Kristin Collier's Musings

A Tour of San Francisco

2012-01-17T22:53:00.000-08:00

I am visiting my sister with the boys at her home in the Dog Patch district of San Francisco.

Today, we take a tour of Chinatown before noon so we can see the fortune cookie factory in operation. We park the car several blocks away after looking for a space for over fifteen minutes. This is the first and least obvious lesson offered by urban life. Stowing the vehicle that got you here takes time and effort. (Good luck with that.)

The walk is a colorful one. Live fish slap around in deep trays, eyes bulging, as water is sprayed in to keep them alive. Fresh flowers, ripe and round citrus, green peppers and prickly golden fruit are mounded high in crates while men and women pick through them, talking, talking, talking in a language that is foreign to us. Trinidad and Sam turn their heads from side to side taking it all in.

"There are so many people!" says Sam.

"We'll have to take a left on Chaos before Jackson," says Trin.

"We're stopping here for coffee," says Robyn. We have one hour on the meter, most of Chinatown and half of Little Italy between us and the fortune cookie factory. Surely there's time for everything. We duck into the Italian bakery.

Yesterday, Sam was sick but slept and is now well. I'm fighting a cold and know I'd do better to eat my greens but... authentic Italian pastries? Hippie health must take a holiday. I buy a chocolate croissant, Sam gets a strawberry and cream danish and Trin has a hot cocoa. Robyn gets her coffee and a macaroon. It's all divine.

We walk on to Ross alley and discover our destination. It is a factory that appears to be composed of a 600 square foot room. Four women sit at stations where cookies slide off hot irons in round discs. The women grab a fortune, press it to a warm disc and bend the cookie around a string to fold it into shape. A sign tells me to pay fifty cents if I plan to take pictures. We give the man two dollars. He has been very generous with offering cooled flat cookie rounds our way. He nods graciously at my offer.

"How long has this place been here?" asks Robyn.

"Fifty year!" says the man.

"How long have you yourself worked here?" she asks a woman.

"One day!" says the woman. When we laugh, she looks flustered and asks us to talk to the man.

"Fifty year!" he repeats emphatically. She is clearly younger than that, but much can get lost in translation. Or perhaps she always gets the best fortunes?

Robyn digs for cash to buy a bag of "adult fortune cookies" with naughty fortunes inside. We agree to split the cookies. She hesitates, embarrassed to ask the man for them. He grins broadly and assures her that they are adult fortune cookies, chocolate and vanilla. We make a point to separate that bag from the one I buy for the kids.

We are tempted by Chinese candies and wooden swords on the way back to the car. We buy more candy than I have all year as I am suddenly nostalgic for edible rice wrapped gummy delicacies like the ones I ate as a child. The boys are in shock when they see what I've purchased. Is it tourism? Am I under the influence of my sister, or are the two of us (so rarely together) suddenly recreating our childhood to pass on to my boys in imported sweets?

We move the car and climb the hill to Coit tower on foot with our sugar highs in full swing. The boys look out over the bay in all directions. Only for a moment. Then they are fixated on the foreign coins that have been set on the outside sills of the locked windows. How did the coins get there? Who left them? Could they somehow squeeze their hands through the opening and take one, just one? More perhaps? Such beautiful foreign coins! The view is disabled by this novel diversion.

I stare out at the land around and walk the perimeter of the tower in a slow circle. Alcatraz island brings me back to a tour of the prison I took in seventh grade. The Marin hills remind me of Ken and his days playing the piano many years before I knew him. The boats remind me of so much water and the desire to command it -- boats from childhood, boats I was learning to sail, all dreams that lap in and out at me like the bay itself gently tugging at my heart.

With irritation, I hear the boys still discussing how they might get at the coins. The yearning in their voices rankles me. I express my frustration with their focus on the sill when so much beauty stretches beyond under a bright blue sky. But here I am, myself counting the tangible coinage of my past from the top of a tower so tall. What did I see that was new here? What am I learning from my view?

The boys and I distract each other from our perseverations. We shake ourselves into interacting with one other, with the cypress trees below whose tops are blown flat as if they'd painted the sky too roughly. I see my sister, tall and beautiful and quiet. We have been appreciating each other, seeing and hearing one another in longer stretches. This is something.

We descend the tower, each lost in our own thoughts. Maybe a view is just a view, and a vista point is a place to see what we have to let go of while we also celebrate what we've ascended. Perhaps the pinnacle offers us an opportunity to look down at our own expectations and the ways that we isolate ourselves from one another and the world.

And maybe, from that vantage point, I felt a little lost for a moment. All the nostalgia and fortunes in bagged cookies across the city could not save me from my own inner chaos as I ascended that place and sorted it out. It's all mine.

Perhaps the finding has to start with being lost somewhere.

Superhuman

2012-01-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

Falling in love gives me superpowers deluxe. I hardly recognize myself under the cape.

In the glowing light of dawn when I should appear rumpled and haggard from lack of sleep, I turn my face to the light and receive it as my own personal blessing for the day. All is beautiful. The wrinkles fall out of my clothes, my eyelids, my memory, and I imagine that even my breath is not as bad as it might seem.

I wake the children with a song, and while I haven't been making the time to practice guitar (some things have to give), my voice rolls forward like liquid gold to dazzle them through the disgruntled waking hour. I cannot be shaken.

I sweep and vacuum the house in a snap before they have stumbled out, rubbing their eyes. My inner drummer keeps time at an ecstatic pace while I look with a fresh perspective at the pieces of furniture I haven't dusted in a year or more. The toaster oven needs a cleaning, inside and out. Had I scheduled it all, the tasks would be a drudgery or a bust. How could I get all of that done, find time to snuggle the boys, and pour a sensual email out to my new treasure?

I do chin-ups to impress Him and manage to complete four. In the rosy haze of rookie love he marvels that many men cannot do one. (He himself is an exception, but he rather uses his superpowers for dancing just now. I have to think to remember to breathe while I watch him.)

I create time! We talked for more than eight hours last night and we didn't get together until 5 p.m. It's a whole day on the calendar that I crafted between Saturday and Sunday. Let's call it Loveday.

I create space! My eyes train on him, and everything else melts away. I do not test this by attempting to cook dinner at the same time as being in love. Kitchen timers are not the sort of thing it is wise to neglect. Such an act could also contribute to spatial collapse on certain levels when dinner appears charred and less than rosy. So ... oh well! Superpowers offer clarity: Dinner or my undying attention -- one or the other!

I see into the future (or just think I do)! And it's swell.

I see into the past: My vision is 20/20, and it all makes sense. That's how we got here!

Best of all, I have patience beyond belief, stretching out past the hems of my shimmering, heart-shaped cape. (Yes, it really flies! But not while I'm in it.) I see the best in everyone, and all is forgiven.

Christmas 2011

2011-12-26T00:15:00.000-08:00

The human experience is one way the Earth experiences herself, a friend told me.

If that is so, then the Christmas experience does not belong to us at all, but rather we belong to it.

Seda, the boys, and I are all home together this year with no intention of leaving. We go out only to walk the dog. Our outer story is sedate, predictable even. Inside my head and heart, there's a storm -- hot and cold fronts butting heads. The rain comes down in torrents when I least expect it, often before I can turn away to hide the tears.

I did not focus on gift-giving this year. The kids knew this and did not expect much. They were already content with money they'd received from relatives when an unexpected windfall of gifts happened our way: a six foot by three foot wooden trunk of Lego, a basketball hoop and several games from a family up the street. Strangely, the family is in crisis, so the gift is bittersweet in the receiving. I bow to that with awe, appreciation, and love. My heart is again broken open.

The greatest gift I receive is an agreement that my children will be mentored by a young man I deeply respect. This gift is almost more than I can take in. It is one of the few things I've had trouble offering the boys in the way of support I think they need. I am thrilled.

I open a gift this morning of a necklace -- a talisman, really -- made by a friend. She crafted it for herself last year and now feels it should go on to me. It is intended to be a reminder of wholeness and courage in challenging times. I hold it in my hand until it envelopes my warmth. We hold each other.

At mid-day, I read aloud to Seda a chunk of Herman Hesse's novel, Siddhartha. To my surprise and delight, both children set aside the new Pokemon cards they have gifted each other and come to the table to listen. They sit rapt until the end of the reading. They do not discuss it with Seda and I beyond an observation that it was interesting, but when they wander away, they walk slowly and quietly watching the floor. Could I receive a sweeter gift?

We cuddle together and watch the movie "Elf." It is much more funny and heart-warming than I had expected it to be. I am touched by the music in it, too, and my face is streaked with tears when the credits roll.

Trinidad unwraps an unexpected gift from Hiawatha, a friend of Ken's who has adopted us beyond Ken's departure to Key West. Trinidad receives a plasma ball ("not a child's toy" warns Hiawatha) which he has always admired and wished for during the hours spent at H's parties. I am touched by the power of a relationship (mine and Ken's) to shape one's world, and even the world of one's children. Sam receives a glow-in-the-dark Science kit from H, and Trinidad wheels and deals until he is the one concocting glow-in-the-dark bouncy balls and light up jelly beads and stars well into the night.

I melt in the evening, prone in child's pose on the kitchen floor after a discussion with Seda about Jesus. She grieves that so much violence happens in his name. I agree, and still I am troubled that this holiday which was originally a solstice celebration now celebrates his birth -- a decision (including a likely fabricated birthdate) made by the church some time ago to redirect a pagan culture into Christianity. I doubt that Jesus would himself approve, and I am sad to think how many decisions like this made by Church hierarchy have brought confusion and suffering to our world. That aside, I appreciate the opportunity to pay my respects to Jesus Christ, and I make my peace with that alone tonight.

Forgiveness, I decide, is not usually a complete and singularly sweeping action. It is instead the calculated effort of lifting rocks and logs from the river flow of love through one's heart. It takes time, and the current changes course to navigate the obstacles that remain. I am removing them one by one. I am forgiving.

At nine p.m., I take a glass of red wine in a flask and the dog on a leash, and I walk to the park. I stand under a lamp post alone and sing Christmas carols until I can't feel my fingers anymore. I sing for my mother who wanted to go out and sing a few carols last year, only few days before her death. I hold the caroling book I compiled for her then. I know she would appreciate this: wine, dog, and song. A high note in "Silent Night" starts the neighborhood dogs barking, and I strike out for home with my breath curling in clouds around me.

It is more than I can fully integrate, this day, and I know it. My eyes burn with grief in celebration.

Snapshots, Nearly Solstice

2011-12-14T20:32:00.000-08:00

I wake up and study voice and guitar until my fingers and throat are feeling worn. I'm fighting a cold again. This music thing is a marathon before me, and I only just got the shoes. Beginner mind is supposed to be refreshing and insightful, I think. But my mind is preoccupied with mourning. I write to a friend and tell her all the things I think of doing in my weakest moment, which is now. I feel better having said them.

"I can't think of what to write next in this story!" Sam shouts. "I just can't."
"Sit with it," I tell him. "It's Spirit coming through you. Just quiet your mind, open and relax. It's all there." I wonder why I can't open and quiet like this in my moments of despair. I think I might be peeking through some sort of tear in the fabric now, because I do hear my words and wonder at them. I am not alone in the struggle because we are all trying to sit with what is while what's next rolls in. So much uncertainty.

I suddenly cry hard in the kitchen and both boys come to comfort me. I miss my Mom. It's Christmas without her. I sob and sob. Trinidad tells me in his young man voice to let it through, it's all right. He rubs my back. I see their care for me as a reflection of mine for her and I cry harder. Sam tells me to take my time, everything else can wait. Sit down. I can do nothing else. When I am done, I get us all some chocolate. We agree that it is good.

I am sitting on a chair in the kitchen, wearing an apron and holding my guitar. I am practicing Ode to Joy over and over until I'm not sure I like it anymore. The dog sits at my feet and stares up at me as if I were Jesus. I wonder at her taste in idols. The pressure cooker hisses above my melody.

All of this is inextricable. How can who I am be anything but what I do in this season of my life?

To Work with the Dead

2011-12-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

The moon is not a difficult thing to love. Even behind a cloud, it is soft in its gaze, always poised at the edge of its seat looking down on me. I see it tonight, and I am moved by its patience, its ever-presence, its spirit in my world.

Sometimes, I forget it hanging there. There are weeks that I do not go outside at night. I bristle against the cold, the damp. Sometimes I forget that even in the rain, the moon sits it out, waiting. When I see nothing but darkness where the moon should be, that pale golden globe holds its place in the sky, singing its silent moonlight song. Even in total darkness, it does not forget its purpose.

I wish I was so steady in my way. I wish that the cosmos had gifted me a heart that trusted light to come and come again, stretching across the darkest canyons of my love-in-waiting. I wish I could touch the stardust in me now, know that I am spinning, spinning, spinning for good reason. All for the blessing of darkness in light.

The trees stand solemnly still in the sky tonight, bare bones lifted high into the mist. I am here beside them, my cheeks chilling as I sweep the last of the leaves up from the driveway. I have borne the rest away to my garden where they blanket the cold feet of naked bushes and trees. Now I stand in the dark, afraid to go inside and return to my human existence.

Here, I am cool and wet like the leaves themselves, tall and dark like the willow. I, too, am waiting for spring. I stand awhile in the rose arbor. I pause to allow the experience to be, this waiting and watching upon entering one space as I leave another. I can go back, I can always go back. The willow laughs at my observation. She doesn't see any going back. She just sees me under the arbor.

I make this human gate, this threshold for transformation. I make it for myself. It is my axis to turn on. I pray for the light to be remembered in me. I receive the damp offerings of earth and sky. This is my home.

I am always reminded of these truths that run far deeper than me when I move so many leaves. It is always a blessing to work with the dead.

In Honor of What

2011-12-03T00:35:00.000-08:00

I bought myself some new dancing shoes, and tonight, I took them out for a spin.

Reentry into the ballroom scene is not so very difficult in most ways. I find my cubby, stash my cycling boots, and slip on my new jazzy black slippers. I look around not-so-obviously at the selection of potential partners while they look not-so-obviously at me.

I remember how this works. New fish in the pond are the first to be caught. Often enough, they are also tossed back when -- oops! -- they forget the steps to the west coast swing. Never tossed mid-song. Well, almost never; I think it only happened to me twice. But at the end of a song, you can feel your partner's disappointment. He wears it like a leaden yoke, and it's painful for him to fully raise his head to look at you politely as a gesture of goodbye. You must pardon my masculine assumption here (the "he"); all of my women dancing partners I've had to invite personally.

Okay, so I am perched on a step, prepared to be caught. Snap! It happens. A swing dance first. My favorite, and not too hard to piece together. Then, something called a "Night Club" follows, which sounds more like a drink than a dance. "I don't really know this one," I say, smiling sweetly.

My partner takes me out, a fine lead, and I pick up the dance more quickly than I thought I would. The first time I get the basic steps without tripping over him, he nods and says, "Okay, now let's try something different."

Oh, right. Just when I get the basic down for the first time? Now we're switching it up? So we try something different. After a couple of turns, I get that, too. He is delighted and jumps into a new move which leaves me criss-crossed on the wrong side of his arms. He looks at me sideways and says, "Oh, don't worry. It's probably the hardest move in this dance."

Excuse me? That's supposed to be reassuring? What makes you think that's such a great idea, I wonder, trying out your most difficult move when I've barely got my feet moving in step with you? Brilliant. I am set for success.

One older gentleman whose name, Helmut, is embroidered on his official ballroom dancing sweatshirt, tells me under no uncertain terms that a woman must follow and the man is totally in charge. Modern women, he says, have a hard time with this. I wonder if he thinks I am intentionally trying to gum up his grace in order to bolster my feminine independence. I look at him cock-eyed. "Is that supposed to be a hint?" I ask. His confidence ebbs, and the lecture ends.

They keep asking me to dance. Each time, I warn them that I haven't danced much in the last decade. Some believe me and take it achingly slow. Others think I'm being humble. If they are a strong lead, I keep up. One fellow just a little older than me learns quickly that my warning especially applies to the tango. He walks me through it counting aloud. We do okay.

Then he starts talking to me. My lips work better than my legs, so they take over, and my legs fall off. Well, not entirely, but it is kind of a drag for both of us. It takes him a full turn around the floor to understand the problem and stop asking me questions. He then has to go back to telling me which foot to move: left, right, left, right.

Okay. Good again. Then he asks me where I dance when I'm not dancing here. Ummm.... really? Aren't you the guy who just taught me my right from my left? "Because there's a dance tomorrow night at the Eagles Club," he tells me. I say I'm going to the concert of a friend of mine instead. He looks disappointed. The dance is over.

One man asks if I do the Silver Waltz, and I tell him that I did once. He tries me, and low and behold! The feet remember. I recall as if it was yesterday practicing this dance while walking my dog down the bark-o-mulch path at Alton Baker park. (Yes, there was trouble with the leash.) I am so surprised to remember the steps that I almost share my celebration. Then I recall how well talking helped my tango, and I keep my mouth shut.

Another man asks me to dance. "Err... what is it?" I ask. "A merengue. You can't mess it up," he tells me. Now there's someone who's been watching, I think. We take the floor, and I do remember how to look sexy squishing grapes with my feet. This man is charmed by my flair. He asks me to dance the next waltz. For some reason, my legs don't go with his anymore, and he is irritated. It's simply a progressive waltz, he says, but I can't seem to remember which leg goes when. I suspect he thinks I'm a great dancer who is disabled just for him, just to ruin his waltz. Perhaps it is so. He gives me a very sour look. I widen my eyes and smile.

A fellow insists on teaching me the West Coast Swing. I appreciate his patience, actually, and his counting aloud. He asks me to teach him the rumba, which I manage to do, just barely. I tell him that I'm rusty because it's my first full night dancing in a decade. "Oh!" he says. "In honor of what?"

In honor of what? How do I answer that? "Transition," I say and look away, hoping he doesn't ask more.

"What kind of transition?" he asks. This is officially not small-talk. This man is fired.

I look at him blankly. One-two-three, one-two-three. Why have I not danced? Transition of my husband into a woman? Transition in and out of two more relationships following? Neither of them rooted, and never a real space to be single, or at least singular, in between...why have I not danced?

It's a transition, I think, in honor of What. Just as he said it. But that's not the pat sort of answer that's allowed on the dance floor.

Nevertheless, it is worth a new set of shoes and an evening of laughter, missteps, and sweet memories lived aloud. In honor of What.

The Saints Preserve Us!

2011-09-29T22:56:00.000-07:00

Opening line of our homeschooling day: "All right, boys. The electricity has gone out. It won't be back. And I'm not your mother."

Sam looked horrified. "I'm some stranger who just walked in off the street," I told him quickly. "I heard you grew tomatoes this year and that your mom used to can, so I'm hoping you can teach me." The wheels began to turn.

"What do you need to can?" I asked.

"Jars. The jar pot, tomatoes," said Trinidad.

"What are the dangers of canning?" I asked.

"Broken jars, getting burned," said Sam.

"What about the long term dangers?" I asked.

"Poisoning!" they said in tandem.

"Right. And what could cause that?"

"Bacteria!" said Trin.

"Yup," I said. "That particular bacteria is called 'botulism.'"

"Botulism? No way. I thought that was a religion."

So went the Socratic lesson on canning today, heavy with sixteen quarts of tomatoes that the boys harvested and cut up from our garden. As we stewed over the details, the rich, red sauce simmered down to a precious seven quarts. I helped stir the pots as we discussed what could be a hospitable environment to various bacteria and what inhibits their growth.

Then, we went a different direction with our preservation and lacto-fermented five quarts of cucumbers that Trin and Sam picked in the garden. All of this with only some instruction (and many questions) from me! They peeled the garlic that we'd harvested in July and plunked the white bulbs into jars with proper measurements of dill, mustard seed, salt and whey. They added water and voila! A work of art that feeds the family. A living food that fends off botulism with its own vitality!

A lesson plan you can eat.

The Beautiful Failure

2011-09-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

Today, I watched as two twelve-year-old boys worked together to build an aerodynamic car that could soar twelve inches off a press-board jump to land in a basket of blocks. This effort was at once humble and Herculean in stature.

The boys considered the track they built: Should it have sides? Should it be taped? Should it contain the plastic official Hot Wheels track? Together they sculpted a vehicle: weight, wings, propulsion, aerodynamic design. Their ideas toppled out into the space between them, then were considered one by one from all angles. They asked for more tape, paper, and elastic. I brought them balloons in lieu of rubber bands, and they used them sling-shot style and as wind propulsion for a vehicle that first looked like a car-plane, then a car-biplane and finally like a car-biplane-sailboat as more and more Lincoln Logs were taped into place to firm up the paper sails and wings.

Sideline experiments took place: Paper airplanes were tested for aerodynamic design to be incorporated, alternative materials and pathways were put into place for a smoother, more effective track. They shared the creation in all ways from inception to closure.

And they pronounced it a failure.

They did not offer this observation in dismay. It was merely a fact, stated plainly as one might observe an overcast day. Nothing to spoil anyone's picnic, but not the hoped for outcome either. One boy told the other that they needed to have a playdate again soon, and this was agreed upon heartily.

What can we make of it? Is accomplishment achieved after successful trials or after many highly creative ventures? Is there a different sort of accomplishment that is born of each?

I remember, as a teenager, deciding to spend the day building a raft that my girlfriend and I could float onto our local slough. It was a rather strange idea from the get-go; neither of us had any building experience, and we never would have dreamt of going out in the mucky, highly polluted slough on any other day. We somehow did not compute that the project might entail getting wet.

I remember that we hauled to the water's edge something that resembled a souped-up pallet. The slats would obviously let water through, but in a moment of unsinkable pride in our creation, I volunteered to be the first to push off on our "boat."

It sunk.

Not too deep. Up to my waist in brownish-gray water and up to my calves in suctiony silt, I determined that I had merely mounted the vehicle incorrectly. Giving the thumbs up to my girlfriend who watched wide-eyed on the bank, I clambered aboard from the other side and managed to stay on top of the wooden flat, even as it sank a few feet below the surface. In this way, I effectively deep-water surfed downstream.

I remember laughing. I remember the weight of my overalls moving through the muddy water stiffly and the moment when I realized that my head, too, was going to go under. The event is elevated in my memory -- relinquishment in the face of ecstatic creation.

It did not matter that my boat did not float. The entire venture became a sort of performance art. The gray sky laughed down at the brownish-gray me, and we were one in our mirth, awash in the bowels of creativity.

I always wonder, no I sempre wonder (Italian captures the longing in "always") what the goal is, anyway. We humans measure our efforts and our accomplishments neatly into units, indeed we measure the value of a creature, of a soul this way at times. For what are we but the energy that finds its path in the world, creating and being created? Who are we to measure the value of outcome when the means itself is born of our deepest truths, our perfect grace?

The boys saved their car-biplane-sailboat for the next passersby to take note of -- a monument to creative failure.

I myself am humble witness to the wonder.

Work

2011-09-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

There is the kind of work you do that has an end: a sinkful of dishes, sweeping the kitchen floor, scrubbing the fingerprints off the door jamb (I don't think I ever do that).

There's the kind of work that eats you up so that you forget you have feet, eyes of your own, children even: working the beehive, working in the classroom, performing onstage.

There's work that you do with joy because you nest it among the things you love: mowing the lawn while blasting the soundtrack to My Fair Lady at dusk, paying the bills with a good cup of Chai tea, doing a boatload of dishes with a friend who really has something to say and an amazing ear for the listening.

Then there's that bottomless sort of work that threatens to pull you down with it: a case and a half of tomatoes, a huge bag of onions and forty jalapeno peppers that ask to be salsa'd in the day before you fly to Kansas at four a.m. the next morning.

You look at that kind of work and you wonder: How? How am I going to get that done? My Fair Lady is to friendly and fair, no one seems to have the ear you're wanting to share with, and it is impossible to pace yourself with landmark "endings" (I'll give myself an hour to do the tomatoes, thirty minutes for the cilantro...), because you really and truly have no idea how long any of it will take, whether you have all the correct amounts of ingredients the recipe calls for (my God, you'll kill your family with botulism if there are two too many peppers), and if, in fact, you contain the moral fiber to get through a job that contains so many unknowns.

The tomatoes wash like this: one shiny under the running tap, two so little dust, really what's the point, three how deep is this basket of tomatoes, four it doesn't really matter when I'll never see the bottom, five inhale, six exhale, seven inhale, eight exhale, nine there's no other way, ten exhale, eleven....

