Blog Your Blessings: Going for the Ride

Did Della ever fall off her bike?

Yes. Lots of times. In fact, for a while there it was the only way she knew how to stop and get off. But she learned.

Fortified recently with the basic fact that his cousin struggled to learn to ride a bike, my nephew Adam was ready to give bicycling a try. My parents showed him how to coast, and they stood by to keep him from rolling into the road and to encourage him to keep trying. The Stride-Rites faithfully took the scrapes for him as he dragged his toes to keep the speed down.

For hours. For days.

Then, on Wednesday, I had the good fortune of stopping by to visit with my parents and my nephew. I got to be part of Team Go, Adam, Go! and raced alongside him on foot to provide some variety to the routine.

Eventually the little guy found the courage to put his feet on the pedals--and to pedal backwards as I wheeled him up the drive. What a kidder. So I told him to try it in the other direction, and he did. The Hunchbacked Aunt of Woodbury held the bike and walked alongside him as he cycled along.

And then--Oh, yes!--Adam did it himself. Without a word of warning, I took my hands off the bike and walked alongside him, feeling for a few moments like one of those wire cages that keep precious tomatoes from breaking their branches and landing on the ground.

The solo trip didn't last long; he didn't go far. But he did it, and I was blessed to be there. Away went the bike as I whooped and hollered. Poor Adam had enough of being stared at and feted by three adoring adults. No need to tempt fate on Wednesday; the bike would be there Thursday. And so would Grandma and Grandpa. Adam will go far.

To think I had been planning to stay in and clean things and move laundry and pull weeds and commit all manner of responsible acts. To think I was going to stay home and do the work that was waiting for me on my trusty computer. To think a thousand and one responsibilities had my name written all over them on Wednesday morning. Yet, I walked away for a few hours to be with three precious people.

Sometimes it's a blessing to be impulsive and to choose on the spur of the moment to do nothing at all with the people you love most.

Wheels turn; life moves on; I'm emnjoying the ride.

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Skywatch Friday:

This beautiful oak lives 50 feet from my front door. I love the way it reaches in every direction for light. This branch sometimes makes me think of lightening, sometimes of a runaway heading East, and sometimes of the letter J. I love the view of the sky through it.

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Thursday Thirteen: Prayer of St. Francis

Recently my daughter's choir sang at a benefit for an urban soup kitchen. The group was asked not to be "too Christian" because this is an interfaith soup kitchen. The point need not have been made; the group and its director are sensitive to and respectful of the faith traditions of others. Nevertheless, the conversation led to some reflection on what it means to be "too Christian" and whether or not it's ever possible or appropriate to be anything but who you are. To this group, being Christian at all means being kind and doing good in every way possible; it means loving people and being open to the changes love brings. That's all

Among the songs the children sang was the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi. Here are its 13 lines.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury,pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seekto be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Thursday Thirteen

Wordless Wednesday: Good Morning!

Wild strawberries thrive in a patch of lawn overlooked by some inexperienced landscrapers.

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To Build Bombs or Swat Flies...

At Wisdom's Table, I read the following, and it stopped me in my tracks.

Recently the UN General Assembly held a two-day debate to discuss its Millennium Development Goals that 189 U.N. member states agreed in 2000 to try to achieve by the year 2015. Those goals are: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal free primary education; promoting gender equality and empowerment of women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating H.I.V./AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a global partnership for development.

Progress toward these goals has been extremely slow for three key reasons: the costs of warfare, the economic downturn, and the food crisis.

Consider this: The US military spends $1.9 billion every single day. In contrast, $1.5 billion spent over five years could provide mosquito net coverage to prevent malaria in all of Africa. That's according to Jeffrey D. Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University and heads the U.N. Millennium Project.

The way forward? Focus on “the bottom billion,” the poorest of the poor. The poverty, education and health goals are the areas where progress is most urgently required. Positive results in any of these areas have a catalytic effect on progress toward other goals. Thus investing in primary health care is one of the most cost-effective and successful ways to improve overall quality of life and the stability of families and communities.

Please visit the Table and read on.

