Heart Happy

This article addresses for me what it is all about:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/health/09sisters.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Zebulen posted this on Facebook. I bring it here.

http://www.thebricktestament.com/index.html

This part is especially important:


- CONTENT NOTICE -
The Bible contains material some may consider morally objectionable and/or inappropriate for children. These labels identify stories containing:

= nudity = sexual content = violence = cursing

I was delighted to see the moon in the sky this morning.  It is one thing to see it at night and another in the day.  I seem to have moved through my "crisis" or confusion of yesterday.  I went to nature and walked down to the beach at Tennessee Valley, and saw that Trips for Kids was out with a group.  I used to be a volunteer with Trips for Kids when it was an idea by Marilyn Price and just beginning.  Now, it has expanded to reach many more kids.   Children who haven't had the opportunity are taken out into the "wilderness" on mountain bikes.  The idea is to empower them and have a good time in nature.  I remember one time when we outfitted the kids with their bikes and rode up the hill out of Tennessee Valley.  I was standing on the ridge above Marin City with a girl who lived there.  We were looking out at the bay and enjoying the view.  She had no idea she lived in one of the most beautiful areas in the world; she had never walked up the hill nor had anyone encouraged her to do so.  There's nothing like a view to open up possibility and put life into perspective. 

Yesterday, I heard a counselor with another group telling the young people about a private place behind the rocks on the beach.  One young man asked, "Why would anyone want privacy?"  I didn't hear her answer as they were walking one way and I, another, but I realized how much privacy means to me.  It is essential and I can't imagine life without it and yet, for some, it may feel threatening or unsafe to be alone. 

Jane and I had a good conversation this morning as we see in looking at the edits where we both glossed, where we both weren't really willing to go as deeply into the feeling or event as the book requires.  Oddly, we have had great feedback already and we see there is more probing within to go.  Ah, big breath!!

Yesterday I really saw that it is summer.  Sometimes it is illusive when the fog is a dragon breathing moisture in and out.  Zach and I shared a delightful time.  At one point, we entered the gazebo and sat together, my arm around him, his hand on my leg, and we sat quietly watching the light tip the waves of the bay.  He has outgrown the baby swings and we reminisce at times and talk "seriously about tires" and other times sit without words. 

Thank you to all of you here who help me probe.

We are on a journey together, a quest.  It may not be as obvious as some of the online interactive games but it is just as clear.

When I first got on a surfboard, I surfed.  I just stood up and rode the wave.  When I first was hooked up to a hang glider and ran down a hill, I flew.  Of course, I didn't expect to fly so hadn't listened to the instructions on how to land, so I when I looked down and realized I was in the air, I pulled the bar in too close and fell and and took in a mouthful of sand.  Both times I didn't try.  I just did it.  I didn't think about it, so there was no expectation or plan.  Then, I tried and oh, my, no ride, no flight, and so, here I post in a stream of consciousness sort of way and then, when I try to figure out what I do, like the centipede when asked how he walks with all those legs, I got all tangled up and the point is we need to be in the world both ways.

Yesterday, I learned from my doctor that her husband is a well-known man and a well-known author.  I was telling her about my editing quagmire.   She said he had done fine with editing comments when his books were about others, but then, he wrote a book that was personal and wrote in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way.  When the left-brain editorial comments came in, he was furious.  How dare someone take a left-brain knife to his unconscious brilliance?   Oh, my.

Well, I usually write here in a stream-of-conscious way.  Whatever comes, I allow the flow.  Sometimes it may work and other times not, but there is no need or reason to look back.  I now understand a book is not like that, and so I am required to look at this manuscript differently and that is tying my brain in knots.

To handle all of this gently, I purchased a wonderful book that I recommend: Don't Bring It To Work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success.  It is by Sylvia Lafair.  I felt I needed to understand how to work this for myself, to bridge this conscious and unconscious way of being in the world.  

