Control

Zentangle Dragon

This particular piece of artwork is a Zentangle in clay.  Zentangles are wonderful designs (similar to, but not the same as, Doodling) which foster a calmness, a peace of mind while the artist is working on it.  It is a process whereby the artist does not have a preconceived idea, but rather lets the art determined the direction.  Traditionally, Zentangles are done in Pen and Ink but I felt like working in clay for this one. 

When I began this small wall hanging, I had no idea what the finished product would look like.  Imagine my surprise when it turned into a dragon's head. 

I find such happenings are common when I let go and allow the art to be itself.  I cannot help but wonder what other areas of my life work this way?  What areas are not helped by my trying to control things? 

Eastern philosophy often speaks about the futility of expecting to be able to determine the outcome.  We all have very little control over anything, even our own lives.  Perhaps the only thing which we can control is our attitudes. 

Perhaps that is the only thing we need to control.

Chaos

Old Fashioned Elegance

            Take what you like and leave the rest. 

I don't know about the rest of you, but sometimes it feels like frustration lives with me.

Like earlier this week when I tried to clean the cats litterbox and the cats insisted on using it during the cleaning process.

Or when I had just finished actually scrubbing the kitchen within an inch of it's life, dishes and all, when my roommate smilingly brings in an entire tray full of used glasses from his study. 

It's a conspiracy, make no mistake about it. 

The Universe was not meant to be a clean place. Dis-order, chaos and dust are the rule, no matter what physics tells us.

In no place in nature do brooms exist of their own free will, nor do vacuum cleaners grow naturally in any corner of our planet.

Given the opportunity, all things attract dust, muddy dogs prefer the couch, sticky children are attracted to keyboards and spidermites prefer favorite plants. 

Somehow, in our household, I was elected to work against tremendous odds, doing the impossible, fighting off the inevitable.

I don't remember volunteering, nor do I remember accepting the draft notification. It is my responsibility to keep the house shining and beautiful. 

I've pondered about this for years (no comments please), but I have yet to come up with a solution.

I have thought of four basic ways to handle the situation, none of which are satisfying. 

    1) I ignore  the situation entirely. I go and play with my art stuff or read my books and have a good time. This works, but only for a short time. Sooner or later I will want to wear clean clothes or drink from an unsullied cup. And it is depressing to live with unrelenting dinginess 

    2) Pay someone else to do the cleaning. This works only if you have a family budget which can afford such luxuries, which ours doesn't. I strongly suspect there still things that fall unattended to, anyway. 

    3) Blackmail other members of the household to do part or all of it. This is great theory, but it seldom works in the real world. My dogs cower at the sound of a vacuum cleaner, and so did my Ex. The cats simply Hate dishwater and so do children. Friends, however, can be trained not to date the messages they write in the dust.

     4) Compromise. Do the best I can with the time I've got. It will never be perfect, but I might sometimes be able to make it livable. 

The real trouble comes with expectations.

My EX used to say that I am sometimes too all-or-nothing in my thinking, and I suspect he was right. I want my home to be perfect, otherwise why bother?

I expect myself to be perfect.

I forget that I can't be.

 I compare myself to Grandma Moses, Betty Crocker, Sister Wendy, Mother Teresa and Princess Di, all at the same time.

Even they only had to be one of them at a time. 

Yet again and again, I forget that I cannot be perfect. I drive myself to distraction, trying to juggle two jobs, church work and community service, the household, my animals, artwork, reading, fixing up the house, and trying to do it all perfectly.

Instead, I collapse in a heap on the floor with dust bunnies larger than cats playing all about me. 

I remember when I was a little girl, my mother would set me to folding the towels and then she would tell me a story when she was finished. 

Nobody is here to tell me stories now, to reward my work, so I must remember them for myself.

I remember stories about a faerie named Alexandria who rode chipmunks as her steeds and glowed when the sun touched her.

I remember stories of a pony named Jack who took his rider by the seat of her pants down a lane to get home in time for dinner.

I remember stories of a pig named Billy Bumps who played with cats til they ran up a tree and left him alone in the grass. 

Sometimes I sit on the porch with a dog under one arm, the little girl who lives upstairs under another, and a cat trying to sit on both laps at the same time.

