A Sensual Orgy of mind and ear

I went to the Friends of the Library semi-annual book sale today, hoping to pick up some good hard cover editions of Gabaldon's Outlander series, but came home instead with a book on bird song. Call it inspiration for Nano. Listening to Maire Brennan sing Ilathair De (In God's Presence) while reading Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg created a nearly mystical apex of delight in my brain today. (A mini-rant: disregard the low Amazon star rating for his book. Never trust a rating that is composed of many five and four star ratings and a few one-star spoilers with nothing in between - clearly the amalgam is not representative of most opinions.) Visit his website to hear recordings of birds, and of duets between birds and people.

Aye, There Be Dragons

Aye, There Be Dragons, and they are circling and roaring around our house these two days past. Hear the dragons roaring! What be those dragon riders thinking, anyway? I can hardly get anything done, what with them roaring loud enough to shake the crockery when they fly over the house so low and so fast. Oh, they are beautiful enough that I must drop everything and go stand on my balcony to watch them as they swoop and dive, flying their dragon maneuvers singly and in groups. Surely the old stories about dragons and their riders and the way they bespell mortal folk who look upon them are true. For didn't I marry a dragon rider myself so long ago?

Weeping, We Resolve

Weeping as I join through live-streaming in Ted Kennedy's funeral Mass, I resolve to follow his example and never quit. The forces of hate and bigotry are not as strong as the forces of love and forgiveness. His death renews my determination to support with all my strength the unfinished battles of his life, beginning with health care for all, not just the privileged few. To know the man, and not the caricature painted by his political opposition, see these eulogies from his funeral Mass: his son Ted Kennedy, Jr. his son Patrick Kennedy We will honor him not with flowers but with contributions to carry on the fight.

The Disappearing Panda

Silver Transitions e-mailed me a lovely bunch of bamboo fresh from Australia this morning, along with a charming picture of pandas (to remind me of what I'm supposed to eat and to look like, I suppose). She'd heard I've been feeling crummy lately, but I think the spelling was altered over the water because truth is, I'm feeling more cranky than crummy. But then, pandas do get cranky when they don't get their bamboo (or so I've heard). I have lost six panda pounds in the past nine days. Pandas are supposed to have nice, big, round bellies and mine is shrinking away practically as I watch. Perhaps it has something to do with a hormone - balancing diet I'm on (see From Belly Fat to Belly Flat by Dr. C. W. Randolph). Every few years I stiffen my will to the breaking point and Do Something to lose the fat - successfully. I enjoy my un-panda-like body for a while, then Something Happens, stress like a ton of bricks falls on me, and the pounds rapidly reappear: magical transmogrification - I look like a panda again. Dr. R claims that estrogen overload is common among women like me who have been on The Pill for decades, followed by hormone replacement therapy to get through the bumps of menopause. He calls for applying a special Mexican yam-derived hormone cream and eating foods proven to encourage hormone balance. Often the meals make me slightly nauseous - I miss my comforting bamboo - but there's nothing wrong with lots of cruciferous and root vegetables, spinach salads and baked fish, except that my body hardly recognizes it as food any more. But it is hard to argue with success, and any plan that has me losing weight (while still eating normal amount of calories and not getting hungry) is a plan that I want to keep following.

Lovely Old Word of the Day

When I was in school, I loved sports of all kinds, was captain of our girls softball team, played tennis year round, and when I wasn't running, biking or swimming I was surfing. So I never thought of myself as a "geek", but geekdom lurked just under my skin, for I was a closet dictionary reader. Yes, I thought reading the unabridged dictionary was a form of entertainment. Sometimes when I run across an especially lovely word, I bookmark it, and while I was cleaning up my bookmarked links today I ran across this lovely word from the year 1623: ineluctable: not to be avoided, changed or resisted (see also inevitable) As in: Visual evidence of the ineluctable physical progression of aging may be delayed or ameliorated, but it is ultimately inevitable.

