Here's how it went down: serious game faces, concentration as we tried to remember how to do first and second transitions with our leeeetle dancing feet and our shake-shake-shake hips while moving our arms in new ways and doing, gulp, head slides. Yeah. I may love dancing, but I'm more your free form girl. Go figure, me preferring to shake my booty in my own damned way. :)
But. I wanna be able to master the prescribed steps first, then raise my nose a trifle and dance my own steps. Which brings us to the move of all moves - grapevine and reverse grapevine with shoulder shimmy. It has a real name. Something mideastern-y and old. But reallllly...it's all about the shoulder shimmy, with extreme attitude.
I still love the way the hip scarves accentuate parts of our bodies that we'd normally hide. I love the way the teeny-tiny-hipped woman in the front row truly cannot roll her hips in a figure-8, and giggles the whole time in utter glee anyway. The small and almost secret smiles of women when our instructor says "hip circle, find your own..." and then "that's your natural movement - own it." I love touching fingers in a circle and dancing, giggling your other right to the girl next to me, the sweet but clumsy one who keeps stepping on my toes.
Yup. Sigh. Grapevine and reverse grapevine with shoulder shimmy. My hair smiles, it's that kinda happy. Enough about belly dance for a moment.
I am trying to figure out if I can hurry up a cutover at work so that I can climb in a car Friday afternoon with my go-anywhere-do-anything friend and drive a few hundred miles, spend the night at a haunted hotel, drink wine and see geysers, talk about books until we want to pass out. Road trip!!! She is giving a workshop and reading - I would be the roadie. :) It is fun to think about, even if it doesn't work out.
In two weeks I'll be flying to Michigan! Yay! I can't wait to see everyone, and meet the new baby. Here's hoping for some pleasant weather. It's March in Michigan...but hope springs eternal, you know.
Enough for today...I'll try to be back more often now that this project is winding down.
peace and good thoughts!
~ patti
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Heart Day
The bellydancing was fabulous! The instructor, Sidonia, showed up with a rolling travel suitcase filled with part of her personal collection of be-coined and sequined hip scarves, and each of the 20'ish women in the class chose one to wear. It transformed us all from yoga-pant-wearing workout participants to wimmmmin, all of us with colorfully-wrapped hips ranging from squared and tiny to full and very rounded. Most of us in the middle of that range. We learned a few basic steps, we learned a few basic arm movements, then we strung them together in short dances. What was fabulous? Women not judging one another. Laughter. The beat of the music, some of it like a heartbeat, familiar as a heartbeat, filling us. The three or four moments where the steps felt so natural that I forgot it was a class, forgot I was "stepping" and just moved. And, of course, 20 butt-shaking women's dancing coins makes a sound that is, simply, fabulous.
Women are hard on other women, in my experience. I've been working at losing weight for about 22 months. It's slow going, and I no longer think those who bemoan the difficulty of losing weight once you pass 40 are slugs and laze-asses. For months, as the weight scraped itself off a pound at a time, in fits and jerks, there seemed no outward change in my appearance. Only I seemed to notice that I was fitting into, then shrinking out of, a series of sizes. But lately everyone is noticing, as though the last few pounds I've lost were the magic ones. I'm not done losing and I'm sure there will be more on this topic in future posts, but I have been musing about the questions of weight, body image, vanity.
The women in my family have generally had healthy doses of vanity in their characters. They were of that "type" that put on lipstick to make breakfast. They wore high heels with shorts. They didn't leave the house without checking their hair, lipstick, powder. I grew up thinking all women naturally smelled of AquaNet, lipstick and face powder with a light-to-liberal spray of some specific perfume. These women poked and prodded at their bellies and the thin pads of fat on their hips. They did not work out, they did not know about the muscle loss that attends aging without efforts to fight it. They merely drank more coffee, ate smaller pieces of pie and wished for their old bodies to return.
But - they were not, generally, heavy as women of my generation can become heavy. Most of them were not. The epidemic of obesity that is sweeping our country would have apalled these women. Not because of the health risks. I can't tell you how many times I heard "we're all going to die of something..." - the mantra of my smoking, cocktail-drinking, butter-eating predecessors. No - they'd be motivated not by health, but out of the risk to their wardrobes. I fought my weight as a girl - and I never remember my mother worrying about my health. I was the smart one, not the athlete. No sports. I sang, and acted in plays, and read books. I wrote stories and did math, memorized the periodic table and made people laugh. My mother worried about my looks, my ability to wear hip huggers or short skirts. I later realized that she worried about the world not seeing ME beyond the imperfection of my body. She marveled that, though I truly did WANT to wear the short skirts and tight Calvin Klein jeans that were "the" thing when I was in high school, it wasn't the kind of desire that moved me. I didn't discover that desire until my 20's, when I realized I liked the way being fit, and exercising, felt. Stubborn, I know.
My point? Most people are not motivated by fear. They are only made fearful, and frantic. Vanity seems to me to be born of fear, a fear that you don't measure up or that you will lose the measure of beauty you have. Pleasure and joy motivate. So what works for me is the simple thought that I will feel better and it will show in every line of my (imperfect but pretty awesome anyway) face and body if I simply move my body often and eat well. Great shoes do not hurt. I'm not immune to vanity's tug! :)
Still, there have been moments that I wished to possess a bit more of that vanity. It would maybe stop me from losing track of my physical self when my life gets crazy, or upsetting. Note to self: Life gets crazy, it always will. Must not react to that by abandoning the pleasures of movement.
Happy Heart Day. I'm thinking of rounded and gorgeously imperfect hips wrapped in fuschia and red and purple and black hip scarves, all stepping through a grapevine step, in a circle, while our hands and arms move in Pretty Lady sweeps, to music as familiar as a heartbeat, punctuated by laughter and the cheerful jingle of tiny coins.
Peace and great good thoughts!
~ patti
Women are hard on other women, in my experience. I've been working at losing weight for about 22 months. It's slow going, and I no longer think those who bemoan the difficulty of losing weight once you pass 40 are slugs and laze-asses. For months, as the weight scraped itself off a pound at a time, in fits and jerks, there seemed no outward change in my appearance. Only I seemed to notice that I was fitting into, then shrinking out of, a series of sizes. But lately everyone is noticing, as though the last few pounds I've lost were the magic ones. I'm not done losing and I'm sure there will be more on this topic in future posts, but I have been musing about the questions of weight, body image, vanity.
The women in my family have generally had healthy doses of vanity in their characters. They were of that "type" that put on lipstick to make breakfast. They wore high heels with shorts. They didn't leave the house without checking their hair, lipstick, powder. I grew up thinking all women naturally smelled of AquaNet, lipstick and face powder with a light-to-liberal spray of some specific perfume. These women poked and prodded at their bellies and the thin pads of fat on their hips. They did not work out, they did not know about the muscle loss that attends aging without efforts to fight it. They merely drank more coffee, ate smaller pieces of pie and wished for their old bodies to return.
But - they were not, generally, heavy as women of my generation can become heavy. Most of them were not. The epidemic of obesity that is sweeping our country would have apalled these women. Not because of the health risks. I can't tell you how many times I heard "we're all going to die of something..." - the mantra of my smoking, cocktail-drinking, butter-eating predecessors. No - they'd be motivated not by health, but out of the risk to their wardrobes. I fought my weight as a girl - and I never remember my mother worrying about my health. I was the smart one, not the athlete. No sports. I sang, and acted in plays, and read books. I wrote stories and did math, memorized the periodic table and made people laugh. My mother worried about my looks, my ability to wear hip huggers or short skirts. I later realized that she worried about the world not seeing ME beyond the imperfection of my body. She marveled that, though I truly did WANT to wear the short skirts and tight Calvin Klein jeans that were "the" thing when I was in high school, it wasn't the kind of desire that moved me. I didn't discover that desire until my 20's, when I realized I liked the way being fit, and exercising, felt. Stubborn, I know.
My point? Most people are not motivated by fear. They are only made fearful, and frantic. Vanity seems to me to be born of fear, a fear that you don't measure up or that you will lose the measure of beauty you have. Pleasure and joy motivate. So what works for me is the simple thought that I will feel better and it will show in every line of my (imperfect but pretty awesome anyway) face and body if I simply move my body often and eat well. Great shoes do not hurt. I'm not immune to vanity's tug! :)
Still, there have been moments that I wished to possess a bit more of that vanity. It would maybe stop me from losing track of my physical self when my life gets crazy, or upsetting. Note to self: Life gets crazy, it always will. Must not react to that by abandoning the pleasures of movement.
Happy Heart Day. I'm thinking of rounded and gorgeously imperfect hips wrapped in fuschia and red and purple and black hip scarves, all stepping through a grapevine step, in a circle, while our hands and arms move in Pretty Lady sweeps, to music as familiar as a heartbeat, punctuated by laughter and the cheerful jingle of tiny coins.
Peace and great good thoughts!
~ patti
Monday, February 11, 2008
Me, a Bellydancer? Really?
Sorry I've been away.
Here is the thing: I hate my belly. I've always hated my belly. At one time I hated being my height, having all these damned curves...but by the time I hit my late 20's, I had narrowed and focused my hatred: I merely hated my belly.
So. Tonight I'm taking a bellydance class. Because I love to dance, and I think it looks like fun, and I'm thinking maybe, MAYBE I'll like my belly more if it is useful, or if I can see it in a new way, maybe as not-horrible...even (gasp) - pretty? Nah, too much. Baby steps.
Also: today, February 11, was my mom's birthday. I woke up happy and have been smiling for her all day today. I wore red for her (she liked me in red). And between conference calls and munching my tupperware-packed salad (healthy!), I am remembering all the funny things about her. I thought of her smartass humor and her giggle. And I remembered the way she thought her kids were pretty much perfect. Especially my brother, Michael. :) (He is pretty awesome, I must agree...but the girls aren't bad, either.) I remember her temper, the way her chin rose when she would say, in disgust, about someone or some agency that "they can just kiss my ass." Seems that MIGHT be where I got this idea that being ladylike does not require quiet acceptance. :)
I'm remembering her snappy blue eyes and her fiery temper, and the way she drank half-beers (they add up, I'm here to tell you), and tapped her feet to music, and picked out songs by ear on a piano. That piano thing still to this DAY amazes me. I'll sing her a song on my way home, and maybe tell her about this bellydance thing. And maybe, though she never learned it, she'll understand when I tell her that I'm all done hating parts of me. It's just silliness.
