Silence

The visiting family has gone off to Great America today, joining Arne, Karna and their cousins there.  Bob and I are happy to stay home.  Sitting here, we find the silence is deafening.  It has almost a physical presence.  In music the spaces between the notes are the most profound actually making the music.  We just don’t pay attention to the silence, rather we usually rush from note to note.  For example, the silent pause at the end of a symphony before the conductor drops his baton, is the loudest, and when the conductor slowly lets the moment of silence go,  then the audience roars with applause and I let out my breath.  We have been having so much fun every day.  There is always someone to do something with, as is said, “There’s never a dull moment.”  Wednesday, Bob went with the girls and Paul to the Exploratorium in San Francisco.  There were only five seats in the car. They had a marvelous time but the fruits of the stimulating visit were seen yesterday.  Checking out what Bob was up to in the shop, Sonja told Bob she wanted to make a large Spirograph like the one they had seen at the Exploratorium.  Together with materials Bob has saved for many years, they created a working one.  It’s not as big as the one at the Exploratorium, but the idea and structure is the same, the weighed board hanging by strings from the rafters and the hinged lever with the pen steady on the side.  Sonja was elated, and ran breathlessly upstairs to announce the creation.  We all had to run downstairs (yes, run) for the demonstration.  Meanwhile Paul was upstairs making a birthday pie for Bob with Elsa.  Listening to them, I was so impressed by how much he let her do the work.  He explained his reasoning for every part of the pie making.  He’s ever the teacher.  Earlier, the girls and I had had a picnic lunch at Codornices Park and afterward they all played on the two-story concrete slide, then climbed trees and played hide and seek.  Everyone’s favorite Uncle arrived from the UK at dinner time and just before we ate, Arne slipped in.  So Bob had a big table with his sons and  his granddaughters here to help him celebrate his birthday.  Just a typical day with the family visiting.  I love having everyone here, but the deafening pause of quiet is a loud reminder of the energy everyone brings when they come.  It is creating the music of the visit.

Surprises listening to Democratic Debates

Monday afternoon, Paul came with our three granddaughters: Erika, age 13; Sonja, age 10 and Elsa, soon to be 9.  We’ve been having daily adventures and lots of time to just hang out and let everyone do what they want to do.  I’ve played games, watched the girls invent games they play, seen the girls make a new path with patio stones in my garden and seen how much the girls love to go to Bob’s shop.  “It’s really cool,”  they say as they run down there.  After a day today of a visit to the dinosaurs at the Lawrence Hall and a hike around Huckleberry Preserve, we watched the first of the Democratic debates.  Bob and I were interested, the others a bit, except Elsa.  She was riveted.  Something in the debates unleashed from her a torrent of commentary.  It was passionate about the future of the world. It was thought out and full of examples, like she’d been taking debate.  She made arguments about what was the right thing to do.  Interestingly, she really liked Cory Booker, the best.  She had so much to say, I was totally overcome, both by her passion and her logic.  Who knew inside this rather quiet child lay a mind full of concerns about the future of the world, how to make a better society, how we should treat each other, especially the poorest and most unfortunate among us.  I will never see her the same again.  At her home they don’t have a television, they don’t get a newspaper, so it is amazing to me she has so many well thought out opinions.  This girl said she’d like to run for President, but she’ll have to wait until she is 35.  What is it that is said?  Still water runs deep.  This girl had deep thoughts about life and how we need to create a world that lets everyone be happy.  Happy people don’t shoot each other, she said.  Her passion and ideas move me to tears and I am so happy to have watched the Democratic debates with her.  Wow!

Cut Glass Party

My friend Sharona gives the best parties.  I got invited to a party at her house on Sunday afternoon.  A group of her friends (all teachers) gathered to be creative and make art.  I was happy to hang out with the teachers as that is truly my tribe.  The medium was cut glass decorating all sorts of things.  One person was decorating a coaster, another a wooden box, yet another a mirror frame and four of us were working on round patio stones.  When I got there, Sharona sat me down saying “This is your place.”  There was a 12 inch diameter round patio stone—-a blank canvas.  The idea was to create a design and then bring it to life using bits of cut glass.  There were multitudes of plastic containers with different shards of colored glass:  green glass, red glass, yellow and orange glass; blue glass and even purple glass.  There were “gems” - oval or round bits of glass, like smooth glass jellybeans.  Sharona showed me how to score and then break the glass into shapes I wanted.  I soon got the idea to make a big sunflower in the middle of my stone.  The various shaped petals were all triangles and I could imagine, then cut glass into big triangles.  Then it got harder, what to do next?  Slowly it began to fill up.  Cutting curved pieces of glass takes skill I’m just beginning to learn.  Next, I had to glue the pieces on the stone.  Glueing is actually harder than assembling all the pieces.  The gritty glue gets all over our fingers and dries quickly.  All the while, all the teachers were happily chatting away.  I loved the company and the creativity.  The creative juices were flowing.  Such beautiful original art pieces were made.  It is a lovely idea for a party.  Sharona was so generous setting up and sharing all the materials and teaching us to make beautiful items using cut glass.  She was wonderful at helping us if we got stuck.  She has become an expert (see the photo of her latest work all in blues and greens) and is ever a teacher, this time bringing out our creativity while teaching us a new craft

.  I am grateful to call her my friend.