Cold - Hot - Cold - Hot - Cold - Hot

The water in the pool was cold this morning, and the air was only sixty-five degrees. It felt like the ocean at San Diego in December. I entered the pool very slowly the first time, and my breathing became irregular as the water reached my chest. Once my leg started cramping, I left the pool for the hot tub - aahhhh. Hot. Just right.

After the hot water restored my body heat I left the hot tub for the pool, and entered the water at a fast but steady pace, descending the steps without a pause. I had the whole place to myself (who else is crazy enough to go swimming in a cold pool on a cold morning?). Part-way through my laps, I got a foot cramp, so back to the hot tub. MMmmmmm. The only thing better than a hot tub is a hot tub after a cold pool.

For my third time in the pool, I let the teenager inside me loose, and simply jumped into the deep end. Whoooh! Another lap, back to the hot tub and done. That was so much fun I might do it again tomorrow. Dr. Randolph in his latest book, From Belly Fat to Belly Flat, writes "if you are too busy to exercise every day, then every day you are busy dying". That was the last thing I read before my jaunt to the swimming pool. Today I'm busy living.

Dewey and Me - a Book Review

"Find your place.

Be happy with what you have.

Treat everyone well.

Live a good life. It isn't about material things; it's about love. And you can never anticipate love."

That, according to his Best Friend Vicki Myron, sums up the life philosophy of Dewey Readmore Books, the official cat of the municipal library in Spencer, Iowa. I had to quote Dewey because his philosophy and mine match so perfectly, if we had met I know we'd be best friends.

When I was a teenager, I asked my parents if I'd been adopted. They were shocked and surprised (and perhaps, after second thoughts, they wondered if someone had mixed up the babies in the hospital.) I never marched in step with my family, even when it looked like I was doing so, the inner me was in full-throttle rebellion. So even though I was not adopted, I identified immediately with Dewey, who was abandoned in a book drop one freezing cold Iowa night.

Dewey: the Small-town Library Cat Who Touched the World is not only about Dewey. It is about Vicki and her family, the Jipsons, and about the town of Spencer. Dewey struggles but remains loving and faithful to his duties and his loved ones all of his days, and the same might be said of the author and her town. They all surpass their beginnings and reach beyond their potential, over-comers and overachievers every one.

If you are looking for a true story that will make you laugh, make you cry and make you feel better about yourself, your life and your future, I recommend Dewey, a five hankie - er, I mean five star book that is sure to please even the curmudgeonly reader, much as the eponymous cat won over the patrons of the library.

and Speaking of Happiness...

It is wonderful how once something grabs my attention, I start stumbling over it everywhere I look. Remember when you bought a new car, and suddenly you were seeing that model all over the place?

What is marvelous is how our unconscious brain works so hard to give us what we ask for. So now that I'm seeking to give my life a happiness tune-up, I find the elements of my research every day, even when I'm looking at other things.

I was on the Forward Motion writers forum yesterday, and there was a discussion of flow. I was reading a political blog this morning, and there was a discussion of forgiveness. At that point I tripped over the mother lode of happiness tune-ups at the Happiness Project Toolbox. I'm s l o w l y working my through The Rough Guide to Happiness by Dr. Nick Baylis - slow because I need to meditate on the points he makes and connect them to my own life and decide how to implement them.

It is O.K. to be happy, and to want happiness. Happiness is not self-indulgence or narcissism, or ignoring the needy world. Happiness is not synonymous with pleasure, and wanting to be happy is not being a pleasure-seeker. Somewhere in my Calvinist background ancestors, I think happiness got a bad reputation. Let me be very plain: happiness is not "un-Christian" and it is not selfish. I wish you a truly happy day, engaged with your inner self, and the people and the world around you. I hope you find something to do where you enter flow, and that you savor it later.

