On Turning Forty, Sgt. Pepper and the Tao

tao te ching
verse 65
the ancient masters
didn't try to educate the people
but kindly taught them to not-know

when they think that they know the answers
people are difficult to guide
when they know that they don't know
people can find their own way

if you want to learn how to govern
avoid being clever or rich
the simplest pattern is the clearest
content with an ordinary life
you can show all people the way
back to their own true nature

(trans. Stephen Mitchell)

I turned forty last month. I share this birthday with my favorite album of all time: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the Summer of Love, 1967, both of us were released in the US on June 2. I didn’t know the Beatles until the spring of 1977, when we were both about to turn ten—my first big round birthday where the odometer flipped the second digit. Though my best friend, Leila Corcoran shared with me every Beatles album in existence, the songs that most appealed to me were the colorful, psychedelic tapestry-like ones from Sgt. Pepper (those, and “Hello, Goodbye,” a single that was released a few months after SPLHCB). As Aimee Mann said in her recent Op Ed piece in the NYTimes, Sgt. Pepper was made particularly for children.

I spent my birthday weekend “working,” if by that participle one means “playing shows.” I never know, before a show, whether it’s going to be a “working” show or a “playing” show. One show was for children and families in Philadelphia at the World Café, and the other a festival in Herndon, VA. On the way home from our weekend of gigs, Katryna swiped a copy of USA Today from the front desk of the Comfort Inn in Newark DE and read a list of “things that have all but vanished” in the last 25 years. These included indoor smoking, typewriters, the rhinoceros, pay phones, Oldsmobiles, the Baltimore Colts, Michael Jackson, videos on MTV, checker cabs and service stations. At our Herndon festival, Carol Welsh, a girl who was a freshman when I was a big senior, showed up; she’d been my “new girl”-an important tradition and designation at my high school. When she mentioned that she is now thirty-seven, I couldn’t believe it. Yes, I knew I was forty; yes, I can do math, but somehow her being thirty-seven was much more indicative of how much time has gone by than my nice round odometric numbers.

I’m kind of in denial about the whole thing. Isn’t forty the new twenty? That’s what my mother said when I came down dressed to go out for dinner on June 2. She said, “You don’t look a day over twenty.” Thank God I’m not twenty, is all I could think. I remember my twentieth birthday. Carol’s older sister Elizabeth, one of my best friends, and fellow Beatles fanatics, gave me a poster of the cover of Sgt Pepper. We were all flipped out because our favorite record was 20 years old (“It was 20 years ago today…”). Meanwhile, I was depressed, lost, 15 pounds overweight, fighting constantly with my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, clueless about what I was going to major in for college, despairing about the Reagan administration, angry at my parents and sad that it was raining. It was truly a low point of my life. I spent the entire 90’s thinking “I hope I never see another 1987 again.”

If I had a list like USA Today’s for just myself and my inner thought parade, here are some of the rhinoceri:
1. Fear of dying in a plane crash
2. Fear of gaining 15 pounds
3. Perms
4. Obsessive thoughts about my ex-boyfriend and the idea that it was his (or anyone’s) job to make me feel good about myself, specifically to answer the question: “Does this make me look fat?”
5. The band Heart (sadly. I really love them, but I cannot listen to them anymore.)
6. Blue jean mini skirts
7. Gigantic bran muffins the size of my current mug of Starbucks coffee
8. TV
9. The belief that it matters where one went to college
10. Fear of being too revealing in my writing.

I used to think there were two kinds of musicians: the kind who were cryptically silent about the meaning of their songs, their processes, their inner lives, their personal lives; they emanated a cool through their dark glasses and silence; they dragged on cigarettes and regarded the reporter (and therefore, you) with a mixture of pity and contempt and mild curiosity. The other kind were completely forthcoming, blabbing about their latest therapist/colonic/girlfriend/boyfriend and of course how each strand of a creative idea came to them. Bob Dylan was the quintessential first kind of musician while John Lennon and Paul McCartney were famous blabbers. (If you don’t believe me, read Jann Wenner’s Lennon Remembers and Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Recording Sessions.) I always aspired to be like Dylan, and for a whole year and a half kept my age top secret by orders of my then manager. (That was from 1996 through about, oh, June 1997 when I turned thirty). Somewhere in my DNA lurks the idea that if I don’t say it in public, the world will not be able to handle the loss of the information.

Lao-Tzu, the great Chinese teacher and sage, says that the wisest among us cultivate don’t know mind. That the older and wiser we get, the more we understand how little we know, and the more we are glad of it. I wrote once “I’d rather live expecting the best though if you gave me the choice I’d like to know the rest/A figure in the distance always running.” I wanted to know the answers. I wanted to know, for instance, that I’d never have to feel as depressed as I did in 1987. I wanted to know FOR SURE that I wouldn’t die in an airplane crash, or of cancer, or that anyone I loved would die of cancer, or that anything bad would happen to anyone I knew. Yes, I knew we all had to die, but I didn’t want any of us to die in any way you could propose to me. I pushed it away.

But we all have to die. We all age. I now have compassion for people who get plastic surgery. Just last month, I noticed that my neck has taken on the cast of tissue-paper; that the bags that were only occasionally under my eyes after all nighters have now, excuse the pun, unpacked, as it were and are here to stay. The aging process is bad enough; the fact that it signifies the actual decrepitude of my dear beloved body is horrifying.

My “new girl,” Carol, has been battling a rare brain tumor, Adult Ependymoma for seven years. She has written bravely about her experiences on her website, and can tell her story better than I (http://home.earthlink.net/~mswelsh/adultependymoma/index.html). I have watched her face the worst with humor and love and courage, and I am amazed at the resilience of some of us humans when confronted with that which we fear most. There is nothing like the very real possibility of death to make one put into perspective one’s complaints about one’s neck, or the numbers of CDs one sells. Standing in the rain together after the festival, Carol told me about the Paul McCartney article in last week’s issue of the New Yorker, and we all marveled at his ability to continue making music, showing up for his fans, his muse, his calling even though he has every reason on earth to retire and spend his old age with his little three year old daughter Bea and his four older children.

Someone recently pointed out to me that we all kill to eat. Even those of us who are vegans are guilty of murdering insects, microbes, animals (by destroying their habitats, which unless you eat completely off the commercial grid, is impossible to avoid) and of course, plants. It’s the nature of life; in order to live, one being sacrifices its life for another. And around and around we go. Death is a part of life; as integral as the yin yang symbol makes it out to be, with the little dot of white amidst the black and the dot of black amidst the white. I hold my gorgeous little 13 month old baby up to the mirror and we put our faces together and grin at ourselves. I am shocked at how much older I am than she is. Next to her brand new face (which people in the know will quickly agree looks remarkably like my own) my every wrinkle and age spot comes forth. And I rejoice at my years, at my aging face, at my surgery-free parts and most of all at all the baggage I’ve long ago left at the terminal. Someone else can claim it if they need it. I’m looking forward to forgetting more and more and achieving less and less and spending my remaining days finding my way back to my own true nature. I just hope that includes the Beatles.

Posted by Nerissa at 6:41 AM 0 comments

Cultivez Votre Jardin

Recently, at a meet and greet for a benefit, a young woman approached me and said, “I’m from your past. You might not remember me, but I was an actor in your ex-husband’s play.” She was wrong—I not only remembered her, I remembered the play, the way I felt back then, the way the theatre smelled and the kind of summer it had been. I sat down and had a wonderful conversation with her, grateful to have someone to get me off my feet and take me back twenty years to a time when I believed my whole life was in front of me.

This young woman, convinced she would be a famous actress, had gone through college, followed her star to Hollywood and spent most of her twenties on both sides of the camera. She decided eventually that the sacrifices necessary to pursue the often heartbreaking career of a performer were not worth it, and instead went to law school and is now making a difference, saving the world, fighting and righting one injustice at a time.

I admired her. I also envied her. And I began to think, “Maybe I should go to law school and be a public defender.”

Jack Kornfield, a wonderful writer and meditation teacher, would call this thought “number one on my hit parade.” By this he means that we all have perpetual, repetitive, compulsive, obsessive thoughts to which our minds return over and over, forgetting that we’ve solved the problem (or pronounced it unsolvable) countless times. It’s sort of like that joke on The Simpsons where Montgomery Burns inevitably points out Homer and asks Smithers who he is. “That’s Homer Simpson, Sir,” Smithers says each time. “Simpson, eh?” Burns mutters, scratching his chin. I might as well say, “Law School, eh?” Except that my “Simpson” comes in myriad disguises. Sometimes it’s Divinity School. Sometimes it’s getting an MFA in writing. Sometimes it’s getting an MA in psychology; sometimes it’s teaching high school English. Recently it was becoming a yoga teacher. I went through a phase where I thought I should become a poet—because that’s where the money is, naturally. Today I was on the phone with a friend who started to tell me about her teen age daughter’s amazing guidance counselor and I don’t know what she said next because I was off on my thought, “maybe I should be a guidance counselor.” If I’m reading a book to Lila, I think I should write children’s books. If I’m cooking dinner, I fantasize about opening a restaurant.

The common ingredient here, pardon the pun, is an obsession with being great. When I started my music career, I wanted to be the next Beatles. By this I mean, I wanted to be so famous, so successful, so influential that I would steer the zeitgeist my generation. If that meant sacrificing all semblance of a normal life, so be it. I felt sorry for Tracy Chapman and Billy Bragg, because they were just kind of famous. I wanted to be SUPER famous. As the years went along, I decided I would settle for “critically acclaimed.” I didn’t need the money. I just wanted to be adored by people with big brains and opinions.

Instead, I have built a sturdy little career as a folk musician. With my sister and the band we formed in 1991, I have released 13 CDs (going on 14 as of this July) and we continue to tour internationally. We have a lovely and loyal audience and have made friends all over the country through our music. Through the music, I now also have careers as a writer, novelist and life coach, and most of the time, I have more than enough to do, more creative projects and joyful experiences than any one person deserves to have. When I am spiritually centered, I know this. Then there are the other days.

