Marz telling me…

 … about the Battle of Borodino [having taken a Russian Empire history class]. “Now War and Peace makes sense.”

Warming up, and a foxy version

 On the radiator, drying off chilly snow.
Not everyone here ended up in the picture.

In the original “Hunters in the Snow” painting, one of the hunters is carrying a dead fox over his shoulder. So we had a version with a fox, but as a friend, and a dinosaur as one of the dogs. I like it a lot, but I thought it turned out too colorful.

 

I was very disappointed there were no skaters on the park's ice rink. It was too cold to wait around hoping some would appear, but at least a family walked past on the way to the skating hill---they appear in the previous post's photo.

Toys ReCreate "Hunters in the Snow"

 

"Hunters in the Snow" (Winter)--cropped--by Pieter Bruegel, 1565, at the Vienna Kuntshistorisches Museum www.khm.at/objektdb/#object-327

I was really disappointed no one was skating today, but a colorful family walked by on their way to the skating hill, so there's still some of the background activity that makes Bruegel's painting so wonderful.

Christmas Eve Day in the Village

Marz drove down from Duluth last night. Cars were flashing her on the highway, and she realized her tail lights were out! This morning she's off to the mechanics. Luckily they're open until noon this Christmas Eve Day and, surprisingly, not busy. 

Marz is getting a crash course in car ownership--a couple days ago she got her first flat tire!
I was telling my coworkers about this over lunch, and everyone had a lot to say--including Big Boss, who recommended Marz get Triple A roadside service. There's this village attitude--a pull-together/swap information attitude toward cars that I, never having owned a car, have missed out on.

Winter Village (below) is full--little red candles ready to be lit before dinner--and across the room, the Magi are making their way. There's still a toy creche to set up too, if there's time.

"The village needs everybody," said the Metaphysical Cowboy on youtube. "You have to have all kinds of different people. That's why communes fail--they attract too many of the same, like-minded people. Don't feel bad if you act like an idiot--the village needs you!"

That's one of the things I LOVE about the thrift store--it's a village of everybody. Like a spider web, the tension of lots of different lines holds it together. I'm so grateful I was gone for 8 months this year. I could re-set and re-approach with fresh eyes. I haven't bothered to blog about them, but all the old annoyances are still in place. I'm not as bothered. I see the store as sort of an organic animal---shambolic, for sure, but weirdly self-sustaining. Let it be.

While most of the staff are pretty poor (although some, like me, didn't grow up that way), there's a mix of well-off volunteers in the mix. The store always gives a paltry Christmas bonus--last year, I got $50. This Monday, I got a check for an unheard of $200, even though I'd been gone 2/3rds of the year. Others got a lot more. An accompanying letter said that an anonymous donor had given a gift so everyone could get a big bonus.

I immediately thought of the volunteer, a retired doctor, who'd attended the young man dying of a gunshot in the parking lot this summer. I'd blogged about how she'd replied to my text thanking her for being there for him:
"I really did nothing, could do nothing but hold some space for his soul to leave his body, and to witness the results of the violence many live with every day."

She and I have discussed the store in depth, in the past. She thinks the staff is treated atrociously, especially financially.
I texted her saying the donation was the sort of thing she would do.
She texted back, "It takes a village."

Yesterday as I was getting ready to leave (early) after lunch, coworkers still in the break room were discussing a recurring topic--what awful punishments should be meted out to people who hurt children. Medieval villagers could be no more inventive.
I say nothing.

But as I was about to leave, I said, "I'm leaving for Christmas now, let's have a happy moment. Let's sing a song!"
And one of my newer coworkers, Ms Linens, leapt up, came over to me, and started to do simple line-dance moves I could follow. We sang a few lines of "Happy Holidays" while the others laughed and applauded.
I left in a happy mood thinking, I am in the right place.
______________

It's a good gray day here for recreating Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow"--so that's what's on today. It's cold though, so it will have to be fast.
Then around 4 pm, I will start cooking the Moroccan fish for Christmas Eve dinner here, for bink & Maura, a couple other old friends, and Marz and me.

I hope you all are enjoying these holidays--and if not, that they pass quickly for you!

Magi on the move

The magi came “from the east”, following a star – – so they had to have been traveling for months – – but they still arrive late! (They don’t arrive till epiphany, January 6.)

But maybe they’re not late, maybe they’re considerate of the stress around a new birth, and they wanted to wait till all the kerfuffle had died down and Mary was feeling restored.

These garments are actually for the Infant of Prague—but they were donated to the store without an accompanying statue of the infant.

