The twenty minute countdown to ER is on, so I have to be brief about all this, but I wanted to do something a little unconventional and possibly illegal in the 'sphere. I am swiping my sister's blog entry and posting it here.
My sister started a blog last month, and while her significant other was away in Italy, she hammered out several days worth. She started out with a bang, and I loved reading her stuff because it was my Jannie, the lovely person I know she is, funny, witty, intelligent, and full, full, full of heart. She is, and I love saying that! Not absence (see last blog) but presence. And she keeps showing up as Anne Lamott likes to say. And though it may not always form a cohesive picture, this showing up that she does day after day, it all seems to count most profoundly with the Author of her life. When she defies, even for a moment, the call from certain others or even herself to play traitor to herself, and she shows up and She is, I can honestly say I feel, yes, feel the pleasure of God.
She's going through a rough time right now, and this is my little tribute to her. I want you to read her last blog. She wrote it right before her SO came back from Bella Italia, and she hasn't written since. I want you, reader, to also know how lovely and tender my sometimes missing sister is. Jan, may you discover in the ensuing days, while you're trying to get the wayward Subaru turned around, how truly wonderful She is. I love you.
An excerpt from Jannie's Jumbles:
March 27, 2005
clipping toenails
I just have to say that the best thing about this day was not the fact that my 17, in a few days, son went to church with us this morning for the 2nd time in a year. No, even better, he asked me if I would cut his toenails.They are as hard as rhinoceros nails and he needed them trimmed so that his soccer cleats would fit(don't think too hard about this) This request came from a boy who probably hugs me twice a year and stiffly at that. I got to hold his size 13 feet in my hands and ,as yucky as they were, I wanted to kiss them and never let them go. They were as precious to me in that moment as when I first counted his tiny newborn toes. This was exquisite. There I was,at last, connecting with Drummer boy in the most unlikely way and I took as long as I could to do the job. I felt like someone who'd been trying to make friends with a wild animal and after months it finally lets you pet it and talk to it a little. Of course, I could not let on that I was having this transcendent moment, so I went on about having his bunion looked at and about where in the world he got such substantially thick toenails. Thank you Lord for letting me be awake enough to recognize your presence in the smell of sweaty boy feet.
28 April, 2005
25 April, 2005
she says
"...si no habla, no habla."
This is what a professor of mine once said to my Spanish oral proficiency class. In the context of trying to learn another language, she simply said that if you don't talk (or practice speaking), you will not talk or speak. While that is self evident, those words jumped inside of me and shook me, terrified me, and I remember them still; I wrote them down in a small journal I brought to class. If I do not speak, I will not speak. If I do not have my say or speak what is in my heart for others to actually hear or read, I will never have spoken. To live my life out in silence...silence of body, of mind, of spirit; this would be a tomb.
There is a famous poem by Rosario Castellanos entitled, "Meditación en el umbral" (Meditation on the Threshold) in which a litany of women and their voices and their lives are held out as reminders that to be a woman that says or does in this life is dangerous. I wish I could share the poem with all of you, but I know most of you speak other languages besides Spanish (I am sure there must be good English translation out there). It's a rending poem about the injustices women, who haven't resigned themselves to absence, suffer for being and becoming. I'll include it here, just in case you'd like to read it.
I am 37 and have carried my professor's words with me now for probably a decade and a half. I still struggle to find this "other way of being" that Castellanos writes so poignantly about. Another way in which I listen to the truest part of myself, hear her out, let her tirades fly, feel her stabs of brokenness, rumble in her anger, recognise her tenderness, taste her salt, love her sparks, and then express, create, tell. Be. Perhaps it is not so important to whom the story would be of significance. Perhaps it is becoming of greatest importance to no one but me.
Hablo. Digo. Soy.
---------------------------------------
Rosario Castellanos
Meditación en el umbral (en Otros poemas, 1972)
No, no es la solución
tirarse bajo un tren como la Ana de Tolstoi
ni apurar el arsénico de Madame Bovary
ni aguardar en los páramos de Ávila la visita
del ángel con venablo
antes de liarse el manto a la cabeza
y comenzar a actuar.
No concluir las leyes geométricas, contando
las vigas de la celda de castigo
como lo hizo Sor Juana. No es la solución
escribir, mientras llegan las visitas
en la sala de estar de la familia Austen
ni encerrarse en el ático
de alguna residencia de la Nueva Inglaterra
y soñar, con la Biblia de los Dickinson
debajo de una almohada de soltera.
Debe haber otro modo que no se llame Safo
ni Mesalina ni María Egipciaca
ni Magdalena ni Clemencia Isaura.
Otro modo de ser humano y libre.
Otro modo de ser.
