Category Archives: God Stuff

The Zennoyance of M. Bullock Dresser

Posted on July 14, 2012 | 4 comments

[Pardon me while I Prufrock a minute.]

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai dietro una vettura lenta,
perché eravamo in un no sorpasso di corsia….”

“Whether it’s pain or pleasure, through lojong practice we come to have a sense of letting our experience be as it is without trying to manipulate it, push it away, or grasp it. The pleasurable aspects of being human as well as the painful ones become the key to awakening bodhichitta.” Pema Chodron Start Where You Are

Let us go then, you and I,
While the drought sucks all the rain out of the sky,
Like a baby nursing at its mama’s breast,
Let us go through several tiny towns,
The kind with no uptown or down,
And speed traps their biggest revenue stream,
The middle class mostly a dream,
One of those nightmares where you find a room
That leads you to numberless other rooms
You never knew you had–
Oh, stop. Don’t tell me about your day.
Let’s just hit the road.

On Highway 14 the woman drove too leisurely,
In a lime-green Mercedes named Martini.

The heat wave that sharpens its teeth on a wheel,
The heat swamp that buffs its nails on a wheel,
Licked its lips along the shoulder of the road,
Turned off the cruise control at some point,
Rolled down the window to watch something congeal,
Did a three-point turn, put the pedal to the floor,
And seeing no sheriff’s car anywhere in sight,
Broke the speed of sound, and drove out of sight. But

On Highway 14 the woman drove too leisurely,
In a lime-green Mercedes named Martini.

____________________________

I might work some more on that, being as I’m middle aged, and wondering what I am not (nor was meant to be) and wondering, A LOT lately, “Do I dare” and “Do I dare?”

In the meantime, let me talk about that Mercedes. My parents and Wendell and I had set off this morning about 10 for Rockford, to see my Aunt Margie, who’s in a nursing home there. Somewhere between Spring Green and Madison, we ended up behind a lovely lime-green Mercedes convertible with the license plate “MARTINIS.”

First of all, I’m not sure I’d want to advertise I LOVE ALCOHOL SO MUCH IT’S MY PERSONALIZED PLATE, just in case I ever got pulled over.

(Not that I get pulled over a lot. Mom and I talked today about traffic tickets we’d gotten–neither of us has gotten many. But I remember being very impressed when my Gran’mommy got a speeding ticket when she was in her seventies, for going something like 60 in a 40mph zone. My cousin Jodie and I used to freak out when we watched her drive because she was old-school—she would have her right foot on the gas and her left foot poised over the brake. I particularly like to think about her as a driver because it stood in marked contrast to her basic mode as a kindly and gentle and extremely ladylike Baptist.)

Second of all, WOW that Mercedes was going slow. About 45, and it’s actually a highway, where you can go pretty much 60 and not worry at all about getting pulled over. There was some slight lane meanderage on the Mercedes’ part as well.

At the stoplight in Black Earth, the woman who was driving was fixing her hair in her fetching visor-cap and YES, the light turned green, and she kept working on her hair for a count of 1-2-3.

We couldn’t pass–Highway 14 is two-lane most of the way, and a lot of no-passing zones (or, as I like to think of them, no sorpasso di corsias) and a fair amount of traffic. It was timed exactly wrong almost the whole way.

Third of all (or is it fifth of all?), it wasn’t really “MARTINIS.” It’s the name of a popular cocktail, though. I just don’t want to go listing license plates on my blog. Except, if you make your personalized plate really easy to remember and then drive in really annoying ways in front of people, you should kind of expect to show up in a blog.

In a very dramatic moment, the minivan behind us gunned it to pass them, and barely made it back over before the passing lane ended, with oncoming traffic approaching, too. The passenger in MARTINIS flipped off the minivan, which puzzled us, until my Dad pointed out that maybe someone in the minivan had flipped them off first.

“I’m pretty sure they’re just out for a cruise,” my son said.

Finally, we were able to pass them. I thought of them briefly as we drove through Janesville later and it was raining—were the Martinis o.k.? Did they get the top up in time?

If I’d been in a hurry, I’m sure I would have been mad. My friend & UW System colleague Ryan Martin explains why we get so mad when we’re driving in this great post, “All the Rage.”

But honestly, my annoyance didn’t shift into anger today. They were so annoying it ended up being hilarious. I asked on Facebook this evening if anyone knew them, and I now know who they are. They own a bar, actually, so I’m wondering if I can turn this into a free drink somehow.

Because this is a totally flattering portrait of them, right? And of me, right?

Here’s the thing, and the reason I quoted Pema Chodron—at some point, getting annoyed at someone who’s being annoying, and then expressing that annoyance, is all just annoying. Same with obnoxious behavior. It’s hard to respond to rudeness without also being rude.