This book is about fluidity in relationship, recognizing and honoring how we shift and change in relationship.  So, here we are.  My good friend asks me a question at absolutely the right time and that sets even more into motion.    I am grateful to him, to you, and what we explore here.  When I am honest with you, vulnerable, I think it works.  When I begin to put on airs or perhaps "try" to be something, it doesn't, and so, how does one find that balance each day.  Well, that is why we are here to play.  Our sandbox is huge.  I give you my shovel, and you give me yours.

Thank you, my Very Dear Friends!!

Ever since My Very Dear Friend asked how I have something to say each day, I don't.  

Curious, isn't it, how we navigate this world we share.

I have been working with the edits on the book.   The editor was very clear about what made sense and what didn't.  Now, I'm sure you have never noticed but I have a tendency to go off into a world of my own and not look behind to see if you can follow.  You give me lee-way on that and are very kind, but in a book each word is supposed to make sense within its context, and so my brain is about to explode with the exclusivity of that.

Meaning that yesterday I spend a good part of the day on one paragraph that still does not work.  There is so much I want to say and part of me thinks just leave it out and don't say anything at all.  Let the reader start the book, so it is the preface to the book I am talking about and the last paragraph of the preface, paragraph five.  

Should it go or should it stay?  Oh, my!    I have now printed it out and I'm taking it up the mountain to ask a mountain's advice.

It is a Zach day, and I'm sure my young friend Zach will help me find the perspective required!!

Perhaps, I will just ask for one wee nugget of help.  My teacher of Sensory Awareness, Charlotte Selver used to say, "A moment is a moment."

I used those words to carry me through chemotherapy and radiation.  I would sit there and lie there and say to myself, "A moment is a moment."  I can do this.  "A moment is a moment."

Does that make sense to you?


Tears come to my eyes.  Those words mean so much to me, and I just don't see how I can remove them from the book.  To me, they are the theme, and yet, would you look at those words, and say, "This woman is a nutcase," and walk away?

Michael Jackson was not protected from the physical abuse of his father who thought it was fine to whip his children with straps and belts. Now, the children, who are not biologically related to Jackson, have been given in temporary custody to Jackson's mother, and therefore, the abusive father. The abuse that Michael Jackson suffered at the hands of his father is proof that his father should have access to no children at all.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090720/williams

This poem says what I would like to say today.

The Man Moves Earth

by Cathy Song

The man moves earth
to dispel grief.
He digs holes
the size of cars.
In proportion to what is taken
what is given multiplies—
rain-swollen ponds
and dirt mounds
rooted with flame-tipped flowers.
He carries trees like children
struggling to be set down.
Trees that have lived
out their lives,
he cuts and stacks
like loaves of bread
which he will feed the fire.
The green smoke sweetens
his house.


The woman sweeps air
to banish sadness.
She dusts floors,
polishes objects
made of clay and wood.
In proportion to what is taken
what is given multiplies—
the task of something
else to clean.
Gleaming appliances
beg to be smudged,
breathed upon by small children
and large animals
flicking out hope
as she whirls by,
flap of tongue,
scratch of paw,
sweetly reminding her.


The man moves earth,
the woman sweeps air.
Together they pull water
out of the other,
pull with the muscular
ache of the living,
hauling from the deep
well of the body
the rain-swollen,
the flame-tipped,
the milk-fed—
all that cycles
through lives moving,
lives sweeping, water
circulating between them
like breath,
drawn out of leaves by light

 

 

 

I sit now in some sort of bogglement as to what I might want to say.

Perhaps that happens when I read the news, the news on dignity and ethics and what McNamara allowed and did.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07brooks.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07herbert.html?th&emc=th

and then there are dogs sniffing out health problems. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/dogs-sniffing-out-health-problems/

I saw the doctor today for a physical and got a tetanus shot so I am all set. Blood work is fine.

