Random Meanderings at Middle Age

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I have ressurrected the book blog.  I know better than to think I will review or record every book I read this year, but I am curious as to the number and type of books I end up reading in 2009 so I will try.  It can be found here  Amysue's Read-o-Rama!.

perspective...again.

  snow. tree. berries. a view from our sanctuary at 7am this morning. snow laden branches that make me think of that first trip through the wardrobe and into Narnia. Let go of the negative cynicism that most of us clothe ourselves in for a few minutes. Let the people you love know that you love them. Create something today. Count your blessings. I'm off to play Pandemic with Noah and then Wii fit with Em. Some John time after they go to bed. This moment is all we have. Cherish it.

creativity. acceptance.

  Distracting you with a picture from October's walk in Purgatory Chasm. We really should head back there this week end if it doesn't snow-my guess is trying to climb around there once the ice is down is not sane. I'm ok. Still a little down some days, but I've broken through my creativity block and making things brings me a certain measure of peace. My friend and fellow knitter Susan helped make this happen by taking the unfinished right front panel of my daughter's Portland Tweed vest (a CEY pattern and something Em's been waiting a year for) and knit it for me!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had knit the back with no problem, the left front with some issues and had started and restarted that right front so many times I lost heart. In one amazing act of knitterly kindness she helped me get my mojo back. I blocked the pieces this morning and am seaming now and will hopefully get started on the button band. What joy!
I also made a fun roll up placemat with little pockets for utensils. I already used it while eating at my desk at work yesterday and plan to make more of these for gifts.     So am I still a little down? Sure, but making things helps, being busy helps, doing stuff with family and friends helps and none of that is rocket science so I just got to remind myself that it will all help if I let it. Back to finishing that vest!

sleep no more

 John and I went with friends last night for a wonderful meal at JP's Bella Luna and then off to the Old Lincoln School in Brookline to see the even more amazing Sleep No More. We've sort of been talkng about it (not to mention dreaming) ever since.  It was an intense, surreal, magical, disturbing and stunningly beautiful 3 hours. 

Sleep No More is a complete immersion into the madness, guilt and shame that the cascading effects of the consequences of unbridled ambition rains down on Macbeth, his wife and the other characters in the Shakespeare's famous play. The three hours we spent wondering over the entire 4 floors of this building were as though walking in a fever dream.  Early on I found myself entirely alone in a darkened room filled with old clawfoot tubs, some filled with water, some bones or dirt, one looked filled with blood and another had an eel swimming in it.  The relentless music, that seems to embody a kind of sick dread, completed my sense of unease, I moved to another empty room, an asylum filled with cots and next to one was a death certificate, moving on I found myself in a dark forest and suddenly heard loud clanging followed the nocie, ran down a flight of stairs and stopped short outside King Duncan's room just after his body is discovered and he is being wrapped and carried out to the chapel.  I entered the small chapel and stood as his retainers said their farewells and lay him on the slab there.  The whole night was like this one moment (our group had split up early on and this is, I think, the best way to experience this-you can join up at the end and exchange stories) I'd be looking at some small candlelit shrine or poking through ephemera filled drawers in an old study the next I'd be running after a character and watching their wordless drama unfold and then left to decide whether I would chase after them some more or go a different way.  Near the end of the evening I found myself in a small room on the bottom floor that was clearly a character's dressing room (Macduff's? Malcom's?) and he was there, agitated, having washed blood off in the small shower attached (I'd gone in there and been disturbed by the blood and obvious fact that it had just been used) he stumbled about the room in just his boxers and suddenly stepped so close I had to press myself against the wall and drew his finger across my throat, he spun away and then back and left a card on my chest and then ran from the room (I put the card back on the dresser not knowing I could have kept it).

