Getting Real?

TAKING THE TITLE OF THIS BLOG IN EARNEST I AM EXPERIMENTING WITH MY TRAVEL WRITING--> In the past week I have started some writing projects that involve me with other people. This represents an attempt to break out of my isolation and to connect with other people who are also interested in writing and improving their writing. Two of the projects are informal and are in the opening stages The first project is with my niece Nimmie. In 2004 she went to India for a long visit and to acquaint herself with her father's family and his culture and the places that were part of his life as a boy and young man in India. Nimmie was born and raised in Canada, and like many Canadian children of immigrants she speaks English and also French but no Indian language. She developed a habit while travelling of writing about her adventures in a diary that she shared with friends and family. I had read and admired earlier journals she posted online of journeys to Cuba and Guatemala. Now she has a 90 page manuscript detailing her time in India, and she would like to raise it to a publishable level. Nimmie is a talented writer and has a funny and engaging persona as a traveler. I would like to help her improve her book for publication and also to use the opportunity to concentrate on one of my own travel writings and see what I can make of it now. In my past travels I spent a year in India, many summers in Ireland and a year in Romania. I only fitfully and very unevenly tried to write about those times. Helping Nimmie and taking my own advice, I might be able to make something I could publish about my locales. Or I might find a way of expressing that time in poetry or drama. I am embarking on these new writing initiatives on line in the spirit of the conclusion that I came to after many sessions with my therapist---DO WHAT I CAN DO NOW. DON"T WAIT TO BE ALL BETTER TO DO IDEAL AND MORE AMBITIOUS PROJECTS>

What is lost in translation

My husband turned 80 years old a few days ago. I have told him that we will celebrate this big birthday for the entire month of October. October is a special month--there is a change in the light : the air seems molten gold that floods the world with some hidden meaning. I got him two CDs of the ghazals of Ghalib set to music. He likes to listen to them and sometimes he translates the Urdu phrases as they are sung and repeated. One he noticed today "One desire can eat up an entire life; desires come by the thousands/I 've received what I asked for many times; but it was not enough." I once would have thought that this insatiability is one of the proofs of human failure, now I see it more as a sign that yearning is our default position--our glory. There is something that we want that cannot be satisfied by mortal things. Shakespeare has one of his characters say "I have immortal longings." Augustine said that our souls are made for God and we will be "restless until we rest in Thee." Shelly, another poet, wrote about "the desire of the moth for the star, the day for the morrow" Is this restlessness the best thing about us--that we know that we were meant for something more than this mortal coil--that we are hungry to be reunited with the spirit that made us. Writing about the endless, hopeful human activity when there is no cause to hope, Ghalib writes "The efforts I make in my life resemble a bird in a cage/ Who can't stop gathering straws for her nest." One funny line from Ghalib " God sent an angel to drive Adam from Eden, we've all heard that story,/But when you threw me out I felt something much worse had happened.

Hopkins' Hymn to Diversity

               PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him

This is one of my favorite poems because it celebrates the unmatchable abundance of Creation.  Often I have been struck by the sheer excessiveness of the world's beauty --it seems almost gratuitous. This poem tackles that fact  head on.  What it seems to do  for me is to clear the way for each and everyone of us  to be loved in the eyes of God.  God made so much  difference in the world--each snowflake, each blade of grass, each DNA,--he made all that difference because he likes difference. HE  is all one and that means that he contains  multitudes. He contains all the possibilities, and he wants to see each and every one of them flourish. HE does not play favorites He created everything and  He pronounced everything that HE  made as GOOD.
I am watching  Pope Francis slowly ride through a crowd  of people many of them special needs children at the Madison Square Garden.  How great  god is to have sent a leader that  shows such receptivity  and inclusiveness to all that  humanity.  It is overwhelming and so obviously right once   we see it.  Why is it so rare?  How can we bring that love and acceptance into our daily lives?

