restingmotion

A Finished Object!

Sneaking in just under the wire, I actually finished something in 2017.  It may the only thing I finished this year, as at the moment my life seems like a giant conglomerations of works in progress.  There is another knitted object, a sweater, which I was supposed to block yesterday, but did not due to some unforeseen developments.  It may dry in time for me to assemble before the strike of 12 on New Year's eve, but it is not likely.  But at least it is nice to have finished something (other than books).

I got a mad urge to knit something simple.  I was working on another, more complicated, project, but it had become apparent that redesign was going to be needed, and I was not up for the math at that moment.  Out comes some super bulky hand-dyed yarn I bought at Rhinebeck years ago for a shell that never materialized.  Just as well, I would have worn it in Hyde Park, but not in Knoxville.  

 

The pattern I started out with proved not to work for a yarn quite this bulky, so the project got simplified.  I am happy enough with the results, at least for now, and I have been wearing the shrug/capelet/loopy thing the past week as it has been cold.   It is in fact, perhaps a little too big.  It fits over my coat, as shown below, but that may make to big to wear as a wraplet over a winter dress, and I have at least two dresses that would be perfect. 

But for the moment I am happy with it as is.  It is warm and the color makes me smile. I have the same yarn in another colorway, and I'll knit that up as well, but in a different style, an actual capelet perhaps.  If that project turns out to be preferable, this may be deconstructed and reknit, but by then we will be far enough into 2018 that it can count as a new project.  It will be colder than average for at least the next week, and this thing will see plenty of wear.  Besides I need to knit something on smaller needles for a while, my hands are much happier with small needles, and for me that is actually faster and more enjoyable knitting.

 

Happy New Year!   I'll be back in 2018.

 

My Top Ten Books of 2017

I read a lot in 2017, mostly before early November, after which life got complicated, I got adlepated, and I stopped reading. I'm reading again now, but I don't think my current reads will challenge this list.  Regardless of how much or how little I read, I'm not going to share the entire list with you anyway, merely my favorites.  Only two of these books were reviewed in any way on this blog, and there are links in their titles.  I am not offering reviews here, many are available, only a brief blurb, and,  because not all of those books were published this year, and a couple have even been reread (gasp!), this list can in no way be construed as a list of the "best" books of the year.

 

FICTION

I read a lot of fiction this year, and loved a lot of it as well.  But upon perusing the list, I see that only a few really stood out above the rest (in alphabetical order):

 

Autumn, by Ali Smith is a beautifully and playfully written novel set in a post-Brexit Britain. Smith manages to tell an uplifting story enmeshed in a setting that could be ponderous, but here balances beauty and humanity with the dangers of nationalism, populism, and easy answers.

 

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. This beautiful novel, is one of my favorites of the year.  In fact it is tied with The Sellout for second place even though it is radically different, beautifully written, eloquent in its kindness and its understanding of humanity and relationships and the idea that we are all immigrants through life.  

 

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. My favorite novel of the year is far more than the sum of its parts, which seems to be a theme for me this year. Not easy going, but rewarding. Click through for my review..

 

The Sellout by Paul Beatty.  I can't say it was the easiest read as it challenged all of my cultural assumptions and yet it did so while simultaneously drawing me into the story.  Extremely satiric, at times difficult, as well as  hysterically funny, this book changed the way I see myself and the world in which I live. All that, and I would read it again.

 

Ties, by Domenico Starnone.  The novel is short, compelling, and something of an emotional rollercoaster.  Long before the end however you begin to see that things are not what we initially perceive them to be and that life itself is a complex web of ties, ties that both hold us together and pull us apart.

 

NON-FICTION

I read less non fiction than fiction but had trouble finding 5 favorites. Once again in alphabetical order.

 

American Ulysses by Ronald C. White. I've long been a fan of Grant, since I read his memoirs at least, memoirs that revealed him to be a thoughtful, often wise, and complex man.  I'm inclined to think he has unfairly been given short shrift, and although this book may be overly positive, I hope it gives more people a chance to reconsider.

