Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today I received photos from my daughter who is in Bali.  The place is gorgeous, colorful and lush, and she and her friend seem delighted.  It makes me want to go there.  This same daughter I have followed all over the world as she traveled, and benefited from the gentle tug to go where she was.  I saw India, Morocco, Spain, Prague, France, and Manhattan many times, as well as upper New York state, Brooklyn, Long Island.  Now I see Oregon:  Portland, Canon Beach, Ashland, Crater Lake, and when I'm done mosey up to see my friend in Washington.  We've gone to Vancouver B.C. and Victoria, and will probably get to Alaska soon.  My younger daughter has been the incentive for visits to France.  Then the older two kids' stepmother and halfbrother have taken us to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.  We've traveled places on our own as well, like Egypt and Greece and Italy and Amsterdam, but it's more vivid and memorable to have the added excitement of seeing the kids and now grandkids.  It's amazing how they get me up and about and in a plane!

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I had Facetime with my older grandson who is almost three.  He was overtired and distracted, but willing to discuss steam engines.  He had had a big weekend going to a Thomas the Engine event and also Monterey Bay Aquarium.  He liked the penguins and jellyfish.  Fish are nice, but clearly the winner was the train ride.  We are taking him Labor Day weekend to a train museum, train ride and gold rush event with his younger cousin and aunt and uncle.  Lots of excitement coming up.  I'm of a generation that actually rode trains to get places, like visiting my grandparents.  I loved it too, but then there was no choice between that and airplanes.  Airplanes were for the rich, and I don't think I was on one until I was 22 and visiting my Dad's father before he died.  My next flight was to Fiji to join my husband and live, and that had to be broken up in Honolulu.  No wonder when I deplaned I felt as if I was in a fairy tale.  I could not believe I had traveled so far.  And yet it looked like Missouri in some ways.  As Dorothy, I wasn't in Kansas any more.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

A friend sent me a website for an artist she enjoys, and I've just finished looking at gorgeous still lifes, as well as some landscapes.  She was taken by the shape of some lemons.  I love the yellow in some of the works, and the thick smeariness of the paint and the leap the viewer must make to identify them.  I've gotten out of the habit of seeing art, and I need to get back in the swing of going to art museums and soaking in the beauty and thought and soul.  I know that one bad print can send me soaring emotionally.  I love the Monet print of the magpie on a gate in a snowy landscape.  I've seen the original painting twice, and just the small print brings back standing before the huge painting and feeling I was seeing my brave soul up there before the world.
I've been thinking a lot about the Louise Bourgois sculptures I visited last week, and how she makes something light and delicate become heavy and massive.  Women are often identified with spiders - Black Widows - and others, and I love seeing the strength in her sculptures.  We are, in fact, quite strong and indomitable.  We just need reminding.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Well, the best laid plans, etc, etc.  We went to the cabin a day late because we were worried about smoke.  "Moderate" was all the information we could get, so we decided Sunday morning to head up, and it seemed okay.  We couldn't smell smoke, and lots of people were around.  We lugged our stuff up the stairs, unloaded and our friends took their boat off the trailer and put it in the water with our canoe.  We had a simple dinner out on our deck.  The next morning at six am my husband got up to pee and came back to say the smoke was awful.  We went back to bed, and a couple of hours later our friends came from next door and said they were packed up and going to leave so we ate, packed up and fled.  The smoke from the Ferguson fire was heavy, but a new fire had started twelve miles from us, and it was unreachable and there are no more firefighters.  So our two week retreat in the mountains dissolved in smoke, which followed us heading down for close to two hours.  I said goodbye to our cabin, as we may not see it again.
Our older daughter is in Bali, and we haven't heard from her since four hours after the earthquake on Lombok, so I'm worried about her as well.  There have been 14 quakes, and she must be pretty shook up.  She's on her last stop, and will be home at the end of this week.  So her get-away wasn't as relaxing as she expected either.
Expectation.  That thing that is constantly being overturned and contradicted.  Change, and planning.  They don't always mix.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We were supposed to go to the cabin today, but fires around made us wait, hoping for better air quality.  We decided to go tomorrow, and see for ourselves what the air is like.  Of course, a change in wind, new fires, extreme heat, and many other factors make this utter guesswork.  So we have reassured ourselves that if it's bad, we can leave, and come back up again later or not at all.  This is the new reality:  fires are bound to happen, the forests are tender from dead trees and climate change.  We will never again be as naive as we were for most of the thirty plus years we've owned the cabin.  Now fires are not elsewhere; they surround us.  I'm grateful we enjoyed the forest for so long, and we love it even with it's transformation because of the millions of trees that have died.  But it's a rapidly changing landscape, and a more dangerous one.  The suffering of the animals is relentless, and even here when we went on a hike around the reservoir this morning, we saw deer wanting to be near the water instead of up in the forested hills.  As we left, dozens of turkeys were under the shade of two oak trees, trying to cool off.  This is the reality deniers of climate change refuse to see.  I've got a feeling they don't walk in the forest, or camp, or fish in a mountain lake or enjoy any of nature's abundant beauty.  They have no heart for the trees, plants and creatures all around us, or even for any of us who feel it is essential to our souls.  They have already lost theirs.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

