The Ancient Art of Reminiscence

When did Sapiens begin to mark anniversaries, remember back to older times, and mark them? When did the rhythms of new moon and full moon and new moon again bring us to taste anew the delicious moments,  to relive sad times and say farewell all over again to loves who have died? When did deja vu begin?

How our life is measured out in moons,
The many moons ago
Of celebration pies,
Of wedding pies, and
Pies no longer possible.
The waxings and the wanings
And the flickerings out,
Recalled when the moon rhythm
Comes around again,
Ancient stirrings of remembered moonpattern,
Bringing us right there
To mooniversaries in time.

Educating the Creativity Out of Children?

Never! The kids who come to me have free reign, to invent worlds and to fly in them. I must listen to Ken Robinson again. I recall that he said the school system was constructed for the industrial revolution, to mould kids into good assembly line workers who didn't glance to the left or to the right but kept their eyes on the task at hand. There was one right way to do things. Do it that way and you get the marks. No sirreee. None of that in my speech room. I always have a plan in place. And I jump for joy the moment the kid tells me that he was at the skating rink and heard, "Ice Clean". All puckered up for two scoops of chocolate ripple and vanilla, what a disappointment when the ice cleaning machine came out on the ice. That was not the story I had planned for today. I love when the session takes its own wings, and I am learning things I never thought of before.

"Self" as a Rube Goldberg slapped together intricate conglomeration

"To be alive is to marvel — at least occasionally, at least with glimmers of some deep intuitive wonderment — at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are as we half-stride, half-stumble down the improbable paths that lead us back to ourselves. " 
How can communication happen at all, when "I", one conglomeration of experiences and reactions and history and interpretations and parent tapes and influences, try to convey a message to you, a while different conglomeration? 
      Answer: Communication can happen when we try, then check, then correct, then try some more. 

Free From Arithmetic's Tyranny

"And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth, You owe me'. Look what happens with love like that. It lights up the sky."
Oh my. Look at all the times when arithmetic doesn't hold. Kissing. I give you a kiss. Do I have less kissness?  More!
Gift Giving. The pleasure direction is not always the direction that the object passed. What joy the giver receives, when the gift is taken with delight. Oh, those lovely times.
 A mom and baby nursing. Mutual. As much as the babe hungers for the milk, the mom hungers to feed her. Take it further. A few months ago, this babe and the mom were one being. That never really stops.
The arithmetic of love. A mother loves her one baby one hundred percent. (Also, this small one takes up one hundred per cent of her thought, her time, her concern, her delight, her wonder). Once there are two, or seven children, one hundred per cent.
       Ah, once we let go of the arithmetic, of scoreboards and the notion that "fair" means anything at all, we are free to love.
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Every bit of advice, and its opposite, are helpful. It all depends on which way you are tipping over at a particular time. Too impulsive or too reflective. Too giving or too guarded? Too busy or too lazy?

The truth and its opposite are true: 

“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides."

How I love the Crazy, Crazy Wisdom, where paradox makes good sense. Once we embrace paradox, "The truth and its opposite are true" we are well on the way.

I love surprise. ////I love routine. Both are true for me.

"Don't be interesting. Be interested"///////. "Fascinate, intrigue, instruct and delight". Both!

Scout Listening, to open our minds, explore, find out something new. Be willing to change our minds./////Hold fast to what you believe and value.

Murray Enkin I want to live in the moving resonance between these opposites. Not a happy medium and not a middle ground. 100% this one and 100% that one.

1979. The Rights of Parents and Children: Exploring Alternatives

A moment by moment blog post, this Friday morning, three generations at Mommy and Daddy's. Adam and Daddy are changing the water in the aquarium, Mommy and I are finding the gems amongst boxes and boxes of papers. June 27, 1979 at Harbour Castle, International Childbirth Education Conference. I easily found Murray Enkin's talk, The New Obstetrics, Premises, Promises and Priorities." Something made me keep on looking through the typewritten brochure. "Eleanor Enkin. Learning the Art of Parenting".
We'll, something went right in their parenting. Here we are, their children and grandchildren, coming by to laugh and work together, and to learn from them.

The Body Remembers Beauty

A friend responded to my memory of canoe trips without phones. You could always drop the phone in the water. Splash!
"Invention is the Mother of Necessity"
Yes! On Yom Kippur when son Adam and I climbed Mount Doug, fasting, I would have taken my phone in my pocket, you know, just for safety and security and, you know, just in case . Someone could faint. You never know. But I forgot.
Our talk as we climbed was elevated, each tangled root carried a life metaphor for us, a tall tree grown past where the lightning had slashed it a perfect picture of Tamar Frankiel's symbol of forgiving while acknowledging the hurt as part of our bodies, letting the remembered hurt shape our contours to a thing of unique and asymmetrical beauty.
       When Adam and I got to the stunning sunshine of Mount Doug's peak, and the clearest view of    Mount Baker's snow in the distance, I had to memorize the scene in sharpest detail.
       Nobody fainted from the fasting and the climbing on no fuel but angel thought, and there were no emergencies down below. And no photo was needed of that thisworld beauty, the vastness of blue blue sea and distant snowy mountain. Without the iPhone, I printed the memory somewhere indelible and retrievable. Anytime. Now.
       Remembered beauty, too, leaves its contours. Our body shapes to it.

