While You're Waiting...

I am trying to write a brilliant post about Kindred Spirits. It is taking me a long time because 1) I can't bear to come in from the yard in this beautiful green June; and 2) Picasa is stubbornly holding on to the mistaken belief that my photo files are corrupt.

So while I 1)wait for a rainy day and 2) wind my way through yet more troubleshooting forums (fora?), I have some news to keep you entertained.  Oddly enough, it too is on the theme of Kindred Spirits.

For Molly has found hers, in the form of her new friend.

 Meet Tui, a four-year-old formerly male boxer. He's a rescue from a family who adopted him several years ago as a stray and then had to relocate to New Zealand and did not want to put him through the rigorous quarantine requirements.

 My best guess is that this explains his name: a tui is a New Zealand bird with a stark white chest (feel free to step in and get the record straight here, Mo).  His two inner toenails on each foot are white, while the outer ones are black.

He loves squeaky toys and food on the counter and jumping into bed with us at 5:30 AM.  It took the obligatory three weeks and then we became a new family.

Here we go again....

My Life As An Alfred Hitchcock Movie

Every day for about two years or so, at every groundfloor window in this house, we have this.

Apparently, he is defending his territory against the Intruder he imagines he sees in the reflection of the glass. 

What a metaphor.

Billy Dog

Of all our dogs, Billy was the simplest. He was not "almost human." He was not "my best friend." 

 Billy was a dog.

Last weekend, Billy's abdominal tumor snaked into his well-being. When we fed him, he collapsed in contortions of abdominal distress. When we didn't, he told us he was starving. In the wild, he would have been killed by another animal.

In our world, the animal was me. 

 He didn't make it easy on me, the little bastard. By the time we made the decision, six months to the day when he was given three weeks left to live, he could no longer get himself up without me lifting up his butt.  Except when I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride. Then, he jumped into the car, bounded out at the vet's, and eagerly answered all the doggie messages he read on the landscaping. 

Once inside, he wriggled in insane delight at being the object of so much attention. I love this practice--they had already spread an old comforter across the floor, complete with a dog treat in three corners. A box of tissues was in the fourth corner. But my wonderful older vet had just recently retired and sold the practice to a new fellow. Kind and gentle though he was, he has not yet learned the magic words.

"You're doing the right thing."

When I expressed alarm at Billy's apparent animation, he told me that the burst of adrenaline an animal experiences at the vet's can supercharge an impaired body. He said, "that makes it hard."But he didn't say what I needed to hear.

"You're doing the right thing."

As the sedation took hold, Billy's head slipped onto my lap and damn if his tongue didn't slip an inch out of his mouth, exactly the way Clutch slept. Oh God, Billy, don't you be making that moronic face too, I smiled to myself.  I wish I could tell you I saw it as a sign Clutchie was there to welcome his old friend, but I didn't think that.  All I thought, as the up-and-down of Billy's chest slowed and then stopped, was This is Death. I thought, I still am thinking, that Death gouges out a deep black footprint onto the soul. Separate and apart from the heart's loss is the hardness of this act. A being...a big sloppy dog, but a being nevertheless...

is no more. Is No More.

I don't need reminders that this act was merciful in light of his suffering. Now, I don't even need to hear that I did the right thing. Because, let's face it, I have already done it. I--we--need to feel the weight of this when we make it happen. Its only right to feel overwhelmed in the presence of Death. Simply, as Grace so often reminds us,to stand and face it.

Oh My God

I had always wanted to make a quilt by Karen Stone, which, as you can see even through this miserable image, is essentially an insane concoction of Tiny Little Pieces That Can Kill You.

My friend Dr. J was thrilled to be the recipient of it. In return, she offered me her handiwork: a needlepoint pillow.

So last year around this time, we spent a Saturday hunting and gathering our respective goods. First, we went to the needlepoint store, where I fell for a pattern of Chinese spice jars. She let me have my brilliant red and lime wool and told me to shut up about the rest of my crazy choices that were disrupting her conservative color sense .  Then, we tore apart her local quilting store for fabric. We needed tons of bits and pieces in each of the five different colorways that form the quilt. I let her have some conservative choices and told her to shut up as I filled in with crazy outliers that reflect my sense of color.

