Lesson

noun

• an amount of teaching given at one time; a period of learning or teaching
• a thing learned or to be learned by a student.
• a thing learned by experience
• an occurrence, example, or punishment that serves or should serve to warn or encourage

• a passage from the Bible read aloud during a church service, especially either of two readings at morning and evening prayer in the Anglican Church.

verb

[with object] archaic

• instruct or teach (someone).
• admonish or rebuke (someone).

 

Origin:

Middle English: from Old French leçon, from Latin lectio

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/lesson?q=lesson

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I learned to speak to the universe because I couldn't speak to anyone else. And now I realize, I am grateful to have learned. The conversation we have is filled with miraculous synchronicity. And when I converse with the universe, I speak gently and respectfully, as I would to a child or an animal, and the animal part I learned from you. I needn't hear the universe answer back with words. Frequently, she only blinks and I feel the dark followed by the light. I see the flash of color and the image therein and I inhale the breeze off the bat of her eyelashes and sometimes, only sometimes, do I wait for one of her eyelashes to fall close enough that I can pick it up without anyone seeing me do so in order to cast a wish upon it and blow it back. I learned that I should not let anyone see my wishes.

There is both pain and joy in these lessons.

I also learned that speaking when silenced could be done through music, specifically through singing in the car. It was a lesson someone must have taught you as well, because music in the car was a constant and, in a way, the car time during which that music was shared was likely some of the only time we communicated in a way that I recognized your humanity and saw, still there in you, the child in myself I wasn't allowed to accept. I'm certain you know the expectations of me as a child were beyond what one could expect of an adult and that I've let you off the hook in my heart but not in my mind because something in our shared life or from the life before me silenced you too.

I learned the danger in following. As with the others, there is both pain and joy in the lesson. The fear of following has lessened my ability to trust because I am always afraid of where I'm being led. I believe, through what I've learned and lived, that I will be trapped, hurt, or left alone, with the potential for all three to exist simultaneously. And the fear isn't just in following another, it is a fear to follow myself as well. Yet, as I've said, there is pain AND joy in the lessons. This same lesson, this learning the danger in following, has opened my eyes wider--I see much more. I evaluate much more. I try quite hard to establish a position that is my own and is one with which I am both comfortable and proud and with which I feel little need to justify. It is why I know I can lead but feel such fear in potentially hurting anyone who might follow. Sometimes people follow anyway and I try to push them away because I don't want to lead them somewhere in which they will feel trapped, or hurt, or alone so I, for the most part, try to go it alone.

I learned that learning, broad learning, expands the connections we can make and that the kind of learning that comes when you listen but stay silent, is best. Watching Sunday Morning or listening to talk radio in silence reinforced that often the lesson or learning you need is given in the moment you need it.

I learned creativity is born, in part, from trying to mold what is given into what you need. The duality of joy and pain in creativity is not unlike the duality that is the sadness of surviving.  What was given was not what I needed. Not having what I needed taught me to find other worlds in books and art and music or in my mind and body apart from the mind and body of the moment. I learned to dissociate and self-protect. I learned to slow my breathing and my responses.  While it helped then and still helps now, it makes being truly here very difficult.  It made being with cancer hard and so I wasn't really, until it was gone in the same way that I wasn't with the hurt of home until I was gone. It is a part of the sadness of surviving. It is why when I can't hide from it all, it all manifests other ways and I'm left unable to get a solid night of sleep free of dreams filled with negativity, why I wake nauseated, why eating is a game of nothing or everything, why my muscles and bones and skin can hurt so badly and why I don't feel I can take or do anything to feel better. It makes me wonder if what I've taken in out of expectation was responsible for growing cancer inside me. It's why I wake wondering what I'd have to do ahead of time if I ever gained the courage and follow through to die ahead of my prescribed time.

I learned to expect the worst and so I'm always fearful and I'm always prepared.

I learned that if your pants are long enough and your shoes are comfortable enough there exists no need to wear socks and that, if at all possible, going barefoot is best. Going with bare feet is genetic and sometimes, though I know wishes should be kept secret even outside of the scope of extinguishing the lights placed on a cake to celebrate birth by exhaling upon them a breath out, I wish that I had more power to take the best of the genetic and leave behind the rest because sometimes I want to make people feel the positive way you've made me feel-- the quiet moments in which there's been no expectation other than sharing space--but I fear that I'll make them feel the negative way you've made me feel-- the moments where I was made an adult when I wasn't, or when I was made to do things no one should have to, or when I was threatened, or hurt, or left alone, or when I watched the hurt and the anger and the fear they told of ooze out of you.