Like last night, during the performance of Skylight (PHENOMENAL—everyone should go see this play), I paid good money for a great seat in the second row, but there were three people in front of me who thought sitting in the FRONT ROW of the Touchstone Theater, a small venue, during a terrific show–they thought that was a good time to talk. It wasn’t so much that I could hear them (I have hearing aids), but they were leaning over a lot, so it was visually distracting. There were some odd dynamics going on, too—I couldn’t tell if the woman in the middle was sick, and her husband and friend were concerned, or if they chose Skylight because they were currently in a ménage a trois. I wondered about the latter because there seemed to be a lot of meaningful shoulder-rubs and knee-strokings in all kinds of variations (him on her, him on other her, her on her, her on him, other her on him). Regardless–what I really wanted to do was thump each of them on the head.

(I did once kick the seat of a woman in front of me at Sundance theater once during a Clooney movie—she was texting on a smart phone and it was REALLY BRIGHT.)

But it’s rude to thump someone on the head, and I was worried that my thumping might be an even bigger distraction to the actors I was already worried were distracted (Clooney couldn’t see me kicking the seat of the woman in front of me), or make them talk MORE, or begin to rub the sore spots for each other where they’d been thumped.

I moved to a different seat at half-time, but the three lovers (or the married couple and friend, one of whom was sick) didn’t return. Which was a little disappointing, since I’d complained about them to numerous people while eating my much-anticipated brownie, which, frankly, was a little dry (the brownies are usually amazing there).

One moral of these stories is, I don’t mind being annoyed as long as I get a story out of it.

Another part of what it comes down to is I’m not sure I have the right to be angry (or even annoyed). My Gran’mommy wouldn’t let us say “darn” or “heck” when we were little, because they were just substitutes for “damn” and “hell.” I remember asking at some point what I was supposed to say when I got mad, and she essentially said, “Don’t get mad.”

I don’t think of myself as an angry person, but maybe these lines from Justified apply (I’d love it if they did–I’d love being an Elmore Leonard character):

At the end of the pilot, Raylan has broken into the home of his ex-wife and her new husband in the middle of the night, and is then chatting with her out on the deck.

“I just never thought of myself as an angry man,” he says, after explaining why he shot a man.

And Winona says, ”Oh. Raylan, well, you do a good job of hiding it—I suppose most folks don’t see it, but honestly? You’re the angriest man I have ever known.”

What I’m hoping for is some sort of Zen Baptist process by which I can feel annoyance (read: anger) and express it without making the world a worse place, without cancelling out the benefit of however many days of meditation and Bible reading I’ve managed to string together.

This won’t be easy. The Baptist part of me remembers this verse, Matthew 7:3, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” Most of the time I complain, I feel compelled to point out my own guilt. That’s not the worst habit in the world (I find it annoying when others don’t admit their own guilt, ever), but do I really have to list all the ways I’ve annoyed people who were driving behind me before I can say, “that Mercedes was really annoying,” before I can allow myself to be annoyed?

Is the height of Zen training really to get to the point where I drive behind a car going slower than I want to go and my actual response goes something like, “it is what it is,” and I use the slower pace to be mindful about my surroundings? How different is that, really, from trying never to get angry?

Just asking. I’ll stop now before I get carried away.

The pilot of Justified ends with Raylan processing Winona’s comment, goes to the credits, and we get to hear, once again, Tone Z with Gangsta Grass:

“On this lonely road,
trying to make it home
Doing it by my lonesome-pissed off, who wants some
I see them long hard times to come.”

If I were an Elmore Leonard show, I’d be done already. Since it’s me, I’ll just say that my new life goal is to mention Timothy Olyphant every other blog entry.

And also to get a free drink from restaurant owners who drive slowly enough, for long enough, that I think they owe me something. Unless that annoys them, in which case I apologize for being annoyed.

4 Comments

Posted in Family, God Stuff, Poetry, Searching, Spring Green, Uncategorized

The Weather Rules: If It Doesn’t Rain, Tlaloc Just Isn’t That Into You

Posted on July 9, 2012 | 2 comments

Say what you will about nature being female—Mother Earth, Earth Mother, Mother Nature, Gaia, what have you—now that this heat-wave-drought-thing is stretching on and on here in the land of dried-out cheese, I’ve realized I recognize this feeling of abandonment and desertion the lack of rain leaves me with.

It’s just like waiting for a guy who said he’d call to call.

That moment of enlightenment reminded me immediately of The Rules, and that got me wondering if we could generate some weather rules.

(Disclaimer here—I did not use the book or website as any part of the mating ritual that led me into my wonderful marriage),

My basic opinion is that rules like The RULES work best for people who play games.

But this whole “20 Percent Chance of Rain” icon that shows up on the weather forecast online AND THEN VANISHES every couple of days, or even, “50 Percent Chance of Thunderstorms” (also vanishes) have left me feeling toyed with.