Weekend Snapshot: No Place Like Home

The warmth of late spring has been slow in coming this year, so we've had a wonderful season of slow-blooming, long-lasting flowering trees. Watching the rhododendron blossom has been like living inside a time lapse movie. A little, a little more, a little more....Soon they'll all be open and the bees will be fast at work and making the sounds that remind me summer will be here soon. It's nice to take the time to enjoy it.

The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy. (Rev. Sean Parker Dennison)

Weekend Snapshot

Blog Your Blessings: 'If You Like it, Shoot it'

"If I like it, I shoot it," said our new friend as we stood with him by the lake and discussed the osprey, heron, egrets, otter, muskrats, beavers, geese, turkey vultures, and bullfrogs that thrive in and around it.

If he had said that without the camera with the huge lens hanging from his neck, my daughter and I would have high-tailed it out of there before he had a chance to like us. As it was, his camera was obvious, and ours were in our hands; we were there to shoot what we liked, too. But not before listening to his stories of venturing out on our lake and nearby ponds and setting up the camera on the tripod to wait for the birds to come.

Harvey spends a lot of time doing that. "I tell my friends, you know, if the day's getting stressful, go outside, sit down for a minute, close your eyes, listen, and breathe. Then open your eyes and look around you. You'll be amazed by what you see."

Harvey had all the time in the world for us, and he told us about the various spots where he finds the wildlife that are his favorite subject of photographs. He made suggestions on how to shoot clouds, water, and animals just in the course of telling us about his own experiences. Before we parted company, he invited us to join the photography club he leads.

As we spoke, Adella took a selection of landscapes and was ready to hunt for things to shoot, too. She wanted to head down the road to the beaver dam, and as we were climbing into the car, Harvey said, "Hey, you want to see a frog?" His eyes were wide and he was pointing to the water. Out Adella popped with her camera ready to go. Harvey told her to go easy and sneak up on him and then shoot. She did that and she got the bug-eyed fellow.

And then, this kid who had been reluctant to get off the couch and put on her shoes for this adventure got into the car and suggested to me that we get up bright and early on Saturday and look for more critters. Thank you, Harvey.

"It's a good thing I gave you a hard time about coming out, Mom," she said as we waited for the geese to glide closer to us. "Why, dear?"

"If I cooperated, we would have been out earlier, and we might not have met that man."

Touche.

Next morning, I took the usual walk down to the pond. This time I noticed a muskrat making a meal of the water lilies, a gigantic beaver coasting along between two disconcerted Canada geese.

"Open your eyes and look around you," Harvey said. And if you like it, shoot it.

I Want to Connect? Who Said?

Sometimes I think I learn everything the hard way. The other day I received an email from the mother of one of my daughter's friends saying she wanted to connect with me at Reunion.com. "No thanks," I thought when I read the message. But, then, I didn't want to snub this woman, either. After a few days of feeling like an oaf for leaving the message in my email inbox, I followed the link to Reunion.com and set up an account so I could reply. Before I realized it, the site scarfed my entire address book and sent an automatic message to everyone asking them to "connect" with me. I am more than a little burned because I had professional contacts in this address book.

Nevertheless, I have heard from friends and associates I haven't heard from in a while--including professional contacts who have offered me more work. Go figure. And here I was about to die over this stupid mistake. I'm glad to know a lot of good and gracious people, though I'm sorry this happened.

Skywatch Friday: Walk on By

This is St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Woodbury, Connecticut. I caught a picture of it one sunny weekday when I was out for a walk. Our Main Street is dotted with white clapboard churches. Though there are four denominations within half a mile of each other, the churches look the same. Take the signs down, and an outsider wouldn't know the difference between them. Essentially, there isn't any.

More Skywatchers at Wigger's World

Thursday Thirteen: 'Fern Hill'

Last week, I presented the last 13 lines of "Desiderata," though I like the whole thing. Though the process of disembodying lines from a poem seems to me to be all wrong because it deprives them of their context as a part of a story and strips them of the creative logic of a complete poem, I like doing it. These lines really shouldn't stand alone, but focusing on them does offer a glimpse of the spirit of the whole and brings us in close on their emotional and imaginative beauty and intensity.