For the 3 hours I was there I was completely immersed in the spell that Punchdrunk casted in this non-linear approach to theater. At the end of the night I joined my husband and friends in the bar (the whole piece has a sort of 30's noir Hitchcockian kind of vibe) and we exchanged stories and images and continued to on the drive home. John and I will be returning again in lat December (the show leaves January 3) and I am wondering if that will be enough. I was mesmerized and oddly, despite the lack of dialogue and the fact that you wander at will and can (and do) miss many things I left completely feeling as though the ambiance that is The Scottish Play was totally there throughout the entire evening. Macbeth and his wife were never able to leave behind their guilt at the heinous actions that bought and secured them the throne, it led them to ever increasing madness and drove those they harmed into their own world of pain and despair and Sleep No More completely brings that to life. As a young student studying Macbeth you are often told that it warns of the corruption that unbridled ambition can bring and that corruption was all around me last night. Oh and John and I will also be seeing another ART sponsored performance in December, The Donkey Show, a sort of telling of Midsummer's Night Dream as a debauched Studio 54 disco. We'll be on the dance floor. No doubt covered in glitter by the end of the night. I am thrilled with the direction the ART is taking this year and while I didn't spring for season seats I expect we'll end up at most of the productions this year. In Sleep No More my love of art installation, performance art and Shakespeare was melded together perfectly. It made for a great end to the Thanksgiving break.

thankful.

 I started listing everything I am thankful for.  It got lengthy.  Then I thought it was a lot simpler than I was making it out to be.  

I'm thankful for a way of life that makes it possible for me to enumerate what I am thankful for.

I am not hungry.  I have shelter.  My family and friends are close by. I have work and healthcare.  The people I love are safe and well.  I have free time to play in the garden, walk, read or craft. I have free time to think about all this stuff I'm thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Be well and healthy and happy and well, thankful.

I am blessed and hope you are as well.

knitting as metaphor for doing the right thing

 
The first "right thing" I did was to not spend more than 5-10 minutes online this morning and instead concentrate on finally finishing my Kilm Gloves.  I spent a happy hour knitting and when  I finally got to the orange garter stitch I was thrilled-only the pink fingers to go!!  Sadly, I quickly realized  I forgot to pt stitches on hold for the thumb.  Yeah.  What follows basically followed the Kubler-Ross model exactly:

DENIAL:  I actually spent a few minutes convincing myself that this glove didn't have a thumb gusset it was actually some other kind of glove.

ANGER:  For a moment or two I hated the stupid glove,pattern and of course me for being so stupid.

BARGAINING: I tried to convince myself that if I ripped the other finished glove back I could have two fingerless gloves which was what I really planned all along.  I believed this was a good plan for most of the morning.

DEPRESSION: OK.  I even went through some self-loathing and got sad thinking that I was the world's biggest failure at this whole knitting thing and I should never create anything every again and........

ACCEPTANCE: ...I let it all go and reminded myself that the stupid hand took about an hour to knit, that ripping it out would take 5 minutes and that  

doing so and then reknitting it thumb and all would really be the right thing.  I'd have the gloves I planned for and really it was ok.  

The whole process took about 5 hours.  If only I could handle all the other stresses in my life so efficiently.

playing with fabric.

I'm very happy I made myself get up and go to the class today. The Quilted Crow is a wonderful shop and pretty close by.  This class was for a pinwheel quilt and like all quilting classes, especially when you're learning a new technique it started pretty slowly, but once I got the 9 pinwheel squares done it started moving a little more quickly.  Well, let's back up-first I had to sort all my 5 inch squares into piles of 4  of the same (where talking about 40 piles) and then DECIDE which fabrics went with which for my 4 dark, 3 medium and 2 light blocks. Those of you who don't quilt or craft have likely stopped reaidng already, but the rest of you can well imagine how much time that took!

Oddly enough it was just what I needed to get me out of my shadowy rut and into a more creative place.  It's funny, I picked these fabrics from MODA (the colorway is called Old Primrose Inn) thinking I had a sort of beigy-tealy pallet.  I purchased a dark brownish-red solif for stashing and the very deep red background material for contrast.

I added my sashing and the quilt still thought I had a beigy-tealy quilt.  The plan, by the way, once this is done and quilted is to add fabric covered buttons to the center of the pinwheels which will look great AND hide any pinwheel point mishaps.

The teacher used the flannel backs of cheap vinyl table clothes for design walls and I am going to start doing this tomorrow.  My plan is to put one up on the wall in my craft room-it's a fabulous idea and you can then play with the blocks as you make them.  Looking at my pics I realize I reversed the second to last row-I hope I remember that when it all is sewn together!

Anyway, the magic of quilting is such that sometimes even when you think you have carefully planned your quilt and have a clear idea of what you are creating, your quilt can surprise you:

Look!

Apparently I've been making a peachy-red quilt with a little teal thrown in for contrast!  I love it and hope I can finish the top tomorrow after work. The reddish fabric that completes the squares is also the border so the reds will be even more emphasized when done (there will also be 4 more "charm" squares (the non pinwheeled 4-squares) in each corner which will be cool to.(Also there will be more sashing between the rows of course).

