10 Things: Loving, living, and letting go

By popular demand, I bring you 10 Things inspired by this quote/meme, shared on Facebook this morning:

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” —Buddha

Apologies ahead of time for the rambling philosophization that gushed out. If you want to play along in the comments, skip over my bit and write your own 10 Things first, then come back and read mine. So, the first 10 Things that come to mind after reading that quote…

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1. I’m slicing up the three pieces of the quote and considering the value of love in all its forms as the foundation for all of our choices and actions. Quantity is implied here, but not the quantity of people or things we love but the amount we love, the amount we give love or put love into the world.

2. One aphorism leads to another. The more you give, the more you get.

3. I was thinking of the different ways we can love, and the marbles that started rolling around in my head were the Greek forms. I thought of eros and communitas, but then I couldn’t help myself and looked them up (I like to get things right; I have a hard time letting go of accuracy). Agape, eros, philia, storge. We are capable of loving in many ways. The deep, true love we hold rare and precious; desire and aesthetic and physical love; the love of friends and family and community that requires virtue, equality and familiarity; and, of course, tolerance (also with many forms). 

4. None of the three statements is explicit about their antitheses. Anger, hate, abhorrence, intolerance, contempt, etc. Is the first phrase — how much you loved — or the judgment implied in the opening, like a bucket that gets filled up by love and emptied by the detrimental emotions? Is it that simple/complex?

5. Gentle living reminds me of parenting babies and toddlers and preschoolers. Gently when you pet the cat. Gently when you hug your brother. Gently when you touch Gramma’s face so you don’t poke her eyes out. Gently. I don’t say that word out loud to the Sonars very much anymore. They have pretty decent self control, which is what we monitored with the word ‘gentle’ in their wee years. But perhaps I should still use it. Gently with your words to your peers who are entering an age of sharp-tongued anxiety. Gently with your brothers who will likely be your longest friends and fiercest allies, even though they may always know how to push your buttons. Gently on the earth. Don’t waste the water or the paper or the electricity. Gently with your mama who is both proud to watch you grow and gain your independence and fearful of seeing you stumble along the way. 

6. How gently you live can then be kindness or conservation or through word or action it can mean minimizing the damage that we inevitably do to the people and the world around us. So that if loving much is maximizing what we give, then living gently is minimizing the harm we cause. 

7. How gracefully we let go of what is not meant for us. In my clumsy understanding of Buddhism, letting go gracefully seems like the ultimate goal. Not allowing material goods to weigh you down. Not allowing negative thoughts or experiences or people to weigh you down. To release the weight of everything. Though in pragmatic terms for the normal human who feels angry and jealous and slighted and loves things and people and feels sentimental and attached, then letting go gracefully is challenging and requires a strong hold on the first two concepts. Maximize what we give, minimize what we take or harm. 

8. My hand is tired and far more minutes have slipped by than a traditional 10 Things exercise usually occupies. I suppose that is the nature of philosophical contemplation. It takes time and might hurt. 

9. The sky just turned much more dim and the wind is gusting. An imaginary line on a weather map is manifesting as a line of force in the sky that blusters across the coastal plains like a dust squeegee pulling cold air behind it. 

10. That dust-squeegee metaphor is both hilarious and terrible. I love it and I give it to you with love, letting go of any embarrassment I feel about it as I release it into a gust of wind and into your eyeballs. Gently, I hope, for the sake of your eyeballs. 

24 Days of Thanks, 2011-Style

I bring you Dani’s Second-Annual, November list of Thanks (Better Late Than Never). Chockablock with over-earnestness, a smidge of cheekiness, and an occasional disregard for paradigms (even while enthusiastically participating in larger hegemonic structures).

 Day 1: I am thankful for my muses, all of them and all of you, but most especially for Partner. Somehow when I bounce words and ideas off of him, they come back to me making sense, and sense is good.

‎Day 2: I am thankful for the opportunity to watch people learn to read. There is so much magic in watching a person figure out how to untangle the squiggles and have the power to decode the textual communication that surrounds us.

‎Day 3: Today I am thankful for cold wind, especially those cold fronts that blow in during the night, giving us a break from the hot hot hot.