We sit and watch the birds chasing each other and tell each other stories.

We go to a place of magic and giggling, and we leave the dishes to sit and the laundry unfolded.

In ten years, in fifty years, no one will remember if my floors were clean this day, or if the cabinets were neat.

 But someone might know the name of the dog who snuggled with us, or remember the stories we told.

The necklace we made of clay & love might still be circling some other little girl's neck.

If you are looking to me for some words of wisdom, some magic spell which will help you to do it all, or to remember that you don't have to do it all, I can't help you.

If I knew it once, I have forgotten it.

I only know that sometimes, once in while, I remember, briefly. I remember to tell stories while I wash the dishes, recite poetry while I fold the towels, and to sit on the porch with a dog and a cat and a kid, watching the birds.

 May you find the strength and time to do the same. 

So Be It. 



The Ballad of Tove

             One can only assume that from time to time the Fates need some comic relief.
   Let me give you an example:  (true story, BTW)

             Michael put a pen in his shirt pocket.  The shirt was white, so naturally, the pen leaked.  Michael decided to salvage the shirt by dying the whole thing black, so he  bought a package of Rit Dye -- black.  He very carefully put it up high in a place where the animals wouldn't get at it.  

             The Fates snickered at this hubris.

             One kitten took such challenges personally, so she found the package of dye and pawed it.  She pushed and pulled and batted it around until she got it off the shelf down to where she could play with it. Then she batted it around the desktop 'til it fell on the floor.   

             At this point, Tove decided to get in on the act.  Now Tove was a dog that looks as if he was put together by a committee.  He strongly resembled the picture of the Slithee Tove in "Through the Looking Glass" -- hence, the name. Tove was not overly blessed with brains.

             The dog thought that if the kitten liked to play with this strange new thing, it must be a great toy, so he took it up in his mouth and chewed it 'til the envelope of dye came open. Then he ran about the house, gracefully dripping dye granules about the house.

             Two of the other cats investigated the piles of dye crystals.  Then, losing interest, they sat down and licked their feet.  After words, they trotted off, with damp paws, over and through the dye crystals, leaving two sets of perfect, dark-blue kitty-prints on the white bedclothes.       

             I walked into the room, saw what had happened and calmly screamed.

             

             Tove immediately figured something was wrong, so he started to back up, right into the dresser, knocking off the flowers onto the floor.  Unfortunately, Tove had a nervous bladder and when frightened, he tended to pee upon himself.   My gentle scream frightened him, so he peed.

             At this point, the Fates are staring to laugh out loud.

             Pee works as well as anything with dye crystals to make a wonderful dye which stains both wooden floors and linoleum very nicely.   Tove, formerly a honey-colored dog, now had four black paws, a black front & tail, a black face and a very black tongue.   Thanks to the pee, he now trailed the dye where ever he went, and, because my scream, he assumed that I was not happy with him, so he scrambled about, trying desperately to get away from me, imprinting everything with blueblack paw prints.

             Several possible actions occurred to me but I opted for the Humane one.  After I caught him,  I took Tove outside and tied him to the porch rail.  Then I came in and started cleaning up the dye, or so I thought.

             At this point the Fates were working overtime.

             First I swept up the worst of it, but the bristles kept holding the dye in them, so I ended up just spreading it around further.   So I tried vacuuming up what I could.  The Vacuum took the dye nicely too.  The floor head and the inner part of the hose were dyed black.  Also probably the motor and the insides, but I decided not to investigate that.   And because the dye clung to the opening of the vacuum cleaner, I left little perfectly round rings wherever I put the muzzle of the cleaner.

             After vacuuming for a good-long time, I had gotten up all the loose dye -- or so I thought.  The floor was littered with paw prints, both canine and feline, so I started to mop them up.  But the more I mopped, the more I made dye.  Soon the entire floor was several shades darker.  The mop-head was now permanently black, the inside of the pink bucket was getting darker, and the tub where I was emptying the used water was turning grayer by the moment.