Peace and shimmmmy-essence to you!
~ patti
Here is the thing: I hate my belly. I've always hated my belly. At one time I hated being my height, having all these damned curves...but by the time I hit my late 20's, I had narrowed and focused my hatred: I merely hated my belly.
So. Tonight I'm taking a bellydance class. Because I love to dance, and I think it looks like fun, and I'm thinking maybe, MAYBE I'll like my belly more if it is useful, or if I can see it in a new way, maybe as not-horrible...even (gasp) - pretty? Nah, too much. Baby steps.
Also: today, February 11, was my mom's birthday. I woke up happy and have been smiling for her all day today. I wore red for her (she liked me in red). And between conference calls and munching my tupperware-packed salad (healthy!), I am remembering all the funny things about her. I thought of her smartass humor and her giggle. And I remembered the way she thought her kids were pretty much perfect. Especially my brother, Michael. :) (He is pretty awesome, I must agree...but the girls aren't bad, either.) I remember her temper, the way her chin rose when she would say, in disgust, about someone or some agency that "they can just kiss my ass." Seems that MIGHT be where I got this idea that being ladylike does not require quiet acceptance. :)
I'm remembering her snappy blue eyes and her fiery temper, and the way she drank half-beers (they add up, I'm here to tell you), and tapped her feet to music, and picked out songs by ear on a piano. That piano thing still to this DAY amazes me. I'll sing her a song on my way home, and maybe tell her about this bellydance thing. And maybe, though she never learned it, she'll understand when I tell her that I'm all done hating parts of me. It's just silliness.
Peace and shimmmmy-essence to you!
~ patti
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Sunday
Here is the baby! My niece and her husband used a family surname as his first name....and I find that awesome. 
He is gorgeous, and though you can't see it, he has dark hair. Lots of it. Yayyy! He also has two sisters and two parents who are a tiny big gaga, and a whole bunch of cousins (I'm not gonna even try to figure out the first or second cousin business....COUSINS, close enough). It makes my heart smile to see them all so happy.
It made me damned homesick though, and I'm trying to plan a trip home this spring or summer. It's not enough - I need to live somewhere nearer. Working on that...
It's been a week already? Hunh. I had a busy week at work, a clarifying week that will have my resume shined up before the day is out, and updated resumes posted on Monster. My stories are doing what stories do in the world of literary journals - being read and rejected with sometimes-encouraging comments. My writing is ARGH. Kicking my ass, but I keep kicking back.
Here is something I told a friend recently, and that seems important as I plan to make some big decisions. I will circle and analyze until I'm certain further analyzing will do me no good - then I decide, and commit, and I'm happy with what I choose. I dislike deciding without that time to think it through. I dig my heels in if someone tries to rush me. But generally I don't second guess my decisions and am not wistful about them. To what end? 'Tis done - move on. This is apparently a key characteristic of "happy" people.
Just finished watching a film titled "Antonia's Line," which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1995, apparently. The film is earthy and sensual, playful, painful and lovely in turns - telling the story of Antonia's life after she returns to her small village. It has powerful female characters, something of a celebration of matriarchy. There is love, and brutality, and ambition - sigh. It is excellent, but that's not what I want to write about today. There is a moment in the film when Antonia has had a great loss, and is mourning. She says "Ehhh...there is nothing to be done but get up. Life must be lived." Indeed, it must. Dinners must be cooked, laundry washed, children raised, lives lived. Because time moves, regardless of our readiness for it to do so.
What I'm wrestling now is how the pieces of my life fit together, or fail to. I need more time to write, I want to have or make a family and my days are not being spent in support of what I say is important to me. It seems that everything touches everything else - like dominoes with teeth. Every change creates a ripple in the little pond of my life. Some people in my life are cheering me on - make the rippppplessss....., while others enjoy that smooth water. I am closer to the former than the latter. Change is good, and necessary, and it is inevitable. So, at some point, I will need to make some ripples. In fact, if you're not much of a swimmer, you may want to strap on your life vests - I'm seeing a potential cannonball in my future. :)
Good thoughts and peace to you!
~ patti
He is gorgeous, and though you can't see it, he has dark hair. Lots of it. Yayyy! He also has two sisters and two parents who are a tiny big gaga, and a whole bunch of cousins (I'm not gonna even try to figure out the first or second cousin business....COUSINS, close enough). It makes my heart smile to see them all so happy.It made me damned homesick though, and I'm trying to plan a trip home this spring or summer. It's not enough - I need to live somewhere nearer. Working on that...
It's been a week already? Hunh. I had a busy week at work, a clarifying week that will have my resume shined up before the day is out, and updated resumes posted on Monster. My stories are doing what stories do in the world of literary journals - being read and rejected with sometimes-encouraging comments. My writing is ARGH. Kicking my ass, but I keep kicking back.
Here is something I told a friend recently, and that seems important as I plan to make some big decisions. I will circle and analyze until I'm certain further analyzing will do me no good - then I decide, and commit, and I'm happy with what I choose. I dislike deciding without that time to think it through. I dig my heels in if someone tries to rush me. But generally I don't second guess my decisions and am not wistful about them. To what end? 'Tis done - move on. This is apparently a key characteristic of "happy" people.
Just finished watching a film titled "Antonia's Line," which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1995, apparently. The film is earthy and sensual, playful, painful and lovely in turns - telling the story of Antonia's life after she returns to her small village. It has powerful female characters, something of a celebration of matriarchy. There is love, and brutality, and ambition - sigh. It is excellent, but that's not what I want to write about today. There is a moment in the film when Antonia has had a great loss, and is mourning. She says "Ehhh...there is nothing to be done but get up. Life must be lived." Indeed, it must. Dinners must be cooked, laundry washed, children raised, lives lived. Because time moves, regardless of our readiness for it to do so.
What I'm wrestling now is how the pieces of my life fit together, or fail to. I need more time to write, I want to have or make a family and my days are not being spent in support of what I say is important to me. It seems that everything touches everything else - like dominoes with teeth. Every change creates a ripple in the little pond of my life. Some people in my life are cheering me on - make the rippppplessss....., while others enjoy that smooth water. I am closer to the former than the latter. Change is good, and necessary, and it is inevitable. So, at some point, I will need to make some ripples. In fact, if you're not much of a swimmer, you may want to strap on your life vests - I'm seeing a potential cannonball in my future. :)
Good thoughts and peace to you!
~ patti
Monday, January 21, 2008
Monday
Officially, today is a holiday for my company's Idaho site. The rest of the company, however, does not observe this holiday, so it was "suggested" that it might be a good idea for us to work the holiday, reserving this day for some future date when we need a day to keep us from running screaming from the building. Sigh. Have I mentioned the part where I need a new job? :) It's on the list.
My sister's middle daughter is having a baby. Today! She is overdue and verrry pregnant, and today IS the day. I'd love to be there, and I'm very aware of the distance between me and the people I love today. Over the weekend I talked briefly with my sister, and was joking with her about this conversation I keep having with the therapist - he gives me the depression test, I say "Doesn't frustrated ranting indicate a lack of depression???" Now I smile as I say it...but I mean it. He laughs, reminds me he has to ask the questions, and then we talk about living with depression, next to depression. My husband is fighting depression along with, and in great part because of, his physical challenges, you see. Or therapist-dude tries to talk the hard-headed me into believing that some small distinction of the difference between anxiety-induced behaviors, addictive behaviors and compulsive behaviors matters. For the record? In my book - they do NOT. They may come from different places in our minds, but they FEEL the same. Your life, your actions, your behaviors are not authentic to who you are. I keep telling him - your job is to know what caused the problem so you can fix it. My job is to tell you you're not doing that great a job yet. :) It's okay, I'm charming and I say this stuff with a smile and a relatively light heart, and so that comment makes him laugh.
This weekend, while talking to another friend, we wound up talking about the things we always thought we would do that we are not doing. She is a single mom, and I am...well, I am not where I thought I would be. Here was our short list: camping, backpacking, snowshoe weekends, international travel, impulsive road trips (that one was mine). Seeing a pattern here? Uh...it's all about escape, babeeee. So we went digging into our Campus Rec calendars to find low cost opportunities to do this stuff. We're going to go snowshoeing in a few weeks on an overnighter (there will be no snow camping, a lodge and someone else cooking will definitely be involved). I'm going to take a belly dance class. We're going to find some group to try backpacking with. It's so easy to accept limits when you are tired, isn't it?
So...I'm reading a book called Atonement, by Ian McEwan, recently made into a film. I've owned the book for a while, and when I began reading it again, I remembered trying to read it once before. It is lovely. Lush prose, surprising observations in a WWII setting, the lens of today on a time that is at once familiar and unfamiliar to us now. What makes it hard to read is the act of a child, a precocious and smart and headstrong child, that shapes lives. McEwan circles the moment of this act with precision and grace until it is almost unbearable to read it. Books do that to me. My dance with the written words of a book, or of letters, or emails, create such a vivid place that I feel I inhabit it. Unlike, completely unlike, the experience of film, where I am clearly an observer. In any case, one of the things I'd rather do than work today is finish this book. Tomorrow night my teaching career resumes, with a nighttime beginning fiction class. I am both excited and wondering how I'll manage it. So, another of the things I would rather do today is work on my materials for the class - my syllabus and handouts and schedule and...all of it.
Most of all, I'd like to spend the day writing. I have a story that is aching to get out of me, that I'm pacing around like a caged lioness, afraid to start, burning to start. The act of writing these stories is so involving, though. I lose myself for a time, and it can be almost frightening to do that. Right now, it feels both seductive and a little scary. But irresistible.
Find peace, stay warm and smile often.