‎Day 4: Today I am thankful for Body Armor. From the top of the head to the reinforced drawers, may it always protect our soldiers (including my brother) from harm.

‎Day 5: I am thankful for cake. And bakers.

Day 6: Today I am thankful for Legos and for our local library’s Great Lego Build Off. The Sonars have been spent MANY hours this month building amazing things, trying to figure out what their entries will be.

‎Day 7: Today I am thankful for proximity—living close enough to walk or ride bikes in most of our day-to-day activities.

‎Day 8: I’m thankful for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Day 9: I am thankful for our health insurance. With allergies, infections, asthma, eyeglasses, teeth, hernias, and regular old bodily maintenance and prevention, I don’t know what we’d do without it. I wish everyone had affordable access to adequate coverage.

‎‎Day 10: I am thankful for the agitators, the skeptics, the questioners, and the people who just wouldn’t shut up in the face of something wrong. Change, progress, and improvement only happen when people are willing to stand up and say something.

Day 11 (Veteran’s Day): I am thankful for those who have chosen to serve our country, who fulfill the promises that our government makes in our name.

Day 12: I am thankful for packed Saturdays. For the many enrichment opportunities for the kids, and for the teachers, coaches, and volunteers who make these opportunities possible.

Day 13: I’m thankful for my seventh-grade keyboarding teacher, Mrs. Horcasitas, who taught me to touch type like the wind. Zoom zoom.

Day 14: I’m thankful for eyeglasses. Four out of five occupants of this house are now eyeglass wearers. Sonar X6 should really watch out.

Day 15: I am thankful for our fabulous piano teacher. Our days are now filled with bits and pieces of music. Tanya is structured and patient, and has given The Sonars a gift that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Day 16: I am thankful for Librarians! They know how to find almost any bit of information you could want. They organize and protect ideas. Fiercely. Some might poetically call them the Guardians of the Flame of Knowledge. That sounds so sexy.  Which is great, because librarians ARE sexy.

Day 17: I’m so thankful for small kindnesses. For holding open the door for someone, for smiling and exchanging a few words, for compliments that are small coming from the giver, but huge for the receiver, for simple, warm-hearted gestures that cost nothing, but feel priceless.

Day 18 (I told you I’d catch up): I’m thankful for all of you. Whether it’s something you’ve read, the music you’re listening to, your thoughts, observations, or actions, you challenge me, you break my heart, you make me laugh, you make me dance, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You people Rock My Socks Off!

Day 19: I am thankful for fruit loops. And friends to share them with.

Day 20: I am thankful for ICE. From the polar ice caps to the jingle in a drink to an ice pack for an injury (or sore typing wrists), I am so grateful for cold, solid, water.

Day 21: I’m thankful for internet access. Without it, I could not share this list with all of you quite as efficiently.

‎Day 21: I am thankful for antibiotics. We live in a world where they are often taken for granted and misapplied, but they quietly and unglamorously prevent serious illness and save lives every day.

Day 23: I am thankful for frustration. Weird, right? But when I get frustrated, I know I’ve reached a limit, I know I have a challenge to face, I know that I need to alter my course or bear down and push through to (hopefully) find the satisfaction of accomplishment on the other side.

Day 24: I’m thankful for holidays and vacations, chances to set aside the routine and be with people we love and do things we wouldn’t normally do, like make pie and marshmallows and roast turkey and stay up too late.

Day 29 (Bonus): I’m thankful for NaNoWriMo and the inspiration, motivation, and excitement that gets me to write down fresh ideas every fall.

Day 30 (Excess): I’m thankful for readers. And writers. And idea-sharers. And inspirers. And you. I’m very thankful for all of you.

Now, I love Pistachios

Before I tell you why I love pistachios now, I should tell you why I didn’t like them before, right?

I’m sure the best reason I did not like pistachios was because pistachio ice cream is green. The idea of green ice cream does not appeal to me. Yes that includes mint-chocolate chip. But I will make exceptions for lime sherbet because I never claimed to be consistent, and limes are awesome. I expect limes to be green. I do not expect nuts to be green. 

