Just Thinking

The requisite posture

Last Saturday we went to the Stone Arch Festival of the Arts and spent part of our time listening to Roma di Luna perform on the City Pages Stage perched on the peninsula of land near Nicollet Island just adjacent to the St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River. The lead singer, Channy Casselle, was a twenty(?)-something young woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and long side-swept bangs and fair porcelain-like coloring. She wore a black tank, a blue-and-black plaid A-lined skirt that fell six inches or so above her knees, brown knee socks, and black boots, which from where I stood appeared to be of unequal heights with one reaching just below her knee and the other, mid-calf. We only stayed for a handful of songs because there were four other stages dotting the river on Main Street, the birthplace of Minneapolis, as well as art booths to be perused and snacks to be purchased in between, but I liked what I heard in those songs. And I admired what I saw in that lead singer and wondered if she might be a good model at the writing desk. She stood on that stage in front of that crowd and sang her songs—eyes closed, face tilted upward, body swaying, foot tapping, shoulders back, arms out to her side and open, not holding on to a single thing.*

*that is, when she wasn’t playing her violin.

I, circa

I bought Robert Clark's Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces last November when Clark came to St. Paul for a reading sponsored by Garrison Keilor's  Common Good Books. Starting to read it, I settled in for 320+ pages in which Clark would weave his life around and through the Arno River, Florence, Italy, and the region's art within the context of the damage caused by the great flood of 1966. Clark was one of my mentors in the SPU MFA program and lived in Florence at the time, flying back and forth for residencies. Every three weeks I received his feedback on my latest writing submissions in a large white envelope postmarked Florence, Italy. I was eager for insight into his life over there while we, his students, had been diligently at our desks.

Clark disappears on page 10. The chapters flow on without him down a timeline of Florence history that begins with Dante and St. Francis, Cimabue and his Crocifisso. Undergirded by a bibliography of more than 120 references, Clark tells the story of how Florence came to be the City of Masterpieces, which is the story of its artists and expatriots.

But where was Robert?

Although surely present as the narrator persona, the "I" had gone into hiding. Since "I" had been there in the first chapter it was reasonable to look for its return on the next page or the next, but the story continued without this character. The Arno floods again and again until the big one. Angels in the form of college students come from around the world to salvage books and art. Photographers, journalists, and art historians take center stage. Finally, on page 261 the "I" returns. The year is 1997 and two pages later, 2005.

In a literary permutation of Where's Waldo? a wave of the author to his reading audience just before he steps away becomes a technique of suspense, much like the gun mentioned in chapter one of a mystery surely will return before the story's end. But more than a technique of suspense, Clark as self, and not just narrator, emerged at the appropriate point on the timeline. Until then the timeline belonged to Cimabue, Vasari, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, George Fairholme, John Ruskin, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Henry James, Bernard Berenson, E. M. Forster, Dorothy Lees, Edward Gordon Craig, Frederick Hartt, Ugo Procacci, Nick Kraczyna, Umberto Baldini, David Lees and many more. Page 261 was Clark's turn. Only here does he return, and we see what he and Florence make of each other.

I like the humility in this restrained use of "I". The point at which any of us intersect a unique moment and a unique place is borne up by centuries of what came before. To assume one's role within that timeline, to withhold the "I" until the appointed time seems respectful and true.

For more discussion of Dark Water, a truly beautiful book, see Greg Wolfe's Good Letter's blog post and Brian Volck's review in Image journal, issue 60. Click here to listen to Clark reading excerpts from the book.

Holy Saturday reading

In this issue of The Other Journal, Eric Severson has an essay about Holy Saturday, the "hiatus in the Christian passion story." I read it this morning and while much of it was over my head, I came away with some new things to think about regarding what this mysterious and silent day may be about. You can find "Listening on the Day of Silence: Khora and Holy Saturday" online here.

