Archive
Two poems
Sometimes the night falls
and I fall with it, those
inner reefs no match
for the outer currents.
Sometimes the day comes
and I’m not ready, the
sunlight streaming, too
binding for a dip in the dark.
Sometimes the rain breaks,
pouring down, washing me
out down the street past storefronts
of fruit, where my boys linger.
This is how I interact with the world,
fully engaged, and a bit unable to
loosen the harness.
This is how I make peace with the world,
too, the personal battles played out against
the ebb and flow of greater forces.
For I am a force to be reckoned with. Know that.
But even gravity finds its match in
nothingness.
by Manya Raman Sundström
For Cathy O’Neil, whom I barely met
Umeå, Nov. 7, 2010
—————————————-
This Wind
This wind
is a woman
no doubt.
She’s soft as silk,
then bold and wild.
She scolds and sulks,
bedraggles,
beguiles.
She’s the kind of wind
the palm trees bow down to:
regal, feral,
revered,
reviled.
This wind
is a flamenco temptress
staccato tempest,
her temper
flares
and subsides.
She rewards with a caress
neither tender
nor mild.
This wind
is an enraged mother,
a heart breaker,
a scorned lover, yes
but, Sister!
She’s a rabble rousing
trouble making
jailbreaker
in a dress.
She’ll rattle the gates
drum at the door
flirt with the warden
if that’s what it takes.
Freedom! my child,
Freedom! she moans.
She’s howling for you:
Woman to woman.
By Becky Jaffe
Inspired by tonight’s blustery wind, and by the kick-ass women in my life (that’s you!)
Nov. 2, 2011
In memory of Sally Hale
When I was five years old my parents moved to Lexington, Massachusetts. My first friend, so my oldest friend, was my next door neighbor Sally Hale, the mom of the twin boys next door Ezra and Caleb, two years older than me and the same age as my brother. Sally, who also had two older boys, so four altogether, took me under her wing as the daughter she never had. I understand that so well now that I have three sons and the boy downstairs from us has a sister. I want to adopt her, I want her to always feel welcome in my home and part of the Sunday morning pancakes ritual (she is).
I grew up in Lexington, not moving away until college, and Sally and her family were an essential part of my life. Looking back at it now it was pretty amazing; Sally and Ken were lefties, had parties with Noam Chomsky and other activists (Ken was a linguist at M.I.T.), they were super involved with all sorts of underrepresented groups through Ken’s field work with various undocumented and mostly dying languages. I have a story about Ken, which may be a myth but gives you an idea of the values I was exposed to.
Ken was called as an expert witness in Australia on the question of whether some indigenous people had the rights to land. The court wanted documented evidence that they had been there for so many thousands of years to grant the rights, but they didn’t have any written records. Ken, being an expert on evolution of languages, argued that due to the aspects of their language compared to the languages in the area, he could confirm their location there for much longer. They got the land.
As a child, of course, I didn’t know anything about politics or even much about human rights, so my experience with them was through their everyday life. I was always invited in to Sally’s house (it was the family’s house but it was really Sally’s house), and the warmth and kindness they bestowed on each other and me made me visit often, if not every day during certain times, especially when my brother and Caleb and Ezra regularly played D&D.
Sally introduced me to music, a gift I will always thank her for, a private world of unrestrained beauty, which was particularly precious to me because outside of this world I was a chubby, nerdy misfit. She taught me to play the penny whistle when I was 5 or 6, and encouraged me to start the piano when I was 7. She taught me to sing rounds (“hey ho nobody home”) and seemed to never get tired of singing them with me. Sometimes she’d take out her guitar and sing old 60’s folk songs about peace and love and teach me to harmonize. When I started playing the violin, I would play fiddle tunes in the evenings on the porch with Ken. We even entered fiddle contests together a few times (we never won anything but we were proud to be part of it).
Sally knitted me mittens to keep my hands warm as I went sledding in her backyard with Caleb and Ezra and my brother. She knitted during movies we would all go to together downtown. For me, listening to the click click clicks coming from her knitting needles in the complete darkness of the movie was a kind of miracle. She later taught me to knit, and we spent many hours in my adulthood talking about knitting and sharing yarn and tips.
