Category Archives: Humanities

Taking Candy From a Baby

“People in the photography world, anyone who is sophisticated about photography, knows that this is not offensive,” collector and former gallery owner Stephen White told the LA Times. “Taking away a lollipop is not child abuse. There’s no irreparable harm. I’m just not sure there’s any significance to the photographs either.”

—Critics call foul over LA exhibition

View selections from the exhibition here.

The photographs depicts pure, raw emotion. I agree with the gallery owner quoted that there was no child abuse. Was the photographer manipulative? Of course. So was Robert Mapplethorpe, as is Annie Liebovitz. Photographers — all artists — have an agenda, a message to express. That’s not a crime. It may be distasteful, but no artist can please all audiences. Jill Greenberg is a photographic artist who attempted, with this series of pictures, to convey her own experience of outrage and helplessness regarding world affairs. I’m not sure being robbed of pleasure (as the children were) equates with despair over a violent world, but the intensity a child feels is probably equivalent to adult angst. To a child, losing a lollipop is reason for despair, I suppose. We adults grow inured to seeing photos of bloody war victims and wailing parents, but it’s hard not to be moved by a child’s face.

[via Bookish]

A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk

A Line Is A Dot That Went For A Walk

Each day brims with dots rivaling the stars
and bursts. Millions pursue me as I await
penetration, integration, creation.

A dot is an adventure contained
within infinite boundaries.
The mystery blooms, the line emerges: here,
a rigid, attentive marching row of Marines,
there a meandering rivulet of rain,
sometimes wavering and shaking like a drunk,
other times oozing blood-viscous. The hand

takes no heed of the mind’s instruction. It is a
wayward teenager determined to discover itself.

We walk slowly over the page; it is meditation,
a masterpiece of attention.

We whirl, sometimes a writhing orgy of squiggles,
sometimes a jagged clash of angles. Each journey,
unrepeatable.

A Metaphor for Learning

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun — bang, it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck around your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets, and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun does.

–Elspeth Huxley

[via Whiskey River]

Coming Out Of and Disappearing Into Nothing

Mindfulness in a way is the opposite of grasping, or attachment, or identification. And it can go very, very deep when we allow ourselves, because what we start to see — if we slow down a little bit and pay attention — is how it is a kind of conditioned phenomenon, like a machine, the mind spins this stuff out in a very orderly way by habit — thoughts, fantasies and memories. The world works in certain conditioned patterns, and that’s it’s nature, and it’s all impermanent and quite ungraspable. Where is yesterday? What happened to your weekend? Where is it? What happened to 1984, your 20’s, or whatever it was — where did they go? They all disappeared, gone. Isn’t that an amazing thing?

It’s a very profound thing to start to be aware of life coming out of nothing and disappearing into nothing. A day appears for awhile, and then it’s gone. It can’t be grasped, it’s like a bird flying. You cannot hold time and fundamentally you can’t hold yourself.

–Jack Kornfield

Shooting Stars, A Creative License, and Everyday Matters

I’ve discovered an interesting blog that synthesizes mindfulness and just about everything else. Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroads Dispatches does an excellent job quilting together a variety of ideas from a wide arrays of sources and providing her perspective. In a recent post reflecting on a study that announced how much more isolated we are becoming, the following grabbed me by the shirt-tail. I am compelled to share.

We live in an age where we collect ‘friends’ like trading cards on MySpace, Tribe, LinkedIn (David Sifry’s quip), and as in any age it is habitual to keep the bolt of our heart fastened. I know in my own life I’ve said I want intimacy, but I’ve often run in the opposite direction. My therapist was my close confidant four years ago. (Less than the whopping average of 2.08 the study cites – thank god for those fractional friends!)

Today I easily count at least eight extremely close friends; friends I can count on to discuss the bread and wine of life, and ones that would share their last dollar with me as I with them if need be.

Paradoxically, at the same time every person that enters my life in person, however briefly, be it in line for a jasmine green tea with tapioca pearls at the mall or sitting across from me at Peet’s or riding BART into the city enters my life like a momentary shooting star and is my best friend at least while they are in my presence, even though we may never meet again physically, tangibly, they have my full attention now. I’ve had conversations on near-death experiences, God, sex, unconditional love, divorce, heartbreak, art, everything under the moon with complete strangers on a weekly, and damn near daily, basis of late.

