live albatross struggling in my arms.
For Your Writing:
Achieving compassion and forgiveness can be a major accomplishment involving months or years of reflection and personal growth. Focus first on times when you have forgiven someone else for "mistakes" both big and small. Stay with this for awhile, starting with the easy forgiveness occasions and working up to some that were more difficult for you. Is it easier for you to forgive a stranger or acquaintance than to forgive someone close to you? If you feel open to more heavy lifting on this topic, reflect on several small, recent mistakes or accidents of your own. Can you achieve compassion and clear your conscience on these? Early adulthood is a fruitful time for making mistakes that matter. If you are looking back on your twenties or thirties, perhaps you may have one or more of these complex behaviors to write about. Forgiveness is a lifelong process.
Quotation for Percolation:
"Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings."
Jack Kornfield (peacequotes@livingcompassion.org)
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Around the Block
This morning as I walked slowly in a light drizzle to a meeting point with my walking partner, I noticed a squirrel making strange movements. It was running partway out into the road and then quickly back to a nearby tree. It scrambled around the tree trunk about three feet above the ground and then stopped to raise its front paws to its mouth. We have a lot of squirrels in our neighborhood. This one caught my attention. As it scampered again into the street and back, I noticed that another squirrel, more unfortunate than this one, had been crushed by a vehicle in the morning traffic just a few feet into the road beside the tree. “Was this your mate?” I queried. What would I make of a suddenly silent, suddenly still, and suddenly flattened companion if I were a squirrel on an ordinary Friday morning in September? It appeared to me that the living squirrel was checking on the status of the recently dead animal and then running back to a safe place to think about what this means, what to do next. The squirrel repeated the pattern several times during lulls in the stream of cars. Finally, the living animal sprinted entirely across the street and was gone.
It strikes me, once again, that walking around the block is nearly as fruitful for a writer as circumnavigating the globe. There is a wise saying that goes something like this: you will learn more by climbing one mountain 500 times than by climbing 500 mountains. A walk around the block might be our local version of this.
This morning on my walk around the block, my thoughts turned to many authors who have put their characters in animal personas to be taught lessons we should be able to learn in our own skin, but don’t. T.H. White (in The Once and Future King) has Merlin transform the young King Arthur into a fish to learn about perspectives other than his own. I’m reading Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra, which is told by a consciousness in the body of a monkey. Is it ultimately empathy that we need to learn, and why can’t we learn it in our own skin?
This morning’s walk around the block also reminds me of W.H. Auden’s great poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” In the poem, Auden describes a painting called “The Fall of Icarus” by Peter Breughel. Within this painting, observers see Icarus fall into the sea, but [they] “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Emily Dickinson makes a similar point in a short poem, “Apparently, with no surprise/ To any happy flower/ The frost beheads it at its play/ In accidental power. The blond assassin passes on/ The sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another day/ For an approving God.” And Robert Frost depicts the tragic accidental death of a young farm boy. The poem ends with a comment about the witnesses to the tragedy: “And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Many of us lost a good man and dear friend to cancer this week, and even as we linger as long as possible to memorialize him, it is sad, but inevitable, that we, too, will return to mundane affairs—like crossing the street—in the days to come. Will the squirrel I observed this morning hear a lingering echo of the unique sounds of its companion? Will it return to this place and feel an inexplicable twinge?
My little granddaughters, Anna(5) and Teah(3½), humored me in taking a walk around the block during their recent visit. Here is what we wrote about that excursion in our journal. “After breakfast, Anna and Teah and Grandma Jo went for a walk around the block with their binoculars to see what they could see. They saw a squirrel, a centipede, flowers, and a recycling truck. Teah saw a rabbit ! They found feathers, leaves, and flowers to bring home. Anna and Teah learned to stop and stand still before putting the binoculars up to their eyes.”
Annie Dillard inspires me to say that if we raised our binoculars more often when we walk around the block (and also when we stand still) we would be exercising and strengthening our eyeballs gradually to see more and more deeply into life’s revealing details and not risk our eyeballs bursting into flames with the shocking brilliance, vivacity, and plenitude of extravagant life on my block and on yours.
For your writing:
Of course . . . walk around your block or your neighborhood. Notice something that you haven’t noticed before. Describe your observation, and then keep writing. What does this remind you of? What does it cause you to wonder about? Can you link this observation to something else that has happened in your life recently?