Her office is by the bay, so I self-served a cup of coffee at the Bait and Tackle Shop and listened to the fishermen talk about whether to go out or not. Though the only fish I ever caught was with my niece Katy's Snoopy fishing rod when she was four or five, and that fish I put back, I seem to enjoy the talk of bait and lures.

I realize that amidst it all I feel positive. Perhaps it is where I live. We had a friend of Steve's to dinner last night. He was out from NY and had spent the last few days in Carmel, Monterey, and Santa Cruz, and yesterday went up the Marin coast. He kept exclaiming over the horizons. Perhaps we need to see the horizon to put everything in perspective, perhaps we need to watch the tides go in and out and expose little critters and cover them up and watch the moon rise and set and the sun. Perhaps.

This is from Geoffrey Dunn's column in the Huffington Post.

I disagree with some of my friends who say this is "out of character" for the good governor. Sarah Palin quit five colleges in her otherwise unremarkable collegiate career, before finally graduating from the sixth. She quit her job in television. She and Todd quit their snow machine dealership in Big Lake. She quit her job as Mayor of Wasilla to run for lieutenant governor. She quit as chair of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission. Now she has quit the governorship of the state she supposedly loves. Sarah Palin is a quitter. When the going gets tough, Sarah Palin quits.

Sarah Palin has no game.

My 14-year-old daughter just told me that someone on Twitter has come up with a new term for Palin's resignation: Iquitarod.

The gray fog and wind have been an invitation to pull books from the stacked piles.  Last night we each lit an illegal here sparkler at my neighbor's house and captured one glimpse of the moon before the fog gobbled it back up and we heard the fireworks, but mainly it's introspection for me. 

I am reading a book loaned to me by my son: Seven Tenths, The Sea and Its Thresholds by James Hamilton-Paterson.  My son said I won't be able to again eat fish when I finish it and I realize I don't think I've eaten fish since it arrived and awaited the opening of its pages to light.

There is a chapter called Objects of Desire.  It seems most, if not all,  harbor the fantasy of our own private island.  Many islands, at this point, have been turned into money machines, and most of us probably view an island of our own as not a possibility, and yet, he writes:

"There is one last kind of island, one whose elusive presence flickers at the edge of vision, quick as fish. This is the imaginary island faithfully mapped in every psyche, mostly unsuspected, infrequently discovered, even more rarely inhabited. An outcropping of the self, it lies across a treacherous strait which discourages acquisitiveness and, even on clear blue days, may have vanished as it it were roaming the oceans in search of the one worthy inhabitant. Then on a rare day the rare person wakes and it has swum out of the corner of his eye and stands before him. One such a morning it takes no effort to cross over, paddle flashing in the sun, until the skiff's bows nudge grindingly into the shore.

And then what pleasure to set up a hut, a fish drier; to pare things back to water and light, to knives and spearpoints, to order and silence! All men have an island, Donne should have said, for a suspended wheel rim being beaten in a cement block chapel on the distant mainland ought to tell us no more than the fish curling and flapping between our hands, bleeding rusty threads into the sea. That steely tolling from across the water brings no news, nothing we do not already know as later we climb the headland to watch soft dusk well up over the world's rim and efface the ocean below. It is not interesting to tot up the sunsets seen and perhaps to come. Those deaths, our deaths, are not plangent affairs but matters of geology. We are all at best marginalia in another era's fossil record. Go down to the hut instead through a drift of fireflies. Light the lamp, cook rice. There is nobody else on this island; there never was and never could be. Outside, the waves wring green flashes from plankton. The great mineral machine turns its fluid gears. The firefly in the thatch tugs us into its gravitational field."

And there, soul is fueled!

Let's support him in his vision of a nuclear free world!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?th&emc=th

Nicholas Kristof today writes about his favorite children's books. It is a day to each think of what we loved to read when we were children and what we may still re-visit now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05kristof.html?th&emc=th

I loved Little Women, the Nancy Drew books, the Bobbsey Twins, the Little Colonel books, Charlotte's Web though it was sad, the Silver Sword, again sad, Winnie the Pooh, and as an adult I came to Wind in the Willows and The Velveteen Rabbit. We had my mother's Book House and I loved reading the stories and poems in those.

