Seeing Clearly

2011-08-09T18:29:00.002-04:00

Join Mom's memorial page on facebook.

Share your stories, and post pictures!

2011-08-08T15:28:00.002-04:00

Our darling mother passed away yesterday morning, at around 10:30am. Both of her children were at her side.

There will be a service at Dimnent Memorial Chapel on Sunday, August 14th, at 2pm. Further details to come.

Love to all,
Annie and Jon

Annie Post: Mom is Back Home

2011-08-04T06:06:00.003-04:00

Good very early morning to you all. Thanks so much for all your kindness over the past few days. Mom received so many flowers while in the hospital that we ran out of places to put them. Thankfully, we're back home and they're decorating every room of the house. We also have more food in our fridge than we could ever possibly eat - but that is also a wonderful blessing, as none of us have any interest in thinking about grocery shopping at present.

Hospice had come in and decked out one of our bedrooms with all the equipment and gear to keep her as comfortable as possible, and Kathy Thornhill and Carolyn Gundrum kindly found some appropriately hippie (peace signs!) sheets to throw on her bed.

Because she is very weak, we would prefer to limit visits to the house. If you'd like to see her, please call in advance, and we'll let you know if that will be possible. You are more than welcome to relay messages to her through me or Jon. If you feel the need to "do something!" as so many of you have so kindly expressed, we often need errand-runners for supplies and/or prescriptions, and Jon and I will graciously welcome any gifts of beer. Or wine. Seriously. It's needed, trust me. We might also need a place for out-of-town visitors to crash, if you have an extra room nearby.

Deborah Mack (my dad's sister), my grandpa, and our cousin Ashley will be coming into town tomorrow, and we eagerly await their arrival.

Thanks once more for your concern. It's no wonder that my mom has touched so many lives that we're now overwhelmed with your generosity. Please continue to keep her in your prayers and thoughts.

With love,
Annie

From Jon

2011-08-01T15:18:00.005-04:00

Hi everyone,

I'm posting on mom's behalf with an update. The cancer in her liver has made her extremely dehydrated and as a result she's spending a few days at the hospital while they rehydrate her. They're also treating her for an ammonia build-up resulting from her liver's reduced capacity to filter it. The ammonia has made her a little confused, but that should clear in the next day or two.

For anyone who wants to send a card or flowers, she's at Holland Hospital in Room 411, Bed 1.

Please send all the thoughts, prayers, and positive energy you can her way.

Thanks,
Jon

ps - Mom needs a lot of rest while she's recovering, so if you have any questions send either Annie (ahagar at gmail dot com) or me (jonhagar at gmail dot com) an email and we'll do our best to fill you in with the latest.

comfort

2011-07-24T14:48:00.000-04:00

Evansville Wednesday
Have been here for a week now and we have well-established rhythms to the days. My bed is the couch in the living room, a somewhat formal room full of paintings and decorative accents chosen by Geneva, painted yellow, tall windows, pleated drapes, oriental rug. My luggage, two bags, sit on a couple of occasional chairs, mouths open and displaying my stuff. I roll up my jammies and tuck them in their place, then make some coffee and take it out by the pool. Since I have been waking up very early, the sun is barely up, and the birds are in full voice, their calls somehow blending into a beautiful morning song, chirping, trilling, cawing, all at once, saying good morning. The mama bird who I have named Geneva is already out looking for breakfast and the babies are still asleep. The sun rises over the back fence at about 6:45, when I am on my second cup of coffee. The sun seems to target my face directly, though I smile at the self-absorption of that thought: God aiming the sun at me for my individual pleasure.
Within an hour or so, Geneva comes down, all sweet smiles, in her Glory Gown (so named because she says when she puts it on at night, she says, “Glory Hallelujah.”) We chat by the pool, start puttering around the kitchen, share our stories about the night and our predictions for the day ahead. Dad appears in the kitchen doorway an hour later; he loves to peek his head around the corner, his hair neatly combed, smelling good, like Dad, with his shirt all tucked in and his sandals velcroed around his Gold Toe socks just so. He favors polo shirts or short-sleeved woven ones, but the other day, sported a t-shirt reading MICHIGAN GRAMPA. He gets the paper, and gradually, the business of dressing and washing up and doing the dishes gets done. Geneva drifts upstairs to put some clothes on and roll her hair; I smoke in the chair by the pool and watch Bella trot with such a sense of purpose around the yard, barking sharply toward the fence and whatever she hears on the other side, her stomach contracting and her front legs leaving the ground with each bark.
Sometime in the afternoon, there are naps, and dinner is a bounty of fresh vegetables and fruit: sweet corn, tomatoes, peaches, asparagus, all so delicious and somehow decadent in their simplicity. After dinner, a movie from Netflix and maybe some of geneva’s delicious strawberry cake. Bedtime early after carefully locking the doors and turning off the lights. The door keys are on old keyrings and have special places in the room. I am comforted by the sense of order in this house. It is the feeling of older people who have figured out a lot of things that are still a mystery to me.

For the past couple of days I have lost my appetite and am wary of eating much of anything because of the consequences. I understand that this is because my liver isn’t able to do its job correctly. I feel apologetic asking it to do more that necessary. I miss my robust appetite. I miss stuffing my face. It isn’t like me to pick at my food or even to hesitate.
My gut is sore and distended and only loose things feel good. Bella snuggles up to it when I lay down and acts as a puppy-heating-pad, soothing the irritated feeling.

Tomorrow, we return to Michigan and to the house I said goodbye to nine days ago. I look forward to seeing my flowers and sleeping in my bed. Next week we talk to a doctor at the University of Chicago who specializes in treating melanoma. In the meantime, the rhythm of the days will unfold.

cradle

2011-07-24T14:39:00.001-04:00

Evansville
Sunday July 10, 2011

In Evansville, one can really experience a midwestern summer. I used to escape here to my dad’s comfortable old colonial house, at the end of the school year, in mid-June, and recover from the end of the year crazies by sitting by the pool and reading a good book. Little by little I would feel the brittle, tired, stiff effects of stress slowly melt into the warm animal of my body (as Mary Oliver described it): skin getting browner, sitting further back in the chair from my usual perched position, easily succumbing to a nap just about anywhere.
Last week my dad brought me down here in his seventeen year old white Lincoln continental, driving all the way down Indiana on old 41, stopping at the Subway and the Cracker Barrel, because of the cancer, because he needs to have me within his sight. Just too scary to talk on the phone with 499 miles between us right now. He needs to see for himself that I can function allright despite this giant mass of tumors in my liver, that every night I sleep and all day long I eat fresh tomatoes, sweet corn, peaches and Posey County melon without too much trouble beyond the occasional mild protestations from my digestive system. He needs to see me laugh and watch movies and help out of in the kitchen and put some makeup on the morning, which any woman knows is a sure sign that you aren’t too despondent. There is some kind of healing quality to going through the rituals of doing one’s hair, putting on the mascara and the shadow, dabbing on some cologne and showing a little cleavage. I don’t want to look like the sort of cancer patient that I grew up seeing on TV. The thing is, this isn’t all that difficult right now since I feel pretty much like I always have. I still have some kind of naïve protection from what I already know about this cancer that says, “yes, take those vitamins and supplements. Eat the yogurt, good for your liver.”
Dad brings me food and iced tea and offers me a blanket on the couch. He pats me on the head and on the arm and gives me such sweet, reassuring smiles that it nearly makes me cry.
There’s a birdhouse right outside the back door that has a GO BLUE license plate for a roof. Inside there are baby birds, whose wide-open mouths you can see as the mother bird comes and goes, her jumps off the edge of the little house creating a soft, swinging motion, back and forth, like a cradle. At night, she sits inside with her head framed by the round opening hole.

cancer, the sequel

2011-06-22T11:38:00.003-04:00

Some of you know that this blog began when I had ocular melanoma, a particularly nasty tumor in my eye that led to it's removal in February 08. Recently, questionable liver work raised a red flag and it has been determined that this cancer has now spread to my liver in a big way.

For the past few weeks, I have been thinking about writing this post and going back to reporting updates/progress through the blog once again. My family and friends have once again rallied around me and I feel the results of prayer and thoughts coming my way. They are a great comfort to me and hold me up from the pit of negativity and fear. I thank all of you for your energy and love.

I am being treated at St. Mary's Laks Cancer Center in Grand Rapids, MI, and my oncologist is Dr. Gribbin. I will be having a specialized form of treatment which will hopefully reduce the size of the tumor and allow for it to be surgically removed later, when I have enough healthy liver to handle the job later on.

I have been through the anger, the denial, and the bargaining. The Buddhists say that all suffering comes from resistance, and that makes sense to me. Taking it a day at a time has never sounded like such a good idea.

Mother

2011-05-09T18:37:00.006-04:00

Today I wonder what and who my mother would be at 86 years old and realize that when it comes to matters of the life of the soul, neither past nor future matter and the living and the dead occupy equal places in our hearts. It doesn't matter that she has been dead for over thirty years or that she had so many dreams and wild imaginings locked deep in her heart that she felt that she could never share. What matters is what I know of her and the ways in which she lives in me and in my children.

When I found her wooden paint box yesterday, while going through long-closed boxes from another life, I was struck by how clean and orderly the brushes were and the care with which her painting cloth was folded. I pictured her hands caring for them, having watched those hands so many times in my life. I used to sit by her vanity-a little desk-like table, French Provencial, with a mirror on top that lifted up to reveal her cosmetics, bobby pins, cotton balls and the like. After her shower she would don her bathrobe and sit on the little padded bench, smiling her dazzling smile at her image as she checked the angles and the makeup application. I watched her cook and clean, sew and embroider, paint and draw. Always her beautiful hands moved with care and precision in whatever she did. Watching her write, her tiny slanted letters gracefully moving across the page, I noticed that she had her own way of making the cursive capitol letters, different than I was learning in school. I liked that about her, her originality, that little bit of rebellion against all of the things in her life that were so perfect...the model-thin figure, the perfect hair, the air of elegance, the long cigarette holder, the jewelry chosen just so, the impossibly slender feet in the high heeled shoes that were returned to box and tissue paper at the end of the day.

I am trying to remember her hands on me as she braided my long hair, tied the sashes of my handmade dresses, wiped my tears. I am aching to remember her voice and her smell. I wish I knew what she was thinking on those late nights with the book open and the scotch in her hand but her eyes looking out somewhere that I couldn't see.

clearing spaces

2011-05-09T15:59:00.008-04:00

Sometime a couple of months ago my house began talking to me, much the way my body does periodically when it is in need of some nurturing. The greatest gift of available time and space in my daily life is being able to stop, listen, and respond to those spiritual nudges and whispers that eluded me for so long as I forged ahead being busy and responsible and whatever else it is that I thought I was being....not dancing to my own drumbeat all too often (hell, I couldn't even find the drum) but jumping through hoops someone else arranged for me in some kind of hellish obstacle course of money, job, addiction, love, and all the other things the ego counts on for a little ratings boost.

The storage room has been where my shame has been stored for the past 12 years, since I moved in to this house post-divorce with my seventeen year old daughter, two huge dogs, and a couple of cats (as is true for many older people, they all blend together in my mind now in a collage of fluffys and bonkies and lizzys and sams). A number of large packing cartons went straight down to this room unopened and were lodged under the stairway on the cement floor, after which additional items accumulated around the room's edges, with shelving erected and boxes stacked, some overflowing as time went on.

Also added were lots of canvases and drawing pads from Annie's time in art school, my own art supplies from my fits and starts as a painter, bins of holiday sweaters, a gradually growing collection of Christmas stuff, boxes of books that I didn't know what to do with, and then, bins with items from my dead mother, items from my dead sister, brought home after funerals in the back of the car. I could see the old VCR tapes of my children's school concerts and our family vacations, books I read to them at night. I began to feel that there were the faintest stirrings of ghosts in that room: ghosts of my children, my family, my life.

Stinky the cat was a casualty of the move, maybe, and also of the revolving door of huge dogs that were a part of my household. Never a very outgoing cat, Stinky retreated more and more to the confines of that storage room, making a sort of home base under the stairs, way back in the corner, where she undoubtedly felt safe. Over time she began to reject the litter box in favor of that little corner. Attempts to bring her into the rest of the house were not very successful; though she tolerated a little snuggling it was obvious she was always anxious to run back into her little spot.

Although I tried to keep up with it, the storage room gained a life of its own, and eventually,

I just tried to pretend it wasn't there, but that corner of my house, the bottom corner, felt heavy and dark, thick, oppressive. Over the years I confided in friends about my shameful room and they always reassured me that everyone has a room or a garage or a basement like that. It was small consolation; it didn't comfort me to know this and my discomfort with that room lived with me in this house every day. I knew that this room represented much more than accumulated clutter; it was literally my baggage, an outward symbol of inner weight. Attempts to make a dent always failed. I began to relate to the poor souls on reality shows whose stuff begins to overtake them. I understood. This was my hoarder room, the sludge of my past swirling through it.

So, with Annie agreeing to help, I rented a dumpster, bought masks and gloves and a shop-vac and attacked. My idea was to throw those under-the-stairs boxes directly into the dumpster, but Annie insisted that every one of them be opened and its contents viewed. "I want you to see, Mom" she said, "that there are no ghosts in there."

And I did see. What was in those boxes? Mostly toys-Annie's extensive Barbie collection (houses, garages, soda shops, furniture, jeeps, corvettes...), childhood favorite toys, baseball mitts and cards, and lots of other tiny toys that made Annie squeal when she saw them. I saw my sophisticated daughter become a little girl again. It was joyful work.

We filled the dumpster, somehow, with I don't know what. It seems that these items disappeared from my memory in mid-air as we heaved them in. Piles of things to keep and things for the Goodwill truck emerged and later were relocated to new homes.

With the help of a great book about feng shui and clutter, I performed a space clearing ceremony, clapping in the corners to release the stagnant energy, burning incense, doing some yoga moves designed to flush out the old and invite in the fresh and new. It is important to remove jewelry and shoes and feel the space with outreached hands. Through them I could feel that the heaviness had lifted and the energy was now flowing. I am keeping the door open for the time being, enjoying inviting the room into the rest of my house and often wandering in just to stand there and feel that space embracing me and dancing around me. Annie was right about the ghosts.

Robert

2011-03-27T13:11:00.004-04:00

It was Friday afternoon and I had just grabbed my bag off the turnstile and headed outside for a post-flight cigarette. Shivering a little in my denim jacket and already missing the warm breezes and hot sun of Palm Beach, I fumbled in my bag for my lighter near a concrete bench, when out of nowhere, I heard a voice and sensed a presence in front of me. I looked up to see a tall young man with his hand out. "Do ye have a cigarette?"

As I looked up, he added, "Is that ok to do in America?"

"Of course...."handing him a Virginia Slim and lighting him up, "we are friendly people here in America. Smokers always like to help each other out."

He took a deep drag and I sized him up...probably 34 or so, strawberry, close-cropped hair, a preppy vest and button-down shirt, khakis, a wardrobe bag over his shoulder, broad shoulders hunched against the Chicago wind.

Making conversation, the kind fellow smokers make in their little approved smoking areas when traveling, I asked him where he was from.

"Dublin....here for a wedding. And, fucking Lord (excuse me), I am so drunk! So fucking drunk, by the Christ. Can the TSA arrest me?" he asked with real concern.

I assured him that I didn't think so, unless he made a scene, but that he seemed ok to me.

Turns out he was in Chicago for a wedding. Turns out that he has a sister in Palm Beach. He told me his mother has red hair like me. Robert was the best part of my trip home.

I gave him a couple more cigarettes before I left and as I headed for the train hoped he would be ok finding a cab and making it to his hotel. This guy, drunk after nine hours on a plane and too many beers. I imagined that he was quite a hit on the plane. I imagined toasting and bawdy jokes. I regretted that I didn't think to take his picture.

I really love to travel. Besides drinking in the new sights, sounds and smells of a different place, there is always the random encounter with other beings who you will never meet again, who are strangers but in some way familiar, with connections to you, who remind you of someone, somewhere, a memory, a wish.

At Jensen Beach I tried out the telephoto lens of my camera on some gulls and other shore birds. One brave bird circled our blanket with his mouth open, looking for a handout. There he was, seemingly out of nowhere, hoping for something. Like Robert.

The Blanket

2011-02-20T11:56:00.005-05:00

I first saw it on a trip to the antique mall last July.

The blanket was folded and hanging from the rung of an old ladder that was leaning against the wall of a booth in the back of the mall-a booth filled with old wooden tools, chairs and shutters. I was drawn to the color first-my favorite color, somewhere between a pink and a peach, a color I struggle to label. "Salmon" doesn't sound right, but "cinnamon" conjures a darker hue; at any rate, it was beautiful and soft and it drew me to it at a most visceral level. You had to touch it. I looked at the price tag: 48 dollars. It wasn't in the budget, especially in July, especially with my commitment to be mindful of every dollar: 48 dollars was a week of groceries, after all. Better to visit the blanket once in awhile and appreciate it without having to own it. I walked away that day and on several other days over the coming months, never removing it from the ladder rung and unfolding it, never daring to become more in love with it.

On New Year's Day, the antique mall had a big sale, and I returned, hoping that my blanket would be marked down. It was a festive occasion, with dedicated antiquers feasting on homemade treats laid out on tables, drinking coffee and feeling the comradarrie that always wells up when people of like interests gather. I walked straight to the back of the mall and it was still there. The sign on the booth said, "20% OFF", but the blanket's sign said, "FIRM" below the price. I removed the blanket from the rung and draped it over my arm, feeling the thrill of a successful stalk-and-win situation. If the booth's owner would give me the 20% off, I would finally buy it.

As i rounded the corner, a woman browsing with her husband noticed my treasure. She said, "Oh, I love that blanket. I have seen it here before. How lucky that you found it...I was going to go back and get it!" We admired its softness, beauty and pristine condition together for a few minutes before I moved on. A few steps later, another woman, younger, exclaimed, "that is my sister's blanket! She always talked about it!" Another woman, proprietor of another booth, joined us and chimed in, " I love that blanket! And, it is in such good shape! Did you look at it?"

