I am making some updates to my blogrolls, here and on my home page. It’s tedious, but it’s been on my to do list for a long time. That’s because I really LOVE to read other friends and writers blogs and share their great ideas too.

However, since I’ve/we’ve started morphing to Facebook and readers and Twitter, I’ve gotten out of the habit of adding my friends on my blogroll here. I think I keep waiting for some kind of miracle of technology to tell me it has some kind of Google Search shortcut to find out all my favorite sites and dropping links to them on my blogroll.

Let’s face it: I am sure that widget exists, but I haven’t found it yet.

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So anyway, as I was doing that today, I realized I’d broken my blog. If you are one of those people who reads it at the actual site you might have notice the formatting has changed. I had to dismantle it entirely because a plugin I installed started chomping away at its insides. Yes, that is the technical term.

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Which is fine. I really want to update the theme here, but I haven’t been able to decide what I like yet. All of this has made me forget — ARGH! — what I meant to start by telling you which is that I stopped by Amy Oscar’s blog today. I’d been away from her for awhile, and the minute I returned I was in love again.

The design isn’t all that fancy. It’s just her VOICE I love to hear. She sounds so comfortable and regular. It’s very hard to achieve that in writing. You have to practice being yourself ALOT in everyday life. Another friend of mine — Alma Schenider, who has the great cooking blog “Take Back the Kitchen” — also has this sort of easy voice on her blog. Makes you feel very at home. When you meet Alma in real life, she very at home in her own skin too. I haven’t met Amy in real life, but I bet she’s cool like that too.

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Which is just to say that I keep on forgetting to just chill out in my writing. The month of small stones, though, helped. (Thanks Fiona) And the poetry is helping too.

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Oh, and in case you are curious what’s a favorite topic of conversation at the dinner table around here, I can tell you: it’s llamas.

All llamas, all the time.

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I have a super great old friend from college, Jen. She’s a writer (here’s her book) and a journalist. And a mom.

She lives in Des Moines and recently she acquired chickens.

She and her husband and her kids have chickens in their backyard. 

Do you ever look at your friends, when they do something cool/amazing/odd/wonderful/outrageous and think:

“Uh oh.”

Here it comes. The Existential Chicken Crisis.

The other day, my friend Deb was over and she mentioned chili or something and then she said:

“Ah I saw that article you posted on Facebook, what was it? The 10 Foods You Should  Never Eat? And I thought OH NO!! Here I thought I was doing something great, making homemade chili! But I use CANNED TOMATOES! Ah shit. They were on that list.”

See?

Uh oh. Existential Tomato Crisis.

There are times — many times — when I have wished I were a moron. Existential Chicken Crises are definitely one of them.

Oh don’t worry. It’s not a permanent feeling. It’s just passing moment when I think:

“OH wouldn’t it be so much easier if I were an idiot and didn’t notice ANYTHING at all and could just work as a waiter forever, and then come home and roll around mindlessly on my Made in China sectional, right after I put ALL of the wrappers from my fast food — include the recyclable and compostable ones — in the trash can?

Then I have  to say no to myself. My days of waiting tables and eating quesadillas at midnight — for the most part– are over. That’s fine with me.

It’s just then I have to DEAL with the new information. I have to DECIDE: am I going to be a person who hosts chickens in MY backyard, or am I going to keep buying them from the chicken factory?

Or something in between.

Once new information seeps in, it makes just living a decent life a tussle.

I don’t think it’s keeping up with the Joneses so much. It’s keeping up following our own ideology: what our family wants to be.

Existential Chicken Crisis commence.

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Part of the December “If Only in My Dreams” series. Thanks.

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It’s 4:30 a.m. of course again. It’s a good time to think about things. In particular, how to change the world this week.

As for me, I am thinking about how frustrated I get with other people: you know, I just can’t control them! Why won’t they follow my mind control??!

I end up doing many things alone — not by choice, but by fear. It’s not because I am lazy either, I’ve decided. It’s because I am scared of people. Truly.

Do you ever get that way? You think; “Maybe I’ll call so-and-so to see if they want to do such-and-such?” and then you start to overthink all the myriad of possible responses and rejections?

Hell, so-and-so might not even bother to answer the phone/email/text, or reply back for that matter.