             My shoes had granules of dye all over them and when I stepped in some damp floor, I started to add my footprints to the decorations.  I took off my shoes and washed the bottoms of them but then my feet got dirty.  I washed my feet and dried them, but every step I took still left prints because the dye powder was so fine I could not avoid stepping in it, and then my feet would sweat, slightly, leaving still more footprints as well as dying my feet a very pretty dark blue.

             For a good hour and a half, I was making more mess than I was cleaning.  Then it looked like I was starting to make headway. 

             Tove was still out on the porch, howling his unhappiness at being left out of the fun.

             I vacuumed him (which he took strong exception to) and then took him to the courtyard to hose him off, but the outside faucet wasn't working, so I had to take him to the basement laundry room.   Tove looked like a lost cause.   I figured that his fur was dyed 'til it grew out, but I wanted to get off whatever I could of the stuff that would come off.   After about thirty minutes of hosing, the water seemed a little lighter.  Twenty minutes after that, I dunked his feet one at a time in a bucket and got no perceptible hue coming from the rinse.

             His mouth was harder to clean.  His tongue was a lost cause, but the rest of his face and muzzle were still very dark.  I was in less than a good mood and not much in charity with him by then, so I dunked his whole muzzle in the bucket of water.  Although he was underwater for less than a second at a time, I must admit it did occur to me to keep him under for longer.  I womanfully resisted the temptation. 

             I wondered briefly if he would die from ingesting the dye, but alas, it was vegetable based.

             Exhausted by the battle, I climbed the stairs back to our apartment to survey the damage.  The porch where Tove had been tied had not a single visible paw-print---it was solid black.

            Tove & I walked in to a bluish kitchen floor which had formerly been white. The wooden floor was decorated by paw prints of all kinds, we now had designer sheets, and a gray & white tile floor in the bathroom.  The tub never did look the same and we needed a new mop. 

            

             Although I did pay my landlord for the damages, I never did get my security deposit back.  But the Fates had a good long laugh about it.

             

            

Healing: part 2

A Happiness

I was thinking about Healing the other day when I happened to watch a documentary that spoke to me on the deepest level.  It evoked all sorts of reactions in me and showed me one possible path towards healing when we have been wronged.

The Documentary was  about Eva Moses Kor.  She and her twin sister Miriam were selected for a series of horrifying experiments performed by Dr. Josef  Mengele at Auschwitz. 

Most of you know that Dr. Mengele performed a series of useless and terrifying experiments on Twins.  I say useless, because nothing whatsoever of scientific value came out of them.  The experiments themselves were unbelievably horrific. 

Of the over 3000 twins he experimented on, only 26 sets were still alive when Auschwitz was liberated.

Eva and her twin, Miriam, 10 years old, were among the survivors.

As Eva says in the documentary

“Just to be free of the Nazis, did not remove the pain they had inflicted on me.  There might be another way that survivors can heal themselves.  I have found one way, and that is to forgive your worst enemy.  It will heal your soul and it will set you free.”

She chose to forgive Dr. Mengele.  Indeed, the name of the Documentary is  “Forgiving Dr. Mengele.”

I have to stop here and tell you that I am not sure I could ever be that strong.  No one has ever done anything to me such as she and her sister suffered at the hands of Dr. Mengele.  But I have had my sorrows, too.

There is one person in my life that I still have trouble forgiving, even though it has been over 40 years ago.  I am trying to forgive, but it is hard.  Yet Eva can forgive Dr. Mengele.

Not all her fellow survivors agree with her.  In fact, few do.

And I can understand that very well.  I have yet to forgive General George Armstrong Custer for what he did to my people.  President Jackson and his ‘trail of tears’ is a dirty word in my household.  And I was not even alive when those events happened.  I was not a witness to their transgressions.  I was not personally a victim of their criminal activities. 

Holocaust survivors were.  They were directly and personally affected.  They saw their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers shot down, gassed, and otherwise brutalized.  I cannot even imagine such things, what they would do to my soul.

Yet Eva, the twin, found the strength to forgive.  When she did forgive, she realized that she had power as an individual.  It set her free from the pain.  It was a life-changing experience.  To be free of that pain.

Eva says:  "To triumph over the pain of the past, forgive.  It is Healing, not just forgiveness.  Getting even has never helped heal a single person.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with the perpetrator,  it only has to do with the victim taking back the power of their lives.”

