Monthly Archives: October 2011

The Honor & Horror of Waking Up: Everyday Magic, Day 434

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 2 Comments

Given that I’ve written of falling asleep (or not) and napping in the last week, I figured I’d better complete the bedtime trilogy by writing of waking up (or trying to).

Yes, it’s good to be alive, and to wake up another day, but it’s still just a little bit of a horror for me, especially lately when I have to wake up at a time normal for many people: 6 a.m. Ken being in Peru necessitates that I take over the laundry drive the kids around twice as much as usual, do some extra housework and check on his mom everyday, but the only part that’s really difficult for me is the crowning glory of what he usually does: waking early to take our son to high school (0 hour of course because otherwise, I could sleep until 7ish).

For Ken, this isn’t an issue: he’s a morning person, and he leaves early for work. For me, a little house of horror each morning. The alarm goes off, and the first thought I have is, “Oh. My. God.” Then I have to get vertical and just awake enough to drive. This means putting on sweat pants under and a down coat over my nightgown and blinking my eyes a dozen times. Obviously, I’m what you would call a night person, or more precisely, someone hard-wired to go to sleep after midnight and to hardly ever glimpse a sunrise.

People have told me I could adjust my inner clock to waking early repeatedly, but really, that’s never happened. Even when I worked an 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. job in Kansas City without a car, which meant waking at 6 to catch two buses, I never got used to waking early. Unlike Ken, who is prone to joke around and even sing a little at 5:45 a.m., when I wake up early, I am caught in a haze that makes me feel like the world ended an hour ago.

Here’s the deal: there are a lot of things I’m good at, but waking up isn’t one of them. It’s the hardest part of most of my days. Luckily, I’ve invented a life, thanks to flexible jobs usually done at home and my lucky stars, that has allowed me to avoid waking up early on purpose much. The gods have been with me on this: when I was pregnant with my first child, despite people telling me my days of sleeping until 8 or 9 a.m. were coming to a close, I trained my baby (and the next two) to sleep late with me. It was easy actually: I just kept each baby up late. When my kids started school, again, the universe lined up according to my sleep cycle: our school of choice didn’t begin until 8:45 a.m. (and although I brought the kids late often, there weren’t many consequences for my excessive tardiness).

So I’ve gotten off easy…….that was until my kids started high school, and difficulties with schedules, plus the terrors they experienced on the school bus, necessitated me driving them in for several years. Now I return to those early mornings, but only for a few more days (I’m counting) until I can return to my slovenly-sleepy ways. In the meantime, yes, the sunrises are beautiful, but so is coming home by 7 a.m., climbing back in bed, and then not getting up to a brighter hour.

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Surrealistic Power Napping: Everyday Magic, Day 433

Posted on October 30, 2011 | 1 Comment

I just woke up after a 30-minute nap, but actually, I was gone about three and a half hours……or maybe the reverse is true. In any case, surrealistic power napping is something I’ve been training at, hard I might add, in recent years: the quick and fast plunge into dreamland only to climb quick out of the tunnel of skewed images and speedily-forgotten plot lines to be awake. Refreshed? Kind of, but more after a half hour of wandering through the house, trying to remember what day it is and why I was so excited about cleaning out a closet earlier. Confused? Absolutely.

Yet I strongly recommend the power nap, with these caveats:

  • It’s easier to fall asleep quickly if you have a lightweight cat (five pounds or under) sleeping on your chest.
  • Eye pillows? This is what they were invented for: sleeping in daylight.
  • Upon waking, try gulping some cold coffee…..or taking a quick bath or shower…..or eating one small squall of high-quality dark chocolate. There are other ways to wake up, but in the interest of not disgusting my adult children, I won’t name them.
  • It’s also good to step outside when you wake up. It immediately alerts you as to what hunk of day you’re in (morning, afternoon, early evening) and what season (note: the season part doesn’t always work in Kansas where our seasons like to dress up like one another).
  • For a really difficult day, two power naps is not too much.
  • Loud music (that you like) is also a good way to wake up.
  • There’s a moment in the nap, when the veil between sleep is particularly thin and you can either wake up or go back to sleep. Choose wisely.
  • These napettes can be done in cars. Park under a shady tree, lean back the seat, remember to lock the doors, and try to be on a street where people aren’t apt to tap on your window and scare you half to death.
  • You can also power nap during particularly arduous meetings. Sit behind someone tall, and if you snore, snore loud enough to jolt yourself awake, turn toward someone else, and nicely say, “Hey, wake up.” If you’re discovered, say, “I sometimes make snorting sounds when thinking deeply,” and then suggest something so utterly brilliant that they’ll believe you.
  • Remember that if you’re walking through walls, seeing your black lab turn into a panther or discovering there are 22 secret rooms in your basement, you’re probably napping. But if you’re seeing tent cities filling public parks, pictures of your junior high drill team on facebook, or someone suggesting you try the lavender-infused chocolate, you’re most likely awake.