And, yes, we really say "shut up." It takes a long time to make old friends and the ability to speak to one another with minimal filters is a clear sign of that you've reached that point.

We then sat outside in the April sun dripping massive Greek salads onto our laps (well, my lap) and promised to exchange the finished products in about a year. We each headed home, took naps, and then started our engines.

Now, as a concept, doesn't needlepoint seems like a no-brainer? In and out of little squares that are colored right onto the canvas, no more than paint-by-number with a needle. Except that the one time I tried it, my square turned into a trapezoid and the flat surface became a relief map of the Himalayas. So I had a tremendous sense of awe when, sometime last fall, Dr. J presented me with this:

 

The squares are microscopic and yet she captured every shadow, every turn, without a burp. Oh my god, I couldn't even do that with fine-tip markers, let alone a needle and fat hunk of wool.

Meanwhile, I was still cutting little triangles and dropping them all over the floor. In fairness to me,  she gets to take her canvas with her to airports, movies, and medical appointments so that she can make track all through her week. That doesn't work so well with machine sewing.  Nevertheless, a month or so ago, I took the finished quilt top to her house. My normally highly articulate friend not stop sputtering. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. She taped it to the kitchen wall in ecstasy but eventually surrendered it as I touted the merits of quilting and binding. 

I am naming the quilt, Oh My God. In a few days, she will see this:

I bound it with scraps from the quilt itself, my absolute favorite technique. And look at the extraordinary machine quilting by Barb Persing and how it brings each little corner to life:

The quilting changes about every two inches, try that sometime if you want to understand

Those circles are about a half inch, little kalamata olives

Dr. J and I are now embarking on our next project. She is going to needlepoint a pillow that she will create from the circular star pattern here. I said she could also make one for me. And we will meet up again with the finished products in about a year. 

Still Stitching "And"

An NPR radio show this week asked this question: if you could go back and talk to your high school self, what would you say? Most men who called in urged their teen selves not to be afraid of the popular girls (bad advice: be afraid of them. Be VERY AFRAID). Women callers didn't care about the popular boys. They wanted their girlselves to stand straighter, stronger and with their true selves facing outward.

I thought about this a lot these past few days. So my advice to teenage me? In the lunchroom, concentrate less on where you sit and more on what you eat. If you remember, I explored this concept as it relates to stitching here, in my blogging infancy. Three years later, I find myself completely comfortable and at home anywhere in the stitching lunchroom.

Here's one side of me. Remember this?

I turned it into a gift for an amazing young woman who I taught to read Hebrew. She just recently converted to Judaism.

The embroidery is the Hebrew name she chose for herself, words that perfectly match the glow you feel in her presence: Shayna Or, or "beautiful light."

 

I feel so self-expressive and satisfied weaving these bits and pieces of scraps. But sometimes, the occasion calls for more than that. Here's Stefanie's chuppah (fermenting here):

As you can tell by the canine point of reference, its pretty big.

I've been appliqueing the circles to the base (and occasionally, to my sweatpants) all winter as we cycled through our Netflix and Acorn TV (a BBC salad bar, the best) play lists. I've got about 10 circles left to stitch down and then its time for fine-tuning: removing excess branches on the sides, putting their initials onto the tree, reconsidering the use of two birds made out of cloth bits their moms sent on to me. And then, figuring out what to do with the edges so that Mr. Wedding Planner can get it in place.   

Sometimes, I just have to follow rules. Liza and Kaffe invited me yet again to create a quilt for an upcoming book. (The one that will follow the book coming out in September 2016, for which I created this. So we're talking about September 2017, which feels like a date in a sci fi movie about the far distant future).

The quilt inside me was already named. "Auntie Em." Lots of little squares echoing Depression-era Kansas, like Auntie Em's faded old house dress. But the design itself eluded me. After listening to me whine one too many mornings, Liza kicked my butt to a magical place called The Quilt Index, which archives more than 50,000 quilts from the past. And I found her.