We unfolded it together and held it up; we all cooed and smiled over the lovely design, which appeared with the colors reversed on the other side. It was, I realized, pristine indeed. The delicate blanket stitch around the edge was perfect and there were no stains or worn spots. I began to realize just what a find this blanket was through the eyes of the gathered admirers. I wondered why I had not thought to inspect it before, and I felt a silly sort of pride that it was going to be mine. When a worker asked if she could take the blanket to the register for me, I declined. I was not going to let that blanket leave my arms.

I never did barter with the blanket's owner. I paid full price and I paid it gladly.

I put the blanket on my bed and for the first time looked at the label delicately sewn on to one of the corners. It read, "Orr Health Blanet. The colors of this blanket were inspired by the Holland Tulip." So, a connection to my adopted home town of 40 years. Another sign that this was destiny, this was intended to be my blanket.

I have slept under this blanket on all of these cold winter nights. I have draped it over me while reading in bed. I have spread it out over the bed every morning, carefully smoothing out the wrinkles, my hand delighted by the thick, rich softness of the wool. I now know, through some online research, that it was made in about 1930. With its lack of wear, I imagine that someone got it for a wedding present and, thinking it too expensive a treasure for everyday use, put it in a chest or a closet. Too expensive to use, to fall in love with, to deserve to own. I understand that.

2011-02-19T23:18:00.003-05:00

Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
like a lover
at first touching?

-from "Flare", by Mary Oliver

Weathering

2011-02-19T22:40:00.000-05:00

Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

–Fleur Adcock

Old Things

2010-09-21T08:59:00.006-04:00

Wabi Sabi: Wabi ... connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object.Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.".....Wabi Sabi, from Wikipedia

I came across this concept in an article last night in one of those magazines whose mission it is to provide us with ways to cope with our lives and achieve some balance and peace. The author encourages the reader to abandon all attempts at perfection and embrace life's anomolies and flaws as the real essence of beauty; to cherish the inevitable evidence of wear, time and human limitations that we seem to wage war against every day. I thought of my aging face and body; I was just standing in front of an aisle full of "anti-aging" potions at the drugstore, reading labels and wondering, hoping against hope that some of them really would turn back the hands of time. Succumbing to these moments of vanity and insecurity is something we all do, and of course these products cash in on that. Our Western preoccupation with perfection keeps us anxiously wondering if we, and all that we have, are good enough.

My face is getting more unique as time goes by. My artificial eye is sinking in a little, not so that the casual observer would notice, but I can tell. Because it doesn't close all the way, I sleep with it pushed into my pillow, and the left side of my face bears the lines and wrinkles that have been pressed into it permanently. When I wear makeup, the watery discharge that comes from my fake eye smears it. My eyelashes stick out at a different angle because of the change in the shape of my eyeball. Add to this the consequences of a lifetime in the sun, smoking and general self-abuse, and you have the face of a somewhat leathery woman who looks older than her years. At least, this is what I see. Most days, I try to spend as little time as I can in front of the mirror, but when I am confronted with the idea of aging and beauty and my drift away from any hope of regaining my youthful symmetry and normalcy, it can be depressing. As I write this, I feel a little revulsion at my vanity and shallowness, but this is the truth of it. Not all of the time, you understand. But sometimes.

Back to wabi sabi-those of us who like to go to antique malls and find treasures with the ghosts of their former owners inherent in them know all about that...we run our hands over the soft patina of the back of the wooden chair, the color made lighter by so many hands doing the same thing. I toured an old country estate last weekend, and the staircase railing, made of brass, was shiny -bright at the base, where your hand would rest at the beginning of your climb. Likewise the knees of the huge Buddhas at the Art Institute. My old restaurant ware, discovered a piece or two at a time like rare wildflowers, has worn glaze from silverware and little imperfections in the green trim. My old Japanese chest, brought back from my ex-husband's brother during the Korean war, has many chips and dings along its edges from half a century of use. My favorite shoes are bent and molded uniquely, as only my feet could do, reflecting thousands of steps, some of them taken with people I love, others doing hard work, the feet inside thankful for their soft insides, holding them gently all the while. I could go on and on....old books, the paper covers long gone and the cloth of the bindings threadbare from many hands cradling them; the slightly undulating walls and creeky wooden floors of my old farmhouse; my grandmother's beautiful hands. All of these things contain, in their wear and their imperfections, the stories of the people who loved them. It is this that we treasure and value, because only the loving use of them could produce such beautiful uniqueness. It is my prayer that I can see my face with this kind of love.

Retirement

2010-08-28T08:48:00.003-04:00

I woke up this morning wanting to write. it has been awhile since I have visited my blog and have thought of it often but been unable to settle on a topic or a way to express all that this life has brought to me in the past few months-if all of our experiences are there to teach us something, I have learned a few things this summer.

In June, I retired from West Ottawa Public Schools. All told, I taught in the public schools for 27 years, with about 3500 different kids sitting at my tables playing with clay or creating a painting.

I greeted classes of kids about 120,000 times over that period...in the early days, I arrived at their classrooms with my "art cart", and later, with the luxury of a real art room, they gathered on the carpet around my chair. I fired somewhere in the neighborhood of 33,000 clay pieces, hung at least that many carefully created paintings, drawings, collages and prints in the hallways of a dozen elementary schools. I scrubbed untold numbers of paint spills out of tee shirts and jeans, cleaned a million paint brushes, poured thousands of cups of ceramic glaze, cut enough construction paper to fill the gymnasium. I tied aprons around little bodies and fixed barrettes and tied shoes and wiped noses and found earrings and did all of the things that elementary teachers do. I will miss those things-I am sure I don't even know how much yet.

Retired teachers tell me that you don't really feel retired until the first day of school. This year, on that day, September 7, my friend Kathy (a teacher friend who also retired) and I will wake up on Mackinaw Island- the trip a gift from my colleagues at Waukazoo. For the first time in 27 years, I am not going back to an elementary school and greeting children.

What I am doing, however, is moving in to a little office space at Depree Art Center on Hope's campus, where I will meet with students and work on art education stuff. I will attend art department faculty meetings, go to the Kletz for coffee, work out at the Dow Center, and create a new work life for myself there. I teach a couple of courses: in the fall, one for elementary education students on how to use the arts in the classroom, and in the spring, an art methods course for art majors. I am excited to have more time for Hope and to be there, on campus, a part of the college life, a new place to belong now that I have left my beloved Waukazoo.

My other commitment is to the Holland Area Arts Council, where I am a volunteer and a board member. The executive director, Lorma Freestone, is an inspired and dedicated leader and I have had the pleasure of knowing her forever. I have a chance to put some things together for arts educators and kids there and it is a great place to work and use creative talents. I will share my love of art with people there and lend my back to the work that needs to be done.

I spent the summer with my son Jon, who just got his Masters of Architecture, finally, from Tulane, having been sidetracked for awhile after Katrina swept him over to Austin for awhile.

We spent a great deal of time at the beach, swimming in the warm waves and walking along the edge of the sand, reading, sleeping, playing cribbage. We worked on my house, which, like my body, was suffering from neglect, having an owner who was never home and when she was, she mostly collapsed on the couch and let the cobwebs and the weeds grow.

The house looks better, now, and so do I, responsive to care and nurturing as we all are. My teaching stuff is all in order in my home office. My closet is in order. As I have made space in my closets and drawers and cabinets by hauling what I no longer need to Goodwill, so have I made space in my life for rest, for dreaming, for writing, for art, for breathing slowly in, slowly out.

2010-06-01T00:18:00.002-04:00

whenever I am feeling like I'm in a race for the finish line, i know that the place to put my eyes is on the things I am rushing past to get there.

2010-05-11T18:06:00.004-04:00

nobody knows why the blues take hold of you, but I have them.

I can't seem to write anything that seems like the truth but doesn't seem like self-pity, so I am not writing anything. I am sitting in the fire these days, trying to stay conscious, staying with what comes. driving through the fog with the high beams on.

talking to my trusted spiritual guide today, who tells me something he heard:

the anecdote to exhaustion is not always rest. instead, it may be wholeheartedness.

somehow, the heart is not invested in life today. i will welcome the return of my passion. I look forward to the return of the energy that eludes me now; to feel that pulse again running through me. the trick here is not to reach for ways to jumpstart artificially-through substance abuse to deaden and distract, through falsely engaging in communication just to avoid being alone, through telling a story about myself or others today that provides a temporary answer for the why of it. To just stay with it as it comes, ride through, ignore thoughts, heed heart, seek no other remedy.

I have spent much of my life listening to everyone but myself, but at this moment I hear.

I hear the soothing, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, beautiful sounds of the blues.

st joe

2010-04-18T10:14:00.006-04:00

My dad took a lot of pictures of us. An accomplished amateur photographer, he had a dark room down in the basement that I have written about before on this blog, and he often had camera in hand. I have boxes of slightly curled, shiny pictures of all different sizes that were produced in the Hayes Photolab, a name he stamped on the back of them before distributing to friends and family. There are hundreds of them. I remember putting them on the photo dryer, a large, two-sided contraption with flat surfaces upon which the wet photos were laid. Then, a canvas cover was pulled tightly over them. You rotated the machine and carefully removed the images when they dried. They always wound up curly on the edges. This was the work of the "dry man", as my dad called it, and was not as important as the work of the "wet man", which you had to graduate to: actually developing the prints in the chemicals and then throwing them on the "bath" was the part I loved most. I also loved running the finished prints upstairs to show my mother, who was usually in her chair, dog on lap, with a mystery novel of some sort. She would carefully put the bookmark in, close the book and look at each picture as I chattered about all that went into their creation. She must have looked at thousands of pictures during my childhood, and yet, if she was bored, she never showed it.

We are leaning against our '58 Ford station wagon that was two-toned, red and white. I named her Beauty Glamour on the day my dad drove her home and adored that car over all others we ever owned ( a considerable number, in that my dad was a confirmed car officianado and his best friend Lee was a Ford dealer). Beauty Glamour had red leather seats, and I liked to think that my dad picked that car out for me, because he used to say I was "especially made for red."

It might be early spring, like it is now, the sun warm and intoxicating on our faces, our little jackets, no doubt carefully picked out my our mother, buttoned against the still-cold winds that blow through Michigan at will. It is morning, because my braids are still neat and tidy, as my mother braided them, one and then the other, sitting on the bar stool, cigarette in ash tray, mug of coffee with cream, lipstick print on the edge in cherry red. My sister is carrying her Tiger and, as is so often the case, looks delighted to see my dad and his camera. My brother scrunches his face as if stifling a giggle. Maybe my dad said something silly or irreverant ("Say shit!") to get us to laugh. We are happy kids, well-loved, and it is spring in the sun.

Click.

picasso

2010-03-23T19:21:00.002-04:00

Frances

2010-03-21T14:19:00.009-04:00

I've been writing a blogpost in my head about my mother lately. This morning, I found a poem by Mary Oliver (you may read it in the previous post) that I found true and beautiful, but I don't want to write about my relationship with my mother, or speculate about the mystery of who she was, or cry over her. Not today. I just want to see if I can create some kind of image of her that will feed my heart for the time being. In the world of the spirit, our relationships are just as complicated with those who have passed as with the living. Our ties with the dead continue to evolve and change and impact us with no need for traditional communication. And, I have found that as the years go by, it is far more difficult, or maybe just less necessary, to put into sentences our memories of them. I see my mother now in the things of the world that remind me of her. This is how people stay alive for us, I think-through the life of what remains.

I have some of her posessions: her collection of turquoise Indian jewelry from a long-ago trip to New Mexico; an Indian print skirt, the tiny waist of which has always been a silent reproach; some art books. In the next layer, I have my deep love for the work of certain artists and artisans; my ability to sew (though never quite as well as she did); my vegetarian stirfry recipes; my fine hair; my ambivalent relationship with my femininity, my vulnerability, my body, men.

Every day things bring me back to her: ordering a muffin and coffee never fails to conjure up images of the two of us in a booth at the little luncheonette at JP Penney's (we split the muffin). When I see a big, luxurious sedan, particularly in a pastel color, I smile thinking of her beloved powder-blue Buick Electra. My little dog sleeps on my lap, as hers did each evening. When I see a Vera scarf, a bright flowered pattern, a colorful dress or dangly earrings, I see her wearing them. When I wish I had been less afraid in my earlier life, less dependent on the affections and the approval of a man, less worried about the results and more interested in the adventure, I think of her, and I wonder how her life would have been, or mine, for that matter, if we had been born now instead of then.

It has been 32 years since my mother died. I had seen her at Christmas, and she seemed tired. I teased her about that: she didn't even want to go to the fabric store. She died two weeks later, and I got the news from my dad, over the phone, on a cold January night. My father told me that she begged not to go to the hospital-she hated hospitals. Her complicated medical issues necessitated far too frequent visits and she insisted that she would be fine. When it was apparent that she was failing, he wrapped her up in the tartan plaid flannel bathrobe I got him

for Christmas and rushed her to the emergency room. She was taken off life support the following day. She was 52.

She died before I realized that I needed her much more than she needed me; long before I realized what she could teach me. The lessons are still there for me to learn, but only if I find new ways to listen.

a poem

2010-03-21T13:56:00.002-04:00

Flare
by Mary Oliver

1.

Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;

it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,

or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;

it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
that are billowing and shining,
that are shaking in the wind.

2.

You still recall, sometimes, the old barn on your
great-grandfather's farm, a place you visited once,
and went into, all alone, while the grownups sat and
talked in the house.
It was empty, or almost. Wisps of hay covered the floor,
and some wasps sang at the windows, and maybe there was
a strange fluttering bird high above, disturbed, hoo-ing
a little and staring down from a messy ledge with wild,
binocular eyes.
Mostly, though, it smelled of milk, and the patience of
animals; the give-offs of the body were still in the air,
a vague ammonia, not unpleasant.
Mostly, though, it was restful and secret, the roof high
up and arched, the boards unpainted and plain.
You could have stayed there forever, a small child in a corner,
on the last raft of hay, dazzled by so much space that seemed
empty, but wasn't.
Then--you still remember--you felt the rap of hunger--it was
noon--and you turned from that twilight dream and hurried back
to the house, where the table was set, where an uncle patted you
on the shoulder for welcome, and there was your place at the table.

3.

Nothing lasts.
There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,
now.

I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.

4.

Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings
of the green moth
against the lantern
against its heat
against the beak of the crow
in the early morning.

Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop
of self-pity.

Not in this world.

5.

My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!

I bury her
in a box
in the earth
and turn away.
My father
was a demon of frustrated dreams,
was a breaker of trust,
was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.
He followed God, there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God, there being no one else
who would listen.
Listen,
this was his life.
I bury it in the earth.
I sweep the closets.
I leave the house.

6.

I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them--one, two, three, four--the kiss of courtesy,
of sweet thanks,
of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.
May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.
I will not give them the responsibility for my life.

7.

Did you know that the ant has a tongue
with which to gather in all that it can
of sweetness?

Did you know that?

8.

The poem is not the world.
It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

9.

The voice of the child crying out of the mouth of the
grown woman
is a misery and a disappointment.
The voice of the child howling out of the tall, bearded,
muscular man
is a misery, and a terror.

10.

Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
like a lover
at first touching?

11.

Anyway,
there was no barn.
No child in the barn.

No uncle no table no kitchen.

Only a long lovely field full of bobolinks.

12.

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.

Mike

2010-03-19T20:59:00.009-04:00

Today, I drove to Saginaw to see my ocularist and friend Mike Bain. I can't take my prosthesis in and out anymore, since I got the articulated peg, and it needed to be removed and cleaned and adjusted a little bit. In spite of the long drive, I always look forward to seeing Mike, who has painstakingly handcrafted two prosthetic eyes for me. He has done this with great skill and tremendous care and thoughtfulness, and I have written about Mike and my prosthesis several times on this blog.

I can't overstate the importance of my close and trusting relationship with Mike or the complexity of my relationship with him, and I am sure that this is the case with all of us who have lost a body part and had to have an artificial one made in its place. This artificial part has to function to some degree; it has to be modified, improved, fixed and changed as time and the rest of the body, the natural part, evolves; it has to look as natural as possible to the casual observer (though I now realize that no prostheses really fool anybody past a cursory glance no matter how good they are); and maybe most importantly, it has to in some way compensate for the lost part to the person who owns it. This last point may be the most important one and the one least understood by others: we have to be comfortable with this new piece of anatomy and getting it to that point has to be a real challenge for the prosthesis maker. They do something that no one else can: they help us feel whole again.

As always, we chat for awhile, sitting in one of the examining rooms that Mike operates out of at the eye clinic. We talk about work, and family, and tease each other about our political differences. We always laugh a lot, though I have cried, too, more than once. When he works on my eye, he is gentle and considerate. There is an intimacy between us, and a comfort level-the kind that comes from going through something horrible together that turns out to be ok. There is a sense that he got on the lifeboat with me as the Titanic of my old life broke in half and sank.

He always tells me I am beautiful, and I always believe him.

views of life-today's version.

2010-03-16T19:52:00.006-04:00

Half my life ago, a sacred tiny being came through my body and left this world much sooner than anyone expected her to. I have written about the events that led up to Annie Lane's birth and death before on this blog-the last time was a year ago. Today, my heart is no less broken than any other March 16th, but the way I experience it continues to evolve. Right after her death, I remember thinking that it would probably not be possible for me to survive it. Ten years ago, I stopped crying at her grave and started talking to her a little while leaving some little token of flowers or driftwood. Five years ago I stopped talking and began learning to silently share that space and time with her, not really thinking about anything, not trying to pay tribute somehow or to conform to someone else's idea of the grieving mother. This year, I did not visit her place of rest, though it was a beautiful sunny day and it may have been a serene visit. Something is changing about the way I live with her in my heart, and it seems less important to me to go to that place, less important to mark the day with solemnity, grief, even remembrances. It has been 29 years. After living with her and without her for this long, she is just present, and there is no need to mark or commemorate the date.

I remember, two weeks after she died, walking into a store where there were baby clothes and nearly running back out the door, heart racing and breaking. Last week, a co-worker brought her newborn girl to our department dinner and we toasted and celebrated. I did not think of Annie Lane. I realize that I no longer live with the loss, but with the realization that this child, like my other two, was never mine, after all-no more than any of us belong to our parents or are really just the product of the two of them. We are so much more mysterious than that, so much more impossible to fathom. Like life itself.

artist annie

2010-03-07T11:26:00.011-05:00

These are some of Annie's latest paintings. I love them. To me, they are her best yet, at least the best I have seen. She goes to work every day, and then she comes home and paints. Other times, she draws in her sketchbook. When she is not drawing or painting, she is making things, or she is painting walls in her room beautiful colors. When she learned how to sew a few years back, she made beautiful dresses, combining fabrics in unexpected ways. When she gets dressed in the morning, it is another way that she composes art.

