Monday, February 28, 2011

Cherish

I wrote a story about the days after my second child’s birth.  I knew those days were special, a gift filled with wonder and awe.  Yet, I was miserable - stretched to the limits of my ability to subsist without sleep, without cooking healthy food, without free time, without claim to my own body, without skills to balance unexpected demands, wrenched with love for two tiny creatures. 

During that time I encountered people who reminded me how much I should treasure those special days.  All I could do was wonder, “How?  How am I supposed to enjoy this?”  After wallowing in the story as it became words on paper, I think what people meant was cherish the days but all I could hear was words of my failure to thrive in them.

The Merriam Webster site lists the following definitions for cherish.
1.  to hold dear; feel or show affection for:  cherish friends
2.  to keep or cultivate with care and affection:  cherish a marriage
3.  to entertain or harbor in the mind deeply and resolutely:  cherish a memory

Some moments I cherish are fun ones.  My disco roller skating tenth birthday party.  The first time I went for pizza with friends after a high school football game without my parents.  Road trips with college pals.  My wedding day.  The first run down a waterslide with my kids.  But some moments are so difficult we don’t ever want to do them again.  A breakup, nursing a child who refuses to sleep, illness, working through family issues.  Challenging stuff. 
Yet, we value the times of fun and difficult times that taught us we are stronger than our adversaries, stronger than our biology, stronger than our finances might suggest.  Who knew?  The older people giving me advice.  Maybe that is what folks in grocery stores and the library were trying to tell me.
Cherish is used often in reference to memories.  Sometime times we cannot value an experience until it has left us still alive and somewhat better for it.  Do we have to pass through and look back at something to keep or cultivate it with care and affection?
I’d like to try to cherish more moments in the moment with my family, my friends, and perhaps my challenges, too.  I want to hold dear reading Dora’s Book of Manners each night, night after night after night.  I want to cultivate care and affection for make dinner that is being rejected as gross before it is even finished.  I want to show affection for a conversation with my tween about anything at all!  I want to hold dear my striving to create organization and balance in my life.  I cannot say I enjoy some of these moments.  But I can harbor them in my mind deeply and resolutely. 

Monday, February 21, 2011

Hate

With all the love being celebrated last week it seems the news was full of hate.  Is hate the opposite of love?  On the contrary, I think they are more like cousins, offspring of a related human place but opposing each other – one a destroyer, one a creator.
Mirriam-webster.com states the following meanings for hate:
noun -
·         intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury
·         extreme dislike or antipathy
·         an object of hatred
verb –
·         to feel extreme enmity toward
·         to have a strong aversion to; find very distasteful
·         to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility

Hate can be a sensation - a noun, or hate can be a verb - an action.  The first entry assumes what I think is necessary for feeling hate (or love), a relationship of some kind.  The relationship can be with a person, with one’s past, with a set of teachings or laws, a religion or government.  Fear, anger, and sense of injury all arise in situations where we are not alone.  We cannot hate what we do not experience in person or in philosophy.  Hate as an action can be as small as writing a scathing letter to the committal of a violent crime.   
I suppose we have all known hate in some form.  Felt it grow in our own bodies or felt it radiate toward us.  Words such as intense, extreme, and strong are present in the meaning of hate.  This is not a quiet thing.   
Hate is a thing to try to be rid of.  My personal experience of manifesting hate means my own body holds the feelings.  Hate as an internal emotion often doesn’t affect the receiver.  But it eats away at the person who incubates fear, anger, intense hostility or extreme enmity.  We have to examine our hate, work it out.  Sometimes that means a peaceful protest.  Sometimes it may mean turning to prayer or meditation for healing and forgiveness.  Sometimes it means approaching someone and letting them know their actions toward you are not acceptable.
We cannot always control the hate directed toward us.  Sometimes there is need to examine our own actions to see if we have created damage for which recompense is needed.  Other times ignorance creates hate that makes no sense and I would love to have some words to address that problem! 
In all cases, hate is a thing of destruction.  This is where hate’s cousin, love, comes into the picture.  The passion, the emotion, the intensity, the call to action is present in love, too.  But love strives to create, to restore, to nurture, and not destroy.  If examined some of what seems like hate may arise from love of something else – self, liberty, freedom?  When I find myself gnawing on hate I try to remember a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.  “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Monday, February 14, 2011