The archival record just says "Medallion, scraps. Circa 1930-1949." And while it comes from Connecticut and not Kansas, the person who donated it attributed it to "Great Aunt."  Good enough for me! I wish I too could make my quilt out of old workshirts and mattress ticking and maybe I will do that next. This time,the rules say new fabric from the Kaffe Fasssett Collective. Here's where I am so far:

I am still playing with choices for the outside borders. And my quilt will also have an outside border that is a series of 16-patch blocks nested on their heads (called "on point," like ballerinas only without broken toes).  She looks a little more Raggedy Ann and Andy than Auntie Em at this point but I will wrestle with the name at the end.

Same stitcher, different stitchings. Something my teenage self would never have been able to understand. That's why, while my heart goes out to that kid, I really and truly like the old lady version a lot better.

Irons in the Fire

I made the mistake of opening my email in front of my father the other day. Now, at least 50 years have gone by since he last told me to straighten my room, but he picked up right where he left off.

"You have too many posts in your inbox," he snapped.

Dregs of defiance from 50 years ago bubbled up into my throat. "Well," I observed, "I don't have to answer to YOU about the state of my email."  Then, as the adolescent stomped back to her place in my gut and slammed the door, I found a more conciliatory tone. "You see, Dad, the posts in my inbox all require some kind of action. People I have to call, purchases I am waiting to receive, links I want to read, things I have to put on my calendar. And when I finally get to it, THEN I file or delete the post."

"Well," he said, "you sure have a lot of irons in the fire."

And that's the start of my explanation for where I've been for the past three months. I started to list my irons here, but honestly, they're no heavier or lighter than your own. What is true for me is that I let them distract me, pull me off course.

What course? Being present in this very moment, with my two feet on the ground or the two halves of my tush in a chair. So I'm back to meditating and I can already feel the results. The irons are still there, but they are clearly in the fire, not inside my brain. Which makes a lot more room for me.

And that me has really missed interacting with you all. So how about we pick up where we left off?

When I look to the last post, I see that we left off with Molly, who is still snoring in the key of E minor. I am happy to report that Billy apparently did not read the memo from October 2015 that gave him three weeks left to live. He has lost lots of weight and in the absence of fat, he sported a handsome apres-ski sweater for most of the winter.

Apparently, this abdominal tumor has a rather large appetite and so in order to maintain Billy's weight, we need to feed them both.  Every day, he eats two meals that he could probably share with a pregnant elephant and that involve lots of dog food cans, brown rice, and many trips to the feed store. No wonder he doesn't die, he already thinks he is in heaven.

Talk to you more tomorrow.

Molly Meditating

Molly is always at my side and so its only natural that she's been picking up meditation techniques.  She is completely at one with her breath.

Now I've done it, I've become a person who uploads pet videos.

Cloth Again

The retreat recalculated everything. Instead of my usual wrestling match with cloth on my design wall, I mysteriously channeled three cloths as I sang some of the retreat chants aloud. The singing moved Molly out of my studio, through the dog door and into the far reaches of the yard. But it moved that little place between my eyes where creativity lives, too.

My intention was to develop one prayer cloth, where I could see the words to my favorite chant from the retreat.  I also wanted to create a gift (since she may be reading, no more details yet).  I started by diving like a boxer into a trash can into my basket of miscellaneous component parts.  And it all just happened.

 

The prayer cloth...

 

The gift...

 And the bonus, as in "make two, get one free."

They all feel like me.

So a Jewish Girl Walks into This Monastery...

Meditation, silence, and simplicity cultivate mindfulness. 

Now, mindfulness is a concept that pervades our zeitgeist as deeply as oxygen permeates the atmosphere. Its very ubiquity makes it easy to be cynical.  However, in the uncomplicated space of retreat,you ultimately discover that, like oxygen, the stuff really works.

Our teachers thankfully broke their silence each evening to share teachings about courage. A word that, in Hebrew, actually translates into two words that mean "heart strength." 

I've been trying to capture their words for you. So I've spent most of this day in a cycle of inspired typing, followed by demoralized deleting (interrupted by intermittent attempts to rescue the chili that I started cooking before realizing that I actually have no fresh, canned, or dried chilis anywhere).

So what did I experience at the feet of these masters in Jewish text and tradition, seasoned by deeply refined and precise Buddhist tools, inside the stone walls of this once Catholic monastery?

 

It only makes sense to let a German poet stirred by Russian Orthodoxy explain.