 

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Everyone's favorite book in the previous couple of years, I came to this book a little late.  There is little I can say that hasn't already been said. Life, illnesses, medicine, and what truly matters.  If you haven't read it, you must.

 

Courage to Be by Paul Tillich. I loved Tillich when I was in college, studying philosophy of religion, and I suppose I still do.  It is admittedly dense stuff. As I've grown older I appreciate Kierkegaard more and think Tillich is heavy-handed in his analysis, but still profoundly wise.  This was either my fourth of fifth reading of this book, and I continue to changed by each engagement.

 

Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks.  Beautiful and beautifully human short essays by Sacks written during the time leading up to his death. Sacks' essays have much to teach us about gratitude and embracing life in all its aspects, even in approaching death.

 

On Immunity by Eula Biss.  The author takes the vaccination debate as a jumping off point for thoughtful and beautifully written essays about culture, parenthood, and what it means to be human.

On the Third Day of Christmas

On the third day of Christmas

My True Love Gave to Me

Three French Hens

...

It is still Christmas at my house, and I've been humming that Christmas carol that many find annoying, The Twelve Days of Christmas, but which I have always found full of joy and silliness, and therefore particularly appropriate.  The first written appearance of the song appears in the late 18th century but the song itself probably dates to the 16th century, or earlier, in France, and was probably just a light, silly, memory device.  That is certainly how I remembered it as a child, and I loved struggling over the verses and trying to keep everything in the right order.  It was so much more fun than most of the memorization exercises we had in school, back in the day when children still had to memorize things in school, at any rate.

 

Anyway, as a student of medieval and Tudor literature, my studies also included a great deal of medieval culture and religious observance, which is perhaps a part of why I still maintain the traditional 12-day Christmas season even though I live in a culture that most definitely does not.  Of course the fact that I am Episcopalian, and Episcopalians know there is a Christmas season helps, as do the memories of Twelfth night, the Twelfth Night parade in Madrid the Christmas that I was seven, and the memories of the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to fill our shoes.  I remember my father explaining to me that Santa knew we had moved to Spain, and that he had passed our lists on to his good friends, the Three Wise Men, so that we could get our gifts on the same day as the Spanish children, something I appreciate even more today as an early lesson in multi-cultural appreciation.  I remember maintaining a twelfth night tradition once we returned home, although back in Texas Santa was the main event, and we usually got grapefruit and chocolate from the Wise Men.   I even remember taking little twelfth-night gifts to my friends at school those first couple of years in elementary school, when I was still oblivious to the requirements for being cool.

 

Traditionally, December 26th was St. Stephen's day.  St. Stephen was one of the earliest Deacon's in the new church and was known for his generosity to the poor.  St. Stephen's day is the day one gives one's excess to those who are less fortunate, and it is commemorated in the Christmas Carol, Good King Wenceslas.  It was still celebrated when I was a child, when Christmas in the United States, was still more of a religious observance with Santa, than the Santa-fest of too muchness it has become. Whether or not Boxing Day has anything to do with St. Stephen or not is beyond my ken.  Today is the feast of St. John the Evangelist, who is, culturally at least, accepted to be the only one of the disciples who was not martyred and the author of the Gospel of John,  the one who wrote "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" and only a little later "And the Word became flesh and lived among us".

 

And I think that is what I want to remember this season.  The idea of the word becoming flesh and living among us, or hope.  In my medieval studies, I learned that there was an entire holiday season, extending from all-hallows eve (halloween) until epiphany, and that although there were times of serious religious observance, there were also times of silliness.  Granted many observations, and many sillinesses arose out of remnants from other cultural observations, and the official church eventually got to taking itself too seriously and stamping such excesses out, but that is not my point either.  We get too hung up on what is authentic or "true" or where something came from.  All human experiences are mashed together, are adaptive, are learned and observed from those around us.  It doesn't matter if one tradition absorbed another, but what matters is that we find the truth, which is usually some simple thing lurking beneath everything else.  Hope is waiting for us to find it.  Even the ancient Hebrews took greenery into their homes at the time of the winter solstice, to remind themselves that the darkness would indeed end eventually.

