Je Vous Aime, France

Une année de rendez-vous avec Jules Verne en 2005
La Ville de Nantes a vécu au rythme de "La visite du sultan des Indes sur son éléphant à voyager dans le temps" avec Royal de Luxe à l’occasion du centenaire de la disparition de Jules Verne.
 
Imagine in America municipal spectacles staged by a well-funded Bread and Puppet Theater, events without licensed products, in celebration of cultural history. Parade routes without barricades! Imagination without profit drive! Then you would have something like the celebration of the Jules Verne Centenary taking place in Nantes, France.

Merci, Beware of the Blog, the blog of Freeform Radio stateside. That's commercial-free radio, folks. Not one ad.

In the Piney Woods

It was a weekend of hiking in the Catskills.

Saturday the kids and I joined a bunch of Unitarians for a hike and picnic near Wilson State Park that ended in a vista overlooking the park and the valley that stretches to west of it toward the mountains, and yesterday I met my friend C, who runs a nature/art/social studies program for homeschooled kids that my daughter AJ attends, in lovely Mink Hollow.

The tent caterpillars are back, and it's wise to hike with a soft-focus gaze aimed a few feet ahead of you so you don't walk right into their threads. Several times I found inchworms on my jacket. The moss had grown long and thick, and on both hikes, lying down on its bedding was a top priority.

C and I hiked from an apple orchard and meadow with a fragrant oregano patch that's always buzzing with bees, up into the Piney Woods, a stand of young pines that the kids in AJ's program love to climb. The thin trunks flex and sway when the kids wrap themselves around them. C gave me a tour of recent activities in the Piney Woods. "This is the bed of needles where everyone sleeps. Over here is Neil's fireplace and this is Emma Rose's fireplace. And here is the big old oak where they bounce on the branches."

Lately, the homeschoolers have been coming to this area and doing positive identification of herbs in the meadow. They pick what ones they like and make jars of tea to bring home to us parents. AJ's teas are delicious and she always specifies that they are gifts for me, a special treat. She's becoming quite adept at herb identification. I feel grateful and proud that her relationship with the natural world is deeper than mine was at her age.

While we hiked, C's dog ranged around, checking in with us periodically. C and I exchanged book and movie recommendations. C bent over repeatedly to pluck violets and wild thyme and put them in a glass jar. Now and then we interrupted the conversation to focus on the forest. "I love these tiny ferns." "What's this?" "It's called a star flower." "Did you see something out of the corner of your eye?" "Yes." "If it was a bear, would he be barking?" "Yes, definitely."

On her last hike in the area, C, her partner and their dog had indeed come upon a bear. Surprised her while she was eating. She up and ran off, which is what black bears typically do, but I am not particularly interested in seeing one just the same, except perhaps from a distance. Once, R left his lunch box in the meadow and after the program day, when C went back to fetch it, she surprised a bear just about to snatch it. Her dog scared the bear off. He looks something like a bear himself, but smaller.

We ended the hike with an auspicious sighting: inches from my toe wriggling through the grass and stopping when I said hello, there was a wee red eft.

Madagascar 1.4.2

"Which was your favorite character?" AJ just asked me of the film Madagascar, which we saw today. Huh. A favorite. Well, there was basically one female character, a hippopatamus whose job as a character was to support the friendship of the male leads, a lion and a zebra. The zebra's conflict was that he needed some adventure and the lion's conflict was that he was hungry. At the risk of sounding like a humorless feminist, which I often am, I'm just a wee bit bored-to-death with male leads, their male sidekicks, and the females who get a corner of the screen to use staring at the dudes.

My son had been counting down the days until the opening of Madagascar. We had arranged to see it with a friend of R and AJ's, his mother and his three-year-old brother. Much excitement leading up to it.

My spirits sank as I noticed, while checking showtimes and arranging to meet our friends, the PG rating "for crude humor." "Uh oh," I said into the phone to the other mother without thinking. "Here come the fart jokes. Or worse, if the script is really bad." When I hung up I turned to R, who had tears in his eyes.

"I'm not going," he said with a choked voice. He really hates "juvenile humor," the provenance of adults with creative limitations who somehow managed, when history named this branch of comedy, to get juveniles blamed for things vulgar. For an hour R argued for staying home. "I won't like it."

"Look," I said. "There are websites for parents where they detail all the things about a movie that might be a problem for parents or kids. I can go read one of their reviews."

"I don't want to know what the problems are."

"That's ok, I'll read and report back to you without the details."

So I read the review on Kids-in-Mind, a site with a numbered rating system for sex and nudity, violence and gore, and profanity that intends to "enable concerned adults to determine whether a film is appropriate for them and their children according to their own criteria and values."

From their review it sounded like Madagascar would have the usual male-dominated cast, with one female in a principal role, the cliché mild-elder-woman-who-beats-up-a-ferocious animal...and we wouldn't be getting away without a fart joke or two. The only value of mine it seemed to support was that the giraffe gets an acupuncture treatment. All right!