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From Kansas to Peru with Love: Installment #1

Posted on October 29, 2011 | Comments Off

As mentioned earlier, Ken Lassman (occupational therapist, writer and wheelchair clinic director, and my husband) is guest-blogging about his experiences working with the disabilities communities in Lima, Peru Oct. 26-Nov. 4. Stay tuned for more!

Hotel Melodia has a very modest presence along the six-lane divided street of bustling traffic in the San Miguel section of Lima, Peru. There is a sidewalk /driveway where folks who stay here pull out of the steady stream of vehicles to take up one of the half dozen parking spots or go down the ramp to park below, getting out to have the locked gates opened by the ever present key holding gate attendant.

I’m sitting on my firm twin-sized bed in a small but efficient 10 X 12 hotel room with a wood wardrobe framed by two small windows that overlook the neighborhood of cinderblock and brick homes and businesses. Since Steve and I are on the 5th floor, we can see the tops of most of the structures, many of which tell a story: pottery containers surrounded by walls that have not yet been finished adjacent to another room where the walls are done but have colorful fabric sheets instead of a ceiling; another roof well lived in with a ceramic patio, plants and clothes drying on a line; another with the old hot water heater and plumbing strewn about, left to the side of the newer, larger roof mounted heater.

My trip here with fellow Lawrencians Dale Huffman, a certified rehab tech specialist, and Mack Price, a lifetime appliance store owner of Price Appliances and repairman extraordinaire, began with the oft feared 3rd world experience of electrical shutdowns creating interminable delays, resulting in missed connections and an extra day in limbo at a small hotel, lost luggage and a delayed flight before finally arriving in Lima. Funny thing is that these things happened in Kansas City and Atlanta, not some overseas backwater. We found ourselves in the dark after an unexplained power outage at KCI shut down the entire airport and computer systems, resulting in the resourceful Delta airline employees belatedly processing us by substituting pieces of scribbled upon paper for our computer boarding passes, and going through security that whisked us through during momentary returns of the power, getting us to Atlanta 10 minutes after the Lima flight left despite a 3 ½ hour planned layover designed to avoid this problem. After some frantic calls from the complimentary Atlanta hotel room, we left a couple hours behind schedule for Lima the next afternoon, wondering why such a delay couldn’t have happened the day before so we could have joined the fourth member of our party, Steve Bolander who came down from Michigan and departed on time the previous day? Questions with no clear answers were actually a good preparation for loosening us all up for the days ahead, no doubt.

So far, Steve and I have taken a few walks down the street , with a mix of the

Ken earlier this year in the Northwoods of Minnesota

familiar—KFC, Pizza Hut and Burger King mixed in with the local big boxes: Maestro, Ripley and Wong. The ever present Interbank and HSBC contrast with the street vendors: one selling candy and, drinks; another standing by a stack of colorful lighted whirlygigs that he slingshots into the air, catching them as they spin down to the ground, much to the delight of the children playing in the adjacent closed in park. It is spring here, warm, mostly cloudy, with some familiar flowers blooming like the oxeye daisy, and others that I must learn the names of from our hosts, Gladys and Raoul. We hope to spend some time at their small apartment as Raoul has told us about his 5 pet frogs that live in their garden, and Gladys talks about the home they have been building on the outskirts of this bustling metropolis for the past two years.

But as planned, most of our time since we arrived has been spent at CASP-Centro Ann Sullivan del Peru. It is within walking distance from the hotel, but Gladys and Raoul insist on picking us up every morning and bringing us home in the evening, requiring much traffic jostling, u-turns and honking buses, vans and motorcycles. We get dropped off at the brick wall gates which are opened by another attendant, walking up a ramp into the bustling 3 story complex that surrounds the central courtyard that is CASP.

