This morning I wished I had a camera

I wished I had my camera this morning. Spring was aborted in the Northeast by a winter encore performance. This event was very annoying, frankly.

I dragged out my boots and hats and mittens out from the landing spot for the “off-season” bins and left the house with Nessie for our 6:30am walk.

Standing on the bridge crossing the creek I wished I had my camera. It was that time after a snow storm when the sun first reveals the skyfall of snow, but hasn’t had time to dismantle it yet. The tree branches are outlined with white. Sounds are muffled. The grey creek lies still waiting for the ducks. My footprints and Nessie’s are the only disturbances in the snow.

And then I go and wish I had my camera. Yup, I still haven’t learned.

Silence is when you don’t need a camera. You let go of the disappointment that you can’t take the gussied up trees home. You let go of the desire to make what is impermanent permanent. There is no digital copy for this moment in time, and there can’t be. I’m slowly learning that.

I’m not cheating here–I took this picture last week! I needed SOME picture for the blog post, didn’t I?

Silence is simply deep seeing the simple beauty of the snow; deep listening to it crackling on the branches, deep being, with no desire to shove the moment in my pocket with my camera.

It’s the wanting things to last that breaks the silence.

 

 

 

iPhone: How do I use thee? Let me count the ways

This post is a little out of character for me–my posts are all much about very low-tech subjects.  But since this blog is about being astonished and telling about it, I feel compelled to talk about one of the astonishing accomplishments of a person who accomplished his mission of “putting a dent in the universe.”

I, like so many others, have spent time over the past few weeks examining the achievements of Steve Jobs since he died in October.  So many friends of mine talked of actually having cried when he died–it was almost like when John Lennon died.  But Steve Jobs was not a rock star in the literal sense of the word.  In fact he was in many ways what the Occupy protesters are protesting:  the head of a huge corporation that made billions, and who knew instinctively how to make money (one case in point, talking Steve Wozniak into NOT giving away his early technological achievements back when they were both part of the Homebrew Computer Club).

What so many of us actually grieved for was the loss of the person who had such passion for his creations that he changed the lives of each one of us, and that sounds hyperbolic, but it is the truth.  I, for one, found out about his passing on my iPhone, and then used my MacBook to read the news in greater depth.  In a weird way I felt that this very fact connected us as if we were some kind of technological distant cousins.  Uncle Steve was gone.

The inspiration for this post was this:  I was at a job just last week in which a quick snapshot was called for of the notes that were up on the dry-erase board our team was using, so I reached for my iPhone, saying to my client, it seems these days if you a phone, you don’t need anything else.

So, that got me thinking about how true that actually was, based on how I use my iPhone:

1. 6:00am:  I wake up early to work on a report, using my iPhone’s alarm.  I’ve chosen a soft, soothing ring, like “Harp” because I’m home and if I oversleep, no big deal.  But if I’m on the road and need to get up for an early meeting, it might be “Piano Riff” or “Xylophone”–much ruder, but much less likely for me to sleep over it.  No more calling the hotel desks for a wake-up call.
2. 7:30am: I’ve worked on my report for an hour and half and now Nessie is looking to go for a walk.  I wonder if I need a hat, so I check the weather app–43 degrees. Iffy.  I grab the hat.
3. 7:45am:  While I’m on the walk I see a turtle cross the path by the creek, so I take a picture with the camera, upload it to Facebook.  The rest of the time I listen to my iPod:  some music, and a daily Podcast by pray-as-you-go.org.
4. 7:50am:  Done with the walk, so I check my calendar to see what meetings I have.
5. 7:55am:  I read the daily Liturgy of the Hours readings on my Universalis app
6. 8:15am:  I catch up on my finances.  I check in with Mint and input transactions from the day before to my YouNeedABudget app.  Mint reminds me I have a bill to pay today.
7. 8:45am:  After breakfast and 20 minutes of yoga I log my meal and excercise on my MyFitnessPal app.I really want to get that report done, so I use my TaskTimer app, which is like a stopwatch, which is great for me because I tend to get distracted very easily.  But when I use the TaskTimer, I know I’ve pledged myself to 45 minutes of straight work.  Amazing what you can get done in 45 minutes of concentrated work.
8. 11:30am:  At lunchtime I’m meeting a friend for lunch at a restaurant I haven’t used before, so I can either use my map app, which came with the iPhone, or I can use the more GPS-like AT&T Navigator.  In this case, because I have to drive and there seem to be a lot of turns, I go with the AT&T Navigator.  On the way, I listen to my iPod.
9. 12:05pm My friend is a little late, so I read some of my book on my Kindle app.  Surprisingly, it reads very well, considering the screen is so small.  I sync it with my Kindle purchases, and the bookmarks always are in sync.   Or I could play a little Tetris.
10. 12:10pm Also while I’m waiting, I check my blog stats on my WordPress app.
11. 12:30pm  At lunch my friend hasn’t seen my kids in a while, so I show her the photos on my phone.  We also talk about the hardships of traveling, so I pull up a really funny comic monologue on travel by comedian Brian Regan on YouTube.
12. 1:10pm  After lunch, I check my email and voice mail in the car parking lot, and return a couple of urgent emails.  I can tell which ones to ignore–the ones that aren’t identified through my contacts.
13. 2:00-5:00pm  The rest of the afternoon I spend at my computer doing assorted tasks, taking all my business calls on my iPhone.  Hardly ever use the landline.
14. 5:30pm  I see a QR code for a magazine article I’m interested in, so I use the code scanner I’ve downloaded and get the article and a coupon to use on a shopping trip.  I save the article to Evernote.
15. 6:00pm  On the dog’s evening walk, I check out movies on my Redbox app and reserve one for the evening.
16. 7:00pm  After dinner, we check in with my son, using FaceTime.  (I actually hate FaceTime because I’ve seen myself on the reverse camera feature and it’s a pretty scary sight!  If they could only create an app with a gauze feature to soften those wrinkles).
17. 10:00pm  And before bed, I want to say a rosary, but I can never remember those darned mysteries, so I pray using my Rosary app.  If only my grammar school principal, Sister Ellen Marie, could see me now!