And there would be some "name-calling," Kids-in-Mind noted, including "pansies."

The "profanity glossary" on the site says "Words or expressions that are used to denigrate and insult one's racial or ethnic background, gender or sexual orientation: Examples include the N-word, various anti-Semitic terms, and anti-homosexual terms like fa**ot."

In my book, "pansies" is anti-homosexual, so I wrote and told them so (nonsensically, it's also pejorative for "nonviolent").

To my surprise Kids-In-Mind wrote right back, said 'right you are,' and changed their designation of pansies to "derogatory." Which is why I'm plugging their site, which has been helpful to me on other occasions with the Highly Sensitive Viewers at my house. (Who until today, by the way, had never said "that sucks." Thank you so very much, whoever thinks a kid's movie can't do well without a PG rating.)

Hollywood should have purged itself of the anti-gay thing long ago, so why does it persist? And, aside from: 1) the occasionally-enlightened Pixar, which throws girls crumbs like Dory (Finding Nemo) and Jessie (Toy Story 2) and 2) the women's liberaton allegory Chicken Run, which in any case had to cross the Atlantic to be screened in the land where women's suffrage was first won (1869, in Wyoming Territory), why are female cartoon personalities nearly always one-dimensional, often ruled by sex jokes or shunted to the side?

If a female buddy movie starred a zebra and a lion, would they have to drive themselves off a cliff at the end so audiences wouldn't be too threatened by the awesome power of female buddyship? Please!

Science Fair

The other day we attended a local homeschoolers' science fair. Like the last one we went to, it was a casual occasion, with participants snacking on popcorn and pretzels while hearing about experiments, looking at posters and listening to talks by children as young as five.

There was an electric circuit, a illustration of frog reproduction, carnations and celery stalks dyed by osmosis, and even "human orgone" generators created from resin, copper and crystals (H said "that belongs at the PseudoScience Fair," but everyone was fascinated by the paper-weight-sized sparkling pyramids). An animated description of how tsunamis happen by a team of brothers who had illustrated the process with drawings drew feedback from a boy who lives with sheep and chickens and has a strong interest in animals. He told us that during the recent tsunami, animals sensed something wrong and ran inland.

R showed his movies on DVD and discussed stop-motion animation and special effects. AJ made a collage about dog and cat anatomy. Both spoke at length without rehearsing, so I had no idea what they would say. They chatted about their projects without shyness or uncertainty, calmly deflecting any questions they couldn't answer.

Parents took pictures, shot video and asked most of the questions. Sometimes they asked questions they already knew the answers to, a pedagogical practice that annoys my children. Later in the car they said "I don't like that jokey stuff, like asking how many eyes does a cat have." Sometimes parents asked questions and kids made up the answers, whether because they are imaginative or to avoid saying "I don't know," I'm not sure.

Everyone listened and supported everyone else, and each scientist got a big round of applause. A good activity for a rainy day.

Aught 14 now live!

A journal of experimental poetry that hails from beloved Ithaca, Aught 14, has published two of my somniloquies in its new issue. I'm publishing under a pseudonym, N. Graham, so don't be looking for "red eft" if you follow the link.

14 happens to be my favorite number, and aught, signifying nothing and anything, isn't bad either.

Prometheus Without Ethics

Dear Representative:

NASA's Project Prometheus aims to develop nuclear engines to power rockets in space. Just as Prometheus and mortals in the Greek myth were punished by Zeus, NASA's project risks nuclear disasters on earth and in space.

NASA must be forced to abandon its efforts to risk peace and safety by using nuclear power and weapons in space.

Letters are now circulating in the House by Representative Cynthia McKinney to shift funds away from Prometheus and to urge NASA to develop solar and other alternative sources of power for space exploration.

I call on all in Congress to add their endorsement of this enlightened effort to keep space free from the scourge of nuclear materials and weapons.

=============

That's a Progressive Secretary letter. Nukes in space! Like we haven't botched things enough yet on Earth, we have to shoot for the moon and beyond! Jeesh.

On a list I'm on, we've been debating scientific method. I got someone's dander up by posting a quotation from the founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison: "Science without ethics is sociopathology."

The debate is as to whether science has anything to do with ethics or not. Adjunct is a debate about where science ends and technology begins, or where science ends and the corporation begins, or where science ends and the world ends, as in our news about nuclear proliferation.

I came of age at a time when Donna Haraway and Stephen Jay Gould and lots of other people were changing the way we look at science and the biases of those doing the science. In my own life I've had occasion to ponder the shortcomings of medical science, psychology and anthropology.

