Things

I have recently scaled back my role as a consumer.  I think this is a general trend, given that the economy is definitely tightening and people are starting to really feel the pinch of using mainly plastic money.  I look at the stuff I have bought in the past, almost all of which I did not need, and am amazed at how easily I am hoodwinked into consuming.  How it is our job, as the Story of Stuff implies (see the link), it seems, to contribute to the system and how it is un-American not to have new stuff.  I always admired those wise souls who bought well the first time - cars and watches and clothes and homes and shoes that they would keep twenty years (literally), that did not have built in obsolescence, that still looked good (and even dignified) as they aged.  Yes, they paid a lot for those things, but in keeping them, were more conservative than those of us who keep buying every season.  Most of us now simply go for what is trendy, as we are instructed to on the Television - the Deity must not be denied.

I feel really good about dropping out.  I like not knowing what is going on in reality tv, not having the eighties look about me now (what a decade of fashion mistakes that was!), about not buying the large size because it costs less per ounce as I won't ever use that many ounces, about not getting online and shopping because it grants uber-instant gratification.  

I also want to say that many people who have money and don't spend it look down on those who don't have money and spend it - the poorer people who want to look like they can compete with those who have health care plans and savings accounts.  I see the nodding heads, the contempt for the unfortunate many who weren't bright enough to choose a major in college that ensured an income level that would provide a big house and investments.  The only problem with those people is that now they are in industries that are expendable - the computer and software and giant plasma/HD television companies, the countless car and high tech sales people, the real estate folks.  Many now have stock portfolios that are worthless.  If people aren't spending money anymore, plastic or otherwise, on things they don't need, many of those people will lose their jobs.  And then what will they do?  Go to work for the folks they formerly found so far beneath them? 

Humility

It has been a long time: a phrase that works in several areas of my life.  Since I've written here (which, at one point, seemed moot), since I worked on my novel, since I really settled down and talked to God, no holds barred.  Since my dad was sober all day, since I was nice or attempted to make eye contact with strangers regardless of my mood, since I felt happy consistently.  

None of this is because I have trouble in my life; in fact, God has so richly blessed me that I often don't understand it.  I think I'm in the habit of being serious, an affliction I've had since birth.  Nothing was ever funny.  Anyway, I must have accidently been willed or delivered someone else's gifts, someone better's job (and students), friends, relatives, co-workers, boyfriend, children (in no particular order).  I just don't get it; I think I forget to smile, forget that work is just work and that is ordinary for lots of people, that my friends will either understand or they won't, that it is not my job to police the universe, that missing someone is part of loving them, that respect is something that is earned and paid, like money but infinitely more valuable, that it is okay for me to age (a big issue for any woman in this country), that I can laugh and not worry if there is food in my teeth or if I look ugly, that the distance I feel between my sons and me when I first see them after being with their dad is a part of the suffering we all still experience because I broke up my family, that I'm a thousand times better a mom and person since I did, that I can have perfect confidence that things will always be okay because they always are (but that is the hardest thing to remember), that God has a plan for me and Todd and my boys and even their dad, even my brother the meth addict, that any time I'm willing to say "I don't know," I am opening myself to life, that I really don't have to be perfect in any way to be lovable, that attempting to live according to my true beliefs is a worthy and difficult goal, that worrying that I won't always be able to keep all the balls in the air keeps me humble and clear in my understanding that I cannot make it without lots of help from all the people God uses to reach me in my incredible stubbornness. 

All I can say is, in the words of Anne Lamott, "Thank You, thank You, thank You."  All is as it should be - shalom.

Simplicity

I am returning from the Painted Desert that covers the northeastern corner of Arizona, northwards into Utah, and east into southern Colorado and New Mexico.  My mom and I spent time in the Sedona/Flagstaff area, Grand Canyon, and in the Navajo Nation, considering the beauty and simplicity of a way of life that is thousands of years old and was more advanced than anything Americans can currently imagine.