So there it is:  17 ways to use the iPhone.  I could have added more, but that would have taken me to a different day, and I didn’t want to exaggerate the number of applications my iPhone has in a typical day.

I love it.   A clock, an alarm, a camera, an outdoor thermometer, a stopwatch, a navigator, a music player, a mail server, a breviary/rosary, an address book, a concierge, a filing cabinet, a TV, a movie screen, a motivational tool, a shopping assistant, a financial manager, AND, did I forget to mention, a full-featured telephone:  All this in one elegant pocket-sized package.

And that’s just the applications used in my tiny corner of the world.  Amazing.

How do you use the iPhone in YOUR world?

A Christmas Treehugger Says Farewell to a Friend

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree!

I have had many live Christmas trees in my day.  My family of origin always had a real one.  I don’t remember them all of course.  I actually only remember the Christmas tree-trim in aggregate–the rituals of hanging those big bulbs that were common in the 50s and 60s, big heavy colored globes that you would sometimes clip on to the branch and then monitor how far down the branch would droop with the weight.  You wouldn’t put the expensive bulbs on the weaker branches.

Conversely, I remember the light-as-air silvery strands that we would dress the tree with after all the ornaments were hung.  My mother instructed us to hang them almost singly and very carefully so you wouldn’t wind up with a clump of silver like a tacky bird’s nest perching on a branch.  No, the strands had to resemble as closely as possible their namesake:  icicles.   If they were done properly, the light from the big bulbs danced off them as if they were fine shimmery mirrors just like the frozen spears hanging off the eaves.

When we had done with all the magic of Christmas, the denuded, dry tree would be dragged out of the house and dumped on the curb, as usual.  But when I was a child, it  seemed as if a dear friend was being just kicked out on the street with no gratitude, no respect, no consideration for the joy it had given us.   I would cry to see my “friend” treated so cruelly.

Many, many trees are under the bridge in my life–58 to be exact.  So I don’t know why, this year, I feel like that little girl who once wanted to cling to the life of her tree-friend.

This year’s particular tree had a very unceremonious introduction to our family.  Even though my children are adults, we have stuck to the family tradition of picking out the tree together–all six of us, even though we are living in three different states.  But this year, it was almost Christmas Eve, everyone was busy, and so one night, my husband, brother-in-law and I just decided abruptly to stop off on the way from the supermarket and grab a tree.  No camera, no kids, no comparing this tree to that one to find the perfect fit, the perfect shape, the perfect height.  Pulling down our hats and wrapping our coats around us in the freezing cold, we did indeed “grab” a tree, tell the guy it was in no way worth the $45 he was charging and that we would pay no more than $33 for the shrimpy, sorry tree we were holding up.  He took our offer quickly–confirming our description of it, and we shoved it in the back of the car on top of the paper towels and dog food, and brought it to its new home.

