Thinking of Nepal… and all of us…

  

Terrible news this morning with a massive earthquake (approx. 7.9 on the Richter scale) in Nepal, destroying buildings, homes, killing and injuring thousands of people in and around Kathmandu, and causing avalanches in the Himalayas, killing hikers there. They’ve had over 15 aftershocks just today of over 5.0 on the Richter scale.  

Just last night our monthly writers group met at my house.  The format we use, “Writing From the Soul”, was developed by the wonderful Jane Brunette, an American who lives much of the time in Nepal.  Though I’ve never been to Nepal, I have a deep sense of connection for several reasons.  A friend of mine’s brother lived in Kathmandu with his wife and three small children. I met them many years ago when they were visiting here. On their way back home to Kathmandu, they were killed in a plane accident.  Nepal doesn’t have an advanced air traffic control system, but has lots of cloudy weather and mountains.  In stormy weather and poor visibility, their plane flew into a mountain. 

Another connection I feel with Nepal is through the work of Olga Murray and her Nepal Youth Foundation.   Olga's built and staffed homes, schools, and hospital, and saved tens of thousands of children.  I first learned of Nepal Youth Foundation more than ten years ago and have supported it ever since. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex1uAtwfFcs

 Another American, an extraordinary young woman named Maggie Doyne, perhaps a saint, at the very least, a wise being, has also  done amazing work in Nepal, creating the Kopila Valley Children’s School and home for orphaned and impoverished children.  Maggie started doing this work when she was 18. She’s now in her mid-20s.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dgA0WasFus

This kind of compassion in action totally knocks me out.  I first heard the term Compassion in Action from Ram Dass in the early 90s. Ram Dass co-founded the Seva Foundation in 1978 along with by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Wavy Gravy, and others. Seva is best known for its work restoring eyesight to over 3 million blind people suffering cataract blindness in Nepal and other countries. (interesting note of interconnectedness: Steve Jobs was an early Seva advisor, and gave the  first significant cash donation as well as an Apple II to enter and analyze eye care survey results in the original Nepal program.) The symbol for SEVA (the image below) is the same one you find on stupas all over Nepal.  

http://www.seva.org/site/PageServer

My friend Mary Watson just returned from a trip to Nepal.  Last night she brought  a gift, a small ceramic disc painted with the traditional “Buddha’s eyes”, the symbol used by Seva, a symbol so prevalent throughout Nepal that it has become  symbolic of Nepal itself. 

While in Nepal, Mary visited the place that Olga Murray created, saw the work that was being done, saw the healthy and happy children.  I don’t know if Olga Murray, Maggie Doyne, and all the children under their care are ok, or if Jane Brunette is ok.  I don’t know if the friends Mary Watson made there are ok. I’m thinking about all of them today. I’m also worried for my friend Montserrat’s stepdaughter, who lives there.  And then of course there are ALL the people living there. 

This morning I was feeling so sorry for the people of Nepal.  Then I remembered I am sitting in San Francisco, on our own serious earthquake fault, ready to shift at any moment.  Mother Earth is alive and, while not as well as she could be, she’s active and moving.  What happened in Nepal today Will happen here.  It will be different, but it will be huge in its own way.  We’re told we can count on this. I’m reminded of our interconnectedness, our fragility, our precarious perch in this life, no matter who we are, where we are.  

At this sweet 29th St. cafe where I’m sitting this morning sipping Earl Grey tea with soy milk, writing on my lap top, I’m feeling my good fortune, which today is tempered by my sense of interconnectedness with the people of Nepal.  There’s a guy at the next table. He’s wearing a red t-shirt with big white block letters that says STANFORD ENGINEERING.  He’s got his headphones on and he’s plugged into his computer.  He’s young, tall, blue-eyed, blonde, handsome, white.  He looks strong and healthy.  I noticed myself wanting to slap-dash concoct a whole made-up story about his privilege and his life, and of course it would be connected to the changing, gentrifying nature of the Mission District in San Francisco. My made-up story might be right, but I don’t know him and what his suffering might be.  I do know that somehow we are interconnected. He has a mother who loves him too, at least I hope she does.  Maybe someday he’ll go to Nepal and help engineer some better construction techniques, or help build a state-of-the-art air control tower.  You never know.  Everyone has their own struggle and their own contribution to make.  Somehow we have to hold tragedy and hope at the same time. Hopefully we can let go of habitually creating the “other” and instead feel our interconnectedness and put our compassion into action.  