Annie began making art as soon as she could: drawing, painting, creating outfits for herself and dolls, arranging things on shelves, building, shaping, combining. There has never been a time in her life that this has not been the case. How happy I am that Annie has remained faithful to herself, through thick and thin, living her truth.

The Farmhouse

2010-02-28T20:53:00.007-05:00

Mark spotted it first, as we drove by on the way to look at another place. It was one of those beautiful old brick farmhouses, two-story, with a big front porch, decorative contrasting white brick trim and tall windows, arranged in threes and rounded at the top. There were several huge maple trees in the front yard. We instantly fell in love, and knew that this was the place to raise our children-Jon, 6, and Annie, 4. We spent the first night there in the living room in sleeping bags,with a cooler and a little tv. It felt a little like camping out. We wandered from room to room excitedly, wondering if we would ever be able to fill all of the rooms, accustomed as we were to our little rented ranch house. I will never forget how it felt to wake up there the next morning. From our bedroom window, we could see acres of blueberry bushes. I can still see their red branches against the snow in my mind. I have a wreath made of them hanging in my present home to remind me of them.

The house had a long history: a plaque set into the front wall announced the original owner's name and the date, 1884. We learned through relatives of this family that they had come from the Netherlands and built this house, raising seven children (two who died in childhood) and becoming the largest dairy farm in that area, bringing milk from house to house on a wagon, ladling it out to their customers into wooden buckets. One family member said that he remembered the day that the indoor plumbing was installed. Mark and I cherished all of these stories and felt lucky to be there, to extend the house's history as a new family. We worked hard, fixing it up. I rag-painted, stenciled, wallpapered, stained, scrubbed, sewed curtains and found antiques. Mark mowed, trimmed, weeded, repaired, shined up old brass hinges, fixed old doorknobs, rebuilt the old front porch. He built a treehouse and ladder for the kids. He made a sign for above the garage: OUR HOUSE IS A VERY, VERY, VERY FINE HOUSE, WITH TWO CATS IN THE YARD...." The kids settled into their own rooms and played in the yard and rode bikes and walked to the pond across the street and picked blueberries and rode bikes to Bill's Greenhouse and rode on the sled, pulled by Mark on the tractor, on the winter streets. They climbed the ladder to the tree house and huddled inside (until the ladder got stolen).

I remember still all of the places on the old wood floors that creaked, especially in the dining room, and I remember how the stairs sounded. The shelves in the closets and the kitchen cupboards were thick old wood. The kitchen counters were crafted of old wood. Mark refinished them and oiled them til they shone.

The glass in the windows had bubbles in it-old glass, made long ago. We are quite sure that there was a ghost upstairs-a woman, maybe watching over those sick children so long ago. We always scurried past that hallway, and it was years before we talked about it. The garage had old, old wood stored in it, and old bricks, and old glass bottles. There were the most beautiful lilac bushes in the backyard, and so many tall and stately evergreens in which the kids played and built forts. Annie climbed the tree by the garage and sat on the roof. Jon and his friend Joey played baseball. The basement had three rooms and was a scary, dark place that took some getting used to. I remember that musty smell.

One freezing February day, we started painting a mural on the grand old plaster wall that spanned the length of the back porch. We painted a picture of our house and the big maple tree in the front yard. The leaves of the tree are turning yellow and just beginning to fall. Our cat Fluffy is sitting on the branch. The beautiful old bricks are carefully painted, one by one. Our wonderful dog, Goldie, is watching over us all.

Somehow, it is that painting that looks the most true and real to me when I think about our life together there. There was this beautiful old place, and it somehow was waiting for us, and the grass was green and the trees were tall, and I know that our voices still ring in the walls like the mice that scurried there in the winter. I know that the love we shared there still warms those rooms, though we have been away for over a decade now. I close my eyes and I am right there, once again, always.

Friday kids

2010-02-28T19:18:00.004-05:00

On Fridays, I have a class of eight kids who are in a special program for the autistically impaired. There are seven boys and one girl, and they range in age from six or seven up to eleven. I have known most of them for a few years now. They used to be "mainstreamed" with the general population, sitting close to their aides, and not particpating much. Now, I see them as a separate group: eight kids and three aides for 3o minutes, gathered around a big table.

My first few lesson plans failed miserably as I groped to understand what would work with this population. I realized pretty quickly that a lot of what I relied on with my other lessons was not going to fly with this bunch. For example, you can't read a book to autistic kids and then expect them to be inspired by it and create art that reflects that. You can't present material or themes, like a video about fish, and say, "Ok, now, let's all make some fish of our own!" Slowly I am learning that the kids are most engaged when they can spend some time playing with the materials and the media unimpeded by my directions, guidance (beyond the bare minimum) or expectations. The challenge is to let go, let go, let go, just like it always is.

For example, an early success involved cutting long strips of black paper, and gluing it onto white paper. Cutting is a laborious process for some of these guys, some of whom have poor coordination and next to no hand strength. For others, it comes easier. Soem cut strip after strip and glued with varying amounts of white in between; others crowded the black strips together, overlapping the thick and thin, making textures and depth. They were beautiful, and I thought of Franz Kline. Earthenware clay is also a winner: one of my guys loves to slap and hit the clay, while another loves to flatten it and then feel the smooth contours created by his fingers; our lone girl loves to make birthday cakes, adding candle after candle; still another, who is a tiny, fragile little boy, pokes little mouse holes with his fingers and grins with obvious delight. During a recent painting session, one boy created the work above. I can tell you that the marks he painted were carefully executed. He worked carefully and with deliberation, choosing colors, placing his marks, choosing his brushstrokes. I think it is quite beautiful.

There is also a consistency of style and manner of exploration that seems to cut across media.

I am eager to recieve the next visual communication from them all.

It is not surprising that this class, of all of my thirty per week, is the one most likely to fill me with gratitude, with wonder, with joy, with great affection for this bunch of originals. I can hear them coming up the hall: hoots, giggles, shuffling of feet, a strange little barking shout. They show me, in their own way, who they are. They remind me that we all are just this different, just this unique, just this deserving of respect and acceptance as one of God's creatures on the earth.

looking for life

2010-01-24T08:52:00.005-05:00

I woke up this morning with this phrase going through my head. I am haunted by something Haitian msuician Wyclef Jean said when being interviewed about the earthquake: " Every night, we could hear the people singing. You can hear them chanting and still singing the words of God--it's unexplainable." This is what I remember from the hours of coverage, the telethon, the photographs in the paper, Anderson Cooper's nightly coverage: the Haitian people are singing every night. They don't sing because they are happy; they sing because they can.

Morgan Freeman read an excerpt from the poem below, written by New Orleans poet Kalamu ya Salaam. Listen to the beauty. Listen to the hope. We can see the life, through all of it.

Tomorrow's Toussaints

this is Haiti, a state
slaves snatched from surprised masters,
its high lands, home of this
world's sole successful
slave revolt. Haiti, where
freedom has flowered and flown
fascinating like long necked
flamingoes gracefully feeding
on snails in small pinkish
sunset colored sequestered ponds.
despite the meanness
and meagerness of life
eked out of eroding soil
and from exploited urban toil, there
is still so much beauty here in this
land where the sea sings roaring a shore
and fecund fertile hills lull and roll
quasi human in form
there is beauty here
in the unyielding way
our people,
colored charcoal, and
banana beige, and
shifting subtle shades
of ripe mango, or strongly
brown-black, sweet
as the such from
sun scorched staffs
of sugar cane,
have decided
we shall survive
we will live on
a peasant pauses
clear black eyes
searching far out over the horizon
the hoe motionless, suspended
in the midst
of all this shit and suffering
forced to bend low
still we stop and stand
and dream and believe
we shall be released
we shall be released
for what slaves
have done
slaves can do
and that begets
the beauty
slaves can do

learning to teach art

2010-01-16T21:36:00.004-05:00

I told the kids we could make some clay dragons this year, as part of the unit on Asian Art. The clay project for this unit has been tea cups, but the last time we made them, I felt uninspired and bored by the whole thing. They were just another kind of pinch pot, it seemed, despite my attempts to dress them up with rings on the bottom and kanji on the side. It dawned on me that we should make dragons, because there is no creature, imaginary or otherwise, that inspires a fifth grader more, and they are just magnificent beings--especially Chinese dragons, who are the antithesis of the ugly, stinky bad guy dragons who are a traditional part of so many Western epics. Anyway, I have never made a clay dragon and began to wrestle, in my mind, with how in the hell to teach such a thing. I worried about many things: dragons have a lot of parts, after all, and many of them are skinny and long and complicated and detailed. Not the kind of components that generally lend themselves to an elementary clay project. Things like that fall off and break. I worried about what to do first and how to lay out the steps and how to show them the way. I kicked myself for promising to do something that I really didn't know if I could pull off. I do this a lot and I do it to force myself to do it and to find a way to do it. As usual, the way presented itself and took me out of the role of Sage/Teacher and into the role of learner, where we all belong.

What happened was that I put some clay and tools on the tables and the kids set to work, in teams, to make a dragon and then to present it to the rest of the class. I modeled it loosely after the Quick Fire Challenges on Top Chef: a challenge, a time limit, and then, the presentation. It was great fun for all of us, and the results were astonishing to me. What is important to remember here is that I taught them nothing; my role was to provide the opportunity and perhaps some motivation. I got out of my own way, and out of their way, and watched them go.

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says that the best way to control people is to watch them: to give them a nice, big space and then just watch. This seems counterintuitive to us teachers, who instinctively want to run the show and control the environment through implementation of all kinds of behavior and management and teaching strategies. And they can be very effective, to be sure: I have found that I can make a group of children do just about anything. The rub is, of course, that these strategies generally suck all of the creativity, let alone the freedom and joy, out of the classroom and the learning lives of the kids. And, the teachers.

A colleague recently has implemented yet another behavior control system in which children's names are listed on the board and consequences doled out. I remember seeing something like that when I student taught and thinking, do I really want to teach? Is this what it is about?

My experience with the clay dragons is what good teaching has become for me. If I can watch it unfold with the creators, it is nothing but joy.

dec 30 early morning

2009-12-31T07:40:00.003-05:00

I am back at my father's house. We had sunshine the whole trip down. I sleep in his wife's bedroom. She is in Miami with her daughter; she does not have snow or cold winds or an old man to take care of. Her room is full of flowers-the draperies, the chair, the painted dresser, the sheets. Dried flowers arranged in a shadow frame-her daughter's business. Pictures of her grandchildren in different sized frames. She has been my dad's wife for thirty years. Our family pictures have never blended.

Last night I dreamed of my first husband. I washed my hair in the kitchen sink this morning, using green travel-sized shampoo and conditioner. I made organic coffee in the french press that I brought from home. Dad's coffeemaker is an old white drip-pot of an obscure brand, and he buys his coffee from Dollar General.

This is my third trip here in a month. The route is straight through Indiana, down route 41. There are old houses, weather-beaten barns, occasional farm animals and worn signs. We pass through several little towns. The skies are usually beautiful. I stop at Subway and get gas at the Pilot station. At my dad's corner, there is a machine rental place, and huge backhoes are lined up along the highway. They always look like brontosaurus heads to me, necks extended.

I read in Dad's chair until I hear sounds. First, the water in his bathroom. Then, the thumping of his scooting down the stairs, one step at a time, on his bottom. It has only been ten days since he fell down those stairs. There is still blood in the carpet; I make a note call the guy to finish the job. He comes around the corner and smiles. He is wearing his Christmas sweater. I want to cry but smile back.

residue

2009-10-15T06:55:00.004-04:00

what is the residue of the past six weeks or so? this is the question that floats through my head this morning...residue, like what you see in the bottom of the coffee cup from a good cup of french press that you maybe ground a little too much or let sit a little too long. Or the residue at the bottom of the water containers my students use when painting-deep syrups of purple and brown.

Birthday residue: two cards propped on the kitchen counter and a shipping box in the recycling bin. Residue of Annie's last visit: wrinkles her bedspread, a necklace from Chicago waiting to be worn. The residue of a busy schedule: shoes and bookbags piling up by the door, dust gathering in the studio, no posts on the blog, no pictures in the camera. Thin ice when you need to create in order to breathe. Thin ice for all of us.

Teaching is hard, and the hardest part for me is to do it from my truest heart. If I don't, I feel dried out, hardened, grey, as we all do when we are merely going through the motions of life and not entering in to the beautiful, complex murkiness of the moment. Of course, there are children who don't accept my invitation to walk down that path, and my sadness in the face of this is palpable. I try not to take it personally. There are others with whom I experience the kind of creative communion that fleshes out my heart and brings the color back to my cheeks. After all, what greater gift can we give one another than the sharing of the things that are truly alive for us-things with a heartbeat, things that warm us and say to us, "yes, that is it! exactly the right red! the right word!"

I am teaching four students this semester who are going to teach kids, and each Wednesday night, I pull some treasures out of my box and share them-tentatively, sometimes, because sharing my heart is so scary, but other times, with such a sense of urgency that I trip over myself. I want them to see the things that warm my heart. I want them to find what will warm theirs and to share with children their stories through their work. It is a holy gift.

The residue of last night's class is curled into the corner of my heart, still sleeping. When we got to our cars at the end, we saw the beauty of the leaf shadow on the car. A shadow we may not have seen had our hearts not been together, encouraging each other to look.

NOLA

2009-08-21T21:13:00.004-04:00

i've had the urge to write for two weeks and haven't done it because I have been either working or staring at a TV or sleeping. Apparently, all of these things seem to be easier than writing, making art, doing yoga, meditating, going for a run...all things that I wish I could have listed as reasons why I have not updated my blog recently.

I want to tell you that going to New Orleans was a beautiful thing. Jon starts back at Tulane on Monday to finish Masters in architecture and together we searched for housing, lazily smoked in the shade, watched the sun go down at the fly, ate incredible food and tried to avoid moving too fast--just too hot for the type of frenetic movements characteristic of us Michiganders. We bought hats at Meyer the Hatter, the oldest habedashery in the South. We met some unforgettable people, including a guy named Johnny Angel, who was one of the people who had a room to rent. He was probably in his 40's somewhere, and had a huge, jet-black pompadour ala Elvis. His kitchen was fabulous, full of retro kitsch like Aunt Jemima images and cool old wallpaper. We went to the Columns Hotel and had drinks under huge tropical plants sitting on old wrought-iron furniture. We drove all over the city, up St. Charles, under the huge live oaks; up and down Tchoupitoulas, past four-star restaurants and galleries on one end and old, beat-up shotguns on the other. We walked, or rather hiked, up the old sidewalks, so uprooted by age, tree roots, (Katrina?), and diversity of materials that failure to pay heed could quickly result in a bad wipe-out.

Jon found a tiny little house in the back yard of a woman named Hannah, a woman with three kids who will need some help around the house and with babysitting that Jon can trade for a cut in rent. When we walked into the happy orange kitchen, we both knew that this would be the place. It is five minutes from the Tulane campus, the grocery and the gym. I left feeling that he was going to be ok.

Taos, New Mexico

2009-07-15T13:06:00.002-04:00

Taos energy is like no other I have experienced. It is a town mostly composed of artists, spiritual seekers, odd ducks and visionaries. the red adobe walls glow in the late sun and provide a perfect backdrop for the many mountain flowers that grow everywhere. Here, you see purple sage; there, a collection of red pots; up the road, an old gate that has creeked back and forth for generations.
Today I am helping my friend Ginto Naujokas, a Taos potter, load an outdoor, woodfire kiln. I am documenting all of this for my students. I have told Ginto that his face will grace a bulletin board this fall: "GINTO THE POTTER."
There is so much I have to tell you and I am busily writing notes and taking pictures. It is hard to properly express beauty and life like this. Until then, have a beautiful day wherever your life is taking you.
love,
claudia

"wild geese" by mary oliver

2009-07-07T22:56:00.003-04:00

took off on a road trip this morning, and will be checking in with you via this blog along the way. this poem by mary oliver captures so much for me tonight:

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.

© Mary Oliver.

sacred spaces

2009-07-04T12:49:00.004-04:00

I just got back from a long visit with my dad. This picture was taken in New Harmony, before he, Deborah and I went out to dinner and a play there. We stopped at this memorial garden and wandered around first, admiring the way the tree branches seemed to join together to form a rooftop over this quiet, sacred space. It was hotter than hell, as it had been all week, in the 90's, but it felt comfortable here, and it was a feast for the senses. A fountain gave us the gift of the sound of softly falling water; the hostas burst forth lusciously; little benches with feminine curves invited us to sit.

