peanut butter. v. Marmite

Marmite is a yeast paste commonly used on one's breakfast toast in the UK and, for all I know, on other things. I have eaten Marmite and its Austrailian equivalent, Vegemite, a few times. It is, as my mom often said to encourage her children to eat new foods, an acquired taste. It is a taste I never acquired.

One my daughter's Waldorf School has a prominent Anthroposophical teacher and speaker come to town. Several leaders of the school community, which included me as a board member, attended a dinner at one board member's home to honor him.

Over that dinner table, the topic of Marmite came up. The visitor was from UK. And he put us all in our place.

After several Americans had weighed in on the peculiarity of Marmite, he announced, in his stensorial, professorial tone, "For most Brits, peanut butter is intolerable. Peanut butter is disgusting. Can you explain to me why Americans love peanut butter?"

Touche.

We didn't get Marmite. He didn't get peanut butter.

Peanuts, by the way, are not a nut. They are a legume, wrongly considered a nut by most. Pinto beans, navy beans, black beans. These are legumes, not nuts.

Peanut butter is an odd food.

So is Marmite, eh?

Rapids by A. R. Ammons

Rapids

by A. R. Ammons


Original Language English

Fall's leaves are redder than
spring's flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.

Lucky: happiness feels like this

We don't even have to pretend
We know what it is
That we are looking for

Life is just a dream
Lucky you
Lucky me
Life is just a dream
Lucky you
Lucky lucky me

Listen to this song and feel happy, as I do when I listen to it.

More lyrics from this song:

There is a Place in Time and Space that WE can ALL BE FREE!  

paintings of women with holes in them

In the late eighties, I ran an intensive training business, training in inner capacity development. Very intense five day trainings.  We offered them one month in Minneapolis, then one month in Baltimore. My former biz partner lived in Baltimore when we joined forces. When I had built up the business in Minneapolis, she basically just took it from me. Old wound. Stop here.

Anyway, I occasionally helped run the intensives in Baltimore. I got to know the base of our Baltimore clientele. There was a woman named Gina who was an artist, a painter.  I went to her studio once. All her paintings were paintings of women and every woman she painted had a hole in her. Just a hole someone, mainly in the torso, that was nothing but air all the way through. When gazing upon her paintings, the holes seemed perfect.  I came away thinking "These paintings are perfect because every woman has holes in her."

And anthroposophists believe that when a woman has a child, the birth tears a hole in her etheric being. Imagine having eight full term pregnancies, as my mom did. Or fourteen, as my great grandmother did. Yikes.

I thought Gina's paintings made a profound statement about women. I don't think she was thinking about etheric holes. She was a artist. She likely worked from a vibration, an energy. If one asked, and people did, why all her women had holes in them, she would shrug and shake her head to indicate she didn't know. I felt like I 'knew', knew viscerally:  maybe all women don't have holes in them but I have a huge hole in me. I am terrified it will never be healed, or closed, or compensated for. Maybe I'm depressed, although I am taking an antidepressant but my hole, my wound, is wearing on me. Hopefully it's just because I am so sick and not healing quickly but I know myself. This is my hole, the kind of hole Gina painted in all her women.

as plants renew themselves from spring to spring

We are not granted
A rest on any step;
The active person
Must live and strive
From life to life;
As plants renew themselves
From spring to spring,
So humans must rise
Through error to truth,
From fetters into freedom,
Through sickness and through death
To beauty, health, and life.
Rudolf Steiner

I think I have posted this before. An old friend just reposted it, from my blog, on FB so I read it again.  I love the reminder that 'as plants renew themselves from spring to spring', so must we humans.

don't apologize for being sensitive

reminder: be gentle to myself

Day 4 mostly spent in bed recovering from intense rear flank pain and a serious kidney infection. . .. I am feeling better very gradually. I ignored my symptoms for weeks. And I can't wait until my flank pain is gone.  I am eating probiotics because I know the antibiotics kill all the good bacteria in my intestinal tract. I dragged myself to a store yesterday to get some probiotic foods.

And I am being gentle to myself.

the joyful cry "I am!"

This photo is from the FB page of David Ah-Zen. I love this image and this saying. How about you?

from "Black Elk Speaks"

The first book I was assigned to read for college was during a week-long freshman studies orientation. That first book was Black Elk Speaks. I loved the book and loved the class discussions of it.

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us."
~ Black Elk ~

Indigenous cultures were way ahead of the curve of our capitalist/dominator culture. They recognized the sacredness in all and had deep reverence for their relationship with nature. They believed that if humans develop their inner capacities in harmony with nature, they could inhabit the bell of being and wisely choose how to live.

Rudolf Steiner also espoused views similar to indigenous culture's harmony with nature as guiding spirit.  He referred to nature, more or less, as the supersensible and nonmaterial realms that most westernized humans ignore.

I choose compassion

Don Miguel Ruiz states, “People can only love you at the capacity that they are able to love themselves.  They can only forgive and embrace at the capacity that they are able to forgive and embrace themselves. They can only give what they have the capacity to give.”

and I say. . .

I forgive myself but I take ownership in the choices I've made. I forgive others in my life and choose to have compassion for where they are on their karmic path. 

The Pied Piper of Delusive Greed

Racism, we are increasingly seeing, appears to be integral to the drive for greed. Yesterday I was an incomprehensibly true story about the State of CA disregarding a federal judge's order to reduce population in CA's overcrowded prisons, arguing that the state would lose billions if it lost its $2/hour labor, esp. for firefighting. Such an argument, of course, ignored the huge cost to house and guard these prisoners so the state of CA is not really paying $2 an hour for this cheap labor. I note that nonviolent offenders are supposed to be released. The state uses such nonviolent offenders who committed relatively minor crimes for their cheap work force because they are nonviolent and 'good' prisoners, exactly the kind a federal judge has ordered released.

It's slavery. But the above story is just one story among an endless string of horrific stories. A few investment banks created the housing inflation and attendant mortgage inflation problem knowing the market would crash. Their plan was to make money on the inflationary rise and on the depression-like crash, radically altering the lives and financial stability of millions of Americans. Pied Pipers, those investment bankers. They lead millions to their financial doom and the bankers made millions and billions.

So what did this allegedly great country do? It bailed out the bankers and let millions of Americans fall.

Capitalism, or maybe money, is a Pied Piper. The Pied Pieper of delusive greed.

It is delusive to believe 'life' will be better if the greedy get rich. Or richer. It is delusive to believe money is the center of life. The way we do money now is not just delusional, it is downright insane. We allow greedy, grasping capitalists to rape the earth and allow some humans  to rape not just the equity in homes but the very labor of some humans brow. It has been widely known for years that restaurants engage in wage theft yet 'we' have allowed it to continue. It has been widely known for years that fast food workers are forced to work off the clock, often fail to receive overtime when forced to work overtime. This is New Millenium slavery.

It's the Pied Piper of money.  It's hard to conceive of life without money because it is hard to see what one has never known.  I believe humans could thrive without money. We could create a culture along the lines of Rudolf Steiner's Threefold Social Order and establish clearly that the economic realm of a healthy social order exists solely to support the social (schools, roads, power, water, parks, etc) and artistic (creativity, spirit, love).

We could make this shift but it would be very hard. The folks gobbling up our commons, Mother Earth, and greedily stealing wages from some of the lowest paid workers, will resist.

So what to do?  I don't believe war is the answer. I actually believe what is needed is happening, but, like all evolutionary emergence, change is slow, even glacial. We gradually develop a culture in which the economic realm exists in perfect equipoise with the social and artistic realms. We make the economic realm smaller and no more powerful than the citizenry.

How? And can we do it or is the earth too damaged to recover from all we have allowed to be done to it?

The Pied Piper of Hamelin/Capitalism

I just did a google of the Pied Piper.  As a child, living in a very Irish world, I learned this story with an Irish twist. It was told to me that the Pied Piper was hired to drive snakes out of Ireland, for an agreed-upon fee. He freed Ireland of snakes but the people refused to pay him. So next he lead all the children out of Ireland.

