The day after snowfall

Even though I am sick of snow and cold, I still enjoy the day after a storm when the sun comes out and the landscape is once again refurbished and shiny. Today was one of those days with around a foot of new, rather powdery snow glittering in the morning light. Shadows of bare bushes stood out in sharp contrast to the white background, as if etched with a finepoint stylus.

A squirrel made his morning run from the willow (out of sight on the right) under the back side of the bushes to make sure all was right in his world. No other tracks revealed the presence of another living creature until . . . . . some feathered visitor landed under the bird feeder and hopped around it, wondering where all the fallen sunflower seeds had gone.

As morning lengthens toward noon, another critter left his tracery on the way back part of the yard - too small to be a squirrel, but too extensive to be another bird: You have to look carefully to see a widespread Vee-shape which looks like the bottom of a valentine heart and then a squiggly line which heads back toward the compost bins, which makes me wonder if it is a mouse or a vole perhaps enjoying the layers of leaves and grass clippings I thoughtfully provided for him this winter.

By tomorrow morning, the kaleidoscope will have rotated and the beauty of today will be replaced by changing patterns of light and shadow, imprints of animals, birds and humans and the shifting winds of the universe.

Free Your Voice

Last Saturday I had the rare opportunity to participate in a two-hour yoga, meditation and chanting workshop led by my daughter. I thought I might be out of my element, possibly the only non-singer in the room, and potentially not able to do all of the yoga. Fortunately, none of that turned out to be true and I settled in for two very enjoyable and fascinating hours.

Some who know me might wonder why I even cared to "free my voice." And I'll bet there are plenty of people who think I've always freely spoken my mind and have had no trouble speaking in public, or even singing in public. Even the name of this blog suggests that I am a pretty opinionated person who feels free to share what I think in this public forum.

That may be who I am on one level, but there is a "but" to all of that, and it has to do with the fact that in my poetry, I haven't quite gotten "there" in freeing my emotional voice, hence, my poems may be well-crafted, but not, perhaps, evocative or spoken in my authentic "heart-voice," as I would name it. And I know I tend to avoid writing about anything emotionally difficult for me. I think that the workshop on Saturday started me on the path to trying to fathom how I can get past my rational self to find my heart center and then, express it. A big thank you to Sarah for all her help in unlocking the creative process for me through this wonderful afternoon, and earlier in January in her e-course Renew Your Creative Voice.

Wonderment

In 1989 I began serious research in order to edit a collection of 19th century letters written between my great grandmother and my great, great grandmother. I read books, traveled to Brooklyn, Chicago, Keokuk, Iowa, Topsfield, MA and various libraries and historical societies in NH. My big purchase to aid in my research was the first laptop made by Apple which came out right around 1991 or 92. The battery lasted a very short time and most often I didn't have a cord long enough to reach the closest plug. It was (and probably still is) a time when the Chicago Historical Society made you wear white gloves in order to handle documents in their archives. I loved all of that travel and research and finally in 1996, the book was published by the University of Iowa Press.

Fast forward to 2014. I have just finished transcribing the letters of my great, great, great Uncle Cyrus, who was born in 1793. His letters begin in 1818 and conclude in 1836. There are 19 of them. If I proceeded to conduct research in the same way, I would be traveling to Mumbai (which was Bombay when he went there as a missionary in 1827) and to various locations all over the state of Massachusetts. Whereas it is true that I am not going to write/edit a book similar to the one I did before, I still need to educate myself on the context of his letters and discover as much as I can about his life. You are no doubt wondering how any of this connects to the title of this post.

Here it is: I have not budged from my house, but because of the vast difference in the internet and the digitization of books, magazines, and archives, I have read the articles he wrote that were published in the Missionary Herald; have found his second wife's journal which was published in 1876 by their son and digitized by Google, and found citations about him in many different sources online. He was not a famous person, which makes it seem all the more remarkable to me that so much information is available. Gone is the laborious note-taking - I can just download or bookmark these items and refer to them at will while I have multiple documents open on my laptop.

The one thing that remains constant from my experience from 1989 to now, is the importance of people in this whole process. My good friend and colleague, Kathy Kentner investigated online and sent me in the direction of Google Books, where I found Cyrus's second wife, Abigail Stone's journal. The archivists at both Andover-Newton Seminary where he received a divinity degree, and at what is now Kimball Union Academy, where he studied for a year and a half before going to Dartmouth, both responded immediately to email requests with excellent information, and in the case of KUA, we have discovered that our fathers both taught at KUA at the same time, and because it was an all boys school then, her brothers were able to attend KUA, but she was sent to Gould Academy and because my father moved to an all-boys school in California to teach, my two brothers went there to school while I attended the local public schools. These serendipitous, and somewhat extraneous coincidences bring me great delight. One source the KUA archivist sent me today revealed that Uncle Cyrus and his first wife sailed to Bombay on the ship "Emerald" out of Salem. Now that made my day.

