Sunday, December 27, 2015
Post Patron Blues
Bridgette, considered the Patron Saint of Ireland, has left the building.
She was here for Solstice. I sang her invocation composed by Mara Freeman. I felt her in the room. I’m carrying around the list surely she inspired and that I wrote Solstice night, adding to it this week as more list-worthy things occur to me - both personally and globally. Like how could I forget that I wanted to nurture the seed of personal right livelihood and global climate stabilization? It’s sixty-five degrees in New York, for Christ’s sake, and thirty-eight in Southern California!? Action is required, let’s get fired. Up. Set this sorry world back on its ass-tronomical course corrected warble through the universe.
Now that solstice is over, and Christmas too, I feel let down after all the anticipatory hype. Business as usual isn’t boring, exactly, but it lacks the high-octane rev of hustling to put some effort out to pull in the predictable comfort wrung from assembling red and green candles, pine scented soaps, and goo gaws with which my Gram enchanted me - all for the benefit of enchanting the enchantress herself, the six-year-old Grandie. I didn’t decorate much, but decorating is a must. Just to get in the spirit. So, Solstice early evening - before the sun set -found me plugging in lights, assembling the candles, and pulling out the little hagadas my friend Wendy Z and I assembled years ago to support others learning the tradition we’ve been practicing for over thirty years.
Tomorrow starts Kwanza. Maybe assembling Rastafarian artifacts will give further testament to the idea that busy trumps depressed.
Ultimately, I still believe that we’re meant to be depressed S.O.B. hibernators in the winter months. Lethargy and ennui serve a purpose. When you sit across the cave from Glurg, who keeps belching and farting, fowling the air in the only shelter you know for the tempest months, there’ve got to be times when you just want to get up and deck him. Lack of light yields a natural lack of endeavor and energy trickles to a slothful minimum. So maybe I’ve simply stripped down to the pro-survival human trait of sitting still and not killing Glurg. It’s in-born pro-survival of the species.
Bridey will kick up her heels when the sun returns. Giving a stir to our loins and blood. A quickening to get the work of survival for another winter in gear. Planting. Gathering. Hunting. Drying. Weaving. Sewing. Curing. Fermenting. All those hearth-felt arts must be pursued for the species to continue.
* * * * * * * * *
What would the world really look like if peace broke out and didn’t let go? Would we recognize it without its opposite pastime? Can we appreciate truly or even recognize any yin minus its yang?
The war-weary dream of a lasting peace. (Do the celibate dream of a lasting piece?) Sorry, that just slipped out… so to speak. But grass is grass: green is a spectrum. Is the imagined grass on the other side of the fence only a spectral green?
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Solstice
Darkness yields to light within the next four days.
December 21 marks the longest night, the shortest day.
It’s all in the tilt of our axis. That’s what makes the seasons.
Traditionally, early agricultural folk in the deep of winter culled the seeds, roots, and tubers that were not viable, and pursued other quieter activities than they enjoyed during summer.
Soul-stice. Be still my soul.
What’s the bustle about?
Why such human doings?
Hibernation is the appropriate activity at this time of year.
Conserve.
The reality from end of November through January First, in our modern consumer culture, is more like this:
My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - it gives a lovely light!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
We modern folk thumb our noses at tradition.
Oh, ye of bright light cell phones and instant iTunes, the world is at your fingertips - 24/7.
When do YOU go dark? When do you turn within to inquire what is true for you?
Taking inventory, I see what a year it’s been. I see where I came from; where I want to go from here. I see where some of my shortcomings are. Others are invisible to me. 20/20 hindsight being what it is… I have regrets, and a plan to use whatever resources are at my disposal to rectify my ooopses.
May this, the shortest day, be spent exactly as you like. May the dark fall gently about your shoulders in a comforting hug of welcomed absence of things to do.
This is the first year I have not decorated one whit. Not a card is up, not a candle is lit. Not a pine bough to be seen…
In some ways, I feel I should pull out all the stops for the Grandie’s sake, but just don’t seem to have it in me to do so. I only just got Thanksgiving put away!
’tis the season for folks to find their exit. One friend is dying. One died on Monday.
I’m glad our daughter has hosted several snow-flake cutting parties and has decorated to the nth degree over at her house! Their winter tree couldn’t hold one more ornament! Tiny as it is, it is gorgeous!
On the actual factual solstice, we will do our same little ceremony here by the fire - writing out what hasn’t worked during the past year, burning that, and writing out a seed to nurture in 2016 - symbolically planting it in the deep receiving earth to be kept safe ’til the light returns. I've kept over thirty years worth of seed lists.