One day, while on tour, I was staying with an old high school friend who was living in Mill Valley, a town in the Bay Area. She was six months pregnant and about to quit her six figure income job to be a full time Mommy.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” I said.
“Why? She said. “Nothing’s better than motherhood.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “I am scared that if I have a baby, I’ll love it so much I won’t care anymore about my writing, about my audience, about advancing my career. I’ll just fall in love with the baby and drift into a kind of happy ever after stupor.”
She looked at me with confusion. “But if you’re happy—then isn’t that the point? If you’re happy, you won’t care about your career.”

What I was embarrassed to admit then—and it’s actually embarrassing to admit now, too—is that I thought, “but the WORLD will not have me, then!”

I so want the world to want me.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Starbucks hasn’t done its part to raise the dialogue. This from a Starbucks cup two days ago:
"A person's pursuit of goodness leads to greatness, but the pursuit of greatness leads to ruin. Pursue goodness and you will achieve great things."-John E. Kramer, VP of communication, Institute for Justice. From Starbucks The Way I See It #245.

I have come to peace with the greatness issue, most of the time. I no longer strive to wear a size 2. I no longer detest everyone who gets reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. I no longer get depressed when Entertainment Weekly chooses not to review our new album. I have what the Buddhists call Sympathetic Joy for my friends in the arts who have achieved a higher profile and accompanying bank account. But I have to work at it, because I was born with a supersized ego, and I suspect that my life’s work—this go round anyway—is about deflation. I have been deeply blessed to have found a spiritual path and to live the life of an artist, to sustain a career doing what I love. I have been deeply blessed to share the journey with others—to be trusted with stories and problems and to witness metamorphoses. As a result of winning the husband-and-child lottery, most of the time I would rather be cuddled up with the two of them, or pureeing some organic chicken, or making scrapbooks of digital photos than doing battle with the ever more baffling media to try to Get Known. On Friday, I got off the phone with a client and made dinner for my husband and daughter, and felt so full, so grateful, that I didn’t even think, “Maybe I could be the world’s greatest life coach.”

Voltaire at the end of Candide concludes that the object of life, “in the best of all possible worlds,” is to cultivate one’s own garden. My husband is on vacation from grad school, and it’s springtime. He spends every free moment out in the garden, growing basil from seeds, moving plants to better locations, our half acre plot his canvas. Except it’s not just his canvas. “My favorite part,” he says. “Is transplanting little seedlings into their spots and patting them down. It’s like tucking them in at night.”

I’ve often thought that gardening is a man’s way of nurturing, of getting to be a mother. Gardening can be a practice divorced from the concerns about what the world thinks. One’s creation unfolds in a natural manner, partly divine, partly mid-wifed by our own attention and love and creative impulses, but not something one holds up to the world to judge as one does one’s career. (Of course there are some people who hold up their children or gardens to the world’s gaze as if they were accomplishments, but those people are very bad.)

And the truth is, my new old friend, the public defender, said, “I am so envious of you for making it.” I need these reminders from outsiders (and by outsiders I mean anyone who isn’t me). I need to remember that “making it” is always relative. That the real satisfaction, as I’ve said many times before, is in the creative moments when I am in the stream of songwriting, or onstage in the moment with my sister, or at my computer typing a new thought, or handwriting a page of dialogue, or on the phone with a client and listening to the story and seeing a new angle that might be helpful. These are the moments when I am not striving for greatness, but merely doing the next right thing; the “good” thing that’s right in front of my nose.

Last night, Tom and Lila and I sat on the floor of her bedroom reading her favorite book, Doggies by Sandra Boynton, and yes, I did think, “Maybe I would be a great children’s book writer.” But mostly, I gloried in my one year old’s newfound obsession. She can now point to the different dogs and say, “Duh!” And “Ar ar ar!” We got to the second to last page, where all the dogs howl a the moon. The precise text is, “A-a-a-a-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.” And when we get to that part, Tom and I throw back our heads and howl like werewolves. For the first time, Lila looked up at us while we did this, very excited, and went, “A-a-a-a-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.” too.

This isn’t just great. This is greatness. I have made it.

The Beach, oh WHY the Beach?

After spending the first fifteen years of my life being what all my teachers euphemistically called “an underachiever” and what my mother and father called “a lazy slug” I have preceded to reinvent myself as the opposite. When, at my first job, (assistant Dean of Students at a prep school for girls) the school psychologist said in a meeting, “Nerissa, you couldn’t possibly understand Student X because you’re such a natural overachiever,” I almost wheezed in indignation. “I am NOT!” I wanted to shout at her, while stamping my little feet. I say I’m not an overachiever because the truth much of the time is that the reason I do so much is in order to avoid that horrible feeling of being called a lazy slug. (Not that I blame my flawless parents, mind you.) And because I’m proficient at doing a lot of things and, more to the point, I’m good at doing a lot of things at the same time, or at least I think I am, I indulge in that fine American art of Busyness/Multitasking/Overproducing. What gets lost, though, when I juggle as fast as I can is actually noticing the fun of the activity. It becomes something to check off my “to do” list, and the only hit I get is the action of checking it off. And we’re talking fun things, here, like writing you this paragraph; like going for a walk with my daughter; like sending my mother in law a present. Why not take a moment to enjoy the task? Well, because I can’t afford to take that moment, or so I think. Until I stop, breath, relax, and do that most sacred of rituals, practice gratitude. Which by the way is The Secret, in case you haven’t seen the DVD or read the book or watched Oprah or read People Magazine. I ‘m here to spoil the ending. Practice gratitude, cultivate good feelings. That doesn’t mean whitewash, fake it, squash sadness, anger or fear down; it just means that each of us is infinitely blessed, if we can but just recognize it and take a small moment (OK, I just timed it: less than one second) to say “Thank you.” If you don’t believe in God, thank the trees, the grass, the clouds, your mother, yourself, your dog, your child, your partner, your hands, your feet.

And now, on to our regularly scheduled essay:


My sister’s ex-boyfriend once said to her, “I bet you’re the kind of person who couldn’t just go to the beach and watch the horizon. “ When she told me this story, I pointed a finger at my head like a gun and said, “J’accuse!” It runs in our family. How on earth could anyone possibly hang out and stare at the horizon? How mind numbingly boring. I have never been able to understand the appeal of the beach. What does one do? One splashes in the water. One fishes around in the sand. One slathers oneself with sunscreen. In short, one lolls. A loller I am not.

I don’t get it. I could get it if I still liked getting a suntan, which was once a part of my identity, a part of my uniform. As a teen, I scheduled “Lie by the pool from 10am-2pm” into my day planner on Saturdays in April and May. If I used any skin protection, which was rare, it would have been a tube of baby oil, but in any event I spent the summer with a nice almond colored tan. Nowadays, you need to apply oily sticky sunscreen from hairline to bikini line to top of the foot or suffer at least the fear of melanoma if not the real thing. As a person who doesn’t even bother with moisturizer after a bath (OK—full disclosure--a person who bypasses the luxurious pause of a bath for the 3.5 minute shower) I really can’t get with the sunscreen. I can’t get with the sand in the shoes. I can’t get with the water, which is too cold. I don’t like to swim, even in a heated pool. I don’t like looking at other people in their bathing suits, and I don’t really want to be seen in one. Throw into the mix my aversive givens, which are an integral part of my profession (soon-to-be-rock star): driving long distances, parking, hauling gear—that leaves one thing I might like about the beach: reading. But now we’re back to the sunscreen. Why apply sunscreen just to sit out on an uncomfortable plastic chair where it might be hot, you might get splashed only to do something which I could do from the comfort of my bed or couch?

See what I’m dealing with here?

Tuesday of this last week, I got a call from my life coach ten minutes into what was supposed to be our session. I’d gotten overwhelmed as usual, playing catch up from the weekend. I’d had two shows and then hosted a book group for my church, given a speech at the VA hospital for Women’s History Month, and continued to do all the other things I do: mother, wife, life coach, writing group leader, writer, yogini , daily jogger, etc. I had just sent an email to the other judges of a local poetry contest to let them know that I would have to withdraw from my position as the packet of poems I was supposed to read and judge was still sitting shamefully unopened on my desk. When my life coach called. I burst into tears.

“I can’t do all these things!” I sobbed. “I need a Sabbath!”

She did that annoying thing that life coaches do—she didn’t tell me what to do but instead said, “And how would you go about giving yourself a Sabbath?”

This is where time consciousness comes in. Instead of filling up all the blank spaces in my calendar, a little trick I use to keep myself busy or as my cruel life coach says, to keep myself from having to feel all my feelings, I would need to leave down time. I would need to say no. I would need to accept imperfections; need to accept that for now anyway, I may set goals, but I probably won’t meet them. I may want to be in super physical shape, and I can be if I don’t also want to be an adequate mother and wife and get some writing done and earn enough money to keep us in our lovely house. I may want to be a famous folksinger, and I can be if I don’t also want a full-time presence in my home and town, my community. Also to be sane and healthy.

In short, I may need to stare at the horizon.

My life coach said something wise and helpful: recognize that when you say yes to one thing you are saying no to something else.

I hate that.

However, through my struggles with food, I understand this. I may want to eat an appetizer, a main course, a salad with bleu cheese, dessert and bread with olive oil and two glasses of Cabernet, and to fit into my favorite jeans—but I have to choose. Of course, I could run six miles a day or make myself puke it all up, but that was not a solution the Buddha would have chosen. It’s the same way today. On the plane, I wrote down a list of Sabbathy things I wanted from my four day vacation to Florida.
1. Be with my family
2. Get some gentle exercise
3. Read Anne Lamott’s and Liz Gilbert’s new books
4. Write in my journal
5. Take Lila to the beach (not for me, you understand, but under the rubric of “being an adequate mother and witnessing key moments in the life of my child.”)

When the collective pulse started its post-caffeine/high-impact-aerobics-class beat the first morning, and we had to agree on a schedule, I forewent my jog in favor of a trip to the detested beach to see if in fact I could stare at the horizon.

We slathered on the appropriate amount of sunscreen and headed off, hauling our gear and parking and the whole nine yards. Once there, I had a moment of panic. Id’ forgotten a book! Oh, yeah—I had a child and my whole purpose was to be in the moment with her, to watch her first experience with horseshoe crabs and conch shells and not miss her childhood. Let’s see if I can just be with her and see the beach from her perspective. So I did the work of slowing down, which to me feels almost like shedding my skin. Have you ever seen a snake do that, by the way? They go very still and seem almost dead. That should have been a tip off for me.