In reading about and experiencing the architecture and habits of these ancient people, I felt something akin to shame about certain mindsets I have: indulgence, ambition, grubbing for things I think I deserve, part-time belief in something greater than myself.  The Navajo and Hopi were (and are) whole people.  I am sure at least some of them want nice homes and nice cars, but they are content with the modest things they do have.  No longer are they innovators in building and design.  There are tires on their roofs to keep the shingles from peeling away in the wind.  Their cars are old and often have body damage.  Their clothes are simple and their hospitals are mobile homes grouped together.  They are proud of who they are, helping each other, speaking respectfully to the tourists who come to see the remains of the architectural marvels built by their ancestors.  They speak Navajo between themselves, pronouncing beautiful, dignified words I get lost in.  They have faces that are both strong and resigned, and if you look into their eyes,  you can almost see the mountains that are their lives.  I feel blessed to have been allowed to witness a thumbnail sketch of the vastness that is the Navajo, a people the American government was determined to wipe out.  Though they eke out a living selling jewelry and playing flute music available on cd and working at gas stations and breaking horses, nothing can defeat them.  Their spirituality transcends anything life can deal them, and they live it all the time, not just for an hour on Sunday.

I don't really know what determines who is in and who is out; the gene pool, the financial markets, the presence or absence of addictions, the presence or absence of confidence and self-knowledge all contribute.  Respect is another matter, however, and is something that can be given, recognized, and returned regardless of any other barrier.  It is universally needed, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral.  The Navajo reminded me of its importance, and the ease with which it can be given, through nothing more than a smile.

"Our hero is home!!" was written on the back of the maroon ellipse of a minivan parked in the bike lane, with all the other shitty cars that take over the bike lane every morning for swim practice.  Like they own the world.  But it was written in yellow (both my fave color and that famous hue of remembrance of absent military personnel) and had smiley faces all around it.  He made it home.  Thank You.  Please help him, and his family, with what happens next.

How would I feel if my boys were taken from me and sent to fight a war I completely oppose in a place that was home to millions of people who want to eradicate America altogether against an enemy that was entrenched and guerrilla?  I would never get over it, never be able to stop thinking about it.  And if they came home physically safe, that would be a miracle.  And what if they weren't okay mentally or emotionally?  My guess is that they wouldn't be.  The randomness of the violence there would be too much to bear, and something inside them would break.  Children are so fragile anyway, such lovers, such givers, such beautiful souls.  I don't know how they would survive without being hollowed out completely.  If they still had any intact self left, they might try to end things for themselves by wading, arms spread, into the line of fire  so the pain would be over and they wouldn't have to bring it all home with them, to relive for the rest of their tenure on this mortal coil.  It is heartbreaking how wrong war is, and how as I type those words, they fall as a tiny drop in an ocean of tears already shed over it.  Thus is the collective mourning of the soul of humanity, a lament the stars can hear. 

The door is still open...

Being in the near occasion of children is a precarious business.  They are notoriously trusting and forgiving, yet they often see through even the cleverest of adult ruses...even if they say nothing about it.  In the past three weeks, I've been privileged (and taxed) with responsibility for the writing improvement of students from a wide range of economic and cultural backgrounds.  I am not a patient person; I sound harsh sometimes when I say "I don't take shit off them," even when referring to my own boys, whom I love with all my heart.  But I think that is a good thing; children don't really want us to "take their shit," but it isn't our job to give it back, either.  Our job is to see through it - in fact, they want us to - and help them make sense of a better way of doing things without embarrassment about their need to learn.  I am just now fully grasping this concept, so please forgive my firm grip on the obvious.  That grip keeps my feet on the ground.

Some kids never find a voice that can be heard and respected.  It is instead lumped into a cacophony of other voices that are labeled a certain way ("athlete," "airhead," "Jesus freak,") and dismissed.  The kids behind the labels stop talking.  They stop writing stories about how they are afraid of the guy on the other side of the door or the weird shadow they see outside their window at night.  They write suicide notes instead, or they beat the hell out of someone who just looked at them wrong, or they tackle someone on the football field and put them in the hospital, or they become "funny" and verbally assassinate any idea (and the attached thinker) that contrasts with their own, or they just fold up and seal themselves away from scrutiny...and each of these misfit voices finds something arbitrary they can hold onto that they trot out when asked for a real, original opinion (something they've been taught isn't worth the risk), a substitute for the thinking they were convinced was irrelevant...and ridiculously money-motivated consumers are the mutations that result.  A user doesn't need to think - she just needs sources and resources.

