How to Be an Adult

Kali Time

2009-11-10T10:58:00.001-08:00

In yoga class on Friday, my teacher talked about the goddess, Kali. Unlike some of her colleagues, she is not a lovely vision of refinement and beauty. Instead, she's kind of grotesque, with a blue face, her tongue sticking out and a necklace of skulls around her neck. "She wears her insides on her outsides," my teacher explained. She's the goddess of death, of dissolution, of decay. She's the goddess of time, too, and when we see deeply, we see how wonderful she is. "The beautiful leaves, when they die and fall off the trees, fertilize the earth for the next season," said my teacher.

I could see that. If there were no death, this planet would be even more hopelessly overpopulated than it is now. Of course we know this in theory, but that doesn't make it any easier when we lose someone we love. And while my greatest struggle these days is my story that there is "not enough time," the truth is that our time limitations are tremendous gifts, because they force us to make choices. It's within the framework of these choices that we see what really matters to us. It's within this construct that we live our lives.

There is no equivalent in Greek mythology to Kali. The closest goddess of this kind might be Hera who, though beautiful, was jealous and vicious. Medusa is very Kali-esque, but she was no goddess, just a punk Gorgon.

In the Tantric tradition, which is the school of yoga in which I am immersed, Kali represents the Ultimate Reality, Byron Katie's What Is, which I continue to believe is nearly as helpful to worship as that loving, steadfast God/Mother of my own understanding. My hope is that over time, these two will merge for me, but I'm not that wise yet. I respect Kali in her guise as What Is. I love my conception of God––Father, Mother, Black Madonna, Holy Spirit–– the way I love my parents, husband, children, sisters, dear ones.

Kali followed me around all day on Friday, and by evening when our I Wanna Be A Woman Like Me creativity retreat started, she had me by the throat and insisted I dedicate the weekend to her. It was good timing; as I posted last week, we are full on within the season of Scorpio, which is Kali time for sure. Scorpio is about going deep; it's about death; it's about psychological probing, turning inwards, meeting our deepest fears about being unlovable, not good enough, not having enough. And, when we bravely go "down there" and meet these fears, sit with them as if they weren't monsters until they cease to be, we rise like the phoenix, or the Scorpion Golden Eagle, and we are given the gift of sight.

So we gathered together, thirteen amazing women, and wrote together, bringing forth our inner Kali and forging the kind of bond you only get when you are brave enough to share deeply. We ate delicious healthy food. We painted and drew and sang in three-part harmony. On Saturday night, in her father's arms en route to bed, Elle announced in a small, shy voice, "I want to be a woman like me."

I figure my work is pretty much done now.

So many highlights. One big one was that this was the first time Katyrna has co-lead with me, and what a joy to work with her! I think we should go into business together. (Oh, yeah...) It was awe inspiring to watch the magic happen with each woman as she brought forth her inner treasures. I felt refreshed and renewed and reminded again about how much I love to draw and paint and color and work with my hands.

On Sunday, we made vision boards. I had intended to do the whole The Secret thing with mine; trying to manifest HUGE THINGS FOR MY CAREER! through pasting images onto a board and searing them into my consciousness. So I took a photo my mother had sent me of Pete Seeger's 90th birthday party last May. Onstage is Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Dave Matthews, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Pete himself. I cut out an image of myself playing the guitar and glued it into the picture so that if you squint it sort of looks like I'm on stage with them all. But then my collage got away from me. I ripped through a bunch of yoga journals and kept being drawn to the face of Angela Farmer, a 71-year-old yoga teacher from the Greek island of Lesbos.

So I pasted her in. Then I cut out and glued on some family photos that had been waiting to be organized, some more yoga poses, some quotations, an image of a lovely painting of a farmhouse. So much for my grand ambitions. Later in the evening after the retreatants had gone home, I sat in meditation and visualized myself on stage with those luminaries from the photo. I was able to do it easily; after all, I actually have been onstage with Joan, Tao and Pete, and it wasn't too much of a stretch to put Bruce and Dave M up there too. So I put myself on stage with Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, definitely my two greatest musical heroes who are still alive. Again, not too hard. It would be fun to be onstage with them, but when I think about the end of my life, lying on my deathbed, pouring through my dearest memories, I suspect that even if I were to be onstage with any of the above, those memories wouldn't crack my top 100. What I want for my future today is deep, loving connections with my husband, children, sisters, parents; I want a strong, healthy body that grows more flexible with age, that weathers well. I want an ever deepening connection with all the forms of God, even the scary ones. I want to love. I want the vision of my vision board, which as it turns out, is a pretty clear reflection of what I already have.

Thank you, Kali.

Samhein

2009-11-10T10:57:00.001-08:00

The Nields-Duffy house is a veritable house of virus currently. Elle's teacher is in the hospital across the street with H1N1 (maybe-she's being treated for it but they can't diagnose yet), and three of four of us have succumbed to a stomach virus (Jay has thus far been protected by breast milk antibodies). Our two main babysitters both bowed out at certain (critical) moments last week.

On Halloween, I dragged myself out of the house and trotted down the road into town to a yoga class. It was warm and drizzly, and the room was packed. Someone passed a blond wig around the room, and our teacher Amy finally put it on the statue of Hanuman, the Monkey God who can take a joke. Halloween, she said, is the pagan new year, also known as Samhein, pronounced "Sowen" (sow like cow, emphasis on first syllable.) It's the time of year when we turn to the darkness, we turn within. The root of "intention" is connected to "turn." (Yes, we did some twists in class). The world gets darker and darker for the next six weeks, and this darkness is the best, most auspicious time to plant these seeds of intention.

It's also the season of Scorpio, the sign of death, depth, determination and occasionally despair. Scorpio is known as the scorpion, but the lesser known avatar is the golden eagle, who rises up like a phoenix and sees farther and better than any other creature. So this is the season of seeing deeply, as well.

So it was fitting that the day after Halloween we also lost an hour of daylight in the afternoon, which always prompts me to turn inward in the evening, cozy up a bit earlier to the kitchen table and put on an extra sweatshirt. Tom and Elle planted last fall's garlic buds on Sunday, and we went up to our church for the first time in weeks. I sang a new song, "Back at the Fruit Tree," my ode to Samheim, and Steve preached about the slow recession of fear in his own experience which gave me great hopes for my future years.

I love this season of Scorpio, as brutal as it can be. I used to be afraid of it, but a dear friend many many years ago told me that if I were willing to sit with my worst fears, really stay with them, they would lose their bite and become like sad and lovable dogs. That friend died in a car crash on Halloween eight years ago.

This season––the six weeks between Halloween and Christmas–– holds such opposites in union, and like magnets whose poles are aligned against each other, the opposites slide off each other in jarring ways. On Sunday afternoon, a perfect New England fall day, as I started my run through the park, marveling at the mottled light through the few still clinging leaves, I saw that someone had spray painted racist slurs and "white power" on the road and the signs and the benches. My mind swung like a pendulum: Horrible! Those kids should be locked away! But they're just confused kids. But so were the kids at Columbine! Beware! Stop them! Lock them up! But silencing them like that will only make them martyrs for other confused kids. And so on.

Halloween contains this truly horrifying aspect, as well as the more traditional graveyard kinds of fears; and it contains the parade shuffling down Main Street in Northampton; a collection of giraffes, princesses, pirates, witches, Star Wars and Wizard of Oz characters and portable-sized ladybugs. It contains the trilling of little voices finding their power in "trick or treat!"

And the season has its share of dark days where it's still too soon for the reprieve of the white snow cover to relieve our eyes; where many of us legitimately feel the spiral down into the darkness and fear that we'll never bounce back up. I don't feel this way today. In years past, I've thought I had SAD. This year, I am embracing the darkness. (Also turning on the lights in the house and playing a lot of music.)

Last week I posted about my disappointment in seeing various aspects of aging in my 42-year-old face. As I grieved my twenties and my twenty-eight-year-old skin which is as dead as the Berlin Wall, I told Tom, "This is going to be good. I need to do this now so I can move past it and embrace aging. But right now I need to be sad." And so I was for a few days. Good and sad. Viruses are helpful with this, in that being sick forced me to be still and contemplate. As the life returned to me, I tried on a bunch of old clothes from the 90s and I and my inner 28-year-old both agreed that they were passe anyway. I put on a sweater from J. Jill and my clunky practical shoes and made some phone calls to older friends who can laugh and sigh and nod and remember what it was like to be 42, right at the midpoint where some still call you young and some, according to my husband who is 47, have no qualms about calling out, "Hey, old man!" as we pass on down the street. And what I learned is that if you love what is, life just gets better and better and richer and sweeter. My grandmother's cheeks were the softest skin I ever felt. Her hands with what she called "liver spots" were so gentle. In my yoga class on Halloween, as I sat in meditation, I vowed to love my body incrementally more with each day that passes. And does my body deserve it! It's survived two pregnancies and childbirths, breastfeeding, not to mention the ridiculous shoes I made it wear in the 90s when every night we loaded in and out of rock clubs around the country, a feat akin to moving a small apartment twice a day.

And my intention goes beyond my own body. Liberation for all who struggle with the jowels and the wattles and the gray hairs! The most radically feminist thing I can do is choose to love my body exactly as it is, exactly as it changes day to day. I think Anne Lamott has a piece in which she discusses her jiggly thighs and refers to them as "the aunties." I love that. In this season of the witch, let's claim Halloween as our own celebration of the crone. My former mother-in-law told us, after she turned sixty, that she suddenly became invisible to the culture. Older women, she said, are either vilified, ridiculed or ignored. But real witches, real crones have wisdom, kindness, power and magic. They are full of the mystery of life, which they generously share if asked nicely. If I ever forget that, I have only to think of my friend who died on Halloween, one of the wisest, most generous, magical women I've ever known.

When I was a young teen, the idea that a woman could rock out was hard for me to get my mind around. There was Heart. There was Pat Benatar. There had once been Janis Joplin, but she was long gone. But by the time I was in my twenties, the popular music scene was dominated by women. Same with Country. Same with Jazz. Though the pendulum seems to have swung a bit the other way in the last decade, I have no doubt it will swing again. I have no doubt that we'll see a woman president in my life time. And I choose to believe that older women will be a powerful, wonderful, inspiring force in the world in the next twenty years. I have to. I see the generation of girls coming along, and there is no force on the planet that can hold these young ladies back.

And if I'm wrong about the power shift, the paradigm shift, that's ok too. The shift has occurred in me. I will still love my aging face, the aging faces of my friends, the graying, the sagging. It's such a waste of time and love not to.

So happy Samhein; happy new year. What is the darkness in you that you think can't afford to be met with light? Is it safe in there? Can you go to it and nurture it, like a mother to an inborn babe? Can you plunge down into the darkness, and like the eagle, rise up, see far, and tell the rest of us what you see? Can you go by yourself, knowing that in just a few weeks it will be Thanksgiving, and you can choose to invite in those you most adore to hunker down with and eat the fruits of the harvest, of all your hard work?

That's what I'm planning on.

Smiles Raise Jowls

2009-11-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.

It is autumn, and dead leaves
On their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows
Or tick on the road.

Somewhere there is an afterlife of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with infinite sighing.
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfillment.
-Derek Mahon

I love this time of year. There is nothing more beautiful to my eyes than the light shining into my bedroom in mid-afternoon, filtered through the golden maples leaves to the west; the unflinching blue of the sky, the stateliness of the oaks, still holding on to their leaves when other trees are bare. I love the dying gardens, the shock of the asters and mums still blooming in my neighbor's garden. Are you still here? I ask them as I pass on my morning run. Meanwhile, i am solidly in long johns and wool socks, refusing to leave the house without some ludicrous head covering.

But this year the dying of the light is getting to me, as is the general mood of anxiety about H1N1 and the recent plunging of the Dow. Last Friday, I scrambled to get to a hair appointment which I'd broken once already because I'd double booked myself. As I sat in front of the mirror, I noticed to my horror that my face had fallen.

Is this even an expression people still use? My mother told me, when she was my age and I was fifteen or so, that faces fall, "like this," she said, pulling the skin on either side of her mouth down, creating jowls. "A face lift is when the doctor pulls it all back up and sews it behind your ears. You can see the wrinkles in old people behind their ears where the pulled-up skin would go." She made noises about not ruling out a face lift now that she was "that age." (For the record, she never did it, nor does she dye her hair which is still, in her mid-sixties, mostly dark brown. I have inherited my father's hair.)

So there I was, forced to stare at my reflection for an hour and a half. Usually I like to do this. I have a practice that's all about engaging myself in the mirror and telling myself kind things to make up for the abuse I hurled on my reflection as a nineteen year old. But something in the fallen jowls bummed me out, and that line from "Maggie Mae" went around and around in my head: "The morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age."

I really thought I'd be more evolved than this, so part of my angst was a disappointment in myself for being so vain. I wrote a song about plastic surgery in 1992, so now I can never have it, which is good, because I am terrified of knives. But somehow I thought I'd be immune to certain aspects of the aging process, like, oh, the whole wrinkles thing, the neck wattle, the sagging, the spread. Pretty much all of it, actually. Somehow last Friday, it felt like one of those storms that arrives this time of year and whips the last of the red and orange leaves off the trees in one fell swoop, changing the season from autumn to fall overnight.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that there are some people who are always going to focus on the first noble truth of Buddhism ("Life is suffering") and some others who are going to focus on the third ("There is a way out of suffering.") The greater part of my spiritual work is about deep acceptance. I am like the prisoners of infinite choice in the poem above, and I have been saved over and over by having limits forced upon me and then figuring out why that limit is the best thing that ever happened to me. But I also believe some of that Law of Attraction stuff about manifesting our desires. It certainly seems to happen to me on a pretty regular basis. (But not all the time.) I am after all a life coach, and the bulk of my work is to see ways in which suffering can be alleviated.

We had a show at the Iron Horse on Friday. These shows tend to be restorative. They are opportunities for us to take a good accounting of where we are artistically. We tend to debut new material at the Horse, and Friday was no exception. In fact, I had spent the previous week in a frenzy of songwriting, finishing two songs and writing two more besides. On Friday, before the fated hair appointment, I had missed my yoga class because George Harrison (our chocolate lab) had wandered out of our yard when sleep-deprived Tom had opened the gate instead of closing it. (I didn't mention that last week, and this week too, our children have re-discovered that when they cry for us in the night, we respond. They are liking this a lot, and no one is sleeping much.) So Tom went looking for George while I brought Elle to school and was too late for yoga. Instead, I came back home and wrote an entire new song in about a half-hour.

We arrived at the club, my two kids in tow, our beloved Patty not there because she was recovering in New Jersey from having donated her kidney to her sister's husband's nephew. It felt so strange not to see her there; she's an integral part of our Iron Horse experience, not to mention we were concerned for her recovery. Elle had dressed me in a shirt that fit me in the 90s. On Friday, its silky buttons kept opening at inopportune moments onstage. Our dear friend Jonas was filming the show. My dentist was in the audience, as was my minister and some of my best friends. Elle and Jay ran back and forth in the aisles, and as I sang and tried to keep my shirt closed, I kept track of their comings and goings.

The show was not sold out. I am not sure if this was the first time we had failed to sell out the club, but it certainly was the most noticeable. Capacity is 180, and our ticket sales were 140, so it wasn't terrible, just not the usual manic energy one receives from a full house. I watched the stories swirl around about aging and diminishing numbers and concentrated instead on authenticity and the way my sister's voice sounds when mine joins it; the fun of playing with Dave Chalfant and the magical elements he brings to our music. We debuted two new songs and I felt vital again, the way I only can when we are singing new stuff.

But part of me went to that place of being mad at myself for not working harder to envision a sold-out show, to manifest a Beatles-like career, to be a straight A student in the music world. Part of me is still struggling with acceptance about the numbers. Part of me still takes it personally, even though numbers are down at the Iron Horse, among all of my other musician friends and across the board in the music world, folk, pop, rock, hip hop, even country. Why would it be different for me?

A few things helped right off the bat. I remembered that whenever I feel this way, I'm about to hit my edge and see things differently. Nirvana is samsara, and samsara is nirvana. Sadness and grief always lead to epiphany and a new re-ordering. We grow. Also, I had to go to the dentist to have a filling replaced. By the time I came in, it was Tuesday and I had mostly digested the spiritual lessons of the weekend. I was grateful again: grateful that I have had exactly the life I have. Grateful for library books, for the color of my son's hair, for the warm sunny days we had at the end of the weekend, for my yoga practice. On Monday I had gone to a different class (because my teacher was sick) and learned the term Anava Mala, which roughly translated means, "a limited, veiled view of the soul; a minimizing view." When we are in this mode, we experience a false duality. We see ourselves as separate from God, and our ego blooms. I did my practice and reconnected with my body, wept for being so mean to my jowls and forgave myself for my vanity. So I was in a better place in the dentist's chair than in the hairdresser's.

My dentist and her assistant had photos up of all sorts of scenes in nature, including shots of lions and South American primates as well as their two dogs. I meditated on the photos as they drilled and vacuumed, and I began to worry about their livelihood. Does a dentist make enough money in this economy? My dentist is extremely reasonably priced, and I calculated her hourly rate and the number of employees she has, and became concerned. Then I thought about how much this might be costing me; I'd neglected to ask. Oh, well, I thought. Whatever it costs, I am glad to support these folks. I love them. And I did. I just felt waves of love fill me, even as my tooth was being drilled. Eventually they took the purple mouth dam out of my jaws and I was able to blurt out, "I just love you guys! You do such amazing work!"

"Well," said my dentist. "I wanted to tell you the same thing. We were really moved by your show on Friday. And so we want to offer you--you and your family and Katryna's family--a permanent discount on dental services. Because of the work you guys do for the community."

Gifts come in all sorts of ways. As an audience member, I much prefer a moderately full room to a sold out show. The people who came to our show had a great time; no one other than we cared or noticed that every chair wasn't filled.
And smiles raise jowls. That's the best plastic surgery there is. I'll take my two kids outdoors on a sunny autumn Sunday over the version of me who became a huge pop star any day. Anyway, that version is off somewhere in the afterlife of dead leaves. God bless her.

Marmoset Thoughts

2009-11-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

Please don't throw eggs at me for posting this picture of Cesar Millan, AKA "The Dog Whisperer." I know some of you have strong feelings about his horribleness as a dog trainer (see under "comments" here) and I want to reassure you that I am not endorsing him in any way as such. In fact, I did rent three Netflix discs worth of his TV show and was only able to watch one and a half episodes of the program, each clocking in at 20 minutes. I found the show strange and disturbing and not entertaining, so I sent the discs back (also giving up on training my dog George Harrison, but that's another story. George Harrison is great, by the way. Totally not pooping on the carpet and mostly not eating our food since we started keeping it on top of the refrigerator.)

This particular image comes from Sunday's New York Times. I am posting it because I have a huge marmoset reaction to it every time it enters my field of vision.

The marmoset reaction is a term coined by my mentor, Martha Beck. She uses it to denote the look one has when one does a double-take, as marmosets are famous for doing (when something interests them, they kind of twirl their heads and bug their eyes out). She says we need to pay close attention to these reactions in ourselves because they are pointing us to the truth (or at least to something really cool, something one simply must have like this Irish cable knit sweater which I covet. I've wanted one since I was sixteen and my former best friend Leila Corcoran showed up from boarding school one Columbus Day weekend wearing one, but I digress, and I'm not sorry. In fact, I am going to find a picture of it and post it now.)