I got behind my eyes. I held Lila and stood next to my mother, a fellow Type A overachiever and together we let our feet sink into the sand, getting buried a little more each time the waves passed over. It felt delicious. I’d forgotten how lovely it is to feel the wet sand between your toes. The Gulf of Mexico is the perfect shade of blue green and the water in the low 70’s. I had the pleasure of watching my husband go tearing into the waves, swimming and splashing like a golden retriever. Lila watched and squealed but was too scared and still too cold to touch the water herself. Tom took her for a little walk and I squatted down in the place where the sand gets covered by maybe every fourth wave. I built a little dyke and watched the water overcome it. I dug my fingers into the sand and got lost in the sea shells, the bits of rock. I noticed that my mother (who earlier had been jonesing for a jog worse that I was, even) was now sitting in her beach chair facing the horizon. I turned from where I was and sat, too, my legs sticking out towards the water in staff pose. And just took in the view. Pelicans were diving, delighted, a hundred yards off. Older kids were hauling a green blow up sea turtle. The air was soft and moist and benign. The water felt warmer. Tom came over with Lila in his arms and I reached for her. He put her in my lap and proceeded to slather me with still more sunscreen. I promptly dropped my resistance to sunscreen. What exactly is wrong with having someone you love slather you with cream?

Lila didn’t seem afraid anymore. She laughed at every incoming wave which splashed up into our laps and even when a big one got us both in the face, she didn’t seem to mind. “This is the beach, Littley-Lou,” I said. “This is where we come to just sit and be with the water.”

Now I can’t wait to go back.

Environmental Indulgences

Trying to be a good environmentalist is at least as difficult as trying to be a good Catholic. Or Buddhist or WWJD Christian or, I suspect, Jew or Muslim. I catch myself wanting to confess my sins to my organic-food-eating, hemp-wearing friends. Bless me, righteous ones, for I have sinned, in thought word and deed; by what I have done and by what I have left undone.
-I still drink bottled water (instead of Brita filtered)
-I eat mangoes (which are imported, since so far they haven’t figured out how to grow them in Western MA)
-Though I am in the process of replacing all my incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones, and I haven’t bought any new clothing since 2003, I still eat Atlantic Salmon (sometimes) and keep my heat turned up to 69 (I use the excuse that I have a baby who needs the heat, but in truth, I don’t feel like wearing my hat and scarf around the house. Yet.) I have looked lustfully upon SUVs and sinned in my heart by contemplating central air conditioning. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent.

Of course, I want them to grant me absolution, send me off to pick up some litter as penance.

Speaking of penance, there’s a website called TerraPass where you can pay money to offset your yearly carbon usage for everything from your car to your home to your recent plane trip to Florida (and maybe even the air conditioning you enjoy while you’re there). Tom calls it “buying indulgences.” Remember how in the Middle Ages your local parish priest would accept a little wad of cash (or perhaps hot crossed buns) to pray for you and insure your spot in Heaven? Kings and barons who’d carried on a little too loosely in those Chaucerian days were especially quick to open their pocketbooks and shed some guilt. In the case of TerraPass, the money doesn’t go just to assuage your guilt, though I can attest that it works really well for this, but to enrich companies dedicated to exploring green energy sources: solar, wind, water, etc. The site insists “these projects result in verified reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And these reductions counterbalance your own emissions.”

I don’t argue. I click some icons and spend about $150 and for the year anyway, my carbon footprint is balanced out and I can sleep at night.

Until, that is, I roll over in bed and wonder why I seem to be more upset about climate change than almost anyone I know. What’s with me? Am I just wired to react to powerful belief systems? In my zeal for environmental correctness, I remind myself of a, well, zealot. I read the New York Times, Yoga Journal, Mothering Magazine, all the usual leftie green suspects, and, like a Bible thumper, I see the evidence in the text! It’s right here, in black and white, and in the case of the Internet and An Inconvenient Truth, technicolor! We are going to severely harm our species if we don’t take action now!

Notice how I didn’t say, “The Earth.” I said “our species.” I’ve been thinking, recently, the Earth is going to get through this just fine. It has its ways. I think something like five new movies are coming out this summer where the climate is the bad guy instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Anthony Hopkins. The earth will overcome whatever poisons we inflict upon it. It’s we who are expendable, or as my minister, Steve Philbrick likes to say, “we’re expensive. The Earth may not be able to afford us for much longer.”

Before having Lila, I heard these dire warnings and rolled my eyes in annoyance at our collective greed and ignorance and kept driving my fossil fuel belching car, kept tossing my plastic bottles in whatever bin was handy. I bought many a canvas bag, and fully intended to remember to bring them to the supermarket, but inevitably I’d leave them by my front door and have to ask for a paper or plastic one at the check out counter. The demise of the human race was sad, but darn it, we kind of deserved it.

Nothing like a baby to turn a misanthrope into a zealous compassionate people lover. I heart people now! I puppy heart them! I want the human race to overcome its wicked ways, to see the (compact fluorescent) light and to change! I want them all to join me when I get up to sing hearty folk songs to get the environmental mojo happening. I want them all to agree that we should boycott all clothing stores except ones that sell hemp. I regard it as a personal affront when people bring beverages made by the Coca Cola company into my house.

And then, I am stopped short in my tracks when some stranger shouts at me across the Whole Foods parking lot, “Nice bumper sticker, lady! Your pal Deval Patrick sure has padded the pockets of all his fat cat corporate buddies!” I was lifting Lila into one of those little car shopping carts, the ones where the kid gets to pretend she’s controlling the trajectory of the vehicle, kind of like life here on earth, but that’s another essay topic. Anyway, I stared at this person who, after yelling at me, beat a hasty retreat into Whole Foods. I followed him slowly, seething and making up clever retorts in case I ran into him again. Though really, I just wanted to say, “Why are you so mean and judgmental?”

Why indeed? Why do I get so judgmental? If you do accept the premise that we humans are responsible for the future of our environment, and therefore our species, that our grandchildren if not ourselves are going to burn in hell (on earth) by our actions and inactions, very few of us get off the hook, carbon-neutrally-speaking. But in what ways exactly do I differ from the religious zealots I spend so much time arguing with in my head? They believe what they believe because a book said so (the Bible, the Koran.) I believe what I believe because the New York Times, some scientists and Al Gore said so. I put my faith in science, and they’ve put theirs in the wisdom of the ages. I believe with all my heart that I am right, but the same can be said for them.

Maybe there are two kinds of people in the world: zealots and normal people, and I am just a zealot. Zealots are fine when they’re with their own kind—for awhile, until one of them turns to the other and says something mean about the progressive candidate for governor you supported and you realize that it’s ok to support a progressive candidate until he becomes The Man, and then you must rip off your bumper sticker and denounce him as a corrupt fat cat. Meet the new boss same as the old boss and all that.

Here’s what I do know from my long 40 years on the planet. I know that I am a being who needs to worship something, who needs to put something above herself in order to feel sane and happy and grateful everyday. People who need to perform rituals may be zealots, or they may just be wired a little differently. For today, I know that changing my incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents made me feel really happy, the way my Catholic friend Mary tells me she feels when she’s said a few Hail Marys using her rosary beads or the way Jonah, my Buddhist friend feels when he’s hung his prayer flags. Someone said to me this morning, “I don’t know whether or not I believe in God. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But I definitely feel better when I believe in God, so I figure, why not?”

People have been making up their own gods since time immemorial. That’s just plain fact; every culture has some kind of higher power, and there are several books on the best seller list currently discussing the various reasons why people are compelled to have faith in something. My feeling is: there’s something cool out there that’s bigger than us, even if it’s just the life force that propels a crocus up from the ground in spring or causes a river to flow from the north to the south. That’s the God we all worship, when you come right down to it. The different masks of that god—Gaia, Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, Krishnu, the Bible, the Secret, the practice of mindfulness, the practice of good stewardship, whatever—are just personal interfaces to help individuals connect with that force. Interfaces are useful as long as we don’t insist that everyone use our interface. When you get behind the interface, that’s when the really good stuff happens—that’s when we get to see that this force is connecting us all.

The Cranky Buddhist

I should call my blog The Cranky Buddhist. At this rate, I will never attain enlightenment.

On Friday, my husband Tom and I along with our baby daughter. Lila and my sister, Katryna who is my singing partner, got up at the crack of dawn to warm up the biodiesel Jetta and drive to the airport to catch a plane to St. Louis where we were to be performing in the St Louis Folk Festival at the beautiful downtown Sheldon Theatre (an almost perfect replica of Cambridge's Sanders Hall, by the way). On the way, pining for coffee and watching the gorgeous southern sky as the sun began its ascent, we listened to NPR and the latest findings from the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) that assembled in Paris under the aegis of the UN. What they discovered, as you probably know, is that there is almost no doubt anymore that human beings are directly contributing to the rise in temperatures we've been experiencing, along with the unusual number of hurricanes and tsunamis and floods that have been plaguing the world as of late.

"I am a scientist," the woman from the panel said to the NPR interviewer when asked what should be done about this, since sea levels are now expected to rise between 1-2 feet by 2100, which will threaten low lying cities everywhere—what happened in New Orleans might happen in New York by the time Lila is my age. "I am not a policy maker. We are not politicians. Our work is to tell the world what is going on, not how to stop it." She went on to say that global warming may not be stoppable at this point, but it can be arrested and the worst won't happen IF we mobilize now.

I thought, again, about all the work it would take for us humans to save ourselves. We need to do big things and little things. Big things include voting for politicians who fully understand this issue and are willing to pass legislation that will change the way we all live. Politicians with tremendous courage who will raise taxes on the usage of fossil fuels; lawmakers who will fund the exploration of alternate fuels. That will affect our pocketbooks, all of us. We need to be willing to sacrifice, maybe in a big way now so that we’re not perpetrating the ultimate sacrifice on our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren (should the human race survive that long.) And each of us also needs to make small daily sacrifices: I need, for example to give up my love affair with the incandescent lightbulb and switch to the detestable compact fluorescent bulbs that cast my office in a depressing glow. I need to be better about turning off the lights in all the rooms of the house, turning the heat down at night, unplugging unused appliances, not using plastic wrap on leftovers, buying organic fruits, vegetables, meats and yogurt, and even (heaven help me) eschewing my beloved imported mangoes because of the huge amounts of oil and gas it takes to get them here from Haiti. I took a deep sigh and nodded, looking back at my daughter playing in her carseat, slapping the dangling toys that amuse her and babbling her “rah rah’s” and “buh buhs.” Recently, she’s been squealing with delight when her father or I pick her up, kicking those little chubby legs and waving her hands up and down, wriggling her whole body with glee. A little sacrifice never killed anyone.

