My Life | 1eclecticwriter

Posts Tagged ‘My Life’

An Appreciation of Habits

October 6, 2013

Interesting how many unthinking habits are revealed when the pressure tank in the well fails, and a household is without water! Over the years, we’ve been waterless several times, for different reasons. The most difficult was the winter it got down to 30F below and someone forgot to leave faucets dripping, resulting in a frozen water line. That time it took 4 days to restore water flow, fortunately without associated broken pipes. Four days of not being able to flush toilets, or easily wash hands. Of hauling water in three gallon bottles, doling it out in dribbles for washing with a cloth in the sink, “birding off” as a friend used to call it (another acquaintance used to refer to the same process, I know not why, as a whore bath).

This latest episode of being without running water lasted only a little over 24 hours, in warm enough weather to need to shower, not just dab and dry. I gained experience at showering without access to running water back in my early teens, when we lived in Saigon.

Our House, a Very Very Very Fine House – Saigon, 1956

Water only flowed in our housing compound for about two hours a day. The live-in maid would fill large vats with a hose from a standpipe, then carry buckets up to the bathroom whenever someone needed to bathe. Showering became a matter of pouring a bucket over oneself, soaping, pouring another bucket to rinse, and drying off. In the steamy heat, two or even three showers a day were necessary. A five person household used a vat of water just for bathing. The second vat supplied water for cooking and mopping and hand washing.

In those days, I also learned how to throw a bucket of water (the third vat’s supply) with just the right force, at just the right angle, into a toilet to force it to flush. In recent days, I learned I am still able to shower by the bucket, but have lost the knack of the toilet flush. Or maybe modern toilets are less amenable to alternative flushing procedures? In any case, the knowledge of how to manage without running water rose up from depths, at the same time as I caught myself automatically reaching behind to flush the toilet that had no water in its tank. Knowing there was no water did not stop the unthinking hand gesture.

How many other actions of daily life, including much less mundane ones, do we unthinkingly perform? How many aspects of our routine do we take for granted? And what about people… how often do we take them for granted? Or respond to them out of habit? Or respond to a present situation with an inappropriate habit learned in childhood?

Regrettably, my mother was only able to experience disappointment with life. She had a unique knack for projecting that disappointment, ensuring by her actions that anything I looked forward to with happy anticipation would fit her world view, and therefore not materialize positively in my life. My childhood was one of fearing to express what I wanted, since to do so was to assure it would not happen. Put differently, I became ingrained with the behavior of waiting for the other shoe to drop. As I matured, left home and began living my own values, I gradually freed myself from maternal negativity, and experienced lots of positives. Life brings mostly what one looks to receive from it – and I look with curiosity for new opportunities, good friends, and spiritual growth. I’ve been blessed to receive an abundance of all these.

So – how surprising to discover, in recent days, that a corner of my being is busy defending itself against a shoe dropping, in relation to my upcoming new employment! Why am I suddenly hearing myself reason that I should delay certain purchases because one should never “count chickens before they are hatched?” In ten weeks of living and working on the Maine coast at a home without electricity, I ‘forgot’ the habit of reaching for a wall switch when I entered a dark room. So why do I, after 50 years of living away from my mother’s fearful negativity still subconsciously duck and cover in response to upcoming positive and desired changes?

The Habit of Following Along

Well, at least I recognize the old emotional habit and can now practice setting it aside. I hope I have more success breaking that pattern than I’ve had with the one that leads me to look up to the right as I leave my living room. For nearly 20 years I had a clock on that right-hand wall – it’s been gone for 2 years now but I still glance there to see the time. And then laugh at myself. I suspect that being able to laugh at practicing an outdated habit is a step in the direction of letting it go, so I will chuckle to myself if I fall back into emotional duck and cover. What better way to switch over to a positive attitude?

And I do intend to retain the habit of washing with minimal water, although not the bucket method needed so recently. Collecting the water that accumulates until a suitable temperature is reached, and turning off the shower while soaping up, have become common sense habits in our continuing drought-plagued environment. Hmmm… I wonder, if someday I move to a place where water is abundant, will my water-saving habits endure?

Tags:balance, climate change, drought, lessons, Maine, My Life, parental conditioning, Saigon, self-acceptance, spiritual development
Posted in environment, humor, life wisdom | Leave a Comment »

Sounds of Silence

October 1, 2013

First, I should explain that a different type of silence was imposed on me over the weekend, preventing me from putting up this post when I intended to do so, on Sunday afternoon. The internet link at the motel where I was staying was somehow incompatible with my computer, and the IT people weren’t able to reset it properly. I am back home, and once again connected – able to ‘speak’.

Thank you for patience, for reading, for following, for being there.

Niki
**************

Noise pollution is one of the issues not being adequately discussed in relation to my county’s examination of a proposed fracking ordinance. I brought the topic into the discussion, and I have to keep raising it as others focus insistently on water quality and scarcity, and contamination of the air and soil. By comparison I suppose noise can be considered a less significant negative – but not to me.

I live in the countryside – what most people would consider a truly rural area. My small 900 square foot house is set back from the road, on four acres, abutting a several-hundred-acre ranch. I have three neighbors – houses close to the road with entrance driveways off it, in a cluster with my own entryway. Across the road are two more homes. Most of the time, those neighbors are quiet – so much so that I wonder if they are at home. No loud parties, nor growling outdoor machinery.

