Alina's Adventures

The rise of forced birth and the shame of female bodies.

I stand by my choices and honor the choices of others.

I didn't want to write a book about miscarriages, terminations, adoptions, trafficked bodies, and pregnancy-- but I could not stop. The stories kept coming. 

My home state of Alabama is a hub for gun rights, recreational violence, and misogynistic billboards that strip the personhood of women. It comes as no surprise:

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

- The Guardian

A female body is punished for failure to make her body a good house. Meanwhile, in Alabama and all across this country, corporations secure more rights to dump and damage the environment, to poison the groundwater that causes birth defects and countless cancers, to get away with mangling fetuses and sickening children leaving citizens powerless. Power-less. Unable to stop them. 

Why are the crimes of the rich being leveraged against the bodies of the poor? 

Why should anyone pledge their allegiance to a flag that represents the reign of bad stewardship and lack of corporate accountability?

National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s one-of-a-kind study identifies hundreds of criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 and 2005, after the decision in Roe v. Wade was issued. In each of the 413 cases, pregnancy was a necessary element and the consequences included: arrests; incarceration; increases in prison or jail sentences; detentions in hospitals, mental institutions and drug treatment programs; and forced medical interventions, including surgery. Data showed that state authorities have used post-Roe measures including feticide laws and anti-abortion laws recognizing separate rights for fertilized, eggs, embryos and fetuses as the basis for depriving pregnant women – whether they were seeking to end a pregnancy or go to term – of their physical liberty. The findings make clear that if so called “personhood” measures are enacted, not only will more women who have abortions be arrested, such measures would create the legal basis for depriving all pregnant women of their status as full persons under the law.

The study found in a majority of cases, no adverse pregnancy outcome was reported and that where an adverse outcome was alleged, state authorities were typically not required to provide expert testimony or scientific evidence to prove that the pregnant woman’s actions, inactions, or circumstances would or in fact did cause the alleged harm.

The study documented cases in which fear of arrests and forced interventions deterred women from seeking help for themselves and in some cases for their newborns. These findings are consistent with the medical and public health consensus that punitive measures, and the legal arguments supporting them, will undermine rather than further state interests in child, fetal, and maternal health.

This study found that far from protecting patient privacy and confidentiality, professionals in the health care system were often the people gathering information from pregnant women and new mothers and disclosing it to police, prosecutors, and court officials.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

I am a mother like any other shuffling between head lice and heart ache. Nothing about this choice is easy or predetermined. Every step we take is a gift and a source of wonder. 

If you'd like to hear voices tied to wombs, consider picking up a copy of Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus, my hybrid poetry collection published by Finishing Line Press. 

Love, always, Alina.

A paean to unpretty meadows.

I don't remember where I read that our conservation ethos is biased in favor of pretty places. Maybe it was Muir. Maybe the comment was actually about wilderness. Either way, it struck me as an unethical approach to conservation. Similar, in a sense, to deciding which kids should receive life-saving treatments on the basis of their good looks. 

I've seen this ethos hard at work in the case of Hurricane Creek, where some folks say the Eastern Bypass will be a boon for development. Then, behind a cupped hand, those same people whisper that Hurricane Creek is "a working class creek"-- and obviously "it's no Cahaba River". To preserve a wild area requires the discovery of some rare lily. Some impossibly perfect beauty. Because only the pretty people are worth saving. Only the tourist dollars count.

Which leads me to a poem. The poem inspired by the desire to honor a meadow, regardless of its economic value to so-and-so apartment magnate. To honor even the un-pretty meadows. To ascribe value to even the unsexy lives.

Today, the awesome Matrix Magazine published the poem in question-- "I Don't Think We Should Use Words Like Meadow Anymore". Here's the first stanza of my paean to unpretty meadows:

 

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread.

Read the rest online.

 

Like historic preservation which aims to preserve the antebellum mansion without an eye for the dogtrot cabin made from nearly-extinct longleaf pine, conservation can be driven by the desire to save what rich people believe deserves saving. Preservation can be a way of maintaining social status. Certainly, the choices made by state historic preservation commissions determine what our children are allowed to value of the past. So it's debutante balls and fainting couches and Scarlett O'Hara swaying at the top of a staircase. Most developers do very well for themselves and usually, they are the ones who have a money-making plan for the meadow or creek in question. Oh Progress, thou art a fine and wealthy god indeed. A god of brass placards and community development. A god to which our politicians appeal again and again behind closed doors and in open chambers-- the god to which some consecrate the awful tornado of 2011.

Speaking of tornados, there's this book you should read (edited by Brian Oliu) titled, simply, Tuscaloosa Runs This. I'm about to start quoting from it. I'm about to agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Beck Grace (and perhaps the whiskey-scented ghost of Walker Percy) when he writes:

"I'm the Southerner who, like an anthropologist living among the natives too long, informs outsides on their customs, their rites, their rituals, their speech."

In other words, I may live here and hike here and dream my way through life here but I'm always a foreign entity. My "ain't" lacks a certain spittle. My "cain't" never could. So I'm not trying to be one of you so much as to feel and understand you-- to savor your BBQ ribs beneath a steel-plant infused sunset. Maybe even tell a true story. 

Which brings me to the post-tornado story. A true story that's jam-packed with traffic and development. When Tuscaloosa Runs This was published in 2012, the development hadn't quite begun. But a Camus-loving prophet by the name of Erik Wennermark nailed it. Probably not because he loved Camus but let's face it, Camus called it over Sartre every time and he had the grist of a good prophet. Three years ago, Erik wrote:

"When they rebuild, they'll rebuild ugly. More cookie-cutter student condos. New look strip malls, Panera and Starbucks and Best Buy. Yes, when they finally opened the Barnes & Noble in town I went too, but with great reservation. Tuscaloosa may have been dull at times and prone to exacerbate my alcoholism, but at least it wasn't like everywhere else in this country-- when I first arrived it could have just as well been El Salvador, so different and unique it felt to me. I fear when they rebuild-- if they rebuild-- it will be just another strip mall suburb along the highway. The same shitty stores in the same shitty architecture. Clean and modern and lifeless boxes dropped to earth."

Did he say the word "life"? Because I feel like that's what we were talking about. I feel like maybe I was saying a pretty life isn't the only one worth saving. A lifeless box is not an upgrade. A massive four-lane bypass is nothing but an opportunity to expand the craven, pathetic strip mall style deeper and deeper into the woods. Then over the creek. Forget grandmother's house because that place was 1,000 square feet and we need bigger houses. Faster cars. Blah blah blah you know where I'm going. 

The fact is simply this: I don't want to go there. I don't want to imagine my hometown covered in highways and byways and neighborhoods abandoned for the latest prefab "community". I don't want to smile and pray to Progress. I don't want to call rampant, ridiculous consumerism a "blessing". I don't want to lie to you and pretend I'm a satisfied citizen of this.

Because...... there are meadows. And because there are people who care about life. And because there are children who might care about life if they grew up in a town saturated with life. Not just roll tide life and tailgating parties but trees and creeks and slippery rocks. Simple, uncomplicated, naturally-existing life. Unpretentious, unpretty, un-manicured life. Yes... WILDlife.

There. I said it. 

Before I go wash out my mouth with soap, you should know there is a beloved meadow in Northport, Alabama currently under siege. You can sign a petition to preserve it here. And I can thank Amy LeePard for caring about life. And I can thank Roxanna Bennett for her sailor's mouth and the wide-open heart beneath. Thank you to all who work to save meadows-- and to all who publish poems about meadows to conserve or preserve the unpretty-perfects of the world. 

The unspeakable part of our bodies, and why it must be spoken.

Visualizations of Adrienne's words.

Trying to educate my children to think critically about what they consume in our overwhelmingly consumerist culture is like howling at the moon and waiting for a response. 

We see the billboards slathered in pencil-thin women with massive breasts and buxom, rubber-ball bottoms. Those of us with curves wish we were skinnier. Those of us who are skinny wish we had curves. The pictures we see show us nothing real or natural. The pictures show us how much money we need to spend to fit the current trends being sold to our children, peers, and lovers. The pictures show us what we will NEVER be without ponying up.

During the second world war and the early ad era, curves were evidence of prosperity. Women rued their skinny bodies and forked out money to purchase Marilyn Monroe curves. My friends tell me how "lucky" I am to be "skinny" but being skinny means I will never have those breasts I see jiggling back from every billboard and mall kiosk. Being skinny means I can only have those breasts with surgical help. 

"So if you want them, why not just buy them?" one friend asked.

There are many things I want that are for sale. But sometimes the act of purchasing these things robs me of who I am to myself- this little "me", this self I call mine, the integrity that is the only thing I've worked to leave to my kids.

I cannot buy those breasts because my desire for them is a betrayal of myself. I am not a busty female. I am not well-endowed. My curves are not as steep as mountain roads. I am learning to appreciate my hills. In a sense, I cannot buy those breasts because somewhere in that transaction exists the seed of human slavery. Dissatisfaction with self threatens to make a slave of me.

Notice how this ad sets up envy between females? Creates it as backdrop?

I am tired of seeing sister placed against sister in this competition to be prettiest. Or coolest. Or most powerful. Or most gifted. Or most successful. 

My menstrual cycle is not a sickness that I feel the need to hide from men. It is not a contamination that makes me disgusting. Patriarchy begins with such myths.

I will not perpetuate the need to wear super-short shorts during my period in order to entertain a man while hiking (of all things, hiking!). 

I won't pretend to like whiskey or football or hunting to play the cool girl. If I liked football, I would not be ashamed to like it, but I don't care who wins the Iron Bowl. I don't care who plays quarterback.

I DO care when a football star assaults a female and the public gets mad that this is reported because "oh my gosh this will ruin his career." A person who assaults others should not be surprised if his/her career is ruined. That's how we learn and grow up. 

Or stop cruelty to women in the name of animals.

PETA's ads are annoying. Is there no other way to argue for decent treatment of animals than by dehumanizing females? Do her legs have to glow like butter? Does have Celina have to appeal to a personal fetish in order to make the world a better place? Does supporting PETA implicate us in much more insidious consumerist memes?

Do we have to imagine a blow job in conjunction with a burger? Do my kids have to imagine it as well? Do males have to compensate for penis size with sandwich size? Do males need to be told the lie that size matters?

I don't want my husband or son to ever think such things.

Size only matters in porn.

Size only matters when the goal is to punish.

No, no- I'm not done. Does innocence have to be peddled as sex product? Is the all-hallowed aura of virginity what we're peddling here? Who cares if someone is a virgin or not? Nevermind, misogynists and religious fundamentalists care. Does Christ care? I think the Bible is pretty darn clear on that one.

I want Lifeway Stories to stop selling virginity to my kids and then calling it "Christian." I'm tired of the disgusting cruelties and misogynies perpetuated in the name of a God who came to this world to overturn law and tradition and convention as we know it.

This female looks scared. That is scary.

And I'm soooooo tired of ads that paint sex as something "done to" a female. I'm tired of ads that show fear on a woman's face while suggesting sex. I'm tired of those ads because I'm tired of rape.

I'm also tired of bad sex. Why can't sex feel good? Why can't it be awesome, beautiful, intense, sublime, a loss of self, a discovery of another- the closest thing we come to magic in this life?

I love sex. I have always loved sex but never so much as now when it is mine- and my body is something I share with my partner- two bodies joining to create a landscape that exists only for us when we seek it- and differently every time.

In our house, I am as vocal about loving sex as I am about despising nonconsensual sex. I will never tell my kids to wait until they are married. I will never glorify abstinence. Instead, I will tell them to wait for someone who deserves to explore that world with them- wait for someone who is willing to get lost.

The last thought is our responsibility to be honest and truthful. Where sex is concerned, this means I'm going to be honest. I tell my kids:

Although the sex I've had while married has been the best and most intensely mind-blowing, the sex I had before marriage was also pleasurable. It's not about a wedding ring so much as the other party.... and your relationship.

And there is nothing wrong with pleasure as long as your pleasure does not hurt or damage another life. Perhaps you will discover pleasure is too easy and therefore unsatisfying. Perhaps you will discover you want more than pleasure. Perhaps you will develop an appetite for communion. If so, godspeed. 

If all the other voices in your culture- all the ads and billboards and peer groups and maskulinities- speak only for consumption, may you find words to hold in opposition. May you find words for the sacred unspeakably beautiful things. And may the truth of these words keep you free.

Defectors and Deserters: A different perspective on Bowe Bergdahl.

My husband empties the dishwasher with the painstaking diligence of the 21st century male while I sit at the kiddie table and muse about the more pressing issues of the average, middle-class American day.

“So….” I begin with all the languor of a pickled bean pod, “This Bowe Bergdahl fellow is really getting attacked in the media.”

We nod together, gazing at our shoes, recalling those early courtship arguments over the significance of praying to a sanctified piece of fabric and placing our hands on our hearts while so doing.

Something is really bothering my husband- a red-white-and-blue something hanging heavy in his head. Empathizing with Bowe’s discovery that his country’s government was not actually helping or protecting the citizens of Afghanistan does not assuage my husband’s concern about the consequences of Bowe’s decision to act on his ethics.

It goes back to the existentialists- and the big question of the previous century- namely, whether one should put conscience before country in everyday life. But he doesn’t see it that way.

My husband’s Atlanta childhood is difficult to resuscitate; he remembers baseball, tree swings, Six Flags, with all the generalized amnesia induced by a childhood of plenty. None of his relatives admit to harboring doubts about the virtues of the Republican Party. And no male member of his family- not his father, not a single one of his four uncles- ever served in any of the US military’s overseas activities. Armchair warriors, the are the angry Americans we read about, the ones still livid over the failure to win the war in Vietnam and vanquish communism once and for all.

Given his upbringing, my husband’s ability to think globally is impressive. But, Bowe still bothers him.

“Can’t we just agree that it was wrong for him to desert?” he pleads, assuming there are better options for the conscience-stricken soldier.

“Why didn’t he just refuse to serve and do his time in jail?”, my husband adds, as if the answer to this question might illuminate entire continents of moral misunderstanding.

“Um, maybe you should do a little reading. Start with Solzhenitsyn and Hannah Arendt.”

“Maybe you should read a little more history yourself, including documents pertaining to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War,” he counters.

“Obviously there’s Lincoln. But there’s also Czeslaw Milosz.”

“Senator Max Clelland,” he snaps.

“Vaclav freaking Havel,” I snap back.

“Groucho Marx?“

The disconnect in our cultural frame of reference becomes obvious. At first, I ascribe it to the varying experiences of a native son and an immigrant. But when my immigrant parents cluck their tongues and decry Bowe’s lack of loyalty to their favorite flag, I realize the disconnect is much more complicated.

The disconnect lies between two different worldviews. In one worldview- the one to which my inlaws and parents subscribe- a government deserves loyalty above and beyond the considerations of personal ethics. In the other worldview- the one to which many dissidents and activists subscribe- modern history offers us the human casualties of the nation-state, each death paid for with taxes, each individual tragedy made possible by unthinking political loyalty.

I can feel the blood in my temples beginning the slow simmer that precedes a boil. Our kitchen feels too confining for the conversation. How can we put human tragedy in a room threatened by an avalanche of sippy cups without doing its victims an injustice?

So it arrives: the hot-headed, stupid comment without which we might actually begin to understand one another.

“Who are you to judge the deserters or the defectors?” I whisper-scream so as not to wake our sleeping angels. “You have no clue what it means to be a veteran of the crimes committed by the nation-state!”

Here’s where it comes from: In 1980, Doru and Lydia implemented their secret plan to escape the worker’s paradise created by Romania’s exorbitant dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Part of this plan required them to leave me, their adorable infant daughter, in the care of my father’s parents until events were sorted out for better or worse.  

The actual events involved slipping through Czechoslovakia to Wisconsin, where my father had established connections in the academic community, then applying for political asylum, moving to another state, waiting for their asylum application to be acknowledged, dealing with the complications ensuing as a result of Reagan’s decision to grant MFN status to Romania, filling out the endless paperwork to bring me stateside, and adding more water to the soup in the hopes that it might last just a few more days.

By the time the US government finally approved my visa, I had a new little sister to fill my place as family baby.

Growing up in Alabama offered me continuous reminders about the evils of communism from folks who wore their Bible belts too tight. When the wall came down at the end of 1989, my parents took a leave from their jobs, withdrew us from school, and rented a car in Germany to drive through the interminable border crossing lines in the newly liberated territories of East and Central Europe.

For the first time since their defection, my parents were returning to the land of their youth and the fold of their extended family. I couldn’t wait to meet all the people that populated the kitchen stories of my childhood.

There is simply no way to convey the intoxicating wonder and ebullience of those early post-communist days.

While many aunts and second cousins kissed and hugged us at every turn, I got distracted by the heated conversations over tuica, the ones that dragged on until early in the morning. Overhearing these conversations revealed, for the first time, the accumulated anger and resentment of those who had remained and lived under Ceasescu. Frequently, my parents’ voices grew thin and reedy, hesitant in that peculiar manner adopted by defendants in a trial.

The accusations mounted like dental plaque. My parents had “run away”. They had “deserted their family”. They didn’t “stand up and protest the system”. They didn’t go to prison or the gulag for their beliefs. They just ran.

Fortunately, my father’s parents did not disown or persecute him for his political treason. One might even hold them responsible for raising their defector son in a way that made it possible for him to marry my mother and do what no risk-averse, well-settled, law-abiding citizen would seriously consider, namely, leaving everything behind and starting again as strangers in a strange land.

When they came to the US, my grandparents practiced their English and dressed in the manner trending with Alabama natives at the time. Neither considered the act of speaking English, or acknowledging the local “hallelujah”-laced lingo, as a betrayal of their homeland. Only the most militant propagandist could have accused them of “accommodation” or “appeasement”.

For the most part, my grandparents modelled politeness and non-confrontational engagement. They took the time to learn about the country they visited, using what they learned to help them negotiate the varying cultural norms and conditions. Ultimately, they made these efforts out of love for my father and a desire to share in our family’s life, whatever its current geographic location.

Like my grandparents, Bowe’s father learned the language of his son’s captors. He showed deference by using the Haqqani lingo, and grew a long beard to keep from being identified with an enemy country. Bowe’s mother wore a veil out of respect and to keep from antagonizing extremist Muslims. Surely I am not the only American who can understand and empathize with these actions.

My grandfather, Claudiu, spent time in a Danube Canal work camp for his impertinence.

“Just because people tell you to do something doesn’t make it right,” Claudiu told me as I juggled cooking his lunch, nursing some infant or another, and keeping my brain from morphing into a mush suitable only for toothless mouths.

What he meant: “Don’t do anything that makes you less of decent human being”.

What he didn’t mean: “Don’t do anything that makes you less of a human being unless everybody else, even the powerful guys, are doing it too.”

The question of conscience is- and had always been- an individual one. A personal encounter with lived ethics. A means of self-reckoning. A source of personal honor and integrity. The fact that people are doing something only makes critical thinking even more important because the tendency to follow the crowd (and find ourselves lost in it) is common to all human beings.

When I asked Claudiu how it felt to spend five months living in the country he fought against during World War II, he grinned and began picking his teeth.

“War is war,” he sighed, “And war is a fight between governments, not people.”

But the US fighter jets that shot down his only brother, Parsifal, as he flew a plane to defend Bucharest from bombs- how could he not hold his brother’s death against us? The U.S. of us, I mean.

Too wise to be baited, Claudiu reminded me that no one can judge what another man does to protect his family- “In matters of taste and conscience, each man is king”.

