Relationships v.2.0

 1/30/10

So I got a call from a friend the other day having some relationship problems. For the sake of anonymity and brevity I will henceforth refer to this friend as MF (my friend) and MF's current partner will be CP.

I must say that CP has been making some pretty extraordinary demands on MF, but I am not going to talk about those today. What has me thinking from our phone call is a tangential remark MF made during the conversation. It went something like this:

"People don't really want to know the truth. They say they do but they don't."

Well, I gotta say, I am a big one for the truth. Otherwise it is GIGO (garbage in , garbage out) and nowhere is that truer than in relationships. Don't get me wrong here. Everyone has some things that they needn't share with anyone. I am not talking about full disclosure, only that whatever we do choose to disclose be truthful. Obviously the more we disclose creates the potential (not always realized but what's life without risk?) for a directly proportional deeper understanding, but that's a subject for another day.

I mean, think about it. What is the point of having friends or lovers for whom you have created an alter ego of yourself based on lies? It's not you they are in love with or friends with then, so what,I reiterate, is the point?

So people, you know where I stand. Expect the truth from me and I will expect the same from you. I don't want to play the GIGO game, and I certainly don't want to waste my relationship time and energies on ghost friends and lovers created by lies.

On the occasion of...

1/26/10

I have a favorite prayer.

"Praised be Your Name, Source of all and Creator of life, Who makes us holy with sacred tasks."

The Universe has given me two such tasks for sure, and one of those turns 21 in a few short hours. I don't know how I am doing on the holy part, but I do know my daughters were indeed sacred tasks/trusts given to me. They have taught me about love and vulnerability and sacrifice and empathy in ways I could never have imagined. I hope my lessons to them have been and will continue to be as deep and meaningful.

I am grateful for them every day. I hope they know how much they mean to me. I hope I didn't (and won't) do any lasting harm through mistakes past, present or future. I love them with all that is in me and hope that can be enough.

Here is what I think. We have all been given sacred tasks. These opportunities to make ourselves better, more than we ever thought we could be. They may come in the form of children, dear friends, complete strangers, animals... even events and issues which call us to some kind of personal commitment or action. I do believe these tasks are our life's mission and meaning. Amen.

Use 'em or lose 'em...

1/23/10

Words, I love them, especially the polysyllabic ones. They even sound beautiful all by themselves. For instance:

Alimentary, ambidextrous, alluvial
Bodacious, bilious, bumptious
Copacetic, crepuscular, confluence
Discombobulate, deleterious, dilettante
Enraptured, epiphany, effervescent
Flamboyant, farfetched, fractious
Grandiosity, gumption, garrulous
Happenstance, hyperbole, hemisphere
Immolate, iridescent, illumination
Jocularity, jeopardize, jambalaya
Knowledgeable, killjoy, kleptomaniac
Languidly, lapidary, lachrymose
Miasma, mellifluous, melancholia
Nostalgia, neanderthal, netherworld
Ostentatious, oscillation, opulence
Plethora, processional, perspicacity
Querulous, quizzical, quandary
Rambunctious, revelatory, reminiscence
Serendipity, solipsism, salubrious
Tremulous, tantalizing, tempestuous
Ululate, usurpation, unscrupulous
Validation, verbosity, vociferous
Winsome, wanderlust, watchfulness
Xenophilous, xylography, xenolith
Yammering, yearling, yesteryear
Zaftig, zeppelin, ziggurat

Really now... aren't they fabulous? Words randomly flow around in my brain when I am not engaging in specific thought. I love to use luxuriant language whenever I can, love to read it and to hear it coming back at me too.

So here is what I think. With the dumbing down of our society those of us who like to write and speak with panache and elegance are often perceived as exhibitionistic elitists. Well that is an amphora of effluvia my friends! Heed my exhortation! Be proudly prolifically polysyllabic!

Muddling through...

1/20/10

As the title implies I am not as focused at the moment as I would like to be so be prepared for some rambling.

