Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My husband has managed to twist his right knee.  He was watering outside plants.  That's all I know.  But it doesn't take much at our age to end up in pain.  I had no "event" with my right knee.  I'd simply been standing too much doing holiday cooking, and then holding my grandson on Christmas day.  But the stairs are a big factor.  If I hadn't carried him up our stairs and later down the stairs to the street when they left, I might have survived.  My husband was standing for three hours last night for his chorus rehearsal.  That'll do it!  He just said to me he didn't want his knee to feel this way.  And he guessed he hadn't been sympathetic to my knee problem for the last six months.  Well, yeah.  But the truth is it's all abstractions until you've experienced something similar.  I was gracious today.  I fetched ice and two Aleve tablets.  I DO know exactly how he feels. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday we saw the opera "Electra", by Richard Strauss, and it was a bloody opus to the Greek myth world of unbridled passions and unchecked impulses and the craving for revenge.  It seems melodramatic, until you see that our human species has not come so very far since.  Myranmar, Isis, teen terrorists, men with guns gunning down their families:  is it outlandish or a mirror held up to us?  The music was gorgeous and the three female singers divine, and even the set lovely to look at.  This meshing of the beautiful and the violent is so very prevalent in our own culture that the opera couldn't be more timely.  Are we noticing?  How violence and our attraction to it are the center of our lives?  We wonder how someone can join Isis, yet, in a way, we have all joined the cult of destruction, including many of our politicians.  Tear it down!  I'm angry, and my life is not going the way I expected, so destroy.  I'm afraid of those people, so destroy them. 
I hope humankind evolves from this free for all, and the calmer and saner of us prevail, but we won't if we can't look in the mirror. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We had dinner with old friends last night.  It's been a while, as we both have adult kids whom we travel to see and in their case his mother, who has Alzeimer's, and in our case, three grandchildren.  We used to get together for Thanksgiving and Christmas day, but that rarely happens any more.  Luckily, we live within walking distance, and run into each other and catch up, plus my friend and I are in a group together and also walk some mornings.  Our talk at the table turned to down sizing and adjusting to aging, and it was my husband who asked to change the subject.  He is very uncomfortable with the idea.  I want to find a smaller house on one level, and he doesn't want to move.  Of course moving is a huge upheaval, and yet, the stairs are difficult for me, and he is adverse to seeing this change.  He can't accept my problems, and yet, I can't just will them away.  What will happen?  We'll see.  I keep bringing it up, and he keeps saying he doesn't want to move.  Would I be any better if our situations were reversed?  Truly, I don't know.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

The women of our family will soon be serenading our younger son and his bride at the rehearsal dinner.  I began this tradition with my older daughter, and that time I sang all by myself.  I was a wreck.  So why did I come up with the idea?  I can't reconstruct my thinking, but my heart was overflowing with love and joy, and music seemed like the way to express my feelings.  Three months later I sang to our older son and his bride, and then  came a gap of many years.  My older daughter had divorced and was remarrying, and I corralled my younger daughter, daughter-in-law, my older kids' stepmother and my young granddaughter into singing one song, and I sang the second by myself.  Then came my younger daughter's wedding, and our group sang one song and my older daughter and I sang the second.  It felt so special that the women of the family were serenading.  This time we are ALL singing two songs, and the intrepid stepmother is playing the ukelele and we have a tamborine.  We are getting to be quite a production.  But the heartfelt feelings remain the ground on which we stand.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Last night two friends and I went to dinner and to see a writer enact parts of his new book.  The idea was clever, and he was very good, but my friends missed the give and take of an author in conversation and a question and answer period.  Inacting one's own words seems formidable, and you become a character instead of a narrator.  I certainly wouldn't choose my own words to act out, when so many great writer's words are available.  Yet maybe he has a point.  Whenever you tell a story, it's removed from the actual event and dressed up and edited.  So the story is not the truth, it's the flower from the seed of something that happened to you.  We are performing for an audience, either in a blog, as is the case here, or when we tell what happened yesterday at the grocery store, or write down our memory of our father talking to us about his eminent death.  There is a translation and a performance. 
So I believe the event last night was much deeper and wiser than it first appeared, and I just bet I'm going to be thinking about it in relation to my life and how I "tell" it.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

At my writing group last night we decided to only meet once a month this year.  I had a pang.  I didn't want to let go of the bimonthly schedule, but I could see I was alone in my preference.  Change.  Always surprising, and usually invigorating.  We did a writing exercise where I placed three objects on the table and we could pick one and write about it for eight minutes.  They were all my objects, yet they had lost their particularity a long time ago.  I wrote about tiny glass salt and pepper shakers and in doing so remembered where I'd gotten them and with whom.  Several other people wrote about a tiny enamel viking ship with a minute spoon and shovel for the salt.  I'd always thought it was a gondola, but I've only had it two years.  It was my brother's and I brought it back with me.  It turned out to be Scandanavian, and if you slip out the glass dish inside there is an intricate carving of a church.  In gold, no less.  I'd never noticed it before.  The lesson:  look carefully and you find tiny wonders all around.  And writing:  it's all about the tiny wonders, not the big, sweeping ideas.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My friend and I went to an antiques store today and took our time looking at many delightful things.  Then we had lunch and came back.  I realized that the things I liked were more than I wanted to pay, as did my friend.  I only bought a paperweight for my husband, who collects them.  After we got in the car I told my friend that what really attracted me were the china Beatrix Potter animals, especially Mrs. Tiggywinkle, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddleduck and a few others, but I would not display them and the grandchildren would break them.  I liked them, but I didn't want them.  Not one little bit.  One of the ladies there said make an offer for what you want, but I am constitutionally unable to bargain.  I drove salespeople crazy in Egypt and Morocco.  They want to haggle.  I can't.  So I wasn't made of stern enough stuff to try for things that seemed too pricey, and I had no fire in my belly.  It was enough to gaze at them.  I didn't NEED them.  I must have grown up while I wasn't looking!  How strange!