So I’m looking for a weather god to blame.

For nominees, I would say possibly one of the Thunder Brothers, who were part of the Penobscot tribes (I’m thinking of Major Houlihan’s husband here, actually), or Pamola the Moosehead, or even Tlaloc, who was Aztec, but things feel desertified here lately, so maybe he’s expanded his range. But really, I’m just thinking some kind of generic, Pan-Indian, vaguely Celtic (given my own genetic heritage) pissy guy with supernatural powers related to rain. I call him Mr. Rain God.

I’ve thought seriously about this for almost an hour now, and I really think if we all follow the following rules, Mr. Rain God will stop being so damn WITHHOLDING.

Rule #1 is “be a creature unlike any other.” In this case the creature is a state (actually just the southern part of the state) or a region, not so much a creature at all, so I would say the weather rule translation would have to be “show up on Google Street View in really freaky ways.” A number of us have been trying to fry eggs on pavement—I think if those of us in Wisconsin just add cheese, we’ll be a dry region like no other.

Rule #2 involves leaving your house. I’ll admit—this has been hard for me. We have the summertime equivalent of “cabin fever,” only it’s hotter outside than inside. So—all of us, ESPECIALLY those of us who’ve been camped out in our central-air-hidey-holes, let’s get out more. (Just not tonight probably, in my case.)

Rule #3 says “it’s a fantasy relationship unless a man asks you out.” I think the weather rule equivalent would be “a weather myth is just a myth UNLESS IT RAINS.”

#4 is about office romance. If you work at a weather-related job, this applies to you.

#5 is about long-distance relationships, and says “he must visit you at least three times before you visit him.” So that’s it. I’m not looking at another forecast, or up in the sky, or anything, until it rains. Three times.

#6 is about personal ads, and to be honest, this had not even occurred to me. But THE RULES says that a woman should place the ad and “let men respond to you.” So I’m interpreting this to mean that not only should we stop looking at forecasts online, we should instead, place one of those Craigslist “missed connections” ads—“Mr. Rain God—saw some dark clouds in the sky above my house, but when I looked again, you were gone.” And just see what he does.

#7 is, I think, the most famous of the rules: “If he does not call, he is not that interested. Period.” So yeah, that’s how I’m feeling these days about Mr. Rain God. He is just not that into me.

#8 says “buyer beware,” but really—what are my options for rain? I mean—Mr. Rain God is pissy and fickle and absolutely Mr. Wrong, but I feel like Peggy Lee here: “He’s a tramp, but I love him.”

#9 says “Close the deal. Rules women do not date men for more than two years.” Not a problem. If it doesn’t rain for another two years, I’ll have much more serious things on my mind.

I know, I know—some of you are saying Yahweh is in charge of the weather, what with the whole 40-days, 40-nights story, and this: from Leviticus 26: “If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you your rains in their season….” But the problem there is that we had massive floods here in Southwest Wisconsin just four years ago, and I can’t imagine we’ve had a serious change in faithful observance in the last four years.

And then some of you will probably talk about climate change.

For the record, I tend to believe God could affect the weather but almost never does, and that we’ve screwed up the planet, pretty much irreparably. (I don’t know how those two thoughts are connected.)

But the hot, dry weather (dry, as in, no rain, but it’s still humid—how is that fair? Here’s my Rule #1: if you’re not going to send rain, you don’t get to make it humid) makes me crabby and when I’m crabby, I find magical thinking MUCH more satisfying than either logic or theology.

The horrible part is that for me, it’s just an inconvenience, just a matter of higher a.c. bills. It didn’t even increase my watering chores in the garden, because I didn’t quite get around to putting in a garden this year. And nath sure hasn’t had to mow. Also—I’ve been noticing the last few years that when it’s a really good year for corn, it’s a really good year for ragweed, so I’m hoping the converse is true.

But that corn is breaking my heart. “Inconvenient” isn’t even on the same planet as the adjectives that describe what a drought means to farmers. Except where the fields are irrigated, corn here in Wisconsin looks spiky, like pineapple fields, or just brown. I worry a lot about the farmers—some of them have crop insurance, but even so, a bumper crop would always be a better outcome. Farming’s hard enough, you know? A drought like this could send someone who’s close to going under financially ALL the way down (and farming is one of those businesses that is almost always a little precarious).

So—instead of simply being sad and worried for the farmers, and worried for people who don’t have air conditioning, and worried for people who have to work outside, and pissy about having a hot summer when this is usually when we get to brag on Facebook about living in Wisconsin—THIS is when we’re supposed to be saying, “Great sleeping weather!” and “Ah….this is why we put up with blizzards….” Instead of all that, I’m working THE WEATHER RULES.

Because, in a direct quote that is directly applicable, Rule #10 is “keep doing the rules even when things are slow.”