At the airport, we gratefully unloaded our checkable bags and moved our posse to the coffee bar at the airport hotel, where I breastfed Lila and watched ESPN, which was on the overhanging TV at the bar. Now, as many of you know, I don't usually watch TV. It's not exactly a moral choice; I just don't have time, and once you get out of the habit of watching TV, it loses its appeal. (I used to watch lots of TV, back in the 90's, and I don't have any judgments about those who indulge, and as you will soon see, I am a person replete with judgments.) But now, whenever I turn on the TV, I get the heebeejeebees, and my internal artist, who is an incredibly sensitive 8 year old, freaks out and wants to hide under the covers of her bed with a hunk of cheddar cheese.

On Friday, as I was watching at the airport, a commercial came on for Hooters. Lila pulled off to watch too, fascinated, as a young woman with thin arms and big breasts who apparently works at Hooters, said, "I'm not supposed to tell you this…but you can take me home." She then looks secretively right and left and goes on. "Well, sort of.” You see, she tells us, Hooters is giving away a flat screen TV as some kind of Superbowl promotion. In fact, as the camera pulls out, you could see that the woman was IN the TV! You could see the background of a friendly neighborhood Hooters, both inside and OUTSIDE the TV! How amazing!

The camera then shifted to seductive shots of various kinds of Superbowly Hooters food, like hoagies and cheese fries, the cheese melting luxuriously over the ham. Next frame was a couple of All-American men (by which I mean—and I say this with all due respect-white blond guys with buzz cuts who weigh at least 250 pounds), placing their hoagies in a Hooter’s take-out bag on top of the flat screen TV and then lifting it up with the woman looking back and forth at both of them, pleased and surprised, a la Barbara Eden in the bottle in I Dream of Jeannie. Next frame, they were in their car. The flat screen TV had been placed in the back, with the woman in the TV still looking a bit delighted albeit bewildered, peering back and forth from between the two men who are in the driver’s seat and shotgun, respectively. They opened their bags of Hooters food and took a bite of cheese fries. One of them dangled a fry in front of the woman. She reached for it, but of course couldn’t get to it, being as she was on TV. “Aw, no fair!” she pouted.

That’s when I almost lost my mind. What hope can the planet possibly have when we have this to contend with? I am expecting something as flimsy and feeble as a Democracy to vote their conscience? Just as the Bush administration responded to the findings of the IPCC by rejecting unilateral limits on emission, saying, “We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution,” so I thought, “Why should I give up my mangoes when there’s no chance in hell this culture will ever look up from its rampant addiction to soft porn, big cars, mindless television and junk food to make the necessary changes to prolong our species? I give up. Until they change, why should I? I want a dictatorship!”

Then, as I covered Lila’s eyes, I had this other thought, from the other side of my pinbally ricocheting mind: “I am way to serious. Why can’t I relax and join the Superbowl culture and not be so judgmental and angry and self-righteous and all those other words they throw at liberals? By judging (prejudging) everyone I am just as close-minded and contemptible as those I wish would change. Hypocrite! Cranky Buddhist!”

As a Buddhist, I am supposed to be embracing the four brahma viharas; loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and sympathetic joy. I’m pretty sure that precludes my indulging in detesting white blond football-loving Hooter patrons. Also, I think it precludes my wishing that we had a dictatorship that would tax the usage of fossil fuels at a rate of 200%, and while at it, ban football, Hooters, cheese fries and flat screen TVs. I’m pretty sure that falls under the category of “worshiping a God who hates all the same people you do probably means you have created God in your own image,” as Father Tom Weston says, by way of Anne Lamott.

Rats. And I don’t really want to live in a dictatorship, by the way. Even if (especially if) I were the dictator.

Humor is a torch we bring with us down into the darkness, into hell itself. Without humor, we are damned, even as we try to damn others. And there can be no peace when the peacemakers are so angry their faces and hearts are as contorted as those of their oppressors. These are serious times, and sometimes I need someone a little more rational to explain to me that when someone is joking about how global warming will give them beachfront property in a few years, I shouldn’t react by screaming at them about how my daughter will never see a play on Broadway because it will be underwater by the year 2026.

We are now entering a new phase of life on this planet, one in which we can no longer pretend that what John Donne said isn’t true, about no man being an island entire of itself. We are all a piece of the continent, just as many of us are already integrally a part of a family, either the one we were born into or the one we are creating with a partner and children, or a creative family of our own choosing, or a mix of these. And just as I work to bring balance to the individual me and the me who is a wife/mother/daughter and sister, so we need to work at bringing a balance between the self with her unique needs and the citizen of the world who is a giving and taking part, one who breathes CO2 out and takes O2 in. How can we bring our awareness of these roles to our daily practices? What did we do for the Earth today? Did we take too much? Did we dance lightly? Did we pass on our understanding to another?

And yet we need to do this gently, if we are going to break what President Bush has called our “addiction” to fossil fuel. Jane Aikin, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis gave the keynote speech at our Arts and Activism panel yesterday. In speaking about violence against women, she made the point that there is a lot of ignorance out there. “Never assume that your friends know what you know,” she said. “Don’t be shy about educating them. Share what you know! That’s how we learn.” The same is true for us. We need to create a climate of support, of modeling good stewardship of the earth. I ask my husband to remind me to pack the canvas bags when I am making the weekly trip to the supermarket. (In Ireland, and perhaps in other European countries, they charge you if you don’t bring your own bags back). He asks me to nag him if he’s spaced out in the shower and overusing the hot water.

If my experience as a veteran dieter teaches me anything, it’s that you have to do it with love, patience, compassion, gentleness, humor and tolerance for others. Just as I couldn’t give up junk food because someone told me too—it had to come from a deep inner desire—so I won’t give up driving the mile to the Stop & Shop because someone’s trying to shame me into walking. I will walk to the Stop & Shop because I want to do my part for the earth, out of love and not out of guilt. Feeling like I am an environmentalist, that this is my issue, that I have a relationship with the earth that is personal and private will make me walk instead of drive, buy organic rather than saving 75¢, and yes, changing my incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent. As always, the solution starts with us, and part of that solution is seeing the greedy Hummer-loving, energy wasting, junk food consumer in ourselves and forgiving that someone.


*If you want to see a really funny piece on how to respond to global warming, check out this link from Monday’s New York Times:
http://www.rickmoranis.com/news.aspx?pid=627

Three Poems

1

Why his liver?
That’s what I want to know.
If it had been me, I feel sure
That God would’ve taken my voice.
And it wouldn’t have been a violent desecration, either, with the mysterious restoration
In the night while the victim slept, wiped out, from the brutal operation
No, more like a borrowing—a book from the library, slyly
Returned with a different page dog eared each day.

2.
Surely I came from the fire
Of their newly minted love,
One piece hot from the furnaces of Hephaestus,
Another wet and glistening
Via a conch shell,
Like my mother, naked and ridiculous in my unabashed joy.
And we together, in the blessed moments at sea
Still had no clue that once she washed to shore,
The marriage would be forced
Arranged
Cobbled, even-
a beauty not even pretending to love a kind hardworking hunchback.

And now we leave pieces of ourselves all over the earth.

3.
In the sill of the window
In the frame of the door where you’ve been hanging
By the tips of your fingers
Casually
For minutes now
Neither in nor out
In the almost silence of the passing cars.

Nerissa Nields
Jan. 28, 2007

When God Comes for Tea

When I was eight years old, I loved to read the same books over and over again. “Try this one,” my frustrated librarian would say, pushing forward a copy of A Wrinkle in Time or one of the Chronicles of Narnia with some urgency.

“No thanks,” I’d say, handing her instead the card for On the Banks of Plum Creek for the fifth time that fall. I was already anticipating my pleasure at going home to my bed in the corner of my room with a two-inch cube of cheddar cheese which I would nibble slowly, making it last until my mother called us for dinner. The books I was drawn to were all about girls growing up a long time ago, girls growing up in little underground sod houses, or Brooklyn tenement apartments, or snow-covered wooden structures buried in a New England blizzard. I liked stories about girls watching their mothers measure out the coffee, precious spoonful by precious spoonful. Girls who knew what scarcity was.

I knew no such lack, or at least that’s what I thought until recently. I grew up in the seventies, and though it’s true that I sometimes had to ford a bridgeless creek to get to school in the Virginia winter, taking off my brown oxfords and shrieking as my bare feet hit the freezing water, I always had shoes. And, truth be told, my mother could have driven us; she just liked the idea of us fording a creek once in awhile. I always had meat on my dinner plate; I slept in a well-heated house, and as far as I know, my parents never measured the coffee, though in those days it came in these horrible tins and was freeze dried. I am sure today’s Starbucks generation cannot even imagine the horror.

Today as I was going for my morning run, I noticed a mother and son waiting, I assume, for the school bus. The mother was just hanging out with her kid—he’s probably eight or so. And she was laughing with him. He was laughing and she was laughing. That was all. But I felt a pang; the same pang I used to feel when I read about Laura Ingalls or Jo March or Francie Nolan, those poor little girls who slept in unheated homes and waited until Christmas to have even a taste of sugar. I felt a twang of deprivation.

My parents gave us everything we needed, but not everything we wanted. We were not poor little rich kids; they were careful not to spoil us. But, like most Americans, they were hungry to improve our lot; not hungry to buy new cars or have us wear the latest fashions—my parents didn’t go out to a restaurant until we were all in our teens, and we rarely went on vacations. What they were desperately hungry for was for us to be well educated. They chose a school that had a fantastic music department and made sure they could pay the tuition, three times over for their three daughters.