Pope Francis Speaks of aging

One of the surprising and touching aspects of the Pope's remarks to  the American  public has been  his emphasis on the  process of aging.  He mentioned the loneliness of the aged and also to day to Congress he reminds us of the wisdom of the aged.  One of the  most poignant  insights is his  stressing of the  mixed nature of all things and of all of us. This thread of the  ways we should examine polarity and refuse to see everything  as either black or white.  He directly  points to the inadequacy of seeing reality always as  a duality. In  calling for a  universal global ending  of the death penalty, he  focuses on the fact of its  finality--that it erases  the chance of change and  rehabilitation.  I believe that applies to the  experience of aging and dying--as long as  we are breathing we have  within us the potential to change, to repent, to seek forgiveness and like the Prodigal Son to  turn back  to the loving arms of our FATHER who is always watching for us  on the road with arms ready to embrace us.
There is a golden thread that weaves  through every remark of the Pope-- to be at the service of dialogue and peace.  We must not write anyone off, must not declare anyone  as finished or hopeless. Especially we must not numb our hearts to the tender  mercies that flow constantly from God to each and every one of us on this planet. Each of us so different in our  circumstances and our DNA but each of us united by our  human dignity and our participation in the divinity that we each carry in our immortal soul.

Making new neural pathways--DAY ONE

Just read  that it takes 45 days of daily activity to create a new neural pathway in our  brains.  Another good reason not to  stay in a negative  space with negative  thinking for too long lest it become habitual. I  know that this blog has not been habitual  for me.  I  feel as if the  content is not as focused and sometimes I am not  sure if there is any  interest  or coherence in  what I  am writing.
My other  Blog "BACK IN THE BUCKET" contains  thoughts, memories and experiences  connected with my life in Pawtucket--where I was born and lived  until I went to  graduate school in 1966.  In 2009 when  I returned to Pawtucket  to  care for my aunt  who lived there,  I  retired prematurely --or maybe just in the nick of time--from  my  professorship at the University of Cincinnati.  I found so much the same in Pawtucket and so  much  that had changed. And I wanted to  react to it all.

This  Blog "MAKE SOMETHING OF IT' comes from a different inspiration.  I  was suddenly  plunged into the world of retirement, care giving and decreased mobility.  I also  was facing  and seeing for the first time the limits of my own  energy and  possibilities.

I wanted to explore the experience of aging and to see  what the tasks were that occupy  me now and how they are shaping my identity. In other words I wondered what to make of this sudden emptying out of  all or most of the activities that had filled my  life before. Also I wanted to  discover what I could make of this new experience.  I want  to make something of it--but gradually I  have come to see that the experiences were making something of me.  I was changing and I was not in charge of the changes.  Then I began to understand that change is the nature of living and that  I have never been in charge of the changes.  But I had an illusion that I was in charge.  I have lost much of that illusion now.  I want to make sense of what is left and what  use  God and  society can  make of me and the millions like me--people who are now over 70 years old and  feeling their energy and certainties diminishing and their questions  expanding.
So for the next 45 day--starting  with this entry I will  explore the experience and the  reality of racing towards eternity.

Rememebering my last visit to my Uncle Irving

"If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness." Paul II Corinthians

Today thinking of the Mowry family reunion that I attended  two weeks ago, I suddenly  began recalling the last days of  one son of Ida Mowry Jenckes, my Uncle Irving Jenckes  Dying of cancer, he was being cared for at home and I went to visit him.  When he learned that I was downstairs waiting to see him, he asked that I be brought upstairs to his bedside.  When I saw him, he was sitting reading his Bible which he did daily.  He asked my Aunt Winnie, his wife, to leave us alone and  then he began reading aloud to me from St Paul's  Letter to the Corinthians--the great  teaching about love:
"If I should speak with the tongue of  man and angels but have not  love, I am as  tinkling brass or clanging cymbals."  He would pause and ask me what each line meant.  He was very intense and his gaze searched my face fiercely. When  he got to the lines that begin--"When I was a child"  and conclude "Now that I am a man I put away childish things."He came to a full stop.
"Explain this to me," he demanded. He asked, " what are the childish things?"
I remember that I thought--why he reads this Bible every day, he is a  staunch Baptist--he must know the answers.
Then I thought again --maybe he is aware that now  I have a PhD.  and  he is asking me as a scholar to  interpret the lines. Such a self-flattering thought to calm my nerves--so I took up the old, worn Bible and read the passage aloud several times.  Then I treated it as if it were a problem  of literary criticism--some crux in  a sonnet by Shakespeare or a dense passage from Eliot's The Wasteland. I explained to Irving that the childish things could be the toys, the tantrums, the willful disobedience and defiance of youth.
I'll never forget how he looked at me and said simply,"No, try again." after I tried and he  repeated that direction three times, I put the Bible down and said "OK I give up." And he asked me directly  what childish things I had given up, discarded--and in the throes of my  prideful agnosticism I thought and I wanted to blurt out--
my rosaries, my scapulars, my novenas, my childish Faith--
I said nothing, just picked up the leather bound volume and resumed  reading. When I reached the  point about "seeing through a glass darkly",he stopped me again--"what is that glass and why darkly?"