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Recuperator

Posted on June 4, 2012 | 1 comment

|riˈkoōpəˌrātər|
noun
a form of heat exchanger in which hot waste gases from a furnace are conducted continuously along a system of flues where they impart heat to incoming air or gaseous fuel.

How weirdly illness changes time and goals–
everything sticky slow and progress ant-sized–
that our bodies heal at all seems miraculous.

Like trying to watch Venus make its crawl
on the sun a day early or while lightning strikes,
how weirdly illness changes time. And goals

become ridiculous. The prayer for normal
bowel movements is such a blow to pride
that our bodies heal. Of all the miracles

I know, I think now of my father’s heart muscle,
its pace currently regulated by an appliance.
How weird. Illness changes time, and goals

conduct themselves along a flue, heating fuel
and air like machines, leaving us febrile,
but our bodies heal sometimes, which seems miraculous

to me now, given how much can go awry
in even this age of advancing medical science.
How weirdly illness changes time and goals
into the age of fucking miracles.

______

Tuesday is my one-week post-gallbladder-removal mark, and Wednesday is my father’s one-week post-tumor-removal mark. My surgery was planned; his was not. We both make slow progress back toward health and normalcy, though I’m closer to home than he is, since my gallbladder wasn’t as big a villain as his tumor, and my surgery nowhere near as violent as his.

I was so pleased with my surgical team–if you read my gallbladder post, you’ll be happy to know I awoke in recovery with four x’s on my right hand. I did question the wisdom of asking for them in permanent marker as they stayed there day after day (but they’re gone now). My parents are pleased with Dad’s surgeon (and I have to say my mother is at a very, very picky place right now when it comes to health care).

What I tried to convey in the villanelle is the weirdness of healing. I told my husband this evening I was officially tired of not feeling well, which I’m sure means I’m just about better.

But progress comes slowly sometimes. This is actually the first villanelle I’ve ever written without having to look up the form–and I’ve written a lot of villanelles. (And then I did look it up just to double-check.)

Looking up recuperation, I found recuperator and I’m really loving the idea of recuperation as a machine–the product of science and reason. But there’s part of me that will always, always, long for and believe in the age of fucking miracles.

(Can you tell I’ve spent time watching the third season of Deadwood as part of my recuperator time?)

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Happy Easter

Posted on April 7, 2012 | 3 comments

for my cousins

In the story I remember, it was an ax
my uncle carried, chasing his father with it,
and promising as he ran, “If you ever hit
my mother again, you’re dead.” Whatever else Max

was guilty of, I credit him with this.
Now getting to know my cousins and their kids,
after a generation of distance and lack,
I’m learning more what it means to be a Bullock.

It seems to involve self-medicating a lot.
It seems to involve holding in or acting out
the pain that runs like sap in our family tree.

If we’d been in the garden with Jesus, we would’ve fought back,
a crazy, screaming Scots-Irish kind of attack.
It isn’t in the Bible. It’s just a fact.

Some of the Easter eggs I bought for my son have camouflage on them–he’s heavy into all things Star Wars and soldiering. I told him the story tonight about Jesus in the garden, getting arrested, and Peter cutting off the soldier’s ear. That wasn’t how Jesus wanted to handle it, I told him. We talked a little about Aslan and the White Witch, and how she thought she’d won when she hadn’t. I’m often anti-war (because I think it should be a last resort, and I think we should treat our soldiers’ lives with respect and be CAREFUL about where we send them), but I’m nowhere close to being a pacifist. My folks say that they always told my brother not to hit girls, and there were girls who wailed on him. They say they never had a chance to tell me not to hit back, that if someone hit me, I’d come back with everything I had. (Part of this helped me survive as a little sister, of course.)

Long-term, I want to work on understanding, perhaps adapting, the whole realm of “turn the other cheek.” Medium-term, I want to teach my son to honor soldiers and think of war as a last resort. (That’s him in the picture above, holding his Maxwell Smart tulip gun.)

Short-term, don’t mess with me or my cousins.

Happy Easter, Bullocks everywhere!

3 Comments

Posted in Family, God Stuff

Pearl Onion Sets in the Pig Pen

Posted on April 5, 2012 | 9 comments

Matthew 13: 1-9

“That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. 2Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9Let anyone with ears* listen!’”

“We’ve been travelin’ on the rocky ground, rocky ground,” Springsteen’s background singers croon out sweetly on his latest album. Even though I’ve been listening to that album over and over during my commute and other times (grading papers, writing, now), there are other reasons I’m thinking about rocky ground.

I’m still spending time this week thinking “what if  my life never changed,” and I’m enjoying that focus–I have so many blessings. Here’s one thing that thrills me–I’ve made a life where I get to spend a lot of time reading,  much of it work related, but not all. Where do I get time to do reading for fun? As I confessed on Monday, I average about 40 hours of work a week. But we also don’t have cable, so there’s not a whole lot of TV viewing in my schedule. Lots and lots and lots of book time.