According to most google resources (not precise research, I know), most consider the Pied Piper to be from German myth and/or history. There is some historical evidence that the German town of Hamelin did hire the Pied Piper to rid the town or rats, which he did. Then the town reneged on their agreed-upon payment so the Pied Piper took the children.

Where did the children go? In the version I heard as a child, the Pied Piper lead the snakes out of Ireland. I was also told St. Patrick lead the snakes out of Ireland. Go figure. He lead the snakes off a cliff where they all dropped into the sea below. And, whether I was told this or not, as a child I believed he lead all the children to the same cliff, like lemmings, I guess, and they also fell into the sea.  I recall feeling sharp pain as I imagined hordes of children happily following the musician and then falling to their deaths.

I think contemporary human culture, with some rare exceptions, is being lead to self destruction by the Pied Piper of capitalism.

I was also told that St. Patrick drove snakes out of Ireland. As an intelligent child, I spent some time puzzling out these stories. Raised in a devoutly Catholic family and community, I did not question the great St. Patrick's ability. I wondered why the story came at me as a fairy tale (Pied Piper) and as the work of the patron saint of Ireland.  I still wonder.

my high school English teacher did not know Kafka

My sophomore, high school English teacher gave our class only a couple 'creative' writing assignments. I didn't go to a great high school. Each year, I took English, of course, four years of English was expected to get into college. Each year, we'd have just a few token writing assignments. Perfunctory assignments, as if each English teacher had been told they had to teach writing and not just talk about novels. Oh, no poetry in my h.s. education. None. We did read a play each year. My sophomore year, we read aloud, The Merchant of Venice. I read the role of Shylock and felt embarassed to have that role. That was my entire h.s. exposure to Shakespeare. Gosh, by the time my daughter finished grade school at her Waldorf School, she had memorized a couple Shakespeare plays by performing in them and read many of them.

Like I said, I did not go to a h.s. with high academic standards. Most of the girls I knew went to college but few of them seriously expected to finish college. College was what good girls did until they landed the husband.  No kidding.  My h.s. best friend doubted she would continue in college past her freshman year.  I lost touch with her and don't know if she graduated from college.

Anyway. Sophomore English. We were given the assignment of describing our bedrooms right after I had read, for recreational reading, Kafka's Metamorphosis. As anyone who has read that book nows, in Metamorphosis, the protagonist is suddenly turned into a cockroach and copes with the ensuing existential angst of being a cockroach and fearing getting stepped on. At least that is what I remember. I only read the book once when I was 14 or 15, so it was long ago.

When she announced the assignment to describe our bedrooms, the teacher, who had struck me as one of the sharper tacks in the dull faculty at our h.s., spoke enthusiastically of creativity, urging us to be as creative as possible in describing our bedrooms.

With Kafka's cockroach on my mind, I decided to describe my bedroom from the perspective of an ant walking all over the things in my room.

My English teacher could make no sense of my bedroom description. I had worked on it.  One had to think to get what I wrote. I did not announce "I am going to describe my bedroom from the perspective of an ant."  I tried, seriously, to imitate Kafka and simply write from an ant's perspective with no further explanation regarding why an ant's walk  through my room was how I chose to creatively describe my bedroom.

I got a 'D' and the teacher told me I deserved an 'F' but she didn't want to mess my college options. Fuck her. I didn't think fuck her back then. Back then, I was ashamed. Back then, I actually assumed the teacher had understood I had been trying to imitate Kafka. I credited her with knowing much more about literature than she did.  It was only much later, like ten years ago, that I thought of that ant paper and realized "Duh, the teacher had no idea about Kafka's cockroach."

Sure I might not have done a good job imitating Kafka but anyone familiar with the Metamorphosis would have realized what I was trying to do.

I got no points for creativity.  I had believed her when she urged me to be creative.

Lesson learned. I never tried again to be creative in an English class assignment. I did write some poems my senior year that were so good my then-English teacher was shocked and did not hide her great surprise that I had written such nice poems.   One of my poems was so good that many girlfriends asked if they could give it to their boyfriends.

forgiveness is revolutionary stance

"Forgiveness is the most revolutionary stance. It opens up the future by letting go the past." ~ Marianne Williamson

it's not mindfulness without kindfulness

If you think mindfulness is just about neutral noticing and non-judgement, then something important is missing, says Ed Halliwell of minddful.org.

“The awareness and approach to life that arises from paying attention on purpose, fully present, with curiosity and compassion." This is a small shift from the most common modern definition of mindfulness, which describes the practice as ‘non-judgmental.'

Mindfulness is just not neutral noticing. There are a clear set of attitudes which underpin the practice, and compassion may be the most important. Mindfulness just isn’t mindfulness without kindfulness. From the very first time we’re invited to come back to attention, we’re reminded to do this gently. Without this emphasis on friendliness, we set ourselves up for an internal battle, making struggle and stress as we try to force focus. Many people do get frustrated when they notice attention wandering, and it’s a key learning when they realize this noticing itself is mindfulness, and that it brings a chance to express care, understanding, patience, and love.
As we train in these attitudes over and over, it begins to affect more than just our relationship with ourselves. As we cultivate the habit of being gentle, loving-kindness percolates outwards. Most practitioners find over time that they’re gentler with others around them, less reactive, less automatically hostile. This makes sense of course—the mind that relates to internal experience also connects to the external world, in which we live and work with others.
This is why I believe that mindfulness—taught and practised properly—is its own self-protection from misuse. As long as we commit ourselves to an ongoing practice of noticing what’s happening with curiosity and friendliness, awareness and compassion tend to follow. Whether taught and practised in friendly environments, or hostile ones in which the prevailing culture is grasping or aggressive, true mindfulness will lead to an increase in kindness, the basis for ethical action.
The key, of course, is reminding ourselves and others that mindfulness is more than just neutral attention training. That’s why I think having clear definitions are important—if mindfulness loses its kindfulness, then we really are lost.

I chunked down (edited) some of what he wrote. Now I am giggling. No one overwrites more than me and here I am, editing a stranger, chunking down his work.

eres de pinga

In some idiomatic Spanish, 'eres de pinga' means 'you are amazing'.  My first lover was a Mexican college student named Fernando.  Fernando was George Clooney handsome. I have never slept with a more handsome man. We weren't in love. We were in lust.  But I was besieged by Mexican college boys who thought all gringas had lots of casual sex. I chose Fernando as my first lover because he had said 'eres de pinga'.  He had to translate it for me and his translation was slightly more elaborate than 'you are amazing'. He probably was wooing me to have sex with me but every guy I talked to in Mexico did that. He just was the most charming and clever.

I am a sucker for charm. And 'ese tipo', this guy, really was as handsome as men get.  He told me being 'de pinga' meant I had fairy-like qualities, that I gave off a magical aura. Good looking, charming, yes, indeed, I chose him for my first lover.

I liked that. So after months of hoping to lose my virginity and besieged by male college boys constantly, I chose Fernando for his charm. His awesome good looks didn't hurt.

Being a sweetie, Fernando introduced me to Oscar, and asked Oscar to drive me to Mexico City for my slight home at the end of the semester.  Oscar, I fell for. He asked me, before we even got to Mexico City from Guanajuato, Gto, to postpone my flight. He said he was on Christmas vacation from school, his parents didn't expect him home for a week and he really liked me.  Oscar was not George Clooney good-looking. He was smart and he wooed me with some really charming choices.

My first night with him in Mexico City, he took me to Denny's, imagining I would love eating American food after being in Mexico so long. I had never been to a Denny's, not ever, because I considered it bad food. I politely ate at that Denny's and did not tell Oscar it was not representative of food I would choose to eat. Then, after that meal, he did something that persuaded me to change my flight, piss off my dad who was expecting me home the next day -- dad needed childcare because our youngest siblings were visiting dad for Christmas. The kids were little and dad had to work. He had been counting on my long Christmas break for childcare.

