Day 72: ignite the finite (homage to Diderot)

Our lives are finite. We can only stand so much. Honey Girl’s actions during today’s thunderstorm prove it.

First, she was hiding in the bathroom because the lightning and thunder scare her. During a lull in the storm, I opened the door and she came out. A little. Then the thunder boomed and she went back in to the smallest place in the house: a tiny bathroom under the stairs. Her world is as small as she can make it. We can’t help it that sounds scare us, but being of a philosophical mind, we can find interest in the concept of being “finite.” And happily, it doesn’t have to scare us.

“Our lives are finite” feels grim; a death sentence. But if you examine the actual word and concept, it feels different. It feels a lot like peace.

finite, adjective and noun (from Latin finitus, pa pple of finire FINISH verb)

a. adjective. 1. Having bounds, ends, or limits; not infinite or infinitesimal.

b. Having an existence subject to limitations and conditions.

2. Fixed, determined, definite.

[Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 962. Three other definitions follow, in math, grammar, and music.]

What I love about this definition is the concept of: “Not infinite or infinitesimal.” In other words, we do exist, we have the ability to act, we are not insignificant. Instead of despairing about our lives’ limitations, why not turn it around? Why not think of our bodies and minds as conduits through which we can make things happen. It’s the real potential at hand. Ignite the finite!

(For my part, I’ve already launched one long-term collaborative project with a distant friend today and I’ve got dozens of masks to sew, so my time feel’s short. I like it that way.)

As Denis Diderot once said, « J’aime mieux une belle chimère qui fait tenter de grandes choses qu’une réalité stérile, une prétendue sagesse qui jette et retient l’homme rare dans une stupide inertie. »

–Lettre à Falconet, in Esprit de Diderot : choix de citations, p. 61.

« I prefer beautiful fantasies that inspire men of genius to grandiose actions, rather than a sterile reality, supposedly the seat of wisdom, which enslaves their spirits to inertia.”

***

 

Yesterday’s face mask production, fyi

 

*with thanks to Laurent Loty’s beautiful book (with Éric Vanzieleghem), Esprit de Diderot: choix de citations (Paris: Hermann, 2013) and the bookmarks commemorating events at Université Paris Diderot, in honor of French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784), editor of the Encyclopédie and many other works of Enlightenment genius.

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After the rain, blue skies

 

Hi readers,

Life has been like a day in Seattle lately: scattered showers, rain heavy at times, followed by blue skies and bright sun. Changeable. Our moods, our relations are constant shifts between yin and yang, shifting, swirling, and moving along through the hours. We all know that change is the only thing constant under the sun, but it takes events like death to make it tangible. And my family has been dealt a lot of death lately: a dear uncle and my awesome mother-in-law both died in the last month, and sickness has afflicted two other loved ones.

Life continues to bring beauty and joy, as well. Honey Girl’s goofy grin, the pinky-orange leaves seen on our daily walks, the sparkling skyline at sunset–those are all things that make me smile.

An invite, then, to something cheerful!

Curious Kidstuff toy store is hosting a display of products by yours truly, “Honey Girl Books and Gifts,” on Sunday afternoon, November 4! Come and enjoy some cozy pillows, and read an advance copy of the new illustrated book, The Frankenstein of the Apple Crate: A Possibly True Story of the Monster’s Origins, (ages 8 and up, available very soon on Amazon in paperback and e-book).

Learn how a discovery in the archives of revolutionary France became a children’s book!

I will be there from 2:00 – 4:00 pm, 11/04/18

I’m also excited to talk to parents and kids about the free writing workshop that I teach, “Write YOUR Story.” The workshop (for ages 8-12) will kick off at Curious Kidstuff toy store in January 2019; information will be on hand for parents to sign up their kids.

Curious Kidstuff is located at 4740 California Ave SW, Seattle WA 98116.

Thanks for reading! I hope you too can warm up to sunny skies today, despite the weather that’s swirling through your head.

