From lupa at kos.net Mon Apr 6 00:38:11 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:38:11 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090406003816.58DA01DB870@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Nudged Why was it so urgently important to pay a visit to my friend Martine? True, she's been in France for the last month and we hadn't talked in ages. True, I am just getting into playing around with glass, and she is an artist who also works in glass (and has the most fascinating stash!). But there was something else going on. I had the send of being gently but firmly nudged, and nudges are something I take seriously. So I called Martine and we arranged a lunch date at her charming, sunny house in Merrickville, and I drove up through a Mud Season rain-lashed landscape, which looked pretty far from lovable (it's very, very soggy around here), and Martine gave me delicious soup and we had crackers and cheese and grapes. We talked about her sojourn in Nice and how my kids were doing and all that. I looked at what she'd been getting up to in her art; neat stuff. And then she produced the book. (She didn't give me her copy, but I found my own copy in a bookstore on the way home.) It's a book on neuroplasticity -- the brain's ability to rejig itself all the way through life, compensating, pruning, growing, reforming its connections. The old notion that the brain is hardwired at the end of youth and that specific functions "map" permanently to specific brain locations is, apparently, contradicted by the evidence. We are forever dancing with our brains. Which is 'way kewl. I am, of course, in no position to figure out what the scientific status of all this is (except that the book got a blurb from Oliver Sacks, among others). But like Martine, I have been racing through chapter after chapter, getting my own personal belief system substantially rewired. This sort of thing has been happening a lot of late. Maybe it's sheer impulsivity (but it doesn't feel like that) but some force seems to be nudging me around, gently but firmly: "Go here. Try this. Talk to this person." I have long since learned that the first duty of a Christian is obedience, and this feels very much like the Holy Spirit in action (not least because there's so much creativity in play). I am finding my singing voice. I am learning how to move when I sing, which, for someone who has been a complete shame-ridden physical klutz from early childhood, is no easy matter. I am trying new creative endeavours. I am working on the spiritual knots in my head. I am thinking about new university courses, this time in psychology. I want to find ways of putting new learning to work in loving ways. Things have come unstuck; things are in motion. Yes, I've been here before. It's an iterative process, this healing. It was in response to the next nudge (this one coming out of the book, which came out of the Martine-nudge) that I picked up the phone and called another friend, Sarah. "I know this is out of the blue," I said, "but would you be interested in coming with me to dance lessons?" Sarah is generally pretty swift, but this did rock her back on her heels a little. I don't know why dance lessons, except that somehow the klutz wants to learn how to be physically rhythmic; I don't know why Sarah. But I do know a good nudge when I feel it. The landscape may be at its least beautiful right now, but the pale green thrust of the daylily leaves has begun on roadside banks amid the bones of the Shield, and if you look well, you can see buds. The snow's pretty much gone from the woods, and the landscape is still, waiting.The willows have turned that odd chartreuse-y golden that they take on, this time of year. I feel blessed that where I live, Easter almost invariably falls in Mud Season. And I feel blessed that there's Someone out there who gives good nudges. Sarah talks about "following the trail of crumbs" through the forest. There's light over the next ridge. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Mon Apr 6 01:19:21 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:19:21 -0400 Subject: [SB] okay, since people are asking.... Message-ID: <20090406011929.1E1FD1DBACB@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Norman Doidge, _The Brain that Changes Itself_. Molly ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sun Apr 19 21:13:43 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:13:43 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090419211348.CEA2C202CAE@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Kvetch I try to maintain a tough hide and a long fuse, but every now and again I find something really, really annoying. At the moment, I have two things that are really, really annoying, and I hope that in writing about them, I may clarify the connection between them, because there is one, and maybe also write my way to peace Both focus around the issue of truth. The first has to do with Easter. Every time we get to one of the major public Christian feasts -- of which Christmas is generally thought to be the most important, whereas Easter really is -- we get back to what Huston Smith has called the two dogmatic fundamentalisms: those who deny that these events happened at all, and those who claim that these events happened exactly as written in the Bible (preferably King James Version, which is the Word of God). The two sides lob shells at each other over the heads of those of us in the middle, who believe that (a) nothing can be proven one way or another, and (2) spiritual truth is not the same as empirically established evidence. Things can be psychospiritually true without being factually verifiable. But another part of me resonates in a sort of grumbling way with an equal and opposite issue: that psychospiritual truths do, in fact, have to be connected to reality. (There! That's the connection I was looking for. Funny how my fingers think better than my cerebral cortex.) This latter is, I believe, a problem that my generation is largely responsible for. I am, forgive me, a Boomer (I wasn't given a choice about this). I can see where it comes from. Our parents' generation, traumatized by the Great Depression and the war, retreated from emotion, often into the bottle or into silence. We grew up in an era of substantial psychological and emotional repression, which was not healthy. Not surprisingly, we arced in an equal and opposite direction -- the boomerang effect. Emotional truth became our watchword. If we felt repressed, we were repressed. (The fact that we were usually repressing someone else was not part of our emotional truth, something that the second wave of feminism had to learn the painfully hard way.) A lot of us eventually clued into the fact that sometimes an emotion is real and justified and important and in need of attention, and sometimes it's just plain out to lunch. Feelings may be very real without being realistic. You learn this essential lesson by taking emotion in one hand and reality (as best you can see it) in the other and seeing how the two line up. This can be a tricky and difficult business, especially given the prevalence of human self-deception and low self-esteem, but it's an important practice. Problem is, there's a sort of mindset based on the cult of freedom and individualism, that says that emotional