But one of the reasons I was motivated to take a hard, blessing-laser-look at my life is that it seems to me the universe has been telling me no a fair bit lately. Lots of yes, sure, but NO sometimes when I was really hoping for yes. Everything from applying for a UW System position that would’ve meant a chance to work with some amazing people AND get a course release to do it,  to getting published, to getting a course approved for a particular degree designation for students. No. No. No.  A few others as well–no, no, no.

Yesterday it wasn’t “no,” but it was furrowed brows and pursed lips and blank looks and “go through another layer of protocol to get approval.” Also possibly some conversations through pursed lips when I wasn’t in the room.  Fine–that’s the world of work, right? You can’t always get what you want. Not every idea pans out. There is no “I” in “shared governance.” I get it. I’m not taking it personally, but I’m taking it.  I’m taking it and processing it.

It’s not like I lack for ideas. If the universe says no this time, I’m ready with another launch. Seeds aplenty. Enough to scatter.

My question is this:  where’s my fertile soil?

I know that later in Matthew 13 the disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable, but I’m suspicious of that–it seems more likely to me that Jesus ended with  “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear” (from the King James Version, the poetry of which can’t be beat, especially not by “let anyone with ears listen,” ironic, since apparently the translators of the New Revised Standard Version, which I like for other reasons, had no ears to hear music).  It seems likely to me that the disciples ended up going home and saying, “Well, what do you think he meant this time?” And came up with the word of God idea and told that to others so that eventually the cartoon bubbles got mixed up and people remembered Jesus saying all those words. In any case, in my head this story is merging with Jesus saying “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” and I’m left wondering if I’m sowing my seeds in the right place.

Where’s the line between giving it the old college try and beating your head against a dead horse?

In looking to Jesus (as I often, often do), I can’t help but remember two contradictory stories–there’s the shepherd who searches relentlessly for the one lost sheep (not practical!), which would indicate diligence and patience are called for.  Then there’s the “brush the dust of that town off your feet” if people won’t listen to you. Again and again–Mary or Martha? Should I stay or should I go? (No, wait–that’s the Clash.)

And then when it  comes to “don’t cast your pearls before swine,” I have to think of Rodney Jones calling pigs “the dolphins of the barnyard,” and I also remember Dorothy Parker’s response when someone moved to let her go through a doorway first, saying, “age before beauty.” Her response was “pearls before swine.”

Clearly, what I’m saying is, I’m addle-pated. I guess for the moment I’ll trust in the gospel of the Boss who sings, towards the end of “Rocky Ground,” that “there’s a new day comin’.” Maybe in that new day there will be some more yes and slightly less no. Of course the song ends with the same sweet-sounding chorus of hard times, “We’ve been travelin’ on the rocky ground, rocky ground.”

At least I’m looking down now and then and noticing, “Oh. That’s rocky ground.”

9 Comments

Posted in Creativity, God Stuff, Uncategorized, Work Life

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On Being David Crosby’s Higher Power

Posted on March 31, 2012 | 1 comment

“If you’re into spiritual practice, you make a space where every day you can make contact with your higher self, whatever you call it – God, dog. I call it Marnie.” David Crosby

 

It makes me like him even more, of course,

That in addition to donating sperm

To help make a lesbian rocker baby dream

Come true (and all his sweet harmonies of course),

He also calls his higher power by my name.

If my name were plainer, I might not even care.

But I once claimed a psychic link with William Hurt–

Marlee sounds like Marnie and we had the same

basic region of problem–she’s deaf, I’ve got hearing aids….

The Quaker in me, the Transcendentalist,

The yin-yang Zen Baptist me that flushed

Original sin clean off my “Here’s What I Believe” list,

I think we all could be each other’s higher power.

But once a Woodstock legend says you’re his,

I think you had better start to act like it.

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God of Monday Morning

Posted on February 20, 2012 | 3 comments

GOD OF MONDAY MORNING

God of running just a little late,
Of the scraping of windshields, another month at least—
Of I cannot wear the shoes that are perfect for this outfit
(the shoe repair I paid good money for didn’t last)—
God of where the hell did the weekend go?
Those hours that stretched so wide and open Friday night—
They dried up and blew away, went down the drain—
I must not have planned each hour exactly right—
I had some fun, I got a few things done
And yet I start the work week just as behind
As ever, always, apparently eternally I am—
Compared to everyone else’s current shitstorm
I know I’m lucky. I know I’m whining and
I do praise God that some days, this is as bad as it gets.
And yet, dear God, what if this is as good as it gets?

3 Comments

Posted in God Stuff, Uncategorized, Work Life

Small Comfort

Posted on December 21, 2011 | 4 comments

During one of those “oops we’re having an existential conversation” moments, Mom asked me once, “But you do think people are more important than animals, right?” I don’t remember what prompted the question, but I remember saying, “Some people.”

