tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3108561593152900742024-03-13T14:42:40.921-04:00Half A Loaf of Bread<b>Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.<br>I will meet you there.</b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-7248380981229676882019-10-20T11:31:00.000-04:002019-10-20T12:01:51.855-04:00One.hundred. (2010)Alex is taking a finance class. And although finance sounds about as boring to me as watching paint dry (which actually, would be more interesting...), he has a fantastic extra credit assignment, which goes something like this: make a list of 100 things you hope to accomplish before you die. When he told me about the assignment, I immediately exclaimed "Oh! I want to do that too!" Today seems a good day to do this. We went to a funeral of a dear family friend, someone who seemed to embrace doing what he loved to do. And so there is his fingerprint on this list. It just seems fitting. In no particular order:<br />
<br />
1. Go to India. I have wanted to go to India since my freshman year of college, when I took a seminar on Indian Civilization. My friend Jenny performed mudras in class. She went to India and brought me back a scarf with bangles. I still wear it today.<br />
<br />
2. Reread all of Vonnegut's novels.<br />
<br />
3. Go on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela with Alex, my favorite hiking companion. I am fascinated by pilgrimage in general. It is what I will do for my sabbatical in two years.<br />
<br />
4. Learn how to make turducken. Because, why not?<br />
<br />
5. Start painting again.<br />
<br />
6. Go on a yoga retreat.<br />
<br />
7. Finish my dissertation.<br />
<br />
8. Reacquaint myself with Italian, well enough to reread Dante and Petrarch and Boccacio.<br />
<br />
9. Learn how to play my ukulele.<br />
<br />
10. Make quince jam. I have a quince tree. I should make preserves from the fruit. It seems only right.<br />
<br />
11. Take my niece to New York and show her the Met and The Cloisters. Take her to a Broadway play, and to Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate.<br />
<br />
12. Read all of Aldous Huxley. I haven't. But I have them all. So that's a good start.<br />
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13. Go to Petra. And Cappadocia. And anywhere else I can visit monasteries carved from rock. <br />
<br />
14. Remember to screw the caps on things and shut the cabinets and so on...this seems like a no-brainer. For me, not so much.<br />
<br />
15. Learn how to make all of my mother-in-law's Austrian meals. So that I can make them for our children. And our grandchildren.<br />
<br />
16. Which would require children. I would like a child. Just one is good.<br />
<br />
17. Keep in touch with old friends.<br />
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18. Keep in touch with former students.<br />
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19. Learn how to knit. Well. As in better than the kindergarten-looking, 8 foot long scarf that I made a couple of years ago.<br />
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20. If I have children, allow them to be children. And allow them to make mistakes. And not worry too much. And love being a child.<br />
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21. Learn German well enough to get by in Austria. And teach our children Alex's first language.<br />
<br />
22. Teach an art history course.<br />
<br />
23. Take a dance class again. <br />
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24. Go to Hawaii. My grandmother went there. She said it was her favorite place on earth.<br />
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25. Perfect my photography skills.<br />
<br />
26. Be better about taking my vitamins.<br />
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27. Not be so afraid of karaoke.<br />
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28. Write a poem for Gran.<br />
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29. Do something meaningful with my Native American heritage.<br />
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30. Learn how to make injera. Seriously.<br />
<br />
31. Write a book.<br />
<br />
32. Actually join a Lupus support group.<br />
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33. Learn to sort of enjoy ski culture. Maybe.<br />
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34. Go to as many dance performances as possible.<br />
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35. Vague, but start a foundation for something. I live in Baltimore, after all.<br />
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36. Go back to Tartine and have their salmon a few more times.<br />
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37. Design the perfect sock.<br />
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38. More dogs.<br />
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39. Run in the rain more. I love that.<br />
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40. Get better at directions. I have no sense of direction.<br />
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41. Read all of Jorge Amado's books again. Make a painting out of them.<br />
<br />
42. Learn to bake the perfect loaf of bread. Find someone to teach me this skill.<br />
<br />
43. Let go. Just let go.<br />
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44. Be authentic.<br />
<br />
45. When the wrinkles come, accept them as signs of a life well-lived.<br />
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46. But continue to wear sunscreen.<br />
<br />
47. Travel, travel travel. That is all.<br />
<br />
48. Take a year and live by the sea or the ocean. And write. Cherish every day of that year.<br />
<br />
49. Be the good when things are bad.<br />
<br />
50. Get better at framing pictures.<br />
<br />
51. Get better at hanging pictures.<br />
<br />
52. Just because I don't work in a museum anymore doesn't mean I shouldn't go to them. Museums need love.<br />
<br />
53. Get over the things I will never be. Celebrate the things I am.<br />
<br />
54. Come to terms with winter.<br />
<br />
55. Save the seeds. Share them. Keep things generative.<br />
<br />
56. Discover an appreciation for the rhododendron, because I currently do not have one.<br />
<br />
57. Never lose my love of a good porch.<br />
<br />
58. An act of love a day. Just do it.<br />
<br />
59. Make sure my students and future unknown potential child do it too.<br />
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60. Always write cards.<br />
<br />
61. Slow down.<br />
<br />
62. Continue to wear my heart on my sleeve.<br />
<br />
63. Add a protective layer of Teflon to that heart.<br />
<br />
64. Sit in silence daily.<br />
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65. Continued wonder.<br />
<br />
66. Embrace my introvertedness. It's okay to be this way.<br />
<br />
67. And don't let it get in the way of living.<br />
<br />
68. Thank Mom and Dad for everything. So much everything.<br />
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69. Bonsai? I always wanted to do bonsai, but does it hurt the tree?<br />
<br />
70. In 2025, go to West Point for role call. I promised Gran I would.<br />
<br />
71. Keep my promises.<br />
<br />
72. Make sure future unknown potential child loves to read as much as I do.<br />
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73. Relearn the birdsongs.<br />
<br />
74. Speaking of birds, find a cool picture of a pelican.<br />
<br />
75. Hear Thich Nhat Hanh in person.<br />
<br />
76. Go to a Joni Mitchell concert (does she still perform?)<br />
<br />
77. Do the little things that make others' lives better.<br />
<br />
78. Perfect my malfatti-making. It's almost there.<br />
<br />
79. Always forgive.<br />
<br />
80. Don't become angry.<br />
<br />
81. Don't be a victim to someone else's anger again.<br />
<br />
82. Accomplish the thing you didn't imagine you would.<br />
<br />
83. Maintain imagination.<br />
<br />
84. With future unknown potential child, foster imagination.<br />
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85. And may that imagination be used to better some pocket of the world.<br />
<br />
86. Be the yin to Alex's yang.<br />
<br />
87. Sing more. I'm not half bad.<br />
<br />
88. Go back to Calvert Cliffs.<br />
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89. Always take stock of what matters.<br />
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90. Never let time or busyness prevent me from being appreciative.<br />
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91. Stop losing things.<br />
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92. Bring love wherever it is needed or wanted.<br />
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93. Sardinia because why not?<br />
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94. Portugal because why not?<br />
<br />
95. A new set of pastels because Granddad would be proud to see me sketching and creating again.<br />
<br />
96. Let the light in.<br />
<br />
97. Keep the cold - temperature-wise and personality-wise - out.<br />
<br />
98. Give more than you get.<br />
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99. Always acknowledge grace in others (inner and outer).<br />
<br />
100. Let what survives of me be love.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-54868309476360108012019-10-19T11:19:00.000-04:002019-10-19T11:19:48.039-04:00Eighteen Months (December 2012)On Thursday, he turned eighteen months old. That morning, I gathered him in my arms and he gathered me in his, and to mark the occasion, we blew bubbles in his bedroom. He sat Buddha-style in my lap: "Bubble? Bubble? Bubble!" he exclaimed, and he smiled, all magic, all-knowing, all little boy. All of a sudden.<br />
<br />
I brought him into the bathroom with me while I showered so that the hot steam could loosen his winter's cough. He lined up the bottles of lotion and bubble bath, counting them " Three, three, THREE!", moving them from one area of the gray tiled floor to another. "Three!" He pokes his head around the corner of the shower curtain. "Hiiiiiiiiii," his sing-song voice cutting through the steam as a beam of light.<br />
<br />
In the evening, after work and play, and a greeting from the neighborhood kitten, I put him in his "grandpa" flannel pajamas, buried my face in his neck, and said goodnight before leaving to meet a friend. He cries when I leave sometimes - real tears, the kind that taste like innocence, loss and love all at once. But in the moment of my leaving, he was busy at play with his daddy, bouncing yo-yo fashion on the couch, his flyaway hair full of static and boyish rebellion.<br />
<br />
On Friday, before he awoke, I read three Emily Rapp pieces, and wept bitterly that her son has to die so soon. I drank my coffee by the Christmas tree, and watched him sleep on the monitor, his little bottom in the air.<br />
<br />
Eighteen months can be measured and not. Before we know it, he will be "Three, three, THREE!" and our hearts will expand in tandem. May he count his days of innocence, and may we treasure them too.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-19522862810565477772019-10-19T11:09:00.000-04:002019-10-20T12:52:18.469-04:00Six bowling balls are in the trunk (2009)Today I took a cab home from work. I had groceries. Lots of them. It was steamy piping hot and I had purchased vast quantities of aloe juice. Because, you know, I was thirsty. My work bag, I will freely admit, is vaguely Mary Poppins-ish in its size, but more so in the amount of things I manage to cram into it, which today included my laptop, a textbook, my planner, the school directory, two bottles of mineral water, a granola bar and one very sad apple, one bottle of coconut water, a stack of 70 student files that I brought home to read, random pens that work and don't work, and six highlighters. Oh - and a bottle of wine from a dear friend.<br />
<br />
So I decided to cab it. When the driver arrived some minutes later, I didn't recognize him at first. Some people probably don't care about who drives them, or their lives. Some people want silence. I get that. A cab can be a meditative pause when one can exhale and not expect the person driving the car to say testily, "What's up with you? Why are you sighing?" It's a gift of time for many, and that makes sense.<br />
<br />
I wrote previously about my love of a good cab, and the stories collected through conversation and fellowship. It's kind of like an internal version of Humans of New York, without the artsy photography, the recording of a person's experience, and the posting on Facebook. The post-it note memory instead is stuck to my heart as a really neat experience with an equally inspiring soul. Cab conversations keep me going.<br />
<br />
So today, with my groceries and my aloe juice and highlighters, and those blasted ringlets that refuse to conform to my ponytail tickling my neck, I may have said something along the lines of "BLESS YOUR APPEARANCE AT THIS VERY MOMENT." It was an all-caps declaration. And then I realized in all that I was carrying, I didn't recognize Babu. He'd grown some facial hair. He too was hot. And tired. In that way that Babu has though, he said "Aww Paige, what has you down?"<br />
<br />
Sometimes shame creeps along slowly, that snail that glides dolefully up one's neck. Other times, it hits one like a Mack Truck. Shame on you, Paige! He's hot, too! He's got things he's carrying! And you don't know a quarter of it! I did know that Babu has been trying to get his family to the States. They live in Nigeria: a wife, a son, two daughters. He misses birthdays and milestones. He misses the first lost tooth, the first day of school, his wife's cooking. "No matter," he shared with me one day. "We will find our way back to one another somehow, and when it is right."<br />
<br />
Patience of Job, I say. And then some.<br />
<br />
Today, Babu saw my impressive load and panic danced across his face. I think I witnessed at least five expressions in about ten seconds. "Ummmm...." he said, rubbing the new addition of the goatee. "The thing is Paige, six bowling balls are in the trunk."<br />
<br />
I love it when people make statements of this sort, because they could easily be the beginning of a story. Sometimes, such declarations are stories without further embellishment. "Six bowling balls are in the trunk" is a terrific example of the mundane and the absurd, bound into one.<br />
<br />
"Babu," I said. "I didn't know you bowled." At this point, I'm pretty sure the pineapple popsicles I purchased had melted.<br />
<br />
"Oh I don't," he said.<br />
<br />
"A friend bought them off of Craigslist and I picked them up for him. But he lives in Pennsylvania, and we were supposed to meet but he was deported so I just have them in my trunk now. They are just so big. I don't want them in my apartment."<br />
<br />
Full stop. Unaware of frozen goods that were no longer frozen. Unaware of the bead of sweat trickling down the back of my neck. Completely oblivious to the Mary Poppins bag and its weight.<br />
<br />
The weight of six bowling balls that Babu carried, in his car, unsure of where, when, or how to put them down. The weight of his friend recently deported, who apparently loves bowling. The weight of the car driving these bowling balls as passengers to so many destinations, none of which were theirs. Six bowling balls that had a life before they found their way to Babu's trunk. Six bowling balls that now spoke to Babu of the burden of loss and responsibility to a friend and carrying what is yours and what is not. That's a lot of weight.<br />
<br />
And it also meant that Babu was paying more for gas, his trunk was full, and the back of his car sort of sagged in resignation.<br />
<br />
We piled my bags next to me in the backseat of the cab. We talked about bowling and how heavy bowling balls are. We talked about the heat and how oppressive it was. We talked about air fresheners in cars, and how he can't find he likes.<br />
<br />
When I said goodbye to Babu, I suggested that maybe he try to sell the bowling balls on Craigslist. He shook his head, rubbed his chin with his left hand and said, "Maybe he'll come back."<br />
<br />
