“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.†– Dr. Mae Jemison
“Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience, Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience… they are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing… the arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity†– Dr. Mae Jemison
“Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.†– Dr. Mae Jemison
“Once I got into space, I was feeling very comfortable in the universe. I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck of stardust, any comet, any planet.” – Dr. Mae Jemison
“You have the right to be involved. You have something important to contribute, and you have to take the risk to contribute it.” – Dr. Mae Jemison
“We look at science as something very elite, which only a few people can learn. That’s just not true. You just have to start early and give kids a foundation. Kids live up, or down, to expectations.” – Dr. Mae Jemison
Someone once asked what ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ was about, and having just seen it I said, “It’s about… hope.” My dramatic pause, and the simplicity of my response caused the questioner to crack up in my face. It may have been Suzie or my brother, two people who have always been able to take the piss out of me with a few short words or chuckles. The movie was playing on television the other day, and I caught the last bit of it. Certain movies draw you in no matter how many times youâ’ve seen them ~ and this is one of those for me.
It also helps that my initial assessment has proven to hold true through the decades since I made the trite proclamation. I’ll add something more now that I have a few more years of life experience under my expanding belt: it’s also about grace, and the way friendship is sometimes the only way we survive the horrors of this world. That’s a sentiment which is always worth revisiting.
“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” ~ Stephen King, ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’
For much of my life, Thursday night was my favorite night of the week. Everyone else usually picked Friday or Saturday, no one picked Monday, and my choice was, looking back on it, a reflection of my enjoyment of the anticipation and planning. I’ve spent the last year or so altering that take, finally realizing that in placing my enjoyment on the anticipatory time, I was sacrificing the real moments of life, and at those times when I was supposed to be enjoying things, my mind was already racing ahead to the next event or party. Many times I would find myself in the midst of a celebration or milestone event, after weeks and sometimes months of planning, and rather than inhabiting the moment, I was lamenting the passing of it, my head already working on the next thing, already living in the future. And that’s no way to live, to be present, to be mindful.
On this Friday night, I embrace the freedom, the way the weekend unfurls before us, even if it’s a frigid one in early February. Inhabiting this very moment, I pause and take in a deep breath, letting it slowly out as I release a work-week of the typical stresses that an average 45-year-old feels: the worries over aging parents, the concerns of work responsibilities, the bowl of chocolates that should have lasted five days but was finished in five hours. I breathe in and out again, releasing the realization that we are going on almost a year of pandemic social isolation, a year of this altered existence where seeing people interact in close proximity to each other on television now feels dangerous and foreign – and I wonder what that does to someone who has already had issues with social anxiety, and whether it will be easier or more difficult if and when we ever return to the state of normal we once had. Acknowledging those struggles, and nodding as they pass through my head, I breathe slowly in and slowly out, knowing that there is no wrong, and there is no right, in how we each choose to deal with this strange, weird, wild and wonderful world.
On the window, the reflection of a candle hovers as if suspended from the snow-laden branches of a Chinese dogwood tree. Winter magic mingled with vague thoughts of spring blooms…
A batch of leftover carnitas makes for a scrumptious pulled pork sandwich with a spicy twist. Adding some salsa verde, pickled jalapeños, and fresh cilantro lends it a verdant heat, recalling its original incarnation, but atop a bulkier base. After years of avoiding sandwiches (perhaps a lingering bit of trauma from running away from grade school, middle school and high school memories) I’ve found my way back to this simple way of lunching, albeit with something better than bologna. A similar thing recently occurred with hot dogs.
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” ~ Andrew Wyeth
A collection of Tibetan singing bowls sounds its choir, each voice adding another layer of peace until the morning is consumed with singing. Vibrations of sound pierce the heart in a way that no other sensory motion can. The deeper the breath goes, the more expansive the plain of calm grows. In my mind, it begins as a small swath of light that slowly enlarges. With closed eyes, I see and sense this light as it grows, obliterating the encroaching shadows, dispelling the surrounding darkness, until there is nothing but light and calm and stillness.
Even in the midst of winter, there is all this peace and quiet. Even in the middle of a raging snowstorm, there is comfort and solace. Maybe such calm can only come in the middle of winter.
In my earliest days of meditating, well over a year ago, I would often begin a session at the end of the afternoon, closer to bedtime. The living room would be dark, except for maybe a candle, and in the hushed light and reverential silence it was also cool, that space being the closest to the largest window of the house. Winter nights left the floor a cool expanse, broken only by a small area rug on which I sat and began my meditation.
Every time I wondered if I should put on a pair of socks, or grab a robe for around my shoulders, but something told me I wouldn’t need such comforts. And every time that turned out to be true. By the end of my meditation – be it five minutes or 29 minutes – my body would have generated its own heat, and my mind would be so occupied with its own empty consciousness that I wouldn’t be able to give such thought to the temperature of the room. Something about the steady deep breathing and the focused lack of focus would emanate heat and warmth from within, and often I would have broken a sweat without even realizing it.