And then that means another week of wondering: why? Are they on vacation? Did they lose their phone? Did I, or someone in my family insult them or sit on their cat the last time we visited?

Seems like it’s just easier to stay at home, clean the house and bake, alone in my own universe.

Hmmm… maybe not.

However, it’s a new week, and a new world. And I can’t help thinking there must be other people out there, strapped to their fear and their Windex bottles, waiting for the phone to ring.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”  – Pema Chodron

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Eyes fixed on mine,
Nearly.
Chin cupped into
Palm.
Furrowed brow,
“Huh.”
Call and response.
You listen.
You don’t agree.

Day 12, July A River of Stones

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I admit it. I have a serious Life-Crush on Tara.

It’s Ok. I am sure she doesn’t mind. I mean, after all, her business is to make people want to feel that gorgeous feeling of love… not just for her, but for ourselves.

There are just those certain kinds of people in the world, aren’t there? The ones in our lives who make us feel lovely.

They walk into the room, and all the self-consciousness, all the questions about who we are or who we SHOULD be just disappear.

In fact, what I like best about People I Love is how perfectly “out” of myself I feel. I turn toward the love between us, which shines like a beautiful ever-changing star wherever we go together.

That’s why I tweet, actually. I love to pop over to Twitter, just to get a glimpse of what the lightmakers are mumbling about today. What zen light is AmyOscar up to? Tara, have you had your coffee and your revelation yet today? Will ImtheQ ever find happiness or the perfect taco? What small stones have Fiona and Kaspalita skipped today?

I walk the line between what is healthy injection of light in my day, and what is distraction. But in those moments when I’ve forgotten myself and feel wonderful, I know I’m doing OK.

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I used to be one of those annoying, know-it-alls about education.

“School is the only place for a child to learn what it is REALLY like out there in the world.”

I’d sneer.

Well, then, what happened was:
I actually MET people who homeschool.

I spent time around their kids.

I learned more about how children learn, in general.

AND, I then I got a big dose of how schools are today (versus the cushy experience I had at St. Paul the Apostle growing up).

And I met some of the actual students who have emerged from actual schools and entered the college system.

And I cried and cried and cried.

Homeschooling – You Can’t Handle the Truth!

…because the truth might be that most public schools are letting our kids down. And the truth might be that even though we all are branded with fear that if we homeschool, our kids will be weird, underneath it all we find, ALL KIDS ARE WEIRD.

My friends who homeschool are amazing. They do use curriculum from websites but they also have a great deal more freedom.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Let’s be real: that’s like saying “working from home and owning your own business is SO much easier than showing up to a desk someone picked out for me, working on a computer someone bought for me, writing emails through a complex IT system (with firewall and virus software) that is supported just on the other end of that really nice phone someone gave me.”

In fact, homeschooling to me sounds really hard. Sure there are curricula to work from, but you still have to create an entire learning system for your OWN kids. And it has to be done (to a certain extent) from the confines (yes I do intend to make that sound like prison) of their home.

Homeschool sounds HARD.

And like madness, torture, and some kind of Pilgrim experiment created by people ALOT smarter than me who are of the ilk who would say something like: “I don’t LIKE being persecuted for my religious beliefs! Come on, family. Let’s all take this boat and sail across the ocean to unbroken land and build our own colony and be free! How bad could the winters be?” And then do it.

And I think, maybe, because it sounds really hard — and kind of “different” — some people who don’t see themselves as wild, maverick-y pilgrims of educations are much more comfortable making fun of homeschooling.

Rather than learning about it. Ironically. But perhaps not surprisingly.

They, like me, like living in La-La land Utopia of what we imagine “school” is — that happy place where everyone gets treated fairly, everyone learns at the same pace, and the rooms are filled with the hum of brains growing.

Because at best, “good” schools are culturally unbalanced and performance driven. At worst, the bad schools are nothing short of Thunderdome.

But that’s off the subject because….

Today,  I am praising my often maligned and usually misunderstood homeschooling homies — the moms who spend ALL day, ALL week, MOST of their time with their kids, not just shaping their values and wiping their snot, but teaching them about metamorphosis, derivatives, class and race issues surrounding the Civil War, how to play the steel guitar and basket weaving.

Oh, and about the whole socialization thing... I feel confident these homeschool kids can learn intricacies of what they are missing —  bullying, techniques for making out with your tongue, and how to text my Facebook status from my phone.