The Nepal Youth Foundation, Maggie Doyne’s Kopila Valley Children’s School and Home, and Seva would all be good places to offer a contribution to the healing that will be needed in Nepal. (if the links don't work, all three are easy to google.)  Thinking of Nepal… and all of us... 

xo,

Gayle

What she said...

Today,  this article!  I tried to post the link, but it didn't seem to work.  So, I've copied and pasted.  Thanks Courtney E. Martin.  You are awesome.  
xo,
g

Listening in the Cracks

BY COURTNEY E. MARTIN (@COURTWRITES),  ON BEING COLUMNIST

I get to a small town in Indiana just 15 minutes before the restaurant within the Holiday Inn is closing for the night. I don’t feel particularly hungry, even though it is nearly midnight. I am still riding the adrenaline of the 100-mile drive through an unknown darkness alongside semi-trucks.

I’d flipped through the preposterous number of Sirius radio channels before settling on silence. I don’t get a lot of silence these days. My darkness is mostly familiar — a baby whimpering in the next room, my husband getting up to go to the bathroom, the homeless folks sorting through the recycling bins outside our bedroom window. It felt good to be hurdling myself through night, alone and on a mission.

My eyes wander over the menu, unsatisfied. “The chicken wings are really top notch,” says the man sitting at the bar. A long, rectangular plate filled with chicken wings and onion rings is piled in front of him. He takes a long sip of his beer. He is black, balding, wearing a cranberry velour jumpsuit, looks to be in his 50s. 

“Everything is good here,” the waitress reassures me. She is young, maybe in her late 20s, wearing a lot of foundation that is even paler than her already pale skin. I’m cynical about her claim, but order the burger and hope for the best. I sit at a tall table, away from the bar, hoping to send the message that I am enjoying my rare solitude.

I end up eavesdropping instead. It’s a compulsion.

My previous partner, Nikolai, a born-and-bred New Yorker, tried to teach me how to look into the glass of the subway doors so I could see the reflection of the people I was listening to rather than staring straight at them, but I never got the hang of it. I’m hopeless. I eavesdrop like other people watch reality television, I guess — a little guiltily, but with so much pleasure that I can’t resist.

Credit: M. Jeremy Goldman License: Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

In any case, the chicken wing aficionado clearly isn’t a guest of the hotel, but a local who frequents the Holiday Inn for late dinners. He and the waitress have the kind of rapport that evolves over many late nights of shooting the shit. They talk about their love lives. He is gay, struggling to find partners in a town where there isn’t a very visible gay community. She is trying to get over a bad man, someone that she knows doesn’t deserve her but she loves all the same. They even talk about sex. He’s scared to have it again after so long. She’d thought it would make him stay; now she realizes that it’s better it didn’t.

It’s such an intimate conversation. There is so much shared struggle between these two people who, on paper, would seem to have nothing to talk about — different generations, different races, different genders, different sexual orientations. Yet, here they are, in this small town plunked in the middle of endless cornfields, perched on opposite sides of a hotel bar, just listening to one another talk.

The Center for Courage and Renewal, the organization that Parker Palmer co-founded, has what they call a “touchstone,” which basically means a guideline or agreement for a group: “No fixing, saving, advising, or correcting each other.”

The first time I read it, it sort of took my breath away. So much of our time is spent listening to other people in a doggedly goal-oriented way. Underneath our listening, we’re asking ourselves: What can I pluck from what this person is saying that I identify with? What confirms my worldview? What gives me an opportunity to offer advice or a response that will showcase my own intelligence or a chance to share an experience about my life?

I don’t mean to make that kind of listening sound shallow or manipulative. Ultimately, it’s with great intention that we listen like that. We crave to connect. We crave to be seen. We crave to comfort. It’s a very useful kind of listening. It helps us create new nodes, get things done, coalesce within communities.