Summer

It’s the first morning of summer in Berkeley and the fog is so thick, I can barely see the tree outside our window.  I hear the drips of the condensed fog on to the ground.  It’s chilly.  We are inside the cloud!  In my mind and memories from childhood, summer is the time of hot long lazy days spent at the beach.  Days that rolled on and on, with nothing to do but to relax and enjoy the sun and water.  The tomatoes are supposed to grow, but here in the fog-belt, they haven’t even started to set.  Not to complain, I like the fog better than the extreme heat we had a week and a half ago.  It just doesn’t fit the summer image.  Maybe later today the fog will lift and the sky will be perfect blue and the Bay a perfect green and the air a perfect temperature in the high 60’s, but in the meantime, I sit here wrapped up in a throw like a character from Frozen.  It’s summer in Berkeley.

Beyblades

Who has heard of a Beyblade?  Certainly not me.  We’re taking care of Liam every afternoon this week after his Music Camp at the Crowden School, where Arne went many years ago.  Liam came with a gallon plastic bag full of Beyblades.  They are a fancy kind of top, around 2 inches in diameter, a fancy colored plastic disc, a metal insert and a plastic tapering part that spins on the surface.  They come with launching devices composed of a handle, a platform where the disc fits in and a sprocketed pull that fits into the handle device.  One pulls the sprocketed pull out fast and the top drops off spinning very fast.  Well, Liam wanted to play with Beyblades, so I sat down on the floor and we figured out what we needed.  First, a flat surface the tops could spin on.  I brought out a plastic tray I use for serving tea.  “Good,” he said.  And we began to spin the tops.  At first I was clumsy but slowly I got the hang of it.  Then, we each released a top on the tray and watched what happened.  They spun fast, rarely interacting and when they did touch, they spun off twice as fast, bouncing like I imagine electrons bouncing off each other.  It was fun, really fun.  Then, the game began seriously.  We each launched one and Liam launched an “obstacle” into the fare.  It greatly increased the chances of the tops hitting each other, bouncing, careening and hitting the edges of the tray.   Next we began to launch as many as we could as fast as we could.  There were four tops spinning, hitting each other and bouncing back sometimes flipping off the tray.  One point for the winner there, Liam stated.  Then Liam began launching his tops to hit the top of mine and we were into “a war.”  I was impressed how the rules of the game changed as we played (it’s playing with a rising First grader I think).

I struggled to keep up.  I thought, “wow, I’m really playing with Liam.”  It was fun.  How much better does it get than this?  Playing with one’s only grandson.  We both were having a really good time.  A great afternoon!

A Visit

We just had a visit from a friend of mine from long long ago.  We were neighbors and friends in New Haven in the Yale Faculty housing where we lived from 1968-1970.  We used to babysit each others’ children.  We were both teachers, our husbands were both working at Yale.  When we moved to Oak Ridge, she didn’t answer any of my letters and so we lost contact.  In the late 1990’s, somehow she searched us out and we began up our friendship once again.  Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen each other a number of times.  We visited them once on a trip across the country.  On a number of occasions, she’s invited me to join her at conferences and spend a few days afterward touring. This was her third or fourth visit to us.  The last time she visited, I knocked myself out, taking her all around and totally exhausted myself in the process.  “Never again,” I said to Bob.  This time I was more careful of my energy and planned shorter excursions and more rest, but I’m still shaken and exhausted.  As I reflect on why, I think it comes down to this:  some of their personality traits are a part of your shadow side, the traits that you also have but that you repress or reject.  For example, my friend has a very strong personality with persistant assertiveness and strong helplessness (passive aggressive).  My mother always told me it was unladylike to be assertive.  She’d correct me whenever I was assertive so I learned to be quiet, agreeable and not have opinions.  My friend’s assertiveness triggered me because I reject that in myself.  I’m learning to be appropriately assertive thanks to Bob’s coaching over the years, but  it still triggers me when I encounter a particularly assertive person.  I define myself as strong and independent and work to not ever be helpless.  These traits of hers really triggered me.  I do value our friendship but her visits must be kept short as I work to integrate these shadow traits into my awareness.  I did better setting limits this time while still showing her a good time.  Good grief, why are relationships so complicated?