But onions are bound to make you cry. And after you cry, you realize that all the confusion that sat planted in your mind, in your heart, was just a boulder waiting for gravity and a rain of tears to send it slowly onward, downhill, and with a whoosh, you find that there was meaning, there was peace in your relationships with all those people you were afraid to call while chopping.

You call them to you, tell them about your celebrations, your fears, your confusions, and they listen and share their own. It's all the truth, and then there is an end to tomatoes, to peppers and to onions (lo! those friends shared your table and a knife, chopped beside you). There is an end to cilantro and garlic, and while you forgot to purchase bell peppers (you never could grow them), the store is still open and you can stop there on the way to picking up the kids from soccer.

Everything falls into place in that cosmic gospel way and everything makes sense, everything comes together so that you can see it all has an end, all a point of closure for celebrations and mournings.

It somehow doesn't matter if the salsa ever gets finished, though it will, of course. And we will keep picking up our work again and again, harvesting, preserving, and searching for the things that feed us.

Because it's good, work. Yield: 16 and a half quarts.

The Sometimes Difference Between Boys

2011-09-14T16:27:00.000-07:00

NVC Family Camp, Vashon Island. The dinner bell rings. Trinidad sits bolt upright in our tent and snaps his book closed.

Trin: That's the dinner bell, and I've vowed to myself to always be first in line for every meal. (He unzips the fly and leaves the tent.)

Sam (sitting up slowly and reaching to move a lock of hair from in front of his mother's face): That's the dinner bell, and I've vowed to always be right where I am. And that is a vow I will never break.

Into Light

2011-09-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

According to Sam, this is what is needed to gain a new skill: Experience and experimentation. He is satisfied with this assessment and not drawn to say more about it.

But I will. Experience we amass from birth, perhaps before. Experience guides our experimentation, gives it the wings of angels to teach us what we most need to know, whether we like the outcome or not. (Do we experiment in our first moment of awareness, or is experience that awareness simply put -- the tabula rosa of our existence here on Earth?) Ongoing experimentation is a way of pulling ourselves forward, integrating yesterday with tomorrow in this only moment we are given: Now.

Our experiments are the seeds of plants well established. These are not new skills we are "gaining" -- they are fully realized abilities that we have always harbored, waiting for the season in which they are to emerge. And so we root, flourish, and flower to give seed again and again, realizing the divine beings that we ever are.

I watch you, young Sam, with eyes that strive to take in your whole being, your living potential, your infinite Being stretching into light. And I honor the learning I experience in your hands.

Help Where You Need It

2011-09-09T14:50:00.000-07:00

At 12:15 p.m., I weighed the dilemma in my head: lunch, housecleaning, soccer games. How could I time it all "just right" so we didn't get cranky with each other before lunch or after the soccer game? I needed help.

"Boys," I said, "we have to leave for the soccer game at 3:30, and I'm guessing that you don't want to have too full of a stomach -- maybe eat an hour and a half ahead of time? But then, there's the house cleaning that we were going to put off until 1:00. We'll need to be cleaning in that window if we want to eat later. And I don't know how hungry you are right now."

"Yes, eat at 2:00," said Trin. He walked out of the room and headed for the vaccuum cleaner.

Sam hugged me and looked a little mournful. "I wish we could do something fun for a reward," he said. We usually set ourselves up with something preferred to follow housecleaning which does not yet rank at the top of our favored projects list.

"Well, you could use my iphone for awhile if you like --" I started, but Trin cut me off.

"No!" he said emphatically. "We've both had way to much screen time lately. It's time we did something else."

"Oh, okay," Sam acquiesced. He took out the broom.

In the time it took me to wash the dog and clean the bathroom, they had double or triple swept to my standards the entire house (thank God it's only 750 square feet). Trinidad decided he would walk up to the store and buy himself some ice cream which he is likely to share.

Do you know what a relief and joy it is to share with my children the chores that keep our home orderly, functional, and beautiful? And perhaps moreso, it is a delight to share the orchestration of these tasks, to know that we all take part in the same plan of activities that meet a great many of our needs, and that we are willing to stretch together to do the less-preferred activities that make it all possible.

Taking in that celebration.

Let The Piano Play Itself

2011-09-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

I ran my first formal homeschooling day with the boys yesterday. We studied Spanish, gardening, the human skin, multiplication, writing, watercolor, and Chaucer. I worked on the piano with Sam, opening my heart to his despair and terror in the face of all the music he's "lost" over the summer break. We did yoga and played Rat-a-tat-cat. In between, I got a chicken in the slow cooker, fielded grocery acquisition calls, and contributed to breakfast, lunch, and clean up.

At the "end" of our day, there was laundry to hang and fold, calls to make, a cat who needed first aid, and my bedroom that needed first aid after the cat's ongoing abcess drainage. The cucumbers were ripe and ready for pickling, the garlic needed to be hung, and the aronia berries begged to be harvested. Most horizontal surfaces were heaped with Lego, playing cards, clothes or dishes, and I am scheduled to teach a workshop here on Sunday.

I hung out the laundry piece by piece. This job usually belongs to the boys, but I wanted to give them a chance to play and integrate after a pretty intense day. I strongly wanted to contribute to their needs and at the same time, I was tired, overstimulated, and confused about how to meet all of the needs on the table. In addition to my household and home business tasks, I've taken on outside employment that I need to finish prepping before Monday. Whew.

I lifted one wet piece of cloth after another. How will it happen? I asked. How can all of this possibly get done when I am so drained, so empty? There are not enough people, there's not enough time....

"Let the piano play itself." The words returned to me from years past when I studied piano with Ken. He told me that if you allow the piano, it will push back at you after you press each note in order to return to its original position. You may receive its energy and use that impetus to play the next note. The image that Ken shared shaped the teaching of my workshops until, now, participant energy carries me elliptically through my workplay so that presenting workshops is a joy.

I shook a damp blouse in the sun. The cotton rubbed against my fingers, pregnant with water from the washing. Clean. I let the sensation fill me. I looked across at my garden, a forest of selectively cut lettuces and kales amid tangled vines of tomatoes and cucumbers. Their jeweled colors threw the sun back at me. I opened my eyes, my heart. I took it in. The laundry drifted between the basket, my hands, and the wooden rack. Effortlessly, one piece after another found its place in the sun. I breathed in with gratitude the blue of the sky, the sound of my children playing.

"Can I help you, Mom? To make it go faster?" Sam asked at the back door. I smiled.

Today, I am taking in the beauty of the day. The crows playing in the park have fueled my pedaling to the bank, the store. Trees have waved me forward, cheering, to discover the next bit of chaos 'round the bend. The sun glinting in Trinidad's honey colored hair reminds me that we have plenty of time to get to the soccer match.

Time may be all we have to measure out the giving and receiving of our love.

Mother's Medicine

2011-09-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

It started late one night with a fever that wouldn't break. My hand rested on the tiny chest of my one-year-old that rose and fell rapidly, the heartbeat impossibly fast. Is he okay? I wondered. What else can I do?

I called Selene. "He's so hot!" I told her. "I don't want to wake him, but I'm scared." I could hear my friend's mind slowly waking to my terror. I knew I could trust her to want to help; she'd been the one I'd called in the middle of the night nearly a year ago when our house caught fire.

"Did it come on suddenly?" she asked. Yes. "Did you try belladonna?" No, that's a good idea. "And it's Sam, right?" Yes. I heard her shuffling books as she looked up remedies that might match the constitution of my particular child. She suggested one or two other possibilities.

"And Kristin? You're afraid, and I want you to remember that Sam is in God's care, too. You don't have to do it all. This is an opportunity for you to trust in that. Are you with me?" Yes. I could always count on Selene for both homeopathy and prayer, despite my pagan tendencies.

Selene was probably the first in my tribe to take her family's health and wellness into her own hands. She gave birth a year before I did and quickly ventured into homeopathy as the easiest path to "first, do no harm." She saw a homeopathic physician regularly and invested in fat texts to extend the care beyond her financial means. I was in awe of her passion and her knowledge.

I ambled into homeopathy shyly, and naturopathy more carefully still, wanting to be certain that I did not get cavalier with Mother Nature's medicines. I saw myself as too far removed from nature to know instinctively how to use it. I grew up with very little medicine myself and even fewer trips to the doctor. My mom always seemed to just assume I'd recover from anything I'd come down with given time.

The joy of homeopathy, Selene pointed out, was that it provided a way that comfort could be given within the time it takes to heal. And sometimes, the time could even be shortened...dramatically. Over the course of years, I came to agree with her on both counts and stocked my first aid cabinet with the old faithfuls: arnica montana for bruising, euphrasia officinalis for eye problems, coffea cruda for sleep difficulty, and drosera rotundifolia for dry coughs. These worked regularly on our family, though I know that while it never worked for us, Selene's clan swore by pulsatilla. Other remedies are kept in a jar at the back for particular ailments: aconite, belladonna, valeriana, rhus toxicodendron and others I can't pronounce.

That last, the rhus, made its rounds about my neighborhood when the chicken pox came through. It is not the only medicine that we share in a neighborly fashion. There are at least four houses on our street full of children of all ages who regularly require the medical expertise or support of one or more of the parents among us. We trade advice and remedies freely.

Dana, the soccer player, is good for a splint of any sort and gave me exercises and advice that straightened out my sprained ankle when we didn't have insurance. Tesha has a variety of remedies on hand, both herbal and homeopathic. She is also keen on nutrition for both pets and people. Brandy is up for borrowing my euphrasia herb to make tea with to put in a compress that her preschooler loves for "pink eye," but Brandy's elder daughter is wary of my witchcraft after she tried a comfrey poultice that healed the skin on her leg before the infection had cleared -- my tough learning to look before making suggestions around comfrey!

Another mother friend, not a direct neighbor, is an excellent resource in all things herbal. She has been wildcrafting since the days before I knew the definition of that word. Mele taught me to trust in the many first aid plants in our midst including plantain for scrapes and stings, dandelion for the upset stomach (helpful after a bad burrito before the big soccer game), and dock for nettle stings.

Mele also taught me to steep herbs in olive oil, stirring them daily until the color and qualities from within the herb coloured the liquid in shades from pink to gold or green. Together, we heated beeswax, some from my own bees, and spun it into the infusions to create a salve that we could pour into so many tins to bestow upon friends and family during the winter holidays.

And what of the traditional holiday treat-sharing among neighbors? Dana's daughter shoved my hummus under her mother's nose when she got home from work. "Try some!" Jetta told her. "Kristin made it instead of Christmas cookies. It came from the weeds in her garden!" I had mixed the garlic and chickpea paste with the ground root of dandelion to cleanse our extended family of the ills of too much sugar in December.

Finally, how could I fail to mention the book that supported me in transitioning into this scrappy, do-it-yourself model of home remedies? Smart Medicine For A Healthier Child by Janet Zand, Rachel Walton, and Bob Rountree carefully lists the homeopathic, naturopathic, dietary and conventional treatments for whatever ails you from A-Z. It also contains sidebars with clear symptomatic points at which it is advisable for a parent to seek medical attention.

With the cost of care being what it is and insurance hard to come by, our self-reliance and interdependence have cultivated a sense of peace and ease in respect to our own healing and well-being. "Believing that a professional's opinion is necessary above one's own intuitive and rational senses is the source of tyranny itself," says Seda. And I believe her. She would also have me mention prayer, and that has often graced our family as well as her own family of origin -- four children growing up in the wilds of Wyoming. Christian Science served them well, and continues to remain in our arsenal of lovingkindness.

So, if it's a prescription you want, here it is: nurture your neighborly healers, yourself among them! Together, we are assuredly the most caring, convenient, and sustainable medicine one can afford.

Making Change

2011-06-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, I got fed up. In the face of imminent budget shortfalls that will grow our already enormous class sizes (2nd largest in the nation, by state, in elementary) next year, losses in P.E., music and the arts, as well as further days cut from our school year (already the shortest, by state, in the nation), our city refused to pass an income tax that would act as a bandaid to schools that are losing a lot of life-blood. At the same time, I participated with anxious hope as our school attempted to win a $50,000 Pepsi grant to cover some of our cuts. We lost yet again.

We need faces to represent the statistics of school budgets cut, I think. We need to refuse service if there are so many primary needs met. Can you imagine being a young person sitting through 7 hours of desk time with only two 10-15 min. recesses and no P.E. class to move around in? What are we doing to our future populations when creativity is discouraged in the absence of designated times for art and music? What exactly do we mean by "public education?"

I am not so worried about my kids. We have the resources, as a family, to supplement or even homeschool if we choose to. I am thinking, primarily, of the thousands of children and families that do not see themselves in choice about the education that they are paying for with taxes and not receiving in a way that adequately meet their needs.

I am thinking that choice is power, and sharing power in our community is what will make positive change happen. So, we're going on strike.

We are the customers here -- children and families -- and we have a right to send our educational offering back to the kitchen if it is half-baked. The problems lie in the districts, the state government, and even the federal government's support (or lack of) for this system. The problems are many, and there are countless possible solutions.

Right now, we need to stand up as citizens, families, and students to say that we want our faces to be seen behind the numbers ticking away in this crisis. We are a part of this community, and to support education is to nurture long-term social sustainability. The prisons get three times the funding that schools receive. Where will our disenfranchised, under-educated population go, I wonder?

I can tell you where we're going. The boys and I are riding our bikes to the state capitol building in Salem this weekend so that we can be on the steps to protest on Monday morning at 10:30 a.m. At the same time (10:30 a.m. Monday, June 13), I invite people from all over our state to pull their children from schools and meet in their district parking lots. Tell friends and community, and we will all show up en masse to make a stand for quality education!

This is our chance to show what a monkey-wrench is thrown into the works if we, the customers, refuse to participate in an educational system that is woefully short on resources. We can build awareness in our community and legislature on Monday. We are to be reckoned with!

I hope to see you there. It takes courage, and I know we can all play our part with loving hearts and the full expectation of finding a way.

A Confession

2011-05-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

Forgive me, God/Goddess, for I have sinned.

I have stood before the altar of the Great God Pepsi, and I have typed in my email and password more than twenty times this month. I have heard the crackling pop sound effect that resonates from behind my keyboard and the luscious bubbling music of cold soda trickling into a glass. I have sinned in my mind about drinking it.

My sins run deeper yet. My kitchen table is full, truly full, of empty Pepsi bottles. More are recapped with the safety seal broken in crates on the floor. I have acquired them rather dishonestly; others have brought them here. Others have paid.

All in the name of education.

This month, our alternative school has been chosen to participate in a popularity contest with 2,999 other good causes to receive a grant for 50K from Pepsi Cola Corporation. That's $50,000. A sum that equals teachers, a reading program. "Everything would really be okay," I'm told by our lead teacher. It would.

But there's this little hitch about the voting. In this month of May, everyone gets one vote per day, two if they text one in. And you get more (surprise!) if you buy some Pepsi, remove the top and enter the code in the cap. You get ten more votes in fact, and each is a "Power vote" valued at 5, 10, 25, 50 or even 100 votes.

You now understand the state of my kitchen.

My kitchen is not the only one littered with liters. Kitchens across Eugene and the nation are full of Pepsi right now, full of hope, as this morning we were in slot #19 -- only 9 away from the top ten that will receive the "grant." (Read: Cash Prize! Thank you, Bob Barker.) This fact moved teachers and parents alike to fill our VW buses, bicycles and hatchbacks with Pepsi to drop off with friends and family to get in the vote!

Are you sick yet?

Some of the kids are for sure. Someone out there is in bed with Pepsi poisoning right now, mark my words. My kids believed me when I told them it was only for scientific experiments, drain cleaning, and laundry. They bought Mento candies and attempted explosive events in the back yard. But surely others drank it.

Okay, so I might get in trouble for admitting it, but Seda was one. She is very ill and regrets it, for the record.

It is sad, sad sad. I'm embarrassed to say that the worst consequence is upon us one day before the closing of the vote. I am sitting on this conundrum: I have convinced my boyfriend that it is his civic duty to vote with Pepsi since the state of Oregon as a whole doesn't seem to give a rip about our children's education. No P.E., music, or art and class sizes at 30+ for lower elementary next year.

Ken has been plunking away at the keyboard, activating power codes, and voting with the spinning golden cap for our school. And our rank has fallen...to 56. In hours. All of our potential gifts for the children of tomorrow dumped like so much Pepsi down the drain because 2,999 other noble causes in this country got bit by the hope bug -- perhaps it was a scorpion? -- and they are now messing with our chances.

Since when do we gamble for our children's future? And when did public education become a charity?

With all due respect and even admiration for those who have made a tremendous effort at this grant (ours are the sins of the innocent parents and teachers who wanted only a decent education for our children), I am praying for forgiveness. I am praying for answers. And above all, I pray that our children can forget that we once tried to buy them school with poison.

Today's Work

2011-05-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

How can I stretch my mind, my heart, to find tenderness for all of our gifts and limitations?

"Do not apologize for the state of your garden," he chided gently, a man who had been a garden educator for years. "It's exactly how it's supposed to be."

To celebrate that, to hold it dear, I must extend a gentle heart to my work in its many forms as it contributes to both order and chaos: there was the time I chose to write rather than to mulch, the day I slept late to recover from a quarrel that lasted until three a.m. and I did not water, the day I spent at the coast instead of planting the onions.

Dandelions and curly dock I have made friends with. Nettle and bittercress sustain me as I wait for spring lettuce to unfurl before the sun. The crab grass still strikes dread in my heart and the morning glory, it's dark green leaves tender and small, are poking through the too-thin mulch as I turn away, unwilling to watch.

How may I set foot into the pathway of my garden welcoming the presence of every being, green and brown? How can I find it in my heart to offer amnesty to the myriad slugs and snails, flea beetles and aphids? (It is not actually mine to offer, I know. They allow me to grow here, too.)

My work is not the work of the lonely. Raccoons, a pestilence to my chickens, eat snails. The chickens will do serious seasonal damage to the crab grass if I give them half a chance.

I suppose it's about trust, knowing that the resources are here with me to find harmony, peace, and beauty in this bed I've made. When I turn my eyes to the earth and see only obstacles to my intentions, I may close them again and recall all the beings that I am connected to that together encompass a greater vision, and I am offered a view into that.

When I open them, voila! The morning glory blooms effortlessly into tiny flawless cups of sunshine, greenery raises its head in every spot I've not taken the time to cultivate, and my mother Earth reminds me that the world is always in movement, always unfolding whether I am capable of bearing witness or not.

The garden is possibility. It is a model of patience, waiting for me to find love.

By Sam, Uncut

2011-02-20T07:34:00.000-08:00

Sam escaped off to his room tonight and wrote this, which sounded an awful lot like a blog post to me:

"I was playing basketball in my bedroom when my brother, Trin, called for me. I wondered if he wanted to talk to me about a giant spider that I saw a couple days ago. It turned out that he wanted to give me tips on how to make a good picture. I said that I didn't want any tips, exept for money tips. Mom laughed."

I have printed it exactly as Sam wrote it: spelling, capitalization, grammar. I am delighted with his ability to express himself at barely eight years old!

This is what he had to say about writing afterward: "When you play video games, you get done and you always want more. When you write something like this, you go 'oh, now I got that out!' and then you [feel ready] to do all kinds of other things you like to do. Because you got it out. And it feels good."

What an important point to make! I had been sharing with the boys my joys in witnessing their art for the evening (Trinidad was drawing landscapes with the guidance of an art book from my mom while Sam drew or wrote) and told them that one of my concerns in making computer games accessible is that they would always use the time doing that instead of using their imagination and (in my mind) growing their souls. Then Sam pointed out the above.

Wow. The difference between hungry and full, yearning and content. I had never thought of it that way.

Trinidad, on the other hand, earnestly argued for full reign of all of his faculties with computer access included so that he could grow his ability to choose and discipline himself.

I think he has something there, too, and as usual, it asks more growth from me. :)

Wise

2011-02-16T21:42:00.000-08:00

Tonight is Sam's last night of being seven years old.

"It's not healthy to hurry," he told me quietly as I rushed around gathering food, water, shin guards, and shoes for Trin's soccer match.

I laughed as loudly as I agreed. Then I rushed on.

We picked up Trin, and I lit into him (translation: earnestly expressed my feelings and unmet needs) about not calling me after school as we'd agreed this morning. For almost an hour, I had chewed my nails waiting for the phone to ring so I could tell him to walk the 2.5 miles home alone -- a new independence for him -- but when it finally rang, it was a friend's mother who had taken him home with her son as rain was pelting the soccer field where they had played. If only I could instill in him awareness, that invaluable notion that (m)others have needs at the same time we do....

We talked and listened and talked with each other, and in the end I could see how he saw it and he could see how I saw it, and both of us were moved to tears that we could be seen, really seen by one another when there had been such tension only minutes ago. What precious relief and hope filled us both as he wiggled into my lap for a snuggle, long legs dangling shoes nearly as big as my own off the end of the car seat.

Later, Ken offered him a book from the 1950's that showed a pictorial progression from a woman with a cat outward into the cosmos until the Milky Way itself was only a speck in a cloud of stars.

Awareness, I thought. How insignificant are my efforts to cultivate family-oriented awareness when I am missing so much: the young man with the sign on the corner who is shivering in the cold while I drive to a soccer match (borrowed car), children eating chemicals that are marketed as "hot lunch," kids being crammed thirty-six to a classroom. How much am I willing to take responsibility for in a given moment?

How big is my cosmos?

"It's not good to hurry or worry," said Sam.

And he should know, being nearly eight years wise.

Turning

2011-02-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

Did I tell you that I tried to stop the world with my shoulder?

It's been aching for a year or so, inflamed to crisis point twice. How did that happen? Hard to say.

This is what I know: people have been dying left and right in my world for the past year, all of them mothers or children. I am not opposed to death, not opposed to the sun setting. I am not against that which is most predictable, lightness and dark, and how could I be? I am sitting inside it.

All the same, I think that I wanted it to slow down a trifle, give me time to say goodbye in my own human way, uncatch my breath. I think with that in my sub-mind, I set my shoulder against it.

The physical therapist, Erik Verdouw, master of the art, smiled knowingly when I told him this. Think of the speed with which this planet revolves, he told me. Think of how everything that appears to be still is yet in constant motion. If you lay on your back in a rainforest when there is not a breath of wind, the trees will creak and lean gently at all times, repositioning themselves with the turn and tilt of our planet. You cannot stop it, he said.

In fact, I do not even think I slowed it down, me with my shoulder. But maybe that's not so. Maybe the pain of withholding scraped into my art so that all that lay before me for a year was blank canvas. There have been precious few blog posts. So much has felt private, guarded. I did not wish to harm anyone in my attempt to capture moments with words.

Our bees have died, too. I am embarrassed to say it, shocked, and sad. I know things die. It is in my picture of the world. Every rotation is complete; we greet the dawn and the dusk each day the same, and still the sadness turns me in my tracks across the yard. I lean against the rabbit pen and cry with a dull moan like tall trees moving without knowing why.

I understand nothing. One hive has honey, more than twenty-five pounds left, I think, and the other needed feeding. But now, it's hard to say whether even the light hive starved; the marauding bees are filling the air around it, and they have been swarming it for a time, I suspect, looking back.

Between the frames, the bodies of my bees are piled light and paper thin, softly coated in mildew. They have been dead awhile, and it has not been wet.

All of this stopping things with my shoulder hard against the turn of the world, this effort to pause, take things in, has rendered me blind, I see. How did I not notice that the bees were not my own?

I am a stillpoint in a sea of color, some cosmic kaleidoscope spilling perfect prisms into one another at every rotation. Something always sticks and holds within the glass, but still the colors change, falling all around as if the stillness itself demanded motion at its edges.

I am breathing again, and that is something toward letting go, moving along. At dusk, I will check the hives in my full bee suit to be sure my colonies have indeed collapsed. Then, I will bring the boxes in so that the spring swarms I plan to catch will have a meal waiting.

What else is there to do?

How To Fight

2011-02-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you how to fight.

It's not the way I was taught: tough lady pushing or pleading with words, sometimes sharp like daggers, and slammed by a fist or the flat iron back of a hand nearly as big as her head.

Not that way.

Not the way I did as a child either, screaming all the right words inside my head fierce as beach wind but only shaped by it on the inside -- a thousand steep dunes with cryptic passage to the sea.

Not like my father who shreds those around him without realizing that he is always right behind each, bearing the scars he has left on one and all.

Let me tell you, it is much softer than all that, and still it is deeper and darker than I ever thought possible.

This is how you fight: you listen. You crack yourself open and you let the other come rushing in until you know how they taste, how they smell, how they move in the world. You open your pores until the other seeps into you and you can feel how they feel because they are not outside and other at all.

