What does the future hold?

So my daughter sends me this photo taken last August of my little granddaughter Bea. Her questioning face seems to ask: What does my future hold?
Bea, this is how it is:
We inherit the foundations of our existence, but we alone are responsible for our future. We begin by living with what our parents achieved, and we arrive at old age with what we have worked toward all our days, whether that's peace of mind or a big bank account or a wall full of diplomas or a cave in the woods. We begin with the world our grandparents and great-grandparents left to us, and we go on to create the world we want to live in and leave to our children and grandchildren.
I've just finished watching the first disc of Ken Burns' Civil War, the 1990s television series that has now been remastered and released on DVD. I remember when it was on TV; I remember that I didn't watch it. Back then I was busy raising my daughters. I didn't want to think about slavery and killing, however it might be glorified. The Civil War made me queasy to think about. I hate violence and racism and everything related to them.
More recently, though, with my children grown, I've started to think about the history of our nation. In the mail yesterday I received a pack of poems from the other participants in a writing workshop that I'm planning to attend in January. The workshop is to be held in Kentucky, that "dark and bloody ground." I sat down this morning at 5 a.m. to read through the poems and was immediately noticed that all of them, or nearly all, are about death. We all write dead grandma poems, dead grandpa poems, dead parent poems, etc. when we're starting out to write poetry. Very few beginning poets write happy poems. That comes long afterward, when all the sorrow inside us has been put into its place. It doesn't go away; we just learn to accommodate it.
So here is the story of American history: We slew the Indians; we enslaved the Africans; we then turned on our brothers and neighbors and killed as many of them as possible. That's the history we have to live with. The media and the advertisers and the big corporations and the military industrial complex try to keep us distracted so that we don't even realize who or what we are. We have to fight to find a peaceful moment--a silent, peaceful moment--to reflect.
But the future that we make is another story. We can work for peace. We can spread kindness around us. We can take a stand against poverty and persecution. We can vote our consciences. We can hope for a day when children can grow up safe and healthy, whatever their country, whatever their race or religion. We can give, as God has blessed us to be able to give.
We can keep open minds. We can keep learning.
Bea, I hope the future holds nothing but happiness for you. Just know that wherever I am, I will be doing my best to make that happen.

Better Times Are Coming

Bea is feeling much better and resuming her usual high-jinks. Here she is as a happy Halloween lion, all decked out for a luau. Who could be more enchanting?

I include this to illustrate my point that better times are coming, even when our lives seem at their lowest points. Goodness knows, there are times when we can't see a way out. But there always is a way out.

Today at work, I was unlucky enough to tune in to the breaking news about the shooting in Orlando. I was absolutely mesmerized by the fact that I was seeing an event in another state while it was still happening. I checked the front page of the New York Times. They were still going on and on about yesterday's shooting at Ft. Hood. We are really getting spoiled by the Internet. It's like brewing coffee. Any process that takes more than five minutes is just too slow for me.

Like back in the 60s, a girl could spend all evening just fixing her hair. Brushing it, washing it, rolling it, drying it. pin-curling it, putting on a sleeping cap. Morning she would have to take out the pins, brush it, tease it, spray it. And we thought we were so modern! Nowadays, I wear my hair cut short. I leap out of bed, grab my instant coffee, fly into the shower, wash/condition my hair out of the same bottle, jump out and blow it dry, and I'm out of the house in about 30 minutes.

Likewise, we used to get the afternoon paper, so we had to wait until suppertime to find out what happened in the world that day (or actually, the day before). Radio sped up the news, TV gave us pictures. But all that was so slow. We lived so slowly then. We had a lot of time to cook and sew and think. Now we just rush from one thing to another. It takes having a child like Bea around to recall to us that we need to stay right in the present. Kids resist being rushed. They hate it. Have you ever tried to rush a 3 year old? Have you ever tried to rush a cat?

Perhaps if someone somewhere along the line had taken the time to talk to Major Hasan he would not have had to express his anguish by killing fellow soldiers bound for Afghanistan. Perhaps if Mr. Rodrigez had taken a walk through the park this morning and fed the pigeons, he might have thought better of going to his former place of employment and blowing his former colleages into kingdom come.

William Tecumseh Sherman, who liked to be called "Cump," said, "War is hell." William Stafford, my favorite poet of all time, wrote a book entitled Every War Has Two Losers. I think they were right. I think the speed at which we live keeps us from reflecting on the wisdom of the past and the lessons of history. I call on the people of the world to slow down and dwell on the sweetness of the present moment. Look at your child--and smile. Look at your cat--and scratch him under his chin. Look at the Internet, but don't let its superspeed fool you. We are people living in human time, not machines living at the speed of light.

The Puking Pumpkin

Halloween was kind of a struggle this year. Bea was dealing with a rotovirus and it was no fun at all. Her daddy made her a sympathetic "puking pumpkin" so she would not have to suffer alone.

