True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
–William Penn
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Category Archives: Quotes
Tell Me About Despair, Yours
As Bean gets older and encounters the world, I find myself thinking that I need an exorcism of my past. That sounds drastic, yes? Bean displays an intensity and sensitivity that I recognize. I observe how she interacts with kids at school, and I feel painful echoes. I want so much not to project my past hurts and memories on to her — she needs me to be confident in her and for her.
Yet I struggle. When I think back over my childhood and school experiences, I don’t wax nostalgic. The first memories that come to mind are not happy ones. In a perfect storm combining my personality, family milieu, and the outside world, I entered kindergarten absolutely not ready for school or the world.
I was a timid, docile child, perceptive and agonizingly sensitive. I had older sisters who were in school full-time when I was pre-school age, so I had no experience playing with peers and navigating the conflict that arises from this. My first day of kindergarten I was so scared I refused to eat snack and cried. Throughout elementary school I seemed to attract unkind treatment. By the time I entered middle school, my way of dealing with peers was to bury my nose in a book and remain detached. I didn’t socialize much with people in or out of school. My self-confidence measured near zero.
One evening I talked with Hub about a school memory that still causes tears (and if I get started, I recall others that do too). My husband asked, “What would you have wished for?” The six-year-old me had a ready answer: to feel safe.
I have since written in a private post at least 20 events at or near school through my youth that generated a lot of pain then and have the power to still. Now, I know that many people experienced bullying or hurtful incidents in school. My husband has even described memories. However, he (and others) don’t carry the pain as I do, and don’t project it all onto their child’s life. Re-reading my list, I have to remind myself that these incidents occurred over thousands of days of school. I’m certain that many of those days were at least neutral, and just as many were happy days, or contained happy moments. My life wasn’t a torment every single day. My list of injuries strikes me as banal.
So what the hell is the problem?
The pain is not something I nurture; I don’t ruminate anymore over my past injuries. It comes unbidden, rising and engulfing me like a rapid tide whenever I observe my child encountering difficulty (e.g., rejection — whether perceived by her or real). I am transported instantly to childhood and respond accordingly, but this is overlaid with the protectiveness of a mother, and so all my energy goes awry. I personalize Bean’s experiences as my own. It interferes with my ability to be present for her.
Part of this pain is just a parent’s burden. We worry about our children. We ache for them. We want to protect them. Yet I feel that somehow I respond internally in a way that many (most?) other parents don’t. I feel raw and unable to maintain composure. Bean detects and absorbs my anxiety.
Observing Bean deal with her hurt feelings brings a mixture of pain on her behalf, irritation that she’s not tougher, and fear for her well-being in the world. I cannot control what she encounters out there when she starts school full-time this fall. However, I can provide a loving, peaceful, supportive home environment; home can be safe haven. But only if I manage to separate my angst-ridden ego from its Herculean attachment to my past.
So here is my question (italicized below), arising from a Mary Oliver poem, “Wild Geese”:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Tell me your despair. Tell me your childhood school memories. Are they happy or harsh, or a mix? Tell me if they still rule you, and if not, how did you win freedom?
The Hundred Languages of Children
The child is made of one hundred.
The child has a hundred languages,
a hundred hands,
a hundred thoughts,
a hundred ways of thinking, of playing, of speaking.A hundred, always a hundred,
ways of listening,
of marveling,
of loving,
a hundred joys for singing and understanding,
a hundred worlds to discover,
a hundred worlds to invent,
a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages (and a hundred hundred hundred more),
but they steal ninety nine.
The school and the culture separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands,
do without heads,
to listen and not to speak,
to understand without joy,
to love and to marvel… only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there and of the hundred they steal ninety nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play,
reality and fantasy,
science and imagination,
sky and earth,
reason and dream,
are things that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child that the hundred is not there.
The child says no way. The hundred is there.–Loris Malaguzzi, Italian Early Childhood Education Specialist, 1994
Goodnight, Sweet Dreams
Come, cuddle your head on my shoulder, dear,
Your head like the golden-rod,
And we will go sailing away from here
To the beautiful land of Nod.–Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Our nighttime routine is sweet, though not exactly simple. When Bean protests bedtime (she’s in bed no later than 7:45 p.m.), we go to the routine written in words and pictures on the bathroom door. It removes the power struggle, to some degree, when we say, “Well, what does the routine say?” These are the steps: Read a story. Brush teeth. Potty. Bath. Put on jammies. Rock. Tuck-in. Next to these words are pictures I’ve drawn so she can “read” the routine for herself.
Daddy rocks Bean down four nights, and I get three nights. It’s a challenge, because she would rather I do every night. There came a time, too, when what I do with Bean became so integral to her relaxation that she began having trouble falling asleep the way Daddy did it. (That’s always been an issue — certain interactions between Bean and me become so ritualized for her that no one else can do it the “right way.” That happened feeding her bottle when she was about six months old.) So he has had to adapt and incorporate what she wants; it’s the rocking and tuck-in that is so important to her.