I do hear traffic on the highway. My house is situated on a hill toward which the road heads before it veers off, resulting in the longish driveway that snakes from the road up over a hill to my front door. Sitting in my living room, looking out its floor to ceiling windows, I can see a section of the road, and all the vehicles that travel up and down it. I cannot see – but can hear clearly – the heavy trucks and the rattle of gravel excavation that is going on a further 2 miles away, on a section of land that “ought” not to be considered to be in my neighborhood. Something about the lay of the valley funnels that noise straight up to my house.

The gravel operation is new this summer. I don’t know yet if I’ll notice it when my windows are closed, but I am very aware now, with windows wide open, of the days it is running and those, like today, when it is not. Perhaps I’m more sensitive than other people to the ambient noise within which I live?

I do not like to have music playing “in the background” of my days. I work better, think better, live better in silence. I enjoy music, go to concerts, play records (there’s an oldie for you) or CDs with intention to listen to them – emphasis on the intention to listen. If my intention is to work, I prefer to do so in silence.

Undoubtedly, that preference has something to do with my enjoyment of Quaker Meeting, and Buddhist zazen sessions, as well as my own daily spiritual contemplative practice. Undoubtedly it also has something to do with my appreciation of the skill of the young musicians from Curtis Institute who performed Britten’s Quartet #3 for Strings at a recent Music From Angel Fire concert near my home. Two of the piece’s five movements, including the last one, end with a prolonged silence defined by the musicians holding their bows immobile above the strings of their instruments until, as one, they relaxed in their seats, signaling the end of the silence that was part of the movement, and the beginning of the silence into which the audience could inject its noises of appreciation.

Once before, many years ago in Boston, I attended a concert which featured a piano performance that included long silences as part of the piece, and then too I was able to ‘hear’ the difference in quality between the silence that was integral to the music, and the silence of the piece’s end. That time, as I recall, I had no visual cue. I was sitting too far back, in the cheap seats, to see the pianist’s hands. I could only rely on my ears, and the pianist’s flawless sense of timing, to distinguish when musical silence transitioned to an appreciative silence from the audience, which in turn transitioned into loud applause.

A few of my acquaintances seem to understand what I mean when I express my awareness of the difference between the silence of Quaker Meeting, and that in a Zendo. Even the famously silent Meetings (the oldest, historical ones in Philadelphia) which I have attended, have a busy-ness to them, a sense of minds occupied with focused reflection, that is distinctly different from the no-thought silence of a practiced group of Buddhists in meditation. And different again from the life in silence of the Benedictines (and their guests) living at Christ in the Desert Monastery. Different yet again from the experience of many hundreds of chelas (students), attending to the silent communication from our Beloved Teacher at a MasterPath gathering. Dare I say that there are many different sounds of silence?

(Yes I know the Simon and Garfunkle song The Sound of Silence. It doesn’t fit into my narrative because the song is about the negative aspect of silence – silence as a barrier to communication and a symptom of loneliness.)

We seem, in the modern urgency of tuned-in lives, to have forgotten the old adage that silence is golden. We settle for the silver, the copper, even the dross of noisy, busy “I’m somebody, doing something important” daily life and think we are fulfilling ourselves. Just yesterday, I had a Facebook ‘chat’ with a young friend who is torn between his desire to study the classical languages necessary to read ancient Buddhist texts in their original, and the supposedly practical necessity of getting a degree in a subject that can lead to a job. How practical is it, to go against one’s nature, to ignore the still, small, inner voice directing one toward a path of spiritual fulfillment, in favor of a loud, outer, boisterous demand to focus on earning a living?

Inside golden silence, there is much to hear and learn. Whole worlds of perception, of wisdom, exist within our inner silent spaces. Would that we all, individually and collectively, were more insistent on spending time in that beautiful silence within! Would that we all, individually and collectively, could share the golden wealth to be acquired from listening to the songs of the Divine played so beautifully within us. Listen…. and you will hear…

Tags:Buddhism, Christ in the Desert Monastery, climate change, fracking, internet connections, lessons, MasterPath, Music From Angel Fire, My Life, New Mexico, Noise pollution, Quaker Meeting, technology
Posted in environment, life wisdom, Living and Learning, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The Tools of our Trades

September 23, 2013

I make it to the New Mexico State Fair just about every year, including this one. Some events, like the Fine Art show, and the Hispanic, Native American and African American art and cultural shows are housed in permanent buildings not too far from the entrance to the fairground. To get to them – and to all the other “housed” activities – one must walk past a midway full of rides and also past clusters of food booths selling barbecued turkey legs, ribbon potatoes, lemonade and – this year at least – such exotica as frog’s legs and fried ravioli on a stick.

Next one must negotiate the plethora of booths filling both sides of the main “streets” of the grounds. These are all commercial. They offer multiple opportunities to acquire surprisingly similar items, from painted faces to sports memorabilia and cell phone accessories, purses, dresses, make up, the latest fads in hair adornment, and cheaply made but not cheaply priced glitz jewelry.