When we fit it into the tree stand in the living room, my husband and I looked at each other with looks that said, “Oh, no.  The kids are going to kill us for not waiting for them.”  Because the tree looked like a scrawny little tree-weed standing there.  Not only that, but it had a physical deformity no tilting or turning was going to hide–the top of the tree, which should stretch joyfully to heaven like a yogi in triangle pose, was bent at the trunk, as if it changed its mind about wanting to point the way to God.

So, my son came the next night, and kindly didn’t chide us beyond a shake of his head and a few futile attempts to turn, tilt, reset the tree.  He helped me put the lights on.  We decided to put LOTS of lights on, to just smother the little tree in every string of lights I had.  We had to give this tree some panache, after all!

And, as was tradition, all the kids came on Christmas Eve and put the lifelong collection of ornaments on it.  I had rearranged the furniture differently this year–making the tree the focal point of the living room, and setting the love seat in a spot that make it seem like the tree was a orchestra quartet performing chamber music.  We gave it that import, that attention, that love.

And it rose to the occasion.  Every night, when I wanted peace and quiet, I’d take a cup of tea and my new Kindle into the living room and just sit.  But most of the time, I couldn’t get interested in the book, because I was mesmerized by the beauty of the tree.  For some reason, because the tree was not as plush on its own as most trees we’ve had, it showcased the ornaments like no other.  Each little memory of my family’s life–the first Christmas, the gifts from friends, the souvenirs from family vacations, were given their due, framed selflessly by the humble sprigs of the tree branches.  I had even filled in some of the balder spots with springs of berries, and they complimented the tree the same way my Gucci scarf deflects attention from my sagging neckline.   In any case, the tree and I had bonded.

Now it is January 17, and I’ve been resisting the dismantling of this tree for too long.  The neighbors’ trees have long been picked up by the trashmen.   Today is the day I must say good-bye to my tree.   After I’ve accepted it.  More than accepted it.  Embraced its imperfections.  Marveled at its transformation.

With gratitude for the beauty it has given the family this season, I will unceremoniously drag it out to the curb, and then sweep up the dead needles it leaves behind.   I may not cry the way I did when I was a child.  But I will be sad to see it go.

Simple Home, Beautiful Home, Part II: Stripping of your life

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.  Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation…”  –Henry David Thoreau

“…and our lives must be stripped,”:

Years ago, I took this picture of my own dining room table when I saw the irony of where the bumper sticker, a gift from my son who had visited Walden, wound up.

If I had a chart that showed the times of my life at its most frenetic, and overlaid it with a chart that showed the times of my life when my house was the least welcoming and the most cluttered, they would line up nicely.   It’s hard, if not impossible, to maintain peace at home, when your life is out of control.

A study, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers was recently released and highly publicized in the news.  It showed that despite great strides in the women’s movement, women are actually unhappier today overall.  Why would that be?  We have spent the last thirty years bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan.  Does that mean we have time to eat it?

Perhaps a correlation could be made in a book about another paradox, “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz, which makes the case that too many options does not create feelings of well-being; on the contrary, too much choice winds up being overload for our psyches.  So, the myriad of options that opened up for women in the last few decades has actually left us wondering, “What now?” in a way that is disconcerting and confusing.  And for society in general, we are simply overwhelmed.

Thoreau tells us to strip down our lives, which can be taken to mean, choose!  “Let your affairs be of two or three, not of a hundred,” he wrote.  Choose your value system, choose your day, choose your desires, and leave the rest alone.   Richard Foster, in his book “The Freedom of Simplicity” tells us that the first step is the most important:  “First seek God’s kingdom.”  Seems easy, but what does that mean?

Maybe we can learn from the choices made by some of the more spiritually evolved.   St. Francis sold everything in order rebuild the church.  That was how he sought God’s kingdom.   In one of my posts, “Decluttering, Purging, and Peace Pilgrim,” I talked about the woman who made her life’s work walking across the country time and again for peace.  That was how she sought God’s kingdom.    I was lucky enough last week to see the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh at the Beacon Theatre.  He has made it his life’s work to teach people to be compassionate through mindfulness.  That is how he sought God’s kingdom.  I’ll bet that none of these people have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering whether to buy the LG flat screen TV or the Samsung; whether they should go to Cancun or Paris on vacation; whether they should stay in their marriage or leave.  If you’ve ever owned a good SLR camera, when you focus on something through the viewfinder, the rest blurs out of sight.  I imagine that’s what seeking God’s kingdom is like.

