Category Archives: Personal

Seven years ago

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Well beyond time to show up here if I’m going to call myself a blogger, but honestly, nothing original is urging itself upon me to say. How about a few days of my journal from seven years ago then? The prose is a bit loopy in places, but it’s a journal — one is talking to oneself! My words from the past often seem strange to me, events already over and long forgotten, but there I was, in those days. (Do you remember these episodes in “the news”?)

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

8 p.m. Enjoying cool air of balcony. Fallen flower petals litter the floor, cherry tomatoes now eager to ripen. Helmut at Habitat [for Humanity work site] today and I did revisions [to a story and essay].

Per David Brooks, who opined at NYT that he was trying to divest his brain of Trump, and Garrison Keillor who had a great column about his high school reunion and how the man’s name didn’t come up at all, and then how what’s (more) important is tomatoes, I didn’t watch news in the afternoon hour I often allow myself to puzzle, but listened instead to an Eleanor Wachtel interview with Edna O’Brien. “Oh wow,” I said to myself when it was done, “that was good.” Truly rich in ideas, emotion, compassion-capacity. – So all good, and turns out I have an Edna O’Brien short fiction collection on my shelves. –

But during my brief victory away from the news, there is a new “development” that occurs. Bombast from North Korea, bombast from D.T. who promises “fire and fury…and force,” “like the world has never seen.” Shock, for he sounds just like Kim Jong Un. It’s really quite frightening, this build-up of tension, both of them nuclear powers.

Friday, Aug. 11, 2017

Two quite opposite emotions today—one a sense of fear/sick/disgust/worry—who knows how to describe it, as the rhetoric continues, and continues—ON THE U.S. SIDE. It’s quite frightening really, and as leaders urge the rhetoric be lowered, D.T. carries right on. His poll #s continue to drop, as markets are too, and it’s as if he thinks he’ll gain people back by talking tough. “People like it,” he says…. It really did quite bother me. I bleat it all Godward, yes, but am mostly bothered by piety [when someone says] well we’re in the last days, we don’t understand, just “watch and pray.” That is good advice, but are we really in the last days? I think we have to resist warmongering like that. Poor Koreans and others in Asia, Guam, etc. Lord have mercy.

But, the world is coming to an end, so why not buy a painting? Was compelled by a “R. Lake” I saw in the thrift shop yesterday, a landscape, flat though low mountains on horizon, a large tree centre, some small buildings. It’s not like real detailed, you have to stand back, but there’s something about the blues. Anyways, it was still there this morning, had in the meanwhile looked up R. Lake, which is Randall Lake, born 1947, of Utah, ex-Mormon, his paintings recently more political—gay man, taking on Mormon Church for their damage to LGBTQ etc. $65. So happy with this acquisition, now in our bedroom.

Haircut today too, some puzzle fun, and some work (revisions), though not as much as I should have, if I wasn’t so anxious about nuclear war or busy rearranging our walls.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

So yesterday I posted my feelings on FB—re North Korea, my cries for Korean people, opinion that DT brought world to brink—….quite a few comments, which is always a little surprising… Karla B. alerts me to tomorrow’s Sunday of Prayer for Peaceful Reunification of Korean Pen. Betty B. says Australia feels very close. John L. proposes how both leaders will spin this. Carol Ann W. recalls Cuban Missile Crisis, how she played Bach. Dayna D. shares Anne Lamott:

What to do in the face of Locked and Loaded? The usual: Help! Thanks. Wow. Radical self-care. Trust & surrender. Serve the poor. Breathe.

 So, interesting conversations that FB provokes. I just “like” everyone and leave it at that.

BUT, End of the World is so yesterday, she says (to herself) sarcastically. Who’s even thinking about that?! Today it’s Charlottesville, VA. Neo-Nazis, KKK, Alt Right gathering, violence and counter protests. A car rams counter-protestors, a woman killed, 3 deaths in all. DT generically calls for unity and condemns violence “from many sides, from many sides.” Dos not condemn white supremacists who chant Heil Trump and wear MAGA hats, David Duke who reminds who elected him. I listened to the statement and agree, it was tepid, he who can be so specific in his criticisms. He… can’t name it for what it is.

Someday, maybe 10-20-30 year from now, if someone reads this, they may say, well is she just hyperventilating, worrying… Believe me, it is this bad on this continent, this sense of division, this sense of something terrible unleashed from the top. “Blood and soil,” they chanted, as they walked with their tiki torches. And “Jews will not replace us.”

Well, the Sabbath nears. Breathe, dear heart. Read your Edna O’Brien book. Think of your new painting-print. Your kids and grands… [Gratitude] for this day. For the blackberries we picked this morning. For the Staples store that opened nearby today. For a pot of yellow mums. For Helmut.

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Did you turn into someone else?