It was a very pleasant way to spend a very rainy day.  John had dropped Noah off at a friends for an overnight and Em is away with her Chai school class on a week-end trip to NYC so we had dinner out and are now having a very quiet Saturday night at home. Thanks to everyone for the kind words and comments both to me personally and on the blog and FB.  I'm so lucky to have such good family and friends!

struggling.

Nothing really to say.  Just struggling with some stuff that will sort itself out.  It makes me tired and not as social as I like to be.  So, rather than enumerate all the depressing stuff milling about my silly head here's what I will do:

•  I will get up in the morning shower, put together a lunch and head off to my all day quilting class. Once there I know I'll have a blast.
• I will see a movie or have dinner with my husband tomorrow night (maybe both)
• I will work on Sunday morning 
• I will play at least one board game, probably Pandemic with my son this week end

Things I won't do:

• I won't punish myself.

Depression is evil on a lot of levels.  You can be fine and then it sneaks up and you start to second guess yourself.  You think maybe it's not depression, maybe I'm just a (insert your stuff here, for me it's usually "horrible person/mother/wife").  Guess what though?  It's chemical.  It's brain chemistry gone awry and my variety is enhanced by the diabetes.  I always know what to do and I allow myself small amounts of time to indulge the worst. We all make choices that work for us, for myself medication is not an option and I'm done with therapy.  I have learned to just take it slow.  Do the proverbial next thing and eventually I'm back on solid ground and out of the forest.  

I just thought that owning it might be good once in awhile.  Too many people struggle with their own demons and think it's just them.  I'm not ashamed or embarrassed (well not much) I just move forward. I

   

Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question - NYTimes.com

So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

via www.nytimes.com

I think that line quoted above, from an Orthodox rabbi, sums up a lot of my issues with that movement in a nutshell.

No offense to my Orthodox friends but to deny an observant child his/her place in Judaism is not exactly going to help with the continuation of the faith.

unbelievably lazy saturday.

No really. In the annals of lazy this was one incredibly lazy Saturday. Well, for me.  I slept in. I then slept in some more.  Em had 2 hours of dance and Noah helped John get all the Halloween decorations down and then they hacked up a huge shrub from the front that has been slowly dying the past couple of years. This year some wasps made a huge beachball sized next in it which was really creepy to look at once they finished the first part of shrub dismantling (next up cutting through the the rest and pulling it out.  after that it's my job to amend the soil and in the spring make that a water feature and plant irises and other things around it).

I am allergic to most of the stinging things like bees, hornets etc. so looking so closely at their handiwork both fascinates and repulses me. Noah and I had a picnic lunch in my room and finally got around to playing a really great boardgame we've had for a year but not opened, Pandemic. It's a cooperative game for 2-4 players, which means you have to be able to work with the other players to devise strategies to save the world from 4 different epidemics that are spreading across the planet.  The rules and set up appear a little daunting at first but once you dive in and play it's great fun.  The planet had no chance our first go round and we were so close to saving the planet the second time but sadly a particularly virulent outbreak in South America spread to North America and that was that.  I'm looking forward to teaching this to John and Em so we can play with 4 players and see if that gives us a chance! We play a lot of board games here, but will sometimes forget to for awhile and then when we start up again it's so much fun and I wonder why we stopped. I think I'll need to get one of the Pandemic expansion sets this holiday season and maybe get some friends to play as well. The only other excitement today was a walk with Em around the block. We were stalked by a kitty. Also I got her to go down the slide for me for old times sake.
It'll be a boring and quiet night tonight and then work and hopefully a longer walk tomorrow-maybe to some waterfalls not to far away I read about. Have a wonderful lazy week-end everyone!

random thoughts on being jewish...

     I just finished reading Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs (subtitled: The pleasures and regrets of a husband, father and son).  As with all his writing, I enjoyed it very much.  He grew up in the same time I did, is Jewish and so, his essays often contain landmarks or ideas that resonate deeply with me.  We had a discussion during services last Friday night on the topic, Why be Jewish?  It was our joint service with the Conservative synagogue in town, something we do every year.  Each Rabbi spoke first and then opened things up to the congregations to add their thoughts.  I will not be able to do justice to either Rabbis' premises, but the basic gist seemed to be that for some being Jewish is a matter of sociology (like being Irish) and for others it's a matter of theology and that for most Jews, especially those in the Reform and Conservative movements talking about God is really, really uncomfortable.