Radical Acceptance

Radical Acceptance is a very useful habit. Total, complete, entire acceptance that this is where we are at right now. It doesn't mean giving up. What comes next may be a burst of energy. But with Radical Acceptance we let go of beating ourselves up, we let go of resenting. We let go of thinking it should have been otherwise. Or grieving the changes that our age has brought about. We are this age. It is what it is.  Now there is work to be done. Have no worries. This huge teaching came in a sweet way today. Simply, I was reporting, in a bit of a complaining voice, that all my funding applications were taken hours and hours this week. So much not the work that is my mission and my love, the actual therapy. "So you're writing grants today", said my wise lover. "That's fine". And suddenly it was. It was what it was. Radical Acceptance.

I'll See It When I Believe It

I know. I know. I've got it backwards. Everybody also corrects me when I say "Invention is the mother of necessity". You have it backwards they say, but don't you see, they invented the iPhone and now we can't be off duty for a minute. I'm thinking of our canoe trips, two weeks away from any contact with the human world. And my year away at school overseas. One telegram, when plans for a family visit changed. Not a single phone call. Now......Invention is the Mother of Necessity. Today's seemingly backwards notion is "I'll see it when I believe it". Mostly people think, show me the convincing evidence and then I'll believe it. But in real life, that's not the place belief comes from. Other ways of saying this are, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are" ( ".... we see things as WE are" is attributed to a character in an Anais Nin novel who credited the Talmud. A woman saw the River Seine as silky and lovely, her partner painted it muddy with corks and garbage floating in it. "Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words, "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are". )
and
"You can ask the universe for all the signs you want, but, ultimately, we see what we want to see when we are ready to see it". Now, think of what this means to an educator or a therapist. "If a child can't learn the way we teach, we should teach the way they learn". That goes for all of our encounters. First meet the person where he or she is. And then journey together as partners.
       Our title here comes from Wayne Dyer's book, "You'll Believe It When You See It". Also, deliciously, from Wayne Dyer,  "When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It's to enjoy each step along the way"

Relax! Nothing is Under Control

She who makes Himalayas and butterfly's wings knows her stuff. Let her be in charge for awhile. I think today's blog may be a secular and useful religion. For people who want to stay in a rational sphere, people allergic to any references to a divine (don't press exit! I promise, no more of that word. This will be this-world, here talk.) The useful messages and life style from religion, and how we can bring them into secular life. Demarcating the times. Setting aside times for rest, times for wonder. As in the top sentence here, Letting Go. Relax! Nothing is under control. There is a very useful Jewish prayer that could well come into secular lifestyle: at night you hand over all of your burden, your plannings, your worries, your unsolved questions. Trusting, you leave these in good hands. And in the morning you express gratitude that your mind is back on duty and that the universe has faith in you to take on your load again. I'll go find my children's book by Byrd Baylor, The Way to Start the Day. But this moment, I'love start my day. Grateful to have woken up, grateful to have my full and huge package of things to think about and things to do.

Happy New Year 2017

Part of our beautiful New Year's Party (so wonderful, and Beno loved that everything went so gracefully, without a hitch, the jumbo lobster was possible to crack, the braised fennel kept its signature essence, the St. Paulin chambréd to perfection, the karaoke lusty and spirited, the reminiscing over 2016 buoyant and loving, the fireplace gentle and warm) (this was a party for 2, Beno and me, by the fireside). Part of our beautiful New Year's Party, just the two of us, was going over the datebook of the past year. Susie's dear visits, Janie, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Justin, Sunny and Shlomo, Raymie and Ursula and Jeremy, Mel and Pearl, Lil Blume, David Baskin, Adam's exuberant reaction to the forests and the climb to Mount Doug,and his renewal of deep and unique conversational connection with Murray and Eleanor, the way each one of the grandchildren has a unique connection with them, Yoni's beautiful visits and the day we were too daring in the rock climbing by the sea and both Adam and Yoni stood at the bottom of a rock cliff, their solid hands guiding me to a safe place, and so many many others. Reading Justin's Facebook post in which he dared to say that he had experienced personally good year (are we allowed to have had a personally good 2016?), I wondered what is the correct attitude. And now, January 1, 2017, I wake up to the balancing, gorgeous writing of Marina Popova, my current mentor and guru for how to read a book in a shareful way, letting one's own world view swoosh to the reader through generous quotes from great authors' works, along with ample personal reflection. "There are events in our personal lives and our collective history that seem categorically irredeemable, moments in which the grounds for gratefulness and hope have sunk so far below the sea level of sorrow that we have ceased to believe they exist. But we have within us the consecrating capacity to rise above those moments and behold the bigger picture in all of its complexity, complementarity, and temporal sweep, and to find in what we see not illusory consolation but the truest comfort there is: that of perspective." Steinbeck writes so realistically, in 1941, of the species that we are. Steinbeck writes on January 1, 1941: Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded. https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/30/john-steinbeck-new-year/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=f4f02a9ca5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-f4f02a9ca5-237779697&mc_cid=f4f02a9ca5&mc_eid=983df15d91