On the way home from that Denny's, Oscar saw a young mother with a small child in a car with a flat tire. It was on a huge road in Mexico City, like ten or twelve lanes. It was very late. Oscar said no tow truck help would come that late so he would stop and help her. He changed her tire. Then when he got in the car, he said it was wholly unlike him to do something like that, to help a stranger on a dark highway at night. He said he did it to impress me.

Let's just say it did.

At first, U resisted having sex with Oscar. I explained that I had had sex for the first time with Fernando and I didn't think it right to have sex again with someone else, not so fast. Oscar asked me if I expected to see Fernando ever again. No, I answered truthfully. Then he asked me, "Do you think you will ever have sex again?" and I had to answer truthfully again. Of course I would have sex again.  "So why not me?" he asked.

I had been with Fernando for months, with Oscar for that one week. Oscar and I corresponded for two years. Fernando wrote to me once or twice.

soft heart takes courage

my favorite Emily poem on pain

Poem by Emily Dickinson

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows being up—
Then covers the abyss with trance—
So memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop him—bone by bone.

another Emily pain poem

Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924.

Part One: Life XIX

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself,	5
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Emily Dickinson on Pain, #372

P-A-I-N

Yesterday in the ER, I was given a morphine drip for an hour or so. All morphine long since warn off.

Yikes, I am experiencing intense physical pain. Sometimes when I move without thinking, I am literally felled by the pain. I might go to get up from a chair without tenderly tending to my left rear flank and the pain is so intense I can't get up, can't force myself to just push through the pain. I stop rising, gather myself and get up more carefully. Sometimes I feel fine taking one or two steps and then kaboom! the pain comes on so intensely that I almost crumble to the floor.

I try to power through the pain and keep moving. I have been ignoring this pain for weeks. It finally started knocking me down, literally knocking me down, on Saturday.

In 2006, I went to the ER and ended up in the hospital, including 3 days in ICU, for a whole week. After that, I vowed I would never, ever go to an ER, or a hospital stay, without a computer or, now, an iPad. Thank goddess I took my iPad yesterday. The hospital had free wifi and I could surf, post goofy comments on my blog (since removed) and I could read read read. I remembered I have several books on my iPad and I got deep into one of them.

This morning I got a script filled for hydrocodone. I didn't take one right away. I resist taking pain killers and most meds. I have to use insulin but I don't have to take statins, blood pressure med or other drugs doctors try to foist on me.  I have acquired some serious health issues because I took meds mindlessly, following doctor's orders, for years. No more.  I have raised my good cholesterol and lowered my bad one through diet and exercise. I have not had high blood pressure in years, since I started eating well and exercising daily.

I was resolved to not use the hydrocodone. I lasted until about 2 p.m. when suddenly I felt an intense, knock-me-over wave of pain. The hydrocodone does not do what morphine does.

I was on fentanyl, which is a synthetic morphine that is more powerful and more addictive than morphine, for years. My doc would still have me on it if I wanted it. I admit I've been wishing I had some fentanyl patches right now but, over all, I don't want to use those patches for the rest of my life. I am proud that I had my doctor wean me off the fentanyl, truly, but right now I would love to have some.

I can deal with stiff knees that sometimes, most of the time, hurt without synthetic morphine.  If I were to have this flank pain for a long time, I can see how someone might crave morphine.

Drug and alcohol dependency run in my gene pool. I have an almost morbid dread of being addicted to any medicine.

I regret that I broke down and took a hydrocodone. She only gave me 10 pills, so little danger of addiction. Gosh, I hope the antibiotics dull the pain.

The pain might not be an infection. The ER doc said the radiologist saw what may or may not be kidney damage. That likely means a trip to a nephrologist. 

Gosh, the pain I am experiencing is intense.

And, gosh, I put up with a couple weeks of pain, ignoring the pain because I believed it was creeping arthritis pain, or standard aging. I got to the point where I could barely walk.

And still no one to bring me a cup of tea at my bedside.

Once my daughter stayed home with some kind of bug from h.s.  Her friends chided her when she returned, saying "What do you get at home that you can't get her?   You can lounge around all day, the cafeteria has a great range of food and we're here." She said "I stay home when I am sick because my mom brings me cups of tea."

Nobody has ever brought me a cup of tea when sick, certainly not my not-maternal mother.

I heretoforth shall measure the success of my life by whether or not someone enters my life who offers to bring me cups of tea when I am sick and, getting wildly dreamy, this person might offer me easy to digest food, all brought to my dramatic bed side. Maybe a bed tray will be involved, but it is not required.

Right now I want a cup of chicken soup. Ooh, some egg drop soup from a Chinese place:  very mild but so soothing.

Only magic will bring such bounty to me.

The hydrocodone doesn't mask my pain anywhere close to that morphine. I see why morphine is highly addictive. To feel nothing and sleep soundly while in pain:  dreamy and desired experience.

Running on. I don't feel well enough to do anything but stay in bed so I write drippy posts and emails.

exuberate: James Broughton

I never lose . . . like this concept

each has their own pace

I have been struggling for about a year with a loss that I have only recently accepted. I thought acceptance would soften my grief. Acceptance has sharpened it. I hope this sharpening sadness is a kind of cleansing, readying my heart to expand anew.

I feel open, happy, hopeful and, well, new. I am so different than I was a year ago. How did such big change unfold when I thought nothing was happening?

I am sick, which is a drag. I have been sick for several weeks. I tend to frame all health related body experiences to my diabetes but other stuff goes on. I forget that I can feel very sick and it's not about diabetes.  I've been sick all year.

I imagine everyone who has been chronically ill for what stretches as if its forever is surprised that they go on feeling sick, and feeling sick on and on.

I work hard at my health. I exercise quite a lot. I kept on exercising when I got sick for a couple weeks. It's only in the last couple days I stopped willing myself to keep exercising and I gave in to being sick.

I sometimes have a lucid dream, a dream that flashes through my thoughts like a movie but which happens in only a few seconds. Inside the dream, the unfolding story can seem long and spacious but when it ends, only a few moments of 'physical plane' time has passed.  A recurring lucid dream is one in which I am paralyzed, my body like running sand. I try and try to hold myself together so I can take a step or move a hand but the sand slithers away. It is an awful feeling dream.  I feel helpless and often morph into hopeless feeling also.

This battle I am facing with being sick much of the time feels like that dream. No matter what I do, nothing helps.

I imagine anyone who has dealt with cancer, especially advanced ones or particularly lethal ones, feels this way. I tell myself I am not entitled to my thoughts

this is gobbledegook, isn't it? Codeine, morphine and, tomorrow, generic oxycontin.  Who'da thunk.

Memories

In 2006, I had many blood clots in my lungs.  The lung x-Ray looked like polka dots. To save my life they put me on an intense med intended to thin my blood so much that it would begin to melt the clots.  This drug made me very vulnerable, thus the close care of ICU.  ICU nurses have love and equanimity.  Those nurses cared more about me than I did.  In that heavily drugged state, I had a very powerful experience.  A voice-my goddess self?-told me if I wanted to live, I needed to start loving myself.  The voice said "these nurses love you more than you love you".  I started loving myself more right away.

I stopped writing this post earlier because Jaden, my adorable male nurse, had come in and said I could go home.

Boring posts about my ER but this is my personal blog and I can be dopey if I wanna.

Let's be honest. I am dopey often, it is one of my charms.

I am also very funny but very tired. And very sick.

I'm tired of being sick and it aint over.  But I am home in my own bed, always a healing balm after an ER trip, eh?

in each of us

This from Spirit Science's Facebook page. They do not attribute the artist.

tenderness in me grows

I am becoming softer, kinder, more empathy and compassionate. I guess I could say that I think I was always soft, kind, empathic and compassionate for for long stretches, I have felt a need to protectively hide these traits with gruff, blunt demeanor.  I get hurt more, it seems, when abusive type personalities sense my vulnerability. And I tend to be attracted to abusive men, emotionally abusive men.