This is what a professor of mine once said to my Spanish oral proficiency class. In the context of trying to learn another language, she simply said that if you don't talk (or practice speaking), you will not talk or speak. While that is self evident, those words jumped inside of me and shook me, terrified me, and I remember them still; I wrote them down in a small journal I brought to class. If I do not speak, I will not speak. If I do not have my say or speak what is in my heart for others to actually hear or read, I will never have spoken. To live my life out in silence...silence of body, of mind, of spirit; this would be a tomb.
There is a famous poem by Rosario Castellanos entitled, "Meditación en el umbral" (Meditation on the Threshold) in which a litany of women and their voices and their lives are held out as reminders that to be a woman that says or does in this life is dangerous. I wish I could share the poem with all of you, but I know most of you speak other languages besides Spanish (I am sure there must be good English translation out there). It's a rending poem about the injustices women, who haven't resigned themselves to absence, suffer for being and becoming. I'll include it here, just in case you'd like to read it.
I am 37 and have carried my professor's words with me now for probably a decade and a half. I still struggle to find this "other way of being" that Castellanos writes so poignantly about. Another way in which I listen to the truest part of myself, hear her out, let her tirades fly, feel her stabs of brokenness, rumble in her anger, recognise her tenderness, taste her salt, love her sparks, and then express, create, tell. Be. Perhaps it is not so important to whom the story would be of significance. Perhaps it is becoming of greatest importance to no one but me.
Hablo. Digo. Soy.
---------------------------------------
Rosario Castellanos
Meditación en el umbral (en Otros poemas, 1972)
No, no es la solución
tirarse bajo un tren como la Ana de Tolstoi
ni apurar el arsénico de Madame Bovary
ni aguardar en los páramos de Ávila la visita
del ángel con venablo
antes de liarse el manto a la cabeza
y comenzar a actuar.
No concluir las leyes geométricas, contando
las vigas de la celda de castigo
como lo hizo Sor Juana. No es la solución
escribir, mientras llegan las visitas
en la sala de estar de la familia Austen
ni encerrarse en el ático
de alguna residencia de la Nueva Inglaterra
y soñar, con la Biblia de los Dickinson
debajo de una almohada de soltera.
Debe haber otro modo que no se llame Safo
ni Mesalina ni María Egipciaca
ni Magdalena ni Clemencia Isaura.
Otro modo de ser humano y libre.
Otro modo de ser.
15 April, 2005
chuckles in the night
It's the middle of the night usually when it happens. I awake for no reason...3am or thereabouts....and I am wide awake. I don't usually know what to do with this. WHY is the first question out of my mouth about anything, so after I have tried to analyse WHY I would be waking up....stress?....too much caffeine?....foot pain?..., whatever, I lie there and do what I do best: think. "To think is to work" for the INTP, so I am not sure why I feel like working that time of day, but I do. But it's a different kind of work and I have less control over what floats by on the monitor. Lately, funny things have been appearing...things that literally make me laugh outloud.
Out of nowhere...bing...! A night I spent in the Gobi desert in the cab of a Russian lorry. Lying end to end like sardines with Elaine, a (thankfully) very thin team member of mine, sharing our impromptu bed. We hadn't expected to be out all night with our vodka drunk driver. We had hoped to make it to the capital of the Middle Gobi province. But somewhere between UB (Ulanbaatar) and the middle of the Gobi, the vodka had it's way...and the bat out hell lorry, screaming across the desert (no roads...just "ways" and ruts and ditches) almost bought it. It was around 2am. That's when I was banged out of the bone jarring, head bobbing slumber I was in when I realised I was airborne and the banging sound was my head hitting the metal ceiling of the truck's cab. We were hauling commodities for the UN and I suppose the prospect of dying under a tonne of rice or milk powder and not getting paid sobered our driver enough to say, Enough.
It's damn cold in the Gobi in springtime, and we froze our asses off, to be straight about it. No sleep for the weary. An unexpected stop means no sleeping bag, no blankies, no thermos of hot tea. No cosy, cosy. Why do I do this job, I wondered to myself that night, exasperated and tired already by all the bureaucratic tedium we had had to wait on to finally get this little mission underway. But inside, secretly, I was chuckling. Chuckling when our driver gave us the heads up that he was "going to check on the horses" : a gesture rather, meaning....he tugged at the corner of his eye with his index finger, made donkey ears behind his head with two fingers on each hand, and then promptly staggered to one of the back tires and peed on it. At last, Mongolian I could understand. And chuckling that this HAD to be one of the best places in the world to spend the night, and in such company. And then, sunrise on the Gobi. Between the cold, the sunrise, and my own quick trip to the back tire, I was breathless, too. Another chuckle.
Not unexpectedly, the remainder of the trip played out similarly, complete with a meeting with the Governer of the whole province, on just one hour's sleep (which is the one hour I got on the concrete floor of our "hotel"). I surely impressed in my dust covered clothes, hiking boots, and matted hair. And on it all went.....
