February 24, 2007
Drove alone to Indianapolis to hear my daughter Julia, who had driven to Indy earlier on the school bus, perform with her vocal emsembles at the high school ISSMA state contest. On the way down I listened to Pema Chodron's "Awakening Compassion" and to some of E. M. Forster's "Howard's End." Tonglen practice--"Drive all blame into the self" and breathe out the feelings you would like to establish. Then the adventures of Helen and Margaret Schlegel--"Only Connect." When I arrived at Warren High School the parking lot was as crowded as New York City at rush hour. Once inside, with the thousands of students and parent swarming to watch the performances, I felt like part of some larger good. Parents and students were shepherded around by dozens, maybe hundreds, of volunteers. So many students rising to the occasion, created by an association that allows for many students to have a performing experience that otherwise might be open only to a select few. Julia sang soprano in a barbershop quartet, "Baby Face," (after the judge had to listen to half a dozen renditions of "Yesterday") and they did it beautifully, with expression and style. She was so happy to see me, and snuggled up to my side, and so happy to go out to eat--she's a Vegetarian foodie. The traffic was still terrible, so we found our Veggie treats at a nearby Qdoba where we also saw a winter storm warning on the news. After her women's ensemble sang "How Can I Keep from Singing," we headed for home in the sleet and freezing rain, but first circling town to look for the bead store in Broad Ripple, and then to eat out at another fun place before returning to the more bland and familiar cuisine of our hometown. We parked and walked through blocks of puddles and slop to the Bead Store, which we had visited after last year's contest, when the weather was spring-like but bracing. This year it was closed early, the proprietor no doubt having fled because of the storm warnings we were not heeding. The Thai restaurant we wanted to eat at was closed, too, because of the weather, so we found a table at Shalimar, the Indian restaurant next door. But I grew more and more worried, so we asked for styrofoam boxes and began the drive home. By the time we got on the road home we were crawling through an ice storm, driving about 30 mph the entire way. Here I was traveling with my most precious daughter, having waited in Indy to please her, and now taking both of our lives in my hands as I drove through a desert of snow and ice, the road barely visible. At one point along State Route 31 I saw lights flashing intermittently like someone was setting off firecrackers. But it was actually the electrical wires that had come loose from their poles and were showering out sparks and flames into the snow and ice. I was glad that the bursts of flame were coming from the opposite side of the road. And breathed a prayer of gratitude when we finally crawled into our driveway about midnight.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Lenten Journal
2-21-07
Woke up with more energy today. It helps that the snow is melting and the sun out. Went to pick up Ida Mae, my Amish cleaning helper, for the first time since her gall bladder operation four weeks ago. She's doing much better. And Senior Seminar today was wonderful. The students ran the class beautifully--Kristine and Alex gave their "English Major" initial statements in which both expressed reserve and ambivalence about their majors. Then Erin and Anita led a succinct and coherent discussion of cultural construction and Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths." I just sat back and the students engaged each other in conversation for a good hour, enjoying the opportunity for cross-talk. I could truly practice "sitting quietly" and allowing them to take over the space. Kristine and Alex stopped to talk with me after class about their essays and I assured them that their ambivalence was a normal English major phase. They mentioned, too, the practical emphasis of Mennonite culture--the anxiety that they weren't doing anything worthwhile when they were reading and writing poetry. Sad, but so true. Alice stopped by to ask about helping me with the newsletter and working as a student assistant. An answer to prayer.
Borges's story has many interesting facets, but one that seems prophetic to me now is that it is filled with intercultural conflict: the story of a Chinese Spy teaching English in a German School in England, working for Germans he despises in order to prove that the Chinese are worthy. And then assassinating the British sinologist who has solved the mystery of his grandfather's labyrinth in order to send a message to the German General about the location of the next English attack--and dying with regret at having committed such a crime without provocation. The entire story seems to be told through the mind of a ghost, and the inherent ethnic conflict all too prophetic. I wish I'd brought this up with the students, but I'm even prouder of myself that I could stay in the background and let them run the course.
To night at yoga I worked hard, almost didn't have the energy to hold plank position long enough to do the moves Kara was teaching us. It would go better, I realized, if I practiced every day as though it were a music lesson. But even once a week the practice is beneficial. I kept Willow for Lizzie during her yoga class and beyond. Mostly Willow was restless, and turned and turned in my arms like a little screw. "Monkey" I decided is her animal name.