~ patti
My sister's middle daughter is having a baby. Today! She is overdue and verrry pregnant, and today IS the day. I'd love to be there, and I'm very aware of the distance between me and the people I love today. Over the weekend I talked briefly with my sister, and was joking with her about this conversation I keep having with the therapist - he gives me the depression test, I say "Doesn't frustrated ranting indicate a lack of depression???" Now I smile as I say it...but I mean it. He laughs, reminds me he has to ask the questions, and then we talk about living with depression, next to depression. My husband is fighting depression along with, and in great part because of, his physical challenges, you see. Or therapist-dude tries to talk the hard-headed me into believing that some small distinction of the difference between anxiety-induced behaviors, addictive behaviors and compulsive behaviors matters. For the record? In my book - they do NOT. They may come from different places in our minds, but they FEEL the same. Your life, your actions, your behaviors are not authentic to who you are. I keep telling him - your job is to know what caused the problem so you can fix it. My job is to tell you you're not doing that great a job yet. :) It's okay, I'm charming and I say this stuff with a smile and a relatively light heart, and so that comment makes him laugh.
This weekend, while talking to another friend, we wound up talking about the things we always thought we would do that we are not doing. She is a single mom, and I am...well, I am not where I thought I would be. Here was our short list: camping, backpacking, snowshoe weekends, international travel, impulsive road trips (that one was mine). Seeing a pattern here? Uh...it's all about escape, babeeee. So we went digging into our Campus Rec calendars to find low cost opportunities to do this stuff. We're going to go snowshoeing in a few weeks on an overnighter (there will be no snow camping, a lodge and someone else cooking will definitely be involved). I'm going to take a belly dance class. We're going to find some group to try backpacking with. It's so easy to accept limits when you are tired, isn't it?
So...I'm reading a book called Atonement, by Ian McEwan, recently made into a film. I've owned the book for a while, and when I began reading it again, I remembered trying to read it once before. It is lovely. Lush prose, surprising observations in a WWII setting, the lens of today on a time that is at once familiar and unfamiliar to us now. What makes it hard to read is the act of a child, a precocious and smart and headstrong child, that shapes lives. McEwan circles the moment of this act with precision and grace until it is almost unbearable to read it. Books do that to me. My dance with the written words of a book, or of letters, or emails, create such a vivid place that I feel I inhabit it. Unlike, completely unlike, the experience of film, where I am clearly an observer. In any case, one of the things I'd rather do than work today is finish this book. Tomorrow night my teaching career resumes, with a nighttime beginning fiction class. I am both excited and wondering how I'll manage it. So, another of the things I would rather do today is work on my materials for the class - my syllabus and handouts and schedule and...all of it.
Most of all, I'd like to spend the day writing. I have a story that is aching to get out of me, that I'm pacing around like a caged lioness, afraid to start, burning to start. The act of writing these stories is so involving, though. I lose myself for a time, and it can be almost frightening to do that. Right now, it feels both seductive and a little scary. But irresistible.
Find peace, stay warm and smile often.
~ patti
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Once
Sometimes when I watch a film or read a book, I realize that it has come into my life at exactly the moment it needed to. I think this happens often, actually, and I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea that everything happens when it should as it should, if we but let it. Actually, it's more my heart and spirit that fight that notion than my head, since in my particular experience trust often costs something.
Once was just what I needed to see right now. It's one of those indy films that makes me remember why I like indy films - actors with imperfect features and great presence, a quiet storyline with heart, people with thwarted desires, quirky and breath-catching moments of real drama. And this Irish film also has fantastic music and many reminders especially heartening for the frustrated and disheartened artists of the world. Here is what I am thinking right this minute: what you get can make you truly happy if you stop clinging so stubbornly to what you want. I don't know that this is always true, and especially not in matters of love - but it often is true of life's paths, and limitations. Most of all, when it comes to things not of the heart, but of the world - letting go of wantwantwant frees your arms and fingers to grasp some other wonderful thing, some undreamed of opportunity, that comes your way.
I know this, and I live this, and in my gut it is the unquestioned truth of how I see the world. But as I recently told a friend - of course there are moments when disappointment threatens to become bitterness. When frustration feels like it wants to seduce me, to stew inside me to resentment. It might be disappointment at my own life's limits, or frustration about the pain a loved one feels. For me, either can whisper darkly when I am tired. As the Cormac McCarthy quote reminded me just a few weeks ago - I'm in the camp of those who will find a way to be happy. What I have to allow myself room to do is accept disappointment and then move through it. Because, simply put, and plainly enough to anyone with eyes: sometimes it's hard to compromise your hopes against reality. Sometimes.
Once reminded me of that, too. The main character rediscovers hope, and he fills his mind and his minutes trying to fulfill his soul's desire. As in all things, it's the journey.
So. Speaking plainly now, because who really reads these entries? Sometimes I simply want it easier. Quieter, more laughter, fewer troubles, simpler, with less drama and pain and angst. When I realize that's what I want, I have to self-scold a bit. I have to ask myself why I think I deserve it easier, when in fact my life is in the cushy paradise section on the sliding scale of human possibility. I'm capable, smart, loved and blessed with much.
Other times, the word I would use is not easier, but settled. My father used that word as a kind of catch-all to ask how I was doing. And of course, there is no state of "settled" that can be attained. Had he lived longer, I would have loved to talk about that with him. As soon as we feel we are settled, the world (which is NOT rotating around me, dammit!) is bound to offer up another challenge, another opportunity, another distraction. It is about feeling settled in your heart, let the world send the salvos it is bound to send.
Feeling settled isn't an accomplishment, it's another kind of journey. Plan and execute and build lives all you like - my knowledge of the world is that it's all at risk, all the time. All you have is the journey, the knowledge that you can make it again. And again, if needed.
Hey, if you read this? Mostly, mostly I do. I'm always walking that space in the center where feeling settled sits in a field of lavender and daisies just up a hill to my right, and giving up sits in a dark, fallow space an easy downhill tumble to my left. Stay to the right. Always to the right.
Hope and light heart to you.
~ patti
Once was just what I needed to see right now. It's one of those indy films that makes me remember why I like indy films - actors with imperfect features and great presence, a quiet storyline with heart, people with thwarted desires, quirky and breath-catching moments of real drama. And this Irish film also has fantastic music and many reminders especially heartening for the frustrated and disheartened artists of the world. Here is what I am thinking right this minute: what you get can make you truly happy if you stop clinging so stubbornly to what you want. I don't know that this is always true, and especially not in matters of love - but it often is true of life's paths, and limitations. Most of all, when it comes to things not of the heart, but of the world - letting go of wantwantwant frees your arms and fingers to grasp some other wonderful thing, some undreamed of opportunity, that comes your way.
I know this, and I live this, and in my gut it is the unquestioned truth of how I see the world. But as I recently told a friend - of course there are moments when disappointment threatens to become bitterness. When frustration feels like it wants to seduce me, to stew inside me to resentment. It might be disappointment at my own life's limits, or frustration about the pain a loved one feels. For me, either can whisper darkly when I am tired. As the Cormac McCarthy quote reminded me just a few weeks ago - I'm in the camp of those who will find a way to be happy. What I have to allow myself room to do is accept disappointment and then move through it. Because, simply put, and plainly enough to anyone with eyes: sometimes it's hard to compromise your hopes against reality. Sometimes.
Once reminded me of that, too. The main character rediscovers hope, and he fills his mind and his minutes trying to fulfill his soul's desire. As in all things, it's the journey.
So. Speaking plainly now, because who really reads these entries? Sometimes I simply want it easier. Quieter, more laughter, fewer troubles, simpler, with less drama and pain and angst. When I realize that's what I want, I have to self-scold a bit. I have to ask myself why I think I deserve it easier, when in fact my life is in the cushy paradise section on the sliding scale of human possibility. I'm capable, smart, loved and blessed with much.
Other times, the word I would use is not easier, but settled. My father used that word as a kind of catch-all to ask how I was doing. And of course, there is no state of "settled" that can be attained. Had he lived longer, I would have loved to talk about that with him. As soon as we feel we are settled, the world (which is NOT rotating around me, dammit!) is bound to offer up another challenge, another opportunity, another distraction. It is about feeling settled in your heart, let the world send the salvos it is bound to send.
Feeling settled isn't an accomplishment, it's another kind of journey. Plan and execute and build lives all you like - my knowledge of the world is that it's all at risk, all the time. All you have is the journey, the knowledge that you can make it again. And again, if needed.
Hey, if you read this? Mostly, mostly I do. I'm always walking that space in the center where feeling settled sits in a field of lavender and daisies just up a hill to my right, and giving up sits in a dark, fallow space an easy downhill tumble to my left. Stay to the right. Always to the right.
Hope and light heart to you.
~ patti
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Straight Man
Finished this book over the weekend, and I caught myself smiling about a quirky funny moment while out walking last night. If you aren't familiar with this writer, Richard Russo, you should check out at least Nobody's Fool. He won the Pulitzer for the novel Empire Falls, but for my money NF has richer humor and human drama.
I am an opinionated snippetybitchet, am I not?
I'm not sure what I think yet about this book. Russo's prose and style is an almost-perfect counterpoint to Cormac McCarthy. Russo writes about minutiae of our modern lives with the sort of detail and focus that we grant it - and thus draws attention to how silly are the ways that we spend our days. While McCarthy goes straight at the big questions, such as the nature of evil or the source of joy in a life, Russo tends more toward the sidelong glance. He writes small towns with small dramas writ large, and dissatisfied middle-aged men looking for their true selves, often in bars or diners with other men who are older or younger versions of themselves. Yet from the small dramas Russo pulls large truths.
One of this book's truths is about fathers. Much of the drama centers around William Henry Devereaux, Jr's (call him Hank) discomfort with being abandoned by William Henry Devereaux, Sr - 40 years earlier. The father is coming to live in the small town that Jr. calls home, and they are both academics, both English professors. But much of the wisdom comes from Hank's insight into how his wife feels about her father. I was laughing about a paragraph in the book where Hank says "every time she spends time with her father, my own stock rises. I hate to think of him staying with us for an entire summer, but by the time he leaves, I'm going to look pretty good to Lily."
But now, writing this, I'm more interested in this idea of the sidelong glance. Maybe that's why I like Russo (not everyone does, and especially not every writer does). His characters, who sneak up on the things that scare them, who look and then look away - they feel true to me. It is a strategy that is very helpful when the thing we need to face is truly frightening, worthy of a respectful, slow, careful approach. But it can quickly become a habit.