Reviewing them is a trip through what has seemed important. The list gets simpler, shorter, distilled. Redux. Music is always in that seed to nurture, as are friendships, good communication with family, and between countries and all fractious factions.
There was a lovely Advent Celebration and Christmas play Sunday, presented by the children at the church I've been attending irregularly here in Oakland. I cried and took to my marrow the dearness of community working together to make a better world, honoring the children whose hopes and dreams are worth keeping alive.
Whether you write out resolutions, seeds, or shopping lists, may your candles burn bright against the black velvet night. Only one end burning is enough.
May peace and cooler heads prevail.
Deep peace be with you.
December 21 marks the longest night, the shortest day.
It’s all in the tilt of our axis. That’s what makes the seasons.
Traditionally, early agricultural folk in the deep of winter culled the seeds, roots, and tubers that were not viable, and pursued other quieter activities than they enjoyed during summer.
Soul-stice. Be still my soul.
What’s the bustle about?
Why such human doings?
Hibernation is the appropriate activity at this time of year.
Conserve.
The reality from end of November through January First, in our modern consumer culture, is more like this:
My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - it gives a lovely light!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
We modern folk thumb our noses at tradition.
Oh, ye of bright light cell phones and instant iTunes, the world is at your fingertips - 24/7.
When do YOU go dark? When do you turn within to inquire what is true for you?
Taking inventory, I see what a year it’s been. I see where I came from; where I want to go from here. I see where some of my shortcomings are. Others are invisible to me. 20/20 hindsight being what it is… I have regrets, and a plan to use whatever resources are at my disposal to rectify my ooopses.
May this, the shortest day, be spent exactly as you like. May the dark fall gently about your shoulders in a comforting hug of welcomed absence of things to do.
This is the first year I have not decorated one whit. Not a card is up, not a candle is lit. Not a pine bough to be seen…
In some ways, I feel I should pull out all the stops for the Grandie’s sake, but just don’t seem to have it in me to do so. I only just got Thanksgiving put away!
’tis the season for folks to find their exit. One friend is dying. One died on Monday.
I’m glad our daughter has hosted several snow-flake cutting parties and has decorated to the nth degree over at her house! Their winter tree couldn’t hold one more ornament! Tiny as it is, it is gorgeous!
On the actual factual solstice, we will do our same little ceremony here by the fire - writing out what hasn’t worked during the past year, burning that, and writing out a seed to nurture in 2016 - symbolically planting it in the deep receiving earth to be kept safe ’til the light returns. I've kept over thirty years worth of seed lists.
Reviewing them is a trip through what has seemed important. The list gets simpler, shorter, distilled. Redux. Music is always in that seed to nurture, as are friendships, good communication with family, and between countries and all fractious factions.
There was a lovely Advent Celebration and Christmas play Sunday, presented by the children at the church I've been attending irregularly here in Oakland. I cried and took to my marrow the dearness of community working together to make a better world, honoring the children whose hopes and dreams are worth keeping alive.
Whether you write out resolutions, seeds, or shopping lists, may your candles burn bright against the black velvet night. Only one end burning is enough.
May peace and cooler heads prevail.
Deep peace be with you.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Hair Pollution
As a child, I learned from my Grandmother Florence May Banham Stern to clean my hairbrush, with a comb to remove the stray hairs, and to wrap them around my finger. She put hers into a round Deco-design amber-colored plastic box made especially for that purpose. It sat on her glass-topped mahogany dressing table, where she kept the annual school photos of all us kids - slipped between the wood and the glass. Her commodious bedroom was papered blue, with long-stemmed Navy and red carnations running diagonally from floor to ceiling. I put my swirls of hair into a plastic margarine tub through a hole I’d cut in the center of the lid. It sat on a small chest in a bathroom I'd paneled with aromatic cedar closet lining. Not as elegant as my Grammy’s Deco tub, but about the same size, and satisfyingly serviceable.
As a young woman, my hair hung lower than my hips. One morning, mid hair-saving ritual, my daughters asked, “What’re you gonna do with all that hair, Mom?”
“Someday, I’ll stuff a pillow with it, so you can pass it down the line to your children and grandkids.” The thought of it made them scrunch their noses.
Eye-rolling was perfected that day along with deep sighs of disgust and disbelief.