I turned around, camera in hand, and saw my dad standing there, with is arms crossed, standing straight and tall and handsome, and took this picture. In it, I see his essence shining through. I thought, this is him, the eternal him. I see the same man I looked up at when dancing with him, my feet on his, when I was little. The invincible one. The next day I photographed many views of his basement, where he has multiple working spaces where he works on his trains and practices his trumpet. Again, I was struck by it: there he was, the same man. It could be that the spaces in which we do the work we were intended to do, the work that makes our hearts sing with gratitude, show at least as much about us as our faces do, especially when we get older, and we weat time as well as passion on them.

things i don't remember

2009-07-04T12:29:00.002-04:00

o I don’t remember most of my kindergarten through fourth grade years. I am particularly blank on kinder and first grades beyond a few brief flashes of images…. kinder rugs and naptime and saying something stupid to the teacher and having her look at me with one of those disgusted looks I dreaded. First grade, cleaning out the fishbowl-come to think of it, why the hell did they make that a job for a first grader? -And dumping the damned fish down the drain in the process. I have no idea who my first grade teacher was. I have no idea who my second grade teacher was. I also don’t remember what the classrooms looked like. I remember the hallway because I was there for six years. I also remember the playground.

o I don’t’ remember what my first three houses looked like. The first one is understandable; after all, I was barely past infancy when we left it. But Forrest Avenue=the stairway, the front porch, the rhubarb plants in the back yard, the alley.
o Lewis Avenue-long curtains that were shiny and I thought quite ugly. The bedrooms are a blank. I probably shared them both with my little sister but I don’t remember.

o I don’t remember what my mother smelled like, or what her voice sounded like. The home movies I have of her do not have sound. Her voice is on a demo record for Kego the Eskimo, a story my dad was trying to sell that included a song. My mom played the voice of Mrs. Santa. I haven’t heard it since the kids were little and we played it for them during a visit to Grampy’s house.

o I don’t remember what I saw in Dave Treul. I remember a great deal about what happened during the two –plus years that we were together-places gone, events attended, snippets from particularly hideous fights, but not what I actually saw in him. I don’t’ remember actually loving him.

o I don’t remember most of the days between listing the farmhouse and actually moving out of it and I certainly and maybe thankfully don’t remember moving day. I am sure that it was hell, but mercifully, I don’t have much in my file on that one.

o I don’t remember what Annie Lane looked like, except that I remember thinking that she looked a lot like Jon, which was a relief, because someone at the hospital, I don’t remember who, told me that she heard that there was a facial deformity. I am glad that I saw for myself that it was not true. I wish I had a picture of my tiny daughter who never drew breath in this world.

o I don’t remember how bad it felt when I was at my worst, those many dark days and nights when demons flew through my head and I was unable to find solace, to rest, to feel safely held.

o I don’t remember being drunk feels like, or being stoned-but especially drunk. I haven’t had an experience that mimics drunkenness that would even be reminiscent, a time when I could say, “ wow, I feel drunk.” I have twice had anesthesia during my seventeen years of sobriety, and both times, I was just OUT, that fast. When I was on heavy pain meds after the enucleation surgery, I just felt sleepy.

o I don’t remember what hamburgers taste like, or chicken or steak, or bacon—you get the idea. I haven’t eaten meat for almost as long as I haven’t had a drink. I don’t miss meat. I don’t like the smell of it. I imagine the molecules traveling through the air, microscopic meat specks, and I don’t want them to get in my nose.

o I don’t remember what PMS feels like. How great is that.

o I don’t remember what is in all of those boxes down under the basement stairs and taking up space on the shelf in the garage. I filled them up before I moved here and I don’t know what I put in them. I have considered just having them all hauled away without opening them.

o I don’t remember what it is like to live without cell phones, cable TV, and computers. In fact, it is fascinating to me to sit and think about that. Hell, I hardly remember what it was like to be chained to a phone or computer by chords.everything is wireless now, and I talk on the phone in the car and pay my bills laying in bed with my laptop propped on my knees.

o I don’t remember to take my vitamins and other pills on a regular basis.

o I don’t remember how to do most math calculations. It has been too long and, as I suspected, I never did have to use any of them in real life, as my lying teachers contended.

The Geographic Cure

2009-06-07T13:54:00.008-04:00

At AA meetings, you will frequently hear about this concept of moving somewhere else to make a fresh start, get away from the old grind, see things from a new perspective. We call it the Geographic Cure. We call it that because it sounds like just the ticket for a lot of what might ail you about where you live. If you are still out there drinking, you might be thinking of escaping from a variety of stinky relationships, obligations, and messes created while under the influence or trying to get under it somehow. We alcoholics have a way of finding every conceivable bridge that might offer a way out or up and burning it the hell down. We go through lots of friends, lovers, jobs, rental agreements, cars, library cards, volunteer commitments, gym memberships...you get the idea. So, moving sounds incredibly seductive and we do it a lot, only to find, to our horror, that wherever we go, there we are (to paraphrase another AA ditty).

If we aren't drunks or addicts, we still may have reason to want to make that leap into a new life. This seems to be the case with we boomers, as we contemplate the possibility of retirement, or just the possibility that we could die before we get the chance to live in the mountains or go to Bangladesh for a stint in the Peace Corps. We have a sort of renaissance of the same cravings for adventure, novelty and challenge that we had when we were starting out, except that we have some money in the bank, a longer and more impressive resume, and maybe a slightly more mature perspective.

For the past few years I have toyed with the idea of moving to Colorado or New Mexico. I love it out there, have friends and family strategically placed and once again am wondering how in the hell I will survive another winter in the Land of Grey that is Holland at that time of year.

This year, I looked into it a little deeper, talking to my financial guy, Ron, ever patient, practical and steady, and to some friends, and to my kids. What I found happening was that I began to create a sort of dichotomy or polarity between here and there in which I was able to create an ever-longer list of pros for there and cons for here. Some of them were no brainers: Denver gets 300 days of sunshine a year, there are cool people out there and I can live out all of my hippie fantasies in close proximity to Boulder. Others, a little more subtle: I have been doing the same thing for a long time here. That is the good news and the bad news of it all. That is the trap and the allure. Could I do it? Could I pick up and leave, sell it all, take off in my little car with my little dog and just go? Find a funky little apartment out there somewhere and simplify my life? Make a new start? Escape the sameness and the routine of my life here?

Of course, I am a drunk, and this could smack a little of the GC, though of course daydreaming about the possibilties in life is what keeps us interested and moving ahead. It could be quite the adventure to move away. The only trouble is, I can't figure out how to do it without taking me along. I have a sneaking suspicion that the things that are bugging me about my life have little to do with where I live and everything to do with my reticence to do the work I need to do to make it better. The grand gesture always sounds better to me than the daily work of making a life and making it worth living.

The Last Day of School

2009-06-06T13:06:00.005-04:00

If you are in the proximity of a school child today,

you cannot help but know that school is either out or should be, depending on which school you are talking about. And, it you are in the proximity of a school teacher, you probably are making an effort not to be today: we glow on the first day off, and it can be a little annoying to the rest of the world, for whom Monday will be business as usual. We are alive with the possibilities of summer and all it may hold. We may have a fat check in our hands that we vow we will not piss away by the end of July, leaving us penniless and counting the days to the first paycheck in September.) We may be feeling some sadness, saying goodbye to certain kids who burrowed into our hearts especially deep. We may be pushing aside the nagging reminder that our rooms need to be packed up and report cards marked. We may, as I am, be slightly nauseous from a last-week diet that was a little too carb-rich and veggie-light. (In the teacher's lounge on Thursday: two boxes of donuts, a box of bagels and cream cheese, a huge sheet cake from a family saying, "Thanks Waukazoo Family", that was out of this world, a crock pot of overcooked veggie chili (my contribution) and lime-flavored tortilla chips.)

But, understand this: we are glowing anyway, as we throw out the produce in the fridge that we bought with good intentions, as we clean out boxes of end of the year gifts, the best ones hand-made, and re-read heartfelt letters smudged and misspelled so endearingly ("Thank you for making me hapy. Love, Thomas"), as we clear off the kitchen table and throw in the laundry and go to Lowe's to get serious about the lawn.

Yesterday was a half-day, and as always there was so much to do. There is a sense for me on that day that I need to be ready for anything, and of course I never am ready for what actually happens. I did pretty well in passing back gobs of artwork (cursing myself for procrastinating),

saying goodbye to kids, getting started on room clean-up, chatting with friends (and fitting in several cake-trips to the lounge). Then, at about 11:00, one of my first graders named Jaden came in and asked me about his clay fish. The one he had to make a week late, because he was sick. The one that had lots of very sharp teeth and a long tail...you remember, right, Mrs. Art?

(Fish? there is still a fish that hasn't swum home yet?) Then, I remember, and there he is, sitting on the edge of the kiln, ready to go. Jaden and I put together a tray of paints and brushes and he sets off for his classroom to paint his fish. All seems well. Phew, I think, I am glad the little guy remembered!

Then, at 11:40, twenty minutes before the final eruption of joy when the kids run out that door for summer vacation, Jaden returns with his fish. It is in three parts. Apparently, it was on his desk, and he lifted the top. sending it flying onto the floor. The delicate jaw with its snaggly teeth has broken off, as has the sleek (really, really skinny) tail.

Quick calculations tell me I can do this, and I plug in the glue gun and examine the pieces. The jaw and teeth aren't too hard, but the tail is really a challenge; the hot glue leaves a thick line that doesn't allow the two pieces to fit together well, and it takes repeated tries to get it back on. (Jaden: "his tail is very thin so he can swoosh it through the water and go very fast.")

I get it on, and then he says, oh, here is another piece-it is the tip of the tail." It is now five minutes before the bell. I am sweating and I have glue on my fingers. Nothing like challenge in the last lap of the marathon. I glue the tiny piece on and the whole tail falls off.

Somehow, the tail gets glued back on and Jaden hugs me and says goodbye. He walks out the door with his ferocious fish and now, only now, do I feel like school is really out.

Love and gratitude to all teachers out there.

Breathe.

claudia

bad day

2009-05-27T19:28:00.007-04:00

I usually don't write about the bad stuff, but I am going to today. It is the end of the school year, and I, like everyone else at Waukazoo school, am cramming six or seven days worth of work into every five and wondering if I will get it all done by the last day, when we all wave goodbye to the busses and collapse in a heap. I feel this way every year, no matter how I swear that I will plan better, do fewer last minute clay projects (this totally demolishes me every year, but I do not learn), get more sleep, say yes to fewer commitments....the end of May comes, and I am right back here, feeling harried, worried, exhausted and stressed. Don't get me wrong--there are many gifts each day that come from working hard and keeping those commitments: watching first graders painting their awesome clay fish, putting on a play with third graders which germinated one day a while back when I mentioned, "wouldn't it be fun to turn this story into a play?"), seeing smiles on kid faces enjoying creating in the art room. So today, just to balance that all out, I guess, I find out that Sarah's second clay zebra has blown to smithereens in the kiln (so did her first one)--and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. And this was a beautiful zebra, folks. She worked so hard on it, and she is a great artist. I wish I could just blow myself up instead. She cried when I told her. God. I hate it. I feel like such a failure.

I also had some other negative stuff come my way, no way as severe but enough to stick in my head, and enough to make me feel like a loser.

I hate these days. I do know, however, that I won't have two like this in a row, because I never do, and somewhere inside I know that this is life and it is only my feeble ego that is whining now. Whining loudly. Telling me, who needs this job, anyway? Well, as a matter of fact, I do, and not just for the money. I still have this idea that if I just try hard enough, all of the bad stuff will somehow vanish. I know that this is impossible but I just keep trying.

garden stories

2009-05-25T21:59:00.005-04:00

Judging from the crowd at Lowe's garden center this weekend, my passion for gardening is shared by a whole lot of people. I love to walk through the rows of flowers and look at the bags of mulch, the cement pavers, the wheelbarrows, the planters and all of the lawn medication designed to cure the ills caused by a long winter. Today, I bought a calla lilly plant and a foxglove to add to my front flower garden. I chose two good spots, dug holes, felt the warm dirt in my hands as I patted it around the stems, and then got out the sprinkler. New additions for the new year.

The first thing I learned about planting a garden is that it is an act of faith; a good garden takes years to evolve. What you do this year probably won't flourish this year. The next thing I learned is that weeds are really a matter of opinion; some of my favorite little guys arrived unbidden by me and have stayed. The third thing I learned is that, like every other living thing, each plant has a story to tell.

My iris, for example, began with a couple of plants that I bought on the way to my dad's house. There is a place in Renzelaar, Indiana, where you can buy just about any kind of day lilly or iris, and they have a gorgeous koi pond where you can eat your lunch. Anyway, I bought the iris because my grandmother had them in her yard, and then my dad had some of her bulbs in our family garden when I was growing up. I felt that iris were a part of my family history and so a good start for my plot. It took about three years to get one to bloom, and what a joy when they did! I have since added more iris (and day lillies) from my trips to my dad's. They will be blooming in a couple of weeks; I often greet the first one right after the last day of school.

My lilac bush is enormous and also reminds me of my grammy Freda, as do the tuberous begonias I plant every year. She loved them and had them in the bed in the front of her house in Howard City. I remember walking around the yard with her every summer and listening to her stories about those flowers.

Next to my new calla lilly is a huge bleeding heart that was a gift from an old boyfriend. When he told me its' name, he smiled sheepishly. The only picture I have of him was taken by that plant. It grows bigger and more beautiful every year. I have three rose bushes, each of them a gift from one of the Marsman girls, students of mine from Waukazoo. The peonies went in after a trip to the Ann Arbor Arboritum. The black-eyed susans are my reminder that it is almost time to go back to school. The cone flowers are probably my favorite of all; those orange spiky centers and delicate purple-pink petals are ravishing to me. The Japanese maple started as the tiniest little snippet from my dad's and is now shoulder-high. The pansies are in honor of my mom. When I was little, it was my job to pick them so that more would bloom. I never look at a pansy without thinking of her.

Hauling the hoses around, pruning branches, weeding, digging, raking, mowing... what joyful work it all is. Days like today, with the breeze blowing, the water pump groaning as the sprinkler arches back and forth, and the hostas unfurling, seem like a long way away from those frigid days of winter.

sunday afternoon

2009-04-26T13:59:00.006-04:00

This morning I walked to the beach, as I so often do on Sundays, with my camera in hand,and looking forward to seeing just what yesterday's storms had wrought on the beachscape. As always, I am guided in my picture taking by intuition, by my artist self, snapping only when certain. I can't tell you what captivates me so about certain images: delicate ivy growing up the trunk of a massive, gnarly tree trunk; evidence of other beings who were there before me, such as birds crowding around a fish carcass and picking it clean; the light on the tops of the beach grass so delicate as the filtered sun bathes them. The sounds have changed from my last visit; the waves caressing the water's edge unimpeded by ice and snow. The rhythm is ancient music that we all respond to, if we listen.

As I walked I thought once again that this place is as constant as anything I have experienced in my life. As a child, the beach was across Lakeshore Drive, just like it is now, but in a town south of here called St. Joseph. To get there, I walked through the neighbor's deep lot, past a vegetable garden and a grape arbor, and climbed down the rickety steps that had all of the character of fine driftwood.

My brother and I wandered down there very early one morning with our blankets and rolled up in them, pigs in blankets, and fell asleep to the wavesounds. I found clay on the sides of the bluff and walked on it, feeling aboriginal. I watched the boats. My parents took us out in ours for day-long picnics, the little vessel rocking contentedly offshore, held by the anchor. I made Frank Lloyd Wright houses out of flat stones with my mother. I made sand portraits. I do this, still, and I dig my toes into the sand, and I have to stop myself from diving into those waves before the water warms. When I was little, i jumped in in March once.

Today, of course, so many new things to see, as always: my favorite image was that of delicate bird feet, so lightly impressed into the loose sand and reminding me of Japanese kanji. This sense of timelessness and newness is the stuff of life-I look in the mirror and I see that little girl walking the beach and building houses with her mother. I see that young mother digging holes in the sand with my Annie; watching Jon, drenched with water, deliriously rolling in the hot sand. I see myself today, slowing down, seeing differently than before, seeing better in some ways, delighted by that which used to elude me. I see an older me, if I am lucky, still finding the perfect piece of driftwood and trying not to frighten the gulls as I approach. It is the same being and I am seeing her on different days. My essence is the thread that connects us all.

Maria Felix

2009-04-25T11:51:00.003-04:00

Actress, art collector, fashionista, outsider woman.

Just had to share.

Edvard Munch

2009-04-20T21:29:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I was able to go to the Art Institute of Chicago and see the Edvard Munch exhibit with Annie and her friend Efrat. The exhibit was powerful, with themes of melancholy, anxiety,

love, and alienation. His prints are really amazing and very rich in their technique; his paintings, many of them, are very linear in their style, which surprised me, given the looseness of the brushstrokes of his most famous work, The Scream. One gets the impression that Munch was a serious sort of guy, given to some obsessiveness and more than a little gloominess. The yellow vertical symbol for the moon on the water, seen in Summer Night, the Voice, is a recurrent theme in his work, and I think it symbolizes the melancholia that he so often expresses in his work.

I am sure that it wasn't lost on many who attended this exhibit that his themes are just as relevant today as they were then. The other day, I had a discussion with dear friend Bobbi about medications that have been developed for the anxiety and depression that seem to be sort of running rampant among us today. Would Munch have created these works if he had the edges softened a little by a daily dose of Prozac?

Easter Sunday

2009-04-12T10:36:00.002-04:00

eye stuff

2009-03-29T12:17:00.004-04:00

Sometimes I forget that this blog began with a grim diagnosis coupled with a car crash. The eye and the car have both been replaced, with varying degrees of success. My car is pretty fabulous: a little white Toyota Rav-4 with a pug nose and sexy lines (in an athletic sort of way). It goes pretty fast and, with my many custom-cool mirrors attached, my visibility is really good. Weirdly, I can parallel park better than ever.

My prosthetic eye is another story. It is beautiful, that is for sure. Michael painted it for me, following some vague directions about echoing the colors of my favorite turquoise ring. I was hell-bent on an artistic prosthetic. It is a work of art, I thought. It is but another way to express oneself, I reasoned. I can tell you that the usual responses to it are 1) wow, it sure looks real! and 2) why is it a different color? So, in terms of aesthetics, mission accomplished, sort of.

What is lacking, to some extent, is what opthamologists refer to as "horizontal motility", or the ability of my prosthetic to move from one side to the other. The up-and-down movement is pretty good-at least within the realm of normal eye movement. We just don't peer WAY up or WAY down that often. The problem comes when I am looking at you from a slightly sideways perspective. My artistic prosthetic stubbornly stares off somewhere in the distance while the real one works the way it should, giving me a rather cross-eyed appearance.

My friends assure me that this is not noticeable with glasses on, but I am aware of it, and no more than when I am a close huddle with my little guys at school. It just looks a little weird.

Fortunately, there is a solution: the peg. Here is what happens: the occular surgeon drills a little hole in your implant, and inserts a titanium peg in it that sticks out a little bit. Then, the occularist, Mike in my case, makes a little dent in the back of my prosthetic, into which the little peg fits. As a result, the prosthetic eye articulates back and forth in concert with the other one, with a few adjustments here and there.

I consult with the surgeon at the end of April and we take it from there.

A good day to read books....love to all out there in the universe.

Claudia

Annie Lane

2009-03-15T18:15:00.005-04:00

I got pregnant again when Jon was only six months old. It was a surprise, but then again, so was Jon, so Mark and I, happy in our lives as young parents, looked forward to meeting the next little Hagar. It was an uneventful pregnancy. I knew that delivery would be by C-section, as Jon had been; that was just the accepted procedure.