I'm off to write some fiction. Happy Thursday!
I am an opinionated snippetybitchet, am I not?
I'm not sure what I think yet about this book. Russo's prose and style is an almost-perfect counterpoint to Cormac McCarthy. Russo writes about minutiae of our modern lives with the sort of detail and focus that we grant it - and thus draws attention to how silly are the ways that we spend our days. While McCarthy goes straight at the big questions, such as the nature of evil or the source of joy in a life, Russo tends more toward the sidelong glance. He writes small towns with small dramas writ large, and dissatisfied middle-aged men looking for their true selves, often in bars or diners with other men who are older or younger versions of themselves. Yet from the small dramas Russo pulls large truths.
One of this book's truths is about fathers. Much of the drama centers around William Henry Devereaux, Jr's (call him Hank) discomfort with being abandoned by William Henry Devereaux, Sr - 40 years earlier. The father is coming to live in the small town that Jr. calls home, and they are both academics, both English professors. But much of the wisdom comes from Hank's insight into how his wife feels about her father. I was laughing about a paragraph in the book where Hank says "every time she spends time with her father, my own stock rises. I hate to think of him staying with us for an entire summer, but by the time he leaves, I'm going to look pretty good to Lily."
But now, writing this, I'm more interested in this idea of the sidelong glance. Maybe that's why I like Russo (not everyone does, and especially not every writer does). His characters, who sneak up on the things that scare them, who look and then look away - they feel true to me. It is a strategy that is very helpful when the thing we need to face is truly frightening, worthy of a respectful, slow, careful approach. But it can quickly become a habit.
I'm off to write some fiction. Happy Thursday!
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Slip Slidin' Awaaaay....
I've been described by some as stubborn. I once received a lowered performance review score on tenacity, based on being too tenacious. It was a tenth of a point on a 100 point scale, intended by my then-manager to illustrate that sometimes it is good to let gooooo....but I debated his reasoning as illogical. Eventually I won...but only after I admitted over a drink that he had a point. See, I can learn. :)
Not stubborn. Tenacious. Determined. Filled to the brim with midwestern, middle-class stick-to-it-iveness. But not stubborn.
Today I awoke to unexpected snow - three or so inches of fluffy white. I drank coffee and watched it out my windows and let my soul calm. Also, I stretched my muscles a lot, sore from a grueling aerobic/weight workout. Oh, and did my characteristic wince-giggle move every time I stood up. I was moderately sore.
But I'd planned to walk today. It's on my list. The list of priorities. The sun came out, and some of the snow melted, and I ran some errands...so it was late afternoon before I laced up my shoes. That's right, punk. Walking shoes, because I don't own snow hikers. Please. This is the first winter in 13 years that we've had enough snow to use a snow shovel. Now, you might be thinking "hey, you could go to campus and walk in the Rec's climate controlled comfort" - and you would be 100% correct. Except that I wanted to breathe outdoor air, clear and clean. I wanted sunlight and cold air on my face.
So off I went. Ipod, cell phone, tissues, lip moisturizer, ear warmers, sweats, fleece vest, long underwear shirt, that amazing nothing-moves workout bra, socks, gloves, scarf. Yeah, I love winter. Thing is...it's cooling off, and the snow that had melted? It was returning to a frozen state. Only not snow, of course. Standing water forms ice, see.
By the first mile, I'd mastered the technique: small steps, stick to snowy areas where possible (ignoring the snow on ankles), watch for idiots in vehicles. But then...the snow disappeared. The next mile was all skate, and it was fun, actually...yeah, fun. The way a county-fair rollercoaster might be fun when you've seen the carny who put it together last night, and he really looked like he wanted to get back at the world for what it owes him? Yeah, like that.
It's getting dark now, and I manage to get past the icy section. Take that, angry carny-guy messing in my karma. It's all good. I'm smiling a lot, rocking out with the Boss on my Ipod, listening to the MTV unplugged album, and a car passes from behind, so I step over further in the parking lane (no sidewalks, Boise has the MOST screwed up system of sidewalks you can imagine). I am skirting a parked car, another car is approaching from the front...and then a horn blasts behind me. It's loud. Really loud, like a percussion on my body. There is a moment that I'm pretty sure I'm going down. My heart is in my mouth suddenly, and I recognize how stupid it is, how stubborn and not tenacious this walk is, how it's maybe possible that I am self-destructively-stubborn/tenacious/determined and the time has come to pay up for my folly - so I freeze, flinch, try to decide whether to flatten myself into the parked car or take a flyer onto the hood...and then nothing. I turn around, and an idiot female person in a truck is parked in front of the house I just passed, honking at someone to come out of the house. Seriously. So uh, a few hand gestures come to mind. I go with the hands raised, palms up, incredulous look -WTF??? She points at the house, laughs, smiles. Across the street the guy I always see running in the summer when I walk in the early morning is in his driveway, clearly trying not to laugh. He is in his sweatshirt and looks ready to watch a football game. Comfortable. Bastard. "You want I should kick her ass, or explain the world to her?" he says, and then I turn to face him and the two of us just grin.
Yeah, so then I realized. No, I'm not self-destructively stubborn/tenacious/determined, and there is no payment due for any so-called folly.
Seriously. But it's possible that next time it's this snowy I'll go to the Rec. See? I told you I can learn.
Yours in the spirit of tenacity. (Truth told, I LIKE stubborn.)
~ patti
Not stubborn. Tenacious. Determined. Filled to the brim with midwestern, middle-class stick-to-it-iveness. But not stubborn.
Today I awoke to unexpected snow - three or so inches of fluffy white. I drank coffee and watched it out my windows and let my soul calm. Also, I stretched my muscles a lot, sore from a grueling aerobic/weight workout. Oh, and did my characteristic wince-giggle move every time I stood up. I was moderately sore.
But I'd planned to walk today. It's on my list. The list of priorities. The sun came out, and some of the snow melted, and I ran some errands...so it was late afternoon before I laced up my shoes. That's right, punk. Walking shoes, because I don't own snow hikers. Please. This is the first winter in 13 years that we've had enough snow to use a snow shovel. Now, you might be thinking "hey, you could go to campus and walk in the Rec's climate controlled comfort" - and you would be 100% correct. Except that I wanted to breathe outdoor air, clear and clean. I wanted sunlight and cold air on my face.
So off I went. Ipod, cell phone, tissues, lip moisturizer, ear warmers, sweats, fleece vest, long underwear shirt, that amazing nothing-moves workout bra, socks, gloves, scarf. Yeah, I love winter. Thing is...it's cooling off, and the snow that had melted? It was returning to a frozen state. Only not snow, of course. Standing water forms ice, see.
By the first mile, I'd mastered the technique: small steps, stick to snowy areas where possible (ignoring the snow on ankles), watch for idiots in vehicles. But then...the snow disappeared. The next mile was all skate, and it was fun, actually...yeah, fun. The way a county-fair rollercoaster might be fun when you've seen the carny who put it together last night, and he really looked like he wanted to get back at the world for what it owes him? Yeah, like that.
It's getting dark now, and I manage to get past the icy section. Take that, angry carny-guy messing in my karma. It's all good. I'm smiling a lot, rocking out with the Boss on my Ipod, listening to the MTV unplugged album, and a car passes from behind, so I step over further in the parking lane (no sidewalks, Boise has the MOST screwed up system of sidewalks you can imagine). I am skirting a parked car, another car is approaching from the front...and then a horn blasts behind me. It's loud. Really loud, like a percussion on my body. There is a moment that I'm pretty sure I'm going down. My heart is in my mouth suddenly, and I recognize how stupid it is, how stubborn and not tenacious this walk is, how it's maybe possible that I am self-destructively-stubborn/tenacious/determined and the time has come to pay up for my folly - so I freeze, flinch, try to decide whether to flatten myself into the parked car or take a flyer onto the hood...and then nothing. I turn around, and an idiot female person in a truck is parked in front of the house I just passed, honking at someone to come out of the house. Seriously. So uh, a few hand gestures come to mind. I go with the hands raised, palms up, incredulous look -WTF??? She points at the house, laughs, smiles. Across the street the guy I always see running in the summer when I walk in the early morning is in his driveway, clearly trying not to laugh. He is in his sweatshirt and looks ready to watch a football game. Comfortable. Bastard. "You want I should kick her ass, or explain the world to her?" he says, and then I turn to face him and the two of us just grin.
Yeah, so then I realized. No, I'm not self-destructively stubborn/tenacious/determined, and there is no payment due for any so-called folly.
Seriously. But it's possible that next time it's this snowy I'll go to the Rec. See? I told you I can learn.
Yours in the spirit of tenacity. (Truth told, I LIKE stubborn.)
~ patti
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Feeling the Love?
Well. I read in my local paper today that most people make sweeping resolutions that they abandon within weeks. They are going to lose 100 pounds, train for a marathon, get out of debt, find a career that satisfies them... Okay, problem number one: I'm reading that list and nodding, even taking notes (ohhh...a marathon, good one). And then the part about how impossible those resolutions are, and the likelihood of failure and abandonment fills three or four inches of column space.
Sometimes, and by that I mean freaking often, I am annoyed by the fact that anytime people dream big, they're told that they are being escapist. Not really. We dream big, I think, because the level of our discontent has never been so high. And it's not - NOT - because of thwarted consumer desires that we are reaching for more. Nope.
A friend and I, each of us raised in relatively (?) religious homes, talk often about the visible levels of panicky consumerism, the crazed casting about for stuff that we see in our neighbors, our families, ourselves. He and I talk often about questions of faith. We aren't wholehearted fans of blind faith...or maybe we're just not able to grasp it. But lately, those talks circle back to what we see substituting for the faith of earlier generations. We are desperate to make meaning of the world, to find meaning, and not simply to subsist. We are told, often and charmingly and sometimes quite loudly, that meaning might be found in a bigger house, or a better sofa, new car, a sexier computer or...you get my drift. Sometimes, for a moment, we do find happiness in objects. There is pleasure and appreciation in finely made objects, in lovely possessions, and in beautiful spaces. But it is fleeting, and the cost is often high (and interest-laden). And most importantly - it doesn't stand in for the greater pleasures, the deeper pleasures - being elsewhere - and that is the quest.