Here are 13 lines from my favorite poem, "Fern Hill," by Dylan Thomas. May we all sing in our chains like the sea.

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Click here to read all of this masterpiece.

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Wordless Wednesday: O, Joy (Brown)!

To view more of Joy Brown's sculptures, visit At Wisdom's Table.

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Hangin' with the Dummies

Somewhere in the 1970s, my dad and a few of his friends were christened Dummies. They had been out clamming on a dark January afternoon (with the help of blackberry brandy to maintain circulation to the extremeties), and the wife of one of these guys called them Dummy No. 1, Dummy No. 2, Dummy No. 3, and Dummy No. 4 upon their return to her warm kitchen in Norwalk. The name stuck. Dad was second through the door, so he is Dummy No. 2.

Dummy No. 1 was the man of the house and a character beyond compare. The adventures of the Dummies figured large in our social life at the time. I think the carefree spirit of these men and their disinterest in and disregard for anything but exactly what they were doing--boating, fishing, eating, sitting around a campfire, laughing out loud--went a long way in teaching me to go my own road in life.

The Dummy camping trips rate high among my childhood memories. Part of the pleasure of the adventure was Mr. D's devil-may-care attitude--thought it would be more accurate to say the devil-may-care-to-join-us (and if he does, give him a beer) attitude.

In his company, everything was funny--tents that didn't want to stand up, motorboats that beached at low tide, strandings on sand bars...Mr. D. taught us how to float around on a Sunfish, how to catch shiners for bait, how to go crabbing, how to live off the land and sea for exactly three hours, how to make up outlandish stories around a campfire and make them last for years. He saw the humor in everything and he'd laugh out loud even if--or especially to--wound our pride. He was essential to a good time.

He and my dad loved Long Island Sound. We enjoyed a tremendous sense of freedom skimming the top of that old grey water in our motorboats. The noise was deafening, but the feeling of being part of that great body of water was a feeling of combined freedom and safety because it was wide open but we were very much at home there. Being on the water was everything. Somewhere along the way I learned that catching fish when you go fishing isn't everything and it might not even be desirable because then you had to do something with the fish

But we caught fish--mackeral, flounder, and blue. And we caught snappers by the dozen with our bamboo poles, and we ate them off our campfire. And we stank of smoke and salt and sweat at the end of every good day.

Mr. D. was a cameraman, too. He had a way of taking pictures that made people feel very good in the way that it feels good when somone cares enough about you to want your picture. He always had that camera. I take my camera just about everywhere, too, and I think I'm beginning to understand something people with cameras share. That is a love of the story, a certain belief that every story is worthwhile, and that if you look for the beauty in it, you will find it. Or it will find you because you want it. That goodness is not to be trifled with but embraced.

Mr. D. is receiving Hospice care now, and this makes me very angry. Mr. D. should live forever. The world needs this man who loosens everyone up, says "relax" in a way that makes you laugh out loud, and who will try anything just because--just because why not?

If you go looking for fun, you'll find it. And you'll live well, somehow. Every Dummy knows that.

Thank you, Mr. D.

Weekend Snapshot: Fleeting Blossoms

More than autumn, spring reminds me that life fleets by, that beauty and youth are not eternal, that of necessity they change and become the fruit that sustains us year round. The other day, the petals of these delicate blossoms danced around me with a rising wind that brought rain. I felt like I was in a snow globe--but that is the wrong image in May. A flower globe, to be sure. This world teems with life, new and pink and fragrant and learning to fly and delightful. For a little while.

I asked the leaf whether it was frightened because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me, "No. During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive. I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So I don't worry at all. (Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step)

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Blog Your Blessings: Buddha's Birthday

Last Sunday afternoon we marked the birthday of the Buddha at the Dae Yen Sa International Buddhist Temple and Meditation Center in New Hartford, Connecticut, with our friend, Buddhist Priest Brian Vaugh, who shared some ideas about the significance of the birthday. It was a well-spent afternoon.