Last night, I dreamt you gave me a flower not yet bloomed. You told me it would bloom in a month if I had no guilt and no shame. And when you told me, my heart sunk because I knew that this present, this child-flower, would not bloom because I'd be unable to get to that place. You told me if I'd been fair and honest, that the flower would bloom in a month, and my heart sunk further because I've been neither as fair or as honest as someone should. You taught me what wasn't fair and yet helped me believe it was and you taught me that truth should be held inside and that when it wasn't, it wouldn't be believed as truth anyway. 

 

And so I woke, aware that you'd set me up to see that you either believe me capable of tending that flower so that it grows or that you already know I'm incapable and just needed me to know with the definitive proof of the stunted flower. And my head begins the logic-driven task to determine which is true while my heart and body and soul are already busy figuring out how to let the flower die before it's begun to grow.

I learned that it is possible for something to die and that, in the death of the thing, something else can start to live. Because every lesson taught has at least two sides and many lessons are full of striations into which other layers leak.

I am afraid I won't be able to make the flower grow and that you'll know and be disappointed and I'm afraid that, should I figure out a way to make her bloom, that you'll still have the power to cut her down, pull her out, drag her by her roots up the stairs and throw her into the window where she'll die anyway. I'm afraid you'll still be able to neglect her into the place where she's alone when she really wants or needs company because she wants to feel love and support but expects love and support to feel like pain.

I'm watching the day break this morning. I'm thinking about how, years ago, I'd still be laying in bed, and you would put on your work clothes, covered in grease and full of holes, and sneak downstairs while it was still this dark and leave not long after and pull away. When you were gone, I'd sneak downstairs to soak in the rest of the breaking day. I learned the peace that is a morning alone by example. I've also learned that mornings are colder than any other time and that as we try to start ourselves up, many of us die because it takes a certain amount of energy to bring ourselves into the day with the sun. So I wonder if, like years ago, you are up early watching day break or if you are struggling to start up your engine on this cold morning, heartbroken.

 

 

 

 

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Perspective

noun

• [mass noun] the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other
• the appearance of viewed objects with regard to their relative position, distance from the viewer, etc.
• [count noun] a view or prospect.
• Geometry the relation of two figures in the same plane, such that pairs of corresponding points lie on concurrent lines, and corresponding lines meet in collinear points.
• a particular attitude towards or way of regarding something; a point of view
• [mass noun] true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion
• an apparent spatial distribution in perceived sound.

Origin:
late Middle English (in the sense 'optics'): from medieval Latin perspectiva (ars) '(science of) optics', from perspect- 'looked at closely', from the verb perspicere, from per- 'through' + specere 'to look'

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/perspective

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At 3 AM, pain is terrifying. When I wake during the 3 AM hour, as I have the last few evenings, curled into myself with my abdominal muscles (yes, even my fat body has them somewhere under the rolls) and my upper and lower legs in tight cramps, I'm terrified. I don't wake as though I've had a nightmare. I don't wake remembering anything from the dream I'd assume to be the cause. Still, I wake anxious and upset and hesitant to go back to the sleep I'd like to have assuming I'm able to straighten my body out in a way that the cramps can be eliminated.

When the alarm goes off at 5:55 AM, and I stand for the first time, I'm given an instant reminder of 3-something AM, courtesy of the then-tight muscles from a few hours before. I still don't have a sense of what started them curling in the middle of the night. I wake exhausted.

As I near 10 AM, sitting at work or doing whatever the weekend plans dictate, anxiety sneaks in.  Like the cramping, I don't have a sense of where it comes from. All I want to do is lay down. The 3-something muscle tightness is replaced by a pervasive dance of negative thoughts and fears and it becomes a 10-something tightness in my breathing. I find a full breath rather difficult unless I deliberately make an effort to breathe one. Shallow, nearly non-existent breathing is the default. It isn't that I can't breathe, it's that my body won't let me have a breath until I somehow will my body over my mind.

As I near mid-day, something in me eases. That ease becomes exhaustion by 2-something. By 3 or 4, the 10-something is back again and it fluctuates for the rest of the evening. As I start to feel sleepy, it eases, pushing me to get changed and head to bed. As soon as I lay down, 10-something is back until my body wins over my mind and the victory lasts until I wake up with it replaced by 3-something, when my mind controls my body against my conscious will.

From the lens I attach to my attempt at understanding, various pictures develop.  But what does one do when the camera that is your understanding is defective?  What if the tool to which you attach those lenses--the same tool you've been using since you've been 5--doesn't do a good enough job?  What if its perspective is too narrow or too toy or too old or too colored by someone else's vision? 

In truth, what happens is that a perspective emerges--a familiar perspective--and the familiarity of the perspective is comforting but the picture from that same perspective is upsetting. 

While I look for a new tool, I attach various lenses to the old one. 