Waiting

Blue sky, no clouds. I'm looking out at the backyard. The lawn is waking up, now twice as green as yesterday despite a heavy thatch of brown. Still, there is enough green grass such that two rabbits have been finding sufficient sustenance to warrant grazing the last few evenings. They are amazingly plump after such a long hibernation. The corner of the deck where the flower pot usually sits is empty while the pruned geranium practices resurrection in the basement laundry tub. Along the back of the fence, shrubs are stick bouquets awaiting buds and blossoms. Ferns lay furled underground. A yellow day lily counts down. Lilacs are a month away. Two Adirondack chairs face southwest, the best position to catch the afternoon sun. Empty now, but open. Everything seemingly empty, but open to be filled. Expectancy. Invitation. Promise in this still moment of not fighting against winter, yet not fully alive. This neutral moment before the concert begins.

Great idea: The 3/50 Project

A Minneapolis woman, Cinda Baxter, has started a national campaign to "Save your local economy three stores at a time." The 3/50 Project works like this:

3: Pick three local retailers that you would hate to see go out of business.

50: Spend $50 at those businesses each month.

Simple! Baxter says that if even half the employed population did this, $42.6 billion dollars in revenue would be directed to locally-owned small businesses.

I first heard about this project from a news story on KARE11 last night, but my husband and I have been thinking along these lines ourselves. A great coffee shop in our neighborhood went out of business a couple months ago, and I feel guilty every time I walk past the empty storefront that I didn't splurge on a coffee or scone more often there, even when I knew they were having a hard time of it. We don't want the same thing to happen to our favorite neighborhood restaurant,and so we go there more often than we would typically allow ourselves. They've been offering a great special and we've been taking them up on it. Eating out as civic duty! Seriously, I think about how much this restaurant has added to our community and grieve at even the thought of its disappearance. Then there's the locally-owned gym above it, and the locally-owned grocery store down the street, and the vet and the ice cream shop and the hardware store and the bookstore and ....

Words to be silent by

In a couple week I'll be giving a talk on solitude and silence and so my radar is on hyperalert for things related. I laid the just-arrived issue of Pilgrimage journal on the table and there on the back cover were words from Henri Nouwen:

Somewhere we know
that without silence words lose their meaning,
that without listening speaking no longer heals,
that without distance closeness cannot cure.

My new favorite soup

Digging through my cupboard for a red box of Minute Tapioca, which I thought I had but didn't, I came across half a bag of red lentils, which I didn't think I had but apparently do. Joy! Without even needing to go to the grocery store I can make a batch of my new favorite soup. What I like best about this recipe I'm not sure. Perhaps its the comforting smoothness or bright yellow color of pureed red lentils (they dissolve in a way green/brown lentils don't), potatoes, and carrots? Perhaps its that all the other ingredients are simply carriers of lots of lemon and garlic? Or perhaps its because anything called "potage" is appealing in this cold winter (although the recipe says it can be eaten cold, with even more lemon, so it may be good for summer fare as well). The cookbook's description of the soup says that it is a traditional Jewish soup sometimes called "Esau's Soup." Here's the recipe:

Potage of Lentils

3 T. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 or 2 carrots, sliced
8 garlic cloves, chopped
1 potato, peeled and diced
1 generous cup red lentils, rinsed
4 cups vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
1 or 2 lemons, juiced (go with 2)
1/2 tsp cumin, or to taste
Cayenne pepper, to taste
Salt and pepper, to taste
Lemon slices and chopped parsley for garnish

1. Heat the oil in a large pan. Add the onion and cook for about 5 minutes or until softened. Stir in the celery,  carrots, half the garlic and all the potato. Cook for a few minutes until beginning to soften.

2. Add the lentils and stock to the pan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the potato and lentils are tender.

3. Add the bay leaves, remaining garlic and half the lemon juice to the pan and cook the soup for a further 10 minutes. Remove the bay leaves. Stir in the remaining lemon juice.

4. Pour the soup into a food processor or blender and process until smooth (may need to be done in batches). Pour the soup back into the pan, stir in the cumin and cayenne pepper, and season with salt and pepper.

5. Ladle the soup into bowls and top each portion with lemon slices and sprinkling of chopped parsley.

Source:  The Complete Book of 400 Soups. Annes Sheasby, ed. London: Hermes House, 2008.

