on the young side of the old people now

as of today, i embark on a new decade. it was a great day. colleagues offering congratulations all day, good wishes pouring in on facebook and instagram and via text and email, a gathering for drinks & snacks at the end of the day that ended in thoughtful gifts, some kinda crazy gifts and much laughter. a big bouquet from husband. and a trip to louisiana, that landmark of modern art, with a friend in the evening. it was a great start to this new phase. my friend mentioned a colleague who said he was super happy when he turned 50 because he was a youngster again - being on the young side of the old people now, rather than on the old side of the middle. i like that thought. another friend said, "if you haven't grown up yet, now you don't have to." i like that as well. i'm weirdly ok with it. it's the next logical step. i started a new project today as well - i'm going to do a daily video for a whole year and put them together, one second each, thereby having a video record of my 50th year. the child gave me the idea. i think it's going to be interesting to think in video. i'll continue my daily photos as well, as that's now completely ingrained in my way of being. happy birthday to me.

think different

there are so many stories in this picture. a tale of a lost captain, far from the sea. or a tale of a tidal wave. or the tale of a lake that dried up, leaving the boat stranded high and dry. being run aground - stories of tragedy and dashed dreams. but instead, i choose to see a story of hope - of faith that the water will come and the boat will float once again.

apple once urged us to think different (the grammar of that always bothered me). a combination of 21 days of meditating with oprah and chopra, months of butting my head against the troglodyte, and a general weariness brought on by the protracted delay of spring has me feeling a strong need to think different(ly).

kylie's thoughts on a support ecosystem, which i linked to the other day, via mel(who has taken the brave step of following her passion towards self-employment) have been tumbling around in my head. as have salman rushdie's musings in joseph anton on maintaining a sense of authentic identity in the face of (even self-chosen) exile. all of this makes being in my head a very confusing place. as rushdie says, 

the migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous instead of homogeneous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed up. was it possible to be - to become good at being - not rootless, but multiply rooted? not to suffer from a loss of roots but to benefit from an excess of them? ... the self was both its origins and its journey.

so as a way of bringing together these fragments that have been circulating in my brain, i've been thinking about how to create a support ecosystem that will cushion the blows of rejection from the culture in which i find myself (by accident as well as choice) when they come (because they inevitably and regularly come).

i think the notion of a support ecosystem is powerful because it contains the feeling of being constantly in flux and adjusting, not static and precarious. i can add and subtract to achieve the sense of balance needed on a given day. one day i might be needing someone to lean on, the next, i may be the one being leaned on. but it's all a matter of interaction and giving (and taking) on all sides. of taking and giving courage and kindness and energy as needed.

and maybe it's not so much a support ecosystem as a cultural ecosystem - trying to retain the best aspects of my culture and meld them much more with the good bits of the culture where i find myself - weaving a more balanced sense of identity that's not so fragile to the blows when they come. because i have to stop feeling every disagreement as a rejection of me as a person and as the denial of my humanity that it currently feels like. i'm not exactly sure how i got to a place where that's what happens. all i know is that it requires too much energy to sustain it and i would much rather channel that energy creatively, into weaving something stronger for myself - identity, ecosystem, culture, life - whatever it be called.

so i'm going to begin to think differently - to look for the positive in every situation instead of defaulting to the negative story. it's undoubtedly a long and slow journey, and a lot of courage will be required along the way, but it seems like one that i need to take. one day soon, that boat will float.

