Category Archives: Social Science

Guidelines For Simplifying

I found this list at the house where I was recently a guest. It was from the Unitarian Universalist church (my host is a minister). It’s so good that I’m putting a copy on my refrigerator to help me to be a mindful consumer.

Strive for Simplicity – Think Before You Buy

  1. Do I really need it?
  2. How much will I use it?
  3. Can I borrow it from a friend?
  4. How many do I already own?
  5. Was it made by a child?
  6. Did it harm the environment?
  7. How long will it last?
  8. How will I dispose of it when I am finished?
  9. Can I relax and wait until tomorrow?
  10. Can I picture a happy life without this?

Home Again

Sweet is the hour that brings us home,
Where all will spring to meet us;
Where hands are striving, as we come,
To be the first to greet us.

–Eliza Cook, “The Welcome Back”

We are home at last. The striving hands were actually paws, as our two cats joyously received us. Our neighbor who watched them also left small tokens of kindness. We are much relieved to be among what is familiar as we continue to cope with our grief.

How Amazing It Was

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

–Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Farewell, Sweet Man

This morning my father-in-law died after valiently fighting lymphoma for over 13 months. We accompanied him as far as we could in his transition. The staff at the hospice were loving, and incredibly comforting.

We, his family, miss him. There is a vast emptiness in our hearts.

Death and Taxes

I spent the morning with an accountant discussing income and estimated tax payments, then wrote two sizable checks in order to make sure the Tax Man is happy come April 15. Because the only certainties in life are death and taxes.

This afternoon I will board a plane to Houston and land around 11:00 p.m. My husband will pick me up, whereupon I will go visit my father-in-law (yes, at midnight), with the hope that he will still be able to recognize me in our encounter. He is fading and will soon be transferred to a hospice.

That’s all I know about anything at this point. Now, I may not post much over the days. Or I may use the blog to cope by posting various and sundry bits.

pacific sunset

If I Die

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

– Pablo Neruda

[via whiskeyriver]

How Do I Write This?

I’m not panicked, but I’m pressed for time. I have much to do today and tomorrow to tie up loose ends at home and work. Why? Because I’m flying to Houston Monday to be with my husband, and to see my father-in-law, who is dying. He has fought for 13 months to survive blastoid mantle cell lymphoma. It is a rare form of non-Hodgkins blood cancer, and the most aggressive form of it. Survival is usually three to five years after diagnosis, at best. He had a two-month remission. It returned in various parts of his body in December and January; the treatment has been as hard on him as the illness.

My thoughts are scattered and thin. It’s tax time and we are behind, and now this. And there are work responsibilities I need to handle or find coverage for. I am writing this as a means of anchoring myself as much as possible. I’m not entirely here — in my body, in this place, in this moment.

What’s Up With America?

And when people ask why they should give their money, even in taxes, to help those who have less and cannot afford to care for themselves, I want to shake them and say, “Because you can and they canÂ’t. Your wealth creates in you a responsibility to your people and to your culture. It helps insure that your culture remains healthy.”

–Kenneth W. Collier, “What’s Up With America?”

[via Good Morning Sunshine]

Integration

From January 2002 to August 2003, I kept a personal weblog that consisted of an amalgam of topics: notations about my mundane daily life, deep explorations of existential questions, self-revelation (journal therapy), and links to items of interest to me that I wanted to share.

I learned with some difficulty the danger of a) writing about people with whom I have relationship and my thoughts and feelings about them, and b) inviting those people to read the blog. They don’t mix. So I worked on shaping my public “voice” in blogging and took pains to use pseudonyms when speaking of people.

When I opened my private therapy practice, I acted on the advice of a friend, a successful businessman, who suggested that potential clients finding my personal blog before my business page might become confused. Thus A Mindful Life was born: a weblog that provided resources and ideas for living and kept personal writing to a minimum.

Simultaneously, I created an alter-ego blog under a pseudonym, in which I wrote about my crappy day, or how I accidentally laundered my cell phone, or my excitement about getting a new job. It is an informal place — a family den, whereas A Mindful Life is a parlor.

I took pains to share the url only with people in my real life whom I wanted to have access. However, web-savvy relatives with whom I did not share the url found me anyway, and read the blog without my knowledge or permission for almost a year before I found out. I found out in a distressing, backhanded way. Immediately my voice was muffled. That blog is no longer a place to pour it all out; perhaps a blog is not the best venue for deeply personal writing. (Though gods know thousands of people do it.)

For awhile I lived with this divide, but after the blog was rediscovered, I have felt the strain of compartmentalizing. The boundary served a purpose, but does it serve me best at this point? I’m no longer a practicing therapist, though I can’t rule out that I might be in the profession again someday. And yet, a sense of unity appeals, and perhaps this is because my life has enough chaos of late that the fragmentation does more harm than good. I also am weary of having two separate places to show artwork and photography, to keep a list of reading, etc.

I’ve not totally abandoned the other blog nor taken it down. I am going to live over here more for awhile, however, and see how it works. So you might find, interspersed with the poetry and quotes and snippets of articles about spirituality and life, passages about me and my daily life that weren’t here before.

Or you might not. It depends. This is the seduction of blogging: it is so very easy to sit down and write whatever comes to mind. Once a day, or several times a day. It is a medium perfect for brain-dumping and informal flights of thought. However. The drawback is that such writing siphons off material that might be put to better use in other pieces, or if left unwritten might gestate into something else creative. The other drawback is that blogging sometimes replaces communication among individuals, as people in a blogger’s life check the blog to see what’s up, rather than directly correspond or speak.

The immediacy of blogging has proven therapeutic for me. It’s also been a creative outlet, not just with writing, but with coding and formatting the site. However, the questions remain: What is my public voice? What is my intention with this blog, with blogging in general? Can one blog serve multiple needs in me? Is this venue the best use of my gifts?

I don’t know the answer. I love the theme and design of my other blog, just as I love this one. They are my creations. Yet sometimes I wish I had not made this split. Can I consolidate? Should I? I don’t know. We’ll see.

All Writing

All writing contains memoir and of course the more you strive to hide it inside of fictional constructs, the more apparent it often becomes. Writers are like shoppers. We go through life putting things in the basket. How jasmine smells in the rain, how a lover’s face looks upon us when we first awake, what a child’s hand feels like in ours, how humans part from each other and how pain feels. We notate the odd philosophies we hear, remember the phrases that identify people from this or that sphere of life and connect the stray dots with fanciful lines we make from all the things in the basket. Unless we’re writing science fiction or fantasy, we’re not making up anything new, we’re just ordering it all differently for you. We can’t do anything else. What most writers do, I presume, is to take bits and pieces of the reality they’ve lived and seen and read about and observed in others and weave a new set of circumstances around it.

—Catherine Jamieson

[via Fatshadow]