statue

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photo "Statue" used with permission of photographer Carl C

Move Within

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move.

.............................................................- Rumi
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friendship in a mobius strip

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The best most amazingly wonderful boss I ever had was a mathematics professor named Ed. Once he tore off a strip of paper, twisted it and then joined the ends to show me what a mobius (or moebius, or moëbius) strip is. In case you don't know, as I didn't, it's a surface with only one side. That's right, if you run your finger along any surface, you'll see that there is only one. It is one of those deliciously annoying impossibilities that tells me I can't be a scientist. I just can't get my head around it, and that bothers me. If I couldn't get my head around it and it didn't bother me, I might be scientist material. (You scientists are going to correct me now.) A mobius strip is also a non-orientable surface. If you want to understand that physical concept, try this. "Orientability is a mathematical property of surfaces in Euclidian space measuring whether or not it is possible to make a consistent choice of surface normal vector at every point dot dot dot"



Whatever. So this is a mobius strip bangle.

I have this friend, a person in authority and power. This is her bracelet, which I admired on her wrist. One day many months later, she publicly scolded me very vehemently over something I thought trivial, and I didn't deserve it. After that I had to seriously consider whether I wanted her to remain in my life as a friend. It took several days and a mini vision quest of sorts to really search out my heart about her and what had happened. I decided I did want her in my life, in spite of her sometimes abrasive ways. There are many things I love about her and our relationship, so I talked with her about it, we patched things up better than before, and a few months later she came for a gathering at my house on my birthday. She handed me a gift box, and when I opened it there was the bracelet. The significance of its twisting and single surface touched me as a symbol of our friendship, one that was pliable enough to go on after a rift that almost tore us apart.

I love it so much that if a fire broke out I would grab it with the photo albums, camera and the external hard drive with all my photographs - after making sure Don is out ok.



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The Year of Yes

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Vessel made by Beatrice Wood

My disappointment in the outcome felt like a hollow dirty blue plastic molded bed pan. I felt sick, like throwing up into it. After all, I had invested my time, energy and love into someone who was desperately hurting, and what happened thereafter? Within just a couple of weeks, we were right back where we started. I wanted to scoop her up in my arms and just let the bad things spin away from us.

Feeling thus the other morning, hugging my hand thrown pottery mug full of fresh hot coffee (not the chalice made by Beatrice Wood in the photo above), I opened Google Reader, scrolling down through the words and images miraculously appearing on my laptop screen from my friends' worlds. What a wonder.

And then there was a poem. Called The Year of Yes. I read, and the words released the sickness in me. Instead of throwing up, I cried - a cleansing sob. The ugly blue plastic morphed into a glazed earthen cup ready to be filled again.

Shaista wrote the poem and posted it at her blog Lupus in Flight. This is what she has written about herself in her About Me.

I live a meditative life in a green village in England. I was diagnosed with Lupus when I was 18 and much of my poetry writes itself in response to living with such a peculiar, demanding and life-altering illness. I write about love and longing and hope. I have lived half my life in India and the other half in England. I was born into two religions in a country of a myriad faiths. I have been writing since I can remember holding a pen, a crayon, paper, anything that comes to hand...

The illness Shaista lives with is "a chronic inflammatory disease that can affect various parts of the body, especially the skin, joints, blood, and kidneys," as the Lupus Foundation site says. I didn't know much about it until reading her blog posts, which sometimes talk about her regular hospitalizations for treatment.

Just from Shaista's blog title Lupus in Flight you understand how she lives with illness. Her story is about letting something from within her experience of incessant pain, ache and disruptive hospital treatments surface and be expressed in poetry. Well, her About Me above says it far better. Here is Shaista's poem.

The Year of Yes

- for Victoria and Perveen,
dearest, patient girlfriends
who nonetheless went off to Bury Farm
without me
and inspired this poem

I wish I had said Yes!

beloved

When you asked me out to walk

among the leaves

the turning leaves

You were offering me

the sound of dreams,

And I turned you down

politely.

Not today, I smiled

Perhaps,

Maybe, tomorrow?

But I wish I had said Yes!

beloved

I wish we had shared this light.

Next time don't ask

Just take me!

Order me to dress!

I am going to need your help

beloved

To begin the Year of Yes.
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lost-and-found trick-or-treater

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With the help of friends, owners of a house in our current town carve 100 jack-o-lanterns every Halloween

I don't know how the olfactory organ manages it - the blessed nose - the way it skips decades like a stone on the surface of water and brings back October thirty-firsts from forty years ago in a nanosecond. I just know it works.

On the drive home from the university this week in the early evening dusk, if I smell burning leaves from someone's yard, instantly I am walking fast in that I-will-not-be-overly-excited-and-run walk that trick-or-treaters commence from their own porch into a dark but streetlit Halloween night (unless you're my husband as a boy and you just full out run door to door, pillow case slung over your shoulder to be stuffed with as much candy as you can carry, go home, dump it out on the living room floor, and go back out again, running).