A friend from a long time ago surprised me by texting this week.  She and I had stopped communicating years ago.  She was the one to go silent, but when, several years later, she sent me a card wanting me to email or call, I wrote a long letter saying I felt that our friendship had unraveled and it didn't see a way of knitting it back together.  We'd only known each other three or so years, and met in the workplace, so when first I moved several states away and then she did as well, and we were two states away.  We saw each other a few times, but then our communication after was by phone.  She'd asked me for money several times, and I gave her an amount that was a free gift.  I didn't want loans to come between us.  But her situation with her youngest drove her to despair, and she, in a letter, said she felt I had all the luck and she none.  She admitted feeling ressentful, and I responded that we hadn't had a long enough friendship before we moved to really know who each other was.  And the distance thing made it impossible to rectify our ignorance of each other.  While we were in the same location, I'd been her birth coach, coaching her through 14 hours of labor and in the delivery room with her and her husband, when her third child, a girl, was born. 
So the reason for the text this week was that that beautiful girl, now 33, had died of a drug overdose.  She'd been struggling since her early teens.  I felt the blow, and the tragedy, and the world of pain the friend is in, and I told her so, but will not be resuming the ghost of a friendship because of it.  I will pray for her.  And, this connection has caused me to revisit a sad episode in my life:  the loss of a friend long ago, because she projected onto me what she wanted me to be.  And I need to be seen.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My older son has noticed that Thomas the Engine products and videos are overwhelmingly a male world.  So much so that my grandson doesn't want any of the several token girl engines.  That got me thinking about my kids' era, which thankfully included Mr Roger's Neighborhood, with some strong girl characters, but, since it was often voiced by Fred Rogers, was tilted toward the male Daniel Tiger, King Friday and the mailman.  But remembering Sesame Street disturbed me more.  Since the puppeteers were male, strong female characters consisted of Miss Piggy.  Big Bird, Oscar, Bert, Ernie, Snuffaluffagus, Animal, Kermit and the rest were male voices.  Yes, some of the live people were female, but were they strong and inspiring?  I'd have to say no.  Miss Piggy is desperate to be romantic with Kermit, and bossy and vain and silly.  My two daughters could not have found any encouragement from the show, and there was no Dora the Explorer then.  Later, my last child saw a bit of Where in the World is Carmen Santiago, but in the meantime she was watching the Little Mermaid or Robin Hood.  Oh, dear, what will my 10 year old granddaughter be absorbing?  And the two little grandsons?  It's as if they are reassured that the world is shaped and meant for their maleness, and, all right, it is, but let's change it for the sake of all our children and their future happiness and coexistence.