I was 7 or 8 when I first realized that I ( capitol I, yes ME) was going to die some day. I was reading "Charlotte's Web" and as I was crying for Charlotte who "died alone" all of a sudden I was sobbing in terror for me. Contemplating My Death ( I wasn't morbid, but it would cross my mind a few times a year) was an occasion for fear and trembling and even tears for quite a while after that initial grim epiphany. Somewhere in my teens I decided that even though I couldn't face the fact of my ceasing to exist someday with equanimity, Time would take care of it. Someday, if I was granted the years, I would be able to deal with the one reality we all face with grace and peace of mind.

I was doing OK in that department until I fell in love with my husband in 1978. Love made death unacceptable. Having my children upped the ante, Death was even more unacceptable. Now I am 58. My husband passed away 8 years ago at the age of 67 (he was 18 years older than me). My children are 27 and 20 (21 in a week). While I have every intention of gracing this planet with my fabulous self for many years to come I do believe I am at peace with the inevitable at last.

Why am I writing about this? My father (95) passed away last April and my Uncle Jack (Dad's baby brother, 94) passed away last week. I am feeling their loss and the approaching losses of the remaining elders in my life. I do believe they are a special generation, formed in the Depression and the World Wars.

For those of you who have read "Lord of the Rings" you will remember the poignancy with which Tolkien wrote about the Elves departing Middle Earth... going to the Grey havens and diminishing into the West. That is how I am feeling about losing these wonderful elders. My world is diminished with each loss, and I daresay the outside world is diminished as we lose this generation as well.

Muddle, muddle, muddle...

Maybe I can't get to the heart of this because it is winter in NH and I am deep into cabin fever. My world was grey before Uncle Jack departed it and my thinking drifty and fuzzy. I wanted/needed to write something, so here it is, such as it is. Maybe I can't get to the heart of this because I don't have the heart for it.

Here is what I think... Death is the one certainty in Life so we might as well accept it and just get on with embracing our lives. When it comes to you at the end of a long life well lived, as in the cases of my father and uncle, it is no tragedy. But oh how I miss them.

A Cat Tale

 1/15/10

We currently have four male cats in our house. Not so long ago it was three which was more than enough thank you very much seeing as how I am allergic. These cats belong to my youngest daughter who obviously has me wrapped around her little finger on the cat issue. If I wasn't a cat lover myself maybe I could take a tougher stance, but I still marvel at how cleverly she got cat number four into the house a few months ago.


Since the first three boys have always treated my house as their personal cat toy no matter how many cat toys, scratching posts and cat towers we brought them I had told my daughter any new cats would not only be neutered as standard procedure but declawed as well. I had never had a cat declawed in my life and had some misgivings about the procedure. There is a wide range of thought about it in the cat world ranging from it's perfectly acceptable to it's psychotic mutilation.

I wasn't sure where I fell in that range of thought, but when our sweet kitten came home so groggy and pitiful looking an ugly voice began to whisper in my mind...."Mutilator...mutilatorrrrrrr."

Over the next few days watching our little guy favoring his paws and hearing his distressed calls when left alone for more than 10 minutes (he was sequestered in my daughter's room because he needed special litter while his paws healed) my guilt grew and grew. The ugly voice whispered almost incessantly. I felt like a criminal.

Long about the fifth day as I sat morbidly brooding on the whole declawing scenario I had a revelation. We had gotten the little guy "fixed" as we did with all our cats at the same time we had him declawed. I never in all my years of cat ownership had a doubt about the "rightness" of spaying and neutering and neither do the pundits of the animal kingdom. But, I thought, what if I asked the cat..."Which would YOU rather lose, your claws or your nuts?"

Poof! The doubts, misgivings, guilt and nasty whispering voice went up in smoke.

So what do I think? Sometimes perspective is everything.

The happy ending... our little guy can run, jump and climb with the best of them. He is dangerously happy and overactive from the homeowner's (in this case me) point of view. I am grateful at least once a day that we removed his claws.

One question can change your life.

1/11/10

A little background material is needed for me to tell this story to my satisfaction. As soon as I was old enough to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always said, "I want to be a doctor." By high school and heavily under the influence of Jacques Cousteau specials on TV my answer had changed to Marine Biologist. The point is I was a science geek. Other girls had dolls and I had microscopes,chemistry sets, dissection kits... you get the picture.