Lens #1-- The sick lens
Lens #2-- The fat lens
Lens #3-- The flashback lens
Lens #4-- The overtired lens
Lens #5-- The you're-not-worth-more lens
Lens #6-- The mental-patient lens
Lens #7-- The bad-mattress lens
Lens #8-- The maybe-it's-job-stress lens
Lens #9-- The I'm-just-like-my-mother lens  
Lens #10-- The you're-just-dehydrated lens

When I look at 3-something AM through each, the images hold at least partial truth.  Almost without variety, though, the image snapped using each looks the same.  All capture something closer to waste film than an actual image.  And I recognize the familiarity of waste.  I collect them, add them to an old album, and turn page after page after page after page seeing the same thing.  It is this constant backdrop-- a constant story where dates and ages and times don't seem to matter as much as they should.  I view waste film. 

When the tool you have is defective but you're still looking to fix a problem, you first try different lenses.  When the different lenses don't work, you remind yourself the tool is broken and you set out for a new tool.  You carry the album with you.  Your body and mind try to find something in the waste film images, each working to different degrees at different moments, but nearly always resulting in the same picture. 

And believe me, please believe me, I do look for different tools.  I do look to be taught how to use different tools.  When I find them or use them they feel so wrong and I worry about offending the new teacher as I express doubt and so, I try to stay silent because offending opens options for the offended to retaliate against the offender and I am that person unless I'm quiet. 

Say nothing...always say nothing... or say it and then take it back.  Go back to your old tool.  Keep playing with different lenses... and remember insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, means you're either looking through lens #6 or lens #9. 

Metaphor

noun

• a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable
• a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract

Origin:

late 15th century: from French métaphore, via Latin from Greek metaphora, from metapherein 'to transfer'

http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/metaphor?q=metaphor

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Always have soft mints on your table and an animal to pet.

I've been thinking about the metaphor of soft mints and pets for about a week now. When the phone rang last Monday morning letting me know Aunt Fran, at 92 years of age, had passed away less than an hour before, I felt relief on her behalf. After waiting 25 years to marry and having only 13 married years with my Uncle Bill before he died, I knew deeply that she longed to reunite. I watched the spirit gradually sneak from her eyes over the last few years. Though she never rushed away from this life, she carried a strong faith in the life waiting for her on the other end of here.

When I was younger, long before Aunt Fran lived in an assisted living facility near my parents' home, when she was still living in Philadelphia with Uncle Bill, we went to see them frequently. Aunt Fran would serve crackers of some kind and tiny glass bottles of 7-Up. My Uncle Bill sat in the other room smoking his pipe, a smell I still love. When we'd all sit in the living room, I sat one of two places-- either in front of the stairs to pet Max, the 'family dog' or in front of the coffee table from which I ate soft, pastel mints out of a glass dish.  I'd pet Max for a long time.  I believed he was real-- the alive at night kind of real.  I recalled him as a heavy, concrete statue that I never lifted.

I recall my brother and I getting dressed in our Halloween costumes and loading into the car to go see Aunt Fran and Uncle Bill, and later just Aunt Fran long after Uncle Bill's medical bed was removed from the dining room. We'd sit on her front porch and watch Philadelphia-- watch the neighborhood breathe in and out in a way that neighborhoods aren't living and breathing any longer. I'd run my hands up and down the iron railings, feeling the swirl of them twist my fingers. When we'd leave there, we'd drive to see her sister, my Grandmom Grove, where the scent of cinnamon brooms and Wizard air fresheners, in seasonal shapes, filled the air.

When Grandmom Grove died, my mother sent my brother and I to school on a half day before we'd return home to attend the funeral. When we left the funeral home for the cemetery loaded in the limo, I started to cry. It was Aunt Fran who put her arm around me and told me to let it all out.

Though I'd done reasonably well  maintaining composure this past week, the day of the funeral was far more difficult than I imagined it would be. I cried, quite hard, complete with giant tears and lip quivering. 

As I listened to the chaplain speak, and then my mother speak, and then recited along with the prayers, I thought of Aunt Fran's fascination with the sponge creatures that grow from tiny gel capsules and how she'd laugh at an Easter toy-- a bunny, that would hop until it would stop and do a back flip.  She laughed, surprised, every time. 

Sometimes I hear that laugh come out of me.  It is the only time I experience hearing someone else's voice come out of my own body.  But it is her voice-- her laugh.

At the service, the chaplain spoke of Aunt Fran's wit and hospitality, the warm twinkle in her eye, and her love of music and animals.  In a few short months, Aunt Fran passed on all the beauty of the things I loved most about her to the chaplain and many of the staff and residents of the hospice unit.

The mints and the pet, then. What of the mints and the pet metaphor?  