Julia

Day Ten: the brewing storm

29 days to go and the skies are churning. A storm is coming to South Bend this afternoon, they say, and I am looking forward to it. A storm breaks the tension, gives us a common enemy, and may even accelerate other life-giving events. 27 years ago in July, some thunderbolts gathered over Tempe, AZ, and may have hastened the birth of my son. Or so they told me at the hospital, when I  arrived…

The storm at home is as prickly as the heat today. Why? No big reason but several small ones. My partner is manifesting some old habits of passive-aggressive hostility, now that he’s being forced into concrete action and decision-making after many years of retirement. Honey Girl pounced and killed a small ground hog yesterday on our walk. I have felt and voiced unkind thoughts toward a number of people, mostly elected officials but still…

What to do?

What is there ever to do?

Practice the Morning Routine. Refrain from harmful speech. Bury the little grey critter, if it is still there.

Rejoice in the rain when it arrives!

***

 

Storm image courtesy of http://blog.gpcom.com/tag/severe-weather/

people are like trees, and other fables

I woke up with a start at 4:30am and have felt off-kilter ever since.

It seems that it must have been the tree branch, which fell off our neighbor’s tree last night and landed right outside our kitchen window that made the huge THUNK I heard. It sounded like a distant bomb going off.

Staring out at the windblown snow during this morning’s meditation brought more sad thoughts to mind, of death and weakness. The trees react vividly to the wind blowing their branches and, if we could watch ourselves from without, we’d probably say the same thing about ourselves. Sometimes I feel like a cedar, other times like an oak.

The cedar tree bounces and sways with every fiber of its being: from bottom to top the whole tree bows and flutters nervously. The maples and oaks more stiffly sway, hold their arms up to the sky despite the wind; but their tiny red and green budlets break off and fall down.

This weather reminds me of LaFontaine’s fable, “The Wolf and the Lamb.” A harsh little story! My own version, “April, the Cruelest Month,” inspired by life in South Bend, awaits below.

The sounds of tires slushing on the street below make me feel excited, like it’s Christmas time, then bewildered when I see robins hopping in the garden. How easily our minds are fooled and confused about what is, versus what is “supposed to be”!

A proverb in closing:

En avril ne te découvre pas d’un fil. Au mois de mai, fais ce qui te plaît.

(trans. “In April, don’t take off a thread. In the month of May, do whatever comes into your head.”)!!

Hang in there!  Only 4 weeks til May!

These pages are from Hey LaFontaine! Are You Ready for South Bend? (ten fables illustrated in a hand-made book, 2016).

day four, what is real?

Hello on day four of the five-day meditation in a mirror challenge,

It is already after noon yet the house is very quiet today, after yesterday’s tornado of family conflict, stress and strife, during the “birthday dinner.”

Today’s setting: the downstairs hall mirror–a full-length mirror ca. 1910–and the downstairs bathroom mirror–another heavy, gilt-framed antique that came with the house. I opened the closet door to allow the full-length mirror to reflect the bathroom mirror, and as I stood there I moved it slightly to see how they reflected each other and the things in between.

We think mirrors are “true” reflections yet look how easily I distorted “reality”: by slightly moving the door and camera’s focus, it is easy to create doubles. The camera shows doubles: doubles of the mirror, of me, of the Picasso print of a girl (Head of a Woman in a Hat, 1962): all those doubles are merely reflections created by the border in the glass of the full-length mirror.

So what is real? right now, cold feet and thirst are real. My ears resound in silent static and my intellect feels wary and weary of things social.

As Alan Watts writes about awareness, “This very simple ‘opening of the eyes’ brings about the most extraordinary transformation of understanding and living, and shows that many of our most baffling problems are pure illusion. […] Because awareness is a view of reality free of ideas and judgments, it is clearly impossible to define and write down what it reveals. […] The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.”  (Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 76).

Letting go of a past “Identity” is scary. This applies to adults who must let go of one Identity, of being PARENTS–law-and-order border agents, battling evil to keep their children safe–and undertake a different Identity when those tykes grow up (anywhere from 18 to 35 years later).