You soften because all those holes leave you open and full at the same time, moving, jitterbugging with the electricity of connection.

And then you can speak, and when you speak, your words don't belong to you anymore. They are words of love, because it is love to listen like that. And you speak from deep down where you broke yourself open. You speak from that brokenness and there is a chance you will be heard from that place because words from down there, they echo. They sound different like a song in a narrow red canyon, and that music is rare and demands an ear.

But sometimes not. Sometimes the walls just shake all around and there is no ear, and that is no time to stop trying.

That is no time to be silent.

Into that canyon, you pull the ear, you bend it and teach it how to listen, how to crack itself open. You sing into it so it cannot resist, and the more that fight means to you, the softer you sing. How can you resist me?

I have you in me now, and you may be right or you may dance with me here.

Being right is lonely.

Being right does not echo or shine or even break through walls. Being right is a dull thud in our favor, and we want more, by nature we want more.

We have to fight for it.

The Mixed Yes

2011-01-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

A week before my last post, I learned that my mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Two weeks ago, she passed on, thin, frail, and resolute on completing her journey whole-heartedly.

My mother did not talk about the fact that she was dying, not if she could help it. She chased the doctor from the room when he came to tell her that there was nothing more they could do for her. This dying thing was her business and her business alone, I imagine she was thinking. The doctor found her tenacity endearing.

She did not say much in those last days as we sat beside her, captivated by her passing. What she did say mostly appeared disjointed and dreamlike. When she spoke with us directly, her eyes widened with childlike presence and singular clarity.

"Oh! It's Kristin Ann." My arrival seemed to both delightfully surprise and meet expectation.

In the last year of her life, my mother found herself remarkably at ease with much of her world. She rarely argued with her husband. She looked at the lavender, lambs, and donkey in her fields and proclaimed herself happy despite economic challenges. The boys and I spent over a week with her at harvest without a single conflict -- unheard of and fulfilling in ways that left us both in wonder.

She had relaxed. I had relaxed. We were both trying to get used to this, looking at each other sideways and smirking. "Just sitting here staring straight ahead," she'd say as we surveyed the valley at cocktail hour beneath the buzz of summer cicadas.

I look back now and wish I could have earlier released all of the strifes of our relationships, all of my worries about her responses that I held long after the volcanoes of menopause had gone dormant. I wish I could have enjoyed her more.

I hold the mirror so that I can see the front of me from behind. I hope that I can enjoy my children and family now for who they are, that I may open my heart to them wholly in this moment, releasing them from the roles I perceived them to play in the past. I hope that I myself can find my grace in present time so that I may proceed with compassionate attention that is not minefield careful, not clinging to armistice for dear life.

I want at least some of my yes's to be whole-hearted if not open-hearted, embracing the joy of embarking rather than the complete consciousness of all needs met and unmet. I want to say "I will!" with excitement and take the hands of my comrades for better or for worse in every commitment, whether it's soccer, dance, ritual or art.

I celebrate the 'yes' of abandon. Analysis can be made, inner reflection spent, but once decided, may the expression be ecstatic -- I'll do it!

I see the price of a mixed yes as a lack of riotous color, and that color is what paints our view of the past. When I survey my life from that pinnacle, whenever I may find it, I want to look back on what I left behind in vivid splendor. I want my children and loved ones to recall the color I added to their world, the times I said "yes!" with all of me, never looking back.

It's too much to expect that every time, I know. Perhaps I could do it just often enough to leave an impression.

Rattle

2010-10-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

I am echoing inside, today, rattling like a key in a can.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?

******

"Look at that bird up there," I tell a young friend I am trying to distract from her task of pushing Sam off my lap. She stares up into blue.

"It's you," she says. "It's you in the future. Hey, Sam, look, it's your mom in the future up there!"

I swivel my head to take her in. Is it true?

I can't tell if it's vulture or a hawk.

******

I struggle at times with disappointment, sadness, frustration. Are these feelings authentic, or do they spring from my attachment to people, ideas, understandings? If the "understanding" is mine alone, where is the truth under what is standing? Which is an authentic feeling if so many arise from the way I think things ought to be? If I perceive my needs to be met, I am content.

I am a center of perception, a mirror, shiny and round. What is the sound of me in this hollow place?

********

Sam came to me three nights ago and told me his brain was going to burst.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I am me. But Trinidad is also "me." How can that be possible?" He groaned and held his head, falling to the ground.

The echoes are not all mine.

Last night, he told me that he wrote a story at school. It goes something like this:

There was a boy named 'I Don't Know My Name," and he'd just moved to a town called Me. He went to school on the first day and his teacher said, "What's your name?"

"I Don't Know My Name," he said.

"Oh. I'll call you 'George,'" said the teacher.

"But that's not my name! My name is 'I Don't Know My Name!'"

The boy went home and told his mom, "I hate Me."

"What? Don't say you hate yourself," she said.

"I didn't. I said I hate "Me" [the town]."

That is all that Sam had written so far.

And me? This is good enough for today.

What's For Dinner?

2010-07-31T20:04:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I wavered between the temptation of "going out" for a burrito or .... I couldn't even imagine. Hungry, tired, I collapsed into a chair announcing that dinner was beyond me.

"That's okay," said Trinidad cheerfully. "I'll cook. You two just rest, and I'll take care of dinner."

Seda swung around and gave me the look only parents can share that says, "Wow, did you notice that we just peaked Mt. Everest? Check...out....this...view!"

I made myself horizontal and offered to write Trinidad a recipe for quinoa. Sam said he would help by making instant pudding (thanks to Trader Joes) for dessert. Wink, wink.

Trinidad picked greens in the garden. I only saw because I couldn't find him when I delivered the recipe. I am under strict instructions to stay out of the kitchen, and by Golly, I'm up to the task.

It's been 30 minutes.

"Boy, I don't get a break!" says Trinidad, running between turning off the timer, stirring the potstickers, and setting the table.

Sam informs him he can take 30 seconds, and Trinidad jumps at the suggestion, chasing his brother around the house with the stirring spoon and swinging at him dramatically with sound affects.

This must be "growing up." This is our household getting old, the tip of the Collier/Krebs iceberg with its wide bottom so far under that I can't consciously recount the stories of my ancestors, each of them struggling with growing old and raising families, each of them wedged wordlessly between past and future in the features of ten and seven year old boys manning the kitchen alone.

I will be fed by this work.

My Teachers

2010-05-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

"Did you ever notice that pie isn't very good without whipped cream and whipped cream isn't very good without pie?" said Sam.

"...stars and moons flew past me as I fell," Trinidad told me, wide-eyed after a fall.

Sam's poetry vernacular dictated and scribbled onto a recipe card stuck to the refrigerator last year: "I sneakily hid and ate a piece of chocolate."

"Why did the intestine cross the road?" Sam asked me tonight. I shook my head and shrugged.

His eyes narrowed. "Because he didn't have the guts."

And finally, the paddle ball.

Sam got a cheap version of this classic toy at our local credit union as a "prize" for saving money under duress. He played with it for hours determined to strike it more than four times in a row.

"What if you could play paddleball infinitely?" he asked.

"What if?" I answered.

"That would be impossible," he said.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "What if an alternate universe opened its space and time to you right now and all you did was play and play and play paddleball...infinitely?"

I looked around me at the grocery lists, emails up for response, laundry to fold, and chickens waiting for their daily scraps. "Would it be so different?" I asked. "Sounds a lot like what I do all day."

Sam looked at me hard

and did not disagree.

In Future Memory

2010-04-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

"When you die, I am going to write something on a piece of paper and put it on your grave," says Sam.

"What will it say?" I ask.

"You want to know now?"

"Yeah!"

"Oh. Okay. It will say, 'When you die, you fly.'" He smiles.

Crossroads

2010-04-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I lifted the lid off the beehive in order to add a queen separator and third box for honeymaking. Queen Mab and her Dreamy bees barely paid me notice. Their business before them stretched onward and up, the wax pouring from their bellies to form countless cells stacked -- a duplex, a triplex, apartmental compartments from which to hatch, to eat, to raise their young.

These are the words of the bees: build, build, build. What interest have they in a white-veiled minion from another world who puffs smoke at them questioningly before scraping, scraping away their work as it rises to touch the inner cover? She is a Breaker, they think. She does not understand.

The chickens escaped last night at dusk from their makeshift pen. My one, my girl, my Henny Penny crouched dutifully as I approached. She had taken out the front of my garlic bed and found the sandy loam a thrill to scatter, vastly superior to the clayed crabgrass and nettle that I allow her to graze. She lifted her wings and bent her knees as I reached down for her, sure that somehow my fate was inevitably intertwined with her own. One liquid amber eye gazed quietly into mine, unabashed. She believes that this orchestra of feeding, fluffing and laying somehow centers around my peripheral presence. She knows me as the Gatekeeper. This is the mythology of chickens.

Death is all around me this week. People, animals, and even trees I love are dying, inexorably silhouetted at the threshold of another world. I am flooded with emotion -- care for their comfort, love and appreciation for the gift of their presence in my life, sadness to imagine their departure. I question my attachment, the hunger that I feel, the desire to sink myself into another being, seeking attunement. Am I looking to escape?

Walking in the cemetery with the children this afternoon, I find peace in breathing through the inner storm I weather. This is compost, I think. My heart is full of decay -- a celebration of life in the face of letting go. I am heating up, I think, getting up to temperature. This is what it feels like in the middle of the pile. Transition, fruition, life pulsing into form. I am the spiral filled with light, swinging arms outward into darkest space. One in a million.

The boys have stopped by some vinca vines. "Mom! Come here!" they say.

They are watching a gray squirrel. It does not run away, and this is odd. I tie up the dog and come to see.

The tiny squirrel moves back and forth beside them for some time, and finally I reach out to pet its soft silver fur. The squirrel's response is almost immediate. Within minutes, it is hiding beneath our still, squatted forms then dashing out again to look up at us expectantly. It is young, I surmise, too young to have fallen from the nest. How young, not even my iphone will tell me with exactitude.

And that is what one needs when considering what to do with a squirrel sitting on your shoulder. One needs clarity about its age, its circumstance. I had to decide whether or how to detach its path from our own. Then, what peace could be made in whether it was served in that deliberation?

We take the squirrel home. A local wildlife rehab center did not respond to our calls, and we pack it along with us in hopes of reaching them by evening. More internet research points to the likelihood that this little fellow is just on the edge of weaned independence and could, perhaps, be rescued yet by his own mother. We take him back.

Peacemaking again with our emotions -- worry, disappointment, gratitude for the crossing of paths. Then I receive a call from the wildlife rehab worker who assures us that our instincts are correct, the squirrel is probably starving and orphaned.

We meet the volunteer back at the cemetery, find the squirrel where we'd left it (we had to bolt when we first returned it and were followed even so), then we send the tiny shaking creature on its way in seasoned hands.

This is the way of interspecies communion, the unwords of all kinds who, in desperation seek to give and receive.

Attuned, I am, even if the pitch shakes me at such a vibration that I think to lose myself. The world is dying, dying, living all around and here is my honored place at the crossroads.

Such is my mythology.

Good Things By Sam

2010-04-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Mom's

Small dogs

Chickens

Peace

Snow

Hot chocolate

Curiosity

Books

Love

Easter 2010

2010-04-04T17:16:00.000-07:00

"Mom! We just got this great idea," Trinidad told me excitedly. "Sam and I are going to make you Easter baskets!"

It was after 10:00 at night on Friday. I smiled and suggested they make a list of what they wanted to do for that the next day.

"But, there's a problem," Trin told me. "I don't know what to give you. If it was for me, I'd want a soccer ball, some crossword puzzles... but for you? I have no idea. What would you like?"

Delighted by his awareness of my individuality, I thought about it a bit. "I always love what you make me," I said.

He and Sam talked it over. "We'd like to give you something we cook. What do you want -- cookies, pie, cake, what?"

"Well..." I hesitated. I had decided to forego our traditional sweet bread to meet other needs the next day. "There is something that I would really like, but I don't know if you could actually make it -- that's Easter bread."

"Do you have a recipe?" he asked.

"Yes, but you've never made bread before, and Easter bread is not easy for beginners."

"Oh, no problem," he said, with the confidence of his nine years. "We'll do it!"

The next day, I got a call on my cell phone. "How do you heat the oven to 125 degrees? I can see 175 and 200, but not 125."

"Are you heating the milk?" I asked. He was -- in the oven. He couldn't remember what part of the recipe went into the ceramic bowl, so he asked if he could wait for me to come home to interpret. I was only 20 minutes away.

I explained further where necessary and Trinidad did it all (except the measuring, which Sam took charge of -- that little ring of spoons jingled so attractively). Trin measured, mixed, kneaded, shaped and baked the loaves. The last steps he did without my support. Wow! I was so impressed.

Late Saturday night, Ken told Sam he'd better go to bed so that the Easter Bunny could come down the chimney.

"The Easter bunny will not come down the chimney. She is sitting on the toilet [referring to me]."

We laughed. "I know this because I am old enough to know this," he said proudly.

"Mom? Will you please make us Easter baskets even when we are teenagers? If we make them for you, too?" Trinidad asked. "Because most kids stop getting them after they're ten."

"You know it, dude," I told him.

Have yourself... a very merry Easter.:)

What's Up With the Collier/Silvermans....

2010-03-18T21:57:00.001-07:00

Here we are, singing our theme song again: Transition.

Seda's fantabulous city job is turning into a pumpkin. Due to budget cuts, Seda's job has officially been eliminated, leaving her to seek (with preference) another job under the city's umbrella.

She ran the options by me tonight. We nixed the 911 operator job, despite the fact that she is clearly qualified after parenting for a decade. There are a couple of jobs that look attractive, but will appear so to dozens of others who are hot on the search, as well. There is the "Park Specialist 3 -- Tree Maintenance and Planting" job which I told her she was not qualified for.

"What?" she retorted. "I worked for a nursery for a month once and... (pausing for my peals of laughter).. and I was a logger for a year!" Just the balance Eugene is looking for, dontcha' think?

And the one that she'll likely get on as: Wastewater Maintenance Mechanic. You got it -- a life in the sewer. Talk about your job going down the drain. The irony is that the pay is equal to the work she does in Plans Examining. She is rather irate about the fraction of an income that a clerical worker, traditionally a female occupation, pulls in by comparison, and she will be bucking for them at the next union meeting. Probably spoken from her new pedestal -- or should I say, "throne?"

Ken and I are exploring job possibilities in the North Pacific. A new highschool built in Kosrae (Micronesia) likely has need of a music teacher and program, and Ken is well-suited. I am prepared to return to the work force as a teacher to support our household income next year while offering the kids a fantastic learning experience (more "public school") on an island that has escaped the causeway of consumerism. The siren song of adventure lulls oh so sweetly....

Trinidad, meanwhile, is trying to break a world record. "Do you think I could hold 60 pounds of bricks hanging from a rope in my mouth?" he asks.

"I don't think so, but you could do a little less and set the record for 'The Most Weight Held By the Mouth of a Third Grader,'" says Sam. Photographs forthcoming on FaceBook.

Everything flowing along remarkably swift and easy, despite the forever newness of it all.

A Late Night Concert (By Sam)

2010-03-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to a strings concert at south Eugene high school, and one of my friends was in it. It was fun. After the concert, I got a cookie and some juice, then I went home.

A Celebration

2010-02-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

First publication in a major mag: The Sun picked up a short essay I wrote (on the topic "Borrowing") for the Readers Write section of their February issue.

Best part of this news: it's my favorite magazine. Real beauty, real ugly, RealPolitik life. Literary bluecollar, almost-always-respectable.

Check it out.

One Lap Saved

2010-02-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

Sam has been very snuggley lately, launching at me with open arms when I pick him up from school, curling himself into my lap whenever I sit down at home. It seems impossible to me that his body is so gangly and long, bizarre that he is so heavy when his wings entrust his full weight to my arms.

"Do you think you'll always love me this much?" I ask, not fully attending to the fact that I actually said this aloud.

"I don't know," says Sam, without worry in his voice. He jumps up to get something from the living room.

"I think that's a very wise answer," I say.

"Save your lap for me!" he calls.

The Grand Finale

2010-02-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

Setting: Monday of the final week of closing on the Collier's refinance of home pending all final inspections.

Kristin: What?! We can't get the final inspections done this week! We are missing a vent pipe for the composting toilet that is on order. It won't be in until at least next week.

Banker: Oh, no problem. The bank is not going to hold up the loan over a piece of hardware. Just do the best you can and give me a call.

Later....

Electrical Inspector: So are you guys ready to insulate?

Kristin: Insulate? Yeah, that's done, and the sheet rock's up and painted.

EI: Well, there's this memo that says I need to check out some work that didn't pass inspection that is in the walls. This is important stuff. I need to see it.

K: Let's call Seda. (Seda doesn't answer her work phone.)

EI: Do you understand what an important thing this is? I need to see in those walls for you to pass.

K: Well (pointing) is this the memo? With these initials that it's been done?

EI doesn't get it, keeps frowning, calls the office, gets word that the work he's concerned about has been approved since and initialed as K pointed out.
EI: Hmmm. Well, all these outlets will need to be changed out. They aren't to code without the child tamper resistant part integrated on.

K: Oh.

Kristin buys 22 new outlets (how can Home Depot sell this stuff?), and various other required parts, some of them apparently impossible to retrieve, but acquired in the seedier districts of Eugene where they sell "Gorilla Nuts -- torque me!" Seda returns home from work feverish and coughing, Kristin bursts into tears trying to get supper on the table, and Ken offers to reschedule his evening in order to install outlets with Seda. At 10 p.m. all electrical is complete, but K is not done crying. The loan, it seems will never come, there is not enough money to pay next months mortgage without the refi, lost waterbottles and keys will never turn up, dinner is burnt, and Seda may never get her vagina. All, it seems to K, is likely lost.

Tuesday.

Final, Plumbing and Mechanical Inspector-in-one: It looks like you need a back-flow vaccuum for this hand-held shower unit and a vent pipe for this toilet. Then I can sign you off.

K: Okay.

K calls all local warehouses desperate to find vent piece sooner, but to no avail. She returns to seedy districts for back-flow vacuum piece.

Proprietor (whose breath smells of liquor): Inspector get you on this?

K: Yes.

P: Well, here it is, the piece you need -- $25. Take it off when he leaves, it'll restrict the flow of your shower otherwise. Then you can use it as a fishing weight, get your moneys worth out of it.

K: Thank you.

While in seedy district, K debates and finally surrenders to the urge for serious decadent support: a coconut cream filled chocolate cupcake from Sweet Life. If that broke the bank, there would be no sweeter irony.

---

K(on phone to Banker): What shall we do? Everything is done but the vent pipe. Will the loan be held up?

Banker: Oh, no, it's no problem, as I've said all along. Look, all we need are the final inspections. I'm sure the inspector (K's NOTE: not the lender as aforesaid.) won't hold up the finals for one piece of hardware. You just tell him your situation. I'm sure you're in good stead. Just get those documents signed and over to the title company by tomorrow and we'll get you your check on Friday.

K: And if they won't sign?

Banker: Oh, it's not going to happen. But if it does, you'll lose your interest rate we locked into and we'll have to start the process over again. Let's not do that.

K: Oh.

---

Last day for inspections. Seda has finally taken the day off sick. K answers the door prepared to beg for vent pipe forgiveness from the inspector, but, surprisingly, the inspector is a young man she's never met -- a temporary fill in as all inspectors were booked.

Seda: Did you see the memo?

I: No. What did you do?

S: I put in this vaccuum breaker piece.

I: Is that all?

S: That's all I did.

I: Okay. (Miraculously, he doesn't appear to take notice of the toilet, signs off, and leaves.)

Kristin: But what if he takes it back?

S: We wait and see.

The last inspector arrives and signs off on Mechanical. He casts a backwards glance at the toilet.

I: Well, you're not going to use that toilet without the vent piece, so I'll trust you to put it in.

S: It's nearly arrived.

I: Yeah. (He signs.)

Kristin, who has been hiding with Sam fully under a sleeping bag in the far back bedroom, rejoices at the news. All, it appears is not lost, even if the keys and Seda's vagina have not yet arrived.

After almost four years of living with a variable rate, interest only loan, unsure of their future on 32nd Avenue, the Colliers have a foundational loan and the space to support this uniquely structured family and their urban farm.

Hurray.

Growing Up and Growing Down

2010-02-17T15:52:00.000-08:00

Oh, blissful day, abandoning myself and all else to the celebration of Sam, today turning seven.

I made popovers and fruit parfaits with custard (in wine glasses!) for breakfast, surprising the children with a breakfast guest from down the street. Then I took them to school and decided to stay.

I spent the entire day mostly with Sam and some with Trin doing everything they do. I even played Wall Ball at recess and impressed their group of friends by outing the fellow currently undefeated (well, I am an adult, even though I am also somebody's mom). "She doesn't really know how to play," Trinidad told his friends apologetically, "but somehow she's still pretty good at it."

My favorite quotes of the day, gathered from a variety of 1st-3rd graders:

Gym teacher: ....So you were chasing the boys instead of racing the boys, and that is not what I asked you to do.
Girl: Well, I actually WAS racing the boys.
Gym teacher: It sure looked like chasing.
Girl: Um. Yes. I did chase them, but that was to get them to run faster. So I could race them.

Sam's teacher: We are having a problem on the playground with people arguing the Ref's call during wall ball. What are we going to do about it?
(The students have a conversation, come up with a plan to have someone pulled from the game for 3 days if they argue more than 2 times/week, then the teacher asks them to vote in an attempt for consensus. 2 thumbs point down.)
Teacher (to a thumb downer): So, I'm trying to understand this better. Are you concerned about this decision because you are someone who argues with the Refs?
Boy: No.
Teacher: No?
Boy: No. They argue with me!!

Boy on the playground: We're rockstars!
Me: Yeah?
Boy: Yeah! He's Prince, he's Michael Jackson, and I'm Elvis Presley. (All assume radical air guitar positions.)
Me (to self): Dang, I'm not as behind as I thought I was!

We played Wall Ball after school for awhile, then the children took me to a toystore where they planned to buy Legos with their savings. I annoyed Trinidad and amused Sam by attacking them with stuffed animals until they both giggled. Then I played with the Jack in the Boxes as they looked at me sideways with a gleam in their eye. I am so glad they are growing up so that I can properly grow down.

Turning New Leaves

2010-02-08T13:59:00.000-08:00

The earth and air are pregnant with spring. The plum tree is budding, and my seaberry bush has set forth 1/2 inch of new leaves -- green! -- with a brazen hope for warm days ahead.

According to my blog, we started this remodel at the end of April, and now we are surely in the last lap. Drywall, plaster and paint are up, floors are down, and the way is lit with genuine electricity. The composting toilet (many prayers offered for its correct installation) is nearly taking seats. The clawfoot bathtub, elegantly arching its white swanlike presence in our jewel of a bathroom (provided the composting toilet does not perform to the standard our building inspector predicts) rests serenely in a sea of blue marmoleum. So what if we still haven't figured out how to plumb the faucet?

For almost ten months, we have worked this remodel and our thoughts and feelings for each other. We have laughed ourselves to tears, cried ourselves into laughter. We have held each other and taken space. The children have come in close, bridging the gap into adulthood with hammers, shovels, and screwdrivers. They have taken in more screentime than we enjoy so we could finish one last thing on the building outside.

And finally, here it is: the inside. We can take shelter in this space, find quiet (!) and safety in the walls we have built. How much math went into its calculations? How many words kept us connected, reminded us of our commitment to each other within this work? How much have we learned?

The blossoming always seduces me from around the next bend. When, exactly, will it be spring?

Today, I am expected to fill in the trench that now houses a storm drain. The sun is out, the rain has lifted. The banker is awaiting completion, rapping his pen on the table beside stacks of unsigned documents. Still, I am not inclined to go out just yet. Four Bosc pears sit on my drainboard, softly reflecting the late winter sun. Four golden pears remind me that food can be cooked, one dish at a time, and not always pulled in meal-sized portions prepared weeks earlier, from the freezer. Four pears tell me that art is now.

I find myself flipping through cookbooks, furtively, as if I could be caught and hung for such a momentary sweetness. Smiling wistfully, I decide on a recipe for poached spiced pears in honey syrup. As they cool on the countertop, I whisk fresh eggs -- the chickens are laying! -- into goat milk. A baked almond custard will accompany the pears.

Dessert. Perhaps, like the seaberry bush, I stretch too much of my neck into the sun. Perhaps, in the ecstasy of imagining spring spaciousness, I lean a little too hard into creation. Is this the wisdom of a fool? Only time will tell.