Maybe he'll come back.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-71770755947442570052019-10-19T08:16:00.001-04:002019-10-20T11:56:22.258-04:00Smile breathe and go slowly (2010)<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Yesterday I returned from three weeks in New England, two of which were spent in Maine's Acadia National Park. Today in Maryland it is 102 degrees, and if I so much as blink, I perspire. This is saying something coming from someone who would happily spend her life in tank tops and bare feet. When we left Maine, it was 75 degrees and the air smelled like that wonderful combination of pine needles and ocean. I cried. Several times. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Upon visiting Acadia, a Brit once quipped with a rueful sigh, "I do wish we had fought harder to keep it." The meaning of this statement was not lost on me as we celebrated the 4th of July last evening. Maine is home to me in ways that are inexplicable. I didn't grow up going there as a child. I don't have any relatives living there. I can't claim to have visited dozens of times. But it tugs at my heart and the moment I leave I am mentally putting away part of my paycheck so that I can return next summer. As I unpacked today, I assembled cairns around our house from the stones that Alex and I collected while we were hiking - an odd homage to wayfinding perhaps, but also an important visual reminder to continue navigating my life with the simplicity that can sometimes elude one on a day-to-day basis. </span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And this is what I love about my time in Maine. It all starts with how you frame your view. Our view, waking up each morning, was of the harbor. If anyone has had the gift of waking up to a sunrise, and not just noting it and moving on but sitting in the sunrise, well they're on to something. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The scent of pine and ocean cannot be successfully bottled. It can't and it shouldn't be. What one can do is sit in the moment of sensory bliss. And share it with someone. Because someone else deserves this too, always.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">A meal can stretch for hours or minutes. At home, meals are fuel more often than they are sharing a memory. Maine offers the latter. Maine offers shoulders to assume their rightful place (not hunched under the ears in bodily protest).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Mornings are my favorite time of day. And they go slowly. As the arc of sun slips into view, and I am up alone, sipping tea and watching, minutes are pearls. They hold one in quiet reverie: "Sip this up. Sip it slowly. Let it work its way into your heart. Breathe it in."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Breathe it in. </span><br />
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</span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-27051687281419144452014-02-15T20:29:00.001-05:002019-10-19T08:21:17.769-04:00Aria for K 2.15.14<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">2.15.14</span><br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><br /></span>
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">Funeral Blues (Song IX / from Two Songs for Hedli Anderson)<br /> W.H. Auden<br /> <i><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,<br /> Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.<br /> Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;<br /> For nothing now can ever come to any good.</span></i></span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">A Sarah Lawrence classmate gently crossed over yesterday - on a day that celebrates love in all its various forms, and the very day that marked the second date she had with her husband. Reading his words this morning - words wrought of tenderness, respect, and piercing loss -I heaved and sighed. And I am stilled. During a season of endless and unforgiving snow that blankets not just my beloved and so very missed greenness, but also any promise of warmth to come, the words hang suspended - icicles that refuse to melt.</span></span><br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /></span></span>
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">I didn't know K. all that well...I knew the cadence of her Italian from our Italian class together, and the slight envy I had that she, with her equally transcendent voice, made the language ever more beautiful. I recall her raucous laughter, which rang down the hill to Bates (our dining hall) - a bell that jolted you into LIFE. She walked with confidence and her smile made you fall in love with her spirit. She was never lacking for admirers. She never seemed to know how <i>not</i> to love.</span></span><br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /></span></span>
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">An insidious cancer claimed her life, but not her spirit. She tackled her cancer with gusto, grit, and a healthy dose of anger, confronting the "what ifs" with a candor that gripped my heart. In one post, she mentioned getting all of her kids' spring clothing ready and labeled for her husband. I thought of one of my favorite films, Tampopo, which features a memorable vignette of a dying mother cooking one last meal for her family, and then dying while they ate it. I thought of my own paternal grandmother, who, while dying of liver cancer, filled freezers full of meals for my grandfather. I thought of saying goodbye to our beloved family friend this time last year (he loved old maps with the same peculiar passion that I do), and as my tears spilled into the glass of water brought to me at his bidding, he took my hand in his, gently and firmly, and HE said goodbye. He offered me grace. And I thought, not for the first time that this is how the dying say goodbye - often with much more grace than those they leave behind. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">As I watched K.'s facebook posts decrease, I began the internal process of saying goodbye to another kindred soul whose ebullience helped me from afar more than I realized. Until now. And with it, I am saying goodbye to something about my time at Sarah Lawrence too. We think we are invincible, most of us. We look to that august time traipsing up and down SLC walkways as pure, unchangeable, perfection in four years. At least I have. K. represents this chapter of innocence and freedom in the purest of forms because, by all accounts, she remained that unchanged through adulthood - with a boisterous and unbridled laugh, with a steely will, and with a love for this gift we so often squander: Life.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">It is hard to recognize that we say goodbye to innocence in so many ways long after we leave childhood behind. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">And until the days stretch a little longer...until the crocus peeps its head through the thaw...until that smell of spring wafts through a cracked window...until our hearts feel a little less heavy, Auden has it right. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show">Because sometimes, we just don't know what else to do. </span></span><br />
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<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-14602340391304769922014-02-08T07:41:00.001-05:002019-10-19T08:26:18.243-04:00Nietzsche Has a Point<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>"We love life not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving."</b></div>
<br />
Yesterday was a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day." It just was.<br />
<br />
And I know that it could be exponentially worse (having read this morning of a poet executed for writing. Writing.), so why is it that nearly every interaction, emotion, movement etc...felt like sandpaper rubbing me to the point of complete and utter vulnerability? With each interaction that left me feeling raw, I kept returning to the inside - the part that feels tender, not raw. And I said to myself, "find the love in this." The vulnerability: perhaps I choose to feel. I think that makes sense. My armor is paper thin, which is surprising given some chapters in my life. Perhaps my defense, so to speak, is to find the love. I proffer it in spades; I look for it in equal measure. In the sage words of Nietzsche, I am used to loving, above all else.<br />
<br />
Find the love when a student stumbles in ways I have no salve to offer.<br />
<br />
Find the love when I am in a meeting and a litany of anger is directed at me, because even if I haven't caused the anger, I am the person who hears it and hopefully helps to find solutions.<br />
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Find the love when after a day that felt like one hundred days (in a Groundhog Day sort of way), a sweet and sensitive toddler has an extended temper tantrum for which I have no response, save a fumbled request for ten minutes to collect myself, and find the love for this moment with him.<br />
<br />
Ten Minutes.<br />
<br />
We are told to love ourselves. We tell ourselves to love who we are, warts and all. Being "used to loving" entails the personal loving of people, things, moments that no one else embraces. I tell others this. I grapple with how to give this to myself. I fail fantastically in successfully and lovingly articulating my need for ten minutes: a "Please Pass Go" freebie for behaving like my very own toddler. I struggle mightily - fitfully, even - to recognize that when I ask for my Ten Minutes, I have passed the point of doing so productively, respectfully, lovingly. I struggle because the heart on my sleeve, which cries out "LOVE," sobs in turn... due to my own shortcomings in that department. <br />
<br />
Yesterday is in the tender past. The Ten Minutes have been filed away, to be replaced with a beautiful and serene morning, with birds leaping from branch to branch chirping in joyful anticipation of spring, with a good cup of tea, with the same toddler who gave Maria Callas a run for her money yesterday. Today, he is back to living love. He has returned to the reflexive act of burying his sweet head of curls and innocence into the crook of my neck, washing clean the spoiled goods of yesterday. I remind myself that it is easier to love than to, out of that defensive mechanism that kicks into high gear, not. That makes me love life, in the crystallized moments that offer a romantic wonder at this great world and all of the singular people who populate mine.There is a lot in life to love, and the bad days remind us of the importance that lies in the loving. <br />
<br />
So on a pristine, pure morning, be USED to loving. Make it the norm, not the exception. Breathe it in and out....and when the inevitable stumble happens, begin the breathing anew. Salvation lies in loving, and while at times, my own personal fog obfuscates loving WELL, I have to hope that the loving is our lighthouse. And as we breath in and out, with diffuse beams and a singular spotlight that says, "Yes! This one moment is all for the heart!", each moment is a beacon.<br />
<br />
<div id="r1PostCPBlock" style="background-color: white; border: medium none; color: black; left: -99999px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">
<span class="bqQuoteLink"><a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/friedrichn103522.html" title="view quote">We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.</a></span><br />
Read more at <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_love.html#VvosaV83xrdUY22J.99" style="color: #003399;">http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_love.html#VvosaV83xrdUY22J.99</a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-35718720063972098812013-12-24T09:19:00.000-05:002013-12-24T09:25:40.064-05:00Carrickfergus"But I'll spend my days in endless roaming; soft is the grass, my bed is free."<br />
-Carrickfergus <br />
<br />
I left the window next to my bed open last night, because it is unseasonably warm, and because I relish fresh air at all times, but there is something singularly pure about nighttime air. I woke this morning to the sound of rain, and just listened. It felt as though I imagine peace tastes. I love these unexpected moments of pause, and the feeling that for one brief breath, the world is doing a happy sigh. The holidays begin in earnest tomorrow, and I have a lot to do. So much to do that I shouldn't be taking this time to write, but I went to bed last night writing this and woke up writing it, and figured that I should take the hint, and WRITE. Write about what?<br />
<br />
Well, fortunately there are people in my life who have more focus than I, and whose focus both aids my vision (spiritually speaking) and sharpens my intentions. I was asked to reflect on my year - well, before the year ends - and since I have a week and change to do so, it makes more sense to reflect while I'm still IN it. As opposed to standing on the brink of new and old, and looking back over my shoulder to 2013 while anticipating the tabula rasa of 2014.<br />
<br />
The thing about New Year's (as in the holiday) is that I really don't like it so much. Part of it has to do with the fact that for me, staying up through midnight fills me with mild dread. I do not like staying up late and I love/need my sleep. Also: I dislike those little horn things that people blow when the clock strikes midnight.To my ears, that is not a joyous sound. But these are small, external protests that I recognize don't carry too much weight in the scheme of things. New Year's Eve challenges the introvert in me to move into another year with others, when in fact, I like the quiet contemplation of home and hearth much more.<br />
<br />
Additionally, we don't wake up the next day all that different, and I am a firm believer that renewal and resolutions can and should happen at any moment. The concept of time and how to mark its passage is a mystifying one to me, and I suppose the lot of us NEED a moment to mark change, to look for fresh hope in the flipping of a calendar. I get that. And some years are better than others - I think maybe what I am trying to do is look beyond the "better" and "worse" categories to the place of simple and happy acceptance. Acceptance is one of the many cornerstones of love. It is so much easier to accept and adjust the sails, reciting personal mantras of love than it is to fight gale winds thinking that we have any power over Nature - or others, for that matter. We don't. Nor should we. <br />
<br />
If I could summarize my year, it would be through the words of a friend of a dear friend: "It's up to each of us to practice love. Don't waste any of your breaths."<br />
<br />
Don't waste any of your breaths. In a year when death and illness have been waiting at every monthly flipping of the calendar, this message grabbed hold of my heart in the profoundest of ways. Watching a dear family friend struggling to breathe as we talked over his bowl of soup and I sat next to him holding his hand not wanting him to leave us, I thought about his labored breathing and wished for him that his last breaths would be sweet. Losing a student who chose to take her last breath, and watching our school community have our collective breath knocked out of us, without warning, without the armor to protect our hearts from the heaves and sighs that attend such loss. And so on, with others who left us too early, too suddenly, too painfully...learning through this that when we BREATHE, we have choice. Choice in how we love, how we forgive, how we greet and conclude each day. Choice in how our own breath speaks.<br />
<br />
2013 has held a whole lot of questioning in its palm, and with every question, a flurry fog of few answers. CHOICE felt burdensome to me at times, which is really not all that helpful to those around me, and in the end, robs me of the whole breathing in the moment thing that I so deeply cherish. It was in autumn that my own resolutions emerged like a gale force wind: BREATHE, Paige. Breathe and practice love simultaneously. It's not that I didn't do this before, but rather that I wanted to be more intentional and mindful of the love that I was putting out.<br />
<br />
John Green noted that "We tilt our lives to catch the wind." In May, I shared these words in a speech I gave about the gift of teaching. In June, our sweet magical son turned two and his relentless wonder at this magical world opened up like a Jack-in-the-Box, with so many words - his first "I love you"; his first "NO!"; his first "Why?" All of this LOVE shared so openly in a singsong voice, and with laughter in his beautiful eyes. 2013 has been a year of wonder.<br />
<br />
So this is what life is, year in and year out. For every loss, there is more to gain - whether it is in the way of a shifted perspective, a slowing of the breath, or new souls who join us in the breathing. It is how we adjust our sails to catch the breeze in ways that ensure that everyone around us knows the power of the love we proffer. It is in the practice of love, which YES, requires practice. And it is in choosing how we spend each breath, guarding them, not wasting them, and breathing out love as we go, remembering that seas will be wide, and endless roaming need not be lonely.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyx6HS83eAI">Carrickfergus</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-37762967965741997762013-11-10T20:25:00.000-05:002013-11-10T20:25:33.517-05:00On sunrooms and courtyards“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."”
<br />
<br />
<i>
</i><br />
-C.S. Lewis<br />
<br />
<i>
</i><br />
It is an early Sunday morning and my sweet son stands in his crib, asking for his Yizzy. "Where did she go?" "Where is she?" He repeats this earnestly, his nose pressed against mine, in hopes that if he asks enough times, she will magically appear. Two-year olds are good at never giving up on hope. They are also remarkably good at sussing out the innately good people from the not-so-good. <br />
<br />
<i>
</i><br />
Not to be deterred by his quest to find his Yizzy, he then suggests going "to the sunroom" - he is convinced she lives there (I mean, in all seriousness, who wouldn't?), and will often come downstairs in the morning, expecting to see her in the sunroom, where his toys are and his memories are made, and where the sun comes in just at the moment it is most needed. It's a pretty magical place. I assure him that we will see her at school, and he seems okay with that...until we drive home again in the evening: "Yizzy in the sunroom?" It is almost a daily occurrence. <br />
<br />
At school, all of the girls - my high school students - want his attention, which is equal parts endearing and also overwhelming for a little boy surrounded by so many big girls, all of whom know HIM, but few to which he can put a name to a face. He is slow to warm to most people (excepting one sophomore who was his first CRUSH and who had him at hello), but once you are firmly in his circle, you have his heart completely.<br />
<br />
And then there is Lizzy.<br />
<br />
Lizzy (aka Liz, aka Elizabeth, aka Lizzy Lou, aka Lizard...) came into our lives a few short months ago. She has a laugh that is contagious- it brings a kind of immediate joy to your heart that leaves you in a better mood for the rest of the day. She has an understated and very mature ease about her that really does force you to stop what you're doing and just sort of marvel at the thoughtfulness and warmth with which she interacts with her world, despite some of the reasons why she may not feel so joyous at times. We all have our stories, and hers has been hard.<br />
<br />
In the traditional sense, she is my student and I, her teacher...but oftentimes, it feels the other way around. And reflexively, she has become family to us in ways that make one thankful for the small miracles that turn into bigger ones over time. It took no effort on her part to work her way deep into my heart, and very little effort to win the affections of Ezra, who looks to her as his own personal lighthouse - the person with whom he connects at school in the mornings, who makes him feel safe, who plays ball with him and teaches him funny faces. She is the person he clamors to see when we go to school, SHE is the person who understands that he likes being spoken to directly, without the high-pitched sing-song that so many of the girls lovingly use to greet him. She gets him. Without fanfare, she has won his whole heart, not on the level of crush, but almost on the level of older sibling. "HIS Yizzy" - this declaration of possession - is akin to saying that she is of his tribe, his people, and that means something so much more.<br />
<br />
For me, she is as much a piece of my soul as anyone else in my life. It is more often than not that when in the same room, we have the same response to a question someone has asked, to the point that one student laughingly noted "You two are like the same person!" She can read my mood in a second, and knows when to make me laugh, and when to give a hug - these are things that most adults fail to do, so it is especially rare that a teenager with so much happening in her own life steps so seamlessly out of her orbit to offer her presence in mine. And she has allowed me into her life too, which is no simple task. To express one's heartaches and struggles is rarely a painless process and it hasn't been easy for her. Sometimes these moments are born due to the person with whom one is sharing, and sometimes it is about the setting: sitting in the courtyard of our school one afternoon, she shared some of the challenges she faces, and we sat in the perfect sunlight, with the perfect trees against a perfectly blue sky, and somehow even the hardest of struggles seemed better articulated, and more authentically felt in that snapshot of, well, perfection. <br />
<br />
And we realize that these are struggles we can face. And we can overcome them, too. Sometimes it just takes a courtyard or a sunroom to realize this beautiful truth.<br />
<br />
More often than not, it has to do with the members of that selected tribe we cull together, those special individuals who fit into the patterns of light and shadow that dance in our sunrooms and courtyards. These are the people who teach us about the wide expanse of family and what it really means. Thank you, Lizzy, for doing this with your whole heart, and for being part of our tribe. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<i>
</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-47735583598743092882013-10-21T08:43:00.003-04:002013-10-21T13:15:21.724-04:00Ten YearsOn November 4, it will be ten years. Ten years since we last heard her voice, saw her newest paintings, found her sleeping covered in a white afghan on one of my parents' couches (I remember thinking that she looked like one of Peter Pan's Lost Boys as she slept, tangled in the blankets with her short pixie haircut). Ten years since that summer when I received one her many witty texts, this time saying "Love Santa stuck in chimney."<br />
<br />
Ten years since we sat hunched together on a big cooler at one of my parents' outdoor tent parties, and I told her I would leave my husband. She was the first to know. We sat together and watched all of the laughing people, dancing and clapping and singing to the music. We watched, and she said to me "You will find happiness, Paige. You are destined to have it."<br />
<br />
Ten years since she brought a stack of her canvases over, laid them out on the breakfast table, and asked me to describe Michelangelo's technique of layering....how did he get them to look so old? I suggested candle smoke. She loved the idea. We made plans to go to Italy in the spring -- I for my research, she to tag along and get ideas for her work.<br />
<br />
Ten years since we saw her palette on the altar of the church - "fitting" I thought to myself at the time, "but not the right time." Not the right time. And on that same day, holding up my father on our way back to the church pew after seeing her open casket, I couldn't walk without counting "1, 2, 3" over and over again in my head. Her beautiful artist hands with perfect nails and fingers that Michelangelo would have swooned over, into which I slipped a four leaf clover. My father's shaking hands. Our shaking hearts. <br />
<br />
Ten years since my parents opened their home and hearts to all of her many loved ones, a party in her honor in their great room the night before her funeral. She said to me once "I never got the concept of a great room until I saw your house. This room IS GREAT." She noticed the Windsor chairs my parents collected and made them beautiful collage coasters with antique prints of Windsor chairs. Helping my parents feed her friends, I placed glasses of wine onto her coasters, and silently cursed her for making them.<br />
<br />
For my dad, ten years without a day trip companion to go antiquing for glass medicine bottles, pieces of pottery, and birds nest, which she loved. Ten years of her gentle jibes: "You're special Greg, but not that special" when he sped through a toll booth after a Bruce Springsteen concert.<br />
<br />
For my mom, no one to sit at the table, slowly sipping a glass of her customary red wine and talking to my mom as she cleaned the kitchen...and also, given the early to bed nature of the rest of our family, no one with whom to stay up late talking.<br />
<br />
For her friends, ten years since she asked one to borrow a shotgun to shoot mistletoe out of the trees. Ten years since she laid her head in the lap of another some hours before dying - a dear, sweet man whose tender heart belonged to her, and whose own painting, made at her urging, hangs in my living room as a reminder of how worlds become connected through tragedy. <br />
<br />
And ten years since our last meal together. She ordered three desserts, and when asked if she wanted the cardamom ice cream, she declared with utter certainty, "Make it so." Ten years since I held her hands for the last time, hugged her thinking that I would see her over Thanksgiving. Ten years since, with my parents, we all listened to Iron and Wine in my living room and she asked me for the name of the album while she sat on the floor stroking my cat, looking with a distant curiosity at my new and unfamiliar world. A blessed world without him...and then hours later, a world so suddenly without her.<br />
<br />
Ten years since I had a friend over for dinner, and we were laughing over soup and wine, listening to music. The windows were open; it was a crisp autum night. And my baby sister called three times before I heard my phone ring from the bedroom. Her sob like a strangle, "Paige, Cheri's gone." I stood in the threshold between my bedroom and my living room, and I remember thinking, "This is what they tell you to do during hurricanes." Brace yourself. You won't be able to stand up without support from both sides. Hold tight to the door frame when a wave of grief pushes you into a place and you need to stop it from spinning. And you then realize that the world actually hasn't moved at all...but still, it won't ever be the same. <br />
<br />
Ten years of not being able to hear Don MacLean's "Starry, Starry Night" without thinking of her: <i>"And with no hope left in sight/on that starry, starry night/you took your life as lovers often do/but I could have told you Vincent/this world was never meant for one/as beautiful as you."</i><br />
<br />
Perhaps this is the only answer we can ever have when our hearts can't move past absence and loss. This morning, I saw the box she made for me, which she painted with peonies because she knew how much I loved them. I picked it up, and pried the lid off, breathing in linseed oil and a profound longing that has no word, no picture, nothing to give it proper weight. Oil paint doesn't ever really dry, and so the box is still sticky when it is opened, ten years later.<br />
<br />
Tears, grief, loss - they never really "dry" either. My heart, though stronger, is not the same. It will never stop missing her. Ten years later.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-16569944836380745392013-09-28T22:20:00.000-04:002013-09-28T22:20:10.600-04:00RetreatI'm sure I have mentally composed about 50 gajillion blog posts, ranging in topics from my little muse of a son to unexpected losses - some violent and sudden, some expected and peaceful - all heartwrenching - to moving into a new home a few blocks away from the old piece of heaven, and transforming this new space into something similar - to teaching and being taught in my career. And so much in between. I was asked by one of my very new but very favorite people on the planet why I wasn't writing - a question my husband has repeatedly asked me, because he knows it brings me something I have been missing. I didn't really ask myself the same question with the seriousness that I should have until about an hour ago, when I was dressing my son for bed and then reading him a story as he lay with his head in my lap, one little hand on my knee, another holding the edge of the book. <br />
<br />
Maybe - to use the ostrich metaphor - we just retreat from the things we know are so good for us when the going gets rough. For some reason, sticking one's head in the sand is somehow easier than taking the time to do what makes us happy. Go figure. Or maybe the fatigue of juggling work and home and parenting and health just prompted an unintended pause button. That then got stuck....<br />
<br />
Leave it to my friend Shannon to stir me to action with a directive: "Write about love for me," she politely asked. Well, okay then. I think about love a whole gosh darn heck of a lot, so this should be easy. And parts of it were easy like Sunday morning. Parts of it felt a little like doing 50 sit-ups after a 2 year hiatus. Oh, there is a muscle there? Huh.<br />
<br />
But this is the thing about a "retreat" from something: if it doesn't force you to question pieces of your life, you need to try harder. Or something. At least work until the muscle hurts a wee bit. <br />
<br />
Yesterday I returned from an ACTUAL PHYSICAL retreat with my new batch of ninth graders. It was pretty profound on a number of levels, not the least of which was my own realization that in getting to know some of my advisees and their truly wonderful hearts, I was forgetting about the needs of my own heart. Writing about love for Shannon was an initial heads-up that "Oh hey, Paige - you like doing this! Here's a grand idea - do more of it!" And then sometimes, people come into your life and open up your heart ever wider. This happened. <br />
<br />
Thank the stars and the crickets for those people. And thank the moons and the heavens that such people keep coming. There is no shortage of personal thresholds (a theme I'm embracing this year) if you can at least learn to recognize them. And so too, there is no shortage of blessings in the form of kindred spirits to mark those thresholds and give them their meaning.<br />
<br />
So yesterday's retreat was a threshold in that I remembered something so painfully simple. I woke up early in the morning, took a quick shower to loosen my joints, and then sat outside to watch the sun rise. Surrounded by soybean fields and endless skies, I watched and listened to one of my very favorite things: Canadian Geese. Why anyone would want to shoot these beautiful bits of poetry out of the sky is beyond me. I mean, they mate for life! I watched them glide slowly down to land gently in a corn field, and I found myself thanking them for sharing in this morning with me. And I realized: salvation comes in all forms, but most principally, it can be found in the notion that in giving of oneself, one is receiving something in return. Holy revelations. And also: it's about time I remembered that.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Because I have a pretty constant soundtrack happening in my head, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXx7vPNYplY">THIS</a> was yesterday's morning anthem. It helped that the sunrise was a singularly spectacular orange. It helped that my students - those I am charged to shepherd through their first year of high school - offer a type of love and understanding to those around them that it really does feel like a salvation of sorts. Everyone is saving someone. It is how retreating and then returning to a newly established center works. It is how the heart beats in its best of moments. And to the one inspiring soul who innocently asked me why I stopped writing, thank you.<br />
<br />
<img height="386" id="irc_mi" src="http://www.rockvilleunitedchurch.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/large/photos/dock.jpg" style="margin-top: 18px;" width="582" /><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-43786437957854490092011-12-31T10:01:00.001-05:002011-12-31T10:44:27.328-05:00Meditations on a pacifier"Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "grow, grow."<br />
<br />
I am watching him through some newfangled, hi-tech monitor thing that my husband set up and tested on the dogs a good six months before he joined us. Twenty three minutes after putting him down for his nap, he is awake. I don't love that he regards naps with a casual disdain typically reserved for things like aspic. I do love that with each thought and impression, his entire body moves in response. <br />
<br />
Everything really is that mind-blowing at six months old.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, at his six month wellness visit, he wriggled happily on the examination table, bunching the paper on the table beneath him with his eager chubby baby hands, listening to the crinkle, the tear, the shhhhhhh sound it made. His need to touch everything is astounding. His feet (two of his very favorite things), my cup of tea, the Buddha bell that hangs on our doorknob, the stream of water at bath time, the ears of the dogs, my lips, my cheeks, sunglasses, hair, necklaces...all of these little tactile moments recording and transcribing some sense of order in his little world.<br />
<br />
Today, he takes his pacifier out of his mouth. With his left hand. He does most things with his left hand, a source of pride for his southpaw mama. He studies it, turning it over and upside down, his eyes widening at each turn. He marvels that he does this. He marvels at his command of his hands in their ability to master the pacifier. He lets out several long "eeeeeeeahhhhhhhhhh" exclamations that remind me of Tibetan monk chants. He kicks his legs, and exclaims with a grunting staccato "Eh Meh Eh" that has the precision and force of Genghis Khan behind it. He makes raspberries, resumes his monk chants and then remembers the pacifier he holds in his hand. He smiles fondly at it, cooing love at a familiar piece of plastic with a joy I wish we didn't ever lose. <br />
<br />
Several attempts, and the pacifier is back in his mouth, and his cherub lips purse and suck, smacking gladly at this accomplishment. Triumph. <br />
<br />
Such moments of sweet victory pass quickly in the busy life of a baby. And for his sleepless, awestruck parents, there is always some moment of rediscovery and the accompanying wonder at how it was ever lost. How to pull back the curtains and let in the light. He does this now from his changing table, gleefully flapping the fabric and watching it fall again. "Embrace this moment, mama" he seems to say. "Look at the way the curtain moves, and the hippos on it dance." With his own little hands, he does this. He creates his happiness. He lets in his own light.<br />
<br />
Sometimes he stops whatever it is that he is doing and with an awareness that belies his relatively few days, he looks at me, silently. With dark liquid eyes that reflect so much light, he stares at me intently. Such moments are profoundly moving. "I know you. I see you." "I see you!" I often respond, with want for something more fitting to say. <br />
<br />
As parents and as people, we look backward and forward in a seesaw motion that can give one whiplash. I don't want to do this. This moment right now is pretty perfect. And as we turn a corner and greet 2012, I am thankful that 2011 has reminded me of this one truth.<br />
<br />
Ezra. Thank you for being here, you imperfectly perfect you.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1bhuFFD68CVqS7oPomfBNlqpfNoQPgpPj9NvNToBdnvwRBw_AELOI-7dwXByirSfeD1F2alRB_USCQvZ1PZTDEmS1G6ZVZrbs6V2mxZ2Grkii5AJnb3g8wSToZafMw_zxRgpIbQgCPew/s1600/_MG_2392.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="214" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1bhuFFD68CVqS7oPomfBNlqpfNoQPgpPj9NvNToBdnvwRBw_AELOI-7dwXByirSfeD1F2alRB_USCQvZ1PZTDEmS1G6ZVZrbs6V2mxZ2Grkii5AJnb3g8wSToZafMw_zxRgpIbQgCPew/s320/_MG_2392.JPG" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-45631728594468063782010-09-11T11:22:00.001-04:002010-09-11T20:38:26.531-04:00Slouching Towards BethlehemYesterday my students and I talked about Abraham. Our seventy minute class turned into a full 90 minutes, as we processed how timely this discussion was in light of other discussions about burning Qu'rans and building sacred centers near hallowed ground. We interrogated the meaning of the word covenant and that unbroken thread of faith that acts as a cord, tying our hearts and our actions to something bigger and older than ourselves. We looked at a family tree, tracing with our fingertips the lines from Abraham to Levi and Dinah, and stopping with Moses. We spent a good bit of time unraveling the story of two sons, Isaac and Ishmael who went their separate ways and never looked back. We chewed on the meaning of sacrifice, compassion, and ownership over words and stories. We studied images of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Mosque of Abraham, contemplating the meaning of sacred space. We had a discussion about the now-frequently used phrase this time of the year: "Never Forget." As one student said, "If we haven't forgotten about all of this history we are learning, how could we forget this?"<br />
<br />
<br />
I asked one girl who had visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem to read these words from a Muslim text recounting the story of Abraham's sacrifice to God, which she did beautifully:<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "ArialMT","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt;"> As the boy lies stunned on the<o:p></o:p> altar, God gazes down with pride and compassion and promises to grant his any prayer<b><i>. "0 Lord, I pray this," the boy says. "When any person in any era meets you at </i></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "ArialMT","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt;"><b><i>\the gates of heaven-so long as they believe in one God-I ask that you allow them to enter paradise."</i></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "ArialMT","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt;"><b><i></i></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "ArialMT","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.5pt;"><b><i></i></b></span></div><br />
She commented after reading this, "You know, I am a devout Jew. And my name is Arab. When I went to Jerusalem, we visited a famous Muslim bakery that bore our family name. And the family gave us sweets and welcomed us into their kitchen. So I guess what this means to me is that we are all family after all, whether we are descended from Isaac or Ishmael. And maybe that is why the Muslim text doesn't identify the boy as one or the other. Maybe like me, he is both."<br />
<br />
Spiritual inquiry at its finest. <br />
<br />
I thought of the Yeats poem, <i>The Second Coming</i>, set to song by Joni Mitchell with the title, <i>Slouching Towards Bethlehem</i>. I have always loved this song and the urgent imperative behind the title phrase. So we listened to it - an impromptu exposure to two artists with whom the girls were not familiar. What a lovely way to meet both at once:<br />
<br />
<b>THE SECOND COMING</b><br />
Turning and turning in the widening gyre <br />
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; <br />
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; <br />
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, <br />
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere <br />
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; <br />
The best lack all conviction, while the worst <br />
Are full of passionate intensity. <br />
Surely some revelation is at hand; <br />
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. <br />
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out <br />
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi <br />
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; <br />
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, <br />
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, <br />
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it <br />
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. <br />
The darkness drops again but now I know <br />
That twenty centuries of stony sleep <br />
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, <br />
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, <br />
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?<br />
-William Butler Yeats<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg0xMry2m9s">Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joni Mitchell</a><br />
<br />
"Wow," said another of my students, "will we ever learn how to stand up straight?" I looked at the girl who is both Isaac and Ishmael. She shook her head slowly and said "Maybe it is the burden of faith that makes us slouch."<br />
<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-32804633455996760372010-08-17T19:56:00.011-04:002010-08-18T21:55:47.506-04:00In praise of Piper<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>This is Piper:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKyO5KhuwCxr1uViNf_Eze-f9FSZ8-f-pWf59GA11T1fBPMVchXlBVLECoKQqIcS3zuAERNwFekeK_ZC89YqTTrCob_5BUutd7FtvGRo6iUYYMCedZw7crDA4CM4eOwrmsFZxnxvcVjl8/s1600/075.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKyO5KhuwCxr1uViNf_Eze-f9FSZ8-f-pWf59GA11T1fBPMVchXlBVLECoKQqIcS3zuAERNwFekeK_ZC89YqTTrCob_5BUutd7FtvGRo6iUYYMCedZw7crDA4CM4eOwrmsFZxnxvcVjl8/s320/075.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Piper at rest. Which is adorable. And deceiving. And I fall for the adorable quotient every single time, in love with her sweet mug. Just to give you an idea, a photo essay of sorts detailing her beguiling cuteness:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6i9V9sjN0-ZJL9qrhLGvZJ7ZPv0K_ytyLGgXrVU7PO4PyuKr1aZsHYM-7LFkpYA7LSHBhyWyxcBr07zp-nPUV23wPkILUv3Fazrpei4hIEbS99u5xvYBTCPGrmETq0SGRcRZXNajAdw0/s1600/149.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6i9V9sjN0-ZJL9qrhLGvZJ7ZPv0K_ytyLGgXrVU7PO4PyuKr1aZsHYM-7LFkpYA7LSHBhyWyxcBr07zp-nPUV23wPkILUv3Fazrpei4hIEbS99u5xvYBTCPGrmETq0SGRcRZXNajAdw0/s320/149.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCO7xRFNy3dsXt_hChCykGPB-GO0wERINVwWpkL6S7oHPwmaXLFS3jMTUB62PobNza26mWrH49siB5qja-NQ_0rLVGtWcVAdQdtoQyPS3K8S6AInsgi6ZUpiDssamZ-tu5F9vuw9yqcOk/s1600/IMG_7012.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCO7xRFNy3dsXt_hChCykGPB-GO0wERINVwWpkL6S7oHPwmaXLFS3jMTUB62PobNza26mWrH49siB5qja-NQ_0rLVGtWcVAdQdtoQyPS3K8S6AInsgi6ZUpiDssamZ-tu5F9vuw9yqcOk/s320/IMG_7012.JPG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Piper: the early days</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtFR8ck2dZF-qy8xa95sI5jvjeRv8P09ixH0AbVWNfS7NaDt-jJobracUIzusYyVsAgXCn_mdbwDTPWrJNTgj-M2WXI2uH8vojsJqDE-RqToc_8UjIBUemLfg338vRMm3JCz5Eoh8GqA0/s1600/IMG_7060.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtFR8ck2dZF-qy8xa95sI5jvjeRv8P09ixH0AbVWNfS7NaDt-jJobracUIzusYyVsAgXCn_mdbwDTPWrJNTgj-M2WXI2uH8vojsJqDE-RqToc_8UjIBUemLfg338vRMm3JCz5Eoh8GqA0/s320/IMG_7060.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Moxa deserves sainthood. Piper adores him. As we all should.</span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYnNe5XTBIxaFNMQfZC9PVc3IrORgQMcZJnLvYSohkKuPtFqyCO7-dSlmcGO9xkwH79Dw9gBt-CO0Cliq7mIQPDTAQSO5GrQUFgToCSP3EZrU-pTIvxI4XGVUxH01yqM9FiFnHdmnCZRQ/s1600/IMG_7095.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYnNe5XTBIxaFNMQfZC9PVc3IrORgQMcZJnLvYSohkKuPtFqyCO7-dSlmcGO9xkwH79Dw9gBt-CO0Cliq7mIQPDTAQSO5GrQUFgToCSP3EZrU-pTIvxI4XGVUxH01yqM9FiFnHdmnCZRQ/s320/IMG_7095.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixeT0ezr0fB_p7JKso0KgXKG97lzf_8lGYnDpBhz6OazpAnYC_0YRG1PLzBCcdEGOXbRc1AlsTrbdKPoqIt68Y3KUW1qLwvGfQs43Lftg80sqKGy3ocGHu3Bjh5WtQZVyr3AY7FmH4Eu4/s1600/IMG_7092.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixeT0ezr0fB_p7JKso0KgXKG97lzf_8lGYnDpBhz6OazpAnYC_0YRG1PLzBCcdEGOXbRc1AlsTrbdKPoqIt68Y3KUW1qLwvGfQs43Lftg80sqKGy3ocGHu3Bjh5WtQZVyr3AY7FmH4Eu4/s320/IMG_7092.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJhE04MYI0QYSjjWw1hs9H36PHUbZ3y5bVUJOaCdUcZzLhpWmBLr3XpEnv0hNrIrt30qM3KnBd6QXSw4xY_jQqrHxyaHNEzMIbFG9cTuhBGWhZsLPFOdoxXXZ7HCtgak2BCmOgvKPND4M/s1600/IMG_7105.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJhE04MYI0QYSjjWw1hs9H36PHUbZ3y5bVUJOaCdUcZzLhpWmBLr3XpEnv0hNrIrt30qM3KnBd6QXSw4xY_jQqrHxyaHNEzMIbFG9cTuhBGWhZsLPFOdoxXXZ7HCtgak2BCmOgvKPND4M/s320/IMG_7105.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">With cunning intellect, she has the unique penchant </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">for sticking her head</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> through/between/under narrow spaces. It's a special talent.</span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi26EBJJIOFMCpH15QX1hyaRVem7lMiSRXwS1AOlaom9yyfLsgrwk7qxSxfEPUUHfkhQvYoki0jzkvII3Kk8NerUHTWa5jMDN7WIui_TSEVYr5pT319qUmGptaCpM_-rstsN5Sm1rTJWSg/s1600/IMG_7119.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi26EBJJIOFMCpH15QX1hyaRVem7lMiSRXwS1AOlaom9yyfLsgrwk7qxSxfEPUUHfkhQvYoki0jzkvII3Kk8NerUHTWa5jMDN7WIui_TSEVYr5pT319qUmGptaCpM_-rstsN5Sm1rTJWSg/s320/IMG_7119.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">She also possesses the gift of climbing into things</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> (i.e. a trashcan, or in this case an empty box) </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">that require special talents to free herself. Special talents that she does not have.</span></div><br />
Piper is all kinds of things, and she is nothing like our other two dogs, who basically live to be near us, and hang on our every intonation, every trip up and down the stairs, every room we enter and leave. Moxa is always in the same room as I am. Mia goes wherever there is a lap, but really, namely one lap belonging to Alex. Piper goes...somewhere...depending upon her whims, which are fleeting and have the added bonus of being completely out of left field. The drummer to which she marches has no rhyme, rhythm, or reason. And I'm not entirely convinced that there is a drummer, even. I am convinced that she spends most of her waking hours trying to relocate her Mother Ship. She isn't what we would dub as "normal" (a good thing) and we wondered for a while whether she was deaf. Nope. She's just in her own orbit, spinning happily through her carefree life with a casual regard for most things. This is as vexing as it is endearing. <br />
<br />
Piper bounces through the house as cavalierly as a loose-limbed sailor; flopping on cushions, the rug, your face, your newly folded laundry, the coffee table even (case in point: this morning, when she did a flying leap onto the coffee table, stood in stunned stillness for a millisecond, lapped from my iced coffee, and kept cruising). She is as unaware of her surroundings as anyone could be. She soars full throttle through the cat door, only to find herself fabulously stuck in the process. I watched and laughed for a good few minutes as she barked at the dark basement on her end, her little corkscrew tail indignant and her back legs boinging up and down on mine. She skids around corners. She screeches to stops, sliding on rugs and biting at the AIR (?!) like Aladdin on an acid trip. <br />
<br />
She is nothing if not an adventure of mishaps. And she seems to be totally okay with that fact. I respect her for it, even.<br />
<br />
<br />
And though she frustrates me to no end, she is also one of my greatest sources of amusement.<br />
<br />
Having a dog who licks the air as she makes her approach to licking you never gets old. And she is absolutely indiscriminate in this regard, assailing her humans, her canine compadres, the couch, the wall, the odd throw pillow, even the cat - with all the audible slopping sounds of a toddler diving into his/her first ice cream cone. Mia, ever so dainty and deliberate in her licks, is horrified when Piper assaults her out of nowhere with the force of a frog hurling its tongue out in an effort to ensnare its nearest snack. <br />
<br />
There is absolutely nothing subtle about this dog.<br />
<br />
If she's bored, she barks. Or jumps. Or pulls every single toy out of the toy bin.<br />
<br />
If she's in pain, she whines like a wee banshee. <br />
<br />
If she's frisky, she becomes a whirling dervish of chocolate brown and white, and she whirs around you until you are dizzy. This happens at least three times a day - five, if you're lucky.<br />
<br />
She hassles the other dogs, tugging at their ears, nipping their legs, coaxing them into a game of rough house. Sometimes I feel as though I have landed in the midst of a three-way wrestling match. There are no innocent bystanders when this happens. And for three very different dogs, their "pack" is cemented. They are loving, tolerant, and considerate of one another (Piper even waits for Mia before bounding outside in the morning). It's very warm and fuzzy. <br />
<br />
She LOVES children, and will kiss them and wag at them, and want to melt into them with no visible signs of fatigue. This can go on for hours. Children love her back. My niece calls her "Hyper" (an apt description), and carries her around like a rag doll, while Piper smiles away, limbs loose and trusting, her head cocked sideways looking up at something no one else can see (the Mother Ship perhaps?). She loves effortlessly - not at all earnestly, but with an enthusiastic blunt force that I kind of equate to a bear hug that goes on for too long.<br />
<br />
The thing about Piper is that she loves us when she feels like it. It's completely spontaneous, her patterns are for the most part unpredictable, but the end result is always the same. She can chew my favorite sandals, demolish a thumb drive, rip holes in carpets, and leave her nose prints all over the glass door. She can take the stuffing out of each and every toy and scatter it throughout the house, she can topple trashcans and eat the tissues, and she can ignore me with all the intellectual might of a maggot (though our trainer swears she is brilliant). She can curl up to my side, nuzzle my neck, and fall sound asleep in a nanosecond. She can bat me with her paw when she wants attention, and stare at me wide-eyed and alert, ready for whatever I have to give her. She can sit for treats, and bury her nose in my hair (as she is right now). And in all of these ways, she makes her own Piper-esque mark on our hearts. Our house without her antics would seem somehow less alive. Even Moxa and Mia agree:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRwp2fvZl6L0geSV8QoCTeNBoCAsRI6rWjTLgcqX8ty8IgL3B2ER2kLZ-X-hM0aZqblafylNIyUT_McT6F3q1xVOiQyBbcLMMxf0ex68gRb304uuZLffxOZymxA2OkCfNZ6NGq0WaiRJQ/s1600/IMG_7056.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRwp2fvZl6L0geSV8QoCTeNBoCAsRI6rWjTLgcqX8ty8IgL3B2ER2kLZ-X-hM0aZqblafylNIyUT_McT6F3q1xVOiQyBbcLMMxf0ex68gRb304uuZLffxOZymxA2OkCfNZ6NGq0WaiRJQ/s320/IMG_7056.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-48534134971198731742010-08-15T06:36:00.000-04:002010-08-15T06:36:13.163-04:00YouYou have a million-watt smile, and very beautiful teeth. <br />
<br />
Your eyes are exactly the color of seaglass, and sometimes they are green. Other times, they turn blue. They almost always sparkle.<br />
<br />
You have few outward fears.<br />
<br />
You have the ability to speak your mind, and hold your ground.<br />
<br />
Whenever there is a piano within a fifty foot radius, you are drawn to play it. In Vienna, a crowd of listeners cheered after you were finished. And the Viennese know a thing or two about music.<br />
<br />
You brought me homemade apple strudel on our first date. Good move.<br />
<br />
You don't like spicy food, or beans, or coconut milk, or ginger - all things I love. Somehow this doesn't get in our way.<br />
<br />
You always give me the heart of your artichoke when we make them. You claim it is because you are full, but I know it is because you know how much I love them.<br />
<br />
You always cut your juice with still or sparkling water, and you are right. It tastes better that way.<br />
<br />
You have the ability to make people roar with laughter.<br />
<br />
You are unafraid to try something new, or to make an adventure out of a mundane task. <br />
<br />
You put music on for me when I cook. <br />
<br />
You sleep very strange hours, and sometimes don't go to bed at all. As an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, I don't get this.<br />
<br />
Come to think of it, there are a number of things about you that remain utter mysteries.<br />
<br />
And the same is true of me, like why I open the cereal box upside down. Or why I leave cabinets open.<br />
<br />
You love to ask questions, even when you already have the answers.<br />
<br />
You are frustrated with the state of the basement. I don't blame you.<br />
<br />
You love animals. Animals love you. It's a win-win situation.<br />
<br />
You notice everything about everyone. You are very observant, sometimes annoyingly so.<br />
<br />
You are a perfectionist. Sometimes this gets in your way; most of the time it means that our pictures are hung straight. Which they wouldn't be if I had the nail and the hammer.<br />
<br />
You are fiercely loyal to your friends and family.<br />
<br />
You sometimes sacrifice your time and happiness for them.<br />
<br />
You worked your way into the heart of our ten year old nephew, who needed a male role model. And who loves you enormously.<br />
<br />
You abhor the expression "Shut up." More people should - you're on to something with that one.<br />
<br />
You can sit at your desk and work for, like, EVER. I can't stay still that long. I don't know how you do it.<br />
<br />
You take the most beautiful photographs. We can be looking at the very same thing, two cameras pointing at it. My photo looks like my two year old nephew took it; yours looks like it should be on the cover of National Geographic.<br />
<br />
You remind me to take my vitamins.<br />
<br />
You are sensitive.<br />
<br />
You are a much better vacuumer than I am.<br />
<br />
Bless your soul, you are so very allergic to mosquito bites and poison ivy.<br />
<br />
You are irreverent.<br />
<br />
Sometimes you will walk by me, or check on me when I am sleeping and ruffle my hair. It's very soothing. You can do that more often if you would like.<br />
<br />
You always want me to try a bite of whatever you are eating.<br />
<br />
You had an awkward phase in high school when you wore burgundy turtlenecks. I call it your Masterpiece Theatre years. <br />
<br />
You are patently not "one of the guys" and don't enjoy competitive sports- I like this.<br />
<br />
You brush your teeth for exactly two minutes. This cracks me up. <br />
<br />
You really want me to learn how to scuba dive, but I might just like to stay a snorkler.<br />
<br />
You walk with a little spring in your step - did you know this?<br />
<br />
You are nothing if not a realist, though you seem to enjoy my flights of fancy and day-dreaming ways. Most of the time.<br />
<br />
You remember my students, their stories, and their struggles.<br />
<br />
You can take apart and put a computer back together. To me, this is magic. <br />
<br />
You chaperone high school dances with me and after the dance is over, you always order a pizza to share at midnight.<br />
<br />
You enjoy rituals.<br />
<br />
You would happily eat whipped cream straight. I don't think I have ever met someone who loves whipped cream as much as you do.<br />
<br />
You always want to help people. Always. <br />
<br />
You are particular.<br />
<br />
You patiently follow me around in nurseries as I look at plants. For hours. And hours.<br />
<br />
You are very left-brained but you have a right-brainedness about you too.<br />
<br />
You switched out the fireplace so I could breathe more easily.<br />
<br />
You put away the dishes that are too high for me to reach.<br />
<br />
You always know where I am in a crowded room.<br />
<br />
I know you are always thinking of me. <br />
<br />
And I, of you.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Happy Anniversary, Alexander. I adore sharing a life with you.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-24034923737326023612010-08-12T16:37:00.008-04:002010-08-13T10:24:18.230-04:00The fatted calf<div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Chi troppo vuole, nulla stringe."</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>-He who wants too much doesn't catch anything"</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>-Italian proverb</i></div><i><br />
</i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8MYwTyUGbc02END5nU1k7lc9rx_LgGcdvoHHWWcyEAACQtfB55svUojHchzDmHl9t1osJDlmlWuivVmwTxpAnTzNY_GyiHXxDtQQBeTXZTRwm_Zbns1vRc1Lm-4KQ3Sc8G_sox1b1_Y/s1600/fatted_calf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8MYwTyUGbc02END5nU1k7lc9rx_LgGcdvoHHWWcyEAACQtfB55svUojHchzDmHl9t1osJDlmlWuivVmwTxpAnTzNY_GyiHXxDtQQBeTXZTRwm_Zbns1vRc1Lm-4KQ3Sc8G_sox1b1_Y/s320/fatted_calf.jpg" /></a></div><i><br />
</i><br />
For various reasons, I have an odd relationship with things and with want.<br />
<br />
There are places in this world that feel like home to me, but I fear becoming attached to them. This can be hard. <br />
<i><br />
</i>I have a lovely little bungalow with signs of age and need for improvement, and although we have done a number of minor changes to make it more habitable, I fear wanting too much. I find myself growing overly fond of my home, and feel as though I am jinxing myself. What if something happens and I lose it? What will I do?<br />
<br />
Truth be told, I would probably cry for a little while, look for four-leaf clovers, gather my animals around me, and eat a sandwich.<br />
<br />
I have art on the walls, books in my shelves, clothes in my closet, a competitively impressive amount of bubble bath, and I know that if I had to, I could leave it all behind, save a few things. I know this because I have done so. And it wasn't hard. I can't even remember the treasures I summarily took leave of, and I have no desire to do so. There are things in my home - mostly memories saved: a four leaf clover, a special rock, a book from a dear friend's grandfather, a ribbon from Brazil, a stack of postcard love letters from my husband, a cherry pit, a letter from a deceased friend, my first book of poetry from my Gran that holds the memory of reading the poems with her - things that I would miss. They would fit in a medium-ish sized box.<br />
<br />
Some have noted my detachment from things to be a curious part of my personality, given the fact that I do have a bit of a crush on shoes; others (my husband, bless his patient soul) have found it slightly frustrating in that I could probably take better care of some of the possessions I have...<br />
<br />
...that cost money.<br />
<br />
Which doesn't grow on trees.<br />
<br />
Which is really the source of my frustration today. <br />
<br />
I work hard for what I have, but that isn't what drives me to work. And what I have is more than enough. It's actually quite a lot, compared to the rest of the world. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wake up and feel lucky: a job I love, a husband I adore, animals that provide endless amusement and <i>joie de vivre</i>, and as I climb up on my soapbox (fair warning given), I am kind of sad that a long walk at sunset doesn't offer the same happiness to people as, say, a new lamp. How could a lamp possibly capture the same kind of light that a sunset does? This is bothering me. It is bothering me on some level deep in my belly. Despite my hard work and money earned, it makes me want to throw all of my things out of the window in protest.<br />
<br />
(One time, when I lived in an apartment a few years ago, the neighbor living above me had the unfortunate habit of throwing things out of her window. She was on the frayed side of lunacy. She threw money out her windows, mostly quarters. Jewelry. Clothing, including lots of socks. And also tuna fish, which stuck to my window. I was bothered by her daily purgings mostly because I could hear her stomping to and from the window in the middle of the night. In clogs. It was kind of annoying and more than a little unsettling. But another part of me celebrated that she did this. Even in her frantic, delusional state, it must have felt awfully good. I collected all of her quarters -a useful commodity for doing laundry- and slipped money under her door for the exact amount. She promptly threw the money out of her living room window. I wrote her family a check for the amount when they came to move her out and into a hospital. It was never cashed. I have always felt guilty about this.)<br />
<br />
I can't recall feeling envious of someone else for having "bigger, better, more" - the unofficial motto of the United States, where people are so used to their creature comforts that they refuse to entertain what it must be like to downsize. But now in this economy, people are. <br />
<br />
I am all for it. Downsize away. Most of us haven't lived with food rations, with being permanently displaced from homes and families and towns. And as an historian, I think about these people who lived on a jar of Marmite and a loaf of bread that was intended to last a week. I read stories of the fun they had, because they were not focused on what they didn't have. And I read of people today being displaced and living in makeshift tents. And they don't feel sorry for themselves. They want to know where their loved ones are. That seems a legitimate wish. <br />
<br />
All of this sort of came to some fever pitch to me today as I sit in my new office, which is GREEN. Which I love. I have a green office chair. And it is quite possibly the most comfortable thing ever. And a soft green throw for winter. And a really cool map of the world. I started thinking about how much I love my office, and then was reflecting on the color green and why I love it so. Green will always be here. If I go blind, green will be something I can still have. Its ineffable greenness will go on. As a child, I stumbled out of my bed in full sleep and leaned precariously over our balcony, asking my mother, "What is green?" After explaining to me that it was a color (apparently not a satisfactory answer for a sleepwalking four-year-old), my mother said, "It's not a thing. It's everywhere." Or some such philosophical reasoning. This apparently satisfied me and I went back to sleep. This may be why I ADORE Noam Chomsky's oft-quoted "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Why, yes they do.<br />
<br />
And that's pretty much the coolest thing about green, sunsets, animals, and other things - like double rainbows. Hey, I've seen a few. That YouTube guy had a reason to be totally psyched. He made meaning out of what to many, is meaningless. And I would argue that GREEN has more meaning to me than the green chair, the green vase, the green throw on my velvet couch..and so on...<br />
<br />
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<br />
The fatted calf was for homecomings, reunions, the prodigal son returneth...that sort of thing. It wasn't for every day life. Neither are double rainbows, for that matter - but for that we make no claims to own them. And if you don't want a double rainbow, you have a far better chance of catching one. <br />
<br />
<i><br />
</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-72087947577501862602010-07-31T14:06:00.014-04:002010-08-01T09:04:27.475-04:00In the Minor KeyI often wake up with a song buzzing about in my head. I don't know if this is normal or not, but most of the time, it's an awfully pleasant way to greet the day. I have started connecting it to that whole question of "What songs would you include in the soundtrack of your life?", to which I would likely respond, "Ummm, it varies on the day..and also the song that happens to appear to me for whatever reason in the morning...put them all together and you have a soundtrack. Is that an answer?" Or, to put it more simply, "That is a very difficult question."<br />
<br />
At 5:30 this morning, I woke up humming Lou Reed's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYEC4TZsy-Y">Perfect Day</a>, a maudlin ballad with some pretty nice little piano sections and a wonderfully impassioned Lou Reed belting out "Oh, it's such a perfect day," a sentiment I can almost always get behind. Alex pointed out that it is actually "kind of a really sad song". Alex is not a morning person, and I made the premature assumption that he just wasn't quite on my "mornings with Lou" wavelength. Alas. The briefest bit of internet research yielded the popularly-held opinion that the song is about heroin. I suppose it should be somewhat obvious:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkiRrB2YD26SY0kIDfSU9W-zP4aCSrJY4YrTjQViRTmQgEa7wMswhNCOms0oqHqLyntWoH9Vd0uBKikZUQvgujZaEDpajGFt8hKnxi9ljI6t2JwFvZrSxJA8g9aOFNXv4RqlrzPRNZCIg/s1600/Lou+Reed+Transformer+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkiRrB2YD26SY0kIDfSU9W-zP4aCSrJY4YrTjQViRTmQgEa7wMswhNCOms0oqHqLyntWoH9Vd0uBKikZUQvgujZaEDpajGFt8hKnxi9ljI6t2JwFvZrSxJA8g9aOFNXv4RqlrzPRNZCIg/s320/Lou+Reed+Transformer+photo.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
This disturbs me. On a few levels. For starters, as someone who can sort of groove with the bittersweet love ballad genre, I fully embraced the whole "you just keep me hanging on" bit...life can be about those moments, after all. But heroin? A love song about heroin? Having never even entertained the thought of experimenting with heroin, I can't really claim to know anything at all about its powers of seduction and the soporific effect that it apparently induces in musicians, thus rendering them lovesick. Truly I only know what I witness on an all-too-frequent basis in the streets of Baltimore (if you don't live in Baltimore, watch <i>The Wire</i> - it will give you some insight into heroin use and its damaging dream-state). It wouldn't have even occurred to me, honestly. Which in itself is ridiculous, given the number of songs dedicated to "the altered state." And I consider myself someone who knows a fair bit about music. <br />
<br />
Pregnant pause.<br />
<br />
I happen to have two other songs (among others) that would join the ranks of the hypothetical Paige soundtrack. One is a poignant reminder of a particularly low point in my life and the sort of breathless effort it took for me to clear a couple of Everest-sized hurdles: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kioyUGaABjA">Running to Stand Still</a>. Which was kind of what my life felt like then. I once listened to this song no less than ten times on repeat. That bit:<br />
<br />
<i>"You got to cry without weeping <br />
Talk without speaking <br />
Scream without raising your voice" </i><br />
<br />
Well, it was my anthem. In my naivete, the "needle chill" was my own personal reference to the many injections, shots, blood draws etc...I underwent when I was very sick. For all of my love of nuance and the layers of the onion and all of that hooey, I can be remarkably literal. Apparently.<br />
<br />
The song is about heroin.<br />
<br />
The second is a song that Alex often hums: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKT5LTWzylU&feature=related">Golden Brown</a>. This particular version is a cover by Cult With No Name; it was originally written and performed by the Stranglers. I falsely assumed that it was a love song and thought that it was sweet that Alex so frequently sings this (as an accomplished pianist, he tends to like songs foregrounding the piano), because I guess you could sort of call my hair that color...in the summer...after I've been in the sun for a while. Okay, it's a stretch. But it is a pretty song and the piano gets me every time.<br />
<br />
And it too is about heroin.<br />
<br />
I have to ruefully chuckle at this, and find myself again bemused by my all-too-frequently naive impression of things in general. And though I am somewhat dismayed that my songs of love and human might and triumph actually share a slightly different story, I suppose we choose our soundtracks for what each song offers each of us...which varies, even in our disillusionment. Alex offered the logical explanation that I tend to prefer songs in the minor key, which are evocative of a certain "mood". That could be the case. Woody Guthrie's lovely conclusion to this (as performed by Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant) explains it better than I - and thankfully, without any references to heroin. I hope.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqFmNUz7WhY">Way Over Yonder In the Minor Key</a><br />
<br />
written by this guy, who knew what was up. The smile says it all:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLLynspJknIfhu7qp0MtYZfyqtDga0OMY5nTPd0xoJPcfzm_F1scWYrgk2VunXR3MoVlOUZxrnq7H_2idicHcNA3C2Py7m7M3JbxAh5-QRae0HoPnV8SpeRLrZOSMvsQsGiHtuUjIip9g/s1600/guthrie_woody.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLLynspJknIfhu7qp0MtYZfyqtDga0OMY5nTPd0xoJPcfzm_F1scWYrgk2VunXR3MoVlOUZxrnq7H_2idicHcNA3C2Py7m7M3JbxAh5-QRae0HoPnV8SpeRLrZOSMvsQsGiHtuUjIip9g/s320/guthrie_woody.jpg" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-79366369551135051682010-07-26T22:04:00.006-04:002010-07-26T22:23:50.607-04:00Catch<i><b>"The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.</b></i>"<br />
<br />
It is not humid in Baltimore today. Which is no small miracle - and this from someone who loves heat most of the time. This morning, I saw goldfinches dancing in my pond (they have their own permanent gold unitards, lucky ones). The air feels more like Maine air. And it's clear and blue. A gorgeous day. My husband just sent me this photo, with the message: "Look outside. I love you." It kind of sums things up nicely:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfDmvF9w4OklxSGqWVFBy1Pzyn3P4ygtPzxd8ZOJZc14yntUDIxip-hQ3SId-s-jdMdHHCK2T-ibuXtnIhnkOw4OOAz53ITnqe5M7vQj7qETw1J1LiYx0Owi2UcDoxTXJOKkVL1qKj7Wg/s1600/IMAG0038.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfDmvF9w4OklxSGqWVFBy1Pzyn3P4ygtPzxd8ZOJZc14yntUDIxip-hQ3SId-s-jdMdHHCK2T-ibuXtnIhnkOw4OOAz53ITnqe5M7vQj7qETw1J1LiYx0Owi2UcDoxTXJOKkVL1qKj7Wg/s320/IMAG0038.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
I live in a neighborhood that embraces summer with an optimism that is as startling as it is familiar to me in some weird way. It is sort of unreal in its genuine civility and warmth. When we moved here, we were greeted with homemade cookies, preserves, muffins, and so many heartfelt welcomes. My next door neighbors, whom I adore and whose son I wish I could call my own, just stopped over and invited me to spend his second birthday with them on Wednesday at the National Aquarium. I'm their plus one guest. This little angel boy is quite surely the subject of an entry all his own; suffice to say that we sat on my porch swing this evening as he battled a newly diagnosed bout with the terrible twos and I, my own long and difficult day when I wished I could have used the terrible twos as an excuse for a wee temper tantrum on the floor. And he rested his darling cherub hand on my knee and the world felt alright.<br />
<br />
That's the thing about my neighborhood - even though the world isn't alright, I live in this little slice of I don't know - Eden? - where people say hello from their bungalow stoops and remind my heart to quiet a moment and be mindful of what a home really is. Neighbors stop and chat and wave at joggers. My new friend Beth (I really like Beth) waves at me as she drives by. Lucas, the recent high school graduate, asks me about my garden and how my grass is growing. He falls asleep at night listening to our waterfall through his open window. That makes me enormously happy. The shy, sweet girl down the street walks her beloved rescue dog while two boys who live a few houses in the opposite direction race by on their bikes, wearing Batman and cowboy Halloween costumes. Awesome. The boy with the mop of wildly curly hair swings from a tree branch, and part of me wants to stand under him to catch him if he falls. But that child is nothing if not indestructible. He has perfected the art of swinging, and running barefoot --and jumping on the pogo stick, which he continued to do one evening with such abandon that he didn't immediately notice the blood pouring out of a spectacularly scraped big toe after a spill. Ten minutes with some hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin and a Band-Aid, and he was back outside. Tonight, I did a double take. He must have grown a foot since I saw him at the (wait for it....) Root Beer Float Social that the neighborhood children had at the end of the school year. When he perfected his pogo stick skills. And when he seemed so much younger.<br />
<br />
Behind our house, there are two houses with families, each of which have three little girls. It is a constant slumber party, and the girls walk to and from the backyards in their bathing suits, their nightgowns, their sundresses. They call to my dogs from the top of their fort and they giggle and chase one another and swing in their swings and sing songs. And the parents sit on the porch, drinking a beer, and sometimes admonishing whichever wayward child (not necessarily their own) has hurt another child's feelings. Which you know, with six girls, is easy to do...<br />
<br />
And then as I was closing my blinds this evening, I looked out to see a father teaching his son how to catch a ball. I thought of Ray Bradbury's <i>Dandelion Wine</i>. I thought of how much I wished, at various points in my life having read and reread the book over a series of New York and then Baltimore summers, I lived in such a place, troubled though it was in ways only Bradbury can put into words. And now I do. I also thought of Douglas Spaulding (the young boy in the novel), who declares that his summer will be a time of firsts: first root beer float, first run through the grass barefoot, first firefly caught, and so on...these firsts and lasts that define Green Town as a place where Nature and technology collide, sometimes in miraculous ways and sometimes in ways that point to evil, to a loss of something pure, to overlooking happiness when it sits right in front of you. We are lucky in this neighborhood that at this juncture, living as we do in Baltimore of all places, that a child can still have this, and that selfishly, I can witness it:<br />
<i><b><br />
</b></i><br />
<div class="quoteText"><i><b> "I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really." </b></i></div><div class="quoteText"></div><div class="quoteText"></div><div class="quoteText"></div><div class="quoteText"></div><div class="quoteText"></div><div class="quoteText"><br />
<br />
Sort of like catch.<br />
<br />
</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i> </i></b></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-69576483019935512352010-07-20T22:05:00.009-04:002010-07-20T22:51:05.571-04:00Everyone needs their version of a gold unitard<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEkIvUmTmiuX93cS1uyqlr03R0gdy4bpV4RoB24-HPoDJ-9gZLCWnOsRhkXIzRxkNWHEpcDp4Dyfmlfj5VEwk0QhJBCAFJNQnJiGLaFGnkjYXethm3kMDLGoTWpIyUW3MXy8FsVw9BWdc/s1600/viola.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEkIvUmTmiuX93cS1uyqlr03R0gdy4bpV4RoB24-HPoDJ-9gZLCWnOsRhkXIzRxkNWHEpcDp4Dyfmlfj5VEwk0QhJBCAFJNQnJiGLaFGnkjYXethm3kMDLGoTWpIyUW3MXy8FsVw9BWdc/s320/viola.jpg" /></a></div> <i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Viola Farber</span></i><br />
<br />
On Sunday, after perspiring mightily on a long walk to midtown Baltimore, I had a moment. It was one of those back-of-the-neck tingling, teeter-on-the-edge-of-my-seat, exclaiming "Oh-my-heavens" under my breath repeatedly moments. I think I may have announced "I'm having a moment" to my dear friend Shannon, who walked with me from Hampden to the Meyerhoff to watch Graham II perform. For free. In an air conditioned auditorium. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I LOVE attending modern dance performances. LOVE them. Addiction in this case is not too strong a word. I love bearing witness to the remarkable poetry that choreography holds, releases, and explodes, using music, sets, costumes, and of course, PEOPLE. The human body is an eloquent thing, after all. I would venture to say that I feel more alive when I watch a dancer on stage than I do in any other performance setting. Basketball holds a similar appeal, and there is a definite balletic grace in the agility and ragged movements that fly across a basketball court -all of which seem to defy logic. Like dance.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There is something about dance, especially modern dance, that really does make me swoon and feel slightly dizzy. In a good way. At Sarah Lawrence (where I went for undergraduate studies), I was surrounded by dancers and by a legacy of modern dance that I knew even at the time was really something extraordinary. Viola Farber, a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, was the grand dame and life-force of the Sarah Lawrence dance department, and I came to know her through my friends and one of my professors, her own dear friend. I loved Viola. She walked with the aid of a cane, and had a shorn crew cut that I often found myself wanting to touch. I can still call to memory her sing-song voice, the staccato of which was uncannily matched by her movements on stage. I saw her perform once, and it shook me to my core. I think I cried. And when she passed away, not long after I graduated, I wept bitterly. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Viola's students (many of whom were my friends) could do things with their bodies that I can not fathom. Is it odd that I remember so many of their choreographed pieces? I think not. A number of them are dancers today. One of my dearest friends, Angeline, came to Sarah Lawrence all the way from Hawaii. She knew how to hula, which basically granted her star status in my book. And when I saw her dance, I understood why my best friend had fallen so madly in love with her. She choreographed pieces that caused me to leap to my feet in admiration (much to Gaby's embarrassment). I don't think I missed one dance performance in my four years at Sarah Lawrence, and I can still remember costumes, movements, who danced in certain pieces, and a particularly beautiful piece that had me sobbing buckets. It was choreographed to this song, and I still get chills when I hear it (especially the end)*:</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuclbQwXnBs&feature=related">Sting, They Dance Alone</a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
*I had forgotten Sting had a long hair phase. Huh. And also - the SLC choreographers blew his video out of the water. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When I lived in New York, I saw as much dance as I possibly could: Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Elizabeth Streb...it is insanely fun to go to dance performances in New York, a city where dance happens on subways, streets, in parks, and on sidewalks. There is a spontaneity in New York that is as infectious as its rhythmic and finely measured choreography - the perfect place for dancers and aficcionados of its art. And the feeling of walking into a performance space grasping a ticket, knowing that the next hour or two will be spent witnessing a series of small miracles...well. It rivals only the high one leaves with after the performance has ended, and one is brought back down to earth again, wanting a gold unitard. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Shannon loves dance as much as I do. She comes to my student dance performances with me, and we gush over the incredible talent so many of my students possess. Seriously. One of my former students was recently told in her first year of college that she was "too good" for the dance department and they recommended that she transfer to a university that would adequately challenge her. Watching her dance is akin to experiencing some sort of angry angel, who has the singular gift of transforming that raw venom into a divine elixir. I could watch her dance for the rest of my life and never tire of it. And when I first saw one of her choreographed pieces, I felt like a student at Sarah Lawrence again, memorizing the costumes, the movements, who occupied stage left, whose leg could kick higher in the air, and so on.. When Shannon first saw my former-especially-insanely-talented student dance, she GOT IT too and I remember leaving the auditorium with her, both of us giddy. Both of us over-the-moon, ridiculously happy.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So it makes perfect sense that we would go to see Graham II together. Sunday was the first time I had the gift of seeing any of Martha Graham's companies perform a full show. Which is kind of funny, given that she is the irrefutable mother of modern dance. I mean, look at her and tell me that you don't feel every single emotion in the spectrum when you study this image:</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If that isn't some sort of heaven, I don't know what is. How can a face be so still while the body does THAT?? How does that hand say so much? </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Graham II is a company of young dancers, and on Sunday, they performed a small number of Martha Graham's pieces, choreographed during World War II, the Cold War, and so on...in the midst of all that ugliness, people had THIS. Had I been alive, I would have clung to these choreographies like rosary beads. One of her most famous pieces (a bit of which was performed on Sunday), <i>Appalachian Spring</i>, had a score of Aaron Copland and a set by Isamu Noguchi. Collaboration at its finest. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My favorite piece was the final performance: a section from <i>Acts of Light</i>, choreographed in 1981. It has to be one of the most technically difficult performances I have ever seen, with dozens of Graham's infamous contractions unleashed in double-time. I think I held my breath through most of it. At the end of the performance, the dancers looked like I did when I walked in off the street, "glowing" profusely (as my grandmother taught me was the proper word for perspiring). I have seen another part of <i>Acts of Light</i>, and it dawned on me, watching the dancers wearing nothing but these amazing gold unitards, that this piece is really kind of a painful thing. All of these contractions - so eerily beautiful, are like bee stings, and like a bee sting, they make one feel more alive than before. Which is kind of the point of most things, I think.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And so <i>Acts of Light</i> rivals my favorite Carracci in its celebration of the human form, and of the complicated dance that life and death engage in so arduously. "There are daily small deaths," Martha Graham once noted. A realist thick and through, she was also able to marvel in the magic that dance offers us, while regarding dance as something that we all must do, and CAN do to keep the human spirit intact, vibrating, alive. Donning the gold unitard (which is something I desperately covet now) is really a form of personal truth, and we need these truths to find our own planets. It is a gift to throw one's arms in the air and make magic. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>"I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination. There is a great deal of outer space, distant from our daily lives, where I feel our imagination wanders sometimes. It will find a planet or it will not find a planet, and that is what a dancer does."</i></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>-Martha Graham</i></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-27399411440919534292010-06-10T18:36:00.010-04:002010-06-10T21:27:47.949-04:00Partings<div align="center" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">THE CLOUD</div><div align="center" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As a free person I can always come and go,<br />
Not caught in ideas of is and is not.<br />
Not caught in ideas of being and non-being<br />
Let your steps be leisurely.<br />
Waxing or waning the moon is always the moon<br />
The wind is still flying. Can you feel it my dear?<br />
Bringing the rain from afar to nourish the nearby cloud<br />
Drops of sunshine fall from on high to earth below<br />
And the lap of earth touches the clear vault of the sky.</div><div align="center" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">-Thich Nhat Hanh<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">This is M. And that is me, looking like the unfortunate result of Harry Potter having a one-night stand with a chipmunk (I knew I wasn't meant for academia after my first run-in with the black robe). I was trying not to cry in this picture, which is pretty much true of every single photo taken of me (and there were many) at Tuesday's graduation. It is humbling when a beautiful, beaming just-graduated young woman is comforting ME, telling ME to dry my tears. <br />
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This senior class, now beyond the world of "senior", starts at the bottom rungs of the hierarchy again in the fall. And we sent them off with all of the regalia that befits this rite of passage. In my case, this included a fair dose of tears and a little bit of my heart fluttering away with white dresses, flyaway hair, and bright smiles that held hope, confidence and excitement about the journey ahead. I can't say that my heart feels completely OK at the moment. I'm not good at goodbyes, and I'm awfully good at getting misty. A lethal combination after grading exams, writing and proofing comments, and general end-of-school edginess which proved to be the Perfect Storm. Every girl with whom I had even the slightest connection made me cry, and MOST of the pictures the girls have so lovingly (ahem) posted on Facebook are heartwarming but decidedly NOT flattering. And that is okay.<br />
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The class of 2010 sort of stole my heart from the moment I met them. I was a new and nervous teacher who basically relied on instinct and internal pep-talks to get through my first year of standing in front of a bevy of girls and trying to impart knowledge about that most dreaded of subjects: history. I shouldn't have worried as much as I did. They are intelligent, spirited, hilariously funny, courageous - in sum, full of character and compassion. They are my cup of tea. And I spent my first year of teaching doing a happy dance over the fact that I advised and taught such wonderfully vibrant young women.<br />
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I didn't teach M. as a freshman, but she often stored her lacrosse bag in my classroom, always asking hesitantly - kind of skittishly - before she deposited her gear on my floor with a half-smile, half-grimace expression that is so quintessentially hers. As a sophomore, she was in my European Civilization class, and within a few classes of watching her and interacting with her, I knew that she was different from the rest of the girls. Unlike so many of her peers, who with good reason, don protective layers that shield their hearts and their hurts, M. has a heart that permits itself to be hurt and allows others in, with little cautionary tape defining her borders. Beyond that, she is just plain funny. In one class, she assiduously typed what I was saying verbatim (this was her habit, actually), and when in the next class, I prompted the girls to recall a specific fact about Versailles, she calmly opened her notes and proceeded to read what I had said...again, word for word, perfectly capturing my intonations and speech patterns. Have I mentioned that dignity is not something you should overly privilege as a teacher? Apparently, I wax poetic when I talk about fountains and art (go figure)...and we all remember that class to this day. <br />
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It is no mystery that being a teenage girl is pretty difficult at times, and that pressure from your peers can cause your brain to take a temporary leave...until the age of 22 or so. This is not some great secret. M. struggled with honoring her enviable moral compass while keeping her friendships intact. She did so with such integrity, and I often wondered how she maintained her smile...I noticed and I hurt for her when it went missing - deeply. Despite the fact that she is a star athlete and has oodles of friends, she was very lonely a lot of the time. She loves her friends. She is a loyal friend. She can empathize with anyone about anything, and she can validate the smallest hurt and the greatest heartache. She can put into words what others cannot. She owns her mistakes and she questions EVERYTHING.<br />
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And she sees the things in people that others cavalierly overlook. She would chalk this up to the fact that two of her senses are diminished: she can't taste or smell. As a result, she notices things around her that pass the rest of us by...her observations go well beyond the superficial; while her peers are sniffing one another's hair, she is noticing the way their eyes close when they laugh, and how her history teacher folds her legs beneath her when she sits and talks to her class. She would be an excellent therapist, because she so quickly picks up on a fleeting facial expression that, with complete accuracy, reflects how a person is feeling on any given day. I chalk it up to M. being acutely aware of the wonderful symphony of many hearts struggling to find safety, solace, happiness, and love - and part of it may be the sensory thing - but a huge part of it is her own huge heart.<br />
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One of the things I love most about my calling is that I get to learn from so many amazing individuals on a daily basis. I've come to the conclusion that if a teacher doesn't learn as much (if not more) than her students, perhaps a different career is in order. And I have learned so much from M. about friendships, about endurance, about the importance of levity in the classroom (I need only mention Lionel Ritchie), and the gift of an ongoing conversation that spanned three years and will hopefully continue a lifetime. It is hard to place a value on the impression an individual (or an entire class) can make on your heart, because over time, that impression takes a different shape. It changes in the same way that a handprint in concrete does once it dries. And people walk on it. And leaves gather in its crevices. Moss creeps in and changes its texture. And a child takes sidewalk chalk to it and temporarily declares it to be a different color. M. would appreciate this notion because despite our differences (i.e. the thought of me holding a lacrosse stick should fill you with dread), we think about the world similarly. Oftentimes, our slightly slanted view of the world is captured through the same rainbow prism, and when the light passes through, it is somehow comforting to know that someone else understands. So I know that she will understand what Thich Nhat Hanh meant when he wrote so beautifully, in such simple prose: "And the lap of the earth touches the clear vault of the sky." <br />