I'd hate to be called a strict subjectivist or relativist or political correct type, but "scientific method" will never sound as antiseptic and reliable as it did the day I melted sugar in a fold of foil over a Bunsen burner in the seventh grade. Other associations to science from those days: World Expos, the clean future, solar energy, a world with nice-smelling, quiet cars and everything recycled, no litter. That's what the 70s seemed to promise me, growing up inside it, unaware of the full import of Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Pretend Play

At the other end of the house my children are deep into their pretend play. From our offices to the east, H and I can hear loud singing, crashing of blocks, banging of cabinet doors, feet running to and fro, shouting. When AJ is pretending, she doesn't call R by his name, she calls him "Brother."

I am facing H, each of us at our computers, but we can't see each other because of the wall that divides our offices. But we talk. "Listen to AJ singing." "What would they be doing if they were at school." "They would not be singing like that, I know that much."

This will go on until lunch, when it will be time for R to go walk the neighbor's dog, his Thursday job.

In the unschooling community, it's axiomatic that these long stretches of pretend play are good for our children, for their sense of narrativity, their emotional well-being, stress relief, information processing and creative evolution. Through pretend play we bring learning fully into our bodies. It often occurs to me that pretend play could save the earth, if enough children and adults were given enough time and encouragement to do it. It's one of the cornerstones of unschooling: make believe, that territory we map out for ourselves where we can try on different identities, learn to innovate, explore situational ethics, develop an intimate knowledge of what it means to have fun.

I have a friend whose unschooled daughter is sixteen. She's taking college classes, writing a novel, dancing, choreographing and teaching dance, and going on excursions with an outfit called Wayfinder. When she was very young, she and a friend used to play in the woods, making up stories and characters, and later lost touch when she moved away. They rediscovered their friendship, and their pretend play, as teenagers with Wayfinder, an organization that leads children through improvisational adventures, many of them in medieval settings, in an atmosphere that supports trust, conflict resolution and acceptance. I think of it as Advanced Pretend Play for kids who might otherwise think they'd outgrown one of the most important features of their childhood.

AJ: Meanwhile, I was sharpening my horn! If you see a beautiful human girl, don't kill her!

R: I'm a genius! See this beautiful building I made? It can never fall down!

red eft's Feeling Great Shortlist

A couple months ago, during the Dark Times, I posted Red Eft's Anti-Depression Kit, a list of things you can do to beat the winter blues.

Because I've been feeling great, I have been honing this into a very short list of what I absolutely have to do every day in order to remain feeling great. Another way to say it is: do these things or else suffer various consequences. Do you have a short list like this, a baseline regimen below which you must not sink? Or more positively, a protocol that floats your boat?

Here's mine:

1. Exercise

I intend to exercise every day, no matter the weather, no matter what time I wake up, no matter if it's dark in the morning. Right now I am experimenting going out walking or jogging alternated with Nordic-tracking inside, and it's sufficient novelty for my restless spirit. 20 minutes aerobic.

2. Yoga

No matter how few poses, or how easy, it's important for me to do a little yoga each day. My muscles, and particularly my spinal vertebrae, need the stretching yoga provides in order to keep me aligned. That downward dog that children do instinctively is one brilliant stretch.

3. Write

Either what you're reading now or what I put in my journal or whatever else I'm working on, no matter. Different muscle, same need. Every day.

4. Meditate

I've learned not to belabor this one. I can bring meditation to whatever I'm doing, even when I don't sit and ring my bell. Washing dishes, gardening, strolling through the yard, mowing (we have the adorable silent rotary kind) and cleaning are all opportunties to bring focus to the body. But I love sitting too, alone or with my husband. I love meditating with a phrase in my head or just following the breath. It's all good, as they say.

5. Eat food free of gluten and dairy

Already posted about this one, but since it must be done every day, I repeat it.

6. Be of service to someone else

I think it was Jung who told a depressed woman that there was only one way he could be sure of helping her feel better, and that was if she did something for someone else every day. Well, whoever said it, they were right. A letter of complaint to a politician, a phone call to a mourning friend, attending a peace rally or pitching in with a neighborhood clean-up, the little things we do for each other give us hope.

There we have it. A program that short should be easy to stick to, nay?

Time for my walk.

The Lower Floor

We are installing a new floor in our basement apartment living room to prepare for a new tenant June 1. Our handyman, painter, friend, Dab, is leading the crew, which includes me and H (nail setting, clean-up, hammering), R (nail management) and sometimes AJ (entertainment). H and I take turns working with Dab so we can also drive AJ to where she needs to be, do yard work, run upstairs to check our email.

The wood is soft pine from the local lumber store, Herzog's. (Please note: not Home Depot or Lowe's, which pull us into the Ugliest Strip in Kingston and pull our dollars out of Ulster County.) Some of the pine planks are warped, so sometimes R or I stand on one while Dab hammers a block against it to straighten it. While we do this we sing or make up jokes: "Hey R, who delivers the nails? The nail carrier." Ha ha ha.