And until then, we will eat dessert.

Hickory Dickory Dock

2010-01-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

Our bathroom is a happening place.

Last summer, a raccoon attacked the chicken house in a midnight raid. With cunning paws, it ripped a piece of corrugated plastic right off the side of the building, and our bathroom became home to a flock of nine overnight. You should have seen Seda's face when she went to shower the next morning. Still, the happenings today proved stiff competition.

Sam had decided to get out of the bath and asked me to bring him a towel. I slid one off the shower curtain rod above his head. A dark object immediately appeared in the tub beside him.
And it swam. In fact, it swam laps around poor Sam while I shrieked and he looked bewildered.

Sleek and dark, the mouse dog paddled for its life. Apparently, it had been sitting on the towel I'd pulled from the rod. It swam remarkably well for a matter of minutes until I had the wherewithal to get Sam out of the tub, at which time it beached itself on a floating, empty shampoo bottle. By then, Seda and Trinidad had joined us to check out the commotion. Harley the cat watched, as cats will, with wide eyes -- noncommital.

Trinidad was thrilled. He somehow arranged it so that Harley got the mouse and he got the bath, but all behind a closed door. I sat with Sam wrapped in a towel in my lap in the kitchen. "That was scary!" Sam told me again. Seda went to fetch his clothes. She forgot about the mouse in the bathroom.

Of course, Harley hadn't killed it yet ("just looking!"). Seda opened the door, and the mouse ran out to jump into the dirty clothes basket. Seda did cuss. The cat was dismayed and the dog now curious. What could it be?

One by one, Seda picked our dirty clothes out and set them into a new basket. The dog watched. The cat looked irritated and occasionally attacked the dog, claws extended, to make her opinion of teamwork quite clear. The boys cheered.

At the bottom of the basket, a wet mouse appeared. And this is the end of our story for no kindness is it to laugh at death, whatever the natural cause.

The Unschooling Continues

2009-12-20T23:37:00.000-08:00

"Who is the man singing?" I ask.

The boys listen and then each tries to call it first, "Louis Armstrong!"

"Yep," I tell them. "And now, the woman?"

They listen. "Billie Holiday?" asks Trinidad, doubtfully.

"Listen to her voice. Is it Billie?"

"No!" he says definitively. "But I don't know who."

"Ella Fitzgerald," I say. "You haven't heard much of her, but isn't her voice lovely?"

"Wow!" says Sam. "How do they make it so his voice stops and her voice starts like that, so smooth? Do they stand next to each other?"

And so goes the conversation about choices made in recording music, about the lives and personalities of the artists, about history.

We are making cookies together. Both boys can now read and double the recipe with reminders from me about what to look for. Both boys know the terminology around doughs and batters: creaming, folding, mixing, and whipping. They still need some support around turn taking when they are both hot to create.

"Ant treats!" says Trinidad. He is reading the permanent marker I put on our sugar jar long ago.

"Yeah. I like to laugh at things that bother me when I'm tired of being bothered," I said. "I get to laugh a lot more that way." He looks at me and nods, knowingly. I wouldn't mind passing that on.

Trinidad peeks into the oven. "They're still pretty wet," he says. "What makes them wet?" He thinks for a minute. "Oh -- the butter!" He gauges the best time to pull them based on the dryness and slightly brown edges of the outer cookies.

I am still the one to take the baking stones from the oven. Sam leans over the stove top to grab a cookie while I pull the oven door down. "Don't fall in, Hansel," I tell him.

"Hmm-hm! Hanthel!" he says, spewing crumbs through his giggle.

"Yeah, now you get these literary allusions since we've been boning up on our fairy tales," I say.

Sam leans over the cookie press, trying to push out a perfect wreath. The last one got caught in the ring at the bottom. This one, too, sticks. "Oh, come on! What the hell?" he asks, incredulous, as he picks the dough from the metal tool.

I turn away, smirking. He has learned to cuss appropriately. It's the first time I've heard a four-letter word from him in awhile, and the timing, by my own standard, was impeccable. As if echoing my logic, he says it again for good measure under his breath. Then, pleased with his own affect, he laughs and tells me he's going to try a new shaped disc. Better luck with that, maybe.

I am so grateful for our conversations, our learning and growing together. I am honored to see their wheels turning and to be invited into the very gears of their clockwork. I am humble in my joy to be a parent, a mentor, a model, and a companion. So very lucky that they are my boys.

The Web We Weave

2009-12-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

I needed a sled, and ours is deep in the pile that I crammed into our tiny storage unit last May. I turned to a neighbor for help. Walking 4 doors up the street bearing bagels rescued from a local baker's dumpster, I presented my dilemma and was aptly rewarded.

On the return, sled in hand, I passed my next door neighbor and another neighbor hoisting either side of a jug of mead on its way to be bottled. This mead contained a good deal of honey from our bees and will grace our Christmas eve table for the next several years. I waved them a hello and stopped off at the neighbor's house across the street to pick up one more sled. A stack of plates and jars were ready for my pickup, too, on their return from transporting soups and baked goods to our "extended family" across the way.

Inhale, exhale.

Another Family School parent who lives nearby became interested in buying goat milk to turn into yoghurt. I called my goat milk connection. She said she'd love the support, but being 70 miles from town, she is unable to supply the milk on her Saturday drop. If only I could come get it on Wednesday, she wished. I'll take the Wednesday milk, I told her, to make my yoghurt from. It will stay fresh for weeks once cultured. My drinking milk I will take from the Friday batch.

The farmer was delighted. She has more financial support now, and even more openings for her Saturday milk list. She's offering me bits of winter squash, chicken feet (for stock) and other bonus goodies to show her appreciation. I am making yoghurt for my new mom-friend, and when I have a sick kid, she picks up the other in her minivan to carpool to school.

I like it.

Gender Inconclusions IV

2009-12-01T21:15:00.000-08:00

"Did you hear a knock at the door?" Seda asked when she noticed I had left the dinner table.

"Yes!" I called from the living room where I was giving another mom her share of the wholesale pickup I'd received on her behalf earlier that day.

"It's nice to live in community, so much easier, really," I said, returning to the table. "I think of all the little things I have to keep track of as a homemaker -- fermenting the oatmeal for tomorrow's breakfast, stacking the firewood before it rains, picking up our order from Hummingbird Wholesale, handling our loan application at the bank -- all of these time sensitive things to do. But in community, so many of these tasks can be shared or picked up by one another when we simply cannot fit it in. It would be so lonely to make a home in isolation."

"Yeah," said Seda. "And so many people do! No wonder they're unhappy homemakers."

"Mmm," I said. "It's part of our consumer culture -- we buy this and that prepackaged thing, a dishwasher to do our dishes, a washing machine to wash our clothes (I'm not complaining on that one, mind you)...."

"And still, with all these modern conveniences, homemakers now spend more time doing housework than ever before," said Seda.

"Well, they now have bigger houses."

"True! In the fifties, people lived in little houses, like ours, and that was the norm."

"Did you know," I asked the boys, "that when we bought this 750 square foot house, our realtor almost refused to show it to us because it 'wasn't big enough' for our needs. If Maddy and I were still together romantically, it still would be."

"Wow," said Trinidad.

"Yep. We should get some old episodes of 'Leave It To Beaver,'" I said. "That would be a real social studies education."

"Women were expected to vaccuum the floors in high heels and dresses, Trinidad," said Seda. Trinidad's eyes widened. "You know, I wonder if that's why the feminist movement turned their back on homemaking?"

"Oh, Seda, you're right!" I said. "The homemakers in those days switched on television and turned to the bottle to keep them company. So much for sisters sharing resources and power in the world. So much for community and sustainability!"

Can you imagine? A T.V. dinner marauding as ease, so seductive... if bland. All that time to play Bridge! But what about meaningful shared efforts to feed the family, feed the world? The recipes and nourishing wisdom of generations, lost to plastic and paperboard.

And then a generation of young women who looked back and said, "I will not stay home."

Herein lies the epidemic of homelessness.

Down In the Dumps

2009-11-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

Our working class neighborhood has banded together in a new kind of sharing. As we all struggle to make ends meet feeding our growing children, resourcefulness and gleaning has risen to a new level: the dumpster.

Behind our favorite bakeries, loaves are regularly dropped into the trash wrapped in paper and plastic. They are the same breads that cost $3-$5 only an hour before. As we stretch to pay mortgages and car/bike repair bills, such tidily discarded food is a blessing. There are now four families on our street alone that regularly dive and share the spoils to stock freezers and pantries.

I have to admit that it took me awhile to wrap my head around the notion of this. Eat food from the dumpster? Is that safe? As I write this, I am reminded of my childhood beliefs about mushrooms. Don't touch them! They're poisonous! Wash your hands! Fortunately, I've taken classes on wild mushroom identification since then and learned what I was missing. (In fact, no mushroom is so poisonous that you can become sick from touching it, or even touching it and putting your hand in your mouth -- unless you've seriously molested the poor mushroom.)

In our world of mass consumption, anything that's turned the corner of premium marketability is suddenly considered worthless and is discarded while people on our streets and in our neighborhoods struggle and starve. Where is our common sense?

What can I make with sour milk? Pancakes, quickbreads, and more. Stale bread is good for stuffing mix, croutons, and bread pudding, or it goes to the chickens if it becomes rock hard. Let us save our planet and our people at once by keeping edibles out of the landfill!

I am also looking to my own habits to discern whether I am truly as frugal as I'd like to be. Yesterday, when I pulled a box off of my beehive to keep the colony warmer this winter, I tossed a chunk of propolis aside. Bees make this golden sticky comb out of tree and bush resins to glue and hermetically seal their hives into antibacterial commercial kitchens.

I tossed it aside. "What am I doing?" I thought. Propolis is medicine, and when carefully processed, it's worth a pretty American penny. Can I afford not to learn how? I came inside with the bees work and sat down at the computer to Google "propolis preparation." I discovered that I can turn it into a powder with ease (freeze and grind), and from this form I can blend it with a variety of carriers to make oral or topical medicines for my family.

God grant me the eyes to see where I waste and easily harvest the bounty we discard.

Hopefully the kids will have it easier. They are already delighted by our gleaning in its many forms. Picking up hazelnuts on the orchard floor after the harvesting machines had been through, they proudly announced their "jackpots." Tromping through the woods with friends, they wavered between sharing and hoarding as they stumbled upon golden patches of Chanterelles. These are big ticket finds, in more ways than one.

And they know quality. Bread is edible three days old or straight out of the oven. The latter is a rarer find, to be sure. When we pulled a bag of seeded baguettes out of the dumpster last Friday, Trinidad squeezed the soft end of one and said, "Wow!"

"Mmmm!" Sam smiled broadly. "Fresh from the dumpster!"

Gender Inconclusions III

2009-11-19T14:38:00.001-08:00

I opened my hex pocket tool and searched for the correct size. "Hmm," I said and studiously began dismanteling the bunk bed/desk/dresser combo that I'd just purchased used for my boys. The former owner, a three year old girl, stood behind me shyly chewing on a lock of long brown hair.

"Where's the man?" she asked quietly. The question appeared to be posed hypothetically, and perhaps that is the best way to answer it.

Why did she ask so quietly? Why did she ask at all?

What could I say? "The man? She's home building our new addition." Or, "Why would I need a man?" Or, "Yeah, really, that's what I'd like to know!" There's room for all of the above.

What has feminism offered us but an opportunity to pack our bags fuller? Now, in addition to snack foods, water, a first aid kit, and wallet, I also carry two extensive hand-held tool collections. I am a cross between a Home Ec teacher and a Maintenance Manager. I need a backpack just for my keychain!

About a month ago, I began to seriously question the value of this. I would like to say for the record that I always wanted to be competent enough to service every one of my possessions. I like the self-sustaining independence of this working knowledge, and (for better and for worse) there is a certain amount of pride connected with this integrity.

When my auto mechanic began to explain the whyfors of my astronomical repair bill due to the location of the glow plugs, I told him that I understood perfectly, having changed them once myself, under the guidance of my father. He was rather taken aback and wondered whether I planned to have a sex change, too.

Hmmm. House of mirrors, isn't it? We are opposed to defining genders by their roles because those definitions are only one story and limit the depth of our humanity in one another's eyes. At the same time, traditional cultural roles contribute to ease in the distribution of labor, and, being a rather buff woman myself, I must say that they also make sense to a certain degree in terms of brute strength needed for particular tasks.

Put a round peg in the round hole.

Sure, there are a million exceptions on both sides of the gender line, if you can find such a line to begin with. But what if we just relaxed a bit about our desires to do or not do the tasks typically allotted to (or resisted by) our apparent genders? What if we take that moment where we might question our appearances and instead celebrate what we can and are naturally drawn to do?

I don't think I can put my stamp on a movement that is for or against the labors we find ourselves intrinsically motivated to do.

I certainly don't want to put anyone out of their work of choice. If you're skilled, sure you can work on my car, build my fence, load my truck, or bake my bread. If you're not or would rather not, I'm content to do it, or learn to do it, myself.

There's this business of opening doors...what do I teach my sons? I have seen women turn a scathing look to the gentleman who held the door for her. She can do it herself! The assumption that women find painful is that the door is being held because they cannot even open a door for themselves.

Hmmm. Might I offer a different perspective? Perhaps we could see the opening of doors as something that we ALL could do to support the ease and well-being of one another. When a door is opened for me (holding this viewpoint), my needs for consideration are met. Women certainly hold the doors for others, but most often children and the elderly.

Ladies, do you ever have a moment when you wish that someone would do for you as you have done for so many others in a day? I wonder why we decline the opportunity to receive.

What disturbs me most about the feminist movement in general is that we guard ourselves against giving or receiving based on feminist laws that may not be our own. In writing this, I find that I'm afraid to express myself so transparently because I am somehow "not knowledgeable enough" to debate a movement that has shaped my experience of growing into a woman. I now offer my respects to those who have formed the debate and still modestly disagree enough to carve my own path. I cannot speak to any particular branch or publication that I might rail for or against. I can only speak to my impressions from the realpolitik of living with this engendered confusion.

My impression of the feminist movement is that it is full of "shoulds." We should do this, and we shouldn't do that. Hence, my three-year-old voyeur asked quietly where the man was. She knew that she "shouldn't" ask the question (by what law she knew not, though surely I broach it now), but I imagine that something in her was profoundly curious about why I chose not to seek such support.

Can we just do what we feel moved to do and talk about that when the urge arises?

Ask out loud.

Gender Inconclusions II

2009-11-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

"How can you be a woman?" I asked, five years ago. It tortured me to pain him. I had spent nearly fourteen years encouraging him in his every pursuit. The deep and lengthy peace of our marriage rested on a foundation of mutual respect for one another's autonomy. But this was too much.

"I can't explain it," he told me. I hated it when his eyes got so big. I did not know him.

His hands opened rigidly, helplessly groping the air as he shook his head. Those hands, so large, strong, and capable. They once reached for mine, tentative and longing in our early days of courtship. They cradled our infant sons, and a finger protected their first steps. They built our homes and fences, caught and carried me over and over.

"What is a woman, then?" I asked, angrily.

"I don't know," he said quietly. "I just know I am one."

I laid in bed in the dark, working this out for myself. A woman served. But a man served also, in his way. A woman stretched beyond stretching, beyond even herself to be sure all needs were held. She was more malleable and capable of squeezing through impossibly small spaces, only to show herself full-scale on the other side. An octopus.

"It's not possible for you to be a woman," I told him in the morning. "If you were, you could live with this and not make any outward changes. You could just be who you are on the inside, to hold our family together. For us."

Even as I said it, I knew the poison of my words. How could I tell him how to live? To put me and the children first? How could I make these demands and be a woman, myself?

But if I didn't insist on his place, then who would I be? The former wife of . . . someone. How could I be, or have been, a wife if my husband was a woman? What was a wife? I sat down heavily on a heap of laundry waiting to be folded. Underwear I did not recognize glared back at me. "Who are you?" they asked. "Who have you been? Who will you be?"

I am white, defined by black edges, I said. I am a wife because I have a husband. I am mortal because there is death, staring me down like every iron grey hair that meets me in the mirror. I am a woman because I have grown quietly into that identity, filling its container as others have defined the edges.

"Walk like a lady, not a logger," said my mother. Growing up, I baked, I cleaned, and I took care of my younger sister. Our father laid on the couch watching television and entering contests by mail. Tough luck.

"You cannot be a woman," I told her, "because you have not been raised like one. Not only have you not been properly conditioned for this gender role, but you have no identity formed around the resistance to it. Does that make sense?"

"Yes, it does," he said, tired. I was winning. I hated the feeling of triumph as much as it filled me with hope. "I don't know what to tell you. I just can't go on as I have been," he said. "I am not a man."

All of those classes in college, the gender studies, the literary theory -- they only suggested the map of this treacherous territory I found myself lost in.

No man's land.

Gender Inconclusions I

2009-11-11T07:08:00.000-08:00

I am pumping along rhythmically, biking uphill. A young man without a helmet bicycles to catch up.

"Are those studded tires?" he asks. The grinding of metal on asphalt caught his attention.

"Yeah," I say.

"No kidding?" he asks, incredulous.

My tongue is pressed against the inside of my upper molars, chin thrust slightly outwards as I nod. I have seen my father in this posture talk to his trucker buddies. "Yeh," I say. "In this mud and wet leaves, they're pretty useful."

He nods appreciatively.

"And, with the loads I carry, nothing else is gonna' give me quite that purchase."

The young man peers across at my knowing confidence, swollen pride, and smiles faintly in reverence. I am such a guy, I think.

Such a swaggering dude.

Smart Captain

2009-11-05T09:25:00.001-08:00

"You ever ridden a horse?" I ask the teacher.

He smiles slowly, then tells me of his early years exercising horses for money, saving his own to ride last.

"You know, when a horse rears, you can spur and yard on the reins to tell him that rearing is not okay." I look in his eyes, and I see the memories. "Or you can just ride him forward. Give him a kick and go on. A horse that is going forward cannot rear."

The corners of his lips relax and fall as he meets my eye. "If you pace those first graders quickly, say exactly what you want to say, and turn them to their work, I think you will have less 'behavior challenges' to deal with. I see what a struggle it is for you and for them and I feel sad. Is there anything I can do to help?"

The teacher bows his head and says that pacing is something he is working on, yes. I assure him that I have companionship with that. Indeed, as the pain welled in me seeing the disharmony in the classroom that provoked this conversation, I took the opportunity to look for the places in my life where my own leadership contributed to pain.

I did not have to look farther than the morning's departure ritual.

As we struggled to get out the door to school on time, Trinidad remembered that he had to go back for his colored pencils. He leaned over the back of the futon couch trying to pick them up off the seat for over a minute. His body balanced precariously on the backside edge as he gathered and dropped the colored pencils over and over.

"Aaagh!" I fairly shouted. "I cannot stand to watch you pick up those pencils in the slowest possible way any longer. Go around the couch!"

Of course, he shouted back at me. "I will not go to school if everyone's always telling me what to do and rushing me!"

I started complaining again about how frustrated I felt when the kids did not do what I asked them to do when I was in charge (with their blessing) of watching the clock and getting us out the door on time. There I was, trying to support them to do what they wanted to do, and it was like pulling teeth all the way.

"I just want somebody to tell me what to do, to get me ready for school for a change," I told Ken, only half joking.

"Get your coat on," he said in a flat, fatherly tone. "Get your shoes."

Irritation welled in me. "Well, I guess I don't want to be told. I want someone to do it for me."

He raised an eyebrow and a hand to help. "No, I don't want that, either. I just -- ergh! I don't know what I want!"

On the way to school, I figured it out. I wanted to lay down the captain's coat. I did not want to try to get everyone else ready everyday. I did not want the responsibility of watching the clock and announcing impending urgency. I felt relieved to notice this. And given my emotional response when Ken played my role, I guessed that the kids, too, would like to hear about this revelation and work out a new plan.

I told the boys I wanted more teamwork in watching the clock.

"But you don't tell us when you want to leave by!" said Trinidad.

"Oh, I have told you when I want to leave by. I do it almost every morning, in fact, but that doesn't seem to support you in taking responsibility for getting yourself ready. I'm guessing that you need it to be available and clear to you in some other form. How about writing?"

"Yes!" they both agreed.

I went home and wrote it on a post-it note: 7:15 wake up and do chores immediately. 7:45 breakfast. 8:00 get ready. 8:15 leave for school.

"Now, the way I see it, you have two choices, if you want to go to school. You can follow the timelines on this note and get yourself ready or you can rely on me to tell you over and over again. If you rely on me, I ask that you not complain about my 'telling you what to do,' nor about my grouchy attitude. Can you do that?"

"Yes," they both said. "We'll just take care of it ourselves. You won't have to tell us."

"I prefer it that way, for sure," I said.

Next morning, I got myself ready and they did the same. I'm still wearing the captain's coat, mind you. But now there's gold lettering on the inner lapel. "Smart Captain," it says.

Mid-Morning Mate (the drink; I can't figure out how to accent the e!)

2009-10-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

What have I got in my pockets?
A bean.
A stone.
A broken rubberband.

The clouds sweep cirrus into blue.

My other pocket yields:
a list of building supplies,
a broken dog cookie, and
a nickel.

The compost pile awaits its turning
as I stir goats milk and honey into Mate.

Seasons Change

2009-09-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

The mornings are crisper, the trees dance and loose their colorful gowns to the wind. This I have seen before. This I expected.

What I did not expect, but snuck up quietly and as peacefully as a seed breaking ground into the sun, was Sam's request to try out school.

The winds of change sent serendipities spinning wildly about us all as we fell into step with a school 2 miles away that seemed to best represent our values as a family. Indeed, it is called "The Family School," a public charter school created and supported by the collaboration of families and teachers. They compost lunch waste, garden for food, and are planting native habitats to support other wild critters. Parents are encouraged to come to class and/or help out as often as they wish.

I went to school 4 whole days last week. Slowly, I faded my presence from Sam's side as he grew more comfortable. Trinidad launched full force into nine-year-old independence and said that I could come to his class whenever it worked for me, maybe once a week. Both are enjoying making friends and having new responsibilities.

There is so so much I could say about this choice. The needs it meets and does not meet. The bittersweetness of moving out into the world, away from the cozy rhythms of our nest. The excitement of discussing new experiences, people, and ideas.

But just now, I must put my house in order.

Not that clarity is lacking. I am very peaceful in this decision, and the boys seem to be, too. It's all been remarkably easy, even as the transition has been rigorous. I have no expectations, only hopes and gratitude.

After a science lesson, Trinidad told me his thoughts on the bike ride home. I told him mine. "But why does it seem so clear when you explain it?" he asked. "Why didn't my teacher say it that way?"

I stopped the bike. "Do you see that trash can over there?" I asked, pointing to the tall rectangular box.

"Yes," he said.

I walked the bike around to its side. "Now look at it," I said. "Does it look different from here? Would you even know what the front looked like if you'd never seen it before?"

He pondered. "No," he said.

"How about now?" I asked, wheeling our bike to the backside.

"Yeah, all the sides are different," he said.

"That's because we're looking at them from different perspectives," I said. "That's what I offered you: my perspective of the science lesson. Your teacher offered her perspective. How many do you think there are?"

"Lots! Wow, mom. Wow. Wow."

All sides considered, I'd say we're in this exploration together, and that's all I'd ever wish for.

Sunday Brunch

2009-08-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

An onion from the garden, sauteed slowly with home-grown thyme, oregano, and garlic. A dash of salt and pepper. Parboiled potatoes of all colors, dug by Trinidad last night at dusk, sliced by Sam, now sizzling in pan. The eggs our chickens have recently begun to lay in and out of the hen house, hidden delinquent in potato beds, collected by two and four year old hands with eyes shining. A renegade kale that popped up in the onion bed is diced and added with feta from a local goat farmer, fresh basil and chopped tomatoes from the garden.

A side of bacon -- not local, but kindly grown. Unfortunately, I haven't found a local bacon I like!

For dessert, a crisp with local peaches, plums from across the street, and blackberries the boys picked with a friend. We'll probably add the indulgence of ice cream to that....

In Order To Find Abundance?

2009-08-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

I am making a mess. Yellow plum juice squirts through my fingers and the pits shoot upward and land God-knows-where. Plum slime slides down my kitchen window and across the table. Thick stringy yellow splotches adhere to the "clean" dish rack, the bench and the floor. It looks as though an Irish Wolfhound has projectile vomited in my kitchen.