The toys said they would far rather be magi: “babies are the  boring parts,” it was declared. However, on January 6 they would like to be referred to as the Triplets of Prague. (After …Belleville?)

Happy Winter Solstice!

Museum Hours

After years of despising art museums as sterile boxes, I've started to enjoy Mia, the art institute here, and I think I'd like to visit other museums to see certain paintings--including ones the toys have re-created.

I could start in New York City (Goya's "Red Boy") and Wash DC (Manet's "Dead Toreador"), but it would have to be a world tour.
I haven't done this painting with the toys yet, but, for instance, I'd love to see Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" (1565) up close––it's at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum.

Now we have snow again (unlike last winter, weirdly), I was looking more closely at it this morning, thinking how to re-create it.
I'd never looked closely at the skaters. They look so modern.
Hockey sticks!

I will go to the lake this winter, maybe during the next couple holiday weeks, and photograph the ice rink. The figures will look similar.
The most important thing for this re-creation the quality of the light.

The painting reminded me of a movie I'd loved, Museum Hours (2012), about a Canadian woman in Vienna to attend to a dying cousin in a coma... At loose ends, she befriends a guard at the Kunsthistorisches museum. A lot of it is him, the guard, musing on the paintings.

(I remember bink found the woman character so annoying, it ruined the movie for her--but she didn't bother me.)
_______________

I watched a disappointing movie last night--Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002), about guns in America. I'd stopped watching Moore's movies years ago, and this one reminded me why--it's heavy-handed and one sided.
Bam, bam, bam. No nuance.

I turned it off halfway through---BUT, I was glad I watched the first half because there was Timothy McVeigh! Moore interviews the brother of Terry Nichols, TMcV's associate.

I'm almost done with Comfort Me with Apples, the memoir by food writer Ruth Reichl--it also disappoints me. It's as much about her love life as food, and I don't care about that. I mean, it's normal--heard it all before.

But she is inspiring me a little to cook, as I've been thinking I might/should do. Her chapter about eating in Thailand made me want to try cooking Thai food again. I used to make a good Thai chicken soup... There are Asian groceries not far from me that sell lemon grass, galangal (like ginger root), lime leaves, and the like.

Raspberries with Avocado

I made up a really good dessert last night. The food shelf had had perfectly ripe avocados--I only took one, you know they only last a minute––and it occurred to me one would go well with frozen raspberries I had on hand...
I was right! Tart and creamy, and so pretty, pink and green.

Maybe I will enjoy eating food, not just getting high on sugar.

On Weds. Manageress complained that I hadn't brought hot lunch, as I usually do. Ha! I went to the food shelf, and last night I cooked up more vegetarian ("impossible burger") meatballs and spaghetti, and made sauce with oddments of vegetables.

I hadn't brought lunch on Weds. because my friend Volunteer Abby had told me she was going to bring in her annual Homemade Holiday Treats that afternoon. I didn't want to compete for kitchen space.

Abby is an excellent baker, and very generous. She covers the breakroom table with bakery and goodies she makes for people to take home in containers she provides. She must spend hundreds of dollars on the ingredients--for not only the usual holiday sugar cookies and gingerbread, but for sugared nuts; caramel toffees; buttery caramel corn...
She doesn't eat it herself--she just likes to cook, and she is someone who loves--needs, even--to stay busy.

Most people totally love the spread, of course.
But even before this year when I stopped eating sugar (have I mentioned?), I found the onslaught a little disturbing. Though it's all good quality ingredients (real butter), and beautifully and lovingly prepared, it's more of what we at the store already get pounds and pounds of almost every day:
free sugar + fat, in the most seductive forms.

It reminds me of my Uncle Tony, who joined the US Navy at 17 years old, just in time for the end of WWII. He said the Navy would heap piles of individual cigarettes on the mess room tables for the sailors to take as many as they wanted.
"You had all these young men at sea," he said, "you had to keep them occupied..."

My uncle died of emphysema.

To be fair, Abby also brings in fresh fruit almost every week--leftovers from the school lunches where she works--and it often goes uneaten.
An old apple has a hard time competing with a chocolate-dipped pretzel.

On a lighter, brighter note…

I just got an email from Marz with a screen cap of her semester grades: all A’s! 

I am over the moon proud of and happy for her. I’m not surprised at her grades; but I’m, … not ‘surprised’ exactly, but, um, impressed to witness her all semester calling up strengths I didn’t know she had – – probably because I didn’t recognize them in their latency because they are not my strengths: drive and discipline. 