Free of any abusive relationships these days and growing more and more adept at politely asserting what I need and even what I want, things get smoother and happier.

I am happy.

Silence by Billy Collins

Silence

— by Billy Collins

Now it is time to say what you have to say.
The room is quiet.
The whirring fan has been unplugged,
and the girl who was tapping
a pencil on her desktop has been removed.
So tell us what is on your mind.
We want to hear the sound of your foliage,
the unraveling of your tool kit,
your songs of loneliness,
your songs of hurt.
The trains are motionless on the tracks,
the ships are at restn the harbor.
The dogs are cocking their heads
and the gods are peering down from their balloons.
The town is hushed,
and everyone here has a copy.
So tell us about your parents—
your father behind the steering wheel,
your cruel mother at the sink.
Let's hear about all the clouds you saw, all the trees.
Read the poem you brought with you tonight.
The ocean has stopped sloshing around,
and even Beethoven
is sitting up in his deathbed,
his cold hearing horn inserted in one ear.

this is it by james broughton

This Is It

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That
O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It

This Is It #2

This is It
This is really It.
This is all there is.
And it’s perfect as It is.

There is nowhere to go
but Here.
There is nothing here
but Now.
There is nothing now
but This.

And this is It.
This is really It.
This is all there is.
And It’s perfect as It is.

I wish life had a pause button

I guess people who can afford vacations take pauses in life through vacations. I can't afford to go anywhere. I used to camp at least a few times every year. I even bought a tent last year. Without a car, it is hard to go camping and renting a car is an economic stretch.

I wish I could just stop thinking and feeling for awhile.  I wish I could take a vacation from being me.

heteronormative is dominator culture, not normal

I attended a weekend training lead by a delightful man who happens to be gay. I had not met this man in person until I got to the workshop venue (right on the ocean . . I still hear the ocean as if it were coming from the Berkeley hills outside my window) and as soon as I saw him, I knew he was gay.

Now gays, or, as one of the other facilitators, a lesbian, prefers to be called, queers, are not unfamiliar to me. My best and my baby brother is gay. When I was 15 and he was five, I suddenly knew he was one of those males I had heard whispered about in my conservative, Catholic world. I had no language for what my brother was but this INFJ suddenly knew "My dolly David is one of those". I didn't exactly know what 'one of those' was but Dave was one. And he most definitely was and is queer.  And still my dolly Dave.

As I entered adult life, having left Catholicism well behind me, I searched for a church that didn't merely tolerate homosexuals but embraced them. Dave was a primary male in my daughter's life and I wished to raise her free of heteronormative conditioning. I didn't ever want her to think there was anything wrong with our dolly, delightful David. And I found a church that we attended until Rosie was in the fifth grade. After a few weeks into fifth grade, she came out of Sunday school and announced "I am done with church"  "Fair enough," I said, for I had stopped going some time prior but was dropping her off, going out for coffee and picking her up. I had had such an intensely religious childhood that I felt, a bit inchoately, that I had to give Rosie some sort of church but I was only exposing her.  I loved it that she felt free enough to say "I'm done" and I love it that I equaniously accepted her decision.  I had done my duty.

There were lots of gays at that church and lots of non-gays. All very liberal people and not all that much piety. The church I chose to expose Rosie to someting besides my own beliefs was nothing like the rigid, hierarchical Catholicism I had grown up in. Plus it had awesome music.  And then we were done, but by then, we were both immersed in Waldorf, which is not at all religious but Waldorf pedagogy is deeply connected to spirit and reverence for all of life and the cosnos -- even better than church, at least for us.  I wonder what she thinks of Wally World and Anthroposophy these days, eh?  Who knows?!

When she was five or six, I chose as my best friend a grossly,morbidly obese dyke as my best friend. This woman was about five feet five and weighed almost 500 pounds. I know her weight because I once took her for a doctor appointment. When the nurse weighed her, I glanced away so I would not see her weight, give her that privacy but I truly inadvertently saw the scale read 480.  She has since had bariatric surgery and is more normal. She had a loving, smoking hot life partner back then. And Rosie and my social life revolved around those two gay women and all their brilliant queer friends, mostly women.

During those years, most who knew me believed I was lesbian. I was celibate and ignored men so I let everyone believe I was gay. Truth be told, I wanted to be a lesbian. I loved that social circle of brilliant women who were all a bit older than me and most of those brilliant women had been out since they left home for college. Think about that a moment:  out lesbians at Harvard in the sixties. It took a lot of inner power to be out at such a young age before the gay rights movement really got going.

I wanted to be a lesbian. I surrounded my child with lesbians and gay men.  Raising her to not assume heteronormative was the norm was important to me. And she did me proud, having some love affairs with girls as soon as she left home for college at age sixteen (I believe, but do not know, she is with a male these days.). As Rosie said to me, back when she came out to me at age sixteen, "Mom, you are so old fashioned. You don't fall in love with a gender, you fall in love with people."  It was a tad unfair of her to even lightly chide me for being unhip about queerness because of all the diversity I had exposed her to.

And I have not yet told you about the deformed dwarf Cheryl who was her babysitter for a few years or the gay friend Craig who sometimes picked her up from day care when I couldn't.

From the moment Rosie told me "I'm here I'm queer, get over it", I stopped making gender assumptions about anyone. I was living in co-housing at the time and spoke of my newly 'out' daughter* at one of our community meals. Many of the parents thanked me and said they would not assume their children were heterosexual, thanks for my openness and, indirectly, Rosie's.

Heterosexuals don't go around announcing "I am a heterosexual" yet many hets expect queers to announce they are gay.

At the weekend training I just completed, one man in the group who I think is straight but he never said so, voiced disappointment that the workshop organizer had not told him he, the leader, was gay.  I asked that straight man "Do you announce your gender identity everytime you join a new group?"  He didn't exactly answer but of course he doesn't.

I never assume gender identity, not anymore.  I have known women who used to be men and underwent the chop (as one such woman put it to me).  I have known so many male-ish lesbians back when trans-man was not in this culture's vocabulary,  I've known very bullish bull dykes who proudly claimed to be bull dykes and I have been yelled at by other more feminine lesbians for calling any lesbians dykes. But some of them call themselves dykes and, at least my dyke friends, let me refer to them as dykes. I would never refer to a woman as a dyke unless she had cleared that framework as part of her identify.

I've known men who pass as female who didn't have sex change surgery. I know a man who started life as a girl and had his sex change surgery at age 19, with his parents support.

I welcome the gay rights movement because like all rights movements, it frees everyone, not just the fighting class.

Heteronormative is so old fashioned.  I can practically hear my sixteen year old daughter scorning at people who make heteronormative assumptions when they meet people, assuming all are gay.

For someone my age and from the era in which I grew up, I think I am very cool about gender. I think my kid was wrong to sneer at me and tell me I didn't get gender identity. I think she learned to think openly about her own gender identity largely because of me and my dollykins David.

A heteronormative dominator culture suppresses all women of any gender identity and all men of any gender identity. Many alpha males don't get this but that does not make it less true. And I guess lots of straight women don't get this and live contentedly in the dominator culture.  I don't live there. I don't want to. Do you?

stand in the fire with me

It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.
It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.
By Oriah © Mountain Dreaming,
from the book The Invitation
published by HarperONE, San Francisco,
1999 All rights reserved

the bliss of with by james broughton

The Bliss of With
You have come to me out of antiquities
We have loved one another for generations
We have loved one another for centuries

You teach me to trust the voice of my voices
You teach me to believe my own believings
You touch the palpability of my possibilities

Together we reflect what our mirrors conceal
Together we upgrade the sun in our meridians
We remain open night and day to transcendence

You are incompletely disguised as a mortal
You are the eternal stranger I have always known
I saw your wings this morning
I saw your wings this morning

James Broughton

my favorite moment in tgroup this past weekend

We did something new to me and the facilitators have only done it once before.  Each tgroup sat in a circle with the other group surrounding us while we did our tgroup in front of them. Then the other group gave us feedback.

