embracing change

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The Geese

It’s like that. One day you realize something has changed. For all I know the geese may have been back for several weeks. But last week, I noticed them in all their honking glory.

2015 spring 3My part of the Earth has turned from winter to spring. It was cold yesterday, but it was spring cold. One of those days that surprises you with its chill. You know winter has passed because the signs are all there: the blossoming trees, the tulips and daffodils finding their bloom, the lengthening days, the woodpecker on the telephone pole.

The chill is as cold as a winter’s day, but it is spring cold. A reminder that change isn’t fixed. It has its own rhythm. Change happens over time.

I’ve been trying to come up with a description of my blog, Writing Shed. What it’s about. The closest I could come to was that I’m a woman growing older writing about what a woman growing older writes about. Which means I write about life’s stuff.

The dust seems to be settling for Tom and me. A new reality in which cancer is a player, but not what defines our life. It catapulted us into a more intense experience of life, but now we are settling in again to the mundane: paying bills, daily household chores, grappling with what to do next.

The mundane is also life. We enhance it by making sure to honor the grace of everyday living: the time we spend talking with each other over breakfast; the attention paid to making dinner a meal worthy of leisure enjoyment—and then enjoying it at a leisurely pace.

And then, of course, we have to do the dishes.

I just rewrote a piece that describes how I went from thinking being a married woman was a what that trumped me, to understanding that anything I do is nothing if it doesn’t include me. I get to write my own story.

The piece is based on the period following my divorce in 1974, which was chaotic. I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t a married woman, so what was I? I had ended the marriage. Felt that I had escaped it. But I had no real idea of why.

I traveled to Europe alone in 1976 (radical for my background). That was when I decided I was a writer. And when, without my realizing it, I began to shape being a married woman around who I am.

But, as I said, change isn’t fixed. It takes place over time. The dust has to settle.

There is something about the recent before-and-after-the-shark event we just went through that has helped settle the dust wrought by that nearly 40-years-ago seed of change.

I am a writer and a married woman. The shark made me realize that being a married woman has a unique vulnerability. It’s not so much a what I am as a who I am by virtue of loving.

Change is time. Time is change.

I’m a woman growing older writing about growing older. Which is life’s stuff.

I look forward to the geese family stopping traffic on Third Avenue—the adult geese raising their necks in defiance as they usher their fuzzy goslings from one side of the road to the other.

Growing older. Aren’t we all?

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Mature Women Wanted

Mature Women Wanted
Link posted on Craigslist, Gigs:Talent

So I’ve been wondering how to market myself and there it was on Craigslist: Mature Women Wanted.

Could it be more clear?

There’s a new book out titled Too Big to Fail that documents the bailouts last year that brought our economy back from the precipice. I believe the bailouts did indeed bring us back from the precipice.

But . . .

We, in the form of the powers that be (not even sure who they are at this point), didn’t learn the lesson. Or at least didn’t ask the right question: How did we get to the precipice in what seemed like overnight?

Bailing out a drunk, drug addict, or gambling addict, because they are too big to fail just sets them loose to get drunk, use drugs, or gamble another day and they always end up at the precipice once again – and expect someone else to rescue them.

Oh, and along the way they gobble up the money, so when it comes time to pay for necessities (oh, like health care, food, shelter, education), there isn’t any left.

We need a new economic system. That was Michael Moore’s point in Capitalism, a Love Story.

The fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the failures of communism. Twenty years later, the fall of Wall Street signaled the failures of capitalism.

We might not need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but, we definitely need to identify the failures of capitalism. I think its biggest failure has been its denial of interdependence.

If you’re too big to fail, than you are dependent on those who are smaller than you to prop you up. Which means you really aren’t that big or productive; you’re just all puffed up. And like George Amberson Minafer, you need to receive your comeuppance in order to mature.

I’ve seen a version of this dysfunction play out with a friend of mine who has been battling the local school district to advocate for her autistic daughter.

The local school district has a one-size-fits-all approach to autism, which seems to be built on the premise that autism is a disease that should be approached much like leprosy was in Biblical times.

The autism class in Livermore comprises thirteen students from the ages of 5 to 9 – kindergarten to third grade. Try putting “normally” functioning children into this situation and you would have problems.

But when you compound that with the different brain wiring of children with autism, you get a train wreck – or to be poetic – a cluster fuck. The special needs of these children, such as sensory needs, are treated as inconvenience for the autism class. If a child’s unique sensory needs are not met, he or she is punished for the resulting behavior.