• Always have something soft for those you love.
• Expect that loved ones will be there but don't expect that they'll stay too long. 
• The longer, sometimes, you need to 'chew' on something, the more it 'sucks'.  Sometimes it's better just to get a taste of what you 'chew' on knowing that, when you'd like more, there are always more 'sucks' in the dish. 
• Stay 'fresh' and true to yourself.
• Smell like mint and you won't have to put up with the smell of other people's 'shit'. 
• Welcome people, unconditionally. 
• Believe in, and be, real.
• Sometimes we assume things heavier than they are because we are afraid to pick them up only to find later that they aren't.  And sometimes, it's all from the perspective of the moment. 

With Aunt Fran's passing, I've lost the last connection to family beyond the immediate family of my mother, father, and brother.  For 35 years, Aunt Fran has been a fixture in my life.  She's been what's made family time feel as you'd hope family time should.  She was a buffer-- a witty, sarcastic, tough-cookie buffer-- to my mother's interactions with me especially.

A couple years back, Kim and I went to my parents' house for Christmas Eve.  My father went to pick up Aunt Fran not long after we arrived.  It was, to say the least, a difficult evening.  My mother, exhausted and supremely over-medicated, continued to pass out and slur her words as she talked to us.  Not long after that, she got angry and stormed away to the bedroom.  We decided to make the best of it and try to have a peaceful, loving family dinner.  My mother ended up angrier that we would have dinner without her.  She screamed and yelled and turned into a person I remain terrified of.  I did my best to diffuse the situation.  Aunt Fran, sitting in the confrontation chair (the chair I would always sit in when I was 'brought up on charges' as a child) turned to me and said, as though she was five, "I'm afraid."  I told her I knew...I understood... and it broke my heart.

So, as I move forward, I'm going to try my best to remember that arm around me telling me to let it all out.  Because as much as I hear Aunt Fran's laugh slip out of my body every now and again, that day I heard my fear--my voice--slip out of Aunt Fran.

I'm going to do my best hold the metaphor of soft mints and pets.

P.S. After the funeral, we went with my parents to Aunt Fran's apartment to see if there was anything there I might want.  The only thing I knew I wanted, if it was still around, was Max-- the aforementioned 'family dog'.  He was still there, guarding the front door. He is not concrete.  When I first held him I was shocked at how little he weighed.  When I returned home with him later and picked him up again, he felt so much heavier.  'Weight' is part of the metaphor.   

P.P.S. Aunt Fran was buried wearing a wristlet of 6 pink roses-- one for each of her animal family members-- my brother's dog, our four cats, and Meg.  With Max, our family has grown by one, and he sits in my space.

 

Re

preposition

• in the matter of (used typically as the first word in the heading of an official document or to introduce a reference in an official letter)
• about; concerning

Origin:

Latin, ablative of res 'thing'

 

noun Music

• the second note of a major scale.
• the note D in the fixed-do system.

Origin:

Middle English re, representing (as an arbitrary name for the note) the first syllable of resonare, taken from a Latin hymn

 

prefix

• once more; afresh; anew
• with return to a previous state
• (also red-) in return; mutually
• in opposition
• behind or after
• in a withdrawn state
• back and away; down
• with frequentative or intensive force
• with negative force

Origin:

from Latin re-, red-'again, back'

 

http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/re

http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/re--2

http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/re--

 

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...realize, remember, re-experience, review, revise, require, receive, rescind, replay, reveal...

 

Recently, I'm remembering.  Recall, as replay, realigns reality in such a way that I receive requests from a long, long time ago when the residual effects of revealing required my story resealed...retracted...removed. 

 

Recite the re--s, and relax.  Restriction and restraints help me to organize their return.  Like the scale Do Re Me, for my second note I must Do Re-garding Me.  I'm trying to respect the progression.  I'm relying on forward motion.

 

Reaching out has always been reviling. Realizing I open without any real sense that I'll be able to call closed, reaches a space where reinforced relics are stored.  The resource residing there was purposeful.  It still is, in some ways, but I recognize now is not the same as then. I am really here. The harder realization is that I was really there. 

 

So, I read. I read files I pull from someone else's life and though the cabinet is named them I recognize myself in the details.  I remember details retained and retold through me without requesting them. I fall in to redefining occurrences with words and images and sights and smells and realize they are real.  They have names, as I do, though I've never wanted to be called by name.  "Hey, you" was more than enough.  There's safety in the passing reference indicating something without naming the what-thing. 

 

Resolute removal from reality required practice and I did practice and I do practice and I realize, though I've grown, I've circled the watering hole for years.  I've peeked in and what's been revealed is the "Hey, there's a lot of stuff in there"-- that's been the type of recognition--and I've retreated, fearing the reflection that can only come from seeing. 

 

Recent rest produces more resections, more reruns, more residue. I'm begged to sleep by exhaustion and forced awake by insomnia.  The pushing tension pulses and it, too, reminds. 