One young woman's feedback for me still has my heart singing.  She said "It seemed like Tree felt she could do whatever she wanted and everything she did seemed to help and please the whole group."

I tend to feel free to do whatever I want in all my life. I live in Open Space.

Open Space Technology was first identified by Harrison Owen but Harrison is the first person to declaim credit. He simply identified the way the world works when free of constraints.

In open space there are a few guidelines.

1. whoever shows up are the right people
2. when it starts it starts
3. when it stops it stops
4. whatever happens is the only thing that could or should

There is only one law in Open Space: the law of two feet. If you find yourself in an experience, or, at a conference, in a session that does not engage you, if you don't feel you are either contributing or getting something out of it, walk away. Go to where you feel drawn. Life works like this. We all live in Open Space if we just free ourselves into Open  Space.

I am free. I live in Open Space. I do tend to feel free, except in abusive relationships when I am attacked (usually by men), mostly because I feel free to say what I am really thinking and many men seem to think women should tamp themselves down. Fuck that.

I am proud that one young therapist in training saw how free I felt and saw that what I said in my fishbowl tgroup was warmly appreciated by my group.

I did feel free. It would never occur to me that I am not free to say what I wish. Sure sometimes I get negative reactions to my 'free', often blunt, often direct open speaking. Those people locked themselves in closed space. I won't own others' failure to be free and self loving.

I am not used to feeling warmly appreciated by men.

love is a mystical force

I just went to a 3.5 day training. It was a t-group.  A t-group is, mostly but not entirely, about love. More boringly, it is about learning how to communicate more effectively, to ask for your needs, to believe that you are entitled to have your needs met.

I don't really like the t-group model. I went from personal curiosity. I was trained in tgroup by an NTL tgroup facilitator trainer, a world reknown consultant but a former friend sees himself as a tgroup professional par excellance and he put me down for not 'getting' tgroup. I've been curious to see if how tgroup is done in California were meaningfully different. It is not.

I get tgroup.

Lots of folks fake in tgroup. Our group talked about that. One of the benefits, hopefully, one gets from tgroup is to stop faking. Or fake less, to show up more authentically and more lovingly.

Interesting weekend. T-group is not my thing. I rejected it fourteen years ago as a component of my work life. I used to facilitated far more awesome training groups. And I am hoping to get back to that work.

But not tgroup.

Most in the weekend group, with two different tgroups, were all eager to come back for a longer five day tgroup.

Me?  I was screaming silently to get the heck out of there after less than 24 hours. Not having a car, I was dependent on my ride home.  All that head stuff just doesn't mean much to me. The love part I got.

I loved everybody. I was in a group with more men than women and it was a great joy to find myself loving each of the very different men.

There was a young, fiery, feminist lesbian who kicked off the first tgroup session by rushing to protect me when a rich, entitled, elitist white male jumped on me.  He turned out to be rich, entitled, elitist but also loving, deeply full of feeling and he worked so hard to show up with feelings instead of talking at folks. I am proud of him. He and I became  friends. There was a process where we had to pair up with a partner and I ended up paired with him.  We were also the geezers of our group, the only sixty-somethings, with most being twenty, thirty and forty something.

At one point, the group pushed me to share my heartache, which they all sensed -- the loss of my daughter. It seemed cathartic for the group. They seemed to think I had made some big leap but I don't really hold back who I am in any situation. I try to only talk about my sadness in moderation so as not to bring others done. It was not particularly cathartic to have a group of strangers empathize but it seemed to please the group. Geez, I am open and authentic all the time.

I need loving, intimate friends in my life to be kind toi me regularly, not a group of folks I likely will not see again to empathically hold space for my heartache.

Interesting. More reflection. Now off to Fort Mason for a full week of events.

Unusually busy for me. Conference work all week and a retreat at Stanford next weekend.

a mystical force present in all humans. . . .

from Evolver Social Movement on FB

David Whyte on Forgiveness

FORGIVENESS
is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, the act of forgiveness not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.
It may be that the part of us that was struck and hurt can never forgive, and that forgiveness itself never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not meant to forget…stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting.
Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful question and a way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama, rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.
…at the end of life, the wish to be forgiven is ultimately the chief desire of almost every human being. In refusing to wait; in extending forgiveness to others now, we begin the long journey of becoming the person who will be large enough, able enough and generous enough to receive, at our very end, that necessary absolution ourselves.
Excerpted from ‘FORGIVENESS’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. ©2014 David Whyte

what happened to my 'complete works of yeats'?

The Second Coming (Slouching towards Bethlehem)
W.B Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Berkeley v. Big Soda spun some gold too

Berkeley v. Big Soda chose a brilliant name for their campaign to get a sugar tax passed in Berkeley. Their choice of name reminded every Berkeley voter that big, anonymous, dark money, corporate money wanted to control the outcome of a race in Berkeley.

When I was canvassing every Sat and Sun for Tony, I listened to anger about money in politics over and over and over.

I hope other progressive groups study what Berkeley v. Big Soda and Tony Thurmond's campaign just did. Also, the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) defeated Chevron on every single item on the ballot that Chevron cared about. Chevron hoped to put in their hand-selected mayor and council but the RPA spun some gold in Richmond through good old, old fashioned, boots on the ground, grassroots organizing.

If a small group of progressives defeated the millions spent by Chevron in Richmond, and a small group advocating for a tiny sugar tax defeated the millions spent on tiny Berkeley for a tiny sugar tax and if Tony could defeat the dominator political machine's hand-picked candidate. . . well, I feel hopeful for the first time in a long time.

These positive, grassroots, inexensive campaigns spun gold and, just as the Japanese beleive a pot repaired with gold makes the pot stronger and more valuable, I believe we can keep spinning grassroots gold and take back our democracy.  at least I sure hope so.

patching democracy with gold

I have needed a haircut for some time but I was so wrapped up in campaigning, and I did not just canvass every Sat and Sun for Tony (who won!!!). I dropped lit for several other campaigns. As the election drew nearer, I'd glance at myself in the mirror as I passed it and think "Need a haircut" but then I would push it out of my mind for I was focussed on getting one more vote for Tony.

I have seen a beautiful image making the rounds of social media. This image shows a cracked pot that has been repaired with gold and there is some lovely saying accompany the picture suggesting that the japanese repair pots with gold and the repair both makes the pot stronger and more beautiful. More treasured.

Well, I believe I just participated, in a small way, in creating a small patch of repair, spun gold, by participating in the on-the-ground grassroot campaign of Tony Thurmond. His opponent, who has never held elected office, was endorsed by the CA Dem Party, primarily, I believe, because she's made big donations to big pols, plus she ran Google's public policy arm which must have doled out money, earning her favors and, of course, Berkeley's despicable mayor Tom Bates and his also despicable wife Loni Hancock seem to think of themselves as King and Queen of both Berkeley and East Bay politics.

Echols, Tony's now-defeated opponent, had no issues to run on other than being a female so she flooded the district with mailers suggesting women should vote for her just cause she's a woman. Gag me, eh? She also used smear mailers with lies smudged as innuendo but they were outright lies, sinking so low as to use a photo of Tony with his kids on the smear mailer.  She thought with the King and Queen's annointment as Nancy Skinner's successful, and Skinner herself mostly ran for the state assembly six years ago (she's been termed out) because Kriss Worthington wanted to run for it and Bates hates Kriss so he drafted Skinner at the last minute.

Six years ago, Bates had a stronger chokehold on east bay politics than he has today.

For folks who don't know this:   when Tom Bates got termed out of the state senate, his wife was then mayor of Berkeley. So she ran for state senate and Tom ran for mayor. a little incestuous. Having the power of those two positions isn't enough for them. Like all people overcome with greed, be it greed for money or power, there is never enough.  I think Bates wanted to control who reps this state assembly district because he wants to control as much as possible.

I think Bates/Hancock/Skinner, the Sierra Club (who increasingly endorses conservative politicians, what's up with that, the founders of the Sierra Club must be rolling over in their graves) thought that if they gave Echols their imprimatur, it would be a cake walk.