 From Rilke's Book of Hours, translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your belonging.

 Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows that I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Eat, Pray, Sit

The first day looked like this.

Those italicized words are Jewish prayer services: morning, afternoon, night

You get the picture. And you probably get why my last meditation on the end of the first day involved an elaborate plan for escaping to a nearby bed and breakfast and spending three days in the craft shops and swell restaurants dotting the gentrified villages of the Hudson River Valley.

My higher self prevailed. I stuck it out, only to wake to a second day that had the rip-roaring zip of the first.

But something happened somewhere in the midst of all that sitting. A heart began to crack open, a soul began to reach out...and by the end of the next two days (see above: meditate, eat, pray, repeat), I...I...I am having so much trouble finding the right words.

Well, actually, I know the right words. They just sound stupid.

I see differently.

I will share more as soon as I take the final exam: figuring out how to upload photos from my phone onto my computer without throwing the phone against the wall or eating the entire box of Christmas cookies Himself brought home from the office.

Sshh.

If I can ever get in and then out of the shower, I will be off to do something I have never done before: a silent meditation retreat that also features Jewish text study on the Chanukah theme of courage.The retreat is sponsored by the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and will be held at the Garrison Institute, which, as you can see here, is an old Capuchin monastery that overlooks the Hudson River.

It is taking all the courage I have go into five days of long periods of silence...my intention is to completely reset my inner GPS and experience recalculating in a Big Way.

Better Living Through Garmin

Disclaimer: The missing camping towels and first aid kit have materialized but my camera is really and truly AWOL. I cannot bear to spend my time mastering a new piece of technology, so we are bidding on Ebay for the exact same model, used. (Might even be so exact because it was mine to begin with!). Anyway, bidding ends tomorrow and Himself won't let me touch his camera lest my LOS relapses. But the words are coming fast and furious and so I just have to go on without images. Feel free to print this out and draw pictures between the paragraphs if you need illustrations.

When you drive into the corners that we do, you need a GPS (sat-nav if you are not on my side of the Atlantic). Although Garmin seems bent on trumpeting that we have arrived at our destination "on left" when it is clearly on the right, it does keep us off roads that end in waterfalls and it breaks up our squabbles about who missed what turn.

Garmin does not get thrown by missed turns or closed roads. It does not curl itself up into a ball and whimper, "what now?" or turn its screen off and crawl back into the box. Nope. Garmin just utters the magic word: "Recalculating."

It occurred to me a while back that Garmin has been trying to tell me something. Not about missing right turns, but about a better way to live. Lately, the road through my life has suffered some serious potholes.  It has dumped me on a route that is unfamiliar at best and like something out of a "dark and stormy night" horror movie at worst. I feel lost and find myself desperately looking for the old road, the place where I am supposed to be. That strategy has given me insomnia, a broken heart, and some serious gas.

This month, I started to try it Garmin's way. The "check tires" light appears? A flat tire NOW? REALLY? Recalculating. Take the road to Chuck the Mechanic. The phone rings and now I have to call American Express, the New York Times, Netflix, two doctors and everyone else on Dad's Unending List of Worries?  Recalculating. I am on the path of helping them now,  these two old people who used to help me in every way possible. The dog is terminally ill? Recalculating...oh wait, he doesn't care. Never mind, just feed, walk and wrestle with him until he cannot do those things. The daughter will never prosper? She may never be safe? That little child with the sparkling blue eyes? There must be something--Recalculating. It is time. Turn off the bumpy road to Hope and drive the highway to Reality.

I actually say it out loud when I lose my grip. Recalculating. Like most metaphors, it substitutes image for abstraction...an image that helps me stop fighting, helps me start acclimating. It might even be the key to survival, both in my picayune little world and on a grander scale. Otherwise, why would a Syrian mother clutch a toddler in one hand and an aged father in the other and begin a walk through the Balkans in winter? For some of us, survival depends on recalculating an entire life. 

Not everyone knows that Garmin knows the secret to life. In fact, so many people found the "recalculating" refrain from Garmin annoying that the company removed the word from its products after 2012? So pass it on, ok?