But there is another kind of listening, a listening that we neglect at our own peril, that is not about getting some particular place, but simply about witnessing another human being. This kind of listening is long and open-ended. It’s patient. It’s curious. It’s not calculating. This kind of listening operates on only one level — the words coming out, the way they hit the ear, the shaping of a story, a sadness, a yearning, a wish.

The guy and the woman in that Holiday Inn, close to midnight on a Monday, were listening like that to one another. Witness over chicken wings. And they made me think about all the people all over the country, sitting in hotel bars and lingering outside of churches and snuggled on living room couches and sitting over steaming cups of tea and maybe even crammed onto airplanes who listen without static or plotting. It’s an overlooked kind of love, a way we stay sane. It happens in the cracks, under the radar, just between two people. And it doesn’t happen enough.

The burger was surprisingly good. The lesson in listening, totally unexpected.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver

Like Kwan Yin, (the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion) I hear the suffering of the world.  I do what I think I can, volunteer work, starting and facilitating some women’s groups, supporting good causes, signing petitions, voting, random acts of kindness...  It never feels like enough. Maybe I need to think bolder, or more humbly.

Though I often feel disconnected, I know my joys and sorrows are intimately connected with those of the world. Writing a blog is one way of connecting with myself and hopefully others.

Currently I’m straddling middle and old age.  Straddling loneliness and feelings of connection.  Straddling affection for my comfort zone and a strong desire to move beyond it.  Straddling fear and bravery.  Straddling fine and not fine. 

When someone asks me how I am, if I answer right away, I say Fine! If I delay my answer by two seconds, checking inside myself to see how I actually am before I answer, I'm in big trouble! Inside I’m chock full of fine-ness and not-fine-ness --  weather systems of the most contradictory natures.  Mostly there is wind, as in butt-kicking tornadoes. Gentlest breezes are my best days, or hours, or minutes.  Inside me skies can be leaden gunmetal grey or the calmest and soul-warming of baby blues with wispy white cloud puffs purely for delight. I’m learning to live this way, weather being what it is and apparently outside my/our control. (except when it comes to global warming, but that's another post).  It’s not always easy to offer a weather report, when someone says How are you?  It’s probably not what they’re asking for.  They’re probably just saying Hi!  But still the question provokes; sometimes I hear it as a real question. Answering How are you? with Fine often feels mechanical. I want a real conversation.  I want weather reports!  of the human and global-warming varieties, of the here's-what's-on-my-mind and here's what-I-fucking-care-about-today variety. I have no interest in Fine. 

That said, real conversations take time and energy. They bring out the best and worst in me. Sometimes I lack grace and clarity in expressing myself.  Sometimes I state my feelings too strongly, other times, too timidly, overly ready to apologize.  I’m always ready to apologize.   If I bump into you, or even if you bump into me, I’ll probably give you a double apology.  “Excuse me, I’m sorry”.  I’ve noticed mostly it’s women that do the double apology.  Rarely a man.  I almost fell over the other day when a man gave me the double apology for a minor collision with a grocery store cart.  It might not have even been his fault; it might have been my fault. It was just a small collision.   I didn’t know him but I wanted to stop and have a whole conversation telling him what a unique guy he is.  Instead, I just looked at him with silent awe, and said, “It’s ok”.

Clearly I’m a work in progress.  We all are.  This is how life goes, never finished until it’s finished. Dead, I mean. I need to keep in mind both  strengths and vulnerabilities. Yours. Mine. Our Fine. Our Not Fine.  The Listening needs to get deeper. The Offering of kindness and compassion also deeper.  It’s not easy.  Sometimes the "deep” I’m going for turns out to be a hole I’m falling into and then have to pull myself out of.  Yep.  Right on course.  Fine. Not fine.  Sorry, not sorry.  Still, the real conversations are needed.

