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Category: Big Questions

Five Things That Made Me Happy Over My Birthday Weekend. And a Picture

Back Deck 3.0 Until this past week, the deck had been a weight around my neck, an unfurnished waste land that reminded me every day of all the things I had not done, and empty void that fed my doubts and really accomplished nothing except to fuel my doubts. Last week however, instead of pulling weeds, I spent some time scrubbing built up pollen, mildew and various seasonal stains off the outdoor furniture. Then I moved the furniture that has been here and there and everywhere, most recently on the slate patio, to the deck, the space on the deck that had once held the outdoor dining table, but that too was relocated (deck 2.0). I’d been looking at deck furniture for years, but nothing clicked. Then, at a friend’s house, I realized I had been asking the wrong question. I had the furniture I wanted for the deck, I just had it in the wrong place.

Another corner of the deck. These chairs have been here a couple of years. The pillows were meant for the furniture above, but didn’t work there and make this corner more cozy. The brick pieces came with me from Hyde Park, were rescued from the original Vassar Brothers Hospital when it was torn down, and moved by me to this location last summer. I sat in these chairs enjoying my birthday breakfast, looking out at a deck that no longer looked like a barren wasteland of empty promises.

Savory Pastry: I made an onion tart, with local onions, cream and eggs. Creamier than a quiche, more custardy, it was light and delicious. I didn’t have the right size tart pan for the recipe though, so I actually made several smaller tarts, in a mixture of sizes, some more successful than others. I enjoyed working with pie pastry, I enjoyed the process of making the tarts. This particular tart was too shallow; the deeper ones, with more filling, are more appealing. But again these are minor details. I feel inspired to go through the boxes of baking supplies which have been languishing, unopened, since George died in 2012.

Farmers Market Saturdays. I have always loved farmers market days. It is more than just shopping for me. I like to wander around once, then come back and make my choices, although sometimes I just have to grab things when I see them. I love talking to the farmers and makers. I love the process of imagining what I can make. I love coming home and planning, dreaming of food and future meals either alone or with friends. Market days are imagination days, creative days, and this year especially, when I do not have my own garden, they are all the more necessary. I miss my vegetable garden, even as I know I don’t yet know how to work out the details of resurrecting it. That will come in time. In the meantime I still have the market, always have the market. I never had a large garden. I’ve never wanted to not go to the market. I want my Saturdays to revolve around this, what is local, what is here. For me, life has always, at least as long as I remember, revolved around food. What we eat, how and why we eat it, is a large part of what makes us human, and what brings us together as a community, connects us to each other and the world in which we live. Increasingly I reject the commodification of food because it feels like the commodification of life, and we are all more than that.

This week at the market I was cautious. I avoided buying too many peaches even though I dream of making peach butter. I knew I didn’t (don’t still) have the energy to make peach butter now, but I might one week. I did buy shishito peppers because I don’t have peppers in my non-existent garden. I blistered them in a hot skillet early the next morning, and they sit on the counter, there for the taking and noshing.

Macarons: On my way out of the market I bought a chocolate lavender macaron and I ate it while I cooled down in my car. Pure bliss.

Limelight Hydrangeas: The limelight hydrangeas are just beginning to open. Really, is there anything more to say?

And I promised a picture.

This is what 67 looks like, looking forward to a sixty-eighth year filled with hope. I feel hopeful, like my current self is more in touch with both the promise of my youthful self and the acceptance of limitations of my older self than she has been in a while. Odd talking about myself as an other, or even a group of others. Well, none of us are mono-dimensional after all. I am a universe of cells and ideas and thoughts and dreams.

July 7, 2025
The View from My Window, Skittering Thoughts

(This post was written when I was in fact in New York City last week. It is only now that I have had time to revisit it and post.)

Here I am, in New York City and I find myself with this inexplicable sense of wanting to write you. Why? It has been months. And I have been content in my rather quiet life. I do have to admit though that the only reason I brought my laptop with me on this trip was a sense that I might indeed want to write.

This is the view from my window as I write. It makes me happy. The penthouse apartment across the street with the lovely patios, in a beautiful old building. The contrast of old and new appeals to me. The shiny glass building on the right; the scaffolding on the left. I’ve always thought that the signs of human industry are beautiful in their own ways — and yes, I can extend that to even our more brutal invasions such as power plants and mining sights. The beautiful ugly. Once I thought I would like living in the city. Now I see peace in my morning suburban walk, in the greenery. in my hands in the dirt, even as I fail, daily, to keep up with the weeds.

But I also recognize that all of this could change in any instant. I recognize that peace exists only in my own head and heart, in where I allow it to enter. It could be found anywhere; it could be found nowhere. The choice is mine. In this moment, in this window, I choose peace.

Openness to new ideas and curiosity; those are the important things. They are not the same, although they are related. And they are each thoroughly interior qualities. They are not about gallivanting about, throwing oneself into new experiences, although they could be, for some people, in some circumstances. But the opposite could be true. Curiosity can also be found in solitude, in quiet moments.

One can travel the world and do all kinds of exciting things, without ever changing one’s mind; a person can gather up facts and experiences, while yet remain closed-minded and set in their ways. I’ve known people like that. I also have known people who have lived in one place all their lives, rarely leaving, but who know more of humanity and the world, who are more open, more curious about ideas and experiences than most. The difference is not always obvious.

I had forgotten how early it gets light here in Manhattan. I shouldn’t have; it took me years to adapt to how late the sun rises in Knoxville, which is very close to the Central Time Zone line, much further west. I do miss this. I don’t actually know if my natural circadian rhythm is to wake early, or if I acclimated after living in New York State for over 35 years, but since I moved to New York in my late teens and early adulthood, I suspect that my rhythms matured into the rhythm of that particular environment. The Knoxville summer light still throws me even though I do often sleep later than I used to. It should not surprise me that an hour, here or there, should make a difference, but of course it does. Look at all the research on the health impacts of our semi-annual shifts to and from daylight savings time, and how harmful it is. Not that science changes anything when butting heads with tradition. Anyway that is not the topic of this post.