* * * * * * * * *
At the Healing Light Center Church, in the 1980's, fellow long-haired student Joe Janosko and I got to talking about this ritual, for some reason now lost to me. He assured me it was far kinder for the environment to collect hair than to put it outside. Many people do, put it outside Joe told me. He was a Viet Nam Vet with a port wine birth mark covering half his face a brilliant deep blue, purple and magenta. He had a distinctive limp where a war injury had fused his right hip to the femur. Gentle soul that he was, he explained that birds pick up stray bits of hair like the ones I described all curled around my finger. It is soft. The birds line their nests with it - unwittingly subjecting their young to those treacherously tough tendrils, which can wind around a wee wing, cutting off the blood supply thus deforming the developing bird - or worse, strangle the little hatchlings.
I'm still waiting for the sewing elves to complete that pillow stuffed with Gran'Ma's tresses for my granddaughter. Right now, the hair collection, that ranges from auburn to Bozo-red, to silver-white, resides in two large zippered plastic bags at the back of the sewing closet.
* * * * * * * * *
As the spectacle of Donald Trump holds a lens to America’s values, I’m beginning to think that hairspray must contain lead. Surely these heavy metals account for his idiocy. My husband asks that this “birther,” who demanded that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama show proof that he was born in the United States, produce a similar certificate showing origin of his (Trump’s) hairpiece. Certainly, what’s under that toupee is polluting our air-waves and engendering hate. Talk about heir pollution! His daddy must be turning over in his grave.
Every day Trump holds court in his buffoonery, is a bad heir, hair, and air day.
As a young woman, my hair hung lower than my hips. One morning, mid hair-saving ritual, my daughters asked, “What’re you gonna do with all that hair, Mom?”
“Someday, I’ll stuff a pillow with it, so you can pass it down the line to your children and grandkids.” The thought of it made them scrunch their noses.
Eye-rolling was perfected that day along with deep sighs of disgust and disbelief.
* * * * * * * * *
At the Healing Light Center Church, in the 1980's, fellow long-haired student Joe Janosko and I got to talking about this ritual, for some reason now lost to me. He assured me it was far kinder for the environment to collect hair than to put it outside. Many people do, put it outside Joe told me. He was a Viet Nam Vet with a port wine birth mark covering half his face a brilliant deep blue, purple and magenta. He had a distinctive limp where a war injury had fused his right hip to the femur. Gentle soul that he was, he explained that birds pick up stray bits of hair like the ones I described all curled around my finger. It is soft. The birds line their nests with it - unwittingly subjecting their young to those treacherously tough tendrils, which can wind around a wee wing, cutting off the blood supply thus deforming the developing bird - or worse, strangle the little hatchlings.
I'm still waiting for the sewing elves to complete that pillow stuffed with Gran'Ma's tresses for my granddaughter. Right now, the hair collection, that ranges from auburn to Bozo-red, to silver-white, resides in two large zippered plastic bags at the back of the sewing closet.
* * * * * * * * *
As the spectacle of Donald Trump holds a lens to America’s values, I’m beginning to think that hairspray must contain lead. Surely these heavy metals account for his idiocy. My husband asks that this “birther,” who demanded that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama show proof that he was born in the United States, produce a similar certificate showing origin of his (Trump’s) hairpiece. Certainly, what’s under that toupee is polluting our air-waves and engendering hate. Talk about heir pollution! His daddy must be turning over in his grave.
Every day Trump holds court in his buffoonery, is a bad heir, hair, and air day.
Monday, December 7, 2015
Joyful Human Animals
When The Painted Turtle has a party, I want to go.
My beloved and I did just that over the weekend.
Leaving Oakland on Friday morning, we toodled down 5 - the desertified core of California, to Los Angeles to see a young camper whose condition is to fragile for him to go to camp anymore, then to a dear friend’s annual artistic offerings party to stock up on Karen Fox’s beautiful gifts and cards, then to see my older brother and his wife, dear friends, and finally to dine with my younger brother and his wife before heading back up 5 a brief way to The Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, California.
Arriving about 10:45pm, we found staff putting finishing touches on the preparations for a fabulous weekend of merriment. We enjoyed some brief catch-up visits and hit the hay.
Saturday afternoon, four-hundred and fifty members of families, whose kids have attended camp, partook of lunch, arts, crafts, creating gingerbread houses, horse-drawn sleigh rides, carnival games, archery, remote control race car racing, teen tech corner, fishing, boating, dancing, singing, and magic & mayhem during a faux snowball fight in the huge gymnasium. It was a chilly day. I was glad of being assigned to arts & crafts - indoors! Dancing out on the grassy slope for the final closing and Jingle Bell Ball, was a toot-chattery experience. Warm hugs, and the families were on their way.