It is gray here. We are summer wrapped.

Here is another look at the turning down of the gift of a museum in SF.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/04/BAKU18ICI7.DTL

I have been re-reading Robert Baer's book, See No Evil. After my cousin died, his daughters were informed this book would give them insights into what their father did. It is odd to read it from that perspective. He would never talk about his work, never. We would tease and probe, and absolutely nothing ever came through.

I learned yesterday that the blurbs of support we see splattered on books are often based on reading an excerpt, not the whole book. How can we know a book from an excerpt? I realize now that the blurb is publicity for the one who writes it. It seems like a game to me that lessens the depth and exploration of what is written, the time a book may deserve.

We have been analyzing poems on Connection Well. We go over and over them, commenting, re-evaluating, dissecting, and learning more and more about ourselves as we turn the poem on a lathe of our own uncovering. This week the poems were on friendship and yet friendship in ways we may not usually think of it, friendship with ourselves.

This poem feels appropriate to me for the values of Independence Day.

Incantation

by Czeslaw Milosz

Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Berkeley, 1968

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky

We seem always ready to pay the price for war. Almost gladly we give our time and our treasure--our limbs and even our lives--for war. But we expect to get peace for nothing.

- Peace Pilgrim


http://www.peacepilgrim.com/

I was speaking to a friend today whose family came to this country to escape Germany under Hitler. Relatives who stayed died. Her mother, who is over ninety now, loves this holiday and celebrates it well. She was worried under Bush that she was seeing tyranny again. Perhaps, this weekend is an opportunity to celebrate what we borrow and what we build, and to remember the lives given so we can stay on an honorable track.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/opinion/03freedman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

It is a legal holiday, a three day weekend celebration which according to the sirens heading out highway 1 yesterday, began sadly, for some. 

I am happy to have a three day pause to consider my own ideas on independence, which in the case of the forming of this country seemed to be about fairness and coming together to form a place that benefited the good of the people who came here to create lives in their own way without the burden of the past.

I just finished the book, Tide, Feather, Snow, A Life in Alaska, by Miranda Weiss.  She writes beautifully and allows us to feel we, too, live the exploratory dream, and the exploration of what it is to be conservative in our lives and liberal, to find the balance within, and balance it within the society in which we choose to live.  

I also read Jeffrey Zaslow's book, The Girls from Ames, A Story of Women & a Forty Year Friendship.  I was interested in it because my family came to Ames, Iowa when I was six weeks old.  I think I may have been about two when we left for Des Moines.  There is now no one left to ask the exact date and it hasn't seemed to matter to me before.

This book is a man looking at the lives of eleven women who are friends.  One died at the age of 22, so there are ten.  He exclaims over and over on what they share, the honesty, tears, and laughter.  I wonder what the book would have been if a woman had written it, had asked to be let in.  His point is that friendship is beneficial to our health, hardly arguable I would think, and he seems so astonished at what these women share.  He wants to better understand his wife and daughters which is why he undertakes this "journey," and I think for him it is a journey into an alien culture. I almost felt as though I was reading Margaret Mead.

Are men and women so different from each other?  How much of that is imposed by how we were raised?  He says men get together and talk about sports,  poker,  work.  Women delve into their feelings, speak easily about their bodies, and yet, women can be harsh.   This book is also about forgiveness and how without that, these women would not be friends.  There has been adjustment, forgiveness,  and accommodation in their lives. 

For this three days, my intention is independence from rigidity of thought.  I want to move my brain cells around and give them a cleanse and a shake.  I want to swim in clean inner streams.