Bowe Bergdahl chased his most idealistic, exciting American dream straight into the US Army, where he was stationed on the front lines of the counterinsurgency, the battle for the “hearts and minds” of individual Afghan villages and communities.

In one of the two letters sent to his parents during his five year captivity, Bowe tried to explain why walked away from the base. He was disillusioned by the leadership- by the senseless risks and conditions imposed on his fellow soldiers- and by the failure of the US effort to win the war of ideas. He was depressed, oppressed by a sense of futility and lack of purpose; the aimlessness best depicted in novels by Herman Hesse.

What I found in Bowe’s letters was a young prisoner’s efforts to reassure his family (and himself)- to discover some purpose to the horror and suffering of life. “All things happen for a reason”, Bowe wrote, citing mathematics as “evidence” of higher meaning and purpose. Then, “just because we cannot understand the master equation does not mean it is not there.”

My husband gazes at me carefully. Marriage to a non-native accustoms you to a certain amount of suspense.

He recalls our experience at the Social Security office when I applied to change my name, and an elderly bouffant informed my husband, “Sir, I don’t know what this woman told you but you married a legal alien without a work permit”. The bouffant remained unimpressed by my USA-issued passport.

“Ms. I-can’t-pronounce-that, what we need is an original birth certificate.”

“From communist Romania?” my mouth dropped. “Can you even read a Romanian birth certificate? I mean, can you speak Romanian or something? Does anyone in this office speak Romanian?”

“This conversation is finished,” said the bouffant. Case closed. No further consideration. The garish misunderstanding brushed away with the words, “You are dismissed”.  

It’s easy to dismiss Bowe’s actions as those of a traitor. It’s hard to explain why we offer defectors the benefits of acting on conscience while condemning our own citizens make similar choices.

Both my parents and Bowe acted from individual conscience. Both assumed the primary risk for their choices. Neither took another life in so doing. Yet both endangered family members, friends, and buddies affected by the actions.

Best not to judge those who run from the lies their government asks them to live and tell, lest we wake up one morning to discover our thoughts bear an uncanny resemblance to shoddy propaganda.

Human rights on our back porch: Immigration now.

This is all I have to say about the multiple news reports documenting the horrible immigration conditions of Latin American children trying to rejoin their parents in the USA.

Tell true stories. Tell stories of families like mine. Learn the language so you can translate true stories. And stop lying to yourself about immigrants being a lesser form of life than you.

We are all immigrants. No one has earned the right to be sick, oppressed, hungry, or silenced.  

Juxtaposing trees, fortune, and national habits.

I know it's odd to juxtapose trees with the images of weekend backyard fun- but there's an epiphany in the brew. It started with a Ukranian folk tale we read aloud this weekend. In the folk tale, a young boy set off to find his fortune. When the King and I asked the kids what a "fortune" entailed, they responded with all the wisdom of their American childhood- "money". 

But there is more to fortune that money in the tales of yore. In our folk tale, a good fortune included a family, a shared narrative, and the joy that comes with the courage to work hard and seek the best.

Here's the rub: There is a qualifier- "good fortune"- that indicates the difference between merely having fortune and having the capacity to appreciate it.

America lacks a mythology for its trees. Unlike the Druids and pagans of the Old World, we approach our trees without the caution of reverence. Though we borrowed a little from Native Americans- mostly names and herbal remedies- none of what we borrowed was savored and kept lidded long enough to sow stories. The lack of studious awe, the stuff of stories, makes sense for those lured by the hard glint of gold.  

As pioneers and homesteaders, our connection to the land proved more practical than spiritual. We loved the land for what we hoped to make of it.

Perhaps even the fact of ownership- the challenge of making land fruitful enough to warrant laying claim- demanded that the ties we forged be of the looser sort, loose enough to keep us from growing too attached.

Rather than name each tree, we calculated its value as timber. Here in Alabama, the longleaf pine forests made way for the rapidly-growing, productive loblolly pine. Certain birds and countless beautiful ecologies were lost in the process.

The nation prospered. Prosperity became a form of patriotism. But all our monied fortune did not translate into good fortune. All the money did not teach us how to use it wisely. All the toys and playthings only stole out attention from the unnamed trees and the holistic meaning of "good fortune" as a life lived in gratitude and joy for all that we've been given.

The dictionary defines good fortune as "an auspicious state resulting from favorable outcomes". I see a fortune in the stately pines and maple trees behind the house. But I see our good fortune as part of an agreement to live with them rather than against them- to live in their shade, knowing they bear witness to our stories- grateful for the chance to learn from our history.

Sir Eustace, my sports trophy.

Friday flew straight in the face of every well-laid plan. But it helps to explain why my "home-making" posts are far and few between.

By the time Max and Ellie got back after lunch, the girls had each invented the most hair-curling cries for their fabric baby dolls. When I asked them if I could breastfeed their babies, Prophet refused.

"They're not hungry, mom," she snapped, "They just like to cry. A LOT."

Little B. and Gnome smiled sheepishly. Then Gnome's baby began shrieking as if a small dragon had a baby toe between its long, shiny teeth. "See?" smirked Prophet, her lips compressed into a tight little line that I like to call a "smugile".

After giving myself the pronounced satisfaction of a little solitary eye-rolling, I trotted into the kitchen, where the boys were debating whether to bake banana bread or raspberry-banana bread. "Hey mom," ventured the Eldest, "I looked everywhere and I can't find my Honest Pretzels cookbook..."

"Obviously, you didn't look everywhere," I replied, keeping one ear cocked for fabric baby cries from the back of the castle.

"I did. I swear."

"But the book is clearly somewhere, so not finding the book means you failed to look everywhere because you may have looked in many places while not looking in the place known as somewhere- which is, in fact, a place BECAUSE...." I raised my voice and caught my breath, "your book still exists as a form or familiar recognizable physical MATTER." 

"Mom doesn't like to help me find things," the Eldest said in an aside to Ellie. "She thinks I should find things for myself." Ellie nodded. The boys looked amused.

They shrugged in unison as I set off (rather huffily) in search of the Eldest's cookbook. Twenty minutes later, with "somewhere" feeling more and more like elsewhere, I happened upon a gigantic cockroach, spread on his back, legs curled towards the ceiling. Since he was obviously deceased, I did the only thing that made sense given the circumstances, namely, selected a swatch of linen from the fabric bin and mounted Sir Eustace into a frame for the dining room wall. 

As I hammered a nail into the wall to display our new family friend, Ellie saw it and started laughing. He loved Sir Eustace. In turn, I discovered that Sir Eustace had minimized the cost of admitting I couldn't find the cookbook either- and maybe "somewhere" was actually "nowhere", immaterial.

The Eldest just grinned and said, "That's cool, mom," when I passed over a printed recipe for banana-raspberry bread.

"Actually," I wanted to say, "Cool is your non-shaming response to my huffiness". But I didn't say it. Maybe a residue of huffiness lingered.

As the Eldest prepared his ingredients and Ellie warmed the oven, I decided to make a snack for the crying baby dolls and the five uber-cool kids in the castle. "I'm going to make some microwave popcorn," I said, hoping it sounded official. Ellie watched as I put a fabric napkin under the popcorn bag and set the timer.

"Why'd you put that napkin in there?" Ellie asked. 

"Because the spinny-dish-thingamabob is broken and the popcorn will burn on the bottom if I don't put something under it and we don't really have paper napkins..."

"Only for guests," appended the Eldest, as he mashed bananas with the meat-grinder.

I set the timer for the minimum popping time and prepared to listen for the promised "popping intervals". It took all of forty seconds for the microwave to begin smoking furiously, filling the tiny kitchen with smoke and the familiar odor of burning. Something wasn't right. When the girls dashed into the kitchen screaming "Fire! Fire!", Ellie and the Eldest immediately demonstrated proper bomb-shelter skills by throwing themselves on the floor and covering their heads with their arms. 

At this point, we torn between cracking up and dealing with the current disaster. Somehow, we managed to alternate between both fairly evenly.

Ellie found a fan in the sewing room, and set it up to blow the air away. Prophet announced the rule that "no one opens the microwave door until daddy comes him". This gave her the chance to indulge in her favorite hobby of all, namely, the enforcement of very particular, legalistic rules. I try not to worry so much about whether this rigidity will condemn her to life as a card-carrying Republican. There are other things to think about. Like the smoke.

Meanwhile, the Eldest went on baking as if nothing had happened, while Ellie theorized about the cause of the burning. "You know, it's an urban myth that aluminum blows up microwaves," he said in his most serious voice. He had the floor. "Because, actually, all it does if you put it in the microwave is make a lot of smoke- I mean, A LOT of smoke, kind of like that", he said, pointing towards the closed microwave door. 

Could these kids be any cooler? I mean, here they are, juggling crisis-management, intricate baking recipes, baby dolls that cry no matter what you do to soothe them,  and then babysitting a mom who can't even pop microwave popcorn without setting fires. Someone give these kids a gold medal.

Needless to say, an hour later, the kitchen still reeked of smoke but we snacked ourselves silly anyway, under the shadow of a somber Sir Eustace, the delicious taste of banana-raspberry bread in our mouths. 

It was Tiffany who finally made sense of the whole event- "I like it," she said with reference to the framed Sir Eustace, adding that it made a great "sports trophy". Granted, Sir Eustace was deceased when I found him, so he was more like a roadkill trophy than a sports trophy, but roadkill trophy fails to capture the budding affection (the sentiment that led me to offer Eustace the token of a "Sir").

What Tiffany didn't know, however, was that our microwave held within it a napkin lined with metallic strips, still smoldering (eventually, charred) as a result of my kitchen shenanigans.

"Whatever," I overheard Prophet telling Little B., a sigh heavy in her voice- "I guess that's why Dad always tells Mom not to worry about doing any of that cooking." 

How to deal with emerging bullying behavior in a homeschooling home.

We've been witnessing a few bullying behaviors here in the castle- and there's nothing quite as painful to watch as little people using cruelty as a means of motivating one another. It's a form of slow torture for those who aren't content with a social darwinist approach to life. So, tonight, the King and I called a castle meeting to try and sort through a few things with our budding bullies.

One of my favorite free resources for castle meetings is the LifeTree Learning Systems Pax Curricula. A yearlong learning program enables you to teach kids how to make compassionate choices through activities, role-play, games, and empathy-building exercises. We use it for all our kids- and I think the little Gnome gets quite a bit out of it, even if the concepts can be a little abstract at times.

“Peace, according to Montessori philosophy, does not mean weakness, and it does not mean the simple absence of war. It means inner harmony and strong individuality, a full participation in community life, responsiveness to the world, and stewardship of its resources. It means respect for human dignity and diversity, and due diligence in protecting and supporting the rights of all. It is to this definition of peace that we dedicate our most passionate efforts.” 

Tonight, we're going to focus on our imaginary friend, Wendy, who just can't seem to be happy no matter how many things she accrues and manages to take from others. Unlike her friend, William, who can find so many wonderful ways to play with a few sticks, Wendy finds herself angry at others for her own inability to enjoy all the things she has.  She takes to picking on William- demanding his stick and throwing a tantrum when he won't give it to her. She calls him "stupid" and tells him that she hates him and that he is "disgusting".

No matter how much she gets, Wendy always wants more. And Wendy loves to talk about other people- there are so many people she "doesn't like". It's hard not to wonder if there is anything in the world Wendy does like. Selfish behavior aside, it's obvious Wendy doesn't like herself very much. 

I can't wait to see how the kids think we can help Wendy find a way to enjoy what she's given. I also hope they offer a few suggestions on how to help a friend like William when he is being bullied or mistreated. Stay tuned.

Tiny sorrows meet with exquisite comforts.

It was the Eldest who summoned me, in his most excited whisper, over to a corner of the backyard near a privet shrub. For the past two weeks, there'd been a pair of cardinals- one haughty red male and a soft brown female- flitting to and from the shrub. I didn't think much of it, but the Eldest kept an eye (and pen) on them, frequently referring to their actions in his nature journal. He also noted the day when the brown mother bird flew over to the shrub with a small twig in her beak. "She's building a nest," he declared.

An urgency in his whisper- perhaps even his ability to sustain a whisper against excitement's uncontrolled volubility- grabbed my attention.

Pointing within the shrub, the Eldest grinned. Inside a nest, three tiny little eggs, carefully laid and tended by our cardinal friends. "How did you know?" I marveled. 

"Because, I told you, she was building a nest," he said happily. "And because I found the nest last week with dad but I was worried because it was empty." The expression on his face charmed me- a look of simple contentment and gratification. 

The eggs imprinted themselves in our hearts and minds. Soon, a ritual developed. After watering the garden each morning- Gnome with her orange tin can and Prophet with ther yellow one- we crept over to cardinal nest to check on the eggs. Expectation and delight coalesced into a wonder-filled tenderness for the mystery and beauty of the three lives preparing to hatch in the midst of our unspectacular yard.

While conducting his daily nature study, the Eldest approached me on tiptoe, again, the discordant combination of excitement and whispering. I thought I detected a tinge of dismay as well. He tried to speak- "the eggs have hatched"- but then silenced himself ("Revererence?" I wondered) and, shaking his head, led me by hand to the privet shrub.

The nest was lying on its side, barely holding a mass of pink flesh within it. Something had happened to dislodge the cardinals' painstaking creation. I drew nearer, heart heavy, burdened by a sinking foreboding.

A pink mass of flesh nestled within the tipped nest. Only one- where there should have been three. My eyes met those of the Eldest. I understood his silence. There are few words to describe that sense when all is not well with the world.

Yet, I drew closer. The little one's head quivered as he brought it up and away from the mass of pink skin and gray fuzz.

Atop a slender, delicate neck, I could see two large black saucers that would eventually develop into eyes. But for the moment, the little chick remained sightless- blind to the fact of the two faces missing from the handwoven home.

What happened to the other two chicks? Did a hawk steal them? If so, would the hawk return to claim this one as well? Did raccoons climb trees to steal bird eggs? Had the cardinals chosen a dangerous location for their nest? The questions spun through my head. Those familiar, chest-warming maternal instincts drove my heart into a faster rhythmn, the beat of empathy for those more vulnerable and defenseless than our egotastic adult selves.

The Eldest looked on quietly. That's when I said it- "Oh no, little bird, you're all alone now...." 

It must have been the sound of my voice, or maybe even the soft feather-like texture of the whisper, that drew the chick upwards, suddenly raising its blind head and opening its mouth in the hope of a worm.

I felt the lump rise in my throat, and the pressure of tears forming in my eyes.

As the Eldest delicately explained why we should leave the chick alone so its mother would return and feed it, I fought the tears, pushed them deep inside, saving them for a later time and place, a time without a blind baby bird all alone in a precarious nest.

The King walked over to investigate; I turned to address Gnome and Prophet, whose worried faces mirrored my own. Pouring a glass of water for a red-cheeked Gnome put distance between myself and the solitary chick.

But the distance was quickly bridged by the King's announcement of the a broken egg on the ground near the nest- and a large colony of ants eating something next to the empty egg shell.

At this point, I simply started crying. 

Because that's what I do when things in the world defy my hopes of a fair and just outcome. Because doing anything else would be a lie or a subterfuge- a sentiment created for the consumption of others rather than a sentiment reflecting my earnest reckoning with my own feelings and fears.

The King shook his head, tried to find the right words, wrapping a warm, familiar arm around my shoulders. "It's not fair," I muttered, allowing the tears to garble the useless words.

The Eldest crept up alongside us, his expression contorted and unsure. "Dad," he said, in a certain voice, "I can feel how much it hurts mom to think about the chicks".

Bringing his face so close I could smell the lemonade on his breath, the Eldest continued, "Mom, it hurts me too. It's.... it's..... not what I thought would ever happen...." I leaned into the sweetness of his empathy. We stood, silent, cheek to cheek, for a moment, before he found words again.

"Even though it hurts, mom, it's just how Mother Nature works.... And the mother bird won't abandon her baby- that's not what's going to happen." I felt the balm of his words before I recognized them for the comfort they aimed to offer. My high-functioning ten-year-old son, the one who defies every expectation and limitation, soothed my soul and comforted me better than any neurotypical adult.

It was hard to keep mourning the broken eggs in light of the Eldest's courage and love. Even harder to keep from beaming at the King, who knows how much these moments mean to me- and who isn't too faux-manly to share them. 

So two fragile and lovely chicks did not survive their hatching. But two adults and one boy discovered the comfort of each other between the broken shells. There is so much beauty to be found in all life's breakings.

The liberating habits of compassionate men.

During my first pregnancy over ten years ago, I devoured books on the topic of raising boys. As with every new terrain, it made sense to cross-reference the maps made by those who came before me.

The most important conclusion from all my reading and research resulted in the taking of a vow. I vowed never to make the Eldest feel that he was only allowed to be half a human- that half currently recognized as the prototypical American male.

Having best friends that were guys taught me how much men suffered for the way we raise them to be caricatures of angry, sarcastic, beer-chugging brutes with "natural drive" for rape, destruction, and violence. Honestly, I've never met a man who fits the bill- though I've met way too many who lived like zombies for trying.

We treat men like they are naturally too insensitive, ego-driven, violent, and lusty to leave with out daughters. Then we wonder why the number of nuclear missiles in our arsenal continues to rise. The truth is that men and women are born with similar emotional needs and emotional expression.

According to various studies, around the age of four, the average American boys realizes that daddy (and his preschool buddies and favorite cartoon characters) doesn't like it when he talks about feeling sad. "Take one for the team," laughs the dad. Or, "crying is for girls- boys don't cry". Some variation on sarcastic disregard for what a boy is feeling and some form of withdrawal that teaches him to detach himself from any feelings lest he lose the affection and regard of his daddy and male peers.

The word "sad" is quickly removed from a developing boy's emotional vocabulary. But the sad feeling persists. Eventually, he learns that boys are allowed to get angry. He understands that winning makes fear and bad feelings go away. He agrees not to name all the complex congnitive emotional states he can no longer acknowledge. Instead, he does what "big boys do", namely, keep his eye on the prize and aim to win. Whether he is winning a soccer game, a promotion, a card game, a bet, a dare, or one of those emotional objects known as females, his develops only one response to losing- the response of fear and anger. Under these two words, entire worlds are submerged.

Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Both co-exist as human beings on the planet known as Earth. Books which promise to reveal why men and women can't understand one another usually fall back on the self-fulfilling prophecy of claiming that women are super-emotional and have emotional needs, while men are rational and lack complex emotional needs. Seriously, sitting in the stands of a college football game will quickly reveal the extent to which men and women are equally irrational and equally emotional.

Rarely do such pop psychology books acknowledge the cause for these differences is not God or "nature" or interplanetary travel. Rarely do they mention all the scientific studies that show these differences are largely due to the way in which males are socialized to ignore, project, or suppress their emotions. At no point does John Gray admit that male emotional illiteracy is normative but far from natural or even "normal". He's built a galaxy of cash on maintaining the stereotypes that keep men and their partners from being able to live life in its full variety of cognitive colors.

Reading one of my favorite magazines today returned me to the trenches of the old "unemotional male" sophistries. Describing five habits of "highly compassionate men", Kozo Hattori begins with the truth of the past- the early socialization against compassion in a culture that tells men "emotions" are something the other sex does.

