Ho Hum.  Don’t want to write about my life, don’t want to regale you with another episode of fights between Robin and I which are as predictable as the sunrise and sunset, but maybe I want to write about what I am reading which is Abundance by Annie Dillard.

Now, I know I said I didn’t like Annie Dillard but then I realized that I had not read her wonderful, confusing illuminating essays.

In the piece I’m thinking about she is in the woods, sitting on a log, when she sees a weasel.  She and the weasel lock eyes.  She sees his weaselness (not the human weasel, but the real weasel), and he regards this human.  She thinks about the consciousness of weasels.  Then she thinks about our consciousness.  The former acts and lives out of necessity, the later, with choice.  In a true emergency you want a weasel on your side.

You might think this is rather silly, but I think it’s really interesting.  Why, you ask?  Because we call slick and slimy con men weasels.  We call sharpsters, weasels.  We malign the weasel.  Only a human being can be a sharpster.  Only a human being can be a shit bird.  A weasel acts out of necessity, that is, to survive.  Only humans have those “tangled webs (we) weave.”

Weasel/human.

Weasel:  weasel wakes up, feels hungry goes to find something to eat, eats, becomes sated, then tired, sleeps, wants to mate, finds someone with which to mate, mates and then feels tired, sleeps.

Human:  human wakes up, feels hungry says what do I want to eat?  Should I eat this or that, should I eat at my desk or at the breakfast table, should I read the paper while I eat or practice mindful eating because I really could lose a little weight.  You get the drift. She hasn’t even eaten yet and already she is confounded by choices.

The weasel acts in exigency, the human, with choice.

Planning, plotting, conniving;  these are human contrivances.  So is a leisurely breakfast with the paper.

Now wasn’t that a lot more fun than complaining about marriage?

 

 

 

Joy

It’s been snowing here and I went for  walk in the woods.  “The woods are lovely dark and deep”, except they weren’t dark.

The skies were a pellucid blue and the wind was blowing and the snow was light and airborne.  The snow formed a murmuration and I was thinking about Van Gogh and how everything in his world seemed to move individually with such energy and joy and that’s what the snow was doing.  And that’s what I do when I write except I’m desk bound but my words fly around and around.

So there.

Boating

I must have been about eight.  I was beyond excited.  My brother, John had built a beautiful sailing ship and we (my family) were on the way to see it off in a Regatta in the pool at Laurelhurst Park.

It was a lovely boat with smooth clean lines and a brave sail.  The day was cold so it must have been late Fall, early Spring.  There was a brisk wind, just a few shavings of blue sky and no rain, very unusual for Portland, Oregon.

Quite a crowd had gathered around to see how these boats would fare.  Ten to twelve young fellows—(eighth graders, I think), set their boats in the water at the top of the pool, the rest of us gathered around the lip of the Pool to watch.

My father came up to me and grabbed me on the shoulder and pinched, hard.

“Don’t fall in,” he warned.  “Don’t fall in.”

The boats were released, the crowd roared.  I roared.  I fell in.  My father, the implacable, the vengeful, fished me out.  I was shaking more from fear of him than of the cold water.  I swam in the Pacific Ocean so I was inured to frigid water.

I never got used to the violence and cruelty that was so close to the surface in him.   I was frightened. His rage infected me.

“You are stupid, you’re an idiot, I told you…” on and on he went.  I was in shock. He took me back to the car and left me shivering, ashamed and unsure exactly how I had fallen in the water.

He seemed to know me better than I knew myself.  He knew that I would get so engrossed in the excitement and my brother’s boat, that I would lose track of my body.  I lost track of my body on a regular basis.

Years later, I can feel my shame and my fear.  Years later, I feel that I could have been obliterated.   Children shouldn’t feel that they can be obliterated.

When I was older, I could make my Dad laugh; I could lighten him up and disarm him.  But when I was a child, I took his blows.  I thought he hated me.

I am sure he had been belittled and shamed by his parents.  He was raised in a German Catholic family, with little or no understanding of the ways of children. We were little animals that needed to be controlled. Help your children to grow up to be law abiding adults who “fit in”, by shaming, physical punishment and sarcasm.

Now, I think that the hatred I felt from him was an emanation of the hatred, the self-loathing he felt for himself.

Hate is a gift we give our children, if we don’t choose otherwise.

 

 

Soul/Self

Radiolab had a most interesting program on about what constitutes a soul.  Is soul the same as self?  What do we mean when we talk about soul/self?  If we deconstruct the brain, take it down to its simplest components, will we find the soul?

They interviewed a neurologist who said it was more likely that our “self” is the stories we tell ourselves about our “selves”.  We would not find a soul but a story.

I remember laying in bed when I couldn’t sleep during a particularly rough patch in my life, and thinking to myself “…and then this happened and then that happened…” and so on.  It seemed to be my way of explaining why I was in a particular muddle.

I was creating a book of my life.  The rationales, the shapes, my reactions and my present moment.

And then, when I reached a point of homeostasis, of calmness and acceptance, I suddenly didn’t need the stories anymore.  I was just where I was, who I was and could move on.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love stories.  But, they are limiting.  Our stories limit us.

“I am just a loser.”

“I asked for it.”