At Redwoods Monastery

I’m just back from a 4 day silent retreat at Redwoods Monastery.  I’ve been going there since in mid-1990’s so I’m very familiar with the beautiful place.  It was established in 1964 by a small group of Belgian nuns.  They were on their way to some S. American country, stopped up near Garberville and  decided to buy property and stay in the redwoods.  There are still two of the original sisters there.  One of them, sadly, had just been taken to the hospital in Eureka the day we arrived with pneumonia, always serious especially when one is a frail 96 years old.  I love to go on retreat up there for so many reasons.  Let me count the ways.  It is very beautiful, there is pristine nature where one can go on long walks through the forest or the meadows.  The sister are very welcoming, kind and supportive no matter who you are or where you are in your life.  I love liturgies and we are allowed to participate in their monastic liturgies through each day.  It is rather like jumping into an ancient river, going back in time.  I love chanting the psalms, bowing, or just meditating with the group support.  I love their garden and spend very much time helping out (this time I got to pick strawberries) or just sitting or strolling around in it.  I love the spaciousness I get on retreat there.  Time falls away and life consists of just walking from my room on the 1/3 mile path through the forest by the burbling creek to the chapel or going on long walks or doing art or reading.  I love the surprise that one never knows what is going to happen on retreat.  This year I knew it would be especially good because I was fortuitously helped by a stranger when I pulled into a Starbucks in Cloverdale and my car was making a terrible scraping sound.  I knew when the right person was just there and volunteered to help me out, not taking anything for his time and effort, things were aligned right for me.  I always come back happy and peaceful.  And being silent?  It is good because it is so easy to feel kindly to people when they don’t speak.  This year, on the last day, in the gift shop, one of the ladies spoke to me and so we began to chat.  Before long she moved into politics and told me she’s a Trump supporter and why she likes Trump and hates Hillary and I had the most terrible head rush I thought I was going to faint on the spot.  It is good to be silent.  Those nuns know what they’re doing, that’s for sure, and it makes me happy to remember them when I despair for happenings in the world.

Sunday in Michigan

It’s a beautiful clear sunny early summer day in Michigan.  The sky is blue, there are puffy white clouds dotting the sky.  The trees and grass are very very green and the flowers are mostly past.  Walking to church this morning, I listened to the choir of birds.  It must have been a big choir because their melodious music was so loud.  I stopped to enjoy a large purple rhododendron, watching the various kinds of bees harvest their nectar.  I marveled at the generous bounty of nature.  There were six inch high piles of ash seeds by the drain in the street, washed there by yesterday’s thunder storm.  We ate lunch in the garden, relishing the sunshine and the gentle breeze that cooled us if we got too warm.  The table was full of neighborhood children who were over playing together so well.  They’d made fresh lemonade.  They had to ride their bikes to the local grocery store to buy the lemons.  The dining room table was filled with five juicers, all hand made by Paul, and too many to count half lemon shells.  After lunch we went to the library which we were surprised was closed.  It’s closed on Sunday in the summer Paul said, so it must be the first Sunday of summer.  This afternoon the birds are quiet, but there is a persistant drone of lawn mowers —- a sound I associate with Michigan.  As I sit here in my living room, looking out the window at all the beautiful trees blowing in the wind, I think what a beautiful place it is here and I’m so happy my granddaughters get to grow up in this idyllic safe haven.

Seeing “Hamilton”

Last night, the girls and I had tickets to see Hamilton, right here in E. Lansing at the Wharton Center on the MSU campus.  Just like they say, it was truly a most memorable performance.  I am not familiar with the music or with the in’s and out’s of the story, so it was all new to me and I really didn’t know what to expect. From the minute the lights went out to the very last note, it was FANTASTIC!  POWER!  AMAZING ELECTRIC ENERGY!  There was no Overture from the Orchestra, rather it exploded into action immediately with the first number “Alexander Hamilton” which Erika had sung to me on the way to the show.  I couldn’t believe she had memorized all the words to that and to most of the show (like thousands upon thousands of young folks).  The music was hip hop, mostly guitars and electronic, so loud it shook you in your seat, the songs were super fast so it was hard for me to understand the words.  I was conflicted whether to read the text on the reader to the left of the stage or watch the amazing dancing.  It was a total sensory overload experience but with a serious message too.  I heard that immigrants fought and won the Revolutionary War, there was first black regiment fighting for freedom.  There were 17 songs in the First Act and 17 songs in the Second Act.  I think what surprised me was the dancing.  It was so fast, so alive with energy and power.  Memorable songs for me was “Dear Theodosia” a very sweet song sung by the protagonists Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton about their first born children; “The Room Where It Happens”, Aaron Burr’s amazing solo sung with all he had and finally “One Last Time”, sung by George Washington.  George Washington was played by Paul Oakley Stovall, a tall Paul Robeson type figure with a powerful baritone voice.  As Sonja said “his voice was loud but also soft at the same time.”  The ending of the musical was very sad.  The acting was so good that everyone in the audience felt the great sadness.  Last Sunday the minister at Edgewood said in her sermon that “Hamilton” gives her hope.  I didn’t come away with that, but I did come away with the political messiness of the Revolutionary Period and the power certain figures, like Alexander Hamilton had.  In the musical, George Washington sang several times: “We can’t control who lives or who dies.  And we can’t control what history writes about our story.”  Lin Manuel Miranda has forever brought Alexander Hamilton’s story to the American consciousness. I felt I ought to write this post as a rap, but I don’t know how.  It was an amazing treat to be given tickets by my dear daughter-in-law to see Hamilton with my granddaughters.