So-called strangers, momentary shooting stars, kindred spirits, while not counted among our 2.08 confidants, give me the felt sense that if time and space were unbounded, every being in the world could become my dearest cherished friend.

—Everyone’s Famous to 2.08 Friends

Evelyn also comments on the trend among her blogging community away from trying to track the hundreds of great blogs daily. It’s true for me as well. I am religious about checking on about one dozen blogs on a daily basis. I track many more via Bloglines, but I sometimes wait until a number of posts accrue before I visit. There just isn’t time to read them all and actually live my life. Evelyn notes, “p.s. You don’t track your friends.”

As for the concept of momentary shooting star friends (a wonderful metaphor!) is admit that I am often closed tightly to these opportunities. Yet I have longed to be more open, and when I was younger, I often was. What prevents me from encountering people in this way? Compassion fatigue? Fear of too much (whatever that would be)? Selfishness?

—
It’s a slow day at work when I am writing this post. I am alone in the office. The phone rang. An elderly woman who doesn’t drive, whose son died in March, and whose husband has cancer was referred to Hands On Bay Area from another agency because she needs transportation assistance. That agency clearly doesn’t understand what we do, because we don’t provide a service like that. I explained, and she said, “I guess they just told me this to get me off the phone.” Being the knowledge geek that I am, I quickly searched the web for Meals on Wheels, because I remembered the one in Austin had a transportation service as well as a grocery shopping service (they didn’t just deliver hot meals). Apparently the Austin agency is the only MOW that offers this. I felt for her, so I took her number and said I’d do a little research on her behalf. She sounded so relieved. She’s been calling number after number without success. A Google search reveals a paucity of services in the Peninsula (or if services exist, they require needle-in-a-haystack searching). She lives less than 8 miles north of the MOW in Menlo Park, but they don’t serve Belmont. Calling the alternate number on their site for her area got me to another agency that also doesn’t serve Belmont, but I was given another phone number that might prove fruitful. I will call her back and give her the information and hope that one of them will be useful. She sounded worn and overwhelmed.

An entire generation of people will create a canyon of need in just a few years, and communities are woefully unprepared to help home-bound and low-income seniors navigate life in a car-based culture.

—
It occurred to me as I wrote the vignette above that I just had a “shooting star” type of encounter. Perhaps by slowing down, observing, and opening my heart just a bit more, I can have more of these without being overwhelmed.

Another reason this is all a-stir for me is that I’m reading a marvelous (and I mean that!) book given to me by Cicada (thank you, dear woman) that focuses on slowing down and truly seeing one’s life, and recording it in illustrated journals. It’s called The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are by Danny Gregory. He wrote another book I’d love to read, Everyday Matters; it’s a visual memoir. His stance is that the ordinariness of life is chock full of riches and wonder if we just pay attention and take a little time to record what we experience. He has a wonderful blog as well, which features a group called Everyday Matters where people participate in weekly drawing challenges; people post the images on Flickr. When I encounter such books encouraging people to embrace the concept of being creative themselves, my gut flutters with a sense of urgency, a recognition that I too want to nurture people’s creativity. I don’t know how or when, but I do know it’s becoming imperative, a calling of sorts.

The trip to Austin was a clarifying experience for me. It made me realize that I must let go of the idea of returning there to live. We moved here tentatively and I put my therapy profession on hold but kept my license. Attending the continuing education courses required to keep my license active reminds me of the fact that I cannot practice my profession here, and my energy and time could be used otherwise. Holding onto this vestige of my profession is one factor preventing me from living fully in the present. I’m going to contact the Texas licensing board and find out what I need to do to put change my status and put my license on hiatus (I was told that’s possible). Someday perhaps we’ll move to another state that does offer reciprocity, and I can return to that. But not now. And this job ends in October, which means opportunities abound. Whatever is next will include creativity somehow. I’m trading in one license for another…

Brilliant, Angry, Funny, Real

Connie’s Pre-O-Bitch-Uary

1. At my funeral, if I have an open casket (which is dubious at best), please DO NOT say, “She looks good.” I don’t look good. I look DEAD.

2. Don’t say I passed. I am not a kidney stone. I’m dead.

3. Don’t say we lost her. I’m not lost. I’m dead. You can’t find me unless you die and maybe not even then.

4. Don’t tell my kids I’m in a better place. How do you know? Have you ever died?

5. Don’t tell my family not to be sad. They are sad. I’m dead. They miss me. They can cry. It’s okay.

6. Don’t tell my kids they will get over it. They won’t. Yes, they will get on with their lives. But they will still have times of sadness. Grief is recursive and there will times that they will feel the loss again and again like when they married or on Mother’s Day or their birthdays.