I see the bright eyes of the girl who wrote "Cold Steel," about a girl getting got by a bad guy when she was simply enjoying cheese crackers.  I see the dumbfounded look on the athlete's face when he knew I'd actually read his argument and wanted to know how he was going to work out its defense and the answer to the "why I wrote this" question.  I see the flaming redhead, hiding behind her glasses, wielder of medieval wars in secret, longing to solve the problem of the War of Lies (which exists presently in reality and in her ancient realm)...and I'm in awe.  I want them to tell me how they hate the fact that whole communities exist by scavenging at landfills, suggesting ways in which to help the situation.  I want them to tell me how they love the turn of a phrase that makes all the difference, forged by their own hands.  I want them to see through their words that there is a reason why we must tell our stories - all of them, the fiction and the truth - because they lead us to understanding ourselves and others.  To know me is to love me?  Isn't that one of Steinbeck's profound, existential explorations in The Grapes of Wrath?   Stories lead us to common ground, words that are nondescript in thought alone, but poetic and life-affirming in the doing.  

It begins, as usual, with respect.

Graduation 2008

It's over.  The screeching halt I know is coming, came today.  So many beloveds I saw in passing; so many I did not see.  People I didn't get to meet, like Beth H's friend, Michael T.  Congratulations to you all.  You have cleared an important hurdle in life.  Parties and conversations and surreality.  How wonderful to be caught up in it and how strange it is, the suddenness with which it ends and life continues, seemingly uninterrupted.

I looked out over the green sheen of gowns and mortarboards, the blackness that always hovers in the walls of the Erwin Center, the faux and real tropical plants, Paige A. wanting to join the choir but not seeing a segue to do so without interrupting, the administrators who have sat through their third graduation in as many days, the impersonal slide show that I wanted to ask them to stop because it was so canned...and I realize, graduation isn't for the students.  I suppose it is for your families, but it certainly isn't for you.  You've already checked out, looked beyond, been struck by the reality of the ending time as you know it.  You've already outgrown this whole scene, and it is simply a formality to "graduate."  But sometimes we need formality.  Sometimes you need to be disallowed chewing gum, flip flops, and your opinion.  Some times you just need to do something because it would help someone else process what is happening to you.  And that seems to be my translation of this experience.  

Thank you, one and all, for the abundant beauty and hope you've graciously given me.  I love each of you and hope for you all the love and peace in the world.  Go and do some good.

Godspeed you on your way.

Bittersweetness

I'm driving home today, processing what happened to me, and I'm struck by the horrifying brutality and angelic "lightness" of being (to quote Kundera).  I woke up this morning to the BBC World Update story about a twelve year old girl who was gang raped by ten UN Peacekeeping soldiers who went home without so much as an accusation.  Early in the day, a student who read the Alice Sebold memoir Lucky told me of a three year old child who had been raped by a worker at her daycare; no prosecution occurred because of a loophole in the law.  Later, another student asked to leave on a pass because she is going to be with her boyfriend who is undergoing surgery, loving him beyond the confines of physical life.  I watched the Hayao Miyazaki film Spirited Away with a group of beautiful, compassionate, empathetic seventeen and eighteen year olds who are about to embark on the next phase of their lives, and who I will truly miss because I've grown to love them.  All of them.  And in the afternoon, we were made aware that a child had been found dead nearby.  My eyes are full of tears - bitter ones and joyful ones all mixed together.  

I don't understand anything.  I don't get why people keep trying to do things to each other, why everything is supposedly out in the open but there are so many secrets.  Why we have so much information but no meaning or responsibility attached to it.  Why we produce satires of the things that are broken in our culture, yet do nothing about those situations but sit and laugh and feel bad for laughing because none of it is really funny.  Why so many children throughout the world are exploited and used because adults are bigger and better at manipulation - and the rest of us are apathetic and too busy watching our big screen tvs and buying things on the internet to really care.  

