My Friend of Cautious Amusement

I dreamt of a mind meld but it was terrifying A stern cold voice and my "how did you get in here?" It held me inside the bubble as I tore against your presence My friend of cautious amusement, you don't know how I laugh now You've never seen me smile so wide, nor so happy How happy I am now, we never dared to imagine You might return but you won't know me You're not following what I'm trying to tell you I forget you don't see what I see You're not acknowledging what remains after the world breaks a heart If you reject the way life has turned out, you'll reject the inseperable self Why don't you accept my joys and sorrows Standing over this wishing well, trying to see our reflections I wonder if I'll ever again say what I used to say about you, and believe And I'm lowering, lowering this bucket into my heart I can't even say if it'll come up empty or brimming.

Stalemate Showdown

A traffic jam of anxieties converges in my mind
each vehicle holding a tiny dictator-occupant shaking a fist,
honking, yelling, cursing in pip-squeak sounds
It's rush hour in my life again.

A railroad yard crowded with beached steel on wheels,
Heavy boxcars squealed to a stubborn halt and
their morose bullying bulk demands my action.
Called to be the magic conducter,
flipping switches, giving clearance
When I'd rather
let their dead weights explode into each other and burn

When I can't escape the logjam,
When I can't shout over them
When they refuse to be ignored
when they refuse to disperse
with their heavy freights
When running away just means
they'll catch up again,
I can't take any prisoners
I have to banish them all
One way or another
I have to deal with each one
and send them on their way
One by one.

An Early Lesson in Greed

I learned a lot of valuable lessons from my Dad early on. Like, the reward of being loyal to a particular team, no matter how abysmal their performance year after year: that loyalty is its own reward. That it's ok for a man to cry. That it's ok to be imperfect, as long as you're genuinely you. Like not compromising your beliefs. But one of my Dad's lessons was largely unspoken, and came to inform an unfolding perspective over many years. It is a discussion he probably doesn't even remember. This weighs heavily on my mind right now, when suddenly everything in Wisconsin seems for sale and "open for business," including public services, benefits, and worker's rights.

My parents had gotten a subscription to National Geographic for donating to some cause or other. Being interested in other places and cultures for as long as I can remember, I would thumb through every issue and study the pictures.

One month, there was a photoessay on famine in Ethiopia. I was 5 or 6. I stared at the picture of an emaciated mother holding a skeletal baby, and the light seemed extinguished in their eyes. I wondered why they were starving. Was there not enough food in the world? Did they live in a place so isolated that food couldn't get to them? Why did people have children if they were going to starve? These were the thoughts that went through my 6-year old mind.

I brought the magazine to my Dad and asked him why there wasn't enough food in the world to feed this lady and her baby. My Dad looked at the picture, and I could tell he felt angry about it.

"Well, you see, there is enough food in the world to feed everyone," he said.
"But Dad, if there's enough food, why are they starving? Can't anyone get them the food?" I asked.
"Well, let me put it this way: we could feed everyone in the world if we really wanted to," he replied.
"But Dad, I do want to!" I exclaimed in horror. "What do you mean, if only we wanted to?! Why should they starve if there is enough food??"
"Because of greed," he said. "Because there are greedy people in the world."

I didn't know what to say to that. And he seemed to have nothing more to say. So I walked away, and for days, my child's mind was obsessed with images of fat pashas gorging themselves with delicacies, and sticking their fingers down their throats so they could throw up only to stuff more food in their faces. I imagined storehouse after storehouse of grain horded by warlords with guns. Although these images subsided over the course of about a week, the seed was planted for me to have an awareness of the enormous structure of global economy, trade, and inequality in the world. What I couldn't grasp at the time, what my Dad could not explain to a child as young as I was (and maybe couldn't even explain to himself at the time), was that there were very few particular individuals gorging themselves on actual rare and expensive delights, but a huge, complicated picture of interconnected political, economic, and social forces of power and greed at work in the world on all levels--local, national, international.

My Dad taught me to see and try to understand the big picture, and about the problem of insidious and destructive greed. To try to grasp things that might defy simple explanation. To try to put a picture, instead of a face, to a concept. To realize that relatively small-scale injustices can add up to far-reaching catastrophe. To remember that greed cannot only be attributed to "warlords with guns," but to an entire global order. That the famine, or any situation, was not an isolated event with a quick and easy fix, but an entire process of historical events and factors. And that therefore, quick fixes are rarely the answer to enormous structural problems of greed, corruption, mismanagement, and inequality.