Hattori remembers "being a very compassionate child"- the kind that "cried his eyes out" during the film version of "The Little House on the Prairie". By the time he became a young adult, however, Hattori's identity stayed firmly within what he calls the “act-like-a-man box”. Fitting popular conceptions of masculinity failed to equip him with the sort of self-knowledge that enables us to navigate the tight corners of fear and frustration:

Although I was what therapists call “high-functioning,” my lack of compassion was like a cancer that poisoned my friendships, relationships, business affairs, and life. At the age of 46, I hit rock bottom. Unemployed and on the verge of divorce, I found myself slapping my four-year-old son’s head when he wouldn’t listen to me.

At this point, Hattori questioned the self he had become and whether it served the spirit and soul of his body. Like many wise men before him, Hattori started seeking. He began with empathy. After workshops and seminars and hours of meditation, he grew into compassion. Or maybe compassion grew, naturally, from him. Either way, he discovered that the more compassion he felt, the "happier" he became. 

Like anyone who discovers an ineffable and life-affirming truth, Hattori felt driven by the need to share what he had learned and, of course, continue his own journey of learning. So he interviewed a number of individual experts in an effort to determine what, exactly, makes a compassionate man. Or, how a compassionate man is made.   

Interviewees included Dr. Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center; Dr. James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University; Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness; Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

The conclusions were as simple as the feeling of compassion to an unbridled, open heart:

1. Learn to see compassion as strength.
2. Cultivate compassionate role models.
3. Strive to transcend gender stereotypes.
4. Cultivate emotional intelligence.
5. Practice silence.

Hattori's happiness is contagious. I look forward to his research and encourage him to keep probing the depths, tackling difficult and onerous topics that assist fellow humans in resisting cultural influences against compassion.

The opportunities to make the world a better place for boys and men abound. So, the next time your son honors you by trying to explore and express his complicated heart, dive into the depths with him, rather than forcing him to tread water on the surface. Being born a boy should not relegate you to being less of a human being.

MY FAVORITE RESOURCES ON CULTIVATING COMPASSION

"Can mindfulness help kids learn self-control" by Sarah Wheeler (Greater Good)
"The way we socialize boys man harm them as men", a documentary must-see (All Voices)
"No more Steubenvilles: How to raise boys to be kind men" by Kim Simon (Yes!)
"Boys have become emotionally illiterate" by John Amaechi (BigThink)
"Male and female ability differences down to socialization, not genetics" by Robin McKie (Observer)
"I'm not socializing my kids- I'm humanizing them" by Kimberly Yvette Price (Home Education)
"Nervous Nellies" by Taylor Clark (Slate)
"How to deal with mean people" by Christine Carter (Greater Good)
"His hidden needs" by Nara Schoenberg (Chicago Tribune)
Barbie vs. Batman: The socialization of children's toys (Paula vs. Patriarchy)
"Creating a new generation of compassionate and sensitive men" by Dr. Ted Zeff
"We must look at how we teach our boys what it means to be a man" by Neil Irvin (Time)
"Strong men don't hide their emotions, they show them" by Jack Fischl (PolicyMic)
"The man who couldn't feel" by Contessa Schexnayder (Brain World)
"Helping men to help themselves" by Lea Winderman (APA Monitor on Psychology)
Understanding and Raising Boys (PBS Parents)
Peace In Relationships, Kozo Hattori's blog and counseling 

RELATED STORIES FROM THE CASTLE VAULT

The Eldest's first soccer game.
Why I homeschool.
About love.
Cross-stitching with boys.
Home-schooling and socialization: The heart of the matter.
Is technology narrowing our perception of life?
A date with Adrienne Rich.
Mining a fallow field for stories.
Radical home-makers of all stripes.

"Declaration of Love," a poem by Carilda Oliver Labra.

DECLARATION OF LOVE

(written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October, 1963) 

I ask if I'm wise
when I awaken
the danger between his thighs,
or if I'm wrong
when my kisses prepare only a trench
in his throat.

I know that war is probable;
especially today
because a red geranium has blossomed open.

Please, don't point your weapons
at the sky:
the sparrows are terrorized,
and it's springtime,
it's raining, the meadows are ruminating.
Please,
you'll melt the moon, only night light of the poor.

It's not that I'm afraid,
or a coward,
I'd do everything for my homeland;
but don't argue so much over your nuclear missiles,
because something horrible is happening:
and I haven't had time enough to love.  

I came across this poem in my dog-eared copy of Women On War.  I appreciate the way she holds the ordinariness of love yet to be lived against the tremendous import of nuclear missiles and Cold War politics.

According to my book, Carilda Oliver Labra is known as one of Cuba's prominent poets and "one of the island's first feminist poets to champion women's rights to an erotic life without the constraints of Catholicism". Though her love poems made her famous, her Song to Marti paid tribute to the revolutionary hero. This poem was written in response to the 1963 Cuban missile crisis which brought the modern world to the brink of nuclear war.

You can learn more about Labra and read a few other poems at the delicious Drunken Boat. 

Finding the shelter of each other.

I burned the candle reading on the stoop outside our backdoor last night. The biblio-love with whom I communed, Mary Pipher's The Shelter of Each Other, resonated as clearly as the song of the barn own which visits our backyard at least once a week, the barn owl whom I have come to believe is divided between a past which took place somewhere in the woods behind our yard and a present which resides down the street from us. 

The social construction of reality and the idol of Progress

Pipher, like Wendell Berry, dismantles the idol of "Progress" to which so many mega-churches and self-help groups are now dedicated. Just because science advances to give us the atomic bomb does not mean that this technological progress makes the world a better place. Like many, I am in the thralls of this consumer myth in the places where I least expect it.

We are, after all, one of those crazy families that gave away their TV set this year. That's right- we don't have a TV. Our kids are clueless about the latest exploits of Dora the Explorer or the how the Bratz feel about halter tops. 

"Choose your books as carefully as you choose your friends," warns a grandmother in Pipher's book. For a woman who treats her books like lovers, the admonition is clear- my neural pathways are constructed by the books and media to which I am exposed. Ultimately, as an adult, I am responsible for creating the architecture of my own brain. As a parent, I am responsible for protecting and encouraging only the best and least harmless materials in the construction of my children's brains. 

We all have our blind spots. Boys are one of them. Pipher writes about the challenges faced by boys in our mediated culture- the tension between messages given by the media and the voice of their conscience, as nourished in their homes. When a boy tells his parents, "You just don't understand," he is absolutely right. How can we understand what it's like to grow up in a culture that sets a standard of "cool" for men in which scoring is always the goal, whether in sports or in human relationships? How can we honestly confront the mixed messages given by media that glorifies killing without remorse and consuming sex as if it were a supersized McValue meal? How can we unravel the unspoken double standard that tells boys to kill and screw without warning them of the cost, whether jail, pregnancy, or emotional detachment that leaves them lonely, lacking the very friendship and intimacy which led them to try and impress others in the first place?

To confront this mixed messages requires us to admit the ways in we are complicit in their formulation. We tell our boys what is right and wrong, then we hand over the remote or iPad that reminds them the extent to which right and wrong are glorified abstractions and unrealistic expectations. We pat them on the head and refuse to acknowledge the way in which their kindness and empathy will be held against them in peer groups. 

"Gentle boys who respect girls are at best ignored and at worst brutalized," writes Pipher. "To be accepted they must do things that are wrong and harmful", things which their peer groups will encourage and reward yet fail to assist them in coping with the consequences. The problem is compounded by the way in which our culture discourages kids from looking to their parents for help with complicated emotions and needs.

"We don't give teens permission to love their parents.... We teach them there's something sick about being close." 

This is tantamount to denying the deepest and most essentially human need of all- the need to be loved and nurtured, the need to find meaning in the way we relate to one another.

Encouraging fatalism and despair

"There is nothing is new under the sun," we promise, when our children express despair over bullying or the images of dead civilians, mothers with children curled around them, on the television set. So our kids learn to keep quiet about the things that shock them. Rather than empower them with tools to make the world a better place, we establish a rationale for passivity. There is nothing you can do. Life sucks. So keep playing that video game. At least you have a chance of scoring. 

Albert Einstein said that our theories determine what we are capable of observing. Rush Limbaugh doesn't see struggling single mothers trying to juggle two jobs and parenting- he sees only evil, selfish women trying to steal taxpayer dollars. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh, chances are you will see things the same way. Like it or not, he educates you and creates your worldview. He tells you what to think and what to care about. He lights that fuse beneath your bottom that makes you angry every time you see a young man wearing a hoodie. Worst of all, he convinces you that the world is nasty place where the ballots are rigged against anyone who considers themselves an "honest American".

I would argue that anyone who considers themself an "honest American" needs to take a step back and do some critical thinking and deconstructing of the phrase itself. The honest American is the one who admits what his lifestyle costs the world and all the children of developing countries. The honest American is one who repents of any "Americanisms" that allow him to justify the desecration of our natural world and its non-American residents.

To argue that change is inevitable is to say that planning and hoping is impossible. Its serves to deprive us of personal agency and identity, to sweep individuals into a dustpan where all are just undifferentiated dust flurries. Telling your kids that "that's the way the world goes round" as if it were a truism rather than just a funny song equips them with a sense of helplessness in facing life's challenges. 

Offering a rather un-erotic sex education

Rather than provide our kids with a rich, compelling sex education, we skim over the technical details and allow the culture of porn to do "the dirty work" for us. Perhaps, deep down, many of us still believe that sex is dirty, something that contaminates those who speak of it. So children learn to have "McSex", to just do it and get it over with and consume it as quickly as possible. The difference is not so much in the people with whom you do it, but in the presence of specific condiments- ketchup, onions, anal, etc. 

Honestly, are you surprised to see teens discussing sex as if it were banal, blase, and possibly even boring? Pardon my excitement, but if the coolest experience in the world (namely, sex) has become run-of-the-mill, what on earth is left to words to like "yearning" and "longing" and "hope"? I like words that represent feelings based on delayed gratification; they give us something to anticipate; they add texture and richness to everyday life. 

Human development occurs within the context of real relationships. We learn from whom we love.

The poverty of consumerism- that feeling of never quite having enough- commodifies things that might otherwise be created, hand-made, seeded between people and allowed to bloom, grow, and blossom in unspeakably beautiful ways.

We're stuff-rich but oh so very soul-poor.

We're theory-laden and yet still desperate for love. All the books which punish people for living as if we truly loved others- for living our way through our loves- throw us back on the market in search of the next book or pill that might fill in the emptiness.

Cars before conscience

I admire the courage it takes for Pipher to say that character has more influence on our longterm happiness than the momentary notion of "self-esteem". To define "will as the ability to act on the basis of one's values". To bemoan the extent to which "cynicism is king". To point out that most teens see conscience- not a car- as a luxury they can't quite afford. 

I wonder how we got to a place where kids feel more comfortable raising money to help pets or animals than fellow human beings. Have we made human-kind as unspeakably dirty as sex? Have we made it easier to show affection for an animal than a fellow human being? Have we made it harder for young folks to determine what they, as individuals, want as opposed to what they have been programmed to want? Have we extolled human nature above and beyond the power of human nurture? And do we really want to live the sort of world that exists as a result of these choices? 

These are important questions to ask- as individuals, as parents, and as families. Relieving kids of the opportunity to participate in discussions about the challenges posed by our culture only disempowers them. Many of us (myself included) are better at teaching our kids to be rebels than helping them understand precisely what they are rebelling against. 

Prophet brings me a bowl of flowers. I put down my pencil for long enough to remember why those books I take as lovers must remain, somehow, as side shows to the real show that unfurls everyday in our home.

In a world that tells us it is "safer not to care", the most daring thing we can possibly do is keep caring. And teaching our children to care, in spite of the cost to their "cool factor". If life is worth living, it must be worth engaging. We must agree to fight battles we can't possibly win just because it is the right thing to do. We must agree to be enthralled and delighted. Perhaps these are the best lesson to impart from our temporary, fragile nests.

Meditations on the uses of anger- and the uselessness of despair.

Still, you cannot believe in uprisings without believing in some possibility of social change, and you cannot believe in positive change without believing that some things are morally preferable to others.

So writes Episcopal priest Garret Keizer in The Enigma of Anger. I console myself with his words as often as I hold his words (somewhat angrily) against others. 

Speaking to my dad or to my in-laws about current events and history only reminds me that the presence of facts does not diminish the prevalence of fictions. We tell ourselves stories based on a compendium of characters and then refuse to accept that any story apart from the one we tell ourselves can matter. 

I’m not good at discerning the precise place where patriotism turns into idolatry. My personal manner of reconciling myself with the mass-murdering apparatus known as the nation-state is an ascetic one. I refuse to add the saccharine of patriotism to the bitter drink, lest it lull me into revisionism.

The drink stays bitter so I’m not tempted to lie about it. 

So why is this drinker of bitter-draughts, the girl who declines to make the drink taste sweet, the idealist? How can we explain the fact that she is the one who believes in hope- believes in the value of protest and picket, finds comfort and fellowship in speaking truth to power- while those who sip from the sweetened tea recline and declare, “That’s just the way the world is….”

“Ever since Eve tasted the fruit,” they declare.

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” they reassure, “for tomorrow we die”.

Or, my personal favorite, “Humans sin and only Jesus is perfect”.

Hallelujah. Amen. Someone pass me that gun so I can take a shot at that hoodie-wearing scoundrel who’s looking for trouble. 

For all my sadness at the human condition, I understand that the American Revolution was not (as some armchair theologians might claim) an act of God but an act of human beings. I understand that human beings are capable of great things and awful things. I cannot understand attempts to mitigate or downplay the difference. 

"The feeling I dread most is not fear but despair: the dim, oppressive sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same," writes Barbara Kingsolver in the first essay of the captivating book of essays aptly titled, Small Wonder. It's a book to which I return often.

The persistence of evil and cruelty is not a sound reason for denying the way in which evil changes shape and form over time. In fact, the extent of this change is usually the reason we fail to acknowledge the most recent form of evil colluding in our daily lives. 

The Boy Scouts now "allow" gay members to scout, but the institution still refuses to permit gay "troop leaders". So a gay father can't lead his scout's troop.

Behind this decision lies the sort of shameful thinking we rarely confront. In this case, the rule is maintained by the unspeakable fear that a gay man is the victim of his own "disturbed" sexuality- a sexuality from which young boys must be protected, one that must never be allowed in a position of leadership. Imagine if single mothers were not allowed to leader Girl Scout troops for fear that their divorces or lack of marriage would "contaminate" young girls. Imagine if skin color determined one's access to leadership positions.

Don't tiptoe around "No"- say it. Set it in stone.

Black Americans are no longer slaves. Things do change. But those Americans who wanted to keep their slaves resorted to the same excuse that "things stay the same"- that change is ultimately impossible, that humans can't help but oppress one another and then validate such oppression by calling it "natural".

What if it is despair- that feeling that nothing you do can make a difference- that keeps us from doing the right thing? Rabid, irrational fear might explain bombing innocent civilians, but it is despair which keeps from acknowledging the horror of what we have done and facing it with courage and humility.

The dances behind us.

The salt water stretches backward like spilled ink. 

My sister always straightened her legs out over the rough, wooden planks of the dock, feet dangling alongside mine. We moved gingerly, careful not to stir up the wood into giving us splinters. 

Under the star-heavy beach sky, it was the back-lighting of the picture windows that kept us riveted, eyes on the stage where the sensual shadows of our parents, Doru and Lydia, kept dancing. All those glasses of wine never posed a threat to the integrity of the tango between them. They knew the steps as if someone had sewn them into their soles. 

We’d marvel over the way his hand curved under her supple back, dropping her almost to the hardwood floor, before saving her, the gallant flourish, maybe the magnet drawing the dance tighter. For the two little girls on the dock, the music was limited to the pulse of waves lapping the shore and the heaving, grunting of boats against the ropes binding them to the schedules of their domesticated human owners.

We learned something visceral about love from this montage. Like this: The way a man loves a woman requires him to let her fall just gently enough to make room for the exhiliration of his catching her. 

But Lydia, our brilliant, fiesty, restless mother, sought more from life than the security of standing still. Doru, our handsome, well-disciplined, and charismatic father, loved best the moments when the cause and its corresponding castle were clearly marked. His knighthood depended on clear instructions and boundaries. A dance must be one which has been marked and scuffed on these floors before them. And they were the best dancers we’d ever seen- no one held a candle to their magic when they picked up where the last dance left off.

Sometimes I wondered what it would feel like to invent a dance with another person- with the boy that would become the man that would marry me. The watching of it might reveal haste and division, confusion about what comes next and all the anxiety of being compelled to find a step of our own and then agree upon it in a world where we’d learned to rely on the steps of those before us.

I married a man who, like me, chose to invent his own steps. We spend the days trying to match our feet to the speed of the melody, always shifting, never certain when a particular sequence is good enough to keep and master.

The three small faces watch us with worried eyes. The mother in me wishes to cover their faces with my palms so they can’t peek- not just yet.

“We’re not ready,” I whisper, the comforting smile, “We’re still learning”. We blush, embarrassed, slightly angry that it’s taking us so long, secretly certain that the other’s clumsiness might be to blame. 

My parents, the impeccable dancers, divorced when my sister and I went to college. Maybe the lack of an audience made their dance less meaningful- no reflections from the picture windows to reveal the light’s glint in our shrunken world. The divorce ended my favorite love story on an unspeakable note. Still, the words won’t settle into something I can absorb and pass along to my kids as family history.

He and I have yet to discover that dance we pledged to invent based on the specific crevices and contours of our passionate hearts. Sometimes the search ends in tears; the little faces look worried again, wishing perhaps that we would just settle on one of those popular dances they see other couples doing on the tv or in their living rooms. The Macarena maybe. Or the Electric Slide. The waltz seems to have served humans well for centuries. 

Sharpened, I wonder the same. 

Who are we- this man and this woman- to need something as special and sacred as a dance all our very own? What makes the seeking- the anger, the frustration, the bruised toes- worth the smudged reflections? Why do we stand where others sit, fall, golf, shop, or take to the therapist’s couch? 

Love is too brittle a word.

We stare at the waves side by side, not touching, touched, apart. We hope that our desire and our dream dance will be worth the uncertainty. His hands know how to hold my body even at the moments when it takes more than love to hold me from running away. 

It’s the hearts that handicap us in formulating the dance. But these same hearts are the ones for whom we promised to imagine the dance.

And so we continue, sometimes shuffling, often slipping, over the revolving floors of our shared life- both creators and creatures of this Eclectic Slide.

Will D. Campbell, a man unlike any other.

The first time I heard Will D. Campbell's name was in the context of a conversation with an elderly neighbor whose voice churned confetti and fireworks as she described her favorite "bootleg preacher". I was intrigued- but all that breastmilk-induced oxytocin erased the name from my memory until I ran across it again while reading a book of conversations with Walker Percy. And then again when researching the life of Clarence Jordan.  

Like Clarence Jordan, Will knew what he was up against in racism- a form of excusable disgust and hatred which preachers sought to justify using scriptures and traditions. For Will, it would not be enough to decry the hatred for other races. Instead, he would have to learn to love even the most unlovable human beings.