Quotation for percolation:
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” . . . - Marcel Proust
It strikes me, once again, that walking around the block is nearly as fruitful for a writer as circumnavigating the globe. There is a wise saying that goes something like this: you will learn more by climbing one mountain 500 times than by climbing 500 mountains. A walk around the block might be our local version of this.
This morning on my walk around the block, my thoughts turned to many authors who have put their characters in animal personas to be taught lessons we should be able to learn in our own skin, but don’t. T.H. White (in The Once and Future King) has Merlin transform the young King Arthur into a fish to learn about perspectives other than his own. I’m reading Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra, which is told by a consciousness in the body of a monkey. Is it ultimately empathy that we need to learn, and why can’t we learn it in our own skin?
This morning’s walk around the block also reminds me of W.H. Auden’s great poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” In the poem, Auden describes a painting called “The Fall of Icarus” by Peter Breughel. Within this painting, observers see Icarus fall into the sea, but [they] “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Emily Dickinson makes a similar point in a short poem, “Apparently, with no surprise/ To any happy flower/ The frost beheads it at its play/ In accidental power. The blond assassin passes on/ The sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another day/ For an approving God.” And Robert Frost depicts the tragic accidental death of a young farm boy. The poem ends with a comment about the witnesses to the tragedy: “And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Many of us lost a good man and dear friend to cancer this week, and even as we linger as long as possible to memorialize him, it is sad, but inevitable, that we, too, will return to mundane affairs—like crossing the street—in the days to come. Will the squirrel I observed this morning hear a lingering echo of the unique sounds of its companion? Will it return to this place and feel an inexplicable twinge?
My little granddaughters, Anna(5) and Teah(3½), humored me in taking a walk around the block during their recent visit. Here is what we wrote about that excursion in our journal. “After breakfast, Anna and Teah and Grandma Jo went for a walk around the block with their binoculars to see what they could see. They saw a squirrel, a centipede, flowers, and a recycling truck. Teah saw a rabbit ! They found feathers, leaves, and flowers to bring home. Anna and Teah learned to stop and stand still before putting the binoculars up to their eyes.”
Annie Dillard inspires me to say that if we raised our binoculars more often when we walk around the block (and also when we stand still) we would be exercising and strengthening our eyeballs gradually to see more and more deeply into life’s revealing details and not risk our eyeballs bursting into flames with the shocking brilliance, vivacity, and plenitude of extravagant life on my block and on yours.
For your writing:
Of course . . . walk around your block or your neighborhood. Notice something that you haven’t noticed before. Describe your observation, and then keep writing. What does this remind you of? What does it cause you to wonder about? Can you link this observation to something else that has happened in your life recently?
Quotation for percolation:
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” . . . - Marcel Proust
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
"L" is for Line
I can’t even recall what I was searching for in my new used thesaurus, but when I came upon the entries for “line,” I was hooked.
Anyone can come up with a handful of expressions without even trying, “My job is on the line.” “Sign on the dotted line.” “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.” “She crossed the line.” “Follow this line of argument.” . ..the thin line, the bottom line, the party line and so on.
Suddenly, I realize I’ve always been in love with lines. On the tip of my tongue are these classic lines:
Virginia Woolf used the metaphor of dropping a line in the water to evoke the inception of a thought process: “Thought . . . had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line . . .” (A Room of One’s Own 5).
Annie Dillard uses the image of a line throughout her small book, The Writing Life: “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. . . . The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illuminates the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm. . . . The line of words fingers your own heart.” (3, 7, 20).
Tim Ingold contrasts living a life assembled by connecting static dots versus living a continuous, vibrant line of a life: creative, dynamic, and generative. Ingold quotes Paul Klee on “the line that develops freely, and in its own time, ‘goes out for a walk’ [in contrast to] the line that connects adjacent points in series . . . ‘the quintessence of the static.’”(Klee: Notebooks, Volume 1: The thinking eye, Ingold: “Up, Across, and Along”)
In the short fable, The Dot and the Line: A Romance of Lower Mathematics, by Norton Juster, a line (male) is in love with a dot (female). The dot is in love with a chaotic squiggle, but the line learns to create one angle and then transforms himself into geometric figures of increasing complexity until he successfully woos his love. Juster apparently was inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 fable, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, where “women are straight lines [and] Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares . . . and . . . Pentagons” (7).