You probably noticed that this second photo is really the same view from the same window. The reflections seen in the window of the glass tower is, at least partially, my own building. I am sitting in one of those windows, reflected, small and insignificant, invisible even. I like that idea. I like the way the reflection is somewhat distorted, the layers of images, of life. It reminds me of how small my life and my choices really are inn the greater scheme of thing — insignificant really in the grander scale, in the life of cities, in the life of the human race itself. I might as well be true to myself, live the life that resonates we me. All of our power is in the small bits,

But even the life of the human race, even our impact, as great as it seems, is again a tiny speck, not really seen against the whole. Our planet, earth, has its own life, a life of which we are a tiny speck, occupying but a few seconds? hours? perhaps days? in an otherwise long life. An unseen face in a window filled with reflections, lost in the greater scheme of things.

I am reminded of Samantha Harvey’s novel, Orbital. In that novel, the astronauts are, at first, attracted and drawn to the sparkling lights they see during the nights of their rotation, the beauty of the human civilization of which they themselves are a vital part. And yet as their time in space lengthens, they grown more attracted to the daytime views of earth, where humanity is less in evidence, just the earth itself, taking on almost its own life and its own light.

Such an idea of the moment, that. The earth is its own life, and we are just a small bit of dust occupying its face. Almost a cliché; and yet no less valid. a thought and creation defined by our own moment in space and time, our own zeitgeist. This is not a criticism per se; that humans before us thought they were the center of the universe simply is a fact. That we have learned we are insignificantly small simply another fact. And I am not criticizing Orbital here; I love this book. And quite frankly my own musings are as ephemeral, of the moment, and inconsequential as anything existing in this world. They remain simply another example of the clichés and worldview of my own generation and time, but far less eloquently stated. A post going nowhere, circling on itself.

I am not putting my own thoughts down. I am not claiming anything. There is much in the word that may be good, and much that may be evil as well. In a sense we are each individual cells in a giant creation the is earth, if not the universe itself, and each of us has a role to play. We are insignificant and yet also mighty.

I am here, in NYC, in upper midtown, very much in my own comfort zone, both physically and, in many ways, mentally. Circling around the musings and mutterings of my own brain. It feels like I have been working my way back here for a long time. It is a comfortable a good place to find myself, even in a world that sometimes feels very much at odds with what I hold dear. To my own brain each echo of light and image in glass, each fleeting thought, each eruption and seismic shift in either the earth or humanity, is a significant event. How do I choose? I can only live in each moment.

June 3, 2025
Meditation

I've been off-balance, wondering how to write about happy frivolous things in a world that feels far away from happy and frivolous. Even as I write that I know it is not so simple and that frivolity must exist even in the face of despair, love in the face of grief and great pain. That statement feels like nothing, a platitude, a feather in the wind. And yet that same dichotomy exists in my own life in the balancing of the despair, the pain and grief of the world, with the very present joys and consolations of the everyday interactions that fill my days.

Yet despite the peace of my own bubble, here it is laid out before me, a slap in the face, a reminder to my kinder nature that wishes to believe that we have evolved into a kinder species. But no: our brutal history, a history it seems we never quite escape, even sometimes within ourselves — the urge to meet rage with rage, to fling more pain on top of our own, to cause hurt when we are hurting — is ever present, and apparently still uncontrolled. Of course much of the horror is driven by greed and lust for power, by those who would fuel division. Pain and horror sells, grabs our attention, diverts us from the good. The people of the world do not deserve this.

When I am distraught and distracted, I am drawn to music and to art. Both remind me that life is a double-edged sword, that joy heals pain. I despair for humanity, and yet I see awe in the face of a baby and smile, I watch the new buds of an azalea unfurl as the dry leaves of autumn swirl about them. I know that I can offer arms of comfort but I do not always know how. And yet, for all the power of our darker underbelly, we also have a gift for healing, for transcendence. I cannot resolve the dichotomy of human existence, but sometimes I think that artists, and I include musicians in this, point me in the right direction.

At the end of September I attended a chamber concert by the Aubade Trio that was lovely indeed. Yet there was one piece that stole my heart, still holds my heart, a piece by Ernest Bloch — concertina for flute, viola and piano. In those innocent days in late September the pieces felt joyous, prayerful, full of laughter. Today it still feels joyous but my awareness has shifted slightly. At the time that music danced in my head, and combined in my thoughts with an artist's exhibit I had seen the previous week, of waves and water, an immersive experience. Those two sensory experiences still swirl in my heart, and although I don't see them differently per se, the way they resonate in my soul has shifted.

I cannot exactly hear the music as it was played that evening. There are recordings. I've listened to two versions streamed on Amazon, and two on YouTube. Neither is quite the same, but that is the way of music, interpretation is always present, the conversational understanding between the artist performing the music and the artist who composed the framework. But listening to variations reminds me of what I have heard. Perhaps that is a curse, the specific nature of my memory. No other performance is the same as the one by the Aubade trio. It plagues me in concerts sometimes, to remember specific sequences of notes, of sounds, but it also rewards me with new insights. Besides, even if the Aubade trio performed that work today, it is unlikely that it would be performed exactly as it was that night in late September, and I too am different today than I was two weeks ago. There are no absolutes.

What I do know is that at the time of the concert, there were moments in the music when I was transported to moments at the Knoxville Museum of Art, where I was immersed in Jane Cassidy's piece You Never Forget The Swim. The exhibit is visual, aural, experiential. One sits in a dark room, sound from outside is muted but not absent. And one is immersed in an experience of water that is everything but the actual wetness. Water in the abstract, the spiritual basis of water. At different moments during that concert I would simultaneously be in that room, experiencing the joy of lightly rolling waves at the shore, remembering the way sometimes the light reflecting on water reminds me of the way light reflects on silk charmeuse, and through the sound of music. The concluding movement reminded me of a carnival, but the good sides of a carnival, joy and sparkling lights, the bubbles in a glass of champagne, the frothy light bubbles that sometimes appear in waves, buoyant, almost ephemeral.

Although I cannot recreate the experience of the concert, I can return to the museum, to the experience. And yet every time it is different, just as every time I am different. Sometimes it is comforting, like a warm bath or a soft caress. At other times the swirling seems out of control. For the most part I find the experience calming, elemental even, much the same way I find music calming and elemental. Both tie me to darker things. The dark side is always present, but when faced with music, or art, I am not lost in that darkness but transformed.