Anyway, as I examined my strong positive reaction to this image of Cesar Millan, I realized what impresses me most is his carriage. I was impressed with his carriage in the Dog Whisperer videos too. He stands with such natural authority, so full-chested, leading with his heart the way my Anusara yoga teachers do. Would you mess with him? I wouldn't.

My family spent four blissful days in the mountains of the Adirondacks, a place we spend as much of our free time as possible. I have been coming to a small town in the high peaks since I was a baby (before then, actually, but again: another story) and I find the mountain air, the lack of internet, the birches, the bald peaks refresh me more consistently and predictably than anything else. My whole family loves it there, and part of the fun is the four hour drive during which we listen to my iPod. On Friday's drive, we found a talk by Martin Seligman on TEDTalks, a wonderful and amazing resource that all should discover. Seligman has been studying the art of happiness for over thirty years, and as such, he tell us that there are three kinds of happiness one may pursue in order to live a "happy" life.

The first is to seek and attain a life of pleasure and positive emotions. Pleasure is defined by gaining sensory delights: food, sex, beautiful vacation homes, Irish cable knit sweaters, etc. Positive emotions come from being in satisfying relationships, love, marriage, parenthood, deep long lasting friendships. It's about feeling.

The second is to seek a life that's about flow: finding work that is absorbing and engaging, or finding a hobby that is like that. Golf, bridge, gun running, doesn't matter what, as long as you lose track of time when you do it. It's about not feeling.

The third way to a happy life is through meaning. Seligman writes, "A meaningful life consists of again knowing what your highest strengths and talents are and using them in the service of something that you believe is bigger than you are." It's about feeling it all--happiness, sadness, rage and fear--and learning to surf on a wave of equanimity.

As I posted earlier this month, I am reading Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code, which is all about how deep practice creates skills in the practitioner. Deep practice is when you engage your focus, take action toward a goal (say, playing a scale or throwing a football pass), make mistakes, correct them, and get it right s-l-o-w-l-y. It's that feeling you have when you really want to achieve something and you're not quite getting it. As awful as that might feel (to me it feels so awful I often quit before the miracle happens), this is what creates myelin, and myelin is what creates talent. I've been trying to apply this to everything I do: parenting, guitar playing, singing, being a wife, friend, coach, writer, housekeeper, lightbulb-changer, etc. There's something in Cesar Millan's stance that speaks to this yearning to improve, especially in the realm of present moment living. He is so there. His very presence connotes presence. His story is inspiring too: he only just became legal here after immigrating in the early 90s. With very poor English, he had aspirations to be on television. His employer, Jada Pinkett, who later became his student, told him he was not yet ready for prime time but encouraged him to pursue his dream.

He's hugely rich now, and I am sure he is able to fulfill all his earthly desires. But what Seligman's work concludes over and over again is that a life of pleasure does not lead to long term happiness. As we all know, there are diminishing returns to pleasure: one bite of chocolate cake is heavenly, the next OK, but by the end of the slice, we're not really tasting it anymore. Eat a whole cake and you feel sick and disgusted. It's the same with anything, even vacation homes and cable knit sweaters (in fact, I'm sick of them already, having spent ten minutes googling them online.)

He's also engaged in his work. The article in the Times talked about how passionate he is about his dogs, how he and his wife Ilusion have built an empire around his work. But does he live for something greater than himself?

I don't know. But I like the way he holds his body. And all this gives me the courage that one can indeed unite practice and play, a question I was struggling with a few weeks ago. In fact, it is in finding one's calling in life--one's mission, one's purpose--and pursuing that that all three forms of happiness come together. For if one does what one does best--in Cesar's case, train people to better live with and love their dogs--one makes the world a better place. And often this leads to wealth, friendships, relationships, and excellent food. Or Irish Fisherman pullovers. But these pleasures that create positive emotions are, as Seligman says, the cherry on top of the sundae. The sundae is the meaning and the flow.

So how does one find one's calling? Sometimes it's obvious, as it was for Cesar. He was known as El Perrero ("the dog man") from the age of seven. For others of us, it's a process rather like the game of Hot/Cold. In order to play this game properly, of course, we need to know what we are actually feeling, which for some of us is no small trick. Do we like the mountains or the ocean? Or both? Do we prefer working with people on a team or working solo? A little of each? Hotter. Colder. Ice cold. Warmer, warmer, warmer. On fire!!

We also know because if we find something we love, we lose track of time. We would pay someone to let us do it. This is the way I felt today when I got to host my first Writing It Up in the Garden teleclass. As I listened to the nine other amazing writers on the line encouraging each other's writing, finding the bits that could improve, I felt as deeply satisfied as I can remember feeling. And even before I was on the call, as I read over and listened to the work of the writers and songwriters, I lost track of time. This is also how I feel when I myself am writing, be it songs or prose. It's how I feel when I am cooking a big meal for a dinner party. The marmoset in me sits up and notices, and it's as simple as, "All right! Let's do more of that, please!"

And I may be naive, but I believe that writing for writing's sake gives meaning to a person's life. I have found for myself and for others that while one is writing, something changes in an alchemical way. I need to write the way I need to exercise, the way I need to eat carrots, the way I need to connect with my husband or other beloveds. I need to write the way I need to pray and feel the presence of something greater than myself. Writing gives meaning to my life, and because I have seen it transform the lives of my friends and clients, I know I'm not alone in believing that.

Plus, I finally found the perfect Irish sweater:

Lions and Tigers and...

2009-10-05T19:16:00.001-07:00

"Oh I was always afraid. but I never let it stop me. Never."-Georgia O'Keefe

A few weeks ago, back when it was still warm in the mornings, I started out on my daily run. I was fiddling with my iPhone trying to find a satisfactory podcast to listen to, changing my mind, changing the volume, looking for the place where I'd left off. By the time I'd settled on a story and was ready to pay attention to my run, I was well into the park across the street from my house. I lifted my head to take in my favorite part of the route--the crest of the first hill, after which it's downhill for awhile--and I found myself staring into the eyes of a black bear.

In all truthfulness, the bear was a good twenty yards away in a copse adjacent to the path, but he definitely met my gaze. The one thing I know about black bears is that when you encounter one, you should not run lest they think you are a meal worth pursuing. So I slowly turned and attempted a saunter out of the park. I almost bumped into a red Saab. The driver rolled down his window and said, "That bear just followed you into the park! I was watching him, and I thought I'd better follow you in too. He walked right past you into those trees over there. Do you want a ride out?"

"No thanks," I said, as the one thing I know about strange men in cars is that you should not get in with them. "I'll just leave now." And I did. I ran for twenty minutes on the streets of Northampton, circling my park and keeping an eye out for more bears. Because it hadn't occurred to me before, but of COURSE there were bears in the woods! Northampton is replete with bears, and we had one on our porch last fall (which I wrote about here.) Why wouldn't they choose to frequent the park? If I were a bear that's where I would go!

The next day, I ran into the park, right past where I'd seen the bear. I can't say I wasn't afraid, but I knew that if I let my fear win, I'd lose something crucial, not the least of which would be my beloved route.

I'm not always brave like that. Fear is a funny emotion, and someone who is brave enough to join the army might not be brave enough to speak in public. Someone who is brave enough to confront her boss on a tough issue might not be brave enough to get through an evening without eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's. As I wrote last week, I'm just beginning to discover that part of my inclination to start (and often finish) hundreds of projects, take on several careers simultaneously (musician, writer, life coach––hey, maybe I'll be a yoga teacher! Maybe I'll go to Div school and become a minister! etc, etc) is a way of not facing the truth about where I am at with some of these projects. If we had sold a million CDs, I would not be career-hopping. By constantly jumping from one project to another, tossing my little fledglings out of the nest and then immediately hatching new ones, I am shying away from my own disappointment.

I'm afraid of disappointment.

When we first started out, we encountered a cadre of older folksingers, mostly men in their fifties, who were in charge of or participants in the open mic nights we frequented. Some of them were really kind to us, encouraging and friendly. Some others regraded us as young upstarts and talked about us behind our backs, dismissing us as pop (which we took as a compliment) and fleeting (which we refused to be). There was a lot of bitterness in the way they talked about their "almost made it" moments and in the way they proclaimed their has-been status. The bitterness frightened me, and we vowed never to succumb to it ("I drink the drug of hope/With my breakfast/To ward off bitterness.") One way of combating the potential bitterness is to never acknowledge disappointments, to always spin them in a positive way. We have become masters of the silver lining, queens of making lemonade out of lemons.

But there was a lot of disappointment, too.

This past weekend, we drove out to Walton, NY to perform at the majestic Walton Theatre, an old vaudevillian venue. It was a great drive; a beautiful autumn day, the views full of crimsons and golds, greens and blue blue sky. Katryna and I brainstormed about our creativity retreat (the theme will be "I Want to Be a Woman Like Me," which is a line from our song "Georgia O" and Katryna will take a portrait of each participant. We will write, paint, draw, make paper mache bowls with favorite quotations, do vision boards, and of course, sing....) We got to see our aunt Elizabeth, a potter from nearby Gilbertsville, staying up way past our bedtime to reminisce and laugh with her.

But five minutes before the show, I peeked through the velvet curtains. There were a scattering of people in the old theatre, none of them familiar (besides our aunt). Sometimes when this happens, I just ignore it, move forward, do the show. That night, I felt like crying.

"There's a lot going on tonight!" the promotor reassured me. "Homecoming, fall weekend, blah blah blah." I still felt like crying. Katryna gave me a great pep talk which I only heard afterwards: "It's amazing that 100 people paid so much to see us! We need to play to the people who are here, not the people who aren't." Still, I felt deeply disappointed. But then I remembered that I was trying to feel these things in general, and that feeling was good, even bad feelings. So I turned to Katryna and said, "We are brave! Lots of folksingers would have given up long ago in the face of dwindling numbers, but look at us! We're still doing this!"

Brave or stupid, one might say. But I didn't say that. I still felt like crying for the first two songs and couldn't say a word to the audience. Then I got into my body (best trick ever) and did the breathing thing. The third song was "This Town Is Wrong," which is about two girls who leave the town that doesn't understand them to pursue their dreams of being musicians. I almost laughed. I didn't laugh, but I didn't want to cry anymore, and from that moment, I fell back into my groove.

Earlier Saturday, I had taken Elle to her first Suzuki "concert." I will have to write another post on Suzuki at some point. The whole experience was fabulous. But what I want to say here is that the kids, all between the ages of 3-5, played many many different versions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and not much else. Earlier today, Jay was playing with an electronic toy that had the tunes to "Old Macdonald," "London Bridge" and "Twinkle Twinkle," and without really focusing on it, I kept noticing how superior a tune "Twinkle" was to the other two. I had the thought: "Wow, Mozart wrote his greatest hit at the age of 4. He died penniless in a pauper's grave. It was basically all downhill from age 4." Now of course, I don't believe that. But in a certain frame, one could see his life that way, instead of recognizing that in between "Twinkle Twinkle" and the pauper's grave he wrote some of the best music the world has ever heard, and incidentally forever changed Western music. (Which reminds me of a distinction my fellow MB life coach Pam Slim made to me the other day: if you have a problem with the word "fame," try "reach" or "impact" instead.) We put our stuff out there, and the world judges it and renders a verdict. It's up to us to either believe it or ignore the judgements and just keep creating for the joy of creating.

Elizabeth is a great example of the artist who creates out of the sheer joy of it all. She lives in a kind of potter's paradise which she and her late husband Roy built together in bucolic western NY, and she weaves all sorts of strands through her work: family, food, sensuality, elephants, spirituality, nature, architecture, mythology. She approaches individuals and art with so much spaciousness, compassion, good humor and optimism that to spend time with her is to be similarly infected. She lives with great relish, and her art reflects that. She is going to be 70 at the end of next year. Her work is better, richer, more colorful, deeper, more fun, more serious, more wonderful than it's ever been––and I have always been a fan of her work. She is not living in fear that someday she will be a has-been. She always has a new set of pots to discover on the wheel.

And I bet she's not afraid of bears, either.

Practice and Play

2009-09-29T16:38:00.001-07:00

In my yoga class last Friday, the substitute teacher whom I love and haven't seen for awhile asked me how I was doing.

"Could you talk about resistance?" I said.

I have a tiny daily yoga practice in which I do one sun salutation, cobra, some movements that might qualify as push-ups if you excuse the fact that I'm not bringing my body anywhere near the ground, and lately something called dolphin or Pincha Mayurasana prep. I leave ten minutes to practice, and many mornings don't even come close, as Elle thinks it's hilarious to turn my downward dog into a slide. The whole thing turns into a pose called Horse, and Elle rides on me as I gallop her to the kitchen for breakfast. It's fun, but it doesn't do a lot for advancing my strength and flexibility to say nothing of my spiritual growth.

Also, the less I do yoga, the less I want to do yoga, which is true for everything I do. The less I play guitar, the less I want to play guitar. The less I meditate, the less I want to. This is true for relationships, too. I have always been less "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and more "out of sight, out of mind." So then when the alarm goes off at 6am, I don't leap from my slumbers to embrace the mat. Instead I think of all the reasons it would be better for me and the world if I slept for another ten minutes.

So I was hoping for some big epiphany from my yoga teacher last Friday, some wise piece of secret code that would change my attitude forever! Instead, she said, "People say that because I'm a yoga teacher, I must just love getting on the mat every day. That it isn't hard for me. That every time I practice I am full of light and joy. Not true. I'm as cranky as the next Joe. But I do show up. I just do it."

Ugh. That Nike appropriated wisdom again. But it's certainly the wisdom that's proved true for me in my 42 years on the planet. As Woody Allen says, 80% of life is about showing up.

The teacher went on to talk about change, and how most resistance is about not wanting to change. Oh, that one. Yes, I know a bit about that.

I am fascinated by the relationship between practice and resistance. I just wrote a chapter about it for our book on the musical family. I am thinking about it a lot these days because of my yoga journey, because I am trying to write daily and because I am thinking about enrolling Elle in Suzuki violin lessons. Last Saturday at the Pete Seeger Tribute, one of the other artists played "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," and my parents whom I was sitting next to clasped hands and started whispering to each other furiously. It turns out on their second date back in 1961 they had realized during a Pete Seeger concert while he sang that very song that they were in love. (I digress, but isn't that cute?)

Anyway, we introduced ourselves to the singer (Emily Greene), and it turns out she teaches three-year-olds how to play the violin. Just an hour earlier, as we trotted down the streets of Northampton to pick up our dinner, we passed a fiddle player busking on the street, and Elle shouted, "Mama! I want to play the violin!" Five minutes later we passed a saxophonist, and she said the same thing, so we maybe should wait for her to choose between the French horn, the flute and these other contenders before we sign her up for lessons. But at any rate, the idea of my children taking music lessons and the accompanying questions about practice are no longer in the category of "someday, a long time from now."

I am reading a fun book called The Talent Code that addresses the issue of practice head on. The author writes about myelin, this fatty substance that coats the brain's neurons to make the firing of the synapses faster. I am not far along enough in the book to say much more than this: when we practice with deep concentration, with a "rage to master" that manifests in the practitioner channeling the Clint Eastwood Squint, we coat our neurons with myelin and progress at a much faster rate than mere mortals. We create talent in ourselves. This process is hard and frustrating and not a lot of fun, and in order to maintain our intention to get better at whatever it is we are trying to master, be it the riff to "Smoke on the Water" or Pincha Mayurasana, we have to keep stoking the fire of that "rage to master." (I love that phrase! Can you tell?) Also, the building of myelin, which is something like the insulation one wraps a wire in, creates a kind of stress response, which is why so many give up the pursuit before they start to get good at their desired path.

Interesting theory. I plan to finish the book and write something more intelligent and thorough at a later date, but for now I'll just say this. What I notice is that my one-year-old son bangs on the piano every third time he circles around the play room. My daughter pulls two unmatching sticks out of the designated music box and drums on one of the many small drums we own. I know this because I catch her at it and I find the sticks in random places around the house. When I tidy up at the end of the day, I almost always find myself putting those unmatching sticks away. Of course I don’t tell her to practice her drumming any more than I tell her to practice her imaginative play with her dollhouse or to practice her puzzle skills. To her, it’s all play.

So here's where I am today: my life is so sweet right now. It's a delicious balance of family, personal health and harmony, professional satisfaction. But. I want this book Katryna and I are writing to be a beloved best-seller. I want the DVD we are making to be so wonderful that kids and parents alike choose it for car trips and make it the default, the go-to entertainment. Most of all, I want to enjoy these works of ours. I always enjoy making our CDs and writing our books. I am a process kind of gal. Taking a cue from my heroes John Lennon and Bob Dylan, I haven't always cared as much about the products once they become products. I move on to the next one. But doing so can be a kind of cop-out. In always looking to the next project, I can shortchange the current one. I don't want to do that this time. Jumping ahead to the next project while the current one is in its finishing stages is just another kind of resistance. It's a way of not dealing with the inherent grief that comes along with any artistic endeavor. Because no matter how hard we labor on our craft, the vision is going to be a little different from our initial vision, just as no child turns out exactly the way the parent thinks she will when she's a baby (thank God!) Often works of art (as well as kids) turn out much better than we imagined, and usually we can see this. But sometimes there's some disappointment. Rather than sit with it and feel it, some of us want to leap-frog into the future.

Speaking of Bob Dylan, I read an interview years ago in which he was asked what his favorite song was. He paused for a long time and said, "written or recorded?" From his perspective, those were two different animals altogether.

There are two kinds of art: art that takes place in time (dance, live music, theatre) and art that takes place in space (painting, sculpture, photography.) Books and CDs are an amalgam. There is the "time" effect of reading or listening, and there is the "space" effect of the artifact itself. I consider myself a good "time" artist. I love to perform and it's easy for me. I like the spontaneity of a performance. I am not quite as confident as a "space" artist, though I would like to be. I want the book we are writing now to be a beloved experience as it is read and played with today, and a beloved artifact, a treasure that a kid born in 2007 might love when he is five and that he packs away and finds again when he is thirty in 2037 to bring out and share with his small daughter.

Can practice still be play? Can we write this book and have a blast doing so, even when we get to the frustrating parts when the myelin is wrapping itself mercilessly around our neurons? I don't know, but I am going to find out. I am going to hold myself accountable to you, my audience and readership by saying this: I am going to practice and I am going to play. I am going to show up for the page, for the editing, for the mixing. I am going to give it my all. I'm going to make music and video and sentences that I love, that I want to hear again, see again, read again. And then I will let it go and move on to the next project, but I will have gained a new book, a new CD and a new DVD for my collection.

Thank you, Mary

2009-09-23T11:03:00.001-07:00

It's hard to overestimate how important Mary Travers was to our family. When my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father listened to an LP by Peter, Paul and Mary entitled simply Album. On it was a short song by the unknown songwriter John Denver called "For Baby For Bobby."

I'll walk in the rain by your side,
I'll cling to the warmth of your tiny hand,
I'll do anything to help you understand
I'll love you more than anybody can.