I have 3 poems in my Lenten commonplace book now, after two day, and have enjoyed reading student responses to Susan Neville's Iconography--asking them to write about a metaphor that intrigued them has worked really well. Helps them to look at the texture of the writing, which is its best part. And one student, Emily, wrote tonight that Neville's honesty about her own imperfections invites the reader to spiritual practice as well.
Woke up with more energy today. It helps that the snow is melting and the sun out. Went to pick up Ida Mae, my Amish cleaning helper, for the first time since her gall bladder operation four weeks ago. She's doing much better. And Senior Seminar today was wonderful. The students ran the class beautifully--Kristine and Alex gave their "English Major" initial statements in which both expressed reserve and ambivalence about their majors. Then Erin and Anita led a succinct and coherent discussion of cultural construction and Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths." I just sat back and the students engaged each other in conversation for a good hour, enjoying the opportunity for cross-talk. I could truly practice "sitting quietly" and allowing them to take over the space. Kristine and Alex stopped to talk with me after class about their essays and I assured them that their ambivalence was a normal English major phase. They mentioned, too, the practical emphasis of Mennonite culture--the anxiety that they weren't doing anything worthwhile when they were reading and writing poetry. Sad, but so true. Alice stopped by to ask about helping me with the newsletter and working as a student assistant. An answer to prayer.
Borges's story has many interesting facets, but one that seems prophetic to me now is that it is filled with intercultural conflict: the story of a Chinese Spy teaching English in a German School in England, working for Germans he despises in order to prove that the Chinese are worthy. And then assassinating the British sinologist who has solved the mystery of his grandfather's labyrinth in order to send a message to the German General about the location of the next English attack--and dying with regret at having committed such a crime without provocation. The entire story seems to be told through the mind of a ghost, and the inherent ethnic conflict all too prophetic. I wish I'd brought this up with the students, but I'm even prouder of myself that I could stay in the background and let them run the course.
To night at yoga I worked hard, almost didn't have the energy to hold plank position long enough to do the moves Kara was teaching us. It would go better, I realized, if I practiced every day as though it were a music lesson. But even once a week the practice is beneficial. I kept Willow for Lizzie during her yoga class and beyond. Mostly Willow was restless, and turned and turned in my arms like a little screw. "Monkey" I decided is her animal name.
I have 3 poems in my Lenten commonplace book now, after two day, and have enjoyed reading student responses to Susan Neville's Iconography--asking them to write about a metaphor that intrigued them has worked really well. Helps them to look at the texture of the writing, which is its best part. And one student, Emily, wrote tonight that Neville's honesty about her own imperfections invites the reader to spiritual practice as well.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Lenten Journal
2-20-07
After the Mardi Gras poetry reading at Goshen College last night--where we read poetry about New Orleans and Hurricanes and the rebuilding after Katrina and Rita and then announced the winners of the Broadside Poetry Contest, crowning them King and Queen--Ash Wednesday seems slow and weary. Almost like a New Year's Day, when resolutions suddenly seem daunting and dreary, and one's waistline swells with the previous evening's indulgences. The students in my Spiritual Writings of Women class are beginning their Lenten projects today, and so I thought I'd begin mine, too. I will keep a simple commonplace book, copy down a poem a day into a handmade book created by a young artist from Elkhart, Indiana, an act of listening to other voices. Something that it appears I will need to practice more and more with age. "Mother was sad that no one wanted her advice any more," one of my sisters told me over Christmas. We lost her in 2004 and we are still very much in mourning. She was such a wise woman, so full of experience, and yet, sadly, she was right--we didn't want much advice. We just wanted her to listen as we stumbled about our lives, and slogged through our mistakes, learning on our own. Listening is hard for me, especially at this busy time in my teaching semester when I have no time for my own writing, and I'm just bursting with ideas. Now even the classroom doesn't seem the place to express them. I've never tried a blog before, but in these days when I'm at the computer a lot and I keep misplacing my notebook, I thought I'd give it a chance. Perhaps writing out the voices in my head will help me open my head and heart enough to listen more attentively.