And the additional price they paid, again like many Americans, was with their time. I don’t remember ever just hanging out with my parents. I think if asked, they would have called “hanging out” “killing time.” And time was more than money; time was love in the form of hard work, which translated to tuition for the school, which translated to a better life for their kids. I think my parents saw the cultural upheaval of the 60s with mixed feelings. Though they were liberal Democrats, they were not hippies. Though they were passionately in favor of the separation of church and state, they simultaneously mourned the fact that Christmas carols were no longer allowed to be sung at our local public school. And so they both worked from six am until 10pm most days so that we could go to a school and learn Christmas carols.

I woke up at seven am most mornings to find my mother furiously red-lining 9th graders’ term papers, planning her morning lesson and throwing together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I braided my baby sister’s hair and emptied the dishwasher with the Today show chirping the day’s cold war news in the background. We slurped our orange juice and grabbed our books and tumbled into the station wagon to pick up the kids in our carpool, always late to school. My mother was usually not home in the afternoons—either playing tennis or teaching or working for the League of Women Voters –and thus I found an alternate universe in the prairie or turn of the century Brooklyn. My father came home, usually after dinner and he’d kiss me goodnight. For many years, my mother referred to their relationship as “the 19 and a half minute per day marriage.”

Killing time was a real homicide in my family. When my mother found out I was reading the same books over and over again, she yelled at me. “Why don’t you go out and play?” she’d shout on a cloudless crisp October day. “Soon it’s going to be winter!” I still have pangs of guilt if I don’t get out on crisp cloudless days. Thus my morning run.

And yet, here was this woman, hanging out with her son waiting for the school bus. It’s not a dangerous neighborhood. Her son is not that small. Surely he could spend those moments alone while his mother could be getting some work done, or maybe going for a run herself.

I’ve been working all fall on the content for my new Life Composition Creative Day Planners, and I’ve been thinking a lot about time management, a topic I am fascinated with, although I’ve come to prefer the term “time consciousness,” but that’s for a later entry. At one time, I prided myself on having my life scheduled down to the second. Then I became a mother, at the ripe age of 38, and my whole notion of time management—of hanging out, of killing time—became transformed. When my six month old daughter calls me from her position under the elephant which dangles above her head while she’s lying on her Gymini play mat, I stop what I’m doing. I look over at her and watch her face crumple into a squinty eyed grin, her whole body wriggling like a puppy’s, her feet kicking in eloquent joy. I lean over and pick her up and hold her, smell her ears, run my hand gently over that miraculous head, kiss her soft little peach cheeks and look her deeply in the eyes. And I sigh. And I forget about trying to get anything done; I forget about trying to save my pennies for her future education (well--for the moment—it is kind of an obsession for me). But I know that if the income column falls short of the expenses column, I can always sing to her. I can read to her and find her books—new ones as well as old familiar ones. I can let her choose what she wants to read and notice if she’s going back to the same old ones over and over again, and perhaps ask why.

My parents, I should add, have learned how to kill time as they’ve grown up. The Thanksgiving when my nephew William was born was a veritable massacre of time. We did nothing but hang out on my sofas, go for the occasional stroll in the neighborhood, comment on how huge my sister’s belly was and eat turkey. And it remains one of the very happiest weekends of my life. Being an older mom, I am acutely aware of how little time I have with Lila. When she graduates from college, I will be 60. When I went to college, my mother had just turned forty. I don’t have the kind of time my mother had to learn how to relax and hang out. I need to learn at warp speed.

So part of what I’ve come to learn about time management goes to a wonderful proverb that I’ve found in cultures across the world. In Arabic, it’s translated: “Trust Allah but tie your camel.” In Russia it’s “Pray to God but continue to row to shore.” I would reverse it for myself: “Hoard your time like sweet cream, but don’t be afraid to pour lavishly when God comes for tea.” When my husband tells me he loves me, that he’s proud of me, or when he tells a joke and makes me laugh; when my daughter coos and chants “ma ma ma”; when we’re all sitting around the breakfast table in the morning watching the sun illuminate the late November clouds, God has come for tea.

HooteNanny

I grew up with folk music. My parents' first date was going to see Harry Belafonte when he was the darling of the Greenwich Village set. Their second date was a Pete Seeger concert. Early in their courtship, my mother taught my father how to play the guitar, and my earliest memories have to do with them harmonizing around the dinner table to "Banks of the Ohio." The first record I remember playing was Peter, Paul and Mommy. And though I eventually rebelled and started listening to the Clash (oh, OK, Captain & Tennille), my first musical love will always be folk music. REAL folk music: not the pabulum served up in the late fifties (Mitch Mitchell, Burl Ives) but muscular leftist populist folk music, dark murder ballads, passionate gospel.

As you know, this led to creating a five-piece rock band with my sister, that at one point in time lived in a van and played in clubs all over the country. Now we tour more regionally and more frequently as a duo, but we still put out a new CD every year and a half and have not yet given away our black motorcycle jackets. We rode the line between the shiny hopeful music of the American left's folk tradition and the alternative rock of the 1990's, trying hard not to be sentimental without being too cynical. "When I am a mother," I thought. "My children will love music. They will not listen to Baby Einstein. They will not have toys that sound like Casio keyboards. They will have authentic instruments and learn songs from all over the world. They will learn about hope from music. And if they can't sing on key, that's AOK."

Moreover (Katryna and I plotted), music shall save the world! If all the kids were busy singing, maybe they wouldn't hit each other! If only George W. Bush had done more of the hokey pokey as a child, maybe he wouldn't be so obsessed with his nasty, unwinnable wars!

To this end, HooteNanny was born.

HooteNanny is Katryna's and my answer to Music Together, (www.musictogether.com) a national franchise whose theory is that your child's favorite voice is your voice; that the best way for children to have music in their lives in a positive way is for parents and children to experience it…together. So classes begin when children are pre-verbal and continue until they are five. There are lots of call and response songs, lots of international songs, lots of made- up-in-the-moment songs.

On Thursday mornings, I put Lila in the jogging stroller and we walk a mile and a quarter into town on a crisp fall morning. I stop by Starbucks and get the requisite coffee bevies for Katryna and me (a 5 shot Americano for yours truly, a mostly milk iced coffee for her, with 2 sugars.) We meet in front of the building that houses the Northampton Quaker Meeting Center and unlock the front door. Upstairs, the room is still cluttered with chairs for big people. We move these out of the way to the periphery and sit down next to the wall with the outlet, plug in Katryna's boom box. I take out the guitar, tune up and place my capo and picks behind my back and safely out of the reach of curious two year olds. And then the parents and kids begin to arrive: mothers of all ages carry their babies, or hold the hands of their toddlers. Some of the kids are older—up to five years old—and these are the kids we keep an eye on. When we get to the parts of the songs that require participation, here's where most of the good ideas will come from. Like finding out what Aikendrum's clothes are made of (Aikendrum lives on the moon, you see, and naturally, all his clothes are made of food. His hat is made of cream cheese. Depending on the whims of the children in the group, his shirt could be made of spaghetti, his tie could be made of dino-nuggets. Once his entire outfit was made from yogurt. You get to find out what kids had for breakfast by how Aikendrum is clothed.)

We begin each group with a good morning song: Good morning, Lila, how did you sleep last night? Going through and greeting every parent and child there. During the forty-five minute class, we do some movement (like dance around the room to Dan Zanes's wonderful "Pata Pata"), play with shaker eggs, tambourines, sing some lullabies while babies nurse in their mothers' laps. We have given each family a CD and songbook with the music for the ten-week session, and part of the program is about spending time outside of class listening to the CD with your child to develop familiarity with the music. The idea is that the more the kids and parents sing the songs at home, the better integrated the experience becomes.

We end the class with a version of the old folk song "Sweet Rosyanne," whose refrain, "Bye Bye My Rosyanna" gets turned into "Bye bye Lila, bye bye William, bye bye Amy and Zoe," etc. So far, I can attest that five-month old Lila loves the class, spending it looking around at the other moms, dads and babies and sucking on her hand with a big wet grin. William, Katryna's almost 2 year old spins around in a circle, suggests we sing about fire trucks most of the time and sings the songs on his own in the car when Katryna plays the CD. Emails from the other moms in the group reflect this, too. And the best endorsement of all, from the mother of 6 month old twins: "They always nap so well in the afternoons after HooteNanny!"

We pack up our shaker eggs, boom box, guitar, children, stroller, leftover iced coffees and head out into the noonday. I help Katryna load the van, and then I walk home with happy Lila, who is a complete lovey-loo after her infusion of folk music. And even though she is still preverbal and toothless, I could swear she was trying to sing the chorus to "Allee Allee O" as we passed under the falling maple leaves.

Giant of the Valley

When I was a kid, I read a biography of John F. Kennedy; one of those youth bios, cleaned up, Marilyn Monroe-free, which focused instead on his huge, friendly family, his speed-reading of five newspapers a day, and his heroics as a World War II purple heart recipient. When the author remarked on how competitive the Kennedy family was, especially in touch football games and politics, I thought, “What’s weird about that? Isn’t that the way all families are?”

In my family, we play tennis, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuits, golf. We argue about politics, even though we all fall roughly on a demographic between very left of center and extremely left of center. And in August, we climb mountains in the Adirondacks—a New York state nature preserve where there are forty-six peaks over 4000 feet. These forty-six peaks-known colloquially as “Forty-Sixers”(or, cutely, “46rs”)- range in difficulty from an hour and a half’s fairly easy hike (Cascade) to a sixteen-hour day’s bushwhack to bag a viewless mosquito-infested peak (Allen). I climbed my first forty-sixer at age 8 and finished at age 26, along with my sisters. We were fairly incongruous members of the forty-sixer club, most of whom are the kind of outdoorsmen and –women whose idea of a vacation is careening down white water rivers in those little boats that tip over, and then cramponing up glaciers in January. Me, I wear old running shoes to hike and eat my lunch with a knife and fork at the summit.

Nevertheless, in case it hasn’t become clear to you by now, I did not completely escape the competition virus with which everyone in my family is infected. Like Anne Lamott, when I brought home a B+, my parents wondered why I couldn’t have worked just a little harder to get an A-. Though I was a fair athlete as a child-a pretty good field hockey and tennis player, an average but competent dancer—my parents were practically professionals (both are nationally ranked in tennis; my mother was her high school’s star of track and field; my father is actually listed as the 189th forty-sixer in the world). So I have a pretty weird relationship with my own athleticism, which mostly translates to thinking that either I am a disappointment as an athlete, or I am not an athlete at all.