At lunchtime, which has been getting later with the longer days, we all migrate to the kitchen. Dab brings himself lunch in a mason jar, rice with chicken. He picks through cabinets until he finds his favorite tea. At the end of the day he keeps talking while I am serving the dinner he said he didn't have time to stay for. AJ says "Hmmm, I smell something yummy!" That's H's way of poking gentle fun at Dab, who always sniffs out a good meal. Now our kids poke gentle fun at him, too. Our mix of pleasure and annoyance at having him around confirms his family-member status here.

We are crewing for Dab to try to make the work go faster and spend less money, but so far I can't tell if it's working out that way. But the bottom line, heh heh, is that soon we will have some rental income. We are going to make this house prosper from the bottom up.

The Inner Wall

Yesterday I took my kids to The Inner Wall, an indoor rock-climbing venue in New Paltz.

The deal was: AJ wanted to climb and R did not, so we stopped at the bookstore and bought him a copy of Charlie and the Glass Elevator to read. An empty chair awaited him and he plopped right down while AJ and I harnessed up and prepared to go "on belay."

I know zippo about rock climbing but it was clear to me within five minutes of my first visit (this was my second) that the phrase "inner wall" must be commonplace among climbers talking about psychic obstacles in their sport.

Bilbo (not his real name!), a guy in his twenties, took me through all the steps of tying on, which I had forgotten in the year since AJ and I had been there. He held up the rope to show me how to tie an eight knot. "Can I hold that?" I said. "Because I'm not going to remember this unless my own hands are doing it." I have a major inner wall about demonstration versus hands-on learning.

R and I have a big joke about a brochure for a museum that sits in a rack at the Cakebox Cafe, where we sometimes go for breakfast. A group of kids is gathered around a printing press, and a fellow is holding up a printed page. "Hands-on learning!" the brochure reads. "Yeah!" We always say, plucking it out of the rack and pointing to the fellow. "Hands-on for the teacher, you mean! Ha ha!" R really loves that one.

Anyway, Bilbo was flexible about my need to hold the rope if I was going to re-learn the eight and fisherpeople's knots. If he tried to demonstrate I good-naturedly grabbed the rope from him. Gimme that!

Finally it was time to go on belay. It took AJ a good five minutes to agree to follow the protocol for stepping onto the wall. She had a block about following the script, or felt self-conscious. Who knows? She told Bilbo he had to leave, and he turned his back so he wouldn't be looking, completely accepting AJ.

"Am I on belay?" she finally asked.

"Belay is on!" That's what the belayer, me, has to say.

"Climbing!'

"Climb away!"

And up she went. But the holds were spread too far for her, or they were the wrong shape, or she preferred to dangle rather than grasp. She would try a wall once or twice and then want to change, which threw me back on my inner wall of having to tie on and remember all the steps, and the A-B-C-D-E-F safety check (Anchor, Buckles, Carabinier, Device, Eights, Fisherpeople's). My patience was starting to fray when R, freshly over his inner wall, asked if he could try it.

(It takes R time to warm up, but if you give him space, don't hassle him, and let him do things at his own pace he will try something new.)

While we waited for R's climbing shoes I eavesdropped on Bilbo and a co-worker. They were talking about schools where they were both teaching, critical of children's treatment, taking the part of the kids in a system where lining up, getting sent to the principal's office and being told what to do instead of asked how you feel are the order of the day (they must have been working in especially stuffy schools). "Let's start our own school," the woman said.

Bilbo brought out R's shoes, put them on the counter, turned to me and said "By the way, I just saw AJ hitting some kids."

"WHAT?" Total shock I felt.

"Just kidding," he said. "Heh heh!"

I'd have been mad, but it was so instructive, how my heart stumbled in panic. And he was quite a friendly person, not motivated by malice, just trying to lighten our way up the wall.

R would go halfway up a wall and then say "I can't." I suggested he say "I'm coming back down now" instead of "I can't go any higher." He tried that. He went halfway up several times, testing the edge of his comfort zone, and came back down.

We stayed for a while after we took off their harnesses, and R & AJ tried the slanted practice wall that you can do without a harness, grasping the holds, letting go, and falling to the thick mat beneath them. Just getting used to the feel of a new thing. Grasping, letting go, falling.

Grasping, letting go, falling.

Flood Recovery Gets a New Name in Ulster Co.

As I took my morning walk through a woodsy section of Kingston, feeling the imbecilic happiness available to some who live free of hunger and bombs dropping on their heads all day, I reflected on yesterday's flood relief meeting.

I sat next to a fellow Unitarian wondering what we can do to help. We don't have a fleet of carpenters, like the Mennonites. We aren't flush with cash, like the Catholic charities. We have lots of creativity, but what are we gonna do, stage a poetry reading for the flood victims?

Not such a bad idea, actually. I sat tinkering with letters and words. The group was looking for a name, and I was trying to find an acronym involving "disaster relief" and "Ulster" and relating to "flood." At one point the director of United Way looked some distance across the room at me and said loudly, "Was that woman there about to say something?"

I was not about to say something and said so, but then I looked down at my notebook and said, "But I do have an acronym here that needs a Y or an I. Disaster Relief I-or-Y-Something of Ulster Towns: the acronym would be DRY OUT." Another church rep called out "Initiative" and after a little tinkering the name was born:

Disaster Recovery Initiative of Ulster Towns—DRI-OUT.

Silly red eft, even doodling is important!

I'm in awe of these people though—the case workers, housing advocates, administrators who've been addressing the flood. The atmosphere in the room was full of 'good works' energy.

Alternative Films for Kids

Announcing! a! new! blog!

Comin' at ya from red eft.

Movies for kids that respect their intelligence and love of the planet. Movies that are Not A Total Waste of Time and Are Not Produced By Disney. Movies slightly-off-the-beaten track that may take some work to track down. Or not.

An ongoing, unalphabetized, nonchronological, yet faithfully opinionated, roster. A link to send to the progressive parents in your life.

Get ready to meet Alternative Films for Kids.

Family Values : : Value Family

It's been almost year now since Massachusetts legalized gay marriage; a little over a year since a weekly wave of weddings swept through the town of New Paltz and beyond. A year since my husband and I stood in front of the New Paltz courthouse holding a huge sign painted by my son and me in rainbow stripes, with a silhouette of a horse and carriage (driven by a conspicuously female driver), framed by the words "Rights and Marriage."

Spring is here again and I want to take a moment to celebrate the indomitable power of love!

In the Year of Gay Marriage I and my family were honored to celebrate the union of an elderly lesbian couple and a middle-aged gay couple. Both of these occasions were tremendously moving, for their historic nature, for the palpable love and respect of the marrying lovers, for the social and professional accomplishments of the participants, for the community of support that surrounded each pair.

Seeing Unitarian ministers lead the way in sanctifying these relationships filled me with pride at being part of a spiritual community that values love, justice and diversity. When R & AJ talk about marriage and family, it's with an awareness that "there could be two moms," referring to a family in our congregation.

This year, New Paltz is hosting its own Gay Pride Parade, and sadly I'll be out of town. So I'm getting a month's head start and celebrating gay pride now, days away from the one-year anniversary of legal gay marriage on May 17th.

Vive l'amour!

Kingston Library: The Community Hub

Yesterday Peter McCarty talked to a big group of children and parents at the library about his career as a children's book illustrator. He read several of his books, and described the process of creating them. My favorite was Hondo and Fabian, a book about his dog and cat, and how they spend their day. Hondo goes to the beach to chase sticks with his friend Fred, a chocolate lab. Fabian stays home and shreds tissue paper and takes a nap. Each is happy doing his own thing.

After Peter was finished talking, everybody grabbed art supplies to make their own books. R showed Peter his claymation figures for Adventure to Pluto. AJ made a book called "Kitty," in which a cat is rained on, eats too much food and acts in a play with another cat dressed in a purple tutu.

One of my favorite kids from the school mediation program was there, and I got to introduce him to my kids and meet his Mom. A couple of homeschooling families I know showed up, plus some kids I only see at these after-school library programs, which draw a diverse and enthusiastic crowd.



I love the library. It's our home-away-from-home, and our librarian has become a good friend. She organizes some of the best puppet shows, storytelling hours and music performances we've seen since moving to Ulster County. Surrounded by flowers, herbs and flowering trees, the charming building is a converted school, leased by the library trustees from the school district for the affordable price of one dollar per year.

The news that the Kingston Children's Library may close or move off site during reconstruction of the library roof distresses me. Apparently, there has also been talk of moving the library out of our neighborhood to a more 'desirable' location, such as the former Ames in the incredibly ugly and pedestrian-unfriendly Kingston Strip Mall (not its official name!).

Some people won't even drive to our library. It's in a working-class neighborhood that has a reputation for drug traffic. We ex-Brooklynites walk there every week at least once, and I've never felt ill-at-ease. It's upsetting to think that people would consider moving the library away from the neighborhood that needs it most: plenty of kids (and their parents) use the library as a free after-school program.

One scenario has the trustees buying the building from the district (for $1!) and erecting scaffolding at one end of the children's library so it can stay open during construction. I hope the trustees will find a way to keep the library's main branch in the community where it belongs—permanently.

Hope for the Future

I am driving my family home from a field trip to the Insitute for Ecosystem Studies at Millbrook (nice trails!) on Mother's Day. We are listening to the new alphabet CD by They Might Be Giants (I'd link to it but now that they're produced by Disney they'll have to pay me to do that).

We've heard the CD oh, five or six times. By now I know the choruses of several of the songs and can sing along. My children, though, know all the lyrics. I push power button off and they keep right on singing. They did not get their audiogenic memories from me.

"Do you think I had fetal alcohol syndrome?" I ask H.

"Quite possibly," he says.

"Mom smoked while I was pregnant," I add.

"There's that."

"And: not breastfed."

I could go on, through early childhood listing pollutants and deprivations, but I know it's better to stop there. It's enough to know I'm raising a generation of superior intelligence that's going to get the world out of the messes it's in. I suppose that's a lot to lay on your kids but that's where we are, isn't it?

*

On Saturday we went to a birthday party at Town of Ulster Park on the Hudson. It was warm in the sun, with a blustery breeze that threatened the cheeze doodles all day.

All the kids played kickball after cake, except mine. My kids don't go in for organized play. They collected driftwood and built a stage, fully immersed in "fake believe," as TMBG would call it.. I thought: should I be worried that they don't enjoy team sports?

The fact is that my husband and I do not enjoy team sports, do not play team sports and find competition in general to be at the root of a lot of the world's problems. I reminded myself of this and crossed the lawn to plop down on one of the theater seats R & AJ had made from dried clumps of grass.

They performed an improvisational skit followed, as you may have guessed, by the "Scheming Song" from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Other party guests joined the audience. After R & AJ inished, three girls got up to perform "Miss Mary Mack." Then the same three girls decided to try their hand at improvisation and created a very funny version of the story "Stone Soup," offering each other rocks to eat and making disgusted faces.

I love parties where the kids make their own entertainment. Certainly, as a species, our facility for doing that has diminished due to the oppressive entertainment matrix, but

there are pockets of resistance.

A Lifetime of Intention

I am grateful for an insight that came to me yesterday.

After our Sunday service, there was a meeting of the Sunday school teachers. (In Unitarian Sunday school, one learns about various world religions and Unitarian principles, which revolve around respecting difference, human dignity and peace.)

A party for the outgoing leader of the religious education program preceded the meeting, so food was served. One of the food preparers is wheat-free, so I could eat everything.

We began talking about wheat-free and gluten-free eating, and I gave my little speech about how I sometimes fall off the program and share my kids' pizza, and how it's hard not to cheat; it's kind of a spiel I've developed that's on automatic pilot. I say it without deliberation or questioning my assumptions.

I like the reply the woman, who's eaten wheat-free since November, gave me. She said, "For me there would be no point in cheating, because it's not worth it. I feel so much better." That sounds quite simple but it was the corrective I needed to my ongoing apologia about sneaking a Newman-O or a pinch of soft yeasty bread or eating "special occasion" birthday cake now and then.

What's been happening, I think, is that my memory tells me buttered bread (or whatever) is comfort food and my body tells me no, that's just an illusion, that constipation, depression and cramps do not = comfort. I have to radically and permanently revise my notion of what "comfort" is; what "a treat" is. I've been in this strange in-between zone where I get it for a while and then I slide back.

I'm getting back on the wagon with this day and this post.

I freely and enthusiastically choose to eat a gluten-free, dairy-free diet to support my good health.

Care to join me in a lifetime intention, starting today?

What We Do Know

Last night H & I finally got around to seeing What the Bleep Do We Know?

I found the film similar to one of its main images, the idea that particles are doing all kinds of things when you're not looking but if you look, there's just one particle there with its hand nowhere near the cookie jar. The more we talked about what had been said by the scientists in the movie, the more vague everything became.

I'm one of those people that thinks questions are more important than answers, so if the filmmakers didn't really make clear the connection between quantum physics and neurochemistry, s'ok. And if the film's scientists don't really explain how intentionality relates to quantum potentiality, all right. If someone took the trouble I wouldn't understand what they were saying, anyway. But I do think it's a positive thing that people get together to talk about how we can change the world we've made and the way we see it. Too bad that got mixed in with physics, channeling and a strange sequence about neurochemistry full of gender stereotypes.

More trenchant and enraged criticisms can be found, with additional links at this blog.

Fitness, Food, Flood, Food

A.M. yesterday had me out getting a spinal adjustment, then popping into newly-expanded athletic club next door, just to check it out. At the front desk I asked for a class schedule and was told "someone will be right with you." Uh-oh. Salesperson coming, and I remembered that summer was coming too, not really a great time to join a club. I like to be outside for my summer exercise.

A guy in a skull cap and a mantle of muscle shook my hand and ushered me into the Nautilus space. I think these places are now aiming for one television per member, hanging from above so you can never be out of sight from them. He fired subtly accusatory questions at me:

"What kind of machines do you prefer?"

"When is the last time you belonged to a health club?"

"Do you want to start getting fit now? Because we've found that people who say 'I'm going to think about it' never join up. Either you want to get in shape or you don't.'

You're probably wondering why I stayed so long. I am!

Fact is, I don't like "health clubs"! I feel like I'm among the pod people, and the combination of mirrors, TV sets and sweat is dizzying. But it's good to get a little values clarification now and then.

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After lunch I spent some time preparing our garden for the summer. I planted two red azaleas I'd bought the previous day, one forget-me-not, and drove fertilizer stakes into the soil around our peach and plum trees. We want those trees to produce this year. In summer, our goal is to avoid shopping and get most of our food needs met by the garden and our CSA. The garden now has horse manure and last year's compost worked into the soil. This week it gets peat moss and by next week we hope to have some seeds planted. More as the garden grows.

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Late afternoon: Over at the Red Cross they were having a meeting to discuss long-term flood relief, and I went to represent the Unitarians. I sat next to a guy from FEMA with a Homeland Security patch on his shirt. One of his recommendations to the group of church people, social workers and agency folks was that they accompany FEMA applicants to the Disaster Relief Center and help them with all the paper work. "With all that spare time we have, right?" an agency rep said. "Between midnight and reveille," he shot back. He seemed good-natured enough despite the military background, and he & the other FEMA person, a young woman in a leather jacket, were full of information. It was like being in a briefing scene from a movie.

Guess how much you can get from FEMA if you lose your home in a flood and need a new one? $10,500. The aid applicants lived near the wrong creek in the wrong real estate market, and now it will take them years to recover.

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Speaking of CSAs, evening brought me and my family to Gabriel's in uptown Kingston for an evening of vegetarian food, talk about food politics, and some videos, all presented by the Sierra Club. Apparently, the Sierra Club is putting monocropping, factory farming, and pesticides on its activist agenda. Good for them! We watched their new video The True Cost of Food (here's info on the campaign), in which a soccer Mom and her kids rush to a supermarket for dinner supplies and find themselves in mysterious aisle 16-and-a-half, where an eccentric elderly woman rings up their purchases and tells them all the hidden costs of their dinner, from methane pollution and crap-contaminated water to antibiotics.

R raised his hand afterward and asked "Why would the Buy-It-All-Mart have an aisle where someone tells the truth?" I guess he understood the video pretty well.

AJ kept pointing to pictures of hanging chickens and crowded pigs in the literature we were given and saying, "This is sad, Mama!"

Some feedback: 1) men cook too, 2) organic food is not cheaper than supermarket food, 3) low-income people need better food options. Still: way to go, Sierra Club!

No Sprawl, Ya'll!

"In New York City and several surrounding counties, nearly 9 million New Yorkers rely on approximately 2,000-square-miles of mountain streams, wetlands, trees, and open space to ensure a source of clean, unfiltered drinking water. The New York City watershed reservoirs, streams, and wetlands are not only sensitive waters but also ecological treasures. In terms of human benefits, one would be hard pressed to name a more critical natural area anywhere on the globe. In addition to containing important wildlife habitat, cultural and historical resources, and spectacular landscapes, the watershed provides prize-winning, unfiltered drinking water to over half the population of New York State."

Read the rest of Riverkeeper's new report, Pave It...or Save It? Volume I: The Environmental, Economic, and Social Impacts of Sprawl.

"I'm Down for Something Positive!"

[—Joie Lee's character in Do the Right Thing]

Last night I met with some women from the Unitarian Congregation. Our conversation drifted in the direction of the power of writing down our intentions to make them real. A touchstone for the discussion was the book Write it Down, Make it Happen, which a few of us had read.

The greatest events in my life have happened after I wrote about them: making lists, elaborating wishes, envisioning. I described my husband and carried the little piece of paper about him in my wallet for months before meeting him. I wrote about the house and community I live in for two years before we moved here. Acknowledging that I had no power to direct the specifics of the birth process, I wrote my desire to birth my daughter in the water, and did.

Each year I make a list of intentions for various areas of my life and post it where I can see it. I carry a second list of tendencies I'd like to have enter my life, and on New Year's Day, burn a list of attitudes (with fire, not onto a CD!) that I'd like to release.

This year's list has a title, "Deep Play in a Sustainable World." A friend suggested heading the list with the phrase, "Effortlessly, these things come to pass," so I added that, too. Toward the bottom of the list the scope expands from my own life to that of family, friends, community and world. The last item on my 2005 list reads, "We feel part of a community and world that is becoming peaceful, sustainable and abundant, a world that is caring for its refugees (of war, of disaster, of the body)."

When we do group envisioning, if we do it on a large enough scale, I believe there is nothing we can't do to turn things around for our planet.

I love to meet people who support this simple idea.

So I was thrilled to talk to LifeCoach Deborah Ager last week. I'm going to spend the summer doing one phone session a month with her, to focus on my writing aspirations, and my need to make some money, and the places where these might intersect. At Ager's website you can sign up for her coaching e-zine, which is full of great tips, and her poetry blog is fun to read. A post-script on the e-zine I got from her this morning said, "Don't keep me a secret!" Check her out, if you haven't! Then write for a while about why you did.

Came Rain, Came Beltane

Saturday it poured throughout, which meant that May Day was postponed until May 1st, which is as it should be.

There were maypoles, horses outfitted as unicorns, and costumes focused on the bust. It was a day for saying the words "bodice" and "bodkin." At one stall, small horns of Sculpy on brown rope were sold, and R put on his set immediately, because even if Puck has little horns, and centaurs have little horns, don't you know that the character Lock from The Nightmare Before Christmas also has hair shaped into horns, because he is a little devil? That was all R needed to make his day.

As for our dancer, all stage fright had evaporated with the rain.

AJ deported herself as a snowflake magnificently, her day threatened only by a bathroom accident that left her white leotard wet. But it dried long before the anxiously-awaited moment in the pageant when Old Man Winter sends his snowflakes to thwart Spring one last time.

Two sisters, friends of AJ's, joined us on our picnic blanket just in time for the pageant, and, adorably excited, asked every five minutes if it was AJ's turn to be on stage yet. Their father made bitter jokes about cold Hudson Valley weather, then lay down and went to sleep, as if exhausted by the slow arrival of spring.

From the grass to the side of the stage, where she was stationed with the other snowflakes, AJ occasionally stood to wave to us.

It was a lovely day of clouds alternating with sun so rapidly that the main activity for all was putting on and removing our jackets.

To Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Winter, the little snowflakes flurried onstage with white capes and scarves, spinning and 'squiggle-jumping,' and happily, not falling on the slick vinyl flooring. (At a rehearsal, two slightly older dancers had approached AJ and advised, "Know what to do if you fall? You just roll and make it look like a dance move, like this!")

(Our video camera is broken and we forgot our still camera, so I can't share any documentation of the event. But you can get a pretty good idea from this footage of the Winter Festival in December. Old Man Winter is a huge white puppet; AJ has a shoulder-length ponytail.)

As the King and Queen of the May regained their throne after a sojourn in the Underworld (and that visit from Old Man Winter), the sun dipped behind a hill. We packed up and took off for dinner at the nearby Rosendale Café, where R & A spent dinner trying to talk H & me into driving them back to Beltane for the night-time bonfire and music performances.

After A & I shared a piece of funny-bone cake (chocolate with peanut butter icing) we walked out into the 48-degree parking lot and I said sorry, no way. We had dressed for spring, with jackets just in case, but no mittens or hats, and May or not, we are still very much on the cusp.


Winter – Concerto in f-minor (this sonnet is thought to have been written by Antonio Vivaldi)

Allegro non molto
Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds;
running to and fro to stamp one's icy feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill.

Largo
To rest contentedly beside the hearth, while those outside are drenched by pouring rain.

Allegro
We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously, for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and, rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds coarse through the home despite the locked and bolted doors…
this is winter, which nonetheless brings its own delights.

A Subtle Message from the Unconscious

I had a curious and unsettling dream.

My next-door neighbor offered me and R a tour of his house. At the sight of his living room I felt terrible shame that my own house is not properly furnished. The pristine beige carpet showed vacuum tracks, and the chairs were upholstered in striped satin.

During the tour I kept making horrible, literal faux pas. In the bathroom I stepped into the toilet basin without realizing. I tried to make a joke of it as my wet sock sopped into the rug.

In the master bedroom the woman of the house was going through neatly-organized scrap and photo albums. Family keepsakes were categorized in acrylic latch-lock boxes along the top of a wraparound bookcase. I thought of our own piles of photos, our wild handwriting and drawings in our baby books.

The woman pointed to four or five faceless, stuffed rabbits that her daughter had made with a babysitter. Where'd she find such a fun babysitter, I wondered. Bunnies and fabric scraps scattered on the bed in a way that looked pretty easy to clean up.

R, representing the part of me that would get bored with such a tour and go home, got bored with the tour and went home.

But me, representing a bigger, more neurotic part of myself, stayed on and went down for a look at the kitchen, where dinner preparation was underway. There was broccoli of an intense emerald green unlike any I'd seen. Where do you buy your food? I asked, incredulous.

Stewart's, she said.

They have produce?!

Stewart's is a gas-seller where you can also get coffee, stale donuts and motor oil.

I walked into a breakfast nook. Everything was neat. Everything was new. The table and chairs were painted spring green.

On my way out I noticed a TV on a tall stand with wheels, and a Sesame Street video tucked under the TV. I pulled the stand out of their doorway on to the porch, popped in the video and squatted to watch it. Soon the couple appeared with two well-groomed labradors on leashes.

Mind if I watch Sesame Street here before I go home? I asked with a charming smile.

They looked at each other and back at me. They obviously minded. But they laughed and said No, go right ahead. They took off on their walk.

Sesame Street didn't satisfy. I pushed the stand back in their house, noted a half-made bed with satisfaction, and left.


"Get your house in order, red eft!"