The other night I went with my dear friends Lincoln and Lisa to see/hear this comedian Sherry Glaser performing in Berkeley.  I laughed for 2 hours straight, all three of us did.  The whole audience did.  By the end we were also crying. It wasn't the kind of crying that happens from laughing too hard.  Sherry was hilarious, off-the-charts funny. But the material was Real, and that meant it was also Sad, Tragic, Poignant-as-hell.  Fine. Not Fine. It was like gaining access to all one's internal weather systems at once. I wish you could have been there. The conversation was as real as it gets. The next time she performs, I'll definitely let you know. 

xo

Gayle 

With a little help from my friends…

Sometimes you get into something, a new town, a relationship, a blog site, and it becomes clear pretty quickly, it’s not a good match.  And so it was. not. a. good. match. with. WordPress.

Better to realize one’s mistake and move on before things just get more unhappy.  At least, I think so.

So, with the advice of a few good people Fran Loosen, Beth Kanell, I’ve been inspired to make the change to Blogger. Thanks Fran, and Beth, and Karen L. who sent me to Beth (who lives in Vermont) for help (thank god for the obliteration of distances with FB, email, and blogs!) So here I am, hoping this will be a place I can stay for awhile.

As author, poet, and blogger Beth wrote to me, as she generously offered to answer any “Blogger” questions I might have “We’re all in this together, right?”

Who knew that writers, or at least women writers, or at least the ones I’ve met, are such a generous-spirited group of individuals?  I am wowed, and so grateful.

I will post my first three essays that were up on WordPress here too, so they can all live in the same place.  You’ve already read them (maybe). I want to keep my "kids" together.  

As I post, I keep getting questions answered.  This quote by Anne Lamott was posted in my Maui writers’ group this morning, which answered the question I had about what I had to offer.

 #s 6 & 7, from a list of what Anne's learned so far…

6. "Writing: shitty first drafts. Butt in chair. Just do it. You own everything that happened to you. You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born". (my bold italics added)

7. "Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and sometimes nearly-evil men I have known were all writers who'd had bestsellers. Yet, it is also a miracle to get your work published (see #1.). Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, will fill the Swiss cheesy holes. It won't, it can't. But writing can. So can singing.”

I'm not really thinking about publishing. It's the part about writing and singing I like.  This morning visiting with a 3 year old named Jack, I played my ukulele and sang a Malvina Reynolds song called “Magic Penny”. Jack enthusiastically played along  with a set of shakers I gave him.  Afterward he said, “Sing it again!”  My first request for an encore!! Yes!

Anna Ty Bergman answered another question, by posting Sugar's own words (though I also appreciated Anita Kline’s and Arpita Brown’s take on the same question) of what she meant when she said “Be brave enough to break your own heart”.

Sugar wrote: ”You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart." - (comes from this column #64 in Rumpus Advice from Sugar).

You should really read the whole column from which this quote was taken. I read it this morning and totally remembered why I had fallen in love with Cheryl Strayed.  Ridiculous levels of wisdom and compassion.

So today I’m just feeling grateful.  1) that I am brave enough to make the move, 2) that there are answers to some questions, and 3) that although late (better late than never) I have made contact with my own writing self, and all of you.  Thank you!

xo,

Gayle

“Be brave enough to break your own heart”. Sugar

My third post from April 17, 2015 (re-posted from WP)....

You wouldn’t think I’d need the Universe to tell me to get out of my comfort zone.  It hasn’t been that much comfort for a long time.  Just familiar. A familiar zone.  The path of least resistance.  I keep trying to “change up”, meet new people, take on new volunteer commitments, remember to breathe.  Objectively speaking my life  is far from a disaster zone. I could write a long list of the good things and good people in my life. And yet there is dis-comfort.  Dis-ease.  Dys-phoria. It starts to sound like I’m entering the medical realm.  Which is NOT where I want to go, and not what I think this is about.  Though for years I did think that.  The body does strange things in response to old and new emotional wounds, especially the ones we don’t let ourselves experience and heal from, especially as it ages.  