* * *

green cities: worth thinking about.

it is a strange and wonderful universe

i read this op-ed piece in the LATimes the other day. it's written by a professor from arizona state (one of my many alma maters or is it almas mater?).  it's an editorial piece about science and the universe and particle physics and quantum mechanics and a little bit about religion - so light reading. it's not too long, so it's worth popping over and reading it.

as i am wont to do, i've been thinking a lot about it and i even shared it on facebook. as much as i loathe facebook (way more than google, but slightly less than flickr), it is a good place for discussion of such things. one of my friends said this: "Very interesting. We come from nothing... and return to nothing. Confirmation of such will only strengthen blind belief in God - simply because the idea of nothingness is just too enormous and unbearable. IMHO." my initial response to that was, "sad, but undoubtedly true." but it haunted me a little bit.

why is the idea of nothingness too enormous and unbearable? because we have constructed it as such, not because it actually IS too enormous and unbearable. doesn't the notion that we are hurling through a universe of ever-receding and ever-expanding, intangible nothingness actually match very nicely a feeling that occasionally nags us from somewhere deep inside anyway?  to try to explain it through some divine creator lets us off the hook in a way that i don't think is proving to be good for us or for the planet.

i am actually comforted by the notion that the universe could have spontaneously been created out of nothing due to some uncertainty principle. this, for me, fits with life in general - everything is uncertain, as much as we try our best to control it. to know that there is an actual uncertainty principle at work explains a lot.  and i don't find at all that it makes life meaningless or purposeless - on the contrary, it seems that more than ever, life is precisely what we make of it.

stop overthinking and just enjoy

i apparently have theory on the brain...yesterday, cultural capital, today, orientalism.

you may have gathered that i love the philippines. the warmth and genuineness of the people, the food, their creative use of vinegar, the climate, the shopping. i love it all. but in my tendency to overthink and over-analyze, i wonder if i end up, in my deep and abiding affection, in fetishizing a whole nation?

nearly every time i've been to the philippines (and last week was my 17th trip), i have had the opportunity to see a performance like the one depicted here...magically lovely young girls enacting traditional dances from one of the philippines' 7000 islands. hotels almost always have such a show - and i wonder if such shows feed an expected stereotype...a taste of the exotic, served up to hungry tourists.

taal volcano - batangas, philippines

this show, on a friday afternoon, at a lovely hotel overlooking the taal volcano, was performed in a restaurant full of filipinos. looking around, i think myself and my colleagues were the only tourists in the place. which makes me feel a bit less like i'm orientalizing, as i'm sure they hadn't put on the show just for our sake.

maybe sometimes i need to stop over analyzing and just enjoy, because the girls were graceful and lovely and their silhouettes exquisite. and it's undoubtedly perfectly ok to simply enjoy that and not worry too much about it.  when i go back in a couple of weeks, i'll think i'll just sit back and enjoy the show.

empty chairs and empty tables

do rooms retain memories of the things they've seen? could you hear what they've heard if you just listened carefully enough? do they feel sorrow? pride? anger? neglect? do they miss the voices? do they hear them at all? or are they just there in all of their beingness. or are they nothing? empty. space. waiting. liminal.

in the same boat

there are these moments, not moments of perfect clarity exactly, because those are something else, but moments where you suddenly, out of nowhere are able to take in, just for a second, The Enormity of Things. i had one the other day when we took a load of books and things to the house. i had unpacked them onto a shelf so we could take the boxes back home to load again and it suddenly hit me, in all of its fullness, exactly how much work we had to do on the house before it would be as we want it. luckily, it only lasted a second, because otherwise i would have just gone mad from the enormity of it.

i had a similar flash of The Enormity of Things today on the train, when i looked up and saw a strange, goofy, awkward man looking at me. you know how you can feel someone looking at you sometimes? and i tweeted something uncharitable about how i had forgotten about weirdos on the public transport. and then i was suddenly hit by the feeling of how everyone is really just trying to get on with their life in their own way. and our paths cross or they don't, but we're all just living along, inside of ourselves, trying to make our way. and the enormity of all of us going along, living, was just THERE for a second. and then it passed. thankfully most of the time our minds protect us from that knowledge of The Enormity of Things. i think if it didn't, we'd just be paralyzed, unable to move. just sitting here frozen, but in the same boat.

i wonder what it is about right now that's making me susceptible to these gateways of my mind...