When the last family left, the generous staff went into Volunteer Appreciation mode, providing opportunities for us to partake similarly of the joyful activities named above. We had a pizza party, followed by fellowship and opportunities to make our own crafts (modge-podge on glass candle holders, painting mugs, building snowmen & snow women from disks cut from tree-branches), and game playing over hot cocoa and cookies. There’s a new feature at TPT which I saw for the first time Saturday night. It looks like a tall robot talking head, but is a camera that you can pose before with friends and props, then e-mail the photo to friends and family. Trippy technology! Evidently, the teens loved that feature during the afternoon options.
Sunday morning, there was a polar bear plunge. Those dozen or so hardy (fool-hardy?) folk jumped into the pool for a true ice-breaker. It was about 31 degrees. After that there were many options. Silk screening T-shirts, and climbing the rock wall were my two choices. Even with a “hurt-paw” shoulder, I was able to scramble up the wall and ring the bell at the top. I suppose it’s my white hair that causes the double-take reaction, but several people came up to me during brunch to exclaim, “You looked like spiderman gliding up that wall, Moose!” Just FUN! So grateful to the belayer folk who literally have our back.
This volunteer appreciation day was a first for The Painted Turtle. The staff efforts are MUCH appreciated by those of us who lingered to enjoy being on the “other side” of these marvelous activities which we usually supervise for campers. The invitation to be a kid again helps us understand how potent a little freedom to explore, endless supplies, and a little encouragement from loving staff members can help bring us back to center and back to the JOY of being a human animal.
If Camp has a party, I wanna BE there!
My beloved and I did just that over the weekend.
Leaving Oakland on Friday morning, we toodled down 5 - the desertified core of California, to Los Angeles to see a young camper whose condition is to fragile for him to go to camp anymore, then to a dear friend’s annual artistic offerings party to stock up on Karen Fox’s beautiful gifts and cards, then to see my older brother and his wife, dear friends, and finally to dine with my younger brother and his wife before heading back up 5 a brief way to The Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, California.
Arriving about 10:45pm, we found staff putting finishing touches on the preparations for a fabulous weekend of merriment. We enjoyed some brief catch-up visits and hit the hay.
Saturday afternoon, four-hundred and fifty members of families, whose kids have attended camp, partook of lunch, arts, crafts, creating gingerbread houses, horse-drawn sleigh rides, carnival games, archery, remote control race car racing, teen tech corner, fishing, boating, dancing, singing, and magic & mayhem during a faux snowball fight in the huge gymnasium. It was a chilly day. I was glad of being assigned to arts & crafts - indoors! Dancing out on the grassy slope for the final closing and Jingle Bell Ball, was a toot-chattery experience. Warm hugs, and the families were on their way.
When the last family left, the generous staff went into Volunteer Appreciation mode, providing opportunities for us to partake similarly of the joyful activities named above. We had a pizza party, followed by fellowship and opportunities to make our own crafts (modge-podge on glass candle holders, painting mugs, building snowmen & snow women from disks cut from tree-branches), and game playing over hot cocoa and cookies. There’s a new feature at TPT which I saw for the first time Saturday night. It looks like a tall robot talking head, but is a camera that you can pose before with friends and props, then e-mail the photo to friends and family. Trippy technology! Evidently, the teens loved that feature during the afternoon options.
Sunday morning, there was a polar bear plunge. Those dozen or so hardy (fool-hardy?) folk jumped into the pool for a true ice-breaker. It was about 31 degrees. After that there were many options. Silk screening T-shirts, and climbing the rock wall were my two choices. Even with a “hurt-paw” shoulder, I was able to scramble up the wall and ring the bell at the top. I suppose it’s my white hair that causes the double-take reaction, but several people came up to me during brunch to exclaim, “You looked like spiderman gliding up that wall, Moose!” Just FUN! So grateful to the belayer folk who literally have our back.
This volunteer appreciation day was a first for The Painted Turtle. The staff efforts are MUCH appreciated by those of us who lingered to enjoy being on the “other side” of these marvelous activities which we usually supervise for campers. The invitation to be a kid again helps us understand how potent a little freedom to explore, endless supplies, and a little encouragement from loving staff members can help bring us back to center and back to the JOY of being a human animal.
If Camp has a party, I wanna BE there!
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