In reality, I am just average. But average athletes can still have a really good time being in their bodies and learning from that unique experience. As a lifelong yoga practitioner, I know that “yoking” body and mind as one does (or can do) in any athletic endeavor brings a oneness and presence that’s incredibly wonderful when achieved. Still, when I compare myself to my one sister who can run a seven-minute mile or my other sister whose serve absolutely devastates her opponents (especially me), I wonder why I even bother to use my body for anything other than loading the dishwasher. Since Lila was born, I have resumed my daily running, something I did in the days when I lived in a sixteen passenger van and considered myself perpetually in training. But then as now, my fastest speed was about a 13 minute mile. Honestly, I am really more of a plodder than a runner. My special talent is that I actually show up and do it every day. Like the proverbial turtle or his new 21st C cousin the Energizer bunny, I keep going and going, even if my speed is glacial. (When I came back from my run just now and moped to Tom, “I run only a 13 minute mile,” he looked up from feeding Lila and said, “Um…did you have fun?”)

My existential sherpa says I have the disease of comparing. Comparisons are odious, goes the 15th century saying, but they sure are fun when you’re winning.

Anyway, I found myself spending a day of my August vacation on Giant Mountain in St. Huberts, NY, following my very athletic husband up the three-mile Ridge Trail. Tom was carrying 9-pound Lila on a front pack plus ten pounds of water, sweaters, a first aid kit, bananas and gorp on his back. Nevertheless, I lagged behind, traveling only as fast as my unenergetic heart and weak knees would allow.

Two years ago to the day, Tom and I had climbed a small, gentle shoulder of this very mountain, a shoulder called Nubble, which took us maybe 45 minutes and gave us a pretty great view, albeit from a low altitude. On top of Nubble, Tom had pulled a box out of his backpack—one of those boxes that won’t open unless you spin it on a flat surface. The flat surface he provided was an old copy of Rubber Soul. Inside the box was a beautiful antique diamond engagement ring. We shouted to the opposing peaks, “We’re getting married!” We kissed, we shrieked with delight, we ran down the mountain to tell my family and we celebrated for the rest of our vacation.

This is the photo of Tom and me when we got engaged in 2004.

Having grown up climbing these peaks every August, I have always known that mountain climbing is the great metaphor for life, itself. It’s the ultimate meditative practice, and by coincidence (perhaps) this very mountain-Giant of the Valley—is the one I visualize when practicing Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “mountain meditation”—the one where you’re supposed to imagine yourself as a mountain, calmly watching the weather go by, watching the people crawl all over you, sitting impassively for thousands and thousands of years, losing a tree here, gaining some rock face there. And so, midway through the ascent, I was certain we’d made a terrible parenting mistake and were surely scarring our child for life. Moreover, I got to watch my mind react in all sorts of predictable ways: “why are we doing this?” “I hate mountain climbing!” “I’m starving” “What’s the point? I’ve seen this view three times before!” (Aversion) “This is dangerous!” “The baby’s going to fall out of the pack/Tom’s going to trip/she’s going to freeze/we didn’t bring enough clean outfits/diapers.” (Fear). And “Wow! This is amazing! How can we make time to come up here for more than 5 days a year so Tom can become a 46r too?” (Greed). And finally, ‘”God, I’m bored. This is the most boring thing ever. When will it be over? When will we get to the top?” (Restlessness.)

We had some external voices in our heads too, in the form of an older woman, most certainly a professional mother, who glared at Tom and said, “How old is that baby? You’re going to the TOP?? Don’t you know there are places where you’re going to need both of your HANDS?” Even my father, who had recommended the climb and the route, said, with a pained look as we drove off with his granddaughter in her car seat, “Be very careful with her! She’s only three months old!” And then there were the voices who said to Tom, “Wow! She’s only three months old? Cool! And her mother’s climbing too? You got yourself a couple of sturdy ones!”

Maybe, but I sure didn’t feel sturdy on the way down, when my knees and hips went on strike and refused to work anymore. For two hours and forty-five minutes, I made my way down, sometimes on my rear end, other times on the backs of my hands like a kid playing a game of crab. I fell a lot (Tom is NOT a fan of my wearing of old running shoes on rock face, just for the record). At one point the skies opened up, and it poured on us. Lila wailed for fifteen minutes straight and we felt like DSS should come and take away our child and permanently eradicate our right to be parents. I sat in the middle of the wet trail and let Lila breast-feed, and stared miserably straight down (I think the trail was at a 60 degree angle at that point) and watched a pack of college freshmen from SUNY Cortland zip up past us.

“This is so selfish of us,” I said to Tom, my aversive and judgmental mind hard at work. “What right do we have to stick our child in a pack for six hours just so we can say we climbed a gigantic mountain?” In my mind, I added, “This disease of comparing and competition could kill me and my baby girl! I am the worst person EVER!”

Tom shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. I pulled the waterproof shell over my head and Lila’s body and listened to her hum as she fed, which is this totally adorable new thing she does. She actually seemed really happy in that moment.

“I guess the work is to see this incredibly sucky moment at just as noble and worthwhile as the one where we got engaged,” I grumbled.

“Yes,” my existential sherpa nodded. “Because this moment is the only one you have. Two years ago doesn’t exist. It’s a memory.”

We got up and continued to trudge downward. I inched along, scooting on my butt, grabbing onto small trees. Behind me, Tom made up a poem for Lila, telling her how he would take her up again when she could walk herself; describing how the trail rose like an upside down stream. He told her the story of how she was born. She stopped crying and, like her mother, listened, captivated.

She was fine at the bottom, when I took her into my arms and snuggled her and fed her again. We drove home, stopping by the vegetable stand for corn on the cob. That evening, I iced my knees and Lila nursed and hummed; Tom cooked dinner. The mountain, no longer real, seemed a benevolent giant, rising calmly above our town.

So how do I feel now, a week later? Still a little sore, but my knees do work again. I found out that formally pregnant people go through a phase where their joints and ligaments don’t work so well and heavy hiking isn’t exactly advised. But I’m fine, and my daily two-mile run seems like a breeze now. NOT that I’m competitive or anything.

All This Intensive Labor Just So I Get My Heart Broken?

In the proverbial village in which I live, one of my elders gave me a book when Lila was born. The book is called Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual and it’s by Louise J. Kaplan. That’s about all I know, since I’ve read very little beyond babycenter.com and the New York Times since Lila was born, but this much I did manage to glean in my bleary eyed 2am post-nursing readings: the baby and the mother start out as one and, from the moment of conception on, begin a process of individuation. In other words, or from my occasional perspective, breaking up is hard to do.

Lila turned 3 months last week, and after a blissful honeymoon in which she snuggled with us in bed every night, traveled with us everywhere in her Baby Bjorn, Guatamala wrap or hand-me-down sling, happily sleeping on our bodies for hours at a time (attachment parenting experts call this “baby wearing” and we wore our baby with joy!) she began to exhibit very clear signs of wanting some more independence. Now, other mothers and child experts might take issue with me (in fact, I know some who would hang me out to dry for what I’m about to say), but what Tom and I noticed in our child was a distinct unhappiness with the status quo. Where she used to like taking naps on our bodies, she was growing quickly discontent, squirming and fussing after only a ten minute catnap. And yet, when we tried to put her down to sleep in a more independent place (like our bed, her crib, the sofa, a swing, the car seat) she seemed unable to fall asleep, almost as if she didn’t know how. She whimpered and cried and scratched her face and Tom and I looked at each other with the uncatagorizable misery every parent feels when his or her child is unhappy. Moreover, we began to notice that nighttimes weren’t quite so cuddly. By about 2am, she began kicking off her wrap, boxing me in the breasts and generally raising a ruckus. She seemed tired all day long, and yet unable to sleep. What gave?

We talked to every parent we knew, past and present; to our lactation consultant, to our childbirth expert, to our pediatrician. And we got all sorts of advice: your baby’s too young for a schedule; your baby should have had a schedule weeks ago. Your baby needs to sleep with you; keeping your baby in bed COULD KILL THE BABY AND THE MARRIAGE! Etc. Etc. Etc. Why is it that child rearing brings out such strong passions in us? Hmmmm.

The best advice, and the advice we finally took, was this: every baby is an individual and every parent is too. Love your baby, watch your baby, tune in to yourself and make choices in the moment that seem like the next right step. Ah! Familiar advice, finally.

And so, last week, we began to try to “teach” Lila how to sleep. We did whatever it took. We sang to her, we read her books, we held her and rocked her, we lay her in her crib, we let her suck on our little fingers. Once or twice, I even crawled with her into the crib, stroking her back until she fell asleep. Quite early on, we had success with morning and afternoon naps. And then, a few nights ago, for the very first time, Lila went to sleep in her own crib at 8pm. Tom sang her ten verses of “High Ho the Rattlin’ Bog” and she was out. When he came back to our bedroom without the baby, I sat up and cried and cried and cried. I just missed her so much. All this intensive labor just so I’d get my heart broken? Is this the parenting deal? (Don’t answer that.)

When Lila was born, I felt a kind of completeness, a wholeness, I’ve never experienced before. I thought, “all my problems are solved.” It was not unlike the feeling of falling in love, come to think of it. And we all know the end of that story. Healthy or not healthy, soul mate or big mistake, sooner or later a blissful couple who seemed uncannily alike, who seemed like twins separated at birth, eventually find out that one of them likes organic half and half and the other secretly prefers Coffeemate. Or that some beloved in-law is completely impossible for the one not related to her. Or that the perfect guy is actually married (see Grey’s Anatomy, the end of the first season. Can you tell I’ve been completely dependent on Netflix this summer?)

So far, mothering has been somewhat similar. I am madly in love with my child; I believe her to be perfect in every way; I want to spend my whole life staring at her little eyelashes…and I can’t wait for her next nap so I can go do something for myself, like practice yoga, go for a run, write in my journal, cook a meal, take a shower, call a friend and not be interrupted. And then, ten minutes after she’s down, I miss her so terribly my heart feels like her two tiny hands are wringing it. I steal into her room and stare at her sleeping body—is there anything cuter?- and watch as she sucks on an invisible breast, wiggles her toes, her chest rising and falling so steadily. I want to give up my whole life for her.

