Epiphany, Please

Twelfth Night

Epiphany

Boxing Day

Gifts of the Maggi

Holiday cards to respond to.

Putting Christmas away

On Solstice, did I write down everything in my seed-to-nurture-this-year that I meant to?

Quicken

Taxes

New calendars up

Putting away the old year is like tucking an octopus into bed… Tendrils and tentacles, each with its own brain, each doing a different task, will not be unified and cooperate with my agenda. I keep finding bobbles and goo gaws hiding in decorative clusters on mantle and bathroom counters.

Why did I put it all up and out? For what purpose? 

The grandie fondled and played with every one of the table decorations I nestled into fresh juniper… the angel and choir-boy candles I used to marvel at on my grandmother’s table… sigh… that’s worth it, right? And I love the smell of fresh greens as I vacuum them up where they’ve fallen to the floor.

But now…

What do I do with the old calendar’s pretty nature photos? Toss or use for wrapping paper?

What do I do about found tissue wrappings lurking under couches from the grandie’s gift-opening spree on Capitalism Day? Recycling bin or fold and re-use?

How many boxes shall I save? There’s that really pretty gold-foil one that has a hinged lid… I’ll save that.

The rest of the detritus and hype go into the rubbish bin. 

Mercifully, every year gets easier and lower key. (Soon we’ll be in the bass register!)

My Grandmother Florence Stern started paring away all the madness in 1973 when she issued an edict stating that in this family we believe no one over the age of eighteen years is wanting for anything and that only the kiddies get gifties. We’ve (mostly) held true to that idea over the intervening forty-five years. Our daughters have had to remind us on occasion not to buy them stuff, but they don’t seem to mind the essential pouch of beautiful stationery hand-crafted of decoupaged flowers by their childhood dance-teacher Karen Fox. So that’s a given.

My oldest friend - meaning we’ve known one another since we were three - sends a box in the mail to me several times a year. Retail therapy is her sane-maker. Jewish Women’s Thrift Council Stores and Saint Anne’s are her go-to shops when the going gets tough. I no longer have wall space for the darling story-book character watercolor paintings, or the lithographs and woodcuts on friendship. I have a complete set of sock monkey dolls - one for every season and occasion you might think of. There is no more room in my house for the stuff she sends. Yet, she sends it. Ah, that’s what I forgot to put away… the Christmas-Tree-Apron-wearing Sock Monkey. She sits on the chair by the fire place, her jingle bells glowing in this morning’s cloudy light.

The new-fangled year of 2018 is upon us. I had hopes that it would be an easier one to navigate than 2017, but it seems to be off to a rocket’s red glare sort of start, as Kim Jong Un and  Mr. No-Collusion-Epitome-of-Sanity-Bigger-Button-Small-Fingered-POTUS trade insults. 

I do have that old folk album with the song made famous by the Kingston Trio in the 1950s or ‘60s which I still love…

They’re rioting in Africa

They’re starving in Spain

There are hurricanes in Florida

And Texas needs rain

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls

The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the poles…

Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch

And I don’t like anybody very much

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud

For man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud

And we know for certain that some lovely day

Someone will set the sparks off and we will all be blown away

They’re rioting in Africa

There’re strikes in Iran

What Nature doesn’t do to us

Will be done by our fellow man

The whole charming song has cheerful whistling after each line.

May you find some semblance of JOY in the new year. May 2018 be kind to you and good for the planet.

Amen. Ah, woman.

Tsunami Mommy and Other Year-End Thoughts

Looking through the slips of paper on which I've written random thoughts and quotes throughout the year,  I found some fun, funny and touching ones. May you find one that resonates with you. 


The best things in life are nearest:
Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
                                         
                                       ~Robert Luis Stevenson


If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?        
                  
         ~Mevlana Rumi, 13th Century Sufi poet and mystic


Tsunami Mommy is one who, in an effort to do everything for her sweet darling child, knocks his feet out from under him. 

                                         ~Melinda M-S


We turn to writing because no one will let us finish a long-winded story (that they've heard before).
                            
                                                ~ Jennifer Castrup


Learning is weightless: A treasure you can always carry easily.
                                               ~Chinese Proverb


Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

                ~ Coretta Scott King, civil rights activist


In the web of life
     Our rhythms reverberate
          Let us dance with love

                                                            ~M M-S


I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) it. This makes it hard to plan the day.

                                                      ~ E. B. White


The secret of Happiness is insensitivity.

                                          ~ Tennessee Williams


If you're happy and you know it, you're oblivious.

                              ~ Mark Robert Maxwell-Smith


Some things have to be believed to be seen.

                                                   Ralph Hodgson


No Society can function democratically until women are considered equal on every basis, particularly to themselves. You will never attain such a thing other than through your own self-support.

                                            ~ Mayan prediction


Art disease is caused by a hardening of the categories.

                                             ~ Adina Reinhardt


I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson, to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into power which can move the world.

                                           ~ Mohandas Ghandi


If you ever find 
yourself, some where 
lost and surrounded 
by enemies 
who won't let you 
speak in your own language 
who destroy your statues 
and instruments, who ban 
your omm bomm ba boom 
then you are in trouble 
deep trouble
they ban your 
oom boom ba boom 
you in deep deep 
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred years 
to get 
out!