It is hard to describe the palpable energy that permeates CASP, with its hundreds of children, energetic teachers and pervasive parent volunteers swarming through the halls and rooms on every story. The students wear clean, well taken care of uniforms, and yet each individual personality is honored as in the best of schools, belying a philosophy of nurturing each child’s potential to live with as much independence as possible. There is a waiting list for joining Liliana Mayo’s vision of what CASP has grown into, from its humble beginning to today’s ever expanding reality (see for yourself at www.annsullivanperu.org for its history and myriad projects). The mothers of the students are required to provide and excel at creating an amazingly proficient and patient support staff person for their child. Staff are selected for their intelligence, compassion and are highly skilled at what they do, with every Friday devoted to world class training from their peers and the parade of professionals that Liliana has created to help support CASP.

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Finishing Begin Again: Everyday Magic, Day 432

Posted on October 28, 2011 | 6 Comments

Yesterday, the books came, marking the end of months of editing, proofreading, checking the proof, talking with designers and photographer, and hundreds of emails to and fro with the press, and the 93 contributors. When I thought of doing the 150 Kansas Poems site, the idea of a book was just a glimmer (as in, “This might be a cool book”), but as the site unfolded, the poems shone brighter, and Woodley Press indicated some interest in publishing an anthology, a book became inevitable.

The space between a book’s inception and the box of books arriving isn’t often pretty, and it’s always far more complicated and challenging than any writer or editor imagines. I learned even more how much I hate rejecting people’s poems, particularly when some of the rejectees take it personally. I struggled with how to organize 150 poems, finally settling on a seasonal approach, and then finding ways to fit the poems together like a puzzle that would reveal a narrative of moving through weather, places, changes and realizations. There were many details to check over and over. “Begin Again” isn’t just a title of a wonderful poem in the anthology by Nancy Hubble: it’s a way of life for anyone putting out a book.

At the same time, I worked with great people — Kevin Rabas and Dennis Etzel at Woodley Press, designing poets superb Matt Porubsky and Leah Sewell (who also fed me at the fabled Porubsky’s in Topeka), and photographer of the skies Stephen Locke. Holding this book in my hands, looking at how artfully the photograph wraps the cover, and how full the book is of poems of so many stripes and spots, I’m very happy……and happy it’s done.

Now that Begin Again is finished, we begin anew to do readings – over a dozen happening soon or in the works, and some in a city near you. I’m especially looking forward to a Southwest Kansas tour (Garden City! Ulysses! Dodge City!) where we’ll bring a little poetry roadshow to a corner of the state where there aren’t many readings (I’m told our reading in Ulysses will be a first).

The book is beautiful, the poems are gorgeous, and where the book leads us now will bring many writers in this state and beyond together in ways we’re just glimpsing at the moment, kind of like the notion of this book itself less than a year ago.

 

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An Insomniac & The Hour of the Wolf: Everyday Magic, Day 431

Posted on October 27, 2011 | 1 Comment

I’m sure I came out of the womb ready to stay up late, and since I was born late at night, I had a good start already. My mother tells me I didn’t sleep much as a baby, and even left in the crib to cry it out — the parenting protocol of the time — I rarely cried myself to sleep. Instead, I cried until I threw up, and then kept crying. As a kid, I remember being wide awake late every night, often listening to Cousin Brucie on a little transistor radio beneath the covers. Even when I did fall asleep, I would often sleep-walk, waking always on the couch, my eyes fixed on Johnny Carson on the TV. My mother was used to this, but it freaked out my dad. So it’s no wonder that sleep is a tricky train to catch for me even now.

It’s not that I don’t like sleep. I love sleeping, especially when exhausted. I mean, is there anything more luxurious and satisfying than lying down between flannel sheets with the stars out the window, the cat purring nearby and the pillow so welcoming? I’m also good at dreaming, and often have many vivid forays through houses with secret rooms, parallel cities where I’m looking for hot bagels or interesting travels that mix up the geography of the awake world.

Yet sleep is difficult for me to attract easily. Even if I do all the right things — exercise vigorously, avoid caffeine after mid-morning, do work I love, get fresh air — it may or may not come. Sometimes when I do all the wrong things, it comes easily. Getting to sleep also doesn’t mean staying asleep. I wake early and often, years of waking for crying babies having honed my insomnia in ways only accentuated by menopause. When I do tunnel into it at just the right angle, I can sleep deeply for many hours. That right angle (and hour) is not something I can plan though.