And the wind will whisper your name to me
little birds will sing along in time,
leaves will bow down when you walk by
and morning bells will chime.

I'll be there when you're feelin down
to kiss away the tears that you cry,
I'll share whith you all the happiness I've found
a reflection of the love in your eyes.

When Katryna and I were two, three, four-ish, our favorite LP was Peter, Paul and Mommy. I stared and stared at the picture of the three little kids on the front and the weird black and white overhead shot on the back that shows the band recording with an audience of children, wires connecting the various mics. I especially loved Mary's version of "I'm Being Swallowed By a Boa Constrictor."

At seventeen, I attended my first PP&M concert, again with our whole family. We sat on the lawn at Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA, a gorgeous outdoor shed. They were full of vim and vigor, having recently reunited. They sang a new song by Tom Paxton: "I Am Changing My Name To Chrysler." Paul sang a new original called "Right Field." They encored with "Blowing in the Wind," and Mary said, over the last big chords, "And the answer is STILL peace, love...and the Democratic Party!" OK, maybe not exactly that, but something to that effect. After all, it was the summer of 1984 and we Democrats were desperate.

I went home and pillaged my father's LP collection (this was before CDs, you young 'uns!) and discovered "For Baby For Bobby." Upon hearing it, I promptly burst into tears. When I mentioned this to my parents, they looked at each other in amazement and said, "That's exactly what you did when you were three, and again when you were six. We happened to play you that song, and you burst into tears each time. You must remember it from being in your Mummy's tummy." (Incidentally, "For Baby For Bobby" showed up on shuffle on my iPod at the exact moment Jay was born.)

I spent many an hour with my ear pressed up against my stereo speakers learning all the parts to the PP&M arrangements to teach to the high school folk singing group I led ("Humditties," which I did not name) and later my college folk singing group, "Tangled Up in Blue" (which I did). Both were essentially PP&M cover bands. I loved those harmonies. I loved also the way Mary's big alto, so mercifully in my own range, soared over the voices of the two men.

There's a great song from one of their earliest records, "See What Tomorrow Brings" where Mary comes in on the third verse:

Never been contented no matter where I roam
It ain't no fun to see the settin' sun when you're far away from home.

As with "For Baby, For Bobby," just hearing her voice, the tone of it, the inflection of it, made me feel the opposite of "far away from home." Rather, I felt like home had just arrived to surround me in the person of Mary's warm familiar voice, my father's stack of LPs (some of which I still have. I need to return them as my stereo is mouldering in the basement.)

Speaking of my dad, when I called to talk to him on Friday, he told me how PP&M had come to do a concert at his college in the early 60s. "This is a song by a great new young songwriter named Bob Dylan," Peter said. And they sang "Blowing in the Wind." It was the first time my father had ever heard of Dylan. The list of songwriters PP&M made famous by championing them and covering their songs is legion. Besides Dylan and John Denver, my first exposure to Pete Seeger, Shel Silverstein, Tom Paxton, Laura Nyro,even Rod Stewart was through PP&M.

I read in recent obits that when she started singing with Yarrow and Stookey, she never spoke from stage. Their manager, Al Grossman (who also managed Dylan) wanted her silent so as to create mystery. Watching her in the YouTube clip, above, I can't help but wonder what she was thinking. Was she intimidated by Mama Cass and Joni Mitchell, or was she confident? Did she love the song she was singing? What did she think of that cheesy Musak-y accompaniment?

In Judith Thurman's recent article in the New Yorker, my favorite author from childhood, Laura Ingalls Wilder, comes across as frumpish, reactionary and a little soft-headed: nothing like the defiant, lovable heroine of the Little House books that I read and re-read obsessively at age eight and nine. I read this article the day after Mary died, and it got me to thinking about the projection of personality which show business (as well as some forms of literature) requires us to do. There is not a lot of room for complexity out there. The media (and perhaps the human brain that created the media) likes simplicity. John was the smart, angry Beatle; George the spiritual one. Laura Ingalls was spunky. Mary Travers was sincere, righteous, sexual without being a threat. Also tall, leggy and slender. When any of our heroes and heroines stray from the box we put them in, the media (and our brains) has a reaction. Look at how much weight she gained! Look at how stupid he's being! Look at how phoney that projection was! She's not innocent and spunky! She's mercenary, and she can't even write a proper grammatical sentence! And the truth is, we are all so much more than any three word combination of adjectives. We all have a smart, a spiritual, an uneducated, a spunky, an innocent, a corrupted side of ourselves. Maybe we feel threatened by these revelations around our celebrities because it makes us come face to face with our own complexities and inconsistencies. It feels so reassuring to see Barack Obama behaving like a responsible gentleman, because that's our image of him. When we see images of him riding a bike on Martha's Vineyard without a helmet, we are shocked, disturbed even. What's he doing being risky? He's not a thrill seeker! He's breaking character (also endangering the fragile head of our Head of State, but that's another issue.)

The Mary we all saw in the sixties was much more complicated and interesting than the blond, leggy, silent-except-when-belting-her heart-out Greenwich Village waif we mostly got to see. She was a mother, for one thing. By the time Katryna and I got to watch her perform in person in the mid-80s, she was silent no longer. Au contraire: she was full of opinions. She was also significantly overweight, a fact she joked about from the stage. She was breaking all the rules, tossing out all the adjectives assigned to her. And through that singular revolution, she liberated two future folk singers.

Our friend Jordi Herold told us last week that when he was a teenager, his friend was dying of ALS, a ward of the state in a row of institutional beds. Somehow Mary had heard that this young person was a fan, and she came to the bedside and sang to her.

In 2007, Katryna and I would share a stage with Noel Paul Stookey at the World Folk Music Association fundraiser outside of Washington DC. He came backstage to tell us how much he'd loved our set, and I was (almost) tongue-tied. How could I tell him how much he had meant to us over the years, how much his kind attention in that moment meant to us? It was like Katryna's recent story to William, about how the Beatles came back in a space machine to do a concert on the rooftop for William and William alone. That's how magical it felt to have "Paul" come into our dressing room and praise us.

He said, that night, that Mary had been very sick, but that it looked like she was going to make it.

It's so strange, and it feels so wrong that I will never get to take my kids to see Peter Paul & Mary do an outdoor summertime show; that they will only know "Puff The Magic Dragon" from CDs. But then again, it feels wrong that they don't know my grandparents, or Tom's father, or see the World Trade Center towers when coming east over I-80. It must have felt strange to my parents that I would never watch the New York Giants play baseball, or know their grandparents or my mother's father. But they internalized these things and these people, and they told me the stories. They sang me the songs. That's all we can do. We can sing "Going to the Zoo" and "Car Car" and pass along what we were given, and sing that top line with our best Mary Travers belt. Moreover, Katryna and I can try to live our beliefs and our values as bravely as Mary did, and sing along with her:

And when I die
And when I'm dead, dead and gone
There'll be one child born
And a world to carry on
There'll be one child born to carry on.
-Laura Nyro

Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for alerting me to the YouTube clip. And for selling our merch in New York!

Mind Maps

2009-09-16T16:18:00.001-07:00

When you want to write a song (or do anything creative, like start a business, organize your office, figure out what to do with five unmatching skeins of yarn), here's a great idea: Make a Mind Map.

A Mind Map, as I use it, is simple. It looks like a child's drawing of a sun. Big circle with you in the middle, lines to represent your rays. In the middle of the sun, write down the central theme of your desired creation (eg "tote bag," "toy store," "clean floor" or "song using that great line that's been kicking around in my head for ten months.") Then make your rays, and at the end of each ray, write down anything and everything you might throw into your project, any ideas at all. So for instance, if you are starting a business, your mind map might look like this:

Click on the image to enlarge and read my chicken scratch.

As you can see, there are a number of different ideas here ranging from the very small and practical to the decidedly woo woo. Once you've got a bunch of ideas down, you can begin to winnow and weed. You can see which ones might be do-able right away, and which ones need more research. For instance, in my example, the first name for your potential toy store that comes to you might be "The Island of Misfit Toys." You are thrilled! Until you tell your best friend and she said, "That is the worst name for a toy store I ever heard." Then you Google it and find out there actually IS a store called The Island Of Misfit Toys in the next town over, so you stick your tongue out at your best friend, but your confidence has secretly been zapped, and you decide the next right move would be to sign up for a teleclass in branding offered by some fabulous life coach.

By the way, here is what I did with my skeins of yarn. I made a gigantic bag, big enough to use as a sleeping bag for Elle.

Then I threw it in the wash and felted it.

Tom was just saying, as he was crushing some garlic that he grew, "I know this garlic isn't really any better than the garlic we could get in the store, but I just love my food so much more when it has my garlic in it."

I told him I knew just what he meant. Up until Jay was born, I made my own yogurt. Honestly, it was pretty ordinary, slightly watery yogurt, but I loved it anyway. Same with this bag. It's a little lumpy and I wouldn't give it away as a gift, but I will carry my iPhone and journal and water bottle in it with great pride. Nothing like homemade. Same with your mind maps. When you put down all your great ideas for your fabulous future life, shining like the sun right back at you, you will love every step of your journey. Because it's yours.

In Defense of Good News: Massachusetts Divorce Rate Down!

2009-09-13T06:11:00.001-07:00

Yoga and the Voice

2009-09-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't written about my yoga teacher training because I'm afraid if I do, I will blather on ad infinitum. It's such an amazing process. I have to be honest: most of the time I have NO IDEA why I am doing this. I don't see a future for me as a yoga teacher, per se. The idea of standing up in yoga clothes in front of a roomful of similarly clad people makes me sleepy, which is a sure indication that my essential self is not on board with the program. No, what I am clear on is that I want a committed yoga practice, and this is a surefire, albeit sneaky way to get me to practice every day, or at least regularly. Also, I know one of my core missions in life (Midwife Of Joy; thanks Bill M for giving me my job description) is to live fully and joyfully in my body and to teach others how to do that too.

About vocation/avocation: I believe that once we are in the habit of telling ourselves the truth all the time, in every circumstance, Life takes us by the hand and guides us gently but firmly on the path we're meant to go down, and that this path will always take us to our best possibly destiny. This path ends up being both one of service and also one of great joy, and we begin to see that we can't have one without the other.

Above is the statue of the Dancing Shiva, one of Hinduism's wicked cool gods. I have a gigantic scholarly tome on the subject of Hindu Deities, but yesterday when Elle and I were at Forbes Library, I found a treasure trove of 8th grade level books on Hindu mythology and snatched them instead. Much more my speed these days.

Shiva is one of the Big Three of the Hindu gods, the other two being Brahman and Vishnu. Shiva is known as The Destroyer, and he dances his way nonchalantly through and around the universe. The Five Divine Acts of Shiva are Creation, Sustenance, Dissolution, Concealment and Revelation. My homework last week was to write about how each one currently relates to my life. I want to say a few words about Concealment, because of all the Acts, this one gave me the most food for thought. Especially, as I said, because I still don't really "know" why I am so drawn to taking this Yoga teacher training in the first place. All the reasons are in a state of concealment.

I was on the phone a few weeks ago with my friend Michele the formerly Republican life coach (she voted for Obama so I can no longer count her as one of my five Republican friends.) She mentioned that she had the idea to hire me at some point to do a workshop with some other coaches on singing and voice.

I got what Katryna and Dave call the Citrus Effect: shivers going up the back of my neck to my crown chakra. Or what I call the Hansel & Gretl effect: another pebble on the path begins to twinkle and shine up at me. I can't count the times I have been asked to teach people how to sing. "I can't," I always say. "I'm not trained." This isn't true; I have studied voice with amazing teachers who have phDs from Peabody and MAs from Yale, and I've been what anyone would call a formal student of voice for a good twenty-seven years. Oh, also I am a professional singer. And I am writing a book about singing with one's children.

Here's what I know about the voice and singing.
1. The voice is the nexus of body, mind and spirit. All three are engaged when one sings or speaks well. In order to sing, one must do a kind of yoga: engage the breath, the throat, the tongue and the mouth in a certain way (or ways) to achieve sounds. One uses the mind to formulate the content, especially the wordy parts, and one relies completely on the spirit for the breath. In the Tantric philosophy on which Anusara yoga is based, we all breathe in the collective breath of the goddess Shatki (one of the many names for Shiva's partner) and it is she who breathes for us in a kind of cosmic dance.

2. When I am under a lot of stress, I lose my voice. When I take the time to connect with my breath, relax my body, let God/the goddess/the Collective Breath "sing" me instead of my trying to sing, the results are a lot better.

3. My "voice" is not just those rubbery membranes in my throat. The instrument that is my voice is really my whole body.

4. Yoga is a way we solve problems. The way we deal with discomfort on the mat is the way we deal with any kind of discomfort in our lives. So as with meditation, we "practice" with our bodies. The same can be said of singing. We can sing in a kind of absent, careless way, or we can sing with intention, with our full presence and make something holy.

5. Singing with others compounds the issue: it can bring great joy, and it can also be a place where we work out our problems and "practice" with each other to achieve literal and figurative harmony.

Brian Eno says it better. In a recent "This I Believe" episode of NPR, he says,

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

The curtain of concealment is still drawn for me, but I feel like I am beginning to peak around it.

Sticker Charts

2009-09-07T18:16:00.001-07:00

Sticker charts work. I know, because they’ve been working on me since I was eight and had to stop sucking my thumb. My mother told me that if I filled up a sticker chart for forty days (it was Lent) I could get whatever toy I wanted. I filled my chart, delighted with every inch of real estate slowly disappearing under a puffy Hello Kitty, and on Day 40, my mother took me to Toys R Us and I picked out a platinum-haired Ballerina Barbie. She had a small gold crown at the top of her head which I promptly removed.

I used this same method last April to get Elle to potty train, though truth be told, I had tried sticker charts earlier to no avail. She was suddenly ready, just shy of three, and the sticker chart did the trick. In her case, it was 14 days and the promise of any toy in our favorite store, A Child’s Garden (which Elle uncannily calls "Kindergarten.") I was thinking I’d be out $200 for a Plan Doll House, but what she really wanted was a $7 pink kick ball with yellow flowers on it.

I have a sticker chart now for myself. Every day that I do my writing for our book All Together Singing in the Kitchen, I get to put a sticker on my chart, which is one of those 2009 Sierra Club calendars they sent us last year to guilt us into contributing (it worked, though we have about 5 such calendars from 5 organizations.) Elle and Jay and I went to Staples to find stickers. I let her choose, and instead of puppies and kittens which I’d been hoping for, she selected a series of positive affirmations to the tune of, “Excellent!” “Way To Go!” and the like. Thumbprint-sized stickers in primary colors with swirls and stars. So perfect. When I fill thirty slots, I get a new pair of glasses.

Here is why I need a new pair of glasses:

We are home from a blissful weekend in the Adirondacks. We climbed mountains and hung out with my parents and were amazed by all the free time we had when there is no On Line or cell phone access (I've forgotten how to use a land line.) On the way down Big Crow, Tom and I decided to renovate our barn ourselves. It may take years (since we don't know what we're doing) but it will be fun, and what a great activity for the kids! Maybe by the time we are actually doing the renovating, as opposed to the planning and drawing pictures (architectural equivalents of stick figures) Elle and Jay can be apprentices. Or slaves. We want to turn it into a studio space where I can hold yoga/writing retreats and workshops with an upstairs where he and I can see individual clients. Somehow there will also be a kitchen, bathroom, woodshop and chicken coop.

Earlier today Jay learned how to say "cock-a-doodle-doo!" and to growl like a dog, or a rabbit (it seems he makes the same guttural "REDRUM!" sound whenever he encounters any creature walking on four legs). I was putting Elle down after Jay was asleep in his crib. She insisted on being covered with every last one of her stuffed animals. When she was finally comfy, curled up on her stomach with the lights out and I was kissing her goodnight, she said, "Mama, my bed smells bad."

I leaned down and sniffed her pillow. Fine. More stalling tactics. "No, it doesn't, sweetie."

"Yes, it does. Smell here," she said without a trace of whine.

I sniffed again, this time picking up a strong odor of ammonia. Also, the bed was wet in one corner near her head. "Yuck!" I said. "Oh, sweetie, I am so sorry. George Harrison must have come up here and peed while we were away. It was probably his way of saying he missed you." (No, I haven't yet read or watched Cesar Milan or Victoria Stafford. It's on my To Do list though.)

I swapped her crib mattress for the one she uses as a trundle bed and took the offending sheet to the laundry where Tom was running a load. "George somehow got up to her bed and peed on it," I said handing him the wet sheet.

"Ohhhhhh," said Tom. "No, it wasn't George. It was Jay. I was letting him scramble around naked and he must have marked his territory."

What a relief. Somehow baby pee seems way more innocuous than dog pee on my sweet daughter's bed. And I can live with my baby peeing in places where we don't really want him to for a few more years. No sticker chart required.

God Dog

2009-09-01T13:13:00.001-07:00

Many of you have asked about our garden. A picture is worth a thousand words, so I have taken a picture of our two, count them 2, eggplants. We harvested them because Tom says eggplants need heat, and it looks like the heat part of the summer is gone with August. So tonight we are going to make ratatouille with our two little fruits. It will be a small portion.

Just to show you the scale, here is Elle holding the larger of the two eggplants.

About vocation/avocation: I believe that once we are in the habit of telling ourselves the truth all the time, in every circumstance, Life takes us by the hand and guides us gently but firmly on the path we're meant to go down, and that this path will always take us to our best possibly destiny. This path ends up being both one of service and also one of great joy, and we begin to see that we can't have one without the other.

But it's hard to always tell yourself the truth. Oy, that's the rub. Harder still is to consistently come from love and not fear. Last week, I was in despair because my writing groups weren't filling up the way they were supposed to. How do I know how they were supposed to fill up? Well, I thought I knew because in the past they always did; in the past, I have had wait lists. So what's changed? Maybe, just maybe the fact that I added a third group where there had previously been two. Or maybe the economy. Or maybe everyone is content writing by themselves, or maybe everyone has found a writing buddy. All of these would be good explanations for the part of me that lives in the fear that I am one meal away from food stamps. (I call this part of me Liz Newton. Martha Beck says this part of us, programmed for flight or fight is just the amygdala, a part of the brain we share with lizards. Get it? Liz Newton?)

So anyway, I was being a good little self-coach, gently asking myself why I had these fears and what were the thoughts feeding them, and I kept breaking it down to a core belief which was, "If they knew me, they wouldn't love me because I am basically unlovable. The writers have known me, and naturally, they have found me out." This is an old threadworn thought, one I had thought I was done with years ago, but apparently I wasn't, or at least Liz Newton wasn't. So I sat at my meditation alter (AKA the pillow at the head of my bed) and tried to meditate. Instead I prayed: "God, what the F??? Help! How do I love myself? I am sick and tired of not loving myself! I have been trying to love myself for years and years and obviously I STILL DON'T!!! Help me out here."

What came back, quick as a flash was a genial voice saying, "Why don't you try loving me?"