 

At this time, just after the winter solstice, near the darkest time of year, but at the same time, a time in which light is slowly returning, we are celebrating hope and the birth of hope in the darkness.  The "Word became flesh" and went from some highfalutin abstract ideal and became like us, filled with pain and despair, and by doing so, brought healing and hope.  The story of Jesus is the story of a savior who was born into a poor family from a town so poor and bedraggled that no one believed anything good could come from there.  Mary and Joseph couldn't find room at the inn because they had no money, and no resources.  If Mary and Jesus were to appear in Knoxville, or New York, or Los Angeles today, they would probably look like some homeless family, and we would drive by them shaking our heads in disgust rather than reaching out to them in kindness.

 

That, precisely, is the story of Christmas, and it is worth celebrating over and over and over again.  Hope comes from the darkness, from where you least expect it.  It exists always in us and in the world, but we get so blinded by our comforts and excesses that we lose sight of it, until some cold dark night, some time of pain, when we have no barriers left to keep out the cold, and it springs up like a new leaf growing in a barren land.  That is what this season is about, the celebration of hope and faith and love, the understanding that you cannot have one without the other two, and that they are always here, if only we allow ourselves to see.

 

When you are exhausted from the excesses of Christmas present, and presents, and the trash has been hauled away, and the decorations down, and you are promising yourself that next year will be simpler,  remember this:  it is precisely now, in the depths of darkness and doubt that hope is born.  In the last sentence of his book, The Courage to Be, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich wrote "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."  Christmas and the Christmas season, the season in which we celebrate transformation, of hope and faith and love, and the knowledge that these things alone have the power to turn us upside down and inside out, and make the world a brighter place.  Hope is born when we let go of all the things we are told we are supposed to believe and we let the light in, let the light transform us.  Hope needs no name.  And the God who appears when God has disappeared is the God who loves us each unconditionally, and sees us in our entirety for who we really are, the God who has no need of names or titles, or even religions.  And this, this hope is worth celebrating, and worth remembrance.  Again, and again, and again.

 

 

 

 

What Is Your Favorite Holiday Music?

"Holiday" music came out this week.  But which Holiday?

 

Tuesday evening I went to see The Meshuga Nutcracker, a film of the Channukah Musical.  It was cute and funny, in parts, and in others a bit strained.  I think it would have worked brilliantly as an actual musical on stage, but needed some help being translated to film.  It was a little bit too "Look here we are making a film and pretending it is a play" to really work.   Or maybe they really were just filming the play, and there was something I didn't get.  I enjoyed it, but it could have been fabulous.

It wasn't well attended, and that could just be a Tennessee thing, although I'd like to think it was also because the actual ballet, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Ballet, was being performed downtown, although I am probably fooling myself it I believe that was all that was involved.  I would have liked to have done both, but even I knew that was never going to work. 

I came out of the movie theater with the latke song roiling about in my head, and I knew I needed to make a batch of latkes, although it could wait as it was late and I had already eaten.  When I was young and naive, and probably a bit arrogant as well, I couldn't imagine that anyone would need a recipe for latkes.  That was before I ever had a bad latke, or potato pancake, as my non-Jewish family and friends referred to them, or before I realized the way the term "traditional" is loaded: Tradition is whatever your grandmother made, and someone else's grandma is always wrong.  Now I am old enough to know that tradition is really a mixed bag, as is the idea of authenticity.

