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Anybody want to go to any of these with me?? (You can read about them in the October San Francisco Arts Monthly. www.SFArts.org)
D'arc, woman on fire
October 5 - 21
Shotwell Studios
Joseph Cornell
October 6 - January 6th (plenty of time for this!)
SFMOMA
Sculpture of Louise Nevelson
October 27 - January 13 (time for this too!)
de Young
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." Plato
The following arrived in my email inbox today, after a day of wrassling, crowing, goo-gooing and getting silly with two boys. Rye is laughing suddenly and it makes me drunk with love when I can get him to chuckle. Right now my shirt is covered in a huge collage of stickers that Jonah plastered me with just before his bedtime.
"Play creates joy, but play is also how your child will develop skills essential to future happiness. As she gets older, unstructured play will allow her to discover what she loves to do — build villages with blocks, make "potions" out of kitchen ingredients, paint elaborate watercolors — which can point her toward a career that will seem like a lifetime of play. Play doesn't mean music class, organized sports, and other structured, "enriching" activities. Play is when children invent, create, and daydream."
—Parent Center
Then I found this nice quote:
"Play may in fact be the highest expression of our humanity, both imitating and advancing the evolutionary process. Play appears to allow our brains to exercise their very flexibility, to maintain and even perhaps renew the neural connections that embody our human potential to adapt, to meet any possible set of environmental conditions."
—Psychology Today
There are some cool images of polar bears and other animals at play located at: Play Foundation.
Also a recent NYT piece: "Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime"
Have fun!
Do you daydream all the time like I do? Recently I have had the following fantasies:
1. We can somehow afford to buy half of the 4 unit building we live in and I convert half the downstairs into an office for my therapy practice. We live here for years and years and get a plot in the community garden and our boys come home to see us in our cool old apartment.
2. Jonah grows up to be a musician like the man in the movie "Once". I can see him on the street in Dublin with a beat up old guitar, roaring his heart out.
And, also, that I get to be a singer in a band, like Neko Case and Her Boyfriends.
3. I am somehow not allergic to cats anymore (or they invent a hypoallergenic cat!) so we can get a pair of kittens for Jonah. This is J and a neighborhood cat, communing.
4. I get 2 minutes alone with George Bush and I manage to convince his neanderthal religious-wacko self that I am an angel of God who has come to give him a message directly from the Lord. "You must reveal the truth about your war and end it. You must make a speech to the country calling for the Republican Party to be dissolved as a morally bankrupt and evil institution. And you must make fighting Global Warming the first priority of federal funding starting tomorrow."
5. They invent a pill to keep you from gaining weight and everyone takes it (including me, of course!) and then plumpness comes back into fashion.
6. A private one about Pullo, from the ROME series on HBO.
Email from Gabe's Dad in Denver—
We were riding the 16th Street shuttle bus in the cold drizzle tonight, and overheard a couple of homeless guys' analysis of Denver's policy:
"Hickenlooper is putting a lot of pressure on the cops to get us out of here."
"Yeah, they want us out before the Democratic Convention next summer."
"You know, with all the overtime they'll be paying the cops, they should just spend $40 and get us bus tickets to Hawaii for a month."
"Hawaii ... Yeah, I'd go."
Sounded good to us, too (brrr).
Tonight before bed Jonah put my glasses on and said, "I'll be you Mama, and you be Jonah. I'm coming to take you home from school!"
"No! I don't want to go yet! Let me just show you one thing."
"Find your shoes, Jonah"
"No! I can't! I don't want to go yet!"
Then things took an extreme turn.
If you don't come now," Jonah told me in his Mama Voice,"You can never have another treat forever!"
I played along, pretending to cry. This delighted him!
He said, "If you don't cooperate, I'll leave you here at school and never come back."
This shocked me a little. I pretended to cry more and then I said it again,"I won't come!"
" If you don't come now, Aba and Rye and I will go on a trip and we won't take you!"
I couldn't stand it—"Jonah! I don't say things like that!"
He looked surprised. Then he laughed. "Let's do it again!"
So good for me to understand what dark fears come to him when I speak sharply to him, "Jonah! Come on! Let's go! It's time to get going! Where are your shoes? Help me please..." etc. etc. Usually he is so defiant that I don't think it is effecting him this way. But this is what he feels, at least partly.
The darkness of childhood. Abandonment, revenge. I just barely remember but this helps me remember more.
What is that proverb? Anyway—it doesn't apply!
Boo's cousin Sophie won! Score one for the children of doctors!
Here's the news:
By Felicia Mello, Globe Correspondent
A Harvard medical student and nursing mother won an appeal today in her lawsuit for extra break time to pump breast milk during her doctor-licensing exam. A state appeals court judge ruled that the National Board of Medical Examiners must grant Sophie Currier of Brookline an additional 60 minutes of rest periods on each day of the exam, which Currier must pass to graduate and begin her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Currier sued the board September 6, arguing that it violated her constitutional rights by denying her more than the 45 minutes of rest periods allotted to all test takers. She also accused the board of gender discrimination.
Last week, a state superior court judge denied her claim, saying Currier could still find a way to expel her milk during the test or on regularly scheduled breaks.