Ya know, I don’t mean to just brag about my “child” [not my child] here. It’s also that I want to share how moved I am to see the resilience of the human spirit. Marz was not exactly encouraged to flourish, but here she is. It’s like how I got all choked up over the reopening of the cathedral of Notre Dame. 

Humans can do great things, if we get on it. You see the cathedral and you think, we could have rebuilt New Orleans in that short time too. (Oh, we knew we could have, but here’s the counter-example.)

Here in town, we could get something brilliant at George Floyd Square instead of still squabbling over the tattered dump that it is.

And for our individual selves, we can be great, whatever that is for each of us. We can shine. 

We do shine!

Apologizing is a semi-colon; and Food as Protection, Comfort, Pleasure

CONTENT NOTE: Not explicit, but I'm discussing hurtful things like eating disorders, "unaliving" oneself, and painful family.
With the intention of untangling some of the snarls...
_____________________

My brother hasn't talked to me in almost twenty-two years, since shortly after our mother's suicide around winter solstice, 2002.

A bunch of recent things––a random conversation; the thought experiment that reincarnation is for me; and stopping eating sugar (!)––led me to write the below postcard apologizing to my brother this morning.
(Also connected maybe to my intention to write 'thank-you' cards (after DT won the US presidential election)--that weighs more than I expected--and now also seems to have expanded into apologies!)

(That's a raku-fired bowl ^ I set upside-down on the address. The photo doesn't show how the pottery bowl is both dusty and shiny. I love it. (From the store, of course.))

I wrote a postcard because I believe my brother wouldn't open an envelope from me. (My grammar is garbled, but I don't want to write it again.)
The front is that Victorian-style funereal Christmas card I'd posted, with the gravestone weeping willows. I thought he'd think it was funny. We share a family sense of humor. (I miss that about him.)

My brother never told me why he cut me off. He just stopped responding. (Not that we were ever close or in touch much before, either.)
He never explained, but it's not hard for me to see that while I'm only nine years older than him, that's a lot older when you're a kid, and I am an elder member of the family that hurt him.

And I never even thought of apologizing before.
 
I. The Random Conversation

One of the things that made me think about my brother (I almost never do) was a short conversation with a newish volunteer at work, Jeff.

"Do you blame your parents for the bad relations with your sister and brother?" Jeff asked me yesterday.

"No," I said.

"You don't?" He was surprised.

We'd been talking about how we'd both left our troubled homes in our mid-teens (Jeff at 15; me, 16) and thereafter had troubled relationships--or none--with our siblings.

"My parents failed in many ways," I told him, "but there were a lot of complicated factors working on them that they couldn't control.
I don't blame them so much as see their failure as a tragedy:
people--my parents––intend well, but fail to meet their responsibilities or live up to their good intentions.

"And I do that too.
So, then what?
I guess I try to pay it forward."
_________________

Here's what I'd say instead of saying, It's not my fault:

I did not intend harm to you.
Other forces that I could not control (or even be aware of) were also at work.
Nonetheless, I did hurt you.
And I am sorry about that.

The past is gone, and there may be nothing I can do in the here and now. (Perhaps, for instance, you are dead.)
But I make amends for my past actions by learning and practicing to do it differently now... and in the future, with other people.

If you and I meet again--perhaps in another life--I hope I can/ I intend to be more aware of my power and use it more wisely.

There's a lot to be said, but in this case, a postcard saying "I'm sorry" will have to do.
I doubt my brother will welcome it. He might hate it, in fact. "Useless, too late, pathetic... Useless."
But I think (hope!) it won't cause harm, anyway. And I felt I should say it.

II. The Spacer of Reincarnation

You see that reincarnation snuck in there.
It's such a helpful story-element to me--a tool, like the semicolon
that some people get as a tattoo to say they wanted to end their lives (to put a period. to it) ; but they put a spacer in, instead.

The idea of reincarnation is a thought experiment, like science-fiction...
Some relationships are over-and-done in this life.
What if we get another chance, a re-do, in other places and times?

Even leaving sci-fi out of it, there's still the rest of our (my) time on Earth. Might I live as if that time is a time to try again with other people, even if not with the original ones?

III. Food Is Time Travel

Another thing that made me think about my brother is the changes I'm making in what I eat: I stopped eating added-sugar a couple months ago, (I may have mentioned--ha, ha), and there's been a slow-motion domino effect. To begin with, big, rippling changes in what's available to eat.
"Not that. Not that either."