For blocks and blocks my small town neighborhood angled off in rows of sidewalks covered in crispy brown leaves, lined with beacons: porch lights inviting me and hundreds of other kids to walk up to a friend's or a stranger's door, reach a hand into a big Melmac bowl and help ourselves to candy - politely take one, or impolitely grab a handful - to what I hoped would be Snickers, Reese's peanut butter cups or sour apple bubble gum, but please no Tootsie Rolls or apples.

We were little fishermen docking for a few seconds at ports of call, lit like lighthouses, where we filled our nets with what the neighborhood sea had stocked.

One Halloween, I was lost at sea.

Little Ruthie got invited to go trick-or-treating with a grown up friend of an older sister. Was it the year Nancy sewed me an 18th century Martha Washington costume complete with black lace mask, shawl and fingerless gloves, white wig dotted with blue satin rosebuds, and lovely draped blue satin garniture hanging from the waist? Impossibly, I managed to go off with Charlene and have a blast without either of us informing my parents. Have you ever seen a police car parked in front of your house, complete with spinning red and white lights? Whatever fun you were just having disappears like a wave seeping into sand.

But no doubt, the catch I emptied onto the carpet, sorted into piles of keepers and undesirables, then eaten a few a day, mollified my guilt into mid-November.
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"suddenly thrill you"

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Do you know who said it, what's written on the page in my journal? No. Stop, don't you dare Google it. I know you might have Googled, if so, then you already knew before I added his signature below.

If you don't know, what would you guess is her or his profession? Did you think it was a visual artist? Think about that while I tell you what I've been doing.

In the evening after supper I am reading my way through a collection of short stories I picked up on the free book table in the hall at work, starting with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown and ending with Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible. Close together this week I read Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat and Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener - both tales about scribes early in the 19th century who live poor and plain, the first in Russia and the second in America. Can there be anything more mundane and boring than copying text scrupulously and painstakingly by hand, all day, every day, six days a week? Then having to read it through with another copyist to be certain there are no errors? The writing they copy would most likely be tedious "legalize" too. Next time you curse your computer, think about the alternative. Well, my friend Inge might prefer it.

But put these ordinary characters Akakievich and Bartleby, whose lives are as achingly banal as anyone can imagine, into the hand held pens of Gogol and Melville, and their circumstances become rich alleyways you can't resist following around the next corner.

Unless you're Paris Hilton, life is pretty mundane most of the time, with blips of interest, joy, surprise or disappointment now and then. Writing, photographing, drawing, painting, exploring, teaching, counseling, parenting, cooking, designing, cleaning, laundering, organizing -- or whatever way of knowing you bring to the world -- you can be blown away by the essence of something inside your ordinary routine once in a while. I dare you.

Ok, who said it: "You need to let little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you." If you know, please let others guess first. Is there anything more ordinary than a Campbell's soup can?
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Answer:

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burning mad

"If you make a hard bed, you have to lay in it." - Hazel Moran, "The Burning Bed"

Last Halloween I wrote about some creepy stories in our little town. One of them was the true story of The Burning Bed, told in a non-fiction book by Faith McNultie, then a 1984 TV movie with Farrah Fawcett playing housewife Francine Hughes right here in Dansville, population 429. (We were not living here at the time of the tragedy or the movie.)

Thirteen can be an unlucky number, and it certainly was for Francine's ex-husband Mickey Hughes that night in March 1977. Francine told her kids to get their coats on and get in the car, and then with a good douse of gasoline burned down the house around her sleeping husband who had abused her for thirteen years. The movie showed that he beat her and beat her and beat her. When she left the burning house, she drove straight to the Sheriff's office and turned herself in, screaming, "I did it, I did it, I did it!" Ms. Hughes was tried here in Lansing and found not guilty by a jury of her peers by reason of insanity. Women's advocates called it self defense.

Our local newspaper has done an extensive feature called Unmasking the Violence on the story of Francine Hughes 25 years after "The Burning Bed" TV movie and how it affected legislation on domestic abuse because it got national attention. It is quite interesting to see how this case shaped definitions and policies on domestic abuse, if you go to that link. It is also interesting to read the section "Read about the Case" and then "Listen to their Stories" and see that some of the locals did not find the movie very accurate. Mickey's friends claim she let him have it too when fights broke out. There are very good video interviews with townspeople who knew the couple.

The world learned later that Farrah Fawcett, in a photo above from the movie in which she played the abused Francine Hughes, was herself beaten repeatedly by her actor husband Ryan O'Neal, who took out his anger on at least one of his sons too apparently. I was going to look for an image of her after the time he shoved her to the pavement and post it, but I decided not to. It's disturbing enough to see the image of her in make-up to look battered.