From PARENTS, we must accept to exert less power and control over our children. We must let go of our PARENT domination and accept a new role as a kindly, non-invasive partner–merely a fellow human on a chronologically-defined journey we share with those people from birth (theirs) to death (ours, if the chronology works the way we hope it will).

That letting go is scary and hard. Words may help:

if in our anger, we realize

the other person is suffering,

we can free ourselves

from anger

and from suffering,

which also helps free the other.

–Shi Wuling, Path to Peace, Feb. 8

Sometimes abstaining from action and thought, what the Chinese call wu-wei, is the best action.

Especially when we’re all so tired of each other. Maybe we should all just tread lightly and remain silent for a while, like Honey Girl here.

 

more flood pics from South Bend, and a sign of spring

 

This force of nature is barreling through towns and drowning homes right and left! These pics were taken across the street from my house on Riverside Drive, South Bend. But the whole region of  “Michiana”–that is, northern Indiana and southern Michigan–is affected. It’s the St Joseph River, an often placid, but unpredictable river in the best of times,  but still people canoe there and go fishing.  But now look at it!

It looks like a Mack truck coming at you. The two bridges over the river from my side were both out this morning; it took 45 minutes to do what usually takes 8.

Yikes!

On a lighter note, while waiting for me to finish taking pictures, Honey Girl pulled me over to a sign of spring.

sign of spring! see the green shoots pushing through the dead leaves?

(so is the trash everywhere, actually, a sign of spring. It means the snow just melted.)

Right after coming over to ask when we were leaving, as in the picture below, Honey Girl licked my nose. That is a high praise! (She is not a big licking dog. She prefers to “talk” in all kinds of funny groans or get her squeaky toy and put on a squeaking show). I feel honored.

That reminds me of Rousseau’s Confessions. In book 6 of the Confessions Rousseau describes his fondness for taming pigeons and keeping bees: “I have always taken a singular pleasure in taming animals, above all those that are fearful and wild. It appeared charming to me to inspire them with a confidence that I never abused. I wanted them to love me in freedom” (Conf, CW, 5:196).

Honey Girl, 2/22/18

 

 

 

a few of my favorite things

 

 

Today I declared a personal snow day and canceled all three of my appointments. They were friendly visits anyway, and we’ll all see each other soon. Instead of driving around and dealing with the traffic and weather, I stayed home. Rich made bread, which means that the house was warm and smelled soooo good for several hours this morning.

Favorite thing: Honey Girl and her warm fuzzy greetings every morning.

Favorite things: exercise and meditation. I got to catch up with my Morning Routine which felt restorative.

Favorite thing: I organized all the fabric in my studio (aka the guest bedroom) and took stock of the inventory. Wrote stuff down. That felt good.

Favorite thing: I moved forward on the three pillows I’m finishing this week, plus the quilt. Starting to feel like a real artisan.

 

 

Favorite things: There are many things in these pictures to love:

1. an adorable French postcard now messed up by living in the kitchen but that makes it even more precious
2. a pepper mill by the French brand Pylones (a “must” whenever you’re in Paris, n’est-ce pas? soo cute!)
3. a beautiful round loaf of Rich’s crusty French bread,
4. the “fabricard” I created to accompany the Limited Edition Literary Pillow. This one accompanies No. 1, The Ladies’ Paradise, by Zola. The citations will zero in on key moments in the book to give readers a satisfying sense of what the book is about.
5. Pillows that I am working on, with my sturdy 1928 White Rotary sewing machine!  The full repertoire of Honey Girl Books and Gifts is due Friday December 15, for the SPARK class graduation at Saint Mary’s College. I’m almost ready. Snow days are helpful. And being on winter break from teaching too.

Speaking of which, the website for my new business, Honey Girl Books and Gifts, is now available!   https://www.honeygirlbooks.com/

It’s not quite “official start” ready yet, because the purchase function and A.V. stuff aren’t plugged in yet, but you can email me at juliawsea@gmail.com if you want to get a jump on the crowds!  I’ll accept pre-orders from readers of this blog.