Yesterday, however, I made latkes.  I also listened to holiday music.  I started the day with a new CD I had purchased this year, Veni Domine by the Sistine Chapel Choir.  I purchased it because it said music for Advent and Christmas in the title, and I like Advent, and Advent music.  It is not Christmas yet, after all, and Christmas lasts for 12 days.  I am too much a child of the Anglican Tradition, a child whose mind remains entranced by the 12th night parade in Madrid and waiting for the wise men to come and fill my shoes with gifts.    The Veni Domine CD was also a bit of a change for me, simply due to its more general nature as an assortment of songs and carols.  I do listen to choral music:  I listen to Handel's Messiah every year on Christmas Day, and usually also listen to Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ at least once during the season, but George was the one who could listen to choirs singing carols for hours on end.

 By the time evening rolled around and I was actually making latkes, I was no longer listening to carols.  It seemed time for celebrating another holiday, and, even though Channukah is already over, I listened to Itzhak Perlman's collection, Holiday Tradition, a compilation of traditional Israeli and Eastern European music.  I can't actually say that I've listened to this as a Holiday album all that much, Jewish Holidays, yes, and Channukah is a Jewish Holiday, but it was not one George particularly observed.  A lot of the music is seasonally appropriate however, and it is relaxing and  joyous music.  

I made my latkes with a combination of shredded and finely grated potatoes, and I don't use flour, but the potato starch that accumulates in the bottom of the bowl after soaking the grated potatoes, a trick I learned from George's Aunt Hilda.  And I served my latkes with pork chops, definitely not kosher, and roasted mushrooms, including some lovely black chanterelles.  I didn't eat half of that food.  But the leftovers went into a lovely hash, some of which I had this morning for breakfast.

 

I can't say that I only listen to classical music at Christmas, or that I don't like Christmas carols either, although I get tired of hearing them everywhere I go, especially now that many places start playing them before Thanksgiving.  Nor can I say that my holiday music choices are particularly profound.  I've listened to my favorite Christmas album, A Charlie Brown Christmas, several times already and it always makes me smile and feel generous and happy and filled with joy.  Charlie Brown is part of my lifetime Christmas lexicon.

 

In these photo montages are my favorite Christmas season albums.  I have more of a collection than I realized, and now I've added two more, the new Veni Domine album, plus the Itzhak Perlman album I've had a while, but which I never particularly associated with the December holidays. I don't use digital playlists yet, mostly because I haven't acquired speakers for my iPad or computer, or set up a way to connect them to my stereo system, something I need to look into next year.

My question to you is this:  What is your favorite Holiday music?  Do you listen to albums? If so do you have favorites?  Do you listen to playlists? If so what are your favorite things to listen to this time of year?  Do you listen to holiday music at all? Or do you come home, happy to get away from the world of "Jingle Bells" at every turn, and retreat into silence or play something else entirely?

A House Filled With Music

Take a deep breath. Inhale.  Breathe out, slowly, letting worries escape on the drifting waves of air.  Inhale again, and with a deep sigh release all that needs release.

 

The happy corner:  Light and Music, a happy collaboration, and a lifetime's worth of collected joys.

 

I decorated the tree last Wednesday.  In 2016 there was no tree, no decorations.  I planned to go away for the holiday, but instead I got sick and bought a house.  The three years before that, after my back surgery, I had a decorator do the tree, do the house, at first because I wasn't certain I could do the twisting and reaching necessary, and later because my heart wasn't in it.  I just wanted Christmas to appear, as if by magic.  It doesn't really work that way of course.  The magic is in the making.  This year this house, this corner especially, is the both the least decorated and the most magical Christmas in a long time.  I sit and breathe and relax, listening to the music, looking at the glistening lights, the reflections of light and color, and my heart is at peace.

 

A friend helped me drag the tree up from the basement last Tuesday, for which I am quite grateful. I hauled out the stereo and set it up, flipped and fluffed and assembled the tree, and started sorting and filing CDs and LPs, which were still in slight disarray from the move.  The stereo had been waiting for the cabinet ,which arrived just before Thanksgiving, but set-up was further delayed while I waited for a call from the man with the drill.  I could wait no longer, so the stereo went up top, my old Talking Heads albums came out, with perhaps a brief interruption from the Ramones, and I was dancing around the house, filing, sorting, cleaning, and reconnecting with my 20-year old self, dancing around my first apartment, hanging my first ornament on my first tree, an ornament I still have by the way. Silliness reigned, and silliness is a powerful force.

