Words That Stick

These days,  I feel I’m in a tug of war between my life bubble on one side, and national and international events on the other.  The knot slips to one side of the elusive middle line, and then to the other.  My goal is to maintain myself squarely on the centre line, equidistant from both polarities.  How to enhance the lives of people I know and love, in even the smallest way, andat the same time keep my eye on the wider world picture?  Honestly, I’m not sure.

For now, my energy focuses on understanding.  I read a lot in general, much of it provocative, maybe even esoteric, in some circles.  Gems abound in those pages, gems that can be shared.  That might be one contribution to the health of the community.  Ideas.  And different ideas.   For people to read, consider, and integrate (or not).  Not just  “ words, words, words, ” empty, thoughtless and insincere, that provoked that response from Hamlet to his so-called university friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  But perceptive, insightful comments and stark conclusions from thorough, well-documented and clear journalists and authors.  Words that stick.

 

Here are a few quotations from my recent explorations.  All the books are fabulous and life-changing, should you want to dig into the actual document.

 

Ryan Holiday, in Conspiracy:  Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue(2018, p. 294), reminds us of our duty as citizens.

 

"If you want to have a different world, it is on you to make it so. It will not be easy to do it—it may even require things that you are reluctant to consider.  It always has.  Moreover, that is your obligation if you are called to a higher task.  To to what it takes, to see it through."

 

 

Jennifer Walsh, in The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century( 2016, p. 297), analyzes threats facing the world as we knew it.

 

"If we want that deeper transformation, we have to initiate it ourselves.  This is what the history of the twentieth century revealed: individuals stepping up to draw attention to injustice, to demand greater equality of participation, and to stand up for fairness.  And they did so knowing that their demands would likely involve some personal sacrifice."

 

 

Isabel Wilkerson  in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020,  p. 16) has created a enlightening analogy to explain why citizens in the 21st century are bound to promises made to indigenous peoples and people of colour and travesties inflicted on those populations centuries before.

 

"We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.  Many people rightly say, “I had nothing to do with how this all started.  I have nothing to do with the sins of the past.  My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.”  And yes.  Not one of us was there when this house was built.  Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation.  We are the 
heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it.  We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.  And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

 

"Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but, rather, will spread, leach, and mutate, as they already have.  When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase.  The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvénient.  Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal.  Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be."

 

Deb Caletti, in A Heart in a Body in the World (2020, p. 26 and p. 252), on change, or the lack of it.

 

“ ‘It is what it is, ’ Anabelle tells herself.   It’s a phrase she often finds comforting.  It reminds her to accept the truth rather than struggle against it.  But now, it sort of pisses her off.  Sometimes what is  is something that shouldn’t be.  It should never have been. It only is because of messed-up reasons going back messed-up generations, old reasons, reasons that don’t jibe with this world today.  Sometimes an is should have been gone long, long ago, and needs to be—immediately and forcefully and without a minute to lose—changed.  

 

She is more than pissed off.  Actually, it fills her with fury, the way people can protest and shout and write letters and yet, the is stays an is,  and bad, bad stuff can still happen and happen and happen.  There are no words for this.  It’s unbelievable.  It is a travesty.  It is a communal mark of shame. ”

 

“People plus people plus anger is how things can change.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resurrection

Three days now since Easter Sunday, and it still doesn’t feel much like resurrection.  The calendar confirms that Easter has occurred.  The liturgical calendar, too, says it’s Easter Season.  My husband and I “attended” the Triduum liturgies—Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil.  We watched them from our home,  streamed from the Archdiocese.   

On Holy Saturday, we  witnessed the new fire, the celebration of light at the Easter Vigil.  We listened to the story of salvation history.  We heard the bells ring at the Gloria.  We listened to the Archbishop’s words about resurrection in the context of a pandemic.   We renewed our baptismal promises, and we followed along as the service continued with the celebration of the Eucharist.  No organizing the music ministry for the Triduum celebrations this year, no personal practicing, no rehearsals, no church attendance.  Just the two of us, in our home, part of a virtual community of more than fifteen hundred people.