Sally was an expert seamstress and taught me to sew, and sewed me clothes when I was little and even helped me sew a dress for myself in graduate school. She loved going to house auctions and would buy beautiful little objects which came from some old lady’s sewing kits. Later when I started sewing and knitting for my kids she gave me some of her auction buttons, collections of perfect little white pearls strung together on ancient string. I still have some.
Sally baked; she’d call us in from outside to give us kids thick slabs of bread, still warm from the oven, with butter and cinnamon sugar for a snack. We’d be sitting on the kitchen stools, eager to get back to sledding, or flashlight tag, or hanging out on the tree fort, eating our delicious bread with some hot cocoa and having no idea of how lucky we all were.
I remember when Sally decided to get a degree in nursing. In fact I thought she was already qualified for absolutely anything, considering how ridiculously competent she was at everything involving nurturing and healing, but she explained to me how much she needed to study. I remember helping her quiz herself on anatomy, with a huge book with mysterious pictures of the human body.
Sally showed me the delights of creation and creativity and of nurturing them both. When I think about how to have kids, how to have a happy family, I think about her method of making sure the basic materials are there, fostering a supporting environment, fostering the desire and the know-how, and then letting go. She did all that for me, and I’m so grateful.
I am very lucky I was able to see Sally recently. I visited her after math camp ended, and I brought my two older sons with me to see her. I also got to see Ezra with his happy family. It was nice to be able to surround her with abundance, evidence of her legacy of warmth and creation. She passed away recently and I am honored to speak at her memorial service this coming weekend. I’m honored to have been so loved by her.
Morning poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
from Dream Work (1986) by Mary Oliver
Habits
This is a guest post by my friend Tara Mathur:
I don’t need to read Tiger Mother to know that I don’t have one. I don’t remember either of my parents putting a lot of pressure on me to do things – even to study, although I developed that habit on my own.
As kids we develop some habits on our own, but we pick up a lot of habits from our parents.
We learn habits from our parents in a few ways. One is by mirroring them. For example, my parents have always read in bed before going to sleep and so have I; it’s so natural to me that until I got married I thought this was something everyone did.
Another is by having our parents make us do something repeatedly. For example, when we first brushed our teeth it probably seemed like a pain to do, but our parents kept making us do it, and it became automatic.
How can we cultivate new habits as adults?
(And am I the only one who associates the word “will-power” with pain and failure? People use that word when they’re talking about doing something really hard, against their natural tendencies. I hear that word and think, how is this gonna last?)
In the last few years I’ve become a big fan of a blog called Zen Habits written by Leo Babauta. He’s made big positive changes in his life – getting out of debt, quitting smoking, running marathons, starting a successful writing career – by focusing on habits rather than goals. Even though big goals are sexy and easy to get excited about, it’s the daily habits, built up baby step by baby step, which last and which comprise most of our life. By definition, when something is a habit we don’t have to rely on willl-power to stick with it. It’s effortless, automatic behavior. Leo emphasizes starting small and focusing on one habit at a time.
This could apply to any positive change we’d like to make in our life. BJ Fogg, a human behavior expert who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, sums up the three steps to cultivate a new habit as follows:
- Make it tiny. To create a new habit, you must first simplify the behavior. Make it tiny, even ridiculous. (examples: floss one tooth, walk for three minutes, do two push-ups)
- Find a spot. Find a spot in your existing routine where this tiny new behavior could fit. Put it after some act that is a solid habit for you, like brushing teeth or eating lunch. One key to a new habit is this simple: you need to find what it comes after.
- Train the cycle. Now focus on doing the tiny behavior as part of your routine – every day, on cycle. At first you’ll need reminders. But soon the tiny behavior will get more automatic. Keep the behavior simple until it becomes a solid habit. That’s the secret to success.
That’s it! He says. Just keep your tiny habit going. Believe in baby steps. Eventually it will naturally expand to the bigger behavior, without much effort.
(There are other tricks too. I’ve also read that you’ll pick up a habit more quickly if you surround yourself with people who already have the habit you want — though I’m not sure if it will last when you’re no longer around those people. Try it and see what works.)
mathbabe 