Monday: A Good Day From Morning ‘Til Night

January morning light

Beautiful dawn! It reminded me of sunrise over the Gulf Coast of Florida, except that here, instead of palm trees and sawgrass, are the homier sights of cherry trees, pines, and mixed hardwoods against the winter sky. How could a day this beautiful before sunrise not turn out splendid? 

Afternoon sun streams through woods

Sarah the Intrepid!

And its early promise was fulfilled. Appointments and errands accomplished before lunch, afternoon summoned me out to meadow and woods and orchards, where Sarah enjoyed exploring, running, sniffing, and investigating, led mostly by her nose, while I followed at a more leisurely pace, my eye taking note of animal tracks and wind patterns on the sparkling surface of drifted snow.

Camera creates illusion of face-to-face meeting

Imagine the snow as sand on the beach....

It was a day of very high winds. A radio announcement warned about a wind advisory for traffic on the Mackinac Bridge. Look at the whitecaps right here on Lake Michigan. And see how bright the willows are in the sun against the blue of water and sky? They look like they’re on fire!

Sun-drenched branches, wind-tossed waters

After climbing Claudia’s hill, treading quietly through Claudia’s woods, following the orchard rows back to Kovarik Road, and then coming back north again between orchard and eastern woods, downhill toward home, I was ready to come indoors to a cup of hot tea, a tiny piece of decadent baklava, and a good book. Joseph loaned me Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, and who will be surprised that I found myself in those pages? Were you called “shy” when you were a kid? Urged against your inclination to “join the group”? Did your parents even worry that you might be “antisocial”? If this describes you, Cain says,

Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you’re told that you’re “in your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.

Or maybe—though it would surprise me to find you among my readers if this is the case—you’re the life of the party but find yourself in a relationship with a mystifying, baffling introvert and can’t help wondering what’s wrong with your partner. The answer, in a word, is nothing.

Introverts and extroverts aren’t even anti- and pro-social, as is often believed, Cain says. They’re differently social. Extroverts in general are comfortable and happy with high levels of stimulation, including louder music than introverts find pleasant. One wants a noisy party, the other a quiet table for two. Longitudinal studies show that a “high-reactive” baby, one with an excitable amygdala (located deep in the “old brain” we share with animals as different from us as rodents), a baby more vigilant and frightened and active in the face of novel stimulation, will grow up to be an introverted adult, while the placid baby undisturbed by strange sights and sounds will be the grownup extrovert.

What does this have to do with leadership—or with simply leading a happy, productive, effective life? Should we listen only to charismatic extroverts? Cain opens her book with a fascinating contrast between Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., observing that

...a formidable orator refusing to give up his seat on a segregated bus wouldn’t have had the same effect as a modest woman who’d clearly prefer to keep silent but for the exigencies of the situation. And Parks didn’t have the stuff to thrill a crowd if she’d tried to stand up and announce that she had a dream. But with King’s help, she didn’t have to.

The two of them together, the introvert and the extrovert, brought about huge changes in the United States, but if the message of the book were only that different human beings have different contributions to make, we might well say ho-hum and set it aside. So yes, there’s more to it than that.

Cain cites Warren Susman who makes the claim that America shifted from a 19^th-century Culture of Character (“serious, disciplined, honorable”) to a 20^th-century Culture of Personality, in which (Cain quoting Susman) “Every American was to become a performing self.” An extrovert is naturally a "performing self," and in the Culture of Personality, the extrovert is valorized as the ideal, the introvert devalued. Cain is not alone in thinking that this valorization of highly sociable, stimulation-seeking “go-getters” goes quite some distance to explaining the recent Wall Street debacle. There were those who saw the edge of the cliff and voiced their warnings, but they were derided as gloomy nay-sayers, afraid of their own shadows. The happy, get-rich-quick party crowd simply did not want to listen.

Even whether an introvert or an extrovert makes a better team leader turns out to depend on the make-up of the rest of the team and how the task at hand is structured. Each type has its own strengths and weaknesses. One of Cain’s repeated points, however, is that the strengths of the introverts are more easily discounted or even completely overlooked and unheard. She makes her points clearly and engagingly and backs them up with citations to research.