Brian began by asking if there really was a baby Buddha, if it mattered that there ever was, and if it might matter if a real baby Buddha were brought into the temple there and then. The point: Why do we care and, if we do, what are we doing to show we care? Buddhists, he said, are defined by what they do, not by what they believe.

Brian told the story of the young man who became the Buddha from the time of his extraordinary birth to the moment he realized he must spend his life alleviating the suffering of others in the world. Buddha forewent a life of comfort, ease, and luxury in favor of a life and of service. In fact, when he woke up to the needs of the world, he walked away from everything in favor of service.

This was despite his father's attempts to keep this son inside the palace, to shield him from all pain and suffering in the world that the young man might focus on continuing his father's legacy of conquest, power, and wealth. The young man thought for himself and made his own choices.

Though I have heard this story many times before, Brian's telling brought to me a new insight. Though the ancient stories of the Buddha's birth often freight that moment with portentous signs, the Buddha did not become the Buddha until he chose to. This enlightenment was an active, conscious, thoughtful choice informed by a full and open heart.

That, as Brian pointed out, is the choice any one of us can make. The various accidents of fate that combine to make each of our lives distinct shape our hearts and our minds and may effect the likelihood of our choosing a life of giving or of taking, but the choice is the same for each of us, regardless of who we are. The Buddha story comes to us again and again in our literature. Most recently, Brian would argue, in the likes of Harry Potter. Farther back, I would argue, in the likes of Jesus Christ.

I believe the power of the Jesus story is the same as the power of the Buddha story; though Jesus was poor and obscure, he made a choice that shook the world with kindness. The power of the story is in the nature of the choice. To say that Jesus had no choice is to miss the point that the Son of Man is the Son of God is the heart of goodness is a Bodhisattva.

This of course leaves it up to each of us to become the Buddha. Rather than outsource compassion, become it.

What's your story, Buddha baby?

Skywatch Friday: James Fort

This is the shape of a building that once stood on this site in Jamestown, Virginia, where English settlers first set up camp in the New World. The first photo is a view through the suggestion of a roof on this suggestion of a building where, under the direction of John Smith, the colony did OK despite myriad challenges. After Smith left, sickness and bad relations with the locals led rapidly to the decimation of the colony.

I liked this hint of a building very much. Looking through it, I wondered what dreams lived in the hearts of the folks who were here for the first time. I wondered what it was like to completely misunderstand the nature of the people around them and of the New World itself but continue to look up and dream. They carried their limitations with them, but their dreams continued nonetheless.

More Skywatch Friday at Wiggers' World

Thursday Thirteen: As it Should

The final thirteen lines of Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata":

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

(Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.)

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Wordless Wednesday: Color for Sale at the Greek Festival

More images from the festival are here.

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The Extraordinary, Ordinary Lindberghs

At a program at Wisdom House on May 10 that explored her memories of her mother, author Reeve Lindbergh recounted the extraordinary and the ordinary in her experiences of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was an aviation pioneer and a writer as well as a mother of five children.

Anne and her husband Charles, were a spirited couple with a shared passion for life. Charles and Anne imbued in their children compassion, confidence, curiosity and a spirit of adventure and fun.

Reeve's contribution to the Lindbergh's story is to translate it for us, to demythologize her parents, to make them real, to take us into the Lindbergh living room on a Sunday afternoon and genuinely feel part of the family as her father makes his lists and moves with economy and precision and her mother steps out into her small writing studio to work. Reeve's stories take you home.

Many of the 50 women in the room shared a personal connection with the family, with the family's story, or with the books of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. (I have one, too--my mother went to school with Scott Lindbergh, and my great-grandfather was the family's plumber.)

For my mother I bought a copy of No More Words, Reeve's memoir of caring for her mother during the last year of Anne's life. Leafing through it during a coffee break, I read Reeve's words about her mother's helping her through the death of her son Jonny, who died of encephalitis before he was two: "At the time of my son's death, when I asked my mother what would happen to me as the mother of the child, how that part of me would continue, she said, 'It doesn't. You die,that's all. That part of you dies with him. And then, amazingly, you are reborn.'"