Like--I was shopping for hard cider to drink with my friend Kate on Solstice this Saturday. (I'm drinking less but not no alcohol.)  I was shocked how many cider-makers add sugar!
One box said, "no added sugar", but the second ingredient was "apple juice concentrate". Uh-huh. That's sugar. 27 g of sugar in 8 oz. prepared! That's 2 grams more than allowed for a grown woman.)

I got Wild State Cider, made in Duluth. (Hm, yes, in chi-chi West Duluth, which Marz calls Little California.)
Its only ingredient: Apples.

But also, not-eating-sugar has had totally unexpected psychological side-effects, including that it opens a window in a time portal...
In my case, I am especially looking back at my teen years, which I shared with my brother.
He was born seven-weeks shy of my ninth birthday.

Below: Our parents and my baby brother – – this all fell apart in the next coupla years:

I started overeating when my mother left the family when I was thirteen--he was four.

___________________

(The oldest girlette here, Penny Cooper, is eight-and-a-half years old, my own happiest age.
No doubt the girlettes are reincarnated Time Travelers. Penny Cooper admitted it!
Well, it wasn't an admission---she was very blasé about it.
"Oh, sure", she said when I asked.

I'm not sure that that means it's a fact, but it's a workable story. Is there a word for that? An actionable story?

LOL--oh, yeah! Myth.)

The Girlettes take care of a sick one:

IV. Food Is Protection, Comfort, and . . .

Last night I watched an interview with Johann Hari about weight loss drugs (on utube) recommended (the interview) by Linda Sue.
Johann Hari is the author of a book about recent weight-loss drugs (he himself takes Ozempic), Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs (2024).

There's a lot to be said about drugs and our modern food culture, but what caught me was Hari talking about the psychological reasons for overeating.
Including that a lot of women who became fat as girls did so for protection from male sexual predation--because they'd been sexually abused, attacked, raped....

I was not sexually abused, but my father was unpredictably violent, and I was very afraid of males.
I remember sitting on the front steps with my sister when I was fifteen--she was almost seventeen--and saying, tentatively, that maybe I was fat partly so I didn't get hit on, like I saw boys and men always hitting on her.
(And it worked! I was ashamed and unhappy about being fat, but happy about that.)

Roxanne Gay wrote Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body--about overeating after being gang-raped at twelve.
For protection, strength, and also for comfort:

"After I was raped I needed comfort," she wrote. "I felt so weak and I felt so powerless, and I wanted to make myself bigger."

--NPR interview with Gay, "Be Bigger, Fight Harder"

Hari mentions that more boys and men have eating disorders now too. He doesn't say, but I would expect they also arise from being hurt, powerless, shamed (and so forth).

And that's what made me think about my poor little brother. Four years old, left with our rather clueless father and two older sisters, both of whom also left home three years later, when he was seven. (I moved out the same year our sister went to college, when I was sixteen.)

My brother and I never talked about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if he and I shared a disordered eating life, though in different directions:
he was model-thin as a young man, and subsisted on cigarettes and coffee.

Thinking about that, I felt so sad for my role in his life. It wasn't intentional, but at any rate, I sure didn't help.
And I thought--I never said I'm sorry. I'm going to.

(I felt some resistance--"It wasn't my fault." No, but I did it.)

V. ... and Comfort & Pleasure

Hari talks about comfort too.
It's one of the three main reasons people eat, he said: sustenance, comfort, and pleasure.
For his first 6 months on Ozempic, he felt emotionally flat, he said, and he realized that he missed the comfort of overeating.

Yes! I'd recently said pretty much the same thing--that I felt sad without sugar. (He didn't mention this, but there's also this loss of eating as a time-filler. What do you do instead???)
Other people on Ozempic (etc.) miss the sensory pleasure of eating.
Hari said he is maybe unusual because he actually enjoys eating more now, because for the first time he's not eating only for the comfort of being stuffed.

Wow! I had just said something like that to bink.
Now I'm not getting the chemical comfort of sugar, I've felt sad, yes, but I also started to think...
Maybe I could experiment with eating for aesthetic pleasure. 

I've never much cared about the flavors, textures, scent, colors, etc of non-sugar food. I felt I would be completely happy if I could live on ice-cream.

Could I cultivate caring?
Maybe...
Do I want to bother? I would have to cook...
Maybe.

Serendipitously (the book came into the store and I'd noticed that it's on lists of Best 21st-century Nonfiction), I'm reading food-writer Ruth Reichl's second memoir, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table (2001).

Marz saw the book and said, that's Solomon. The benefit of a Biblical childhood. I did not know!