                                              ~ Amiri Baraka


I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear.

                                                       ~ Rosa Parks


A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

                                              ~ Margaret Atwood


"Remember only this one thing," said Badger.  "The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put theses stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves."

                                                   ~ Barry Lopez


May we care for ourselves and for one another, and may we act to preserve this world. May our wonder stir gratitude of such magnitude that it fuels our current actions to preserve the planet's magic for future generations so they too may marvel at its intricate and inexplicable beauty.

Blank Scrabble Piece

May the coming year be a blank scrabble piece for each of us to write upon it our fondest dreams. 

May you grab with certainty and conviction that which makes your eyes light up and forget the rest of the dross.

May the beauty of Nature and her ferociousness inspire us to worship and care for her. 

May the light you carry within you illuminate the dark spots in your surround - inspiring others to do the same: Beam out our love light into the dark night.

May you have good healthy snacks available for watching the Rose Parade or football or whatever thou art inspired to do on New Year's Day. 

May you commune with Nature whenever possible.

May you walk much and drive less; eat fresh and just enough.

May you laugh often till your belly hurts.

May music inspire your heart to sing its own song.

With love and gratitude do I wish these things for thee and thy kin.

~Melinda

Diamond Anatomy

The Earth Diamond at the base of our pelvis

(Drawing by Frank Netter, MD, Atlas of Human Anatomy, plate 336)

(I added red dots for emphasis of diamond shape)

The Sky Diamond at the top of our head

(Photo of plastic replica of newborn skull from my collection of faux bones)

In Meditation

In Meditation one morning, I had an internal visualization about the anatomy of a seated human  that causes a diamond to form at the base of the pelvis and another diamond at the top of the head.

The diamond at the bottom is formed by a sit bone (ischial tuberositiy) on either side, the tailbone (coccyx) at the back and the pubis symphysis up front.

The fontanel of a newborn, likewise, is a diamond shape formed by two curved parietal bones on either side and the frontal bone, with a diamond shaped opening among the bones until they fill in during the first year of life. The bones grow together and form sagittal sutures — like interlocking puzzle pieces only more intricate.

While sitting, but before meditating, I orient by taking an awareness inventory. The routine goes something like this: Earth, sky, front, back, right side, left side, outside and inside. I can feel each part come alive, or not, as I bring conscious awareness to it. When it’s hard to get consciousness into any part of me, I simply note it. Oh, not yet fully awake. It helps to do a few simple yoga poses to wake the body up before sitting in quiet. Some days are easier than others to be conscious of my entire body.

This particular morning, I was keenly aware of the diamond shape as I oriented to Earth. My pelvic floor felt alive and the shape among all the bones was particularly clear in my visual cortex, perhaps because of increased sensation that comes of sitting on a wood block. When I moved my awareness to the top of my head for the sky orientation, a similar diamond shape presented itself to my awareness. 

Even though our adult skulls no longer open to sky, after one parietal bone presumably slid over the other to allow our big head to navigate through the birth passage so we could emerge, and the bones knit together during our first year of life, there is still the slightest imprint of what was there before the calcification process was complete. It feels like a diamond.

The significance may be of no import to anyone but me, but it delighted me to notice that correspondence of our central skeleton’s two diamonds top and bottom! It’s bound to be a rich life with diamonds fore and aft.

I then went on to recognize an imaginary diamond shining from the breast bone like that on the sculpture of a maiden carved to be mast-head of a ship, and the shape made by the trapezius muscles of the back. More correlations of paired diamonds. (It was a busy mind sort of meditation that morning!) Then, I dropped into a lovely weightless ease of being upright with no drag from the body. The diamonds lingered.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

When I was in sixth grade, Rhonda Dunstan and I would draw crosses and then draw lines between each of the points. The finished product was a diamond shape. Perhaps diamonds are a girls best friend — on the baseball field and in God’s Eyes - made of two sticks with yarn wrapped around them. (I swore I’d never own a real diamond because of the huge kerfuffle in my household when I was about nine-years-old. My Grammy Maxwell, a widow since before I was born, had recently remarried and somehow lost her new diamond ring down my mother’s sink. They never found it and there was as much grief and upset about that ring as there had been around my best friend Angelika’s mom dying that same year. And anyway, most gemstone diamonds that I’ve seen do not have that iconic cross-with-points-connected shape.