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When my eldest granddaughter was 3-something, I showed her our wedding photo, which  happened to stand on the family mantel in her home. I said it was Grandpa and me. Obviously she’d never made the connection, for she looked back and forth from the photo to me, comparing the young woman with long dark hair inside the frame to the woman with short grey hair and glasses who was holding her.

“Grandma,” she finally said, earnestly, “did you turn into someone else?”

I can’t remember what I said in reply, though I chuckled. I still chuckle, thinking of it more than a a decade and a half later. What a great question.

I could have said Absolutely, yes, I’ve turned into someone else, in fact I’ve been a number of “elses” over my lifetime, at the cellular level for sure, but in other ways too, in awareness, knowledge, thinking, views on matters theological, political, and otherwise. Change is the stuff of life and I’ve tried to be open to changes and conversions of all kinds Here’s hoping it shows. 

But no surprise my granddaughter was confused. I get confused about myself too. I shopped for pants this week. Strolling the mall, seeing the window displays, I realized that when I look at the mannequins, in some weird way I still inhabit the sense of being a teen, assume myself slender and taut. Once inside the change room then, with my items to try on and it’s Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s that you’re looking at? and it’s someone with soft belly, soft thighs. With a sigh, recognition realigns with reality.

On the other hand, I could have said, No, no, no, same me, or better said, same old me. Surface is surface, and underneath is the me I’ve always been. It seems to me that there’s something basic in personality and sense of self that threads back as far as memory can take one and furthermore, that this thread, at least for a child with a reasonably happy childhood, doesn’t want to break. Shouldn’t.

I was struck by something I heard at an online funeral recently: the deceased person, on getting their terminal diagnosis, had said, “I’ve enjoyed being alive.”

Me too, I thought, I enjoy being alive.

Joy and wonder. That’s the part that feels unchanged, or when lost, can be recovered. It’s the entering the kingdom like a child. Being four or maybe five or six, the wonder of hearing exquisite music come out of a huge tape player above my head on the table. The wonder of fields and hills we played in, the wonder of “swimming” in a foot of creek water, the wonder of those letters on a page that make up words and can be read, the wonder of God is love.

Oh you sweet, bright grandchild of mine, did I turn into someone else? Yes and no. No and yes.

And you, what about you? Did you turn into someone else?

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A February day.

December’s great big decision

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This week — between Christmas and New Year’s and a few days beyond – can be anticlimactic after packed and people-full holiday events, can even be, as someone on Twitter once remarked, “strange and timeless and heavy with depression and restlessness,” but that’s not the case for me this year. On the contrary, it seems among the loveliest of weeks. There’s a sense of fulfilment in what’s just happened and no particular obligation left, while the tree twinkles still with its lights and special ornaments, the poinsettia carries on with its remarkably radiant red, and there are leftovers to eat. Even for someone who’s semi-retired, there’s an impression of extra permission in the air: do what you want.

This airiness, this possibility, threads me back to such weeks in my childhood, when the main events of Christmas were done but we had more days free of school and did a puzzle, played games, read for hours, skated. Oh how we skated! Round and round and round the rink, in the bliss of the crisp outdoors and the ecstatic glide of blades on ice.

This week I have a puzzle spread out, and enough to read. I’m thinking about the past and the future. Not exactly making resolutions but assessing. Playing with images of Spirit. (“I take refuge in the shadow of your wings” Ps.57:1) Considering the multiple conflicts and sadnesses in the world.

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And then there’s December’s great big decision (don’t laugh): next year’s journal. I’ve done large notebooks, Moleskines and knockoffs, in-between sizes. I’m fussy by now: the paper has to be quality so it doesn’t bleed through with ink on both sides, it has to be narrowly lined. (I’ve also tried unlined.)

I liked this year’s journal book, but can’t find another like it. I have something close though am wary of the coil binding going wonky on me.

At the juncture of a new notebook, I brood about my journaling practice too. Should I go for diary-like, or intermittent random thoughts? How about one of those one-line-a-day attempts? Sounds like a fun challenge but might be like handcuffs for a writer. Gratitude and grump, or just gratitude?

In In The Jaws of the Black Dogs, John Bentley Mays judged his Aunt Candalia’s diaries as “performances of dread, a stalling of death… an attempt to ground herself, if on no more solid ground than the shifting site of writing….”

Mays’ critique stings, for yes, the journals/diaries certainly add up to “the suffocating intimacy of details” over the years, but then again, if I hadn’t noted these quotes when reading his book back in 2007, could I have used them here? At any rate, the new year approaches and I’ve got an (almost decided upon) notebook waiting as pristine and empty as a field of new snow, ready for the first foot marks of the first day to be written over it.

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I wish you all a good new year, friends, however you live and mark your field of days. May you be blessed!