Pesky Inner Child

"Oh look - the pool's open!" "Nothin' to do with us." "But, but - I want to go swimming!" "Too cold." "See, there's people in the pool." "We AREN'T going swimming." "They're having fun." "No." "Remember floating in sunshine?" "Can't go. We'd look silly in a swim suit." "No one will notice us." "It's too cold for swimming." "Not anymore. Today will be 89F." "All right. You win. We'll go this afternoon while everyone's at work." My inner child skips in a circle chanting, "We're going swimming." I mutter, "All our flab will show, and all the wrinkles and liver spots - " "But it will be FUN!" chortles my inner child. I smile.

Happiness - thoughtfully

Dr. Nick Baylis, author of the newly released book The Rough Guide to Happiness: Practical Steps for All-Round Well-Being, spreads his passion for living life to the fullest in his work as an experienced therapist, lecturer and columnist. He begins by explaining what happiness is not: it is not the definition given by Freud -the sum of our pleasures minus our pain.

According to Baylis, pleasure and happiness are not the same. Pleasure is a transitory state dependent on our physical sensations or emotions. Happiness is a deep rapport with life: with others, with nature, with our own conscious and sub-conscious. I could read The Rough Guide to Happiness in one day - and then forget most of what I read. Instead, I'm approaching it as an opportunity to make changes in my own life, by embracing the ideas in his book one by one.

Yesterday I went for the longest walk in a year, exploring the neighborhood around our apartment. It was not the bicycle ride I would have done in years past, but to do nothing because I can't do what I used to enjoy would be to quit the struggle to remain actively engaged with life. And it is a struggle most days, but that is no reason to give up.

There was a merry wedding in the park we passed by, with a horse-drawn carriage for the bridal party. In this recently-built neighborhood, the houses were architected in a style strongly reminiscent of old Portland, and the charming streets reminded me of days from my childhood. A bank of pale pink climbing roses wafted a scent that brought back the rose trellis in our back yard when I was in grade school.

Sights, sounds, smells, memory: engaged with my world, myself, a satisfying afternoon to save in my memory portfolio.

On Grey Hair and Wrinkles

My husband and I both engaged in risky behavior when we were young: speeding cars, speeding jets, speeding boats, etc. We liked to go fast. We also did not think we'd live to be over thirty (that was old!) and we didn't plan for living long and well. Short lives but happy was practically our motto.

So now he is seventy and I'm getting there, and we really are quite perplexed to discover grey hair and wrinkles in the mirror. How did this happen to us? One day at a time, I suppose, but still, we aren't any older in our hearts. Perspective changes though.

On Monday at the periodontist, the hygienist, who I had assumed was newly out of high school and no more than twenty years old, told the dentist he just turned thirty. I nearly choked. Not only do I feel as if I'm walking around in a weird disguise like an 'old person', but really old people like thirty-year- olds are disguising themselves as high school kids.

This just is not acceptable. I'm going to get out my belly-dance CD before I start really believing I'm as old as I look.

All Clear

If the definition of courage is doing something that terrifies you, then I'm much braver than I ever thought - over something most people take for granted, so it doesn't count. Good news, I have a very pretty colon, as colons go, and I will not ruin your day by telling the ugly details of preparation. As a funny consequence, seeing the periodontist next week looks easy by comparison. So the moral of these appointments? Eat your fiber and floss your teeth.

Even a Panda Sometimes Needs a Colonoscopy

Tai Shan at our National Zoo underwent a colonoscopy earlier this month. I shouldn't complain about a mere sigmoidoscopy, so I won't. I printed a picture of Tai Shan being brave to inspire me. This is the third time I have agreed to schedule this procedure, and I won't cancel this time. I won't, won't won't....

Ow. ow - ow - ow

Interesting fact about the elliptical exercise machine - the resistance can be set from low to high. Now I know. (But I didn't know the day before yesterday, when I just hopped on a vacant machine in the gym downstairs. Although I wondered why I couldn't make my machine go as fast as the one my neighbor was using.) So. It turns out my machine was set for 'up a steep hill'. My first time using it. Owww-www.

Sleepless, reading The Beggars Trilogy

I've been an insomniac my entire life. When I was a toddler, my mother would put me down for a nap, and once she fell asleep, I would get up and play.