And I know (from past experience) that that’s not necessarily the best thing I could do for her. When I see families that seem to do it right, I see moms and dads who spend lots of time with their kids AND they have interesting lives outside the house. They go on playdates AND they hire a babysitter to have grown up dates. They listen to Dan Zanes and his Rocket Ship Review AND watch Margaret Cho DVDs. So I practice my yoga and meditation; I (try to) write in my journal (and not always about Lila) I go on dates with my husband and I think about the books I am writing, the songs I am singing, the albums I am working on, the environmental choices I am making.

And I try to savor every single moment I get with this amazing little girl who changes so much from one day to the next. I hold her in my arms and let her nurse, watching as she pulls away to give me one of her half crooked, slightly drunken grins. We are two different people, from two different generations who will have two totally different experiences walking on planet earth. But for now, we’re together.

Our Vegetable Sipping Car

If one defines “religion” as a way of viewing the universe in terms of cause and effect, right and wrong, and involving a set of practices and devotions, then environmentalism is a religion, as much as Christianity, Capitalism or even the beliefs and commitments shared by rabid fans of Star Trek The Next Generation. I grew up among both Christians and environmentalists, and I have to say, I think from a “fundamentalist” or “extreme guilt inducing” aspect, the environmentalists I knew win hands down. My mother worked for the League of Women Voters throughout my childhood, focusing her attention on alternative fuel sources. (Also sludge, but that’s not the point of this blog.) My aunt gives us yearly subscriptions to Co-op America and has been advising me against using anti-perspirant since I was too young to perspire. We bought small cars before small cars were cool (or even that small), and my grandmother referred to RVs as “stink pots.” (Ditto all boats that weren’t powered by wind or muscle.) We composted. We recycled tea bags and aluminum foil, even when they had been used, respectively, as many as fourteen times. I regard recycling as a spiritual path of mindfulness equally profound as sitting meditation or yoga or saying the rosary. We use cloth diapers on our baby, Lila (and gdiapers! They work great! See previous post.) So it’s no surprise that I liked the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth. It is a little more surprising that my husband and I have just cashed in all our savings to buy a 2005 diesel with the intention of converting it into what those in the know affectionately term a Grease Car.

A grease car runs on vegetable oil. Yep, the kind you can buy at the Stop & Shop. The kind you put in salad dressing or deep-fry your chicken in. Soybean oil, safflower oil, even olive oil will do. (We’re naming our new car Olivia, by the way; not so much for the oil nor the Popeye reference as for Olivia Newton John from the movie….Grease.) In order to do this sleight-of-pump, one must buy and install (or in our case, have installed) a second tank; the Grease Tank if you will. This tank rests in the well where the spare tire usually is. Then, a fuel line is run into the something or other and you have to operate a switch. You start your car using the diesel tank, and once the vegetable oil is warmed up (a gauge confirms this) you switch over to the grease tank. How do you get the grease, you might ask. If you want it for free (which is part of the point of the whole grease car culture), simply visit a local restaurant, preferably a Chinese restaurant or clam shack where they do a lot of artery clogging deep-frying. Ask the owner if you might have the leftover fryolator oil. They will generally be happy to give it to you since it often costs them to have it disposed of. Then, take home the grease and filter it, since there will be pesky bits of leftover tempura and clam. The filtering situation is a whole other problem, requiring yet another kind of tank. Once you’ve filtered, pour your grease into empty milk jugs. Now, when your grease tank is empty, fill ‘er up. You can even take the milk jugs with you on the road, dispensing with the need to stop at Mobil to refuel; in fact, you can have your rest stop at Starbucks or Whole Foods or Aunt Nancy’s now.

If you haven’t gotten the point already, let me make it for you: this is not for the fastidious. Grease car owners are probably going to get greasy at some point, and even with the best of intentions, so will their car. Said car, when running, will smell like French fries. This is why it’s so incongruous that I of all people am hopping on this particular board.

I’m a girly girl. I like to be clean. Not that you’d know it from the interior of my car, but in theory anyway, I like my car to be clean. Moreover, I know nothing about cars. When I was sixteen, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and while I thought it was a really cool idea—not to mention zen- to get to know your vehicle the way Phaedrus does, I still don’t know the difference between a carburetor and an alternator (I don’t even know what they do, or even whether or not they are in that part of the car that’s under the hood thingy.) I have never changed a spare tire. I kind of know what a transmission is and that it’s bad if it breaks—very bad—but that’s only because I lived for four years in a van that went thorough three of them in rapid succession. In short, I am not handy, especially when it comes to cars.

And, like all good liberals who were brought up to question authority, I notice my passionate authority-busting inner teenager itching to challenge at every turn as I travel this particular spiritual path. So what if I’m using gdiapers? So what, in fact, if thousands of us weirdos are using gdiapers? Landfills are still getting filled at atrocious speeds. So what if I drive on soybeans? If everyone drove on soybeans, we’d run out of arable land in a matter of weeks and the planet would starve to death. And besides, the Chinese are now driving at record numbers which are only climbing; the world’s population is going to be 9 billion in a few minutes. Rather than invent clever ways to get better gas mileage, it remains best to reduce, reuse, recycle—to slow down and do less, drive less, use less, take up less space in the land fills as well as on the freeways. A few weeks ago the New York Times ran a story in their Science Times section called “How To Cool A Planet (Maybe)” about all these crazy ideas of how to stop global warming, including a kind of Star Wars-esque space mirror and a plan to infuse the atmosphere with sulpheric clouds. When are we going to stop overthinking this? When are we going to learn that it’s about doing less, not doing more? So what if I can drive for free, getting 50 mpg? It would still be better to walk into town, ride my bike to Amherst and leave the car at home. Consume less. Live simply so that others may simply live, tread lightly on Mother Earth and all that.

When I am angry and/or exhausted, feeling like my 2 month old in melt-down mode, I want to shut myself in the one air conditioned room in our house and read a magazine. (Not the New Republic either; something really trashing like Shape or People) I have a kind of, “I deserve” mentality that reminds me of the way I used to say “I deserve to eat that sundae since I’ve had such a hard time” when I was an overeater. It’s an adolescent cry of frustration. What I’m really saying is, “Mom, take care of me.” Mom is food; mom is mother earth. To consume is to consume, whether it be food or our precious natural resources.

After we saw An Inconvenient Truth, my husband, Tom said, “We can’t just do things because they’re convenient anymore. That no longer cuts it.” In Walden, Thoreau says, “To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of the arts.” The reason I’ve always thought recycling was a spiritual path is largely because it forces me to be mindful in a very quotidian way. I don’t put my fruit into plastic bags at the supermarket because I know that if I do, I will eventually have to throw away a piece of plastic, so I’m mindful at the supermarket. When I’ve eaten the fruit, I compost the skin and the pit. This brings me down from my habitual home way up in my thoughts (where I’m doing any one of the following: writing a song, obsessing about my weight, thinking about a client, wondering when I can get back to the novel I’m reading or griping about the messiness of the kitchen sink) and connects me to the earth, literally and figuratively. I pour my water into a glass instead of using a plastic bottle because otherwise, I’m going to have to sort that bottle from the trash into the containers bin. It’s a wonderful way to live, to live deliberately instead of mindlessly. To spend my nest egg on a car, however foolhardy, is to impose a new limit on my finances, reminding me to reduce, reuse and recycle for personal as well as political/global reasons. I can’t think of a better use of my money.

Breaking the waters

The fact that Lila’s birth began with the very unexpected breaking of my waters seems like an apt metaphor for what I have so far (in my grand total of two whole weeks) come to understand about parenthood. I had been hoping to avoid what I grew up seeing all around me: parents blaming their children for ruining their lives and children blaming their parents for the same. Parents complaining that the children fed off of them like parasites and that they no longer had any time for themselves; children claiming the parents never really paid attention to them. One big blame game. But here I was with the facts: the amniotic sack ruptured. An act of God if ever there was one. Not my fault. Not Lila’s fault either, even though some people sent sweet notes saying, “She must have really wanted to be with you guys to come so early.” I myself thought she was eager enough to attend the shower that was scheduled for May 6, she might make her entrance early. But given that she had so much trouble breathing once she arrived on the scene, I quickly came to doubt that her early arrival was her own doing. It’s not like she had a Swiss Army knife in there, or even fingernails. No one’s fault; no one’s plan, exactly. It just was.

Lila arrived and immediately, my life turned inside out, like one of those silk scarves magicians use, with one color inside and the other outside. I felt then and continue to feel completely skinless, as if there is no amniotic sack protecting me from the incredible joy and incredible pain of the world. I look down at her lovely little face and the tears well up in my eyes at the thought that she and I won’t be together forever and ever, that I will die, that my parents will die, that she will grow up and have to go through the seventh grade, that she’ll get too heavy for me to hold in one arm, the way I can now (she’s just five pounds.) In short, I don’t want anything to change from this moment of pure perfection. And, as Anne Lamott stated so potently (and accurately) in her memoir of her son’s first year of life (Operating Instructions), if anything were to happen to her, “I would be f-cked unto the Lord.”

A daughter! A little girl! I have to say, I’m relieved. As all my psychic friends plus the majority of the old wives tales insisted me I was having a boy, I prepared accordingly, buying a blue rug with dinosaurs and eschewing anything pink. I love boys, and was looking forward to raising one, but a girl was what I always wanted, especially as my first child. I have two sisters, no brothers, four aunts and no biological uncles. Even my dogs were all females up until Cody. I went to two all girls’ schools, worked in two different girls dorms, taught mostly girls, wrote songs about mostly girls. I know girls. I figure with all the other curveballs parenthood will surely toss my way, it will be nice to be ahead of the game in this one respect.

What I was not prepared for was the overwhelming, physical love for my child which gripped me from the moment I set eyes upon her. She was placed in my hands and I instantly felt my heart grow at least three sizes, like the Grinch’s. Then she was whisked away and placed under oxygen to help her little lungs adjust to the world outside her watery womb. I didn’t hold her again for thirty-six hours, but once I did I haven’t let go, much. Tom gets to hold her (though we fight over whose turn it is constantly) but no one else. Hey, I never said I wasn’t selfish.