Only a New Englander could have written that, I thought as I read it--terse, true, straight, and clearly focused on the kind of surviving that leads to thriving. And then I thought: Only a wise and compassionate mother could speak thus to her daughter; and only a genuine soul could give the words away.

Reeve Lindbergh makes the adventure, the mystery, the romance, and the sorrow of her extraordinary family seem ordinary. Perhaps they are. Perhaps those passions exist within each of us though only in some of us do they ever take flight.

Reeve Lindbergh reflects on her mother, Ann Morrow Lindbergh.

Reeve Lindbergh talks about her father, Charles Lindberg.

Weekend Snapshot: Happy Mother's Day

The other day my daughter and I came across this mama and baby crossing the road with papa. Of course, the parents were rushing the gosling across the road because there we were in our silver goose of a Volkswagen. We were on the way to school and making up for lost time trying to get the pony tail just right, but this encounter stopped us in our tracks. Suddenly we had all the time in the world. There's nothing like the natural world to point up the foolishness of our self-important haste. And there's nothing like a mother's love to remind you that life itself is all we really have time for.

Happy Mother's Day most especially to my mom and to the really fine women who have graced my life.

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Blog Your Blessings: Walking Down 200 Years

I joined my daughter and her class on a field trip around the historical sites of our little town of Woodbury this week. She is one of 20 lively kids who managed to hold relay races; pick flowers for sweethearts; discuss the gummy bear qualities of calamari, the trouble of planting irises sideways, and seasonal allergies; and get every trucker to honk his horn yet managed to safely walk down the road and two hundred years back in time.

We visited the Glebe House, the birthplace of the Episcopal Church in America. There the first bishop was selected from among Connecticut clergy and later consecrated in Scotland in an effort to preserve the traditions of this faith without lugging around the political baggage of loyalty to the British crown. That was an important consideration and a form of health insurance for Anglicans during the Revolutionary years.

We checked out the Glebe House kitchen with its rope bed up against the wall, apples drying along the fireplace, and pewter chargers. We did not touch anything in this house on a street that was once one of the richest in America.

We listened to a storyteller as she spun some local yarns that kept all of us in rapt silence for half an hour on a hard-as-nails wide-board floor. We checked out one of the town's four remaining one-room schoolhouses and learned that all the kids shared germs by drinking from the same bucket of water supplied by whoever lived closest. The biggest kid tended the fire. The older kids tutored the younger ones, and children used soapstone to write on their slates because paper was so dear and chalk was nowhere around.

Recess back then was unsupervised and perfectly safe because there was no road full of horn-honking truckers out front, only grass. We learned that kids kept their horn books with them all the time so that they could fill every possible moment with learning. That horn would have come from cattle, and it was also used for holding gun powder forming a drinking glass. Call it colonial plastic. It was everywhere and ever so durable. You could drink out of a 250-year-old horn glass if you wanted; it wouldn't leak. .

Times for practicing reading might have popped up between serving adults their meals, clearing the table, fetching water, knitting, sewing, mending, helping with the animals, and, at long last, tightening the bed ropes for a sleep-tight-don't-let-the-bed-bugs-bite kind of night atop a mattress full of corn husks or pine needles or what have you.

And of course they showed us the graffiti in the window of the Glebe House and on the walls of the schoolhouse. Old graffiti in places that make history is venerated, I learned. In fact, when the old schoolhouse was restored and the clapboards replaced, the men who rebuilt it recreated some old graffiti so new generations could imagine what the wall might have looked like carved full of initials, the work of young, unsupervised pen-knife artists at play. Were they special, the letters that started the names of the kids who had gone this way before?

I think so.

Skywatch Friday: Lines of Symmetry

Clouds rolled in and out of the afternoon sky as we played Wiffle ball last Sunday. As I performed the vital task of reffing the game (capturing errant balls before they went down the storm drain and cheering both teams simultaneously and equally as the one and only onlooker--I enjoyed the busy sky,the green glint of buds, and the ever-faithful pines.