Farther into the grounds are a Spanish village and a Native American village where culturally traditional items and foods are sold, and groups perform appropriate music and dances. Also near the middle of the grounds is a large building housing the many types of items we older folk associate with the shop and home economics classes that used to be mandatory in all junior high and high schools, but which now seem only to be found in the context of career programs at community colleges. Wood workers, quilters and seamstresses, experts in home canning and baking submit their finest products in hopes of winning a coveted blue ribbon.

Nearby there is also a space for flower arrangements. Other hobbies are represented as well. I acquired a book mark with my name in exquisite calligraphy, and watched two ladies carefully making lace, twisting bobbins around the pins which mark out a pattern. I remember seeing the famous lace makers of Bruge, in Belgium, sitting in the sun and chatting as their bobbins flew in complex designs they knew by heart from a lifetime apprenticeship in an ancient craft.

One has to complete a long walk across the full length of the fair’s main street in order to get to the true core of a state fair – the animals.

4-Hers and adults spend years breeding to obtain a perfect specimen to enter into their county competition before advancing to the state fair. Horses are trained to perform complicated maneuvers, mule and draft horse teams pull wagons or increasingly heavy loads on sledges, demonstrating their ability to perform the classic work of a ranch. Judging the quality of livestock is a learned skill, often passed down within families. As I walk along stalls with handsome palomino heads protruding to be admired, I overhear a discussion of which judge will be in charge – competitors clearly have their own favorites.

There is much less foot traffic at the livestock end of the fair grounds. Kids tug their parents to the petting zoo and pre-teen girls congregate in the open space between the rows of stalls where their horses wait with them to be called into the ring for their classes (the level of competition each has achieved, showing off the gait and conformation of their rides). Older teen boys lead cattle of various breeds and sizes to and from their show ring, talking about weight and sale price. Many of the animals, like much of the handwork in the crafts building, will be sold or auctioned before the fair ends.

Sitting on a bench near the horse stalls, enjoying a treat of ribbon fries, I try to imagine what the fair would be like without all the commercial booths – or at least only with ones related to farming and ranching. There are no representatives of John Deere on the main street. Instead, lines of old cars are displayed, most from the 1920s, including an early fire engine whose siren sounds whenever an ambitious child cranks its handle. What was marketed at the fair when the attendees arrived in those early Fords? Back where I relax in the livestock area, it is not hard to imagine myself in that earlier time.

I suspect there would have been many more teams competing in the draft horse heavy sledge pulls. And many of the contestants would have arrived by horse power, not automobile. Canned goods, instead of being one row of the crafts building, might well have taken up a tent all on their own. The same with sewing and quilting.

I can’t help but feel dismay that our modern preoccupations, if assessed by the balance of items offered up to view at this year’s Fair, have become so faddish. And so mass produced. And so poorly made.

OK, we’re living in a wired age and we are hooked on our technology. So, where are the hand-beaded cell phone covers? Why don’t I see tooled leather cases for laptops? What has become of pride in beautiful, well made, durable crafts to embellish the tools of our modern everyday trades? Why are hand painted Easter eggs, braided rugs and crocheted blankets considered only to be examples of “saving the skills of the past?” How did these arts become locked into traditional forms, instead of adapted to the items most commonly in use today?

In the Vicinity of Acoma

English: Original lithograph for report of J.W. Abert of “His Examination of New Mexico in the Years 1846-47” to the Secretary of War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The day following my visit to the State Fair, I was escorted by a friend to one of the last places in New Mexico that I wanted – but had not yet made it – to see, Acoma Pueblo. The majority of current tribal members live in two communities in the valley, near Interstate 40 in the western half of my state. According to our guide, only about 30 people (of about 6000 tribe members) still live atop the mesa that is historical (from the 1100s) Acoma. Most of those who do live on the mesa appear to be the potters and practitioners of other traditional arts who market their wares to the groups of visitors escorted on tours coordinated by the tribe.

Our tour guide provided a lively account of the history of Acoma, in an interesting language style which notably did not use standard past tense. “The people were living atop the mesa and were welcoming the first Spaniards to come to their area. Because the straw in the mud coating of their sandstone homes reflected golden in the sun, the Spanish were thinking they had found the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola, so they were demanding that Acoma turn over its gold and, not believing there was none, they began subjugating the people with torture and killings.”

The effect of our guide’s narration was to make his listeners aware of how differently the Acoma people (and most other Pueblo tribal groups I’ve interacted with) perceive time – how intimately their distant history informs their present day lives. The mixture of tradition and history with modern innovation and adaptation is also evident in the Acoma art – mostly finely painted and incised pottery – which was on offer. Some of the artists appeared dedicated to repeating ancient family patterns; others clearly added personal perspectives and made use of new colors and forms, while still reflecting traditional cultural styles. I was delighted with the demonstrated Acoma talent for maintaining art forms yet adapting them to modern needs!

WLA brooklynmuseum Pueblo Acoma Water Jar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I hope some of my online friends whose work lies in the decorative arts will take up the challenge implicit in my two days of contrasting experience. Can someone run a contest to see how many different “traditional arts” can be adapted to making modern day accessories for our ubiquitous cell phones, laptops and pads? How about a quilted dash cover? A pretty lace wrist strap for the new wearable smart phones? It would be such fun to visit the State Fair again in a few years and, instead of what I overheard one visitor describe as “so much schlock”, see rows of booths offering well-made, hand crafted items of practical use to the modern, hip visitor!