I am initially appalled at the mess. I had thought this would be "the fun part" of canning today. Now, I look around me and my nose wrinkles. I feel every muscle in my chest contract as I resist the chaostrophy I have created. I have to wonder.

In the backyard, Trinidad is digging a hole. He plans to make it big enough to trap some innocent adult who wanders past. He is covered with dirt to the extent that he appears to be some nationality that he is not. I ask him to sit somewhere other than the couch.

Why is Trinidad's mess liberating, a clearinghouse of structure and order in the name of raw creation? Why does he embrace this expansiveness effortlessly while I cringe to fling pulp in what was a tidy kitchen? Where has my youth gone?

An intimate once told me that he seriously questioned whether abundance was the order of the universe. Our relationship ended much sooner than I'd anticipated, and now I wonder if he's right. There is a certain chaos in abundance -- a running over, perhaps even a lack of awareness. In this moment, I can imagine abundance, remember the feeling of fingerpaint running down the insides of my sleeves in kindergarten, recall sensations in my body back in the day when it did not bear the responsibility of Clean Up Time.

Yep. The feeling's still alive. But now, I am in ebb, quietly stockpiling my energy to prepare dinner and organize the lives and household of a family of 4 or 5 (depending on who's counting themselves aboard at any given point). I turn the tide inward in the face of this mess, drawing it toward me in an effort to localize the chaos so that I do not have to stretch much to stow all in its place before bedtime.

I wonder if the Willow tree does this, too. I wonder if right now, as that majestic tree appears to grow effortlessly in abundance, it actually holds its water carefully, turning silvery leaves away from the sun. I wonder if the wide expanse of its limbs bear introspective cells that order its efforts by design, an invisible and soundless ebb that necessarily keeps the tree rooted in its skyward thrust.

Perhaps abundance is only a portion of the equation. Saying "half" seems too divisive, as if the word could be separated from its opposing force. Perhaps that force is not scarcity, but conservation -- care and awareness of the current life cycle we are offered, the totality of abundance and conservation equaling an ultimate sustainability.

In that view, scarcity is not related to abundance at all. It is a falling out of trust in presence and sustainability over the long-haul, the acrobatics of an ego self-entranced.

Hmmm. Just see what busy minds can create out of a mess....

We Can Work It Out

2009-08-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

"Mom, I don't tell a lot of things to M that are really important to me, even though he's my best friend." Trinidad's face was solemn.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, when I tell him something really exciting that I did, he usually says he doesn't believe me or that he's done something even better. I just feel really sad about that."

"Is it that you would like to celebrate with him your new accomplishments and share what you're really excited about without him thinking that he or his accomplishment is in any way 'less'?"

"Yeah. It's just really competitive, and so I don't want to talk to him much even though I really like to do things with him."

"I think it goes both ways in being competitive, don't you?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Have you ever thought about telling him what you'd like?"

"Tell him what?"

"That you'd really like to be able to celebrate something special that you did and ask that he only focus on that accomplishment and not share anything he did for a minute?"

"Yeah!"

"Would you really like for both of you to have that kind of time and space for celebration?"

"Yeah! I think I will talk to him," Trinidad said and looked much relieved.

Yesterday, Trin did tell M just that. He told him everything we talked about and Trinidad said they also made an agreement to believe what the other said (or at least not to say they didn't) in addition to making space for celebration.

"And guess what, Mom!" Trinidad shared with a beam. "M said he was just opening his mouth to say the same thing to me when I said it to him!"

"All that about celebration?" I asked.

"Yep. It's important to him, too. And then we spent hours telling each other all the things we'd been saving up and not saying for so long."

Conversations

2009-08-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

With Trinidad....

"Oh! That blue jay just caught a snake." Trinidad's face falls, then relaxes into calm. "Well, I guess that soon all the cats in the neighborhood will be over to catch the blue jays, and before you know it we'll have mountain lions coming through the backyard to eat the cats. They do come into town, you know." He's right about this.

"Mmmm," I say. "Two days ago, I saw an enormous hawk take a jay baby out of a nest in the tree across the street in front of M's house. That jay mama threw up such a squawking! The hawk flew it's dinner over to that big tree next door and ate it."

"What? There's a jay nest in M's tree? He thought it was too big to be a bird nest. He thought it was an abandoned squirrel nest!" Trinidad's whole body grows and tenses with the news. "I am so excited! I am going over there right now so we can climb up and take a look at it."

On tree climbing:

Trinidad told me this while we drove through country south of Roseburg. His words floated from the backseat like a meditation rising from the hot Earth, herself. I tried to jot down phrases soonafter, but I doubt I did justice to the poetry of his words in the moment, or the relief and satisfaction that I felt in his safety and meaningful pursuits.

"I know my foot on any tree," he said. "Each tree tells me which branch to grab and which limb to step on. Every tree is challenging in it's own way and every tree is easy in it's own way. The thing that is easiest about one tree is the hardest thing in another. They are individuals and I learn them while I climb. As I move up in the trees, I listen for where to hold and I know that the tree is guiding me in the safest way. Each tree moves differently and I must move with it, as only it moves. It teaches me something new every time. Each time I climb a tree it is like the first time, but we also remember that we know each other."

With Sam....

"I knew that was why the sky is blue," said Sam quietly after we read an in-depth explanation of atmosphere and light on the internet.

"You did? Why didn't you tell me so when I asked?"

"Because I wanted to make you think I was more like a kid. So I didn't get over myself."

~Sometimes, I think that "wide-eyed" is just my natural state.~

Belonging

2009-08-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

"I want to go home," says Sam.

"Why?" I ask.

"I don't know. I just do," he says.

We return home, and both boys run to the backyard. The door hangs wide open behind them. With fixed gazes and hips set, they aim and throw rocks at a chosen target east of the pond. Over and over stones are hurled, then the boys run to retrieve them. I no longer watch the game protectively to interrupt if they threaten to pelt each other by mistake.

I stand quietly at the kitchen window. A bowl of blueberries sits on the table beside me with a bag of canning jars that someone mysteriously left on my step. The wind lifts tall willow branches into a dance of light, silvery leaves bending and stretching in the afternoon sun. For a moment, I choose not to think of what's for dinner, or anything else. For a moment, I only feel.

A surge of bittersweet belonging fills me. The boys are rooted here, a sense of place. This grounding feels healthy, coherent, integral. Yet, this land, too, shall pass. They will move on, with or without me. They will come home to me wherever I am, or I will bring this sense of belonging back to them when I come to visit.

Rooted. Countless generations behind me and one at the pond just ahead. The ache fills me. I have been alive lately with what I perceive as the rich reality of my relations. Colorful language, fiery forthrightness, and purposeful independence are the trademarks of my known tribe of origin. I masquerade as a post-modern hippie, but the Kool-Aid and jello that stained my cheeks as a child sitting riverside reveals my backwoods pedigree. I did not eat nutritional yeast until I turned thirty.

Part of me is becoming proud of what I once perceived as a "shadow" in my raising. My compassion stretches into celebration, a fierce devotion to the soul that pulsed in my mother and father's lineage despite poverty, alcoholism, and abuse.

My grandmother tells a story of visiting her grandmother in a hospital after her grandmother had fallen from a ladder picking cherries. The eighty-something woman had broken her neck. "What are you doing here?" she demanded of my grandmother from the hospital bed. "Those cherries are ripe! You get out there and get picking!"

I was raised on wild venison and duck meat, cheap grocery hamburger, corn from the garden, and canned green beans. Food translates to the soul of me. It is who I am. In everything my parents killed, harvested or touched I tasted the generations of hands that bore me into this world. The cans from the food bank, sheepishly accepted, tasted like wounded pride, and that, too, shaped me.

"Where did you get your faith in God?" Seda asked me through the kitchen window last night.

"Adversity, I guess. Funny thing to ask through the window," I said.

There are parts of my roots that the children barely recognize. Parts of Seda's roots as well. Where once I wished to hide what unfurls deep beneath me, I now seek to share openly but gently. Roots are, in their right, sacred. They can be damaged.

The understory is alive in me. Nothing to outrun, outrace, or cast off. It is my path into light.

There, my boys throw rocks under the sun. In our protected wilds, a small city yard consumes them. They belong.

And so do I with them.

Technology Found Me

2009-07-26T12:18:00.001-07:00

It finally happened. I went out and bought my first computer of my own volition. I set it up and tinkered with the applications. Then I placed my first call on it to Ken.

The new computer is an iphone. Ken, my honey who brazenly told an acquaintance that he didn't need anything more than his iphone and his girlfriend, finally tempted me into the flock. The recent "upgrade" of the iphone left last years model obsolete, so I rushed out to buy one for less than $100.

I justified it as a homeschooling expense, and it appears to be working. We moved our campus to the coast Friday and Saturday. I had my handy cell (i) phone in case of emergencies. When we arrived and unpacked, Trinidad went straight to the creek to hunt crayfish. Sam and I played cards at creekside, and I turned the iphone onto a recording of Billie Holiday's "Night and Day" that I am learning to sing at Market next month. Over and over, my tiny "transistor radio" played a soft accompaniment to Sam and I giggling and stealing each other's cards. Then Trinidad turned up with crayfish and freshwater clams. "Are these clams edible, Mom? Why don't you Google it?" he asked.

Trinidad knows that I use the internet extensively as a resource. If I want to know which part of the herb to harvest and when, how to kill a chicken humanely (paradoxical phrasing, hm?), or whether to be concerned about the leakage of peach juice in the canning process, I fire up the web.

Now I have it creekside. After procuring reassurance that he had, in fact, caught dinner, we took some pictures (iphone) of the critters as Sam grappled with them fearlessly. We could have emailed the photos to my mom, but I don't have the account set up for it yet. We downloaded (for free) an application that shows us what the constellations are in our night sky by the iphone's location, and if I forget which direction is north (how embarrassing), there is a compass application, too. In the morning, we checked the weather and tides online, then headed to the beach to tidepool. If I need a gas station, there is an application that tells me where I can find one within three miles and the directions to get there. Not that I typically do need gas (my bike is decked out and well-worn), but even hanging close to home is going to be easier with internet support.

Dude. I can even place a call on it.

The only thing I have to hang up is my pride in roughing it.

Where's the hook?

Survival Giving

2009-07-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

What is a gift?

I give my heart, my hands, my thought to the comfort and well-being of my family, my community. I take joy in cooking, creating, cleaning, and organizing for myself and others. I most love to give from the place of abundance, not looking behind me at any cost or consequence in the giving.

There have been consequences.

I did not learn to give from abundance. I learned to give from fear. Raised in a family that struggled with domestic violence, I did what I was told. Daily from the age of seven, I completed long lists of chores with bitter determination. I learned the trade of homemaking well, and I am grateful for the efficiency it offers me as a mother.

I am also grateful that I saw early on that giving is a skill in itself. I saw that people welcomed my company because they saw me as "a giver." I have been told I am angelic, kind, and generous in my adulthood. The skill of offering my efforts to others were born in a home where my father threatened and chided me for laziness if I missed a corner in the vacuuming. They are only skills.

I learned to give because it met a need for power. I'm sure I wished to contribute, too, but in all honesty, the need for power resonates just now. I needed power desperately at a time when my voice and my needs were silenced. I clung to power as I watched helplessly while my father pushed and swung at my mother. This power shined so brightly that I could see myself in the dark when no one else could see me.

Giving was a strategy, a means to an end for safety, acceptance, and love. It served me well.

I remember hearing about school shootings when I was a young teenager. As the people around me shook their heads in horror, I could understand why the man in question pulled the trigger. I could understand the disjointed fear and helplessness, and most of all the power behind that cold piece of steel. I felt confused; didn't everyone else know what it was like to be in that place?

I didn't dare say it. I couldn't tell them how I could feel what I imagined he felt, that it made perfect sense to me why and how he could see his action as all-powerful and still meaningless, ultimately inconsequential. So fragile and so loud.

Giving, running, hiding, striking out, and striking back --all can come from such exquisite pain. And now I see that it is not the giving that had its consequences. Any resentment I now harbor is not from having given too much, or even from seeing myself as "forced" to give. My giving is ultimately inconsequential; there has been nothing taken from me or anyone else in its offering. In this sense, giving was a gentle strategy to have settled on.

What is left when I reconsider my history of giving is only the pain that birthed the strategy that I trusted to keep me alive. What is left is looking back and into the constancy of fear I was raised with, the eruptions and undercurrents of crisis from within.

Perhaps holding this pain will truly free me to give from my heart.

I am humbled, again, to witness the gift of compassion, no matter how terrifying or cold, that my childhood bestowed upon me.

Give Peace A Chance?

2009-06-18T20:34:00.000-07:00

Tragedy struck in our neighborhood on Tuesday. The dog that killed our cat two years ago (when she went into my neighbor's yard) escaped through a mysteriously opened gate at night and killed at least two other cats up the street. One couple rescued their cat at the scene, only to watch it die at the emergency veterinary hospital later that night.

In the morning, both families realized the identity of the dog and its owners. One family is close to the dog's family and felt their own grief magnify, particularly as the other couple, not tight with those on our end of the street, sent their energy into retaliation.

I went out to stand beside my neighbor and the angry couple as I expressed my sadness for us all. The couple turned and walked away, still shouting about civil suits and the wrongness they had witnessed. My neighbor turned to me as tears began to fall.

"I get it. I totally get it," she said. "That's the worst part. I'd be that angry if it were my cat. I just don't know what to do with my dog!"

The angry couple made a call to Animal Regulations and demanded that the dog be "put down." The dogs owners, one of them a twelve year old girl, grieved for the loss of their dog, the neighbors' beloved cats, and their own connection with community.

I offered empathy to myself, my neighbors, and my family. I witnessed all of our varying degrees of compassion and awareness as we coped with the big feelings coming through. Anger expressed in blame and shame found quick reflection with frustration at such "unacceptable" accusations. The work of it rocked us, and it rocks us still.

Here is my point: you can't just "give peace a chance." It's not waiting in the wings to be spoonfed to the right politicians, soldiers, or corporate leaders. I don't think it's even the dominant latent force in the universe that we can just "open ourselves to" when the time is right.

Peace is a commitment to take time to turn inwards when things on the outside fall apart. That commitment is like agreeing to feed a hungry baby, even when you are exhausted or starving. Seeking peace is a radical act of love for ourselves and the universe, and it is the hardest work we have to do. Most importantly, we must learn to recognize the opportunities for peace as they present themselves daily.

I think that our people are confused about peace. We march in rallies and write letters so that those who have the power to make peace can do so on our behalves. We will not get off the hook so easy.

Gandhi said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Those words do not represent the beginning of a ripple of change. They represent the ripple itself. If there is peace in the world, it happens at our dinner tables and on our city streets. It happens when we make a commitment to take responsibility for our feelings, to grieve and celebrate fully, without demands on others. It happens when we join hands, even in our pain, to work with what is.

Peace is acceptance. It's not always pretty or even hopeful. Sometimes it can be lonely. But if we find the space and support to nurture acceptance in community, then we can share the pain and lighten our load. We can build bridges and ease our way.

Peace is both power and responsibility.

Show, don't tell.

Building Up and Taking Down

2009-06-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

The foundation has been poured. Smooth walls shine silver in the moonlight. My children are reading to each other aloud in their bedroom, and Seda sleeps behind me on the futon here in our living room. She has put in a full day.

The garage is being demolished. Trinidad learned how to pry siding from the exterior with a wrecking bar, pulling every nail. He marveled at the differences between our learning curves, practiced acceptance and perspective, and appreciated the notion of modest goals for beginners. I, myself, considered it my only goal to step through the threshold of the kitchen and into the backyard, a flat bar in my hand. Enough to conquer this insidious fear of building tools. Enough to begin work on the unfamiliar. I was not disappointed.

The last ten days have passed not quickly, but compactly. Each has been marked with the milestones of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our food has given me a road map, a way of traversing this project within my comfort zone. It has been good. Stew, grilled steaks, tamale pie, garden salads, strawberry milkshakes, tuna sandwiches... Every day we sweat the work of transition, of growing, and every day we celebrate around a table together, many helpings and many hands.

The blessings are spectacular. We have begun a new ritual at the start of our meal. We hold hands and someone says a word (love, community, gratitude, friends, etc.) that the rest of us take it in and then repeat, holding the living energy of that idea. The shared expression has proven to be a touching, connecting, and significant way to begin a meal. Humor has not been avoided. One evening, Trinidad said with great reverence, "Crap." We all repeated it with equal reverence, then laughed. Afterwards, I embraced the notion more fully. Why not pay our respects to that which we find difficult? So much learned and gained in the face of it. Yes, m'Lord, I am grateful.

Everything continues to fall into place effortlessly. The washing machine pipe broke today after I finished washing just about everything we own. The neighborhood children are home and available to play. The weather is cool, dry and beautiful. The entire contents of our garage and laundry room (before the annual declutter) is somehow integrated into the rest of the house or our tiny storage unit. We break bread together as a family and even with friends nightly. Our house is in order and Seda in bed by 10 most nights. As I write, I notice that the boys are now quiet, having put themselves to bed. I can't imagine how it all happens this way. I just show up.

We learn and grow, every one of us, on the job. The children are thrilled to discover construction and demolition. Seda kneels beside them explaining softly the hows and whys of each step. I am in awe of her total trust in their efforts and exploration. Trinidad struck with his sledge so rhythmically while I cooked tonight that I found myself singing to it. Sam cleans up, screws on nuts and washers, and even wields the four pound sledge himself. They spend hours each day engaged in whatever aspects of the work Seda can set them to. And somehow, she finds work for them every time they ask.

Lord, love, universal harmony, I am so grateful to be a part of this weave, so grateful to be amongst such bright souls and tender hearts. Grateful to have the everyday work of loving and growing. Grateful to know this path, if only for a moment. Thank you.

Supernormal

2009-06-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

"Mom, I just loved that movie we watched at E's house. I wish Trinidad could watch it."

"To tell you the truth, Sam, I don't want you watching movies over there anymore. I did not like that movie, based on what you told me. [Coarse language, gratuitous violence, objectification of women....] I can understand that you probably have no idea why--"

"Oh, yes I do, Mom. I know why you don't like me to watch it."

"You do? Why?"

"Because they barely ever use words that I don't know."

"Oh."

Extranormal.

**

"This guy looked over the counter at me today, then he looked again, and when I didn't look up -- I was letting him have a good look without interrupting -- he decided that whatever it was, it was okay," Seda told me.

"You have a lot of power, Seda. Just your presence can be discomfiting."

She frowns.

"If you don't like that, stop blogging. That just puts your presence in writing. You've lived more about gender than most of us can imagine."

"Do you like me being abnormal?"

"Your motto before transition was 'Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable.' You coined it. Careful what you wish for. I love you just the way you are."

Paranormal.

**
"This addition to the house will bring us to a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with functional shop/storage space. I'm afraid, Seda. It's going to look so 'grown up.' Will we be normal?"

"Um, yeah. Two children, a maddy and mother with boyfriend, 26 (2) chickens, rabbits, and sometimes captive snakes and mice. I think we are not in danger."

Unnormal.

**
"Mom, I learned something valuable from all those movies I watched about people catching snakes!"

I'm sitting in the living room as Trinidad enters with a 2-foot long garter snake on a stick.

"This one bites, and see? I can pick him up safely with a stick. Just like in the movies!"

The snake falls to the floor, opens its jaws and hisses.

"What did you learn?" I ask.

"Woops."

**
Does it ever work like you see in the movies? I saw a bumper sticker today. It said, "Don't believe everything you think."

Maybe we're Supernormal.

Parenting With NVC, Understanding and Care

2009-06-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

I have received a question from one of my workshop participants (Parenting From Your Heart with Nonviolent Communication) that they have agreed to allow me to post and answer on the blog. My response is not that of a certified trainer and is, as always, reflective of my own best understanding of NVC. Here is her question:

Without an understanding of child development, how can NVC be helpful?

Example: one mom wants to explain her needs around materialism to her 4 1/2 year old son and another mom is frustrated because her child wants to jump in puddles instead of walking straight to the parent's desired destination (distracted every 2 minutes)... but child is 2 1/2.

She says that she, "can see how empathy is appropriate [in both situations]. My concern is that I have seen moms NVC-ing children around the mom's needs not being met. I am relieved, refreshed and hopeful being in your class because I see that you are trying to teach about heart connections rather than giving a parent permission to meet their needs at the child's expense. I am concerned that the verbal processing with young ones around mom's or dad's needs not being met puts pressure on the child. I also see the beauty of authentically expressing disappointment, frustration or sadness in front of children. I want to make sure that my children don't feel responsible for my feelings or needs not being met.
For example:
My needs for order may not be realistic for the situation. My need for support shouldn't be placed on the child's shoulders. How does NVC deal with this so the child doesn't feel that responsibility?
I suppose that just being aware that I have a need for order and this is causing my grouchy feeling is a huge step in the right direction. Then being able to talk myself down by giving myself empathy and understanding. Without the NVC tools, some parents may not ever get this much self awareness."

Here is my answer:

I think that this question gets to the heart of the primary challenge we face in living NVC. Children will always bring this work to light faster than any other people in our lives, so the arena of parenting is an excellent one to practice and take note of this in.

I agree that empathy is the foremost support that NVC can offer -- first the parent giving themselves empathy, and, as they find the spaciousness, offering it silently or verbally to their children.

Then we must turn to the zen of NVC to address the next part of the question. You say, "I want to make sure that my children don't feel responsible for my feelings or needs not being met." First, a celebration of that awareness -- hurray! I have companionship with you there! How can we accomplish this?

I believe that the answer lies in our attachment to specific outcome and our ability to make a fast and effective request. Both require a fair degree of skill and will in the practice.

You use the example of your need for order: "It may not be realistic in the situation." What is not realistic? Your need or the strategy you are requesting? I would venture to say that your need is always realistic. You might be very clear about what strategy you think would meet that need (20 maids in 20 hours?), but at a loss as to how it could be met in your current environment where you and your children are the only ones at home. In this moment, grappling with a need that feels greater than what we can see an answer for, our options (as I see them) are:

*Do a Jackal count: Are the howls in our conscious or subconscious thoughts blaming our children for their laziness, messiness, etc.? Do a good listen without trying to change anything and decide how much space to give yourself for empathy before engaging with your kids on the topic accordingly.

*Self-empathy -- feel the pain of your unmet need of order. Anxiety, disappointment, sadness, frustration. How many layers of needs can we tease out? If that need for order were met, then what? A need for spaciousness, self-connection? A need for connection and fun? What are the feelings attached to each?

*Getting empathy in person or by phone from someone other than our children.

*After sitting with it awhile, do we have a broader scope of options to support us and our families in this dilemma? Has there been a shift? Are we experiencing more peace and acceptance? Is there clarity about whether and what we might request from our children or others?

If I am charged with judgment about my child's contribution to the disorderliness of my home and I express myself, even with observation-feeling-need-request about my frustration, it is likely that my child will feel the energy I would (perhaps unconsciously) like to saddle them with in bearing my pain. I don't want to hold it alone. It is easier to shove it off on someone else. The words, the tone, the energy translates.

It can also happen that I am fully owning my feelings and needs and express them accordingly as my child still takes responsibility. First, I must cultivate an acceptance that this could happen despite my best intentions (for a variety of reasons depending on where they are at this moment), and be in choice about whether and how to express.

In the latter case, a lightning-fast and effective request, especially a connective one (e.g. "Can we work together to find a way to meet both of our needs right now?") will be most likely to support the child's empowerment and clarity about what would contribute. You would be requesting them to take some action, not to sit with and potentially take on the nebulous darkness you dispel. They also find themselves supported in choice and invited to engage rather than to play a captive-passive role of receiving energy and information that they don't have the skills or maturity to cope with (particularly from a primary caregiver).

This question is one we would do well to consider deeply and practice daily in all of our dealings. What is the energy we express ourselves from? Is our reaching out a request or demand? What attachments do we have around it? How actively do we pursue acceptance of what is when our awareness of attachment is discovered?

In addition, I believe that we have the responsibility to learn what is developmentally expected in our children so that we are not surprised or bewildered (in addition to our sometime frustration) by the ways that they commonly seek to meet their needs. We can do this most easily by cultivating awareness in community with other children and their parents. Take an informal poll. What are the primary frustrations and delights you see at different phases of development? Caterpillars do not suck nectar from flowers and nor do butterflies eat the leaves.

The opportunity to find gold within us -- full presence and compassion -- is always alive, and the children in our lives put the heat to our making. Where else do we find the depth of care, passion, and responsibility to live in utmost integrity? Where else will we be questioned with such brutal honesty at our points of greatest challenge?