Travel companion

An overdue notice from the library hit my inbox last week, but before I return this book I want to make a note of it here. Upon a friend's recommendation I read Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain by Michele Morano. What a beautiful book. There are some books that are life-changing based on their content, and there are some books that are companions along the journey. Grammar Lessons is the latter. Morano's beautiful precise language, keen insights, and dexterous handling of time transcend the generic travel memoir to create a text I couldn't wait to open each night in those moments of relaxation after a long day.

Here's a sample:

"Now I listen and the words float through me in phrases that will never make sense. Now I look around at the faces, the slight smiles, closed eyes, the full-stomached belief in the power of rituals even though not one of us understands what is happening here. Even Chus does not understand, or remember, all of what he's trying to say. This is a poem, a prayer to the dark spirits, a rhyme he tries to call back from the depths of memory. In place of certain lines, he hums, the rhythm held deep within his throat, within the motion of his arm and shoulder. Our faces are beginning to glisten, and I am memorizing the movements, listening to the almost familiar sounds, like Castellano but not quite, like the language of my sleeping dreams, always on the verge of being remembered. The sounds swirl and lift and pour and burn, and I am so open, so thankful for the warmth and the transport back into the part of my mind where language rises and falls like fire dancing on liquid, that I don't notice Chus is humming and humming, dissolving with the last line, the final word, into laughter."

Essays not to miss in this collection are: "In the Subjunctive Mood" and "In Praise of Envy."

(In)voluntary storytime

"Once upon a time," and so it began. An eight-hour train ride seated in front of a child and mother who believed in the virtues of reading aloud. A lot of loud reading aloud. We weren't even beyond the city limits when my frustration at the encroachment upon my personal auditory space began to build. No iPod buds or Bose headphones to block the sound. Yet, I had to admit, her voice was clear and smooth. Expressive in all the right places. Accents! She even sang when the text called for it. It's hard to maintain frustration when in admiration mode. Maybe I could listen, I started thinking. Just sit here and secretly let myself be read to. After all, it had been a long time since I'd heard "The Princess and the Pea." Down went the book I'd taken out of my bag. I settled in. Then came Cinderella and a magical pumpkin and glass slippers that had inexplicably slipped past the reality of midnight's stroke.

Care packages and other causes of worry and guilt

Earlier this month and a couple days before my youngest son went back to school for his last semester of college, we were out to dinner with my parents. Some delicacy came to our attention and I said to him, "Hey, I can include this in your next care package." He and I both laughed, the joke being that I have sent few care packages during his and his brother's cumulative eight years of college. Many mothers box up their son's and daughter's favorite treats and comfort items at frequent intervals and ship them off to schools across the nation to the delight of their children and children's roommates. I have not been one of those mothers. Although I'm reasonably confident I've been a good mother--despite the care package delinquency--I'll admit to a little critic deep inside that gets busy sometimes tallying up my failures, deservedly or undeservedly, particularly now that I'm on the letting-go side of mothering. Like all myths, the myth of the perfect mother is tenacious.

Leslie Leyland Fields, my former SPU MFA writing mentor and now friend, has a new book about other myths of parenting. In "Parenting Is Your Highest Calling: And Eight Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and Guilt," Fields tackles--with honesty and eloquence--distorted ways of thinking about parenting that are 1) not true, and 2) not at all helpful to either child or parent. As I read this book, I underlined what I wanted to remember for being a mother now, but wished that it had been around when I was new to the job. Unlike a parenting book that gives a list of rules (do this, don't do that), this book constructs a mental and spiritual context from which to parent, like a friend along the way. I'll gratefully use it now and give it with enthusiasm to new parents who always seem to receive more than enough onesies and rattles.

Grace on the floor and in the theater

Yesterday morning I sat on my livingroom floor with scissors and tape, cutting up an essay that I've been working on for four months, and then trying to tape it back together in some semblance of sense and order. In between the cutting phase and taping phase, however, was the despair phase in which I was quite  confident I'd been deceiving myself all along about the viability of this would-be essay. The little snippets of white, representing chunks, paragraphs, sentences, and even single words, were like so much litter along the highway.