Tags:4-H, Acoma, calligraphy, cell phone covers, creativity, generational differences, horse pull competition, lace-making, My Life, NM State Fair, palominos, quilting, technology
Posted in environment, life wisdom, Living and Learning, technology | 2 Comments »

Creativity in a Second Language

September 15, 2013

I’ve started a new class through Coursera – a MOOC – that apparently has close to 125,000 people signed up for it worldwide. Mind boggling to think of that many students going to class together. The topic is Creativity – and in keeping with the course’s intent to promote more creative lives among the students, I’ve joined a subgroup of French speakers enrolled in the class. A challenging way to resurrect my skills with a language which I once spoke and wrote fluently, but which I’ve had little occasion to use in the last thirty years. Since the class is on-line, that means I’m writing French – the most difficult way to use a language skill. Should be an interesting eight weeks!

The first assignment included an option to make a sort of life map – identifying a core value at the center of everything one does, and then listing 3-5 priorities in each area of life, such as family, career, community, etc. I found the exercise relatively easy to do, given that my spiritual path (MasterPath) calls for a consistent effort to examine and process one’s life experiences. But I also attribute some of the ease to age – one doesn’t get to 70 and still engaged with employment, learning and community service, without having examined one’s priorities, and kept tabs on how they evolve over time.

What didn’t get addressed by the Life Ring activity was what I’d call a question of style – how do you, I, we approach daily life? I’m scheduled to facilitate an Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshop with a competent co-leader who is very organized, detail oriented, and most comfortable when every aspect of the workshop is clearly spelled out in advance, including how each activity links to a small number of specific topics. I on the other hand, like to ‘wing it’ for at least part of the weekend. I’ve put together an agenda that includes exercises which can be related to a number of different topics. Part of the challenge – and the learning – that I value in AVP is how it reveals interrelationships that participants have not previously considered. I trust my own skill at helping tie those relationships together, and therefore like to leave room for the unexpected to emerge as the activities are processed.

There’s a lot to be learned co-facilitating with someone whose style differs from mine. Birds of a feather may indeed flock together – but do they learn how to get along with those of a different plumage? We draw reassurance from associating with others like ourselves. We learn and grow when challenged by those with whom we have differences. Which makes the concept of thousands of students from a hundred or more different cultures all joining together to explore creativity a highly innovative concept.

The Francophone subgroup is on LinkedIn, enabling me to check the careers and interests of other members, as they can review mine. Most of those I’ve looked up so far are younger, in business, engineering, industry, very few list teaching, none that I’ve found so far work in social service or health-related careers as I have done. The instructors for the course want the students to find ways to apply the concepts we study to our fields of endeavor, and to work together in teams to develop those projects. I seem to have set myself up to stretch my creativity to the max, finding ways to apply my skills, in a second language, to areas of life with which I have little if any experience! Should be fun…Meanwhile, the course does stress that we all have the capacity to be creative – and that our styles do indeed differ. We have all been asked to take a survey that classifies us along a continuum from adaptively creative to innovatively creative. I come up moderately innovative. I suspect my AVP co-facilitator would land somewhere on the adaptive end of the dimension. I’m realizing, as I write, that by putting on the workshop with her later this month, I will have completed the major assignment of the course – which is to apply the principles of creativity, in conjunction with others, to an aspect of my professional life. Thankfully I don’t have to put on the workshop in French!

Tags:Alternatives to Violence Project, Coursera, French language, French-speakers, internet connections, LinkedIn, Massive open online course, MasterPath, My Life, self-acceptance, spiritual development
Posted in life wisdom, Living and Learning | 1 Comment »

Memory Lane

September 8, 2013

Told that you will be spending two days with a former partner – lover, ex, intimate friend – from whom you parted on amicable terms but have not seen in 45 years, what would you expect to experience? Assuming, of course, that you are old enough to have so much time elapse between encounters. If you’re younger, compress the time appropriately, and include an awareness that you and the former partner knew you had different goals and would be traveling different paths. You parted amicably.

So here you are at the other end of a long separation, having pursued your divergent aims. You are going to meet not just your ex-partner, but that person’s current mate about whom you know absolutely nothing. Would you, like me, wonder if you’d find anything familiar in your former partner? Would you ask yourself questions about “the road not taken” and be curious to learn if you’d been correct to leave it? Would you – unlike me – obsess about your looks and how you’d aged and whether you’d still be found attractive?

Turns out, I had the interesting and enlightening experience of both appreciating the qualities that originally drew me to this particular former partner (FP), and recognizing how our differences had deepened into a rift which would inevitably have pulled us asunder. We were indeed lucky – or perceptive – enough to have realized that we should separate “before any harm was done.”

What I didn’t anticipate was the extent to which the visit brought back other memories from my earlier life – memories not necessarily connected to the relationship, including memories of events from my early childhood. It was as though, once broached, the closet where I’d shoved recollection of much of my early life behaved as any physical closet stuffed to overflowing – it spewed out random items when the door cracked open.