Lost Object Syndrome

I keep a neat little (4 x 6) spiralbound notebook for writing my lists, for taping business cards of  handyfolk, for jotting phone numbers of Customer Service and the reference numbers it generates, for keeping track of books I want to read, music I want to listen to...and quotes that come across my life.  It replaced a rather ad hoc system that involved tearing corners off the nearest electric bill or piecing together shreds of business cards from the lint trap of the dryer.

The single rule is that the notebook can never leave the house. And so it is a brilliant way to keep everything in one place.

Except when you lose it. 

Because everything is in one place.

Because I slavishly follow rules, I know its here somewhere. After a month of looking in every possible and impossible hiding place, I finally gave in and bought a replacement. Much to my sorrow, because I love leafing back through the shorthand version of my life.  I would show you a photo of it...

But I can't find my camera either.

I used to think the thing I hated most about aging was the fumble for reading glasses to see anything smaller than my dogs. But since the glasses have become a permanent facial fixture, I am nominating Lost Object Syndrome in its place.

My Life as a Fungus

I've written before about the mushrooms I innoculated into logs of white oak in February 2014. I never expected another fruiting (actually, I never really expected the first fruiting), especially after this very dry summer and autumn. 

One morning, in what seems now like lifetimes ago but the calendar says just 10 days, something white caught my eye from the upstairs window...a trash bag caught in the bushes? An albino racoon? A midget Sta-Puff Marshmellow Man?

How 'bout oyster mushrooms?

 How 'bout shitaake mushrooms.

 How 'bout this life, huh? Punches below the belt and outpourings from old logs, all in one breath.

My Life as a Country Music Song

Well, my dad, he's sick and doing his best

To grab on to his walker without needing rest.

My mama is stuck in an endless refrain

Of asking "when can he go home again?"

I got a daughter who cycles from bad to worse...

And the vet just told me my dawg Billy has a large tumor 

somewhere inside his abdomen with just a few weeks left to live.

And I'm out of red wine.

Field of Feelings

Two years ago, a developer bought up a farm down the road a piece. He cleared the corn stalks, graded it into gentle rolling hills, ran a nice access road into it...and put up fancy signs about 7 custom-built estates with 20 acre lots each.

Here's how he is doing with that.

About a week ago on a sunny Saturday, with just a bit of chill burning off, I was tramping through the upper left corner of this picture. My mom called distraught about my dad. A former reference librarian, she did not remember how to call an ambulance. She did know to run down the hall to Charlie, "because he is always having to take his wife to the hospital."

Like a bad three-act drama, the emergency room set turned into the second floor acute care unit, and then into rehab on the fourth floor of something ironically called the "Health Center." That would be institutional euphemism for nursing home (the fifth floor, for dementia patients, is called "The Garden.")

He progresses slowly, but at nearly 88 years old, "progress" is also a euphemism. This man, who never met a medical intervention he didn't like, refused further invasive diagnostic procedures. And  he's become a bit giddy with self-management, like a two-year-old who just discovered the word "no," refusing things just to see if he can.

 I sit with my father in this place, literally and figuratively. Unless I have to deal with the disorganization of this organization, so that he gets the promised haircut, the necessary nail trimming. I sit with my mom in her place. Which usually includes an endless loop of 1) torturing my father with grapes, tangerines, and the whatever cookies she manages to steal from the lounge; 2) nagging him to stop sleeping so much.and 3) asking me why he is here. When she agrees to leave his side, we go to the movies, we share a meal somewhere.

My other commitments have proven stressful, not nourishing. So I dropped my class at rabbinical school and I pulled out of volunteering at the nursing home. (Actually, I AM volunteering at a nursing home, just for a party of two instead of a whole room.) For the first time in my life, I make a conscious choice not to busy myself with to-do lists that will subversively distract me from my feelings. Because everything is changing and a world I knew is coming to end.  Distractions will not prevent that and so I might as well be fully and truly present.

Little by little, I test out the hypothesis that I won't die from feeling sad.

I take breaks for that which comforts me: hiking, stitching, getting winter camp in place. My socializing is skeletal and primarily canine. (Himself is tickled to learn that he made the short list of people I can tolerate at the moment.

"Wow," he hums as he pushes out his chest in pride. "My wife can TOLERATE me!"