I can remember when Halloween was so, so different. There was no such thing as going out and buying a costume. You made a costume out of stuff from the ragbag. You could be a gypsy or a hobo.

You could only go trick-or-treating to close neighbors that you knew, and only right after dark. I always went to the neighbors who lived right across a field from us, a couple named Dotty and Woody. (Wow, those would be good cat names.) There was a path through the field from my house to theirs, and on their end of the path were two apple trees, one was a red apple tree and the other was a yellow apple tree. They would always have a treat for me, maybe a homemade popcorn ball, but in addition, they would invite me to help myself to apples from their trees. Now that was really neighborly.

Today Halloween is all about adults and drinking and sex, and I could just care less. The churches have tried to take up the slack with such festivities as a "Holy Ghost Weenie Roast." I am not kidding. I saw the sign outside a Baptist Church.

Even for a rational person like me, the very idea of a Holy Ghost Weenie Roast made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

So on to Thanksgiving, until some wretched fool somewhere finds a way to commercialize and Christianize that as well. I am definitely planning a vegan meal. I saw four wild turkeys crossing the road in front of my car last weekend and I pledged to them that I would not eat turkey flesh this year or probably ever again. I do thank the pilgrims for inviting the Native Americans to a feast and so beginning what I like to think of as the Democratic party. Let's all feast with peace in mind.

Children are really helpless at the hands of adults. If you have ever been a child, you can identify with the feeling of absolute powerlessness and the feelings of hatred it can induce in children.

Yesterday, my daughter and I tried to get my little granddaughter dressed and into the car for a fun trip to Old Salem. Fun for whom remains under discussion.

Anyway, Bea did not want to go. She resisted getting dressed, had to be carried to the car and forced into her carseat. All the time she was weeping and saying she wanted to stay at home.

Well, we got about halfway to Winston-Salem, and finally gave in and took her back home. Turns out she really was sick and there was plenty of evidence of that that I will not go into here.

My daughter and I have been cursing ourselves for the past 24 hours for making Bea go when she so clearly did not want to. We have apologized over and over to her. We have groveled. We have been very angry with ourselves for imposing our will on her.

This brings up a lot of memories for me that I would rather not go into here. The thing is that I am learning, learning, learning. There are times when children have to do what their parents tell them to do, and there are times when the parents need to back off and listen to the children.

We have decided to delay the day trip to Old Salem for Bea for a couple of years. As Amy says,

"Bea doesn't know from Moravians!" Oh, isn't it so?

And Amy revealed that she was only going to Old Salem to please me. She doesn't really care deeply about the Moravians, either. Who knew?

My biggest mistake is assuming that people are as interested in history or whatever as I am. I just have to get over that. And it's definitely OK not to care about the Moravians. Care or don't care, it's OK! Was this vital lesson worth a lost day's vacation? You bet!

Footprints

Wow, October.

The kids are taking one more weekend at the beach, as the autumnal colors are
already beginning to show on the Piedmont. I love the dry spareness of autumn and winter, after the lushness and humidity of summer.

My son-in-law Tim has been doing some work on my house this week, enclosing the laundry room that used to be open on one side to the raw underpinnings of the house. Looking over there at the view from under the house used to be very scary. There could be snakes or spiders living over there--or worse yet, ghosts.

We leave footprints wherever we go, as well as other traces of ourselves. A camera with a heat detector can photograph the very air that we warmed with our bodies after we've left the scene. If you watch CSI, you know that DNA and loose hairs and fuzz from our clothes can prove clues to where we have been. A lot of criminals have been caught that way, by a careless fingerprint or a discarded paper coffee cup left at the scene of the crime. "Be sure your sins will find you out," is a saying that I grew up on. Best then, to just be good all the time.

If my life were seasonal, I'd be in Autumn now, for sure. I can feel the colors ripening in my spirit, even as my skin and hair fade to shades of winter. If I were a vegetable/fruit, I guess I'd be a pumpkin. Or maybe a gourd, with a lot of loose seeds to rattle.

And I'm very conscious of the footprints that I'm leaving as I travel through this world. Others have traveled before me, and shown me the way. I honor them, and I try to be worthy.
This week I watched a documentary on Harlan County's (Kentucky) tremendous and history-changing miners' strike of 1974. I felt as though I were watching my kin.
The people in my family who were grown-up when I was a child were a lot like the Appalachian folk who appeared in the documentary, gold teeth, missing teeth, lanky build, pale skins, salty language, and all. I am like them. They are me.
My great-grandfather Frank Reed was a farmer in the summer and a miner in the winter. He had six children and a wife to feed. I know that he struggled. My grandmother has told me about seeing the miners come down the road in the predawn hours with their headlamps shining. They left some big footprints for me to follow.