I’m not quite as bad as one of David Sedaris’s sisters, who, according to him, when she sees a car wreck says, “I just hope there wasn’t a dog in there.”

But if I’m honest, I’ll admit that the deaths of animals I’ve loved, in general, hit me harder than people deaths.

I wrote the following last night and this morning. I don’t think in sonnets, but I do process the world in sonnets a fair bit of the time.

SMALL COMFORT

Jack Baptist though I am, I hold out hope
For Heaven. Please don’t tell me if you don’t,
Not right now, not when my Buddy Cat is gone,
And by the time he went, a bag of bones.
Don’t tell me that in all the universe
This dusty planet’s all there is for us.
I live as if there’s nothing more than this.
Or do I mean I live as if there is.
I want my cat restored, purring and fat
With all the other cats and dogs I’ve lost,
And all the people, too. If I can’t have that,
A holy mountain where life is joyful and just,
I’ll settle for love, work for justice, etcetera,
The everbearing blessing of now. Small comfort.

This blog with pictures from dueling-banjo church signs is comforting, though–I particularly love the tone and the end.  Of course,  even as a Jack Baptist (my version of Jack Mormon) , I immediately began hunting for verses that hint at animals in heaven. My faves: Isaiah 11 where the lion and lamb hang out on the holy mountain, and God’s covenant post-flood, which was with Noah & his Mrs. AND all the animals.

This isn’t the stuff of argument for me, though. It’s in the realm of faith & hope  & quantum physics & the changing nature of matter on the nano scale. It’s hard to see what’s there and hard to understand what we do see. Meanwhile, the everbearing blessing of now, however small that comfort is.

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Posted in Family, God Stuff, Uncategorized

GRIEF FOR THE UNCOUSINLY CHASM, Part 2 (my inner Cadfael)

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 1 comment

What books do we reread? Sharing that information shares a lot.

One of the reasons I’m more o.k. this fall (in the turmoil of an effort to Recall Walker–please see note #1 below ) than I was last spring (in the anxious haze of protesting against Walker)—more able to hold onto my equanimity, less likely to feel whipped around by second-hand adrenaline, can be found in a couple of books I reread most years.

The Virgin in the Ice is the sixth book in the Brother Cadfael series. (The BBC made some fetching adaptations of some of the books, but I prefer the books themselves, although Derek Jacobi is firmly planted in my mind as the meddling monk.)

Edith Pargeter took the pen name Ellis Peters and wrote 21 of these books. I love them for several reasons (cf. note #2). Brother Cadfael is the monastery’s herbalist, so there are terrific passages about gardens and herbs and healing. Peters loved the changing seasons, and I love her passages about them.

In her last book, Brother Cadfael’s Penance, published just after she died, Peters muses on the beauty of November (which our early December still resembled until today, when it just seems COLD):

“Most of the leaves were fallen, the stems dark and clenched like fleshless fingers holding fast to the remnant of the summer, all the fragrances gathered into one scent of age and decline, still sweet, but with the damp, rotting sweetness of harvest over and decay setting in. It was not yet very cold, the mild melancholy of November still hand lingering gold in it, in falling leaves and slanting amber light.”

Peters doesn’t have the lush, swampy poetry of another mystery writer I love, James Lee Burke, but I appreciate her imagery, the occasional dab of a trope, and the perspective—a little surprising. A little twist on how we might normally see things. That’s what makes her books worth rereading for me—the gentle prodding to see the world differently.

She goes on to say that Brother Cadfael, now in his late sixties, “had never before been quite so acutely aware of the particular quality and function of November, its ripeness and its hushed sadness. The year proceeds not in a straight line, through the seasons, but in a circle that brings the world and man back to the dimness and mystery in which both began, and out of which a new seed-time and a new generation are about to begin.”

I’ve been appreciating the yin yang symbol lately, and this passage reminds me of that—the sense of circularity, the sense that the green on green on green of my favorite month, June, can’t happen without the gray on brown on white of late autumn.

Brother Cadfael, of course, is musing on his own mortality and concludes he should “go contentedly into the earth with the moist, gentle, skeletal leaves, worn to cobweb fragility, like the skins of very old men, that bruise and stain at the mere brushing of the breeze, and flower into brown blotches as the leaves into rotting gold. The colours of late autumn are the colours of the sunset: the farewell of the year and the farewell of the day. And of the life of man? Well, if it ends in a flourish of gold, that is no bad ending.”

Cadfael’s friend Sheriff Hugh Beringar (see harrumph in note #3 below) comes upon him at this point and says “God bless the work…if any’s been done here this afternoon. I thought you had taken root.”