Then I had another not so brilliant thought--oh, he is dying and he  is reading Corinthians for solace--. So I mustered up my Platonism and told him that the  fact that we have bodies and eyes of flesh permits us to see only material, earthly things but when we die and our spirits are free of the constraints of the  physical  then we will know the  spiritual truth of everything.
Well--he said wearily--that's a start..  He dropped his head back on the pillow and closed those eyes. Almost on cue my Aunt Winnie came into the room to say that I should go down for tea with my cousins, Mary, Grace and Roberta. And I must admit I was glad to leave that room.

It has taken me many years to see that interview less darkly and to understand that  Irving was not asking me  questions for his sake, he was doing it for my sake. He was bearing witness, using his scarce energy to  raise  questions in my mind about  FAITH, HOPE and LOVE.
He was  acting like that  notorious HOUND OF HEAVEN,  acting on behalf of that GOOD SHEPHERD,  seeking that lost  sheep that was his niece and turning me towards eternity.

"Whoever brought me here will have to take me home,"  Rumi

Does my Road to Damascus Runs Through Pawtucket??

For the past  couple of years I have been struggling with two seeming contradictory situations: 
1. I have been beset with health and physical mobility problems that made  me able to do less and  less
2.I have become convinced that the  most necessary task of the  rest of my  life is to discover how I  can best respond to God's love and how I can   show forth  my own increasing awareness of the divinity that is with in me and every human being. 
So that with diminished  physical powers  I am   trying to find a way to explore and  expand my  God-given spiritual powers. This paradox is a hard one to explain and also  seems to me to demand some kind of  dedication and devotion. I am  especially moved by how many times Jesus gives his newly chosen apostles just one simple direction :FOLLOW ME.  I don't see what the path of my following would  be. I do see clearly that for  Jesus it was a path that lead him to Golgotha and I have seen the increase of my own suffering but it  is not comparable to that of the Savior.
I am uneasy even expressing these ideas.  When I feel a little better I start imagining myself undertaking and completing some pilgrimage or taking up some form of active  work of mercy--visiting the imprisoned,  helping the homeless. But I am unable to do much  except send  limited charitable  donations to  support the good works of others.
So what can I do? What is  the path that I am to seek out and follow when I can barely walk at  all?  I am reminded of Milton's pignant question in the sonnet on his  blindness 
"Does  God exact day-labor light denied?"
Here is the entire sonnet:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait." 

John Milton

The poet  finds an answer to his question and expresses it in the final six lines:

 "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait." 

What are the implications of  that answer that Patience gives in the poem for my  life and my limits? So God  does not need me to do anything?  I need to adjust my attitude  to bear  my mild  yoke.  That is literally the rub for me.

That means that what is right before me--the daily  inconvenient, pain ridden, boring  routine of rising and  trying to maintain this household that consists of a  person-me- who can do very little, and a person --my husband-- with dementia and memory loss who can do many things but no longer knows how.  That is the meal the Lord has set before me  and that the poet George Herbert tells us is a LOVE FEAST?

286. Love

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning	5
If I lack'd anything.
'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'	10
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'
'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'	15
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.  I CANNOT LOOK ON THEE Where do I go from here?