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So, M., may your steps be leisurely. May you always come and go. May the lap of the earth always provide a soft landing. And may ideas of "is" and "is not" never cloud the clarity your perfect vision. <br />
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</div></div><div align="center" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-52791641694471395602010-05-09T19:36:00.004-04:002010-05-09T20:24:20.189-04:00Mama Mia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Today is Mother's Day, a time for celebrating one of the most difficult jobs anyone could possibly have and the many women who, in the process, open their hearts entire gulfs wider than most do to offer their vulnerability, their wisdom, and their love to someone they will worry about for the rest of their lives. I am not yet a mother, but I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what kind of mother I will be.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And I hope that I am able to approximate a small percentage of my mother's talent at being Mom. </div><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When I was a child, I used to lie in bed at night and vividly imagine a scenario wherein parents were nominated for "Best Parents Award" by their children. In my reverie, I gave a speech, extolling the virtues of my parents and the many reasons why they should win the award. As fantasies often play out, my parents won. I was PROUD to have such loving parents; the fantasy (still a vivid memory) is testimony to that pride. </span><br />
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<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So much of this is thanks to the woman who took me to my gymnastics and ballet lessons, who walked the long oyster-shell lane to meet my school bus each day, and the woman who agreed to play adult Wendy to my childhood appearance in our school production of Peter Pan. And of course the woman who, with epic consistency, can butcher the words to almost any song but remain beautifully in tune while enthusiastically singing along to the radio in the car. Seriously - other drivers waiting at a red light have been distracted by my mother's ardent devotion to the 80's love ballad and watched with a combination of humor and fascination as she earnestly belted out Celine Dion, nailing every fourth or fifth word... maybe....on a good day. Really, there is so much to love in someone with so many talents. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My mother was a full time mom for most of our childhood, and while she made it look easy at the time, she worked incredibly hard to bring us stability, routine, and a sense of self from the moment we were born. She did so many things RIGHT, from instinct and from what she knew was best for her daughters, all of us very distinct individuals with sometimes very different needs. Television was permitted on very rare occasions, and not only did I learn to read at an early age, but as a result it was (and still remains) my favorite past-time. While most children feasted on bologna sandwiches at lunch, my lunchbox was packed with healthy foods like raisins and whole wheat bread (this was rather forward-thinking when I was a child). She believed in "less is more" and so although we had scheduled activities as children, we also had free time, a luxury that few of today's children seem to enjoy. Naps were permitted, reading outside for a couple of hours was encouraged and writing poetry in the middle of the night (while not completely endorsed) was deemed alright because it was a creative outlet. In sum, my parents agreed that they would not shape us to be something we were not. We were permitted to be ourselves, another novel concept on the brink of extinction among too many parents today.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My mother did hold us to certain standards though, and for that I am eternally grateful to both of my parents. The Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them done unto you"), to which she often refers, was the guiding principle of my parents' parenting and our sense of what is right and what is wrong. We were taught to treat others with unwavering kindness and the benefit of the doubt. We were counseled not to judge others, and to be open to all cultures, faiths, and lifestyles. Rudeness was anathema. A sense of entitlement of any kind was viewed as shallow and selfish. The absence of compassion in our interactions with others was simply not tolerated. At a very early age, I was taught the basic principle of kindness that both of my parents embody to this day. Thank goodness for this. Thank goodness that my parents' standards embrace moral courage and character, and that my mother patiently explained these things with love and hope for our bright futures. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">She has always held herself to very high standards as a parent. From the earliest reaches of my memory, birthday cakes were a big deal. On the year of my fifth birthday, my mother, seven months pregnant with my younger sister (and thus donning TWO birthday hats) painstakingly made me a Wonder Woman birthday cake. Hours before the party, I leaned too far into the cake while inspecting it and fell into the golden lasso. All too familiar with my lack of grace, she sighed and redecorated the cake. And then played host to some twenty-odd five year olds who jumped off the deck into her impatiens, swung upside down from the bars on the swingset, and wreaked general havoc. It's a wonder my sister wasn't born early. It's a wonder too that my mother didn't go postal. But pictures of her from that day depict a beaming, beautifully pregnant MOTHER, whose love for her daughter was forever a cause for joyfully picking up those rose-colored glasses and seeing things through the eyes of a child.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As we grew up and away, I watched my mother grow too. She went back to school, and became a nurse, graduating a mere few days after my graduation from college. She has spent her whole life - at home and at work- caring for others, something she does exceedingly well. Her patients may as well be her children; she is not afraid to correct a doctor, question a dosage or advocate for more immediate care. Now a grandmother to three, she still makes cakes, including the Emerald City, Dora the Explorer, brown sugar pound cake, train cakes at Christmas, and even desserts that avoid dairy and wheat. She attends recitals and she pulls out my old books for my niece. She is never tired of loving. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When I left my husband, when I was diagnosed with Lupus, and whenever I need an ear, my mother has always been at my side. She hasn't judged me. She has picked me up and put me back together again so many times and in so many ways. She has gone to doctors with me and I've seen her brow furrow with concern when I cough or seem stiff from joint pain. But she puts a smile on her face, brings me a glass of water, and reminds me to take my fish oil. She has watched as I fall in and out of love again, and she has cried with me as I sometimes struggled to find my equilibrium. When I succeed at some small thing, she exclaims, "Well, hot damn!" and when I tease her (which is frequent), she laughs until she cries. What a gift it is to have someone always there to hold your hand and soften the blow when you fall. She planted dahlias for my wedding at my parents' home last summer, tending to each blossom with all the love she feels for her three daughters. With her bell-like laugh that can erupt at any moment, she has shared the gift of laughter with me, and has taught me that laughter is medicine, a tonic for the soul. She has told me to "buck up" when I needed some tough love and a gentle reminder of how blessed and beautiful my life is.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In so many ways, she has made it so. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-71876811692921905512010-05-03T19:49:00.000-04:002010-05-03T19:49:40.686-04:00The shopping cart<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Damn you, internet. Damn you for forcing me to confront one of my secret obsessions-hobbies-"issues": the online shopping cart in spring time. Anyone who is an avid gardener can empathize with the heart-wrenching pangs that the spring garden catalog induces in one. It is lethal. It is cruel. And for the past decade or so, it has been online. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I love springtime so much that at the age of ten, I wrote a poem about it. And drew illustrations with pastels of flowers, tree branches, robins' nests (the latter has a prominent, if somewhat overly saccharine role in the poem). I love it so much that I confess to being one of those annoying individuals who exclaims at every lavender sunrise, every weeping cherry, every new sign of life in my garden. Hyperbole, you've met your maker. And she happens to love to garden.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now that I once again have my own garden, I devote a sizable portion of my mental energy to thinking about it. It is a living, breathing thing, my garden - and I can easily lose at least 20 minutes of a morning staring at a single euphorbia and wondering if it shouldn't be a little to the left. And oh look! It has another set of bracts! How brilliant. I should have ordered a few more...and I need something blue (caryopteris? baptisia?) to off-set the lime green...and crikey, there's that spot there that practically weeps for a mock orange. Should it be a double or single blossom? And if I get a mock orange, maybe I should just throw in some of those gorgeous near-black pansies edged in white...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">(When I was in first grade, my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Boardley, had a teacher's aid stand by my desk and tap on my shoulder when I daydreamed out the window. I'm just saying: I come by this naturally)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There is much left to be done in my garden, and the spring of 2010 is devoted to the front beds. Easy-peasy, one might think. But I've done a half a dozen variations of what the front beds (which now, on May 2nd, boast a rampant case of morning glory and very little else) should look like. I have performance anxiety when it comes to the front beds. Plain and simple. After all, they are the first things one greets when approaching our house. Do I go all architectural? Colorful? English cottage garden? Japanese Zen? Monochrome? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Paralysis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To date, I have roughly $2300 of plants in different "carts" - none of which, mind you, are a) the perfect front bed combo, b) affordable, and c) thus, not so much a reality. Fortunately, I collect seeds from my plants each year. And I love to divide iris. And </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">the unthinkable happened: I found a kind of hosta that I actually like and it happens to have really taken a liking to my garden. So the front beds will be cobbled together with pieces of what is already here - a generative process, actually. Which in its own way, is much more satisfying than the shopping cart.</span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-18832117166164886932010-03-15T21:21:00.001-04:002010-03-15T21:24:30.620-04:00Making it down the mountain<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Today is my first full day of a week in Park City, Utah. Park City is known foremost for its top-rate skiing, which to those of you who know me AT ALL, at least invites a bit of mirthful incredulity. "Paige? Skiing?" I know. I know. At the age of thirty-five, I can do a split. I can ice skate, and I can run stadiums better than most lacrosse players. Skiing? Ha. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And then there was the whole debate over what constitutes a vacation. I recognize that even sitting here as I am in a lovely hotel, I am rather spoiled to bring this to the table. That said, after a very long year at work with ongoing challenges, and as a hothouse flower in the truest sense of the word (I kid you not. I am like one of those heat/humidity loving banana plants. I love hothouses. Steam rooms. HEAT. Bring it on.), spending my break in more cold doing something for which I have a cool and distant appreciation - well. It didn't seem very vacation-like to me. And seeing as I am bunny-slope-bound, and Alex speaks the language of quadruple-black-diamond-with-zigzags-and-exclamation-points, it didn't seem to involve to a whole lot of "couple bonding" which I admit, I want and need. And to be fair, my admittedly narrow definition of this does not involve watching me careen down a mountainside for days on end. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And sometimes the truth is in the challenges, and in learning to work through them with the balance, respect, and acceptance that they deserve.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">One of the things that I am "working on" is confronting my self-doubt with a little more determination and a little less "meh". When I face scenarios with which I have a tenuous sense of enjoyment at best, I tend to be a little bit of a stick-in-the-mud. This is a difficult personality trait, I recognize...when it comes to tending the soul of another, caring for someone, or trying most new things, I am perfectly fine. You can also count on me to try almost any kind of food on the planet, so long as it doesn't involve American cheese. When it comes to anything involving snow, skis, heavy boots, and poles - none of which feel at all like extensions of my body - trepidation takes hold like a lamprey. It isn't fun for me, and it isn't fun for my husband, who in his expert-skier mindset understandably has a difficult time understanding my stubborn difficulty with negotiating so much equipment while careening down a mountain. Quickly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This morning we went skiing for the first time together with our dear friends, Dominic and Eliza. Eliza used to race - so, umm, she's really good. Dominic is an expert rock climber and an improving skier. He's also one of the best cheerleaders I have ever met. I wanted to high five him when I fell down for the twentieth time and he was right there, saying "Good job, Paige!" and meaning it. Before we set out though, panic set in. The boots - they felt like concrete blocks. The skis had me tripping over myself like a new-born colt. This had man-down written all over it. And I admit it - I panicked. "Take me OFF this mountain," I muttered under my breath, completely aware of all of the skiers on the mountain who in my mind, were stopping to watch the free entertainment wobbling, sliding, and slipping with all the knock-kneed grace of a giraffe. The first run down felt like an eternity, and I had sudden sympathy for my students when I charge them with completing a new assignment that I expect in two days - an eternity of effort, focus, and pushing bounds to many of them.</span><br />
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The second run, which Eliza patiently guided me down, took less time. I fell, laughed, got up again, had a few brief moments of euphoric disillusionment during which time I imagined myself winning Olympic gold - it was awesome. And then I would fall again. And ski lifts - why are ski lifts so darned difficult? I can never gauge when to jump. Alex was good at explaining this, but I am really bad at following directions with any consistency, I find. It was a lesson in finding patience with myself, with my co-skiers, with the mountain, and with the ski equipment, which I secretly wanted to hurl off the nearest cliff.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">All in all, two and a half hours in, and I was done. I do enjoy aspects of skiing - in small doses. Like aspic. But I am not a skier. I can approximate good cheer and I can wear cute ski clothes and feel all sporty, but in truth, it's a bit of a paper-thin veneer. Tomorrow, I'll get back on the slopes, and I will ski for a few hours, and I'm sure I will improve. Slightly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But then, I'll want to read. And maybe nap. Or sit by a fire. Or find a cool art gallery. Or decide where we should eat dinner. And shed my ski-bunny pretensions for who I truly am: an apres-skier. I am trying to make peace now with maybe not being someone who can be labeled "a skier" and instead trying to reach another place entirely. Perhaps making it down the mountain means confronting the things that one simply will NOT excel in, and finding simple happiness in this alone. Perhaps it also means working on that always-challenging but ever-rewarding balancing act with a partner, when we together stare a situation in the face head-on and say "Okay. So we want different things at this moment. And let's figure out how to make both people happy."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This week, we will make it down the mountain. And we might take different trails. Perhaps what matters is that we share in the spills, physical and figurative. And also that we recognize that we DO share common interests: hiking a mountain, for instance. Give me Maine, New Hampshire, the Alps, and I will want to reach the summit. It's the ups and downs that make things interesting, and make things worthwhile. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">On our shuttle back to our hotel today, one of our favorite songs came on the radio. And I looked at Alex, this man I married for all of our shared loves and for all of our differences, and I thought to myself "there is nowhere I would rather be."</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-52600301780880915742010-03-04T19:54:00.003-05:002010-03-04T21:11:04.166-05:00Do-Re-Mi redux<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now this just makes me really, really happy:</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDE3JHLqiSheRYVw424rmL8JI5r1zFp1rTdeoM6wu3gBYKvBeW7t0D41q_W2hzUCx8v5OADEyofAjC_rtl_tt6ikrcfdjsl1pnT82F2S58WOEeiKchHuRF_dubobjNqEOIRfmEHQr2w3M/s1600-h/doremi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDE3JHLqiSheRYVw424rmL8JI5r1zFp1rTdeoM6wu3gBYKvBeW7t0D41q_W2hzUCx8v5OADEyofAjC_rtl_tt6ikrcfdjsl1pnT82F2S58WOEeiKchHuRF_dubobjNqEOIRfmEHQr2w3M/s320/doremi.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkBepgH00GM">Do-Re-Mi, train station</a> - the anti-anger agent</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Seriously, I am not sure how anyone can watch this and not smile a little wider. As a lover of public spaces, and as someone who could happily watch The Sound of Music on repeat, I fought tears (and lost) when I saw this for the first time. Strangers! Dancing together! In a beautiful Belgian train station! What could be better?!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">For some, better might be this...</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXqU9dHLNaT-9i2psISW4U9i954kIOO2tPoBs9YO4YT6jRKOxAabrGy50H_uzS8mHRYNWUSN0shZ9wIzPyCIUt9NT5PBd37K3XQ7TkNw9OtBm96HTkOkYNUp57vmaOrpn6OM43HQCNFyI/s1600-h/latraviata.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXqU9dHLNaT-9i2psISW4U9i954kIOO2tPoBs9YO4YT6jRKOxAabrGy50H_uzS8mHRYNWUSN0shZ9wIzPyCIUt9NT5PBd37K3XQ7TkNw9OtBm96HTkOkYNUp57vmaOrpn6OM43HQCNFyI/s320/latraviata.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds8ryWd5aFw">Spanish Market, Opera</a></span><br />