Whether the topic of a book is business success or world peace or how to raise kids or whatever, the ones I find most valuable offer not just theory but some kind of practical advice and strategies, and Cain comes through on this criterion, too. How should you go about finding a work environment in which you can flourish? Is it all right to “fake it”? How far can you “fake” being the type opposite from yourself and still be true to yourself? How can life partners with different needs and styles understand, accommodate, and enjoy each other over the long term?

Good stories, recent research, why it all matters, how you can apply it to your life—but maybe the single most important take-home lesson for the struggling introvert "in a world that can’t stop talking” is the permission Cain gives us (and invites us to give ourselves) to take the quiet time we need, away from the crowds. The book will be out in paper ($16) later this month, and I’ll be happy to order and ship.

Meanwhile, out in the woods in the afternoon with my dog, back home with a book, then enjoying a quiet evening with my darling and our dog, I could feel the stress of December slipping away in the peace that is January.

Savoring quiet

Looking Backward Across a Year in My Neighborhood

Evenings this winter, when I’m ready to turn out the reading light and go to sleep, which comes after David and I have watched our evening movie or a couple of episodes of “Ballykissangel” (a BBC series set in a small Irish village), I bring on sleep by revisiting in imagination the outdoor places where I sat quietly during the year past. My stated goal was to take an hour each week for what I thought of as my “stillness project,” and recalling those hours puts my mind in a relaxed and peaceful place.

I did fairly well with the project until toward the end of the year, when back problems curbed my enthusiasm, so my memories begin in the cold of January and circle through the seasons to the cold of December. My sketchbook is full of trees, weeds, old farm buildings, and a couple of away-from-home days, one in Arizona and another in the U.P. I remember winter hours of cold toes and fingers and summer hours filled with humming insects.

When I look at the stats for this one-year blog, I see that one post garnered almost no visitors. It was not an “exciting” outdoors day—but then, none of my days in this experience were “exciting” in any grand, headline-grabbing sense. No eagles landed in my field of vision, no white-tailed deer browsed close by, no turkey parades filed past. Mostly it was just me and the trees and weeds and wind and insects, chickadees and old buildings nearby and sounds of crows and traffic in the distance. Sometimes a squirrel.

The lessons of stillness began the first day. The challenge was to be quiet and patient and to welcome whatever came along. Even if there was only the breeze and a few snowflakes, it would be enough. Every day, every hour, however little it held, would be full and enough. And it was. It filled a treasure chest of memories for me.

Will this new year bring a new project? If so, it has yet to reveal itself to me.

Do You Keep a List of the Books You Read?

The other day I posted about the books I was reading on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and I realized on re-reading that post that whatever I finish from now on will have to go on a new year’s list. For better or for worse, 2012 is finished.

For a couple of years I kept lists of my reading religiously, then fell off for a couple years before starting up again in 2009. My lists tell me that I read 101 books in 2012, 102 the year before, and back in 2010 a total of 125 for the year, probably in large part because we spent the late winter and early spring in Florida, where I had few responsibilities to cut into my reading, writing, drawing, walking, and dreaming.

Looking back over my book list (total: 108) for 2009, I enjoy remembering that year’s reading. Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer was a book David and I read aloud to each other at bedtime in Florida. Patrick Smith’s novels, Allapattah and Forever Island, gave me a new appreciation for the history of the Everglades. Still Alice, fiction by Lisa Genovese, and Horse Soldiers, nonfiction by Doug Stanton, opened frightening worlds to me, as did Dreams From the Monster Factory, nonfiction by Sunny Schwartz. I was transported by the new book of Jim Harrison’s poetry, In Search of Small Gods. Don Lystra’s lovely novel, Season of Water and Ice, was part of my reading in 2009, along with Mardi Link’s Isadore’s Secret. It was a good year for Michigan writers! That year inaugurated a reading group I still refer to as “our Ulysses group,” for together we tackled James Joyce in a dozen intense and wonderful sessions.

I highly recommend the keeping of a list of each year’s reading. Part of it for me is purely practical, as titles and authors’ names tend to slip my mind unless I can refer to a list, but there are side benefits to the record, as well. As my eye runs down the list, I remember the time of year and where I was when reading that book; if it was one I read with a group or a book whose author I know or at least met, that adds another dimension; fragments of conversation and discussion with other readers of each book cling associatively to various titles; and, finally, there is the ineradicable but uncommunicable affective ambience that surrounded the reading of the books. 