Love

As if we could fail to notice, today is Valentine’s Day.  In addition to chocolate the day makes me think about love.  My faithful help, dictionary.com, gives twenty-eight entries for love which I decline to include.  Who needs more reasons to be mystified on the subject? 
Despite reading the dictionary I’m no expert on how to get more love, how to make love easier, how to express our love more effectively, how to make it last or find it fully reciprocated.  Instead I offer a poem, Liebst du um Schonheit, written by Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866) I heard last month.  The poem is included in a set of songs composed by Gustav Mahler in 1901 known as the Ruckert-Leider.  Below is the English translation from German.
If You Love For Beauty                       
If you love for beauty,
Oh, do not love me!
Love the sun,
She has golden hair!
If you love for youth,
Oh, do not love me!
Love the spring,
It is young every year!
If you love for treasure
Oh, do not love me!
Love the mermaid,
She has many clear pearls!
If you love for love,
Oh yes, do love me!
Love me ever,
I’ll love you ever more!

These words speak to me of how I want to be loved and the way I should love.  People are not mythical creatures, celestial bodies or seasons.  We, as fabulous, finite-in-body humans, are in love relationships with other temporal humans.  We are imbued with wonders and flaws.  We are each worthy of love not because we are superhuman but precisely because we are not.  The sun does not need our love, but we need love from each other and love from ourselves.  We are, after all, also in relationship with our own selves.  We can receive and express love in earnest not for beauty like the sun, wealth or endless youth but for the relationship itself.    
If you want to treat yourself to a Valentine, here is a link to hear the poem performed:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht1OkPN6Zso&feature=related

Monday, February 7, 2011

Plan

I wandered to my computer Sunday night just before bed.  I was amazed how quickly news coverage occurred after Super Bowl XLV.  Thoughts on commercials, performers, and images of the action were posted for perusal.  According to an Associated Press article on foxsports.com four hundred fans had been refused admittance at the gate.  They paid $800 for tickets and got in line on time, but their temporary seats had been deemed unsafe.  While they apparently walk away with $2,400 for their troubles, those fans did not have the evening that was their plan. 
The World English Dictionary at dictionary.com offers the following entries for the noun plan.      
1.  a detailed scheme, method, etc. for attaining an objective
2.  a proposed, usually tentative idea for doing something
3.  a drawing to scale of a horizontal section through a building taken at a given level
4.  an outline, sketch, etc.
5.  (in perspective drawing) any of several imaginary planes perpendicular to the line of vision and between the eye and the object depicted.
Making a plan feels as natural to me as putting one foot in front of the other to walk.  Is there any other way to get moving?  Annual themes, family fridge calendar, time regulated daily events, lists for dinners - all art in action in my life.  Or so I like to think.  Having a detailed scheme for getting things done generally works.  But I do often forget the proposed, tentative nature of a plan.  No matter how perfectly the events on a to-do list should flow, sometimes they don’t. 
What happens when we have done everything to accomplish our plans and they don’t come to fruition?  Or when we change our minds?  The disappointment can be as short-term and simple as lunch to cancel when a child wakes up sick or as complicated and painful as a broken engagement.  The ramifications of changed plans can range from rescheduling a hair appointment to selling a home we can no longer afford, choosing an out of state job, or cancelling an anticipated trip to attend a child’s holiday school performance.  Occasionally the change in plans is our choice.
I recently decided to avoid some disappointment of derailed plans, to be more fun (see last week’s post) by skipping lists and trying to go with a more spontaneous flow.  The outcome was that I forgot to pick up kids after early dismissal at school, served several mediocre meals, missed a gymnastics class and felt exhausted.  I removed the frustration of a wrecked plan and replaced it with a much worse sense of confusion for myself.  Plans work for us.  I might even say they are essential for getting anywhere.  But we should not let plans make us stuck and we have to try to roll with it if reality doesn’t match the proposal intended for a day or a year or a lifetime.