Reflections of a Minor Mirror

Don't even try...

2009-08-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

First day of school - 1 student in 8th Grade, 2 in 5th Grade, and Dear Husband teaching in High School Chemistry. And I, at work, receiving calls and emails from teachers who needed their online course support materials yesterday.

I used to write things - way back in the days before the internet even, let alone blogs. Now, I never have any unbroken time at the points when I feel the creative twitch.

I suggest a new category for us to recognize as 'creative genius' - those people who in the midst of all this sort of thing manage to produce anything that has cohesion, beauty, or even a glimmer of Truth. I do not put myself into that category,

-- and on cue, Dear Husband arrives home early, before kids are in bed, so no slack-water creative time tonight!

May 18, 2009: Catholic Refinery in Full Operation

2009-05-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Today is Day 1 of Post-May 17, 2009. Here are my thoughts in response to Fr. Z's blog.
(Fr.Z's specific post: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2009/05/my-take-on-sunday-at-notre-dame/)

My response:
I am still reading and consider all of this post, but here put in my own considered response to May 17, 2009. I choose to remember first the students who chose not to participate in the common Commencement, and became leaders of an alternative, most truly Catholic ceremony. These young, unwitting,leaders inspired others, INCLUDING Bishop D’Arcy, to participate in a truly Catholic ceremony. THESE young people are the rocks that are forming a stronger, if smaller, foundation for Our Lord’s Church. THIS is an answer: a positive and visible presentation of what true Catholicism is. Gold has been proven by fire.

Changing Mind

2009-04-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

I love to hand quilt. It takes a long time to do anything, but I find it very soothing, and I enjoy having the finished product. I make nice quilts. I don't feel any vanity about them, I just love the look and feel of really good quilts, mine or anyone else's, and I can only afford my own.

I recently had the ambition to make a quilt to donate to the annual fund-raising action at my kids' school. We receive something of a discount which is the only way we could afford to send all three to Catholic school, and I would love to do something that would raise the funds we are not able to give in tuition. And maybe I did feel a sense of pride at the thought of my work finally on display.

I mentioned it to the principal. She responded to my offer with a "Oh, that sounds very nice," then quickly went on, "Didn't you donate a blanket to the layette drive during Lent? I wanted to tell you, that really thrilled the Pregnancy Center staff when I brought our things over. They grabbed that up first, they said 'Is this really hand-made?' and they were SO thrilled. I wanted to let you know."

The blanket in question was something I crocheted in a couple weeks time, because the Layette Drive was announced just a few weeks before the contribution deadline. I learned to crochet from my late mother-in-law, and it is also a very soothing activity. It is also a lot more portable than a quilt, but the results don't impress me as much.

But the principal's remarks changed my mind. Literally - I have a new perspective on both craft activities, and while I still love to quilt, I see the crocheting as an offering, something I can do that helps others in a direct, very personal, and real way. It has become a more personally rewarding work.

Suddenly the world changed

2009-04-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

Bad news abounds. Natural disasters overtake have the globe, filling the media with the tragedies of strangers. In my own life, people have strokes, become unemployed, fall on general hard times.

I suddenly remembered some time ago prayerfully wondering what could I do, as a Catholic, to 'help the poor and suffering' beyond writing a check to the local St. Vincent de Paul organization. It just hit me today, this is the answer to that prayer. The bad things would be there no matter what, surrounding someone, no matter what, because "the poor we always have with us." What's happened is that God has given me the grace to be that someone.

My unemployed neighbor needs help weeding and watering her garden, and paying for the vegetable plants we are growing; I have the blessing of being the one to help her. My fellow parishioner is ill and unable to attend to his parish responsibilities; I can share the blessing of helping him. My coworker's mother had a stroke; I have the blessing of praying for her and helping him take care of work while he takes care of her.

The world isn't wallowing in misery anymore; I have been given the grace to live my faith more completely.

What is normal anyway?

2009-03-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

I am an ordinary person, extremely average. In fact, years ago I had occasion to take a battery of medical tests. The doctor told me that not only did my results come back "normal," but they fell into a range of normal that only 5% of the population achieve. Thus I have objective evidence that I am definitively normal.

I take comfort in that at times, in a whimsical way. It gives me something of an out, so to speak, when something extraordinary happens. It means that some force outside me, or events themselves, are out of the norm.