The other Brother Cadfael book I reread yearly, The Virgin in the Ice, takes place several years earlier in the series, but also at the end of November and throughout December. It’s that point where things are gray and cold and it feels as though it could snow at any moment. Sort of like today. You can tell by the title things get cold and stay cold.

And this book comes to mind especially this year, the year of “the troubles” in Wisconsin, as one of my many clever colleagues put it. Brother Cadfael’s books take place in England in the 12th century, during what is sometimes called “the Anarchy,” when the Empress Maud and King Stephen fought for the throne and divided the country.

I’ve been in Wisconsin for twenty years now, and in the election cycle we’re often called a battleground state. Of course our battles don’t result in deaths, so calling our current conflicts “the troubles” is an exaggeration (see note #4 below). We have not suffered the violence they suffered in Northern Ireland and I hope we don’t come any closer to it than we already have, although things sometimes feel very powder-keggery and tinder-boxy.

And of course we’re not in a civil war in Wisconsin, although we are surely divided. Polls have shown that almost no one here is in the “undecided” category.

One of the things I love about Brother Cadfael is that he doesn’t choose sides with Maud or Stephen. In fact, he makes the point to numerous characters over the whole series that although he understands fighting for a side with all your heart—before he was a monk, he was a foot soldier in the Crusades—this is not his fight.

I am not Brother Cadfael—I have chosen sides and I’m not sorry for that. I am partisan. I have a dog in this fight, as my father would say.

However.

At one point during a battle in Brother Cadfael’s Penance, he is told,

“You’ve done enough brother…in a quarrel that’s been none of your making.”
“None of us,” said Cadfael ruefully, clambering dazedly to his feet, “has ever done enough—or never in the right direction.”

And although I’ve chosen sides and am working in my pitiful way to help Recall Walker, I do rue the quarrel. I do feel dazed. I do wonder how we’ll emerge from this hard time, if we’ll ever be other than a battleground state. I wonder if we’re doing enough, or too much, or always in the wrong direction. All of us, I mean—the side I’m on and the side I’m not on.

So I have summoned my inner Cadfael. There is a part of me I’m holding apart, a neutral monk, as it were, someone who can see the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. It helps. And in that mode, I was able to send a friend request to someone I’d unfriended on Facebook when he made a perfectly civil comment last spring in support of Scott Walker. It’s a tiny gesture toward common ground, but it was sincerely meant. Last spring I felt so unhinged I couldn’t bear to see even his civil disagreement as anything but but a devastating blow. Things feel very different now.

He accepted my friend request and I felt deep gratitude, perhaps out of proportion to the act. But I am grateful for grace, wherever it appears.

I’m still partisan. If a woman ends up being the Democratic candidate for governor, I will absolutely get a bumper sticker that says MY CASTLE STANDS WITH THE EMPRESS MAUD.

But as I look across this particular chasm, I want to at least make eye contact with people I care about on the other side. Obviously we’re very far apart politically, and in some cases the chasm runs deeper than politics. I’m just hoping that what connects us runs even deeper.

 

 

 

#1Once again, let me assure readers I have worked on this blog off-campus, using my own computer.
#2There are words I find in these books I don’t find anywhere else and I long to use them in a Lexulous game: tocsin, hauberk, and seisin among them.
#3This is one of my problems with the BBC series—Sean Pertwee was Sheriff Beringar in just a few episodes, but he was the first one I saw, and perfect, I thought, and then I was sorely disappointed every time he wasn’t in there, nearly aggrieved, really. Since the friendship between Cadfael and Beringar is a huge part of the stories, the disappointment appeared frequently.
#4Perhaps akin to the hyperbole of Sylvia Plath identifying with Holocaust victims because her emotional life was HARD.

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GRIEF FOR THE UNCOUSINLY CHASM, Part 1 (La condition humaine)

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 1 comment

“England was already frozen into a winter years long…. King Stephen was crowned, and held, however slackly, most of England. The Empress Maud, his rival for the throne, held the west, and came with a claim the equal of Stephen’s. Cousins, most uncousinly, they tore each other and tore England between them, and yet life must go on, faith must go on, the stubborn defiance of fortune must go on in the husbandry of the year, season after season, plough and harrow and seed, tillage and harvest.”     Ellis Peters, The Virgin in the Ice

I have pledged to sing at karaoke at the Shed next time around IF my friend Melinda is there and IF Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender”  is playing. I’m terrified to sing in public—it has to do with a childhood trauma in which I taped myself while singing along to a favorite record, after which, at some point, the tape was stolen and played in front of others, and I was assured by the thief that everyone laughed and thought I was a horrible singer—but Melinda makes me brave, and Springsteen makes me brave, and Lake Louie’s Warped Speed Scotch Ale also makes me brave.

Melinda is one of the main organizers of Spring Green’s Recall Walker effort (see note #1 below) and I am helping a little, though the number of signatures I’ve gathered is pretty pitiful.