I don’t have an explanation to such a physical manifestation of meditation, and I’m not going to probe very deeply into online research that may or may not be grounded in reality. All I know is that when I meditate, I have no need for socks or warm clothes – not even in the darkest nights of winter. My mind goes to a place that conjures its own comfortable warmth for my body, and I find it best not to question such wonders.
“I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren’t allowed to go in the store to try them on.” – Claudette Colvin
“Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there’s no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.'” – Claudette Colvin
“As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.” – Claudette Colvin
“When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.” – Claudette Colvin
Watching the wind swirl the snow outside the window, through the boughs of a Norfolk Island Pine and the billowing water vapor of a bubbling humidifier, I sit ensconced on the cozy conversation couch, having the kind of conversation that a person can only have with themselves. Nina Simone sings this gorgeously plaintive song, and while it once represented spring to me, and all things to me, this morning it takes on a different glow.
The quivering desperation. The feral want. The essence of survival, hanging on the human whims of the heart. A middle-aged man who feels like he is already in the winter of his life, who has felt that way since his childhood. And winter never rests for long.
LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, SAY YOU DO
LET ME FLY AWAY WITH YOU
FOR MY LOVE IS LIKE THE WIND
AND WILD IS THE WIND
GIVE ME MORE THAN ONE CARESS
SATISFY THIS HUNGRINESS
LET THE WIND BLOW THROUGH YOUR HEART
FOR WILD IS THE WIND
The Japanese Umbrella Pine holds heavy clumps of snow in its branches. I haven’t had a chance to remove the Christmas fairy lights from its hold – every time I feel the least bit of ambition to do so, a storm seems to come and make it impossible. Perhaps the universe isn’t quite ready to let go of Christmas yet. Seems a bit unfair. The rest of us are ready to move on, to rush into spring. And so I work to embrace winter a little while longer.
YOU TOUCH ME
I HEAR THE SOUND OF MANDOLINS
YOU KISS ME
WITH YOUR KISS MY LIFE BEGINS
YOU’RE SPRING TO ME
ALL THINGS TO ME
DON’T YOU KNOW YOU’RE LIFE ITSELF
LIKE A LEAF CLINGS TO A TREE
OH MY DARLING, CLING TO ME
FOR WE’RE CREATURES OF THE WIND
AND WILD IS THE WIND
SO WILD IS THE WIND
There are tight little buds on the Chinese dogwood trees. They wait for the slightest nod from the wind that things are warming. Such a nod will not happen today or tomorrow. It’s best that they not begin to open just yet. Starting spring too quickly can be dangerous. Anyone who has watched the petals of a jonquil torn apart by ice and snow would share such dire concern. And still we want for it, still we long for it, still we eagerly anticipate its arrival, like a child waiting for the arrival of a favorite relative.
With the wind and the snow, a winter garden has sprung into bloom. With its little drifts and crests, the front yard has produced a lawn of crystalline wonder. The rhododendron across the street carries blossoms of snowspray, and the brown umbrels of the Sedum in the backyard are topped by snowy caps. The wind will scatter them soon enough, capable of creation as much as destruction.
WILD IS THE WIND
WILD IS THE WIND
WILD IS THE WIND
The gray and coral tip of a Japanese incense stick glows as baroque designs of smoke curl into the morning air. Through the window, a scene of snow reveals the falling of the night. Winter is sparse in many ways, simplicity and elegance working together like smoke and flute music.
“Winter solitude- in a world of one colour the sound of the wind.†― Basho Matsuo
Every year around this time, I think back to my brief stint in the Empire State Youth Orchestra, and every year I get a little bit closer to appreciating and reconciling myself to that difficult time in my life. Not that anything so very terrible happened then – it was more a confluence of angsty adolescence, growing uncomfortably into myself, figuring out a growing sense of not belonging, and the general malaise of the average 15-year-old. Such a precarious place to perch. Not all my classmates would make it.
You lower your hand, clarinet will play
Raise it back up and it flies away
When you smile violins will soar
When you move your legs timpani will roar
I can hear it, I can hear it, I can hear it, I swear
All the music you’re provoking, filling up the air
It’s getting louder
This is the sound of an orchestra
I can hear it playing everywhere that you are
There is a sound for everything you do
This is the sound of my love for you
Listen to the sound of my lust for you
I didn’t belong in the Empire State Youth Orchestra either. It was the rarity of my instrument – the oboe – that got me in the door. Once there I realized too late that my talent and skill level was on the lower end of things. After excelling at so many other things with relative ease, this shook me and my already-faltering confidence to the core. It was the worst possible time for such an ego-blow, but we don’t usually have control over that kind of timing, and if the possibility of a perfect storm exists, I’ve learned to batten down the hatches.