Unfortunately I also feel constantly at odds with the world around me, which means the world itself is abnormal, as are most of the people in it. Very few share my interest in understanding how things work, or what would happen if, or why something happened. Perhaps because, for me, the world is not normal, I am not surprised that something goes wrong, that accidents happen, that people get hurt. Most bad things are not actually the result of a deliberate act by someone intending harm. I marvel as people around me search for someone else to blame and attack when they suffer some injury. What's the point? The Universe is and to a certain extent, the Universe is random, and accepting that has given me great ease of mind.

I do believe the Universe has natural laws as solid as rock, and is rational. Irrationality leads sooner or later to a confrontation with those laws, and whether the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher...

Rationality brought me into the Catholic Church. In my 20's I did not practice or follow any particular faith, though I did believe in God. A series of events caused me to begin seriously studying my perceptions of the Universe, which then led me to a conscious 'credo' or understanding of my beliefs. Years later, I picked up the newly published Roman Catholic Catechism, and found my own beliefs matched the Church's. The teachings of the Church are founded in rational understanding of the Universe!

Some time after that I picked up C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" and found it would have brought me to the same point, in a quarter of the words, had I only known it. Ah well.

The Other Son

2009-03-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

Driving to work the other day, listening to the news, I suddenly realized that I'm "The Other Son". In the parable of the Prodigal Son, I've not thought much about the Other Son, the one who stayed home, did what his father asked him to, and in general Did The Right Thing. The story is all about the Prodigal, who breaks the Commandments, repents, and comes home. I especially identified with him when I made my first Confession as a Catholic -- receiving Absolution was an overwhelming sensation of ... renewal, cleansing, I don't know how to describe it.

Until now, I've never really understood why Jesus has the Other Son protest so strongly when his Father celebrates the return of the Prodigal. But as the news about bailouts and handouts and stimulus packages circulates, I understand. I've done the right thing, I've not been victimized, I've managed my life and my finances so that at least so far I am able to fend for myself. Businesses that should have known better have taken money and squandered it, and now the government is effectively killing the fatted calf for them. Where is MY reward?

Great love has no one...

2009-02-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

I saw this years ago but can never think of love without remembering this scene.

I was at the light rail station waiting for the train home late in the afternoon one September day. On the platform across the tracks a man held a sleeping boy and walked slowly up and down the platform. The child looked to be three or four years old, and the man was not tall. The boy’s head rested on the man’s shoulder, his legs swung gently, his feet were level with the man’s knees.

The tenderness of the scene was unmistakable. The pair was on their way somewhere and the boy was tired. The father carried him to help comfort him to sleep, and walked back and forth to sooth him. I watched them for a quarter hour until my train came, captured by the scene of complete love.

But what made the scene iconic was not the living figures but an ignored object. Against the bench behind the pair leaned a heavy cane, and the father walked with a heavy, labored limp.

January brings moments that give you hope for spring

2009-01-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

Today's moment came as the sun lies low in the afternoon sky, so that shadows fall across the buildings but the bare limbs of tall trees glow orange against the white-blue sky. The day had warmed enough that I needed only a good sweater, and the breeze blew away the chill hiding in the shadows. That was wedge enough to open time and bring a moment from Spring into the middle of a winter afternoon. I will spend the next six weeks waiting for another.

Permission to say Merry Christmas...

2008-12-23T11:39:00.001-08:00

http://johnmalloysdb.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-confession.html

2008-12-10T20:15:00.000-08:00

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town" is on. Not only did I watch this when I was a child, I watched the first broadcast of it when I was a kid. Yes, I'm that old. I also love "A Charlie Brown Christmas,"The Little Drummer Boy" and to a somewhat lesser extent the original "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." These are all rebroadcast every year, along with some very inferior shows that seem cheap commercial ripoffs of the season.

One show that I loved and have looked for hasn't been on the annual repeat list. Amazingly, it was only broadcast 4 times, once a year for 4 years starting in 1970. That means I haven't seen "The Night the Animals Talked" in over 34 years - yet I remember it as strongly as any of the others I have enjoyed over the weekend. (For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_the_Animals_Talked.)

The article does say there are bootlegged copies available for sale - but I refuse to purchase such things on moral grounds. It seems as if the only chance I'll have to see it again would be if someone today does a remake. Anyone interested? I'll buy the first copy!