"I have seen and known the resentment of the racist, his hostility, his frustration, his need for someone upon whom to lay blame and to punish," Campbell wrote in his first book, Race and the Renewal of the Church. 'With the same love that it is commanded to shower upon the innocent victim of his frustration and hostility, the church must love the racist" Therefore, in 1969, on the night before Bob Jones, the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina KKK was shipped off to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for contempt of Congress, Campbell was there in the Dragon's Den to celebrate communion with a bottle of bourbon. Later, Campbell talked with James Earl Ray, the man who had murdered Campbell's friend Martin Luther King. When people asked if he really expected to save the souls of such men, Campbell allowed that that would be presumptuous: "They might, however, save mine." (Source: Lawrence Wright)

Given his extensive career in the Christian church, Will often surprised people by confessing that his faith came to him much later than his memorization of scriptures. Though a preacher, Will claims he actually became a Christian when his friend, Jonathan Daniel, was murdered in 1966. Daniel had come from his Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to register blacks to vote in the notorious Lowndes County. After walking into into a country store with a white priest and two black friends, Daniel emerged holding a Moon Pie and a soda pop. A sheriff's deputy named Thomas Coleman found this Moon Pie to resemble a threat and decided to resolve the matter with the help of his shotgun. Daniel gave his life for the civil rights movement.

When Campbell heard about Daniel's death, he was visiting his friend PD. East, the colorful and defiant editor of the Petal, Mississippi, newspaper called The Petal Paper.

It was East, years before, who had badgered Campbell into giving him a definition of the Christian message in ten words or less. “We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway," East recalled. “Let's see if your definition of faith can stand the test. Was Jonathan a bastard?"

Campbell was still in shock and deeply grieving for his friend. Mainly to get East to shut up, Campbell admitted that Jonathan was a bastard. “Was Thomas a bastard?" East asked. It was easy enough to agree to that.

Then East pulled his chair around, put his bony hand on Campbell's knee and, staring directly into Campbell glistening eyes, whispered, “Which one of these two bastards do you think God loves most?"

This was the turning point in Campbell's life. He describes it in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly.

I walked across the room and opened the blind, staring directly into the glare of the street light. And I began to whimper. But the crying was interspersed with laughter.

He was laughing at himself: ”At twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication. An attempted negation of Jesus, [a ministry] of human engineering, of riding the coattails of Caesar ... of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshipping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court, a theology of law and order and of denying not only the Faith I professed to hold but my history and my people - the Thomas Colemans."

I never got over Campbell's Brother To A Dragonfly, which I read en route through the entire opus of Walker Percy. Unlike Percy, Campbell didn't need to play dress-up in order to reveal the nakedness of modern man. Like Wendell Berry, Campbell's sense of "place" oriented his characters in a way that is familiar to anyone who was born in Romania and raised in Alabama, between one place and out the other.

Passages like this one found a nook, a place to sit and simmer, in my mind:

I said something about Hitler taking over the world and none of us being free.

"Brother, nobody is free. Freedom is how much you're willing to do to get people to leave you alone."

"And patriotism? That's just something they sold us. How can you love a country? A country is nothing but a big piece of geography. I love that eighty acres of land up there in Amite County where we were raised. But I can't love three million square miles."

As a piece of southern history, Will's book is unsurpassed. It breaks the heart while mending it. Though Will passed away several years ago, his influence continues to ripple outwards. Here are a few selections from those who knew him...

"Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88" (New York Times)
"Bubba to a gadfly- remembering Will D. Campbell" (Ken Carder)
"Reverend Will D. Campbell, southern racial reconciler" (Southern Spaces)
"The first church of rednecks, white socks, and blue ribbon beer" (Rolling Stone)
"The tragedy of the redneck" (Joel Rieves)
"Apostle to the rednecks" (Phillip Yancey)
Brother to a dragonfly (The Contrary Goddess)
"Brother to a dragonfly" (Paul Greenberg)

DIY woodland tea party cards.

Since their valentines to E. and A. would travel by mail, the kids buzzed and begged to make "different valentines" for their further-away friends. So we created these woodland tea party cards, which can serve as a valentine or just a special way of connecting with treasured friends by mail.

SUPPLIES

cardboard or cardstock
scissors
glue stick 
watercolor paint
paintbrushes
water
newsprint paper (or another thin kind of paper)
stickers of various woodland creatures
stickers of tea party set (or cut-outs from magazine)
plastic bags and mailing labels

PAINT

Start by using the newsprint paper as a place for a painting frenzy. Arm all with paintbrushes, watercolor paints, and a little glass of water. There is no rhyme or reason to the painting- just the impetus to add an assortment of colors and brush strokes. When finished, set aside the painted paper to dry.

PICK

Now have the kids go through their sticker collection, looking for stickers of woodland animals. At this point, I should add that the kids revised my original idea by including stickers of toadstools and flowers, in addition to the requisite tea party pot and cups. If you don't have tea party stickers, then flip through magazines and cut out a few pictures of tea cups and kettles. Your friends can use a glue stick to add them to the woodland tea party scene.

Stickers were chosen and put into plastic baggies with a label and a name on the front. 

EXPLAIN

Finally, the kids included a message to their friends, instructing them to create their ideal woodland party tea scene with the added request that, perhaps, at their next meeting, they might act out the woodland tea party of their dreams.

As she sealed the envelopes, Prophet told me that she "loved making the kind of valentine" she "wanted to get." My "me, too" went without saying.

"Who Remains Standing?", a poem by Andree Chedid.

WHO REMAINS STANDING?

                by Andree Chedid

First,
erase your name,
unravel your years,
destroy your surroundings,
uproot what you seem,
and who remains standing?
Then,
rewrite your name,
restore your age,
rebuild your house,
pursue your path,
and then,
endlessly,
start over, all over again.

Andree is a Lebanese poetess, a woman well-versed in the art of beginning again. Given the sour aftertaste of an unintended power struggle in lapbooking with the girls today, I found myself closing the books, turning my back on the crafts, and waiting for the howl.

Standing in the room- with the girls and the toys and the half-capped glue sticks, the floor sticky with lemonade, the windows smudged with tiny fingerprints, a sketch I'd started only to find as part of someone's surprise collage- standing still in the center of the chaos, not a word came to my lips.

There was nothing to say.

Or, rather, nothing I said would have shaved the edge from the madness. Nothing would make the cut from the remainder of the well-laid plans any cleaner.

The Prophet wanted to take "portraits". I sat on the floor by the $30 thrift-store couch and gave in.

The images showed me to myself- an immobilized "modern" woman feeling her feminism more intensely with each passing minute- a still life surrounded by motion, by moving life. 

 When I reach out to steady myself, the poems are sturdier than any oak table.

It's not what we know, but what we long to know that keeps us hungry for life. The unquenchable longing is my best friend- the piece of myself I won't relinquish for any man, woman, or child. 

On days like this today, I fold my hands. If I sit still long enough, steadied by poetry, the hubbub dims and narrows, chiseled by words folding one atop the other, thickening to the density of whetstone. I wait to be sharpened. 

How we "survived" the southern Snowpocalypse of 2014.

We played and cavorted in the snow as if it was just another miraculous day on this planet. Since we don't have cable or satellite TV (and we have only one TV in our home), we stayed fairly oblivious to the events of the southern Snowpocalypse.

Snow covers the garden plot.

Two frozen garden gnomes.

Cold and cute go hand in hand.

And so the snow fell, clogging traffic, stranding the King for a hour one drive over 8 measly miles. My sister got trapped at UAB; she and another resident tried to drive home, but couldn't make it through Birmingham's icy hills. Her husband saved the day by driving through the disaster to retrieve her. The King's brother walked three miles through the snow in Atlanta to get to a safe house where he could sleep.

Watching the snow from the front window.

Little B. enjoys a water-less campout by the fireplace with hot cocoa in hand.

Abandoned cars clogged the streets and roadways. Families wept, wondering where their sons, daughters, dads, and moms might be. The stories of kindness and courage continue, interspersed with heartwrenching tales of accidents and untimely deaths.

Students in Atlanta were trapped in their schools.
Helicopters searched the roads for stranded drivers in chilling conditions.
Students in Alabama spent two nights trapped in their schools.
The Washington Post shared photos of what it called "the South's disastrous response to a snow storm".
NPR describes the "rush hour from hell".
In Birmingham, helping others is described as "the way we do things around here".
Tuscaloosa businesses feel the chill.
Two drivers were killed when they collided with a train in Cottondale.
Local resident Brian Howard helped stranded drivers get home.
School bus driver Sylvia Anderson earned accolades for bringing little ones home safely.
City schools closed, and the Tuscaloosa city council meeting was cancelled.
Three Brookwood boys get caught stealing a four-wheeler when a rescue helicopter spots them.

Grandma Vicki called to tell me that Tuscaloosa had made the Athens, Ohio newspaper. She worried about us. I assured her that we were fine.

Of course, I did not mention the fact that our water pipes have been broken since last week- and that the front lawn was flooded by a broken pipe which could not be fixed until weather permitted. That's the sort of thing that would ruin Grandma Vicki's day. And ruining her day would ruin mine as well.

 

All the excavating in the front yard made it hard not to think about the significance of this day- the winter storm and how two inches of snow and ice can wreck an entire region of unprepared cities. We decided to make a time capsule and bury it in the front yard before the dirt was replaced.

 

And so the house gnomes scoured the house for trinkets and tidbits to add to the time capsule. The Eldest suggested we add a large letter "P" as a tribute to the King, who was unable to be with us during the auspicious ceremonials. Since the letter P stands for pedagogical and persnickety and piddle-some, I consented to the tribute.

Milla decided to donate her Hello Kitty lunch box as the vehicle for the time capsule. A few favorite collector's cards were included by the ladies as the Eldest did his best to pen the perfect time capsule letter- one which represented the occasion (i.e. the excavation of our yard during the 2013 snowstorm) as well as his current feelings on various friends, wood trails, dog breeds, etc. 

Finally, the time capsule was ready to bury, just around the time when the plumbing company approached me for a the smallest number that can be called a four-digit sum. I didn't dare disrupt the solemn burial procession with tears over the high cost of home ownership. The procession itself, of course, deserves a post all its own. Forthcoming.

Returning to an old love at 35.

My calves ache. Each time I lean forward, a burning sensation tunnels up from my ankle. The small muscles above my knees throb when I bend to pick up a book. My inner thighs feel like they felt after the first time I tried to do a split. 

But my body doesn't ache enough. You see, I can still walk and talk and laugh. I can empty the dishwasher painlessly. I can even car-dance, which is exactly what I did while driving home last night with Lady Gaga's "Do What You Want" blasting from the minivan speakers. 

My first two classes at Ballet Arts and Fitness brought back all the old love for ballet- for the way it impresses your body into the service of disciplined movement and measure. The way the sweat emerges- more like a sheen than a river- after barre. I've forgotten the technical names for the positions, and yet the flowering persists like an inarticulable memory in which I find myself moving without knowing exactly how this movement became so natural.

After ACL and MCL complete reconstruction in my right knee, after herniated discs and years in which even driving a car was impossible, being given the freedom to dance again is such a precious gift that I can't bring myself to stop doing it. So I danced in parking lot of Target with The Eldest. And I danced in the front yard as Angie watched from inside the house. And I danced in the living room as the little folks joined me. And I danced in the bathroom as I pondered whether to take a bath. 

Dancing is a language my body can speak. Unlike the lumbering gait of softball, those days when I stood anxiously in the outfield, hoping the ball would not come my way to find me tripping over anthills to catch it. I was never good at softball. My body didn't do "home runs" or "good throws". But whenever a melody wafted through the air, my mind grew silent while my body responded, beginning a conversation as unique and fascinating as the song itself. 

To be able to dance is to be able able to speak, again. It is to be able to have those conversations with pieces and tunes. It is to lose my own voice while discovering the facile articulation of the arms, legs, hips, ankles, and shoulders. It is something Rainer Maria Rilke might have called "sublime", if the taste for dance pulsed through his veins. It is a wonder and a mystery. And it is the place where I always find the missing pieces to the parts of the day that went awry. I am so very grateful.....

A three-year-old's thoughts on "being in love".

Milla has been talking about love lately.

More specifically, she keeps referring to "being in love". It's hard to believe she is only three years old, as I haven't heard much talk of romance from the mouths of other budding babes.

Milla chatting with Joshua on Thanksgiving- Linda and I overheard lots of giggles from the foyer.

SCENE: Today, at the castle, the kids prepare to go play outside in the wet grass with a dreary December sky overhead. I zip up B.'s coat, and help Micah wiggle into her cardigan.

ME: "If you say 'thank you', then I get to say one of my favorite things."

MICAH.: "What?"

ME: "I'm not going to tell you without the magic words..."

MICAH: "Thank you, Mommy."

ME: "Oh man, you are so-o-o-o welcome Micah."

I help snap the buttons on Milla's denim jacket.

ME: "It makes me feel warm inside when someone says 'Thank you' to me... All warm and fuzzy."

MILLA: "I too, Mommy!"

The final button snaps shut.

MILLA: "Thank you, Mommy."

ME: "You are so very, very welcome, my Milla."

Milla cocks her head to one side and grins. Her eyes meet mine in the warm squinty ooze I recognize all too well-  the one akin to that similar squinty sweetness which runs through the veins of the King.

MILLA: "I feel like I gonna fall in love wich you...",

 We stare at each other for a second, tasting the fullness of love and life. She is her father's daughter. I am her father's partner. There are oceans of unlived delight between us.

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: A sense of place.

Days long past at Koinonia.

The spiritual kinship between Clarence Jordan and Wendell Berry is hard to escape. Both put a tremendous amount of stock in the importance of community and the beauty (not just the duty) of sacrifice. There were many moments when Wendell's words came to mind as I watched Koinonians share their concerns about the year's pecan harvest and the challenges of shared burdens. 

One of the interns left her book on the outdoor table at Jubilee House....

I am reminded of the poem, "Healing", which Wendell published in a book of essays called What Are People For?. A poignant excerpt:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Micah before one of the pecan orchards.

This commitment to living for and with others- living alongside nature in a mutually sustaining relationship with humans and creatures- is how a sense of "place" is created and cultivated. As pilgrims to an established place, we pay homage to it through awareness and respect. It is not our "place"- not unless we agree to give up our current lives and accept this shared responsibility- but it is a place we deeply admire. A place that has changed the way we feel the blood rush through our veins. A place that brings to life (and brings into life) many of the ideas that have changed our hearts and minds over the years. 

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: The first day at the farm.

Milla chases a kitty towards the herb and vegetable gardens at Koinonia.

Having been raised in a home where the basement often served as temporary residence for an Eastern Orthodox monks, nuns, and artists, my heart holds a special fondness for monastic communities and their devoted denizens. As an intentional community, the days at Koinonia follow a deliberate pattern which soon feels like a flow- a rhythm subject to changes in volume and tone yet unfluctuating.  

There is a daily discipline. For the residents and interns, communal life begins at 7:45 a.m. with silent meditation and prayer at the chapel, followed by morning devotions at 8:15. On weekdays, after chapel, everyone stands in a circle on the dew-covered grass and discusses daily work assignments and service. 

“Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.” 
                Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith: And Other Cotton Patch Sermons

We woke up the first morning to a room bathed in light and the unmistakable sound of roosters crowing nearby. Still tired from the drive, I lingered in bed with the kids, listening to the roosters and trying to decide if we could get dressed quickly enough to make it to chapel.

My long-haired Max, still flirting with sleep, observed, "Hey, maybe the roosters are like church bells here..." Clearly, we were being called to chapel by the combination of ethereal morning sunlight and rooster bells. Groggy and hungry, I followed the kids out the door just a few minutes too late. Before the guilt set in, the little people started gallivanting through the bright green grass, sniffing flowers (and weeds), exclaiming over spectacular "fire ant castles", and befriending a couple of very friendly kittens.

Clearly, we were being called... to life.  So we set out to explore the farm. The seasonal interns that shared suites and rooms with us in the Jubilee House were returning from chapel. Clad in rubber books and carrying coffee cups, they stopped to greet us warmly before setting off on their assigments for the day. Lacking an assignment, we set off down a path following the kittens.

Max keeps an eye on the ladies who lay the eggs.

Lo and behold, the henhouse awaited us. Max tried to classify the feathered friends while the girls avoided a rather startled turkey that lumbered around the corner of an old wooden shed. 

And then we discovered "three little piggies", to borrow Milla's phrasing.

Soon all three kids found themselves enamored of pigs.

Milla carried our cardboard butterfly book from path to path.

The Koinonia bell rings three times a day for a moment of silent meditation and prayer. Whereever you may be working or studying, whether in the fields or in the bakery, the bell rings at 10:30 am, 3:30 pm, and 8:30 pm. As the days slipped past, I found myself listening for the sound of the bell to divide the morning and afternoon, to make me aware, again, of the rhythm behind everyone's actions and intentions.

At the 10:30 ringing, folks congregate in the coffee house to brew a couple of pots and share their thoughts with one another. Coffee creamer waits in the pitcher of fresh milk coaxed from resident cows at the first crack of dawn by Brendan; something about the coffee (probably the creamer) tasted sublime. We introduced ourselves to a couple of Koninians, though names and faces still tended to run together at this point.

A charming intern named Susie shared her own experiences as a home-schooled child. As we chatted, I found myself thinking (probably contrary to her own impressions) that her independent spirit and openness were exactly the sorts of qualities I treasure in Max, Micah, and Milla- the qualities I hope to honor and cultivate, the qualities that may one day lead them to choose the sort of journey that brings them back, as interns, to Koinonia. 

My restless desire to help somehow rubbed against the three little people who needed my guidance and care. In my imaginary world, of course, I could volunteer while somehow juggling the needs of three kids (one still potty training). But reality intervened to put a kink in my plans. Trying to avoid the sense of annoyance- "I came here to help and then but for the small folks"- I reminded myself that I was here to serve and to learn; and that the two did not have to take the form I imagined.

I closed my eyes, counted to ten backwards, and vowed to stay open to what the surroundings, and the spirit that filled them, wanted me to learn. Even if it was something as unexciting as the realization that my own impatience and eagerness often stands in the way of my humility towards the daily tasks and demands of life. 

Milla stares down a goose outside the dining hall.

We camped out at Jubilee House sharing Clarence Jordan stories and writing (or coloring) poems and hymns until the lunch bell rang. Then we wandered over to the dining hall for what would be our first communal meal- an experience that truly merits a post of its own, one which I look forward to sharing later this week. The short version is that the shared meal time transformed my understanding of communion and fellowship. The meal took two rituals which had managed to stay separate and brought them together with all the force and power of an intergalactic collision. 

I think we ate a few of these delicious flowers at lunch in the salad.

Our explorations took us to the town of Americus and then back to the farm, where we read, wandered, chatted, and played before meeting everyone again at dinner. I kept finding funny stories- tales of Clarence- in books and magazines, stories I read to the little people over laughs and giggles. Stories like this one.  

Once when he was being given a tour of a new church building, the pastor pointed to the cross on the steeple. The pastor said something like, "That cross alone cost $10,000."

Clarence said, "You got cheated. Times were when Christians could get them for free."

"Clarence was a funny farmer," Micah declared. 

The sun set without a sound. As Micah and Milla changed into their pajamas ande debated whether or not to brush their teeth, I read the free copy of Koinonia Farm Chronicle laying on the table in our room. Just reading it made the world feel like a better place- the kind of place in which it made sense that I never once locked a car door or a room door during our stay. Once everyone finished their pre-bed preparations, we changed our minds about the bed and set out on one of our "starlight walk", a tradition quickly started under the vast, starlit Koinonia skies. 

"Mom, we're really just tiny things," said Max, staring upwards from the center of the meadow where we settled and snuggled in the tall grass. 

"No Max!", replied Micah, huffy as always. "Milla is tiny but I am big- my feet are big too!"