Alchemists, we are, every one.

I appreciate the opportunity to play with your question. I welcome any thoughts or points that require further clarity or discussion and plan to address them as time permits.

A Week of Posts....

2009-06-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

I came to understand early on that my work in this remodel, beyond shovels and sledgehammers, is the work of empathy. I am grateful to have received that vision in clarity and calm and now my work is at hand, daily supporting us all in finding our strength and love in this building process.

Last week, the boys and I rented a UHaul pickup that we loaded time and again with lumber from our friend, David, and from the Home Depot. The latter we attacked like the hoodlums that we are, tearing down the aisles at top speed on a Tuesday morning, seeing how much air we could catch with the shopping cart. When we returned the pickup, we spent the afternoon riding the bus home and touring the scenic route just for the fun of it. What a delight to spend a few hours spinning and laughing!

The garden work also took precedence. I loaded 1/2 yard of compost into the back of my Volvo stationwagon and carted it off to the neighbors to plant another corn and bean field. I turned and planted three beds with tomatoes, peppers and green beans. I weeded, watered, and mulched. The winter garden at Ken's place we slashed to the roots to make room for a quick cover crop. Compost piles built, manure moved, the earth rose through my fingertips and grounded me with her energy and insight.

At one point, I felt exhausted and worried considering how much there was to plant and dig within the next two weeks. I needed a day off to rest, I told myself. I had pushed just a bit harder in the digging than I could recover from easily, especially on my moon cycle. But the garage contents would have to be moved and the wall taken down before the concrete poured in two weeks. When would I rest?

These were my thoughts as my hands shook wet laundry and hung it to dry. Now, came the answer. Rest now. I inhaled deeply and smiled. A pair of underwear. Ah, that is all. A sock. Yes. Here is my rest. And so I hung laundry and only hung laundry for fifteen minutes. The last piece went up and my strength and joy restored at once. I am grateful for the lesson.

The weekend before, we dug almost 300 square feet of footing, 18" deep -- nine hours a day at the shovel 'til finished. Seda and I discussed world history with such fervor that the hole swallowed us effortlessly. We have worked side by side for seventeen years now. Our romance has long since crumbled and blown with the wind, but the one mindedness of our partnership stands naked like bedrock between us. When she inched the excavator across a narrow landbridge, I sharply begged her to retreat. Half an hour later, I fell sobbing into her arms for what we've lost and what we've held through this transition. These are old bones.

The boys spent those days and much of the week floating in and out of the building site with friends, carrying lumber, popsicles, and books to read. They run half-wild in the neighborhood, accepting sun screen and food from other mothers hands with trust and appreciation. The last children in at night, they are rooted to their own set of possibilities, independence imminent.

On Saturday, I lead an NVC workshop in Portland, gone for the day. At seven o'clock at night, I took in the piles on piles of laundry, miscellaneous toys, clothes, seeds, and projects that had layered themselves in the house as I labored a week outdoors. I asked Trinidad when he could help me clean up. "Well, actually, mom... I had other plans," he told me.

I needed empathy. As the boys played badmitton at the neighbors, I called a friend. My worries poured out about the timing of our project, my desire to live in joy, my needs for efficiency and more than anything, connection and teamwork. In fifteen minutes (hard to take in the chaos of my home), I wound down to the core of what I could see: a week of work I engaged in with almost no interruption from the kids. A week they entertained themselves without screeens, and here was the mess to prove it.

I smiled. It is my joy to contribute back to them this way. I picked up the house in short order and hugged both of my sweaty children as they came in with the moon. They thanked me profusely as they do daily for all of my work. I heartfully thanked them for their efforts. This is the path I set out to find. Deep gratitude to the universe for keeping my footfalls true.

The next day, a dear friend and her family came to help us move the garage and take down the wall. The work was slow to get rolling. We were not completely prepared, and this fact shifted many outcomes. I found myself not resisting at all, but easily moving to give Ken empathy for the fact that he, too, had come to help in a short window and now had no time left. The empathy wound around to other frustrations and mournings as I witnessed it calmly, making space for us all to grow, individually and in relationship. He sighed over and over, melting into the carseat as I hung off the car window, feet planted in the street.

This is my work, I thought. This is what I'm here for. I felt so grateful to have found the strength to ask for empathy myself the night before, to have grounded myself in compassion, that I might offer it to others. The time it all took felt meaningless as the space opened wide for all possibilities.

There is a hole in the wall now. Seda swung the sledgehammer like she meant it, and the concrete shook. Eight kids from the neighborhood took front row seats with lollipops and shouted commentary over the fence to others. I cut a bouquet to send home with our friends who brought food, hands, and hearts to this work. My intentions for the day -- fun and connection -- manifested.

I am so grateful to be present here at the foundation.

Food For Love

2009-05-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

Our table is set with the infinite efforts of a universe alive. Can we ever fully appreciate the food that sustains us? Dishes, plates and four sleepy people encircle sauteed apples with vanilla honey yoghurt and cornbread. It is a moment of transformation, every element awake in its reckoning.

May we reflect the wisdom of our food.

Precious honey has been taken from the hive, our bees work tireless in life and death humming to the flower's center. Veiled in white, I pledged my efforts to their keeping while the harvest thick and golden sweet poured from the comb between my gloved fingers. I promise not take an ounce more than they will eat, and their hive is in my care.

The yoghurt has cultured on my counter, slowly stiffening to a tart and creamy white. This milk has traveled in the hands of a farmer that I know, across our broad county, from a goat who offered herself in trade for her keeping. Whether this exchange is fair is a question I hope we all ponder for as long as we enjoy her efforts.

Corn has been harvested from the plot across the street. The earth there had baked with spotty lawn for a decade until I mulched and planted it with broken heart and wildly open mind. I taste the moment now and then, transformed to gritty sweetness. This corn came willingly in the stewardship of my family and community. I have lifted it from the stalk, dried and ground it for our bread. This meal is an offering from the earth in our care. Will our efforts to sustain her be equal to the gifts she has bestowed?

Apples grew willynilly wild upon the neighbor's tree. Trinidad and I brought crates early on a Saturday morning in August, dew still on the grass. I stretched tall on a ladder with the picker balanced precariously in hand filling box after box. Trinidad got bored, sat in the gutter eating downed fruit and wished to go home. An autumn afternoon saw every apple cut and frozen to stillness, poised for transformation.

With reverence do we complete the circle, only as we see it. With reverence do I share the stories hidden in the flesh, the skin, the germ and bran of all we eat.

This food is for love.

Am I Bored?

2009-05-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

So. Tonight I decided to teach the dog to clean up. She was already running around with Lincoln Logs between her teeth anyway, and I thought in that miserlyteacherly way: I can shape that.

Thank goodness for dogs. Who else could I feed processed food to, command, and occassionally lay a guilt trip on (after, for example, she consumed an entire plate of pancakes)? I have to crack the halo on something.

I told her to "take it." She picked up the Lincoln Log and spit it out. "Good dog!" I said and gave her a kibble. We did this over and over so she learned to hold it in her mouth until I said "okay!" -- up to 3 seconds. Then I tried to chain the next step and get her to drop it in the bucket. I always like to think she's some kind of dog genius and I rush the steps. Why do I do that?

She learned to drop it whenever and wherever she wanted. But, like a child, she was very generous and gave me another try.

I retaught what I'd untaught, and now the dog is very full of kibble. I told her how smart she is. (Though what am I?) Even though she did mistake my finger for the 2 notched log once. Have you seen the size of a terrier's teeth? I'd remove the bandaid to show you, but my finger might fall off.

She pointed out that she would like more kibble by gnawing rather fiercely on the leftover logs. What kind of hobby is this, for a stay-at-home mom? What have I come to?

I think there's progress. She can hold it and chew it up and spit it out. Wait, what was the original behavior I was trying to shape?

Yeah, well. I'm not done. I'm much faster at cleaning up the Lincoln Logs now before she gets to them. Call me crazy, but still I aim to have a clean house ... and a fat dog.

Mothers Day and a Remodel

2009-05-11T07:28:00.000-07:00

Happy Mothers Day to each of you who daily shepherds souls upon this plane!

Seda and I celebrated the day together as my sweetheart dove into a mysterious plot with the boys about Mother's day breakfast. They put up a feast: cinnamon bagels with peanut butter, salsa, chocolate sauce and apples. This delicacy is designed to be piled one upon the other and eaten. Seda ate two. I enjoyed one and found them to taste just as interestingly as they sound. The boys made us cards, too, and Sam continued wishing us a Happy Mother's Day until he fell into bed.

I took Seda up to the tree house and we did a 30 minute meditation together about mothering which was very sweet for us both. In the middle of it, one of our beehives decided to swarm. I guess it heard the importance of birthing and abundance in the air. We decided to forego our walk in the park for the adventure of donning bee gear and attempting a capture.

Just as we got the bees in a box, a neighbor came to tell us that another swarm had showed up three doors down. At that point, the boys forgot to stay inside as we'd told them to and Sam got stung. He was shocked and scared because he'd forgotten the bees would be feeling irritated. We treated it, then walked to the neighbors to see a lovely swarm balling on a tree limb, completely accessible.

We tried to locate another bee person who would like it, and just at that time, the bees we'd put into our box vacated, so we caught the new swarm ourselves. This whole procedure took a couple of hours, but we ended up with 10-15,00 gorgeous bees and a queen that we were able to gift to a friend who is just getting started.

It is a gift to us to give. This friend, David, is backing us in a very big plan we are now embarking on: a remodel! We have decided that the living room (futon) is no longer a decent bedroom for Seda, and she has designed a bedroom/office/laundry (w/composting toilet and sink) wing that will sit where the strawberry beds are now. David has tipped the scales in making this possible by offering many scavenged materials and his time and expertise in foundation work.

I can hardly believe we're going to do it. I'm terrified -- what if I don't have what it takes? The energy, the patience, the strength? If I don't, I guess it takes a lot longer to complete. Maybe they fire me as mother, lover, and project support. Not likely, now that I ponder it.

My hopes? I envision that this experience brings us all closer as a family. I see us learning how to better support each other physically, emotionally, and in our learning as we all push our comfort zone in every way. I see us sharing a meaningful adventure, and being aware and awake to it's value and repercussions. I see us all learning new skills (especially me and the boys) and becoming more physically fit. I see us giving and receiving in our community on new levels as we seek help in all phases. (Let me know if you'd like to be on the list!) I envision a beautiful new home that meets our growing needs as a family.

Wow. Celebrations and new challenges to embark upon. I am grateful for the rich tapestry of my life before me.

I am a lucky mom.

Musings On A People Struggling To Survive

2009-05-06T08:06:00.000-07:00

I have a new theory to try out.

I decided last week that if 80% of my life was lived in the root rhythms our species has held for thousands of years then I would be living rather than surviving. Up to 20% is often variable due to the particularities of cultures, natural "disasters" or other unexpected upheaval. In these variables, our needs for predictability (among others) are not met. When our needs for predictability are not met, our needs for trust are not met. Ultimately, I define the need for trust loosely as the belief that I will maintain the ability to stay fully present regardless of my circumstances. When I lose my footing in this foundational need, I am likely to move into the realm of scarcity and fear.

A certain proportion of our lives cycling through the predictable feeds us sustainably even as the occasional disturbance of the earth at our roots brings needed bursts of fertility and growth. I liken this directly to my garden. When I dig, the oxygen and loosening of the soil for new roots offers a fresh supply of energy to seedlings. When I employ this strategy over and over, the herds of microorganisms which hold the soil together nutritionally become exhausted as they replenish and reorganize themselves over and over. Soil constantly worked loses fertility over the long haul.

In this way, I have watched the nouveau strike our culture at alarming rates. We travel faster and farther from our places of origin and our current homes. Our apparent ease in this is taken at great cost to our planet. If you would like a realpolitik example, try pushing your automobile around the block. How much energy does it take? Imagine a hundred horses (or more!) stomping and sweating to lug you in your finery to the store. As I drive my car once every week or so, I ponder it. Ouch.

We absorb change in other ways, too. Our food is processed beyond recognition. Our time is spent behind screens, keeping up in various ways with the sensibilities of our culture. We feel overwhelmed with how much there is to learn, to know. Most of us do not live in community or extended families anymore.

Some rhythmic variables (up to 20%, I think) would not be shared across all peoples. Nomads move their place (in human scale travel) but stay with their people. Others with a sense of place sometimes shift in people. Each of these challenges can be absorbed without living in a state of constant crisus (surviving) if there are not so many that the barrel overturns.

So here's the fun part: what is in the 80 list and what in the 20 as I make my way in the world?

I'm just beginning to figure it out, so I expect the lists on this post to grow over the weeks. Here are my initial musings:

Human Scale Sustainable Rhythms, 80% (goal):
*bike or walk to my destination (contact with earth in travel, human scale)
*live in a small house (clutter collecting deterrent) and smaller footprint
*awareness of energy usage in heating (I now am wood heated and in connection with that intimately as I prepare fuel for winter)
*eating food that I prepare or harvest
*doing my own laundry, dishes, housekeeping (natural daily rhythms)
*building long term relationships with people, plants, and animals, thus
*remaining in place or cycling through the same places over time
*working with the earth to grow my food
*sharing food, tools, children, space

Out of Sync (ultimately) 20%:
*typing this to me and you on the computer
*using electricity
*traveling by car, airplane
*living apart from my family of origin
*being in debt (still, ergh)
*eating out
*using the phone ("Poison!" calls Trinidad.)
*eating food that does not originate from my locale
*not being in touch with the make of my clothing

Please keep in mind that the "out of sync" is not necessarily "bad" or even something I want to change. Obviously the choice to engage in this list nourishes me in some way or I would not do it. Nevertheless, spending more than 20% of my life energy here is exhausting and mentally/spiritually debilitating in a chronic sense. My efforts to name it here are intended to meet my needs for awareness and understanding.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

I Didn't Mean To Say It

2009-04-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

"Mom was saying 'sh#*!" a lot when we checked the bees yesterday," Trinidad told Sam as we ate lunch together. Sam giggled and looked at me disbelieving. He and I have been discussing the potential consequences of swearing.

"Yeah," said Trinidad, who had been suited up and manning the smoker beside me the day before. "We took apart the boxes and she said 'Sh$*! Baby bees!' [these, white and undeveloped, exposed to the sun above the frame] then we looked some more and she said, 'Sh&$! There's the queen. Sh%^! Sh@#! We can't squish the queen!'"

Sam rolled his eyes at me and giggled again.

"I guess," I said (humbly, mind you) "that there is a secret place in your Mama where the sh%* is stored, and in certain extreme situations, the door just flies open and it all comes out."

Trinidad's broad grin showed his half-chewed lunch. Sam fell off the picnic table bench laughing.

"Now, Mom," Trinidad reasoned,"the time you almost skidded our car off the icy road and you were saying 'Da^%!' and 'Sh*^!' I could understand, because it was a life-or-death situation."

"I did say the Lords Prayer afterward and forgave my father [the earthly one] for all that I held against him. I did do that."

"Well, yes," said Trinidad, "But the beehive wasn't that bad, was it?"

"30,000 bees lost and 25 pounds of surplus honey, all gone with us responsible. I'd call that bad."

He thought a moment. "Sh&#," he said.

What's It Worth?

2009-04-22T14:21:00.001-07:00

"Sam, would you like to help me with the weeding?"

"Well...would you pay me?"

"Mmmm -- yes. Even though I don't get paid."

"That's alright, Mama. You can pay me, and I'll give you half."

Offloading Surplus

2009-04-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a follow-up to the "Don't Like My Peaches" post.

I'm thinking about surplus. In particular, I'm thinking about trees dropping apples by the pound onto hard concrete, seniors who have time and no money, kale plants lushly bolting into seed while their gardeners show up nine-to-five at their paid workplaces. All this care, these resources, the synergistic kindness of Gaia in our stewardship, dissipating into the environment without meeting needs.

A request, in NVC, is the point at which an action is begged. It is where the rubber meets the road and food hard won is placed in the hands of the hungry. Expression without it is a chorus of feelings and needs, authentic and courageous, but spoken without the effect of meeting needs.

We all have our peaches. On my tree, there is time to spend. Time for laundry, dishes, cooking, reading to children, weeding and planting. Those who are nourished by my efforts land here. And I have needs unmet as well. Wouldn't I like more time to really focus and play with my children, time to nurture myself? How will I find it?

Surplus. I have enough peaches to share, but I need some beans. When my peaches are ripe and easy to collect, I pick and I eat, I can and I freeze, I jam and I bake. After this effort has been made, a hole in the fabric can become apparent.

Too many peaches. The way our culture is currently set up, we operate in isolation. Each of us goes to the grocery store to support our little islands of family with the food we need. Sometimes we don't even look out the back door at what Gaia has to offer. At a potluck last week, I noticed we were low on greens and offered to go pick some wild cress and dandelion. Spring is bountiful in so many ways.

What do we do with our excess peaches? If we habitually stumble into our cars, go to work and shop with eyes to our own needs alone, the peaches will go to the bugs. It ain't a bad thing to feed the worms, but given the amount of damage we do to our natural world in order to feed ourselves out of grocery bags, I'll say we could be more efficient.

Here is a request, a call to action. You consider your surplus, and I'll consider mine. Those resources we stockpile without using are a liability to ourselves as energetic clutter and to the world as we pay cash to consume new materials. I propose that we learn to see our lettuces before they bolt and share them, care for the children that show up and work themselves into the fray, feed the neighboring elderly when we cook too much for ourselves. I propose that we even assert ourselves in helping each other to recognize our talents, abilities, and resources to share. I invite you to educate me!

This shift requires awareness first and then a willingness to share. If it is truly surplus that we witness on our shelves, then it can be parted with painlessly, particularly if cumulative losses are greater if it is not used. Consider: if I pull the flowering kale from my garden and feed you effortlessly, then you may do the same, catching me by surprise to meet my needs later. At times, we are asked to give what is not surplus, and we want to be generous (integrity) and to see others' needs met. A graceful decline is all the easier (and often better received) in view of what we routinely give with ease! My offering is a bank deposit with no strings attached.

I do not give in this way with the expectation of a gift in return. I do give in this way as a strategy to meet my needs for sustainability. To give and to give and to give... the natural cycle of life cannot be broken. I will receive.

But I am in choice about what I will give. I give my best to those who want it, and it will be my surplus. Will you join me?

Best Kid Stuff For Creation and Play

2009-04-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

I just ran across a list I composed a couple of years ago and decided to post it. What follows is my own "Best of" list regarding what children most enjoy occupying themselves with. Early on, it became apparent that most toys go obsolete within minutes or hours, and still we (as a society) throw our money at them, stare at them gathering dust, and then send them to the landfills. We don't need much to fully enjoy our development, and this list happily serves ages 1-100.

Here it is:
boxes (add tape for hours more fun)
balls
natural fiber scarves
blocks
marbles and marble mazes
dolls
paper, pens, crayons, colored pencils, paints and brushes
clay (as in the kind that dries -- I run from modeling clay)
bird seed in a large flat bucket (my favorite gift for the 3 and under crowd)
vehicles

Short list, huh? Countless variations, but my experience has pointed to keeping it simple. Please post a comment to add your own favorites. Hope it's helpful for an upcoming birthday party!

What They Said....

2009-04-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

No names named, here are some gems from kids in my world this week:

Advertising spy services,
"I'm a Spy. You can tell because of my [cowboy] boots and... all this stuff [sunglasses]. My shirt says 'Sketchers,' but it's really a spy shirt -- see? It says 'S.' Spy."

Describing a younger sibling,
"He was excited about 'dickers' which was his word for 'stickers,' and then he came over with respiratory napkins stuck all over him...."
(That is what those napkins are about, isn't it? A reminder to breathe deeply?)

My six-year old told me after babysitting a four-year old (mother's helper):
"I told him I could read him a book and he said, 'What? No, you can't read books. Only adults can do that.' [Me: What did you tell him?] I said, 'Well, actually, anyone can read if they practice.'"

The Insurance Agent

2009-04-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

Seda and I sit looking across a broad wooden desk at our insurance agent who keeps her eyes on the form she is filling out in our stead as a request for a new life insurance policy. Every frank question she poses requires an answer of inscrutable honesty.

"Have you, in the last six years, seen a doctor or psychologist?" she asks Seda.

"Well, yes, both," Seda answers.

"For...?"

"Yes, Seda, what's it on the books for?" I ask.

"Depression, I think. Yes, that was it. Then the doctor for hormone therapy," she says.

The agent scribbles this jargon quickly, looking relieved.

"Will they take you off the 'preferred' rates for having gender dysphoria?" I ask.

"I don't think so. I don't know," she says. The agent declines comment. "It was never an official diagnosis, and the gender psych I see in Portland is on a cash-only basis -- no paper trail."

"They probably won't even notice," I tell her. "Unless they look at that little box that's now checked 'female.' Then they'll probably wonder. The name change, you know. But, hey, no formal diagnosis. It's an at-home transition. Something in your Wheaties."

Our agent cannot suppress a giggle, but keeps her eyes on the paperwork, unsure about our relationship and her role in supporting us.

"Come to think of it," I add, "it must have been the Fruit Loops. I thought I warned you about those." Seda and I laugh out loud.

"Have you been advised to have an operation?" comes the question from behind the desk.

"Yes," says Seda demurely. Then she turns to me. "Is that the right answer?"

"NO," I tell her.

"Oh," she says, and folds her hands in her lap. "Well, the Association of -- but, then, 'No,' I've not been personally advised by a doctor to have an operation."

She'll have one, of course. And by the time that policy is up, the physical exam itself could not argue with that little box marked "female."

Not that it would matter if they did. She is who she is, though certainly not the man I married.

"Are you -- will you... stay married?" the agent asks uncertainly.

"It looks good on paper, doesn't it?" I say.

"That's about the extent of it," says Seda.

"For as long as we share children and a sense of humor, perhaps."

The ancient Chinese blessing-in-a-curse: May you live in interesting times.

For The Birds

2009-04-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

If the blog has been quiet lately, the house has not.

Two weeks ago we purchased twenty-seven chicks in several breeds (New Hampshire Red, Rhode Island Red, Plymouth Barred Rock, Americauna, Jersey Black Giant, Golden Laced Wyandott, Buff Orpington) from a local feed store. If I planned to heat and tend to four chicks, a flock could not take many more resources, I reckoned. A half dozen will be our laying hens, a half-dozen hens we'll sell, and the roosters will go to pot.

Most of my friends said, "Oh, baby chicks! How fun." I wondered.

We brought said chicks home and quickly discovered that they needed more space than what we'd planned for. We collected refrigerator boxes, duct tape, masking tape, kitchen shears and a half dozen kids who appeared to have smelled our recent additions and then turned up "coincidentally."

Picture the building party that ensued while children cuddled stacked chicks and offered them a view from the living room windows. Imagine the Chick Hotel that emerged, two-story in parts complete with ladders and arched doorways. I can only imagine the effort myself. I think we adults were hiding in the kitchen where it was safe.

On the first nights, we kept the heat lamp on as instructed. Seda, who sleeps on the futon in the living room, found herself sleeping in the henhouse. The girls (okay, so it's hopeful) stayed up all night to party. Goodness knows what they found to talk about. Seda never slept.

On the third night, I switched beds with Seda, turned off the heat lamp, and stoked a fire in the wood stove until temperatures soared. I was up every couple of hours to check the babies and add wood. It's now two weeks later, our wood pile has much diminished, and I've given up chasing them all back onto the heating pad in their designated sleeping quarters.

For all that, they are cute. At the moment, awkward and partly feathered, the bulk of them sleep with necks laid long and faces flat against the newspaper. One young rooster already knows his place and never appears to sleep, but keeps vigil with a half-bald head and wary eye over the downy brood. I admit I am charmed. His work ethic surpasses my own.

What have I learned? I know now that I will not ever again set out to create an orphanage for chicks. They came into the world too early, and our sun cannot sustain them motherless. Determined, they peck at pictures of asparagus from the Safeway ads in their bedding and "dust bath" against smoothe cardboard. I cannot feed them a natural diet such as they would be offered in the chicken yard with a mother hen, and have instead substituted granular chick starter with some dried nettles. I've just started adding fresh greens.

I did not purchase medicated chick starter, because I did not want them to take in medicine for ailments they did not feel. And yet, this medication could mitigate the unnatural season and environment that I have contributed to. Their manure is on newspapers. Do I want this on my compost pile? Urban recycling with agri-waste -- garbage and gold. How can I integrate myself more gracefully into the cosmopolitan permaculture? What is fair to my babies now?