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
There is a sound for everything you do
Listen to the sound of my love for you
You don’t even know everything I hear
Every move every nod, every time you’re near
If I close my eyes, promise I can see
A hundred people playing and it’s just for me
Being the weakest link in a chain of excellence and talent is the definition of hell for a perfectionist. It wears away at the soul in almost diabolical fashion. I wish I could have learned then to let go of such silliness at that age. I wish I could have embraced the freedom that should have come with being the last, with nothing to lose. I simply couldn’t. It would take decades to understand this, decades of difficulty and foolishness. Failing to see that then, I did the only thing I could: practiced and worked and pulled myself up from the bottom of the talent pool, to a few rungs above it. I improved enough to move up a chair by the end of a few months, but by that time the damage had been done, and the fear and terror I felt at failing had instilled the drive to be perfect at all costs. A lesson was there; I only learned half of it.
This is the sound of an orchestra
I can hear it playing everywhere that you are
There is a sound for everything you do
This is the sound of my love for you
Listen to the sound of my lust for you
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
There is a sound for everything you do
Listen to the sound of my love for you
Before you even say what I know you’re gonna say
That all the sounds I hear are only in my head
Come stand really close, hold me like you do
Then all the music in my head you’ll hear
If you’re truly smart, you assemble your life so that you’re rarely the smartest person in the room. I wish I’d seen that then, and appreciated the wonderful talent and reservoir of musical prodigies that surrounded me. Instead, I felt only the competition, the threat, the shame of not knowing what it seemed everyone else did. In hindsight, extreme hindsight, only a rare few were true prodigies. The rest of us were mostly just kids who displayed some form of musical aptitude – some had natural talent, others like myself had to work all that much harder to reach what came easy to them. For the most part, though, we were remarkably similar, even if we did not see it. Maybe it was better that we didn’t see it.
This is the sound of an orchestra
I can hear it playing everywhere that you are
There is a sound for everything you do
This is the sound of my love for you
Listen to the sound of my lust for you
As we grow up, we take on many instruments, mostly in the figurative sense, trying out different sounds, varying tempos, and playing our way through life from pianissimo to fortissimo. If we allow ourselves to grow, and learn all the different things this world has to show and teach us, we become the conductors of our lives. We speak several languages, we master several jobs, and we orchestrate all the little facets that comprise the simple and expansive skills of getting through the day.
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
It’s getting louder
There is a sound for everything you do
Listen to the sound of my love for you.
“In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.†― Shirley Chisholm
“Women in this country must become revolutionaries. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes…We must replace the old, negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive action affirming it, and more. But we must also remember that we will be breaking with tradition, and so we must prepare ourselves educationally, economically, and psychologically in order that we will be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us.†― Shirley Chisholm
“Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.†― Shirley Chisholm
“Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.†― Shirley Chisholm
“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.†― Shirley Chisholm
“My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don’t understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more.†― Shirley Chisholm
The sweet spot: that space on a chocolate chip cookie where there are no chips so you can safely hold it without melting anything on your fingers. And then hanging onto the thing for dear life because you don’t want to put it down and risk losing that spot.
“One cannot creep upon a journey; one cannot help getting on faster than one has planned: and the pleasure of coming in upon one’s friends before the look-out begins is worth a great deal more than any little exertion it needs.” ~ Jane Austen
On this day, when folklore has it the groundhog will reveal how much winter remains, I’m left wanting a note of hope, a chance for an early reprieve, but if the rodent happens to catch its shadow and retreats to its underground lair, even the six weeks such an act portends is at least a light at the end of the tunnel. Hence the happy Jane Austen quote that opens this post, and the happy anthurium spath that smiles in its featured photo.
If life is measured in holidays – and what happy life isn’t? – then the next up is Valentine’s Day. (I know I’m ignoring those Presidents, but I’m all Presidented out at the moment.) While Valentine’s Day holds its own cheesy allure (and the chance for something exquisite to happen) it soon leads into St. Patrick’s Day, which is practically the verge of spring, so let’s have a happy moment no matter what the groundhog says.
As much as I’ve been trying to embrace the winter this year, and as generally successful as I’ve been in doing so, I’m still greatly looking forward to spring, and the requisite relief it will bring after a winter of cooped-up social isolation. Last spring and summer, I don’t think we made enough of the ability to gather outside and at a distance, perhaps thinking (wishfully) that this pandemic would not last, having faith that our fellow Americans would each do their part instead of acting like a bunch of spoiled and entitled babies who won’t wear a ask or get a simple vaccine to stop the spread of a fatal disease. Clearly, some Americans aren’t getting that message, so while other countries like New Zealand can open up completely and go the movies and sporting events and theater, we are stuck in this muck of stupidity and slowness. Oh well, land of the free and brave and moronic…
Sorry, a bit of bitterness remains even after a year of daily meditation and mindfulness, because I’m only human after all. As I work on that, I’ll focus on these beautiful grape hyacinths, seen at Faddegon’s on my weekly pilgrimage, and a pleasant reminder of the glory that is spring. Less than two months remain of winter, no matter what that pesky rodent tells us or doesn’t tell us tomorrow…