I watched her live a few times. Often she was like a deer stunned suddenly by headlights in the dark. I think she thought getting elected, with Tommy and Loni's kiss of approval, which also brought the CA Dem endorsement (shame on the CA Democratic party for endorsing a political patron over a candidate with 8 years elected experience being accountable to voters). . 

I'm rambling. . . of course I am sad about losing the Senate. A few times in recent months, I have had money solicitors on the streets of Berkeley to ask me to donate to support gay marriage. Each time they hit me up I said "I don't think gay marriage should be at the top of our agenda right now, saving the senate is much more important right now".  Up to a day or two before the election, I had fundraisers on the street, folks who must be desparate for jobs to be doing such work in the first place, asking me to support, financially, trivial causes when meaningful measures and offices were up for grabs.

blowing out the flame of you:

I love Annie Lennox, have all her albums on iPods.  I love her solo work but I still love her work as the //eurythmics.  One of my favorite songs is, I think (but have not checked) from her Eurythmics days.

Do you feel sorry, lover?
Do you feel blue?
What reason did you have
To be untrue?

Now you could be so good
But you have to be so bad
When you could make me happy, lover?
You make me sad

Now there's a cool breeze blowin'
Blowin' out the flame
That used to burn inside me
At the mention of your name

Now there's a cool breeze blowin'
Blowin' down the track
That's where I'm goin'
And I'm never comin' back

My, my, baby's gonna cry
My, my, baby's gonna cry
My, my, baby's gonna cry
Tonight, oh, yea

Now there's nothing, comes from nothing
That's what they always say
Didn't mama tell ya?
That's the price you have to pay?

Now you can't have your piece of cake
And eat the sweet thing too
But that kind of understanding
Isn't good enough for you

My, my, baby's gonna cry

Songwriters
LENNOX, ANNIE / STEWART, DAVID ALLAN

Read more: Eurythmics - Baby's Gonna Cry (my My) Lyrics | MetroLyrics

my two year old's Halloween

When Rosie was two years old at Halloween 1984, we still lived in Omaha. I think both of us were still reeling from the custody battle. Maybe it wasn't quite over. Fortunately my memories of that bruising custody battle have faded.

My happy memories of being Rosie's mom live in me.

I had not rebuilt a social life after the legal separation because I was planning to move away as soon as a judge would let me which, I suspect, was the main reason my ex sued for custody. He didn't really want custody. He wanted to keep me trapped in Omaha until she left for college.

I could not live in Omaha just for an ex. I rationalized moving away by telling myself I had a duty to show my daughter how to make choices for one's self, how to be happy by seeing me move to be happy. It was wicked hard to petition the court, after years of custody crap, for permission to remove our minor from the jurisdiction of Nebraska. I prevailed and on New Year's Day 1985, we moved to Minneapolis, where I had gone to law school. So had her father but he was 'from' Omaha. I was from Chicago but loved Minneapolis.

Rosie was really into Strawberry Shortcake in 1984. She carried her Strawberry Shortcake doll with her always, slept with it. I have photos of her in bed in Strawberry. That Christmas, I bought an old doll cradle, painted it fresly white and made bedding from flannel covered in tiny springs of strawberries. The bed, of course, was for Strawberry. That's how into Strawberry my daughter was.

I used to have a photo of her trying to lay down in that doll cradle with strawberry. It was a large doll cradle but not large enough for a two year old.

So. Halloween. I took Rosie to a Halloween party at the Childrens Museum. She won a prize for best costume in her age group.

Now I am crying over the loss of my daughter. This memory is happy but thinking about her too long brings pain. It always ends up hurting.

Rosie wantd one of those junkie costumes that used to be sold in big box stores like Target with a crappy mask of Strawberry Shortcake and an even crappier dress made out of fabric made of toxic-laden fabric that itched.  In 1984, you could buy a crap costume like that for four or five bucks.

My mom had forbidden all her children from ever buying store bought costumes and I had internalized the practice. No way my kid was going to wear a costume-in-a-box, a cheap junk costume from Target.

One year she was Carmen Miranda. I sewed a bunch of plastic fruit on a headscarf stitch to form a hat with fruit on top. She wore a weird outfit my sister had given her as serious clothing to wear in life. It was way too big for her, for one thing. The top was slanted so some of the middriff would show if it had fit my toddler but being too big, it was modest. And the skirt was ruffled and rose up from ankle length to floor length. And garish fabric. It was a perfect college-age-auntie gift but too big for Rosie to wear as clothes. And it was PERFECT for Carmen Miranda. Rosie had no idea who Carmen Miranda was but she loved the swirly, ruffled dress, the make up that I laid on thick and she was happy.

The year she wanted to be Strawberry Shortcake, I made her up to look like a punk rockstar, sorta AC/DC kind of rock and roller. I painted her face half black and half white, zig=zagging the colors. Her eyes was a white star on the black side and a black moon on the white side.  Then I put on an adult-sized white t-shirt, belted it and draped her with cheap chains that you could buy by the yard at real hardware stores in those days. (I wonder if you can still buy chains by the yard?). And black tights.

It was an awesome costume, esp. on such a tiny creature with a squeaky voice. And she thought she was Strawberry Shortcake.

At the Halloween party, many would lean down and ask the adorable little girl "What are you supposed to be?"  She looked like a punk rocker, I assure you. She would squeakily chirp "I am Strawberry Shortcake."

After the party, which included some food, I stopped at a restaurant to buy her a real dinner. Mostly I stopped for dinner to prolong her fun being in costume, hearing everyone that passed us tell her she looked fantastic and asking her who she was. Over and over, she chirpily squeaked "I am Strawberry Shortcake."

Everytime my little punk rocker said, believing what she said "I am Strawberry Shortcake" I was very happy.  I loved her singleminded love of Strawberry and I loved my own cleverness, the clever costume and my good parenting. I had to be a pretty decent parent if my kid, painted like AC/DC instead of Strawberry Shortcake lived in her happy imagination all evening as SS.

Man that was a good time. Gosh I love her and miss her.

I'm Nobody, Who are You? -- ED

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

This is one of Emily Dickinson's most popular poems.
I most def am nobody.  Hush.

feeling bliss as my day begins, Aristotle, billy collins

color me blissful

I am not very adept on this ipad so I suggest anyone reading this post google Emily Dickinson on poems about happiness. She wrote many. I appreciate her work more and more. and there is always Billy Collins, former national poet laureate:

On Aristotle by Billy -- not quite happiness but reading and typing this poem is happiness for me. Hat tip the former friend who gifted me the book of Billy Collins poems I am typing from. I have since bought other Collins' work but treasure this one because I treasure my lost friend.

On Aristotle

This is the beginning
Almost anything can happen
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page,
Think of an egg, or the letter 'A;
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises
This is the very beginning
The first person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks
This is early ion, years before the Ark, dawn,
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the all of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl,
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her,
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers

teaming with people at cross purposes
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment  unshoulders  his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals
where the actions suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edwards child
Someone hides a letter under a pillow
Here the aria  arises to a pitch
a song of betrayal salted with revenge
and the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain
This is the bridge, the painful modulations
this is the thick of things
so much is crowded into the middle
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados
Russian uniforms, noisy parties
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through walls
too much to name too much to think about

And this is the end
the car running out of road
the river losing its name in an ocean
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electric line
this is the colophon, the last elephant  in the parade,
the empty wheelchair
and pigeons floating down in the evening
and the stage is littered with bodies,

the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book,
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck,
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining
a streak of light in the sky
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves


thanks Marc. I love you, I love this long-ago gift from you and I like aristotle.

if your nerve deny you

If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve—
He can lean against the Grave,
If he fear to swerve—

That's a steady posture—
Never any bend
Held of those Brass arms—
Best Giant made—

If your Soul seesaw—
Lift the Flesh door—
The Poltroon wants Oxygen—
Nothing more—

  -Emily Dickinson

I usually get Emily's poems instantly. This one challenges me. I get the first two lines, even the first . . . .hmmm, now I get it. "If you Soul seasaw --- Lift the flesh door"  I get it.