For you and me, it would be as if someone had locked us in a windowless room for 3 days, turned on a light, cranked up the heaviest metal music they could find, and left the light burning and the music blaring for the entire seventy-two hours –– then accused us of being an animal because we reacted to the lack of sleep and sensory overload.

Frankly, I don’t think any of the students fit the size. But my friend’s daughter definitely doesn’t, and instead of trying to meet her needs, they have labeled her as a wild rabid animal.

I see these two issues – enabling the greediness of the too-big-to-fail – and my local school district’s philosophy about autism – as symptoms of the same thing:

Fear of compassion and failure of imagination.

Compassion means the willingness to bear suffering – to feel what it is to be in the skin of the other who is suffering.

Imagination – well, as John Lennon pointed out, we don’t fly across the country because of the Wright brothers, we fly because for generations humankind imagined what it would be like to fly.

Fierce individualism is an American trait. It has its value. But the truth is we are interdependent. We are born alone and we die alone, but in between we rely on the tribe of humankind and the earth, its inhabitants and the ecosystem to live and thrive.

So we need a new paradigm and with it a new economic system – one that values imagination and compassion and recognizes interdependence.

Mature women definitely needed here.

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Dragons Never Fear to Tread

I was quite pleased with my post yesterday, where I waxed poetic about slaying my dragon. Then my friend Jim pointed out that dragons have a different meaning in Eastern mythologies. They represent raw power.

I was annoyed with him for disturbing my moment of satisfaction with having slain my dragon. Jim often annoys me because he forces me (okay no one forces anyone to do anything) to dig deeper with his well-maybe-not style of questioning.

I want to dismiss these questions by assigning them to the cynicism bin – where they are sent to be disposed of with no regard for what they might mean to me. I think cynicism is the flip side of a coin that has cynicism on one side and sentimentality on the other. Cynicism annoys me because it, in my opinion, dismisses things by assigning them to bins where they are sent to be disposed of with no regard for what they might mean to the cynic.

I hate when I impale myself on my own prejudices.

So, today I did a bit more googling about dragons and found this interesting link to a site called Dragon Tango. It’s about a sound sculpture that depicts Eastern and Western dragons meeting. Here’s from the Website:

During a trip to Asia in 1994 Amanta and David were in Hong Kong gazing out over the mountains of Kowloon. Kowloon means “nine dragons”. Their thoughts came to rest upon the contradictory and mysterious nature of dragons worldwide. Amanta and David wondered: what does the dragon mean in today’s world? What would happen if an eastern dragon met a western dragon? The dragon quest began.

Dragon Tango

Check out the link. It’s very interesting.

Then I remembered the movie “Dragonheart.” The story tells the tale of the last dragon joining with a disillusioned dragon-slaying knight to stop an evil king who was granted the potential to be immortal. I love this movie. For one thing, Sean Connery is the voice of the dragon and, of course, a dragon would sound like Sean Connery. That is embedded deep in our DNA, probably from the time we lived in caves.

And, I loved it because of how sympathetic the dragon was.

So, I still trust what I wrote yesterday. But maybe there is more.

I think what I was trying to get to is change and how we deal with it. I’ve heard people laugh that horses are so stupid they run into a burning barn. But they do that because that has been their home—what is familiar to them.

And, oh my, if we humans don’t go running into the burning barn time after time. We seek the familiar, even when the familiar is not good for us (think bad relationship number four), because it is comfortable. We know what to expect. We know that story. We suck it up and ignore whatever pain that story might be causing us because it no longer fits—like a pair of shoes we have outgrown.

I think we rarely move easily into change. I think we are usually catapulted into it by life events and for me, it usually means facing the dragon’s breath and letting its fire burn away what is no longer useful. I don’t go willingly into change.

I think that the point of facing the dragon is to show a willingness to be transformed by change. And that slaying the dragon with compassion (if that is the mythic image one is using at the moment) means understanding that the dragon is sacrificing itself so change can happen, much as we die because—well, there just isn’t enough room on the planet for us to be immortal.

I just became the dramaturge for the play “Metamorphoses” at Los Positas. It is a wonderful play. It includes this line of dialogue:

“Transform me entirely, let me step out of my own heart.”

So I must thank my friend Jim for annoying me—making me feel discomfort. I suspect he will annoy me again.

I have known Jim for close to fifty years. His mother was my mother’s best friend. I know she misses my mother. The downside of living a long time is you live long enough to miss your loved ones.