After my first experience of You Never Forget the Swim, this is what I wrote in my journal "caressing, stroking, smooth, comforting, enveloping, engulfing, drowning, strangling, suffocating, calming, eternal, love."

Ernest Bloch and Jane Cassidy both might be horrified by my comparisons, or not, but this is how they have been captured in my experience in this particular space and time. Each thing we create, each word we say even, these words included, once uttered, once created, flow out into the world creating new experiences beyond our control and our intent. I hope my words overall are good, but I too am human and my feelings and run the gamut of human experience.

I wish I could share the experience of Jane Cassidy's work. I highly recommend seeking her out. I can, however, include a performance of the Bloch. The first time I heard it I thought one thing. The second another. I might have found another version more prayerful, yet another more joyous. It doesn't really matter. When I listen again this morning, just before posting this, I am compelled to tears during the slow movement, and then slowly, as if the music is tickling my toes, slowly first, but just enough. And despite the tears, a smile rises and I know there is hope. There is always hope.

October 17, 2023
What IS This Blog?

The simple answer: a journal, an online journal if you will, not entirely private, but a journal nonetheless.

I realized I had lost something, something important, and it took me a little while, and a bit of soul-searching to figure out what. It seems that the internet, online communities, and social media have all moved on, but I have not. I started this blog, or at least its previous iterations, as a way to keep a record for myself, yes one that I shared, but nonetheless a modified personal journal. At first it was about sewing and knitting and eventually my general observations on life. These were things I could have committed to paper, but I have a history of tossing bits of paper, including journals and sewing notebooks. The internet remains here, although I suppose even it is not permanent.

I don't mind people reading what I write; in fact it even makes me happy to hear from readers. But I remain opposed to the idea of marketing, of packaging my blogs to fill a niche, to catering to the reader. I suppose I reject the idea of the curated life, at least the curated life as it reflects outside expectations. I do curate my life; most of us do to some level or another, but I curate my life for my own joy, and increasingly I feel that outside expectations do nothing but hamper that joy.

I suppose posting to Facebook was my first mistake. Initially, I did so at the request of a friend, so she could access the blog easily. But then it became something else. I was never shy about telling people I knew that I blogged; most of the time my friends thought it was something weird, and if they read my blog, they did not, for the most part tell me so. But once I posted to Facebook, more and more people I knew would comment on my "secret" life, and I found myself wanting to please readers, sometimes at the expense of pleasing myself. I was trained to achieve, to please, to rise to meet expectations, and I find I had not quite fully escaped those shackles. As soon as I began to think I "should" write, the joy in writing slipped away.

For now, I am forgoing Facebook and social media links, but I am still tossing my words out into the world. Anyone who wants to find them can of course, but I am feeling no need to make the process easier. Besides, as I have learned, only 10% of my readers find me through Facebook, but that 10% plays an outside role in triggering my own demons, not through any intention of my readers but just through the medium itself.

So, what have I been doing since last I wrote?

I came home from Texas to an overabundance of sorrel. So there has been some cooking, several kinds of sorrel soup, including a Russian Sorrel broth, and the chard and sorrel soup shown above. I have also made, and frozen a large batch of spring spinach and sorrel soup, which doesn't look much different except that it is a darker green.

I have 12 jars of carrot green pesto, and an equal number of jars of canned carrots.

I missed most of the snow pea harvest while I was in Texas but it looked like the squirrels and birds had a feast. I also planted some purple podded peas and they were still producing in late May. I thought they were spent, but we had a cool snap last week and I got another small flush of peas, which I have thoroughly enjoyed both lightly steamed and in salads.

The blueberry bushes suffered from neglect and did not produce much. I just lost my late crop to something, birds or the bear that was wandering down my street a couple of mornings ago, but it does look like I will have a bumper crop of blackberries again this year. The roses that are intermingled with the blackberries are also doing well, even though I fretted that perhaps they had been killed by a harsh winter frost.

I continue to work intermittently in the garden. Nature is ahead of me but I am doing more work than I have been able to in years. Still not as much as my younger self once managed, but I am comparing myself to what I could accomplish 20 years ago, an unfair comparison. I have done more this year than any previous summer since I moved into this house. And I've finally admitted to myself that I did not lose two summers, but three. My first summer here was the summer I broke my nose on my birthday, the summer I found out I was in atrial flutter, and probably had been for some time. I can only accept that now because although my almost-65 year old energy level is not the same as my 45-year old energy level, it is higher than it has been for some time. And if I am driven less than in former years, it is more because I am less inclined to worry about what anyone else thinks.

The other thrilling thing is that I found a roller frame in my stash of needlework supplies and assembled it to work on the next baptismal towel. It is not quite the size I need, and I don't have any cotton webbing so I had to substitute quilting cotton on the sides in order to pull the fabric taut. As you can see, there are still adjustments to be made to the tensioning before I begin work, but I am excited. I have ordered a roll of cotton webbing. I have a box of various kinds of needlepoint and other frames and I think I need to sort them out to figure out what I have and work from there, but that is progress. I am slowly accumulating a set of embroidery materials and tools and am excited to work. No the above is not perfect. Yet it is an improvement over what I have done in the past. My work keeps improving. I tried something new with the last baptismal towel (seen at the top of this post), and I am increasingly excited about this work.

I might wish I had pursued this interest when I was younger, but I did not, and I have made the best decisions I could at any time of my life. I'll never be a master knitter, or embroiderer, gardener, or chef. Truthfully I never cared to. I just wish to pursue what I enjoy for the pure joy of doing so.

In short. Life is simple. Life is good. What more could I ask?

June 16, 2023
Four: A reentry

I'm back!

Am I? For real this time? The difference between saying I will write and actually writing is like a giant chasm, a chasm that must be bridged, that can only be bridged by actually writing. I realize my priorities have shifted. I am not at all certain how that shift will manifest itself. And yet I can spend time trying to figure it out but not writing, or I can simply hope for the best and toss my words into the void. I'll never start unless I start, as messy as that might prove to be.