7. Don’t say only positive things about me. This ‘don’t speak ill of the dead’ is a bunch of shit. I’m a human being. Sometimes I was a bitch. Maybe even a lot of the time. I know I could be condescending, arrogant, impatient, self-centered, superficial, materialistic, pompous, holier-than-thou, stuck up, anal-retentive and egotistical. Not to mention stubborn, self-righteous, and critical.

8. On the other hand, don’t say only negative things about me! I was funny, loyal, loving, generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful, smart, grateful, tolerant, fair-minded, dedicated, and patriotic. I tried my best to be a good wife, mother, daughter, family member, friend, teacher, citizen, and Christian. I recycled and adopted pets from the Humane Society.

9. When you write my obituary please include three pictures of me. One at three, one at 24, and one at the age of my death. I want people to see how cute I was as a toddler. How beautiful, thin, and blond I was at 24, and how I looked as I aged. Every wrinkle, roll of fat, and gray hair was earned by blessings, challenges, joys, and sorrows. I earned all the scars both physical and emotional by living life loudly and passionately and overcoming obstacles.

10. I want a huge party after the funeral. With lots of booze. And a chocolate fountain. And music. Loud, rock and roll. The stuff you can dance to. Play lots of Warren Zevon. I have a Warren Zevon playlist on my iPod. Favorite songs of his include “My Shit’s Fucked Up” and “Keep Me in Your Heart.” Play some Jon Bon Jovi, too. Especially “It’s My Life” and “Have a Nice Day.” Tell funny stories about me. I was always able to laugh at myself. If you were a student of mine or knew me professionally or knew me as a child or woman, tell my children stories because they know me as their mom; not as a woman or a teacher. At the funeral have someone with a beautiful voice song “Ave Maria.” Bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” would be a nice touch. Celebrate my life. It was a good one filled with so many blessings.

–Connie Hammond Saunders

Blessings to Fran for sharing such wisdom. It was written by a friend of hers who is in remission.

If Not On the Day I Die

If you were really going to die tonight, would you sit and read through the whole Sunday paper, or most of the magazines you subscribe to? Would you really surf around the TV looking desperately for anything of even minor interest? Would you still go out and spend an hour or two at lunch or dinner, gossiping about the other managers. Decide then: If not on the day I die, then not now either. Because, frankly, it may really be today.

–Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter

Excerpted from Crossroads Dispatches — the whole post is worth a read. Thanks to Nacho for pointing the way.

Sensate

Sensate

Mid-night I rise to pee, my feet shocked
awake by chill tile, the cold making
my arms like sandpaper.

Then I return to the warm cocoon bed
next to you, and melt again into sleep,
grateful.

—
I’ve written nothing since mid-April, and I could not abide allowing May to pass without my writing something, however lame.

My encounter with a poetry forum inhibited my willingness to play with words, made me overly conscious. While poetry is a difficult craft, something to become skilled at, this awareness made me stop completely, rather than strive to improve. So here is a small poem.

Another List and Some Tidbits

It’s nearly the end of May. I have not written a poem in more than a month — nor have I read many either. I’ve been in the thick of reading about life, the universe, and everything as expounded by Bill Bryson. Among other things.

I’ve also not knitted or made art. I take that back — I knitted a little bit of a scarf I started Christmas eve. It’s nearly done, but I’m usually so worn out from work I don’t have much eye for detail.

This week I will go up to San Francisco tomorrow to help finish a mural project and will supervise another corporate project in San Mateo on Thursday. Sometime in there I’ve got other tasks to get to, not to mention it would be good to get a workout or two in there.

My posts of late seem more like “to do” lists. Sorry about that. The poem below resonated with me, especially the last six lines.

Milkweed

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now, it is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.

–James Wright

What are the small dark eyes that love you in secret? What delicate creatures surround you?

If that’s too esoteric, then you might might bend your brain around this. Just click in the square and keep clicking in each new square as the focus shifts — requires Flash. (Thanks to Euan for the link.)

And for a good if irreverent laugh, check out this movie trailer. (Shout-out to Eden for finding that!)