 

So I'll reveal my desire to realign and restore and regain a self I've known as incomplete--as a prefix.  I'm hopeful I can retrain, retaining some and reinventing the rest.

 

I'm requesting "Hey, you" and "Hey, there's a lot of stuff in there" retires.

 

http://images.gizmag.com/hero/reveal-1.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grey

adjective (greyer, greyest; grayer, grayest)

•  of a colour intermediate between black and white, as of ashes or lead
• (of the weather) cloudy and dull
• (of a person) having grey hair
• (of a person’s face) pale, as through tiredness, age, or illness
• without interest or character; dull and nondescript
• (of financial or trading activity) not accounted for in official statistics
• South African historical relating to an ethnically mixed residential area

noun

• [mass noun] grey colour or pigment
• grey clothes or material
• grey hair
• a grey thing or animal, in particular a grey or white horse.

 

verb

• [no object] (especially of hair) become grey with age
• somewhat (as adjective greying)
• (of a person) become older: (as adjective greying)

 

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/grey
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When Friday arrived, I went home. After putting the dog outside and letting her back in, I sat down. Exhausted, I fell asleep, perched sideways in a cream colored wingback. 

When we eventually wandered out with the goal of eliminating tasks off the to-do, one of the stops landed us at a favorite store of mine. Just past the candles, was a shelf of intrigue and on that shelf of intrigue rested a half dozen hourglasses. Around them, a handful of smaller hourglasses. The large ones each contained a single color of sand...one of them, bright pink. The smaller ones were either black or white.

For those of you who read last week's blog, you'll remember hourglasses and pink sand and perhaps you'll appreciate the moment of synchronicity therein.

When I woke on Saturday morning, it was on the other side of a disturbing dream. I was on the campus of my first undergrad school. It was late at night, quite dark save for low orange light cast by landscape lighting. The campus was as the campus was then though, as the dream progressed, it easily morphed into the living room and kitchen of our home.

Walking through campus, I was aware of the terrible thing that had happened, but can't tell you what it was. I get a few words in trying to retrieve the event-- holocaust, massacre, tragedy, expected--none are spot on. I walk in the dream and startle when I almost trip over a body. It is a nun, in her habit, laying face down on the concrete. I know she is dead. Her white lower legs and thick soled shoes are exposed. I'm scared. As I walk there are perhaps hundreds more dead, all covered from the top of their heads to about their waists with sheets. All are women--nuns--with white lower legs & shoes exposed. I am no longer scared. It feels expected. I am not fearful of what has happened. I take a blue towel, go into a grassy area, and lay down with the dead.

It isn't until I realize I don't know where one of my cats is, on the other side of this tragedy, that I feel fear again. The cat I hunt for is black and white and our only boy. He is, from outside of the perspective of the dream, the one who comforts me differently than the rest. I have a sense he senses and understands me differently than the others.

He is eating when I find him, unharmed and unphased. His top half is blocked from my view and, like the nuns, I only see his lower half including his white back legs and long black tail.

I wake.

I tried to go about Saturday but from waking, I was off.  I wrote for a bit and took a bath.  It didn't help.  We attempted to venture out with the plan to go to one of our favorite places about an hour away.  As soon as we were outside, the light bothered me.  The sounds made by trucks bothered me.  The feel of the car on the road bothered me.  We turned around and headed home.  I went to bed, exhausted, for about two hours.  I woke up with the migraine I sensed coming.  I was shaky and uncomfortable and struggled for the remainder of the day, though we did run out for a bit, venturing into Target where Kim found a grey hair amongst my blonds and I, not surprisingly, found two glass hourglasses in the office supply section-- one with white sand, and one with black. 

We went home not long after. 

By the time I went to bed, I was engulfed in horrible nausea and terrible exhaustion.  I didn't sleep well-- spending the night cold and oddly emotional. 

Gratefully, I woke without 80% of the pain, nausea, and sensitivity I went to bed with.  I've spent the day reading student papers-- I'd say about 4-5 hours worth of paper grading.  I've read about challenges and creative takes on fictional research material.  I love reading their work, though on the other side of a migraine, that much reading eye work isn't quite as enjoyable.

One of the papers I read talked of a student's belief in things being either black or white, never grey.  I read through it with my black and white male cat laying next to me.  As a matter of fact, each time I sat on the bed, propped to read papers, he jumped up and cuddled next to me.  He knows.