That was Easter?  But it still feels like Lent.  Although the sun rises at 6:00 a.m. now and it’s still daylight while I’m cleaning up after supper, I wear my winter coat, boots, gloves and a toque for my afternoon walk.  We are at home, not visiting our children.    Our lives continue in letting-go mode:  letting go of cuddles with our grandkids; letting go of the work community; letting go of visits with friends; letting go of community gatherings.   Doing our part to flatten the curve means that Lent continues—for weeks.  We are still in the tomb with Jesus, longer than at any time in my memory.  Millions know that tomb much more intimately than we do. They experience a much more daunting impact:  illness, the loss of loved ones, job loss,  business shutdown, income constraints, family stresses.  Heart-rending loss.  Despite our collective eagerness to reclaim normalcy,  we hear even this morning that we will be in the tomb for weeks more.

Easter, beyond simple marking of the day and experience of the ritual, will come.   Resurrection will be ours.  One day, when it’s safe for all, we will leave the tomb.  We will rise again.   Resurrection 2020, though, can be a surprise, if we let it.   In the Epistle for the Easter Vigil from Romans (6.3-11), we heard:  “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.  For if we have been unified with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”   Resurrection is about NEW life.  Not just life.  Not normalcy.  Not the status quo. Resurrection is about transformation, change, surprise, pushing boundaries, things never being the same again.

So, the big question for me is, Will we allow this resurrection to realize its full potential impact on us individually and as a society?   How could we seize the opportunity?

       1.  Find personal meaning in the suffering and the isolation.  

As Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times,  “bringing meaning out of suffering is the saving work of God.”  He adds,   “even people suffering the sharpest pain will eventually leave the graveside and begin life after tragedy.  And in both cases — suffering that endures and suffering that belongs to the past — there is a need for something more than solidarity as time goes by; there is a need for narrative, for integration, for some story about what the pain and anguish meant.” (my bold).   We need to know that our time in the tomb has significance.  Does a return to the normal or the status quo respect the suffering in the tomb?   How does what we learn translate into a visible, tangible difference in our choices, our behaviour, our values,  as individuals and as society?

       2.  Resist attempts to ease back to the status quo.   

We will be vulnerable to attempts to continue as we were, unmarked, unchanged. Julio Vincent Gambuto, writing in Medium, anticipates “the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again.”  How can we resist that pull? He suggests that we “take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life.”  It’s like cleaning out a corner of the house because there’s been a water break.   Might as well take advantage of the necessity to sort through what’s worth keeping, and redesign the space to make it more comfortable and more functional.  “This is our chance to define a new version of normal,” Gambuto continues, “a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all.”   

       3.  Maintain an openness to what “new life” and resurrection could look like.  

Sonya Renee Taylor, performance poet, activist and transformational leader, is emphatic:  “We should not long to return [to a normal]” that, she says, “normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack.”   New life will mean re-envisioning the value we attribute to the roles in our society, and the congruence between those priorities and the resources we allocate.  All of us have an obligation to consider paradigms that might be outside our normal or habitual view of the world.  That, too, will be painful.  But it’s part of getting out of the tomb.  It’s the essence of resurrection.  The light could be blinding.

Easter means resurrection.  New life.  Not the same old life. New life means shedding the old one, bit by bit, burying those bits, and that involves suffering, hardship, stress.  If we allow ourselves to imagine what new life can mean, we will have the courage to let it happen. 

Covid Time

Our youngest granddaughter was born on February 19.  She came into the world looking quite surprised.  What am I doing here, she seemed to ask. After all, she was a week or so early.  Why is it so bright in here, her eyes in wee slits wondered.  Of course, how could she anticipate that there would even be a new world, never mind what it might look like.  She came on her own terms and in her own time, when grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends could still hold her, when visits were still possible, when everything on the outside was not a threat.  

She is five weeks old now.  Five weeks ago—a forgotten time, an epoch ago, a bygone era that may look very different from a new reality whenever we release the pause button on society. Paul Krugman, the economist and Nobel laureate  who writes for the New York Times,  has referred to our new reality as Covid Time.   What CovidTime looks like here in Canada and in various parts of the world fills our screens 24/7.