truth *is* truth. If having a heavy fender-bender after a really bad office blowup feels like a huge crisis, it *is* a huge crisis. And this turns into all sorts of spiritual issues. Self-deception is a huge issue with emotional truth, as John remarked in his first epistle: if we think we've got it all right, we're lying to ourselves. We're all sinners, and that's a reality we have real problems facing. Possession of the emotional truth can easily morph into yet another dogmatic fundamentalism, another tug-of-war, because your emotional truth and my emotional truth may be absolutely contradictory. And then we're back to being on opposite sides of the battlefield lobbing shells at each other, just like the other dogmatic fundamentalists. Moreover, when we focus on our emotional truths, we have a tendency to blow things out of proportion, as in "I have a zit on my nose! Omigawd! My life is ruined." Or we become completely self-absorbed and self-focused (a character flaw, I admit, sadly common to Boomers). Emotional truth may be the high road to real narcissism, and we've all got more than a trace of that. So how can I put this all together for myself? I can do so in two ways: first, by looking at Creation and honouring the Creator. I am only one among billions and billions of souls, all dearly and individually loved by my Creator God. My truths are very real and precious to me, but they are not the only truths. I believe in my beliefs, but I also know that nobody has yet succeeded in walking around God. I remember that my first duty to God and to myself isn't to freak out when things aren't going the way I want, but to get my nose out of my navel and give thanks for what I have, remembering how much worse others have it. I can't prove or disprove the existence of God, except that God is a highly elegant solution to the problem of Creation (just think of the human nervous system). And second, by re-assuming some antique virtues, which had gone very badly out of fashion but seem, perhaps, to be on their way back in: humility, selflessness, a willingness to bend my individuality to the community, self-honesty, love for others, a willingness to spend more time with the suffering of others than with my own, trust in the provision of Providence. Somewhere, at some point at which all the shells cross the battlefield, there is a quiet spot where no shell shot by a dogmatic fundamentalism ever falls, and that's where Truth is sitting. I won't find it in this lifetime, but I trust in my bones that it's there, and that I will find the deepest peace when I get there. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sun Apr 26 21:39:41 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:39:41 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090426213945.28243219942@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Over the Dishes George gave me a hand with the dishes, as I was on solo duty for our church coffee hour this morning. Maybe it was something in the sermon -- Mike had preached on fear, a bit, and how it deforms our lives -- but George got going on bullying. He experienced some pretty brutal stuff in his high school days. Moving into a new school for grades 11 and 12 can be a difficult experience. I sympathized. I only got bullied for one year (Grade 6); after that, our class was in with the high school kids, and senior students took a dim view of bullying, recognizing it as loser behaviour. Besides, the bullies who'd gone after me were, on the whole, not high scholastic performers, so they ended up in the shop wing, out of sight. But my kids -- that was a different story. Both of them caught it going and coming for years, the older one worse than the younger one. We lived in a tough town, with a deep-set cultural belief that you clobber the other guy before he can clobber you. My kids, being too bright for their social good, stuck out enough to be hammered. It was terribly hard to watch, and it made me feel so helpless. And it was something we couldn't understand. Why do kids feel impelled to torture other kids? It's gotten worse, in some ways, with the arrival of cyberbullying; you can turn a whole school against one vulnerable young person with a few well-placed text messages. We had a horrible case in Toronto (the trials have just been completed) in which one 14-year-old girl psychologically manipulated her boyfriend into murdering a young girl whom she barely knew but hated anyway. And there rest of us look at this and say, "Huh?" But if I pull my nose out of my own self-absorbed navel and look around the world, there is so much of this stuff going on. Recognizing others' even greater suffering does not diminish our own, but it does put it in perspective. I cannot fathom how you can live with mothers and sisters and daughters, aunts and female cousins and grandmothers, and maltreat women the way women are maltreated in some parts of the world -- and so often, women are part of the maltreatment, mothers-in-law abusing daughters-in-law, women mutilating young girls. We lack the empathy to empathize with those who have no pity and no remorse. We just can't go there. Or at least I can't. It's a failure of imagination that I have every intention of cultivating. Some of it, I know, comes from fear, for fear begets cruelty (begets fear begets cruelty...). Bullies, as George observed, tend to be people who know that all is not right with them and who are terribly afraid of being outed and clobbered, so they get the first licks in, just to be on the safe side. I have seen this up close and terribly personal, and if it weren't so outrageously *wrong* it would be very, very sad. And maybe that's the part I should be concentrating on -- how terribly sad it is to feel the need to clobber first or to clobber back (but harder and more nastily). How sad that we flee from fear into inflicting fear. How sad that we have this overwhelming human drive, with hurt, either to pay it back or to pass it on. The whole point of Easter, it seems to me, is that God steps in and yells STOP THAT! Jesus takes on the whole hurt of the world and stops it in its tracks: you will not pay this back, you will not pass it on, because I have scooped it all up into myself, and with my life I have made sure that all this suffering will, in the end, be completely redeemed. I have a wonderful sad memory: Back in my early 20s, when I moved to Canada, I spent some time working in the Byward Market, at that time a still-unyuppified warren of small but funky shops, several of them run by people with blue numbers on their arms. Ottawa was a chilly burg in those times (it's a bit better now), and I was lonely and homesick. I don't think I've ever met with more kindness than I found in that grubby, lively warren. For the good thing about experiencing and recognizing your own reasonable suffering (as opposed to fending it off by whatever means possible) is that it gives you a conscious choice to say "This happened to me; it must not happen to anyone else." Give thanks for all who take their suffering and simply set it down for God to pick up and deal with. It's the hardest work in the world, sometimes, and sometimes it's something we have to do over and over and over again. But we know in our hearts that it's what needs to be done. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain