One Cup of Rice

If I have learned anything, it is that there is always something more to learn.  Nothing has given me so many opportunities for learning as motherhood.  Never before has something had such a power to make me feel so weak and unprepared, and then strong and downright ninja.  It never ceases to amaze me.  On this path, one is required to call upon every tool they have, and sometimes ones they don't know they have yet.  And it is nothing anyone can fully prepare you for. 

A parent is frequently called upon to act in a way that may be different from their initial reaction.  I'm learning the value of cultivating patience, and re-tuning my own imagination.  I'm learning to pick my battles, and to find new ways of doing things.  Even so, I sometimes find myself banging my head against a wall (figuratively speaking, anyhow). 

One example while is cooking dinner.  My son loves to be a part of things, loves to help mommy do EVERYTHING.  This is adorable, true...for the first five minutes around a flaming, spitting stove and five simultaneous tasks and one frazzled mommy.  Sometimes I can indulge his curiosity, showing him each step of the meal prep.  Sometimes, it's just too dangerous and/or I just don't feel like it (there, I said it!).  There was a point when I would just get frustrated, and banish my son from the kitchen. Tonight, I learned that sometimes, all I need is one cup of rice to keep him happy.

I poured him one cup of rice into a loaf pan.  I gave him a couple of measuring cups, and a spoon.  He loved feeling the texture of the rice, pushing it into piles on the floor (it didn't stay in the pan for long, of course), and even drawing "pictures" in it.  Rice was everywhere, and I really didn't mind.  it was among the most enjoyable times we'd had making dinner together.  I felt proud of myself for continuing to try to look at things differently, for being resourceful, and for finding a solution we both could live with.  Yay for progress!

happy birthday?

It's quarter after midnight, and it's officially my 25th birthday. Funny, I don't feel any different...I haven't felt different any year before, either, though my mom would always ask me if I felt older.

Yes, it's a birthday. It's the anniversary of the day of my birth...but it's not celebrating a year-older me. I'm not the same person I was when I was born - whether literally or figuratively. My entirety of skin cells have sloughed and regenerated countless times. My experiences have expanded and broadened every day since birth. I have learned, unlearned, and relearned. I'm me, but completely different every day. So is "birthday" really accurate?

I'll get older every year, and I'll see many more wonderful and terrible things. I'm sure I'll laugh, I'll cry, hurt and grow. I'm sure I'll give and receive much more love. And I'm sure my body will replace itself many times before the end of my own time here. I think that's great.

And what's a "year", really? Other than a unit of time we created to make things easier to categorize and organize, a year doesn't seem very tangible. And years are different on different planets, depending on orbit and distance from the sun, galactic location, etc.

So maybe it counts more as a "happy one more Earth year of doing Earthy things"? Or happy "your car insurance is now going to drop" day? Or happy Sunday?

Either way, it's all pretty neat. The more time I spend around this joint, the more I believe Kurt Jr. was right: "Humans were put here to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise".

Ain't no other nation I'd rather fart around with than the Earthly nation. Earth is where it's at, for sure...that is, without all the dang oldness.

It's definitely the little things...

I can often be found daydreaming. I wonder about things like, what would conspire if gravity were to suddenly reverse itself? Or where will I be in fifty years? My favorite, though, is to imagine what super power I would choose, should the situation ever present itself. At first I thought I might like to be able to control fire. Other times I think Jack Frost is pretty cool. Today, however, I found amusement through resourcefulness.

I was casually driving home this afternoon, enjoying the warm sun and fresh air when I heard an engine closing in behind me. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a canary yellow sports car inching up my tailpipe. I tried to ignore the revving engine, and focus on the road. It just seemed the more I tried to block it out, the closer she got to my bumper.

I was so focused on controlling my temper that I was startled when a few water droplets splattered onto my windshield. The car ahead had washed his window, and spritzed me in the process. It was as though a light bulb had switched on - I knew what I had to do. With one eye on the rear view and a waxing grin, I reached for my wiper control...

I pressed it one short blast, two short blasts, pause...one long blast..and watched in my mirror, and waited. A moment later, I saw an irritated hand swat at the controls. I broke out into peals of laughter, and again reached for the controls. And again, she fumbled to remove the spray while maintaining her close encounter. I felt so powerful, controlling the wipers of the car behind me. That is to say, until she blew past me at the first available passing zone. It was sweet while it lasted - almost like having a giant invisible backwards-bending arm...except without all the breaks in the laws of physics.

It is decidedly the greatest super power I have manifested...thus far. :)

"The Quest" by W.H. Auden

I. The Door

Out of it steps our future, through this door
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.

Great persons eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.

We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made

Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.

II. The Preparations

All had been ordered weeks before the start
From the best firms at such work: instruments
To take the measure of all queer events,
And drugs to move the bowels or the heart.

A watch, of course, to watch impatience fly,
Lamps for the dark and shades against the sun;
Foreboding, too, insisted on a gun,
And coloured beads to soothe a savage eye.

In theory they were sound on Expectation,
Had there been situations to be in;
Unluckily they were their situation:

One should not give a poisoner medicine,
A conjurer fine apparatus, nor
A rifle to a melancholic bore.

III. The Crossroads

Two friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
This empty junction glitters in the sun.

So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated his vocation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?

All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for; yet
Who could complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?

IV. The Traveler

No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where
A little fever heard large afternoons at play:
His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there
Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.

Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found
The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned;
For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round
Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.

Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,

That everywhere on his horizon, all the sky,
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.

V. The City

In villages from which their childhoods came
Seeking Necessity, they had been taught
Necessity by nature is the same
No matter how or by whom it be sought.

The city, though, assumed no such belief,
But welcomed each as if he came alone,
The nature of Necessity like grief
Exactly corresponding to his own.

And offered them so many, every one
Found some temptation fit to govern him,
And settled down to master the whole craft

Of being nobody; sat in the sun
During the lunch-hour round the fountain rim,
And watched the country kids arrive, and laughed.

VI. The First Temptation

Ashamed to be the darling of his grief,
He joined a gang of rowdy stories where
His gift for magic quickly made him chief
Of all these boyish powers of the air;

Who turned his hungers into Roman food,
The town's asymmetry into a park;
All hours took taxis; any solitude
Became his flattered duchess in the dark.

But, if he wished for anything less grand,
The nights came padding after him like wild
Beasts that meant harm, and all the doors cried Thief;

And when Truth had met him and put out her hand,
He clung in panic to his tall belief
And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

VII. The Second Temptation

His library annoyed him with its look
Of calm belief in being really there;
He threw away a rival's boring book,
And clattered panting up the spiral stair.

Swaying upon the parapet he cried:
"O Uncreated Nothing, set me free,
Now let Thy perfect be identified,
Unending passion of the Night, with Thee."

And his long-suffering flesh, that all the time
Had felt the simple cravings of the stone
And hoped to be rewarded for her climb,

Took it to be a promise when he spoke
That now at last she would be left alone,
And plunged into the college quad, and broke.

VIII. The Third Temptation

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say,
Re-opened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey,

And came reluctantly to his conclusion:
"All the arm-chair philosophies are false;
To love another adds to the confusion;
The song of mercy is the Devil's Waltz."

All that he put his hand to prospered so
That soon he was the very King of creatures,
Yet, in an autumn nightmare trembled, for,

Approaching down a ruined corridor,
Strode someone with his own distorted features
Who wept, and grew enormous, and cried Woe.

IX. The Tower

This is an architecture for the old;
Thus heaven was attacked by the afraid,
So once, unconsciously, a virgin made
Her maidenhead conspicuous to a god.

Here on dark nights while worlds of triumph sleep
Lost Love in abstract speculation burns,
And exiled Will to politics returns
In epic verse that makes its traitors weep.

Yet many come to wish their tower a well;
For those who dread to drown, of thirst may die,
Those who see all become invisible:

Here great magicians, caught in their own spell,
Long for a natural climate as they sigh
"Beware of Magic" to the passer-by.

X. The Presumptuous

They noticed that virginity was needed
To trap the unicorn in every case,
But not that, of those virgins who succeeded,
A high percentage had an ugly face.

The hero was as daring as they thought him,
But his peculiar boyhood missed them all;
The angel of a broken leg had taught him
The right precautions to avoid a fall.

So in presumption they set forth alone
On what, for them, was not compulsory,
And stuck half-way to settle in some cave
With desert lions to domesticity,

Or turned aside to be absurdly brave,
And met the ogre and were turned to stone.

XI. The Average

His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those fine professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.

The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.

So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes,
The silence roared displeasure:
looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.

XII. Vocation

Incredulous, he stared at the amused
Official writing down his name among
Those whose request to suffer was refused.

The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late
To join the martyrs, there was still a place
Among the tempters for a caustic tongue

To test the resolution of the young
With tales of the small failings of the great,
And shame the eager with ironic praise.

Though mirrors might be hateful for a while,
Women and books would teach his middle age
The fencing wit of an informal style,
To keep the silences at bay and cage
His pacing manias in a worldly smile.

XIII. The Useful

The over-logical fell for the witch
Whose argument converted him to stone,
Thieves rapidly absorbed the over-rich,
The over-popular went mad alone,
And kisses brutalised the over-male.

As agents their importance quickly ceased;
Yet, in proportion as they seemed to fail,
Their instrumental value was increased
For one predestined to attain their wish.

By standing stones the blind can feel their way,
Wild dogs compel the cowardly to fight,
Beggars assist the slow to travel light,
And even madmen manage to convey
Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

XIV. The Way

Fresh addenda are published every day
To the encyclopedia of the Way,

Linguistic notes and scientific explanations,
And texts for schools with modernised spelling and illustrations.

Now everyone knows the hero must choose the old horse,
Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse,

And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to:
Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,

The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock
For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock,

Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men
Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got
By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

XV. The Lucky

Suppose he'd listened to the erudite committee,
He would have only found where not to look;
Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed,
It would not have unearthed the buried city;
Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid,
The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.

"It was not I," he cried as, healthy and astounded,
He stepped across a predecessor's skull;
"A nonsense jingle simply came into my head
And left the intellectual Sphinx dumbfounded;
I won the Queen because my hair was red;
The terrible adventure is a little dull."

Hence Failure's torment: "Was I doomed in any case,
Or would I not have failed had I believed in Grace?"

XVI. The Hero

He parried every question that they hurled:
"What did the Emperor tell you?" "Not to push."
"What is the greatest wonder of the world?"
"The bare man Nothing in the Beggar's Bush."

Some muttered: "He is cagey for effect.
A hero owes a duty to his fame.
He looks too like a grocer for respect."
Soon they slipped back into his Christian name.

The only difference that could be seen
From those who'd never risked their lives at all
Was his delight in details and routine:

For he was always glad to mow the grass,
Pour liquids from large bottles into small,
Or look at clouds through bits of coloured glass.

XVII. Adventure

Others had found it prudent to withdraw
Before official pressure was applied,
Embittered robbers outlawed by the Law,
Lepers in terror of the terrified.

But no one else accused these of a crime;
They did not look ill: old friends, overcome,
Stared as they rolled away from talk and time
Like marbles out into the blank and dumb.

The crowd clung all the closer to convention,
Sunshine and horses, for the sane know why
The even numbers should ignore the odd:

The Nameless is what no free people mention;
Successful men know better than to try
To see the face of their Absconded God.

XVIII. The Adventurers

Spinning upon their central thirst like tops,
They went the Negative Way towards the Dry;
By empty caves beneath an empty sky
They emptied out their memories like slops,

Which made a foul marsh as they dried to death,
Where monsters bred who forced them to forget
The lovelies their consent avoided; yet,
Still praising the Absurd with their last breath,

They seeded out into their miracles:
The images of each grotesque temptation
Became some painter's happiest inspiration,

And barren wives and burning virgins came
To drink the pure cold water of their wells,
And wish for beaux and children in their name.

XIX. The Waters

Poet, oracle, and wit
Like unsuccessful anglers by
The ponds of apperception sit,
Baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest,
At nightfall tell the angler's lie.

With time in tempest everywhere,
To rafts of frail assumption cling
The saintly and the insincere;
Enraged phenomena bear down
In overwhelming waves to drown
Both sufferer and suffering.

The waters long to hear our question put
Which would release their longed-for answer, but.

XX. The Garden

Within these gates all opening begins:
White shouts and flickers through its green and red,
Where children play at seven earnest sins
And dogs believe their tall conditions dead.

Here adolescence into number breaks
The perfect circle time can draw on stone,
And flesh forgives division as it makes
Another's moment of consent its own.

All journeys die here: wish and weight are lifted:
Where often round some old maid's desolation
Roses have flung their glory like a cloak,

The gaunt and great, the famed for conversation
Blushed in the stare of evening as they spoke
And felt their centre of volition shifted.

Auden, W.H. Collected Poems. Edward Mendelson, Ed. Random House Inc., NY. 2007.

Swine Flu Propaganda is Not Your Friend

There's been a ridiculous amount of chatter in the media relating to the Swine Flu. They've tracked down every case reported on every continent, and even interviewed the family of "patient zero". It has already been suggested by several sources that this is an act of biological warfare.Now we're broadcasting the fact that the first US death visited the Houston Mall?? Come on, now. And don't give me the old "the public has the right to know" speech. While a well-informed public is truly important, a propaganda-fed public will lead to mass hysteria.

Throughout our history, fear has been used as a powerful tool: fear of infection, fear of homeland invasion, fear of death, fear of poverty, etc. etc. etc. It frustrates me that our tendency is to eat it up as fast as they can feed it to us, pushing us deeper into our shells. Ultimately, this quest for security can only lead to deeper insecurities as our unity is disintegrated. FDR was absolutely right in saying "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". A calm, clear mind is more likely to solve a problem than one full of frantic uncertainty.

In an age where common sense is no longer common, it becomes ever more necessary to stick together and feed from each others' experiences. We are in ourselves a vast wealth of knowledge and possibility. Wash your hands, avoid crowded places, and take care of yourself and each other. What sickness has ever been cured by fear?

"...The People, Yes"

Sandburg, Carl. "...The People, Yes". This Is My Best. The Dial Press. New York. 1942.

The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.

The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot sprayof northern lights.

The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
"Where to? what next?"