At sixty-seven, I know through direct experience that the body situation is inexorably a downhill one.  I watched my own father who was still playing serious handball (a terrifyingly fast and life-threatening sport) into his mid-60s, and riding his bike in his 70s, go seriously downhill in his late 80s, with no diagnosed malady.  Just the body aging and weakening to the point his legs wouldn’t hold him up, couldn’t take a step.  How could this 6 foot tower of strength, handball champion go without injury or illness so impressively for so long, then, like a slow motion train wreck, but soundless and without trauma, move right on into frailty, and death?  

My mother, at 95 (in 3 weeks), is doing great, still walking, still engaging, still with more of her marbles than many 60 year olds. She has a great two bedroom, two bath apartment in a wonderful independent living place in Phoenix.  Every afternoon, she gathers with 7 other people for the earlier-than-early-bird dinner at a round table in the big dining hall.  A rather handsome 90 something year old who looks young for his age, and has a terrific broad smile, teeth flashing white against his rich  brown east Indian skin is one of her regular dining companions. His name is Matt and apparently smiling is what he does best.  I was told he doesn’t talk because he can’t remember anything from one minute to the next, but when I went over and sat next to him and asked him a question, he started telling me about his life as a nuclear physicist. (He was not making this up.  He WAS a nuclear physicist.)  But mostly he just sits there, eating, alone in his world. Smiling when anyone makes contact.  It’s enough to break your heart.  A fraction of this whole world is enough to break your heart, not to mention the whole of this whole world.

Cheryl Strayed, in one of her Sugar columns, wrote to an advice-seeker, “Be brave enough to break your own heart”.  I have this printed on a pink bracelet I got at a workshop I took with her two years ago (and now also on a coffee mug I won in a trivia contest at the last workshop I attended).  It’s always intrigued me because I really don’t know what it means.  But I know Sugar (Cheryl) is brilliant and it means something important. In the meantime, heart break finds me daily (I only have to read my FB feed and listen to NPR). I try to be brave enough to just deal with that, never mind adding to it with breaking my own heart.

Still I can’t help wondering about this quote, if and how I will finally understand it, and about the bravery I feel and will need more of.  Frankly I need a shit load of bravery just to get out of my comfort zone, which I am doing writing this, and need to do more of. And then, more bravery for everything else, including, I guess/hope? when I eventually break my own heart.

xo,

Gayle

“…and then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” —Anais Nin

2nd post, from April 13, 2015, (re-posted from WP)...

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling the desire, No! the Need to be more expansive than I’ve taken my self to be in the past, to take more risks, to not be so afraid of others’ judgements, to not feel boxed in by previously imposed labels that in the past I accepted. I also know some people are thriving and not feeling boxed in at all. I am inspired by their sense of ease and freedom. As the older woman said in “When Harry Met Sally”, “I’ll have what she’s having”.  IF ONLY freedom and ease could be ordered up so easily!  Anyway, I want change, and it feels like it’s happening . I have a sense of urgency about it.  And, I’m aware that great patience is also required, that life unfolds on its own schedule, not mine.

When I was seventeen, the Jewish community in Phoenix decided to have a “debutante ball”  for young Jewish girls.  I can still remember the white heavily beaded sleeveless top I wore over a long narrow white skirt, hair pulled up at the beauty shop into a french twist, how I  barely managed to walk in high heels a few months after surgery on my polio-weakened leg, and just a few weeks after wearing a polio brace for three months at the start of my senior year.  I was big time “into” Pete Seeger  and Joan Baez. I was the first at school to pierce my ears, wore gold hoop earrings,  and  hair parted in the middle, hanging straight and long or in one long braid on the side. I wore dark turtlenecks! If I didn’t “belong” in Phoenix, I obviously felt the need to belong somewhere.  Between my polio brace and a neighbor, Barry Goldwater running for US President (90% of the kids at school wore Goldwater for President/Bomb Hanoi campaign buttons, while I was a teen Democrat),  I think I was pretty much in shock that whole year. I take that back. Not pretty much. I was. in. shock. My friend Robbie wrote me a note on a little pink scrap of paper: “I can no longer be your friend. My parents joined the John Birch Society. You are either a communist or communist dupe. Signed, Robbie”.  My parents thought being a debutante would be good for me.  What I do remember was that my “speech” at the ball started with that famous John Donne quote.  When all seemed crazy around me, it rang true.  I so longed to thrive,  I willed myself to walk on high heels and, wtf, I quoted John Donne.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…. therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The John Birchers (and it turns out there were many of them in my childhood) had me scared, and feeling judged for a long time.  Not that they kept me from doing anything I wanted to do, but I was scared. And I admit, some things still scare me.  ISIS.  Dick Cheney. The Koch Brothers. Right wing militias. Crazy fundamentalists. Fortunately the wise, kind, brave people sowing seeds of sanity in the world (and there are many!) inspire me to join in the work of making the world a better place, a place to which I Want to belong!