When I was older, I was found sleep-walking. Life is just too intensely interesting to spend much of it laying down with my eyes shut. When I was made to stay in bed, I brought a flashlight with me so that I could read under the covers.

So I was immediately intrigued by the concept in Beggars in Spain, of a society of Sleepless - people genetically engineered to be productive and awake 24/7. Fifteen years after the first publication, Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride is still a mind-boggling rich tapestry of futuristic society, with deep characterizations, a plot that twists shockingly right up to the ending, and a piercingly accurate portrayal of thought processes and social dynamics.

The science is believable and has not yet been outdated, (at least not so far as this non-scientist could tell at any rate). It doesn't get in the way of the plot, and does generate musings on social and medical ethics. Like Heinlein, Cherryh, and Orson Scott Card, Nancy Kress uses the contrast between familiar human society and alien society as a vehicle for raising the question of what, exactly, makes us human and what we value in a person or a society. Beggars in Spain won a Nebula and a Hugo award. I give the trilogy my own highest honor: I'm keeping it on my bookshelf, because I will read it again.

Like a trip to the dentist only cheaper -

Take one (former) shopaholic. Give her a Ph.D. in psychology and ten years experience treating over-shopping. Publish her book about how to get free of the vast consumer conspiracy surrounding us, and you have Dr. April Lane Benson and her vital new book: To Buy or Not to Buy.

This is not a comfortable book for me to read. I find my behavior unmasked and as undeniable as my shoulder-length gray hair. Have I used shopping to feel better about myself? Yes. Have I used shopping to avoid confronting a situation I want to avoid? Yes. Have I used shopping as a weapon to express anger? Yes. Sometimes to all of the above, and other questions in chapter one.

Like a trip to the dentist, confronting my negative behavior and the psychology behind it can be painful, but also healing. I love this book, because there is healing in getting the rot out. Dr. Benson offers a way to find authentic happiness to replace the false esteem of keeping up with (or exceeding) the 'Joneses'. She points out the relentless consumerism driving our economy, with tentacles invading our consciousness through stores, malls, television, catalogs, Internet and even cell phone shopping. She uncovers the true cost of credit card purchases, and documents the ways invisible forces demand that we buy "more more more and now now now".

Knowledge is power. Self-knowledge is the power to change. To Buy or Not to Buy is a tool that can enable us to get free of our compulsive shopping. If you are confident that you don't have any shopping addictions, I challenge you to go to a bookstore and browse her book - consider the many ways we can fool ourselves into buying things to fill an emotional hole rather than a material need. I recognized some of my buying patterns in her analysis, and also patterns of friends and relatives.

Our materialistic society is even more insidious than I suspected. There is compassion and not condemnation in Dr. Benson's words. I recommend her book and I will be spending the next three months working through all the exercises. I have two pages of notes this morning, a start to the journal she recommends keeping. There is no such thing as an insignificant cavity - as we all know, sooner or later it will destroy the tooth. I am going to be working on the occasional - but not insignificant - ways that I over-shop, and expect that the result will be good, even if the process is sometimes painful. I want to fix the ways that I over-shop. I need to fix buying things to repair my mood, hold onto love, fit into society, and feel in control.

Grey or Grey - sad either way:

Grey or Grey - sad either way:  fog, mist, indistinct, dismal, pale, cloudy, gloomy, dull, hoary, and also ashen, drab, dusty, mousy, grizzled, smoky, somber. All of which describes both the sky here this past week, and increasingly so, my mood as well. This is the time of year I start daydreaming about running away to live on a sunny, tropical beach. That would not be a southern Australian beach right now, with their record-breaking heat wave last week amid highs over 113 degrees. I'm thinking Boca Raton, Florida, with a forecast of sunny and high in the 70's most of next week, and silky beach sand, tropical water both warm and clear. (Well, I can dream, can't I?) There is a saying here in Oregon - "If you don't like the weather, no problem - just wait a few minutes and it will change." So. I'm waaaaiting.