I remind him that the list is in pencil.

And above all, I try to spend sunrise in the field that the developer built me.

 

Gifts of Love

I've been busy striking the set of summer and starting preparations for winter camp, which, blessedly, brings me a project of love, for two young lovers.

ignore hearts and initials

 My cousin's daughter is getting married next July. Out of great love for my cousin, I had offered her son and his intended a quilted chuppah (the canopy covering the bridal party at a Jewish wedding ceremony). They were thankfully not interested and I never even thought about making the same offer to Stefanie.

Last month, at her engagement party, my cousin tells me that Stef wondered if I would make her a chuppah. She naturally felt out of place asking me but lucky for her, her mom and I can--and usually do--say anything to one another. I felt so very honored (and mightly ashamed that I had never made the offer). And yet, because I had just recently been paroled from the massive wedding One Block Wonder quilt, I was wary of taking on a project like this.

I learned from my last experience that for me, the gift of my stitching labors is really only a gift when it 1) comes from my heart and 2 ) allows me to express my creativity in my own way. So now what? What if I say yes and it turns out that her ideal chuppah and my worst nightmare look very much alike?  What if I decline and miss this very meaningful way to kiss my dearest cousin and her daughter?

Yikes.

I ran over to Himself, who was trying to hide from my family behind a large chafing dish. I  asked him whether he thought I should say yes. He offered his always astute and penetrating assessment:

"Do what you want to do."

"Yeah, but what do YOU think I should do?"

"I think you should do what you want to do."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Do you know where the bathroom is?"

 I tried to receive an answer from within my soul, but since we were in a large barn with 100 people and a live country music band, the reception wasn't too great. And then I saw beautiful, brown-eyed Stefanie two-stepping across the room and I knew.

When she wandered over, I took both her hands, looked her in the eye and said, "I am pleased and honored to make you two a chuppah." I think I then choked up, either from emotion or because she was throwing her arms around my neck.

"Only there are some rules," I added fiercely. "We have to talk about what you want and see if its something I can do."

"All I want is for you to do it, Julie."

I wasn't going to give up. "We have to find a color, a design--"

"I love you. I will be so thrilled to have what ever you want to make me."

The perfect answer. And so that is how two gifts of love were exchanged in a gentleman farmer's ersatz barn on a Saturday night in suburban New Jersey. Somewhere in there, the groom was told, as most grooms are, that he had always wanted me to make a chuppah and he thanked me from the bottom of Stefanie's heart.

So that's how I have come to be working on this project. As you can see from my sketch, its going to be a large tree, with colorful circles spreading across and down to the ground. It has to fit onto an existing stand, which required multiple communications with a frantic florist reminiscent of that wacky wedding planner in Father of the Bride. It also required lots of addition and subtraction, which I count as particularly frightening forms of higher math.

I came up with a size--about 7 feet wide by nearly 5 feet high. It will be tacked on to an existing white chuppah by the florist's seamstress (who knew that florists had seamstresses??). After the wedding, Stefanie and Mr. Stefanie can decide whether I should add to it for a bed quilt or just finish it off to put on the wall (or in a drawer).

I am going to do it all by hand onto a background that is in turn backed with harem cloth. That way, there is a better chance that the entire structure will not collapse and send the florist (and his seamstress) to the hospital.

The first step is to make a tree on craft paper, cut it out and see how it looks on the background before cutting up pretty pricey hand-dyed fabric.  Sounds easy, until you remember my previous dissertations on my drawing skills.

These are scary trees, good if your wedding has a nice Zombie theme. Lucky for me, Himself and his magic pencil were in the general vicinity when I was throwing the sketchpad against the wall.

He did it on graph paper so I could enlarge and transfer it onto a large sheet of craft paper that we used to use in kindergarten. I did that all by myself!

Now, the tree trunk goes up on the wall on a rough of the background so I can see how it works.

I will have to add the branches but I am happy with this start. I've been auditioning all kinds of browns and grey hand-dyes and will build a tree from them the size of this template. And then I get to make circles--4, 5, and 6 inches--out of my tentative palette:

 I'm sure lots will change but for now, I'm pretty energized and excited.And any and all ideas are warmly appreciated.