Until our recent foray into New Mexico I had not eaten pistachios since I was about four years old. My grandmother visited and brought pistachios and dates with her. She loved them. They were strange, exotic foods for me. Perhaps the dates were too much like cockroaches? Perhaps the pistachios were too little like peanuts? I didn’t like them. There’s no real accounting for my four-year-old taste though. I didn’t like beer and onions then either. In fact, my dad will tell you that the only food I ate for a very long time was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He was sure there was something wrong with me. My diet worried him. But I am living proof that it didn’t kill me. My steady breakfast of a Dr Pepper and a Twix bar in high school didn’t kill me either, but neither I nor any scientific entity will recommend that as a sound nutritional practice.

But I digress. I was talking about pistachios.

What was the cause of my recent reconsideration of this nut? Perhaps it was an encounter with the World’s Largest Pistachio near Tularosa, New Mexico? No, while that strangely vulval roadside attraction may have softened my attitude a bit, the credit really goes to my parents-in-law. They’re the ones who bought a bag of pistachios and left their innocent, partially-cracked, lightly-saltedness on the counter in the condo in Ruidoso, inviting anyone to share. 

One nut was meh. The tenth greenish, tannish, reddish nut though, probably caused a bit of an obsession. Perhaps my brain was softened by the relaxing and happy trip we were having. Surely that didn’t hurt. Perhaps it was just that the pistachios were Just. So. Good.

And it’s not just me. Partner had a similar turnaround in his pistachio-tude as well. We’ve had pistachios of three different origins since returning to Texas and find the New Mexico nuts far superior. Not just because of the fond memories they prompt of our lovely vacation, but because they were much more crisp than their farther-flung counterparts.

This is not, by the way, a paid endorsement for any pistachio grower or distributor, but if anyone wants to send me some of those Tularosa pistachios, I WILL happily eat them.

That's It, I'm Breaking UP With My Paintbrush

Tomorrow I will put away the hammer and break up with my paintbrush. Then I’m going to try to remember all the crazy, stupid, sublime shit I thought about writing while I was painting, so I can finally write it down. Painting and home repair and daily showering has been a blast, but I’m ready to go back to being the shoeless, semi-hermit writer who only bathes a couple of times a week.

In the meantime, apropos of nothing, here’s one of my favorite vacation pictures. 

Dani’s stained knee, with knitting and camera bagThis was taken somewhere along I-10W, between San Antonio, Texas and the great big batch of nowhere that reaches out from there. I was NOT driving, as evidenced by the shifter almost visible next to my leg. From left to right (after the shift indicator strip): blueberry yogurt stain, coffee drip, robot knitting, empty camera bag, robot-knitting pattern. On the return trip, I sported a coffee drip on my left boob. Sorry, no gratuitous boob shot of that one.

In which I dream of a space-worthy restroom

Early this morning I had one of those vivid, bizarre dreams that must be shared, but probably shouldn’t be.

In the dream, I was at a fair of some kind: exhibits, rides, games, food, squealing. A very standard community festival, arranged in a broad, grassy field. One section of the fair included demonstrations of wonderful new inventions, the most fascinating of which was the walking tree house. People lined up to get a chance to climb up the ladder into the observation room. Once the seats were full, the ladder would be pulled up, and the mechanical tree would walk on leg-like roots around the perimeter of the festival, giving riders a dramatic moving view of the revellers below. Cool, right? 

The best part of the walking tree house though? The restrooms.

At each end of the observation room were restrooms. Inside the restroom was a wall of tubes, each large enough to hold a grown person. To use the facilities, one would crawl inside the tube and evacuate one’s waste systems and the excreta was whooshed away with a high powered blower of some kind. Sort of like those Dyson Air-blade hand dryers that are popping up in public restrooms here and there. In between users, the lavatory tubes were self-disinfecting, so the entire restroom was clean, dry, efficient, and strangely quiet for a place made entirely of brushed stainless steel. 

Because it was a dream, behaving with dream logic and dream physics, I was never quite clear about what one did with one’s pants when crawling into the lavatory tubes. Perhaps they were Heisenberg pants.