Let's begin with three weekends and four events:

First there was the Knoxville Symphony's April performance of the Mozart Requiem with the Knoxville Choral Society. Most of the audience was there for the requiem, and it was indeed beautifully performed, even one of the more enjoyable performances I have heard. The highlight of the evening, however, for me at least, was a contemporary piece by young American composer T. J. Cole, Death of the Poet. Cole had been inspired by a painting by Conrad Felixmüller titled Death of the Poet Walter Reiner, which she had seen at the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting was created as a kind of a requiem of its own, an obituary or memorial for a friend, the expressionist poet, who died of a drug overdose. The painting is shown below:

When I looked up the painting after the concert, I felt strongly that I've seen it before, although I don't believe I've ever blogged about it. Perhaps I should seek the painting out and take another look. Of course, if I do that I will also want to listen to the music again. At least there are recordings online, and I will link to one below.

Both pieces, music and painting, seem filled a sense of loss and ascendance, suitable requiem material, as well as confusion and a sense of worlds on the cusp, of one world fading away and a new one being born. Perhaps it is this overlapping sense of grief and hope, entangled together that has settled into my mind. The music and the painting seem very dreamlike to me. In the painting one doesn't really know if the artist is falling or perhaps flying, and I do think that is part of the point, as well as the use of intense colors and cubist images, of a world turned topsy turvy, despair intermingled with homey windows filled with pots of flowers. The music was very lush and poignant and yet also unsettling. I find it interesting that both works were created by artists in their 20s; both also created at times of political and social upheaval. I suspect this will be haunting my thoughts for a while.

https://soundcloud.com/tjcole/death-of-the-poet?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

The following weekend I went on a knitting retreat. It was small, we ended up with 14 women, and the focus was on brioche knitting, although I would have gone whatever the focus, as I was mostly just interested in the idea of knitting community. But I was game to up my brioche knitting skills. Now I am smitten. Prior to the retreat I was in a fairly monogamous knitting stage, with 1 project on the needles, 1 project in hibernation, and 1 project waiting to be seamed. At the end of the weekend, I had four active projects on needles. Needless to say I've been knitting a lot but nothing has yet been finished. As I write this I have three projects on the needles and two awaiting finishing. There will be finished knitting to share soon.

The time at the retreat helped me rekindle my focus and refine my priorities, both in terms of giving myself permission to allow hours to be spent exploring process without worrying about having something specific to show for any particular stretch of time, as well as giving myself permission to claim time for solitude. Yes, I was exhausted after a weekend of music at Big Ears. I was exhausted after Holy Week, and those all involved too much time spent in public spaces where I was overwhelmed with constant stimulation. But I was also exhausted by a quiet weekend with 13 other women. Before the retreat, I did not realize that even in this quiet setting, I would still require significant solitary decompression time. Although I can, in fact, tune out much of what is going on around me, I cannot block it completely. Some part of my brain is always watching, feeling, observing the minute changes in energy around me, and I need time to decompress. Without that time I have no energy for either the social or the creative. If anything, this retreat was the final seal of approval on accepting the need for not just silence but solitude.

After a calming weekend and a few days rest, I was prepared for another weekend feast for the senses.

On Friday evening I attended the opening night performance of Knoxville Opera's The Marriage of Figaro, which I felt was a complete and stunning success. A friend called it "world class" and I agree if one thinks of the production as a whole. The company pulled off that almost magical feat of creating a cohesive, emotionally rich, enveloping world within the theater. The singers were very good, some excellent. The musicians were good, the acting excellent, but mostly it all just came together in a sparkling and satisfying experience. Nothing jarred, nothing triggered that critical, comparative part of my brain. That, to my mind is always the difficult part. The best performances somehow always come together from the heart. The finest orchestra, truly world-class voices, none of this matters if everything doesn't mesh together, and I've attended far to many operas that should have been great, but which have left me bored or disappointed. Figaro has sometimes become such a part of the common experience that it fails to rise above its own history. This production rose, it danced and sparkled — Figaro reborn. I think I would call it a stunning production and one that has me yearning for more.

Then on Sunday I went to the Clarence Brown Theater's production of Hair, which I also thoroughly loved. I was too young when Hair first came out on Broadway, but I did see an amateur production of it in the mid-seventies, after we had abolished the draft, after we had finally pulled out of Vietnam, after I too had my turn shouting "Hell, no! We won't go!". Even now I look at how those changes were shaping the world, shaping my own youth, and also the world the youth of today live in and experience. The youth of 1968, the ones portrayed in this play, are the grandparents of the youth of today, the students who were performing in this play. But that sense of both harmony and communal safety, as well as connection across generations was infectious. It seemed to me like this was an apt time to reintroduce this musical to a new generation, even as I am reminded that as much as the linearity of time is a foundational principle of western culture, there is also a cyclical aspect to time and growth and human evolution.

I always want to be enchanted, to be carried away, to be connected to some essential part of human nature; all of these events enchanted me in some sense or another. In the three performances, there is a common thread, of youth, of age, of love, of loss and hope, or hope and loss (not quite the same but inextricably tied together). Even in my retreat, in the experience of coming together and later of rest is connected to this cycle. As the body needs sleep however, so to the heart, the head, the creative and intellectual spirit. It seems my weekends are not time of rest but of massive input, and when the working world returns to its tasks, I need time to slow down and take it all in.

Perhaps retirement is also a period of turning the world topsy turvy, of the hero coming home from the wars of work and success and rediscovering the simple acts of breath and life which are essential to us all.

May 3, 2023
I Have No Idea

What do you do when you have fallen out of a habit that you once found useful, calming even, but which now seems like a distant memory. Is it better to "let sleeping dogs lie", or is there some semblance of yearning still hovering in the inner recesses of the soul. Is this a true yearning, or simply a reminiscence, a remembrance of things past, nostalgia rather than growth.

I don't have the answer to any of these questions. 2022 has not been my best blogging year, but it has not been a year in which blogging was absent from my mind. Rather it has been more of a time of reacquaintance with so many things — chores, passions, energy, loss, newfound treasures. I suppose this is a long drawn-out way of saying some kind of reset has been required.