finding meaning in stripes

working on a scarf for sabin in soft, colorful cotton

i've made my own striped scarf as long as i want it to be and have only to go down to the local knitting shop and have the nice lady there show me how to join the two ends and then it will be finished. in the meantime, i have turned to one for sabin. she had to have an identical basket to mine for the project and we gathered all of our soft, bright cotton yarns into it and i'll make a colorful scarf for her like mine. she doesn't get along too well with wool, so we thought the cotton was a good solution and it was a way to use some of a stash of yarn that i had acquired out of addiction to the acquisition of colorful, soft things rather than having any project in mind. being an inexperienced knitter, i wasn't sure at first if i liked the cotton, but now that i've gotten a little way in, i do like it and it will be nice for spring, which has finally shown up.

snowdrops - a welcome sight, spotted in the woods at the new house
(and we just officially received word that they've agreed and it really IS the new house!)

last week, i spent time with an old friend who i used to work with and who i will work with again, starting april 1 (convenient to start a new job with 3 days of paid holiday and a weekend, don't you think?). i had my knitting basket with me and was knitting on my stripy scarf. i also mentioned that i had two more weaving lessons left before they were over. he laughed uproariously and made fun of me for indulging in activities that, in his words, only a 90-year-old woman would do. and oddly, that didn't bother me. because i know better. for one thing, i bought my loom from an 80-year-old woman who wasn't going to weave anymore because she was now painting, so there goes the age theory. and for another, craft is cool. here we all are, crocheting granny squares, knitting, sewing, quilting and embroidering. we're outfitting rooms of our houses to accommodate these hobbies. and we're not feeling any shame about it, just because they are homely pursuits (in the sense of home, not ugly).

i've done a lot of thinking about why this trend is so prevalent at the moment and have a few theories. one is that in the face of economic crisis, people simply are doing more around the house - not only are they taking less long-distance vacations, they're thinking about making a cover for that mixer rather than buying one. so the popularity of craft is partially from the desire to spend less, tho' i can vouch for the fact that sewing and knitting are rather expensive hobbies. even more, i think that as so many of us are information workers in one form or another, spending our days in offices, using computers, making elaborate powerpoint slides and excel spreadsheets, we have a longing to make something tangible and real, rather than all of that virtual ephemera. knitting, crocheting and sewing satisfy that longing. plus, we're so removed today from the production of things, that we have a desire to return to the simpler times of our forefathers and -mothers, where people really know how to do things with their hands. a quilt is much more tangible than a powerpoint presentation when it comes to it, so we simply have a desire to have something real that we made with our own two hands.

that dark chocolate brown stripe doesn't entirely fit

of course, i'm not above assigning deeper meaning to the things i've made. when i started the scarf, i consciously decided not to rip anything out and start over, but leave the small imperfections as markers of a learning experience and hopefully, to lend their own charm.  i've been looking upon the stripes in the scarf as a series of events, just as life is made up of event upon event. they build upon one another and the shades of the different events play off of one another. sometimes they clash and other times, they harmonize. towards the end of my scarf, i felt the need to introduce two new colors - a dark chocolate brown and a darker turquoise. interestingly, the brown doesn't work. it doesn't ruin the scarf, thankfully, but it jumps out in a jarring way, just like some of the things that happen in life. also interesting was that i couldn't see it until i had gone past it and added the next colors, so it wasn't until later that i realized how it didn't fit. just like life. but having vowed not to take out stitches once they were in, i have left it, as a learning experience. in life, you don't get a do-over.

in all, i'm pretty ok with the ribbing that i'm doing things a 90-year-old woman would do. those old ladies know how to do stuff and they've seen things. and i'm just fine with that.

asking what if?

what if?

...we looked at the world from a different angle?

...things just fell into place as they should?

...people got to do that which they were meant to do?

...my neck didn't hurt?

...we knew exactly what direction to go?

...beautiful things appeared, fully formed, in our imaginations?

...the snow melted and snowdrops burst forth?

...the sun shined?

...there was time for all of the important things?

...someone brought me a steaming, fragrant cup of milky, sweet tea?

...the whole house smelled of cinnamon buns?

some of these are already true and i have faith that the rest of them will be...