But Appeals Court Judge Gary Katzmann overturned
that decision. “In order to put the petitioner on equal footing as the
male and non-lactating female examinees, she must be provided with
sufficient time to pump breast milk and to address the same
physiological and other functions to which those examinees are able to
attend,” he wrote.
Currier, who has a 4-month-old daughter, originally planned to take the exam this week, but postponed it until October 4 in hopes of winning her appeal. She already has received permission from the board to take the test over two days instead of one, because she has dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The board also offered to allow her to bring a breast pump into the exam room and to provide her with a private room in which to express milk during breaks.
Lactating women can experience pain and risk developing infections of their breasts if they don't express milk at least once every three hours, breastfeeding experts say.
Today in Human Development class we did a great exercise. It's going to sound strange but it was really fun.
First we lay on the floor in the fetal position, and then Greg took us through this guided experiential process where we gradually rolled onto our stomachs, then onto our backs, then we started using our limbs, then we pretended to try to grasp things and bring them to our mouths, then we were creeping, crawling, pulling ourselves up on furniture, then trying to walk. It was amazing to have such a physical experience of what infants are trying to do in their first year or so. What Rye is doing. What strong little beings!
The Drama Therapy students were incredible at it—I kept peeking. One woman rushed around the whole huge room exactly like a grinning, headlong toddler just learning that tippytoes walk. We clapped for her she was so good.
Mahler calls the stage after early infancy the stage of "elation".
That seems like Rye.
I am a guest blogger tonight on my friend Jamie's blog, Should We Flee The City.
Jamie is the reason I have a blog. Her writing and photos inspired me and kicked my ass into gear.
She asked me all these nice questions: girls are so good at it.
I feel like Jamie and I, and a few other girls I know, are alike in all these ways that make us feel jealous of each other when one of us breaks out and does something cool. But it's a good jealousy because it is totally above-board. "I am so jealous of you!" we say to each other, and then we go and make what we want happen for ourselves. There is safety somehow to say it and it does not fester. That is what happened when I saw Jamie's blog. And that is what happened when I figured out that I felt jealous of Anastasia being a therapist. Or Julia publishing poems and being serious about poetry. Or Kate quitting her job when she was ready. Or Justine's bravery in coming out to our whole family. I want to be like that, I think, and then I can more easily be like that.
I don't mean to imply that it is easy—but that is why I think it is cool. Jealousy can be humiliating. It is so powerful to own it! It's half way to outgrowing it, maybe.
Thank you my ladies! I toast you with my evening margarita!
Love,
The Green Eyed Monster
- Are penguins good or bad?
- What do you think that robot lobster is saying?
- Is it a firecracker or a firefly?
Gabe's great-grandparents emigrated to New York at the turn of the century. Here they are at the beach, fresh from Minsk. Oscar and Celia Siegal. Great-great grands to my boys. I'm glad they have good pirate genes...
1915, Camp Algo (**Catskills, Evan?)
These two are of Dave Siegal (changed to Metcalf!) as a babe and as a young pirate. He is Gabe's grandfather and Jonah David and Rye's great-grandfather.
1922
1927
I used to go over to Berkeley and audit Robert Hass's freshman lecture on Modern Poetry in the fall. I'm sort of longing for it right now. Nothing made me happier than to sit in the bleachers and listen to Hass talk about poems. We had the Norton anthology and just went clean through all these greats: Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Sandburg, Stevens, Joyce, Williams, Pound, H.D., Jeffers, Moore, Eliot, Millay, Cummings, Hughes, Roethke, Brooks, Lowell, Bishop, Plath, O'Hara...etc
He once spoke about how strange it is that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were contemporaries. Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 and died May 15, 1886. Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 and died March 26, 1892.
The summer issue of Poetry magazine has this great poem by Campbell McGrath about the two poets as parents (they are all our parents):
Emily and Walt
I suppose we did not want for love.
They were considerate parents, if a bit aloof,
or more than a bit. He was a colossus
of enthusiasms, none of them us,
while she kissed our heads and mended socks
with a wistful, faraway look.
She might have been a little, well, daft.
And he—Allons, my little ones, he'd laugh
then leave without us.
And those "friends" of his!
Anyway, he's gone off to "discover
himself" in San Francisco, or wherever,
while she's retired to the condo in Boca.
We worry, but she says she likes it in Florida;
she seems, almost, happy. I suppose they were
less caregivers than enablers,
they taught by example, reading for hours
in the draughty house and now the house is ours,
with its drawers full of junk and odd
lines of verse and stairs that ascend to God
knows where, belfries and gymnasia,
the chapel, the workshop, aviaries, atria—
we can never hope to fill it all.
Our voices are too small
for its silences, too weak to spawn an echo.
Sometimes, even now, when the night-wind blows
into the chimney flue
I start from my bed, calling out—"Hello,
Mom and Dad, is that you?"
Our assignment for Therapeutic Communication this week was to read an excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind": "If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself. If you are too demanding or too greedy, your mind is not rich and self-sufficient. If we lose our original self-sufficient mind, we will lose all precepts. When your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violating your own precepts: not to tell lies, not to steal, not to kill, not to be immoral, and so forth."
Hmmmm. I have fought in my life to learn to be discriminating, to have limits. And I have worked hard to feel a right to be demanding. I really don't aspire to have a "self-sufficient" mind. I think there are lessons to learn from Zen, the goal of remaining open appeals, so why can't I appreciate this piece? Here is a poem I love about the dark emotions that Zen seems to spurn. (Lots of other religions don't like these feelings either, Quakers, as Olds notes, and Catholics—I happen to know!)
Greed And Aggression
Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats,
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into its nature the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the throat of the held goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger and the
making of new tigers, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light––
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of an animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouths running, into sleep.
—Sharon Olds
I love the passion for people and creatures, in this poem. She is not afraid of her excitement, her aggression—it is her love! She is not afraid of a tiger—she IS is tiger, devouring, drinking blood. It is almost frightening to read! But her project is to name it all aloud—everything human—without holding back. I love this project.
The way I was raised, as a young Catholic girl in a conservative, body-hating culture, was that any strong emotion I had was unwelcome. If I felt angry, proud, sexual, jealous, demanding, I was to be silent about it and hide it. It has been a long process for me, and for many women and people I know, to uncover and welcome back all my feelings. Because when you repress some feelings, many others also begin to seem too uncomfortable (of course, others might grow and begin to stand in for what is unfelt).
Poets know how to feel their feelings. Here are a few haiku I love, and some of the emotions I think may be said to be associated with them:
1. longing
January—
in other provinces,
plums blooming.
Issa
2. sexual desire (aggression?)
I do not care if
Our love making is exposed
As the rainbow over
The Yakasaka dam at Ikaho
If only I can suck and suck you.
Anonymous
3. anger/disgust
Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.
Issa
I honestly hate the way the Zen goal is to turn away from longing, from being demanding, from all greed and aggression. And I feel that often they are not able to make fine distinctions between all the different kinds of emotions—the massive range of ways that people can feel. In fact, I think many Zen practitioners and promoters are actually afraid of emotion. This way of dispensing with the emotions reminds me of depression, strangely.
To be alive, to be fully human, you must not merely "observe" your feelings—you have to feel them. And it is painful and humiliating to feel jealousy. It is frightening and shaming to feel greedy. BUT, there are so many ways of feeling romantic, alive that we must not detach from: to long for your lover as you speed away on a train through a country you've never been in before; to feel greedy for delicious food when you feast with your friends on a holiday; to feel anger when your country's President takes your nation into an illegal war. This is especially true for people who have been inhibited. Like me.
There is a great show of paintings by Tracy Grubbs at Dolores Park Cafe now. Just before Rye was born I went to the San Francisco Bike Coalition's Winterfest party and found her tiny, beautiful painting of a red tricycle at their silent auction. I bought it for Rye!
Anyway, I loved the paintings at Dolores Park Cafe the other day while I was studying, and then I figured out it was Ms. Grubbs herself!
Her pieces are all smoky/foggy imagery, with beautiful form and color. Check them out!
Her show is up through September:
Now Through September 30
Dolores Park Cafe
501 Dolores Street (cross street: 18th)
San Francisco
www.doloresparkcafe.com
October 19, 20, 21
Open Studios
Opening Reception Friday night: 6 pm to 9 pm
69 Belcher Street
www.belcherartists.com
I went to Antioch College for my undergraduate work, and also to be born as a person, learn most of what I base my life on, and to meet the love of my life. It feels like home to me there, especially the crazy parts. Anyway, Antioch is in trouble (it has always been in trouble) but this time it feels realer...maybe. There is a cool postcard art show that I want to promote to show our love. And because it is so fun to make postcards. I was once in a postcard project on maps where I made a map of my ideal city: no cars, many sculptural coffee shops and lots of tall tall buildings and plazas. Anyway, Jonah and I are going to make our cards today after school.
"Greetings from Antioch College - The Postcard Show"
November 3 - December 31, 2007
Casa Frela Gallery in Harlem, NYC Opening night gala at 5:00pm
http://casafrela.gourdom.com/gallery/antioch
OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - ALL WILL BE ACCEPTED
Submissions deadline is October 12, 2007
This is a major art show fundraiser and awareness-building event to support the continuance of Antioch College. The exhibition is open to submissions from all in the larger Antioch Community (students, faculty, alumni, staff, villagers, supporters, etc) and encourages the expression of the creative imagination of this Community as testimony to the vitality of the College. We invite you to join our effort to keep Antioch College open, maintain faculty tenure and re-establish independent governance for the College.
Complete details about the event, submission guidelines and application are available here:
http://casafrela.gourdom.com/gallery/antioch
Please spread the word, as this project is a great way to come together as a community to raise money and positive awareness in the media for Antioch College.
Brought to you by the Antioch NYC Alumni Chapter and Casa Frela Gallery
Gabe's Dad was in town—we all went out to see the kites on Saturday, then we had a picnic with take-out stuff from Greens. There is something so amazing about managing to go out in the city and have a good time with your kids. This sounds like nothing—just a normal day, right? And, playing around the city in cool places is how you (I) picture your life before you have them. And then once they are with you it gets so ridiculous to leave the house and not have nap conflicts, meltdowns, potty emergencies, crabbiness, and key forgotten supplies. Plus 100 playings of "Go Go Ninja Dinosaur" by Princess Watermelon in the car, fear of jumpy houses/fascination with jumpy houses. Everything. Now it seems like a triumph when we do something. And it was actually fun, seperately from being an achievement. Kites are just brilliant, no?