What a needy God. But whatever. I scrunched up my face and said, "Okay. I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!" And immediately, I felt a WHOOSH. The big black hole, previously empty except for a few empty beer cans rattling around inside, was filled with that love, the love we all want and think we lost when we left infancy. More than that, I felt as though my heart had turned into a three dimensional puzzle piece and was suddenly plugged into its rightful spot in something much bigger than me. I felt whole.

This all makes sense, now that I feel it. I have known cognitively for ages that in order to feel abundant, I need to give; in order to feel helped, I need to reach out a hand, and in order to feel loved I need to love. When I exercise that muscle (and it is a muscle) I get strength. Come to think of it, in yoga, when I exercise my back muscles by doing cobra, my back pain goes away, much more quickly and permanently than it does when I get a massage. Strengthening= strength. Or to use another physical analogy, I found that the knee pain that kept me from running completely disappeared once I started running (and stretching the leg muscles) on a daily basis.

But back to my meditation cushion AKA my pillow: I was so shocked by the force and suddenness of the revelation and the change in my attitude that my eyes flew open and I shouted, "Tom! Tom! I've discovered the secret of the universe!!!!!" I tried to explain to him what had happened; like many who have had a "religious" experience, I was an instant evangelist. He smiled at me and gave me the equivalent of a pat on the head. That was okay, too, though. After the ecstasy the laundry and all that.

What I got from that moment was something I remembered from reading the wonderful Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, one of my all-time favorite spiritual writers. He writes in his essential book Life of the Beloved: "Coming home and staying there where God dwells, listening to the voice of truth and love, that was, indeed the journey I most feared because I know that God was a jealous lover who wanted every part of me all the time. When would I be ready to accept that kind of love?" And: "I want you to hear that voice, too. It is a very important voice that says, 'You are my beloved son; you are my beloved daughter. I love you with an everlasting love. I have molded you together in the depths of the earth. I have knitted you in your mother's womb. I've written your name in the palm of my hand and I hold you safe in the shade of my embrace. I hold you. You belong to Me and I belong to you. You are safe where I am. Don't be afraid. Trust that you are the beloved. That is who you truly are.'" See here for complete text.)

God can be like a jealous lover, which comes as a shock to me. I try not to, but I can't help imagining God as The Big Celebrity in the Sky; sure He loves everyone, but if He loves everyone, then why is it such a big deal if He loves me? He loves me, but He loves six billion other people plus plants and animals and insects and all the space creatures from other galaxies. Big Fat Deal.

But in my moment of revelation, I got that God just might be more like a little dog who follows you around trying to get your attention all the time. Play with me! Love me! Pay attention to me! And no one but me (you) will do.

We each have our own little God dog. Mine happens to eat raw catfish and occasionally other gross things.

My writing groups still aren't full, but I imagine that's because God wants me to have light groups so I can better serve those writers who are coming. And maybe because I need more time to write my half of the book Katryna and I are working on for Shambala (interesting that our book publisher is most famous for publishing books on Buddhism and yoga, huh? Coincidence?)

George Harrison Update

2009-08-25T09:31:00.001-07:00

The good news is: George used to eat his poop.

The bad news is: today there was a pile of it on my favorite oriental carpet, the one my grandmother gave me as a wedding gift.

The good news is: camels probably gave birth on that carpet and it seems to be none the worse for the wear.

The bad news is: maybe George has been pooping on the carpet for months now and I only know about it today because the spice Tom's been putting in his food makes him not like the taste of his poop anymore.

This is not the first time George has proved less than the perfectly behaved $20,000-worth-of-training-therapy dog we inherited last March. He eats anything and everything not locked in or on top of the refrigerator. Last week, while shopping at our co-op with my two kids, I realized that I had left the frozen catfish to thaw on the counter and that Tom's colleague was dropping George off as I shopped. I thought, "Should I just go ahead and buy more catfish now? Nah. He won't eat it. It's frozen." I came home to a litter of white fish-wrapping paper on the kitchen floor.

Elle went exploring and came running back. "Mama, see what George did on the music room!" she shouted.

There, on that same oriental, was the catfish. Not even eaten, just kind of massaged by George's gums and left in the 90 degree heat. I was so mad, not because he'd deprived us of our dinner but because HE HADN'T EVEN LIKED IT!! Ingrate.

So I'm trying to find the lesson in George's annoying behavior. I firmly believe that bad things can lead to good things. To wit: last spring I had such nagging awful back pain that I posted about it here. A wonderful reader suggested I watch Esther Gokhale, so I did. Then I bought her book and began using my hunched shoulders as a bell of mindfulness to get into my body and improve my alignment. This lead me to finally pursue a lifelong dream of taking yoga teacher training. This had lead to massive joy, newly discovered physical strength, a dear new friend in my teacher, spiritual insights, befriending my body in a new and deeper way, and not least, no more pain in my shoulders.

Not bad. All from chronic pain.

So I don't know what will come of the George situation. Something good, I am sure. I just ordered the Dog Whisperer series on Netflix. And no more than an hour after I woke up, he'd redeemed himself. Elle and Jay and I were cuddling at the bottom of the stairs, along with Elle's favorite blanket, pillowface and about a thousand of her stuffed animals. After ten minutes of heavenly cuddling, I looked at my watch and said, "Sweetie, I have to go for my run now."

"Noooo!!!!" she cried.

So we snuggled some more. Then she popped her head up and said, "Oh, I'm going to go cuddle with George Harrison now. You can go, Mama." And she and Jay both crawled over to the dog, who was lying on his side, and proceeded to climb him like a mountain, rolling all over him, Elle covering him with her blanket. George Harrison lolled his head back and exposed his big silly belly to my children's hands. He'd definitely earned his keep for the day.

Church of 80% Sincerity

2009-08-22T18:28:00.001-07:00

Note: During this period of time while I write our forthcoming book All Together Singing in the Kitchen: How to Create Family Harmony, while I intend to update this blog with current posts, I also will from time to time post old pieces. This one is from the 2007 Life Composition Creative Day Planner series.

Via David Roche and Anne Lamott:
David Roche is a monologist whose face was badly disfigured in a childhood radiation treatment. He has created a wonderful program in which he shares his unique and inspiring take on the world. Read more about him at www.davidroche.com or read the chapter about him in Anne Lamott’s wonderful Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

"We in the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity do not believe in miracles," says David. "But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you've got to put your foot in it.

"Look, 80 percent sincerity is about as good as it's going to get. So is 80 percent compassion. Eighty percent celibacy. So 20 percent of the time, you just get to be yourself.

“God, it's such subversive material, so contrary to everything society leads us to believe -- that if you look good, you'll be happy, and have it all together, and then you'll be successful and nothing will go wrong and you won't have to die, and the rot can't get in.”

Anne Lamott writes: “In the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity, you definitely don't have to look good, but you are supposed to meditate. Following David's instructions, you sit quietly with your eyes closed and follow your breath in and out of your body, gently watching your mind. Your mantra should go like this: ‘Why am I doing this? This is such a waste! I have so much to do! My butt itches ...’ And if you stick to it, he promised, from time to time calmness and peace of mind will intrude. After some practice with this basic meditation, you will be able to graduate to panic meditations, and then sex fantasy meditations. And meditations on what you will do when you win the Lotto.”

So for this week, I invite you to meditate like this. Also, to journal about some areas in your life where we might be liberated if we could just accept 80%.

Arnold Westwood

2009-08-18T18:44:00.001-07:00

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that.
-- RW Emerson Series I. Self-Reliance

Arnold died on Sunday night. He was wrapped in the healing quilt Annie Kner made for the church, a gorgeous tapestry of reds, blues, greens, in a black window-pane design.

He asked to be taken off his ventilator/life support so he could talk to his four children who were around his bedside. He asked for a flashlight and was holding it, lit, when he died.

He was 88. I know he lived such a good, rich, full life, and still I am greedy for more. I can only imagine how his family feels. I am so grateful we knew him. I am so grateful we let each other know how much we loved each other while he was still alive.

Arnold invited himself to our wedding. We'd only known him a few months and we were not yet the good friends we became. It was so like Arnold to invite himself. He came up to us the Sunday before we got married and said, "I'm coming to your wedding. The rule is, if the wedding's in our church, you can't turn away a member. Did you know that?" Then he chuckled slowly and shuffled off in his Arnold way.

Whenever Tom or I preached on a lay Sunday, he would embrace us afterward and tell us we should be Unitarian Universalist ministers, which is what he was up until he retired, some twenty odd years ago. I believe he encouraged every lay minister in this way, and it was so affirming; kind of the highest compliment you could get from an ex-minister after you put yourself out there like that.

He came to our post-election party last November and moved everyone to tears with a story about how he had voted for the first time for FDR. He had been a very early Barack Obama supporter, with a big O poster in his front window at his house way off in the hill towns. In January '08 we went to his house for a church potluck and he told me, with that same chuckle, "I love the man. I give him money whenever I can."

Yesterday, when I got the news via a voice mail message, I felt all my own energy drain out of my body. It was midday, and I was home alone with Jay. I had a huge list of things to do, and I abandoned it to sit on the couch and just hold Jay, stare out the window, cry, sit, remember, feel sad, laugh when Jay laughed. Arnold had been the youngest in his family, and he told me on several occasions that he was well-loved as a baby, and that his mother's unconditional love carried him through his whole life. So that's something I can do: love my own son as hugely as Arnold was loved.

I wish we were Jewish. I think sitting shiva is one of the greatest ideas of all time. All I want to do is get together with other people who loved Arnold and cry with them and sit still and be quiet. And when someone has a story to share about Arnold, she shares it.

After a few hours, I connected with Tom and we cried together on the phone. Then I called my dad who knew Arnold just from occasional visits to the church. Toward the end of the conversation, someone beeped in, and I told my father I needed to take it, thinking it might be news of a memorial service. Instead, it was someone calling about the president's health care initiative wanting a contribution. Ordinarily I would have declined since I don't really know anything about the initiative other than that the Republicans are making up a bunch of scary death stories. Honestly, I have been one of those Obama supporters who, though well-meaning and intending to serve my country, has kind of put her head in the sand post-election. I'm not proud of this, but it's the truth. So without letting the guy get through his schpiel, I said, "How much do you want?"
"Well, a hundred would be great."
"I can do fifty."
"Oh, thank you!" he exclaimed. He asked for some information, including my profession.
"Musician," I said.
"Huh," he said. "You're the third musician to contribute today. And believe me, that's saying a lot. People are not exactly forthcoming these days."
"Yeah, I can imagine," I said. "We musicians are self-employed types, and we really get that there needs to be change." Then I said, "Can you put this contribution in the name of Arnold Westwood? And make it a hundred after all." Because he loved the man.

I posted about Arnold here a few months ago after he preached. He was delighted to have his words on the internet at that time, so I am taking the liberty to post more of that sermon. Here it is:

...Now, generally, when one receives a great gift, you want to give something back in return. Perhaps you are expecting me to share some wisdom. I find it hard to fit into the mold of the wise old man. After all, there is nothing so special these days about being 88 – the number of keys there are on a piano – still at 88 most of the people my age are already dead. The rest of us are struggling to keep up with the pace of you who are so much younger than we.

Moreover, I don’t feel so very wise. Actually, a lot of the time now I feel like a kid – sometimes like a teen-ager. Nonetheless, please let me share a few thoughts.

I was talking with a group of friends the other day about aging, telling them that I had lost my fear of death. My dad certainly had prepared me. One day when I was quite little, when bandaging my finger, with the usual twinkle in his eye, he declared, “You know, you’re going to die after this.” We laughed. He made it easy.

Since then I have had, of course, many encounters with death – at a roadside after an accident – at a hospital beside – quite a few precious times in the last days at a parishioner’s bedside preparing for the funeral, picking out music, readings and hymns and what needs to be said – finally, of course, being with Carolyn as she slipped out of consciousness in the midst of a conversation – never to return.

It is mostly we, the living who endure so much of the pain and the loss.

Aging is an altogether different matter. Since the beginning of April I’ve been trying three days a week to work in the fitness room at the Dalton Recreation Center. In addition, I’m getting weekly coaching from a Pilates teacher. Neglect exercise at your peril! Believe me, even after a few weeks of not moving enough, at 88 you start to waste away. And drop off for a year or more and you really have your work cut out for you!

What else can I share with you?

You’d better understand your own temperament.

I need people. I’m not a very good alone. Solitude doesn’t work for me. When I was active in the ministry my life was full of people. Afterwards, in those 17 years that Carolyn and I had the Bed & Breakfast business – those years between my retiring in ’84 and just before her death -- we had all the people we wanted around us.

When you’re elderly and widowed, or younger and divorced, the world does not come to you. If you want company it’s up to you to find your own friends. Emerson tells you how to go about it in his incredible essay – his thesis – “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” – The essay tells us very well how to go about it.

The hard part is loving...

I pose as no expert on how to be a good lover, though I sense I am a loving person and am sometimes perceived as such.

Emerson’s rule, I believe, also applies. The only way to become loving is by being loved.

I was certainly loved as a child. My mother’s only child, I was born when she was 43 years old. And she loved me totally, unconditionally, almost, if possible, too much. My dad loved me, too. My older brother and two sisters loved me. [Brief explanation: Dad’s first wife tragically drowned. My mom was her first cousin and available as dad’s second wife.] So, little Arnold grew up in a home surrounded by the attention and affection of 5 loving older ones, cuddled yet, unfortunately, over-protected.

First Grade was a different matter. Entering the world of neighborhood kids, wearing glasses, not knowing how to throw a ball or hit one with a bat – always the last one picked when choosing up sides – a good student yet devoid of the social skills ordinary kids gained through peer experience – so elementary school bordered on devastation.

Then, for 6th and 7th grades, dad & mom went on the road and had to place me in a boarding school. There I experienced the whole bit of an abusive housemother and sexual molestation.

Redemption slowly began in California where I rejoined my parents. High School was OK; college was great; graduate school was terrific; meeting Carolyn was bliss.

Now, don’t get the idea that all my adulthood was easy. Whose is? I have no need to recite its ups and downs. You’ve had or are having your own. During the last year of my therapy was not so much about losing Carolyn as about my childhood and my father. Simply put, I now feel myself still bathed by my mother’s love.

But, believe me, I have still more to do.

The really, really hard part for me is to truly begin to love myself. I’m discovering for me it all has to begin there. It’s sort of like being retooled. The amount of being loved by family and friends doesn’t do as much as what you have to keep on loving yourself – and it runs all the way from accepting all the complications and embarrassments that come with an overactive bladder to my no longer needing to call attention to my petty virtues and several accomplishments. I know I’ve done a lot. I just don’t need to tell other all the time. My chorus to myself is: “Westwood, leave it alone, you’re OK.”

So, at 88, I still wrestling with my ego needs and expect I will be until I die. And as death approaches I hope they will pretty much disappear. That will be heaven.

In conclusion, I suspect unconditional love must be akin to what so many others experience as the love of God. Love to draw upon when it’s the only love there is.

So now, I use my days and what energy I have doing what I am able. May I give back something of what has been so abundantly given to me – by this incredible church, by my loving family, by the five congregations I’ve been chosen to serve, and above all, by my multitude friends.

And when I’m stupid enough to get discouraged or feel neglected and sorry for myself, I always have the starry nights we are blessed with here up in these quiet hills and I look up at the heavens and all their shining brilliance and know a joy that passeth all understanding.

Friends, All these eruptions are supposed to strike a familiar chord with you. If they do, God bless you. In any case, God bless us all.

Recipe for Happiness

2009-08-13T10:46:00.001-07:00

Recipe for Happiness

1. When in doubt, breathe. Your body is always right and it never hurts to notice that you are still alive. Breathing calms the whole self: body, mind, spirit. Breathe deeply for 4-10 breaths. Don't skimp. Just be with the breathing. Ask your higher self/God/Truth/Krishna/Jesus, etc for alignment.

2. Move your body with love, kindness and mindfulness.

3. Eat whole unprocessed foods from an address as close to home as possible.

4. Do something creative and helpful every day, for your livelihood and for fun.

5. Be yourself in all your relationships. Be the best version of you that you can be, and be kind to yourself when the version you happen to be today isn't as fun as the version you were yesterday.

6. Let everyone you encounter be themselves. Don't bother trying to change them. Bless everyone and recognize everything that happens to you as an opportunity to grow and learn.

7. Drink as much water as you can. You are 70% water, and if you don't freshen the tank...well, just look over at a vaseful of flowers that hasn't been changed in a few days. Enough said. Drink as much water as you can.

8. Catch yourself when you find yourself trying to create problems. (And laugh.)

9. When you feel love, express it! In words, in deeds and with a big smile.

10. On occasion, act As If.

11. Make peace with the past, practice gratitude today, and dream big.

12. Life is hard, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

13. Live the serenity prayer: ask to be granted the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can and the wisdom to know the difference.

14. Give away what you don't need. Notice how you feel as the clutter disappears. Notice how you feel when you practice generosity.

15. Go outside and touch trees, feel your feet on the bare earth, dip your toes in a body of water as often as possible.

16. Laugh.

17. Laugh at yourself.

18. Slow down.

19. Sleep as much as you can.

20 Step away from the computer.

Mountain Climbing

2009-08-02T17:48:00.001-07:00

It's raining again. I don't mind the rain so much; in terms of my own comfort level, I actually prefer this gentle weather to 95 degrees with high humidity. But I recognize that the wet is responsible for the blight that's affected tomatoes and potatoes and all sorts of crops all over the North East, and our local farmers have pinned it on climate change. So I am routing for sun and a drier spell.

My kids are both taking a nap right now. My husband is biking, rain or no. I have been tidying the house, cleaning out the nasty drawer next to my bed which contains twenty five different kinds of lotion, a disorganized mass of sewing materials (mostly threads), some dental floss, ear-plugs in various stages of use, barrettes, bookmarks, emery boards and loose band-aids separated from their boxes. Before their nap, my children were both in Elle's room on her "new" big girl bed: a plastic pink toddler bed with a teddy bear's head as the backboard and a crib mattress. We put her other crib mattress under the bed and then pulled it out so it looks sort of like a trundle bed, which, if you are three, is almost a bunk bed, which is the grandest, most excellent sleeping situation imaginable. The bed is completely covered with stuffed animals and pillows and blankets, as Elle like to make a big nest for herself, which she crawls into for sleeping. Jay thought this was the most exciting thing ever, and squealed with delight as he hurled himself onto the top of the pile and then fell over backwards onto the lower "trundle." This made him laugh even harder: huge chortles of pure glee. I sat next to them and just watched and listened. What could be better than your own two kids squealing and snuggling like a litter of puppies? So far, nothing.

Elle is three, and to date, I like three better than two. Either that or I have changed. I look back on last year, the year of Jay's arrival, and I feel like I've come over a tight mountain pass and am now on a smooth level path. Maybe it's the yoga; maybe it's the meditation and journaling. Maybe it's the knitting. I think it's just plain grace. Or mabye it's that three really is easier than two. I'll find out when Jay hits that marker in August 2010.