I pick up each, stroke and speak to them gently as I change their papers three times a day. I offer my attention as much as I can amidst the drumming, keyboards and wrestling of my own lively brood. I focus my care to their well-being and open my heart to the sadness that is mine in having perpetuated such an unnatural, though conventional, method of raising up chicks. "What can I do for you now?" I ask.

I can promise you this: next time, it will be different. Next year, I'm calling up Rent-a-Rooster and pollinating my homebound hens right here so they can lay, sit, and deliver what they are called to bring forth. I will let you, my then-grown flock, warm and feed them through the summer that they may be ready to lay the following spring.

My footprint is never small enough. What was I thinking? I am not a hen.

Learning the Musette, by Sam

2009-03-31T16:54:00.000-07:00

One day, my Mom asked me if I wanted to learn the Musette, and I said, "okay!" So we sat down at the piano, and my mom taught me how. Then I was playing it. I was usually hitting the wrong keys. Then I got it right, and my mom asked me if I wanted to learn the next part, and I said, "okay!"

Then, when it was my next music lesson, my music teacher, Ken, taught me the first part of the Musette. And he also taught me the third part of Bartok.

"Don't Like My Peaches...

2009-03-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

...don't shake my tree!" Sweet song.

I'm only just grasping the significance of that line.

Why is it that some relationships are so effortless and others so taxing? Sometimes the answers are easy to discern, other times near impossible.

"Would you be willing to bring in some firewood?" I ask Trinidad.

"Ugh!" he says. "No, I don't really want to."

"But would you do it because it would lighten the load of all I am working on to keep order in the house right now and because you might enjoy a fire tomorrow morning?"

"Ergh. Mom, I'm right in the middle of organizing my Pokemon. Maybe later."

My energy bleeds from me in exchanges like this. So much more ease in doing it myself. A month of mourning around how our culture is set up so that parents do not have easy support around routine tasks foundational to a family's health and well-being.

But, wouldn't it be nice if what I asked Trinidad to do was actually a joy for him to contribute? Not just something he liked to do, but something he liked to do especially because I enjoyed it, too?

I enjoy doing housework and cooking (to a point), particularly if my efforts are seen and appreciated. How can I discover and request the work that is most joyful for others to offer me? What do I enjoy receiving from Trinidad that he likes also to give?

There is a list forming in my mind. I find hope there.

I am also grateful to stumble on this question, because it seems to be at the heart of all functional working relationships, be they parent-child, employee-employer, or the work of lovers. If the mutual giving is intrinsically motivated, then there is no energy expended in the giving. It is sheer joy.

Yes, this is the Real World (even I have to smirk at our limited scope), and somebody has to clean the toilet if we don't want the smell to knock us out while we brush our teeth. So someone does the duty, maybe willing but not wanting. Okay. Some energy expended. But if the person who did the job now receives with grace the gift that others wish to give, that energy is restored. We strike a balance not in blanket giving and receiving, but by doing so with tender awareness of each others Work in the world, that we may grow and harvest in community with beauty, ease and fun.

If we do not want to take the time to imagine or get to know each others passions and how they might align with our own needs, then our world loses its human scale. We are reduced to lists that are accomplished with a sense of "have to," and we drag our feet resentfully through what could be a ritual of caring.

With this in mind, we also choose our communities. "Change the dynamic or change the person," a friend wisely suggested. Exchanging my children is not an option (with gratitude that I've never seriously thought of trying), so my determination to uncover and enjoy the gifts that I can authentically receive from them as a contribution is all the more pressing.

The commitments I have to friends and lovers is now defined by only that -- what is my level of conscious determination in finding a way that we can both be in our joy? How can the vast majority of giving and receiving between us be effortless and fun? Why did we choose each other in the first place? Has there been some shift? Are our needs still met in the balance of this relationship? Do I, in fact, have good cause to keep shaking the tree?

This effort is not about a commitment to people. It represents a commitment to love.

Out Standing In Their Fields

2009-03-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

From six-year-old Sam (who reads at about fifth grade level):
"Mama, when I grow up and die, do you think I'll be canonized in... 2099 ... to be the Saint of Reading?"

From eight-year-old Trinidad:
"Your brain gets as big as what you're doing. I want mine to be bigger than a video game."

Tired

2009-03-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

We went to the snow last weekend and shared a cabin with three other families. Trinidad rode his sled in all ways (even "snowboarding" over jumps, hands-free standing) from the crack of dawn until after dark. He barely came in to eat. During daylight hours, he did not enjoy the distraction of a mama asking questions. After that time, he was too exhausted to speak intelligibly and mostly snarled and made faces.

I got tired of being responded to in monosyllables at high decibles. I grew weary of his intense frown at every turn, eyebrows furrowed and silver eyes glaring up from half-closed lids.

"My sweet little Sith," I thought, with sinking heart. I don't like having such a thought about my child. Craving connection, I told him over and over how much I did not want to be spoken to in that tone of voice, at that decible, with those words.

And still, it continued. I gave myself a lot of empathy.

The weekend we had much looked forward to met some needs while others withered tragically. I longed for fun and connection with Trinidad. I had a talk with him between scowls. I offered empathy around his needs for focus and fun, and these conversations brought us both some understanding and relief. I also shared the intensity of my sadness, the unmet needs, and my worries that if we couldn't find ways to connect, I couldn't imagine investing so much in a trip like this in the future.

He heard that. He tried to turn around, but it was hard. He was exhausted in every way, even struggling to sleep. I saw these needs drastically unmet for him and again questioned the resources plunged into a trip that left so much wanting.

On the ride home, we talked about what we liked and did not like about the adventure. I only referred briefly to what we had talked about earlier, imagining that he would be tired of discussing it (we had a few ten to fifteen minute meta-conversations about it). Instead, he opened the topic again.

"Yeah, I remember -- we might not be able to go again," he said.

"Well, it's not about that, honey," I told him. "I don't want my frustration to be connected to whether or not we go again. I just feel so sad when we struggle to relate so much over a weekend. I do not like being spoken to and responded to in those ways [we were both clear which]. I would like to be spoken to with the same care and tone that I speak to you in. I want that mutuality. It's part of a respect that I want for both of us. In a trip like this, the challenge is more apparent because you're tired, and I'm more sensitive because we're in a group."

I really wanted to own this last part. "I feel embarrassed when you shout 'You hid my boots!' and make this face [scowl], because I want to be clear with myself and others that I care about the words I use and want to be spoken to with. I'd like to have discussions where we both take responsibility for our feelings and needs."

"Mom, I wonder if it's something else, too," he said. "I wonder if you'd really like it if we were communicating that way because you'd like other people to see how good you are at being a mom."

Well, I had some judgment come up about myself for a moment and gave myself empathy -- do I want people to value me so that I can value myself based on the pretty package of "good communication?"

"I'd really like for you to be authentic," I said. "I want you to say what's real for you, but take responsibility for it by saying how you feel and what you need rather than blaming me. I want to connect and to hear what's alive, even if I don't like it."

"No, mom," Trinidad said. "What I mean is that when other people come around, sometimes I'd like to show them how good I am at something -- like shooting a hoop or doing a magic trick."

"Wow," I said, and I meant it. "You mean that I'd like to show them a representative sample of what I do all day -- the connection we usually share?"

"Yeah," he said. "Is that it?"

I felt such relief when I fully heard this empathy guess. Why wouldn't I want to share this work that is vitally important to me with my community in the most distilled way I could -- by example? Why wouldn't I be disappointed if the snapshot of time we shared together was filled with a radical display of unmet needs rather than our usual rich dance of connection, challenge, and reconnection? It's not about wanting to be a "model NVC Mom" for the sake of "doing it right." That did not resonate, anyway, even though I had some confusion and worry that there could be something there. I value the acceptance that I generally feel about showing up as we are en famile. Instead, what Trin shed light on for me is a need for celebration and empathy; I am in awe at the depth and quality of connection (regardless of difficulty) that I experience in my day-to-day, and I'd like us all to be seen for that.

What Trin put his finger on was Murphy's Law itself: the minute someone is watching, the ball misses its mark. Over and over. Some hours, some days, some weekends, the Law prevails, and I tear my hair in frustration. I mourn.

And then, when I pick up the pieces and find unlikely support in the seeming source of my struggle, I remember that there are so many phases in this metamorphosis. So many forms that both of us will take, so much room for growing and finding our places with each other.

I am grateful that Trinidad offered his heart, his ear, his words of wisdom at a time when we both bottomed out. I am grateful for the connection I treasure, the clarity and the hope.

And still, I'm tired.

Time Crunch For The Unschooled

2009-03-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

"I have been trying," said Trinidad, "to work brushing my hair into my schedule these days. It's been hard. I've been busy."

Urban Farm Mother Says....

2009-03-04T22:23:00.000-08:00

1. If you stay inside long enough in the winter, you may forget that the bathroom sink is not the best place for children (or anyone) to wash muddy rocks.

2. If you have made the above mistake, you might look at your toothbrush carefully before using it the next time.

3. Children do not always remove their gloppy boots at the entrance, despite their best intentions. This fact could be viewed as an inexpensive personal growth workshop in the art of lettting go.

4. While living large on small city acreage is to be commended, hanging the white clothes within six feet of the manure pile that awaits transport to the garden is not advisable -- it happens.

5. If you have made the above error, you may be consoled to know that whatever streaks are now visible on whatever whites you dare to own will only be recognizable in origin to you -- the fact of the matter is that "white" clothes (amidst children under 10) are only "dirty" when they stink.

6. Beating the dirt out of rugs is a charming way to connect with your ancestors and tidy your home. Don't wear lipgloss to do it.

7. When children dig, they find tools you did not know exist to do it.

8. When children hit the water table while digging, this is a marvelous discovery and opportunity for a lesson in earth science.

9. When children hit the clay layer just below the water table, your deck and floors will pay the price. But you will discover the charm of authentic clay booties on everyone -- even the dog.

10. It is shocking what a mother will let slide as a "nutritious lunch" when she is trying to gain a little more time in the garden. This moment-of-abandon acts as a balance for all of the fresh, crisp greens she has been unsuccessfully encouraging her children to eat. Surely if sinning in the mind is still a sin, intending to feed your children local, healthy food is worth something....

11. Despite the hard-core belief of fantastic young imaginations, plywood alone is not an adequate surfboard for a pond in winter.

12. It is very rare that only one child at a time falls into a muddy pond. This is a moment of intense cooperation that you are not likely to celebrate.

Lessons

2009-02-24T20:50:00.000-08:00

The boys had their first gymnastics lesson today. It is the third "being taught" experience for Sam and the fourth for Trinidad. Initially, Sam clung to my legs whispering regrets about having signed up. Trinidad asked me not to stay and watch.

I walked slowly, Sam barnacled to my left thigh, to the circle and sat down. Over ten minutes, I slowly faded behind and away from my six year old as he took up the movements of the group, smiling.

After the hour of tumbling, rolling, and balancing, I asked my boys what they most enjoyed. Sam celebrated first that he had asked the teacher for help when he needed it. Wow! The fact that he valued the ability and willingness to seek support when needed -- how empowering I imagine that is for him! Trinidad told me that he loved it all. "Some things she asked us to do were plainly too difficult," he told me (his words, honest). "So Sam and I just found other things to do on the equipment when that happened."

I watched their integration with interest. In terms of motor skills, they both appeared to be ahead of the pack in almost all ways despite the novelty of this equipment. Other mothers turned to me with looks of surprise. "Looks like you've got a natural there," said one. Perhaps they stood out, being the only boys and wearing faded jeans and t-shirts rather than formal "gym clothes."

I also thought I saw a bit of awkwardness socially as they took instruction in a group format, something uncommon to their experience. Only once did they find themselves unable to resist the call of the beam when everyone else sat for instruction. But still, something about their quality of focus when they turned their full attention on the instructor seemed unusual. Perhaps it's my bias, but other parents did smile my way which seems to support my theory. Something akin to the mule that took the dressage title, yah? I'm guessing that their natural aptitude comes from the amount of time that they spend exploring their world freely in body, mind and spirit.

Maybe instead of "unschooled" we should call it "undesked."

The Wake

2009-02-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

I put on the Madre Deus album, Existir, and emotion that has been brimming strikes me head on. The rain that falls grey and lush around my cozy kitchen as I cook and cook and cook, my children playing, arguing, running, jumping, shouting, and eating... all of it mirrors moments a year ago and beyond. What have I learned? Where am I now?

I have learned that I will never truly know another creature, never understand completely their perspective -- their whole being that gives and receives. This alone will inspire me in learning compassion, the fact that I can never assume for a moment that I understand. Track nine plays and I fall to the floor on my knees in tears. The children and the dog come to my rescue, but I do not want to be rescued. It is my work now to toss adrift. I ask them to go, and they do. A year ago, two years, they would not have come. They saw me cry too often then. They accepted my sadness without fear.

I am engaged in my life, my work. This has not changed from then to now. The way is easier now, gentler. But I have not forgotten what I learned then. There is no high, no singular love that I can believe in with fierce or trusting care. There is no falling in or out of love. There is only my care in the moment directed to nurture the world around me, or at this moment, the woman I embody here on the kitchen floor, rocking. Opening slowly, I bare my heart to the world -- my kitchen, the backyard pond, the garden. Opening myself to mourning, I am moved by the enormous energy of loveinsadness that flows through, beyond, and around me. I rest in the wake.

This is not a sadness about any one person, incident or accident. It is a formal recognition of the loss of innocence, so beautiful a sacrifice. It is a celebration of the precious gift this loss has offered me -- a peace and acceptance beyond words. No regret, no bitterness.

But waves on waves of sadness are mine at times when all is water falling, and my world is so quiet the boat may be felt. Perhaps the moon sings its song, and I listen. Perhaps a thousand invisible forces collide and I am halted in the tracks of my daily work to pay homage.

I do not know. But here I am.

If The Shoe Fits....

2009-02-20T17:47:00.000-08:00

Sam: My shoes are too small.

Trin: Your feet grew.

Sam: No. They're just too small.

Trin: That's because your feet grew.

Sam: No. They fit five minutes ago!

Trin: Feet grow fast.

Sam: Look at them. (The boys compare foot size.) See? They're smaller than yours.

Trin: Well, compare them to Mama's. They get bigger as you do.

Sam: I want to take them off and try again.

Trin (aside, to me): Sam doesn't want his feet to grow because he likes his cowboy boots so much.

Sam (to me): My shoes are still to small. My feet are cramped.

Me: What are you going to do about it?

Sam: Maybe eat some ice cream? When I eat cold things I shrink up.

Me: Hmmm.

Sam: Maybe. Or maybe I'll just try them again. (He takes them off and puts them on.) There! Now they fit.

To be continued....

Did I Hear You Correctly?

2009-02-15T16:42:00.000-08:00

It's ten o'clock at night, and I'm shuffling around picking up the last odds and ends before bed.

"In three years, I mate," says Sam, age five.

Seda thinks to herself that she should be concerned by this statement, but is too tired to remember why.

"You mate?" I ask. I am trying not to make assumptions. Perplexed.

"I mate!" he says emphatically. I shake my head.

"What do you mean when you say 'mate?'" I ask. I would like him to lead this discussion.

"No!" he says. "In three years, I'M EIGHT!"

Oh.

Fundamental Difference

2009-02-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

"I'm back at my old Waldorf school again," a young friend shared with us at dinner.

"Waldorf? Circle time -- iahhhhhhhhh!" shrieked Trinidad, wide-eyed running from the room. He returned momentarily with swinging stride and eight-year-old slouch, grinning broadly.

"We like to have a bit of drama in our family," I told our friend.

She looked at me blankly. "We like to have harps in our classroom," she offered.

A fundamental difference. Perhaps irreconcilable.

Free Food

2009-02-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

This week, I threw up my arms and dropped one of my final Control Freak Frontiers: food. I told the kids to have at'em. Eat whatever they wanted, as long as they clean up after themselves.

"I'm having marshmallows!" said Sam.

"Me, too!" said Trin.

"Cool," I said. "When they're gone, they're gone. Hope you like them plain. I'd rather have mine with hot chocolate, but with weather like this, who wants hot chocolate?"

"Right," said Trin. "I'll save mine for tomorrow morning when it's cold."

Hmm. This could be sustainable.

There's certainly a lot more creativity and cooking. Trinidad fried himself two eggs and ate them with the yolks cooked hard (he prefers over medium). I did not realize that I still owned peaches in a can. But they found them. The boys are turning the place upside down to see what's in our addled pantry. I found Sam randomly peering under the sink and into far off cabinets. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"Looking for food!" he said, opening the cold oven door. "Bacon!" he cried. "I'll have bacon!"

"What?! Bacon? In there?" Apparently I had left it in the oven last Sunday and turned it off. A lecture about the possibility of food poisoning ensued. (Seda couldn't resist and snatched it later -- if only she'd heard the lecture?)

Tonight, as Trinidad told me about how clear his head felt in the time he spent at the top of a fig tree, Sam erupted with a post-dinner announcement: "And then we ate all of the Tobasco sauce, mom, and we thought of lots of things."

Well. What do you think of that?

I Believe....

2009-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

My children spend hours each day at a new hobby: Wheelbipping. At first appearance, the sport is anything but magical. A child attaches a Lego person to an equally small Lego base with wheels. He then rolls the creation over all surfaces, horizontal or vertical, in the house. Occassionally, Wheelbip Jousting takes place in which competitors roll toward each other with their lances at the ready, attempting to knock one another down.

Why is this activity fascinating enough to go on for hours? Perhaps because we don't have television. Perhaps because I spend too much time writing blogposts. Maybe because I tend to cook our meals which lands me in the kitchen while my children find yet another thing to entertain themselves with.

But here's what I think: Wheelbipping is dreaming in the hand. Both boys spend a chunk of each week skating or biking the skateboard bowl near our home. As they roll over and over in real time the simplest maneuvers, I imagine that they dream of their bodies and vehicles arcing midair in the form of their companion spatial artists. What is Real?

When I see Sam Wheelbip with singular focus across tracks that appear to be randomly chosen, my breath catches in my throat. The energy that emits from his controlled flight sets my hair on end. He is joyfully present in his awareness; the doing is the being.

At age eight, Trinidad approaches the sport more analytically. "Do you know, Mom, for some reason Air Surfers [a recent offshoot involving plastic human figures that hover in air over the chosen substrate at all angles] look more graceful than Wheelbippers."

"Maybe it's because they fly," I said. (What is flying, I wonder, if our hand alone controls the distance these objects hover above the earth? If all objects have potential flight, why are only some credited with this power?) "I'd be -- I'd be more graceful if I flew," I add. Seda laughs.

"What is funny?" asks Trinidad.

"Adult joke," says Seda.

"Adult joke? What does it mean, Mama?" asks Sam.

"I don't know," I say, blankly. "I don't get it either."

Long NVC'ish Dialogue -- Get Yo'self A Cuppa Tea...

2009-01-21T19:41:00.000-08:00

We bit into a fabulous dilemma today. A family friend expressed to the boys that he feels annoyed when he hears their voices dive into a whine pitch (they both understood from the example what he spoke to), and he asked if they would be willing to express themselves in a different tone of voice.

Sam said he understood what he was being asked to do and was willing. Trinidad bowed his head in silence, and then slowly melted until his head nearly touched the floor, lower lip hanging. I went to check in, quietly, but he avoided me and asked for some space in his room. In my history of parenting this child, I have not yet seen him respond like this.

Trinidad refused empathy, and returned quietly to the room when he was ready for a group story. After the story, he and our friend reconnected in wild physical play, but I knew that the work had only begun. After awhile, I translated our friend's request into feelings and needs (unsure whether he had; I'd been out of the room in the middle of the discussion), and then Trin told me that he had felt sad to hear what K-- had to say.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Because I don't know how to speak any other way when I am sad or angry," he said. "That's just me, and I don't want to change who I am. I would rather have no friends than do that."

I saw how much this meant to him. "You really want to be authentic when you express yourself -- is that right?"

"Yeah. And it's just me. I like K-- , but I just want to be me, too."

We talked about meeting some needs -- authenticity, self-connection -- while watching others not be met -- connection, fun, contribution. He felt so sad, hopeless even, to imagine so many needs unmet. I breathed into it, holding the space for mourning.

Two hours later, walking in the sun, I reframed it. "So. I hear that K-- has needs for choice and connection up and you would like to be authentic about how you express yourself. That is a dilemma. Hmmm. Somehow it sounds less dismal when I just focus on the needs. Does it seem that way to you?"

"Yeah!" he said.

"So, our job is to find a strategy that holds everyone's needs."

"I don't think we can," he said, after a moment. Tears welled in his eyes.

"Mmmm. When you think that, I bet you feel sad," I said. I opened my heart to hold the space.

"Yeah. I don't want K-- to be annoyed, and I want to just be me."

"Mmm. So, I wonder if there are any other ways to meet your needs for authenticity besides whining."

"I don't think so," he said.

"Oh! I have an idea. What if you expressed yourself by saying how you feel and what needs are up for you? Would that be doable?"

"Yeah, but I'd probably still whine."

"You might, but you'd be taking responsibility for how you feel, and I'm guessing that that would be a big contribution to K--. When you whine, he's often hearing what you are asking for as a demand, so here's another idea: you could let him know that what you are asking for is a request and not a demand. Do you know the difference?"

"Well, kind of."

"It's like this," I told them. "If I ask you to set the table and you tell me 'no,' and I say, 'Well, I want you to set it anyway. Because I said so,' then that would be a demand."

"Hey!" said Trinidad. "A lot of other mothers tell their kids to do something, and when their kids ask 'why?' they say 'Because I said so.' I think they say it because they don't really know why either."

"Have you ever heard me say 'Because I said so' to you?" I asked, prepared for the worst. :)

"No, you haven't."

"You know why? Because I heard it so much from my parents when I was young (and I didn't like it), that I vowed to never say that to you. I make no guarantees about the future, but I want to celebrate right now that you don't remember me saying it in your eight years. Hurray." We smiled at each other. "And I think you're right: the parent who says that probably does not want to take the time or energy to check in with what needs are behind it. They might be tired and just wanting ease and to get the job done."

"Yeah, that's what I think, too."

"Anyway," I said, "if I hear your 'no' and then decide to share my needs that would be met by you doing it and make the request again [I gave example], then you might shift and agree to. Or, I might decide to do it myself."

"Or eat without forks that night," offered Trinidad, in the spirit of limitless possibility.

"Yup. The point is, I could work with your 'no' and find other ways to hold both our needs. Do you think you could make it clear to K-- that you are making a request, not a demand?"

"Yeah, I think I could," said Trinidad.

"You know, even if you whine to do it, I'm guessing that would really meet his needs for autonomy, because he would know he was in choice about it, and that's the big problem."

"Yeah!" said Trinidad.

The kids shifted their attention to walking on the edge of curbs and after about ten minutes, I offered this: "You know, an interesting thing might happen if you own your own feelings and needs when you're upset. You might well speak it in some other tone of voice than a whine." I paused and noticed Trinidad watching me intently. "Because," I went on, "a whine is that tone of voice we often use when we think we are helpless -- that our happiness depends on someone else."

"You're right!" said Trinidad. "How did you know that?"

I laughed. "Because I've given it some thought. So, just the act of owning your own feelings and needs will probably make it easier to make a true request, easier for that request to connect and for everyone to feel in their power, even if they are disappointed with the answer to that request."

"Yeah!" said Trinidad, beaming.

"So, I have an idea. And this would really meet my needs for teamwork and mutuality in our family, too. Would you guys be willing to practice expressing your feelings and needs at various times throughout the day when we are not upset, just for practice?"

"Sure," they both said, and we did it right then. Both were remarkably eloquent in their expressions, despite the fact that they have often claimed to be clueless as to what feelings and needs were in the past (what is it about the cobbler's children being ill-shod?). Apparently, this conflict offered them new motivation. I expressed my own needs met!

We have checked in on feelings and needs twice more this afternoon. (Interesting aside: When Sam expressed that he was happy with a need for peace met, he insisted on whispering it in my ear, afraid that saying it aloud could jinx his luck with volatile big brother...) And, as I've been typing this, another conflict brewed between Seda and Trin. The latter came in and expressed himself, taking full responsibility for his feelings and needs and his part in a misunderstanding. His voice could be described as a whine, erupting in tears midway, and making space for a good sob before asking for my response. I found that we were both more creative than usual in solving the problem, and both of our needs were met, Seda releasing her issue with it in confusion over our solution.