It seems that each of us has an important decision to make when it comes right down to the “line.” Where do you stand on the line? I’m going to take just one meaning to heart today: Ingold’s line that “goes out for a walk.” This is the kind of walk that “wends hither and thither, and may even pause here and there before moving on. But it has no beginning or end . . . every somewhere is on the way to somewhere else.” Ingold makes clear that his metaphor extends to how we know and narrate our experience of the world. “As with the line that goes out for a walk, in the story as in life there is always somewhere further one can go . . . it is in the movement from place to place—or from topic to topic—that knowledge is integrated.”
A line of words often does not proceed directly from point A to point B, but may meander and diverge, flowing like water that some would call aimless, but which can also be viewed as a complex and meaningful pattern. You may choose, on a familiar walk, to take alternative routes that add time and variety to your walk. Similarly, in writing, we may follow lines of words that do not immediately announce their purpose or meaning. Freewriting is based on this principle, as are some guided writing activities. For example, I begin by writing about the arrangement of books on my shelves and meander into meanings about deferring important conversations. A walk (or a piece of writing) can begin almost anywhere and, yet, pass by and accumulate breathtaking vistas, new insights, threads of connections, and ambiguity rich enough to feed you for many, many days and nights.
For your writing:
First take a walk (preferably) or a drive and choose a new route. Allow yourself to meander a little bit and then maybe a little bit further. Observe what you see and what you think about. Write about how this differs from the usual rush of getting from one destination to another without awareness of the experience between destinations. Another writing activity might be to take a common object and after describing it, let it lead you in different directions. “Take a walk” with the idea of this object. For example, choose a shoe in your closet. (Or your car, bike, briefcase, watch, etc.) Describe it first. Where has it been with you? What kind of support does it give you? What is your relationship with this object? What about the history of this category in your life? What thoughts does it elicit? Let your mind go off in tangents. You might begin with a shoe or watch and end up in Venice, your grandmother’s kitchen, or underwater.
Quotation for Percolation:“The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity.”
Friedensreich Hundertwasser (brainyquote.com)
Anyone can come up with a handful of expressions without even trying, “My job is on the line.” “Sign on the dotted line.” “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.” “She crossed the line.” “Follow this line of argument.” . ..the thin line, the bottom line, the party line and so on.
Suddenly, I realize I’ve always been in love with lines. On the tip of my tongue are these classic lines:
Virginia Woolf used the metaphor of dropping a line in the water to evoke the inception of a thought process: “Thought . . . had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line . . .” (A Room of One’s Own 5).
Annie Dillard uses the image of a line throughout her small book, The Writing Life: “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. . . . The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illuminates the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm. . . . The line of words fingers your own heart.” (3, 7, 20).
Tim Ingold contrasts living a life assembled by connecting static dots versus living a continuous, vibrant line of a life: creative, dynamic, and generative. Ingold quotes Paul Klee on “the line that develops freely, and in its own time, ‘goes out for a walk’ [in contrast to] the line that connects adjacent points in series . . . ‘the quintessence of the static.’”(Klee: Notebooks, Volume 1: The thinking eye, Ingold: “Up, Across, and Along”)
In the short fable, The Dot and the Line: A Romance of Lower Mathematics, by Norton Juster, a line (male) is in love with a dot (female). The dot is in love with a chaotic squiggle, but the line learns to create one angle and then transforms himself into geometric figures of increasing complexity until he successfully woos his love. Juster apparently was inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 fable, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, where “women are straight lines [and] Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares . . . and . . . Pentagons” (7).
It seems that each of us has an important decision to make when it comes right down to the “line.” Where do you stand on the line? I’m going to take just one meaning to heart today: Ingold’s line that “goes out for a walk.” This is the kind of walk that “wends hither and thither, and may even pause here and there before moving on. But it has no beginning or end . . . every somewhere is on the way to somewhere else.” Ingold makes clear that his metaphor extends to how we know and narrate our experience of the world. “As with the line that goes out for a walk, in the story as in life there is always somewhere further one can go . . . it is in the movement from place to place—or from topic to topic—that knowledge is integrated.”
A line of words often does not proceed directly from point A to point B, but may meander and diverge, flowing like water that some would call aimless, but which can also be viewed as a complex and meaningful pattern. You may choose, on a familiar walk, to take alternative routes that add time and variety to your walk. Similarly, in writing, we may follow lines of words that do not immediately announce their purpose or meaning. Freewriting is based on this principle, as are some guided writing activities. For example, I begin by writing about the arrangement of books on my shelves and meander into meanings about deferring important conversations. A walk (or a piece of writing) can begin almost anywhere and, yet, pass by and accumulate breathtaking vistas, new insights, threads of connections, and ambiguity rich enough to feed you for many, many days and nights.