My nerve has denied me but will no more.

Gone girl: my daughter's coming out DRAFT more to come

I don't believe it is homophobic to state that Northhampton, MA has a large lesbian community. Many in Western Massaschusetts attribute Northhampton's large lesbian community to Smith's presence in the town. All female colleges do seem to attract not just some lesbians but what some lesbian friends from the Berkshires once suggested to me were "college lesbians', suggesting many Smith students have gay relationships at college and then go on to marry barons of industry, captains of finance and any monied man they can get their hands on. This is an unfair characterization of Smith. It's a very  good college. Not all the students come from the monied elite, although only the elite attended Smith in the old days.

Kitty corner from the main gate entrance to Smith there is, or used to be, an inexpensive pasta bistro.  I had never eaten pasta in a restaurant before but I became a regular there, hooked by the decadent, creamy and cheap pasta. With a salad, of course.  I discovered this place because of my daughter.

Rosie had dropped out of h.s. after her sophomore year at  prep school and started college at Simon's Rock College of Bard,  which is now wholly integrated into Bard. Simon's Rock was this nation's first early college, awarding two year and four year degrees.  It's a college for smart teens who are bored in high school.

Rosie wasn't exactly bored in high school. Her prep school was demanding and rigorous, which she seemed to like. It was the social atmosphere that motivated me to let her leave home, away from  me, two years early. Her prep school was mostly newly rich families. Lots of tackiness about fashion, status, size of parents' homes. There was also a lot of sex.  A Waldorf parent friend had gone to Rosie's prep school. This friend told me that many of the kids in her class started having sex in the eighth grade. 

Rosie and I had an agreement, forged when she was, maybe, twelve. I promised her that whenever she decided to have sex, I would help her get birth control without trying to talk her out of having sex. I swore, over and over, that I would not judge her decision, that I would simply take her to a doctor for birth control.   I don't know when she started having sex but when she did, she did not come to me. She didn't have to. Because of some health issues, Rosie was put on birth control pills to get her periods better regulated.    Of course, once she got to college at age sixteen, the college infirmary  and her student health insurance covered birth control.

Rosie told me after her first party, once she had started high school and after the sheltered environment of a Waldorf School, that a couple had sex on the floor in front of all the other kids at the party.  I don't know if she had sex in high school.  It wasn't sex that motivated me to get her out of that. It was the unpleasant, elitist arrogance of most of the kids. And the parents. Rosie was constantly subjected to comments about her clothing. Boys would tell her that her clothes looked like they came from a department store and she really should shop in more unique boutiques. If the boys were saying that, what the heck did the girls say, or, maybe, think of Rosie's clothing?

At Simon's Rock, because the students are mostly 15, 16 and 17, they require the students to go home mid-semester for a week, to get some parental bonding.  I was living in Amherst MA at the time, a two hour drive from the Rock. I picked Rosie up for her first required-to-leave-dorm school break and suggested we stop in Northhampton for dinner.

First, we walked up and down all the downtown streets of Northhampton, with Katie reading all the posted restaurant menus before deciding where she would eat. Her anorexia was full blown then. Eating was always a painfully conflicted experience.

I am still surprised she chose that pasta joint. I can't believe she actually ate pasta. They must have had salads. Maybe salmon. My little anorexic did not eat pasta, not until she was in a bulimia phase of her eating disorder.

I was glad to have discovered the place. After Rosie returned to college, I went to the pasta place now and then. I was in grad school. I liked to study at the Northampton Public Library, a grand, old, wood-filled, elegant library, perhaps a Carnegie Library. The library was on the same block as the pasta place.

So I became a regular.  The pasta place had a hostess that was very obviously a lesbian, and just as obviously butch. She dressed mostly like a man, with a shirt and tie, fancy slacks.  She combed her hair into a blonde ducktail, very masculine. And I loved that ducktail.  This pasta place could get really busy. It had a full basement for diners as well as the tables on the street level. I thought she directed the traffic of a busy, cramped restaurant masterfully and once I had told her so as she seated me. After that, this hostess and I limited our communication to smiles and nods, maybe a hello but we both knew I had become a regular. And I liked that.

The next time Rose had to come home, and she would not have come to stay with me unless forced off campus by the college rules, we stopped for dinner at the same pasta joint. It was a relief not to have to slowly wend our way around town, closely scrutinizing every single menu.  Rosie was very rigid about food. Once she had chosen her Northhampton restaurant, that was it. No need for further exploration.  It was the only place in Northhampton that she would eat.

The second time I went to the pasta joint with Rosie, we were seated downstairs. With candlelight. The tables were so close together that the hostess had to pull the tables out for people to sit along the wall and pull them out again when patrons wanted to leave. The tables were so close together that people on either side of us could hear everything people on either side of them said.  I am pretty sure the women about my age, which was mid-forties, heard my conversation with Rosie that evening.

First we had to get past the dangerous passage of ordering dinner. She started out by snappishly reminding me not to make any suggestions. When she had first gotten sick, I might have suggested she try the salad. Or other suggestions. Rosie heard anything I said about food as judging her illness and her. She also forbid me from discussing the menu options for myself. "Just order when the waitress comes to take our order and let me go first so I don't know what you are having when I order."

Okay. I had learned, through many painfully shared meals, that food was a tense, anxiety-inducing experience between us. I could do nothing right when we ate together.  I ordered bad things. I ate too fast. I ate too slow.  I believed meals were so fraught between us because mommies feed their babies, because food is an integral part of a mother's bond with her child.  I suggested this once to an anorexic in my graduate program. This gal had had lots of treatment. She was going to be hospitalized after our weekend class was over, actually. She was quite surprised to hear my theory but once she had cooled down, she said I was right. She went on to tell me that out of all her relationships, and she was married, the only person she had food tension with was her mom. I said "I bet you were breast fed, too, right?" She nodded and seemed relieved to have an answer for one aspect of her illness.

We ordered without discussing our choices. When the waitress stepped away to place our order in the kitchen, Rose told me she had something serious to discuss.

I had ordered a beer. I have never been much of a drinker. I think, perhaps, I ordered that first beer because the beer came in a tall, frozen flute. I had seen them being served many times. Rosie asked if she could have some of my beer and I said yes, having no delusion that she was not drinking beer at college.  "Just be discreet. It is against the law for me or this restaurant to serve you beer."  She only took one sip. I think the request was about showing me she had grown up.

Once my beer was delivered, I took a big thirsty gulp. One of the benefits of drinking very little is that when you do drink, you really savor it. At least I do.

When I had almost finished my large, icy cold beer, Rose told me her big announcement.

"Mom," she said, "I am gay."

I saw one woman seated to the right of me quickly glance over at Rosie and me. I am sure she heard the announcement. I am also sure she and her dinner partner, another woman, probably two moms, stopped talking and listened to my daughter's coming out scene.

Then Rosie, who had told me a thousand times throughout her childhood and teen years that she was sure I was gay since I never dated men, said "And now that I am gay, you can't be gay."

The parties on either side of us heard that. I saw those people suppressing laughter.

I thought, but did not say, that Rosie thought she was acting very grown up but forbidding me to be gay now that she was gay suggested to me that she was full of false bravado that evening. Her angry declaration that I could not be gay now that she was seemed like a kind of tantrum. And it felt like she wanted to hurt me with both her declarations.

I gulped the rest of my beer and gestured to the masterful hostess to order another. To my surprise, the hostess, who I think may have also heard my daughter announce she was gay, said "Will you let me buy you a beer?"  If she had heard, she probably figured I needed another drink under the circumstances.  I liked that solidarity, if that was what motivated the hostess to buy me a beer.

I know hostesses have leeway to comp customers, especially regulars, a drink or a dessert here and there. That offer of a free beer might have just been coincidence.