I wrestle with what she is saying.  This is how I understand it:

 If we carry a grudge, If we cannot forgive, then in effect, we are victims.  Someone else has power over us. 

We have no need to forgive someone who has no power over us, because they have no power over us.  What they do or did does not matter.  It is only those who can affect us in some way that we need to be wary of.

An interesting idea.

 I began these two posts by talking about healing, especially healing from when you have been wronged in some way, and yet now the subject is Forgiveness.   Why?   I think the two are often related.

Can you have inner peace, healing, when you carry bitterness with you?  I cannot.

Earlier I spoke of the one person I have trouble forgiving.  She is long dead now.  My anger does not hurt her.  It only hurts me.  It cuts up my peace, not hers.  If I want to be healed of that situation of long ago, I must forgive her.  But it is hard to do that.  She wronged me!   I had done nothing to her, yet the pain she inflicted followed me and affected my life for the next 40+ years.

It doesn’t matter.  If I cannot forgive her, it may well damage the rest of my life as well, and I do not want to do that.  Forgiveness does not mean that I condone what she did.  It does not mean I excuse her or her actions.   It does not mean that she should not have been held accountable.   It does mean that I must leave her to her fate and walk away.

Now, I have to admit, after 40 years, I do not think about it every day.  In fact, I seldom think about it.  Coupla times of year maybe.  But still, when I do think about it, there is a knot of pain inside me.  It is still there, alive and well, for as long as I choose to nurture it.  In my better moments, I can be magnanimous and forgive her, understanding where she came from.  But I haven’t really forgiven her, because the resentment, the bitterness is still there.  It’s getting smaller, but it still lives.

I think back to what I learned at the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross foundation, that the Five stages of Grief are:  Denial, Sorrow, Anger, Bargaining, Acceptance. 

Grief.  I have known grief, as have each of you.  And I have decided that I do not want to get stuck in an endless cycle of Denial, Sorrow, Anger, Bargaining and Fear.  I want to break the cycle.

I want health.  I want to be healed.   I want to be whole.  I want that inner peace.  I do not want to carry around bitterness as my companion.  So, as often as I possibly can, I must choose to forgive, to let go of resentments,  even when it is damned difficult.   I want to be healed, and I  am the only person that can do it.

And as for the times that I find the burdens to heavy to put down, I pray that I find the strength to let go of what I can, to forgive what I can.    I must love myself enough to heal. 

I must recognize my own power and set myself free.





Healing: part 1

Blue Flower

The Post tonight and the post tomorrow are from a sermon I gave last year.

Healing

Part 1

 We all need to be healed.  Some of us have physical issues.  Some of us have emotional issues.  Some of us are trapped in bad situations.  Some of us are trapped by fear.  Some of us may be trapped by the inability to let go.   

I am sure there are many other things I have not thought to list here.

I do know that we are all wounded.  We all need healing from time to time.  Every single one of us. 

In the 1980’s I had the good fortune to work for Elizabeth Kubler-Ross at her Foundation for Death and Dying in New York City.  I took several weeks of intense training on what it meant to be dying, what a person goes through, what feelings they might have.  I learned about the Five stages of Grief:  Denial, Sorrow, Anger, Bargaining, Acceptance.  

I was given exorcizes to practice on what it might feel like to lose part of your body, or to lose control of it, because that often goes along with dying.   I learned that having a disability is like a ‘little death’, especially if you contract the disability  and you remember what it was like before.

And I learned there were related issues having to do with all sorts of disabilities.    For instance, well over 80 % of marriages fail when a child with disabilities, especially mental ones, is born into the family.  For other folks, contracting a disability is to become isolated from the rest of the world, because even well-meaning family and friends often forget about you when you can no longer participate the way you used to.

I learned lots of things I’d rather not know.

After the training, I was assigned to the Projects in lower east Manhattan.  I was frightened at first.  In real life, it is not nearly as attractive as they show in TV.   The elevators seldom worked and the stairways were really narrow, dark and scary, and they always smell terrible.   But when folks are dying, they need someone, no matter where they live.

The Foundation talked a lot about ‘Healing’.  That may sound strange, speaking of healing to a dying person.  Yet I have seen it.  I am not talking about   “Curing” but  “Healing”.