As we women sometimes do with orgasms (as Sally showed Harry), we fake  a lot.  We fake being “ok” when we’re not. In the hopes of pleasing others or at least not causing disturbance, we fake what we think we need to.  In the short run it seems to work.  In the long run, direct contact with one’s own real feelings and true sense of self can get lost.  So I’m done faking. I’ve got authenticity in mind.  I’ve got thriving in mind.  This is where I stand, both brave and scared, working toward deeper connections of the inward and outward variety,  as I am…

xo,

gayle

"starting out, yeah!"

My first post from April 6, 2015 (re-posted from WP)...

Welcome to my new blog! I’ll be posting a short essay each week.  Maybe some pics too!  There is a lot in the world to read these days, books And lots online, and occasionally looking at Netflix (I got rid of my TV a few years ago after becoming a Law & Order addict. It was on almost every channel at all hours, and since I hadn’t watched it in the first ten years of its existence, I had a lot of catching up to do. I think I lost a couple years of my life to L&O. So I got rid of my TV. Then I discovered Netflix streaming!) Beyond reading and streaming, there are important things to DO in the world, both personally and as a citizen.  Work, play, contributing to the greater good, rest. Love, did I say love?

I needed a name for my blog. There are so many cool ones  - seems like the good ones (like men) are already taken!  I came up with a list of names. I asked FB friends which they liked.  Then, I didn’t like any of them.  I came up with a new list.  I struggled with how to not be hopelessly out-of-date, unless I could somehow be vintage.  Born in 1947, I/we “baby boomers” are perhaps a little delusionally attached to thinking of ourselves as perennially “cool” — the rule-busting hippies, anti-war activists, and revolutionaries many of us were when we came of age. “The Sexual Revolution” with the advent and availability of birth control pills and Before AIDS.  Marijuana, mescaline, LSD, eventually ayahuasca.  The Beatles, Dylan,  Jefferson Airplane,  more.  (sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll).  It was a wild ride, but not really my favorite time. In future posts, I’ll tell why.

I couldn’t keep up with the slang of my teen daughter 20 years ago, and I’m certainly not up-to-date with a lot these days. (except Cheryl S. and Lidia Y, and FB, and now trying this!)  So… a blog name — how for it  not to be hopelessly old-fashioned, sentimental, or maudlin?  I love Swedishly spare-and-modern or chunky & graceful calligraphy.  Swedish spare, not quite me. Calligraphy, yes! But I’m not there yet. 

One friend suggested a name that lets people know what I’m offering.  Oh, that! I’m hoping to find out along the way.  For sure I have nothing to sell you! I once heard the Zen Buddhist teacher Yvonne Rand, who teaches at Goat-in-the-Road in Mendocino County, California, talk about how quickly we label ourselves and each other, and don’t allow ourselves to be different than we think we are.  She said generally we’re labelled by our first mistake in our family or where we work; she said it’s really difficult to get out of the box people get put in by others. AND we do it to ourselves!!  We can live our whole lives in a box too small for us, or entirely (and unkindly) mis-labeled! Then when we die, we get put in our final small box, and get our final labeling  with eulogies, true or not.  As my nephew Harrison used to say “Don’t do it!”  So, IF I’m gonna make a box for myself (a name, a label), I want it to reflect something true, not too small, and with room for growth and change.   For now, there’s the name I landed on, up at the top of the page.  I welcome your kind comments and/or questions.

xo,

gayle