My book list for each year is, then, a shorthand diary, written in a code that only I can decipher. It holds worlds of memories.

R&R on the Rocky U.K. Coasts

On New Year’s Eve, our physical selves, David’s and mine, stayed home, while our hearts and minds traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, with more of the same on New Year’s Day. In my case, it was travel to multiple destinations, involving both books and DVDs.

It began when bookstore customers and friends Walter and Marjorie learned a month ago that David would welcome movies during his post-surgical recovery. They kindly loaned us two boxed BBC series, and we are now over halfway through the six-series Irish story, “Ballykissangel,” thoroughly immersed in the life of the little rural village and its inhabitants. Here’s part of what Wikipedia has to say:

The name of the fictional village in which the show was set is derived from Ballykissane, a townland near Killorglin in County Kerry, where the show's creator, Kieran Prendiville, holidayed with his family as a child. The village's name in Irish is shown as "Baile Coisc Aingeal", which means "The town of the fallen angel" on the sign outside the post office.[1] 

The show was filmed in Avoca and Enniskerry in County Wicklow.

Quite by coincidence, two different novels also transported me to stretches of rocky United Kingdom coastline. The new M. J. Rose novel, Seduction, is set on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel (an advance reading copy came my way just before Christmas), while Meg Rosoff’s What I Was features the landscape of East Anglia, so what with going back and forth between these books and the Irish DVDs, I spent a very restful New Year’s Day on dangerous cliffs and in frightening caves, on rock-strewn beaches and tidal marshes (ever watchful for tides), and amid ruins of earlier cultures near the edge of the sea.

The third book claiming bits of my attention from time to time—short bits because each paragraph is so dense with information—was, of all things, a textbook. But what a textbook! First, the marvelous title (which I associated at first glance with Chinese history): Five Kingdoms. This introductory work by Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz is subtitled An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth and has a foreword by no less than Stephen Jay Gould, one of my science heroes. Does anyone remember my shock a few winters ago when I stumbled on what was “news” to me, namely that life on earth is no longer divided into two simple kingdoms? Whether the field of biology will eventually settle on three or five still seems up for grabs, but at least I’m starting to catch up in my very amateur way. The biggest kingdom is that of bacteria. A bacteria cell is without a nucleus. As for viruses, they are left out altogether, on the grounds that they lack cells and can only “live” (feed, grow, & reproduce) by hijacking living cells. Besides bacteria, then, the remaining kingdoms are those of Protoctista, Animalia, Fungi, and Plantae. Each chapter is illustrated with photographs and line drawings, and many pages hold a sort of illustrated frieze along the top-right page that shows the habitat in which the lives under consideration are to be found.

Gould’s foreword gives justification for the book's purpose, to anyone who feels the need to have it justified:

Some people dismiss taxonomies and their revisions as mere exercises in abstract ordering—a kind of glorified stamp collecting of no scientific merit and fit only for small minds who need to categorize their results. No view could be more false and more inappropriately arrogant. Taxonomies are reflections of human thought; they express our most fundamental concepts about the objects of our universe. Each taxonomy is a theory about the creatures that it classifies.

Margulis and Schwartz base their evolutionary theory partly on the timing of branching of life forms as shown in the fossil record. You see? Back we come again to rocks and oceans and geological discoveries, and once more we find ourselves peacefully visiting prehistoric earth through the comfortable lens of distant time.

Caught up as I was in my own reading, I can’t say what literature David enjoyed on New Year’s Day. I can attest to the fact that he also spent time with books, but the other special treat of the holiday for me was that from morning coffee through after-dinner treats, and including dinner for Sarah, David took it all on himself. A third unusual feature was that when we were not actively listening to the radio or watching a DVD, the house was quiet. No background noise or chatter. I cannot remember having a day that completely relaxing in the whole of 2012. It was sybaritic, it was voluptuous, it was almost unreal luxury. I did not miss being "out in the world” at all.

What’s It Like In Your Field?