The lull left a space for me to speak, maybe to soothe the misunderstanding by reasserting the hierarchies of big, small, and in-between. Older, younger, wise- all the known quantities- felt too heavy to handle in that open field. Something about the beautiful night skies always steals the words from my lips.

Making sense of language pales next to the mysteries of existence- the wonder of all that remains ineffable. So we talked about the word "ineffable" instead. And then we sat together, all four on the verge of a shiver, and paid a silent tribute to the ongoing ineffability of things.

Previously, I blogged a little bit about the history of Koinonia. Stay tuned for the next post about our Koinonia experience...

Honoring Jon Daniels' life and love.

Pilgrims in Hayneville hold an icon of Jonathan Daniels on this year's pilgrimage.

If you do a quick online search for the name "Jon Daniels", you'll find multiple links to the manager of a major sports team. What you probably won't find, however, is a link to the "Jon Daniels" that made such a difference in the world as we have come to know it.

Jonathan Myrick Daniels (March 20, 1939 – August 20, 1965) was an Episcopal seminarian, killed for his work in the American civil rights movement. His death helped galvanize support for the civil rights movement within the Episcopal church. He is regarded as a martyr in the Episcopal church. The wikipedia entry offers more facts and details. Now I'll offer my own shrivelled synposis.

While Jon was studying at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the spring of 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. put out a call for students and clergy to come to Alabama and participate in a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. The students debated how to respond to a call from the dark- a darkness made more palpable by its social and intellectual distance. Tim Abbott shares his father's own encounter with King's call, as well as with Jon Daniels:

Dad describes his own growing activism and the late night conversations with his fellow seminarians in which "we were honing our positions and our hearts on what had to be done."  He remembers his classmate Jonathan Daniels as a complex man, and totally non-violent. "I was in a very different place than he was, in terms of active activism and spirituality" he told me.  "In his liturgical way he could sing the Magnificat and feel as if that was his calling, a true Epiphany, and I wasn't there yet.  I was studying religion rather than living it the way he was.  I was much closer to the activism, on the verge, but there were too many easy rationalizations for not going down to Selma.  They weren't about self-protecting - I was not as concerned about personal harm, though perhaps I should have been - but felt I had obligations at school...When he went to Selma with the 1st wave, a couple of seminarians went with him..."

Thus Jon answered the call. And then he missed his bus back to Cambridge. Feeling pulled by the social breakdown he witnesses in Alabama, Jon stayed behind in Selma the rest of that semester to help the civil rights movement.  He returned to Cambridge for his final exams, and then went back to Alabama in July. Because something unspeakable kept pulling this highly-disciplined, non-flamboyant, dedicated young seminarian back...

There was a moment, of course, when Jon’s commitment to the beloved community became clear. This moment came prior to his time in Selma at a time when he was working in Wilcox County, specifically in the town of Camden, where sharecropping remained the primary industry for blacks. In Camden, Jon first experienced tear gas and came to see the ribald fear of blacks to become a casualty of the march for their own freedom.

He found himself inhabiting his own "existential moment". To have an existential moment is to become aware of the fact that our lives have signficance and that we exist within them- that we are responsible for them and to a spiritual sense of self characterized by a concern for integrity. An older man who lives on my street likes to call those moments "epiphanies"; I'm inclined to follow his judgement. 

The impact of this epiphany on Jon's faith was life-giving. He wrote:

My hostility really lasted until last week. I think it was when I got teargassed leading a march in Camden that I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were themselves not free: it was not that cruelty was so sweet to them (though I’m afraid sometimes it is) but that they didn’t know what else to do. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy, they were human beings, too. I found myself feeling a kind of grim affection for them, at least a love that was real and ‘existential’ rather than abstract….. Last week in Camden I began to discover a new freedom in the Cross: freedom to love the enemy. And in that freedom, the freedom (without hypocrisy) to will and to try to set him free.

On August 14th, Daniels was arrested for protesting against a "whites only" store, and he was sent to a county jail in Haynesville, Alabama, along with several others.  After their release on August 20th, Daniels, along with a Catholic priest and two young African-Americans, went to a local store to get a soft drink.  They were met at the door by the store's owner, Tom Coleman, who was carrying a shotgun.  When Coleman aimed the gun at 17 year old Ruby Sales, Daniels pushed her away, and he caught the full impact of the blast in his chest, killing him instantly.

The story of his murder was reported nationally in the immediate aftermath of his death, and once again after his killer was acquitted by an all-white Alabama jury.

Jon completed his college education at Virginia Military Institute, where he was a valedictorian, before deciding to attend seminary. This is his VMI class photograph.

As a seminarian, Jon struggled to continue his studies while fulfilling his spiritual calling to serve the torn communities of our state. Soon, his experiences in Alabama began to inform and supplement his theological education; the abstractions of theory rubbed shoulders with the reality of love in an angry, selfish world. It became hard for Jon to separate the texts from the people he encountered along the way. For his theology Professor William J. Wolf, Jon submitted a paper he’d prepared during the summer entitled “Theological Reflections on My Experience in Selma”. In it, he described his experiences as the source of a "living theology", a faith lived anew in each day of one's life, a love lived with immanence and resolve:

All of this is the raw material for living theology.  And yet in as deep a sense, from my point of view, it is the product of living theology.  The doctrines of the creeds, the enacted faith of the sacraments, were the essential preconditions of the experience itself.  The faith with which I went to Selma has not changed: it has grown.  Darkening coals have kindled. Faith has taken wing and flown with a song in its wings. 'My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior...'

I lost fear in the Black Belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had truly been baptized into the Lord's Death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God…

The point is simply, of course, that one’s motives are usually mixed- and one had better know it. It occurred to me that though I was reasonably certain that I was in Selma because the Holy Spirit had sent me there, there nevertheless remained a fundamental distinction between my will and His.

This paper was read at Jon's funeral as a eulogy. I read it now as a testament to the message of love he left behind. How many of us know the saints that live just down the street? How many times have we encountered a love so certain that we find our fears and anxieties dissipate as the urge to share this love becomes a central part of our lives.

The signs of the times- the signs Jon prayed would disappear, and take with them, the paralyzing fear felt by many blacks in Alabama.

Jon Daniels is a model for all of us who lose sight of the way in which love demands that we respond with unconditional love in the immediate, absolute present. Carpe diem is not a slogan that urges us to throw back as many beers as possible during a football game- it's a slogan that reminds us no love and no faithful action can be postponed to a "better time" or a "better place". The only time we can be sure of is this moment. The only acceptable time to do what is right- to honor the image of God in every life- is the present. Living in the moment means loving in the moment. Nothing is a greater, more worthy challenge.

The life and ministry of Jon Daniels is remembered on August 14th every year by the Episcopal Church. In this context, the role of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU) played a pivotal role in eventually integrating southern public institutions. Members of ESCRU felt that Daniel’s alleged murderer, Tom Coleman, was acquitted wrongfully and that white juries would continue to fail to convict those that should be found guilty of race and hate crimes. In response to the acquittal, ESCRU launched Operation Southern Justice, a campaign and lawsuit undertaken in conjunction with the National Council of Churches and other groups to integrate southern juries.

The Episcopal Diocese of Alabama supports an annual pilgrimage to Hayneville to honor Jon Daniels' sacrifice. 2013 marked the 15th annual Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage. Though we missed it this year, our calendars will keep this date open for August of next year. I was especially inspired by a 2010 pilgrim's post about how the experience impacted her life and spirit....

For more on the life and death of Jon Daniels:

Outside Agitator, the wonderful biography written by Charles Eagles (and published by the University of Alabama Press) that led me to Jon Daniels' life
"But My Heart Is Black," an article by Jon published Oct. 29, 1965
"A Burning Bush", an article by Jon written in April 1965
Jonathan Daniels lectionary 
Jon Daniels (Encyclopedia of Alabama)
Daniels' 1961 Valedictory Address (Virginia Military Institute)  
Daniels' Yearbook page (Virginia Military Institute) 
Memorial plaque for Daniels in Hayneville, Alabama 
White House tape transcripts of Pres. Johnson's response to Daniels' murder 
Liturgical lesson plan for "A Love That Forgives" 
Bishop Fisher's blog post about Jon Daniels 
"The Journey of Jonathan Daniels" (Sentinel Source) 
"Memory and Denial Are Kissing Cousins" (Greensleeves) 

Idea for a horror movie: The Ezzos come over for dinner with my family.

Who knows what I'm saying in this photo, but my stellar eye infection really brings out the chatty Cathy in me. Clearly, not an Ezzo moment.

Reading Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future illuminates the ways in which the struggles of feminism have gained complexity for the Third Wave. Since its publication in 2000, the book itself is already somewhat dated. For example, it glosses over the rising numbers of educated feminists who are choosing to educate their children at home with the premise that the revolution starts now. While providing ample information on the continuing battle for a choice over whether to continue pregnancy, the book skims over the tremendous battles fought by women who seek to reclaim their uterus and birthing process from the medical establishment by giving birth at home.

I can't read the words of sisters without remembering that it's my responsibility to say what I see and not to expect others to say it for me. Being a woman who has decided to also be a mother changed my mind and reaffirmed my belief in the continuing need for feminism in our society.

What I discovered did not please me. I am very good at biting off the head of a man who condescends to women and I am unparalleled in my ability to provide running monologues on the extent to which we perpetuate the patriarchy by honoring the concept of "success". Yet I am somewhat lacking when it comes to integrating my parenting choices (which tend to follow the child) with my Riot Grrrlish self. I'm going to take a little detour to explain what I mean by this.

Fact: It's important to parent and raise your children in a way that works best for you. However, "a way that works best for you" should not be taken to mean that the child becomes a product which you compare to other highly-valued objects. When we talk about children, we don't talk about possessions or things- we talk about little people whom we hope will NEVER be treated like possessions or things in our super-thingified culture.

After the King and I first got married, we attended a small-group for young parents which focused on parenting strategies. The textbook for the group was one written by the Ezzos which outlined their program for "Biblical parenting". As the sessions progressed, my discomfort with some of the phrasing from the Ezzos just wouldn't go away.

The "strategies" seemed mean and hurtful- as if to punish little babies for being needy, vulnerable little beings who cannot thrive or survive on their own. Letting them "cry it out" required me to deaden my most natural maternal instinct to comfort and soothe- and deadening that instinct leaves you less sensitive to a child's needs and concerns. I cannot believe that women were created with this universal instinct by accident. It seems to me to be an important part of the way in which God wants us to relate to our children. In other words, that constant nurturing impulse is a given- a starting premise for any parenting methods rooted in respect for human beings or their Creator.

Your Shenanigans Will Not Be Tolerated wittily sums up more Ezzo in the most snarky and simple fashion:

In a nutshell - and I will keep things to a nutshell, there is plenty of information readily available on him - Mr. Ezzo was complimented on how well behaved his kids were in church.  This led him to create the Babywise publishing empire.  Babywise, as a method to raise your baby is very similar to that of the Baby Whisperer.  The main difference, however, is that instead of getting to know your baby's signals & cues and respond to it's individual needs, you actively avoid learning its signals and cues and make it respond to your own personal needs.  This is generally done through starvation and abandonment.

The Ezzos believe the primary threats to the family came from a bad relationship between the parents and child-centered parenting (i.e. behavior that acknowledged and dealt with the little person's feelings or fears). Their solution to these percieved threats might be called the Nuclear Rearmament Strategy with all selfishness and inhumanity implicit in such a description. You can read the details here.

Essentially, the Ezzos insist that the "greatest influence parents have on their children is as a husband and wife, rather than as a mother and father". While there are ways in which this is true, the rest of the Ezzos' philosophy is just one particularly rough interpretation on how to honor this relationship in a family. Lest we begin to worry about kids getting liberal ideas, the Ezzos quickly insist:

"This lesson is not promoting egalitarian roles in marriage. Egalitarian is defined as “equality in marriage,” meaning equal leadership as well as sharing common roles at both work and home."

Of course, promoting egalitarian roles in marriage is precisely what the King and I were trying to do. As we worked our way through those first years of marriage, deciding who would do the laundry and who would cook dinner, we realized that "expecting" me to cook dinner just because I stayed home with the kids was another patriarchal way of undervaluing the work I do by caring for our kids.

It didn't come as an epiphany, of course- it emerged through arguments and re-arguments as we learned from our gay friends that a "partnership" is the only way to truly honor one another within a marriage. Our partnership is my favorite place to be in the world- it evolves, changes, and amazes us continuously as we negotiate new ethical qualms and novel interests. The Ezzo-style marriage for us would be a quick route to disenchantment and divorce.

As the group meetings continued, I realized that I was accepting and learning this odd philosophy without studying the source- so I decided to study the source. Who are these Ezzo folks for whom egalitarianism is such a threat? What makes them such supercalifragilistic specimens of humanity? Are they known for their kindness and generosity, like Jimmy Carter? Or their peace-making skills, like Nelson Mandela? Or perhaps even their piety and joyfulness, like Thomas Merton?

What I learned was that the Ezzos did not have a reputation for honesty, truthfulness, and accountability in their longterm relationships. Former elders from churches wrote warning letters to naive, exhausted parents like myself- letters which suggested that snake oil might be part of the package we were purchasing from the Ezzos and their outfit, Growing Families International.

The snake oil really started to stink in 1998. That spring, the conservative, evangelical-minded Christian Research Journal published a report on their extensive evaluation of Growing Families International. While acknowledging GFI’s popularity (over a million reported followers around the world) and noting that “a number of the parenting ideas in GFI materials are sound and have benefited families who have used them”, the article evaluated the widespread controversy associated with the organization. They concluded:  

“GFI has provoked unprecedented public censure from Christian leaders because, although it is not a cult, it has consistently exhibited a pattern of cultic behavior, including Scripture twisting, authoritarianism, exclusivism, isolationism, and physical and emotional endangerment”. 

As far back as 1998, a physician writing for the American Academy of Pediatricians warned that the Babywise method was "linked to dehydration and failure to thrive". This physician, Dr. Matthew T. Aney, expressed his concerns again in 2001 after comparing a chart generated by the Babywisers to one generated by the AAP. But the Ezzos are still winning hearts and minds under the guise of their secular books on the "Babywise" method- essentially the old Biblical parenting without reference to Bible verses or Evangelical terminology.

The truth is that my feminism is not compatible with a parenting philosophy that undervalues emotions and the stuff of the heart.  And I am baffled by the Ezzos' pro-life politics in light of their anti-child parenting. Fear is not a "structure" that little ones need in order to thrive. And love is not manifest in how we hurt or frighten little ones who rely on us for their lives and livelihood.

There is a lot of pressure to consider children who "obey" their parents out of fear as "good kids". Deep down, however, I know that fear can be used to motivate us to do anything in the world, including bombing cities overseas and marching lockstep behind political parties or ideologies. So I bite my lip and accept that my children are usually not the most "obedient" ones in the room. Instead, I focus on their zest for life, their creativity, their strong individual sense of justice, and their love for our family.

Michael Bates expresses my misgivings better than anyone when he shares his own about the "first time obedience" strategy central to the Ezzos' philosophy:

That approach to discipline alienates parents from children, and sets mom and dad up as scorekeepers and penalty managers. I found myself denying myself the enjoyment of time with my brilliant, funny, and beautiful kids for the sake of teaching them a lesson. And a child's natural desire to please mom and dad turns to despair -- the feeling that nothing he does will ever be good enough, so why bother trying?

It is hard to ditch the Ezzo mindset. You're confronted with regrets over years wasted and damage done, as the letter on Quiet Garden discusses. There's also the inner Ezzo nagging you that you're being too lax, too lenient, that you're spoiling your kids. But I'm starting to think that the worst kind of spoilage would be if my child no longer felt connected to me, if my child felt alienated from me, no longer identifying with my values, uninterested in my advice, unwilling to learn from my experiences.

I'd rather work alongside my children, enjoying their company, sharing laughter, and guiding them down the right path -- not like the guy back at the gas station who gave you directions but like the sherpa who is with you step-by-step up the treacherous mountain trail.

While Michael and I probably don't share the same views on other things, we both have that same gross feeling in our stomachs that something is wrong with the extent to which childhood is demonized by the Ezzos. Tomorrow, if you can bear it, I'll share the story of a young mom who sees the world through Ezzo-eyes and what this has helped me to realize about parenting as a feminist, Jesus-loving existentialist who is more convinced of her own ignorance than her sanctity or "savedness". 

[Caveat: I don't believe in hell and I don't think anyone is going there. If you're concerned about my politics or worldview, see my bio for details.]

The face of courage when losing a child.

The first time I met Bethany, she was managing to joke and make light of the challenging early months with a high-needs baby. Having been one of those mothers and having failed to remain as calm as Bethany during the long nights, I immediately had one of those "I can learn from this person" moments. A few years later, when she lost Lucy due to complications from Kell's, my heart broke for her.

I'm still learning from Bethany. When I ran into her at Manna Grocery last month, she looked tired and sad. My sister and I were having lunch with our brood of chatty children, so it wasn't a good time to stop and talk. But I needed to talk to her- felt drawn to the sadness and grief she wasn't bothering to hide. So I ignored the awkwardness and walked over to her table, realizing I had not decided what I wanted to say or even why I needed to say anything at all. I just hugged her and then told her that grief was a long, torturous journey (something Sarah taught me) that doesn't just end according to our plans and schedules. I wanted her to know that her grief over Lucy's death was legitimate (how sick that I should even feel the need to reassure her of that) even six months later. I wanted her to know that I admired her (as I admire Sarah) for refusing to settle for the fatalistic "it's God's will" sort of answers which suggest a God that does not hear or communicate with us.

But Bethany should be the voice in your ear right now. On her wonderful blog, Losing Lucy and Finding Hope, Bethany shares her journey with grief and Kell's antibodies. Her courage in sharing what most of us prefer to hide or fake amazes me. And teaches me about what courage means in a world where social taboos keep us from being honest and living with integrity. Bethany explains:

"I’ve noticed that people don’t like to talk about miscarriages or stillbirth (I mean who would WANT to talk about something like that.) Some women feel like they’re supposed to keep these losses to themselves. It makes people feel uncomfortable and awkward. Before losing Lucy I used to think miscarriages were sad and that the women who suffered them probably felt better after a few weeks. I thought miscarrying or having a stillbirth was nowhere near as painful as losing a child. Now I know that it IS losing a child. It is a soul shattering, heart crushing tragedy that leaves permanent wounds. No matter how far along the woman is in her pregnancy it is still her baby she lost. I think her grief should be respected and her baby should be mourned as a lost child. I want to talk about my miscarriage. The people who have comforted me the most through this ordeal have been mothers who had miscarriages/stillbirths and shared their stories with me. I hope that this story somehow can bring hope to someone who has been through a similar tragedy."

To honor a life often requires us to mourn its passing with devotion. Beautiful Bethany is in my thoughts and hopes. I am grateful to her for everything she dares to feel and express- grateful because her love for Lucy frees me to be honest with myself about grief and hurt.

The more I experience of this life, the more convinced I become that stoicism is the enemy of hope, joy, and love. It's the ultimate cop-out, the way to "save face" under the pretense of appearing to be strong. But there is nothing strong or brave about living a lie and asking others to play along. Maybe the best I can do is to acknowledge this and honor the grief which lies at the heart of only the best love.

Revisiting France with Thomas Merton.

"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."

Thomas Merton

When I was a young lass, my father took a sabbatical to teach in Nancy, France. Carla and I went along with him and I studied in a French school for the first semester of 7th grade. It was the longest time I'd lived without the sweet Tresor-scented aura of my mom nearby.