Kites we flew on kite staff had that same pleasing shape. My friend Katy and I built a kite at her house in Pacific Palisades. The handy part of having parents who don’t pay much attention to the play of their young ones is that we children got to explore deeply how to do things and how not to do things. Katy and I built this kite by using a hack-saw to cut off two strips of plywood from a hunk we found in her carport. We nailed the shorter piece to the longer piece so it made a cross shape and covered it over with newspaper held on with lots of Scotch tape and rubber cement. I remember the smell of the friction-burnt wood and the rubber cement. We tied torn-up rags on as a tail and found a ball of yarn for kite string. We laughed and laughed. That sucker must’ve weighed seven or eight pounds and we couldn’t hold it aloft long enough to catch a wind without muscle fatigue. We needed a gale force wind to catch it and carry it aloft. Woe to anyone who was in its path when the wind died.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 

Our mailbox at this time of year is filled with cards of all sorts — including funny ones, secular, religious, utilitarian, heart-felt, skinny and fat santas, reindeer, trees, dreidels, creches, and giant diamonds in the sky above the lowly manger in Bethlehem. There are my sixth grade stars! What fun to revisit them and to wonder if that’s how they came into our consciousness and how we came to replicate them compulsively on our paper-bag book-covers, notebooks and nearly every paper we turned in as homework. Rhonda and I seldom had to do the cursive homework. Our handwriting was that good!

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Over the weekend, my husband and I watched a four-star (four diamond?!) movie called Okja. It is wonderful, but not getting the press it deserves. I highly recommend it for story, acting, directing, special effects and timeliness. Mostly, it is a heart-warming and inspiring tale. Not for children, but about a female child with gumption and a very intelligent creature. 

May you enjoy WHY-A-CAT-TOY*

*Whatever Holiday You All Celebrate At This Time Of Year!

Good Grief

Sunday was Children's Remembrance Day for parents whose children died too young. At George Mark Children's House in San Leandro, many families gathered in the afternoon and early evening to decoupage memory jars with stickers, sayings, butterflies, and glitter, and they placed votive lights inside. Jarring memories of their beloved (pun intended) to take home.

From the kitchen came food, hot cider, warm hugs and lots of Kleenex.

In the Sanctuary two ceremonies were held, an early seating and a later one. Each family placed a single rose in a vase after speaking the name of their child aloud. What comfort in community! What beauty created out of tragic loss to see all those colorful roses together; to hear the sighs and cries and accept the make-up of the day for all assembled was streaming tears.

The Threshold Singers provided soft cushioning for our ears as all the names of children lost from the past thirteen years were read again. Four-hundred and twelve names read aloud from 2004 to 2017, from one facility in one community. 

It fell to me to translate the ceremony so that Spanish speaking families could partake. After the formal gathering, I spent the rest of the evening listening; primarily listening, sometimes mirroring the recuerdos (memories) of madres, padres y abuelitos. (Mothers and fathers and grandparents.)

I'm reminded that while terrible things happen in isolation; healing happens in community. 

To watch my beloved blowing bubbles and being his goofy, kid-magnet self with teeny baby beings to teens, was a great joy. I see him setting down and watering rootlets in our new chosen community. Ultimately, our ties to camps in Southern California will give way to these new venues for volunteerism closer to home. Kids are kids. Families all over are in need of the clown who can meet them where they are in their journey. Tears and laughter, so close together. 

Children with whom we've interacted over the years will never be forgotten, the long list will be added too with names of these new friends, families and fine folk who volunteer or professionally staff so many different venues ~ from hospitals to camps to hospice / respite care facilities.

Grief is a terrible thing to bear in solitude. Truly, it is borne as a lighter burden when carried in company and community.

From the ceremony:

We Remember Them

At the rising of the sun and at its going down,

We remember them

At the blowing of the wind and at the chill of winter, 

We remember them

At the opening buds and at the rebirth of spring,

We remember them

At the blueness of the sky and the warmth of summer, 

We remember them

At the rustling of the leaves and at the beauty of autumn,

We remember them

At the beginning of the year and when it ends,

We remember them

When we are weary and in need of strength,

We remember them

When we are lost and sick at heart,

We remember them

When we have joys we yearn to share,

We remember them

So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us,

We remember them

Adapted from "The Gates of Prayer" 

by Rabbi Jack Reimer

Wakes and Waves

Harvey Weinstein’s Wake I’d like to attend,

If all the “Me Too’s” are accurate in the end

Lengthening list of perpetrators grows

For all those who lie, so too grows their nose

The sky is falling ‘cause half who hold it aloft

Are beaten down for being too soft

Have been down so long it looks “up” to us

Struck mute till Harvey’s antics allowed a good fuss 

Open the window, to let out the stink

How low did you think some people could sink?

Open the window to let the truth in

Step up and welcome the brave and good men

“Women and children first” sounds noble and nice

Words to live by after throwing the rice.

Yet, in practice they seem first for sacrifice

"Rule of thumb”measured the beating twig’s size

In the animal kingdom must males display,

Beating their chests and killing their prey

Showing their tool to all so they’ll see

The lord of the tribe has the biggest wee wee?

Open the window, to let out the stink

How low did you think some people could sink?

Open the window to let the truth in

Step up and welcome the brave and good men

Learning to use our top brain over lower

Cherishing children and women? True Power!

Society’s strong as its own weakest link

My fear is too many are full of the stink

Can women ride the wave toward safe shore

Ride the crest do our best and a little bit more

Watch for dark currents that could pull us under

Will we seize our equality this time? I wonder

Open the window, let the stars wink

Knowing and nodding they bid us to think

Open the window in truth let us soak

Step up and welcome the brave and good folk