Speaking of mountain passes, we did a lot of hiking in the Adirondacks last week. All the members of my family are 46rs, which means that we've climbed all 46 peaks over 4000 feet in New York State. This really means that we have a father who is an avid hiker (though his season is extremely limited to one week every summer, and he climbs wearing tennis shoes, eschewing walking sticks and crampons) who thought it was fun to drag his whiny wife and daughters up tall mountains every summer. Eventually we all stopped whining and caught the Fever which compels one to hike in 45 degree rain and cloud cover that erases any kind of view. In 1986 my father figured out that my mother, the most reluctant climber of all time––albeit extremely athletic––was within 15 peaks of 46. My mother, always the historian, also figured out that she would be able to bag these peaks before her 47th birthday, and so agreed to what can only be called a campaign. For the next three years, and then continuing on for our own 46r goals for another three, we Nieldses hiked the most obscure, trail-less, bramble-filled, viewless mountains in the Adirondacks. We were cursed with cold wet weather, but blessed with no injuries, victory, and best of all, the gifts one gets only by climbing mountains.

What are these? Well, for me, this strange thing happens when I hike. I am a middling kind of athlete. I am not fast nor particularly skillful, and I am definitely not strong, but after the initial shock to my body that it's being asked to do something other than play guitar or write, it really is a good sport. It's sort of like my dog George Harrison: it goes along with the program. And after about 45 minutes of slogging, when my heart is pumping nicely and my muscles are working in harmony, my mind lets go of its regular tangle of plans and fears and instead gets creative. It also gets seriously involved with the present moment. This is especially true when it's carrying its son on its back. Paying attention carries a lot more value when to fail to do so would mean slipping on a wet mossy rock and tumbling several yards down with an eleven-month old in tow.

Jay loved hiking. The first day, we felt a little guilty: he's just learning how to walk, and he's so excited about what his own little body can do that he barely wants to sleep. Would you want to sleep if you suddenly figured out that your body could fly? But riding on mama's back is apparently evolutionarily charged with positive associations; after all, for millenia, moms have been carting their tots around in slings and on backs, over the Andes and the Pyrannes and Kilimanjaro and the Himalayas. Babes are used to it. Jay slept peacefully for a few hours, then woke up, singing and drumming lightly on my shoulders. Tom mostly carried him on the way down when I feared that my spaghetti legs would fail. He liked dad's back as much as mom's.

There comes a moment on every hike when I hate it. Usually about an hour before the summit. It's my mind rather than my body that freaks out. "I can't do this for another hour!" my mind protests. "What is the point?" On our last day in the high peaks, my family gave Tom and me the gift of hiking by ourselves with just Jay. Elle was happily playing with her cousins and getting a tennis lesson. (She is definitely my daughter. When my mother, a professional-level player, tried to teach her how to hold her racket, Elle grabbed it from her and said, "No, I'm going to show you how I do this," and proceeded to take the racket and bang it on the court.) Anyway, Tom and I had a fabulous time. We hiked Wright Peak, which is next to my favorite mountain in the world, Algonquin. The two peaks share a trail for most of the trip, and then the trail to Wright veers off to the left and hikers ascend open rock face for about a half hour to 45 minutes. It was a beautiful day, but the wind was blowing at the top. My legs were tired and my boots were wet. I was more afraid than I have ever been in my entire life. I had visions of being swept off the summit, or falling backwards and landing on my baby. At one point, I thought, "This is so stupid. I am risking my son's life. For what?"

I thought about camping out and waiting for Tom to bag the peak. That wouldn't be so bad. But Jay wasn't scared. And I thought of all those mothers who have climbed before me, the mothers of the Andes and Himalayas. I prayed to their spirits, and saw the summit. When I finally arrived, Jay's hair flying around his little head like a halo, I said, "We are at the top of the world." He said, "Nah nah," and clapped his hands. Tom found us a place behind a big rock where we could eat our lunch and gaze at Algonquin, and I remembered that it's not until we walk through our fears that we overcome them. My father carried me up these mountains when I was Jay's age. We risk our children's lives in a much more (statistically) dangerous way when we strap them into their car seats and drive across town. What I gave to my son that day was the model of courage. Not the kind of courage that shrugs at danger, but one who feels it and goes up anyway.

The Couch We Can't Get Rid Of

2009-07-20T16:22:00.001-07:00

My parents bought it in the 80s. It was our first and last foray into the world of sectionals. It had two sections! One was a three-seater, with respectable arm rests on both sides, and the other was a kind of love seat with a missing arm rest so that you could make an L shape between it and the larger piece. The only thing wrong with it in our teen-age minds was that it was white. Because given my entire family's proclivity towards spilling beverages (or really, anything) it wasn't white for long.

My parents spent certainly more than the couch was worth to recover it in forest green. And we moved the smaller section so that it faced vertically toward the TV. What a revelation! You could sit and watch TV with your legs out in front of you! The problem was, only one of the five of us could sit that way, so we three girls fought constantly about who got the love seat. I usually won because I had a boyfriend and argued that love seats were for LUUUUV.

When my parents developed some better taste, I inherited both pieces sometime in the late 90s, and this couch moved up to Massachusetts where it sat in my music room and on which I wrote all the songs from Play, If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now, Love and China and This Town Is Wrong. My good luck songwriting couch. It's the couch where I've taken countless naps, eaten many years worth of meals, made out for the first time with my husband. It lived in the writer's room of my current house and many other writers graced it with their fine muses.

Did I mention it kind of smells?

Here is the couch in 2004, a few days after Kerry lost the presidential election. We were having a party to cheer ourselves up and agree to work for peace and love our Republican friends and relations despite our deep grief and frustration. Katryna is about 20 days away from giving birth to William. The dog is the late great Cody, Tom's Australian Shepherd.

Speaking of Tom, he has never liked the couch. "Please please please get rid of it!" he begged me. We were given a fancy Pottery Barn couch when we got married, and at this point the larger sectional moved to the music room where it once again functions as the TV watching nap-taking couch. Also, Elle's favorite thing to do in the entire world is to take its eight pillows off of it, build a fort with them and generally toss them all about the room, jump on them and rip the stuffing out of them. (More on that anon.) The smaller sectional has migrated all over the house we now live in; at one point it was on the third floor in our impossible-to-access attic office space. For several years I used it as my primary life coaching couch (say that 5 times fast.) (This is the main reason Tom hates it. I make him move it every few years.)Up until last week, it had been relegated to the front porch where one of the writers who comes to my weekly groups favored it as a spot to write poetry. When I begged Tom to let me bring it back indoors so that I could have a spot in the kitchen to recline for breastfeeding Jay, Tom said, "That's like asking, 'can I bring tangible depression into the house?'"

A few weeks ago we noticed the wasps. Tom was washing the windows when he got stung. We monitored him carefully to see if he had developed the allergy that makes one stop breathing, and kept our eye on the hospital across the street to make sure it was still there just in case we needed to rush him over. He was fine, but we decided we couldn't live with a wasps' nest right next to our front door. But how does one destroy a nest that is inside of a couch?

Answer: spray it with a ton of toxic chemicals.

Actually, we still don't even know if this is accurate, as there still seem to be some wasps hovering around the couch, which Tom dragged in several stages to the side of our house where it rests as of this writing. So what should we do? We can't take it to the dump; even if you ignore the tremendous environmental irresponsibility of throwing away a gigantic piece of furniture, how mean to the good disposers of garbage to leave them with a possibly active wasps' nest?

We can't freecycle it for the same reasons. Our friend Alice said she'd come by with her truck and take it, but really. How?

Meanwhile, both of us inexplicably developed a tenacious fondness for the remaining sectional, even though, as I said previously, our children have ripped open the fine workmanship on the upholstery and Jay is now pulling pincer-grip sized fingersful of asbestos-like filling and attempting to eat them.

So we have rejected the option of buying a new couch. Instead, I had grand visions of re-upholstering the couch myself, rending it thus:

But because I have a book which I should be writing now instead of blogging about the couch we can't get rid of, I opted to take the strange extra pieces of material that inexplicably cover the armrests and make a patch which I sewed by hand onto the cushion like so:

Viva le divan!

Pillowface Dog

2009-07-20T16:19:00.001-07:00

Here is Elle's new Pillowface Dog which I made so she could have a pillowface at school naptime. Reports come back daily that she is among the non-napping crowd, but no one seems to mind. I tried in vain to felt the ears. Apparently this kind of yarn (worsted weight? It's from a sheep farm called Christopher's in Maine and I bought it in 1991) doesn't felt. Alas.

Wanna Be A Star Then Suffer

2009-07-14T16:55:00.001-07:00

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
-William Butler Yeats

I can't stop thinking about Michael Jackson. I know I'm not alone in this, though I have so far avoided most of the pipelines of infotainment that hurl tidbits, stories, photos at us about the now deceased King of Pop. My main sources of media are NPR, the New Yorker and the New York Times, so I know that Jackson had to pay royalties to the African pop singer Manu Dibango for "borrowing" his phrase "mama se mama sa ma ma coo sa" for "Wanna Be Starting Something."

Other than that, those three sources of media aren't giving me what I really want to know, which is why that perfection of a child turned into a perfectionist who turned his razor sharp powers onto his own body and mutilated himself, and (perhaps) harmed other young people along the way. Also, like the rest of the world, I am fascinated with his three kids, and I want to know all the stuff enquiring minds want to know, like what was he thinking when he dangled his baby off a balcony (this clip was shown about fourteen times on CNN and MSNBC last Sunday when I was trying to enjoy some cable TV in my hotel in Durham while I was on the road and away from my own children for the Eno Festival. I can't believe how exciting the promise of cable TV always seems and how unsatisfying it always ends up being.)

Michael Jackson's seems to be a cautionary tale to parents everywhere: do not exploit the talents of your child! Do not tell them they are ugly! Do not wince when the boys' voices start to change, ushering in the end of those pristine golden soprano notes and your own golden nest egg! ("Just look over your shoulder, baby! Ooooooo!") And would that he could have turned his overly critical eye onto his music and come to the same conclusion WB Yeats did in 1912: that it would be better to walk naked than to tarry with those who had turned his songs and himself into mythologies. Would that he could have loved himself––his true self.

Speaking of mythologies, today, I felt like I'd stumbled into one of the early fables about the Buddha. On our walk home from school (yes, she started school!), we came through the park and paused to enjoy the beautiful day. I let Jay out of his stroller and he climbed up my leg, took my hand in his left hand, and with his right, reached for Elle's hand. The three of us walked a good fifteen feet––by far the farthest he has traveled on his own little pristine soles. Elle pointed to a tree she wanted us to hang out under, and we sauntered over. I smelled a strong odor and hunted around until I found the carcass of a squirrel. Elle ran right over and said, "Mama, what's that?"

"That's a dead squirrel," I said. I resisted the urge to grab her away from it and instead let her come close and examine it from about three feet away.

"How did it die?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, though it looked as though it had been mauled. There were flies buzzing around it, and as I said, it stank.

A few moments later we passed by an extremely old woman sitting on a park bench with her daughter, who was also quite old. The two of them admired our children and it turned out the old woman's son (the other woman's brother) had the same name as Jay. "So this little one will be a world famous neurosurgeon and all-around wonderful guy too!" the younger of the old woman squealed. I smiled and agreed, though I don't care so much about the neurosurgeon part.

And then we saw an old friend of mine whose arm was in a splint. She'd broken her collar bone, she told us, as we stopped to chat, but Elle couldn't get it out of her head that she'd broken her arm, and I didn't bother to correct her. We didn't see a beggar, but other than that, we pretty much got the tour of the "four passing sights" the young Siddhartha Gautama witnessed on the outing his father had famously tried (and failed) to choreograph into being free of the suffering of humanity. Like the Buddha's father, Jackson's dad, for perhaps different reasons, wanted his son to stay a boy. Don't all of us parents have a little part of us that wants to keep our children innocent children forever?

I didn't think too much of this coincidence until tonight, when, while putting Elle into her crib, she interrupted her nightly "Story About My Day" right around the part where we'd eaten breakfast to ask, "Mama, why do people die? When are we going to die? I don't want to die. I don't want you to die."

"Oh, sweetie," I said, hugging her and stroking her hair. "Everybody dies."

"Does this crib die?"

"Ye-es," I said.

She was silent for a moment and the sound of an ambulance siren punctuated the evening. "No," she finally said, shaking her head as if to say, "silly." "Cribs don't die. But do amimals?"

"Yes, they do," I said as gently as I could. "It's too bad, but they do. Everything dies eventually."

"I don't want them to!" she said.

"I know. I don't want them to either. But here's the thing: there are a couple of ways we don't die. One is that when we die, like that squirrel that we saw? We kind of melt into the earth, little bit by little bit and become part of all that is. And the other thing I believe is that we all have a soul, which is the part of us that is aware and the part of us that loves. It's the part of me that loves you no matter what. And that will never ever ever die, sweetie. That part is part of God, and God doesn't die, so that part of you won't die either."

She liked this. "The part of me that loves you won't ever die!" she shouted. "And Jay, and Daddy, and George Harrison, and my stuffed amimals and my blankies!"

We cuddled some more and she said, "Mama, how do you break your bones?"

"Huh? Oh, like Maria?" [Our friend with the broken collar bone].

"Yeah. How do you break your arm?"

"Well, sometimes by not being careful enough, or having an accident or something. We try to be careful, but we can't always help it. And if you break a bone, it's okay. It usually heals pretty well. But it's good to be careful."

"I'll be careful, but sometimes I'm not careful, like when I fall on the ground."

"I'd say you're pretty careful. But we still have to watch Jay, because he's just a baby and he might fall and hurt himself if we're not watching him."

"He won't fall!"

"You're probably right. But still. That's why we close off the stairs for him."

I kissed her goodnight and we made a date to have breakfast together the next morning. And then I came down and wrote some more about Michael Jackson. I think the reason I'm so consumed with thoughts of him (besides the fact that I can't get "Beat It" and "Rock With You" out of my head) is that he represents the ultimate in fame and stardom, a path I once thought I wanted to pursue. Then again, when I was fifteen, I thought "Wanna Be Starting Something" was "Wanna Be a Star Then Suffer," which as it turns out was prophetic, if not for Jackson, certainly for myself.(Calling Dr. Freud...)

The Buddha taught that life is suffering; that the cause of suffering is the constant wanting and grasping state of mind; that there is a way out of suffering and it involves the Eightfold path which is a middle way between excessive consumption and complete self-denial and asceticism. I'm no Jackson expert, but just from passing by the tabloids in the supermarket I can see that he seemed to vacillate between both extremes: the Neverland Ranch on the one hand and anorexia on the other. To see him, even still images of him, in later life was to see a haunted person. His face, in my mind, is the quintessential face of suffering.

And yet, the world did take his coat and has worn it and will continue to wear it. I downloaded “ABC” and “I’ll Be There” and played them last week for Elle as we drove up to church. She didn’t like “ABC”––she prefers the several versions of alphabet songs she already knows––but as the first notes of “I’ll Be There" sounded in our car, I said, “This one’s sort of a lullaby.” She listened for a few bars and said, “Mama, I want you to sing this song to me before I go to sleep.”

And right afterward, “Rock With You” came on. She sang along with every single lyric of the chorus, right on tune.

I wanna rock with you all night/Dance you into day
I wanna rock with you all night/Dance the night away.
-M. Jackson

There’s something preternatural about the clarity of a child’s voice singing adult lyrics, something eerie about hearing my own daughter singing along with the post-adolescent Jackson juxtaposed with the school-aged Jackson whose vocal talents pretty much define the term “preternatural” (and who was singing pretty mature lyrics, too, I might add.)

I closed my eyes and said a prayer right there: “God, please bless these children––all the children–– and keep them safe from the evils of the world. But may their protection rest inside of their own sweet little selves. May they find that inner strength, because there are not walls high enough to keep it all out: the tabloids, the carcasses, the concepts of mutilation and––yes––the sex offenders. Just be there with these children. Let them know You are present. Let them know they are not alone.”

If you should ever find someone
new, I know he'd better be good to you
cause if he doesn't, I'll be there.
-Berry Gordy, Bob West, Hal Davis, and Willie Hutch

Maybe “I’ll Be There” is an appropriate sentiment after all.It's a pretty generous description of unconditional love. I just wish Michael had felt it for himself.

United Breaks Guitars

2009-07-11T04:25:00.001-07:00

I heard this story on NPR yesterday. Here's the video which has gone viral. I consider myself infected.

Felting Update

2009-07-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

In 1992, I was working as the Assistant Dean of Students at the Madeira School in McLean, VA. That's a really fancy title for "Glorified Secretary And Well-Paid Babysitter of 40 Teenage Girls." To give you some perspective, the women the Dean of Students hired to be our shared secretary became the Dean of Students herself the following year when both the former dean and I left for greener pastures. She--the secretary turned dean--also taught me how to knit, which was pretty much all I did in the dean's office, other than sign girls on and off campus, call the taxi company to get rides for girls, organize trips to the mall and occasionally hire indie rock bands (that the girls hated) to play at the spring formal. But I digress. The point is: I learned how to knit once, and now, thanks to my efforts at blogging daily last March and Amanda Soule's wonderful book The Creative Family, I am a knitter again.

Here is a sweater I knit circa 1991:

Here's another:

This last one, the cardigan, was knit for Katryna, but it was too huge for her so she gave it back to me. OK, truly, the problem with the pink sweater was that it was just a gigantic, unshapely mess of a thing. It looked kind of like what it was: a novice knitter's sweater that only a doting grandparent would wear, or one that one's attractive sister would politely received and then stick in a drawer, never to be worn. So I decided it would be perfect as a felting project.

Felting is easy. This is what you do:
-throw the garment in the washing machine. Make sure the washing machine is clean! (Make sure there have been several washes since your last load of diapers, for instance.)
-set your levels to run both a hot and cold rinse, and set your level at small, or low, to save water. (And don't take up felting if you live in Arizona or California or anywhere there's a water shortage.)
-add some earth-friendly delicate soap, or Woolite.
-repeat three times, or until the garment looks felty.
-shape the garment when wet: this is your first and last chance to make it look the way you want!

I was hoping the pink sweater would shrink so that it hugged me nice and tight to the body, but instead it just turned into a small version of its former self: baggy with sleeves that now wouldn't cover my wrists.

Oh, well. It's cozy.

Next up: Elle's lunch bag! Her first day of school is Thursday!

Before...

and after!

Grandmummy's 102nd Birthday

2009-07-02T13:23:00.001-07:00

Photo by Katryna Nields

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

I am breaking my "no faces of my kids on the blog" rule today for a couple of reasons. First, because this is a picture of Elle two years ago, and she just seems like a totally different person. Second, and more importantly, because today is my grandmother's 102nd birthday, and I just love this picture of four generations of oldest daughters, oldest children.

My grandmother is a phenomenon. We always knew she would live past 100. In the 70's when Willard Scott celebrated centenarians on the Today Show, we'd all nod smugly and say, "I can't wait till Grandmummy gets to be on." She discovered yoga in her 60s and spent the second half of her life traveling the world: Russia (USSR then), South America, India, China on several occasions, including in 1972 post-Nixon's visit when she discovered acupuncture and began seeing an acupuncturist once home in her native New York. She took me to Greece when I was ten. She took Katryna to Kenya when she was ten, and she took all of us to Paris and London at various times. She spoke many languages; in fact French was her first. She was a dancer and actress and continued performing until the beginnings of Alzheimer's slowed her down in her mid 90's. She loved modern art, theatre, the color of tomatoes, strangers––she was famous for regaling New York cabbies–– and often befriended single gay men, inviting them to live rent-free in her apartment's spare room in exchange for household chores and company.