Before we begin we review the Sleep Rules if she needs reminding (i.e., if she’s been getting up out of bed “just because”):
- Stay in bed.
- Close your eyes.
- Stay very quiet.
- Go to sleep.
Then the non-rocking parent says “Good night, sweet dreams, don’t have bad dreams, I love you and I love you.” And Bean says it too.
If I’m rocking, I first ask Bean what her favorite part of the day was, and then I tell her mine. Bean then snuggles into me (or Hub), and several songs are sung, the same ones always in the same order: Husha My Baby (from our first Music Together class), Go To Sleep Little Bean (sung twice to Brahm’s Lullaby), My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean (first stanza sung twice), and the chorus to To Ra Loo. (And if she is sick or having a really tough time, the song lineup is much longer: Husha My Baby; Gaelic Lullaby; Su La Li; Go To Sleep Little Bean; You Are My Sunshine; Daisy Bell (without the second stanza); Home On the Range; My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean; Do Re Mi; To Ra Loo.) Then a few extra minutes of rocking and snuggling.
Then Bean gets into bed for tuck-in. I pull up the covers around her and say, “Bean, I love you. You are funny, smart, brave, strong, creative, beautiful, and fun to be with.” Then she’ll say, “Do Safe In Love.” So then I ask her (rhetorically): Do you feel safe in my love? Do you feel safe in Daddy’s love? Do you feel safe in Stella’s love? And so on for each grandparent, aunt, uncle, and her teachers. She also insists on Do you feel safe in your germs’ love? Do you feel safe in the love of all the wild animals? After all that she gets a kiss, and a promise from me: “I’ll check on you when I go to bed.” At which point she says “Good night, sweet dreams, etc.” and I say it to her. Then I quietly leave, and on most nights that’s all we hear of her until 6:00 a.m.
In December 2010 there was a time when she began getting out of bed and rocking at all hours in her chair because she had “thoughts to think.” We responded by removing the chair and ottoman from her room one night, and the wailing which ensued was loud, long, and almost insufferable. We returned it in the morning. It happened another night, and the chair went away. More crying. Finally we said, “We know you love the chair. We’ll return it. But if it’s too much temptation and keeps you from sleeping, it will have to leave your room forever.” She stopped doing it.
In December 2011 she began to get up and come wake us whenever she was awake, just because. For several nights this happened 8-9 times each night, starting as soon as we put her down, and often every half hour in the wee hours. We employed the gate (attached to her doorframe); we put the potty in her room and shut the gate. That generated a lot of tantrums at first. We told her if she stayed in bed, the gate would stay open. So now what happens is if she gets out of bed once, I’ll tuck her back in, and then I remind her if she does it again, I’ll tuck her in, put the potty in her room, and shut the gate. Sometimes she says she needs extra love, and that one extra tuck-in helps. Then I tell her, “You are loved, you are cozy, you are safe.” (Sometimes she gets out of bed five minutes after tuck-in saying, “I had a nightmare.” It’s pretty clear she hasn’t!) It works so far.
My daddy calls me sweetie pie.
He calls me honey bunny.
He also calls me poopsie,
which I think is kind of funny.My daddy calls me sugarplum,
and also sleepyhead.
My silly dad forgets my name
when he tucks me into bed.–Bruce Lansky
Touching Eternity
“I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I’m touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.”
–Lauren DeStefano, Wither
Boundaries and Respect
Email is one of the few private spaces left in this hyper-sharing age. Sam Biddle at Gizmodo says, “This isn’t about having something to hide — it’s about keeping meaningful boundaries in an era when there are verrrrry few. We all need whatever scraps of privacy we have left, and your email is just that.”
Trust is an important bedrock for any relationship, but this isn’t trust. This is mutually assured trust destruction. Intimacy comes from sharing select private information with people, not giving them keys to your privacy kingdom.
When you share your password with someone, you open yourself up to the obvious downsides suggested by the Times. But you’re not just violating your own privacy, you’re violating that of everyone you correspond with. People send an email to your account assuming you’re the only one who will see it. They realize there’s a risk you might share the news with significant others, friends, family, or a random stranger on the bus, but there’s a reasonable assumption that you don’t have someone else reading your email.
–Kashmir Hill, Why Sharing Passwords With Your Girlfriend/Boyfriend Is A Spectacularly Bad Idea, Forbes
The Only Paradise
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.
–Edward Abbey
Wise Words For Parents
I really wanted to quote the entire article here, but out of respect for copyright I haven’t. It’s an intelligent article about the “cherish every moment” pressure and frenzy that accompanies parenting. The author portrays mindfulness — at least, what I attempt and occasionally manage to experience — beautifully.