We also went to a really fun birthday party, where Happy Birthday was played on a harmonica! And we played "Freeze Dance". Feliz Cumpleanos Antonio!
It is going to sound funny, as I am studying at the freaky shrink school and I am myself a freaky anti-establishment therapy participant, but I love Freud right now. We are reading him closely in Psychodynamics and a little in Human Development and I am learning so much about the original ideas, which are lucid, poetic, and playful. The poet H.D. had analysis with Freud, and she called him "midwife to the soul."
He is just so intimidating without someone to carefully explain him. Mildred Dubitsky asked us to try to let go of the irritant of Freud's seeming arrogance in quickly "curing" the patients in his stories, or in his seeming certainty about what symptoms mean; to focus instead on his ability to look skeptically at everything the patient brings. He has a particularly astute way of looking for secret meaning, digging for the individual person's world beneath the symptoms. Bettelheim does a great job of explaining Freud too.
Here is a little something from him:
"In his work and in his writings, Freud often spoke of the soul [...]. Unfortunately, nobody who reads him in English could guess this, because nearly all his many references to the soul [...] have been excised in translation."
—Bruno Bettelheim "Freud and the Soul"
and Freud himself:
"I want to protect analysis from physicians, [...] and from priests. I want to entrust it to a profession that doesn't yet exist, a profession of secular ministers of souls, who don't have to be physicians and must not be priests."
—"The Future of an Illusion"
"Mama! Want to play astronauts? ("Yes.") Ok! You be the fairy princess astronaut, and Rye can be the baby astronaut. Ok, and your bed will be our spaceship. We're going in space. Blast off! Now this is outer space, isn't it pretty? See the stars? And there's a baby alien in his spaceship. Now we're crashing down. We're in the snow! We're on a sled in the snow. It's a flying sled, right? Hold on, we're going too too fast! Hold Rye! Now it's crashing into the water. There's a barge in the water. Mama, if two ships crash in the ocean, how can the emergency guys find them? (I attempt to explain radar.) Let's call out our radar! We crashed! Come help us! Now we're swimming in the water! We're dolphins and you're the Mama dolphin and Rye is the baby dolphin. I need to get my special tool and whack the water! Here it is! It's so cool, right? Now let's go get a snack and go to school. I want pb and j!"
Jonah and his cousin, Maxie, had such a good time together when we were on Fire Island this summer. My youngest sister and her wife have a gorgeous place there and we got to go vacate! No cars allowed on the whole place—we biked everywhere. Ahhhh.
Life would be so much better if we could bike this way in the city—especially with kids. I commute to school by bike and do some trips and errands that way but I still feel too tied to the car with the kids, especially the baby. On Fire Island I saw tons of old people on bikes (and trikes!), as well as kids of all ages. My favorite was a very old weathered guy on a cruiser smoking a cigarette. Yeah! And of course this is why we should all join the Bike Coalition: www.sfbike.org.
Jonah was great on his bike with training wheels—so effortlessly independent in the bike-friendly setting. One day he and I pedaled about a 1/4 mile to town. When we arrived, Jonah decided that he was bored and he wanted to turn back. In the city, what a fight this would be! But on Fire Island, I could just let him go because it's completely safe. He took off on his own to the house to see his cousin, and I watched him go feeling half scared/half proud. I guess that is the feeling I will have a lot from now on in relation to him.
(This image is a lomograph, by the way. Thanks Anastasia!!!)
was enourmous:
1. Grocery store
2. Laundry
3. Bank
4. Reading for school
5. Dinner for J & E
6. Pump milk for tomorrow, for Rye
7. Summer vacation artifact for J for school
8. Warm up exercise/poem for Thursday class
9. Finalize 2 page essay for Therapeutic Communication
10. Order books for school
11. Get an under-the-sink rug for kitchen
12. Blog! (Hello!)
13. Find a babysitter for Monday and Tuesday
14. Put huge backlog of printed photos into albums
15. Hang out, nurse and be chill with Rye
Now dinner is done (we ate roasted broc and potatoes, and bowls of yogurt and banana and blueberries). Jonah likes "ice-milk" lately, a tall glass of milk with ice in it. And now it is time to bathe this big-little one. Ta ta Internet!
I volunteered to bring the content for Thursdays warm-up exercise in Therapeutic Communication. Last week was my first class. The leader, Phillip Brooks was vulnerable while still being a great leader and keeping things moving and interesting. All my professors are this way, actually. It's kind of amazing. During the check in, Brooks spoke about how much he loved hiking and camping in the granite of the Sierras, and Gabe feels exactly like him, so it made me warm to him immediately.
Therapeutic Communication is going to be kind of like a "homeroom". We are going to spend a little more time than in other classes getting to know one another and making a kind of home base. I am grateful that CIIS has thought about this. It seems like a good idea.