As I enjoyed this sky and its strangely equal distribution of light and shadow and shape, I thought of my daughter's geometry assignments in which she is required to find lines of symmetry in various shapes. It's an exercise that teaches balance and form. It was nice to do homework in the sky, even on a Saturday.

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Thursday Thirteen No. 32: Mary Oliver's 'Red Bird'

"Are you familiar with the poetry of Mary Oliver?" I asked a student once in the hope of beginning a conversation on the poem "Wild Geese," a gem that contains the lines

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

en route to the statement "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself to your imagination."

This was the line I wanted in the hope of beginning a conversation on inspiration.

"I think so," the young woman squinted, the better to scan a distant memory. "I think that's that woman who writes about, like, her dog, Percy, I think and trees. That her?"

"You can start there," I said. "And you will get to Mary Oliver."

Because Mary Oliver's poetry is about this moment in this world in this light in this weather, alone or with the dog or on the way to something or nothing. It's about being here and loving it.

I believe, there is nothing worth saying about Mary Oliver beyond that. Better to spend the time reading her work or revisiting the magic of the landscape of your life through her words.

Her new collection Red Bird is her 12th volume of published poems. Here she speaks to the beauty of the ordinary, the environment, and the people of the world who suffer at the hands of those who love power.

The world offers itself to your imagination. Accept the invitation and walk with this wonderful woman from Provincetown, Massachusetts.

May these 13 lines tantalize you:

1. "I am a God-fearing feeder of birds./I know he has many children,/not all of them bold in spirit." (from "Red Bird")

2. "I see you in all your seasons/making love, arguing, talking about God/as if he were an idea instead of the grass,/instead of the stars, the rabbit caught/in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought/home to the den." (From "Straight Talk from Fox")

3. "...I will live/nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting/equally in all the blast and welcome/of her sorrowless, salt self." (From "Ocean")

4. "Because, Sir, you have given [the panther],/for your own reasons,/everything that he needs:/leaves, food, shelter;/a conscience/ that never blinks." (From "With the Blackest of Inks")

5. "It is a serious thing/just to be alive/on this fresh morning/in this broken world." (From "Invitation")

6. "The ripeness/of the apple/is its downfall." (From "The Orchard")

7. "How many small, available things/are in this world/that aren't/pieces of gold/or power--/that nobody owns/or could buy even/for a hillside of money--/that just float around the world...." (From "Summer Story")

8. "I listen hard/to the exuberances/of the mockingbird and the owl,/the waves and the wind./And then, like peace after perfect speech,/ such stillness." (From "The Teachers")

9. "Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough./Let's go." (From "Percy and Books (Eight)")

10."Let the world/have its way with you,/luminous as it is/with mystery/and pain--/graced as it is/with the ordinary." (From "Summer Morning")

11. "About tomorrow, who knows anything,/Except that it will be time, again,/for the deepening and quieting of the spirit."(From "Swimming, One Day in August")

12. "So come to the pond,/or the river of your imagination,/or the harbor of your longing,/and put your lips to the world./And life/your life." (From "Morning at Blackwater")

13. “I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable/beauty of heaven/where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes/and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.” (From “Red Bird Explains Himself”)

Wordless Wednesday: Morning Light in Spring

Who Holds the Copyright?

Our names are written in sand.

In the world of literature, questions of ownership often arise. Scholars wonder if Shakespeare really is the author of Shakespeare's works. For some this is a hot debate. Same goes in biblical scholarship. Thoughts on the actual authorship of each book of the Bible precede the historical readings of each book in the Interpreters Bible, for example. Is Solomon really the author of the words of wisdom ascribed to him? Serious scholars wonder. Did the apostle Paul write all those epistles?

All these centuries later, I'm content to ascribe authorship of a certain body of Elizabethan plays and poems to William Shakespeare. The name really means little more to me than a time and place in English history. As for Paul's letters, they are the Pauline texts. Whether or not someone named Paul wrote them is immaterial. The wisdom stands outside and beyond Paul, whoever Paul was.