A week before the scheduled birth, I went to my obstetrician, who proclaimed all well and sent me home. The next day, I felt a heaviness through my swollen belly, and as the day went on, a quiet stillness came over it. By eight, the contractions had begun and we left for the hospital, leaving baby Jon with friends. My joy evaporated as I watched the face of the physican who was moving his stethoscope over my contracting abdomen; he was searching in vain for a heartbeat. Someone took my hands and lifted them over my head; still nothing. An anesthesia mask came down over my face. "Count backward from ten," a voice instructed. Their urgent faces told me that the baby was in trouble. I began to cry as unconsciousness overtook me.

I woke up to see my doctor standing by my side, tears streaming down his face. He told me that our baby, a girl, had been stillborn. My husband Mark joined us. More words about autopsies and possible causes of death were uttered but of course we were beyond hearing such things.

I was placed on the surgery floor, away from the new mothers, in a private room. Later, a nurse came to give me a backrub. I remember that she was very kind and had gentle hands. As she kneaded my shoulders, she quietly suggested that I see the child I had lost. I hesitated, remembering something someone said about a facial deformity. I was afraid. She told me that in nature, mothers always inspect their young, whether living or dead. this made sense and I agreed to see her before the funeral. My dad arrived, picking up the tabs for funeral and headstone and fighting back tears at my bedside. He and my mom had lost two little boys in similar fashion and it brought it all back for him.

Mark and a friend went about the business of buying a coffin and arranging for a funeral. We named her Annie Lane-Annie because it is a beautiful name, and Lane, after my mother. I found the christening dress that my mother had worn as a baby and we sent it to the funeral home for her to wear. We arranged for a private viewing. My father, Mark and I entered the chapel and sat with her for a few minutes. She was quite beautiful, and all of these 28 years later, I wish that I had taken her picture. She looked a lot like Jon when he was tiny.

Mark chose a plot at the Lakewood Cemetary, across from the elementary school. He told me that he wanted her to be able to the sounds of children playing. We chose a line from a Shaker song for her headstone: "Tis a Gift to be Free." Someone cleared out all of the baby items. I never found out where they went.

We buried her on March 19th, in a drizzle of cold rain. I still remember how it felt to stand there shivering and looking at the tiny white coffin going in to the ground. Afterwards, my friend Patti DenUyl, who was nothing if not generous, arranged for half the staff of Point West to come to my rented cottage, setting up tables loaded with a huge buffet dinner. She brought with her a large basket overflowing with personal things for me: bubble bath, lipstick, scented oils. She was pregnant, too, and her grief nearly matched mine that day. A few weeks later, her Mia was born.

Of course, time heals, and now I mark March 16th by visiting her with flowers, and talking with her for awhile. Early on, of course, Mark and I went together, and took Jon and then our beautiful Annie Elizabeth, born 54 weeks later, with us. They would find pinecones and beautiful sticks to put by the stone. Later, after the divorce, we would show up separately, one of us adding flowers to those left by the other.

When Annie Elizabeth was born, we had the same team in the delivery room; the nurses joked about putting "pink juice" in the IV to assure that a little girl came out. Tears of joy reigned as she entered the world loudly and confidently, looking slightly Asian and very pink.

I spent a week in the hospital and she rarely left my side (I marvel that my insurance company paid for that now; how relaxed it all was back then.)

I sometimes wonder about what Annie Lane would look like. I try to imagine a collage of Jon and Annie. For some reason, I think that her hair would have been more like Jon's, darker and coarser. I see a taller and somewhat more lanky version of Annie Liz. I think that she would have loved music.

To all those who have been close to the death of a child, there is this kind of dreamy wondering and speculation. In one way, we feel that we knew them so well, as they nestled and swam inside of us. In another, they barely touched this earth, and what is left is what might have been.

The picture was taken when I was about seven months along with Annie Lane. I marvel at my youth and I marvel at the resilience that we all have to have when walking through this life.

I am not sure how to close this post, except to say that tomorrow, when I visit Annie Lane, I will tell her once again how she would love her brother and sister, how beautiful the trees are around her, and how much her spirit sings inside of me still.

Earning our place

2009-03-01T09:43:00.007-05:00

From Parker Palmer:

"Our inner world has a reality and a power that can keep us from being victims of circumstance and compel us to take responsibility for our own lives."

This distinguished author and thinker wrote a book called THE COURAGE TO TEACH.

Here is another quote from that book:

"Authority is granted to people who are percieved as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on coercive powers of law and technique, they have no authority at all."

Palmer's message is good news and bad news for all of us, whether we are educators or not.

The good news is that investment in and commitment to our inner lives-turning our compassionate attention to what is in our hearts- will lead to affirmation and authentic success in our personal and professional lives. The bad news, of course, is that this work is necessary if we are to truly succeed in our endeavors. Remaining in the hole of victimization and spiritual blindness is what in AA we call the "easier, softer way." It may be a seductive path initally, when we are in pain or facing huge challenges, but it will lead only to more suffering.

I think of all of the years that a false and pretty two-dimensional Mrs. Hagar has posed and functioned, sort of, as a teacher of art. Of course, she can and does take over immediately, should I decide to leave. Going through the motions, relying on "powers of law and technique", I really can do a great imitation of a teacher. The hollowness and lack of fulfillment of that path are hard to describe and harder to live with. When Claudia shows up for work, and true connection with students then occurs, I can tell you sincerely that there is no greater joy for me.

Leonard Cohen: ANTHEM

2009-02-13T06:59:00.002-05:00

I found myself singing this to myself this morning...one of Leonard's greatest songs and a beautiful way to follow my last two posts.

ANTHEM

The birds they sang

at the break of day

start again

I heard them say

don't dwell on what

has passed away

or what is yeat to be.

Ah the wars they will

be fought again

the holy dove

she will be caught again

bought and sold and bought again

the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

that's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs

the signs were sent;

the birth betrayed

the marriage spent

yeah the widowhood

of every government--signs for all to see.

I can't run no more

with that lawless crowd

while the killers in high places

say their prayers out loud.

But they've summoned, they've summoned up

a thundercloud

and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring...

You can add up the parts

but you won't have the sum

you can strike up the march,

there is no drum

Every heart, every heart

to love will come

but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

tha's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

One View of Julie

2009-02-11T21:01:00.006-05:00

This is a poem I am working on about my sister.

She was a beautiful child

Irish colors of copper and green

a face you always remembered as dimpled

though it wasn't

an upturned nose

delicate

We loved dolls, Julie and I

hers blonde, mine, dark,

Snow White, Rose Red,

She the beauty, me the brains

Then came the injections

blood sugar tests

syringes in the bathroom

clearing of sweet things from the cupboards.

A shift happened.

Dad, the doctor; Mom, the nurse.

the glazed-over eyes and slurred words

sweating, shaking,

foretold trouble

we quickly got orange juice or candy

and watched her slowly return

like an image coming back into focus

and then the relief that it was over

but she was disobedient

and it would come again

and she pulled out her hair

growing back in a little crown

my mother's mouth a thin, straight line

as she cut long strokes with scissors

trying to make it right

but it wasn't

i don't remember

her looks got her boys

her mouth, attention

Irreverent, funny, drunk

Julie didn't give a rat's ass, it seemed.

A trail behind her of jobs

told us to keep our advice

told us to fuck off

she had married boyfriends she met at church

she had medical bills

because the diabetes was taking its toll

and she had to run faster.

This disease makes your little veins burst

and your feet go numb

and your eyes go to hell

and your bones get brittle

and your nerves don't tell you when you broke your ankle

until your eyes insist that the angle is wrong

lying there on the kitchen floor.

Your body races toward old age.

She had a heart attack.

Near the end, Thanksgiving

She traveled here with Dad,

He the doctor, she the patient,

On the ride up, already, Julie zones out

(stubbornly refuses breakfast once again)

He hauls her into the restaurant

the waiter calls 911

"it's ok, I am a doctor, give me some orange juice"

My old dad dealing for the millionth time with Julie

It happens again at midnight

I hear her screaminG:

DADDY, DADDY

in an unholy voice

a cat howl

a ghost howl

so loud

my feet lead me to her

she is drenched in sweat

Dad looks weary in his pajamas

we wait for the orange juice to work

In my terror I yell at her with all the love

i can muster

and I hold her and rock her

I hear her voice in my shirt:

"I don't want to die"

Nothing we could think of could stop these things from happening.

Three months later

My dad knew she was gone before he got there.

Only the cats greeted him, skittish, hiding.

I got the call.

I remember, I remember

Her old boyfriend was in the doorway

at the funeral

people from church

all of us sickened, sickened

cleaning out her apartment

excavating the layers

witness to the life and the aftermath:

evidence of

hastily shoved furniture to fit the gurney

sheets dragged off the bed

medical supplies

dishes in the sink

surprising, sweet touches

an unfinished needlepoint:

"A Sister is a Friend Given to You by God."

cracks

2009-02-11T20:15:00.002-05:00

It was one of those friendships that happens fast. I met her through another friend and there was something about her that intrigued me, that I found sort of exotic and quirky. She agreed with me that we had some things in common and what followed were get togethers for food--she always brings food to people, wherever she goes, a charming and sometimes maddening habit, since she can't afford it--and increasingly, serious talks about some issues with her new husband, with the old husband, with the three children with the old husband.

Cracks began to appear in the relationship after a few months, and I am pulling back a little. It is more a matter of staying with myself than with staying away from her. If relationships are the stuff of life, then navigating through them is the task that requires the greatest skill and has the greatest potential for pain--receiving it, and causing it in others.

I love to read Buddhist stuff because the message is-believe nothing, understand that things are not good or bad, they just are. There is a story about a young man who becomes crippled, in a wheelchair. Then, the general comes riding up to the farm, looking for soldiers, and they leave him behind, and he can stay with his family. So, being crippled is bad, and it is good. It all depends.

I feel that way about cracks. They are an indication of growth and change, of softening, of movement. A crack in a pot is not so good. A crack in the ice could mean that spring is coming. Cracks are what happen when trees grow, and from the cracks we get the beautiful texture of bark. Cracks in the sidewalk create opportunities for small plants to grow where they otherwise wouldn't. Cracks in our armor and defensiveness create the possibility of movement toward each other. Cracking up can mean we're enjoying a good joke or losing our marbles.

I felt some cracking in the veneer of my art work this week-breaking through some walls that I thought defined the edges. This, of course, is the great enemy of creativity: thinking that you know the size of the room you are in, when in reality, there is no room.

february thaw

2009-02-08T13:52:00.002-05:00

What a glorious gift this weekend has been-the oppression of the cold air and the ice underfoot has lifted, long enough to venture out sure-footed for a walk with Bella, camera in hand and joy in my heart. Bird sounds. The smell of dirt and old leaves, recklessly unearthed by snow plow blades. The glorious sun in the blue sky, shining through the trees and landing on the snow, sometimes casting a satin sheen, and in other, slicker areas, an icy glow. For Bella, a cornucopia of smells and puddles to drink from. Today, the windows are open and the curtains pushed back. This is one time when being reminded of impermanence has been a cause for celebration!

Yesterday, I began a new adventure with some other women who are also interested in creativity and the spiritual life. Organized by my friend Kim, a writing teacher, author, and passionately humanitarian friend, there were five of us brought together in her warm and peaceful home. I was a little nervous as I looked around the room, even though I knew all but one of the participants. Sherry, my old friend and fellow art teacher, is one of the more giving and thoughtful people I know. Jeanine, another Hope professor with maintains an air of the urban life she and Andrew left behind when they moved here long ago, and a sparkle undiminshed by MS. And Jennifer, who I had met a few minutes before making tea in the kitchen while we loaded our plates with hummus and veggies. She writes music and children's books and has a soft, reflective air about her that I was drawn to right away.

Kim led us in readings from diverse spiritual traditions with common themes. The point of this curriculum, she told us, is to bring us together; it is being taught worldwide, among the learned and the unschooled, everywhere. The exploration of the arts follows the study-we wrote in our new journals about what the "composted" thoughts from our discussions yeilded in our hearts and minds. I look forward to our next meeting, which I will host. I spent hours this morning making art from my journal notes. Like the thaw outside, my creativity is warming and moving, flowing forth. It feels good.

Austin Christmas

2008-12-21T11:03:00.003-05:00

In a few days, Annie and I will fly out of Chicago to Austin for a Texas Christmas. It will be my fourth trip to Austin and my third stay at the Austin Motel, one of the finer and more eccentric and soulful establishments of that city. I am sharing a few pictures from last year for you to get the general idea of the place,

but if you would like to know more, go to www.austinmotel.com , where you can read the history of the place and understand the reason for the fabulous karma of the place.

The first time I stayed there was with my then-fiance Dave, who agreed to book the room in deference to me and my love of all things tacky and unique; I am sure that a sensible Best Western would have been far more up his alley, but he put a smile on his face and commented on how the purple walls of our room were really quite pretty, after all, and watched a football game on the tiny little tv with rabbit ears.

Last year I returned solo. Each room at the Austin is an individual work of art, and when I checked in to my new digs I was not disappointed. It had sort of a "c" shaped floor plan with the bathroom in the middle. One end of the C showcased a great old dresser, the kind my grandmother had, and the other end held a double bed under a window. The head of the bed was about 2" lower than the foot, which gave you the feeling of diving into dreamland. In the mornings, the sun streamed in that little window and I still remember how that looked and felt with perfect clarity. There was also a little couch and another tiny tv that didn't work. The bathroom was brightly tiled and the layers of calking around the fixtures were like little necklaces that just spiffed everything up. In short, perfection.

Austin is an outdoor place full of independent, liberal and eccentric folks. There is art everywhere, both the official and the unofficial kind, and street merchants peddling everything from shea butter ( a gorgeous black man with dreds down to his ass) to mocassins. The food is great and they have three theaters where you can order some of it and watch a movie. We hope to see Clint's new movie on Christmas day.

My friend Tina will be here at the house with little Bella and the Ozman, stoking the home fires for me. She is still waiting for her husband Almamy to get his visa approved and fly here to Holland to be with her. They have been separated far too long and the story of their struggle to get him here is a painful one. I had dinner with my new friend Vic, a handsome, brilliant and smooth-talking caramel-colored man with a voice like Lou Rawls, and he told me that he looked up the word "steerage" in the dictionary after hearing it used in the movie, "Titanic". I remember the scene: a shot of those belowdecks who couldn't afford first-class passage. It refers to those cheap accomodations for people who really don't count quite as much in this world; those who are marginalized by their skin color, their poverty, their powerlessness, their gender. An awareness of how this pervasive attitude drives our world will help to change it. I don't want to get preachy, here, but seeing clearly is coming to unfold for me as so very much more than getting that I am a lucky woman.

peace to you all, and love,

claudia

we are saying thank you

2008-11-30T16:47:00.004-05:00

I am thinking of that poem from Annie Lamott's book that is somewhere on this blog and thinking how appropriate it is for this weekend (and every other day of the year if your goal is peace)...my weekend was so glorious that I feel gluttonous in more than the food department (although I certainly did well there, too...) Jon and Annie were here, arriving on Thanksgiving day and staying til just a little while ago. I said goodbye to them in the JPs parking lot with snow coming down all around us and us in our hats and scarves. It was picturesque and it snowed just in time for JOn to get a little taste before heading back to Austin. Tina and Kathy were here for TG dinner, and Mark and Benny came the next night for more food and some Monopoly (Benny won and I can tell you two things about that: first, he is a little capitalist, and second, we let him win, I swear). Nothing like an 8 year old counting 100 dollar bills to crack you up.

Saturday we spent in Ann ARbor with Seyth and Molly doing still more eating--Northside Grill for breakfast and my beloved SEVA for dinner. Annie got to see her painter friend, the other Seth (without the "y") and he inspired her to crank out some paintings on the theme of Facebook.

My friend Tina continues to hit walls trying to get her Almamy into the country...the visa is still not a done deal despite their jumping through every hoop presented. She is struggling through each day without her new husband who is still in Conkary, Guinea.

Almost the end of the semester for Hope and finals are looming. I have enjoyed both classes but must admit it will be nice to be back to one job.

My friend Barb lost her dad, Vern Washabaugh, last Tuesday. She and her mom were right there for him around the clock and were giving him a bath and a shave when he left them.

Julie is driving back to DC with her fabulous basset hound, Bessie in tow--her first sojourn to the big city. In other dog news, my friend Carolyn is missing her Lilly, her little black dog who she has had for years. She just seemed to disappear. There are signs up all over her neighborhood in Carmel, Indiana. Mark brought Reggie for breakfast and we talked a little about how things will unfold when the time has come for him to go...loving dogs is so hard sometimes although of course worth every minute.

I have one quote and two pictures for you that may bring a little unity to this rambling blog. Really, I just felt like talking.

Here is the quote:

"Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."--Barbara Kingsolver

The pics are of my Bella and Jon's Vanessa, Tarzan the cat and Poppy pup.

Halloween hike to the beach

2008-10-31T21:17:00.001-04:00

Halloween hike to the beach

2008-10-31T21:11:00.000-04:00

A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fclaudacious%2Falbumid%2F5263487811582894833%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

pause...

2008-10-29T06:54:00.004-04:00

good morning,

I found this image waiting for me in my inbox from Katie's parents, who I had the pleasure of talking to on conference night. Katie is a remarkable artist and one of many interesting small people I have the good fortune to be teacher to at Waukazoo Elementary. I also think Katie is well on her way to being a great spiritual teacher!

A new issue of The Sun has me taking respite this morning in my chair with my small dog snoring on my lap, instead of heading for the gym. I found this quote in an achingly beautiful essay called "Lost" by Elana Zamen:

The writer Andre Gide relates this experience fo a trip he took into the Belgian Congo:

My party had been pushing ahead at a fast pace for a number of days, an done morning when we were ready to set out, our native bearers, who carried the food and equipment, were found sitting about without any preparations made for starting the day.

Upon being questioned, they said, quite simply, that they had been traveling so fast in these last days that they had gotten ahead of their souls and were going to stay quietly in camp for the day in order for their souls to catch up with them.

So they came to a complete stop.

I wonder how far removed I must be from these native bearers in my ability to feel my soul lagging behind me in my business, moving ahead with this sense of self-importance I so often feel. How do we listen for those footsteps? How do we know when to stop and turn around?

7 secrets

2008-10-21T16:52:00.002-04:00

I have been tagged by organicsyes....

here are the rules.