My friend Melany is a neo-natal nurse, and she explained the motherhood gig like this: you take in, you take on, you take over. I liked the sound of that, especially the take over part. So I diligently tried to learn everything the nurses told me to do, particularly in the breastfeeding department. As I was resting in the post partum room, one of the post labor nurses informed me that I was anemic following the delivery and needed to eat more foods with iron. “Beef, spinach and yams,” she said, and of course, wanting everyone to like me and think I’m a good little patient, I immediately began my iron rich regimen, complete with an iron supplement. Another nurse, whom Tom swore was an ex-nun, wielded her authority cleverly, by first telling you that all the other nurses were incorrect and/or liars, and only she really cared enough about you to give you the straight truth. Then she terrified you with the consequences of your doing anything other than what she recommended. Her method of making sure Lila was awake enough to breastfeed properly (an issue as Lila was 4 lbs 13 oz at the time) was to vigorously pinch her tiny ears and rub her head so forcefully that I was afraid she’d give my daughter whiplash. Initially. I took this in, and then tried to take it on once home, only to find that there were other more humane ways of getting Lila awake enough to eat. This same nurse also said the reason Lila was gassy was because of all the spinach I ate. “Iron,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Babies just don’t like it.” And again, I had to remember, no one’s fault; this is just one of those situations. And here’s where the parental transformation reveals itself: I immediately stopped taking the iron supplements (though I continue to eat spinach. The idea that spinach has a lot of iron is a conspiracy perpetuated by the creators of Popeye.)

I’d like to veer off topic for a moment to mention that my whole life is about breastfeeding these days. No one really tells you that your body completely stops being your body once you have an infant. I eagerly signed up for breastfeeding when I heard that breastfed babies have way fewer colds, flus, have lower obesity rates as adults, are more likely to be young Einsteins and Michael Jordans, can leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc. etc. Plus, the idea of spending thousands of dollars on formula didn’t appeal when the good Lord gave me plenty of what my child needs for free. But I somehow slept through the part about how you breast feed for a good half hour at a time and have to do a feeding every two hours, three max. Figuring into this equation the fact that premature babies don’t really want to do anything passionately besides sleep, there’s a good fifteen minutes devoted to rousing our teeny child for each feeding. This means, I really am spending more than half my life focused on feeding my baby these days. Once she is latched on and grooving at the job, I have huge impulses to multitask. I want to talk on the phone, check my email, read my Dr. Sears Baby book, have a meal, get Tom to entertain me, watch TV, listen to the new Bruce Springsteen Seeger Sessions CD (a blog topic in and of itself!) and fantasize about doing the laundry and rearranging all the furniture in my house. But if I do these things, I inevitably fail to notice that my baby has fall off the breast and is dangling, half asleep from her little nursing cushion (marketed as-I kid you not-“My Brest Friend.”) Yet another annoying lesson in the virtues of mindfulness.

In the novel I wrote called The Big Idea, there is a character named Rhodie Becket who has a baby named Margarita. Every time Rhodie, a member of a folk band, tried to pick up her guitar and practice a little, Margarita would wail, as if uncannily knowing that the guitar was her main competition for her mother’s attention. Sitting in my customary spot on the sofa with Lila at my breast, I gazed across the room at my own little Martin, once the apple of my eye, standing forlornly on its stand, completely neglected. Once or twice last week, I tried to pick it up. I got as far as tuning it when Lila began crying from her basket where I’d hoped she would take a nap. I had two songs written for her in the womb, which I wanted to sing for her, but she would have none of it. Until today. Today, Tom held her and I sang. I’d like to report that my child awoke, opened her almond shaped blue eyes and gazed at me with sudden recognition and devotion: “That’s the voice and sound I heard so close to my head for all those months in my watery warm little world, the world I inhabited, I thought, alone. But no! She was with me all along!” Nope. Lila just fussed and squiggled around as usual. Her mother, on the other hand, wept big old tears, fusing finally the song with the intended audience. She’ll hear it properly one day, when the time is right. I can wait till then.

On Easter, Being Two Places at Once and Global Warming

On Easter, I wanted to be two places at once. I wanted to be in Long Island with my father’s three sisters and their families. I grew up with these three women, and each one of them is a glorious, lovable and admirable person from whom I’ve learned much and who makes me laugh and think. Their children (I have six cousins) are interesting, funny, delightful people as well, and I don’t see them nearly enough anymore. Holidays with them are more and more rare: we used to spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas together, up until about the year 2000. Since then, marriages, new children, schedules and the general feeling that there are just too many people in the room at cocktail hour have conspired to keep us in different states for many of the holidays.

I also wanted to be with my sisters and their families, who were not into traveling to Long Island on Easter weekend, and I wanted to preach a sermon at my church. Our minister, Stephen Philbrick, is on a four month sabbatical, and we in the congregation are taking turns in the pulpit while he is away. In early March, when trying to make a decision about where to spend this particularly confusing and strange holiday, I realized that if I volunteered to preach on Easter Sunday, my parents would most likely be lured up from Virginia: a pregnant daughter preaching plus the promise of an Easter egg hunt with four grandchildren under the age of five was a sure-fire combination.

The word “Easter” comes from Eostre or Eastre, who was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Thank you, early Roman conquerors for utilizing pre-existing pagan holidays and incorporating the new Christian ones. Knowing this, makes me love Easter more than thinking of it as the painful, difficult story (to me) of Christ’s murder and resurrection. I’m a big fan of infusing Goddess energy into my Christianity. And, being nine months pregnant now, I appreciate the metaphor of early spring as Great Fertility season. I also had spent the Palm Sunday weekend at Kripalu, at a meditation workshop with Sharon Saltzberg. She had said, paraphrasing the Buddha, “When you put a teaspoon of salt into a glass of water, you will have to enlarge the container to dilute the salt.” So I had on my mind this idea of the need to NOT pack a whole lot of salt into my little container, but perhaps instead work on enlarging. Or, to jump traditions, to honor my loved ones, the salt of the earth, but recognize that too much salt overwhelms.

So I stayed, I preached, (sermon is at http://www.nields.com/blog/writing/) we had a fabulous Easter brunch at Katryna’s house, we took lots of pictures of adorable children, and I had one of those days I will never forget. It was certainly the right decision. Nevertheless, I missed my aunts.


Just now, I stood on the porch and watched the creeping green work its way into the trees in our backyard; everything is now green but the forlorn black branched cherry tree. Two years ago it was blooming, but last year nothing came at all; it was as leafless in June as it was in December. Still, it’s very beautiful, and it made me sad to watch Tom cutting it down. I am thinking about the two-places-at-once problem. We want to have a vegetable garden, and cutting down the tree will give us both the space and the sun we need to grow one.

When I called my aunt to tell her I wasn’t coming for Easter, I said, “I miss you. I miss all those years we spent having holidays with you. But I need to make time for my new family now.” With the birth of my two nieces and two nephews, not to mention the two brothers-in-law and my husband, my immediate family has grown by 240%. That’s a lot more salt, and none of us has a house that’s 240% bigger.

I’m the kind of person who hates to make a decision, hates to throw out old clothes, shoes, books, records (what DOES one do with those old, beloved, unplayable LPs?). I hate losing touch with friends; I hate the feeling that I’m not able to see people as much as I want to; I hate wasting food; I hate that fear that I might not have enough. I have four careers, and am contemplating starting a fifth one. My life, as a result, is stuffed; too salty. And I hate the feeling of too salty more than almost anything.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the notion of Global Warming has, as yesterday’s New York Times “Week in Review” section noted, “the feel of breaking news” all of a sudden. I’m not new to this issue; I’ve been one of those nervous Nellies who has felt guilty about using air conditioning, eating seafood and having a lawn since 1989. The article I read yesterday pointed out that it’s very difficult to make people change their actions unless the threat of punishment, retribution and/or disaster is looming in their faces. Another point the article made is that it’s becoming clear that the main source of the green house gasses, which contribute to global warming is not one simple factor. Our six million bodies, in addition to our cars, the heat we use to keep our homes warm, the cows who fart, and the fact that the destruction of the world’s trees and forests lowers the O2 to CO2 ratio, all contribute to this phenomenon. The sheer number of us and our many kinds of emissions; our huge appetite for consumption. And yet, it’s really hard for me to get my head around the notion that if I buy this one tube of lipstick instead of wearing my last tube (with a not nearly as exciting color) down to the nub, I am contributing to global warming. Harder still to think that if I choose to have a child, biologically, which I seem to be doing (5 weeks and counting to the due date), I am adding yet another being to this planet.

As a meditation practitioner, I am also not new to this idea that the wanting mind is at the root of my (and the planet’s) affliction. The Buddha said there were three types of people: grasping (wanting, consumption), aversive (fearful, hateful) and deluded (clueless). I have aspects of all three, but I most identify with the grasping/wanting types. When you get right down to it, I absolutely love life and I want more. Last night as I was driving home, I watched the rain fall, and noticed how it is both visible and invisible at the same time, and I noticed the forsythia in bloom next to the fuchsia rhododendron bushes that line my street, and I felt such joy that my baby is going to know this gorgeous, mysterious, marvelous earth. I immediately thought, “I hope there will be springs when he or she is my age. I hope there will be springs when his or her children are my age.” I want more springs! And I want them forever and ever!

When it comes right down to it, the underbelly of the wanting mind is the desire to avoid loss and grief. I want a vegetable garden AND I want a cherry tree, even if it’s a dead one. I want to keep my two huge crates of old LPs AND I want to use that space in my music room for a bookshelf to keep all my books, and the books my child will surely accumulate. I want the earth to keep on producing beautiful cool springs, AND I want to stay cool on hot summer drives in my car AND I want to eat Chilean sea bass, AND I want to have a lawn, even though to do so is clearly not what my land desires. I let myself get too salty because the coolness and space of the flavorless water frightens me sometimes, leaving me face to face with an emptiness that demands my full attention. But letting the emptiness in—enlarging the container, accepting a little less salt—has always proved, over and over, when I am willing to do so, the most peaceful result. I want to spend Easter with my aunts because I love them and because I don’t want to lose them. It is really, honestly sad that I can’t be two places at once, can’t be with all the people I love at the same time, and that fact creates grief. Sometimes the right answer is just to accept that grief and feel it deeply. To feel the space they once occupied and honor it with presence and emotion.