It’s not a perfect analogy, just sort of loosely, vaguely analogous, but if we time-traveled to England about 850 years ago, Melinda might be a chatelaine whose castle declared for the Empress. Or an abbess whose nuns sheltered the right kind of knights. Or a merchant who acted as a courier for secret messages. Whatever she would have been, I’d have been the third kitchen helper or the clumsiest nun or the woman buying gloves, standing there acting as though I didn’t know exactly what was going on. In short, I would do pretty much whatever she needed me to (pitifully, probably, cf. above).

And I think, if we were standing there some 850 years ago, as the late autumn hardened into early winter, we would say we understood why others fought for the king.

We agreed recently it must be hard for Walker’s supporters, who were happy when he won, and who now wish people would just leave him alone to do his job. We agreed we felt the same way about Obama. We had this conversation standing across from a church gathering Recall Walker signatures, just after an older gentleman had called us “damn fools.”

This tendency to disagree, whether or not blood is shed, makes me think of Robert Penn Warren in his poem “Folly on Royal Street.” Our grand captiousness is, pretty simply,

“La conditione humaine,
which was sure God what we were.”
Empathizing with people I disagree with doesn’t stop me from disagreeing, however—not this time.

Of all the things I’m angry at Scott Walker about, the devastating blow to educator morale is high on the list, and one colleague springs to mind more than almost any other. This is a young man well on his way to earning tenure, admired by his colleagues, loved by students. He’s one of those people with a large personality and an energy level to match. But when I saw him this fall, he looked utterly bedraggled. It was late on a Friday afternoon, but he’s someone I would typically expect to see bopping around even at that point, annoying the rest of us who experience dips in our energy levels from time to time.

He said he was depressed and I would say he is also burned out. He works a lot of hours, more than I do, and isn’t sure how long he can sustain the pace. I know times are hard, so this isn’t the place to argue about salaries—most of the people I know who teach in the UW System do understand how lucky we are to have jobs, how lucky we are to have relative job security, to be able to provide for our families with our salaries. But our salaries were stagnant before 2008, and beyond that, the divisiveness in Wisconsin has made it acceptable for some people to say right to our faces that they think we’re overpaid and underworked. Let me assure you—this young man I speak of has never underworked a day in his life. As for overpaid, well, he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep up his mortgage. If another college in a state that’s supporting higher education even slightly more than Wisconsin comes calling, he might listen. Or we might lose him to a private college, the way the UW Colleges is losing our premiere researcher in the field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to Vanderbilt, beginning in January. Or we might keep him, but not really him at his highest potential, not him, not really, not if he stays depressed and burned out. Everyone loses if someone like him isn’t routinely thrilled to be doing the job he does.

When I saw him in early November, we talked briefly about the Recall Walker campaign, about ten days before it kicked off. He said he wasn’t going to participate, that he just couldn’t. And we agreed that last spring had been very hard emotionally.

Yes, I protested at the Capitol. Three times. One of those times I got to touch a hero of mine, Susan Sarandon. I hadn’t realized she was there, but I was moving one way in a mass of people and she was moving the other, and I recognized her, reached over to touch her arm, said, “Thank-you,” and she looked up at my ridiculous blaze-orange-ear-flap cap, on which I’d written “Public Employee”” and said to me, “Thank-you.” That’s one of my top-ten life moments. I won’t apologize for it.

But it was an adrenaline roller coaster last spring. I think the collective weight of the citizens of Wisconsin stayed the same, but only because the pounds gained by those of us eating emotionally (one friend began putting bacon on her veggie burgers) were balanced out by the pounds lost by those too tense to eat.

My young colleague said he couldn’t help with the Recall because he couldn’t go through that again. I said I understood, but said I felt calmer now. “How?” he asked. “How?”

I’ve been articulating my answer, and it’s taken me a month. Here’s how.

I am currently in the process of healing from burnout. I think I’ve been on the edge of burnout most of my life. I remember it most clearly beginning in high school, so it may be correlated with hormones. I come by this naturally, the tendency to push to extremes and then collapse. My mother does it (though less as she ages, so maybe it really is related to hormones), her sisters do it, her mother did it…. I’d like to stop doing it. There’s a terrific book called Tired of Being Tired that has helped a lot.

So that’s part of the answer to my colleague—healing from burnout. Because, as Ellis Peters says, “life must go on, faith must go on, the stubborn defiance of fortune must go on in the husbandry of the year, season after season, plough and harrow and seed, tillage and harvest.” Our professorly version of that would be semester after semester, grading and prepping and conferencing, teaching and turning in grades. We go on because we have to, and there are still so many moments we love what we do, which is part of why so many of us are working on the Recall.

Or as the Boss would say, “No retreat, Baby, no surrender.”

#1 Because this particular blog has political content, I have been careful not to work on it while on campus, and I am using my own laptop to compose it.

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