God Speaks to All People in All Languages

A beautiful song, passionately performed. I heard it in the movie KITE RUNNER. The movie was excellent. The song is "Supplication," shared via YouTube. Different name, different messenger, same God.

Garage Sale

We're checking off the summer traditions. First camping, now a garage sale. This one trumps camping in goofiness by far, I feel.

I am standing out in the sun putting 50cents stickers on most of my stuff. Many of the things are things I picked up at another garage sale.

I will not make enough money to make my effort worthwhile, but there is something in the human psyche that makes trading irresistible. I read whole books about this in graduate school. I am sickened by the glut of stuff I have as I begin to thin it out, will not make a dent in it with this sale, will ultimately have to donate most, but still, I am out here pricing things. A move looms in our future, and this is just a nasty little preview of it. For my daughter, the planner of this sale, it is a serious purge. We just happened to have the premier location for the sale.

The best part will be hanging out with the neighbors, who will come and paw through my things, suspending for an instant, the wall of privacy that separates us. The kids will sell cookies and lemonade, recent immigrants and resellers will come early to try to beat the crowds for our furniture. I know the script.

Papa and I will have to work very hard to pace ourselves over this weekend so that we can continue on with our summer in good humor. His knee is hurting, and I am fatigued, but we are still enjoying life. Let the swap meet begin.

"Warning: Habits May be Good for You"

This is a "must read and re-read" article for me as I continue to work on creating a better life by creating a better set of habits. It is an article from the New York Times on using the principles of advertising to create new habits. The title is "Warning: Habits may be Good for You."

The point is brilliant. I am considering the possibilities! Instead of telling myself things I should do, or even would like to do, I can just use my imagination as if it were the advertising I encounter at every turn. I could imagine the desired result, framing it as an ad executive would. I could play that "ad" in my head until I created the desire to adopt the new habit, all the while taking on new behaviors that would make the new habit possible.

I am the rat, learning from the trainer how to train myself. This is truly letting my brain work for me instead of me working for my brain.

Family Camping

Have just returned from a great ritual- the family camping trip. It is at the same time ridiculous and glorious. How goofy to bring duplicates of all your home conveniences, spend days preparing them, packing them, then unpacking and setting them up, packing them back up, filthy, and taking days to return the household to normalcy.

I have never escaped this thought in all my forty-some years of doing it. Yet, it is always fun, provided it isn't cold and raining. The outdoors invigorates. The sights and smells refresh. The quiet soothes. The family hilarity, particularly that provided by children, is joyous. The campfire mesmerizes. The appetite is piqued by the outdoor air. A bell on a buoy rings out the movement of the water, energizing. The wild animals join us, surprize us. There is room to get away from the group, and time to be close as well, breathing one another. There always ends up being a lot of stories.

It is a great chance to cleanse the palate, as it were, from the daily routines. Like coffee beans at a perfumery, or rice at a twenty course ryokan banquet.

Papa and I have begun to invest some of our time in things like this which we feel so strongly enable/create good in the world. Retreat centers and state parks, for example. We are daydreaming spending a month at such a campground, volunteering in ways that will enhance the experience for others as it has enhanced our lives over the years. In our daydream, our grandchildren, reaching sufficient age to be a real help to others, would join us in this industriousness. Our children as well, as their busy lives allow. It was a wonderful camping trip.

A New Face on the Angel Wall

As I move through life, I am guided by the faces on my angel wall. This is my name for the gallery of pictures I have in my mind of those who have died. The gallery gets larger and larger as I go on.

It is an interesting experience. These faces are cues to all of the stories that make up my identity in this world. The older I get, the more stories there are, of course. This should weigh me down, but it does not. Instead I feel lighter.

Our loved one's passing adds another face to the angel wall. This one's passing was a time of intimate completion. The stories she generated during her lifetime were often troubling and contentious. She had many wounds, and often wounded others. But the physical and emotional intimacy involved in an agonizing passage revealed much, completed much, and brought great closure to the stories.

We are resting from the work, and rejoining our lives in progress. Our children and grandchildren surround us with youthful energy which sweeps us back into life. The angel wall on one side, the effervescent chaos on the other. Sample the summer energy by checking in on the blogs I have listed on this site.

Processing the Experience

The last tasks are being completed regarding our loved one's passing. These tasks involve summarizing her life in a few paragraphs, and sending letters to those who knew her. The writing provides a time for reflection.

My mind is on the bigger picture again. I am sad that death is not organic to our culture. We have no traditions which guide us through the dying. (Traditions, yes, but only after the death has occurred, and very commercially driven). We had to find our way through many obstacles during our loved one's passing, and we were operating in the dark. Conflict, confusion, and fatigue served to further alienate parts of our already broken family rather than to bring it closer together.

Earlier in my life, I had the experience of living for an extended time in a much more traditional (post tribal) culture in the Pacific Islands, and so I have known a life in which life transitions are surrounded by and guided by strong and unifying traditions. Such a life does not insulate one from exhaustion, fear, grief, or even anxiety, but it provides a pathway and guides, so that one does not have to experience these inevitable states in a blinding chaos.

In such a life, there is also ample time allotted to the telling of stories which result from struggles such as the death story of our loved one. We will be hard pressed to find time to relate these stories to our children in a way that can provide either completion for us, or education for them.

The hospice facility was a merciful refuge both for our dying loved one and for us. Both Papa and I were moved to think about volunteering at a hospice as we have volunteered at the retreat center in Tucson. The endeavors of these organizations fit the more wholistic vision of life we experienced during our time in the Pacific.

As I write this, I realize that these are abstract generalizations about very visceral experiences. Abstractions themselves are a symptom of the very thing I lament.

Up Among the Contrails

One day when we were sitting on a sunny park bench at her care facility, our dying loved one looked up at the airplane contrails, something she had often done because her son was an airline pilot. "That's where I want to be," she said longingly, impatiently.

Her son was sitting by her side last night at 7:35 p.m. when finally, at long last, she made the passage and is there.