1. link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog

2. share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.

3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links on their blog.

4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Remember chain letters?

They were letters that we wrote and sent to a set number of people (was it seven? that seems right) and then each person sent to seven more, etc, etc, but also back to you, and the idea was that you were going to get a dollar or something from everyone and be rich. The other kind was that you had to do it or you were going to have to endure some awful fate if you didn't keep the chain going. (come to think of it, maybe I can attribute whatever bad luck I have ever had in my life to broken chain letters --or maybe broken mirrors.

Anyway,

here are my seven facts (I am only doing this because it is a chance to talk about myself)

1. I am a teacher and doer and lover of all things art.

2. I have a fabulously diverse, interesting, irreverant and delightful group of friends.

3. I have a tiny little dog named Bella.

4. I lost an eye earlier this year.

5. I love books about maritime disasters and great adventures.

6. My first name is Frances.

7. I was named after a little girl with a terminal illness that my doctor dad and nurse mom took care of before they got married. (I love that one.)

WILD THINGS

2008-10-04T09:36:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite books is WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, by Maurice Sendack. It is a story about a little boy who goes to a place where there are monsters roaring at him, showing their claws, rolling their yellow eyes and doing their best to terrify him. Max, however, being a true six year old, is not intimidated by these theatrics, and tames them by "staring into their yellow eyes without blinking....and they were frightened, and called Max the wildest thing of all...." I have the great pleasure of reading this book to my first graders every year, and presiding over the creation of some pretty awesome puppets, like the one you see here. You can imagine the roaring and general wildness that ensues during this class!

This morning I reread another favorite story, from Pema Chodron, about facing the things that scare you. My monsters look like political figures, my retirement fund, my wrinkles, cancer....

maybe there is something to this taming of the monsters by looking them in the eye.

Here is the story:

"When I was about ten, my best friend started having nightmares: she'd be running through a huge dark building pursued by hideous monsters. She'd get to a door, struggle to open it, and no sooner had she closed it behind her tan she would hear it opened b y rapidly approaching monsters. Finally she would wake up screaming and crying for help.

One day we were sitting in her kitchen, talking about her nightmares. When I asked her what the demons looked like she said she didn't know because she was always running away. After I asked her that question, she began to wonder about the monsters. She wondered if any of them looked like witches and if any of them had knives. So on the next occurence of the nightmare, just as the demons began to pursue her, she stopped running and turned around. It took tremendous courage, and her heart was pounding, but she put her back up against the wall and looked at them. They all stopped right in front of her and began jumping up and down, but none of them came any closer. There were five in all, each looking somewhat like an animal. One of them was a grey bear, but instead of claws, it had long red fingernails. One had four eyes. Another had a wound on its cheek. Once she looked closely, they appeared less like monsters and more like two-dimensional drawings in comic books. Then slowly they began to fade. After that she woke up, and that was the end of her nightmares. "

In an interview with WTWTA author Maurice Sendack, he confided that the inspiration for his wild things came from childhood memories of his relatives coming for dinner. When I read the wild things' pleading with Max: "oh, please don't go! We'll eat you up, we love you so!" I am again delighted by the similarities between the two.

Have a beautiful day, and look 'em right in the eye.

Love,

Claudia

good news from Thich Nhat Hanh

2008-10-03T05:49:00.004-04:00

Woke up this morning once again with this heaviness in my heart over the way of the world. It seems like it is painted in such dark hues these days. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Buddhist monk from Vietnam who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. They worked together in another turbulent time-the 60's. Offered here to you:

"Store consciousness, your thoughts, your speech, and your actions bring about the fruit of karma, which is comprised of yourself and your environment. You and your environment are one and create your karma. It is possible for us to assure a beautiful future by taking care of our thoughts, our speech, and our actions. You have the power of changing yourself within, and you have the power of changing yourself by changing your environment. Taking care of yourself means to take care of your body and to take care of your environment. It is not true that the genes determine everything. Through produc ing your thoughts, speech, and actions, you create your environment. You always have the opportunity to arrange yourself and arrange your environment in such a way as to water the positive seeds in yourself. That is the secret of happiness."

Good news for those of us who feel a little powerless in the face of all of this turmoil.

Sending wishes for joy and peace to all of you out there...

with love,

claudia

PS: Buttberry update: in a previous post I mentioned my attempts to emulate my friend Mark by developing a personal organization system for keeping me on track. Yesterday, I not only dumped water all over my paper but proceeded to accidently rip it and then lose it somewhere between work and home.

Lamination? a waterproof planner to put my buttberry in?

from Pema Chodron

2008-10-01T05:59:00.004-04:00

"Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Somalia, everywhere All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, " Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?" Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, " Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?"

This reading resonated with me this morning. Everyone is talking about our dire situation on Wall Street, and those of us who grew up with parents who survived the Depression and World War II and Korea, who came into adulthood during the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, can be reminded that it is not the world that needs to change, but our response to it.

Peace out, brothers and sisters. Each one of us contributes or contaminates...

love,

claudia

2008-09-28T20:51:00.004-04:00

More from Moore; On Busyness

2008-09-21T21:55:00.002-04:00

"Simplifying the externals allows us to cultivate a rich inner and outer life. A cluttered existence may keep us busy, but busyness doesn't mean that we are fully engaged in what we are doing. Usually, just the opposite; we feel busy because we are neurotically active at things that don't matter much in the long run. It does little good to be successful in a business that requires sixty hours of work a week, while the simple pleasures of home life are neglected. A complicated person can simplify life in that simplicity find a deep articulation of values. Complicated lives often do the opposite: they show to what extent the person is lost in the busyness of the world."

As I put together my list for the week, my challenge will be to see the spaces between the items and try to flesh those out a little with some self-care, some rest, some time sitting on the cushion, making art, dreaming, breathing.

Sunday night: how long have I been anxious on this, the starting line of another week?

from thomas moore-soul food

2008-09-18T06:00:00.004-04:00

"Rainer Maria Rilke said, 'I live my life in widening rings.' It may well be useful to note the expanding of the circles in which we live, but it is also important not to lose the sensation of cycles, which may be painful to anyone living in a culture dedicated to the extending line. Maybe in life we never really develop, but only expand the rotations that give us our firm identity. Maybe we should expect always to get into familiar trouble and to repeat both the glorious and the defeating themes that are imbedded in our soul."

Being a teacher enhances my sense of the cyclical nature of life: the beginning of the school year is marked by tremendous excitement and anticipation. It is all new, and the possibilities are tantalizing. This year could, after all, be the best year ever. At the same time, I embrace the familiar-writing children's names on my class lists and smiling as I remember their faces, pulling out the clay tools, sharpening the pencils, writing on the board, reading for the millionth time Where The Wild Things Are and holding a group of first graders in the palm of my hand....the old, beloved things come back in yet another new way. And, of course, my old challenges of staying present with my heart, being mindful and resisting the tsunami of the tasks of the day, are familiar refrains.

The changing of the seasons seems to magnify this awareness of the cycles and circles of my life. I look at last year's pictures of the colors of the leaves and then, walking up the familiar path to the beach the other day, I notice that the bushes are already turning red. Out of the whole row, only one so far-the leader, I think. I know children like that.

sending peace your way.

let's stay soft in the middle of it all.

love,

claudia

Tuesday morning

2008-09-16T05:44:00.003-04:00

I have a friend who is so organized and on top of things that I am not only impressed but also a little envious. As I wade through the many tasks involved in launching the Queen Mary of a new school year I notice that my old friends, aversion and distraction, want to come out and play, and staying with the developing of lesson plans, the tedium of typing up art orders and the challenge of bulletin boards is difficult, to say the least. I love the opportunity, with time off, to let the day unfold, lighting on this interesting thing or that like a butterfly, unencumbered by To Do lists. It is the attitude of play, and the fertile ground of creativity. Yet Mark seems to thrive on listing and completing tasks, and he accomplishes a great deal on any given day. He is the person for whom this quote was invented: "If you want something done, give it to a busy person."

He calls his system his "Buttberry", and he has used it for as long as I have known him. It is a daily printout of his schedule and list, organized by day in a table, and he folds it up and puts it in his pants pocket, ready to whip out for reference throughout the day (when he puts it in his shirt pocket it becomes a "chestberry"). I am working on my own version of this nifty system, though the corrections and editing of this printed document are what keep me delighted; the rebel in me loves to make changes and cross things out. I guess the important thing is that I am somehow paying the mortgage, calling the plumber and remembering that dentist appointment.

Another friend, a victim of our hideous economy, has lost her home through foreclosure and now has moved to a much smaller place, an apartment in Zeeland, and is staring at boxes, the content of which is so precious to her, and wondering where in the world to put it all. She can't find anything, feels cast adrift and a stranger in her own digs. She is trying to piece it all back together after this storm that has totalled her home base. Where Mark's life is characterized by order, my other friend faces the complete lack of it.

Another visit to Mike the occularist last Friday to remedy a slight "toeing-in" of my prosthesis, giving me a vaguely goofy gaze. I wound up wading into unfamiliar waters with him and I am still pondering all of that. Although I generally welcome the unusual and surprising encounter with others, I was unprepared for this one. One's attractions are so individual and irrational sometimes.

Dear friends, I hope that all of you are moving into this new season with passion, as the temperatures cool down and the uniform green gives way to the subtle unfolding of the riot of color that always signals that we are once again approaching the month of my birth.

Peace Out,

Claudia

Downtown

2008-09-13T22:01:00.005-04:00

The drizzle couldn't dampen my spirits as I headed downtown this morning. The farmer's market was humming despite the rain, with clusters of bright umbrellas moving up and down the walkway. I love the Windmill Restaurant and their delicious veggie omelets and divine homemade wheat toast. If you have never visited the Windmill, you must go and eat there. Although I preferred their old orange and maroon booths to the new, more muted tones, it is a warm and friendly place and usually bustling with locals and tourists alike. Downtown would not be the same without it. Another favorite place is The Bridge, staffed by volunteers and providing a place for artists from all over the world to sell their wares and for us to find beautiful, unique and affordable treasures. They sell fair trade coffee and other goods, beautiful handmade sweaters, lovely ceramics and wood carvings, fabulously ethnic jewelry and bags galore ( I love that word: galore.) I fall in love with things there, such as a tiny teapot from Vietnam, carved from soapstone, of an ox with a tiny man on the back with a book in his hand. One of a kind things. The Bridge's business is booming and this means good karma for Holland.

Another wonderful place is Reader's World, a place I have been frequenting for 38 years. When I was in college there was a great little counter in the back where you could get coffee.

I also got to see Karla today, and her good news is that she will be renting the back part of Treehouse books during Nov and Dec, so all of you Karla fans can buy her nifty stuff once again, just in time for Christmas. Her old shop is now occupied by Favorite Things, a great consignment shop with fab vintage stuff.

Recently I got some new glasses, the first since my my surgery. I walked into Globe Vision and was greeted by Bob Schultze, a lovely man who is not only warm, friendly and fun but also possessing a great eye. He helped me to find the fabulous frames you see in the picture and I just love them. This is a great place to go, full of not only beautiful frames, but art, music and the occasional offbeat customer who engages you in a rousing discussion of Buddhism and physics and then sends you a poem.... Michael, I promise to write you back someday. I have never recieved anything quite like that communication and I loved it.

Mike made some more adjustments on my eye, which was toeing in a little and making me look ever so slightly feeble...apparently as the socket heals it also changes in shape sometimes and this makes the prosthetic shift around. Mike told me that they are working on robotic eyes now...imagine.

more later....

love and peace and Obama to you.

claudia

back to the blog

2008-09-04T08:02:00.005-04:00

Dear All,
The month of August flew by without a word written on this blog or in my journal. As I flipped the calendar page, I turned my attention to my work as an art teacher, as I do every August. The black-eyed susans are my cue that fall is coming and there are things to be done.
Summer Arts Camp was a glorious experience, largely due, of course, to those involved, particularly my gifted and dedicated Hope students, Allison Fisher and Cassie Thomas, both seniors preparing for a career in education. Allison had the energy to rally students to explore theater games, body percussion, beat-boxing and dance, while Cassie planned and led wonderful art projects using recycleable materials and endless patience and resourcefulness. Our campers were delightful kids, as all kids are, and it was just a great time. Thanks to Lorma, Andrew, Tenina, Judith, Derek and Marilu, the awesome Arts Council staff, for their smiles, help, brainstorming, coffee, access to the treasure trove of stuff in the basement, and patience as campers swarmed upstairs and down.
Then, of course, the Olympics, the Democratic Convention, and the first day of school....this makes 50 of them for me (first days, not Democratic Conventions) , and I still have trouble sleeping the night before. I am so happy to be with my colleagues and students again.
The thing that has me heavy-hearted today is the politics. I am horrified to hear some of what is out there right now. I wonder if there will ever be peace in our world with such mean-spiritness being applauded.
Anyway, it feels good to be writing this...more later....
love and peace to all of you out there...
Claudia

chicago!

2008-07-29T18:41:00.005-04:00

Annie at my favorite restaurant, The Garden Restaurant at the Art Institute of Chicago. Beautiful, elegant, and wonderful food. As my mother took me there as a child, so I am able to continue the tradition and bring my lovely Anna.

no shortage of beautific Buddhas at the Art Institute

We figured out that Des Plaines stands for "the planes!!!!!". They are the state bird of Illinois,

apparently.

a poem for you: Now I become myself.

2008-07-27T18:13:00.004-04:00

Now I become myself. It's taken

Time, many years and places;

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people's faces,

Run madly, as if Time were there.

Now I stand still, to be here,

Feel my own weight and density...

My work, my love, my time, my face

Gathered into one intense

Gesture.

So all the poem is, can give,

Grows in me to become the song,

Made so and rooted by love,

Now there is time and Time is young.

O, in this single hour I live

All of myself and do not move.

I , the pursued, who madly ran,

Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

-by Mary Sarton

Jack Wiler Discusses Monster Rats

2008-07-18T22:13:00.003-04:00

Another friend on You Tube--Jack alerted us on his blog that he was interviewed for a show on the History Channel on Monster Rats in his capacity as a NY Exterminator. Check it out if you aren't the squeamish type. To hear some of these guys talk, you could feed a family on one of these critters.....

http://youtube.com/watch?v=lksnp81UHU

Barak visits Ami's School

2008-07-18T21:20:00.004-04:00

lorenzo has a full-ride scholarship to the college of his choice this fall....against some pretty significant odds.
Barak listened to individual reports by students and gave them feedback.
Barak with students at Mapleton School

Ami meets Barak Obama
Barak hanging out with students

Denver Venture School: http://www.denverventureschool.org/

2008-07-18T20:56:00.004-04:00

The first time I saw Ami, she was sitting quietly (one might say, contemplatively, now that I know her better!) in the teacher's lounge at Lakeshore Elementary School. She was a student teacher then, and during our first conversation I learned that she was already choosing among several job offers. That is the way it has been for Ami ever since; you see, she is a powerful combination of ambitious career woman, social activist and Buddha Mama (with a little Mary Poppins thrown in, Indian style). Ami taught at Lakeshore for a couple of years and then moved to Denver, sensing the need for a more diverse, urban community. She continued teaching the elementary level, then became a teacher coach, and then an assistant principal. She told me a story about a terrible day when she found herself in the middle of a huge gang fight, with police cars and ambulances and injured kids. Ami had never seen a fight before, and it must have been terrible for her, but it also, like everything in life, brought her farther along, and made her stronger. Ami has mentored students who no one thought would amount to anything, and they are amounting to a great deal with her support and love. This is why I know that her new high school in Denver is going to be a great success. I got to visit her school, freshly painted by 60 volunteers one weekend, while in Denver. We were with our friend Russ, who teaches in a very tony district in Connecticutt, and he was struck by the humble circumstances from which her new school is being born. This is a free charter school and the focus is on entrepreneurship. I encourage you to check out the Denver Venture School link (I put it on the subject line of this post) and see for yourself. The video, in which students are interviewed, is inspiring. Best wishes to my Ami as she begins this new chapter. I am betting on this school being amazing with her at the helm.

Oh, I must tell you, too, that Barak Obama visited her old school in June, and she was able to meet him and watch him in action with students. He spent the entire day there, folks. She said of him: "he is the real deal."

With people like Ami and Barak out there, I know we can do anything.

trains, planes, and automobiles (oh, and shuttles, footpaths and a little levitating)

2008-07-18T20:12:00.006-04:00

Hello, All,

As I write this, Bella is trying to convince me to play with her by waving her toy Skunkie in my face. This toy was a gift from her Aunt Barb, who spoiled her way past imagining when I was gone, right down to getting her icecream from Capt Sundae's on her last night at the Malis's. Bella no doubt experienced a level of nurturing, care and joy equal to mine on our vacations. Thanks, Barb and Joe and Ollie and Leo, for taking my little knucklehead into your home and hearts and treating her like one of your own. When I die, I want to come back as one of Barb's pets.

Shambhala didn't disappoint. It was as challenging an endeavor as I have ever taken on-physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually--came out of it feeling stronger, lifted up, I hope a little wiser. I met some incredible women, like Tory, a free-lance correspondent who has traveled a great deal, and continued this habit at Shambhala by walking the perimeter's 6 mile path before any of us got to the breakfast tent one morning. Full of humor, heart and wisdom, her stories of her adventures kept us captivated.

Also Joan, a woman who took me for a walk one morning when my tears were blinding me and showed me a broken tree that had such life and new growth that it inspired her each time she looked at it. This tree, she said, was a metaphor for her life. Joan's smile was serene and radiant and I knew she meant it when she said her life is beautiful now.

I could go on and on--there were 15 of us all together, and as always happens in these kinds of situations, my ignorance and fear at the beginning told me how different (unique?) I was, and five days later, we were all the same, all the same.

on the road to shambhala

2008-07-04T00:53:00.003-04:00

I think that song was by 3 dog night....and speaking of golden oldies, my beloved classmates, the Gateway Gators, are having their 38th class reunion tomorrow. I will be raising a glass with them in spirit (nonalcoholic, of course) and wishing I could be there. I send my best to all of you. My friend Jack is writing about that place and that time on his blog and his funny and sweet reminisces are such a joy. there were lots of interesting people in the class of '70, that's for sure.