I’m not sure how to begin the life stripping-down process, but here’s a little brainstorming:

• Let go:  of stuff, of worry, of anxiety, of things you can’t control.
• Stop being a people-pleaser:  Say no once in a while.
• Be happy with what you have:  Cut the coveting.
• Don’t go it alone:  Ask for help, hired or otherwise, to share your burden.
• Recognize that’s it’s impossible to have it all.  What are you trading off for your life?
• Be easy on yourself.

Finally, the other night, Thich Nhat Hanh told the sell-out crowd that the kingdom of God is right here.

My dining room table today

Right now.  Right now you can only be in one place.  Right now you can only do one thing.  Right now you can only think one thought. Be present right here, right now in this beautiful moment and you have found the kingdom of God.

For me, that’s where the stripping down starts.

Hair: Then and Now

Jane Asher

Dorothy Hamill

Julia Roberts

Me: Jane Asher wannabe

Me: Dorothy Hamill wannabe

Me: Julia Roberts wannabe (dream on, honey)

A revival of the 60s’ seminal American tribal rock musical, “Hair,” is currently on Broadway.

Farrah Fawcett died last month.

Those two seemingly unrelated events got me thinking about hair in general, and how we take it for granted.   We style it, or we cap it, or we blow it, or tie it, or flat-iron it, but it’s usually nothing more than a part of our total grooming routine.  For some, it might be a 30-second part.  For others, it might 30 minutes.  But I know that no matter what, having it, or not having it, matters.

I love the story my cousin told me.  My cousin is a political journalist for a cable news channel in Boston.  She’s interviewed political candidates on national debates.  She’s a solid journalist.  But when she was earning her stripes, she was given the chance to anchor a news show.  She prepared, she was nervous, she stared into the camera and gave it all she got.  When the cameras stopped rolling, she was sent to her boss’s office.  She sat down, and thinking she was going to get accolades for her brilliant, on-point work, she asked, “Well, how was it?  Did I deliver OK?  Were the stories relevant?”  And her boss brushed her aside and said, “Oh, yeah, all that was fine, but what was with your hair??”

My mother had beautiful platinum blonde hair and was known for it.  She never bought a box of hair dye in her life–although many were skeptical, it was so blonde, so pure.  Who was actually born with hair that color?

When she was 50, she was scheduled for brain surgery, to repair two looming aneurysms in her brain.  Before the nurses came in for the pre-op hair shaving routine, she had already done it herself–leaving piles of spun platinum gold on her hospital tray–she was OK with having her skull opened up, but the thought of losing her hair devastated her.  Of course, many victims of the side effects of chemotherapy would attest to the emotional toll of losing one’s hair.

And that’s not just a woman’s issue.  Men aren’t crazy about losing their hair either.  It seems that these days there are more and more shiny heads out there–men who intentionally have gone for the hairless look, rather than to appear to be in the process of losing it involuntarily.  Or maybe it’s about control, and maybe the choice-to-be-bald is the same as my mother’s choice to take the scissors to her own head.  It’s OK if YOU are the Master of Your Pate and shave it all off, but to have nature thumb its nose at you… that’s just not acceptable.

Hair is an easy way to make a statement–after all, it’s right on top of your head, and you’re always wearing it.  If you’re not into the tattoo as personal bumper sticker, you can still talk with your hair.  Lady Godiva did it, hiding her nudity behind her long locks.  The more progressive women of the 20s did it by letting down their pinned hair and bobbing it.   And of course, no one has to ask why young people of the 60s wanted hair that was “long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty.”  It was to differentiate themselves from the crew-cut wearing, Bryl Cream gleaming, bouffant-do-ing, pin-curling parents.   Chopping one’s locks can also be a spiritual ritual.  I still remember watching Franco Zefferelli’s movie “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” back in the early ’60s and the scene in which Saint Claire started a religious order and cut off her luxurious long hair was just as compelling to me as when St. Francis was struck with the stigmata.

I recently asked my hairdresser what the latest ‘do is, and she said that Katie Holmes is calling the coif shots now–now that her hair is short, people are flooding the salons to chop their hair off.   From Clara Bow, to Marilyn, to Dorothy Hamill, to Farrah, to Jennifer Aniston, to Katie Holmes, every now and then someone comes along with something as simple as a haircut to define a generation.