Going for a Walk

Visits to the zoo with my grandfather, during which he talked about life, and values, and the challenge of finding just the right word for his latest poem. He queried my week and my interests and what I was reading. I was vividly reminded of those Sunday conversations when FP gently probed how I live and who I am now, in much the same way as my grandfather had sought to know me.

Memories of intensely difficult times with my mother, who had serious psychiatric problems. It took me quite a few years to overcome the effects of her paranoia, explosive anger, and abuse. FP perceptively commented on his recollection that my mother also had an abusive mother, in the context of mentioning that he and his present wife were lucky to have grown up amid very positive family lives. I know now what it’s like to feel supported and encouraged by a set of caring supporters. And I also appreciate to what extent my adventurousness and my inability to fit neatly into the socially defined role FP offered, arise from the instability and emotionally volatile nature of my childhood. I’ve not had an easy life, but I’ve certainly had a varied, challenging and infinitely rewarding one.

Also tumbling out of the closet were memories of other relationships, rather a lot of them, mostly all pleasant. Such a range of different types of people I’ve come to know and value as friends! People who are very far removed from the European immigrant, advanced-degree-educated, middle class traditionalist pattern of my parents and of FP. Motor cycle riders, cowboys, ex-cons, and prisoners still serving time who participate in the Alternatives to Violence Program workshops I facilitate in the New Mexico prison system. Sixth generation descendants of Spanish families who migrated into the New Mexico territories from Mexico, and who still speak English only as a second language. Some of them are conversos (crypto-Jews) rediscovering their family origins. FP and his wife, conservative Jews, were deeply interested to learn about this link to an area they now plan to revisit.

I’ve known mechanics whose crossword puzzle skills rival my own. Believers and practitioners of a host of religions, and of no religion at all. Providing home health care throughout a large rural section of the state, I’ve been welcomed into ancient adobe homes with sod roofs, ranch headquarters in the midst of thousands of acres of range land, luxury second homes for people who spend half their year in Texas, and the truly mobile homes of a couple living permanently in their Winnebago.

Amidst the tumble of memories spilling forth, I find and grab onto a gem of an idea. I ended the relationship with FP because I knew I did not fit within what felt to me like a confining, prescribed role. I was not at home within a “family” structure. It turns out I’m not at home within any other established structure I’ve encountered in my life journey. I’ve fit myself into them (work, a variety of different cultural norms) to get along, but none have felt like ‘home’. I belong nowhere. Ergo, I belong everywhere!

Perhaps that’s why I’m planning to start a new career within weeks of turning seventy, and then, four or five years from now, I’d like to take off to live once more in a different country. Somewhere with a comfortable climate for older bones, where I can teach, and learn, and continue my life adventure. I’ve been dipping into memories from the past. I’ve defined a possible future to hold in intent. Meanwhile, it’s time to resume the most important aspect of Being – living in, and appreciating, each moment of the present.

Tags:Alternatives to Violence Project, Crypto-Jews, Happiness, lessons, life learning, My Life, parental conditioning, self-acceptance
Posted in life wisdom | 1 Comment »

Older… and Wiser?

August 30, 2013

Have you noticed that the ‘older’ part of ‘older but wiser’ is singularly obvious in wrinkles, aches, and the need for Post-It notes littered over every surface – but the wiser part is much harder to recognize? Especially when the dog mouths one of those Post-It notes, and you have to make an extra trip back to town for the three forgotten items of the six that you need to make supper.

How delightful, how ego-boosting it is, then, when circumstances allow you to recognize that the ‘wiser’ at least occasionally manifests. A recent experience allowed me to feel grateful for whatever passes for wisdom in my brain. I had thought to pursue a course of study which would require me to hold in equal respect two conflicting paths to spiritual understanding. My training directed me along one path, my mental inclination tempted me onto the other. The studies would have meant constantly balancing two goals, two world views, two concepts of self. The outcome of the program would have enabled me to practice in a field I’d like to enter, for which I do not – at least at this point – see another means of qualifying.

So I did all the paperwork, wrote the essays, completed the application – and then was denied acceptance. What to do now???

Here’s where the wiser comes in. I did nothing, just let the fact of the denial settle into my awareness. Within a few days, I had one of those blessed “aha” experiences, a flash of insight that allows me to lay at least passing claim to wisdom. Recognition is enough! Seeing the differences between the two paths, understanding how different aspects of myself are drawn to each of them, and knowing that I am capable of continuing to follow one while learning the other – that is the recognition. And it is enough. I don’t have to also undergo the stress of carrying awareness of the paths and their differences through a two year course of study.

Wiser seems to be at work in my growing ability to move through a mine field of life choices while maintaining a ‘neither for nor against’ mentality.

Older is definitely a handicap in my search for paid employment. I cannot help but believe that the on-line application and screening systems which substitute for preliminary job interviews include an edit that discards all applications with college graduation dates before 1990 (the application isn’t accepted if a graduation date is left blank). No other explanation accounts for a year of denials of my applications for positions for which I meet every criterion, which mirror work I have already done successfully, and which are written using all the key words of the job description included in my work summary. Wiser allows me to keep the constant rejection at arm’s length, not translating it into a feeling of personal inadequacy. The right income opportunity will come my way, so long as I keep an open, explore-everything approach to the search – and all this rejection is good practice for the inevitable “send out twenty stories to get one accepted” that mark a writing life.