From what I remember, 7th grade was the year when all my Catholic school friends started "dating" and tight-rolling their jeans. I was a little bit of a wierdo- the kid who wasn't allowed to watch "Saved By the Bell" or to shave her legs, the one whose mother laughed when she mentioned getting a "perm"- "You don't need all those chemicals in your hair, Alina!"

In a sense, I escaped the pressures of 7th grade girldom in the States and found a whole new world. In this new world, everything you had to do as an American preteen made no sense. My experience with cultural relativity did so much to ease my transition into the teenage years. All those imperatives assumed their proper space within a particular locality and culture. Peer pressure lost its rub on me. 

And my Tuscaloosa friends could not hide their concern when I returned wearing straight-leg jeans and having "grown out" my bangs. The good news is that I found better ways to relate to my friends that by wasting hours "styling our bangs" together. Rather than love them for the way they fit the mold, I was free to love them for the ways in which they were themselves, young girls on the cusp of womanhood with inarticulable dreams and a soft spot for star-filled skies.

My 7th grade class at Lycee Frederic Chopin, where I learned more red-letter words than my parents knew existed in the French language. It was a baptism of fire for me in my puffy red down coat. 

I loved to chew on these anise-flavored twigs for days at a time. I think we were driving through Lorraine on our way to Domremy-la-Poucelle in this photo when the most beautiful storm belly-danced around us. 

Every weekend, we climbed into our car and visited another tiny village. The intensity and rich backdrops of history absorbed me completely. I would just sit with my Walkman and gaze at the amazing stories unfolding around me. It still gives me chills to remember those days and that effervescence that tied me to the soil while leaving me somehow floating above it.

In a park munching on baguettes with Carla and her friends.

Given the sensual awakening of my first love affair with a land, I wasn't surprised to feel a tad of Franc-envie while reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain this morning. When ennui sets in, Merton reminds me that "the biggest human tempation is too settle for too little". To settle for marriage without love. To settle for faith without awe. To settle for life without living.

Merton describes his impressions of Cazals, a small village which even today has an estimated population of 160 people. His description captures certain shades of the meaning invoked by the daily wonder we discover when refusing to settle for commercial voyeurism and, rather, delve deeply into the heart and flesh of human culture.

It was an old, old town. Its history went back to the Roman days- which were the times of the martyred saint, its patron. Antoninus had brought Christianity to the Roman colony in this valley, and later he had been martyred in another place, Pamiers, down in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near Prades, where I was born....

The town itself was a labyrinth of narrow streets, lined by old thirteenth century houses, mostly falling into ruin...

Everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church... The church has been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rouge, to the winding river and the green valley.... and the significance thus imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole world.

And this is exactly how I remember feeling when driving through the French countryside, unassaulted by billboards of girls in bikinis promising that I could look like them if I purchased some product meant to distract me from that trembling little spirit within- the only real and eternal part of me. My parents did more to nourish my heart and soul with these experiences than all the Sunday School sessions in the world combined. By drawing my attention and imagination to history and the varieties of cultural experience, they freed me from an allegiance to "looking good" or "being cool". It's all temporal anyway...

Now, in the present, looking backwards, I wonder how to share this lesson or experience with my children who have been raised in the culture of affluence..... As I plod along, don't be surprised if you find more Merton in the coming days. And don't be too reticent too share how you have found ways to connect your children to the beauty of the eternal in everyday life.

Merton and the mint family.

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

    Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain    

I am so guilty of seeking the superb stimulations to distract me from the marvels which require me to inhabit and live them, rather than just keep that seat warm on the bleachers of life.

Being a civil libertarian in the context of community.

On Saturday, May the 18th, Westboro Baptist Church is planning a picket on The Campus of The University of Alabama. Like everything planned by the Westboro Baptist Church, this picket will be targeted against social diversity and will probably attempt to blame social tolerance for the tragedy of the April 2011 tornadoes. Although it is disgusting and sad, and everyone should sign any petitions to this effect, I believe it is very important that they be granted legal permits for this event. 

Wise citizens of Tuscaloosa are planning a counter-protest (you can learn more here), which I plan to attend with my kids. Because the most important part of civic education is not the part that occurs in the abstract- it's the part that occurs on the streets when we are confronted with intolerant ideas and ideologies.

Little people who aren't equipped to counter the hate in the flesh will not recognize it when it calls their name.

In his prophetic book,The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry expresses concern about the rising, career-oriented elitism and its effect on the ties that bind local communities and fellowships. He notes correctly that learning ideas in the abstract prepares us for resume-building and sycophancy but does not enable to actually understand and participate in the civics of everyday life. Berry warns:

It must not be forgotten that, divorced from the practical, the liberal disciplines lose their sense of use and influence and become attenuated and aimless.

Towards the end of the book, Berry hones in on the importance of an "intelligence" which is holistic and experiential- based in life as it has been lived rather than life according to the text-based guidebook- rather than an "intelligence" based on access to constantly-changing facts, statistics, and experts. Since I have been guiltier than most when it comes to consulting the guidebooks, this observation is especially important to me.  Berry describes the current notions of intelligence (obvious even in the way we test children in schools and train them for fact-oriented, regurgitative "thinking") as follows:

This intelligence protects itself from the disruptive memories and questions of experience by building around itself the compartmental structure of the modern university, in which effects and causes never meet. The experential intelligence is a tyrant that is saved from the necessity of killing bearers of bad news because it lives at the center of a maze in which the bearers of bad news are lost before they can arrive.

But it is imperative to understand that this sort of intelligence is tyrannical. It is at least potentially totalitarian. 

A book-bound, abstracted form of "intelligence" is not a good breeding ground for ethics. Unlike calculus, ethics must be lived to be meaningful. Ethical intelligence requires habituation and habitation- a feel for the soil and ecology of life and community. When Westboro (or any form of ugliness and hatred) comes to town, you look them in the eye and say, "I firmly disagree".  

As those who dissent under totalitarian governments know, there is some comfort to be drawn from humor. What is tendered by extremists as "sacred" is very vulnerable to satire. So reading Landover Baptist's critique of Westboro reminds me that both extremes are silly. In a talk forum following the talk forum about how "Pregnancy through rape is a gift from God", "True Christian" shares a video from Westboro and writes:

Just look here what these liberal so-called "Christians" has to say about God's nr. 1 favourite country, you could almost think they are from Chechnya or something. God does not hate America, God LOVES America, the best and most Christian country in the world. 

Of course, Landover Baptist's disclaimer (scroll down to the bottom of the page) makes it clear that fundamentalist extremism cuts across every divide of major religions:

The information presented here is Biblically accurate. Opinions concerning the technical difficulties, fitness requirements, safety, and ratings of self-crucifixion, flagellation, stoning, destroying enemies of GOD utterly, without mercy, and other activities inherent in Christianity are subjective and may differ from yours or others' opinions; therefore be warned that you must exercise your own judgment as to the difficulty and your ability to safely protect yourself from the inherent risks and dangers. Do not use the information provided on this site unless you are a True Christian ™ who understands and accepts the risks of participating in these activities. Landover Baptist Church makes reasonable efforts to include accurate and up to date information on this website, errors or omissions sometimes occur, therefore the information contained on here is provided "as is" and without warranties of any kind either expressed or implied. Viewing, reading, or any other use of the information contained within this web site is purely the voluntary will of the viewer or user. You, 'the viewer' or 'user' shall not hold the publisher, owner, authors or other contributors of The Jesus Experience responsible for any incidents related directly or indirectly to the Experience. Landover Baptist Church, et. al., assumes no liability or responsibility for your actions.

Not being a trade-marked True Christian spares me the seriousness which accompanies said views. Perhaps there is something to the statement that "if babies had guns, they wouldn't be aborted"- but the something is far more evil and twisted than anything Larry Flynt might dream up. Ultimately, my kids won't truly grasp the consequences of extremism unless they see it for themselves. And I'd prefer that their first experience be one in which there is caring, sober adult present to point out why it is so very, very ugly and so very, very wrong.

A Bob Dylan kind of day....

The King is resting, and I am procrastinating on all the sock sorting in the plans. Our bedroom is filled with that crisp, post-rain light that reveals every bundle of dust bordering the stacks of books on the floor.

All in all, it's a Bob Dylan kind of day- a day that straddles the line between poetry and blues. Listening to Bob is like hearing the story of the last American century in a song. His lyrics offer the best of what living in freedom means- the ability to question official narratives and owe your allegiance to nothing so abstract as a flag. And if "The Death of Emmett Till" doesn't shake you up a little, then you are only half-alive.

Bob recorded "With God On Our Side" in 1963- and its heartbreaking message echoes today in this light-covered bedroom. Don't get excited- Bob was not a "pacifist", which is a pretty rigorous ethical framework- but his "politics" emerged from the attempt to tell our history as it was lived by those Americans rarely included in the official version of events.

WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE by Bob Dylan

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that the land that I live in
Has God on its side

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
l’s made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side

I’ve learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side

Through many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

"Every Day" by Ingeborg Bachmann.

War is no longer declared,
it is continued. The unheard of
has become everyday. The hero
is absent from the battle. The feeble one
has moved into the firing range.
The uniform of day is patience,
the order of merit is the sorry star
of hope over the heart.

It is awarded
when nothing comes to pass,
when the bombardment is hushed,
when the enemy has become invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.

It is awarded
for the flight from flag,
for the boasting before a friend,
for the betrayal of shameful secrets
and the contempt
of every command.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was born in Austria. She studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, where she completed her dissertation on Heidegger. Bachmann wasa member of the literary circle “Gruppe 47,” which included writers such as Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, and Günter Grass. Her death came like the slow spark lying at the edge of her poems; she died in Rome when a burning cigarette ignited the mattress of her bed. 

Isla drove her mom to T-town to wish her aunt a happy birthday.

Isla, tiny trickster, always has something up her sleeve. Last week, it was a suprise birthday visit for her Aunt Alina complete with a boisterous birthday lunch at Manna Grocery, one of the few places in Tuscaloosa that I consider to be truly family-friendly.

When she was not regaling us with her fascinating tongue contortions, Isla demonstrated her certainty of ownership over nearby breasts with a snarl.

Max amused himself with reading more about the Ingalls family while the girls baked more mudpies and whipped up flower salads. They kept a wary though loving eye on their little cousin as she cuddled with Carla in the shade.

Micah came to "check on" Isla several times, and offered plenty of advice to her aunt on how to wipe Isla's mouth after she eats. Where Micah discoveted her precociousness in manners is beyond me.....

Hoping to score a snarl from the Isla, I decided the moment of self-reckoning had arrived. It was an uncomfortable position for me as an aunt, but my commitment to truth overshadowed my concern for how others might take it.

Of course, Isla did not appreciate my efforts to reveal the truth about the back of her hair. First she flashed a gang sign at me....

And then she revealed the genetic origins of her gorgeous little snarl.... 

But there is nothing that a little nuzzle from mommy can't fix....

And nothing as precious as Isla and her mommy visiting me on my 35th birthday.

Add a magical, baby-whispering and Pinka-hypnotizing Josalyn to the mix and you have what words don't suffice to describe- a simple, peaceful, beautiful day.

Living in a castle.

I live in a castle with three children, a partner, and a poodle mutt.

I know a castle when I see one. He and I agree that to own a castle we must first agree to be one.

After we got married, we bought a big house. Then we traded it in for a small house- the kind where your power bill makes only a blip on the budget.

If our dreams can go no further (which they can't), then it just so happens that this is our castle.

The spring rains soak the grass, pooling in the driveway, creating the moat once local Prince has dubbed "Pontulia".

The coronation ceremony took place on the New Year's Eve of 2010. I was three months pregnant with a princess, yet managed to catch the King's eye wearing my snug wedding gown. Afterwards, at the royal ball, I danced with the King, the stellar thumps of Outkast's B.O.B. bouncing from the stone walls, the freshly-coronated Prince and Princess tearing books from the shelves with glee. Royal affairs are like that- however you want them to be, I mean.

Our kingdom is a small one, overtaken by privet hedges and plastic components of the larger petroleum empire in which we reside. We are a humble royal family, the kind that directs its energies towards keeping the house and garden gnomes happy and yarn-filled.

So we live in a castle with a moat and various fantabulous creatures- a castle that others might mistake for a cottage. "Fools abound," is a regular saying in the tower. The castle is in the mind of its makers. What story do you tell yourself to justify settling for a McMansion? What keeps you from your own castle?

Throwing flowers at Isla's curly litte feet.

A little morning tribute to the imp who has enraptured us all- my little niece, Isla. I love watching my sister lose her well-kept mind with love for her baby girl. And I love how love opens our lives to even more love... Thanks Isla. We are your fool.

"To You", a poem by Kenneth Koch.

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut

That will solve a murder case unsolved for years

Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window

Through which he saw her head, connecting with

Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red

Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;

For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not

Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a

Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails

In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from

The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;

I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields

Always, to be near you, even in my heart

When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you

Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to

The place where I again think of you, a new

Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow

Of a ship which sails

From Hartford to Miami, and I love you

Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun

Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

Homeschooling and socialization: The heart of the matter.

It's the generic reasoning offered by even the most open-minded of my friends and acquaintances- School is very important because it "socializes" children. Without it, socialization of this particular sort just doesn't occur. And while many express concern and dismay over current social norms and trends in bullying and violence, no one really looks hard enough to ask if this "socialization" is truly desirable and good for children or society over the long-term.

Are we creating the change we want to see in the world? Are we promoting tolerance, nonviolence, mutual respect, and intellectual curiosity? We use the school=socialization equation as a justification for our choices while doubting its status as an axiom. Or we get huffy over the superficial indicators without bothering to interpret and understand them.

What is this "socialization" and why does it matter? Is it exclusively a school-based good? I decided to take the ground rules from an anthropologist:

Human infants are born without any culture. They must be transformed by their parents, teachers, and others into cultural and socially adept animals. The general process of acquiring culture is referred to as socialization . During socialization, we learn the language of the culture we are born into as well as the roles we are to play in life. For instance, girls learn how to be daughters, sisters, friends, wives, and mothers. In addition, they learn about the occupational roles that their society has in store for them.

At this point, the socialization process seems to be ideal for homeschooling, where many social roles and norms are experienced  (rather than merely taught) on a daily basis. Many homeschoolers have chosen to educate their kids "at home" (I use this loosely because so much education takes place outside the home, on field trips, co-ops, excursions, etc.) for precisely this reason- the rich texture of experience-based learning. I find myself in Eli's "worldschooling" court quite often, especially when we take month-long international trips as a family.

Remember that there is not a single textbook, video, program, or worksheet that a school provides which cannot also be provided in the home. Granted, some parents (myself among them) prefer to teach American history using Howard Zinn as a guiding text rather than the standard textbook that includes George Washington as a "hero".

But that doesn't mean we lack access to other materials- it simply means we find them to be "behind the times". Dare I say MacMillan has its own market-based and institutional reservations for producing history texts that question the value of war as an instrument of policy?

What is special about the school lies more in the social routine, structure, style, and classroom environment than the content of the academic materials. That's what many of us accept as true without question. So let's go back to the anthropologist:

We also learn and usually adopt our culture's norms through the socialization process. Norms are the conceptions of appropriate and expected behavior that are held by most members of the society. While socialization refers to the general process of acquiring culture, anthropologists use the term "enculturation"  for the process of being socialized to a particular culture. You were enculturated to your specific culture by your parents and the other people who raised you.

Socialization is important in the process of personality formation. While much of human personality is the result of our genes, the socialization process can mold it in particular directions by encouraging specific beliefs and attitudes as well as selectively providing experiences. This very likely accounts for much of the difference between the common personality types in one society in comparison to another.

Socialization varies in degree by personality. Even the most socialized child (whatever that means) will still exhibit characteristics of their personality in peer and group interactions. For example, shy kids will still be shy, introverted ones will be thoughtful and contemplative, and funny ones will be funny. Personality, regardless of socialization, still plays a role in how we navigate our world.

Some methods of schooling, including those utilized in Nazi Germany and communist Romania, certainly "punished" inquisitive and analytic thinking very effectively. Under such systems, the range of personalities becomes more narrow (those who don't fall in the range go to a gulag or prison camp). But I don't think the American public school system has any such goals in mind.

Our system, at its heart, has progressive and noble intentions which have been pushed down the list of priorities so academic performance can rule. We take integration and diversity as measures of tolerance, and take comfort at the thought that our children have a Sikh as well as a Muslim child in their classroom.

But token integration is as superficial as the conversations about eyeshadow colors at an Avon party. "Look at how diverse and multicultural we are.... And that green really brings out the blue in your eyes..." For a better perspective on why this view is offensive and crude, read the amazing, insightful content and materials from Teaching Tolerance (a magazine subscription every parent should have or gift). 

In "Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization", Richard G. Medlin explains how school education and socialization have "become closely linked in our cultural consciousness". Over the past 50 years, as we've all gotten "busier", schools have been made responsible for an expanding range of socializing activities that previously were handled by other social institutions, including the family. 

Many people now assume that traditional schooling offers essential socialization experiences that home schooling cannot (Harris, 1995; Mayberry, Knowles, Ray, & Marlow, 1995). For example, the American Psychological Association, in an effort to bring professional psychology to bear on current issues, presented the opinions of educational psychologists about home schooling in the APA Monitor (Murray,1996). These psychologists warned that home-schooled children may be unable to get along with others and may experience difficulty entering “mainstream life.” Home-schooled children, they said, “only hear their parents’philosophies and have little chance to form their own views,” whereas conventional schools teach “what society as a whole values.” Home schooling shelters children from society, they suggested, but traditional schools ensure that children will grow up to be “complete people” by teaching key social skills such as cooperation, respect for others, and self-control.

These assumptions are not supported by relevant evidence. Specifically, homeschooled kids do not have trouble forming intimate friendships, enjoying group activities, or participating in mainstream cultural norms. At least, not according to any sound studies I've seen. (Homeschooled kids on the autism spectrum or with special education needs will find such things more difficult, but it is not due to their homeschooling experience.)

Essentially, we are given to understand that opinions about the "dangers" of homeschooling are so deeply entrenched that evidence is not even needed anymore. Discrimination against homeschoolers may be the last acceptable form of stereotyping and bias. Medlin writes:

The harshest critics charge that isolating children from larger society and inhibiting their social development are the principal goals home schooling parents have in mind. A survey of public school superintendents found that 92% believed home-schooled children do not receive adequate socialization experiences (Mayberry et al., 1995). When asked to explain their views, some of these superintendents commented that home schoolers “don’t want any influence other than parents” in their children’s lives, believe “communities at large are evil,” and “want to ensure their children’s ignorance” (pp. 92, 94). The parents “have real emotional problems themselves,” one superintendent asserted, and do not realize “the serious harm they are doing to their children in the long run, educationally and socially” (p. 94).

I tend to disagree with the superintendent, but I also empathize with his/her position in defending their turf by demonizing those who question its landscaping. Here's where it gets spooky:

Successful socialization can result in uniformity within a society. If all children receive the same socialization, it is likely that they will share the same beliefs and expectations. This fact has been a strong motivation for national governments around the world to standardize education and make it compulsory for all children. Deciding what things will be taught and how they are taught is a powerful political tool for controlling people. Those who internalize the norms of society are less likely to break the law or to want radical social changes.