The month of May in particular has felt very much like a slow process of reconnection. There has been plenty to do, including things I used to write about: books and music in particular, but random navel grazing as well. These are all things about which I have spent time thinking even if not writing, thinking and wondering. There is a part of me that wants to return to the blogger I once was, before I knew anything about blogging, before anyone read my blog, when I just wrote whatever I felt like writing for the joy of it. A time when most of my friends thought the idea of blogging was suspect, and then, since they didn't know or care that I was blogging, I felt no sense of obligation to be anyone other than myself. Is there a way to recreate that bloggerly moment? Blogging is, in many ways, an anachronism. At least the kind of blogging I yearn for, not the commercialized, stylized, marketing-world blogging of today. But then, perhaps I too am an anachronism.

I am older now, and I am far less inclined to feel any sense of obligation to being anything anyone outside of myself expects me to be. But a yearning for the past isn't necessary a path forward, even as I think there are things to learn from that yearning. Our dreams, our thoughts, our emotions — not just these but also our indulgences — the things we read, the things we listen to, even the things we watch — all of these are our instruction manuals, if we are paying attention at least, our guides through the complex process of constant change that is life. I do believe we are attracted to and find the things that relate to some essential aspect of our inner selves, but whether we move forward or continue to look backward is up to us. Holding on to the past, to false stability, isn't growth

In early May I adopted a dog. Her name is Garbo and is is mostly standard poodle with a tiny sprinkling of golden retriever fairy dust. She is sweet, elegant, silly, and a great companion. She greets me all wiggles and squeaks when I come home, and she runs around improvising a small symphony in squeaky toys to show her gladness at my return. She is also a calm and patient studio assistant.

Garbo has also gotten me out of the house for two walks most days, a long walk in the morning, and a shorter walk most evenings, although there are some evenings when I am out at other events and our late walk becomes very short indeed. My goal is to gradually increase my walks to be 3 to 5 miles per day, not all in one walk, but divided between two, or even three walks, although three may not happen often in the midst of summer heat and humidity. At the moment we are up to three miles per day. In terms of energy, and cardiovascularly I am ready for an increase, but last week I had a bit of ankle tendinitis, and this week my left knee is bothering me, so best not to push. The knee is probably due to differences in gait caused by back pain last week, and that aforementioned ankle, and I do not think it will be a long-term setback.

I have also been catching up on the piles of stuff, and the many tasks and routines upon which I fell behind following chemotherapy, radiation, and then struggles with atrial flutter and two additional procedures. I am still working through cycles of physical therapy for damage to my right shoulder and chest musculature. It has taken me some time to get fully settled back into these routines: walking, stretching and exercises, housework, cooking and all the activities of maintaining a comfortable and valuable life, including reading, knitting, needlework and yes, sewing. The goal has been in terms of reestablishing habits. The writing habit has not yet been the priority, but the air seems to be signaling that said change may be in the works. The trick for me is, always, to maintain structure and habits, when my natures is now, and always has been, to throw myself entirely into the activity of the moment and allow all other things to fall away. This was not manageable when I was 20, but at that time I could convince myself I had time. Now I realize more fully how interrelated everything is, how fleeting the passage of time, and my increasing inability to bounce back from abandoned structures.

I can accept that I have not, prior to this moment, had time to write. Do I now? Once again I have no idea.

I don't want to return in any haphazard, piecemeal fashion. I want my writing, like my daily walks with Garbo, to become a fixture in my life, something that is a necessary part of existence whatever other temptations may arise to lure me away. I want my writing, like my walks, like cooking, like playing with fiber, to be something that is a necessary part of who I am, and therefore not subject to whim. I must walk, even when I don't feel like it. Garbo and I both need the walks, and the need to walk Garbo is enough to pull me out of my own periodic funks and reluctances. But rebuilding habits is a struggle. Is blogging the same? I suspect it is.

I suppose then, I am writing a long, navel-grazing statement of intent. I intend to blog. I intend to maintain the three separate blogs, as they play different roles in my mental and writing life. Does that mean that occasionally one or the other will be neglected? Probably yes. Just as in life. There was the week I cooked a great deal, trying new recipes from a new cookbook. All other activities fell back. This past week I have spent more time sewing, and my knitting has fallen by the wayside. I have knitted most days, but there are days when that knitting may consist of a single row, a tiny blip. The habit has not been lost, but my focus has been more about priorities than product.

Am I ready to add something new into the mix? HaveI a reached a state where the habits that I have formed are well enough established, like these flowers in the garden, that they will continue to blossom? Am I ready to fill in the empty spaces? It seems the only consistent thread in this post is that I have no idea of what the thread is, or where the answers may lie hidden. Here I am. Life is often easier than I expect it to be, and at the same time it is harder than I want it to be. But isn't that the basic conundrum of human existence?

June 6, 2022
Joy. A Reflection.

A few weeks ago, attending a small birthday celebration among friends, the birthday girl asked the members of the party to reflect on the year that was coming to a close. When it was my turn to speak, another friend interrupted and deflected the conversation into another topic. I was a little put off, and a few minutes later was talking to a third friend, telling her what a positive experience the past year had been, when she asked that I wait and share my comments with the group. And yet, when the topic came up again, I was once again interrupted, and the birthday girl was distracted with another unrelated conversation. I never did get a chance to speak.

In some ways this conversation, with all its attendant frustrations, is a mirror for my year, and, in fact, much of what I was hoping to say that evening. I can state upfront that at that moment I felt unheard, and uncared-for, as if my year and my thoughts were somehow less valid than anyone else's. But that was also a fleeting feeling, and like so many disappointments in life, one can either hang onto a momentary flash of negative emotion, letting it shape and color your being, or one can simply release it into the air and let it go. I chose the latter, just as I chose, despite a year that many would consider challenging, to see it as a good year, chose to count my blessings rather than my losses.

In fact, what I was going to say that evening was not about cancer or struggle or how hard the year had been; everyone in that room knew what I had been through, knew my struggles and that was not the time to reiterate them. What I had actually been about to say was that through my experience I had been offered an opportunity, and in a way a blessing, because I was forced out of the comfort zone of habit. Habits are not always to our benefit. It was only through the process of falling apart that I was able to realize the possibility of rebuilding, of rebirth if you will. I am in fact happier today than I was at this time last year; I am happier today than I was two years ago. That does not mean the road was easy; in fact it was damn difficult at times. But no one ever promised any of us an easy road, and the more mature I become the more I see that ease and comfort often hamper growth and creativity. I would not wish cancer on anyone. But at the same time, increasingly, neither would I wish anyone bland comfort and ease. There is something in our essence as Homo Sapiens that needs to be challenged, that needs to create, and the process of creation is a process born of destruction. We cannot live up to our full potential without constantly dislodging ourselves from the dead-ends life has imposed on us, no, that we have imposed upon ourselves.