I will not get in a car.  I have food and I can walk and my neighbors are giving a Fourth of July party so I will wander over there when impulse calls.  The fog is doing its usual this time of year game.  I've lived here over thirty years and each year the fog plays with whether or not the fireworks will be seen.  The warm jackets come out and people sit on the ground in the Headlands with their flasks wondering what they will see, and no matter what, comradeship is the elixir shared.

The fog moves in and out, seemingly more independent and freer than the tides.  I have been with the concepts of conservative and liberal of late, seeing where I reverence the past and where I reach to stir a future I don't yet grasp.  I suppose the tides might be viewed as conservative, predictable, holding on to a route of the past, and the fog as liberal and probing and willing to try new things.  Where can I explore now?   Do I want to be drawn in by heat or drop into this valley for cold?

Last night I thought I must have been reading a long time because the moon was in one place and then it was gone, but it was just the fog offering a cape.   I, too, play with the veil, choose when and what to see, open my eyes at times and other times, slip into rest, always intending to meet what comes with a beat of peace.

Happy Cultivation of Independence and Planting of Inner Seeds!   Happy Fourth of July Eve!!

I have changed my icon from a vision of space to one from the sea, the flotation bulbs on kelp. Kelp was on the beach when Anna and her daughters were here and they had never seen the huge strands, the bulbs, never held them in their hands.

This is to me one of the most important and painful poems ever written, a poem of conscience and witness, read here by the author Carolyn Forche. The poem is The Colonel.

Brace yourself. The image in the last lines will never leave your mind.

Here is a deeper look at her: http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/a_f/forche/life.htm

I love museums. They give me hope, so I am disappointed to read this article. I agree that we need oversight on the impact and integration of buildings, but to so hammer until the givers need to step away is sad and sobering to me.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/02/MNJL18HMBA.DTL

Zach and I had fun today.  I love this child so much my whole being bursts into bloom when I see him.  We hadn't seen each other for three weeks because I've been gone on Wednesday's, so he jumped into my arms and I melted into his huge, blue eyes, eyes just like his mother's, face just as sweet.

We decided to make a big day of it and go to the Academy of Sciences in the city.  I had forgotten that Tut is at the De Young which meant we had to park so far away that we had to pop into the De Young because it was the closest bathroom and I had to go, so we went out into the sculpture garden and explored and went into the circle that is Three Gems.   There is nothing like a museum with a three year old.  He walked along the bumpy slate paths and checked out the lights set into the ground.  One statement that we don't touch the art, even the twelve red apples on the ground, and he was careful only to look.  He was puzzled by the statue of Winged Woman Walking, which has no head and only one wing and I was puzzled too.  He wondered why my purse wasn't searched.  I wondered too.  I guess when you walk in with a three year old clearly in need of a bathroom, you don't look like you're planning to bomb King Tut.

We don't walk in any kind of straight path so it took about an hour to arrive at the Academy of Science which is just across the way.  We watched the sting rays and the sharks and checked out the pendulum that shows the turning of the earth and looked at a giant tortoise and then, when I showed him the photo on the wall that my young friend Kara Scherer took, we realized there was a special room for children under five.  Off came our shoes and in we went.  One child was crying.  Zach took her a toy.  Some of the carpet looks like wood.  Zach spent a great deal of time exploring how wood could be soft.  I was intrigued too.  We do a great deal of exploring at levels I don't normally see.   We walk along and everything says hello to us, so we say "The grass says hello," and like that, and on and on we go.   At the Academy of Science, his hand was stamped with a T. Rex and he was given an activity book with a song about eels.  

The Academy of Science is a great gift, the De Young, the benches, the park.   I came home and for some reason felt very sick so I watched the moon become more distinct in the sky as it got dark, and then, the fog covered it.  Steve made soup.  I still don't feel well and I will tomorrow.  When I'm with Zach, we notice every leaf and thank the weeds and talk about what everything eats, and today, when I said I love you, he said, Thank you, and I realized that was the most perfect response of all!   I so want his mother to be well.  She is home from the hospital and on the mend.  Prayers for health for us all!