+++++++++++++++

Older is what I will be – starting another decade – on my next birthday in the autumn. Wiser is what I hope also to be by then, having learned the parameters of a new job which I’ve been offered, and having experienced yet again the virtues of patience. I’ve been hired into a position which exceeds every criterion I had set – flexible hours, service to others, supportive and enjoyable coworkers. And I have almost two months to discern how to maintain my established writing pace while fulfilling the job’s requirements. I’m old enough to know that won’t be easy. Hopefully I’m wise enough to know both how important the writing is to my sense of well-being, and how possible it is to “have it all.” With patience, I will see the way.

Tags:adages, balance, Employment, generational differences, lessons, My Life, Philosophy, self-acceptance, spiritual development, writing challenges
Posted in life wisdom | 3 Comments »

A Good Day

August 23, 2013

It seems to be perversely part of human nature to never be satisfied.

Through months becoming years of drought, we in the northeastern New Mexico high-mountain desert worried about the lack of rain. Our brown grasslands, swirling dust devils, raging fires and smoke-poisoned air were prominent in every conversation.

Until just a month ago, when suddenly, for some of us, things changed.

Water began to come out of the sky, in thick sheets, on almost a daily basis. Not everywhere, not for long periods of time, but enough where it did appear – including where I live – to turn the prairie green and yellow – green weeds shooting to chest height, yellow wildflowers making wide swaths of color especially where run-off water has pooled.

Now I hear complaints of pollen-allergies, and worries about the burrs and needle-like seeds that will permeate everything – especially the fur of four-legged pets – as soon as the short-lived grasses and flowers dry out this autumn. People hustle to find mowers and weed eaters, to chop down the lush growth, the absence of which was so recently bewailed.

Today, the sun is shining, there’s a cooling breeze, hummingbirds are hovering over the purple thistle flowers, and a dove is pecking seed from beneath my bird feeder. A few puffs of cloud float in a dust-free postcard blue sky. I’ve had to use the snips designed for nipping small limbs from trees, to cut down the largest red-root weeds blocking the steps to my home. A friend has promised to come mow, before I have company over Labor Day weekend. Not all my acres, just the area immediately around the house, so I can get to the bird feeder and the outside water hydrant without wading through chest-high weeds. So my guests can get into the cottage door without scratches to their legs and prickers in their clothes.

Nothing I can do will prevent the forthcoming torment to dogs and cat. Daily brushing, sessions of picking out burrs, even a close shearing of coats (canine at least) can reduce but not eliminate the pending assault by things that stick and sting and burrow into skin and paws. It’s been so long since we’ve had rain, and weeds, in summer that none of the current crew of pets has experienced what is in store for them. They are all too young.

I am not too young. I remember, ten years ago, the last time we had summer rains and weeds and wildflowers and enough grass for horse hay to be a reasonable price. I remember the quill-like needles that result from those pretty yellow wildflowers dropping their petals, drying and disseminating their seed. I remember the cockleburs, brown and clawing, so sharp they pierce the leather of my shoes as I walk by them; so sharp they even caused my horses to limp until the spines were picked out of their hooves.

I remember, but today I will not complain. Today I enjoy the sun and the cool breeze and the green vistas and the dancing yellow flowers. Today I am grateful that we have had rain, and a respite from dust and fire and smoke. Today is a good day to Be.

Tags:balance, climate change, contentment, drought, essentials, Happiness, My Life, New Mexico, Outdoors, plants, satisfaction
Posted in environment, life wisdom | 4 Comments »

Solitude

July 28, 2013

I’ve just finished reading Sara Donati’s Fire in the Sky, committing to myself to find the next book in her series about the Bonner family, and life in upstate New York in America’s early years. In an afterward, Donati states that she hopes she has done her work well enough for readers to seek out histories of the period, the War of 1812, which she feels is given short shrift in school history lessons. If my own experience is any indicator, she’s correct. My recollection of what I learned in elementary school about that war is limited to the battle at Fort McHenry and its role in the origin of our national anthem. High school American history class gave me even less about the War of 1812 – undoubtedly because the lesson was taught in a school in Paris, by a British woman who dismissed the entire affair as a “skirmish on the edge” of the important war happening at that time – Britain versus Napoleonic France.

My take-away from Donati’s writing is not, however, an interest in researching the complexities of what U.S. history books also refer to as the ”period between the French and Indian Wars and the settling of the West” (i.e. all the anguish and horror of the Amerindian experience with European intolerance). My take-away from Donati’s well written, engrossing series is far more personal – a profound feeling of loss, and a bone-deep sense of aloneness. Unlike the characters in this novel, who are an extended family with deep interconnections and emotional commitments to one another – unlike these people written into vivid life – I am alone. Profoundly alone. Only child of older parents long deceased, no first cousins, formerly married to a loner whose own small family (one brother and his children) made me welcome but with whom I have too little in common to connect. I have no children of my own, and never had the occasion to adopt any.