Who Put the Plastic in Plastic Surgery?

Going to the plastic surgeon for a consult this morning (no, I'm not getting a facelift), I found myself experiencing a doctor's office unlike any I'd ever been in before. First of all, I was surprised that the door was locked when I arrived at 8:15 for my 8:30 appointment. What doctor's office doesn't ask you to be there ahead of time to fill out paperwork?? Since it was about 10 degrees outside, I walked into the office next door, an MRI Imaging place. The receptionist was quite welcoming and alerted me to the fact that the folks in plastic next door wouldn't open until 8:30 on the dot. This office was warm and comfortable and offered coffee. I had to force myself to walk back out into the cold when 8:30 rolled around.

When I walked through the door into the spa... I mean doctor's office, I thought I had walked into a beauty salon. Well, I guess, in a way, I had. Glass showcases elegantly arranged featured different lotions and skin creams and the whole decor was elegant and fit for a queen. Or someone not exactly me. I only had about five minutes to observe my surroundings before I was called in to my appointment, but in that time, I was horrified by the video playing on a huge flat screen t.v., featuring the best way to get rid of the muffin top fat around your waist. It started with a woman wearing shorts and a jogbra in a doctor's office and the doctor (at least he was wearing a doctor's white coat) squeezing her fat between his fingers. This was bad enough, but then it went to a picture of all the little fat cells swarming around inside the fat. Fade to treatment, where she was sitting in a lovely reclining spa chair with a wide belt around her waist and some metal contraption pressing down on the flabby muffin top. At the same time it was lowering the temperature of the area - killing fat cells?? Not sure. The next scene showed how svelte her body was as she jogged off with her boyfriend (or maybe it was the doctor in his jogging shorts?) and on the screen it flashed "Get your swagger back."

Fortunately, I was called in to my appointment to find out the details of having a squamous cell cancer removed from my face. The nurses were all impeccably made up, and the doctor seemed like an ordinary guy, making gobs of bucks off of people like me who actually have something wrong, and others, who have been convinced by the culture that they have something wrong because they don't look a certain way. It was on my way out that I wondered why all of this is called "plastic" surgery. Is it because they are producing people who look like they've come out of a plastic mold? (I couldn't help thinking about Barbie dolls made of plastic.) Is it because back in the beginning of the specialty they were using real plastic as breast implants? Or, more likely, because what they do is so costly, most people have to pay for it using their plastic.

I am grateful for their expertise, but I am genuinely puzzled by their name. Please leave your own understanding of this specialty in the comments!

The power of music

Hearing the news of Pete Seeger's death gave me my moment for today. I learned to play the guitar with some of his most famous songs: This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone, to name some. I can still see the multi-record boxed set of long-playing records featuring the great early folk and blues singers in my brother's apartment where he gave me my first guitar and taught me the basic chords needed to play these songs. I had fallen in love with the whole folk music scene, and even ironed my semi-wavy long hair to try to achieve long straight hair that would swing back and forth like Mary Travers' hair when I played. Hearing those songs can transport me to college and early adulthood in a way that no other music can. Thinking about the power of the music of those years and how it accompanied the major social movements of two decades makes me wonder if there is music today that could fill that role. The world could once again use music that helps achieve social justice, the end of war, and brings people together to lift their voices in common cause.

Sunset

When I walked into the kitchen late this afternoon, this is the sight that greeted me. The phrase "rosy-fingered dawn" flew into my head, but of course, this wasn't dawn. More like flaming fingers of night, not dawn. Whatever it was, it was the most beautiful sunset I have observed in recent days and I decided that to try to capture it I would have to brave the cold and go outside to take the photo, not try to shoot through the grimy kitchen window.

Tonight, I googled the phrase, "rosy-fingered dawn," which I thought came from Shakespeare. Shows you what I know, or don't know; it is from Book XII of The Odyssey: "Then, when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I sent some men to Circe's house to fetch the body of Elpenor.” Homer!! Huh, I thought. How about "Red sky at night/Sailors delight/Red sky in the morning/Sailors take warning. Delight, indeed. In seconds, the brilliant red disappeared into the graying end of the day, waiting a few more moments for the black cloak of night.

Practicing Yoga

I have managed to do yoga for five of the last six days, and I find that the 45 minutes or so that I am doing yoga are the most mindful of the day. Quieting my brain is one of the hardest challenges for me, and I think it's paying attention to my breath and coordinating breathing with movement that causes me to abandon conscious thought and just "be" in the moment with my breathing and the awareness of the position of my body. There is a particular CD of "yoga music" that I play, and like Pavlov's dog, when that music starts, I click into yoga mode. My mat faces the east, and I have the empty sky to look at, though most of the time my eyes are closed. On the days that I do yoga, I find that I have a much better attitude about life and I am more willing to adopt an optimistic approach to problems I may be facing. Yoga makes me feel so good, in fact, that I can never understand how and why I let myself fall out of the habit of doing it each day.