I applied to the only two schools in the country with undergraduate programs in Marine Biology at the time (1969), was accepted at both and went to the one in Florida versus the one in California. It didn't take me long to figure out a degree in Marine Bio was far more likely to get me a ticket to a little basement lab somewhere studying some one celled plankton for the rest of my life and not a first class berth on the Calypso as Cousteau's new sidekick.

I dropped out of college in a bit of a tailspin and when the dust settled decided I wanted to study creative writing in as small a school as possible (no more Intro to Bio classes taught by television in a 300 seat auditorium for me baby!). That decision led me to the college I graduated from, Bennington College in Vermont.

I had signed up for a load of pretty heavy courses and my adviser recommended I drop at least one and replace it with something I thought would come easy to me. I took his advice and opted for an art course...what any not quite reformed science geek would think of as an "easy" choice (how wrong I was but that is a story for another day).

My first day in my ceramics class was a revelation to me. My teacher was a smallish, middle aged man. During his introductory remarks the way he talked about clay alone let me know I was in the presence of someone extremely unusual, someone I definitely wanted to have as a teacher.Whew... we are finally at the story I came to tell today.

So, I was making my second pot (we weren't allowed to use wheels yet so we were "hand-building") and came to the studio one afternoon to discover it was cracking along the bottom. I found the teacher and showed him my barely started and cracked pot and asked the question that changed my life:

"How can I fix the crack in the bottom of this pot?"

He just stared at me for a few moments. He was known for his lengthy pauses and I had already been instructed by some of the long time studio regulars to just wait him out. To this day I wonder what he was thinking before he spoke. I can tell you just about any other teacher on the planet would have told me to chuck the thing and start over. But he was the most remarkable teacher I have ever had and when he finally spoke he said to me:

"Well it depends on whether you believe in the Western philosophy of perfection or the Eastern philosophy of perfection."

You can imagine the blank look this drew from a former science person who had taken her last art course in Elementary school. He pondered my vacant expression and decided to press on. He spent almost an hour explaining the two philosophies but I am going to condense. In the West the crack is seen as an imperfection and the solution is to fix it or toss the cracked item and start over. In the East the crack is seen as the medium, in this case the clay, having its say and the artist has to decide whether or not to listen. In the East sometimes it is a flaw that makes something perfect.

So he gave me this totally beautiful and amazing talk on the two philosophies of perfection , did another lengthy pause, then told me how to use vinegar, water and pudding consistency clay called "slip" to fix the crack in my pot and walked away.

Well, I stood transfixed in that little chicken coop of a studio. Major shifts were occurring in my brain and it felt like the light filtering in through dense forest branches. There was more than one way to look at even the simplest things. I was conscious of the extreme beauty and simplicity of things on the one hand, and the extreme beauty and complexity of things on the other. Both existing side by side and each one informing us if we let them. My way of seeing everything for the rest of my life was altered because I asked that question to the right person who took the time to really give the whole answer.

So here is what I think. Never be afraid to ask a question, and if someone asks you one, stop and think and give them the best possible answer you can. There may be other forces at work.

Relationships...

1/10/10
Lately I have been thinking a lot about relationships. I have two daughters who are both of marriageable age and currently not in relationships. They talk occasionally about the associated frustrations, hopes and benefits of their present conditions and it gets me thinking. I was married for 22 years when death did us part. There were a lot of good years and some not so good too, so I think about that as well and tend to ponder what went wrong. My husband was a very good man and father and I truly thought he was my "soul mate". We lived together in relative peace and had a decent relationship, but we lost what we were to each other somewhere along the journey.

What is the key element that must be kept for a relationship to stay alive over the long haul? I have come to the conclusion that the essential piece to making any relationship (especially love) work is faith. I went to the dictionary to see what it said about faith and belief. Those words are often used as synonyms but there is a subtle difference that makes ALL the difference. Mr. Webster states..."BELIEF and FAITH are often used interchangeably but BELIEF may or may not imply certitude in the believer whereas FAITH always does even where there is no evidence or proof." (Mr. Webster's capitols, not mine)

So here is what I think. We can lose a lot in a relationship and find ways to continue or rebuild an even better one. But if you lose your faith, your certitude, in each other it is over. So this aging hippy says do everything you can to... keep the Faith.