Yesterday a lovely student told me in an email that he thought that there wasn't enough discussion in class, because after I spoke there was nothing left for them to say. "You know the material so well and you've thought about it so much, that perhaps they are intimidated. Your comments are very good, but if you could save them for later in the class period, perhaps more people would speak up." So that was today's plan. I'd asked students to respond to one entry from Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, choosing in a lectio divina manner what chose them, and write about it. I was thrilled with the responses I was receiving over email. One student wrote about "Blood"--it connected the Vagina Monologues and the notion of honoring the body with incarnational Christianity for her. Another wrote about "Exorcism"--a word that's terrified her so much that she's afraid to watch movies on the subject. (I don't blame her--I also avoid them like the plague.) But when she discovered Kathleen's view of demon possession as addiction, she began to re-possess the word. Another student confronted her own fears about owning her own spiritual journey through Norris's entry on doubt and unbelief. So I lit a candle and then asked students to read their responses aloud, suggesting a bit of silence in between. Well, perhaps these students are such good listeners that they don't need to talk, but my --there certainly was silence! Was it reflection, or fear, or intimidation, or boredom? I felt so let down after class. What I'd expected, the gathering of a bouquet of voices, didn't happen. It didn't feel like any flower arranging was going on. The flowers stayed put in their individual plastic holders, nodding at each other vaguely across the room. They had gathered in my mind only, during late night and early morning reading on the internet. Perhaps this isn't fair. Perhaps these students' efforts were the seeds of future dialogue. Risking the sharing in the group is scary for them. They didn't read the most personal parts that would really have helped them connect to each other. Open the heart. Breathe in the fragments, breathe out unity. Keep doing it. Keep doing it, Ann.
I've been listening to Pema Chodron on Tonglen. I started last Thursday morning, when Elizabeth, my daughter, called at 7 in the morning to see if she could drop off Willow, her daughter, for the morning. I'd risen at 5:30 so I could read papers and would have had just enough time to finish them by the time I met Senior Seminar at 12:30, but now, Willow was coming my way with her seven months of energy and delight, and I would also have to drive out in the snow to get Lorana, the Amish woman who cleans for me. I knew Lizzie needed me--she needed to sand walls before the painter arrived, she said, and I didn't know how she'd so it even without Willow--so I said OK and tried to breathe my way through school preparations with Julia and David, Willow on my hip. The house was a disaster, and I couldn't even seem to get dishes in the dishwasher before the cleaning help came. At one point I lay Willow, who was clinging to me, down on the floor so I could get a load out of the washer and into the dryer. She just screamed her bloody head off. Well, this is not quality child care, I thought. Not what she deserves. How was I going to calm my racing heart, bucking with the pressure of all I had to get done and a child to care for who needs all the calmness I can muster? I snatched the Pema Chodron conversation with Alice Walker tape out of my office, buckled the screaming Willow into her car seat, and drove to get Lorana, listening to the voices of these two calm wise women. I'd heard the tape before, but wasn't really listening. This time I practiced the basic instructions for Tonglen as I drove by snow-covered Amish farms, the sun rise glow still in the sky. And I began to calm down. Open the heart I kept telling myself. Open the heart. And now, with Tonglen, I was being asked to take in suffering and breathe out joy and peace. So Willow lulled into sleep and I began to remember to breathe and I opened the heart. I began to feel how suffering can dissolve like alka selzer with the breath. Those hard knots of resistance and pain. A kind of lamaze for the groaning psyche, the groaning earth. And I made a space for Willow, and a space for myself, and all my papers did not get done for the seminar, but some did, and the world did not end.
After the Mardi Gras poetry reading at Goshen College last night--where we read poetry about New Orleans and Hurricanes and the rebuilding after Katrina and Rita and then announced the winners of the Broadside Poetry Contest, crowning them King and Queen--Ash Wednesday seems slow and weary. Almost like a New Year's Day, when resolutions suddenly seem daunting and dreary, and one's waistline swells with the previous evening's indulgences. The students in my Spiritual Writings of Women class are beginning their Lenten projects today, and so I thought I'd begin mine, too. I will keep a simple commonplace book, copy down a poem a day into a handmade book created by a young artist from Elkhart, Indiana, an act of listening to other voices. Something that it appears I will need to practice more and more with age. "Mother was sad that no one wanted her advice any more," one of my sisters told me over Christmas. We lost her in 2004 and we are still very much in mourning. She was such a wise woman, so full of experience, and yet, sadly, she was right--we didn't want much advice. We just wanted her to listen as we stumbled about our lives, and slogged through our mistakes, learning on our own. Listening is hard for me, especially at this busy time in my teaching semester when I have no time for my own writing, and I'm just bursting with ideas. Now even the classroom doesn't seem the place to express them. I've never tried a blog before, but in these days when I'm at the computer a lot and I keep misplacing my notebook, I thought I'd give it a chance. Perhaps writing out the voices in my head will help me open my head and heart enough to listen more attentively.