I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but I'm paying attention now.  I'm looking for a way into the fray.  I don't think most of us are Gandhi, but we do have a voice and a vote and can slow down a little - to take responsibility for who and what is in our lives.  Turn off the damn TV and radio and get off the internet and actually talk to people.  Who knows how many secrets wouldn't be kept if we reached out to each other and actually knew who is in our lives.  We might see less conflict, less crime.   Maybe, God forbid, we might help someone who is thinking about doing something tragic to see another way of dealing with life.  

Millay

I have been reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, a devastatingly excellent poet, who makes me realize how critical specificity and sincerity are.  I don't mean the Hallmark card-esque smarm that makes every emotion valid since it is artistically presented on cardstock.  I mean the clear-eyed stepping out into the truth when you know there's no net under you and your friends are standing on the sidelines, looking around like you are no one special, and your lover is suddenly uninterested in your conversations, continually leading you to something that will distract you from what you want to say...

Lately it has become evident that I allow things to happen that I don't always endorse.  And in trying to stem the tide, emotions are sometimes involved, strong ones, people's hearts and plans.  Even mine.  But when I don't stand up in the river of whatever I'm caught up in and tell the truth, I loathe myself.  I feel dirty and can't wash the feeling off.  

It is very hard to be completely honest when you love someone.  The margin between love and power is like a pie crust.  I think the key is letting go of the outcome, letting go of the power, remembering the beauty of that person and how they have blessed your life.

Waking Up

I have been especially grumpy lately.  Mad at myself for not being and doing what I think I should be being and doing.  Cutting myself off from all the beautiful people I share my life with.  How dumb is that?  The more stressed I get about being stressed, the uglier I become.  So this weekend, I took time to "take care of business," as my friend, Lynn, says.  It felt very good.  It felt very God.  And because I did things to address, to face, what needed dealing with, I was able to live this weekend - to truly feel, to truly be present, to truly listen, to begin a painting for someone's birthday, to show appreciation for a beautiful man who gives love so freely I am dumbfounded by it, especially because he wants to give it to me...  Sometimes it takes shutting up and dealing with it to get to a point where life makes sense again.  And I realize again that I don't know anything, really.  I cannot say there is anything more out there better than what I've got right now.  I can't even appreciate what I've got, which is a lot.  And I have a lot to learn.  I don't understand why I've been given the chance to do it, but I don't want to waste it.  I've grown tired of swimming around in the same place.  I'm ready to move on, but I know I have to finish dealing with what's here before that will happen.  I need help to see the beauty in right now.  Don't we all?  

Consumerism

Portia is gently purring at my feet, a strange ray of golden light is playing on the wall beside my desk, fluttering lines and leaves and blind slats throwing random, vibrating shadows before me, and my head is full of what I heard and thought today about our way of life.

As The Story of Stuff website (see attached link) describes, we are slaves to the businesses who generate stuff because they have learned how to undermine our contentment so thoroughly that we are insatiable, trying to fix ourselves with whatever it is "they" suggest might work.  But then that idea is contradicted with another, making undesirable the stuff we thought would fix us and we spent so much money on.  The most profound thing for me in this message is that it is now more important to consume and to be seen as a consumer than it is to be a good parent, a good kid, a loyal spouse, a decent person, a (fill in the blank with some worthwhile human calling).  Consumerism has consumed us.  As Todd put it, materialism has spread to our relationships, making them as disposable and upgrade-able as anything else we can buy on credit.  A musician friend said something like that as well, about the irony in many love songs that most people don't even catch - they aren't about love at all, they are commentaries on the way we work through one relationship after another, using that person until "perceived obsolescence" sets in and we decide it is unworkable.  Until a newer, better model comes along.

I feel kind of dirty after all that.  I have fallen for it.  I encourage it by being part of the problem.  So I have to figure out the balance between management of my vanity and understanding what I really need.  That will take a lot more digging than I can comprehend right now.  And I don't really want to do the work.  But I'm convicted, so I can no longer claim ignorance.

Throughout the service today, David Gentiles was asking us to clench our fists, imagining our grip on all kinds of things.  Especially consumer things.  Worry.  Control.  And he asked us to slowly open our hands, imagining letting those things go.  When I do that in my own mind, I imagine putting the issue or the person in a boat and sending it sailing away from me.  If it comes back, I have to be careful not to take it back out of the boat.  I think I need to practice this open-handedness some more.  I'm pretty grabby as a rule...so I better pick up something constructive with that hand before I try to control something or someone else with it.