We did a few practice listening exercises. One where you had to trade listening/speaking with another person and the listener had to say absolutely nothing the entire time. It was hard! I think it made the person I listened to speak more freely. As for me, it was hard at times because my listener was a bit distracted. It made me falter and lose confidence in my train of thought. Even though that kind of sucked, it made me aware of how subtle eye movements can effect the speaker. Interesting to think about.
Anyway, I was thinking we could do an exquisite corpse for the warm up. Do you that game? You write a line and pass it to next person and they write the next line working off of your line (without being able to see the rest of the poem because you fold the paper over). And in the end you have a poem. I don't know if we have enough time. In case we don't, I'm just bringing in a poem I love to read aloud.
First Memory
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
Louise Gluck
I love my letter, the letter E house:
Go find your letter house—
(via Swiss Miss http://swissmiss.typepad.com/)
Also wanted to call this, "You Boob, You Lose".
I'm a member of this great group started by the female half of the team that started "Move On.org", Joan Blades. It's called Moms Rising, and it's trying to build a movement for mothers in the U.S.. You can visit it and join at Momsrising.org.
Anyway, I received an email from them this morning that says, "Dear MomsRising Member, Starting today, one of our favorite blog sites, the Huffington Post, is partnering with MomsRising to launch a series of blogs about work/life issues. We invite you to join the conversation with us in this blog space. This new column is about consciousness raising and culture change. Very few Americans realize that there is deep bias against mothers in this country and that we are undermining family's ability to care for children."
Check it out: To read and respond to the inaugural Work/Life post in this new blog space, click here: MomsRising blog
It also says, "Share your story: I encourage you to go to the blog and share your stories in your response Have you ever been denied a job or a promotion because you are a mother? Research tells us mothers are 79% less likely to be offered a job and offered lower salaries, but what does this mean in human terms? By sharing our stories we empower each other and remind our leaders that we need a fair chance in the work place as well as the space to lead lives outside of work."
I love how she is calling this "a peaceful revolution". I still long for revolution so fiercely, only I am so desperately hopeful that nobody will have to be a soldier when we remake this society.
In my life as a mother of young kids, I've been lucky enough to have amazing support from City CarShare, and from Streetline Networks. But I also received an email today from my sister Justine that serendipitously is about just this—
My sister Justine's wife, Boo, has a cousin, Sophie Currier, who is being denied (by the National Board of Medical Examiners) a request for time to pumpbreastmilk while she takes her nine-hour medical board test. Here's today's NY Times article about it:
"One test stands between Sophie Currier and her Harvard medical degree and a prestigious residency. But Ms. Currier says she runs a high risk of failing the test unless the National Board of Medical Examiners gives her additional break time to pump breast milk for her 4-month-old daughter.
The board has refused the request, and on Thursday, Ms. Currier asked a Massachusetts Superior Court judge to order it to give her extra time on each of two days of testing, plus a private room with a power outlet so she can express her milk in private with an electric pump. (The nine-hour exam, on clinical knowledge, allows 45 minutes for breaks.)"
The rest: NY Times piece on Sophie
It's so revealing that the medical establishment will not make provisions for doctors who are nursing mothers. It's a perfect statement from them.
Once, Jonah and I were talking about being sad, and I asked him what he would do to feel better if he felt sad.
"I would go find you!" he said. That made me happy.
"And," he said, "if Rye was sad, and crying, I would take him to you too."
"And what about Aba?'
"I would take him to you."
"And what if Mama were sad?" G asked.
"I would take you to you." He told me.
Gabe: "That's your problem."
When Rye was two months old, G and I had a pregnancy scare. I was nauseous two mornings in a row, and it felt horribly familiar.
So, poor man was sent to Safeway to buy: an early results pregnancy test, a jumbo size package of condoms, and, because we were fresh out of drink mixings and clearly needed them desperately: a bunch of vodka and Rose's lime juice.
I would have added a few items to my basket, probably, for just this reason:
Two Castro queens were in line behind Gabriel at check-out, curiously examining the tableau of his purchases.
"Oh Honey," the first one said kindly, "You've really got a lot going on in your life, don't you?"
"Leave the poor man alone." his friend said, "can't you see he's in turmoil?"
"What? Maybe he wants to talk about it."
Gabriel wisely said nothing, just paid for his purchases and headed home. Just another free show in the Castro.
(And we weren't pregnant, by the way!)
Seal
Where Ocean heaved
A breast of silk
And a black jag reef
Boiled into milk.
There bobbed up a head
With eyes as wild
And wide and dark
As a famine child.
I thought, by the way
It stared at me,
It had lost its mother
In the sea.
Ted Hughes
[Anemone, Fitzgerald Marine Preserve, California.]
[Fitzgerald Marine Preserve, California.]
I read this poem to Jonah tonight before bed and he loved it. He and I both have a thing for a seal.
I like all the ways Northern California is like Ireland. Our fog, the green (in winter only of course) rolling hills and crags, our poets, our gray ocean and our beer, and especially our seals. It is so amazing how they bob their heads out of the water to stare at us, just exactly as we are staring at them. As if we are equally curious about one another, and they talk about this beach in just the same way, maybe..."Hey, let's swim over to that human beach and watch them walk around!"