Going down into the darkness of the year

2008-12-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

Back in the days before I got a prescription to cope with it, before I even understood that I have 'Seasonal Affected Disorder," aka Winter Depression, the period from Thanksgiving to sometime after Valentine's Day would see me virtually incapacitated by miserableness, cold and dark and lonely. Typically I would break up with whatever boyfriend I had sometime in October, then spend the holidays valiantly trying to find a place to get out of the metaphysical cold. Thanksgiving would happen anywhere I could get an invitation from some friend or relative with a large dose of pity. Christmas approached with the glow of a city at night in the desert, and usually proved as rewarding as a visit to Las Vegas, so that the year ended with a roller-coaster crash into deeper depression.

Personal enlightenment began in college, when I spent a week in December visiting the Southwestern US, basking in bright sun under incredibly blue skies. I went into December devastated as usual by the abandonment of a boyfriend. I happened to have taken some courses that covered pagan religions' focus on astronomic cycles, and grabbed hold of the concept of the Winter Solstice as the 'low point' of the year. December 21 is the shortest day and the longest night of the year, the point after which every day is slightly longer than the one before.

I held on to that idea, that if I could get through to December 21 things would start to get better, slowly to be sure, but definitely better. Coincidentally, the time in the Southwest gave me a burst of positive energy, so I came home after the New Year feeling a definitely improvement in life.

Life is better for me now. Not only because I have finally recognized the Winter Depression condition and now have medication that helps it, but because I have learned better ways of approaching life. I've essentially turned the calendar upside down for winter. The fall is a time of watching, looking ahead and noting the days' as they shorten and fall down towards their smallest point, down to the bottom of the year. The actual passage of day and night become my focal points, moments of transition, observed, recognized as unique periods in the massive cycle of creation.

Candles seem more beautiful in winter, and conversely so does the dormant earth in my back yard and the bare branches of trees around my home. It helps to be able to afford to heat the house, but so does sewing on quilts that my family wraps themselves in at night.

Instead of fighting the flood of time, struggling against an overwhelming force, I feel carried along within it. Lighting candles, sewing, sending Christmas cards, the phases of the moon: these are markers along the banks that show me my progress through the end of one year and beginning of another.

If you feel the weight of time crushing your spirit today, light a candle tonight and sit and watch it burn for a while and think of me, sitting here doing the same. My thoughts are with you!

Twilight

2008-11-25T16:44:00.000-08:00

I want to explain my own appreciation for the Twilight series, to contrast with all those who have just recently jumped on the Screaming Phangirl bandwagon. It seems like a lot of the very loud buzz is coming from people who either picked up the book or went to the movie because they've been hearing from raving fans about how good it is. I'm very much the opposite, I tend to move away from things that someone tells me "You've GOT to read/watch/listen to this!"

I first heard about Twilight from an 11-year-old girl who is an obsessive reader, who I knew had already read many of my own favorite books. We were hanging out in a bookstore, and she wanted to pick up a copy of one of the Twilight books even though she already had the book, because the new one contained a preview chapter from the next book which wasn't out yet.

We talked a little about the story, and I began expressing my issues with all the vampire love stories that have spread through popular culture. I don't like the perspective these books show on the world, they always seem to show the worst of human nature, with people giving in to their passions at the expense of all around them, with evil winning the day, good guys being corrupted by evil and ending up as bad as the worst of them.

She protested that this book was different, but I was skeptical, because she is after all just a kid. Finally last summer she badgered me into reading the first book, Twilight, "just so you know what it's about and who the characters are."

So, I read it, and I love it. And here is why:
The characters are real people, fully developed. The writing is strong, it creates vivid pictures in my mind and makes the 'Twilight universe' real as I read it. There is definitely an emphasis on what I consider good things: successful resistance of temptation, doing better than expectations, good winning over evil, redemption.

Luckily for me, I started the series just before the fourth and final book came out, so I could read it all in one wonderful long summer. So my overall first impression is of the entire story. And this is my final assessment:

The four Twilight books are simply: fairy tales. The good kind, but set very believably in our modern world. So just like people a thousand years ago who told the original "fairy tales" that we now know of from the Grimms Brothers, we can hear these stories and imagine the charactors in the world around us. And feel good about our world, because in these stories good wins over evil, virtue triumphs, all the people you want to win do win, success is possible, and hope is justified.

Shopping versus Buying: fun versus consumptive consumerism

2008-11-12T20:14:00.000-08:00

I try hard to rein in my disgruntlement with what is going on between spendthrift financial corporations and the US Federal Government. If you want to know what I think just take a moment for some free-fall mental grumblisms - and ask me privately what my thoughts are. Most everyone knows I won't respond to comments here, it's all I can do to control my political incorrectness in posts.