It's a hard thing in this age of memoir and oral history to detach text and the value of its wisdom from the life of the author..We seem to value like never before the individual voice and the individual experience. Even if we don't remember the names. The real point is that we recognize that within each of us exists a voice that is entitled to speak for its age and capable of expressing an experience that is at once individual and universal--and we don't have to be Shakespeare to do that.

Watchers of Ken Burns's documentary The War will likely remember that his oral history of World War II includes voices of ordinary people from the North, South, East, and West of the US. The names might not stick, but the place will--and so, especially, will the experience. Whatever they said that connects us to them and them and us to the cosmos will stick. Names are irrelevant.

Our names are written in sand; ownership is a myth. I think of this whenever I see watermarked photos on blogs or read copyright restrictions on posts. I wonder how I would feel if someone plagiarized my own photos or the work closer to my heart, my writing. I would be angry at first. But then, I know copycats--parasites--don't get far without a host. Anyway, if someone found something I wrote to be useful or meaningful, I'd be happy for that. The fact is, I don't know if anyone ever has plagiarized my work or used it without attribution.

In the big picture, it doesn't matter to me. Right here and now I feel that so long as I am a part of an active conversation about or through creative work, it means something to me that my work represent me and I, it. Nevertheless, I'd be thrilled to know I might create something that can do fine without me. I can hope the work will speak for itself.

Signing your work, claiming ownership, is a key to commercial success. Name recognition is everything. It can put food on the table. But what about the artist who doesn't sign, who doesn't show in a gallery, who doesn't measure success in these ways? Perhaps he or she has moved on or away from being commercially successful to being successful in some other way. Perhaps there are other ways of measuring success.

The artist who cares about the survival of ideas and thinking about ideas above and beyond all else is to my mind a success. Commercial success is another story. Anyway, the tide will roll in and take away those names in the sand.We will be left with what is true. We will call it art. We will breathe it.

Weekend Snapshot: Tulips from Two Boys

Here is one of the many tulips my delightful little nephews gave me at the reception for Strange Attractions on Friday evening. Nine-year-old Alex said to me, "Aunt Sandy, I thought graffiti was what people write in bathrooms on the walls and was ugly stuff that ruined things. I guess it can be nice, too." His young mind is bigger than the labels and assumptions that are out there.

More at Weekend Snapshot

Blog Your Blessings: Graffiti

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. (George Lois)

Part of my fascination with graffiti is its anonymous nature. A writer's tag is not his name but his pen name. Graffiti refuses all assumptions about context. You may not deconstruct the work in terms of the creator's life; you can only take it in as a part of your own. In this way, graffiti is pure gift. When you look at a piece, it's all about you--even as it challenges notions of control (some might call it stability) by being big, edgy, and bright, and unsanctioned in a social landscape that defines itself by being clean and gray and dull. It's about you and

My little photo show at a cafe in Cheshire recreates that immediate, enveloping experience of being anonymous and in the art. These pieces are from Connecticut, primarily. They are gifts from the lives of some folks I have the privilege of meetings, but most are the works of strangers. I could tell visitors where they are from, and they could wonder how a lush suburb in Connecticut could sport a graffito of a dead man. Or that Connecticut could host so many abandoned toxic industrial sites (brown fields) that draw people to paint.

It is remarkable to me that artists will risk life and limb and their own health by standing for hours on toxic ground to paint pictures that may not ever be seen by anyone other than themselves. What is so compelling--so utterly unstoppable--about the creative process that being known for one's art, receiving credit for one's work, and perhaps cashing in on one's talent don't even figure into the conversation?

I'm grateful to my friends and family who came out to support me in presenting all that I find beautiful in this art. I am equally grateful to the many in the bunch who over the years have challenged me about my respect for this art that is to many simply a form of vandalism. They have caused me to think hard, to think openly, to entertain opposition, and to love an honest conversation. They are all my teachers. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to meet fellow blogger Digital Flower Pictures. Thanks to Mary, too, for her supportive email, which I received just as I headed out the door. I know some extraordinary, good folks, and I love them all.