Revealing

So.  I spent most of today listening to the experiences and postulations and musings of someone who reached me, who changed my point of view, who made the top come off my head.  About how people believe in the written word, how it not only allows them to put aside their problems because it requires attention when they read, but that it might grant one the opportunity to sort, to reconcile, to heal when they write.  How lovers emerge from prose, incubated in the complex, delicate strands of a sentence.  How treaties and constitutions have been wrought, families broken and mended, lives exalted and deprecated.  How a boy with hair in his eyes sits in a ray of sunlight in my classroom, making sense of the world with his poetic torch lit and held aloft before him, simultaneously illumining the depths and creating shadows that creep after him relentlessly.  His sentence is unfinished...but I know he has no need to seek the villains outside himself, because it always comes down to man vs. himself.  To quote Joni Mitchell, in the end, "it all comes down to you."

And then the keyhole that is language - a metaphor the wise man (Dr. Randy Bomer) imparted to us - through which all of you must press yourselves if you wish to be clear, to be very clear and understood and significant, the pursuit of all who admire celebrity because they'd like it (but at what cost?).  All the vast ocean of ideas and worries and potential and reality must be funneled through it.  A tight fit.  Things get stuck.  And my friend, Jantzen, asked me how to make the keyhole bigger.  And that was the perfect question.  I don't know the answer, but I can make some stabs at it: I can listen.  Really listen.  Be present.  Be a soul mirror.  Be open.  And other things I don't know now.  And remind them (and myself) that the shitty things that come out when you have a larger keyhole (which Anne Lamott thought of before me) are not permanent; like a relationship, they are meant to be borne, to be sorted through and understood and perfected.  Then we can have a conversation about whether or not what is there is what they meant to say.  And we begin again.  Praise God for revision.

So it's Easter and I am supposed to feel joyful, but my ex husband has my boys and all my friends are going through something difficult and I'm still dirt covered and smell like an armpit, wandering out in the desert.  I know I can't go home until I'm open enough to receive.  And I know that openness isn't coming because I have work to do, and I'm naturally lazy, and keep thinking if I just do it this way, things will work out differently.  And they don't.  I keep trying to find meaning in the superficial, and it just isn't there.  I can gratify myself temporarily, but the consequence is always emptiness, like I just wasted what I didn't realize had value on something stupid and useless.  I look down at my hands and see only lines going nowhere.

What seems to need to die are my plans, laid out of concern about what "they" will have to say about me if I am just me.  The things I make more important than listening to and playing with my kids and my students.  The agenda that dictates how much time and how much money is allotted to this and that.  But I don't know how to do it.  I don't know how to be that radically open and still actively give, still work with some intention.  I need help.  I need the hand of someone stronger than death to walk me through it.  And he showed up again today.

So there's this thing lately about change.  It started with pennies: in the mulch by the sidewalk on a run, actually on the sidewalk on another run, beneath my feet on the asphalt as I got out of my car, and somewhere else I don't recall.  I remember thinking, someone else needs to find those and receive their "luck." Days later I saw a quarter, shiny and expectant, in the crease of the car seat.  A dime a few days after that peeked up at me from the gray rubber seal of the washing machine.  Then I found a quarter and a nickel together, and things got weird.  

Having just paid property taxes, by myself for the first time, money is very tight right now.  I've been planning fairly large scale changes in my budget to keep this from happening next year, staying prayerful and grateful for the abundance I have all around me and for the lessons in being frugal.  But I totally missed God trying to tell me that it is in minding the small things that grace comes.  This is true not only with money but with the changes I want to make in my life.  Running three and a half miles at a strong pace without stopping is something that happens a little at a time.  Changing the way I think about those I love happens the same way, as one by one I pry my fingers off their lives and let them be.  Accepting those pennies, that small change, is a metaphor for life.  

It began with "hello..."

At the urging of friends and colleagues, I open this weblog.  I hope the ancient Muses and the divine being I call God bless its existence.  Considering its purposes, I understand two: it is a forum for (hopefully) the exchange of ideas, and it is an opportunity to connect with those who might be interested in participating in my writing research.  Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll respond.