Mind you, I am not lonely. I like my own company, indeed find that I need solitude and tire quickly of constant interaction on those occasions when I am in extended social situations. When, with my husband, we went to visit his brother for a weekend, my sister-in-law was first puzzled, then amused to know that if I went missing, she could usually find me settled in the back seat of our car, with a book. Never happy unless surrounded by the noise and chatter of her children, nephews, cousins and visitors, my sister-in-law struggled to understand how overwhelming so many people could be to a person like me. I was raised in a home dominated by the quiet of parents who, because they did not like each other much, spoke little and went their own ways – until my mother would explode in rage. Noisy interaction, to me, means anger, shouting, ugly accusations, slaps, and being punished for non-existent infractions of unstated rules.

I am well aware of other types of noisy, social family dynamics. Adults happy to be together, chattering about their shared past and planned future, children busy with invented games that send them chasing among the adults, teens congregated on the porch giggling and talking (now also texting) their secrets to one another… I see all this around me as a positive experience, but know myself unable, now, to become part of it. Know that I was set onto my solitary path as early as kindergarten, where my tentative efforts to join the other children and make friends were undermined by my mother’s belief that it wasn’t safe for me to visit in any of their homes, or get to know them outside of the classroom. I know, as an adult, that it was her own self-doubt, her own fears that she was projecting outward, creating an environment around me that forbade socializing in groups.

I’m grateful that I’ve learned to enjoy people, and have been blessed over the years with companions and close friends. I’m also blessed with the ability to enjoy life as a single person, not needing to be part of a couple or in anyone’s company to eat at a restaurant, go to a concert or play, take a road trip, or vacation abroad. I have seen how family dynamics can become warped, twisted into lifelong animosities and unforgiven grudges. I know that much of the appeal in Donati’s stories (beyond the fact that she is an excellent writer) lies in becoming engaged with an ideal of family caring. The members support each other through their various trials, remaining in the end united despite distance or even death. The appeal of romances is that they portray an ideal, of love overcoming obstacles, achieved in the end. The appeal of traditional westerns is of clear cut right and wrong, an ideal justice achieved in the end.

The appeal of an ideal… Is there an ideal of solitude?

Not noticeably in fiction, but perhaps in religion or spiritual pursuits. The Buddha, sitting alone in contemplation. The Benedictine brothers at Christ in the Desert, living a vow of silence in their isolated monastery. The occasional lone backwoodsman – Robbie, in Donati’s Lake in the Clouds – an exemplar of a character choosing to live alone. Spiritual practitioners of solitude do carry the qualities of an ideal. The fictional characters do not. They are portrayed, even the most positive of them, as missing some important element of life. They are portrayed as strong enough to live alone, but nonetheless in some way damaged and unable to connect appropriately with society.

Why this disconnect between the positive image of spiritual solitude and the flawed one of social solitude? I am happy to have ample alone time for my spiritual practice, during which I feel embraced and held close in the joy of the Divine’s presence. I only question my aloneness when I encounter – usually in fiction, but occasionally in daily life experiences – the ideal of family, and then my emotional self begins to wonder if I’ve missed something important. A co-worker has been diagnosed with cancer. His family – sister and two adult daughters – have come from across the country to visit with him, provide support, and enjoy his company. Who would come if the same challenge were to arise for me?

I am looked after and cared for most completely by my spiritual Beloved. I know in my bones, in my gut, in my Soul, the certainty that I am not alone, not forgotten, not adrift in a life without purpose or meaning. As life challenges arise, the tools to meet them will be provided to me, in ways and forms I cannot invent nor imagine, as has already been proven true when I review my Path thus far. Indeed, my current querying of my state of aloneness, my curiosity as to whether I’ve missed out in some way by not experiencing the ties of family, my observation of the ideal of those ties as presented in fiction – all this reflection is an example of the process by which I am gifted to acquire whatever tools I will need going forward. It is just my mind, like a little child, tugging at my spiritual skirts and whining, “I want a sister, I want a brother, to talk to, to play and share with.”

Maybe next lifetime?
Careful, there. Remember the adage about being selective in what you ask for!

Tags:adages, balance, Happiness, lessons, My Life, parental conditioning, Paris, Philosophy, Sara Donati, self-acceptance, spiritual development
Posted in life wisdom | 5 Comments »

. . . Was the Word

July 20, 2013

I wrote my first poem, in my teens, after standing up to a howling wind blowing across the rim of Les Baux, in southern France. Below me was the Val d’Enfer (Valley of Hell), so named, I was told, because it was the site of attacks on merchant caravans whose masters tried to avoid paying tithe to the lords of Les Baux. My poem sought to express a sense of standing up to challenge.

Now, in my so-called golden years, I live in one of the windiest areas of the USA, the foothills of the Rockies in northeastern New Mexico. As I write, the wind swirls around my home, slamming against the house before fading to a conifer-leached sigh. With my eyes closed, the sounds could be those of the ocean, hitting the Maine coast and splashing me with spray or, from even earlier in my life, the rolling tumult of storm-roiled combers crashing onto Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, below where I stand hanging onto the railing of the boardwalk.

Just last month, the wind lifted tin off the roof of my loafing shed (fortunately no horses were around to be frightened into bolting). I arranged to re-roof the cottage to which the shed is attached, so tonight there is no clatter and rattle, only the almost intelligible language of an ocean of wind, once again attempting to tell me all the truths of the world.

Heavenly Wind

The wind, no matter in what spot in the world I experience it, brings change. Sometimes merely a change in the weather, other times a practical change like the needed, but previously postponed, new roof. The wind, no matter in what spot in the world I experience it, always brings me to inner change.