Yet I also see that there are certain gifts to waking or still being awake in the middle of the night. I was struck by this article — “Appointment with the Wolf” by Clark Strand in Spirituality and Health Magazine — although Strand names the hour or so when we’re awake in the middle of the night as the time our fears grow largest, and we’re closest to death. He suggests that we’re awake not by mistake but by a calling to meditate, pray, contemplate. Strand started using this time in his life to go outside and talk to god, “green meditation,” he called it, based on an esoteric Jewish tradition written about by Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772 – 1810) to restore “the hour of the wolf.”

Although he wasn’t Jewish, when he contacted an elder rabbi, the rabbi said to him,

“Wouldn’t it be wiser to say that this ‘hour of the wolf’ you speak of — this luminous reality — well, isn’t it really as old as God? After all, it’s too old and too big to belong to human beings, isn’t it? Maybe it belongs to the wolf.”

I don’t know that I’ll be stepping outside all that often when the wolf calls (and in Kansas, it might best be called the Hour of the Coyote), but I like the idea to seeing these awake moments in the deep dark as a time the soul can speak…..and listen. Instead of thrashing around over the difficulty of snagging a snooze, I’m thinking about how to submit to my own nature and the nature of the world around me.

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He Flies To Spring, I Drive In Fall: Everyday Magic, Day 430

Posted on October 27, 2011 | 1 Comment

All afternoon and evening as I drove through the brightest reds of our fall so far, I thought of Ken, flying for almost seven hours into spring. He should be landing in Lima, Peru soon, changing hemispheres, seasons, languages, proximity to the ocean (as in right next to versus 1,400 miles from), and even time to some extent.

Being close to someone who is going someplace neither of you have ever been is one way to have a window into the magic of what might come into his/her view. Add to this a restless mind and propensity for imagining things, and I’ve been picturing Ken looking out the window, wondering if he can see the ocean or just layers of clouds. Since I’m a little claustrophobic when it comes to hours sealed up in an airplane, I’m glad I have the advantage of simple imagination. But I also wonder about what he’ll find when he lands, how the air will feel, what strange and likely wonderful new world will envelop him.

I remember that when Ken and I went to Kenya 25 years ago, we arrived in the middle of the night, and were swept off by Ken’s sister and her husband to a room in a convent somewhere in Nairobi. I don’t remember anything we saw, heard or did, just a lot of motion in a very surrealistic world of night we emerged into after 18 hours of air travel. The room was simple, we were exhausted, the bed was heaven.

Then I was woken up by an explosion of sweetness, the smell of the flowers, so vivid that it swept me out of my dreams. I got up, opened the wooden doors in the single window, and the technicolor world poured in. We were in the middle of paradise, a garden with saucer-sized flowers from another planet, large green or orange birds disappearing into towers of blossom.

This is what I wish for Ken — this kind of immersion celebration into a reality more vibrant than what we imagine. Actually, whether we’re literally traveling or not, this is what I wish for all of us.

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In Praise of Growing Old(er): Everyday Magic, Day 429

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 2 Comments

Almost two years since I crossed into what I’m sensing is the second half of my life, I’ve been thinking about growing old. What will it be like to be 83, 97, even, I hope one day, 100? What will it feel like to live in/be a body with far more limitations when it comes to flexibility, strength and speed? How will my mind move when it’s lost its lightning-fast surges?

I’m guessing I’ll care most about what I care most about now: health, the people I love, the state of the world, whatever I’m currently creating. But I wonder if I’ll have grown my patience out enough to do some of the things I want to do now (but can’t sit still enough long enough to do), like watch a tree entertain its birds for an hour. Maybe I’ll be able to start reading a book without reading the last page first. I’m hoping I can savor the soup, admire the wind, listen to a particular song I’ve loved for 70 years with all the layers of memory filling the air. Of course, I’m also hoping I’ll be able to walk, talk, think, feed myself, drive until I’m ready to not drive, sleep well at night, and generally feel okay, which may not be realistic, but I’m guessing its a common dream.

Mostly, I look forward to getting old, and perhaps even more so since I watched this remarkable video on the beauty of aging. It gives me hope for opening my life to more dance, more art, more kissing and more clear views of the changing world.

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Coming Soon: Stories From Peru with Ken Lassman

Posted on October 22, 2011 | Comments Off

Within a few days, Ken Lassman (who happens to be my husband), will be arriving in Lima, Peru, where he’ll be part of a team building and repairing wheelchairs for children and adults with disabilities, and training community members to build and repair wheelchairs into the future. Some of you read about this in Ken’s campaign — the Kansas-Peru Mobility Connection — and you can see a powerful little video on this project here.