 

Wednesday was calmer as the decorations came out.  All my ornaments are on that tree.  That never happened on a decorator tree, and much as I love decorator trees in other people's homes, here, I love my tree best, a mishmash accumulated over decades, rustic items mixed with glistening Radko glass, all dubbed "whimsical" by the decorator.  Whimsical isn't really my term, but I have grown into it along with the implied imperfection. I love my tree, and as I decorated I listened to a mismatched clutter of music as well, my choices constrained only by the letters D and E in my sorting and cataloging project, and my varying moods and peripatetic thoughts.  I danced and decorated to a mixed bag primarily consisting of soothing piano music by Debussy, the cheerful infectious pop of Raghu Dixit,  the moody blues-rock of the Eels,  and jazz by Eric Dolphy, complex, sometimes enervating, often energizing. Other bits and bobs found their way into the mix, a soupçon of Dvorak, Depeche Mode, Dylan and Eminem, as needed to soothe restless thoughts.  Right now, I'm not sure I crave anything more than a reacquaintance with my music, all my music, and all the music yet to be discovered.

 

As I sat in the semi-dark late one evening, admiring the tree and hoping to knit but instead finding a cat and dog negotiating a detente on my lap, a glass of proseco in my hand and more Debussy filling the room, I realized how well this mish-mash suited me.  It seems that as I've grown older I've grown more adventurous in my taste in music, more willing to be eclectic, to resist being pinned down.  I'm not comfortable being decorated, curated, collected or defined, and I hope that never stops.  I hope I can grow younger and more open as I grow older.  I hope that I can always stop and enjoy the twinkling lights on a tree, the music in the early morning air as the wind blows gently through the leaves, a soft underpinning to the cawing of the crows, I hope I can be open to new things and, first and foremost, the joy of enjoying life, both in times of quiet and in times of company, and the importance of having fun.

 

The past week has been a mini-retreat, a letting-go of responsibilities and obligations, a release of psychic energy, an acknowledgement that I cannot fix what is not mine to fix.   It has been a reminder that the solution is not to build walls to stop the waves, walls which will inevitably come crashing down, but to find my own center of calm, to bend, to float, and to allow the current to swirl around me on its own path, releasing it to its own destinations while simultaneously freeing myself from the burden of obligations that cannot be fulfilled.  I dance, not because I am oblivious, but because I do indeed care.  I dance because joy, like creativity, is a precious gift,  a delicate commodity to be protected and safeguarded.  Joy isn't our weakness but our strength; it doesn't stem from the absence of pain and suffering, but through it, a light in the darkness, a spark to be protected lest it be snuffed out.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where the Squiggle Meets the Square

Sometimes it seems that the past decade or so of my life has been a series of transitions, with no time to settle into any one place before something new rolls around.  At times I long for stasis, but as much as I long for meditative stillness, without movement the calm can rapidly become stagnation. I could claim this restlessness is new, but that would be misleading, as I have always had that restless side, just as I have also always had my introspective quiet side that simply wants a safe quiet space.  

 

Increasingly I seem to think that this tension between change and stasis is part of the human condition, that we constantly struggle with both.  We need security, a safe place to protect us from the ravages of the world, but we also need change.  The world changes around us and we need to adapt or die.  More than that, we have developed these brains that push us into further change.  An essential part of our nature is to push ourselves, to create, and creation itself is an act of change.  And so we are torn.

 

Recently, I sent a friend a quote from Ernesto Cardenal's Gospel in Solentename, this from Vol 3, page 74:

"The law of the universe is the law of evolution, that's the supreme law of God. Any other law that tries to hold onto the past is an unjust law. Father Juan Luis Segundo says that in the language of the New Testament 'sin' is equal to conservatism: it's the attitude opposed to change."