Yesterday a lovely student told me in an email that he thought that there wasn't enough discussion in class, because after I spoke there was nothing left for them to say. "You know the material so well and you've thought about it so much, that perhaps they are intimidated. Your comments are very good, but if you could save them for later in the class period, perhaps more people would speak up." So that was today's plan. I'd asked students to respond to one entry from Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, choosing in a lectio divina manner what chose them, and write about it. I was thrilled with the responses I was receiving over email. One student wrote about "Blood"--it connected the Vagina Monologues and the notion of honoring the body with incarnational Christianity for her. Another wrote about "Exorcism"--a word that's terrified her so much that she's afraid to watch movies on the subject. (I don't blame her--I also avoid them like the plague.) But when she discovered Kathleen's view of demon possession as addiction, she began to re-possess the word. Another student confronted her own fears about owning her own spiritual journey through Norris's entry on doubt and unbelief. So I lit a candle and then asked students to read their responses aloud, suggesting a bit of silence in between. Well, perhaps these students are such good listeners that they don't need to talk, but my --there certainly was silence! Was it reflection, or fear, or intimidation, or boredom? I felt so let down after class. What I'd expected, the gathering of a bouquet of voices, didn't happen. It didn't feel like any flower arranging was going on. The flowers stayed put in their individual plastic holders, nodding at each other vaguely across the room. They had gathered in my mind only, during late night and early morning reading on the internet. Perhaps this isn't fair. Perhaps these students' efforts were the seeds of future dialogue. Risking the sharing in the group is scary for them. They didn't read the most personal parts that would really have helped them connect to each other. Open the heart. Breathe in the fragments, breathe out unity. Keep doing it. Keep doing it, Ann.
I've been listening to Pema Chodron on Tonglen. I started last Thursday morning, when Elizabeth, my daughter, called at 7 in the morning to see if she could drop off Willow, her daughter, for the morning. I'd risen at 5:30 so I could read papers and would have had just enough time to finish them by the time I met Senior Seminar at 12:30, but now, Willow was coming my way with her seven months of energy and delight, and I would also have to drive out in the snow to get Lorana, the Amish woman who cleans for me. I knew Lizzie needed me--she needed to sand walls before the painter arrived, she said, and I didn't know how she'd so it even without Willow--so I said OK and tried to breathe my way through school preparations with Julia and David, Willow on my hip. The house was a disaster, and I couldn't even seem to get dishes in the dishwasher before the cleaning help came. At one point I lay Willow, who was clinging to me, down on the floor so I could get a load out of the washer and into the dryer. She just screamed her bloody head off. Well, this is not quality child care, I thought. Not what she deserves. How was I going to calm my racing heart, bucking with the pressure of all I had to get done and a child to care for who needs all the calmness I can muster? I snatched the Pema Chodron conversation with Alice Walker tape out of my office, buckled the screaming Willow into her car seat, and drove to get Lorana, listening to the voices of these two calm wise women. I'd heard the tape before, but wasn't really listening. This time I practiced the basic instructions for Tonglen as I drove by snow-covered Amish farms, the sun rise glow still in the sky. And I began to calm down. Open the heart I kept telling myself. Open the heart. And now, with Tonglen, I was being asked to take in suffering and breathe out joy and peace. So Willow lulled into sleep and I began to remember to breathe and I opened the heart. I began to feel how suffering can dissolve like alka selzer with the breath. Those hard knots of resistance and pain. A kind of lamaze for the groaning psyche, the groaning earth. And I made a space for Willow, and a space for myself, and all my papers did not get done for the seminar, but some did, and the world did not end.
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