And here's where Michel Foucault laughs from his grave:

In all societies, however, there are individuals who do not conform to culturally defined standards of normalcy because they were "abnormally" socialized, which is to say that they have not internalized the norms of society. These people are usually labeled by their society as deviant or even mentally ill.

And here's the closest thing I can find to a reason why the classroom is a critical component of socialization- also, suggestively, a reason for early daycare and nursery, where infants are given to understand that their emotional needs cannot be met by human beings or family members, not in this society, not when we've given up the corset for the silicone breast. From our anthropologist:

Early childhood is the period of the most intense and the most crucial socialization. It is then that we acquire language and learn the fundamentals of our culture. It is also when much of our personality takes shape. However, we continue to be socialized throughout our lives. As we age, we enter new statuses and need to learn the appropriate roles for them. We also have experiences that teach us lessons and potentially lead us to alter our expectations, beliefs, and personality. For instance, the experience of being raped is likely to cause a woman to be distrustful of others.

Looking around the world, we see that different cultures use different techniques to socialize their children. There are two broad types of teaching methods--formal and informal. Formal education is what primarily happens in a classroom. It usually is structured, controlled, and directed primarily by adult teachers who are professional "knowers." In contrast, informal education can occur anywhere. It involves imitation of what others do and say as well as experimentation and repetitive practice of basic skills. This is what happens when children role-play adult interactions in their games.

Ball returns to Medlin's court:

Home schooling parents, not surprisingly, disagree on every point. They describe conventional schools as rigid and authoritarian institutions where passive conformity is rewarded, where peer interactions are too often hostile or derisive or manipulative, and where children must contend with a dispiriting ideological and moral climate. Home schooling parents argue that this kind of environment can stifle children’s individuality and harm their self-esteem. They say it can make children dependent, insecure, or even antisocial. They believe it can undermine their efforts to teach their children positive values and appropriate behavior. Finally, they insist that it is unlikely to cultivate the kind of rewarding and supportive relationships that foster healthy personal and moral development (Allie-Carson, 1990; Gatto, 1992; Holt, 1981; Linden, 1983; Martin, 1997; Mayberry et al., 1995; Medlin, 1993b; Shirkey, 1987; Williams, Arnoldsen, & Reynolds, 1984). From this perspective, the “social environment of formal schools is actually a compelling argument for operating a home school” (Mayberry et al., 1995, p. 3). Nevertheless, when parents decide to home school, they are thinking more of the advantages of home schooling than the disadvantages of conventional schooling (Parker, 1992). Home schooling parents are strongly committed to providing positive socialization experiences for their children (Johnson, 1991; Mayberry et al., 1995; Montgomery, 1989), but they “believe that socialization is best achieved in an age-integrated setting under the auspices of the family” (Tillman, 1995, p. 5) rather than in an institution.

Rather than interact for 15 minutes in a truncated recess, my kids interact for hours on end in our weekly homeschool co-ops which are dedicated to nothing apart from the pursuit of play and extended imaginative social interaction. This special space for unstructured, unregulated play provides a space in which they can enjoy what was once known as "childhood". Even a group as conservative as the American Academy of Pediatricians recently went on record saying that recess and play are as "important as math or reading" for childhood development. 

Now I understand that going from home education straight to college with no group-based or classroom-type social experience can be daunting. But I also don't know a single homeschooled child who has done just that. Some attend community college classes in high school, others are heavily involved in Envirothons or extracurriculars, and most have done their fair share of time in the old Sunday school classroom. What deep human truths and relation data are they missing? Are they less likely to model fake happiness? Good- then they are less likely to end up on the therapist's couch addressing that midlife crisis that occurs when the accumulation of fake smiles turns malignant.

Professor Medlin concludes his paper by asserting that more research needs to be conducted on the relationship between homeschooling and socialization. But he also emphasizes that the existence of bias is not related to the actual psychological health and life satisfaction of homeschooled kids. Instead, the bias is related to the prevalence of a specific formula that says, "You have to go to school to learn to act like everyone else". The credibility of this bias should be questioned by anyone who acknowledges that human development occurs along a continuum and that we are learning more about a more progressive means of education every day.

Although there are still far too many unanswered questions about home schooling and socialization, some preliminary conclusions can be stated. Home-schooled children are taking part in the daily routines of their communities. They are certainly not isolated; in fact, they associate with—and feel close to—all sorts of people. Home schooling parents can take much of the credit for this. For, with their children’s long-term social development in mind, they actively encourage their children to take advantage of social opportunities outside the family. Home-schooled children are acquiring the rules of behavior and systems of beliefs and attitudes they need. They have good self-esteem and are likely to display fewer behavior problems than do other children. They may be more socially mature and have better leadership skills than other children as well. And they appear to be functioning effectively as members of adult society.

Perhaps the most intriguing unanswered question is, “Why?” Why should home-schooled children seem, in the words of Smedley (1992), to be “better socialized” (p. 12) than children attending conventional schools? Smedley speculated that the family “more accurately mirrors the outside society” (p. 13) than does the traditional school environment, with its “unnatural” age segregation. Galloway (Galloway, 1998; Galloway & Sutton, 1997) agreed, stating that because they are not peer-grouped in school, home-schooled children learn to get along with a variety of people, making them socially mature and able to adjust to new and challenging situations. She added two further explanations: She argued that the highly individualized academic program afforded by home schooling creates an ideal learning environment, giving children an excellent chance to do well both in college and in a career. She also said that because home-schooled children learn and grow in the nurturing environment of secure family relationships, they develop a confidence and resiliency that helps them to succeed as adults.

Medlin ends with the following statement: "Research on the question of socialization suggests that children are thriving in the home school environment and that much can be learned from looking more closely at what home schooling families are doing." I can't take this as a compliment because a homeschooling parent has a MUCH easier job than a teacher of 30 children whose job and pay depends on how well those children pass certain standardized tests.

If I have learned anything absolutely during my days of educating the kids at home, it is that there are so many wonderful teachers who adore the children they teach. The current trend in American public education is not only sad for the kids but also for these creative, dedicated teachers who are given very little room to adapt their materials to suit their students' needs and learning abilities. Ultimately, my intuitions insist on being deeply and actively involved in my children's education. Our intuitions lead us to different places- whether to the PTA or the home school.

And then there is also that obvious fact which stares us in the face every time we see our children- the fact that each one is an individual born in a world where the legacy of our species has been less than glorious. The social Darwinism of the schoolyard, much as it prepares a young person for a conventional version of success, fails to reward the developing conscience while "teaching" the very truths we try to deny (i.e. the stronger wins, power is better than kindness, popularity determines worth, etc.). I'm uncomfortable with the longterm consequences of this.

Dana Goldstein may decide one day the Social Darwinism and excruciating competitiveness of school is good for society as a whole. She may be willing to overlook her own rigid construal of "progressive values" to include other ideas which don't all lead to the same place- namely, hers. I prefer to stand with my conscience and confess that I think school can be awful and damaging for many small people- for their families, for their communities, and for the teachers whom we disrespect and straitjacket through current practices as well.

If schools were truly effective (and some private schools are) at providing the nurture, intimacy, and encouragement which helps young people learn and thrive on an emotional and spiritual (as opposed to religious) level as well as a competitive or academic one, I would willingly pass the buck. Remember that most of a child's time is spent in school, not in the home, family, or community at large. Public education is truly a public good- but it's a public "bad" when it engenders intolerance, hierarchical thinking, and overwhelming pressure.

In the words of Sonic Youth, perhaps it's time to "kill your idols". Be the change you want to see in the world. Refuse to outsource love and nurturing when you feel it could be an opportunity to learn and evolve. Do what you can, and love what you do. Love life. Don't settle for a statistic. Here's a little inspiration for the journey:

 
Just Enough 
Progressive Homeschool 
The Feminist Homeschool
 Cocking A Snook 
The Edgy Chronicles 
Joyfully Rejoycing 
The Natural Child Project 
Cheeky Bums Blog 
Quarks and Quirks
Role-playing activity (Teaching Tolerance) 
"Won't Get Schooled Again" by Rebecca Ellis (Briarpatch Magazine)
"Learning Curve" by Maya Schenwar (Bitch Magazine)
"Why Homeschooling Happened", a historic review by Milton Gaither 
"Homeschooling Goes Mainstream" by Milton Gaither (Education Next) 
"Homeschool stereotype far off the mark" by Dana Rohr 
"How homeschooling threatens monopoly education" by Glenn H. Reynolds (USA Today)

"Litany", a poem by Billy Collins.

This is one of my favorite love poems- and I wish it for Tino, a love somehow undefined with only the most beautiful boundary disputes.


Photo taken by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine... 
- Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

Yoga with the kids and smiles all around.

Whoever first realized that yoga is just as awesome for kids as it for adults deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously. We've been using Baron Baptiste's book with yoga for a while now, but rising enthusiasm made a it a more regular part of our day.

This morning, Max positively beamed after half an hour of Shanti Generation yoga (yes, you can stream it on Netflix). As it turned out, his devotion to his practice led him to forsake math for an extended period of poses on the living room rug. 

IF I WERE- Sammie Haynes

Thanks to the Childlight Yoga Blog for sharing this song and lyrics. Although the song works best in a class format, it can also be prepared by homeschooling families for working partners upon their return to your castle. But performance should never be forced. One of the greatest things about yoga for kids is that it is not competitive and doesn't force shy wildflowers into recitals.

If I Were (written by Lisa Flynn, music/performance by Sammie Haynes)

If I were the sun, (reach up)
I’d shine down on you. (fold forward, reaching for toes)
If I were a rose bud, (hands behind ears, elbows touching in front)
I’d open for you. (stretch the elbows out wide)
If I were a puppy, (down dog)
I’d wag at you. (lift one leg and shake) 
But since I am a child, (hold one hand down, palm facing floor)
I’ll sing for you.  (bring hand to mouth, then away)

If I were a star, (star pose)
I’d twinkle for you.  (rock from side to side, from one foot to the other)
If I were a penguin, (heels together, toes out, hands at sides, fingers out)
I’d waddle to you.  (‘waddle’ in place.)    
If I were an eagle, (eagle pose)
I’d soar to you.  (stretch out arms and legs to ‘soar.’)
But since I am a child, (hold one hand down, palm facing floor)
I’ll sing for you. (bring hand to mouth, then away)    
And since I am your child, (point to self, to parent, then palm to floor)
I’ll give you hugs too!  (hug self or run to parent to hug!)

From Little Lotus Kids Yoga Flashcards.

More free yoga with kids if money is not on your mandala:

Relaxation scripts (Relax Kids)
My First Yoga: Animal Poses for Kids app (iTunes)
Robot relax script with visual (Om-azing Kids)
Kids Yoga: Bedtime Rhymes video (YouTube)
Yoga games for kids (Yoga in My School)
Dr. Seuss-inspired yoga pose printable (Om-azing Kids) 
Pose of the week (Yoga Kids)
"The Benefits of Yoga for Kids" (Greenchild Magazine) 
Peace tree visualization printable (Om-azing Kids)
Joytime yoga warm-ups (Joytime)
Good behavior in yoga group social story (Om-azing Kids) 
Om-azing Kids Yoga tunes (Soundcloud) 
Yoga for Kids with Autism video (Shiva's Centre) 

A date with Adrienne Rich.

 I stayed up late last night arguing with the ghost of Adrienne Rich. Or, rather, arguing with her brilliant text, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution. We had so many things to say to one another.

I use the word "argue" affectionately, since Adrienne and I agree on most matters and the only hairs we tend to split emerge as marginalia. Perhaps the most important part of being a woman, a mother, a lover, a partner, a friend, and an individual is the continuing dialogue with oneself- and with other women.

In this ongoing conversation, I refuse to feel guilty for reading or writing, for expecting my children to entertain themselves, for assuming that they can wait for that drink or that snack, for providing them with an understanding of me as a person with her own dreams, desires, and interests. I also do not believe that being at home with them is any less valuable an occupation than one with social access and pedigree. Accepting the status of martyr might just be the worst example that one can give a child. 

I do, however, believe very strongly that as women we should not settle for the current divisions in our lives and loves. The "solitary confinement of full-time motherhood" is only necessary in a society which pits life and work or family and self-realization against one another.

We, as women, are just as guilty as men in agreeing to this arrangement and keeping it in place. Until we learn to build communities in which children play a part as human beings (rather than pests), until we forge less gendered conceptions of family roles, until we assume that a man who can mow the lawn is also capable of nurturing a child and comforting them, until we agree to stop expecting so little of male partners and treating them like children with fragile egos, until we stop idealizing the power structures that oppress others in the name of "success", until we stop equating a stay-at-home father with a man who does "women's work", we will continue to see the same arguments, frustrations, and lack of common ground between men and women.

When "you sound like a woman" is not spat out as an insult, we'll know things are moving in the right direction. 

On single motherhood: To bear an "illegitimate" child proudly and by choice in the face of societal judgement has, paradoxically, been one way in which women have defied patriarchy. 

On raising sons: If we wish for our sons- as for our daughters- that they may grow up unmutilated by gender roles, sensitized to misogyny in all its forms, we have also to face the fact that in the present stage of history our sons may feel profoundly alone in the masculine world, with few if any close relationships with other men (as distinct from male "bonding" in defense of male privilege). When the son ceases to be the mother's outreach into the world, because she is reaching out into it herself, he ceases to be instrumental for her and has the chance to become a person. (I promise, Max, that I will not ask you to be the powerful male I never got to be.)

On twilight birthing: No more devastating image could be invented for the bondage of woman: sheeted, supine, drugged, her wrists strapped down and her legs in stirrups, at the very moment when she is bringing new life into the world. This "freedom from pain", like "sexual liberation", places a woman physically at men's disposal, though still estranged from the potentialities of her own body. While in no way altering her subjection, it can be advertised as a progressive development. 

On the guilt of motherhood and its results: It is all too easy to accept unconsciously the guilt so readily thrust upon any woman who is seeking to broaden and deepen her own existence, on the grounds that this must somehow damage her children. That guilt is one of the most powerful forms of social control of women; none of us can be entirely immune to it. A woman whose rage is under wraps may well foster a masculine aggressiveness in her son; she has experienced no other form of assertiveness." 

On Infanticide: The Church had much to do with creating the crime of individual maternal infanticide by pronouncing all children born out of wedlock "illegitimate". Until the eighteenth century or later bastards were largely excluded from participation in trades and guilds, could not inherit property, and were essentially without the law. Since the "sin" of the child's father was more difficult to prove, it was on the unmarried mother that the full penalty fell; as the eternally guilty party, she was considered by the Church to "be the root of the whole sex problem". 

On anger and frustration: In a living room in 1975, I spent an evening with a group of women poets, some of whom had children. One had brought hers along, and they slept or played in adjoining rooms. We talked of poetry, and also of infanticide, of the case of a local woman, the mother of eight, who had been in severe depression since the birth of her third child....Every woman in that room who had children, every poet, could identify with her. We spoke of the wells of anger that her story cleft open in us. We spoke of our own moments of murderous anger at our children, because there was no one and nothing else on which to discharge anger. We spoke in the sometimes tentative, sometimes rising, sometimes bitterly witty, unrhetorical tones and language of women who had met together over our common work, poetry, and who found another common ground in an unacceptable, but undeniable anger. The words are being spoken now, are being written down; the taboos are being broken, the masks of motherhood are cracking through.

On early motherhood: For centuries no one talked of these feelings. I became a mother in the family-centered, consumer-oriented, Freudian-American world of the 1950s. My husband spoke eagerly of children we would have; my parents-in-law awaited the birth of their grandchild. I had no idea of what I wanted, what I could or could not choose. I only knew that to have a child was to assume adult womanhood to the full, to prove myself, to be ‘like other women.’

When President Bill Clinton awarded the National Medal of Arts to her in 1997, Adrienne refused it, citing the administration's “cynical politics.” She believed art and politics should not be separate, and she felt accepting this award would be to dishonor the many Americans injuried by economic and social inequality as institutionalized by the US government. Getting richer in a good way:

"The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" by Adrienne Rich
Alfred Haskell Conrad (Wikipedia) 
Michelle Cliff (Lambda Literary)
Pablo Conrad's tribute to his mother (YouTube) 
Why she stopped writing when she got married (The Guardian) 

"I Married You", a poem by Linda Pastan.

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

A Veteran's Christmas Carol.

The room where we caroled at the V. A. Hospital in Tuscaloosa.

One of my favorite parts of the season is going to carol for our local veterans at the Veteran's Hospital. This year, the number of singers was much smaller because we did it on Christmas Eve- a difficult date for many to free on their schedule. However, the VA administrators made a compelling case for caroling on Christmas Eve- those veterans who are there will be all alone and no one really comes to visit on that day, so it would mean the world to them.

The Tuscaloosa12 Days of Christmas (PDF)

The kids colored  the page below and adding their name (or portrait signatures) with small notes in the margins and the folded it as a card. We know that the staff will hang these in the rooms of the vets for a little of that human touch.

Veterans Thank You Coloring Page (PDF)

Our program included several carols, piano solo performances, a Christmas poem reading, and a little bell-shaking by Milla. One of the best parts, however, was going around and thanking each veteran afterwards.

I learned about what it was like to serve in World War II in the Air Force from this kind couple (not romantically involved). At a time when women were not officially acknowledged as veterans, she was piloting planes. I learned about God's continuing blessings from a mute young man who suffered a traumatic brain injury due to an IED in Afghanistan. He is confined to a wheelchair but even without a voice, I read his lips as he told me and Max about the way in which God blesses his life every day.

Max tried to convince this gentleman that he was not a girl without resorting to showing him any private areas. Proof is complicated.

The girls found a way to cause a ruckus in the lounge- but I think the vets enjoy all the childish hubbub and commotion since it is a relief from their usual routine.

Shepherding the nativity.

Somehow I knew all that shepherding practice we got in Romania would pay off. This year, our Romanian sheep will be acting in a Christmas eve nativity. Of course, their shepherds, Miax, Micah, and Milla will also be on the scene. Yesterday was the rehearsal.

Unfortunately, Milla napped through it so her shepherding abilities will be the wild card this evening.

There is something magical and mysterious about nativity scenes in which children with all their natural energy and joy enact the first Christmas. It is no secret why the scriptures say children are closer to God and more capable of seeing angels than adults, for we are steeped in what we call "reality" and convention. We mistake the duties for the love. We struggle with feeling the Spirit as we crush the Spirit that reveals itself in others.

So I can't wait for tonight- for the way the nativity will unfurl amid giggles and foibles and the general joy of children. It is soothing and beautiful and holy to be so close to the untamed, unbridled heart.

"If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark." 
St. John of the Cross

Thoughts on violence and Sandy Hook.

We spent our weekend in Atlanta visiting with extended family- but the story of the Sandy Hook massacre was never far enough from my mind. Every mother who loves her children knows her children- knows in some silent, unspoken way what their challenges and struggles in life might be. My heart breaks for Nancy Lanza and what she feared about Adam- how the way in which she tried to protect him was ultimately undone by her blind spot with respect to guns.

The news media keeps bandying an Asperger diagnosis (a.k.a. high-functioning autism) as if this explains the killer, Adam Lanza's, motives and actions. Unfortunately, the media's ignorance about Aspberger's feeds into a generalized public ignorance at this point which does unspeakable harm to families with "Aspie" kids. Aspberger's is not a form of mental illness- it cannot be medicated or fixed with pills; it is considered a "developmental disorder".