***

Now back to the contemplation of favorite things.

As I was moving around in silence this morning, enjoying the light snow outside and the cozy sounds of this old house, and Rich and Honey Girl moving around downstairs, I suddenly felt a Zen sense of detached observation.

Watching the quick industrious ways my mind and hands were working together, I thought of an article read in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. It is one of the most startling and useful metaphors for how the mind works (along with William James, to whom we will return one day), that I have ever seen. And, as a professor of literature for 30+ years, I’ve seen a lot! It made me feel serene, and affirmed more than ever the new path I’m on. Change, physical vitality, and hope: that’s what is making me feel so young these days.

Citing the work of Sigmund Freud to explain the antecedents of Oliver Sacks’s discoveries, the reviewer Nicole Krauss writes, “Freud wrote that he had come to explain psychoneuroses ‘by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material.’ In other words, that our psychological health depends on our ability to constantly revise and refashion memory to allow for growth and change, and the absence of this process–the stagnation of a memory, the brain’s treatment of it as something fixed–leads to pathology.”

“This is an extraordinary insight,” continues Krauss, one that helped to establish our understanding of the self as flexible instead of static, and our sense of the past as an imaginative reconstruction, ever evolving, both of which make therapy possible.”

The reviewer notes rightly that Oliver Sacks, as a neurologist and brilliant writer, “deepened our understanding of the dynamic, creative abilities of the brain by uncovering, again and again, the unusual ways the impaired brain may deal with its handicaps, compensating in ingenious ways, or by creating plausible explanations for the nonsensical, thus preserving a form of coherence, however subjective. ” [Sounds like some of Sartre’s characters.]

As Krauss explains, Sacks’s work is particularly powerful for young writers, who suddenly are able to see how “for the brain, the coherence that narrative forges is paramount to an accurate account of reality.”

I agree with Krauss that narrative is a primary human activity, without which we waste away.  That is what my narrative quilts are all about!

***

See Jane E. Brody’s piece on loneliness in today’s New York Times. After reading that, I reflected on 1) how lonely I used to feel last year, and 2) what has made me feel better.  Here are the things I am grateful for:  1) reading Byron Katie and learning to do “the work” on the thoughts that come into my head; 2) learning to practice T’ai Chi and meditation daily; 3) sewing; and 4) being able to channel my creativity into things I love, instead of trying to please external censors. As a businesswoman, I will see if there are any buyers out there. As they say, Some Will, Some Won’t, So What. Surely there is some lonely soul out there, or a grandma or a lover, who would like to give one of my soft and lustrous goods to a beloved?

At any rate, I don’t have to worry about some jerk at Stanford any more.

I wrote to Jane Brody, actually, with a compliment on how her article made me realize things, and an offer. I proposed a complimentary quilt from my new business, to see if she might agree that it has therapeutic effects.  We’ll see if she replies!

In the meantime, it appears that we weavers of meaning, artists of cloth, paper and pen, are all entirely “normal.” Whatever that is.

 

 

constant change

I write to you in the midst of a terrifying, electrifying storm. Honey Girl is huddled in the corner of the kitchen downstairs and will stay there for awhile or for hours, maybe, depending on what happens here. The storm has been overhead for about 15 minutes so far: it is close, loud, and electric–probably hitting the river. It reminds us of how lucky we are to have shelter, but also to let go of any certainties. Just as the storm will whip through or crawl and wreak devastation in its wake or not, everything else is in constant change too. Our cells, the air, our feelings, memories.

***

As Nao, the sixteen-year old would-be suicide artist of A Tale for the Time Being says, after watching her wise grandma die: “Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

“That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.

And just like that, you die.

***

The rumbling has moved on and the rain with it. All one can hear now is the dripping eves,  and footsteps below, a distant TV, a car. And the clock just struck nine.

***

Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (New York: Penguin, 2013), 408.