For your writing:
First take a walk (preferably) or a drive and choose a new route. Allow yourself to meander a little bit and then maybe a little bit further. Observe what you see and what you think about. Write about how this differs from the usual rush of getting from one destination to another without awareness of the experience between destinations. Another writing activity might be to take a common object and after describing it, let it lead you in different directions. “Take a walk” with the idea of this object. For example, choose a shoe in your closet. (Or your car, bike, briefcase, watch, etc.) Describe it first. Where has it been with you? What kind of support does it give you? What is your relationship with this object? What about the history of this category in your life? What thoughts does it elicit? Let your mind go off in tangents. You might begin with a shoe or watch and end up in Venice, your grandmother’s kitchen, or underwater.
Quotation for Percolation:“The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity.”
Friedensreich Hundertwasser (brainyquote.com)
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Role Models, Mentors, and Catalysts
I am a slow learner. Even after earning a Ph.D. I still had a difficult time identifying who had been my mentors. Was I ungrateful or did I not have any mentors at all?
In one of my roles at the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, I organized and managed several mentoring programs. I finally had to confront the question: “What is a mentor?” Marion Wright Edelman’s wonderful book, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, was an important resource for the programs and for my own understanding. Edelman redefines the concept of mentor away from a narrow, career-focused instrument, to a notion of the “critical influences of the natural daily mentors [who] . . . all stressed how to make a life and find a purpose worth living for and to leave the world better than I found it” (xiv – xv). Edelman revealed the concept to me by identifying her parents and the women of her community as early mentors. Mentors, according to Edelman, “expressed no sense of limits on my potential or who they thought I could become, and they engaged me as a fellow wayfarer and struggler. What they all had in common was their respectful treatment of me as an important, thinking individual human being” (xvii).
OK! Now I see! My inability to identify my own mentors was based on two conditions. First, I was thinking too narrowly. Secondly, I had few opportunities in my small world to find guidance of the sort typically called a mentor. Instead, I had an array something like Edelman’s lanterns. They could all, potentially, be grouped under the title of mentor, but I can better express my gratitude by thinking of these varied inflences as role models, mentors, and catalysts.
Role Models: Those we are attracted to because we see ourselves heading in the same direction or life path. They provide an embodied vision of our own future that we can aim towards.
Personal Mentors: Those we seek out for advice and discussion of life dreams and goals, more personal than professional, and the strategies we can use to get there.
Career Mentors: Those who engage with us for career development and decisions.
Catalysts: By their words or actions, catalysts motivate us to shift course, rethink commitments, break a habit or make some other dramatic change.
Any of these may never know the power of their influence, and often we don’t even know how influential someone has been until years later.
Anna McGuiness may have been my first mentor, although I didn’t realize this until I read Edelman’s book. She was old when I knew her, and I was just a kid, maybe ten or twelve years old. I was already a voracious reader and she was a retired teacher two houses away with a wonderful library dispersed through every room of her stone house. My mother wisely sent me often to Mrs. McGuiness on neighborly errands which would stretch to hours as I browsed among the books, plunked at the piano, and had a cup of tea or cocoa at her kitchen table. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I felt like her equal, like we really connected. She loaned me Frank Baum’s Oz books, all of them, one at a time. She encouraged my mind to follow its inclination in many directions and not to limit myself. After Mrs. McGuiness moved away, I don’t know if I had a mentor again for many, many years. I made many important decisions alone and by default, like choosing a college by finding the catalog a classmate abandoned on the windowsill in math class.
Mary Bartolone was a role model. She was herself an Italian-American with a traditional family, like me. She still lived at home with her parents when she first came into my life as a young English teacher when I was in seventh grade. To the dismay of my siblings, I brought her home to dinner to meet our parents. I could see myself following in her footsteps—here is how an Italian girl can go to college and become a teacher. The women in my family had worked in the garment industry in New York. Miss Bartolone was similar enough, but different, too. I could imagine my future by learning about her life.