Do you have to dress up to go to work? The first words I read this morning were from the last essay in The Tenth Muse. Here is the author describing the look of field geologists at work:

Field geologists do a lot of walking, climbing fences, fording creeks, running from domestic animals, and other activities that take their toll on personal experience. Even freshly washed clothes, an uncommon garb, are seldom ironed and usually bear numerous stains and battle scars. The geologist is invariably sunburned and thirsty, and in situations where showers are a rarity, is commonly sweaty and dirty, as well. ... In Victorian times the same problem [geologists not looking like scholars] is said to have existed. ...

Didn’t Thoreau say we should beware of enterprises requiring new clothes? When I read these words of Parker's, I feel a rush of warm fellow feeling for the sweaty geologists, and I remember a different group of unlikely scholars, the philosophers, and how at home I felt with them after realizing that—unlike the economics and political scientists faculty, who stood around between classes discussing their retirement benefit packages—philosophers outside the classroom were still chasing down questions about, say, the mental life of dogs. These, I thought then, are my people! They also tended to wear the same rumpled clothes day after day.

Writers who work in their pajamas, truck farmers with grimy knuckles, artists whose clothes attract paint drippings as a magnet attracts iron filings—in their fields of endeavor, the work is what counts, not the appearance of the worker. These are my people!

What I Like Is Sometimes (But Not Always) What Others Like

The late Prudy Meade of Leland, founder of Leelanau Books, was famous for her spot-on book recommendations. That will never (sigh!) be my legacy. (1) I am not a fast thinker (my husband says I “grind exceeding slow”); (2) I’m never up-to-date on the latest bestsellers (however many shades of whatever, I haven’t read it); and (3) I am only too aware that what excites me as a reader may well elicit nothing but yawns from some of my closest friends. When on occasion I do make a recommendation that hits the mark, my delight probably exceeds that of my happy customer. So on December 26, my first two bookstore customers brought joy to my heart.

The first person in the door on Wednesday wanted a book I’d written about on my blog (an indirect recommendation) and happily, at my suggestion, added Donald Hall’s String Too Short To Be Saved to his purchase, along with one of my new Dog Ears Books book bags. I am thoroughly confident that he will not be disappointed in either book (especially the Donald Hall), so that felt good. Then the very next customer came for a second copy of Iron Hunter, autobiography of Chase S. Osborne, our most colorful Michigan governor and the only governor ever elected from the U.P.,  a book I’d recommended to her two days earlier as a gift for someone on her list. The recipient was so enthralled that he couldn’t stop raving about the story, and everyone else in the family wanted to read it right away! Luckily, I had another copy in stock.

In the midst of December anxiety this year (surgery, storms, and power outages, to name only a few), I went on a binge of escapism, reading three Alexander McCall Smith novels back to back. I’m still escaping but in smaller doses now, a chapter or two at a time in a book of geology essays by Ronald Parker called The Tenth Muse: The Pursuit of Earth Science. How can I convey the comfort I find in reading geology? Rocks don’t care. They have no needs or desires of their own and cannot suffer pain or hurt feelings, and neither do they heed ours. Rocks award no prizes, mete out no punishment. They have stories of their own but do not—cannot—clamor to be heard in their own voices, and that lack of argument is restful, even when the subject of an essay is volcanic eruption. There are eruptions, yes, but no wars.

If rocks do not argue, however, geologists sometimes do, and Parker’s essays touch from time to time on controversies in the field. His own theory of energy buffers flew in the face of the old gradualist dogma. The laws of crystallography were overturned by the discovery of a fivefold symmetry “forbidden” by said laws. But while graduate students have nightmares, and academic careers rise and fall, those of us outside academic geology departments can remain calm and unruffled while surveying outbreaks of heresy, defense of orthodoxy, heated debate, and outcomes that make or break academic careers. It’s somewhat akin to reading of philosophical and military conflicts in medieval China.

Then there are the lovely, intriguing thoughts. Parker writes of the “safe” world of crystallography, the “security” to be found in its laws, and he finds it significant that the study arose in the West, where symmetry has always been held in high regard.

We see it in architecture, poetry, politics, and machines—indeed in almost every element of our lives. The angles between the edges of paper are universally 90 degrees, and it is unthinkable that it could be otherwise. The size of the [right]* shoe is the exact mirror-image duplicate of the left, even though with most of us the right foot is larger than the left.