She is complicated. And wonderful. And we are every bit her descendants. In Elle, I see all sorts of her complicated, wonderful, adorable traits. We just sang happy birthday to her, Elle in the tub, while my grandmother was shown a picture of us as we sang. I was told to say who I was several times.

My grandmother went to Smith for her Freshman year and then spent a year at the Sorbonne. Smith wouldn't accept the Sorbonne's credits, so my grandmother dropped out. One of my relatives will have to correct me here, but I think she then opened a hat shop and hung out in Greenwich Village to support her acting and dancing, but that might be my fantasy version of her life. At any rate, she lived with her parents until she married at 35, which was of course shockingly old in the early 40's. She had my mother at age 36 and my aunt Sarah at age 40. This turned out to be a hopeful omen for me while I was starting my own family in my late thirties and early 40s.

So as a tribute to my grandmother, I spent the day reading my Anusara yoga teacher training manual and fretting about my gadgets. Here is a litany of my woes:
-My iPhone has a scratch in the top of the screen and needs to be either fixed, which will involve me living without a cell phone for several days or weeks, or replaced; either way I will have to drive to Holyoke Mall, which I hate.
-My classic iPod which I sent away to KingiPod.com thinking it needed a battery replacement turns out to need a whole new logic board. This will cost me upwards of $140, not counting shipping. A new machine is $250.
-Also, I'd sent KingiPod.com my antiquated iPod Mini which I'd tossed in the kitchen table drawer in 2004 when its battery died, in the hopes that it too could be replaced (I had been told at the time that they were discontinuing the thing and thus weren't making replacement batteries. Turns out they do make a few, but KingiPod doesn't service minis.)
-My digital camera's lens broke
-My MacBook's hard disk is completely full, so full that Microsoft Word stopped working just as I was trying to send our book proposal to our agent, so I had to send him the doc on Google docs and then I had to buy a hard drive, which I still haven't figured out how to work.
-My ancient and beloved Beatles watch broke when I absentmindedly took a shower with it on.

Though my woes are somewhat less severe than oh, 99.98% of the population's, I still feel frustrated by all this. I get this awful sinking feeling in my stomach, tightness in my jaw and an angry tingling in my chest every time some element of my kingdom of technology fails me. And I hate that when I have so many delightful events, work, projects, people in my life that I have to spend time addressing the broken iPods. Do I have to? No. I can live without all this stuff. But I hate the waste. I hate that I bought it to begin with. I get mad at myself and tell myself I am a stupid consumer. The stupid consumer in me shrieks, "Things shouldn't break! Things cost too much! They always break one month after the warranty is up! It's an evil conspiracy!" This does not bring me inner peace or allow me to be helpful and loving toward others.

So I've been trying to work with the malfunctioning of my gadgets as a spiritual practice. Questioning the thoughts, I find that maybe iPods are supposed to break as soon as their warranty is up, and that maybe that's okay. Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that my little pieces of metal and lithium and God knows what else predictably turn into litter. After all, a tiny device that contains my entire library of CDs plus podcasts, photos and audiobooks––which at one time filled 8feet by eight feet worth of shelf space in my house and now fits in the palm of my hand is a miracle! Once, we were all amazed by it. Now, we all have at least two and toss them in the bottom of our knapsacks. (This was why my digital camera's lens broke. I have since bought a little sack for it, made from recycled plastic bottles.)

Maybe the real cost of an iPod is not $250 but more like $600 over the course of its lifetime. Certainly anyone who is awake to the food activist movement knows that the real cost of $2.50/lb chicken that lived for a mere 49 days before it was slaughtered is far more when you factor in the environmental and social costs. Things should break. Things should cost so much. Things DO cost so much; more than we pay up front.

This is my habitual dilemma: wondering to what extent I should be accepting life on life's terms (that iPods break and that if I want one I am going to have to devote way more money and time and attention than I might like, but it's worth it to me to enjoy the gifts of music and wisdom it can give) or try to change the injustices of the world (in which case, I'd probably come to the conclusion that iPods are just a part of the corrupted system and refuse to buy one; or I might instead lobby Apple to make longer-lasting, more easily fixable machines). Along these lines, when do I accept that my daughter's tantrum is just a phase in a normal three-year-old's development, and when do I move in to lend a hand? If I move in too often, I have been told, she might equate "have tantrum" with "get mom's love" and that might be BAD. But how can I just leave her alone with her painful feelings? That doesn't feel right either.

Once again, it probably comes down to "the wisdom to know the difference." And interestingly, I am usually able to accept her tantrums as developmentally appropriate and also be with her while she's having one, without shaming her or losing my own temper. Today, I have little wisdom for iPods, the crumbling infrastructure that is my gaggle of gadgets, but I do have this: When I sit with my breath and calm my own system, clarity eventually returns and some direction comes to me, either to act or to wait a little longer.

We mothers these days are so hard on ourselves. In the course of three days, five different important people in my life said something to the equivalent of, "Nerissa, you have got to stop beating yourself up!" Tom says I was always hard on myself, but I feel like it's more pronounced since motherhood, particularly being the mother of two, and why should this be surprising? If a person has some tiny unresolved perfectionist tendencies to begin with, motherhood is a flagrant opportunity to completely bash oneself with recrimination. Because isn't motherhood (or fatherhood) the ultimate testing grounds for the nature versus nurture debate? (And of course parents represent the bulk of the "nurture" part of the equation.) Isn't this where we have the most difficulty setting our boundaries? In the case of mothers who carried their kids in utero, this separation from one to two is literal. A helpful mantra for me in all this is, "Well, the story's not over yet." Maybe the kids will turn out all right, but we'll be putting some pennies in the therapy jar just in case they don't.

And the great thing about Inquiry is that when I take some parental action and then immediately worry about its eventual ramifications, like for instance, how I've just bribed Elle with the promise that I will get her a Krazy straw if she does what I want all day, including take a nap, and then have some self-critical thoughts about my behavior, I get to ask, "Really? Is it really true that because you bribed her she will never do anything from her own volition? Have I really corrupted her in some damning way?"

And doesn't love count for anything? My grandmother was a five-foot tall fire cracker. She had a temper that flattened people twice her weight. She and my mother could argue for years about the same issue (often, which was better, New York City or the Washington suburbs.) In the early years of our career, she would arrive in a taxi to our gigs in the seediest clubs in Soho and then call one of us to tell us how terrible we were. She wanted us to be cabaret singers, I think. Or maybe tap dancers. Once she said to me, "Well, at least you're pretty, because you haven't got any talent."

And we love her so so so much. In a way, I love her more for her struggles with her daughters, with Smith College, with her triangle pose, with the artistic path her granddaughters chose. And when I breath myself to calmness, when I unite with my inner divinity, when I follow Mary Oliver's gorgeous advice to be "idle and blessed," all of life is as easily lovable as that girl who was an older sister in 1909 and a frail, tired, intrepid yogini looking out of her seventh floor window in New York City tonight.

The Shoulds and the Tao Verse 17

2009-06-25T09:19:00.001-07:00

When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"

Tao Te Ching, verse 17 (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

I am reading a wonderful version of the Tao specifically for parents by William Martin. In his translation of the above verse, he writes, "You can control your children through threats and punishments/and they will learn to fear./You can control your children by praise and reward/and they will learn to look outside themselves/ for approval and worth....Or you can love and guide/without controlling or interfering/and they will learn to trust themselves./If your child fails at something/merely express your confidence/in their ability to handle the consequences."

The first few lines of Martin's verse generally describe the way I parent, or the way I have been, anyway. Big cereal bars are the most likely candidate for reward, with watching an episode from our Curious George Goes Green DVD a close second. Withholding one of those two carrots is our most usual form of punishment, though we do use the occasional time-out (trying to be extremely neutral about times-outs because we don't want Elle to connect quiet time with punishment. When we give a time-out, we try to emphasize our own need for space when we get disregulated. Who knows if she understands what we're talking about, but it makes Tom and me feel better.)

But as I wrote in a previous post, I am trying to get away from my habitual pose as Cheerleader Mom. I keep asking Elle, "Oh, how does that feel when..." When you put your toys away, when you make your brother laugh, when you have a tantrum. The answer is invariably (and interestingly) "Good."

Today at lunch she was filling me in on her morning with her babysitter.

"I played with her really well, Mama. I didn't even have a tantrum."

"Wow," I said, nodding. "What does it feel like to have a tantrum?"

"Good," she said, munching on her sugar snap peas.

"Does it feel...like a lot of movement, or does it feel still?" I persisted, genuinely curious.

She chewed some more. "Um," she thought about it. "It feels move-y and still. Both."

"I know what you mean," I said. "That's how it feels to me sometimes too."

As readers of this blog know, I am trying to slow down. I am trying to live in the margins a little more and not so much in the print. For years, lunch was the time in the day when I watched a DVD or listened to an audio book, under the theory that I should not waste time and that lunch was a great opportunity to fill my mind with some external source; to feed my intellect as I was feeding my body. When Elle was a baby, I ignorantly propped her up in an exersaucer with a handful of puffios while I sat next to her on the floor in front of the TV. Together we watched a ton of left-of-center documentaries like The Corporation, Born into Brothels, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and the like. It wasn't until I was watching a biography of George McGovern and some footage came on of atrocities during the Vietnam war and I instinctively covered her nine-month-old eyes with my hand that I put an end to this practice. But even recently, I have plopped her in front of an Elmo DVD or SuperWhy while I read articles from the New York Times as I chomped on my carrots and edamame.

We had one of those weekends that usually takes me three or four days to recover from. Friday Tom and I drove out to Boston with the kids and rode our bikes along the Charles, all the way to the Public Garden where Elle got to ride on the back of Mrs. Mallard. We had dinner at a great restaurant in Cambridge called Full Moon where kids have a playspace and grownups have a real menu. We spent the night with Tom's mother, and then on Saturday I had to be at a rehearsal for Revels SummersDay at 10am, back for call at 2:30pm and then over to Passim for our 8pm show. Katryna and I drove home, arriving at my house at 12:30. In between, and at evening's end, all sorts of breastfeeding logistics had to be co-ordinated. I woke up on Sunday, Father's Day, with a horrible case of the Shoulds. I should not be in such a bad mood, for starters. Also, I should not have booked so much to do this weekend (including a three-hour shoot for extra footage for the DVD we are making, scheduled for Sunday afternoon.) I should have planned on making Tom something special for breakfast. I should take care of the kids all day since Tom should get the day off, and I hadn't spent enough time with them Saturday. The tireder I got, the worse the Shoulds hounded me, like Hera's gadflies in the myth of Io. They persisted even though Tom graciously insisted I rest and even though we had a fabulous time at the shoot (we went to Town Farm and filmed the ducks, hens, goats and our four kids who marched around in the mud carrying little parasols.

By the end of it, Elle had one red foot from stomping around in a big puddle which made her red Mary Jane's dye run. She said, "Mama, I can have ruby slippers even when I'm barefoot!"

We came home triumphant with pizzas and Chinese take-out and celebrated all the dads. The kids played together in the yard with George Harrison, and I didn't even feel all that tired for a few minutes. But after we put the kids down, the extreme fatigue returned and so did the Shoulds. I decided to write them down--that if I could witness them, they might not bite me as badly, or at least I'd be prepared. I wrote them down, tried to find my limiting beliefs which mostly had to do with my fear of being alone ("If I am too tired, I can't be my charming self and people will leave me," goes some of the logic. Another version of this is, "If I take good care of myself by setting limits, people will leave me because I won't be taking good enough care of them." Then I brought the feelings into my body and did some breathing, thanked the gadflies and released them.

That night, I had the most amazing dream. I dreamed this fan of ours had taken hostage all the participants in a workshop Katryna and I were running at a kind of day camp for grown-ups. I walked in late and missed the drama; I was carrying Jay in my arms. Katryna filled me in. I was not told, but assumed the fan had a gun; how else would she compel everyone to stay and be afraid of her? Somehow I got permission to leave the building and get something from my car in the parking lot. On my way, I said to every single person in the parking lot (and there were hundreds, "Hey, _______ is holding everyone hostage! Call the police!"

"Yeah, right," everyone dismissed me. I found my car and put Jay down. He promptly disappeared, which in the world of my dream was a good thing: he was now safe. I got my cell phone and tried to call our manager, Patty, but the buttons wouldn't work. Frustrated, I went back into the building and climbed the stairs to the Art room. I told the instructors there that our fan had taken everyone hostage, and they believed me. (Artists, you know.) They rolled their eyes. "Yeah, she's crazy," they agreed (about the fan) and picked up the phone to call the police. Relieved, I kept climbing the stairs to the roof where theoretically the fan was herding everyone in order to somehow kill us. I found her and took her hand, calling her by name. "______," why are you so angry today?"

"Wellllll," she said, sounding a lot like my three-year-old daughter. "The last time you came to _______ [her state] you didn't stop by to visit us. You never pay any attention to me."

I was about to protest, to sputter with indignation about my two children and the fact that her town was three hours away from the gig, but instead I said, "Yeah, that's really disappointing. I wish I had more time to visit people. But, _______; you are going to feel pretty sad if you cause harm to these people."

Then my Zen alarm clock woke me up.

A few minutes later (it was around 6:30am) the whole household was awake. I was changing Jay's poopy diaper in his room and Elle was jumping up and down on the double bed.

"I have to pee!" she suddenly shrieked. A minute later, she was back, chagrined. "Sorry, Mama, but I tried to pee in the potty but I peed, I only could get to the bathroom floor, and I peed on my pants." Which she handed to me, soaked. I was about to express my disappointment when I remembered that verse of the Tao.

"That's okay, sweetie. You're figuring it out, and I know eventually you're going to always pee on the potty. But accidents happen. Just get a towel and clean it up."

"Okay, Mama," she ran off and returned with the damp towel. And I kid you not; the next thing she said was, "Mama. You listened to me today."

Jung would say all the characters in the dream were me, or versions of me. So the fan was me, pretending to have a gun when all she had was a lot of rage and threats. Mad that she wasn't getting enough attention. The participants in the parking lot who were dismissive of the threat were me, too, as was the uncooperative cell phone and even the disappeared Jay. And of course all the participants who were fooled by a mad person with only the threat of a gun.

Today I want to be a person who listens more than anything else. I want to be a witness to the hostage in me as well as the hostage-taker. And of course I can never know how the dream might have ended this morning before the alarm cut it short, but I can hope that the fan figured out on her own that she didn't need to be feared or despised in order to get what she wanted, which was just to get some love and attention anyway.

Top photo by Nerissa. All others by Kris McCue.

May There Always Be Sunshine

2009-06-22T16:05:00.001-07:00

"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark."
-Rabindranath Tagore

In case your child ever breaks a compact fluorescent bulb and it shatters in thousands of pieces, DO NOT VACUUM! like we did. Instead, calmly take your children and pets out of the room and wait 15 minutes, preferably with the window open. Then, assuming you can secure your kids, return to the room and clean up the pieces using a piece of cardboard and a damp rag. Use sticky tape such as duct tape to get the smallest bits.

Then pray.

I absolutely hate that this happened today, and I hate that I was such a good little environmentalist that I replaced all the nice, friendly incandescent bulbs with harsh Soviet era CFBs. Is it really worth risking mercury poisoning to save the planet?

Well....This is exactly the kind of moral conundrum we parents are in, constantly. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, as it were. I used to make my own yogurt; now I save time but spend money and create garbage by buying it (Side Hill Farms yogurt, though, which is infinitely better than anything I've ever made. A local company, too, in Ashfield MA. Try it if you live in New England! YUM!!) As I posted eons ago, I would have loved to walk to the co-op to get my groceries, but when I tried it once with my two littlies, I almost died of a heart attack (the co-op is on a pretty scary artery; not to mention it's hard to load up on groceries when most of the real estate of your stroller is taken up with children.) So now we drive.

And usually, we drive at least part way to our local organic farm (Town Farm in Northampton which is on the complete opposite side of town from us). So we park in town and walk the rest of the way. At Town Farm, there are goats, chickens and as of today, baby ducks. Elle and Jay were entranced. Our friend Liz said she liked the yellow ones best. Elle liked the black ones, and I liked the ones with light brown feathers and black beaks. Not sure which ones Jay liked best, but he seemed to say, "Duck!" Elle and I are constantly on the lookout for Jay's first word. Sometimes it is "Dog," sometimes, "Dada" but always it is some version of "Duh." So who knows? Maybe it really was "Duck" today.

On our way back from the farm, in order to avoid traffic, I took the sneaky way across Main Street through the parking lot behind the Calvin Theatre. There was a gigantic bronze tour bus. Idly, I wondered who was playing, and as soon as I remembered, I saw Amy Ray come out from around the front of the bus. I rolled down my window.

"Hey, Amy!" I said, acting like a totally cool, casual, one-time-almost-almost-famous folksinger, myself. She came over to the car and peered in. "It's Nerissa Nields from the Nields."

"Oh, hey," she said. She's extra friendly and social. I have met her several times in the past fifteen years and she has always been warm and supportive and engaging. At South By Southwest, for example, she told me to go to Thaiphoon for Thai food, and of course, she was right.

"I so wanted to come see you tonight, but..." and I gestured to the back seat towards my kids––which is only metaphorically true. I actually have a writing group to lead tonight, but one could argue that in a broader view, I lead writing groups instead of attending folk shows with legendary duos because of my kids.

"I can see why you aren't coming tonight," she chuckled, waving at Elle and Jay.

"Have a great show," I said, driving off. We were trying to get Elle's hair cut, and as I pulled into a parking space across from Pam's Kickin Cuts, I realized that it really was true that I'd rather be right here, right now on this beautiful Juneteenth day with my little daughter and son than performing for a thousand loyal, loving fans at the Calvin."

I guess this surprises me a little. I remember in 2000 visiting my friend Melissa in Mill Valley, CA. She was pregnant with her first child and glowing with anticipated glory. She asked me if I wanted to have kids.

"I do and I don't," I said. For the previous ten years, I would say, "In about five years," whenever anyone asked me that question. My preparatory husband David felt differently; he always said, "In about a year," but the result was the same. So I said to Melissa, "The thing is, I am afraid that if I have kids I will love them more than I love music. And that I wouldn't be as engaged with my career. that I wouldn't love it as much. And then I might have to do something else besides music."

Melissa looked confused. "Well, then..uh...but that would be because you were happy with your kids. And if you're happy with your kids, who cares what else you do?"

I was ashamed to say this to Melissa, and I am embarrassed even to write it now (though my wise friend Judy says this is a perfectly normal developmental stage that twentysomethings go through), but my answer was that I thought I would be subverting my destiny; that I owed my music to the universe and that if I denied it, something essential would be forever lost! This was before I had the concept that God is a river that flows in a certain direction and that, by this theological perspective, it would be impossible for me to deny the universe anything the universe demanded. (Also, this was before I believed that it was okay, spiritually, to be happy.)