Joette Warren was a factor in many life changes as my therapist, but I still recall four words she said that catapulted me into immediate action. I had applied and been accepted into graduate school at Fordham University. I was thinking of delaying matriculation for another year; the obstacles just felt so overwhelming for a married woman with two children living in upstate New York. One day she said to me, “It is too late,” meaning that I could not, even if I wanted to, matriculate that fall. “Too late!!??” I remember the shouting inside my head at those words! I mobilized all my skills and friends and, within days, managed to activate my matriculation, secure a leave of absence from my teaching job, and make feasible travel arrangements. It surprised me that all fell into place once I over came inertia because of the right catalyst.
I was very fortunate during my career to have the opportunity to be mentored by Darrell G. Kirch, M.D. during a fellowship year at the Penn State College of Medicine and Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. A good mentor, like Dr. Kirch, invites participation in his or her thought processes, includes you at meetings where strategy is debated among equals, and nudges you out of the protégé “nest” into real responsibility. He would say, “Go and meet all these people and then let’s talk about your sense of what we can do in this situation.” I learned the most when he turned problems back to stakeholders for a solution.
Marion Wright Edelman reminded me also to count friends and family in my list of “natural daily mentors.” Mother, Father, siblings, cousins, dear friends who get wiser year after year, and my husband, Vincent, who taught me (among many other things) to consider whether “better is the enemy of the good,” and even better than this, to enjoy a “both/and” approach to life.
As I sit writing this in the public library, I glance up to my right and see a poster for a mentoring program sponsored by the American Association of University Women. Sometimes it is crystal clear when we are entering a mentoring relationship as the mentor or as the protégé. The rest of the time, we may search for the seeds of our achieved dreams and know, that in those moments, we were in the presence of influential role models, catalysts, and mentors.
For your writing:
Identify a mentor, a role model, and a catalyst in your life and write about how each one influenced you.
Quotation for Percolation:
“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us-and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.”
Louisa May Alcott
In one of my roles at the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, I organized and managed several mentoring programs. I finally had to confront the question: “What is a mentor?” Marion Wright Edelman’s wonderful book, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, was an important resource for the programs and for my own understanding. Edelman redefines the concept of mentor away from a narrow, career-focused instrument, to a notion of the “critical influences of the natural daily mentors [who] . . . all stressed how to make a life and find a purpose worth living for and to leave the world better than I found it” (xiv – xv). Edelman revealed the concept to me by identifying her parents and the women of her community as early mentors. Mentors, according to Edelman, “expressed no sense of limits on my potential or who they thought I could become, and they engaged me as a fellow wayfarer and struggler. What they all had in common was their respectful treatment of me as an important, thinking individual human being” (xvii).
OK! Now I see! My inability to identify my own mentors was based on two conditions. First, I was thinking too narrowly. Secondly, I had few opportunities in my small world to find guidance of the sort typically called a mentor. Instead, I had an array something like Edelman’s lanterns. They could all, potentially, be grouped under the title of mentor, but I can better express my gratitude by thinking of these varied inflences as role models, mentors, and catalysts.
Role Models: Those we are attracted to because we see ourselves heading in the same direction or life path. They provide an embodied vision of our own future that we can aim towards.
Personal Mentors: Those we seek out for advice and discussion of life dreams and goals, more personal than professional, and the strategies we can use to get there.
Career Mentors: Those who engage with us for career development and decisions.
Catalysts: By their words or actions, catalysts motivate us to shift course, rethink commitments, break a habit or make some other dramatic change.
Any of these may never know the power of their influence, and often we don’t even know how influential someone has been until years later.
Anna McGuiness may have been my first mentor, although I didn’t realize this until I read Edelman’s book. She was old when I knew her, and I was just a kid, maybe ten or twelve years old. I was already a voracious reader and she was a retired teacher two houses away with a wonderful library dispersed through every room of her stone house. My mother wisely sent me often to Mrs. McGuiness on neighborly errands which would stretch to hours as I browsed among the books, plunked at the piano, and had a cup of tea or cocoa at her kitchen table. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I felt like her equal, like we really connected. She loaned me Frank Baum’s Oz books, all of them, one at a time. She encouraged my mind to follow its inclination in many directions and not to limit myself. After Mrs. McGuiness moved away, I don’t know if I had a mentor again for many, many years. I made many important decisions alone and by default, like choosing a college by finding the catalog a classmate abandoned on the windowsill in math class.