Anyway, I really am on the road tomorrow, back to Shambhala Mountain Center, 600 acres north of Ft Collins, CO, a Buddhist retreat I first visited last November. The interesting building in the picture is the Stupa, which contains an 18 foot high golden Buddha which is a sight to see. This time, it is for a women's yoga retreat, and I will have the great joy of twisting myself into hideous contortions and meditating with a roomful like-minded females. I will also be able to spend some decent time with my friend Ami Desai, with whom I will be making a road trip to Taos and hanging out with at her place in Denver. She's the one with the beautiful teahouse in her back yard (see pics of said yard and Amos engrossed in a book) and Buddhas everywhere. I have known Amy for fifteen years and I treasure our friendship. So, the estrogen and patchouli oil will be flowing and I have packed not only my incense and peppermints, but some Aleve, too, because I just saw the daily schedule and it's Hippie Girl bootcamp for me!

Wishing you all a beautiful Independence Day and hoping that you are in the ranks of the free.

love,

Claudia

lives not ordinary

2008-06-20T21:10:00.008-04:00

I have always been drawn to eccentric and interesting people. When I was a child, there were many of them who came into our lives and we were encouraged to seek out and value these encounters. One of my favorites was Billy McWayne. Billy was a heroin addict who met my dad in the emergency room one night. He was a handsome, soft-spoken Southern man in his thirties with impeccable manners, articulate and polite. He stayed with us for awhile, to the consternation of community members who knew his history and doubted my parents' judgement in allowing a dope fiend around their children. He certainly was about the farthest thing from a fiend that I ever had met, and we were sad when he left. Billy never did stay clean and wound up on a chain gang somewhere, but for awhile, he was part of my life, and my world got bigger as a result of knowing him. Another favorite was Jimmy Daggitt. He also had a rich dad and a substance abuse problem-his was booze. He had a cute little house by the beach that was loaded with antiques, including a cool old ladderback chair which he fitted over his toilet, hinging the seat. The towel bar was a huge old sword in a sheath. There was baby grand and I swear it was painted gold. He had a jeep, and he always kept Koolaid in the fridge for us kids. He had wavy hair and a big nose and I thought he was so handsome. Jimmy eventually went to law school and practiced in DC, where he overdosed on some combination of drugs and alcohol and was found, legs twisted under him, unconcious several days later; it is a miracle that he survived. He suffered physical and cognitive damage and walked with a cane and an even more eccentric point of view from then on. Very gay and sort of Truman Capotesque, he has faded from my life, but I did get to see him at my brother's wedding, where we shared memories and his stash of Xanax.

I am blessed with some pretty colorful friends now, people who have never shied away from putting themselves out there, stepping into life with both feet and making some noise. I am learning every day from them to have the courage to be who I really am. One of them seems to be running at a higher voltage than usual, leading her loved ones to wonder if a little lithium might be in order. Being less than practical and very artistic, she takes risks, makes dramatic moves, lives outside the box and walks on edges that would make many of us a little woozy. And my response, to my dismay, is only too often one of thinly veiled disapproval and an urge to "help" and advise. As if.

It is a spiritual axiom that those things that hook and irritate us about others are the very things that we reject in ourselves. Maybe this is why cultivating compassion and understanding in relationships is so hard; we have to do it for ourselves first, and that critical voice that lives in our heads gets loudest when directed inward.

So, a poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay for my impractical, dramatic, beautiful, wild friends (I include myself among them):

My candle burns at both ends

it will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,

It gives a lovely light.

If you are reading this, dahling, you know who you are.

sleep well, if sleeping is on the agenda tonight.

I loved your assortment of weapons last night:)

survivors

2008-06-16T08:41:00.005-04:00

Friday night was the Relay for Life event at the WOHS track. Cancer survivors were invited to walk a lap together, wearing our colorful teeshirts inscribed witht he words, "Remember", "Celebrate", and "Fight Back" on the front, and "SURVIVOR" on the back. My friend Kathy and I found the sign-up tent and I got my shirt, then looked around and took in the scene- a sea of shirts like mine, survivors everywhere: a toddler, an elderly man in a wheel chair, a beautiful woman with just the tiniest bit of hair..

Many of you know that my dad is a retired Oncologist as well as a cancer survivor himself, and he came to my heart as I walked with Kathy. I worked for him over summer college breaks and got to witness him with patients. One woman I remember had breast cancer-she looked like someone's second grade teacher. A year later she came back on crutches-it had gone to her hips, and she had consulted a faith healer before finally returning for more radiation. Who could blame the woman for wanting to avoid that. Many other stories live in my mind from the dinner table, my father telling us about these people. Memoirs around the house, gifts from grateful patients. My dad's weary eyes as he told the stories.

I talked to him on Father's Day. I told him that I wondered if I deserved to walk that lap with the likes of Emma, my friend Barb's mother in law, who endured chemo and surgery three years ago when diagnosed with breast cancer. The neat and tidy ennucleation of one eye seems to pale in comparison. I don't know that i "fought" cancer. I basically had it removed.

My dad called cancer " a perverse lottery". You just get it, and it doesn't really give a damn who you are.

Our West Ottawa team, headed up by the amazing teacher, musician and dad, Jeff Gaul, raised over 14K. Maybe this is how I fight back-by following his example, doing something good that allows me to forget about my damned self for a little while.

Thanks to all who do that each day so that I can walk with Emma and enjoy another sunset.

Benny and the Tiger Game

2008-06-16T08:21:00.004-04:00

My ex Mark has an eight year old named Benny. When he was born,on the day after Annie's high school graduation, the kids and I were still reeling from the divorce and splitting up of the old family, and the thought of this new life somehow fitting in to our old ones was a hard one, to say the least. Jon and Annie would now have a half-brother, and who the hell knew what he would be to me? I could see what a child of Mark's with no Claudia involved might look like, maybe, but really, who would this little person be?

Mark introduced me to Benny when he was a baby, and he as an angelic little creature. Over the years, I have gotten to know him better. After my surgery, Benny and Mark came over, and he brought me a book about the Detroit Tigers, inscribed carefully in beautiful first grade printing: : "Dear Mrs. Art, I know you like the Tigers, so I got this book for you. Love, Benny." We decided then and there that we would go to a Tigers game this summer, and we did just that yesterday, on Father's Day, 3 days after Benny turned 8.

He was in full Tiger regalia, sporting a cool two-toned Tiger hat and a Pudge Rodriguez jersey. He kept saying, "I can't believe I am in Detroit!" When you are eight, Detroit is still a cool place, and seeing it through his eyes, I had to agree. An old church became a castle through Benny's eyes, and Ford Field looked a whole lot bigger. And then, of course, there it was-Comerica Park, with huge lions poised for attack and a giant screen proclaiming, "HOme of the Tigers! " Enough to make anyone's heart pick up a little, I think.

Even the rain delay was fun. We ate, we cheered, we watched some great baseball (back-to-back homers by Guillen and Thames! The Dodgers' rally in the ninth!) and drove home playing the alphabet game and a few that Benny made up as well. I looked over at Mark, navigating through the crowds, and remembered so many car trips with the kids in the back, playing those same games and enjoying a beautiful day. We held hands for awhile, and it felt just fine.

Be Still

2008-06-11T21:08:00.004-04:00

from Thomas Merton:

Be still

Listen to the stones of the wall

Be silent, they try

To speak your

Name

Listen

To the living walls.

Who are you?

Who

Are you?

These iris and many more belong to my neighbor on Lakeshore Drive. They are a highlight of my walks with Bella. I have three blooming myself, along with my lilac bush, which is groaning under the weight of all the blossoms. They are the color of pale lavender silk.

Suddenly the air is friendly and caressing, the daylight seems to last forever and the color is everywhere. In Michigan, spring is a miracle!

after the storm

2008-06-08T11:02:00.008-04:00

Good morning, friends,

If you live nearby you weathered an incredible storm last night-awesome in its power. Phone lines are buzzing this morning with stories from benign to tragic of its consequences. The sheer volume of water coming down from the sky was hard to wrap your mind around. And, it raged well into the night.

The storm left its mark in many ways on the beach. The waterline showed evidence that the waves traveled farther than halfway up Riley beach, and dragged sand to the shoreline, forming a little dune. Everywhere, the rushing water carved rivulets into the sand, re-enacting the making of the Grand Canyon on a small scale and creating crevices delicate and precarious. Fractal patterns were everywhere along the sand. Debris had been lifted, carried and dropped along my path, most organic but also, the remnants of beachgoers mixed in-a stray sandal, plastic components of something or other, charred wood from campfires.

The wind was refreshing and clean. The sky as peaceful as it was turbulent the night before.

The beach once again has been made new, baptized by the rain and the magificent dance, the raging minuet of the water, in and out, to and fro.

I walked in tandem with the footsteps of a child for awhile and wished that I could see around me with his eyes, free of thought and preoccupations. As happens so often, I thought of all of the people I have loved who have walked this beach with me, both in person and in spirit. Again I saw the two certainties of life-that it will change, and that it is eternal.

I have a good friend who is having a storm of her own this weekend. This morning's call sounded like it is dying down and the sun is peeking through.

words for today:

abundance

light

force-light

school's out

2008-06-06T21:48:00.004-04:00

School is out as of noon today and me without a camera! I wish I could have shared some images with you of my fifth graders at their Aloha breakfast-they were just beaming with joy and promise and although I will miss them all I am happy to send them forward from their Waukazoo nest to the bigger world of middle school. We teachers waved good bye from the hill and I brought home another rose bush from the Marsman family--this one is coral pink, a fitting color to represent their youngest and most colorful child, Kristin. Three other Marsman bushes grace my garden and the blooms are almost as beautiful as the girls (Kaitlin, Kelly and Kara).

One of my favorite things is finding a piece of artwork like the one above on my desk. Perhaps this helps to explain my relentless optimism-kids having a way of making your world much brighter. I have a friend who is retiring next year, and when I asked her why, she said, "you know, Claude, being an accountant for such-and-such company isn't quite as rewarding as teaching art to children." thanks for the slap upside the head, Jean...:)

My heart has been so full today that I am now sitting here listening to the wind blow and feeling the peace that has alluded me all week. The transition was aided by a call from my darling Vanessa, who had her last day yesterday. Only teachers know how it feels.

I have a poem for you from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that speaks to this idea of stillness after such busyness:

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the

earth,

let's not speak in any language

let's stop for a sceond,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together in a sudden strangeness...

sending peace vibes out and feeling them coming back...

love,

claudie

another passage

2008-06-06T06:54:00.004-04:00

I sit here in my wonderful old leather chair with Bella sleeping soundly on my lap (just the tiniest sound of a snore) and the intoxicating breeze blowing the curtains as it enters the house and whispers, "summer! summer!" The birdsong, the smells. The cup of coffee in my favorite mug. All of this and the promise of some open time ahead. Longer mornings, the beach, a nap on the couch in the middle of the day. It seems impossible to be this blessed!

Yesterday I taught yoga and papermaking to my kids. Today I say goodbye to my fifth graders at their Aloha breakfast. The teachers at Waukazoo have a fine tradition: we stand on the hill by the driveway and wave goodbye to our kids as they leave in their busses and cars. It is like a parade. There is an exquisite feeling of joy and sadness-and love. We all know that we will be together again.

A quote for you from LEGACY OF THE HEART, by Wayne Muller:

"As we explore the practices of faith, sraddha, and equanimity, one thing becomes clear: Genuine faith is born of the ability to trust in what is most fundamentally true within ourselves. Circumstances will change, and all manner of things pleasant and unpleasant will arise and fall away; sometimes our lives will be touched with joy, and at other times we will be given tremendous pain and sorrow. Many times we will be afraid. But the object of faith is not to eliminate difficult circumstances, nor is faith about trusting in a God who will rescue us from hurt, or who--if only we believe strongly enough--will make everything better. The real question of faith is when pain and loss inevitably come our way, do we withdraw in fear that we will be destroyed, or do we deepen our trust in our innate capacity to endure them? Can we find a strong and courageous heart, a place of clarity and wholeness within ourselves in which we can place our ultimate trust, gently allowing both the fear and the pain to simply move through us?

Faith is a centering response. The search for faith is a search for our true nature, for the spirit within, the divine strength that lives in our deepest heart...we begin to see that true safety is not the absence of danger but rather the presence of something else-the presence of a sense of faith, born in the heart and sustained by a spirit of serenity, trust, and courage. "

peace to you, friends.

love,

claudie

annie's home!

2008-06-01T13:07:00.003-04:00

What a morning for a walk on the beach. Glorious. So good to have Annie here.

join me for Relay For Life!!

2008-05-27T15:35:00.002-04:00

Relay for Life Holland will be held on June 13th and 14th at West Ottawa High School. I will be new to this adventure this year but have heard such great things about his event that I can hardly wait to get there! I have joined the West Ottawa team and am inviting you out there to join us.
Basically, everyone has to raise $100, and we take turns walking thwe track for 24 hours to earn our pledges. Fun, food and fellowship will abound!
If you are interested please follow these simple steps:

Go to the website www.relayforlifeholland.com

Click on Join a Team and follow the steps.

Then, got to the Particpant Center and click on the Personal Page Icon and customize your page. Add a photo and tell others the reason why you Relay. It seems like we all know someone who has battled cancer--let's get their names and pics out there, too.

Or, ask them to walk the Survivor's Lap, which will be at 6pm on the 13th. I will be walking with friends and colleagues who are cancer survivors and we would love to have more join us. Contact me if you have questions: 616-786-1894.

Thanks, All.
Love,
claudie

symbols of peace and harmony for you

2008-05-26T22:14:00.003-04:00

the Mighty MO

2008-05-26T21:49:00.004-04:00

On Saturday my friend Kathy took me to the cemetary where her dad, Ralph Martinus, is buried, and I had the pleasure of meeting him, or at least his spirit. I have heard a lot about him from Kathy and he sounds as though he was quite a guy. He was in the Navy. My dad Tom was also in the Navy, as was my Uncle Jack and my Uncle Larry. My dad was on the Battleship Missouri, also known as the Mighty Mo. He has a great portrait of her at the house, and when I grew up, I loved looking at it. My dad looked handsome in his sailor blues and all three boys had their military portraits hanging in my grandparents' house. I often wonder if his love of maritime stories (and mine, for that matter) comes from the time he served as a young officer on that huge ship.

It has been a good weekend, with the weather finally feeling like spring and the warm sun shining. I built a little wall around my garden and I have my friends to thank as usual--Carolyn provided the little paver bricks, Bobbi helped me haul them and Kathy helped to dig up the dirt and put them in. A friendship wall. It warms me to look at it.

Also bookended my Sunday with Mark and Reggie...breakfast at I-Hop and dinner at my house. Mark made some monster grilled asparagus and we watched an inspiring documentary about a teacher.

In between, I got out on the golf course with the girls and am thrilled to tell you that there didn't seem to be much difference for me between golf with two eyes and golf with one. Honestly, I was hoping I'd be able to keep my eye on the ball better, but alas, no such luck. Not one bit better. But oh, it was such fun!

LEMMINGS CLOCK

2008-05-26T21:44:00.002-04:00

I was mezmerised by this video that I found while browsing blogs tonight so here it is for your amusement. how weird! and it just keeps going, on and on and on. no "play" button. just an endless loop. yikes.

one year ago..

2008-05-25T08:00:00.005-04:00

A year ago tomorrow was my wedding day. Had we not called it off after our disasterous spring break in San Antonio (scene of the Alamo-and we stayed at a hotel that used to be the jail--that pretty much paints the picture), I would be out buying an anniversary card for Dave. Or not. Sometimes I think that is overly optimistic.

I met Dave on eharmony and we were together for a little over two years. We had hideous fights in all the best places: Minneapolis, Sante Fe, Denver, Tuscon, Milwaukee, chicago.....even the wilds of the UP. We had sleepless nights at all the best hotels. We bought lots of cards for each other which described our endless love for each other, and we slammed doors and screamed into telephones and I cried more tears than I thought you could produce. We saw therapists, read spiritual guides and psychological profiles. We even consulted the Enneagram, trying to determine how a fearful 6 like him and a bossy 8 like me could find lasting happiness. We wrote beautiful, spiritual vows, hired a hip minister, rented the coolest house on the beach and hired the caterer. I had a beautiful wedding dress waiting in the closet.

Peachy flowing bridesmaid's dresses for Annie and Sarah. Nifty pinstripes from Banana Republic for the boys. Annie worked on artistic invitations.

After it all went to hell, we decided that we would somehow stay together and see what happened. It was kind of like the movie Frankenstein--the one with De Niro, when Dr. Frankenstein takes his dead fiance and attaches her beautiful dead head to another body and re-cooks her and then they have that gruesome dance scene when he is smiling frantically (he is utterly mad at this point, of course and saying to her, "remember? remember???"

Anyway, we spent the wedding weekend at the beach house. What an appetite for pain we had.

By the way, for the exact hour that the ceremony was to take place, there was a torrential downpour. We sat and watched it and I cried and cried. Dave politely got after me for leaving my kleenexes all over the place. We had an unwedding night.

The next morning, a young deer appeared on the edge of the water. He had gotten separated from his mother and appeared to either be exhausted or injured. We couldn't get too close to him, and didn't know what to do, so Dave called the DNR and then the cops but no one was interested in a stray deer on the beach. People walking the beach stopped to take pictures. An hour went by. Finally, in a burst of speed, he began to swim, moving farther and farther from the shore. We watched him until he was out of sight.

That evening, another beach walker told us that they had seen a dead deer on the beach up the shoreline a ways. I don't know if it was him.

Dave and I dated all summer and had an almost anticlimactic breakup in October. I will remember those months as an uneasy truce. We took a couple of trips and all went well, and then, the cracks began to appear....an explosion on our anniversary weekend in Saugutuck, and then the final bullet to the head prior to my birthday trip to Traverse City.

To paraphrase Tom Waits, the music had stopped long ago, but we had kept trying to dance. That gruesome, sleeping, trancelike dance of denial, smiles plastered to our faces.

After the breakup, I went to DC, to Shambhala in Colorado, and Austin....I lost Miles and got Bella, got cancer and lost an eye, started this blog, reconciled with people who I thought I had lost, and learned a lot about myself, love, friends, happiness, art, and breathing.

Happy Memorial Day weekend...love to all of you out there in cyberspace. May your troubles be small and may you feel the sun on your faces today.