I am sitting now in gratitude for dilemma, the opportunity to crack open perceived barriers so that limitless possibility can be seen by both sides. In gratitude for growth and shared learning, shared reality, and the unconditional love that keeps us trying for a winning solution.

For patience, for care, and for the courage to say 'no.'

January Skies

2009-01-18T20:17:00.000-08:00

"My" bees took wing in mid-afternoon sun. This is quiet proof of their existence, a celebration that they lived through the freeze. The ceremony is lost on them. From the outside looking in, their living or dying is mine alone to ponder, letting go the temptation of taking full responsibility. I am only a worker bee myself.

The air, the water, the earth is One hive above and below me that I may witness what flies beneath the sun as some part of who I am.

A New Year

2009-01-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

My gracious! Over a week with no post! The New Year is full of hope, new beginnings, and adventure. I took the kids mid-winter camping (oh, isn't she a fun Mom?) at the coast last weekend. We braved ice and rain, dirt and damp to sit by the campfire and consume more than our healthy share of hotdogs and marshmallows. Don't get me wrong -- we also brought beans and rice, greens and salsa, fruit (two pumpkin pies with whipped cream).... oy vey! We found the middle of the road by ditch diving either side!

It was a blast to play by the ocean in our one sunny day, to hike in the lush green forests that adorn our coastal edge, and to covet every ounce of comfort, warmth and good cheer allotted to us in this, the brightest of winters.

We visited the Darlingtonia, carnivorous and voluptuous pitcher plants unfurling their dappled leaves invitingly. It is a season of consummation -- the fly to be eaten, digested, and translated into green. We stood among them, our eyes and mouths tipped upward to the sun. We rested and rooted in the hummus of a world that cares for us.

Vacation is our home.

Tension

2009-01-06T10:40:00.000-08:00

Power under pressure.
Mother of the Big Bang.
Tangible swift, backwards and up, filling in the cracks.
Searching for, creator of outlet.
One dance step manifested.
Potential.
Release in reaction.
Intentional creation.
Container and contained.

Tension farmer planting, harvesting --
Focus and Serendipity --
Guide me.

Conflict

2009-01-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

"You know, I just want to celebrate the joy I feel in witnessing the very rich lives we lead. We have a lot of fun, and I also cherish the opportunity to grow in the times we have conflict," I said.

"I think that having conflicts seems more realistic," said Sam, age five. Realistic -- is that a synonym for Alive?

"Yeah," said Trinidad, age eight. "It's really great that when we have conflicts, we just work them out and go on. [I think he was thinking of a very emotional, nearly (?) violent moment between him and his brother hours before that they appeared to recover from completely within fifteen minutes.] It's not like in a movie when everything changes because of a conflict."

This gave me pause. Trinidad had named a piece that I think is critical in supporting childrens' emotional development and presentfuture peacemaking. I have long watched our neighborhood youth run in packs, squabble, and work through their challenges by a great variety of means including retreat, pursuing reconnection, self-connection, and seeking support. I have seen them look to their own and others' needs without attachment to their personal responsibility (in a sense of blame and shame) in "making it right," and still they move on in connection at the turning of tides. I have seen children in groups dive into both their challenges and their play with a full fervored frenzy, then shift as white water turns the bend naturally into deep tracts of calm. I have seen them let go to find peace.

As we adults seize each opportunity to make Right in the world, seek fairness and consideration for all, it is this element of letting go that seems most at risk as we attempt to support "processing" the challenges we see coming up in those young lives we steward. I am not at all saying that these efforts are without value, integrity or even necessity to support safety. I am only naming the dance between recognizing and holding space for sensitivity even as there is also the spaciousness to allow conflict and pain to move through without our own understanding keeping pace. It can be most challenging to let go the pain the we perceived to have happened as we make room for the autonomy of our children, trusting that their work is their own even if some piece goes yet unprocessed.

It is another effort to let go in the trust of love.

My New Years Resolution:

2009-01-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

Focus.

Because when I laugh, I laugh for our world. When I cry, it is for us all. When I play, I see that the play is of me and through me, at large in a culture starved for the presence of play. When I write, it is in our words, that we may better understand each other in ourselves.

Let that inform my focus.

Sam's Best Understanding of Failure

2008-12-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

Sam remembered that the last two times he played racquetball, he had melted into tears. As he played yesterday with joy and determination, the memory clearly shadowed him. Perhaps understanding "failure" is just as important as understanding "success." The following is his unsolicited evolution of thinking around the incident:

After 10 minutes of play: "I think I cried last time because I didn't have my own ball." (The two boys had one ball in play then, not two.)

After 25 minutes of play: "I think I cried before because I didn't really practice."

After 70 minutes of play: "I think I cried back then because I didn't believe I could do it."

Taking My Hat

2008-12-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

Trinidad traced his fingers lightly over my face in the dark as the three of us snuggled into the King sized bed for our evening's rest. "Did you feel the love I just sent you?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "Now I'll send you some." I poised my palm about an inch from his forehead and opened myself to channel universal love into the divine being beside me.

"Did you feel it?" I asked after a few minutes.

"Yes!" he said.

"Many wisdom traditions call this spot the Third Eye because you can see things with it that are not necessarily of the world you can see with your other two eyes."

"Really? Like what?" he asked. I began to describe some possibilities.

"Yes, but, have you seen things, too? I'm asking because I've experienced this, and I want to understand it better!"

I told him my experience and he told me his, ending by telling me that it didn't matter to him whether I believed it or not, because he knew it to be true.

I smiled. "You know, our existence takes place on many levels in this lifetime and our body is a vehicle for sundry aspects of our soul in the world. Many wisdom traditions see certain points of our bodies, called chakras, as a place that we are particularly open to give and receive energy." I paused and could feel his body, tense with excitement, beside mine. "Do you have any idea where they could be?"

"The heart," he said quickly.

"Yes, that's a big one. And one that is recognized to a large degree even in our culture -- think of the hearts that people write all over things to represent love. Do you know any others?"

"There are more?"

"Yes, several, actually," I said.

"Wow! Is one here?" He placed his hand on the top of his head.

"Yes."

"And around my eyes?"

I asked him to point. He moved his hand around both eyes and landed just above and between them. "Yes," I said. "I like how you used your hand to feel."

He smiled broadly, then his face eased into the serious expression of inward searching as he slowly ran his hand down the center of the length of the body and identified every other of the several chakras that are familiar to me. I affirmed his discovery. He switched hands and felt each one again. "Are they in your hands, too?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. Trinidad beamed and hugged me hard over and over, telling me how much he loved me. I held him tight to me and smiled. As I released him, I told him that many of my friends knew much more about chakras and energy movement than I did.

"But let us not ever forget how much you know, yourself, when you are open to hearing it, Trinidad. The same is true for all of us. And your energy, little one, is strong like the wind. Like a very big wind. You will spend your life learning to understand and focus it so that it may bring good and healing to the world. It is an honor to see you witness it now."

He grinned at me so I thought his face would crack open, and then he darted a hand out and stole my hat off my head.

"Got your hat!" he said.

I'm Dreaming of a Used Christmas....

2008-12-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

Every value of my own that is embraced by my children fills me with awe and is worth a celebration.

"Mom? Tomorrow can we glue this piece back on the Jumanji game we just unwrapped? It's supposed to go here, see? It just got torn. It was like that when we unwrapped it."

"Sure, honey. Glad you thought of it."

"I'm guessing this came from Goodwill!" says Sam, smiling proudly.

I grin back. "Actually, it came from S--. We guessed you'd like it, so I just wrapped it up."

"We sure do!" they said.

The skateboard top quality and already broken in, the well-loved snare drum, kindly refurbished.... We're not the first, and we may be the last stop for these gifts that Santa brings -- but I doubt it.

Infectious Humor?

2008-12-23T00:27:00.000-08:00

Sam got his blood drawn today for a Lyme disease titer so we can rule out that as a possible cause for the bizarre infection he's developed at the site of a tick bite from several months ago. "That was fun," he said as he put on his coat, dropping the jaws of the entire laboratory staff. He'd really enjoyed watching his blood go into the tube and observing the entire blood drawing process.

"You know, sweetheart," I told him as we put on our bike helmets, "many people believe -- and I do, too, sometimes -- that chronic illnesses can have something to do with a part of your life that is not healthy, balanced, or integrated with love. Your doctor reminded me of this today. So, I'm wondering, is there any part of your life that you don't like, anything that could hold you back from healing?"

Sam held my hand as we walked slowly down the long hall. When we got to the end, he turned to face me. "Too much greens," he said. "If I ate more candy, I think I'd be better."

From Trinidad....

2008-12-19T16:04:00.000-08:00

A horse smells like it is.

The Lost

2008-12-19T07:43:00.000-08:00

Scene: Pizza Parlor indoor playground, birthday party.

One toddler, escorted by an older child, returned to her mother, sobbing. "Some girl pushed her down and pulled her hair." A different child cried from the indoor playground, and his mother jumped up to attend. "Now the girl is riding A--," reported the older child.

"Oh, sometimes pretty mean kids come here," said one mother. "Especially in the afternoon when school's out. We don't come here much. Someone's always getting hurt. There are some mean ones."

I sat another moment by the fire and let this all sink in, giving silent empathy to myself and the toddler crying beside me. I was keenly aware that no "answer" arose in me. I felt worried and sad about the language around "mean" and "nice" I was hearing, sad about the violence that had occured, and still I sat, completely blank beyond emotional resonance. It would be easier, I thought, if my moral structure supported me in taking some stand. A clarity of right and wrong that would tell me just what to do and feel. Not that I wished for it. I just noticed the dizzy, confused feeling I had about not understanding on a deeper level what occured, considering it had affected so many at heart. I wanted to contribute and be clearer about my feelings.

I returned to the indoor playground. A group of children and an adult holding a different sobbing toddler stood in a circle. "She did it," several children said over each other, pointing to a girl at one end. "She keeps pulling at people's arms, hitting them and pinching. She sat on him."

The toddler continued to wail unconsolably. His mother held him and shook her head, appearing at a loss. I took a look at the culprit.

Three feet tall with whispy blonde hair and Coke bottle lenses in her wire-framed glasses, this was not your postcard bully. The child's mouth contorted at the edges. I had the sense that she was separate from the group in more ways than one. This was a child who needed and offered more than was expected in the world. I have worked with "special needs" kids enough to see them from a distance. Despite her inability to connect in a meaningful way, this little girl felt the pain that she thought she had caused.

I crossed the circle and sat beside her. "Hi. I'm guessing that you want a friend, too, is that right?"

She nodded. "You didn't want him to cry, huh?"

"Sad," she said.

"Were you really wanting to play, and when you touched him, he cried?" I asked. She nodded.

I offered more words of empathy and gave some silently as well to both the girl child and the toddler. The little girl declined my offer of a lap, but suddenly lay down beside me, her face against the mat, welcoming my hand upon her back. We sat quietly for awhile. Then she stood up. I offered her an example of how I expected the other children would like to be touched. She took it in with large eyes but no words.

I called a couple of the older children down. Trinidad was one. I explained that the girl had trouble connecting with children with her body, but she really wanted to play and be included. Would they be willing to support her by showing her how they wanted to be touched and by staying with her in the climbing structure (the dang thing is too small for adults) so everyone could be safe in their play? Trinidad made a fierce face at me and said, "No," irritated to be interrupted in his focused play. I assured him that I was not making a demand. He looked relieved and ran off. Two older girls with soft eyes said they would be willing. A crowd of smaller children stood around them and heard my explanation of what I guessed had happened in the violent encounters.

"Everyone learns how to connect with their bodies at some point," I said. "She needs a bit of help just now. It's kind of like playing with a puppy." Two children lit up with understanding. "How do puppies play?" I asked.

"They jump and bite!" said a three-year-old girl, smiling broadly.

"That's right. And it takes awhile for you to show them how you want to be touched and played with. They're just trying to connect."

"Yeah, you're right," said a boy. "And she doesn't listen when my Mom tells her." This, I guessed, was the girl's brother. I asked her name, as it came out quite unintelligible to my ear from her own lips. He said her name was M---.

In agreement and good will, the troupe of children climbed back into the plastic tunnels with M-- in tow. She did not grab or pull, but watched them carefully and stayed close. No more cries sounded.

After a quarter of an hour, a woman entered the play area and called to M--. "She's up here!" replied a girl in our group.

My heart leapt to hear that the children had taken her into their group so much as to speak for her. Partly because I did not feel lost anymore -- the path of empathy is always with purpose. Partly because I could see the gift of love and belonging that this little girl received as she was included in play despite the challenges she offered.

And partly because I remember being a lost little girl with Coke bottle lenses.

Out of the Jungle

2008-12-17T10:08:00.000-08:00

"We are connected here," Sam, my five-year-old, tells me, pointing to his belly.

"We are?" I ask. "Because that's the part of me that gave birth to you?"

"Yes," he says. "Our organs are still connected."

"Sometimes I think so, too," I say quietly.

Sam does not want to grow up or for me to grow older. He could hardly bear to be just the "shopkeeper" with me as a "customer" last night when we played a pretend game of Motorboard (fake surfing on sticks on the carpet). In the end, his heart melting at our connection, he asked to play my child.

This morning, all three of us snuggled under the covers and read Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. It was my first reading. Somehow it did not appear in my childhood canon. As we read the first story, "Mowgli's Brothers," Trinidad and I paused frequently to take in the beauty of the words, the wisdom of the wolf-pack leader, Akela, and the depth of tragedy in the plight of Mowgli and Bagheera as they navigated worlds to which they did not entirely belong. This line also caught my attention: "And [Mowgli] grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat." Mmmm.

At the end of the story, my heart splayed open in awe. As I staggered in the prose of a master, I noticed that my tears were not alone. Mowgli finished his speech to the wolf pack, acknowledging his presence as a leader in the hierarchy beyond the jungle, waved the fire before the council to punctuate his point, and then dissolved into tears as the pack departed. I saw a tear trickle from the corner of Trin's eye. It is the first I've witnessed in response to a story. Just as Mowgli's tears were seen by Bagheera the panther as a rite of passage into Manhood for Mowgli (and I am touched by Kipling's sensitivity here, again), Trinidad's tears marked an awareness and understanding of nuance that we have not shared before.

For an hour after, Trinidad and I chased the tragic aliveness of this tale, the title (who were "Mowgli's Brothers," really?), and the choices of Akela, the wolf-pack leader. "It seems to me that in our culture, people are not taught to fight with wisdom, but instead with violence," Trinidad told me.

Sam began to fidget and asked why we kept going on about the beauty of this story. He pulled himself into my lap and began to poke at me, connecting by body our souls. Looking into Trinidad's slate blue eyes across the table, I could see reflected the territory that he and I are now stepping into. With compassion, both of us rested a hand on Sam, knowing he could not understand the connection of minds moving out of the jungle, thoughts beyond the Mother Wolf.

We are Growing.

Going Natural

2008-12-15T07:36:00.000-08:00

I sit with the children by the woodstove, gold and red lighting up their faces. A blanket is spread before us with the empty shells of filberts and white paper skins of garlic. They crack nuts to grind into hazelnut butter while I break the last heads of garlic to be planted. We sit for hours talking, cracking, peeling. Bliss.

It is Sunday morning. The flour mill has arrived by mail. We take it apart, wash it lovingly, and begin to grind our first batch of flour. It is an effort. The boys can barely turn the handle while standing on a stool. We are making our traditional Sunday morning breakfast, and we are hungry. The flour is coaxed slowly from the cast iron disks that grind it, 1/4 teaspoon at a time.

We are having fun. We are taking turns. We are severely denting our only kitchen table because I did not remember to cushion the clamp with a cutting board. One hour later, I am the last Mohican at the grind, sweating and turning the crank nearly naked, huffing and puffing. The children are barking at each other and threatening war. It is nearly noon, and I have a few cups of flour ground. "Use the electric thing," says Sam. And I do.

Wednesday night. The soup is made from our own squash and potatoes, carrots and tomatoes. The greens came from the plot where they still grow out back. I am, in mid-December, beginning to get thin on what I can offer our family from the garden. Next year, as every year, I will dedicate more space to winter crops. I believe my family is fed in spirit by eating local.

And there is a price. Year round, the time taken to bring in the leaf mulch, plant, harvest, weed and water is time my children want me at their side. I have hoped that they will grow into the rhythm of farming their own food. I have hoped that the organic shape of this part of our lives would nurture. At times, I mourn that they are often inside playing with the Tamagotchi and calling to me while I work our urban farm. I can't imagine trying to run a full-scale production.

A friend tells me that my children would benefit from a cleaner house. "Keep a distinction between outdoors and in," she tells me, essentially. She is steeped in the Waldorf tradition. There, the fields are represented by puffy green bushes with buff colored wheat, all riding a pink sunrise. The mud does not come in the kitchen door. The leaves do not migrate to the hearth. There is somehow time in this soft pastel landscape for mothers to ground themselves indoors where they remove their dear ones clothing to hang by the fire and serve herbal tea in a spotless kitchen.

It is a beautiful vision. But where is my family in this? Where is the sweat, the conflict, the stretching periodically through the day to consider the needs of all, the exhaustion and the letting go?

My world is not Waldorf portrait material. To be honest, most of us Colliers would rather live in a barn. Perhaps that is an indication of our station in evolution. We ask also for a cozy fire and access to hot water, a good friend to lean on, and food from the garden (no matter how warm), and we will eat it, grow, bicker, doubt, love and be grateful for what is ours.

Longing

2008-12-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

"....just waitin' for my ship to come in..." I sang to myself quietly, washing the dishes.

"What's that song you wrote about?" asked my eight-year-old son, Trinidad.

"Oh... it's about longing, about wishing you could have something that always seems to be just out of reach. It's about the frustration I feel in not just sitting with gratitude for what I have. There is so much to be thankful for, and much of it I wanted and received, but still there's this longing! It seems to be part of the human condition, a yearning to touch the universal spirit of Love, and we always try to put it in some earthly pursuit, whether a person or a thing. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah," he said. "Everyone longs for something. And you'll never long for something you already have."

He's got it.

Adventures In Leafdom, Part Two: Finders Keepers

2008-12-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

The fun didn't end as O-- rolled away. I gathered my things to go inside for a telephone appointment and to put on a movie for the kids. To my surprise, Trinidad would not have it. He told me that he would be staying outside and working on the leaves while I worked inside on the phone. He had a goal to reach. He agreed to put on the movie for Sam (National Velvet -- now isn't that a warm-your-heart classic?), field any of his questions or needs, and then return to the leaf pile.

Wow. Is this what it's like when they grow up? Amazing. I took him up on it, of course. He was good as gold, except when the kids from next door suddenly came out to play, and Trinidad was distracted enough to join them, pitchfork in hand. I glanced up at one point to see him brandish the fork threateningly (in play) once and had to interrupt my call for a quick reminder that the fork is ONLY to be used on leaves. What a transition point this is for Trinidad -- torn between the world of pretend while in connection with friends and the world of tools and adult-scale meaningful work.

Interestingly, the topic of paid work only came up peripherally, and Trinidad understood that we had made our goal together as a family piece of work, not offered up for payment (very little is, at our house). He only shared his curiosity around what I thought his work might be worth if he did it for someone else. I told him that if he proved a steady focus, I guessed it would be around $5/hour.

As dusk fell, Sam joined us again while we threw everything we had into the last hill of damp leaves. When the Leaf Guy dumped it all the day before, we took note of a glass beer bottle that fell in as well. Sam's fork hit something hard that clinked.

"Oh, there's the bottle," I said.

"I don't think so," he said. He stooped down.

"Maybe it's an aluminum can," I said.

"Nope," he said. "It's a quarter!"

"I'll be darned!" I smiled.

"And another," he said, beaming. And another, and another, and another. Both boys fell to digging and recovered $6 worth of quarters and a wrapper from a quarter roll. Can you believe it?

"Oh, here's that bottle," I told them, pulling out the brown glass whole.

"Yep, mom. You found that because that's what you expected to find. We expected to find money, so that's what we found."

Then I found the can. Hmm. What does that say for the year I found a steaming dead animal in the leaf pile? Was that back when I thought that moving leaves really stinks?

The boys saved their collection on the porch and continued work until they couldn't contain their excitement and plans for the money (they bought each other Christmas presents that they opened promptly the next day). Both headed inside.

All of this excitement bought me another hour and a half in the leaves by myself after dark. I saw them in the kitchen as I passed with each wheelbarrow load. They asked if they could have a glass of Egg Nog. I agreed, and they very responsibly doled each other out a small cup.

On return trips to the back garden, I noticed the carton still on the table, and glasses still tipping to nearly sated lips. After an hour, I asked if they could put the Nog away. Within minutes, both boys were burning the sugar high, taking turns spinning one another until they fell.

Trinidad returned to the leafpile to use the rest of his sugar on his work while Sam ran around the house bouncing off the walls. Seda came home and spelled me so I could cook dinner. The pile disappeared completely as I set warm plates on the table and everyone gathered round.

Trinidad, looking so adult-like, leaned his cheek on one hand and said how good he felt. And exhausted. I ran a bath with Epsom salts and later rubbed arnica into our wrists. There is nothing to bring a family together like working a common goal.

Adventures In Leafdom, Part One: Stranger in a Strange Land

2008-12-04T07:44:00.001-08:00

Two dumptruck loads of leaves in the driveway. Me, wondering as I do each year, how it will all be moved. They are the first of a total of 5-6 loads I will take, clearing two at a time until all of them mulch my garden beds and paths. This year, two neighbors also ordered leaves for me to mulch the beds I've cultivated in their yards. My work cut out for me.

At almost 10:30 a.m., I headed out with a pitchfork and a song. It was almost noon when Sam decided to put on his cowboy boots and come help me. I asked if he thought we could clear half by the end of the day. He made it a goal. Trinidad joined us a bit later and decided that the whole pile should be gone by then. Okay!

Friends arrived to drop off a garlic press we'd left behind shortly after noon. As we chatted for a moment, a black man rode by on his bike. I smiled at him, as I do at all of the neighbors I know and haven't met. He stopped his bike and spun around.

"I haven't ever seen a smile like that!" he said. "I've gotta' talk to you."

"I've got guests at the moment. Can you come back in ten minutes?"

"You bet!" he said, and wheeled away.

Half an hour later, he returned, and Trinidad and I were prepared to give this high energy man some empathy. He told us he'd just been chased out of the DariMart parking lot by the cops who couldn't understand his intense disparity about the economy. They thought he was "attacking."

He told me he needed to buy an RV for $500 or less. I thought to myself that I might know someone who was selling (in wonder at the potential serendipity), but I waited to hear more of his story.

O-- hailed from a big city back east, where he had earned a great deal of money in his work dealing drugs. He'd gotten tired of being shot at and seeing friends and family jailed, so he moved west with his girlfriend and became a Rastifarian. Needing to pay the bills and visit his girlfriend's family, they headed to Oregon where she now lives with her family and their 2 year old son. O just got out of a community college. He is homeless and looking to build trust and find work in our community.

Trinidad went to heat up some leftovers for his lunch while I spoke with him about the friend with a potential leaky RV. I decided to call on it right away, and it did appear to be available. I put phone in O's hand and made an informal introduction.

Something funny happened at that juncture. This civilized but intense young man who had been telling me his heartfelt story with eloquence suddenly shifted into a different persona as he "met" the man who might help him.

"Wha'sup?" he said in a deep voice, head cocked. Pause. (I imagined the man on the other end meeting him with some bewilderment in a proper British accent.)

"This's O--!" said my new friend. Guessing that the RV owner was still confused on his end, I heard O-- repeat his name. At this point, I left them and returned, grinning, to my leaves.

The boys and I continued our work and O-- tried to help after making plans to see the RV within 24 hours. He took our half-filled barrows and dumped them with vigor until we all began making strong requests that he let us fill them, first. He liked to keep things moving.

Before he left, I sang him a song I wrote and called "My White Girl Spiritual." He laughed at the name and listened. As I sang with my heart full on, he turned away and bowed his head in the spirit of my words and tone. It is a song of struggle and repentence, a song of longing and acceptance. I wish I could find a way to put it on the blog. At the end, he said, "Well. Now I didn't think you would do that. You are not your average Wh--" he stopped.

"White girl?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "But I knew that when you told me to come back in ten minutes. You are a blessing."

"You are a blessing to me," I said. "It is tragedy to have a gift to give, a song to sing, a smile to share and no one to share them with. Your receiving is a gift to me."

He looked at me long. "White and black," he said.

"We both have to give and receive to build this bridge. I thank you for coming by, neighbor."