I think our resolutions are often about this frenzied quest - so I say dream BIG. Put the marathon on the damned list. Put debt free on there. Put "new life's work" on there. And then go make them happen. Break them down, attack them, but don't start by turning your dream into a shadow of itself. The world is likely to do that, but you don't need to help it in the effort.
My list? Yeah, here we go:
* Lose 10% of my current weight. My diet is excellent - no resolutions there. (Bite me, no numbers will be offered)
* Walk or workout most days each week.
* Snowshoe weekend with the chicks I love. Bike 1/2 century ride with those same women.
* See more of my family. I suck at that. They can't find Idaho on a map, either. :)
* Volunteer as a court appointed special advocate. This is the year.
* Finish the three stories necessary to complete my first book of stories.
* Submit the four finished stories everywhere in the known universe for publication.
* Change my job. More time - I need more free time, more flexible time.
* Keep my center. Always. Big love goes out to the one who helped me find my center this year. Your faith gave me faith.
So, that's it. And it IS doable. I'll prove it.
Seek peace.
~ patti
Sometimes, and by that I mean freaking often, I am annoyed by the fact that anytime people dream big, they're told that they are being escapist. Not really. We dream big, I think, because the level of our discontent has never been so high. And it's not - NOT - because of thwarted consumer desires that we are reaching for more. Nope.
A friend and I, each of us raised in relatively (?) religious homes, talk often about the visible levels of panicky consumerism, the crazed casting about for stuff that we see in our neighbors, our families, ourselves. He and I talk often about questions of faith. We aren't wholehearted fans of blind faith...or maybe we're just not able to grasp it. But lately, those talks circle back to what we see substituting for the faith of earlier generations. We are desperate to make meaning of the world, to find meaning, and not simply to subsist. We are told, often and charmingly and sometimes quite loudly, that meaning might be found in a bigger house, or a better sofa, new car, a sexier computer or...you get my drift. Sometimes, for a moment, we do find happiness in objects. There is pleasure and appreciation in finely made objects, in lovely possessions, and in beautiful spaces. But it is fleeting, and the cost is often high (and interest-laden). And most importantly - it doesn't stand in for the greater pleasures, the deeper pleasures - being elsewhere - and that is the quest.
I think our resolutions are often about this frenzied quest - so I say dream BIG. Put the marathon on the damned list. Put debt free on there. Put "new life's work" on there. And then go make them happen. Break them down, attack them, but don't start by turning your dream into a shadow of itself. The world is likely to do that, but you don't need to help it in the effort.
My list? Yeah, here we go:
* Lose 10% of my current weight. My diet is excellent - no resolutions there. (Bite me, no numbers will be offered)
* Walk or workout most days each week.
* Snowshoe weekend with the chicks I love. Bike 1/2 century ride with those same women.
* See more of my family. I suck at that. They can't find Idaho on a map, either. :)
* Volunteer as a court appointed special advocate. This is the year.
* Finish the three stories necessary to complete my first book of stories.
* Submit the four finished stories everywhere in the known universe for publication.
* Change my job. More time - I need more free time, more flexible time.
* Keep my center. Always. Big love goes out to the one who helped me find my center this year. Your faith gave me faith.
So, that's it. And it IS doable. I'll prove it.
Seek peace.
~ patti
Monday, December 31, 2007
New Year's Eve - Crack the Champagne?
I have a bottle, and I'm making a list of reasons to raise a glass.
It is quite amazing to me the things I learn about life from writing, in the act of finding language to create meaning and sensation. Here is one I'm pondering today: in editing, I often spend too much time trying to correct symptoms of underlying issues. For example, I'll say that a section of dialogue is stilted, when the real problem is that the character is underdeveloped. That sort of thing. Guess what...I do that in life, too. I react to symptoms and try to fix them, instead of taking that single breath and step backward to be sure I'm correcting the right thing. I've been working on this pretty hard in 2007, and I've made a lot of progress but dammmmmmit...I keep slipping up.
I forgive myself...but I really wish I would stop it. No: I will stop it.
Here is how I slip up most: not measuring opportunities FIRST against how they match with my priorities, and THEN by what else they might offer me. I'm very lucky in many ways - opportunities come to me. People who love me say that's because I work hard. Ehhh...I think it's some sort of balancing act for the crappy stuff that's been thrown in my direction. Either way - when opportunities arrive, it is hard not to be persuaded by the priorities that OTHERS have for me. More salary, more "prestige" - these aren't on my priority list. More time, more focus, the time and energy to write and to care for my body - these are on my list.
Oh, wait. Maybe how I slip up most is in overbooking myself, overcommitting my time. No. I'm getting better about that. Progress.
So, I'm withdrawing from consideration for a job that has a great title and pays better (and does get me to the side of the country I'd prefer living in) - but that advances none of my priorities. Whew. I'm getting better at this.
It occurs to me that if my priorities are attained...I'll likely find myself a healthy, fit, poor-but-happy writer. That's okay - I'll still have my shoes. It will be better than okay. It will be perfect. :)
That 12 week thing started today. So this morning, after a healthy breakfast, only ONE cup of coffee and a couple of glasses of water, I bundled up and went out to walk my 4 miles (including the breath-stealing hill!) in the chill air. It felt great. And now I'm here...and soon I'll go give myself a pedicure and get semi-snazzily dressed to ring in the new year. I'm wearing the shoes, I think...even if they are a super impractical choice for the quieter celebration we're planning.
And today, tonight, tomorrow - I'll be making my list of things to be grateful for, 2007 milestones and great moments, people to thank and connect with. And I will also be working on my plans for next year.
Be safe and joyous!
~ patti
It is quite amazing to me the things I learn about life from writing, in the act of finding language to create meaning and sensation. Here is one I'm pondering today: in editing, I often spend too much time trying to correct symptoms of underlying issues. For example, I'll say that a section of dialogue is stilted, when the real problem is that the character is underdeveloped. That sort of thing. Guess what...I do that in life, too. I react to symptoms and try to fix them, instead of taking that single breath and step backward to be sure I'm correcting the right thing. I've been working on this pretty hard in 2007, and I've made a lot of progress but dammmmmmit...I keep slipping up.
I forgive myself...but I really wish I would stop it. No: I will stop it.
Here is how I slip up most: not measuring opportunities FIRST against how they match with my priorities, and THEN by what else they might offer me. I'm very lucky in many ways - opportunities come to me. People who love me say that's because I work hard. Ehhh...I think it's some sort of balancing act for the crappy stuff that's been thrown in my direction. Either way - when opportunities arrive, it is hard not to be persuaded by the priorities that OTHERS have for me. More salary, more "prestige" - these aren't on my priority list. More time, more focus, the time and energy to write and to care for my body - these are on my list.
Oh, wait. Maybe how I slip up most is in overbooking myself, overcommitting my time. No. I'm getting better about that. Progress.
So, I'm withdrawing from consideration for a job that has a great title and pays better (and does get me to the side of the country I'd prefer living in) - but that advances none of my priorities. Whew. I'm getting better at this.
It occurs to me that if my priorities are attained...I'll likely find myself a healthy, fit, poor-but-happy writer. That's okay - I'll still have my shoes. It will be better than okay. It will be perfect. :)
That 12 week thing started today. So this morning, after a healthy breakfast, only ONE cup of coffee and a couple of glasses of water, I bundled up and went out to walk my 4 miles (including the breath-stealing hill!) in the chill air. It felt great. And now I'm here...and soon I'll go give myself a pedicure and get semi-snazzily dressed to ring in the new year. I'm wearing the shoes, I think...even if they are a super impractical choice for the quieter celebration we're planning.
And today, tonight, tomorrow - I'll be making my list of things to be grateful for, 2007 milestones and great moments, people to thank and connect with. And I will also be working on my plans for next year.
Be safe and joyous!
~ patti
Monday, December 24, 2007
Merry Christmas Cormac McCarthy
This morning, around 9, I started reading No Country For Old Men, a novel by Cormac McCarthy. He is a brilliant writer, and his prose thrills me even when his material troubles me. But it's Christmas Eve, so I expected to read a few chapters, then set the book aside and read something else. Something Christmasy. Lighter. Like, say, maybe...Dante.
Oh, my. Nope. Read the whole book in one sitting. Straight through. What a novel. It raises big questions about the nature of faith, the aims of our country, the aims of each one of us - questions it doesn't answer and that it raises without approaching preachiness. The characters are complex and simple, honorable and flawed. Lovely. You will, if you know me, hear about this book for a while. But tonight, I am moved to quote one section.
So as not to ruin the book's lovely and quiet surprises, I'll not say where this section is from, or who the speaker is. He's smart, tough, and wise. He is not educated, and is, as they apparently say in Texas with great reverence, "common as dirt." He has not had an easy life, and he is speaking to another character about the nature of regret in a life. He says this:
"I ain't got that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things you might think would make a man happier. . . You can make up your own list. You might even have one. I think by the time you're grown up you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it."
My, yes. I've known people who never got the hang of it, either, and this passage rang with such immense and simple truth to me. I've known people, smart people, who sniffed at happiness as the playground for the simple-minded. But in the end, that's just not true. It may be, arguably, harder to stay happy when you can see the complexities of the world's problems. But in the end, you're going to find a way to be happy with today if you are so wired. You're going to smile at some touch of nature in your life, or the sweet smile of a child, or the taste of something simply delicious. And it will not matter, really, if you do that from a chair surrounded by sunshine and daisies, or from a place that is darker. Because for happy people the darkness is transitory. It simply is.
I'll tell you, this gives me pause. You have to try to place yourself when you read something like that, don't you? Out walking tonight, in the cold and clear darkness, I thought hard about this. I have had a series of hard times, unrelated to one another, but piled on top of one another, such that I became an essentially happy person who began to doubt that the darkness was transitory. Or, as one of my friends says, the "little donkey burdens all added up." I didn't even really know that I was losing my faith in the light. And then, then a lot of things conspired to lift my head up. I was reminded that the darkness could be lifted. I remembered, and I believed. That memory made me kick for the light, in a way that reminds me, still, of kicking for the surface of a lake when my lungs ache for air. One never knows what you'll find at the surface, or in the clarity of bright light, but the happy person is certain it will be better than burning for air, or fumbling in darkness. Rediscovering the light has been such a gift - it's hope and happiness all in one.