I can recall the picture of the mother and baby, and their eyes. I still wonder what happened to them. I still wonder if the light seemed extinguised because they were so hungry, or because they knew there were some who wanted to help, and others who wouldn't help.

Falling under

Sometimes it's too cold
I drive to end of the road
And I walk to the end of the land
Where the land falls under the water

Brilliant blue ice and eyes
when he appears and I ask,
"What brings you here?"

Aren't you afraid that you've run into a strange man out here?
I never fear my own people.
Are you the queen of this land, then?
Why, yes. And as queen, I know what you're seeking. I can take you to it. As long as you agree to do no harm.

Come on, let me show you these parts.
So I showed him where the deer sleep and the birds wait out the winter
I showed him how they survived and when they would go to the stream
Until he'd forgotten what he was looking for, and his intentions

As his lips turned blue to match the ice and eyes
He realized he felt the fear inside no longer
The land and water would keep him
We had time to walk in the land that falls under the water
And I showed him those parts too
And there I left him, knowing he could find his way home.

When Winter Gives You Lemons...Make Sunshine

It's a snow day. Well, not officially. But it did snow a bit last night, and everything about this Monday feels like a snow day. The walk remains unshoveled; the sky's white matches the ground. I've been burying my nose in a book, and I caught Himal and Babs the cat gazing out the window together in companionable quiet.

Although it feels like the only thing in season here is the Packers, January is the height of lemon season in CA and AZ. So when winter gives you lemons, make...lemonade? Lemonade hardly sounds appealing at the moment. A cup of tea, a dark beer, a towering mug of hot chocolate, anything but...lemonade. So what to do with lemons when it's not lemonade season?

I'm currently on sabbatical from facebook. I need time to focus on other things, and I need to remember what life was like without it. I have too much that I want to do, and catch up on, and something had to give. I also cut out the volunteer activities I was doing for now. We need to focus inward for a precious bit--it is, after all, what winter is about. It feels good. It feels darn good. Yet there is still so much to catch up on, and being without facebook has caused me to reconsider its usefulness. When I go back to it, I'll have to appoach it in a different way. I'll have to pare down my "friends" list. I'll have to not let it be so much of a substitute for real interaction.

Lemons! What makes me happy? Little things make me happy. I've always been the type of person to savor the small pleasures life has to offer versus the big and gaudy. What makes me happy in winter? Food makes me happy. Drink makes me happy. Books make me happy. I gazed at my new coffee calendar this morning. It is a work of art. It's classy. The book in my hand is a gem that very few readers have discovered. I finally sat down and ordered a boatload of tropical chai and Thai spice from Cathy's Botanicals, the talented tea maker we met in last year in the Naples Farmer's Market. And then there are the lemons that were on sale at the local grocery store in a giant, exuberant citrus display.

My little suns. The lemon is versatile. I can, and will, use them to clean my cutting boards and kitchen sink. I will shave curls off their peels and use them to flavor cups of espresso. I will make lemon-mustard cod on a bed of lemon spinach. I will add them to my tea, and to the new juicer I got for my birthday in the quest for the perfect orange-lemon juice.

Keep the lemonade. When winter hands you lemons, make your sunshine.

Romantic with a Capital "R"

I have a doppelganger, a strange and estranged doppelganger. One time I said, "I'm a Romantic, but I'm not romantic." He replied, "you mean, in that train travel and postage stamp way--not in that flowers and chocolate way. Romantic with a capital 'r.'" "Yes, exactly!" I was relieved he understood.

It all makes it fairly easy to please me--I have a husband who's more "r"omantic (luckily, in an effortless, not contrived, way) than I am, so I'm never disappointed in my marriage as some (many?) women are.

However, when it comes to "R"omance, I'm always mourning the loss of it in our society. I'm a fan of postcards, handwritten letters, artifacts/tangible objects, snail mail, used/vintage books, CDs with artwork in the booklets, rocks, leaves, sticks, feathers, bookshelves and photos. I'm not such a fan of digital files-easily produced, dispatched, modified, deleted, forgotten.