Many friends who think they know us would probably be surprised that David, the artist, is the lover of symmetry, while I, the bookwoman, prefer asymmetrical balance. I think people would expect the reverse of the two of us, but I felt much more at home in the next paragraph of Parker’s essay on crystals:

Objects in the Zen world should lack symmetry, just as the natural world lacks symmetry. Left is not the same as right any more than yesterday is the same as tomorrow. ... A bowl from a German factory is perfectly shaped, with no variation from the circular cross section at any cut parallel to its base. A Japanese raiku bowl is intentionally made asymmetrical by being picked out of the kiln with tongs while the hot silicate mass is still plastic. Each Western bowl is, ideally, just the same as every other. 

... Each raiku bowl is obviously unique, just as each carrot or tree or person is unique.

Two memories emerge as I re-read these lines, pausing with delight and repeating aloud, “Left is not the same as right any more than yesterday is the same as tomorrow,” my mind’s eye glancing fondly in Henri Bergson’s direction. One is a memory of the small museum buildings just to the east of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. At least, I am remembering them as two. Perhaps they are one building with two separate exhibit rooms, but that is really beside the point. The first large exhibit space contained crystals. I explored each case and dutifully admired the colors and facets, but they left me unmoved. In the second exhibit space were fossils of prehistoric mammals, and I shiver now to remember my feelings as I gazed on the remains of an ancient proto-mouse. A fellow creature! It lived and breathed, “saw sunset glow,” ate and procreated and died. I could feel for the animal fossil.

Then there was the summer a friend happened to mention that her kitchen lacked a good wooden salad bowl. My weekend flea market trips took on the flavor of a mission, and finally, having examined and rejected any number of possibilities, I bought my friend not one but two wooden salad bowls. Each seemed perfect to me in a different way, one in the regular, Western way, and the other in the imperfect Zen way. “So I bought them both.” Her husband immediately judged the regular bowl to be the better, saying of the other one that it was too heavy at the base and had a sloping rim. “I know, I know--.” My friend smiled at me and understood without explanation.

Despite his love of symmetry, David shares my fondness for animal bones and recognizes what I treasure in irregular oddities. He finds me rather an oddity sometimes. When I turn to geology as escape reading, he shakes his head and laughs.

I’ve looked into the remaining pages of my current book and see, to my great relief, that there is nothing there on fracking. It isn’t that I’m sticking my head in the sand permanently, you understand—I’ve faced and will face again this important geological and economic issue—but for now it’s holiday time, the last week of the year, with long, cold nights and short, chill days, and I’m thrilled to see, coming up in the very next essay (am reading about salt at present) a reference to those “Chinese paintings with a mystical-looking land with towering, steep-sided hills rising above a flat plain.” Oh, boy! Yes! We have seen that landscape in travelogues and marveled to realize that it is realistically represented, not stylized, in the Chinese paintings.

This is what I call very relaxing reading. There's a lot to be said for aesthetic distance.

[*There was a typographical error in the sentence, with "left" appearing twice and "right" not at all, but the intended meaning was clear in context.]

Holiday Greetings From Up North

The favorite movie of one of my girlhood friends was “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1955), starring Judy Garland. My friend was so good at “telling” movies that I couldn’t figure out for years if I’d seen this one myself or just heard the story from her. We’ve all heard the song, though--“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” with music by Ralph Blane and lyrics by Hugh Martin. Anything Judy Garland ever sung had a poignant quality, don't you think? It was something about the vulnerability in her eyes and the courage in her voice. But there have been different versions of the lyrics to this song over the years, and that's interesting, too. 

Life isn’t always easy, and a lot of people struggle with pain of one kind of another. Holidays are no exception. What to do about it? To “hang a shining star upon the highest bough” is one way to defy sadness, but it is a gesture of a moment, whereas to “muddle through somehow,” putting one foot in front of the other, doing all the little, ordinary things that have to be done day after day--that is a beautiful and deep kind of bravery.