     What's this have to do with Chabon?  Well, in one of the last essays in the book he says "I am a liberal, agnostic, empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlies religious fundamentalism of every flavor, from bearded to clean-cut." I don't know but to me that sentence embodies where many of my fellow Jews and certainly I often find myself standing.  I was born Jewish.  It's something I take for granted, although I when I was a child I would get scared that it might not be true and I might not "really" be Jewish and therefore not accepted by my own people.  I was adopted as an infant and in theory my biological maternal parent was Jewish but I would still wake up scared that I wasn't really and this led to many years that I felt I couldn't fully participate in Jewish life without being a fraud.  I had completely forgotten about this until our rabbi spoke about moving away from a sociological reason for being Jewish and moving towards a theological reason.  I can get behind that 100%.  I am a Jew because Judaism embodies the ideals and beliefs that speak to me as a human being trying to live in a contemporary and often scary universe.  I actively chose to be part of the Reform movement because I believe in the necessity of my faith to be an organic thing, open to change and adaptation to the realities of the world we live in. I don't believe that I am any less Jewish even if my family was lied to about my origins and I don't believe my children are any less Jewish because they were born and adopted in other countries and therefor don't "look" Jewish and I don't believe that my somewhat agnostic husband, who chose Judaism after careful thought and study is any less Jewish than any other Jew.  

     And yet.  It would be naive to ignore the reality that many Jews would not consider us "Jewish enough" and that it hurts to know those thoughts are out there (and I would add that it would also be naive to believe that the only Jews who feel that way are strictly observant-there are plenty of liberal Jews who have institutionalized antipathy towards those they see as less authentically Jewish).  And yet. I have it over my husband and others who were not raised in Jewish homes because I am comfortable with all the...for lack of a better word...stuff.  The holidays.  The foods.  The expectations.  The ebb and flow of a Shabbat service.  The etiquette at a Shiva minyan.  All of these things come naturally without a lot of thought (they do for my children as well-they may be Chinese and Cambodian American but they have been Jewish and part of a Jewish home for all their remembered lives).  I have been to Israel once and yet I miss it terribly. My husband has no interest in going to Israel and is baffled by the emphasis placed on it and what sometimes seems like a lack of accountability for some of Israel's actions.  A concern I share while also fetishsizing the country as though it were a picture perfect postcard of an idealic Jewish life.

And yet.  Even within our Reform congregations there is (and should be) a huge amount of theological diversity.  I grew up in a time when woman never wore kippot or tallitot.  I would try to do one or the other and feel really, really silly.  In time I have become comfortable with wearing a head covering on Shabbat during services but I am not consistent in that practice.  This year (that is 5770) I actively decided to take on the obligation of wearing a tallit whenever I am at services and Torah is being read.  This was a huge step for me.  It took me almost 5 years of thinking about this.  Thinking about why I'd want to do this.  Getting over my fear of seeming silly or pretentious when I do so.  I finally just shut off all the internal noise and asked myself: Why?  Why would I do this?  What would it mean?  I realized it meant an obvious thing and a more secret thing that I wasn't admitting to myself.  The obvious thing was simply that  by wearing a tallit I was able to to honor the ritual and sacredness of reading from the Torah and also able to focus my prayer and thoughts in a more meaningful way.  I was connecting myself to our people and more importantly to our Torah in doing so.  The unspoken or for a long time unthought, unadmitted, part?  Simply that I can.  I am a Jew.  More to the point, I am a "real" Jew and if this ritual is one that I believe has importance and meaning in my life I have every right to wear a tallit and do so without shame or feeling like I was playing dress-up.  It was something of a shock to me to realize I just always believed I didn't really have the right-not because I was part of the Reform movement, not because I was a woman, but because I was still a child waking up in the middle of the night scared I wasn't really Jewish.

     My Judaism isn't about a free pass I got because of an accident of birth.  It's about being an active participant in a living, breathing faith that espouses the values I most wish to emulate.  My Judaism is a reflection on my relationship to the faith but it is not the only way to get there.  I accept that for every Jew, certainly every Jew within my own community, there are different paths to the same place -that place of being a Jew, even a "liberal,agnostic..semi-observant bacon-eating Jew."  All those paths are authentic, all those paths are part of an organic whole and we are all "real" Jews.