These kids seem pretty smart. And self-motivated. If they don’t figure it out by college, I KNOW they will look it up.

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On Everyday Charity and 9.0 Earthquakes.

One day on Facebook I asked my friends: “What can I do to help you?”

It was one of those days when I had some unexpected free time.

I sincerely hoped that someone would ask me to make dinner for them or watch their kids or juggle their seven balls for them so they could lie on the ground and watch the clouds. Sure, I am busy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help out my friends in return when I can.

I got many responses, but they were mostly in the non-specific range of  ”how thoughtful!” to “what? You don’t have enough to do right now LOL?” No one asked for anything in particular and I clearly didn’t know WHAT to do, so I gave up.

I ended up watching “America’s Next Top Model” instead.

The Problems We Share

My 16-year-old niece Shona, this weekend, was laying with her head on her Nana’s lap, listening to her elders discuss the disaster in Japan. She broke in: “It seems like a lot of this kind of stuff has happened in my lifetime. Is there more distasters now, or have these bad things always been going on?”

Her family was quick to reassure her that the light-speed of our media has made it much easier to internalize other people’s suffering, and to make that a part of our own everyday experience.

“In the past,” I said, hoping to sound like a proper old auntie, “before telegraph and texting, we only shared such news with our neighbors… A five-mile radius might have been the extent of our reach.”

It’s a good problem to have…

… to have the time and the resources to help. But I know as soon as I have the time, I often find myself tangled up in questions about:

• what to do
• how much to do
• who am I missing
• what is appropriate
• who have I forgotten
• will my company match the donation
• why bother

So, then, I often just end up watching, well, “Desperate Housewives” and thinking: “I’ll send my $80 to NPR in the next fund drive.”

The Quality of Help

I want to be more cognizant of others and their needs. It’s on my “I Don’t Ever Plan To Empty This Bucket List.”

So I found this great list from Zen Habit’s Leo Babauta called “25 Ways to Help a Fellow Human Being Today” that I think is a good guide for when I am feeling generous, or just all-around conflicted about charity.

Leo notes that: “what we must guard against is the tendency … (of) individuality to have us focused on ourselves to the exclusion of our fellow human beings.”

He gives a wonderful argument for the improvement of MY life, based on the improvement of yours.

A few of my favorites from Leo’s list are:

8. Comfort someone in grief. Often a hug, a helpful hand, a kind word, a listening ear, will go a long way when someone has lost a loved one or suffered some similar loss or tragedy.

We don’t allow ourselves to really grieve in our culture. So if you meet a friend who has lost a loved one or a pet, I think it is so important to listen to them, to nod and to touch them, and to tell them “it’s ok to cry.”

11. Lend your ear. Often someone who is sad, depressed, angry, or frustrated just needs someone who will listen. Venting and talking through an issue is a huge help.

The friends who have done this for me are the friends whom I carry in my heart everywhere.

14. Do a chore. Something small or big, like cleaning up or washing a car or doing the dishes or cutting a lawn.

When the kids first came to live with us, our community of friends from church made food for us, and came to the house to help us, even went and bought them pajamas and underwear. It was so wonderful.

16. Send a nice email. Just a quick note telling someone how much you appreciate them, or how proud you are of them, or just saying thank you for something they did.

Don’t you love it when you get a note for “no reason” to tell you how great you are?

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Make the day pause,
A top all done now the spinning:
But not yet toppled.

If (for just one day)
I am the morning sun,
Then
You are the luscious hills
I peek over;
The refracting air dew
–In winter, air’s mirror–
And that single ecstatic
Songbird rambling
Her grocery list.

And if,
At noontime,
I’m busy shrinking
Dingy winter piles
(Just this once),
Then,
You’re the relieved oak branches
Sighing,
Or epic icicles smirking at my
So-called heat.
You are
The tires and the grit
Scratching roadside harmony
To keep me company.

Then, when I see it’s time
(One day only)
To stretch the shadows long,
Then you become the
Winged beauty of your dreams:
Hummingbird, pheasant, or pterosaur

And we’ll light out
Together,
Horizon advancing on
Our command,
Into our dreams and
Any ordinary day.

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The friend is
A spring in the
Trampoline which–
If you are willing
To risk the bone crunch
And the stomach lurch–
Can send you flipping and flying.

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