After a long break, I visited a topical site in the last few weeks.  It is a discussion board with a range of sub-boards.  After a period of consideration, I opted to post on one where the moderators asked about triggers.  I considered, thoughtfully, for a few moments those that came easily.  I came up with a few: lists--people talking in lists, repetitive noise--particularly with the mouth like gum chewing, being upset, the sun warming me in the morning, when the air isn't moving, and when that air is the same temperature inhaled and exhaled.  I felt, almost immediately, a sense of relief, just in having put that outside of myself after some of these things snuck into the past little bit of time. Out of nowhere, I'm back in topics I've not considered, at least in this way, in quite some time.  Out of nowhere, I felt that sun the other morning.  Out of nowhere, I've realized that as I think and consider and circle through some of this old, the biggest side effect is an abnormal level of tired.  Almost immediately, I want to sleep.  I want a long, deep sleep. A sleep marked by a few full flips of the hourglass. 

But only the one with the pink sand.

 Black or white never worked for me. 

Black and white always has. 

In the grey, I play and in the play, I learn.

Reflect

 verb

• [with object] (of a surface or body) throw back (heat, light, or sound) without absorbing it
• (of a mirror or shiny surface) show an image of
• embody or represent (something) in a faithful or appropriate way
• (of an action or situation) bring (credit or discredit) to the relevant parties
• [no object] (reflect well/badly on) bring about a good or bad impression of
• [no object] (reflect on/upon) think deeply or carefully about
• archaic make disparaging remarks about.

Origin:

late Middle English: from Old French reflecter or Latin reflectere, from re- 'back' + flectere 'to bend'
http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/reflect?q=reflect

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On Wednesday, driving from Scranton to Dallas to meet with a thesis student who is working on a children's book and then to teach class, I sang along to the radio when I could HEAR the radio.  Wednesday afternoon started dramatic thunderstorms in Northeast PA and they continued into the evening.  The cross country team was still running when I parked my car at Misericordia, but I still received a text from students asking if we were having class on account of the weather.  The day felt odd all the way around.

I spent the morning with headphones plugged into my computer, listening to the anniversary coverage of 9/11.  I paused my work and closed my eyes for each moment of silence.  I wrote down the following two phrases from the speeches, the first from a speaker at the Pentagon, "We remember them as individuals with their own stories" and the second from the Twin Towers site, read by a loved one memorializing their loved one, "We tell the stories of your life everyday." I listened to hours of names read and my eyes teared heavily more than a few times.  The names themselves didn't bring the tears, the last line, the personal connection was responsible for that.  In a list the names, for most of us, are concepts of people.  At the end of each section, though, a parent, a spouse, a child, a godparent, a friend would read the name of their loved one and a few words meant for or about them and the concept people would come alive.  When they did, I cried.

Wednesday at work a summer picnic was held in the middle of the day, one meant as an opportunity for fun and time to reflect on the employee and company accomplishments over past year.  I was asked to participate ahead of time, assisting in coming up with and coordinating  games from our particular area of the Scranton facility.  I did this.  I did not, however, feel comfortable participating in the picnic.  In some ways, I feel a bit bad about this.  I think about things I might either hear or that I'd think.  Isn't it time to let 9/11 rest?  Don't you think that carrying on with our lives on this day shows more respect for the victims than stopping what we'd do normally?  Why should this still make you upset-- you didn't lose anyone?  You didn't know anyone that was there?  ...and the list continues.  Still, I didn't attend the picnic.  Save for the flag in front of the building, moved only half-way up the poll, no mention was made of the anniversary. 

It isn't that I disagree-- maybe carrying on with our lives on this day DOES show respect for the victims and their families.  I count plenty of people doing that and thank them for that.  It isn't right for me.  Maybe I should let the day rest-- but maybe I already have.  Maybe what's left isn't the day itself, but some concept of that day and days in all our lives like it.

My 9/11 story is unremarkable.  I heard about the first plane while cashing a check from my parents at a bank in Dunmore after which I was supposed to go to class.  I went home instead and turned on the TV.  Kim was with me for a period of time before heading out to go to a job interview.  I stayed at the TV for hours and then days and what may, very well, have been weeks.  It wasn't healthy.  After not going to class that day, I never went back.  9/11 ended my days at Marywood.

I collected newspapers and magazines and still have them stored in a plastic box.  I hunted down all the songs altered in one way or another marking the tragedy and the nation's resolve as we started to move forward.  Awhile after, when the NY Times published their Collected Portraits of Grief, I added it to my bookshelf along with the American Writer's Respond book published by Etruscan (a press, at the time, I had no idea was housed at a school where I'd eventually end up as a a graduate student wishing to be a writer). 

On Wednesday night, driving to class, I sang along to the radio.  Heading down I thought little of the songs themselves though one line, from one song, stood out.  I met with the thesis student and we started class at 6.  I pulled up a few of the 9/11 obituaries from the NY Times Portraits of Grief project to start us off on the writing prompt for the evening. 