In retrospect I saw that my friend, fearing I my comments would be something of a "downer" was deflecting, as she had been reared to do, steering the conversation away from unpleasantness and toward idle chatter. Of course this did mean that my thoughts went unheard; it also meant that on some level she expected something less of me than I was going to offer. But it also presented an opportunity for forgiveness. I realized that my thoughts were no less valid for not being heard. Yes, we all want to feel heard, and that is an important part of feeling loved. The crime was not really against me, but against herself and the others. In choosing to deflect, she was choosing not to engage on a personal level, to live on a surface level, which is both her choice, and her loss. Yes, she was protecting herself from despair, but she was also closing herself off from the possibility of joy. The simple truth is that all of our words deserve to be heard. And by shutting down each others words we close ourselves off to the possibility of connection, and ultimately to joy and through joy, hope.

For that, it seems is one of the things I have learned this year, perhaps one of the many things I have known in my head for a long time, but which I have not always practiced in my heart, is that life is short, that I am very lucky, and that it behooves us all to treasure and hold onto joy. Joy has nothing to do with the trials of life; and although it often does us good to rail against pain and affliction, holding onto our grief, our anger and our sadness does us no good. When we cannot manage hope, we can still find joy. Through joy we can often find happiness and love. Holding onto joy teaches us that there are things we can let slip away, that forgiveness is not difficult once we let go of pain. Taking even hesitant steps toward joy starts us on a path that can lead us to finding hope in a world that occasionally seems devoid of just that.

In the past two years the median life expectancy in the US has dropped by 1.5 years. Regardless of the numbers, no single one of us is guaranteed anything, to live to the median, or beyond it. And yet this reminds me of something. The median life expectancy of an American is roughly slightly over 4100 weeks, perhaps less by these new calculations. I have already lived over 3200 of those weeks. No matter how I look at it, I am on the downward slope. It is easy when we are young to think we always have time, but it is not true. Most of my time is already in the past. When we look at years it all seems so far away; when I look at weeks, it all seems so short. I want my weeks to be about joy, whatever joy I am finding in the moment of that particular week. Last week it may have been about family. This week joy revolves around friends and fabric and creative endeavors. If I am lucky I have 900 more weeks, perhaps more, perhaps less. But the luck isn't in the number of weeks; it is in how I chose to live those weeks. The gift is that I can chose who I want to be. I can chose joy. It is not about what happens, or even time itself, but what I chose to make of my time in my life.

I choose joy.

January 1, 2022
Gardening in Slow Motion

This is my front yard as seen from the master bedroom window.

I took the photo a week ago, Sunday the 18th. Since then the field of green weeds on the right hand side of the center island has been filled with little yellow flowers, flowers which gladden my heart, even though, yes, I know they are weeds. I love violets too, and apparently do not care if there are violets or clover in my lawn. Something to consider for the future, but at the moment the lawn is something green I don't have to think about. The same can be said for those areas of the garden that I am not yet ready to plant. Weeds are Mother Nature's interim plantings.

Weeds and all, the vista makes me smile. The center brown area, between the slates and the road, contains the blueberry bushes, and I hope to have small annuals beneath them, preferable to my eye over mulch, or, eventually, some form of ground cover. I am the kind of gardener that wants the beds filled with a panoply of growing things. To the right of the stones is where the three peonies were transplanted, and I am still in the process of planting Columbine and other perennials to fill the space. Something similar will take place to the left of the blueberries, in the still-weed-filled green patch. More peonies, a rose, some delphiniums — all are planned but not yet planted. I hoped for this spring but plans may have been interrupted. More about that later.

Next photo. Still looking north, slightly to the east of the first photo. This bed, along the east side of the house, was the only part of the yard I disliked when I bought the house, now it is much more my garden. Hydrangeas, coreopsis, daffodils, irises, nepeta, even a stray peony are located here and are beginning to fill in nicely. The laurel that is falling down has finally been removed, and replaced. I suppose I should update the photos, but that is not going to happen today, not for this post.

Ther azaleas between the fence and the driveway are thriving, blooming intermittently, and there are more plants to go around the curved wall near the steps to the circle, all planned and ordered before I knew the course my summer would take. If you look you will see plants lined up, awaiting new homes, in the lower portions of the top two photos. I will get to them in time. Life is like that sometimes, and I grow annoyed with interruptions, but there is nothing to do but live with them.

The top two photos were taken two days after I had a partial mastectomy for a breast cancer that showed up on my mammogram in March. Remember that week I was crying? I was crying because I had to have a biopsy, my first, and I was tired of doctors and hospitals, tired of illness and exhaustion, of broken noses and broken heart rhythms. I felt it was silly to cry over a biopsy as 80% are negative. It was as much frustration as it was fear: I was finally starting to feel good, starting to walk and work in the garden and it didn't seem fair. Well, no one ever said life would be fair.

I've gotten over that now. There is no help for it. Now I am in fight mode. It seems I have an aggressive little breast cancer but it also appears we have caught it early and my summer will revolve around chemotherapy with radiation to follow in the fall. Many women have done this before me. Many more will follow. My primary goal is beating back the invader and reclaiming my body. My body is a war zone and I cannot make predictions as to what I will or will not do, when or what I will, or will not, write.

The last photo is of an iris, a Louisiana iris, that opened the morning I had my surgery. I missed it at its peak. We had cold temperatures and it only lasted a day or two. In this photo, taken that same Sunday, two days after surgery, it is already waning, but still beautiful. I love it even as it begins to curl and fade — the grace is in the living not the perfect moment of full actualization, something ephemeral that we somehow always seem to miss anyway both in the world around us, and in our own lives. Even these photos, celebrating a past already lost in the mists, reminds me of the multi-faceted nature of every moment, reminds me of the fractal geometry of memory.