Wherever you are this year, and whatever you are growing through, with family or on your own, I wish you at least moments of heart-lightness. And here's your song:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas 

Let your heart be light 

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight  

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Make the yuletide gay 

Next year all our troubles will be miles away 

Once again as in olden days 

Happy golden days of yore 

Faithful friends who are dear to us 

Will be near to us once more  

Someday soon, we all will be together 

If the fates allow 

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow 

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

Holiday Plans and Holiday News

My plans, of course, are always subject to revision, but despite the beginning of what has been forecast as a 36-hour storm, I have made it to Northport this morning, and the bookstore will be open at 11 a.m. Yes! We are here, we are local, and we are OPEN! Schools are closed, and the roads are bad enough that I wouldn't be keen to drive to Traverse City today myself.

Then what? Will we be socked in at the farm tomorrow, or will we make it to Northport again? I'm hoping for the latter and that the bookstore will also be open all weekend--Saturday until 5 o'clock and Sunday until about 3. Then on Monday, Christmas Eve, I'll have my Emergency Last-Minute Gift Wrapping Table set up for customers who waited until or got caught short at--well, you get it.

For the rest of today's post, I want to share an e-mail I got from Traverse City author Jerry Dennis, most recently at Dog Ears Books with artist Glenn Wolff to sign copies of The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes. Here is their latest public offering, in Jerry's words:

I’m happy to announce that Glenn Wolff, Chad Pastotnik, and I have teamed up to produce a second edition of our classic limited-edition broadside, “The Trout in Winter.” The first edition of 60 came out in December 2000, quickly sold out, and is now highly sought after. This new one, signed and numbered in an edition of 65, has some new features, including Glenn’s engraving of a stonefly nymph in the lower right corner and Chad’s gold ink on caps and typographical tweaks. The text itself is unchanged (read the story of the notorious “e’s” on my blog. The price is $225 (plus shipping). Please feel free to contact me with any questions. 

For more information you can also visitn Deep Wood Press and/or go to Glenn’s Facebook page for a gallery of photos of us at work on the project. 

Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays to you, Jerry, Glenn, and Chad! You all do beautiful work!

A Fog of Causes

Into the fog we go again.

While David was in surgery on Thursday morning, a good friend of ours kept me company in the waiting room. This friend is a cardiac nurse and gave me some advice about back problems I’ve been having lately: apply ice, take anti-inflammatory medication, wear a good brace to support the back, and, yes, think about investing in a good mattress. I told him I’d tried the ice a couple evenings, to no effect whatsoever, and he replied that when he tells someone to take aspirin, get bed rest, and drink a lot of fluids, the person is quite likely to report a few days later that he followed the advice about fluids but ignored the rest. “You can’t just do one thing,” he said. “You have to do it all. It all works together.”

When we human beings think about cause and effect, it’s all too easy for us to envision oversimplified schematics, such as a pool cue hitting a cue ball that hits another ball that goes into a pocket. Even the physical world of pure material causes is seldom that simple! And as for that pool cue—wasn’t someone guiding it?  And so, looking beyond the pool table at the larger realm of human behavior, a complex and confusing welter of dreams, fears, resentments, desires, hopes, and intentions, is it any wonder we want to simplify the picture? But simplification distorts and falsifies reality.

The cue ball had no choice. It offered nothing other than insufficient material resistance to the cue that struck it and no resentment whatsoever against the ball it struck. A purely causal explanation tells the story. Human beings are different. We are intentional beings, partly but not fully conscious of our own desires and aims, and there it is. If we had no intentions, material causes would explain us, and there would be no “behavior” at all. If we were fully conscious, completely aware of all our intentions and emotions, we would behave very differently from the way we do. But that’s not who or where we are. We move through a fog that obscures our own motives as well as those of others, and often, searching for simple explanations, we tell stories that serve only to generate more fog.

Much is hidden, and we see little.

Whenever there is a tragedy such as the recent school shooting in Connecticut, the same sadly predictable, two-sided debate questions are hurried onstage. Is our violent film industry to blame? (Sides form up in yes or no lines.) Is America’s love of guns the culprit? (Debaters say yes or no.) Easy access to deadly weapons? Or maybe it’s violent video games or untreated mental illness or drug addiction or divorce or one-parent families or parental neglect or parental abuse or bullying from others or social isolation or post-traumatic stress?