‘Curing’ would be when your troubles go away.  Most of us do not experience that.  But Healing, ah, that’s different.  I would strongly suspect that a number of us have experienced Healing. 

Healing is Inner Peace, A Calm Strength,  Facing Reality square on, with no anger or fear or sadness, acceptance of What Is.  It is knowing the difference between what we can change and what we cannot change.   It is letting go of fear and sorrow.  It is when we have a profound sense of Emotional Well-Being.

The lessons from the Foundation have relevance to just about every part of life. 

Anyone here who has gone through a divorce, for instance, will recognize the Five stages of Grief:  Denial, Sorrow, Anger, Bargaining,  & Acceptance.  And you also know there is no order to them, nor do you do one and get over it.  Rather, you slide around, maybe feeling anger, then sorrow, then acceptance, then denial and back to anger again. And it just keeps on happening over and over again, no order, no promise of relief, a roller-coaster of emotions, until we might begin to feel numb---only to be plunged back into the morass.  And it happens in so many areas of our lives: losing a job, having a serious illness, or any of a hundred other things.

So we are stuck, all of us, with the problem, of how to heal ourselves of whatever life brings us.

For those of us with a physical disability, sometimes more than anything else, it is annoying.  Things that used to be easy are now beyond our capabilities, or perhaps we can do them, but it is a real hassle.  My friend, Anne, used to be a social worker who specialized working with the blind.  She worked with folks who used to be able to see but lost their sight. 

Can you imagine that?  The obvious things are not being able to drive or read, having to buy special, expensive equipment to use the computer or internet.   But there are so many other things as well.  Not knowing where you are if you get turned around or get off at the wrong stop, not knowing what time of day it is by looking at the sky, not seeing what your children look like as they grow. 

Loosing your hearing?  Another devastating issue.  Talk about isolating!   

And so it goes.  Many of us here can speak first-hand to what it is to have physical disabilities.  It is not fun.

But there are other things that need healing too.  The healing of the heart.  Many of us have suffered losses other than physical.  The death of a loved one, or the death of a cherished dream.     Or when someone has wronged us and we feel the victim.

That pain can be carried within us, silently, throughout our lives.  We deal with it, but we are not healed.  Health is inner peace.  We are not at peace.  Healing is letting go of fears, sorrows and pain of loss, but we carry the pain with us.   It seems too heavy a burden to put down.

But a person who is whole does not carry extra baggage.  So, how to put it down?

To Be Continued Tomorrow . . . 

Blue Paisley  ATC

Made with cut paper & ink decorations



It was a long day today.    My plans to stay home and veg -- never happened.  I ended up going out twice and braving the crowds, all for cat and dog food.   I hope they appreciate what I do for them, but I doubt they do.

It's very late at night or early in the morning, depending on your point of view.  I'm watching an old Made for TV movie.  It's not very good but I am enjoying it.  Sometimes, I'm just in the mood for a 'B; movie.    I love cheesy special effects and over-acting.   Right now here are two monsters, fighting each other.  But sometimes the costume slips a little and you can see the human underneath..   Ah, and famous final kiss.  Very satisfying.

I'm actually glad that life is not a series of Happy Endings, but I am also glad that movies so often are.  The idea of  happy endings, implies that there is an end, but in real life we just go on--until we don't. 

And that's about as profound as I can get tonight.

Thanksgiving 2010

The View from my Kitchen Window

As I type this, it is late at night on Thanksgiving in the United States.  I hope you each had a good time with family and friends.  By the time most of you will read this, it will be 'Black Friday', the biggest shopping day of the year.  Many of you will be out there, helping the merchants to be able to pay their bills.

Me?  I'm not setting foot outside the house if I can help it.   Actually, I like the crowds and the hustle and bustle.  It's fun, and  they start playing Christmas music over the loudspeakers.  I love Christmas music.  No, the reason I will not be joining you is because I am watching my budget like a hawk.  Frankly, there are too many places where I cannot be trusted.  So it's better to just not put temptation in my path.

Instead, I am hoping to spend a quiet day with the animals and maybe a good book.

Whatever you decide to do, enjoy.