Anne Lamott says there are really only two prayers: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." Theologicially, I'm not sure I really agree with her, but practically speaking, she is on to something. My audible prayer on the floor was the first variety. Then like a game of solitaire, the moving of snippets began. Uncountable chunks of tape later, thirteen consecutive sections emerged. Order from chaos, and so was triggered the second variety of prayer. I don't want to give too many details about the essay's subject matter (after all I will want readers to buy the book someday :)), but it's a braided essay with strands related to a meal at a Chicago restaurant and to an icon exhibit at The Museum of Russian Art here  in Minneapolis, among other things. I'm now hopeful about the essay, although much work remains to be done on it and a little voice inside nags that those thirteen sections might not really make sense when I take them out again next week.

With my scissors and tape put away, and the taped together streamers of words in a pile on my desk awaiting another day's revisions, I decided, rather impulsively, to go a movie matinee, "Rachel Getting Married," a movie I knew little about other than it was starring Anne Hathaway and involved a wedding. Many times in life there are occasions of coincidence and I tend to regard them as moments of grace. Little--or not so little--nudges or benedictions. A good way into the movie there is a scene of the rehearsal dinner. Wedding party and friends squeezed into a single long table in a small private room. The camera (the entire movie is shot with a hand-held camera) circles the table and the room over and over in this very long scene, stopping to focus on faces and conversations and speeches. The room holds all kinds of people, relationship messes, past embarrassments, future hopes, terrible grief, joy. I was fascinated by the dynamics of all this, and then I saw it: along the perimeter of the room, on all four walls, hung a row of tightly placed icons. There was hardly a shot of a face without an icon or two or four in the background. Part of the theology of Orthodox icons is that they represent divine presence. My eyes welled up when I saw this encircling of the room, not just for the "coincidental" affirmation that my essay may actually be on the right track, but for this stunning visual depiction of humanity and the presence of God. And so was triggered more of that second variety of prayer.

On the care and feeding of ideas

"Anyone who does things carelessly also learns to talk carelessly. But careless, unclear, inexact talk drags into its carelessness and unclarity an idea. My very dear, dear children: don't let yourselves think carelessly. An idea is God's gift and it needs to be taken care of. To be clear in one's ideas, and to be responsible for them, is a token of spiritual freedom and intellectual joy."

From Florensky, Pavel. "My Will." Quoted in Florensky, Iconostasis.

Image Journal's Twentieth Anniversary Issue

 I want to spread the word about a tremendous milestone for a wonderful journal. The 20th Anniversary issue of IMAGE (Art, Faith, Mystery) will soon be available on bookstore shelves and mailed to subscribers. Included are contributions by Kathleen Norris, Ron Austin, Robert Cording, Thomas Lynch, Stanley Hauerwas, Valerie Sayers, Makoto Fujimura, Tim Hawkinson, Mary McCleary, Joel Sheesley, Roger Wagner, Ruth Weisberg, Theodore L. Prescott, Wayne Adams, Alfonse Borysewicz, Catherine Prescott, James Romaine, Ron Hansen, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Sam Phillips, and more. New subscribers will get this issue FREE. Click here for more info. I've been a subscriber for about four or five years and just renewed so as not to miss an issue, this one in particular.

Surviving

The last several months I've been immersed in a six-part project on cancer therapy, a topic that is at once bleak and exciting. Targeted agents in development and genetic profiling for individualized treatment suggest a future of increasingly hopeful outcomes. Nevertheless, the million dollar question for people who receive a diagnosis of aggressive malignancy remains, How long have I got?

Clinical trials in these settings typically use median survival--overall survival or progression-free survival--as the measuring post by which to compare one treatment regimen to another or to placebo or observation. To review statistics 101, the "median" number in a series of numbers is the middle value, with half the numbers above and half the numbers below. For example, if 32 apples are distributed among 7 children, with one child receiving one apple, three children receiving four, two receiving five, and one receiving ten, the median number of apples is four. An understanding of median is important in thinking about survival data because the upper and lower range of numbers in the series doesn't change the median. If instead of 10 apples, the last child in the example above received 1,000 apples, the median would still be four. (In contrast, mean is the average of all the numbers in the series and mode is the most common). In cancer terms, if the median survival is one year, the survival for some is a few months, and for others, many years.