Of course, I recognize the utility, practicality, and convenience of technology. I'm not anti-technology; however, I find it preferable to try to preserve some sense of individualism in how we consume media and correspondence. When I was in Mongolia, it was this sense that drove me to send handwritten letters on local paper, using Mongolian stamps, sometimes with a Mongolian bill enclosed as a tangible piece of the place. But if any of the recipients preferred one of these letters to a standard email (all of which looks the same) from the unreliable, slow, sole computer in Bayangol, none commented. I still love to send and receive letters in this way. I have kept, nearly 10 years later, the letters a friend sent me from his Peace Corps assignment in Cameroon. I've kept postcards from faraway places, with defunct stamps, bundled in my desk drawer. The emails, on the other hand, from various people's vacations and stints abroad--they are forgotten and haven't been so much as glanced at since they were read for the first and only time. There's something about seeing a person's handwriting, the pen and paper and envelope and stamp that they chose, that I think reflects upon them and the relationship in a way that the billionth gmail or yahoo message cannot possibly.

Recently, a friend (who also writes letters) and I engaged in a Romantic endeavor: sitting in Anaba Tea Room and chatting for a couple hours over slowly-imbibed cups of tea. One of the things we talked about was whether technology is good/better simply because it's new, whether change is always good, and whether change should be made just for change's sake. US-style capitalism, with planned obsolesence and the creation of desire for "newness" that feeds our consumer economy, seems to have spilled into our outlook on how we learn about and share our our experiences of the world as well.

One of the products we discussed was the e-reader. I can certainly see how an e-reader would be convenient for travel, as well as for magazine subscriptions and the like. But as a bibliophile who is not only enraptured with the act of reading, but the books themselves, the Kindle, Nook, Sony E-Reader, or iPad just doesn't cut it for me. My friend agreed with me: "at the end of the day," he said, "it's stil just pixels on a screen." I know that the e-reader has done its best, thus far, to replicate the reading experience. You can still get cover art; you can even design a "bookmark." You can check out, return, and "lend" books to other e-reader devices.

But still, it comes down to the weight of things. I like the weight of a book in my hand. I have held and paged on kindles and nooks, and it's the same dead weight for every book or magazine you could possibly download. The weight of a book is part of my reading experience. How yellowed the pages are--part of my reading experience. My bookmark collection (gathered and gifted from all over the world, from people whom I remember fondly when I touch and examine these bookmarks) is irreplaceable. To walk into our family's office and be surrounded by my books on bookshelves all around--this matters to me. To be able to take one off the shelf and page through it, as opposed to hitting the same button on an e-reader over and over again--this matters to me.

The weight of things also reminds me to exercise restraint. Never a person to desire being bound by excessive things, the weight of things matters to me as a symbol of how much clutter might be in my life. What does it mean when we have endless digital space to horde and forget about? How do we relinquish attachment to the meaningless items in our collection then?

The issue of Romance came up in the past couple days again, which is why I write this. Some of my friends don't want actual books this year--they would prefer a gift certificate or gift e-book for their e-reader instead. Which, if that's what they want, I guess I will have to indulge. However, it once again makes me mourn the loss of the weight of the book I would give them, the act of paging through it or wrapping it or sending it through the mail, the loss of the handwritten card I would attach to it.

The Mandala

Every year around this time, I feel ugly. The glowing tan of summer is wearing off, my sun-streaked hair is coming in a dun brown at my scalp. Fall's preening display has succumbed to a barren brown landscape; puddles freeze over and the rivers develop icy sheens upon which the lingering waterfowl sit with their naked webbed feet, making me wish I were cold-blooded. The novely of breaking out my fall fashions has worn off as I wear the same handful of sweaters over and over again.

We haven't had our first snow yet, and for the most part, it's actually been rather blue-skied and warm here--relatively speaking. Still, the ugliness of the late fall/early winter season gets to me--a sea of Packers gear and blaze orange, dead deer strapped to vehicles, Christmas trees lashed to car roofs somehow incongruent in the snow-free landscape.

But then--but then. I come to accept the quiet and the indoors. I focus on the little things that have been overwhelmed since the bacchanal summer arrived. I get out the music that makes me reflect and dream on the beauty of the world, such my classical Spanish guitar and Latin harp albums. I notice, and appreciate, the interior--the interior of the mind and soul, the interior of living spaces, the interior of nature where many creatures lie dormant under ice and snow. I come to admire the unique pattern in which the steam rises from my coffee cup; I take in the beauty of people's attempts to celebrate the holidays without the rush and spending--the handwritten card, the visit, the late night discussion in a German bar over a warm winter drink, decorating a tree, hanging stockings...and I focus on these things until beauty blossoms from the feelings of ugliness...this is winter's mandala.