The last time we went to the special tide pool/seal beach, we saw a whole extended family of fat, gorgeous selkies lolling up on the beach dozing and sunning. Two little babies scampered and surfed at the edge of the water and generally irritated their trying-to-sleep parents. Jonah and his friend Sophie and Sophie's Mom Claire and I sat a few feet away and watched. The kids were so so quiet and respectful. They especially loved watching the little seals skitter around in the waves.
"I could watch seals forever." Claire said quietly. Yeah.
Later, I noticed an educational sign that explained that seal babies nurse so much that they gain about a pound a day. Claire and I, both nursing newborns, had a laugh about that. Ouch.
My Mom wrote to tell me that the author Madeleine L'Engle died yesterday at 88 years old.
[Day of the Dead, Los Angeles.]
I loved her books so passionately when I was a girl. Somehow they made being a bookish, shy, over-sensitive young woman seem like a good thing—a sure sign that you would grow up to be amazing. She was the first writer who conveyed the idea to me that there were other worlds, ones that I might fit into much better than the one where I was living. And after I had read everything she wrote, even the obscure out of print stuff that I got my local bookstore to order for me, I wrote a letter to her.
I remember sitting at my little wooden desk. I must have been 10 or 11 years old. I had chosen the desk myself at the unfinished furniture store. I loved it because it had secret cabinets for little magic objects and two bookshelves on the bottom where your legs went. I wrote her a letter, and bless her she wrote me back. Almost no one famous does this, but she did. So kindly. I hope I have it tucked somewhere. Maybe I can find it and post it here...
I just started reading chapter books aloud to Jonah this summer. So far we've read Stuart Little and the Cricket in Times Square (why are so many brilliant kids books set in Manhattan?) I can't wait till it's time to read the Wrinkle trilogy to him—a few more years, I think. He is still so sensitive and bewildered by "bad guys" in books and movies. ("Why is he so mean? why are they chasing that guy? Is he a bad guy or a good guy?").
He had a hard time falling asleep last night after watching Robin Hood for our Friday night movie. His play is so wild and intense, we forget that he is still such a baby. He still has this softness at his center that is so good for boys to keep.
Here is some info from the obit: "L'Engle's novel "A Wrinkle in Time," about a teenage girl named Meg Murray and her search for her father on a faraway planet, sold more than 6 million copies and won awards including the American Library Association's Newbery Medal for best American children's book. The book was rejected by more than 25 publishers before it was published in 1962.
Subsequent novels "A Wind in the Door" and a "Swiftly Tilting Planet" formed the Time Trilogy, a series known for a blend of fairy tale, science fiction and family themes.
In addition to children's books, she wrote plays, poetry and a series of autobiographical works including an account of the illness and death of her husband of 40 years, actor Hugh Franklin.
For decades, L'Engle was also the librarian of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan."
Focus on "A Wrinkle in Time" being rejected by more than 25 publishers. Jesus! This is the kind of conditioning my thin-skinned soul needs to be exposed to...I think I would have stopped after, what? 1 rejection? 5 rejections? 7? Somehow I am so easily hurt, so quickly bruised and wounded. It does not serve me well anymore, if it ever did.
And her job as the librarian of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. How I long to have this job when I am old and wise. To live among books in New York, to commune with music and spirits. To read and write poems for the artists and thinkers who visit the Cathedral. I wonder if they would mind an atheist? I am so irritated that there are no cathedrals built for non-religious purposes. I love the quiet, contemplative atmosphere in churches, and the smells and dim echo-ey sounds. I just hate what they are for...
The Myth of Psyche and Eros
[G's Grandma Barbara's hands, and lilies. Durango, Colorado 2006.]
My Psychodynamics professor, Mildred Dubitsky, told us this story on the first day of class. It is the myth of Psyche, and her curiosity and pursuit of love, which is a kind of creation myth of psychoanalysis. I really like how brave and active Psyche is in this story. This female representation of "soul" (which is one meaning of "Psyche" in Greek, another one is "breath" or "spirit" according to Mildred) is such an adventurer! Like all people undertaking therapy...
We are to read Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis this week for her class. I have heard so many people say Freud is easy to read and understand in his own words, and there is no reason to be intimidated. This is to get people to try reading him in his own words, and to make him less forbidding, I suppose. But I really struggle every time I attempt to read him. More soon on these lectures, I hope. Meanwhile, here is the myth of the wonderful Psyche:
Psyche is the daughter of a queen and king—the youngest of their three beautiful daughters. Psyche is so beautiful, however, that people in her city dare to compare her to the Goddess Aphrodite. Although Psyche is a modest person, Aphrodite is offended. How dare a mortal woman be compared to a goddess? Aphrodite asks her son Eros to prick Psyche with an arrow and make her fall in love with the ugliest man on earth. But when Eros sees her, he falls in love with her himself.
No one proposes marriage to Psyche because her beauty intimidates people and because Aphrodite is displeased with her. So Psyche's parents go to the Oracle of Delphi for counsel. The Oracle tells the horrified parents that Psyche must be sacrificed to a monster. The parents must follow the advice of the Oracle or their entire kingdom will suffer. Psyche herself accepts this judgment and agrees to be sacrificed. She is clothed in a wedding gown and brought to the mountain. Then, distraught, her parents leave her alone to face death.