From my tiny sphere, it means:

o   a recognition more than ever that all we have is today, the moment, the choice for that moment;

o   an awakening of what we know deep down, and what our ancestors who lived on this land before us, knew: that success and failure, life and death, depend on community, and that in times of crisis, community coming together in solidarity is the linchpin;

o   awareness that my husband and I belong to the high risk group of +65, and that we stand to benefit from the risk that others take every day,  just going to work, a risk we can avoid;

o   deep gratitude and admiration for anyone on the frontlines of this pandemic—medical professionals, elected representatives at all levels of government, civil servants, people in retail and maintenance, truckers, anyone whose job definition means carrying the yoke of this pandemic or who can’t work from home, or can’t work, period;

o   an effort to do what we can to help the cause, even if that’s just to stay home, only take what we need, follow the protocols, hang on to our joy with both hands and try to pass some on, take care of those in need around us;

o   months ahead without visits to our children or cuddles from our grandchildren, all of whom live in neighboring provinces;

o   retooling myself to provide some distance ed opportunities for the students in my care this year, beginning Monday;

o   disbelief that somehow we threaded the needle of reasonable safety in a trip to Australia and New Zealand, from January 14 to February 8.   In unimaginable good fortune, the fires in Australia did not impact us, and, although we spent the last twelve days on a cruise ship, we escaped the coronavirus (or it bypassed us, not sure which).

CovidTime may also mean more time for sharing experiences and stories, an attempt to do my part to record history as it unfolds and to help myself and others manage the effects of that history.  To leave a record for my granddaughter of the first months of her life.

Stay well, everyone.

Solidarity

My classroom on Thursday,
prepped for social distancing Monday,
and now empty.

On Thursday, the last day of classes before the province-wide school shut-down in efforts to help plank the Covid19 pandemic, I’m in the school chapel at 2:00 p.m.  Alone.   I have my phone, and my rosary.  I’m wondering why I’m here.  Yes, an email I noticed by chance  a few minutes before reminding people to pray the rosary with Pope Francis at 2:00 did prod me.   And yes, my inner voice said, Why not go?  No excuses—I had just enough time before two pm; I had finished my work; the chapel was close by.  I even had the  rosary I had brought for  the prayer table.

Since September, I’ve been in a high school, drafted by the school division to help out in a pinch in the French Immersion department.  Life since then has been streamlined, to put it mildly, narrowed, to be realistic, the multiple driving lanes of my world reduced to one—school work.  This blog has been only one of the casualties. 

That’s why I was in a high school on Thursday. What took me to the chapel, rosary in hand, is more complicated to explain.  I’m not devoted to the rosary.  In fact, I wonder if I’ve ever said the rosary by myself in my life ever before.  I’ve prayed the rosary in church during various rites, and at home, with my parents off and on while they lived with us in their last years.  But alone?  No.  To me, the rosary has always been a communal devotion, something you do with others as a ritual.

So why, then, am I here, in a chapel, alone, with a rosary?  To pray for healing? For protection?  I’d have to say no, although the spirits of my children and grandchildren surround me in that space.    If not to pray for, then surely to pray alongside people all over the world.   To feel connected in my solitude to millions of others all over the world joined with Pope Francis to find strength in prayer and in each other in their own solitude.  

A need for solidarity took me to the chapel that Thursday.  The same sense of solidarity that moves me to distance myself from others, to wash my hands until the knuckles bleed, to stay home to protect those I love, as well as well as the medical professionals, the retailers, the maintenance people,  who keep society going.   Add to the list those who, like me, do their best to stay calm and carry on, one hour at a time, to get through this pandemic.

In that stillness and solidarity, as the Hail Marys slip by, a centering mantra, I think of a suggestion I’ve posted online for my history class.  Students are living history that they will share with their children and grandchildren.  They will read accounts of this period throughout their lives.  Why not, then, add their voice to the record? Journal, take photographs, talk to people, during the months to come, as their recorded experience of the pandemic will be primary source historical documents in the future. I do really need to walk the talk, to chronicle my own experience,  as well, in this space.   

After the last Glory be to the Father, I feel calm, settled, with a sense of purpose and an ironic gratitude that such a tragic event has opened up space in my recent life to reflect.  Here goes.

Retrospective : Names

I've surfaced after a 9 month silence, inspired by a Christmas Eve breakfast conversation related to the musical Cats and T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Naming of the Cats".  Searching for the poem, I realize that I did a blog post on the subject five years ago.  Here it is, a nostalgic retrospective.  Because today I have time.  Merry Christmas, everyone.