If graffiti messes things up, it messes up the way we think things should be and how we identify the ordinary. To my mind, it's a delightful and beautiful mess that points to the extraordinary beauty in each of us.

Skywatch Friday: Meet the Welcoming Committee

I arose early each day when we were in Virginia a few weeks ago so that I could go for a morning walk. Every day the birds awoke me before the clock went off. What a gentle way to return to the world after a night's sleep! Out and about while the others slept, I came across these lovelies in a cherry tree.

The sky seems always to be a mere back drop to the beauty right before me.

You must dare to disassociate yourself from those who would delay your journey... Leave, depart, if not physically, then mentally. Go your own way, quietly, undramatically, and venture toward trueness at last. (Vernon Howard)

More Skywatch Friday at Wigger's World

Thursday Thirteen: 'I Will Not Be Broken'

When he was a college student in Israel in the mid-1980s, a landmine--leftovers of the 1967 War--blew Jerry White's world apart, taking a leg but leaving him with a big choice. Would he become a victim of an accident and live in bitterness and self-pity, or would he choose life?

First with the help of the do-or-die Israelis who had no time for self-pity or any other form of self-destructive self-indulgence, and then with the help of family and friends and countless wise others, White chose life and transformed his traumatic experience into his life's work. Today he is the leader of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (for which he was corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1997), and cofounder of Survivor Corps. He describes his journey from victim to survivor to "thriver" in his new book I Will Not Be Broken.

The book outlines a program of five steps for coping with disaster. He draws on his experiences as well as those of famous persons such as Lance Armstrong; Diana, Princess of Wales; Christopher Reeve, the American Psychological Association, and the not so famous--his college roommate, his mom, Bosnians who survived the warn in their country, a little Cambodian girl who also lost a leg to a landmine. His drawing on the wisdom of persons from all walks of life underscores he beliefs that wisdom is a collective resource as well as an individual one and that all life is interconnected. White's book approaches the challenge of trauma positively by focusing on individual strengths rather than dwelling on what went wrong and why.

I Will Not Be Broken is an earthy, conversational, and real testament of the beauty and wonder of all life. Here are some highlights of the book in White's words.

1. "Each of us has seeds of victimhood, survivorship, and thriving potential within us."

2. "The challenge we face is integrating our experiences--sorrowful and joyful--to help us evolve from victimhood to thriving."

3. "For many people, there isn't one precise moment of crisis [but an accumulation]--a few unpleasant things overlap, and a crisis sneaks up from behind."

4. To prevent being broken by crisis, First, face the facts. "Great teachers and prophets admonish us to get real with ourselves, no matter how humiliating the facts."

5. "None of us will get very far without first examining our circumstances, relationships, and feelings. We will need to be ruthless in our self-assessment."

6. Second, we need to choose life. "We must consciously choose for our lives to go on in a positive way."

7. We can accomplish this by "nurturing a positive view of ourselves, keeping things in perspective, and maintaining a hopeful outlook."

8. Having crossed the threshold to survivorship, we can take the third step of reaching out because no one thrives in isolation.

9. "We have to let people in our life into our life." As Albert Schweizer has said, "'At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark form another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.'"

10. Next, we need to get moving, to think of the future and develop a plan for achieving goals, though "the speed at which [we] move is less relevant than the belief that [we]will move."

11. Finally, we must take Step Five and give back. "You must give to a community in order to belong to a community. You can become a volunteer, a community leader, a donor, a social change agent, a future peer supporter. You get outside yourself and, by doing so, get away from your suffering. It's not charity. It's not pity. It's gratitude in motion. It is belonging in action." Giving back is essential to thriving.

12. Taking these steps is the best way to avoid falling into the trap of victimhood, a stagnant state of being that includes living in the past, wallowing in self-pity, resenting others, blaming others, and taking from others.

13. Taking these steps can lead to resilience, "our capacity to bounce back and resume function and health after a confrontation with disruptive or traumatic events...Resilient people are somehow able to draw on past experiences and find inner strength to navigate their troubles and make the transition to a healthy, flourishing future."

More at Thursday Thirteen