For Christmas 2007, my son gave me a book of essays by Harvard professor and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called The Richness of Life (great title!). One of the essays, "The Median Is Not the Message," is about the hope inherent in statistics, contrary to popular belief. In 1982, Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a particularly aggressive form of cancer with a median survival of eight months. He read everything he could about cancer, this cancer, and survival statistics. Once he realized, with relief, the extended possibility of survival beyond the median, he knew he had time to "think, plan, and fight." He flung his efforts into increasing his odds of landing at the far end of the survival range, which he succeeded in doing, living for 20 more years.

His essay explains in very understandable terms the good news he found through his analysis of statistics. It's worth a read if you have cancer, know someone with cancer, are afraid of cancer, or just want to have some practice looking at a negative situation from a positive point of view. You can find the essay in the anthology I mentioned or on numerous cancer advocacy sites, including here.

It is the day before New Year's Eve and so a more appropriate post on this day might be a hip-hooray for the fresh start ahead, or a musing on how the changing economy colors the outlook for the coming year, or even a preview of what I'll be serving guests as the clock strikes midnight. But I'll stay with this post anyway. After all, what better time to focus on the who-knows-what-is-possible streaming flare of life than hours before a new year begins.

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Figure source: http://www.stat.psu.edu/online/development/stat500/lesson02/lesson02_02.html

New on the stack

Three new books are on my reading stack. Rather than wait until I read them, I wanted to post something about them now, particularly because all three were written by friends of mine. Below are excerpts from their beginnings and something about the book and/or author.

The Lost Daughters of China: Adopted Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past

"In the Pearl River Delta of southern China, the land is criss-crossed by water. Rivers, like long fingers, reach deep into the landscape from the South China Sea, and along their banks fertile soil would seem to promise paradise. The climate is subtropical and mild, rainfall is plentiful, and the fields are patchworked in muted tones of green. Farmers tend their rice in rolling terraces. Water buffalo stand placidly in the fields. Where there aren't rice paddies, plots of elephant-leafed taro and pole beans spring from the ground. Sugarcane grows in profusion, and there are mulberry trees, harboring billions of silkworms...."

This book  is a revised edition of the original 2000 National Bestseller. Evans has updated it to include information about cultural and political changes in China since she first adopted her daughters, and also to include insights into the lives of adopted girls as they are growing up in the United States.

Karin Evans is a lovely lovely (should I say it again for even greater emphasis?) woman. I had the privilege of getting to know her when we were both recent students in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program.

Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying To Tell You

"Love occupies a special place in the realm of human feelings. We identify it closely with human beings at their best, and this is so whether we view ourselves as secular or religious. Love never really goes out of fashion. It is a perennial source of trouble to cynics. Whatever we may believe or not believe, our love, as the song says, is here to stay...."

Paul Martin and I first "met" via correspondence on his original blog some years ago. His current blog, named for the title of his book, is a place of lively and respectful spiritual dialog. Earlier this year, he applied his gracious conversational skills to an interview with me.

World Gone Beautiful: Life Along the Rum River

"When you drive down County Road 4 in Bogus Brook Township, turn onto a tree-lined gravel road marked by a yellow Dead End sign. If you are in a dark or speculative mood you might interpret that sign as a message about our lives (or your own). Keep going, past the black and white Holsteins taking shade under the poplars. If the neighbor hasn't just spread liquid manure on his field, roll down your windows to get a glimpse of the wild pink geraniums blooming in the ditch, and to hear the frogs before they cease all at once as you pass their marsh, and pick up again only when you are driving along the cornfields..."

I met Linda Buturian last summer at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, but she lives outside of Minneapolis (along the Rum River) and teaches at the University of Minnesota. After meeting her and finding out about her book, I went to her reading at Magers & Quinn, one of the few independent bookstores still in existence, and laughed and laughed. The section she read was at once profound and very funny.