After many hours, Psyche falls asleep and dreams she has been taken to a beautiful valley of flowers. Before her stands a magnificent castle that is clearly the home of a God. When she enters the castle, a pleasant voice says: "All this is yours, sit down at the table and eat". And then a exquisite banquet appears. She finds she is not dreaming, and eats.
When night comes, Psyche settles in a bed of ivory and the light is blown out. A warm breeze arrives and Psyche finds herself in the arms of her lover. She cannot see him, she can only hear his loving voice and feel his warm embrace. This occurs several times and Psyche is quite content with her situation – being waited on in this enchanted place during the day and savoring the warm embrace of her lover at night. Soon she becomes pregnant.
After a while, however, because Psyche has no one to talk to during the day, she becomes lonely. She especially misses the company of her sisters and desires to see them and share her pregnancy with them. Her invisible lover warns her against seeing her sisters. He says that they will try and force Psyche into finding out what he looks like, thus ruining their situation. But Psyche sneaks away to see her sisters.
Instead of congratulating Psyche on her fortunate marriage, the sisters sow a seed of doubt in her mind. They tell Psyche, now pregnant with Eros's child, that rumor is that she is married to a great and terrible serpent who is fattening her up and will soon devour her and her unborn child. They advise her to sneak a look at him while he sleeps, using the dim light of an oil lamp.
That very night once her lover has fallen asleep, Psyche, deeply curious, ignites the lamp to finally lay her eyes on him. She sees that he is a handsome young man with milky white skin and dark curly hair. She sees wings, arrows and a bow beside the bed. He is the god of love, Eros himself. Overcome with the beauty of her beloved, Psyche spills a drop of hot oil on Eros which wakes him up. When he sees that she has broken her promise, he immediately flies away, but she catches his ankle and is carried with him until her muscles give out, then she falls to the ground, sick with remorse.
Psyche seeks her beloved everywhere. She prays at all the temples, begging for the help of the gods. All the immortals refuse to help her because they do not wish to attract the wrath of Eros’ mother Aphrodite. Eros, brokenhearted, has sought the consoling shelter of his mother's house and does not know of Psyche’s desperate search. At last Psyche is forced to confront the goddess herself.
Aphrodite receives her coldly, but offers her a chance to win back her beloved. She puts Psyche to several tests. "Let us see if you are a suitable woman. Sort out these seeds and put them into order." Psyche receives a mountainous pile of poppy, wheat, peas, beans and many other seeds to separate from each other.
She is devastated when she realizes how difficult the task will be. But an ant comes to her and decides to help her because she is so beautiful and sad. He calls on the help of his friends and they sort the out the piles for her. When Aphrodite returns that evening she is extremely vexed at Psyche's accomplishment. So she sets her a second task. Psyche is to collect the wool of some golden rams.
The next morning Psyche sets out to collect the wool. The Naiads warns her of their wildness and tells her to come to the pond in the afternoon and take the wool that they shed instead. Psyche does as advised and returns with the golden wool.
Aphrodite is still not satisfied and demands water from a special spring at the top of a cliff. Psyche starts a long climb and hears whispers that say: "Turn back, turn back" and the sound of a dragon spitting flames. She becomes frightened and stops to rest. An eagle soars through the sky, takes her container and fetches water from the spring high above her.
Aphrodite is astonished. She then demands that Psyche must go to the Underworld and fetch a box of beauty from the goddess Persephone, for Aphrodite was growing tired in tending her son. Psyche realizes how impossible this request is and decides that she will end her life to get to the Underworld. Psyche ascends a tall tower but when she gets ready to jump, she hears Eros' voice, which says "Don’t jump! I know of a way you can return alive. Descend to Hades at Tainaron in Southern Greece with a cookie in each hand and two coins in your mouth."
"When you arrive at the barge of the ferryman Charon, let him take a coin out of your mouth and you will be sailed to Hades. At the gate give one of the cookies to the guard dog Cerberus. When Persephone invites you to dinner, do not accept anything to eat and do not sit at her table but ask to sit on the floor. Ask for the box Aphrodite wants, return the same way you came, give Cerberus the other cookie and Charon the other coin. No matter what you do, do not look into the box."
Psyche does as the tower has said but when she reaches the light of the mortal world, she is tempted by curiosity to look in the box. She looks inside and out flies the Sleep of Death. Psyche falls asleep and her body stops breathing. But now Zeus has watched the hardship of Psyche from Olympus and has had enough. Zeus orders Aphrodite to leave poor Psyche alone, fetches Psyche and gives her a drink of ambrosia which makes her immortal. Zeus says to Psyche: "From now on, you are never to leave Eros’ side."
The word infant comes from Latin roots meaning, "not speaking," according to my Human Development textbook.
But Rye talks a lot. He squeaks and coos and gurgles and sounds his yawp. And when he cries he sometimes says, "ma ma ma ma ma" as clear as day! His talk sounds intelligent and witty to me, it's just that he's speaking a different language. Gabe sometimes asks Jonah if he remembers how to speak baby, if he can translate for us—but he sadly tells us "no".
I've tried to take the little Harry Potter photo/30 second movies from my digital camera and capture Rye when he gets chatty, but it is elusive. He only speaks when he has something to say.