Creation is, in and of itself an act of change.  Something is transformed into something else.  We are born into this world, and the very process that leads to our birth, to our becoming fully human is a process of change, from cell to embryo to infant; from infant to child to adult to old age and death. Of course we are not the only thing that changes.  The world changes around us daily, seasonally, eternally.

 

And yet, still we cling to safety and security, to stasis, forgetting that we need to move as the world moves around us or risk being crushed. And yes, I intentionally chose that word, not because of some need to feel negative, but because it is a danger we face, the crushing not only of our lives but of our spirits and it can be a process that is painfully slow as well as one that is blindingly fast.  

 

The simple fact is that we are not islands standing still in the storm.  We are creatures of relationships, and relationships are fluid, constantly changing.  We are constantly changing.  I am not the person I was last month or last year.  You are not the person you were last month or last year.  Those changes may be dramatic, but more likely they are extremely subtle.  The question becomes how to be hold onto our sense of self while we also hold onto our relationships and push forward, creating a space that is good for ourselves and our relationships while holding onto responsibility for our actions, both as individuals and as a group.  In short we must be flexible, even when we are not so inclined.

 

Six weeks ago, more or less, I was at a Women's retreat and we played a game of sorts.  A series of geometric shapes were posted on the wall and we were to gather near the shape that spoke most deeply to us.  I ended up at the rectangle.  It was not one of the most popular shapes, but I was, and still am happy with my choice, even though I came very close to choosing other shapes, and might do so on any given day.  Still, I think I prefer to return to the rectangle.  Why?  Here is what was written about the rectangle (from a management training program from the early 1990's):

 

Strengths: confused shape, not frozen they are going through a change such as a new manager, just moved, etc. Going through a transition or soul searching. Represents growth -- everyone of us has been this shape. Can be this shape for 1 day to 15 days. In turmoil of some extent to see what works and what doesn't. Change from day to day, hour to hour. They are growing all the time. Weaknesses: They make a lot of mistakes -- this is O.K. as it is part of being human.

 

 I got the impression the author didn't really like rectangles.  I get that. Much as I feel drawn to change, see it as necessary even, I don't always particularly like it much.  When faced with too much change I would rather crawl under the covers and never get out of bed.  I don't think I am alone in that feeling.  

 

I like the flexibility of the rectangular shape.  It can be short and squat, almost a square, or long and skinny, almost a line.  It bridges the space between the other two shapes I was most drawn to, the square (or box) and the squiggle, or bent line.  The square and the squiggle define in some ways my ongoing struggle between my boxy, organized, structural and meticulous side with my creative, questioning, innovative and conceptual side.  The part of me that wants order fights with the part of me that never stops thinking of new things, that revels in chaos.  Perhaps my happy place is one or the other but something else, something in between:  the good old rectangle.  Most of my life I have struggled with organization/disorganization and stasis/change.  I will never be the most organized.  I will never be the most creative.  But I am perfectly comfortable with the less strictly defined boundaries of that rectangle, and growing more comfortable as I age, now that I realize that life doesn't really have to be an either/or.  Perhaps that squiggle just needs to poke into that old square and drag it out, just a little bit, creating something new in the joining.

 

I do think the author is correct in that we have all been in transitional spaces, and we all return to them occasionally, just as we probably all have dominant spaces where are personalities are most comfortable residing.  When I was younger my organized structure-loving self struggled with my chaotic creative self, but I am growing more comfortable in the spaces in between.  I can't stay there, in between, but gradually I am accepting the ability to let life and my relationships, both to the people I know and love and the earth I live in, temper my stance.  Perhaps growing older is a process of growing more comfortable with more fluid understandings, with an acknowledgement that one does not lose the self by relaxing the boundaries, but perhaps finds oneself more fully.