“If only I had…”

Our stories change, they move right along with us as we change, unless we get stuck in a particular one and never move on.  That said, it seems to me that stories change, self/soul not really.  It has always seemed to me that when the crisis is over, I revert back to my truest self.  I wonder if that is true for other people.

Getting stuck in your story must be like getting cut off from the Mother Ship.  You have no home.  You are floating out there in the cosmos;  floating in the cosmos with a smaller limited version of yourself, unable to find your way back.

A selfie as opposed to a soul.

 

 

Valentine’s Day—our minds turn to thoughts of love and betrayal.  Only chocolate will heal the wounds.

Flowering Around

The sun is out again today.  A walk is in order.  Maybe cleaning up the garden a bit.  Maybe reading my favorite nursery catalog.  Thinking about flowers, blooming trees, trees with bloomers.  Whatever.  It’s  fertile ground.

The part of the flower labeled stigma,  is the sticky end of the style that leads to the ovary.  The ovary holds the eggs like a flowery nest.

 Stigma can also mean a brand or a mark of shame which attaches to a person or place.  It’s that sticky bit that you cannot shake off.

In another form it was the mark of blessedness—the stigmata, a mark like that on Jesus’ palms.

Stigma/stigmata, disgrace/ grace.

Isn’t language a wonderful thing?

So this sticky bit of a flower, a generative half of reproduction (it does need to be pollinated), is the place where rebirth can occur.  The petals attract attention, but the stigma is the business.

Another part of the business is the anther. The anther, along with the filament is called a stamen (Pliny),  and literally means “thread of the warp” in the upright loom.

The warp thread is the thread that is strung over the loom vertically, and holds the tension while you weave. The weft thread is the thread that you weave between the warp threads, creating your patterns and structure in the weave.

Can’t you just see that DNA molecule being formed?

You see where I’m going…the male part holds the tension, and the female creates the pattern.

Talk about recycling.  Language is constantly being repurposed.  You can see, you can almost hear, how one word became one thing and then another thing and then with a little tweaking became something else entirely.  But it all holds–its a complex matrix of interconnectedness that reflects how we see and feel and hear our world.  Oh it’s grand.

You start with flowers, segue into weaving and voila into sex.

Birds again

We lived in a Victorian house in Brooklyn in the 80’s.  It was a mess when we bought it but it was only 80,000 dollars and so we could swing it financially.

I loved the deep front porch and the columns leading down to the lawn.  In the spring we had baby birds nesting in the nooks and crannies.  One morning as Rob stepped out to go to work, he encountered four little birds chirping on our welcome mat.  I brought out a chair and we very carefully placed them back in their nest.  They were ready to fledge and fly away and so as soon as we left they left the nest again. They didn’t go far.

Later in the morning, Kate and Tess heard a ruckus outside and there were those little birds in our driveway being stalked by the neighborhood cat, Peaches.  I screamed out the kitchen window as I ran for the back door startling our neighbor lady who thought I was screaming at her.

I chased the cat away and we kept look out for the babies for the next hour or two until breakfast and chores and reading books and playing and lunch and nap time and shopping and life took over.

Here I am years later, daughters grown, sitting at my laptop wondering what happened to those baby birds and their progeny.

 

Silliness

I’m thinking about amuse-bouche—I love the idea of amusing your mouth.  Then I thought “Hmm, how about amuse-cerveau?”  That’s supposed to be brain in French.  Amuse your brain.  Tickle your fancy.

I looked up the french word for mind and of course discovered that you can’t just use the word for brain or mind, you have to suss out the context.  So cerveau may not work.  I might have to use esprit, a word I much prefer the look and sound of.  Or I could use intelligence.

There are twenty two different words for brain/mind.  Isn’t that interesting.  The french are so subtle in their use of language.

On the other hand, people who live in the Pacific Northwest have at least forty words for rain, twelve for mold, fifteen for mildew and hundreds of moss species with different names.  How subtle is that?

This blog is a perfect example of amuse-esprit or cerveau or what have you.  Here’s a little amuse-bouche to whet your appetite:

Pat’s Starlings

I am reading the new National Geographic about birds. I thought about my sister-in-law, Pat, who told me a compelling story about a bird.  The bird was a starling.

Early Spring, green grass, still cool in the early morning.  On her journey from the car to her office, she first heard and then found a small bird peeping on the ground.  A number of birds had gathered round chirping encouragement perhaps, frightened and quite distraught.  Putting down her coffee cup, her stacks of folders, and her purse, she rescued this little bird, putting him or her on top of a cement retaining wall.

This act of kindness done, Pat gathered her coat and purse, her coffee and papers and continued into her office.  She forgot all about this incident.

The next morning when she returned to work, a group of starlings had gathered along the rooftop of one of the buildings.  They heralded her return like supplicants greeting the Dahli Lama and then one starling peeled off from the rest.

He left her tokens, mementos, honoring her gift of life.  I don’t remember what this bird dropped—seeds, a pod, a bit of this or that.  What they dropped was unimportant; that they brought something to acknowledge her act of kindness,  was remarkable.

A starling is a drab little bird, colorless here in North America.  He looks like he’s wearing widow’s weeds.  But starlings are among the bird species who flock and form murmurations.   They develop relationships with their neighbors in order to thrive.  They communicate.

Pat acted as a neighbor, and, in return, they communicated their thanks.  One neighbor to another.