We are responsible for doing all the good we can in this lifetime. The Universe will guide us if we let our consciences be clear and open and innocent, like children. We know what we ought to do. God help us do it!

The artist at her work

As you can probably tell, this is my granddaughter at the beach at Avon, putting the finishing touches on her sea turtle made of sand. All of us scoured the beach for the fragments of shells that make up the turtle's back. Bea thought of giving it eyes, nose and mouth. The seaweed, presumably, is the turtle's lunch.
Words cannot explain how much I miss seeing her from day to day, because she's growing so fast and changing so much. I love to see how her mind works.
I brought a student paint set, some brushes and some watercolor paper to the beach thinking that if it rained, Bea would enjoy doing some painting. On her first try, she dipped the brush in black paint and applied it lavishly to the paper, creating a very large dark shape of many tones. She resisted (rightly, I think) my suggestion to add another color to her painting. She wanted just the black against the white. That picture is now on my refrigerator, where I see it every time I go into the kitchen. I see a lot of thought and direction in that black shape now. I see the dark patch in the middle of it and the lighter patches around the edges. It's very Zen.
On another painting, she painted one front and one hind leg of what I suppose was going to be a dog or something. She studied her painting intently, and then remarked, "The other legs are on the other side of the paper." Of course!
Last evening, I went with my friend Bonnie to a poetry evening at the Nasher Art Museum, which featured a lecture and reading by a famous American poet named Jerome Rothenberg. Dr. Rothenberg spoke on the poetry of Picasso and read some of Picasso's poetry and some of Gertrude Stein's poetry, as well as his own. As you can imagine, Picasso's poetry is utterly incomprehensible. Dr. Rothenberg, however, read it with such passion and vigor that the sounds virtually leapt out of his mouth. The result was that I as a listener began to feel, after a while, a pleasant heat in my brain, as if it had been vigorously massaged. I explain this by saying that when I heard these nonsensical poems, my brain lit up like a fireworks display frantically searching for some meaning or some connection in the juxtaposition of words. This seems to be the whole point. Dr. R. also showed us a series of slides depicting concrete or found poems, in which the poet/artist simply arranged letters or symbols or words on a page. If you didn't know it was supposed to be a poem, you might have assumed that it was a typesetter gone mad. Visual poems also included collages of junk and leavings and fragments of words and strips of newspaper and even twigs and bits of string. Fascinating!
What I love most about it is that Bea has been doing this sort of thing since birth. Wasn't it my Bea who snipped off the cat's whiskers? What better "word" for a poem, since cat's whiskers arouse all sorts of feelings in the viewer, to say nothing of the poor cat, whose face looked unbalanced for weeks until his new whiskers grew in. But such is art. Oy vey!

The Best of Times

Yes, I am back from the Outer Banks, and yes, I am a different woman. Boy, did I ever need a vacation!

When you work from day to day, seemingly 24/7, you can so easily lose perspective. I get so locked in to my routine that I deaden myself to changes needed. For example, on a typical work day, I get up, make a cup of coffee and some kind of quick breakfast (instant cereal, frozen waffle, etc.), then go plop down in the recliner and turn on the TV. I watch the local news, which is just about as interesting as watching my hair grow. Who bloody cares what the temperature is or whether it's going to rain or what the traffic is like? If I could find something else more interesting to watch, I would. The point is, I feel like I can't just eat without having something to entertain me, and I can't read while eating because I would be likely to get food on the pages of my book or magazine. Ick!

However, since I've some back from being away from TV news for a week, I realize that I can actually eat my food without having the TV on. Wow! What a revelation!
The other thing is this: When I'm in my usual routine, I do absolutely crazy things like mop the kitchen floor even when it isn't really dirty, but just because it's Saturday. And if I don't get it mopped on the weekend, I'm perfectly miserable every single day until I finally get it mopped. It weighs on my conscience like a dirty rag.
But after only one week at the beach, not mopping, I can now easily choose to sit and knit awhile or paint my toenails or read Newsweek or by golly, just sit and rest, without mopping. How did I become so compulsive about mopping the kitchen?
The truth is that I am not alone. There are a lot of us locked into silly meaningless routines because our brains have gotten into a rut. A vacation gives us the chance to rethink why we do things the way we do. Do I mop because my brain is full of guilt and anger over things that happened years ago? Am I trying to purge old regrets or stall off depression? What is this brain-clutter that I call thinking?

As my favorite poem states:
"The new life begins when you can sit still,
even if only for a moment,
and feel the waves of your own breath
rising and falling, ebbing and flowing--
an ocean of diamonds in the center of your chest."

Yes, the moments are diamonds, beyond price, and we should waste none of them. While I was at the beach, an old friend died of pancreatic cancer. Do you think, if she could come back to advise us, she would say, "Be sure and mop your kitchen floor?"