Merry almost-Christmas to all those who helped me to find my light this year, and those who waited while I did. Thank you, a thousand thousand times over.
~ Patti
Oh, my. Nope. Read the whole book in one sitting. Straight through. What a novel. It raises big questions about the nature of faith, the aims of our country, the aims of each one of us - questions it doesn't answer and that it raises without approaching preachiness. The characters are complex and simple, honorable and flawed. Lovely. You will, if you know me, hear about this book for a while. But tonight, I am moved to quote one section.
So as not to ruin the book's lovely and quiet surprises, I'll not say where this section is from, or who the speaker is. He's smart, tough, and wise. He is not educated, and is, as they apparently say in Texas with great reverence, "common as dirt." He has not had an easy life, and he is speaking to another character about the nature of regret in a life. He says this:
"I ain't got that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things you might think would make a man happier. . . You can make up your own list. You might even have one. I think by the time you're grown up you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it."
My, yes. I've known people who never got the hang of it, either, and this passage rang with such immense and simple truth to me. I've known people, smart people, who sniffed at happiness as the playground for the simple-minded. But in the end, that's just not true. It may be, arguably, harder to stay happy when you can see the complexities of the world's problems. But in the end, you're going to find a way to be happy with today if you are so wired. You're going to smile at some touch of nature in your life, or the sweet smile of a child, or the taste of something simply delicious. And it will not matter, really, if you do that from a chair surrounded by sunshine and daisies, or from a place that is darker. Because for happy people the darkness is transitory. It simply is.
I'll tell you, this gives me pause. You have to try to place yourself when you read something like that, don't you? Out walking tonight, in the cold and clear darkness, I thought hard about this. I have had a series of hard times, unrelated to one another, but piled on top of one another, such that I became an essentially happy person who began to doubt that the darkness was transitory. Or, as one of my friends says, the "little donkey burdens all added up." I didn't even really know that I was losing my faith in the light. And then, then a lot of things conspired to lift my head up. I was reminded that the darkness could be lifted. I remembered, and I believed. That memory made me kick for the light, in a way that reminds me, still, of kicking for the surface of a lake when my lungs ache for air. One never knows what you'll find at the surface, or in the clarity of bright light, but the happy person is certain it will be better than burning for air, or fumbling in darkness. Rediscovering the light has been such a gift - it's hope and happiness all in one.
Merry almost-Christmas to all those who helped me to find my light this year, and those who waited while I did. Thank you, a thousand thousand times over.
~ Patti
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Snow Falls on ChainLink....
My house sits on a corner, across the street from an old, private golf course. I always say I have the cheap seats - the lush open space spread out and filling the view from my windows...just across a rather busy street, and on the other side of a chain link fence that is almost invisible. Until the snow outlines each rectangle with teeny drifts of white that glisten in moonlight. Still...it's nice, almost decadent, that expanse of groomed earth. In summer it's too green for this desert climate, and in winter it feels like a private park.
It snowed last night when I was out walking. First it was that icy kind of sleety rain-snow, and I was laughing to myself about being so hard-headed that I was 1.75 miles from home, in the dark, in the sleet, without a hat but with both an Ipod and a cell phone. Nice. But then...the snow changed to the heavy, dense curtain of flakes - the kind that falls straight down in a silent press of white. And I smiled at it, tipped my face up to let it strike my skin and thanked the universe for sending it. It made me MUCH less homesick to have the snow falling. I might have dialed my cell to share the news with someone...but it was as sweet, I think, to send my thoughts out into the dark night sky and trust that they would be felt, if not heard.
Yeah, this 12-week thing? Uhm....I'm thinking maybe I started with a four week maintenance warm-up kind of plan, and then I'll leap right into the 12 week weight loss cycle. Yeah. I have changed my habits a lot, and I'm no longer at risk of just piling on pounds when I let my guard down. I have habits that involve uh...vegi burgers and whole grains, instead of my old standbys of french cheese and delightful breads. Thus - it is okay to be in a maintenance loop for a few weeks - it IS. It is a long road, this life road. And I'm under direct orders to treat myself with love and respect. To which I say...whatever...and then try to honor that request, because it came out of love and care.
Love and peace to us all - it's just a few hours from Christmas Eve day here, and I'm enjoying the silence and the glow of my late-decorated but lovely Christmas tree.
Peace and love ~ Patti
It snowed last night when I was out walking. First it was that icy kind of sleety rain-snow, and I was laughing to myself about being so hard-headed that I was 1.75 miles from home, in the dark, in the sleet, without a hat but with both an Ipod and a cell phone. Nice. But then...the snow changed to the heavy, dense curtain of flakes - the kind that falls straight down in a silent press of white. And I smiled at it, tipped my face up to let it strike my skin and thanked the universe for sending it. It made me MUCH less homesick to have the snow falling. I might have dialed my cell to share the news with someone...but it was as sweet, I think, to send my thoughts out into the dark night sky and trust that they would be felt, if not heard.
Yeah, this 12-week thing? Uhm....I'm thinking maybe I started with a four week maintenance warm-up kind of plan, and then I'll leap right into the 12 week weight loss cycle. Yeah. I have changed my habits a lot, and I'm no longer at risk of just piling on pounds when I let my guard down. I have habits that involve uh...vegi burgers and whole grains, instead of my old standbys of french cheese and delightful breads. Thus - it is okay to be in a maintenance loop for a few weeks - it IS. It is a long road, this life road. And I'm under direct orders to treat myself with love and respect. To which I say...whatever...and then try to honor that request, because it came out of love and care.
Love and peace to us all - it's just a few hours from Christmas Eve day here, and I'm enjoying the silence and the glow of my late-decorated but lovely Christmas tree.
Peace and love ~ Patti
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Twelve Weeks
I was manhandled by one of those "free gift" offers into buying a book titled Body for Life for Women. The book is a little inspirational (galleries of before and after photos, success stories) and quite blunt. If you're over 40, you are on a fast track to a higher percentage of body fat and less lean muscle unless you work hard at reversing the process. Ugh.
One element I like quite a lot is one that I've followed rather unconsciously the last few years as I worked to lose the pounds I'd piled on: 12 weeks of focused weight loss effort, and then 12 weeks of maintenance at the new lower weight before losing more. I like this. It works for me, and it makes sense to me.
So, today is day 1 of a 12 week weight loss segment.
I ate wisely, drank lots of water (that part's always easy for me) and, joy of joys...walked my 4 mile loop, though without taking the hill that steals my breath. It felt awesome. Yay, me.
Happy December.
Peace to all ~ patti
One element I like quite a lot is one that I've followed rather unconsciously the last few years as I worked to lose the pounds I'd piled on: 12 weeks of focused weight loss effort, and then 12 weeks of maintenance at the new lower weight before losing more. I like this. It works for me, and it makes sense to me.
So, today is day 1 of a 12 week weight loss segment.
I ate wisely, drank lots of water (that part's always easy for me) and, joy of joys...walked my 4 mile loop, though without taking the hill that steals my breath. It felt awesome. Yay, me.
Happy December.
Peace to all ~ patti
Friday, November 2, 2007
Staying in the Now
People who strive to stay in the now, to experience this moment as it happens, are magnetic. It simply feels good to be near 'em.
I wrestle to achieve being in the moment, and only sometimes succeed. A coworker was shocked to find, when he attempted meditation for the first time, that he could not free his mind of busy thoughts for even 10 seconds at a time. We really are that frantic, inside our heads. So, I give myself some slack - staying in the now is hard to do. When my life feels "in balance" it usually feels nearly effortless to stay in the now. My actions and intentions are in harmony, the pieces and parts of my life all claim the appropriate amount of attention. But it's hard to stay in that state. Nature abhors a vacuum, right? And stasis is...well, 'tis better to be in flux than dead!
What I find most interesting today is the habit of imbalance, the forces that tug and press this way and that in an effort to push us off center, into the gap. Speaking bluntly - not everyone appreciates having us "in the moment" - or in balance. Bosses, lovers, coworkers and sometimes friends all like, they think they like, the frantic, hyper, wildly amusing/busy/zany/zingy versions of ourselves. My boss, for example, thinks that my calm when I am balanced is a kind of dullness, a lack of engagement. Some of my friends find me livelier when I am out of balance - that crazed edgy energy, the panic of feeling that drives humor and motion. Hell, I like being inside all that energy - it keeps me from having even an instant to reflect.
D'oh....was that my outside voice?
But the ease that I feel when in that balanced place - it's so vivid. It is a sense of well being that is easy to recall even in dark moments, an ease that is a worthy goal.
So what is balance? It is, as I mentioned, that state when my actions are in line with my intentions. Action is intention. So what I really mean to say is that balance is when my actions are in balance with my stated intentions, the intentions in my head, those I say out loud, write on "my goals" lists, measure myself and my worth against. Mine are easily stated. My intention is to live so that I value my time over money. To love generously but without giving up my true self. To eat well and move my body in all the ways that it is intended to move. To give back to those who need, to those I love. To follow my dreams. To write well and daily, and to read.
We are now entering the season of little balance, and much mania. Seems a good time to remember what peace there is in silence. I'm trying - those of you who love me best know that. I'm trying very hard to stay in balance. Thanks for the hands and hearts and hugs and good wishes.
Hold tight to your center.
Peace ~ Patti
I wrestle to achieve being in the moment, and only sometimes succeed. A coworker was shocked to find, when he attempted meditation for the first time, that he could not free his mind of busy thoughts for even 10 seconds at a time. We really are that frantic, inside our heads. So, I give myself some slack - staying in the now is hard to do. When my life feels "in balance" it usually feels nearly effortless to stay in the now. My actions and intentions are in harmony, the pieces and parts of my life all claim the appropriate amount of attention. But it's hard to stay in that state. Nature abhors a vacuum, right? And stasis is...well, 'tis better to be in flux than dead!