That offer of a free beer from a bullish dyke, made instantly after my daughter had just told me "now that I am gay, you can't be gay" made me laugh, of course.  Rosie kicked me under the table.

"Rosie, I'm not gay but if I were, you being gay would have nothing to do with my gender identity."

I was a bit tipsy from just the one beer because I so rarely drank alcohol. And they were big glasses. And then I gulped down the second one, bought for me by my lesbian hostess pal.

Rosie kicked my leg under the table again when I accepted that free beer.  I believe she was angry that I accepted.  Rosie thought the hostess was flirting with me, ruining her insistence that now that Rosie was gay, I couldn't be. She kicked me again as she said "If you laugh right now, mom, I'm going to kill you."

"I can't help it, honey," I said through laughter.  "The timing of that woman's offer to buy me a drink is funny. Come on. Lighten up.  I'm not upset that you are gay."

On either side of us, two women were having dinner together. None of them seemed gay but it was Northhampton. Who knows? All four of those women heard the whole thing and did their best to not laugh about the obviously gay hostess offering to buy me a beer right after my daughter had come out to me. I wonder if the hostess had heard Rosie's coming out announcement and had bought me a beer to be supportive.

Now I wonder if my not being upset over her announcement was why she was in such a snit, being so unpleasant. She had loved telling me she was gay. It had not been hard for her.  I also wonder, in hindsight, if part of the reason my daughter was a lesbian for just a few months her first year in college, for she soon went back to hot boys, was to provoke me.  I have had other parents tell me that one of the ways teens revolt nowadays is they have same gender affairs, a way to unsettle the folks and their circle of friends.  Rosie used to get angry with me because I didn't argue with her, would always insist on waiting until our anger had passed before we talked about the inevitable conflicts of teenage girl and her mom.  She would pound on my bedroom door, demanding I come out at 1 a.m. and fight with her. It pissed her off that I insisted on waiting until morning, when we had slept on it.

Rosie's friends at college were angry about her lesbian fling with Anna. Many kids told her, repeatedly, that she was just being a lesbian because at Simon's Rock, anything goes. She was just being gay, they said, because the place was so free and open.

I didn't think Rosie was gay.  I had considered it. My best friend while she grew up was a lesbian. That friend had always insisted she could tell Katie was gay.  I still don't think my disbelief that my daughter was a lesbian was because of homophobia.  I was ready to accept a gay daughter. I just didn't think Rosie was gay.

So I said that at the restaurant.  I said "I accept you however you choose to show up in the world, honest I do, but I don't think you are gay."

"What do you mean you don't think I am gay?  I just told you I am."

"I think this is a phase, perhaps a rebellious gesture. I've watched you for sixteen years, seen you in all kinds of situations. I know you. My deep instinct is that you aren't gay."

"Mom," she said as sneeringly as she could muster, "I'm here, I'm queer, get over it."

"I'm sorry, honey, but I know you pretty well. And you have grown up surrounded by gay people so you know I am not homophobic. I don't think you are gay and I am sorry if my belief upsets you."  She kicked me again and sneered "Don't make fun of me." I dropped my position and tucked into my dinner.

Rosie and I had talked about gays all her life. My best brother, and her the only uncle out of many that ever showed up in her life, is gay.  When she was getting to school age, I thought I should give her some exposure to spirituality. We church shopped for a couple years. My criteria was we had to go to a church that would accept Uncle Dave. The last time I ever went to a Catholic service was when the priest, during the sermon, said "If anyone in this church right now doesn't think homosexuality is a sin, you aren't a Catholic, you are a sinner and you should leave."  Fortunately, Rosie and I were seated close to the front, because she was very little, maybe three or four and smack dab in the middle of a long center row. I was pleased to jump up and crawl over about twenty people, dragging my dolly, making a noisy spectacle as a gay-loving sinner. And I was glad that happened, glad I could make that dramatic departure.

Rosie and I spent a lot of time with my gay baby bro and his partner of twenty years. She loved both of them. My brother, Dave, wasn't exactly in the closet. He lived with Tom and had since he was 19, years before Katie was born. And they were both very effeminate. Tom has now passed,  but not from AIDS. Once, Dave and Rosie went to an video store to rent a couple movies for her visit. Dave told the cashier that he shared a membership with her roommate. Katie, about age ten, said loudly at the register, "Uncle Dave! Tom is your partner. He's not your roommate. Call him your partner." And Dave did ever after that.  He realized he had been semi-closeted. After that, he came out at work, which was probably unnecessary. He is a hairdresser. And he thanked Rosie over and over for teaching her to call his lover his partner, not his roommate.  Some of that conservativism was probably Tom, who was a lot older than Dave.

Rosie knew that it was a top priority for me that she accept gays and people of other races and ethnicities.  And I did try to be a lesbian. For years, my best friend was a PhD psychologist and lesbian named Joni. Our entire social life revolved around Joni and her partner's life and friends. It was a circle of PhD's, me being a lightweight with my JD. These were women who had, for the most part, always been out, and women five or more years older than me. I concluded it took a lot of will and a drive to self actualize for women of their age to have been out in college, or even high school. And they were all so smart. I wanted to be a lesbian because I was too damaged from my marriage to be with a man. Rosie came to know some of this as she grew up, not when she was little.  She knew I wanted to be a lesbian.

Then one day, Marti, Joni's other best friend and also a lesbian, said to me "If you are going to be a lesbian, you have to have sex with a woman. You can't just hang out with us and pretend."  Marti wasn't kicking me out of the club. She probably was trying to encourage me to come out. Her words, however, frightened me. I didn't want to have sex with a woman. I just wanted to hang out with brilliant, well educated and empowered women. I left that social circle, lost Joni.  And Rosie knew about these things. It was during the years I refer to as 'my lesbian years' that Rosie started haranguing me, telling me I was gay and should just accept it.

There was also an incident when Rosie was about fourteen. In a contact improv dance class, she really loved the instructor, an adult member of the dance company in her late twenties. Once Rosie had told me, after a contact improve class, Rosie remarked that she was very attracted to the adult instructor. Then she said she meant she really liked doing contact improv with her, that her attraction was not romantic. And I said "Rosie, if you are a lesbian, that's okay by me. It is not okay for a fourteen year old to date a twenty eight year old. So if you have a crush on this dancer, forget it. Not gonna happen. You cannot date adults at age fourteen, male or female."

In that pasta restaurant across from Smith, hearing my sixteen year old come out while a little boozie was actually somewhat pleasant and funny.  Keep in mind that Rosie had been with a girl for only two weeks when she came out to me, an indication of how close we were.  What a conversation to have while having my first, and large, beer in years. Then a second one. Since I drink so little, a single beer gets me tipsy. That second beer left me drunk. And silly. And happy.

I was happy Rosie was home for a week. I was always happy when I was with her. The mother in me lit up like Christmas lights whenever Rosie was within my sight. So I happily dropped my comments indicating I did not believe she was gay.

This exchange took place at Thanksgiving time. Add Xmas in New Mexico story here.  In January, she and Anna broke up, Rosie went back to boys and she's been with boys, then men, ever since.

The following semester, when Rosie had to come home for a week, had to get out of the dorms, she came home with Rob. Rosie, Rob and I went to that same pasta joint. The hostess greeted me warmly. Rosie poked me, rolling her eyes at the same time.  That poke and eye roll was to warn me not to flirt with the hostess. As if.  Rob knew about her gay fling. On a tiny campus with only 300 students, everyone knows everyone's business.  When Rosie had first moved into the dorm, a cartoon was published in the campus newspaper showing a thought bubble over the freshman boys dorm. The thought bubble said "Rosie". The cartoon implied all the freshmen boys thought Rosie was hot. They did. So did some of the girls.

I liked Rob. Over that dinner, right in front of me, he told Katie that she treated me unkindly and it hurt him to see it. Man, I liked Rob. It damned near broke my heart when they broke up. It also damned near broke hers.  I remember suppressing an urge, when Rob broke up with her, to say "Honey, boys or girls are like the bus downtown. There's another one in twenty minutes."