Names

None of the names is familiar to me.  Although I took the time in the fifteen minutes before the oratory contest to write the names of the contestants on each of the adjudication sheets the other judges and I have in our packages, I can’t find the Smith-Jones* my fellow judge has assigned to first place.  He has put Findley in second, and I can’t find that contestant, either.  I can find Amanda, and Tom, and Chelsey, and Brandon, and Stephanie, though.   I dig out my program from the pile of adjudication forms, and attempt to match the speakers’ first names to the last names I hear.  Even in the first two minutes of our discussion to finalize winners in each of the categories, I am uncomfortable referring to people by their last name.

For my judging partner, a police officer, wielding last names seems natural and comfortable.  The officer certainly means no disrespect.  Before the contest began, he chatted with the young people in the audience.  His genuine smile and evident interest in what they had to say established an easy rapport.    So, why would using last names be so normal for him yet spur such a visceral reaction in me?

He might be used to it, I speculate.  I would wager he remembers being called by his last name during his own training.   At that point, I ask myself in what contexts individuals might be called by their last name.   I come up with military and police recruits.  Boarding schools.  Sports teams.  Professional athletes.     Aristocratic men (Darcy, Bingley from Pride and Prejudice).   Authors.  As I have never been part of the military or the police, have never attended a boarding school or been part of a school sports team and definitely am not (yet) a professional athlete, a published novelist or a member of the aristocracy, calling people by their last names is foreign to me.  It’s not how I do things.

Throughout my career, I have always used first names.  I knew my students and my colleagues as Brittany, Cindy, Tom, or Dave.  Not Tremblay, Smith, Jones, or Findley.  Any last names I might have used have always been hooked up to an appellation like Miss, Mrs. or Mr. In fact,  names are so sacred to me that whenever I have been called by my last name (without appellation), I have always felt demeaned and intimidated, as if my identity as a person had been stripped away, and I had become a faceless object.  Which, in the end, might very well have been the intent.  

Our names are inextricably linked to our perception of ourselves.  That’s why most parents reflect a long time and weigh all possibilities for nicknames, initials, or connotations before naming their child.   That’s why bullies often torture their victim’s name as part of their concerted attack on the individual.  Their contortion can associate the name with unflattering, even lewd, overtones.   Any attack on our name targets our very identity, strikes at our essence, and disarms us.   T. S. Eliot alludes to the importance of our names in developing our identity in his poem, ‘The Naming ofthe Cats.’

In Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the poem that inspired Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Cats, T. S. Eliot writes that a cat needs not only its everyday name and its fancy name.  A cat, Eliot reflects, needs  “a name that's particular, / A name that's peculiar, and more dignified.”  Without such a name, “how can he keep up his tail perpendicular, / Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?”  Without esteem for its name, a cat can’t be who it’s meant to be.  It can’t hold its tail up or spread out its whiskers.  Without names that are significant and instill pride, humans can’t be who they are meant to be either.  When they are not called by their particular, dignified names, their identity is compromised, and they will not actualize nor showcase their innate abilities and talents, that is, hold their tails perpendicular or spread out their whiskers.

When I first heard those words, sitting in the audience at Cats, I scratched them down in the dark in the small notebook I stowed in my purse for those occasions.  I recalled them after the oratory contest, as I reflected on why the use of last names might affect me so deeply.    In my worldview, a person’s name, so representative of identity, is sacrosanct.  Its utterance inspires growth and translates respect.

*Names in this post are fictitious.

Connecting the Dots

I may have watched Chopped, on Food Network, too many times.  When I saw leftover whipping cream in the fridge the other day, I synapsed to the frozen pomegranate seeds I had purchased on sale to try, still in the freezer.  Oh, and beside them I found the silvanas one of my Filipino friends brought back for me from her visit home.   I could make a parfait!!  Maybe add blueberries and homemade custard?

You might know the cooking competition that challenges four chefs to combine four disparate ingredients in each of three rounds into a delicious dish.  One chef is "chopped" after each of the appetizer, entrée, and dessert rounds, until a champion is crowned.  