The Portraits of Grief are beautiful.  When you look at the typical obituary, to some degree, you're reading a resume or posthumous application.  When faced with needing to publish thousands of obituaries typical doesn't work.  And so we can read portraits, snapshots of who these people were and still are to their family and friends, and because we can crawl into those snapshots, we can know these people as more than names off a list.

So we sat in class and with the two phrases, "We remember them as individuals with their own stories" and "We tell the stories of your life everyday" and the couple of NY Times Portraits of Grief we started a prompt: If you were being memorialized, what would a loved one say about you?-- write in their voice OR How do you want to be remembered?  We wrote for ten to fifteen minutes.  A few of them agreed to read.  Most of them created lists sounding like this: "Good friend, loving daughter, honest, caring..."  Lists like names unattached to stories.  As they begin to craft their personal narratives with the first, smaller draft due this upcoming Wednesday, a list won't work.  And so, as a class, we brainstormed how to take these lists of characteristics and roles from the generic to specific, from a list into stories and anecdotes.  We talked about meaningful detail.  We talked about digging in and digging down until you start to see connections and patterns in ways you never have before and how that applies in their personal narrative essays, in their academic papers, and ultimately in their lives. 

We are not generic.  We are crafted and shaped and influenced and, like silly putty, rolled up, bounced across a floor, and rolled out to copy what we are pressed onto until we are rolled again, folding what we've copied into ourselves and the ink from those newspaper pages start to color us.

There were an amazing amount of 'I can'ts' as we worked on our idea maps.  With chalk in hand, I started my own on the board, continuing as they worked on theirs. "I just don't think like that, Ms. Grove."  But they do.  I know they do.  They're learning how to translate what their heads do out into the world-- into expression.  Some of them may not end up doing this onto paper, but their words, spoken aloud, will change.  And maybe spoken means something different too, as it often does for me.  We're working on it. 

A lot of the time the process is dependent on the question from which you've started.  If, I asked one student, "What do you worry about rather than what do you believe in, I suspect you'd have less trouble answering.  I suspect as you lay down at night, or when you shower, or when you're riding in your car, or when you've slightly disconnected from the hear and now and have moved somewhere else, you do this anyway."  We'll see what happens as the drafts start to come in.  We'll move forward from wherever they are at.

The storms were nearly over by the time I travelled home.  I had the radio on again, and sang along.  A line stood out from one and it was, I realized, the same line that had stood out from the same song I'd heard driving down to class.  "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table." 

As individuals, with stories, we all have an hourglass.  We're all given different volumes of sand.  All our sand is composed of different broken down 'stuff''.  We may have the power to push and pull and stretch or condense the confines of the hourglass itself, and that will impact how the sand flows from one side to the next,  And in many ways, that hourglass is glued to the table.  There are events, though, like 9/11 and other national or personal tragedies and challenges, capable of flipping those tables right over.  9/11/2001 reminded me what it felt like for tables to flip.  I remembered being that hourglass stuck to the underside of the table with the weight of life and the world crushing me underneath.  It reminded me of loss and sadness and fear. 

If you, on the flip side of the table flip, manage to knock or have your hourglass knocked off that table, pick it up and hold it tightly in the palm of your hand.  Lay it sideways and look at how the sand lays when  it's balanced between the two sides.  Tilt it one way and then the other.  Examine what makes the sand move faster or slower. 

My mom-mom had an egg timer next to her virtually unused stove in the kitchen.  The sand was pink.  It was one of the random items in her house I played with...one of the items I found most fascinating.  It was not glued down to anything.  That is why I played.  Because I was free to play.  Because the weekend getaways to her house, my books by book-light, my backyard adventures to the creek, were on the land of the free. 

Freedom is born when the glue, called loss or sadness or fear or whatever it is holding us captive, releases.

Key

noun (plural keys)

• a small piece of shaped metal with incisions cut to fit the wards of a particular lock, and that is inserted into a lock and turned to open or close it.
• a small, shaped metal implement for operating a switch in the form of a lock, especially one operating the ignition of a motor vehicle.
• an instrument for grasping and turning a screw, peg, or nut, especially one for winding a clock or turning a valve.
• a pin, bolt, or wedge inserted between other pieces, or fitting into a hole or space designed for it, so as to lock parts together.
• each of several buttons on a panel for operating a computer, typewriter, or telephone.
• a lever depressed by the finger in playing an instrument such as the organ, piano, flute, or concertina.
• a lever operating a mechanical device for making or breaking an electric circuit, for example, in telegraphy.
• a thing that provides a means of gaining access to or understanding something
• an explanatory list of symbols used in a map, table, etc..
• a set of answers to exercises or problems.
• a word or system for solving a cipher or code.
• the first move in the solution of a chess problem.
• Computing a field in a record that is used to identify that record uniquely.
• Music a group of notes based on a particular note and comprising a scale, regarded as forming the tonal basis of a piece or passage of music
• the tone or pitch of someone’s voice
• the prevailing tone or tenor of a piece of writing, situation, etc.
• the prevailing range of tones or intensities in a painting
• the dry winged fruit of an ash, maple, or sycamore maple, typically growing in bunches; a samara.
• British the part of a first coat of wall plaster that passes between the laths and so secures the rest.
• [in singular] the roughness of a surface, helping the adhesion of plaster or other material.
• Basketball the keyhole-shaped area marked on the court near each basket, comprising the free-throw circle and the foul line.