There are two different types of time. Chronos time is what we live in. It’s regular time, it’s one minute at a time, it’s staring down the clock till bedtime time, it’s ten excruciating minutes in the Target line time, it’s four screaming minutes in time out time, it’s two hours till daddy gets home time. Chronos is the hard, slow passing time we parents often live in.
Then there’s Kairos time. Kairos is God’s time. It’s time outside of time. It’s metaphysical time. It’s those magical moments in which time stands still. I have a few of those moments each day. And I cherish them.
Like when I actually stop what I’m doing and really look at Tish. I notice how perfectly smooth and brownish her skin is. I notice the perfect curves of her teeny elf mouth and her asianish brown eyes, and I breathe in her soft Tishy smell. In these moments, I see that her mouth is moving but I can’t hear her because all I can think is — This is the first time I’ve really seen Tish all day, and my God — she is so beautiful. Kairos.
Like when I’m stuck in chronos time in the grocery line and I’m haggard and annoyed and angry at the slow check-out clerk. And then I look at my cart and I’m transported out of chronos. And suddenly I notice the piles and piles of healthy food I’ll feed my children to grow their bodies and minds and I remember that most of the world’s mamas would kill for this opportunity. This chance to stand in a grocery line with enough money to pay. And I just stare at my cart. At the abundance. The bounty. Thank you, God. Kairos.
Or when I curl up in my cozy bed with Theo asleep at my feet and Craig asleep by my side and I listen to them both breathing. And for a moment, I think- how did a girl like me get so lucky? To go to bed each night surrounded by this breath, this love, this peace, this warmth? Kairos.
These kairos moments leave as fast as they come- but I mark them. I say the word kairos in my head each time I leave chronos. And at the end of the day, I don’t remember exactly what my kairos moments were, but I remember I had them. And that makes the pain of the daily parenting climb worth it.
–Glennon Melton, Don’t Carpe Diem
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
-Michel de Montaigne
Nothing Is Fixed
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
–James Baldwin
The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.–Christopher Morley, To a Child
“Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.”
– Alexander Pope
In The Beginning
We shall not cease from our exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
–T.S. Eliot
Beyond Words
Genuine prayer is an event in which man surpasses himself. Man hardly comprehends what is coming to pass. Its beginning lies on this side of the word, but the end lies beyond all words. What is happening is not always brought about by the power of man. At times all we do is to utter a word with all our heart, yet it is as if we lifted up a whole world. It is as if someone unsuspectingly pressed a button and a gigantic wheel-work were stormily and surprisingly set in motion.
–Abraham Joshua Heschel
Afterthought
In asserting: God* exists, we merely bring down overpowering reality to the level of thought. Our belief is but an afterthought.
The transition from obliviousness to an awareness of God, is not a leap over a missing link in a syllogism but a retreat, giving up premises rather than adding one.
–Abraham Joshua Heschel
*or Brahman, Nirvana, Ground of Being, Absolute, whatever word stands for you
Minimum Standards of Well Being
One ought to enter old age the way one enters the senior year at a university, in exciting anticipation of consummation. Rich in perspective, experienced in failure, the person advanced in years is capable of shedding prejudices and the fever of vested interests. He does not see anymore in every fellow man a person who stands in his way, and competitiveness may cease to be we his way of thinking.
At every home for the aged there is a director of recreation in charge of physical activities; there ought to be also a director of learning in charge of intellectual activities. We insist upon minimum standards for physical well being, what about minimum standards for intellectual well being?
–Abraham Joshua Heschel
Awe
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.
Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, …to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
–Abraham Joshua Heschel
On Old Age
Old age is something we are all anxious to attain. However, once attained we consider it a defeat, a form of capital punishment. In enabling us to reach old age, medical science may think is has given us a blessing; however, we continue to act as if it were a disease.
More money and time are spent on the art of concealing the signs of old age than the art of dealing with heart disease or cancer. You find more patients in beauty parlors than hospitals. We would rather be bald than gray. A white hair is an abomination. Being old is a defeat, something to be ashamed of.
While we do not officially define old age as a second childhood, some of the programs we devised are highly effective in helping the aged to become children. …Now preoccupation with games and hobbies, the overemphasis on recreation, while certainly conducive to eliminating boredom temporarily, hardly contribute to inner strength. The effect is, rather, a pickled existence.
Is this the goal of existence: to study, grow, toil, mature, and to reach the age of retirement in order to live like a child?
Old age is not a defeat but a victory, not a punishment but a privilege.
–Joshua Abraham Heschel
Heavy With Wonder
To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words. …The tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. Its flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. Its silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away.
Sometimes we wish the world would cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur.
Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.
–Abraham Joshua Heschel
Going On a Journey
“When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.”
— Japanese Proverb