Thank goodness, watching Chopped has not been a colossal waste of precious time.  I’ve learned a lot about cooking.  Over the years, my knowledge of ingredients has certainly broadened, along with the cooking techniques for these ingredients and their pairings.  Even more important, I’ve retained some of what NOT to do.

As a result, this recipe-bound cook has, from time to time, risked forging ahead on her own sans recipe.  So, the silvanas, coarsely chopped, lined the bottom of martini glasses as the base of the parfait.  On top went homemade custard, then pomegranates and blueberries, then whipped cream.  Another layer of silvanas, custard, fruit, and cream, topped with a dusting of the silvana crumbs and some toasted slivered almonds.  Not bad for my first original dessert.

I had gone from a container of whipping cream to pomegranates, silvanas and custard,  culminating ultimately in a parfait.   Not only had I successfully connected the dots; I had recognized them in the first place.  In this case, the dots  were potential ingredients for a dish.  But, in other contexts, they could have been information from various sources on a particular topic.   Or  life experiences over a few weeks.   Or manifestations that could explain a particular phenomenon.  

An exercise in critical thinking par excellence, connecting dots involves analysis of objects or events,  interplay with one’s prior knowledge, and the ability to come up with something new—in short, the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognition, the creation of a theory, a hypothesis, or an explanation to be further tested and refined.  Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001) define it as the  "compil[ation] of  information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing alternative solutions."

So why is this a big deal?   It means that mechanics can figure out what’s wrong with a vehicle given some noises, lights or smells; a teacher can differentiate instruction for a child based on observations, conversations, or products; a doctor can make a diagnosis from test results, symptoms or patient descriptions; and a detective solve a case from clues, interviews, or photographs.   Every day, it means we can figure out what might be bothering a friend from conversations or events, or  assess conclusions we hear in the news based on multiple sources of information.

So what might people good at dot-connection have in common?  In my experience:

•     They can recognize the dots.  They can see commonalities between things happening in the present and events, details, statements or images they recall from the past.

•     They retain a healthy sceptism.  They don’t take things at face value.  Someone connects some dots to arrive at a particular conclusion?  They stop to wonder whether that conclusion is legitimate.  They wonder if any dots were left out, intentionally or inadvertently, or if, in fact, the connections are logical.

•     They peruse a wide variety of information sources.  They force themselves to understand points of view totally opposed to their own.  They are open to seeing things from a different perspective, no matter if that perspective goes against beliefs or positions they have long held.

•     They can manage  discomfort.   They know that difficult facts might give rise to unpleasant conclusions, and they have the skills to deal with that.

•     A solid, anchored core allows them the security to look at things differently.

In my efforts to connect the dots that were these ingredients,  I evolved as a cook.  I created a delicious parfait.  Could it have used less nutmeg?  Yep.  Would a fruit with a more definitive taste like mango or orange have sharpened the flavour?  Likely.  Still, my relative success  encourages me.  It gives me the confidence to try again.   It sharpens my awareness.  There’s a chance dots I have never noticed before will be obvious, as if illuminated from black light, and, I’ll be dumbfounded at the links that appear.  Like those between a Chopped-inspired parfait and connections.

Always Something

In Sarah, Plain and Tall,  Jacob, a widower with two young children, places an advertisement in the newspaper for a wife.  He receives a reply from a woman from Maine, who accepts to come to the American prairies for a month to see how things are before she makes a commitment.  Maggie, a neighbour originally from Tennessee who has married the man to whose advertisement she had herself responded, asks Sarah,  "'You are lonely, yes?'"  Maggie continues, "'I miss the hills of Tennessee sometimes.'"  When Sarah replies that she misses the sea, Maggie adds, "'There are always things to miss.'"

In that context, . . .

There’s always something to miss.

To treasure.

To reject.

To admire.

To envy.

To trust.

To question.

To risk.

To distrust.

To embrace.

To avoid.

To appreciate.

To resent.

To remember.

To forget.

To forgive.

To begrudge.

To cultivate.

To ignore.

To support.

To neglect.

To accomplish.

To regret.

To celebrate.

To mourn.

To love.

To grieve.

To cling to.

To let go of.

To acquire.

To discard.

To express.

To conceal.

To bless.

No matter where we are.

No matter what we might already have.