adjective

• of paramount or crucial importance

verb (keys, keying, keyed /kēd/)
[with object]

• enter or operate on (data) by means of a computer keyboard or telephone keypad
• (usually be keyed) fasten (something) in position with a pin, wedge, or bolt
• British roughen (a surface) to help the adhesion of plaster or other material.
• word (an advertisement in a particular periodical), typically by varying the form of the address given, so as to identify the publication generating particular responses.
• North American informal be the crucial factor in achieving
• vandalize a car by scraping the paint from it with a key

http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/key

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For the last few weeks, I've been almost entirely without the motivation to write.  I wouldn't blame it on the writer's block which leaves words and subjects elusive, but rather the writer's block responsible for filling time with everything other than the space necessary for words to not only come, but also make their way onto the page. 

I'm about to enter into week three of the fall semester.  I have half-completed lesson plans and grading yet to complete.  I didn't get a chance this weekend to read even a single word of the reading I'd dive into because of my fascination with the subject or to spur on my own writing, though I did read the two chapters I assigned to be read for Tuesday in one of my courses.  I did get all of the domestic things done-- groceries were purchased, the house was picked up and vacuumed, laundry was switched.  All day long I contemplated the words I expected I'd be writing on for this week and none of them seemed quite right.  And so now, at 8 PM on Sunday night, as Sunday night football plays in the next room, here I am, finally, in front of the keys...the keys...

There's been a good deal of change cycling through me as of late.  Perspectives I've long held are shifting, in small ways and in rather large ways.  And yet, right alongside this modulation of melody, is the old, the very, very old, competing song.  A song I can't seem to stop playing.  It goes something like this-- dumb, fat, worthless...ugly, stupid, fat...fat, why, fat...I shouldn't try...I'm wasting...I'm wasteful...I'm nothing other than nothing other than dumb, fat, worthless. 

Catchy, isn't it?

I haven't seen my immediate family for quite awhile now.  I haven't seen my brother and his wife since their blessing ceremony in July of 2012.  I haven't seen my parent's since their Christmas visit a few days after the holiday this past December.  I haven't spoken with them via phone since January.  This is, decidedly, the longest period of time I've gone without that kind of contact.  Even email contact has been sporadic, though not for a lack of my mother's attempts.  It's been my fault.  My fault. Dumb, fat, worthless, my fault... old song...

Key change...

On days where the new song plays, I don't think in terms of fault.  I don't label myself in any way.  It isn't that I'm magically smart or worthy or faultless.  I just am and so I'm able to move freely.  My song can progress.  I can progress.

My thoughts, key changes, are also seasonal.  As I sit here now, the cool, leaning-toward-cold, almost-Autumn air, blows over my right shoulder.  My hands are cold.  In part, the change reminds me of going back to school as a kid, with much new-- new clothes, a new backpack, untouched school supplies, new teachers, new things to learn, new schedules, new locker combinations.  On another hand, the seasonal change reminds me of that time of year when the endlessly lingering summer, the stiflingly hot, stuck-at-home summer, finally kicked over into the relief of cooler weather, of feeling like I contributed to something bigger than myself.  There was music again and theater again and reading for class and writing for class and the endless attempts to connect to teachers as I tried to find one or two who truly felt I was special and had something to offer because I was looking, so desperately, for that kind of validation.  And when the season would shift and change again, looking for that validation and acceptance and love wasn't right.  I was wrong and fat and dumb and selfish and worthless and... play on, sweet, familiar song, play on...

I'm three weeks into the fall semester.  I have half-completed lesson plans and grading yet to do.  I still don't know what I want to say, but I suspect it's because things are changing and I'm still trying to tune in to the modulation, still trying to find the right key and the correct door.  There's a seasonal change coming that has already brought cinnamon brooms and homemade applesauce into our home.  There's a crafted pumpkin as the centerpiece on our dining room table sitting on an orange and yellow and maroon harvest plaid tablecloth, purchased on our way back home from stopping for cider donuts and the cider to drink with them.  Football is playing in the next room.  And I'm hoping somewhere in the midst of all of these things, I'll find a key capable of turning the old song off, if not forever, for longer than I ever have before.  As the temperatures get cooler and we move in, we can discover the warmth in the warmth in the center of our selves.