Awareness of a power beyond my small self, clinging to the boardwalk rail.
Awareness of good and evil across the ages of man’s time on earth as I looked into hell’s valley from the heights where I was sheltered and protected.
Awareness of the power in wind-driven, fragile drops which shattered to spray against mica-rich Maine rocks, before falling back into the sea and rising again to the work of eroding those rocks over eons of time.
Awareness tonight that, living amidst frequent winds, I have placed myself in the perfect outer environment to match the pace of my inner spiritual evolution. Washed by waves of wind-sound, like the Maine rocks, I am inexorably cleansed, my ego eroded to allow the bright mica reflections of Soul to shine forth.

Cleansing started, and will end, with the Word, spoken by the lips of the wind, into the ears of those who wish to hear.

Tags:adages, Delaware, France, Les Baux, Les Baux-de-Provence, lessons, Maine, MasterPath, My Life, New Mexico, Philosophy, Rehoboth Beach, spiritual development, wind, wisdom
Posted in environment, life wisdom | 2 Comments »

Life Patterns

July 7, 2013

At UWC-USA Graduation 2013

Marker events in our lives – weddings, baptisms, graduations, funerals – don’t just bring us together in community. These rites of passage often also occasion a life review, or at least a review of that part of one’s life affected by the event being marked. Is my child growing in the way I would hope? Has my marriage turned out as I anticipated? Do I need to make changes to my diet, to live longer than friend John there in the casket? It is a natural human behavior, to make comparisons and to consider not just where one stands in relation to others, but where one stands in relation to one’s own life goals.

There is another type of life review, however, that does not arise so easily, nor so obviously. I’m referring to a bout of unsettledness that descends (or creeps up) seemingly out of nowhere. For me, a recent one definitely came as a sneak attack, catching me in the gut, triggering an upset digestive system not related to diet, illness or any other identifiable external cause. Only stress has, in the past, caused me this sort of physical response. There are no apparent stresses in my life just now, at least not recognizable ones off the widely distributed list of events (including happy ones) known for causing this pernicious dis-ease.

Perhaps that’s why it took me awhile to recognize that what was troubling my tummy lay deeper than a ‘bug’, or too much green chili on my tostada.

For much of the past year I have not known in what direction my life would turn. I left a position I’d held for twenty years, and experienced a huge easing of stress. I’ve gone forward with an open mind, following no pre-chosen path, but rather exploring each option that has presented itself, to see where it would lead. All of the possibilities fizzled out, until I came to writing, which is not a new interest but one that I have pursued in fits and starts over the past twenty years, too frequently allowing it to fall to the wayside as paying work and family demands took precedence. Now, however, I find myself able to give the writing precedence – and am very happy to do so.

I have recently recognized that my life pattern has been one of compromise – and of finding validity for my existence in activities that are of service to others. Teaching college in a prison, working for defense attorneys, running a home health agency and providing case management services to clients – worthwhile pursuits from which I gained as much in learning as I offered in care. The compromises lay in choices made regarding how and where I served – in the U.S. rather than in other countries, as I would have wished to do had I been single and free to go where I pleased. The compromises also lay, unrecognized until just recently, in the subtler realm of belief that I had to justify my existence by some form of service. How many of us are driven by an unstated, perhaps unrecognized, belief that we have no worth until we have somehow ‘earned’ our right to existence? I was startled to realize that until very recently, I did not feel entitled to choose a career on the sole basis that it is something I want very much to do!

I was still a young child when I first came across Robert Frost’s “Death of a Hired Man”, and the concept therein (stated by the wife, mind you) that home is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” By that criterion, I have been searching for a home most of my life, and am only just beginning to understand to what extent I have carried within me parental strictures about having to measure up, to prove myself, to earn the right to be thought ‘good enough.’ Finding home, and happiness, as I seem to have managed over this past year, means I have – finally – extricated myself from the tentacles of ‘deserving.’

In my former conditioned way of thinking, I could say that I have worked hard, done what was expected and required of me, for enough years that I now deserve to devote myself to the new career I choose – writing. But I recognize with some considerable surprise that the happiness I am feeling arises not from the doing of the writing, but from my freedom from the need to justify the doing of it. I think I have finally found ‘home’ – a state of being which is independent of the concept of deserving, within which whatever I choose to do with my time and energy will prove to be the right thing for me to be doing.

It isn’t surprising that a major shift in how I approach current activities could cause subconscious stress, and hence digestive upset. I do want to be careful that I don’t use my physical state of well-being (or lack thereof) as a measure of my success in making this transition, since I know that the physical takes much longer to change than does the emotional, which in turn takes much longer than the spiritual. What can be grasped in a moment of enlightenment can take years to fully manifest on the physical.

What matters is that first willingness to recognize that a shift is not only necessary but has in fact occurred. And to allow an unexpected welling of emotion, as well as the uncomfortable gripping of pain, to mark a happy transition from a limited state of (earned or deserved) being, to simply Being.

Tags:adages, balance, graduations, Happiness, My Life, parental conditioning, Robert Frost, self-acceptance, spiritual development, UWC-USA
Posted in life wisdom, the writing experience | 4 Comments »

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