How can we think only one identifiable “thing” is to blame? We all know individuals, maybe even ourselves, who have suffered from or participated in any of the possible “causes” listed above but have not gone on a rampage of violence. So we say, no, bullying doesn’t explain it, because I was bullied as a child, too. Or we say, no, guns cannot be at fault, because everyone in my family hunts, and none of us would ever kill another human being. Or, no, we can't blame violent movies, because I’ve seen plenty of them, or no, it can’t be divorce, because my parents were divorced—and on and on and on. Everyone is ready to point to a cause, and there’s always someone else ready to argue that what is identified as the cause is insufficient.

Human status: "It's complicated."

I would feel more hopeful about a solution if there were more indications of awareness that the reasons and explanations for these horrible tragedies come from many directions, from time to time converging (to schematize) on a vulnerable point, a desperate individual. Can we not imagine that while every contributing cause is insufficient it itself, together they gain strength? And so, every contributing cause may be significant, even though insufficient in itself?

It isn’t enough to try only to stop bullying in schools or only to put tougher restrictions on purchase and ownership of weapons or only to intervene in troubled families or to take any single line of remediation, ignoring other sources of harm. On the other side of the coin, it is naive and unhelpful for anyone to say, “No, it isn’t my bullying or cruel teasing or gun manufacture or violent film production or violent video game creation or sales of weapons or sales of violent films or games or music or my not bothering to know my neighbor or my avoiding eye contact with people I meet or my rush-to-judgment of others’ motives and overly confident faith in the purity of my own-------.” On and on and on.

As long as I live, I will probably be enough a child of the Sixties to believe that “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” We children of the Sixties, like the children of every other decade, surely made our own contributions to this problem. The question is, can we stop pointing fingers and come together to explore possible solutions? Can we find our way into the light together?

Seeking clarity....

I have been thinking and thinking about how to say this, and here is what I think I want to say: If the last straw had been the first, it alone would not have broken the camel’s back, but each and every straw the camel was asked to carry would have contributed its weight to the final result. 

Our Precious Time: Families, Together and Asunder

Visiting Indulgent Friends 

Early Friday morning I began composing a cheery post for my blog. David’s imminent homecoming and the indulgence of Sarah’s volunteer dog-sitters toward their canine guest was the occasion for me to put together my thoughts. Here’s what I’d written:

Sarah had her first overnight away from her folks. That’s right, our little five-year-old dog has never before been away from both of us at the same time. If David and I were not traveling together, Sarah always went with the traveler or stayed home with the stay-at-home, but usually it’s been all three of us on the road. She has never been in a kennel since that one night at the Humane Society before we were lucky enough to find her and snatch that four-month-old puppy up before anyone else.

Look at that picture again. She looks pretty comfortable, doesn’t she? It didn’t take long at Bill and Sally’s house for Sarah to find Bill’s favorite chair and appropriate it for herself. He could have ordered her down and onto her comforter on the floor, but he got out his camera instead. Is this girl spoiled, or what? She gets away with it, too.

It has been a very anxious five weeks for us, waiting for David’s scheduled surgery. We stayed overnight at the Munson Manor Hospitality Inn the night before, applauding ourselves for the wisdom of that choice, which freed us up from having to drive into town in the dark in what would have seemed (and did, anyway, even in town) like the middle of the night and took away the worry of possible severe weather and dangerous road conditions. Not that the weather was dangerous, as it turned out, but in December, in Michigan, you never know. And when you already have enough to worry about....

Now all is well. The surgical procedure went without a hitch (there were a few stitches, but not even many of those), and we are all together again at home. This is all the Christmas present I need. My cup overfloweth.

I wrote all this in anticipation, before David was actually home. He was discharged as expected later yesterday morning, and he and Sarah were both happy to see each other again. We were all happy to be together at home once more, but then David wanted to rest in bed and listen to the radio. That’s when we heard the horrible news. Our weeks of anxiety were put into perspective, and our happiness appeared in sharp contrast to the agony and heartbreak of families.

Life happens all around us. It happens relentlessly, unceasingly, all at once. It is—overwhelming. In the best of cases, we have it for only a very short time, on loan. Not to be taken for granted, it is—everything. Who has words today?