Life really isn't about what happens or doesn't happen, it is about how you chose to deal with it, or chose not to deal as the case may be. It is about where you chose to find beauty and joy, and what, when, and where you chose to let go.

Good grief I say! Enough is enough. And if I were talking to you in person I would probably say exactly what I can't write — I am going put every effort into kicking this M-F-B (imagine the swear words here) in the balls. I will knit or sew or cook when I can as these things all soothe my soul. My hands will be in the soil. I will write whenever those splintered moments of clarity arise.

April 27, 2021
This World: Friday Musings

I drove 188 miles in January of 2021. In February I drove 256 miles, and March came in at 307.

Why am I telling you this? Well, not to say look at me, I am driving less, aren't I environmentally conscious. Because I am not, or not as much so as I could be. It is true that last year I said one of my goals was to drive less, or more exactly to be more conscientious about how I live and my priorities. Part of that is combining errands into fewer days so that I drive fewer miles but also spend far less time going here and there, time that could be more fruitfully put to use doing something that is actually important to me. Sadly, time in the car does not count as quality time in my book. And much of this is as much due to restrictions from a global pandemic. That doesn't mean I should drive willy-nilly once the world returns to normal, assuming we even know what normal will be. Despite a global pandemic, we saw very little drop in carbon emissions in 2020, about 5% according to Bill Gates in his new book. It is not enough.

But why now? Again, another good question. Perhaps I started musing on these environmental issues again when my book club read A Children's Bible back in December. Perhaps one of my regular produce suppliers moved from paper packaging to plastic clamshells. Perhaps I was upset one day when I saw one of my neighborhood recycle bins was overstuffed with recyclables packed in plastic trash bags rather than loose in the bin; the bags are not recyclable, and someone has to open the bag and unload it it sort the recyclables out, or it all just goes in the landfill. I was upset because I recently read that 25% of my local curbside recycling is contaminated in some way, by materials that cannot be recycled, or food waste, and has to be sent to the landfill. We can do better.

It seems perfectly obvious that no single one of us is going to stop global warming. But that is not enough reason not to do our part. it also seems perfectly obvious that if we focused our attentions and worked together we could beat this; if not, change will be forced upon us and our children. We can chose to control it or we can chose to let it control us. That of course is never as easy at it sounds. And the whole things actually sounds rather overwhelming. Sometimes it seems we are not wired for looking at long term objectives, nor for differentiating between the big picture, ie. the goal, and the tactics for reaching that goal. We look at where we are not and cannot work out a way to move ourselves forward. It is difficult for us to look at where we should be and then start working backward to where we are now. The space between these approaches can feel like an insurmountable gulf.

And yet it is a gulf that must be faced.

I was reminded of this recently when I was reading Bill Gates new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. The truth is that I did not expect a great deal from this book, and perhaps for that reason I found it more interesting and enjoyable than I anticipated. Gates' writing comes across as if the book is written by an enthusiastic nerd who is fascinated with technology and human ingenuity. Surprise? No. But he reminded me of things I forget, or don't think about at all, like how much carbon is produced in construction and the very process of making things. He reminds the reader of the enormity of the task, and he does not gloss over the difficulties involved. Sometimes his enthusiasm runs a little wild. But the book is easy to read and I think that is of benefit. Gates writes that he loves the books of Vaclav Smil. I love Smil. But Smil is not easy reading, more like the opposite of easy reading.

Gates makes reading about climate change manageable, but I suspect many people will discount the book simply because it is written by Bill Gates. It is worth more than that. And he makes very good points about change, the enormity of the project, and the hidden pitfalls in choosing short term, partial solutions, that in the end can distract us from the ultimate goal, and instead make the process more difficult. He gets wrapped up in his enthusiasms and sometimes misses things, as do we all. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is more of a wake-up call, a book for the generalist, than a serious treaty on what should be done. Gates doesn't know everything, no one does. And I disagree with Gates on some points. But that doesn't mean there is not a place for this book.

Gates is convinced we can beat this. I agree that we probably have the ability to beat this, I question whether or not we yet have the will. I do believe that if we, the population of this earth, really set all our greatest minds to solving the big problems — net zero emissions, with as little cost to global human well-being as possible – we could do it. However I am far from convinced that our governments, our national and corporate interests, and even our personal comforts, are quite ready for that. I hope we manage it before too many people suffer. But then, too many people already suffer the costs of climate change, and for too many of us this fact is so remote that we can't see it.

But what can I do? I can be more conscientious. I can think about the choices I make — what I buy, what I waste — and how I chose to use my own space on this earth. I am not always conscientious, and I am constrained by the limits and biases of my own location, society, culture. I do believe that we can all live a good life, and we can do it in a way that neither destroys our planet, or builds a life of comfort and even luxury for some on the suffering of others.

April 2, 2021
2020 in Review Part Two: Books and Changing Perspectives

The plan was always to write about books. The plan was to review last year and write about changes hopes and dreams. The plan was….the plan was…. the plan was…

Then Wednesday happened and 2021 no longer looked like the “happily ever after” coda of a fairy tale. The big bad wolf wasn’t dead. We weren’t tripping hand in hand down the lollipop trail. I was thrown into a sense of turmoil. I was not alone in that, but I did not know how to react. Continue with previous plans? Write something new? But the more I thought about what I would write the more I also realized I needed to write about what I had planned to write. Sometimes we can’t go forward without figuring out where we are. And although I was not the only one shocked by the events in Washington last week, the episode did not spring out of the ether without warnings, and its lasting effects will not simply disappear because we wish it so.

And so I find myself back at books. There is no reason to subject you to the tedious list of all the books I read in 2020; that list is available either by looking me up on goodreads or library thing. And I continue to either struggle or question with the idea of “best” lists. How do I compare nonfiction to fiction, and even within those broad categories? Does a really good mystery compare with a literary novel? Writing a book is hard, and although I do believe discernment is a necessary aspect of life, I can also say that everything I read satisfied the requirements or reasoning behind my choice. So once again, who is to judge?