What I find most interesting today is the habit of imbalance, the forces that tug and press this way and that in an effort to push us off center, into the gap. Speaking bluntly - not everyone appreciates having us "in the moment" - or in balance. Bosses, lovers, coworkers and sometimes friends all like, they think they like, the frantic, hyper, wildly amusing/busy/zany/zingy versions of ourselves. My boss, for example, thinks that my calm when I am balanced is a kind of dullness, a lack of engagement. Some of my friends find me livelier when I am out of balance - that crazed edgy energy, the panic of feeling that drives humor and motion. Hell, I like being inside all that energy - it keeps me from having even an instant to reflect.
D'oh....was that my outside voice?
But the ease that I feel when in that balanced place - it's so vivid. It is a sense of well being that is easy to recall even in dark moments, an ease that is a worthy goal.
So what is balance? It is, as I mentioned, that state when my actions are in line with my intentions. Action is intention. So what I really mean to say is that balance is when my actions are in balance with my stated intentions, the intentions in my head, those I say out loud, write on "my goals" lists, measure myself and my worth against. Mine are easily stated. My intention is to live so that I value my time over money. To love generously but without giving up my true self. To eat well and move my body in all the ways that it is intended to move. To give back to those who need, to those I love. To follow my dreams. To write well and daily, and to read.
We are now entering the season of little balance, and much mania. Seems a good time to remember what peace there is in silence. I'm trying - those of you who love me best know that. I'm trying very hard to stay in balance. Thanks for the hands and hearts and hugs and good wishes.
Hold tight to your center.
Peace ~ Patti
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Liquor, Sugar and Hormones
There are many times that I love being a woman. There are other times that I do not enjoy it quite so much. I speak, of course, of the interesting (damn, I've grown to hate that word in the last month or so, standing in as it does for so many other more specific, clear or direct word choices - but I'm writing, so I get to use it with impunity and y'all just have to deal w/it) interplay of hormones and mood. Hormones, those invisible chemical strands traveling my blood and inciting tiny riots in my various organs. I imagine them like Pan, little teeny-tiny specks of perfectly-natural-just-a-part-of-femininity wandering freely, urging me to eat just one more handful of salty wasabi/soy almonds at just the moment when my tissues most want to grip tightly to every molecule of water, apparently fearing some massive internal drought, or waking me at 2 AM to remind me that there is stashed organic chocolate in the cabinet where I keep my liquor, or making me impatient with every aspect of my life at once.
It is this last thing that bothers me most. I can stumble back to bed at 2:15 AM, mouth smeared with chocolate, smelling sweetly of cocoa and cognac, and be asleep again in a few minutes. I can pay someone to hide the salty snacks, or just wear bigger clothes and marvel at the puffy places where my cheekbones sometimes appear, like phantoms. But the urge to change everything - sometimes I trust it, and I think that maybe this urge is the only time I really see clearly, and I could easily, and have actually, made big decisions and taken big actions while caught up in what may be a simple hormonally-induced fugue state.
Here is my dilemma: what if this really IS the only time I truly see clearly, when the nicey-niceness of my spirit is laced with a bit of Tabasco-hot "gimmesomeofthat" clarity? Because what I want becomes very clear when I allow myself to think about it. I have a friend who thinks we are all, the entire nation, even the entire world, becoming too self centered. In theory, this works for me, but in practice. Hmm...I don't know. It seems to me that the self centered become ever more so, while normal people often forget to get their needs met at all, busy as they are with mortgages, children, careers, obligations, a thinner waist and attaining a weed-free lawn. Normal people figure out how to not want what they need - that's my experience. They, or we for this one, excuse the hurtful behavior of others because "they didn't intend to hurt me." We pile on obligations to make meaning of our days. They imagine that they don't need to be loved and cherished and passionately sought by their lovers or spouses, that any one of those is enough. Or they decide that really-really-liked with shared parenting responsibilities is enough. I'm pretty sure these are not enough, not really, but there sure are a lot of us settling for a piece of any of it.
I think maybe I'll start to listen to the hormonal me's list of "this ain't working for me and let me tell you why" items. Maybe write them down. Peruse at my leisure, maybe when I'm back to eating the they-almost-have-flavor rice cakes. I'll smear the rice cakes with Nutella, cause hey, everyone needs a little nuttychocolatey goodness in their life.
I'm big on letting people who love me know that I'm hurting by saying that I'm putting on my big girl panties. It's official, folks. Today is a full-on Nutella-with-a-spoon and big-girl panty day. Stand clear unless you're part of the solution.
Smiles all around.
~ patti
It is this last thing that bothers me most. I can stumble back to bed at 2:15 AM, mouth smeared with chocolate, smelling sweetly of cocoa and cognac, and be asleep again in a few minutes. I can pay someone to hide the salty snacks, or just wear bigger clothes and marvel at the puffy places where my cheekbones sometimes appear, like phantoms. But the urge to change everything - sometimes I trust it, and I think that maybe this urge is the only time I really see clearly, and I could easily, and have actually, made big decisions and taken big actions while caught up in what may be a simple hormonally-induced fugue state.
Here is my dilemma: what if this really IS the only time I truly see clearly, when the nicey-niceness of my spirit is laced with a bit of Tabasco-hot "gimmesomeofthat" clarity? Because what I want becomes very clear when I allow myself to think about it. I have a friend who thinks we are all, the entire nation, even the entire world, becoming too self centered. In theory, this works for me, but in practice. Hmm...I don't know. It seems to me that the self centered become ever more so, while normal people often forget to get their needs met at all, busy as they are with mortgages, children, careers, obligations, a thinner waist and attaining a weed-free lawn. Normal people figure out how to not want what they need - that's my experience. They, or we for this one, excuse the hurtful behavior of others because "they didn't intend to hurt me." We pile on obligations to make meaning of our days. They imagine that they don't need to be loved and cherished and passionately sought by their lovers or spouses, that any one of those is enough. Or they decide that really-really-liked with shared parenting responsibilities is enough. I'm pretty sure these are not enough, not really, but there sure are a lot of us settling for a piece of any of it.
I think maybe I'll start to listen to the hormonal me's list of "this ain't working for me and let me tell you why" items. Maybe write them down. Peruse at my leisure, maybe when I'm back to eating the they-almost-have-flavor rice cakes. I'll smear the rice cakes with Nutella, cause hey, everyone needs a little nuttychocolatey goodness in their life.
I'm big on letting people who love me know that I'm hurting by saying that I'm putting on my big girl panties. It's official, folks. Today is a full-on Nutella-with-a-spoon and big-girl panty day. Stand clear unless you're part of the solution.
Smiles all around.
~ patti
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Dancing
Today I had long instant message conversations with two girlfriends. I met these women online, one lives 1500 miles away, the other on another continent, yet they've become real, whole people to me. I stood later in my living room, and later yet in my backyard, and danced to music playing on my iPod's headphones, to songs recommended by those far-off friends. Here is the thing: my constant reminders of the shrinking world make me despise my ignorance. It is shameful that I have not engaged myself with people from other cultures in years, that I am well educated yet know no other languages, that I've never travelled outside this continent. My time has been far too focused on the tiny sphere that I moved within each day, and that sphere feels constricting these days. I am fighting the urge to sweep everything aside, but I welcome these stirrings of desire for change. Change that I might choose. That seems the key to my musings these days.
Just watched the film "The Queen" - several friends had recommended, no, demanded that I see it. What a performance Helen Mirren gives, and what an icy-cool message of such weight. The film reminds us that some elements of our lives are prescribed, some of the life-paths we will walk, that we must walk, are chosen for us. But it is in us to change, to adapt, to react with purpose and not with fear. This is my mantra these days - to live with purpose and not in fear of what I do not, cannot, will not or have not had. Living with purpose is, it seems, the prerequisite to living in joy.
I am a fan, a starstruck and giddy fan, of the writer Andre Dubus. In a book of tributes to Andre Dubus, a friend quotes a letter that he wrote. The quote is lovely, and funny, and smart. But a single sentence in it has become something I hear echoing in my mind in moments of joy and of pain. The sentence is this:
Indeed. I believe that shadows make us see light more vividly, that there is no life worth living that doesn't have difficult moments, that loss and failure and hurt make success and joy sweeter. We are in a durable, graceful dance to the music of mortality.
Isn't it lovely?
Peace and hope ~ patti
Just watched the film "The Queen" - several friends had recommended, no, demanded that I see it. What a performance Helen Mirren gives, and what an icy-cool message of such weight. The film reminds us that some elements of our lives are prescribed, some of the life-paths we will walk, that we must walk, are chosen for us. But it is in us to change, to adapt, to react with purpose and not with fear. This is my mantra these days - to live with purpose and not in fear of what I do not, cannot, will not or have not had. Living with purpose is, it seems, the prerequisite to living in joy.
I am a fan, a starstruck and giddy fan, of the writer Andre Dubus. In a book of tributes to Andre Dubus, a friend quotes a letter that he wrote. The quote is lovely, and funny, and smart. But a single sentence in it has become something I hear echoing in my mind in moments of joy and of pain. The sentence is this:
This is not all fun in the sun but a durable, graceful dance to the music of mortality.
Indeed. I believe that shadows make us see light more vividly, that there is no life worth living that doesn't have difficult moments, that loss and failure and hurt make success and joy sweeter. We are in a durable, graceful dance to the music of mortality.
Isn't it lovely?
Peace and hope ~ patti
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Light
Do vacations prime you to see things differently? Maybe not the kind filled with drives to vacation "destinations", where the expectation of what you will see and experience is created in brochures and through the don'tmissyougottasee comments of friends or relatives. Maybe not the kind where your express reason for travel is to see those relatives or friends, which lead you to visit places like Detroit in August. NotThatThereIsAnythingWrongWithDetroitInAugustExceptTheHellishnessOfItAll. My vacations tend to fall into one of a couple of categories, with my favorite category being the go somewhere beautiful and read/relax/write/singsongs/walk/eatwell/drink wine/laugh much/talk irreverently about everything under the sun. I need that type of vacation at least annually. I just had one, a trip to the Oregon coast from my home in Boise, trading dry desert summer for the cool wet coast in August.