I’ve invited Ken to be a guest blogger on this blog, sharing with you stories of immersing himself into another culture and land. Instead of working and driving through days of fall, he’ll be wandering and serving through days of spring. Ken is a wonderful writer (not that I’m biased), and the author of Wild Douglas County, among other articles and books. He especially has keen eyes for the wonders of the natural world and the magic around us in each breath. So please warmly welcome him soon when you see his posts.

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Posted in Activism, Bioregionalism, Health, Kansas

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Living in Two Worlds At Once, or “Do I Contradict Myself? Very Well Then, I Contradict Myself”: Everyday Magic, Day 428

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 3 Comments

A few days ago, a woman driving me through a pounding rainstorm in New England revealed to me that she both works for an organization that receives some state funding and is president of the state libertarians (which call for eliminating funding of state programs as well as no or only voluntary taxes). As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contract myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes.)”

Besides, it’s not like I don’t contradict myself in many ways also: I drive through Taco Bell on the way to the ecological meeting, I write about bioregionalism and sense of place while flying all over the country, and here’s the kicker of late: I totally support the Occupy Wall Street movement although I will be out of contact with it in early December for four days because I’m getting on a cruise ship with an amusement part in the center of it.

For many years, I’ve realized how much we live in two worlds at once: one foot clad in a warm, fashionable boot walking through the world to which we were born (which has been steadily going to hell in a handbasket); the other foot, bare of course, in the world we’re creating by how we live, work with others, build and interact with community, land, place, work, soul.

It’s hard to walk this way without falling over at times, but the alternatives don’t appeal to me much. Stepping completely into compliance and acceptance of a world in which profit motivates action over values isn’t a way to live with integrity. On the other hand (or foot), being a purist, even taken to extremes (say living off the grid, maybe hiding out in a tent on a public lands, foraging and hunting) doesn’t make for many opportunities to improve the world for the multitudes we contain and that we are.

I’m not defending Taco Bell, Libertarians, or cruise ships — I think none of these are ultimately the way to move ahead in good relation to the social contract. But this world is imperfect, and so are we. There are also many ways to grow our own food, and not just by gardening (although of course I’m in favor of that exponentially). The important thing is that we’re both honest about our contradictions and committed to doing our part to cross over, not just on our own but with our people, to the world we believe in: one that replaces poverty with peace, powerlessness with voice, blind greed with generous vision, and isolation with community.

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Written in Occupation: Everyday Magic, Day 427

Posted on October 18, 2011 | Comments Off

I sit at the altar at Occupy Wall Street, drumming nearby, but not the usual bongo deal but instead a combination of several drum sets with some Afro-Cuban drumming. A young woman in a furry tan hood lies close by, talking into her phone. A young man sits on the marble bench in half-lotus, deep in meditation. Around the circle, one man smokes a hand-rolled cigarette while another sleeps, his head dropped on his crossed arms on top of his backpack. Meanwhile, a beautiful old man in dreadlocks bends to pet a pug dog.

Around the perimeter, visitors and regulars stand at the gate and film what’s happening. Tourists walk through, giving out money or bringing in clothes or food. Double-decker tour buses pause to look down into the occupation where a man in a suit holds a Tibetan flag as large as him.

I eat a pear I plucked out of a food bin in the center where a crew continually serves whoever is hungry. When I donated some books to the library, I found the books organized according to genre and subject, the whole library burgeoning with words. Then I saw more of the occupation’s infrastructure: a think tank (a box people can put paper into), a notary public, a sanitation station, a health center.

I want to say to the occupiers both “Thank you” and “Please stay.” They are living in a ceremonial village, holding the light high enough to show us how difficult making change is, how most societal issues and causes are interwoven, and how all they’re protesting comes from a core of tangled motives and lost values at the center of our economy. They show us that this is not a movement about a single demand or list of demands, but one about how and why we need to live differently. And they call for us as a culture to look at how, in the last 30 years, wealth has been drastically redistributed at the expense of the human and other-than-human communities of this earth.

So while they’re sleeping on the ground, getting arrested, trying to catch a nap in the middle of lines of tourists snapping their photos or washing dishes in the rain, I hope they know that, just like the young man I saw today holding up the sign that said, “I love you,” I love them too as well as many of us. And we’re infinitely grateful for their vision and courage.

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