Frances Crowe, amazing local activist and legend in her time, came to preach at my church last week. I got to do the music, and I was told ahead of time to focus on peace songs. So I did nothing but peace songs: "Down By the Riverside," "Imagine," "S/He's Got the Whole World in His/Her Hands," "Redemption Song" and my new favorite, "May There Always Be Sunshine," a Russian kids' song that we have been doing in HooteNanny. Katryna figured out the ASL movements to go with it, so I taught it to the kids at my church (and the congregation) technically in three languages.

Poost svig-da boo-dyet sohn-seh
Poost svig-da boo-dyet nyeh-boh
Poost svig-da boo-dyet Mama
Poost svig-da boo-doo yah

May there always be sunshine
May there always be blue sky
May there always be Mama
May there always be me.

Someone in the congregation corrected one of my signs: I'd been doing "I" instead of "me." "I" in ASL is a fist to the chest with the pinky up, as in ASL alphabet "i" while "me" is pinky down, a closed fist. Perfect. That was me in the '90s, striving to get my music "out there"--but of course, I couldn't because I was close-fisted; it was all about me. That day in church, sitting at the feet of Frances Crowe (who, among other amazing feats, once put up an antenna in her backyard so that the town could get Democracy Now) I got to be a part of a whole, a big river of music that came before me, includes me and will keep on flowing downstream into the ocean, up into the rainclouds and back again. I'll take that.

What to Do When Your Baby Breaks a Lamp With a CF Bulb

2009-06-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

Don't vacuum!

Air the room out first, evecuating all humans and pets for 15 minutes.

Use a piece of cardboard, a rag and duct tape to pick up the pieces.

http://www.epa.gov/hg/spills/#whatnever

Human Billboard, Anusara Yoga and...Pedicure

2009-06-16T17:02:00.001-07:00

Above are the necklaces my friend Jen McGlashen made. She sent me these and asked me to please wear them as a human billboard for her design. She also sent me a pack of cards with her website address which I stuck in my purse and always mean to hand out to people who compliment the necklaces, of which there are many. But I always seem to have the wrong purse when this happens. So here is her site: www.mcflashpants.com. Enjoy.

She's brave, my friend Jen. It's really hard to put yourself out there, I am continuously reminded. We have been working as musicians since June of 1991, which means as of June 7, we have been The Nields in a professional, yes-we-take-money--please--for-our-singing way for 18 years. Our first gig for real money was on that date (June 7, 1991--someone please alert Bruce Palmatier) at Trinity College where Katryna and I along with Mary McCormack (yes, THE Mary McCormack) sang two sets at a Trinity alum party.

I go back and forth with the whole putting-self-out-there thing. Obviously some part of me loves it. Why else would I be a professional musician, or for that matter, writing this blog? I love the connection I get when I go forward in life with my heart open.

And some part of me doesn't. It is said that the number one fear in this country is public speaking. Not death, which is number two. More people are afraid of what others think about them than they are of losing their lives. I love public speaking, and if you asked me whether I'd rather have the love and admiration of million people or a million dollars, I'd choose the love every single time. Fame practically guarantees both kinds of millions; but it almost always comes along with the disgust of a million people. Or at least one person, and I don't love the idea that even one person might be offended by me.

For my birthday present, Katryna gave me a spa pedicure along with her presence and participation (namely, she had to sit next to me and chat and get a pedicure for herself while I got my tootsies tended to). In the picture below you can see the tops of my sweet kids' heads along with my pampered foot.

The pedicure is important because I have come to the conclusion (for the umpteenth time--this is not new) that I will not have lived a completely happy life unless I go through yoga teacher training. It's not so much that I want to be a yoga teacher, though I might. It's more existential than that. My grandmother, Margaret B. Tenney, discovered yoga in 1967 after traveling to India. She came back to New York City and began a practice that included standing on her head every morning, along with sun salutations and a bowl of yogurt and granola. (In two weeks she will be celebrating her 102nd birthday, so she's not exactly a bad advertisement for these practices.)

Yoga is not new to me. I had a pretty serious Ashtanga practice in the late 90's and continued to study different paths, spending time at Kripalu, doing prenatal yoga in both pregnancies. When I practice yoga, I am incrementally more grounded than I am at any other time of the day, even when meditating (trying to meditate, I should say.) This doesn't mean I'm always present in my yoga practice; I spend much time wondering when class will be over and what I will eat for lunch and how nice that other person's mat is and how I wish I could do a backbend like the guy in the tank top and how I probably will never be brave enough to do a handstand and how I hope the teacher is noticing how flexible my hamstrings are. Speaking of which, I once injured my knee so badly when I was trying to show off my flexibility doing a standing half-lotus with forward bend that I had to stop practicing for a month. Still. I tend to catch my mind drifting off the beam into its competitive, acquisitive, judgmental ways more quickly on the mat than off.

Plus, there's the sheer bliss I experience when and after I practice. The hard part is getting me on the mat.

Anusara yoga, the path I will be studying, is all about opening the heart, which I have been convinced for a long time is my life's work. The central philosophy is in line with my own: that God dwells within us as.

The art of Anusara yoga is a co-participation with the Supreme-not a practice of domination, subjugation, or control of Nature. The poses in Anusara yoga are considered to be "heart-oriented," meaning that they are expressed from the "inside out." Instead of trying to control the body and mind from the outside, the poses originate from a deep creative and devotional feeling inside. -www.anusara.com

It's not lost on me that this time around my intention began because I was in pain. My back hurt, so I went to the physical therapist who pointed out that I walk around in a slump. I wrote about it and one of you angels out there sent me a link to Esther Gokhale's lecture. I was forced, through pain, into my body: to pay as much attention to my small body movements as I try to pay to the small adjustments my mind needs to make in order to be as calm and happy and helpful as possible. And all I could think of was, "Yoga, yoke, embody. Heart forward. Be brave. Heart forward."

Do one thing every day that scares you, said Eleanor Roosevelt.

So here I am with my new pedicure which will serve as a bell of mindfulness every time I lunge forward from down dog. Of course I wish I'd chosen purple like Katryna did, but probably if she'd chosen Cancun Fiesta instead of Louvre Me Louvre Me Not, I'd have wanted the pink. (What a fun day job that would be, to come up with nail color names!)

I am really scared. I am going to be studying with the yoga teacher of my dreams. We have become friends recently, which is a whole other amazing, grace-filled story. I have mentioned a few times about my secret wish to do yoga teacher training, and she kept saying it would happen when it was meant to happen. And then in the space of a few hours we figured out a way to make it happen--this summer.

In a strange way, this is an even more frightening version of "putting out there" than speaking is, or certainly singing is. She is going to see me as an imperfect student instead of her strong, smart friend. She's going to see my pride, my competitiveness, my weakness––all the things I regularly try to disguise. I am going to have to show up with my body, in my body, with my heart open and forward, even when the last thing I want to do is move my body, be in my body, risk my own judgmental competitive thoughts. I am going to have to show up for the God within when I'd rather tune out and read Twitter posts or find some other way to slump in a chair. But what I've learned is this: I get to show up in whatever state I'm in, and I only ever have to work to whatever my own edge happens to be. I am pledging now to honor the tightness, to go gentle, to embrace the body that I have and work with what is, not what I think might be (given years of practice and some plastic surgery.) And whether or not my teacher loves and approves of me is ultimately none of my business.

And I don't fully know why my call in this direction is so strong. I believe and think empirically that it will make me a better songwriter and musician, a better coach and a better writer. Most importantly, I think it will make me a happier person which will infiltrate all my relationships, but maybe none of this is true. But my body says, "GO," and I've learned that the body knows.

A good friend just told me about a parenting philosophy (Vicki Hoefle who has a program called "Parenting on Track" ) that resonates with me. She said, "Instead of praising your child when she hits a home run or paints a beautiful picture, ask her how it feels to do this. That way she gets her affirmation from within rather than from an external source."

I love this. My inclination is to shower my kids with praise for every little accomplishment. I'm an enthusiastic cheerleader, so this happens all the time. But what if I inquired instead? What if I held back just a tad, so that it's not about me and my reaction but an invitation to curiously explore the feeling? That way my children get to find their own God within, their own North Stars, without all my editorializing. And then maybe, just maybe, they will not need to stand on a stage or look at their bank balance or be dependent on a partner to feel how fully and completely they are loved by God, by the planet, by their own miraculous bodies.

Update on Felted Pick Necklace

2009-06-15T16:07:00.001-07:00

Here is the ongoing evolution of the felted pick necklaces which are sure to make us RICH!

I still need to knit a cord for this. And then I have to take a giant leap of faith to see if it's true that if you cut into felt, your stitches won't come apart, for this needs a button.

I am making projects from this great book. Here is what I hope will be Elle's school lunch bag. I still need to knit the strap (my first I-chord!) and felt the bag. I can't find any #11 needles so I am going to use #10s and hope for the best. Also, I am going to try to find some waterproof fabric and line the inside. (If you look at the above picture sideways, you can see what the finished bag should look like: it's the middle picture on the book's cover.)

Jay loves his pillowface cat so much. When I give it to him he leans back and then hurls himself forward onto it, howling with delight.

"Don't Try So Hard"

2009-06-12T10:55:00.001-07:00

Is it a requirement that all children who become older siblings go through a regressive phase that includes talking babytalk, crawling, wanting to drink from bottles and eat from babyfood jars and, in some cases, breastfeed? And furthermore, is it a requirement that their parents find this phase cloying at best and mysteriously irritating? I say "mysterious" because when I chunk it down, nothing Elle is doing right now is not cute, including her high squeaky "I-am-just-a-baby" voice. And yet every parent I know cannot stand when their child acts younger than he or she is and in fact often snaps at said child, losing the desirable parental cool we all aspire to. Also, the babytalk the child uses is not real babytalk but some proximation of it. For instance: "goo goo ga ga." I notice real babies don't actually say "goo goo ga ga" as such.

I am trying again to meditate properly. I go in and out of this attempt. My mind hates to stay still. I am an inveterate planner, which serves me well in a way. I have been known to get a lot done because I am good at filling all the cracks and crevices of my day. When I find myself with a spare five minutes, I love to fill it with a phone call to a friend I've been hoping to catch up with, or I sponge off the counter which always needs a cleaning. At some point I internalized both the phrase about the devil liking idle hands and also "Don't just sit there; do something!" When I started meditating, I was told to reverse that last directive: "Don't just do something; sit there." I find the latter much more challenging.

Our minister Stephen Philbrick wrote a poem which he often recites as a kind of benediction, especially on communion Sundays.

The space between stars, where noise goes to die;
And the space between atoms,
Where the charges thin out;
These are places too.
The moment in the movement of the soul
When it all seems to stop, seized up.
This is true too...
"Not a thing" is something. After the end
And before the beginning
Is time, too.
Let it alone, don't try so hard.
This is God, too.
All of you is.

This coming Tuesday, June 16, our town of Northampton is about to vote on whether or not to override the budget. Because of the catastrophe that is the US economy, Massachusetts has slashed its budgets and towns like ours are scrambling to make ends meet. The vote's in a week. The override would put a million dollars into the school system, and that alone is enough for me to be for it. The rumor is that if the override doesn't pass, my daughter's first grade class will have 35 kids in it. The increase in our property tax comes out to something like $62 per $100,000 worth of property value per year. To me, this is a no-brainer. Moreover, an override very similar to this lost by one vote in 2003. Guess who was too busy to go to the polls that day.

So we have a big sign on our lawn and Tom's been making calls trying to get out the vote. I have no idea what the chances are, but it's been interesting to see how my mind reacts to this whole issue. Of course, what comes up are some of my primal fears. I was raised in the religion of higher education: to believe that all of society's problems could be solved if only we could imbue our children with information and the skills to acquire it, we would make better choices which would lead to fewer wars, better stewardship of the planet, eradication of poverty and support of NPR. I still believe this. But I also know that it's not that simple and that people who don't agree with me are not the enemy. And yet, when someone close to us called today to question why we are for the override, I found myself yelping in the background (Tom was on the phone) things like, "Our kids won't have music, art or PE! Our kids have to bring their own paperclips!" And then trembling with rage when he hung up the phone on the caller.

This behavior kind of goes against my desire to be a compassionate person.

Sometimes when Elle is being a baby, I lose my patience and say, "Too bad you're just a little baby. Only big girls get to _________ (watch TV/eat cookies/ride their trikes, etc.)" And it works; she suddenly becomes a big girl and uses her proverbial words. But I'm not crazy about my behavior in this situation, clever and manipulative though I think I am. If I took the long view, I'd see that she's acting out beautifully. If I weren't in such a hurry, I'd just let her prolong her babyhood and be amused at her recreation of that time, goo goo ga ga's and all.

I hate the idea of her going to a school with 35 kids in her class. I hate that I can't give her what my parents gave me: a school rich (literally) with music, drama, art and athletics. I most of all hate that she might suffer the way I did; that kids might tease her, call her names, ignore her, not recognize her brilliance and beauty and specialness. But of course they will, no matter where she goes: that's part of the walk of childhood. I don't know a single person who didn't experience some kind of social pain at some point in childhood. Mine wasn't the worst, but it was enough to scar me.

But who's to say I am not better off with those scars?

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's where the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen

And where is God except in the suffering? I was listening to a Speaking of Faith interview with Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my favorite bodhitsattvas. He was talking about how the lotus flower needs mud to grow in. "Not marble," he said in his French Vietnamese accented gentle voice.

It's like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. That's why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…

Ms. Tippett: The kingdom of God?

Brother Thây: Yeah, because I could not like to go to a place where there is no suffering. I could not like to send my children to a place where there is no suffering because, in such a place, they have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. And the kingdom of God is a place where there is understanding and compassion, and, therefore, suffering should exist.

"Don't try so hard," Stephen's poem reminds me. Tom had our friend Mike Biegner set it up, printed it out and framed for my birthday last week, and I have been savoring it ever since. My practice so far, in my 43rd year, is to honor the margins by giving myself and my family more of them. Rather than scheduling myself down to the minute, I am trying to leave a half hour, an hour, a few days, a few weeks between activities. I am living in those in between spaces, and––who knew?––it turns out, in the end that there's a lot of life there. Maybe even more life than in those blocks in bright colors on my gmail calendar.

Writer Unblocked

2009-06-10T13:47:00.001-07:00

Half-screened porch. Once it's completely screened, I will be able to write our book.

… "Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known."

Seamus Heaney, "North"

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."-Thomas Mann

I am trying to write a book. I have written three books already, and published two of them, so I was under the mistaken assumption that it would be easy for me to write another book.

Not so fast, lady.

My friend Nalini Jones, a wonderful writer whose book of short stories What You Call Winter practically oozes grace and depth of character, told me years ago that whenever she had to write, whenever she had a deadline, her husband would come home to an exceptionally clean house.

So for the past two-and-a-half months, I've been cleaning my house, making long to-do lists of projects I should have done last September, gotten excited about crafting little teeny tiny knitted-and-then-felted pick necklaces (which, I decided after several cups of extra strong green tea, were going to make Katryna and me MILLIONAIRES!),

Soon-to-be, pre-felted pick necklace which will make us rich.

Also, I sorted about thirty-five hundred loads of laundry, flossed my teeth too enthusiastically and fantasized about how I could only really write the book I'm supposed to write if my husband would locate and put up the screens on our porch.

In short, I did all the things I tell my clients not to do.

I've been in a kind of a rut. Not the regular kind of rut where you feel stuck and sad and frustrated and it's raining and muddy and your car won't move even when four large humans come to push it out. My rut is comfy, in a way. But I've dug it for myself with phrases that I repeat, like: "I am so exhausted!" "I am so busy I haven't had time to wash my hair!" "We are just in survival mode, that's all there is to it." And my favorite: "there are just too many things I want to do and not enough time to do them."

But there was something I really wanted to do, and that was sit down and write this book about how anyone's family can be musical if given just a few ingredients and a dose of permission. Katryna and I have been talking about this book for years now on our drives to and from our gigs. We even have all sorts of wonderful outside supporters encouraging us and cheering us on. It's the best gift our grown-ups gave us, and now that we are grown-ups (really, we are), we want to pass it on. So why was I trolling felting sites on the internet and buying yarn to make an all-purpose summertime tote bag instead of working on our outline?

There are lots of good answers to that question, actually. I'm a firm believer in letting the muse have its way before it gets down to business. Think Pat Morita in The Karate Kid making Ralph Macchio paint his fence. But I'm also a believer in bum glue: that at some point you just have to show up with your laptop and sit until something comes out.

I read an article in the New York Times last week that enhanced the process of my liberation. The article was about the newest trend in parenting, which the writer called "slow parenting." It cited a book by Tom Hodgkinson called “The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids” and it featured a cover — parents lounging with martinis as their small child mixes up their drinks. "Pay attention to your own needs," writes Hodgekinson, "back off on your children and everyone will be happier and better adjusted."

Don't worry--Elle and Jay won't be mixing our drinks for us. And don't worry is actually the point--it may well be that the worst thing you can do for your kid is worry. At any rate, something from my coach training snapped into place after I read this article. It was a long-forgotten, or perhaps long-ignored voice in my head: the voice that questions. "Is it true?" the voice asks when I take as fact what Martha Beck calls a "limiting belief." What if, I suddenly thought, my idea that every time Elle or Jay cries it's my fault, that I am doing something wrong as a parent, what if that thought is not true? What if they're just in a bad mood? And more importantly, what if all that's required is a small shift, a small adjustment in my behavior--not a giving-up-my career adjustment, not a quit-my-yoga-class adjustment, but a two minute cuddle and kiss and be-present-in-my-body adjustment?

As I wrote in the last post, my back is much better, due in fact to an adjustment--a tiny one at that. And it seems to continue to be better as I do my simple exercises (imperfectly) and notice when I am hunching. Course corrections, I remember from my few times on a sailboat, are minute but they have huge consequences for the direction the ship takes.

It's all about the breath. I've heard that for the past twelve years, but it wasn't until recently that I've taken that in and lived it, the way Helen Keller finally got "water" at the end of The Miracle Worker. When I get shaken up by all the events and people in my life that conspire to shake me up (it's their job, after all--every moment is my perfect teacher), my first task is to get back in my body, and the easiest way for me to do that is to come back to the breath.

I turned 42 on Tuesday. I'd planned a kick-ass day. I'd scheduled a session with a Martha Beck life coach––for me. I'd scheduled a Dr. Hauschka facial (I adore them and am an ambassador for their products.) I'd told Tom that all I wanted from him was to take the afternoon off so we could bum around town together. I'd invited my sister and her family for BYO take-out dinner. So when I woke up that morning, I was already in a good place. But in my first moments of being awake, I set this intention: may I take whatever happens as the way it's supposed to be and fit myself to it rather than trying to get it to conform to my hopes and expectations.

So when Elle hopped into bed with us and immediately started kicking and pouting instead of cuddling and kissing, instead of thinking, "She hates me! I'm a terrible mom! She needs more attention! She needs less attention! My day is ruined!" I smiled and thought, "She's three. She's fine. Her mood will pass." And it did. Five minutes later, she was cuddling on my lap cooing, "My baby Mommy! I love my baby Mommy!"

"Everything passes, and the problem is already solved."

"Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-doing." This last from the Tao te Ching and from my new life coach Terry DeMeo who royally kicked my butt on Tuesday morning. I told her how hopelessly busy I was and instead of sympathizing and shaking her head with wonder at my multitasking fantabulousness, she said, "Oh, really. And who is making you be so busy?" She got me to see that my dread of the feeling of being busy was much worse that the actual moment-to-moment reality of my life. She also reminded me that, as Mark Twain said, " I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." In other words, it's my thoughts that are keeping me in this rut.

All this is to say, for the moment, my little vehicle is back on track. I have the proposal almost finished, and feel as though someone came in and cleaned my windows. I can see clearly now, the smog has gone, and I can't believe this is my life.

The Essential Twenty-First Century Mom Conflict

2008-11-24T11:15:00.001-08:00

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is it just me, or is everyone having the same fantasy? I find myself saying to myself several times a day, “Oh, that’s okay; when Barack Obama is president, that’ll be solved.” "That" being everything from the ever-sinking Dow to our high health insurance premiums to the mice who have taken up residence in our cupboards to my daughter’s continuing refusal to become potty trained. Now and then I remember that Obama is just a guy, albeit a smart and attractive and charismatic one, and that he probably can’t wave his hand and produce miracles, but I think it’s probably good for my nervous system to pretend he can right now.

A friend of mine sent me two articles today that stirred up my Time, Money, Calories matrix and left me panting for breath. One article was from the magazine Brain, Child and the other was her response to it. The Brain Child article is called "Eco-Housewives" and tells of a woman named Shannon Hayes who is writing a book tentatively titled Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity form a Consumer Culture. It sounded right up my alley—a sort of Annie Leonard "Story of Stuff" homesteady fantasy, and with trepidation, I started to read my friend’s response to it. My friend, the mother of three and a brilliant professional writer and card carrying feminist, took offense at the suggestion that “eco-moms” were somehow more enlightened and evolved than those who, as she does, shop at ShopRite and occasionally accept plastic bags when they forget their canvas ones. My friend raised the question “what is enough?” which to me is at the root of what I keep thinking of as the essential Twenty-First Century Mom Conflict.

What is enough? My friend was clearly disturbed and, by her own admission, thrown on the defensive by Hayes’s embrace of a completely consumer-free lifestyle: no TV, all local organic cuisine, no presents at Christmas, etc. Hayes’s stance didn’t bother me in the least: I admire her; occasionally want to follow that path; don’t (I have many an eco-sin); and figure it’s good enough that I use cloth diapers and make my own wipes and drive a biodiesel (which may or may not be an eco-sin, but that's a topic for a different post). It’s about batting averages, I figure, and I am grateful to the Hayeses of the world for allowing me to have lower ones.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own areas of defensiveness. I get defensive around moms who spend most of their day actually doing something that can be perceived as “playing” with their kids. I am pretty good at making up stories, but oddly terrible at engaging with my daughter around her stuffed animals or dolls. This is especially odd as that was exactly the kind of play I did as a child. The other day when I was lamenting my lack of talent and interest in imaginative play, my husband said, “You don’t like to play with her that way because you brought that part of you along with you. Now you play by writing novels and songs, and you can’t go back.”

Maybe so, but I still feel like a rotten parent when I see someone else–– a babysitter, another parent, my husband–– animating one of her dolls and getting her to giggle and shriek with joy. I have friends who get defensive––in fact, go on the offense––when it comes to a career they may have left behind. These moms speak with passion about selfishness and priorities and deathbed regrets.

Whatever. Motherhood, career, good stewardship of the planet, It's impossible to do it all. I give up. Also, I give up on trying to be enlightened. The High Priests of the Present Moment may now come and officially excommunicate me. I’ve been trying so hard to live in the Now so as not miss a single thing my darling children do or say that I think I’m seriously in danger of losing my sense of humor forever. I wish today, with all my heart, that my friend and I (and all the Shannon Hayeses of the world) could just relax and enjoy our few moments here, even if that means we are zoning out and watching Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central; EVEN if that means we are sitting around the kitchen table judging our other mom friends for watching Comedy Central. Either way, at least we will have a few precious moments for ourselves, even if they are self-righteous ones.

Today I let my daughter cry in her crib for five minutes after I put her down for her nap, and yes, I felt terrible, and yes, it was the absolute best choice I could make given how exhausted I was and how my son needed his diaper changed. Then I noticed that she stopped crying, sung herself the ABC song and fell asleep. When she woke, she was in a great mood.

“I say 'hostibal,' mama, and you say ‘hospital.’ Isn’t that funny, mama?”

I picked her up and snuggled her. “I’m sorry you were sad before your nap,” I said.

“I not sad now,” she replied. “Talk about the bear and the scary boy, okay Mama? That’s a good idea, right Mama?” and she hugged and kissed me, and perhaps I was forgiven, but at any rate, her innate, instinctive kindness allowed me to forgive myself. In this, as in all things parental, the kids are the best teachers of all.

Homemade Diaper Wipes

2008-10-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

When I made the decision to use cloth diapers, I consulted my friend Carol on the ins and outs of the diaper pail, how many cycles should they be washed, and other sundry matters. She happened to mention her friend Frances who, she said, made her own wipes.

My eyebrows flew up in amazement. "Her own wipes!"
"Yeah," said Carol. "She's really hard core."

I figured that particular hard-coreness would never strike me. Wipes didn't even seem that bad for the environment, especially the brand I used: Seventh Generation, which is basically an unbleached kleenex with some eco-friendly suds soaked in.

It wasn't the eco-aspect that got me after living for two months with two kids in diapers. It was the cost. We were going through two or three packs at week, and at $5 a pack, that's nothing to sneeze at, so to speak.

So I went online and made my own formula, out of olive oil, baby shampoo and water:
1 cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp baby shampoo

I put the formula into three squirt bottles--one for each diaper changing station. Best of all, I turned all my stained infant clothes, my puked on-and-inadvertently-dyed-pink-from-being-in-the-wrong-load tee shirts into nice long wipes. Now, instead of using five or six wipes per poopy situation, I use just one long soft rag. The new formula works much better than the wipes--it's more like a sponge bath than a toilet paper attack--and my kids prefer it two to nothing.

And we're saving $60 a month. Though I still use wipes in my diaper bag, and I have not yet instructed my babysitters to follow my suit. I'm not that hard core.

How to Heal Stinky Carpets

2008-09-29T13:27:00.000-07:00

This from the brilliant novelist Melissa Miller:

Hi Nerissa,

I thought of an idea for the How To Be An Adult site ... I have carpets in our bedrooms and they have fallen prey to both the kids and dogs in the urine department. I hate the stuff that they sell for such odors and don't think they're good for my family or pets to breathe, or for the environment. What I found works like a charm is to sop up the wetness, clean the area with a good cleanser (I use the new green series by Clorox or something by Seventh Gen.) and let it dry ... then the piece de resistance is plain old baking soda. I sprinkle it over the stinky spot and brush it deep into the fibers with a hand broom. Let it sit for the day and then vacuum it up! This also works for every day kinds of pet odors in carpets ... vacuum the carpet, shake the soda all over it, brush it into the fibres, let it set and then vacuum it up!

Nerissa says: the wonders of baking soda! We keep countless boxes of it in our pantry and in all our bathrooms. Combined with vinegar, it is a powerful, earth-friendly all purpose cleaner.

Dead Car Battery Question

2008-07-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

In some cars, you can charge a cell phone whether or not the car is running. My question is: does that in anyway hurt the car? My husband and I are in disagreement about this.

Unbelievably Good Mock Sushi Salad

2008-07-04T18:19:00.000-07:00

I haven't had real sushi in over 10 years as I don't eat sugar, and sushi has sugar in the seasoning for the rice. Also, it is ill-advised* for pregnant women to eat sushi, so there are multiple reasons why, when Tom and I go out for Japanese, I abstain from what was once my obsession. But pregnancy cravings are pregnancy cravings. Today, I marched into my local food co-op, set down an avocado, a cucumber and some organic nori sheets on the belt and got creative in the kitchen.

Ingredients

-nori sheets
-one can crabmeat (the fake crabmeat, which most California rolls use, have sugar in them, so if you don't have a problem with sugar, you can substitute this.)
-6 oz cooked brown rice with a little rice vinegar shaken over
-1/4 avocado, thinly sliced
-3/4 cucumber, thinly sliced
-2 tbsp Annie's Organic Shiitake Dressing (optional; again, if you don't have a problem with sugar, go online and find a recipe for sushi rice and follow that)
-powdered wasabi (or real, if you can get it)
-tamari or soy sauce
-caviar (I didn't have this, but a girl can dream)

You might also want a bamboo sushi roller, though I don't have one and did just fine making little cones with my piece of nori.

Assemble your ingredients. The rice should be cool and easy to work with. You can either toss all the ingredients together to make a non-traditional Japanesish salad, or attempt a more roll-like creation. Either way:

-hold a sheet of nori over a gas flame or a candle very briefly. The sheet should turn from black to green.
-wet the powdered wasabi to create a paste. Leave for 10 minutes.

Then, if attempting rolls:
-lay the sheet down on the bamboo roller. Put a layer of rice on it in a square, leaving a margin of about an inch all around
-in the middle of the sheet, make a vertical line of crabmeat.
-next to the crabmeat, a vertical line of avocado
-and a vertical line of cucumber
-and a vertical line of caviar
-roll up the roll and seal the nori (wet the inside and outside edges of the nori to make a seal)
-with a VERY sharp knife, cut the roll into four-six equal parts. You may need to wet and dry the knife blade between each cut.
-with chopsticks or your hand, dip your sushi into a little dish with some tamari/soy and wasabi

OR what I did:
-cut your sheet of nori into quarters
-fold one quarter into a cone
-with a spoon (or chopsticks if you are very skillful) fill your cone with the sushi salad
-dip into the wasabi/soy mixture and enjoy!
-keep making cones till you are satiated or the sushi salad is gone, whichever comes first.

*perhaps falsely, but that's another story--see Trevor Corson's wonderful essay here:

What to Do If You Break Your Pinky Toe

2008-06-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

Nothing. Okay, not nothing: tape your broken pinky toe to the nearest other toe, ice and elevate and take some ibuprofen or Tylenol. If you go to the doctor and they confirm it's a broken toe (by X-Ray), the doctor will tell you the same thing.

I broke one of my pinky toes when I was a teenager by banging it against a chair as I was whizzing around my bedroom. I broke the other one last Tuesday when I was whizzing around my kitchen, trying to make yogurt. In order to make yogurt, you have to monitor the heat of the milk very closely so as to keep the probiotics healthy and happy. So I was whizzing. Also, being pregnant, I am extra clumsy these days, forgetting I have about 22 extra pounds on me and that my center of gravity is a bit off. So now I have an impressive dark purple streak running down the center of my right pinky toe. I figure it's just another way my body is telling me to slow down and quit the whizzing already.

Banks

2008-06-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

In my book, I confessed that I bank at Bank of America. I also wrote about how I learned from my friend Melissa Scott all about compound interest. As far as I can tell (and this from talking to a rep at my local branch) Bank of America doesn't give compound interest if you just open a simple savings account, only if you open a CD (which involves locking up your money for a specified period of time, usually 6 months minimum.)

So my questions are:
1. Is there a better local bank than Bank of America? (Florence Savings Bank, Easthampton Savings, etc.) Or national branch?
2. Is it unusual for banks not to give compound interest on simple savings accounts?
3. Where Would Jesus Bank?

composting

2008-06-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

A reader told me that I have it wrong about the compost jar by the kitchen sink. I had written that you should keep the lid closed because compost stinks! She corrected me, saying that compost only stinks when you keep the lid closed and let the smells fester. If you leave it open, it airs itself out. I've been trying this for a week, and she's right. BUT--now we have a fruit fly problem. Any suggestions?

Question About Health Insurance

2008-06-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

This might vary state by state, so please indicate which state you are writing from when posing responses.

If you have a pre-existing health condition, and are currently in a good (okay, not necessarily "good"; safe--not fun) job with benefits, how terrifying would it be to quit your job and seek a new one? I have heard awful stories about women who are in the middle of a pregnancy and lose their insurance when switching jobs.

Please share your experience and knowledge below!

Poor Woman's Air Conditioning

2008-06-09T16:27:00.000-07:00

RIght now, it's still in the 90s, even though it's 7:30pm. According to the downtown Northampton Silverscape clock, the mercury hit over 100 today, so today isn't the best day/night to try this. This works best on moderately hot days with coolish nights (even low 60s will do).

1. When the sun goes down, open all the windows in the house.
2. When you get up in the morning, resist the urge to listen to the birds, and instead close all the windows again.

Your house will stay remarkably cool this way. It is, I admit, much more high maintenance than turning on an air conditioner, but much much cheaper and better for the environment. Plus, some people hate the quality of air produced by air conditioners.

Other a/c free suggestions:

-take many many cold showers throughout the day
-put ice packs on the back of your neck
-put up curtains or blinds in the windows of rooms that get a lot of direct sunlight
-eat Gazpacho and watermelon

Katryna and I played at the Sustainability Festival in Coventry Rhode Island last Saturday. It was very hot, and a good day to be convinced that we should install solar panels to the roofs of our houses. Our friend and heroine Cheryl Wheeler has done just that, and in summer months, her household generates so much extra energy that it spills over to their neighbors (and they get the credit on their electricity bill!) Right now, the government pays half of the costs, so if you have an extra $12000 hanging around, this would be a great use for it.

Patty's Starbucks Contribution

2008-05-28T10:24:00.001-07:00

[Eidtor's note: This is from our manager, Patty, who was forced to become employed at Starbucks, all because people started burning our CDs instead of buying them.]

Now that you are out on your own and mom is not brewing your coffee, you will likely be spending more time at Starbucks getting your caffeinated beverages. Firstly, be nice to your barista. They usually have been studying Latin till 2:00am or working at your local restaurant the evening before, serving yummy Mexican food, or managing your favorite band. Also, once they know you, your drink might be ready when you get to the counter and you will not be late to work.

The Barista’s don’t expect you to speak perfect “starbuckees” but as they say, when in France…. Here are the basics on how to order your starbucks beverage.

1. If you would like an ICED drink, mention it first.

2. SIZE…Short (very, very small) Tall (small), Grande (medium), Venti (large)

3. Milk Type ….Starbucks uses 2% milk as the standard. If you don’t mention anything, this is what you will get. If you would like non standard milk (something other than 2%), now is the time to mention it. Would you like fat free, whole milk, soy milk…

4. Drink Type….. Latte, Cappuccino, Americano, Mocha, Frappaccino

Of course there are many other options and special requests like adding syrup (Katryna likes the caramel), extra shots, extra hot, no foam, energy boost etc. but if you get 1-4 basics down in that order, you should get the drink just the way you like it. If not, don’t be shy about asking the Barista to remake the drink.

How to Pee by the Side of the Road

2008-05-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

You might thank me for this someday.

It's broad daylight, you're on the highway driving at 60mph and the urge strikes. You crane your head looking for signs for the nearest rest stop, the nearest exit, only to discover there IS no exit for 50 miles! You can't hold it! You consider your options. You even look for receptacles to pee into, only to have your partner nix that idea (though I know plenty of rock bands who put an old Big Gulp cup to good use without blinking an eye.) You look for trees, shrubs, bushes, ANYTHING you might hide behind (and I am assuming, by the way, that you are a woman--men just seem to hop out of the car, turn their backs and let fly, so to speak.) But there's a fence along the guard rail and miles of ankle-high weeds--that's it.

Ah, the simplicity of the solution! I wish I could say I thought of it, but I didn't. I wish I could give credit where credit is due, but I can't--I don't remember who taught me this trick, but here it is.

1. Travel with tissues and a plastic/zip lock bag (or a baby who has a diaper bag with container for gross bodily-fluid-contaminated items)
2. Pull over by the side of the highway
3. Open your door
4. Open the door behind you! (Warning: this only works if you drive a four-door vehicle that isn't a van with those sliding doors)
5. You now have privacy. Sit on what would be the bumper of your car, if cars still had bumpers
6. Keep your tissue in the glove compartment, along with the zip lock bag--do not litter!
7. When you stop at the next rest stop and see a line full of women waiting to use the ladies room, smile and refrain from shouting "Suckas!"

Introducing: Question of the Day

2008-05-22T16:07:00.000-07:00

Katryna and I officially launched How to Be an Adult yesterday at Broadside Books in Northampton, MA. It was pouring rain and so hard to find a parking space that Katryna didn't arrive until about 40 minutes into the reading. She had a good idea (she's full of good ideas): to sing a song that went along thematically with the section I was reading. The book is divided into an introduction and five parts.

1. Vocation and Avocation (everything from figuring out what you want to be when you grow up to how to put together a resume to the importance of failure)
2. The Vehicle that Is You (the life-coachy section of the book, all about self care)
3. Bloom Where You Are Planted (how to rent an apartment, choose and get along with housemates, keep your place clean, shop for groceries and cook yummy healthy food-recipes included)
4. Money, Cars, Insurance and a Bunch of Other Boring Stuff (just that)
5. Other People (includes a section on democracy, voting with your pocketbook and all sorts of relationship advice)

I read the section on Voting with Your Pocketbook before Katryna arrived; then I read the section on dating and we sang "Tailspin." For the preface to Vocation and Avocation, we sang "Night Rider's Lament" and for "Carpet Therapy" and "Smile Yoga" (in "Eight Cheap Forms Of Therapy") we sang "When I'm Here." Someone at the reading suggested we put together a play list to go along with the book. As soon as someone explains to me how to do that, I will!

We asked for questions and answers (since we need answers as much as we need questions) and didn't get many (or any). So I am extending this invitation to you readers to please ask us questions. We will research until we find answers. And we will ask YOU questions too.

Question of the Day: How hard is it to find a neighborhood bank that gives you compound interest on a savings account?

Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey

2008-05-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

I was doing an interview with Monty Belmonte today on WRSI in Northampton, and he said, "Do you have 'righty tighty lefty loosey' in your book? Because you should. That's probably been the most successful navigational tool I've had in adulthood. But tell your readers, it goes for everything EXCEPT propane gas knobs. I found that out the hard way."

How to Be an Adult

2008-05-14T07:59:00.001-07:00

Greetings, readers, and welcome to our first post!

The book came out on May 3, 2008 and we are keeping our publishing partner Collective Copies mighty busy trying to keep up with demand. So far, we've sold over 100 copies and are getting great feedback from our readers. We are glad. This is the book we wish we'd been given fresh out of college and wet behind the ears.

A word about eggs: our friend Gay Daly wrote a blurb for the back of the book which says, A friend of mine once said, “In college I studied Shakespeare, calculus, molecular biology. What I really wish I had learned was: How long do eggs keep in the refrigerator?” How to be an Adult is packed with information required to make it in the real world where a person needs to rent an apartment, vote, set up a 401(K) and buy those eggs. If you know anyone who is graduating soon, buy them a copy of this book. It might be more useful than a car.

However, we neglected to include this important information in our first edition. So how do you know if an egg is okay to eat? Katryna says:

Fill a pot with water. Put the questionable egg(s) in. If they float to the top, throw them out! If they turn on their ends, eat them immediately and throw out the next day. If they stay placidly on the bottom, they're good for weeks!

More to come--please stay tuned!

Love, Nerissa and Katryna