It is an amazing thing, to feel the slow uncoiling of tension that happens in me when I unplug. For some this relaxation requires backpacking crazy mountain peaks in extreme weather, or riding bicycles to exhaustion up or down mountains, or across miles of roadway. But for me it takes only quiet, beauty, no phones ringing, no devices clamoring for my attention. Water speeds the process, particularly big water like the Atlantic, Pacific or Superior. My favorite stretch of Oregon coastline, thus far in my travels, is the one south of Newport. No wireless coverage reaches SouthBeach, as they call it. My cell phone worked only spottily, though it worked beautifully when we drove into town. No high speed internet - in fact, I brought no laptop! Five full days, four books, a pile of magazines and a lot of iTuneage later...my brain feels restored to some state of ease.
The drive back from the coast was tiring, but uneventful. Driving it, I noticed things. The long and deserted stretches of road through Oregon's southern desert valleys alternate on this drive with the wide green spaces with black, black bottomland, where farmers grow everything from grapes to onions to organic lettuce in fields that seem effortlessly groomed. Lazy late summer farmstands rolled past now and again, wood-slatted counters filled with the big bushel baskets of tomatoes, melons, peaches, peppers. Summer's richest colors show up now, I remember from the gardens we grew when I was a kid. All of summer's sun and good rain packed into the dark red and juicy flesh of a tomato, thinly sliced on toasted wheat bread with some mayo and lettuce, salt, pepper...a bit of bacon, thin sweet onion and avocado strictly optional.
I remember gathering peas, and then baby cucumbers, and then in late summer the cherry tomatoes in our garden. In late summer my hands filled with small red fruits, fresh rinsed from the garden spout. At first ripening we could not eat these vegetables fast enough, greedy fingers overfilled. But by the late summer ripening of the tomatoes we knew - no hurry, there will be plenty of tomatoes. Our eagerness tempered with knowledge. But we knew, too, by August that the season lasts only so long. In a few weeks, the tomatoes would be bitten by frost and gone.
The light on this vacation captured my attention as it hasn't in such a long time. Here is what I remembered, driving across Oregon with my peaceful brain listening to cello music alternating with buttshaking Motown and anything Rick Rubin has ever produced: moonlight from the risen moon on the ocean surf outside the window of our rented house, or off the deck, the silver light a pathway, gorgeous and soft on the water in perfect harmony with the sound of the surf surging to shore; the sun setting and spilling lovely pink and peach tones across the sky, staining the fluffy white clouds with color, rinsing the water with a wash of rose; soft morning light on tall white bouncy Shasta daisies and Oregon holly and rhododendron's dark green, the bright pink and orange of a thousand blooms of late-summer lily on a hillside above the beach while I walked the packed sand and marveled that I was there. Light changes - even while you stand on a sandy stretch of beach, the light moves and changes and will not return to that space again. It is wondrous.
We can have so much, so MUCH, but we can't have everything. Isn't the trick to accept the gifts of life, to reach but not grab, to allow hunger but not greed? It is a trick that takes every day to relearn. I'm greedy for experiences - and so I have too much crowding in my life, too much pressing at my fingers and demanding my minutes, so that I find myself not choosing but simply reacting to schedules, deadlines. I need to change that. That's what vacations are for, I think, the best kind. To remind me to live in real time - get out of the past, stop thinking so far into the future, and take excellent care of the now. To remind me, and maybe you, precisely what it is that you want more of in your life.
Seek joy. ~ patti
It is an amazing thing, to feel the slow uncoiling of tension that happens in me when I unplug. For some this relaxation requires backpacking crazy mountain peaks in extreme weather, or riding bicycles to exhaustion up or down mountains, or across miles of roadway. But for me it takes only quiet, beauty, no phones ringing, no devices clamoring for my attention. Water speeds the process, particularly big water like the Atlantic, Pacific or Superior. My favorite stretch of Oregon coastline, thus far in my travels, is the one south of Newport. No wireless coverage reaches SouthBeach, as they call it. My cell phone worked only spottily, though it worked beautifully when we drove into town. No high speed internet - in fact, I brought no laptop! Five full days, four books, a pile of magazines and a lot of iTuneage later...my brain feels restored to some state of ease.
The drive back from the coast was tiring, but uneventful. Driving it, I noticed things. The long and deserted stretches of road through Oregon's southern desert valleys alternate on this drive with the wide green spaces with black, black bottomland, where farmers grow everything from grapes to onions to organic lettuce in fields that seem effortlessly groomed. Lazy late summer farmstands rolled past now and again, wood-slatted counters filled with the big bushel baskets of tomatoes, melons, peaches, peppers. Summer's richest colors show up now, I remember from the gardens we grew when I was a kid. All of summer's sun and good rain packed into the dark red and juicy flesh of a tomato, thinly sliced on toasted wheat bread with some mayo and lettuce, salt, pepper...a bit of bacon, thin sweet onion and avocado strictly optional.
I remember gathering peas, and then baby cucumbers, and then in late summer the cherry tomatoes in our garden. In late summer my hands filled with small red fruits, fresh rinsed from the garden spout. At first ripening we could not eat these vegetables fast enough, greedy fingers overfilled. But by the late summer ripening of the tomatoes we knew - no hurry, there will be plenty of tomatoes. Our eagerness tempered with knowledge. But we knew, too, by August that the season lasts only so long. In a few weeks, the tomatoes would be bitten by frost and gone.
The light on this vacation captured my attention as it hasn't in such a long time. Here is what I remembered, driving across Oregon with my peaceful brain listening to cello music alternating with buttshaking Motown and anything Rick Rubin has ever produced: moonlight from the risen moon on the ocean surf outside the window of our rented house, or off the deck, the silver light a pathway, gorgeous and soft on the water in perfect harmony with the sound of the surf surging to shore; the sun setting and spilling lovely pink and peach tones across the sky, staining the fluffy white clouds with color, rinsing the water with a wash of rose; soft morning light on tall white bouncy Shasta daisies and Oregon holly and rhododendron's dark green, the bright pink and orange of a thousand blooms of late-summer lily on a hillside above the beach while I walked the packed sand and marveled that I was there. Light changes - even while you stand on a sandy stretch of beach, the light moves and changes and will not return to that space again. It is wondrous.
We can have so much, so MUCH, but we can't have everything. Isn't the trick to accept the gifts of life, to reach but not grab, to allow hunger but not greed? It is a trick that takes every day to relearn. I'm greedy for experiences - and so I have too much crowding in my life, too much pressing at my fingers and demanding my minutes, so that I find myself not choosing but simply reacting to schedules, deadlines. I need to change that. That's what vacations are for, I think, the best kind. To remind me to live in real time - get out of the past, stop thinking so far into the future, and take excellent care of the now. To remind me, and maybe you, precisely what it is that you want more of in your life.
Seek joy. ~ patti
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Welcome
Is this the height of ego, starting a blog?
Here we are, August. I'm about to take my annual trek to the Oregon coast to play in the surf and let the sounds of the water and the wind soothe me. But before then I have a big week - lots of work herding the cats through peanut butter at my place of employment, a subpoena-ordered appearance at a trial, and of course PACKING.
But that can wait a bit - what I'm thinking about today is connections, and about something I read this morning by Mary Clearman Blew. I am missing a connection that has sustained me, and maybe that is why this leaped out at me. It's an excerpt from her memoir, All But the Waltz, part of a textbook that I am helping to edit. Blew is in the cab of a pickup truck with her grandmother and uncle, looking out across a river swollen with runoff and rain at a pig and her piglets, moored on an islet of earth. It reads, in part:
My surge of understanding arcs across the current, and my flesh shrivels in the icy sheets of rain. LikeI cringe at the roar of the river, although behind the insulated walls of the cab I can hear and feel nothing. I am in my center and they are in theirs. The current separates us irrevocably, and suddenly I understand that my center is as precarious as theirs, that the chill metal cab of the old truck is almost as fragile as their ring of crumbling sod.
I'm taken aback by this passage, today. Two things strike me: we are all separated by currents, whether they are physical, like the rain-swollen river in this excerpt, or more ephemeral, like currents of mistrust, doubt, fear or misunderstanding. We are all, then, stranded alone on tiny islands of earth, or moored in the relative comforts of houses or offices or cars. It seems, today, as though all there might be that matters are these arcs of understanding and connection that surge across the currents that isolate us.
It is the mark of my heritage, my Scottish, and Irish, and steeped in lapsed-Catholic fatalism, that in this realization, this imagining of isolated souls being connected by arcs of understanding, that I find hope, and the beginnings of joy.
I'm going out to my pleasant deck, in the cooling August night air, to drink a glass of wine and try to feel surges of understanding arcing toward me across the currents that isolate me. Peace and hope, light and love to us all tonight.
~ plk
Here we are, August. I'm about to take my annual trek to the Oregon coast to play in the surf and let the sounds of the water and the wind soothe me. But before then I have a big week - lots of work herding the cats through peanut butter at my place of employment, a subpoena-ordered appearance at a trial, and of course PACKING.
But that can wait a bit - what I'm thinking about today is connections, and about something I read this morning by Mary Clearman Blew. I am missing a connection that has sustained me, and maybe that is why this leaped out at me. It's an excerpt from her memoir, All But the Waltz, part of a textbook that I am helping to edit. Blew is in the cab of a pickup truck with her grandmother and uncle, looking out across a river swollen with runoff and rain at a pig and her piglets, moored on an islet of earth. It reads, in part:
My surge of understanding arcs across the current, and my flesh shrivels in the icy sheets of rain. Like
I'm taken aback by this passage, today. Two things strike me: we are all separated by currents, whether they are physical, like the rain-swollen river in this excerpt, or more ephemeral, like currents of mistrust, doubt, fear or misunderstanding. We are all, then, stranded alone on tiny islands of earth, or moored in the relative comforts of houses or offices or cars. It seems, today, as though all there might be that matters are these arcs of understanding and connection that surge across the currents that isolate us.
It is the mark of my heritage, my Scottish, and Irish, and steeped in lapsed-Catholic fatalism, that in this realization, this imagining of isolated souls being connected by arcs of understanding, that I find hope, and the beginnings of joy.
I'm going out to my pleasant deck, in the cooling August night air, to drink a glass of wine and try to feel surges of understanding arcing toward me across the currents that isolate me. Peace and hope, light and love to us all tonight.
~ plk
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