What I am actually interested in this year is the idea of change. What changed me? In a year where so much of my interaction with the outside world was through books, are there books that profoundly affected the way I see myself and the world? To some extent all books do that, everything we read, see, do, affects who we are, how we see the world, and who we become. But in this year that truly challenged the assumptions of many of us, were there books that also rocked my basic understanding of the world and my place in that world?

Yes. Yes there were. They may not be the “best” books, and they may, in fact may not be the books brought about the greatest change, but they were books that opened a door if you will, and forced me to see something I might not have seen otherwise. They laid the foundations.

In order read:

Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys shocked me in many ways. It is a beautiful and yet horrifying novel. The story flows, the characterizations are strong, and one is drawn in to a novel that breaks one’s heart, a novel that is simultaneously compelling and sickening. It is a novel that is difficult to write about without giving everything away, but then, as one is horrified and sad, and congratulating oneself on how much better everything is today, Whitehead throws in a surprise ending that works perfectly and hit me like a sucker-punch. In that moment I realized that everything I assumed and thought I knew was perfectly backward, that we think we see character clearly but what we actually see condemns us more than it tells us anything useful.

Then I moved on to The Underground Railroad. Initially, it came as a bit of a relief; even though it was intellectually more challenging and highly metaphoric, the novel felt a bit more distanced and removed from the highly personal and empathetic prose of The Nickel Boys. But then it got hold of me and hit me upside the head. We are often able to intellectualize the past, to protect ourselves from our discomfort. Our need to think of ourselves as “good” allows us to distance ourselves from the past, no matter how shocking and horrifying it may have been. But then the masterful way Whitehead uses allegory hit me. This is a novel that explores all of the ways of slavery, past and present, a novel that belies all the exceptions that we claim for own ancestors, that talks of the work and danger in seeking freedom, and it is a novel that simultaneously, while writing about the past, is writing about today. Every stop on this railroad, every experiences is its own bubble, as much of today as of yesterday. We haven’t changed, the world hasn’t changed. After reading this book I had to close my door for days. After reading this book I could no longer see myself or a world I had taken for granted, in the same way. I, in fact, could no longer be the person I had been a week previously. Who this person would become I didn’t know. I still don’t know, but we never understand change while we are going through it.

Then the world started to shut down. I shut my door, and in fact, although I thought I would read up a storm, I couldn’t. I slunk into the quiet. When I started reading again, I read Tayari Jones’ novel An American Marriage. I expected this novel to be more outraged, to kindle my own outrage, but I found instead was that its heavy, resigned, acceptance served to cement the changes that had begun in my heart. Yes it is a story of a marriage, a truly American marriage even, and it is meaningless to say that this is not “my America” because there can’t be “my” America and someone else’s America. America is not what I believed it to be. Knowing that in my head was one thing. Feeling it in the very core of my being was something else entirely.

I reread Milkman by Anna Burns for book club. Once again it rocked me. Burns has created a unique voice which allows the reader to experience a particular time and place and to feel both the physical and emotional constraints of that space in a very personal way. She allows the reader to do this without judgement. The first time I read this novel, I understood one thing in a way I had never understood it before. Reading it the second time I realized that this unique time and space is not unique at all, in its very specificity and distinction, it is simultaneously universal. This story is not so separate from my own life, from any story. The details change, but we are all shaped by understandings, by what is done and what is not done, what is said and what is not said, by who we can be, and who we cannot be.

This lead perfectly into Yoko Ogawa’s beautifully poetic novel The Memory Police. An island somewhere. Sometime in the future I suppose. Things disappear — words, objects, memory — one day they are there, the next they are gone, forgotten. The story begins when our protagonist is a small child. She worries that the disappearances will be frightening, but they are not. People accept. Eventually we learn they are complicit. But what happens when you give up the past, memory, self? What you agree to forget also takes away from yourself. What you accept, what you let go of, shapes who you become. We accept too easily, give in too readily. What do we lose?

These, these were my sucker-punch books. They shaped the foundation for three other books that have also profoundly affected me, my final triad. I list them as such not because they are not worthy, or because they do not stand alone, they do. But my reaction to them was indelibly shaped by my reaction to those previous books. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste because it made me think about systemic racism differently, although Michelle Alexander had also talked about the American culture of racism as a caste system in The New Jim Crow, which I read in 2018, and picked up again at the end of December. I will read Caste again, probably later this year, and I suspect its impact will be more profound on the second reading, which was the case with Alexander’s book.

And then there is is Ta-Nehisi Coates novel The Water Dancer. I don’t know where to put it. I read and hear contrasts and comparisons to The Underground Railroad, but I think that is unfair. The only thing they have in common is that they are both allegorical, and that in an age that doesn’t really understand allegory. The Water Dancer is a profoundly human novel, and it is about what it means to be human. Yes it is also about slavery, and perhaps that confuses the issue. It also employs a lot of magical realism. But humanity itself is not so easily pinned down. Our essence is very metaphysical; we do not have the words to explore our metaphysical natures directly. Coates explores the way slavery shapes humanity on a very personal and humane level. Rather than discussing the horrors of racism as differentiated from the self, he shows us the way racism shapes and perverts the self. In doing this he writes a novel about a specific culture of slavery, about its broad ramifications on the essence of what it means to be human, and, through that, about the many many ways we are all enslaved. I say this not to make less of this book, or to make less of systematic racism or slavery, but because the simple truth that we are all harmed. We are all enslaved.

Where am I going with all of this? How should I know? Where is the US going? I don’t think we know that either. Last week while I, like many others, found myself watching something I never imagined could happen in my own country, a quote from The New Jim Crow kept running through my mind. Although Michelle Alexander is writing specifically about mass incarceration, the idea she expresses here relates to so much that is facing us today:

The question of how we do reform work is even more important than the specific reforms we seek. If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration, and if our advocacy doe snot upset the prevailing public on senses that supports the new caste system, none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial equilibrium. Challenges to the system will be easily ignored or deflected.

I do know what the world post 2020 will be. None of us knows. I do know that I do not want to return to the equilibrium of my former life. I don’t know the specific of my role, and yet I accept that I have a role to play. That is true of each of us. Each and every gift, each and every action is significant in shaping who we are and in shaping the world around us. I can easily sacrifice some of my comfort to bring more comfort to someone else, for what is my comfort if its price is someone else’s discomfort?

January 11, 2021