And still goes. You know, some people talk of waking up to nightmares or bad dreams, but I'll be content if this is the sort of thing that keeps peeking its head out, from under the covers, to surprise me. No amount of world-weariness or personal confusion can take away the good and outright fun of those moments. I am blessed. Truly.
Out of nowhere...bing...! A night I spent in the Gobi desert in the cab of a Russian lorry. Lying end to end like sardines with Elaine, a (thankfully) very thin team member of mine, sharing our impromptu bed. We hadn't expected to be out all night with our vodka drunk driver. We had hoped to make it to the capital of the Middle Gobi province. But somewhere between UB (Ulanbaatar) and the middle of the Gobi, the vodka had it's way...and the bat out hell lorry, screaming across the desert (no roads...just "ways" and ruts and ditches) almost bought it. It was around 2am. That's when I was banged out of the bone jarring, head bobbing slumber I was in when I realised I was airborne and the banging sound was my head hitting the metal ceiling of the truck's cab. We were hauling commodities for the UN and I suppose the prospect of dying under a tonne of rice or milk powder and not getting paid sobered our driver enough to say, Enough.
It's damn cold in the Gobi in springtime, and we froze our asses off, to be straight about it. No sleep for the weary. An unexpected stop means no sleeping bag, no blankies, no thermos of hot tea. No cosy, cosy. Why do I do this job, I wondered to myself that night, exasperated and tired already by all the bureaucratic tedium we had had to wait on to finally get this little mission underway. But inside, secretly, I was chuckling. Chuckling when our driver gave us the heads up that he was "going to check on the horses" : a gesture rather, meaning....he tugged at the corner of his eye with his index finger, made donkey ears behind his head with two fingers on each hand, and then promptly staggered to one of the back tires and peed on it. At last, Mongolian I could understand. And chuckling that this HAD to be one of the best places in the world to spend the night, and in such company. And then, sunrise on the Gobi. Between the cold, the sunrise, and my own quick trip to the back tire, I was breathless, too. Another chuckle.
Not unexpectedly, the remainder of the trip played out similarly, complete with a meeting with the Governer of the whole province, on just one hour's sleep (which is the one hour I got on the concrete floor of our "hotel"). I surely impressed in my dust covered clothes, hiking boots, and matted hair. And on it all went.....
And still goes. You know, some people talk of waking up to nightmares or bad dreams, but I'll be content if this is the sort of thing that keeps peeking its head out, from under the covers, to surprise me. No amount of world-weariness or personal confusion can take away the good and outright fun of those moments. I am blessed. Truly.
05 April, 2005
Pleasure Appeal
Today I am publishing a Pleasure Appeal. I am writing to solicit your ideas, your thoughts, your ruminations on this thing that is so vital to our lives....enjoyment, pleasure, happiness...whatever it's called. Someone reminded me yesterday that I have a bent (or affinity for, whichever way you see it!) toward intensity, which I suppose I will take as a compliment; I certainly like this about myself. However, the same intensity that can inspire a revolution can zealously want to control, too. So hearing these words was both affirmation and admonishment. Admonishment in the sense that I should use intensity to advantage but also that I use it to enjoy life. Am I enjoying, experiencing pleasure in any area of my life, I wondered? Being a creature of earth and air, how can I know what it means to be alive today?
So I am here to ask you all what you do for fun, what makes you feel alive, how pleasure has its proper place in your lives? Here's my expectation: that if you read this...you will hopefully take a moment to reply. I WANT input. Anyone reading this has my personal email, so if you prefer writing that way, do so. Or post a comment. Makes no difference to me. The request for your ideas is not necessarily so I can imitate or recreate what you do. Ideas for me are more like electricity....like leaning onto, by accident, an electrified fence....all I can do is shout and shake myself and say, damn! what was THAT? I have sensations I don't often feel, I experience something that I cannot put words to, and then I know I am going into the realm of the intuitive. And then I know I am getting closer to home, closer. And that's surely a help to me right now.
That's me. Appeal done. Ahora te toca a ti.
So I am here to ask you all what you do for fun, what makes you feel alive, how pleasure has its proper place in your lives? Here's my expectation: that if you read this...you will hopefully take a moment to reply. I WANT input. Anyone reading this has my personal email, so if you prefer writing that way, do so. Or post a comment. Makes no difference to me. The request for your ideas is not necessarily so I can imitate or recreate what you do. Ideas for me are more like electricity....like leaning onto, by accident, an electrified fence....all I can do is shout and shake myself and say, damn! what was THAT? I have sensations I don't often feel, I experience something that I cannot put words to, and then I know I am going into the realm of the intuitive. And then I know I am getting closer to home, closer. And that's surely a help to me right now.
That's me. Appeal done. Ahora te toca a ti.
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