Love,

Claudie

RIDE OF SILENCE 2008

2008-05-22T21:36:00.003-04:00

My dear ex, Mark Hagar, has once again coordinated the Ride of Silence and I am giving him a shout out here for his hours and hours of hard work and devotion to this cause. For those of you who don't know about it, this ride is what it sounds like- a silent ride which is in honor of bicyclists who have been killed while riding. My son Jon and his partner Vanessa rode in Austin.

There are 285 rides that all happen at the same time all over the world and it is growing every year. For more information check out their website at

http://www.rideofsilence.org/main.php

Here's a clip from Mark's interview with WZZM yesterday:

"People are taking their bikes out of the garage and bringing them into the bike shops to get them maintained because they're going to start communicating because they can't afford gas prices. With more and more cyclists out there we need to make motorists and the public aware to please be careful because we are out there. You need to share the road with us."

By the way, Vanessa (who is even cuter from the front) just bought a white Vespa to zoom around Austin in. Jon dubbed it "The Vanespa."

Thanks to Mark for helping make our roads safer for cyclists.

love,

claudia

ah, love...

2008-05-22T20:48:00.005-04:00

Hello, All,

I was looking through my blog a little while ago, especially the first part. This blog means so much to me, not only as a record of the events, but reading and looking through it makes me feel full (some would say "full of it":)), and lucky as heck. Here is this woman who gets cancer and cracks up her car and has her eye removed after her stupid boyfriend dumps her, and what do we see? Incredible people who love her and look after her, not a small amount of good fortune, renewed connections from people from long ago, new connections with people I have met through this...all that was good in my life remains, and some crappy stuff has fallen by the wayside (mostly attitudinal in nature.)

Lately I have renewed my membership in an online matching thing, and have communicated with a couple of men ("matches", in online dating parlance), and this has brought up the issue of how and when and if to talk about all of this to a potential date. The big issue for a long time has been the alcoholism--but I could always hastily add : "but I have been sober for 17 years", which very quickly turns a liability into an asset. Makes me sound all discliplined and mature, when truth be told, it has been more a matter of luck and stubbornness than anything else. On the second tier is the vegetarian Buddhism issue. By now, the potential date is putting it together that I will not be going out for burgers and a beer after Mass with him. Still, this might be appealing to the right tree-hugging boomer sort who maybe owned a bong or at least tells people he was at Woodstock.

Now, I have this fake eye, and I am thinking that since a-this has been a very recent (and life-altering) experience, it seems odd NOT to bring it up, and b-it is a FAKE EYE, I need to be forthcoming and frank about it. On the other hand, I don't want to scare some great guy off (though how great would he be if this WOULD scare him off?? )

Today I told a handsome guy named Steve, via email, the main bullet-points, and I am at peace with whatever comes of that, because I have learned that this is the only thing to be done. I learned from that last relationship, that long, laborious and often very painful one, that the greatest gift I can give myself and you is the truth. I didn't do that with him and it didn't work. Go figure.

I don't know where I am going with all of this, except to tell you all that I love life, and though I would welcome a lovely man in to it, I am one happy woman right now, with things just as they are (ok, maybe minus a few pounds and wrinkles--truth, right?). Let me tell you about my friends and family: they are sterling people, and they love me real good, regardless of anything that might be present of absent in or on me. I have been spoiled by this devotion. Lucky woman.

bringing the Buddha to the gym

2008-05-20T19:21:00.002-04:00

Hello, All,

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending a Sock Hop at Waukazoo-Carolyn arranged it as a farewell party, and a great time was had by all, as you can see from the pictures. I even got to teach the poor children how to do the Swim, the Jerk and the Pony (none of which caught on, by the way:)) Anyway, thanks to Carolyn for getting us all togehter. What a blast!

In other news, I returned to my old (really, really old) routine of going to the gym in the mornings. Doing this requires me to get out of bed earlier and bypass the couch, coffee and reading that have characterized my mornings for some time, and I have been worried about letting go of this meditation/reflection time that has been so instrumental in staying centered and returning to a peaceful place on a daily basis through the thicks and the thins of the past few months. In the past, going to the gym has become sort of an obsession and I this is not what I am seeking anymore. My plan was to take my Buddha to the gym with me, by downloading my audiotapes by Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron, along with my favorite spiritual rock star, Krishna Das, onto my little music player and see how that worked out. Happy to say that it has been very interesting and engaging, at least so far. The variety has kept me engaged-this morning, for example, I listened to Tay talk about the spirituality of nature, Krishna Das chanting, Tom Waits singing a great funky love song, Pure Prairie League singing Amy, and Fleetwood Mac, among many others. I adjust the treadmill or exercise to suit the song, so every day is different.

Having said this, I can also say that I have had some pretty significant ups and downs over this past week or so. There are days when my experience with my eye and cancer are very much at the forefront of my mind and I wish with all my heart that I could have my old eye back. When there is self-consciousness it is hard to be content. Thankfully, these days are followed by more days of joy and contentment. This is the way of life for all of us, of course. Thanks to the people in my life for carrying me along.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..........................breathe............

2008-05-11T21:40:00.001-04:00

mother's day post

2008-05-11T21:18:00.004-04:00

All day I have been mulling over motherhood....and it has been such a day! The rain made the house seem so cozy and I spent time blogging, editing photos, reading and cooking a pot of red lentil and sweet potato curry soup which was the perfect lunch. I got to the beach with bella this evening and took in the breathtaking light and the clear air as the sun peeked out after the rain stopped. A day when gratitude is easy to find.

Several good girlfriends are feeling discouraged, frustrated and just plain rejected by their adult children today. One daughter has left the home and is worrying her mother sick with casual comments about potential pregnancies and bad drugs. Another is dealing with an angry son who doesn't support her as she moves away from a long and unhappy marriage. Still another sighs with relief that her daughter is moving to another town because she feels "eaten alive" by this girl's demands for time, support and money. A fourth is estranged from her daughters and dreaded this holiday, as many do. I talked to a half-dozen middle-aged moms today, and the common theme seems to be "when does it end? When do I get sprung from this job?" Of course, the answer is, never.

How do I feel about this weird holiday? Was it really invented by Hallmark Cards, like everyone says? Is it a good thing--other than for restaurants, flower shops and of course, Hallmark? Do we really feel better if they call, and worse if they don't?

Jon gave money to the Burmese monks for me today and I am glad. We are discussing how we can turn these questionable "holidays" into something more meaningful, more gratifying--to help us be mindful of all of our relationships with all other human beings. Can we find ways to honor all people-to be inclusive rather than divisive in our attention? Can we care more about those we have never met?

If you are a mother, you know about this: the smell of a baby's head as he sleeps on your chest.

No card comes close to that.

Three months post-op today.

love,

claudie

MOTHERS ALL: A PHOTO GALLERY

2008-05-11T15:24:00.003-04:00

BUDDHA MOTHER

MOTHER GOOSE
MOTHER MARY
MOTHER NATURE
ANDY WARHOL'S MOTHER

5000 year old artificial eye!

2008-05-07T21:18:00.002-04:00

"Archeologists in Iran recently found the skull of a woman nearly 5000 years dead with a prosthetic eye made of tar and animal fat intact in her eye socket.

According to experts, this was a wealthy woman in her late 20's, probably royalty, which would explain why she had clay vessels, ornamental geads, a leather sack and a bronze mirror in the grave with her. A California optometrist guesses that the soman wore the fake eyeball for aesthetic purposes..."from a blog by Lisa Katayama

morris louis

2008-05-07T20:25:00.004-04:00

Morris Louis was an American abstract expressionist painter who, like Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and many others in the 50's and 60's, developed new ways to apply large areas of color to canvases without the brushstroke (and often without the brush!) The result here is beautiful saturated soft color that I find beautiful and powerful. I share this as a place for you to take refuge from the grey cold of today.
The weather has got me curling up and the creative circulation slowing down.
Too tired to even write the list of things that I have to do.
Unless, of course, the list included things like this:
daydream
languish
scan
wander
emote
nibble
snore

now, those things sound manageable today!

hungry ghosts

2008-05-06T22:50:00.004-04:00

Hungry Ghosts are are part of Buddhism's six realms of existence. I first read about them in Mark Epstein's book, THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER. These gross little guys seem to represent intense craving and addiction. They have tiny little mouths and skinny necks, and they have hugely distended, big bellies. They can never be full, never satisfied.

They are hideous little things, appropriate images for addiction. I struggle with it every day and I believe that the root of all suffering is this kind of craving for more-than or other-than what we have and are at this moment. I am here, but I want to be there. I have this, but I want that.

I have this much, but I need a little more. I look at this image and I feel like I not only know these guys but may be related to them! :)

I am captivated by this Hungry Ghost thing and just had to share.

What a beautiful day. Spring really is here.

Happy Tulip Time, all.

love,

Claudia

Things falling apart

2008-05-05T20:52:00.004-04:00

It was a weekend of company-Annie home from Chicago and a dinner party on Sunday night to celebrate the birthdays of two of Holland's most wonderful men-Ken Freestone and Mark Amenta, both born on Cinco de Mayo some years ago. My beautiful new friend Tina made Thai Curry and Vali, this gorgeous woman from Venezuela and Tina's friend, brought incredible cheesecake. My old friend Marilu Andree was here, too, and it was a lovely time. Mark was so funny-in rare form telling us stories. Kenny played with his gifts. Lorma looked beautiful in her shawl. I am one lucky lady having friends such as these.

Two other very dear friends are going through all kinds of very hard stuff right now and I have been thinking of a passage from Pema Chodron's book, WHEN THINGS FALL APART. It goes like this:

"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't reallly get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It is just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

When we thing that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don't know. We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure."

I have learned in my life that when things fall apart my life gets bigger, sometimes uncomfortably so, but that this is invariably good news. Anything that disrupts my cocoon living is to be welcomed, even as I kick and scream and freak out. I am holding these friends so close to my heart, and of course watching the pain they are enduring is difficult, but the sun will rise tomorrow and maybe we will be there to feel its warmth. The rest is temporary stuff that will pass.

This is my hundredth post and I actually have hesitated to write because people like my friend Susan have done such cool things on their 100th and I just felt paralyzed trying to come up with something anywhere near as good. I had to let go of that ambitious idea because I just couldn't think of anything. What occurs to me now is to just to paraphrase my friend Jungle Jon, who says that when we have the gift of really seeing our lives clearly, the only possible response we can have is gratitude.

With gratitude for all of you-and love,

claudia

jack's book (FUN BEING ME)

2008-05-01T07:11:00.004-04:00

I found Jack's book waiting for me on the doorstep yesterday. Words fail me as I try to talk about it and of course this means that it is what I hoped it would be, which is a type of communion, like all good art is. A way of being deeply touched and involved, pulled in to the heart of things. My tolerance for the ring of falseness is at an all-time low these days. My sense of urgency to live hard is driving me to embrace things like Andy Warhol's image of someone diving off a building, mangled in a car crash, Jack's poems. To be able to see the beauty of all of this without turning away. I don't mean to be one of those rubber-neckers who can't resist a look as they drive by. I mean, to not be afraid to be in the middle of it all. To lean into it, rest within it. We madly seek ways to avoid discomfort when it is the stuff of life, what moves us forward and makes us real. We drink and shop and visit the therapist and try to assure ourselves that all the bad stuff will go away. Artists stick it back in our faces.

Pema Chodron tells us a story about her childhood friend who was being chased by monsters every night in a recurring dream. Pema asked her what the monsters looked like. Her friend responded that she didn't know-she was too busy running to see them. So, the next night, she did turn around, and what she saw was not the terrifying visage she imagined, but flat, inchoate, almost cartoonlike images, silly, almost. She never had the dream again.

Here is that poem I told you about from his blog. One last poem for poetry month.

DREAMING OF IMPS by Jack Wiler

Last night there was an imp in my bed.

Well, not really an imp;

a small demon, I guess.

I woke up and must have frightened it

because it scurried off to hide in the shadows.

But I saw it,

The coor of a young roach.

Twisted.

Mean.

Then it was gone.

There was a time such things were with me daily.

Demons and imps and shrouded ghouls.

Lingering by my bedside as I lay sleeping,

dreaming horrible dreams of a good life.

A life where I had a job and friends and ate food

in restaurants.

A life filled with nice clothing and cars.

People who laughed at my jokes and forgave my foibles.

The demons watched me twitch in sleep and giggled

at my travails.

I was very sick for a time.

I came so close to death that it seemed almost like I was dead.

I spent much too much time with demons and angels.

I ate too little and slept too little and sweated through the night.

I woke each morning drenched from my dreams.

I haven't been sick for years.

Not like that anyway.

Oh, a flu now and then or a sore throat,

but that's been it.

Til the imp leaped up

and licked my face.

Perhaps they never left.

Perhaps I'm still desperately ill.

This is the dream I dream.

My car, my dogs, my new suits, my beloved.

All just fodder for their little jokes.

There should be an insecticide for demons and imps.

There should be some kind of poison I could set out

for them to find and eat.

It might be unpleasant to find their swollen little bodies but

except for a day or two of stink it would be better to have them gone.

But it seems to me that there is no poison that they wouldn't love.

No death they couldn't cherish.

No desire or whim that wouldn't amuse them.

Dreams and imps.

Poisons and wishes.

All things to think about as we kneel at the foot of the bed

to say our little prayers.

thanks, jack.

My Dad

2008-04-30T09:31:00.006-04:00

Yesterday my dad, Tom Hayes, aka Dr. Tom, the Silver Fox, Der Alte Mann, turned 82 yesterday. Here he is with his adorable wife of 28 years, Geneva. For those who don't know him, he had a fifty year career as a physician and is the son of one and the brother of two more. If you ask him about his illustrious career, he will probably modestly tell you that he is a product of a trade school, albeit an exclusive one (UM), and that he is largely self-taught in all other areas out of necessity. He devours books, particularly history books, and maritime books like those of Patrick O'Brien (don't get him started!!)--but also sci fi, biographies and nonfiction. He searches for obscure documentaries on Netflix and he asks a lot of questions. He designs and builds HO train engines and wears jeweler's glasses to add the tiny little lightbulbs and wheels. When I was a kid, he developed a system for developing color photograhs and won awards at the Camera Club shows in St. Joe. He golfed like a madman.

His greatest love, though, has always been music. He plays the trumpet and is in two bands: The Bend in the River Brass Band and the Shrine Band, both in Evansville, Indiana. The BRB just narrowly missed a gold medal at the huge regional competition of brass bands. If things had been different, he would have made a great music teacher or professional musician. He practices most every day. It brings him joy to make music. He went to Interlochen summers and there are pictures of him, an elementary kid with big pink cheeks sitting next to a bunch of big kids. He played second chair.

He wrote me an email yesterday:

Claudia

Just checked your blog and thought you would be interested in learning that I danced in the chorus of the "Firebird" at Interlochen under the direction of Martha Graham in 1937 - the summer that she was on the faculty at the camp (which became a full-time boarding school after WW II.) I did real good - didn't fall down or anything. She was a totally impressive person.

This of course doesn't surprise me. He is still very much alive and has a lot to share.
Happy Birthday, Dad. I love you.
Claudia

another offering for Poetry Month

2008-04-30T06:54:00.002-04:00

My friend Kathy bought me a book of poetry called NINE HORSES by Billy Collins.

Drink this poem in....small sips recommended:

Night Letter to the Reader

I get up from the tangled bed and go outside,

a bird leaving the nest,

a snail taking a holiday from its shell,

but only to stand on the lawn,

an ordinary insomniac

amid the growth systems of garden and woods.

If I were younger, I might be thinking

about something I heard at a party,

about an unusual car,

or the press of Saturday night,

but as it is, I am simply conscious,

an animal in pajamas,

sensing only the pale humidity

of the night and the slight zephyrs

that stir the tops of the trees.

The dog has followed me out

and stands a little ahead,

her nose lifted as if she were inhaling

the tall white flowers,

visible tonight in the darkened garden,

and there was something else I wanted to tell you,

something about the warm orange light

in the windows of the house,

but now I am wondering if you were even listening

and why I bother to tell you these things

that will never make a difference,

flecks of ash, tiny chips of ice.

but this is what I want to do--

tell you that up in the woods

a few night birds were calling,

the grass was cold and wet on my bare feet,

and that at one point, the moon,

looking like the top of Shakespeare's

famous forehead,

appeared, quite unexpectedly,

illuminating a band of moving clouds.

This poem does what all good art does-it makes my heart fill as I recognize myself in it, and I say, "yes! that is exactly it!" and I realize once again that I need to tell you so many things. I feel inspired. Alive.

There are not enough hours.

Second Helping of Andy Warhol

2008-04-27T20:30:00.004-04:00

Hello, friends,

Another trip to the GRAM today with my friend Mark and his friend Tina-Sunday brunch was divine and in addition to seeing the work a second time, I got to see the documentary showing in their cool theater, which was excellent. My blurry mental image of Warhol as this stoned-out skinny guy at Studio 54, that caricature, is now gone, which I guess is a kind of definition of education--replacing misconceptions with truth.

Years ago I went to a seminar with David Perkins, an educator who has thought and written a lot about the nature of learning, and his theory is that the reason teaching is so hard is that you have this three-fold job you have to do in order to install concepts into a person's head. First, you have to discern the nature of the misconceptions, and we are all loaded with them. Second, you have to actually prove them wrong. And then, finally, the misconception falls away and is replaced by something closer to reality. No blank slates out there, in other words.

My belief is that the arts are the vehicle.

Jack Wiler wrote about JFK's assassination this morning on his blog, at about the same time that I was looking at a roomful of Warhol's images of Jack and Jackie on that day in Dallas. He reminded me of how we loved the Kennedy's, of Camelot. I remember that. I loved my misconceptions about that.

jack wiler's world

2008-04-26T09:02:00.005-04:00

Some of you know that I have a high school reunion coming up this summer in New Jersey (class of '70, Gateway Regional, home of the fighting Gators). It has been great fun to reconnect with many of my old classmates through email and this blog. Unearthing Jack Wiler has been one of my greatest pleasures. He has become an accomplished writer and has just done a one-man show in NYC based on his book, FUN BEING ME.

his blog is tender, funny, and raw, and he will delight you, especially if you are a baby boomer and grew up in the 50's.

check him out at http://jackwiler.blogspot.com

He posted a poem today that is breathtaking.