While Adam's withdrawal into this own world may be characteristic of Asperger's, his controlled silence and shyness are not. Most Aspie kids tend to speak continuously on a topic of their choice- their social problems stem more from inability to recognize social cues than from shyness or avoidance.  The likelihood that an Aspie child will turn into a killer is minute compared to the likelihood that they will do amazing and wonderful things in this world.

I am convinced that when the true story emerges, Adam Lanza's medical record will reveal a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoid personality disorder. I am convinced that his mother, Nancy Lanza, kept him under close watch as this diagnosis became evident (schizophrenia usually emerges in the late teens and early twenties). I think she homeschooled him because the public system refused to provide the mental health resources he needed. I believe his reclusiveness was a symptom- not something imposed by his mother. I am convinced that she assumed the medications he was supposed to be taking made it safe to keep guns in the house. (Sadly, she was very wrong.) But I am also convinced that she loved him deeply, that she structured her life around his illness, that she was scared, that she felt him beginning to disappear, that she knew the world he inhabited was so different from her own that she couldn't bridge the divide.

Schizophrenia is a complicated and torturous illness for those involved. Adam Lanza's flat affect is more characteristic of schizophrenia than Asperger's. In sum, here are characteristics of schizophrenia that lead me to believe this is what Adam struggled with (I am not a medical doctor, of course, and do not wish to anger any physicians who worry that I am treading on their turf):

• Isolation
• Showing little emotion
• Flat, expressionless gaze of teenage years (compared with smiles of younger years)
• Inability to carry on a conversation
• Inability to cry or to express joy
• Delusions of grandeur
• Flat affect or speaking in monotone
• Insensitivity to physical pain
• Not responding much to other people
• Inability to care for oneself
• Reclusiveness
• Hallucinations and breaks with reality

If you know someone struggling with this illness, remember that it is not their fault and that they are not "evil"- the way in which they perceive reality is just markedly different and makes it difficult to live in our "normal" world. The absolute best movie I've seen on the subject of paranoid schizophrenia is The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It should also be noted that those with schizophrenia are not more likely to be violent criminals or murders- they are just more likely to feel threatened by perceptions unrelated to what actually happens around them.

I think Adam Lanza's connection to reality was severed and he acted on a hallucination or delusion. I do not believe having more prayer in schools would have made a difference in this outcome. On the other hand, exposure to violent video games and familiarity with assault rifles and weapons cannot have a good outcome in persons subject to hallucinations. The extent to which violence and the celebration of violence permeates our culture never ceases to disturb me. It's time we started thinking about the longterm consquences of a culture in which God is equated with crueltry, bombs, and killing.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families in Sandy Hook devastated by this nightmare, as well as to the surviving members of the Lanza family who are asking themselves what they could have done to prevent this.

Love letter #44: Spike Mason's Widening Circles.

Spike Mason's album, Widening Circles, brings Rilke into the room as a song. 

The words, sung by the 2012 National Jazz Award winner Kristin Berardi, are an English translation of poems penned over a hundred years ago by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The music is composed in a style that is a synergy of jazz and classical music.

"The writing came slowly" says Mason, "I worked for eight years on the music, and over that time the words have weaved their way into my life. I knew I couldn't get in the way of these poems - the music had to cushion and support the lyrics, all the way through. If I moved toward overpowering them, the structure and meaning would simply collapse."

It is beautiful, wistful, and the perfect gift for a few on my Christmas list. Thanks to Spike for telling me about it.

Why we have handmade holidays.

The holiday season can be a time for giving and loving. Over the years, I've found that the amount of time spent in stores purchasing plastic toys from factories in China is inversely related to the satisfaction I derive from giving and receiving holiday gifts. There are a plethora of ethical reasons for handmade holidays as well as a bevy of traditional and historic reasons- but ours tend to be a combination of all the above and more. 

Homeschooling your kids means that every hour spent shopping is an hour in which they learn to consume, buy, and associate the holidays with spending money. It is my sincere hope that the holidays will be associated with making, creating, and giving a little piece of your heart and soul (rather than your wallet) to family and friends. Handmade holidays automatically reduces the number of gifts and increases the quality of gifts.

Just click on this image to visit our burgeoning collection of tutorials, crafts, and ideas for handmade holidays.

Alina's Thanksgiving Happiness Experiment.

A combination of Carol Shields, Iris Murdoch, the perpetually-improving-house, and the embarrassing gluttony of Thanksgiving left me pondering happiness today. Happiness in the backyard with birds warbling and chirping- the happiness of being absolutely peripheral for a few chunks of time in which my actions or stares have no meaning to the living creatures around me.

Now that we've mastered the ability to obliterate the planet, what does "happiness" or "sadness" mean in context? How does post-nuclear man experience joy? And how is this experience related to his/her power over the world around them? For example, is the modern version of happiness that feeling you get when you find a great Groupon or sale at your favorite store? 

I'm going to take a microscopic look at my experiences of happiness on this Thanksgiving Day. I want a close-up of what makes me tick in the hopes of unraveling a little more of who I am and what I should be doing with this beautiful gift of a life.

                                                  ALINA'S THANKSGIVING HAPPINESS EXPERIMENT

List ten moments- with description- in which you have felt joy or true happiness during the past few weeks. If you can't think of ten, leave them blank. Only include happiness; don't get sidetracked by pleasure, satisfaction, or mere accomplishment. Then ask your partner, best friend, family members, or loved ones to list ten such moments for themselves in the past few weeks. Don't show them your list.

Now compare and see if any happy experiences were shared. Did you and others tend to feel these moments more when alone or in the company of others?  What characterizes these experiences? Were they planned? Did they have spiritual components? Was an experience of the sacred involved? Journal your thoughts on your happiness. Savor it and be grateful for it.

Alina's Thanksgiving Happiness Experiment (PDF)

OUR ANSWERS

ALINA

1. Earlier this week, we took the kids for a tromp through the woods at an hour when everyone should have been asleep. We brought a few flashlights and crawled through thickets, shrubs, and tree limbs which looked like lace against the night sky. It was beautiful. We had nowhere to be- the little ones loved it- and we got all those secret vitamins I think must be reflected in moonlight and the scent of autumn nights. I was just plain happy.
2. Seeing what Amy and Josalyn brought for Carla's baby shower- and seeing how much they wanted to help and how easily they give. It made me feel happy and somehow lighter.
3. Carla's baby shower pleasing Carla- to give gifts that bring smiles and make it feel as if we still do have those tiny little powers to share our hearts with others. The magnificence of love.
4. Patrick's recent bonfires and the way the shadows of smiles flicker across the faces of my family. Happiness in just being and just being together.
5. Waking up and going for a walk with Mary (though it's been too long). Beating the kids to the day and just chatting about everything from neighborhood militias, sewing projects, and loving our husbands and children.
6. Seeing Patrick return from a night out with Dan glowing. Happiness in knowing my husband connected with a friend and walked the journey of life with someone for a breath of time.
7. Patrick's wedding ring on his hands on his hips. The only jewelry he wears. The only adornment. Our simple silver wedding rings which cost less than $100 but will never be "upgraded" to a metal that costs more to lose. The happiness of agreeing on a shared future.
8. Watching Milla care for her dolls so very carefully. The happiness of seeing love reflected in the actions of others.
9. Watching Micah care for Milla so very carefully. Milla's head in Micah's lap as Micah strokes her hair and my mom says, "You used to do the exact same thing to Carla. She loved to put her head in your lap and you would smooth her hair." Happiness in the continuity of tenderness, a hopeful legacy. 
10. Simply sitting in the perfect weather with the perfect leaves and the perfect colors and the beauty that does not require my hands or upkeep to remain eternally just so.

PATRICK

1. Today when you were gone, the kids were all outside and I watched them from the window as Max gently pushed Micah and Milla in the swing. I was thankful to you for homeschooling the kids and making them such a tight-knit family and I realized that not every child gets this, which made me grateful for your persistence and determination. So this happiness was like a thick gratefulness that started with a small observation of love and tenderness between our kids. 
2. Watching a movie with you last night, in and out of sleep, but touching. 
3. Holding you. When you want to be held.

Handmade dining tables to support a local adoption.

Our lovely friends, Stephen and Susan Norris, are working to raise money for the adoption of two orphan children. As many know, adopting a child is a painstaking and expensive process which is as trying (if not much more) than those 9.85 months of pregnancy. 

To raise this money, Stephen is making custom hand-scraped farm house style tables and benches. Susan writes:

Choose your dimensions and choose your finish. It is gorgeous, very heavy and sturdy (and thankfully for us, indestructible!). If you are looking to buy a table/benches just call or email. If anyone you know is looking to purchase a table and benches, would you forward our contact info to them. If you know any decorators who help people find furniture, would you forward this to them? You can email us at [email protected] or call 205-554-0063. We are aiming for a Christmas delivery, but if someone contacted us very soon, we could probably make Thanksgiving! This would make an excellent heirloom quality gift. Stephen is an amazing craftsman and artist in this way.

Pricing is $85 per square foot for the table and $50 per linear foot for the benches. This is comparable with prices for similar tables at furniture stores (although their tables are generally veneer, Stephen's are actual hand scraped wood), but far less than other custom prices. Plus, we have free local delivery, but would certainly try and figure out a way for more distant delivery at a reasonable price. Our benches are not finished yet and are not pictured. If anyone would like to see it in person, just let me know. I'd love to show it off!

It's not everyday that you can get a fantastic table and benches and give two orphans a family at the same time. Imagine that every piece of bread broken over this table would be a reminder of how you helped bring together a family.... I can't think of anything more beautiful.

Books that make you want to draw on the walls.

Joseph Had A Little Overcoat by Simms Taback is the current favorite. The ladies enjoyed cutting and pasting magazine pieces onto their own traced overcoats as a follow-up fancy. 

It's fun to break down the colors and collage pieces and seek "similars" in a magazine.

We made a story-telling board collage with faces from magazines as inspired by this page. 

The girls picked the faces and "characters" and we created a base for inventing our own stories about the inhabitants of "Overcoat Park". I hope we get to use this as a means of creative conflict resolution by telling stories which create empathy for one another when there is a "fight" or intractable squabble. 

The tempestuous twos: Reconsidering the "terrible twos".

Given my rapture with toddlerhood, I use the words "terrible twos" uncomfortably. The word "terrible" doesn't sit right with the excitement of the new independence that toddlers display. Tempestuous twos is my preferred description.

Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik and her compadres at the University of Washington stoked my intuitions with their book, The Scientist in the Crib. Gopnik maintains that the discovery of the fact that different people have different desires is the source of the "so-called terrible twos":

What makes the terrible twos so terrible is not that babies do things you don't want them to do- one year olds are plenty good at that- but that they do things because you don't want them to.

Unlike the school of thought which believes toddlers are testing the limits of authority and demanding to be shown who's boss, Gopnik thinks that toddlers conduct a rational and engaged exploration of personal preferences. She came to this theory after several experiments, which you can read about in this article, demonstrated that toddlers are entering a world in which they discover that the preferences of others do not match their own.

When Milla was a year old, she would scream and cry if Micah laid her head on my chest. Micah suggested that Milla did this because "she thinks I'm going to drink her milk". Indeed, Milla was very possessive of my breasts for quite some time. Now, however, if I joke about "giving milk to Max", Milla laughs and says, "No mommy, no Max". It is no longer a question of tears; she seems to understand that no one else wants the breast milk except for her. Milla's preferences for breast milk are not matched by other family members. In Gopnik's words:

"Toddlers are systematically testing the dimensions on which their desires and the desires of others may be in conflict."

The implication is that toddlers are little scientists who develop their own theories about the world and test them in the lab that is home. When evidence mounts that an existing theory is incorrect (i.e. no one else ever drinks mommy's milk), then toddlers create a new theory to explain and understand the world (i.e. mommy's milk is special for me). Rather than being passive receptors of whatever surrounds them, little people are active collectors of information which is then analyzed, organized, and systematized in a manner that makes sense. 

Gopnik's conclusions rest squarely with Dr. Sears' contention that "the work of a child is play". For us, as parents, the challenge is to address these "scientific queries" in the spirit of learning as opposed to the spirit of coercion and hierarchy. The tempestuous twos are an exciting and beautiful part of natural child development. Perhaps being "Babywise" isn't so wise after all.

Surface mining on beautiful Alabama streams.

Karen's parents weren't planning on spending their retirement days
trying to protect the value of their property and its natural resources.

    In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to weight the costs and benefits of destroying natural beauty for economic quickies. The longterm economic value of green spaces and trees and free-flowing clean streams would be assumed. But we live in the age of the quickie, and our values tend to be arranged in a scheme which places immediate gratification at the top.
    On that note, surface mines are the equivalent of an economic quickie- fast, destructive, and ultimately unsatisfying. Learning that our state is so quick to permit, enable, and solicit the destruction of private and public property in the name of a few bucks makes teaching kids about delayed gratification feel rather tawdry.

    Our neighbors, the Palmers, are facing a surface mine in their parents' backyard in Cordova, Alabama. Don't get me wrong- I understand that coal mines provide jobs and help sustain the fast and cheap American lifestyle to which we are accustomed. And I understand that people need jobs. But I also understand that we spend millions of public taxpayer dollars teaching people not to smoke because it kills them and our government doesn't have the money to pay for all the health costs of smoking.
    Coal mining should be considered in a similar manner. Until our government is willing to pick up the costs to our communities for strip mining (or, better yet, ensure that the coal companies pick up the cost of their profit-maximizing activities), we'd better hold off on inviting more strip mines and do a better job of incentivizing those that currently exist.

    Meanwhile, in the land of newspaper publications and unicorns, publisher Jack McNeely thinks a windfall tax and few jobs will make up for the costs of cleaning up after the strip mine mess. Jack is reassured by the comment that the EPA has approved the way in which the waste will be handled. But Jack hasn't done his economic homework. If he had, he would know that an 8% windfall tax isn't going to cover the costs of clean-up- not now, not anytime in the near future. Looking at the 8,000 foot deep dispersal wells at the former site of Reichhold Industries in Tuscaloosa provides another picture of what EPA approval means.
     Back in the 1970's, the EPA partnered with private industry to drill these wells and dispose of toxic wastes. Alas, no one will touch the wells or the property now. You know why? Because no one can afford to touch them. The cost of making this land- which borders on the Black Warrior River and Hurricane Creek- "usable" exists in no public or private coffers. It is a sunk cost that everyone refuses to pay. But it's not going away. 
    If anyone cares to invite Jack to savor the untouchable mess left behind at the former Reichhold site in a joint project between the industry and the EPA, you can do so  at [email protected]. Perhaps he will understand why learning that "the EPA makes certain requirements" doesn't comfort me at all. In fact, I'd love to invite Jack down for an up-close-and-personal visit- it might even affect the way he views the world as much as those dollar signs from advertisers.
    In the meantime, I urge you to write a letter and be part of what Jack describes as an imaginary process of local citizen feedback that "doesn't change" a thing. Despite Jack's cynicism, I have hopes for American democracy.
    Writing a letter to the address below before July 29, 2012 might actually have some impact on the way things unfurl. If it doesn't, then Jack is right and American democracy is as real as the lip colors in a high-school beauty pageant. If it does, then Jack is wrong and July 4th is still worth celebrating. Either way, we can't know unless you write. So take a minute, write a few lines, learn a little more, see a few example letters, and be part of that thing called "freedom". Last time I checked, it was pretty popular in the polls.

 

A flurry of thoughts and a moon so vivid I could skip it like a stone over a puddle.

It's late, and the weekend's chaos is winding down. After leading my poor family, including the usual suspects plus Grand Bunicu and Bunicu (who are visiting from Ohio) and Carla and Lesse (visiting from Homewood), on a wild goose chase across Tuscaloosa, we grilled some meat and corn and settled down to discuss the lack of contextual basis for "honor" in our culture while I burned mix CDs for my dad. 

Originally, the day began with a plan to do a little creek cleaning at Binion Creek as part of the Northriver Watershed Festival. But we arrived too late. And then I decided we needed to visit Hurricane Creek in Brookwood. But we never found a piece of public land from which to access the creek. Sometimes the adventure takes the guise of a failure in which grumbles and complaints (Carla is the only one who didn't join the chorus) chip away at our ability to appreciate the mere fact of being able to wander around looking for a spark. For wanderlusty girls like me, the wandering itself scratches an itch. 

A flower Micah picked for me on our stroll today.

Lately, the days roll by faster than I can name them- certainly too rapidly to sit down and claim them by poring over salient details. It is not for lack of action that this reporter-of-the-quoitidien has been absent from her usual perch. So very much has happened, and continues to happen.

Just today, I read Rev. Fred Hammond's post about his recent experiences while protesting the shameful HB 56 anti-immigrant law currently on the books in Alabama. Fred's compassion and love for his fellow humans offers solace in these grim times. It is so easy to walk around Tuscaloosa and ignore the fact that there are fewer Latinos in public spaces- that houses which used to be occupied by large families are suddenly vacant, that swathes of faces have disappeared from our daily lives. It is easy to pretend that everything is fine- their misfortune, after all, doesn't directly impigne on our daily routines. But such chosen ignorance is a crime of spiritual negligence and willful neglect.

He [Gov. Bentley] said the law enjoys widespread support in spite of protests. "We are not going to repeal our anti-illegal immigration law," he said.

Gov. Robert Bentley, who signed the law, said that when he was a doctor in Tuscaloosa, he never asked people if they were legal or illegal, but protesters must follow the law.

"If they read what I read in the Bible, the Bible says you always obey the law," he told reporters while attending a National Day of Prayer observance. 

(Source: Tuscaloosa News)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with these same ideas living under Nazi Germany, a democracy in which the law relegated Jews to the status of sub-humans and a systematic policy to remove them was the law of the land. Today, churches celebrate Bonhoeffer as a conscientious objector to the evils of the Nazi regime- a man who broke unjust and cruel laws. But we fail to see parallels between the past and the present because such parallels are disturbing, inconvenient, and obviously "not the same". 

This country was founded on the breaking of laws. Fred correctly observes that the Boston Tea Party and similar events in American history were characterized by conscience disregard for the laws of the time. The civil rights movement, one of our triumphs as a nation promising "freedom and justice for all", occurred precisely because many conscience-driven Americans chose to disregard an unjust and cruel law.

Fred also notes that Gov. Bentley's very own faith tradition- that of the Baptist denomination- was founded in law-breaking:

His own faith as a Baptist came about because people of conscience disobeyed the law. It was illegal to be of any other faith than Anglican when John Smyth declared his Baptist faith. But if Governor Bentley is correct that the Bible says you always obey the law, then his own faith is illegal, twice over because John Smyth broke the English law decreeing the Church of England as the one faith and the Church of England broke the law when it severed ties with the Roman Catholic Church over the doctrine of divorce–another law that according to Bentley’s argument must be obeyed. Remember that church law and civil law were one and the same in the time of the reformation. There was no separation of church and state.

The context of Romans 13 which Bentley refers also includes Romans 13: 6 and following: “This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor. Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not covet,’ and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

But love, while wonderful as an object of lip service, is certainly impractical as a matter of public policy. Being all-knowing, our God will surely forgive us if we can't take his injunctions seriously because, as He knows, that stuff sounds good in books but just doesn't make much sense in real life. Tomorrow is Sunday. How many local pastors, preachers, rabbis, reverends, or faith leaders will speak about the unspeakable in our midst- the law that punishes those who wish to be Americans for not having enough money to game the process or not having enough power to squeeze through the tiny allotted quota? How many will elect to direct attention to the tornados of past rather than confront the one brewing right in our midst?