Madison

 

Me, sitting on the steps of the cottage

“If I died and found myself at Madison, I’d know that I’d made it to heaven.”

That’s what I said in my early 20s, speaking of the spot on the Connecticut shore where I had spent my childhood summers.   My mother sent me there to stay with two great-aunts and my grandmother for a few weeks every summer from the time I was about five .  She had spent her summers there, too, so she must have wanted me to have that special experience.  The cottage had been built by my greatuncle and greataunt in 1910.  It was a true cottage, with no insulation, and no heat.  The framing was exposed on the inside, and it had a rustic stone fireplace and Arts and Crafts-style windows.  It was a regal, cedar-shingled 4 bedroom home, sitting back from the beach road, atop a slight incline, where the beach breezes swooped on up and kept the place much cooler than the waterfront cottages across the street.

It was a safe haven.  My own mother had her hands full with four young kids and my alcoholic father.  Life at home was pretty chaotic, and I never knew what each day would bring.  Would I be able to have friends over, or would Dad be drunk?  Would Dad show me how to oil paint the way he did so well, or would he slur insults from the dark corner of the living room?

But at Madison, nothing ever changed.  The “bowl-o-beauty” rose paperweight sat on the same corner of the living room table year after year.  It didn’t move.  The kitchen beams were lined with linaments and oils that had probably been ordered from the Sears catalog in the 1920s.   My aunt could be relied upon to tell the same stories every year–stories about her marriage to her beloved Edwin that always ended with a chuckle.  All her stories had happy endings.  The only story that didn’t have a happy ending was the one she never told–about her son, John, who died of pneumonia when he was three, after it had taken her nine painful years to conceive.  I only knew about John from the sepia photograph of the small boy with the bowl cut and crisp white shirt on her dressing table.

 

Aunt Florence, knitting. She was always embarrassed because the wing chair was frayed, so she would drape her sweater over it.

The daily routine was… well, routine.  And at that time, I hated it.  I’ve grown to appreciate the luxury of rising at the same time every day, spending the better part of the morning preparing breakfast, served on a six-piece place setting of Victorian rose china.  Then performing the clean-up.   Then taking the trip “up town” to buy groceries and produce.  Then going right into lunch–a large midday meal.  Then again the clean-up.  Then, and ONLY then, did I get to meet my friends at the beach.  That routine probably saved me from skin cancer, because I never got to the beach before 2 p.m., and of the few things that frustrated me about Madison, that was #1.  

 

Oh, I could say so much more about Madison, but it wouldn’t be interesting to anyone who hadn’t lived it.   It sounds mundane to hear about my evening walks down to the stone pier with a book or a camera or drawing pad with which to watch the sun go down.   It’s not too thrilling to hear about the afternoons which, when they were not spent at the beach, were spent learning how to sew on Aunt Florence’s old black Singer, or stretched across my bed, reading, while raindrops pitter-patted in a magnified way because of the lack of insulation in the ceiling.  Or who would care about the delight of blueberries and cream with sugar sprinkled on top, or slices of summer-ripe cantaloupe.  Or the aroma of salt-laced timber, or enamel pans filled with Ivory Snow and Aunt Florence’s soft, silky slips.

It all seems other-wordly, but at Madison, I was not completely isolated from the world.  When I was young, I was given the privilege of watching As the World Turns with the great-aunts, although they didn’t 100% approve because of the “risque” story lines.  At 17, I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon–the same moon that was reflecting in the waters off the Connecticut coast right outside our door.  In 1973, the “Summer of Judgement,” Aunt Florence and I sat glued to the Watergate hearings. 

Sometimes I become obsessed with Madison.  I wish I could go back.  I suspect my memories are hopelessly romantic, and thus, perhaps skewed.   I tend to dream about it when my own life becomes chaos-infested and unsure, and I remember that safe haven and want to go back.  

Yet, I’m not sure I’d want to go back, because the Bowl-o-Beauty would no longer be there, nor the pink Victorian china.   And Aunt Florence’s presence would only be there in ghost-like form.  I’m not the same anymore, either, nor should I be.  But perhaps I can bring a little bit of Madison to my life today–a little of the routine, the simple joys, the beauty.   I can find the Aunt Florence within–calm, and orderly, and cheerful.  If I can do that, then I can create that little bit of heaven, right here, right now.