Oh it's such a painful topic. A person has a lot of anger, and it gets triggered by someone in the house, or some stress, and they take it out on someone close. I'm sorry if this stirs up painful memories or feelings for you.

So ok, anger exists. We all feel it sometimes. Why deny it? There are some things we really should be angry about. Others, not so much. When I feel the latter, I try to talk to myself. Slow down. Stop.

THIS HAS HELPED ME SINCE I READ IT RECENTLY.
See your anger as donkeys galloping along. You want so badly to hop on and take a ride. It would be delicious fun, such a good romp of anger! What if you just let the donkeys run on by? I have tried this, and it makes me smile. (I got this from Osho.)

SOMETIMES THIS HELPS.
If you're angry, just be angry, don't be angry with someone. Go be alone with it. G.I. Gurdjieff's father told him if he was insulted, don't react immediately in anger. Wait twenty-four hours, and then respond. Gurdjieff said that never did he have to respond, because by the next day the anger was gone. If you're alone with your anger, let it go to the cosmos. Osho said:

Remember, it is just like a dirty river falling into the ocean: the ocean will purify it. Whenever your anger, your hate, your sexuality, moves into the cosmos, into the ocean--it purifies it. If a dirty river falls into another river, then the other river also becomes dirty. When you are angry with someone, you are throwing your dirt at him. Then he will also throw his at you and this will become a mutual dirtying process.

I'VE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE THE KIDS WERE LITTLE. I WAS ILL EQUIPPED TO BE A MOTHER, THEN SOMEONE TAUGHT ME THIS. IT HELPED.
Change your belief about something. If you have a negative reaction, such as anger, it is in you, not someone else. First you have to ask yourself if you want to be angry. If not, maybe there is some way of thinking inside you that could change so that you won't get angry next time. If someone cuts in front of you in a line of traffic, and you become angry, ask yourself, What do I believe about this? "I have the right to this bit of space on the road, no one should take that from me." If you changed your belief to something else, such as: "Others may drive as they will, I will adjust accordingly," then would you be angry if it happened again?

It takes practice. Change doesn't happen overnight. Do you learn to play the piano in one day? Don't feel bad if you don't learn to conquer your anger in one day either.

I'm not promoting sainthood. And I'm not your nanny. I also recognize that some of us have ongoing conflict with people and circumstances we can't remove from our lives. I'm just saying. We are human, we have emotional responses to a tough world. But maybe putting our dirt onto someone else is not the best way to make things better. I'm talking to myself first and foremost.

Follow this link for help for abused and battered women, including state resources. If you are not in the U.S., please google domestic violence help in your area.
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blue cousins

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Here are second cousins, sons of two of my nephews. Second cousins are of the same generation, and they have different grandparents but the same great-grandparents, in this case my mom and dad. At the cottage clean-up day, Asher, on the left, was shy at first. But pretty quickly he and Aden realized they had probably met before (lots of times) and they must like the same things. The rest of the day they were inseparable.

Here they are at the spring 2007 cottage clean-up day, Aden on the left this time.



I myself had one cousin. And she died young. I have no memories like this.



Well I would have been playing with dolls, not cars.

































Do you see three-year-olds? Or future old men?














My one cousin was Marjorie. I think I met her twice, maybe three times. In fact I had so little contact with her I forgot her name and had to ask Bootsie. I was remembering "Melanie." She and my father's brother, Uncle Jimmie, lived in Richmond and it was a big deal if they, or we, made the long road trip to visit. I never met Aunt Virginia, who died before I was born. One Thanksgiving when I was about eleven, they came. Marjorie was already a mature fragile Southern flower, and maybe I would have pictured her like Blanche DuBois if I had known Tennessee Williams' character then. Her skin was pale, her hair the color of the lightest salmon maple leaf. She hardly spoke, and if she did, it was in a soft Virginian voice of grace. She was modest, unsure. We shared a room that week, and I don't remember a word passing between us. I knew she suffered a mental fragility, related in part to her mother's mental illness, which was triggered at the time of Marjorie's own birth. I didn't know how to talk to such a person. A couple decades later when she died, there was mystery and suspicion around the circumstances. Supposedly it was suicide, but my uncle, who believed in everyone, was certain that her husband, whom she had met in a hospital and who was not unlike Stanley Kowalski, was responsible.

Why share all that in a post about three-year-old cousins who rediscover the joy of boyhood every time they meet? To show that there are some things we learn later in life, like how cousins can be good friends. Don't we as parents try to make our children's lives better than our own, in whatever ways we can? It's the nature of our Instinct. All possibilities are reborn with every new child.

Right, DeeDee? Welcome to sweet little Lily.
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