So, here is how someone has lived and been happy without going into bankruptcy.

Whatever kind of 'learning-style' consumer you are, someone somehow is messaging you that a particular THING that they happen to sell is JUST WHAT YOU LOVE. And someone else is telling you that if you truly love something you must have it/marry it/embalm it/keep it forever.

What's a girl with limited space and no tolerance for long-term commitments to do?

Here's a stranger but somehow more concrete idea:

I have two parakeets, they are 'free-range' but I promise not to eat them! they are not confined to their cage, that's all. So, they have each other if they truly want a real companion. And, they do spend a good amount of time with each other chatting, or bickering, or just hanging out in the same 1 ft cubic space.d

But, we have mirrors for them, with convenient perches. And they spend a LOT of their time fixated on the 'parakeet in the mirror' - in fact one is right now putting a lot of energy into clinging to a mirror suspended from the ceiling, hanging upside down so she has to twist her head backwards to see and attack/bicker with/feed the parakeet in the mirror.

Angela (parakeet) isn't interested in reality, in really connecting with or hanging with that 'thing' on the other side of the display case. When she can be happy with reality, she has Pedro. But something about the elusive 'on display' is more attractive at times.

I too feel the pull of what is behind the glass, so beautifully arranged. Yes, it is done so as to show me in my perfected state, or at least my perfected surroundings. (it begs the question, does stuff sell more when it has mirrors in the display?) But I have 40 years more experience with life than my parakeets, and I have broken the barrier and taken possession of the thing on the other side of the barrier so many times that I have a little different perspective on what actually will give me satisfaction; I have learned that once I get the 'magic thing' behind Door Number 1 it becomes "stuff." And I now spend much of my life getting rid of 'stuff.'

Then, a friend set me free. "There can be stuff in the world that you don't own, it is OK!" she said as we left a garage sale without purchasing anything.

Things that have a price tag on them are very beautiful. "Stuff" has much less beauty. So, I have finally learned to enjoy beauty without destroying it, to appreciate beautiful things without purchasing them.

In short, now I SHOP, I don't buy.

Letting others color your world black on a Friday?

2008-10-24T08:17:00.001-07:00

Black Friday of a Black Week. Stocks down around the world. Bleak end to a bad month: banks sitting on their assets, too fearful of each other to lend a dime. Homeowners in crisis, foreclosed houses sitting empty on block after block of Main Steet America. The world is ending and there's nothing we can do about it!

Ok.

Well, so what?

I sat looking around the living room last night, wondering if I should worry. If either of us lost our jobs, we could not pay our bills, including the mortgage. That doesn't seem likely, but what if our bank called the loan (told us they needed it paid NOW not over 30 years). What if the credit card we are paying down raised the interest rate drastically? What if the price of gas triples again? I imagined us forced out of our home, off to live with my mother. Where would we put our stuff? It wouldn't fit into her tiny condo, would we have to sell it all? Sell the car? Release the pets into the wild to fend on their own?

Honestly.

The reality is that global financial meltdown, housing crisis, frozen liquidity, all that really is just vibrating air molecules that disapear when I turn off the radio, light and sound waves that emerge in patterns from the television, pixels on a computer screen. It's not real to me.

I can afford the day's groceries, I can put gas in my tank. True, I have changed my driving habits and now generally stick to the speed limit (and get 35 MPG in a 2001 full-sized sedan!). I bring my own lunch to work more than I purchase it in the cafeteria. Sometimes I regret that certain items are now priced out of my range.

But those are moments of the day, not my whole life. There are many more moments spent talking with the neighbors about their new puppy who is a bundle of pure joy, or going for a walk at lunch with colleagues and marveling at the wonderful weather of the day. The sunrise was glorious this morning and lasted for longer than the brief market update I put up with because the radio station plays the best classical music in the area.

I've had hard times too, but my personal hard times were not caused by large-scale circumstances. We HAVE lost one income over a decade ago), I HAVE bounced the rent check (more than one month in a row even) but not for a long time now, friends and family members have died, I've felt hunger, depression, fear in due season.

Those things happened to ME, not the economy. They were REAL events, not news stories. Because I've had hard times, I can look at the moment and see the good in it, make even a moment of time brighter.

When you look around you, at what your real live contains, look at the reality. Even the hard things. At least you know it's real.