Mary Bartolone was a role model. She was herself an Italian-American with a traditional family, like me. She still lived at home with her parents when she first came into my life as a young English teacher when I was in seventh grade. To the dismay of my siblings, I brought her home to dinner to meet our parents. I could see myself following in her footsteps—here is how an Italian girl can go to college and become a teacher. The women in my family had worked in the garment industry in New York. Miss Bartolone was similar enough, but different, too. I could imagine my future by learning about her life.
Joette Warren was a factor in many life changes as my therapist, but I still recall four words she said that catapulted me into immediate action. I had applied and been accepted into graduate school at Fordham University. I was thinking of delaying matriculation for another year; the obstacles just felt so overwhelming for a married woman with two children living in upstate New York. One day she said to me, “It is too late,” meaning that I could not, even if I wanted to, matriculate that fall. “Too late!!??” I remember the shouting inside my head at those words! I mobilized all my skills and friends and, within days, managed to activate my matriculation, secure a leave of absence from my teaching job, and make feasible travel arrangements. It surprised me that all fell into place once I over came inertia because of the right catalyst.
I was very fortunate during my career to have the opportunity to be mentored by Darrell G. Kirch, M.D. during a fellowship year at the Penn State College of Medicine and Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. A good mentor, like Dr. Kirch, invites participation in his or her thought processes, includes you at meetings where strategy is debated among equals, and nudges you out of the protégé “nest” into real responsibility. He would say, “Go and meet all these people and then let’s talk about your sense of what we can do in this situation.” I learned the most when he turned problems back to stakeholders for a solution.
Marion Wright Edelman reminded me also to count friends and family in my list of “natural daily mentors.” Mother, Father, siblings, cousins, dear friends who get wiser year after year, and my husband, Vincent, who taught me (among many other things) to consider whether “better is the enemy of the good,” and even better than this, to enjoy a “both/and” approach to life.
As I sit writing this in the public library, I glance up to my right and see a poster for a mentoring program sponsored by the American Association of University Women. Sometimes it is crystal clear when we are entering a mentoring relationship as the mentor or as the protégé. The rest of the time, we may search for the seeds of our achieved dreams and know, that in those moments, we were in the presence of influential role models, catalysts, and mentors.
For your writing:
Identify a mentor, a role model, and a catalyst in your life and write about how each one influenced you.
Quotation for Percolation:
“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us-and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.”
Louisa May Alcott
Thursday, March 27, 2008
A Distributed Notion of "Home"
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been feeling bothered and sad by the thought of dismantling the home where my sister and three brothers and I grew up. The home where prom evenings and hunting expeditions were launched, where we grumbled over chores on Saturday mornings and marveled at surprises on Christmas mornings. The house where seven people shared one bathroom and three bedrooms, and where Dad’s one glass of beer at dinnertime suffered a round of children’s sips before he could enjoy it.
My father and mother were able to save some modest certificates of deposit when the five of us were finally out of the house. Each time one of the certificates matured, my father would cash it and “make a distribution,” his term for sharing the funds equally among his children and their families. Over the years, we had quite a few “distributions” of between $500 and $5,000. They were always welcome, and often trickled down to our own children. Now, we are in the process of receiving our final distribution of the assets of our parents’ life; our family home and its contents.
We met recently to talk over what treasures we each wanted from the house. My sister, Nina, claimed a special mirror for her daughter; and the coffee table and end tables will move to Connecticut with Gabe. Andy recalled that the coffee table once had a fitted piece of glass on top. He remembered it by the sound of its shattering. Mike reclaimed the paintings his young bride made for Mom. Pasta bowls will be dispersed among five families to spread the bounty of heaping memories as far as possible. An ancient box camera, walking sticks, the espresso pot we filled after dinner for every holiday, and Mom’s bundt pan will all have new homes. A small cabinet, two upholstered chairs, a cedar chest and Dad’s desk will migrate near and far.
As the oldest child, I have perhaps the longest memory of the austere upright desk standing in our parents’ bedroom. The key was placed far out of our reach. We could see the sets of dark books through glass doors, and it was a momentous day when I finally received permission to open those doors and select a book to read. Only recently have we examined this sanctuary of documents, photos, and war memorabilia from top to bottom. I emptied the desk myself, and slowly realized that there were no deep secrets preserved there, no cryptic map to buried treasure. There were the crumbling immigration documents of two families, decades-old pairs of glasses, photographs from “the old country” and from distant branches of the family tree. But there were also paper clips, a collection of pins from political campaigns, some pennies, and autograph books from my mother’s junior high school graduation class and my father’s high school graduating class. Are you finally finished growing up when you empty ALL the drawers under lock and key and find out that there may not have been much mystery after all in your father’s life or your mother’s life? Even though I’ve touched the wooden bottom of the drawers with my own hands, I still believe that they each had locked places in their hearts that we’ll never know.