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Who doesn't enjoy an aria or two while purchasing sausages and tomatoes? Why not have champagne while doing so? What's wrong with waltzing in the middle of a bustling market? And why not find so many different ways to fall in love?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If every lunch had a little impromptu Verdi, and if every commute was set to the tune of a little Julie Andrews, the world would be a better place. We must find reason to dance and sing sometimes. Thank goodness some people realize this. Thank goodness that there are those for whom spontaneity is something too beautiful to pass by. To weep at something heavenly is a very good thing indeed.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-46570430674172964432010-02-26T17:40:00.016-05:002010-02-26T21:56:14.136-05:00On bravery and on Brian<h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="UIStory_Message">"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change." -RFK (via Brian Kinsella)</span></span></i></h3><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think that bravery and moral courage are wrapped in all sorts of packages. It is important to me to make a mental note when I witness or experience acts of bravery that defy our sometimes watered-down use of the word. In a previous post, I made mention of what it is (for me) to be humbled, and I suppose the two go hand in hand. I admit to having a short fuse when it comes to people who are so enamored of their own activities that they don't allow the actions and deeds of others to sit with them a while and push them to reconsider the cost/benefits of their self-absorption. Maybe this is why I dislike Twitter and why increasingly, I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. Are we spending too much time "on the grid" and waxing poetic about those beautiful and poignant moments that delineate our protective bubble? Could we instead be just doing instead of documenting? Maybe there's a balance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Take my friend Brian. Brian is not afraid to burst a bubble, if it means that we have a deeper appreciation for life and for the people whose lives are not as gilded as our own. I met Brian in 2004, when he was an undergraduate student at Hopkins. He was in ROTC; I was a graduate student in the history of art. Brian worked at The Wine Source, an amazing wine-beer-spirits-cheese store in Baltimore where my two graduate school friends Heather and Jen also worked to make extra money. Our $13,000 annual stipend only went so far, after all. Side note: Heather and Jen both met their husbands at the Wine Source. I love that. Social outings included "the guys from the Source" - a welcome reprieve from grad school socializing which invariably centered around discussions of Panofsky, Donatello, and what Bernini was really up to in his Ecstasy of St. Theresa. As scintillating as these discussions were (and still are), I couldn't help but feel that all of this intellectual banter wasn't really all that illuminating after all, and I often found my inner dialogue wondering just how much I should care about whether the latest Rembrandt attribution was correct. Why not just love the painting for being what it is - something that none of us participating in the conversation could ever possess the talent or the agency to sign our names to?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Conversations with Brian, on the other hand, consistently pushed me to shed my pretensions and the widely-held belief that intellectual might held great moral merit. His perspective on the world - at the time, an intriguing combination of naivete and wisdom - challenged me to embrace my moral courage and what little bravery I felt I had at such a watershed moment in my life. He also taught me one of my most valuable lessons: do what you are. Don't say what you are and expect the Ganges to rise up to greet you. It has more important souls to tend to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A New Jersey boy, Brian speaks with a slight New Jersey accent that reminds me so much of so many childhoods spent on the Jersey shore with my family. Brian used more product in his hair than I ever have, and he was always a perfect bronzed tan - even in February. His teeth are white as innocence. I found this so charming and endearing. He was a body builder for a time, and he shaved his entire body of all hair. He once showed me photographs from bodybuilding competitions, and I remember being amazed by what people choose to do with their bodies. Brian was in a fraternity, SAE, and he was the soul of his fraternity house. He was a shameless flirt, but rarely dated, because he is particular. He also had NO time, given the number of jobs he worked: the Wine Source, an internship at the Secret Service, his obligations to ROTC, among other part-time commitments. I am not a fan of sororities and fraternities, though I respect and understand the appeal they have to some. In my estimation, spending time in the gym pumping iron couldn't be more boring. And tanning beds make you smell weird. But Brian and I got along like a house on fire. We were instant friends, built from a shared locus of honesty, mutual respect, and the unspoken acknowledgment that we had a whole lot to learn from one another.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Despite his busy schedule, Brian always had time to come by my office in the library. He frequently left me notes, and I still have one he wrote me that is truly one of the kindest letters I have ever received. He made me watch <i>The Ring</i>, and I will forever curse him for falling asleep 15 minutes into the film, while I sat perched on the edge of my couch, stiff and trembling with terror. He challenged me to make fun of myself at a point in my life when I had a very hard time doing so. He hated compliments, and whenever I would thank him for carrying armfuls of art history books for me, or checking in on me after I had a medical procedure, he would shrug it off, "No, no, no, P. That's nothin'," he would say. He was a friend - a real friend. I needed this in a member of the opposite sex - even if it was an undergrad with whom, on the surface, I had very little in common. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Baltimore is a place for hard-knocks lessons, though - even Hopkins undergrads are not immune to its breezy callousness. The back door to the SAE fraternity house where Brian lived was left open one warm April night in 2004, while Brian slept because he had to be up early for work and his housemates finally dozed off after a typical evening of revelry. Brian awoke in his first-floor room to the sound of his housemate screaming from the living room, and he ran out to discover his friend pleading "Help me," covered in blood from being stabbed by an intruder. "So much blood, P," he later told me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Brian knows how to save lives. This is what he was trained to do and this is what he does now. He held the wound together with both hands, and yelled for his housemates to help him. No one heard. One girl, who stayed over at the fraternity that night, heard the screams and was too afraid to do anything. Brian doesn't blame her, because his heart is just that big and forgiving. His friend died the next day from multiple stab wounds. Brian spoke at the memorial service, and I listened to his voice cracking and quivering as he mourned the loss of a brother - someone he couldn't save.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I worried for a time that Brian's understandable anger and sense of helplessness might wipe away that amber warmth that he shared with such consistent altruism and sincerity. I worried that he would become jaded, and that his heart, which is so very open to the world, would close. I worried that he would find the nearest corner, and reside THERE, with his back against the wall. But Brian doesn't have time for such things. He also doesn't have it in his make-up to be an Atlas to his own heartache, when he has bigger loads to carry:</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyYPzFPmatyJ67d0vL452gwo0HqcyZ_7b6XmtDtShJxHkF2mTxBDWXZxxR3SBbTJ_ETW6ECUOEzqEksOeqGtiE5_jdbqTdjR9NTQxryPD_zoMUkiZXAcMokBHNhnl_h5t6Pw2e-Qi5GU4/s1600-h/brianhaiti.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyYPzFPmatyJ67d0vL452gwo0HqcyZ_7b6XmtDtShJxHkF2mTxBDWXZxxR3SBbTJ_ETW6ECUOEzqEksOeqGtiE5_jdbqTdjR9NTQxryPD_zoMUkiZXAcMokBHNhnl_h5t6Pw2e-Qi5GU4/s320/brianhaiti.jpg" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Brian in Haiti, 2010 </span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">After graduating from Hopkins, Brian started active duty, first in Europe. "P!" he wrote, "I finally understand what the big deal about Renaissance art is!!!" Brian was stationed in Italy and in Germany, before spending over a year in the thick of our current war with Iraq. When I heard he was being stationed there, it was from a simple post on facebook, and then a short letter. No fanfare. No "pray for me." My heart sort of sat in stunned panic for a good day after I learned he was going, because part of me didn't know that Brian would survive (despite the fact that of anyone I know, Brian could survive almost anything). He doesn't believe in "think before you leap" when it comes to helping people, and my overactive imagination had scenarios of Brian taking bullets for others on rerun. He could very well have medals of honor galore, and I wouldn't know about it. He doesn't boast of his meteoric rise in the military, of the many things he has done to, in small but significant ways, make our world a little bit better. He just does it. He does not agree with this war, but he went. That takes moral courage, bravery, and a strong stomach to boot. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Brian is now in Haiti for the next few months. Having only recently joined us stateside after his time in Iraq, he left immediately after the earthquake. While everyone posted on facebook about where to donate (which is very important), Brian posted simply, "Off to Haiti." This kind of makes one think twice before boasting about something that doesn't involve saving a life, unloading 50 lb bags of rice, or organizing housing for the so many millions of displaced souls. We don't have time for our own hubris. We don't have time to give ourselves daily "shout-outs" anymore than our time is wasted if we don't spend a bit of our day leaning into discomfort to help someone who lacks the wherewithal to help themselves. Brian understands this. He understands that we can write and post and paste links and bemoan all of the ways that the world hemorrhages, and that to truly honor these souls in crisis, one has to help them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And I wish I was more like him. </span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310856159315290074.post-29540156101734691542010-02-12T16:44:00.008-05:002010-05-05T05:38:40.937-04:00Sayonara Sylvia Plath - repost from February 11<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yesterday marked the day that Sylvia Plath died. Of course she wrote <i>The Bell Jar</i>, which I read in eighth grade and loved. She wrote "Daddy" and "Ariel" and "The Stones"; the latter is a beautiful poem that I could read again and again and again. And she wrote "Lady Lazarus". Mercy. Edgar Allen Poe has nothing on this poem, which is as much about redemption as it is about the darker bits that further shatter Plath's edges - "the autobiography of fever," she once described it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Nothing is more terrifying than listening to Plath read her own poem, which thanks to YouTube, you can do:</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2mGiSBr_1sfhLohQN57SHDNfe_54ivanWIr8Acd1buYV-EZP5YKCD5QI96kCl3xvMIiZ1aMXmQGovKFMu9xy8nDBYELSN8pPkZZBOMRGAxJG5vY2gFznNd9TxGXS1AyBdPa0eC8UsjXk/s1600-h/sylvia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2mGiSBr_1sfhLohQN57SHDNfe_54ivanWIr8Acd1buYV-EZP5YKCD5QI96kCl3xvMIiZ1aMXmQGovKFMu9xy8nDBYELSN8pPkZZBOMRGAxJG5vY2gFznNd9TxGXS1AyBdPa0eC8UsjXk/s320/sylvia.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLxyTFDxE&feature=related">Sylvia Plath reads Lady Lazarus</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The first time I encountered this piece, I thought of Lady Lazarus as a phoenix, a mental image I have been unable to shake in subsequent revisits. Perhaps this is why I hear redemption on repeat, especially in the second half of the poem:</span><br />
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<pre style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.</i></pre><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> This from someone who gently placed her head on a soft towel in a gas oven, and neatly died in her London flat. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And yesterday, found dead in his home in London, the brilliant, volatile, and bewitching Alexander McQueen, whose designs included marvels such as this: </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifUKKipgXPtY5pygZVD8o-CeYUXqWsqNCWCyFtFLKhA4pWiUivkaAUJsUb0v6oSnb5SXBI5GHXnzeLN8kUHMbCn1NujDrRJYiSPpy5HZ9lCGXBJtUhJmqV9Sz8dkambmSpo1D8kl4WodI/s1600-h/mcqueenbutterfly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifUKKipgXPtY5pygZVD8o-CeYUXqWsqNCWCyFtFLKhA4pWiUivkaAUJsUb0v6oSnb5SXBI5GHXnzeLN8kUHMbCn1NujDrRJYiSPpy5HZ9lCGXBJtUhJmqV9Sz8dkambmSpo1D8kl4WodI/s400/mcqueenbutterfly.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I've never closely followed the fashion world. But Alexander McQueen lived on the margins of it, and kind of created his own world in the process, leaning into discomfort to challenge our notions of beauty and really, if you think about it, human nature. I value his ideas about creation and how we fit into it, especially as he explained it to the musician-artist-performer, Bjork: </span><span class="interviewBody"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="interviewBody" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"I've done loads of collections based on man and machine and man and nature, but ultimately my work is always in some way directed by nature. It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance....</span><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> I support what you're saying about this connection between man and nature, but it's like you're talking to a brick wall when it comes to the rest of the world. Everyone wants an easier life. I don't think nature fits into most people's concepts of an easier life." </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I love that McQueen is thinking about the locomotion of creating in terms not that far removed from Walter Benjamin's essay, <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm">"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."</a> Anyone who has any interest in modernity and how it bisects with what it means to authentically create something should read this work, which embraces the fact that crises can and do occur when new forms of art are born. The "aura" of a work of art is compromised by our demands to have it, to own it, to claim it as our own. </span></span><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"I am your opus," challenged Plath. What a curse and a blessing.</span></span><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Benjamin's essay, certainly read widely in Plath's day (if not as often in our own) is part of the scaffolding for the dialogue that artists such as Plath and McQueen entered. They did so with an uneasy volatility that is so wretchedly beautiful and ugly all at once. In many ways, it puts an essential and declarative point on their pain. You can hear it in Plath's voice, and you can read it in her lines. You can follow McQueen's twitter and arrive at a silence as still and arresting as stones. As Plath herself said, </span></span><span class="sqq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think Plath would have appreciated McQueen's comments as much as she likely would have dug his butterfly head piece, a nest so strange and beautiful - a miracle, really. I also believe that sometimes there are those who walk on this earth to create and create until there is nothing left that they want - their theatrical comeback refuses to rise again.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In these voices, there is yet redemption. An easier life, no. But one worth interrogating these strange angels who trouble us as much as they inspire, yes. </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="interviewBody"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And lest we forget Descartes, who also died on February 11: </span></span><span class="sqq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.”</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="sqq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Amen to that. </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0