Another interesting thing from my Human Development textbook: in 1959, a psychologist named Harriet Rheingold demonstrated how reinforcement can influence behavior in infants specifically on talking. Three month old infants were initially observed at an average of 13-15 vocalizations per half hour. When researchers reinforced the infants' vocalizations with encouraging sounds, smiles and gentle touches, the average incidence of vocalizations nearly doubled to 24-25 within a half hour. The opposite was also proved (poor confused babies!) when the researchers did not encourage vocalizations.
J in the crazy fake fur vest G got him—
The Surly One
1
When true love broke my heart in half,
I took the whiskey from the shelf,
And told my neighbors when to laugh.
I keep a dog, and bark myself.
2
Ghost cries out to ghost—
But who's afraid of that?
I fear those shadows most
That start from my own feet.
Theodore Roethke
What is the opposite of Burning Man? That is what I am. I liked being inspired by the artists and the trance-ey dancers and the bike culture—but the physical conditions were so hard for me! I wish it could all be done at the beach, or by a cold, clear Loch.
We've been away, I have not written because I have been trying to be a Burning Man Lady. I am definately not cool enough to be there, but somehow I snuck in and hung out for a few days to watch the beautiful, free ones.
Yes, I took my children, and yes, the four year old had an amazing time with his Burning Man Aba. The baby and I spent a lot of time running down the battery in the RV.
Still, I got to see some amazing things: a huge temple dedicated to forgiveness, made of thin wood on which everyone was writing their messages to the dead. I wrote a message to my darling Grandma—Mary Patricia, who died last year. I miss her, and the last time we saw each other was hard. Later, like all the art (or most of it) it was burned down.
One night I saw a huge line of enourmous propane torches, blasting off massive plumes of fire in some kind of musical pattern. I saw a pirate ship sailing the playa dust, and a set of cupcake cars. I saw thousands of people on their bikes, looking so beautiful. And the dancing, the thumping techno trance music. I'm definitely more of a Marvin Gaye appreciator, but there was something I got into with the pounding bass, after a while. And the best part was, it was blissfully safe (almost no cars!) so I could actually strap Rye on my back and ride my bicycle around. Not something I can do in the city.
A low point: when I ventured off for myself for an hour and got caught in a whiteout dust storm. I could not see six inches in front of my face, and as I stood trying deserately to figure out where to go, drunk people drove their art cars around in total disregard of other people's safety. I was terrified that I would be run over in that weird way you fear for yourself as a parent and it's really fearing how your death would effect your kids. All I could think about was the groaning stupidity and tragedy for my boys of me getting killed by a motorized cupcake on the playa at Burning Man.
But it turns out they were ok, and not caught in the dust like me. And I was ok too, after an hour of groping towards Kidsville and home. I felt really vulnerable when I got back to safety. I was caked in dust in a way I have never experienced before, my hair and eyebrows and eyelashes and tongue. I felt a lightheaded sense of having escaped real danger. No one was at the camper when I got there, and I was almost physically sick as I thought of G out in the dust with the two boys. So weird to choose to put oneself in this kind of a situation. Aren't people supposed to grow from this sort of thing? Hmmmm.
Well, it sure made for groovy photographs:
I've had my first two classes at CIIS—Human Development and Psychodynamics.
Human Development is interesting to be taking right now in my life with kids. My house is already "ages of man" between the infant, child and adult man...Still, it's going to be great to get the expert background on all of these stages and changes.
I loved what the Instructor said about "development". He said almost all the problems he sees in his own practice are matters of people in one or another stage of life who are not managing to achieve the developmental task of that time. He spoke about himself and said when he should have been starting relationships and thinking about what work he'd like to do around ages 18-20, he was at an ashram in India meditating, and he then struggled because he did not have those things that he wanted so much.
At first I felt irritated when he spoke about development—I suspected it was a set of social conventions that people had to rigidly follow. (And what a deranged society to be giving out conventions!) There was also that word I hate, "adjustment"—which seems to imply that all the originality and weirdness of people has to be flattened out of them so they can become conventional and boring. But as he spoke more about the "tasks" of development, they began to seem more individual and creative to me. I mean, it made sense that 18 year old kids should be falling in love for the first time—it doesn't seem like what they HAVE to do but instead like what I hope they get to do. And everyone can do it so individually. It is all made new each time. Other life tasks to accomplish: learn to control your bowel movements; figure out what gender you are (well, I'm not as sure about this one): face dying with courage.
He also told us about a miserable New Year's Eve he spent alone on a bench in Central Park, only to come out on the street and come face to face with John Lennon. The man's eyes, and his look. Ah. He said it should remind us that just when you think everything is at its worst, something amazing can happen. I've been playing "Beautiful Boy" for Rye a lot, since he was born. I love, "the monster's gone—he's on the run—and your Daddy's here..."
Finally, he had us do a short, guided meditation to try and dredge up our earliest childhood memories, and I got to remember this amazing thing. I found a memory of crawling! Being on the floor, about six inches away, and crawling on my hands and knees. So visceral and clear. But nothing else. A good thing to have access to as my own darling Rye Whiskey starts to get motivated about crawling. he's revving up on his hands and knees, doing his bends and thrusts and just generally meditating seriously on "over there".
Go Rye!