After this weekend, our childhood home will be in the hands of a realtor. This is less disturbing than I had anticipated. I’ve begun to focus on the continuity in our process of distribution; after all, I’ve been making sauce in my mother’s sauce pot for years. My sister has been wearing Mom’s marcasite pendant, and the smaller espresso pot migrated to my brother’s kitchen long ago. Our family home has evolved and is dispersed across five or six states and perhaps ten or twelve homes. A tea cup here, a shovel there, a bracelet, a walking stick, a special shark’s tooth, troves of photographs in many desk drawers: home has come closer and more deeply into our lives through this process of distribution. And we are more firmly knit together as a family by these distributed mementos of home.
For your writing:
How do you define “Home”? Is it a place or a set of belongings? Is it the shared habits and traditions of your family? What does “home” feel like? When you are “Homesick,” what are you missing?
Quotation for Percolation:
The most important work you and I will every do will be within the walls of our own homes. Harold B. Lee (1899 - 1973)
My father and mother were able to save some modest certificates of deposit when the five of us were finally out of the house. Each time one of the certificates matured, my father would cash it and “make a distribution,” his term for sharing the funds equally among his children and their families. Over the years, we had quite a few “distributions” of between $500 and $5,000. They were always welcome, and often trickled down to our own children. Now, we are in the process of receiving our final distribution of the assets of our parents’ life; our family home and its contents.
We met recently to talk over what treasures we each wanted from the house. My sister, Nina, claimed a special mirror for her daughter; and the coffee table and end tables will move to Connecticut with Gabe. Andy recalled that the coffee table once had a fitted piece of glass on top. He remembered it by the sound of its shattering. Mike reclaimed the paintings his young bride made for Mom. Pasta bowls will be dispersed among five families to spread the bounty of heaping memories as far as possible. An ancient box camera, walking sticks, the espresso pot we filled after dinner for every holiday, and Mom’s bundt pan will all have new homes. A small cabinet, two upholstered chairs, a cedar chest and Dad’s desk will migrate near and far.
As the oldest child, I have perhaps the longest memory of the austere upright desk standing in our parents’ bedroom. The key was placed far out of our reach. We could see the sets of dark books through glass doors, and it was a momentous day when I finally received permission to open those doors and select a book to read. Only recently have we examined this sanctuary of documents, photos, and war memorabilia from top to bottom. I emptied the desk myself, and slowly realized that there were no deep secrets preserved there, no cryptic map to buried treasure. There were the crumbling immigration documents of two families, decades-old pairs of glasses, photographs from “the old country” and from distant branches of the family tree. But there were also paper clips, a collection of pins from political campaigns, some pennies, and autograph books from my mother’s junior high school graduation class and my father’s high school graduating class. Are you finally finished growing up when you empty ALL the drawers under lock and key and find out that there may not have been much mystery after all in your father’s life or your mother’s life? Even though I’ve touched the wooden bottom of the drawers with my own hands, I still believe that they each had locked places in their hearts that we’ll never know.
After this weekend, our childhood home will be in the hands of a realtor. This is less disturbing than I had anticipated. I’ve begun to focus on the continuity in our process of distribution; after all, I’ve been making sauce in my mother’s sauce pot for years. My sister has been wearing Mom’s marcasite pendant, and the smaller espresso pot migrated to my brother’s kitchen long ago. Our family home has evolved and is dispersed across five or six states and perhaps ten or twelve homes. A tea cup here, a shovel there, a bracelet, a walking stick, a special shark’s tooth, troves of photographs in many desk drawers: home has come closer and more deeply into our lives through this process of distribution. And we are more firmly knit together as a family by these distributed mementos of home.
For your writing:
How do you define “Home”? Is it a place or a set of belongings? Is it the shared habits and traditions of your family? What does “home” feel like? When you are “Homesick,” what are you missing?
Quotation for Percolation:
The most important work you and I will every do will be within the walls of our own homes. Harold B. Lee (1899 - 1973)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