Just a dumb question but

2008-09-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

How do you get spaces after periods to display? My editor's eye is pained when reading my own posts because the text isn't displaying proper spacing. Even editing the html doesn't work. Argh, I know it's an odvious thing, but what am I missing here?

one of those weeks

2008-09-20T10:26:00.001-07:00

You know the kind, so this is a "connecting with the audience by sharing universal experiences" post. End of last week, over the weekend, I logged onto the blog and stared at the screen - nothing comes. Work week starts, every day driving to work I think of things to write about, get to the office and all creativity disappears in the storm surge of email. My inbox has over 500 messages now, too many for me to even sort out the now meaningless ones from those I need to address. Friday evening I finally have moments to think and remember ideas to write about, and I cannot for the life of me remember my password.

Yeah, one of those weeks.

September 11, 2008

2008-09-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Seven years after. . .something. Would it be better if you didn't know what I referred to?

I have nothing to add to what the world has already seen and sees today. So instead:

Sometime later, in 2003 or 2004. Maybe later, let me think. Youngest kids able to appreciate music and song, aware of the Bible, before The Passion was released. When would that be? 2003?

2004 sounds better. Wounds healing but still sensitive.

I bought and we all watched Godspell: a musical based on the Gospel of Mathew, immortalized when it was filmed in New York City. At a point the scene shifts and they are singing on the top of a building, and the cameral pulls back and we see the scene at the top of the World Trade Center.

I gasp.

You watch it someday. Do you?

Momma

2008-09-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

Today is September 9. It is my late mother-in-law's birthday, she would be. . .laughing with me about it if she hadn't passed away in 2000. She was a wise woman with a sense of humor, all tied together with tremendous charity: the selfless love for others. That made for some memorable exchanges that will always color my view of events and make me laugh when I should cry.

One simple example: We were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea with Tang and sugar in it, talking about this and that. I remember she turned to me, her eyes wide with the urgency of the message, and said, "Marry the faults you can live with." It seemed such a timeless piece of wisdom I thought it ought to be delivered in Spanish instead of English, like an Old World proverb. Such a simple thing but really, it's as good a beginning for a happy lifetime together as anything else. The man leaves his socks on the floor - messy but you don't mind so much? Ok. Messy socks on the floor cause you impossible stress at the disruption of order and the proper place of things in the world? Very bad. Such simple, good advise, I will do it in needlepoint some day.

The humor? She said this to me after I was married to her son. Timing, Momma, always timing.

She left us in May, not exactly a month from my oldest daughter's birthday, not when anything important was happening, no special event that would be colored forever by our loss. The disconnection to special events instead ties my memory of her death to jokes and laughter so strong we cried with laughter:

It was spring, sometime in the mid to late 1990's. She was telling me about a time when she looked out her back window one night and saw a horrible, ugly, huge, rat-like thing, clumbering along the back yard fence.

"Oh, that sounds like a possum," I said. She looked at me with eyes wide and eyebrows raised.

"I feel sorry for possoms," I continued. "They hybernate all winter, then in spring they come wake up and come out all groggy, and all they want to do is find a member of the opposite sex and, you know... and they stagger out into the street and WHAM get hit by a car."

She dissolved in laughter, tears and all, for minutes.

Finally, she lifted her head up and said, gasping, "If..... you ever hear that I died.... and it was because I was hit by a car..... You'll know what happened..."

And we both exploded, laughing so hard tears came down our faces.

Another time, we were sitting there again, and my father-in-law went by off to his office or somewhere. She tossed a nod at him to make sure I knew who she meant, and said: "I'm just leading him on." I said, "Oh?"

"Yeah. As soon as I find Mr. Right, I'm out of here."

Me, too, Momma, right behind you.

Introduction: What Am I?

2008-09-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

I am an empathic metamorph - a description given to a charactor in an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. Who I am and how I feel varies depending on who I am with. I get along with just about anyone.

I also somehow recognize, respond to, and reflect back to a person their own good traits. I used to think of this as an ability to see the truth about people, but modified that when I came into contact with some truly evil people - I found myself shutting down emotionally, and somehow to them I became invisible.

Hence my description of myself as a mirror. Mirrors reflect light. Darkness is the absence of light, so I can't reflect that, though I can show it by virue of a lack of reflection.

Also, we can only see our own faces as reflections - we can never look directly into our own eyes, we can only see our faces as reflections from another object separate from us.

It's interesting to be a mirror interacting with people. One person looks directly at me and I respond to them - they see something of themselves. Two people can see each other indirectly in my presence: I show them each something of the other.

But it is also a lonely thing. Is there a 'me' in the mirror when no one else is there?