"As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love."
--Song of Solomon, 2:5, KJV

It's not only about this, but naturally it's a lot about the pleasures of food. Many, many pleasures I would not enjoy, mostly involving dead animal parts. But the pleasure of food...?
Maybe I'll try that.

I've already experience something new like that:
a couple weeks ago, I enjoyed the look of the sliced-open layer cake I'd made for Big Boss's birthday, without tasting any.

One more key thing––I don't need fat for protection anymore:
I am old.
Yay! Age is an even better protection than fat.

Just to note:
I'm way over-simplifying things here. For most of my middle-years, for instance, I was more at peace with food.

I gained my current extra weight at fifty, with menopause. Maybe I don't need to keep carrying it into old age?
As I say, I'm more motivated by physical HEALTH concerns now. I didn't expect these psychological, spiritual, sci-fi concerns to arise. But they're welcome.

Oh, my.
This is all a lot to feel and to think about.
I'm going to sign off now, and walk to the mailbox to mail the postcard before I become afraid to.
It's a good thing to do.

This semi-colon, an investment in our next lifetime(s).

"What is your deal?"

There's a new guy at work--a young, toy-loving (!) punk from the East Coast, "in recovery", Jewish...
I asked him if he'd like to light candles for Hannukah with the girlettes.
"Are you Jewish?" he asked.

"No," I said, "but some of the dolls are. Or, they say they are--but really, they just like to set things on fire."

(You know. Zoroastrians.)

A couple days later I was telling him we're soon entering his sign, Capricorn, and what great energy that is. (He's anxious a lot, and this seemed like a good perspective to share.)

He looked at me suspiciously. "What is your deal?" he said.

Then he immediately took it back––"No, no, I didn't mean that..."––and walked off to do something else.

But, honestly, I was wondering the same thing about him!
You're smart, creative, active... What are you doing here?

What am I doing there? What is my deal?
I don't know...

To do: work on an elevator pitch in reply to that.

And you?
Can you say in the length of a comment, what's your deal?

Work out your own movement

I. Freeze Frame

I'm posting this photo for the people behind me--it's this funny phenomenon where a photo makes people look frozen... or like actors in a film-still.
"The Thrift Store".
(The cashier, left, is also my replacement in BOOK's--I call her Amina here. I don't know the customer.)

The blond woman ^ is a friend of a friend--we're posing for the mutual friend who lives far away.
(I'm not too keen on my self-cut hair, but I am loving not having hair wrapping itself around my face at night!)

What causes this freeze-effect? Is it partly the light?

BELOW:
1. Marz at Lake Superior
2. Me, Italian dinner with Uncle Tony and Auntie Vi
3. Take-out delivery guy in Brooklyn, photo by Marz

BELOW: Amina put out this toy truck. I don't know if she didn't see the alteration to SWAT? I thought it was kind of hilarious and left it out, but I'll take it away today--I don't want someone buying it for their kid, not knowing what it means.

_______________________

II. Move Your Own Self

BELOW: I just discovered the name "functional movement". (Screencap from IG.)
It's whole-body movement, based on stuff you already do--real-life movement... Or, dancing around with intention.

Of course there's science to it... but like so many things in life, you don't need an expert--you can just MAKE IT UP!

I've been enjoying watching reels on IG--not just current mini-videos, but snippets of material from the past.
Last night I saw a clip from an old interview with Noam Chomsky saying that when people ask him for advice––
"The world is so terrible, what should I do?"––
he says, Figure out for yourself what you should do. Everyone's different, there's no expert who can answer that for you.

(Like what St Paul said that I'd quoted recently: Work out your own salvation.)

Similarly, we look to exercise experts, but really,  you can work out your own movement.

Stretching Toward Solstice

Last night was the full moon, and now we're in Solstice week!
Winter Solstice is this Saturday,  Dec. 21 (3:20 a.m. Central; 9:20 a.m. Greenwich).

I love this magic dark time for reflection and stock-taking––I've certainly been feeling that ––("Who were you and I to each other, in our previous incarnations?")––and, in astrology we are entering the cardinal [active initiator] sign of Capricorn, the sure-footed goat = a good time for setting intentions.
We can scamper up sheer cliffs!

And pain is a great motivator, eh? Work is a lot of standing and lifting on concrete, and my lower back has gone into crunch-freeze mode.
Thank you, Back, for alerting me that I must attend to you and your (my) musculoskeletal friends.

I remember a physical therapist explaining to me, spelling it out like he was amazed I didn't know this:
"You have to take care of your body."

Sure, ha, yeah, doc, I knew that! (In theory.)

So, after waking up again with a locked back, this weekend I started stretching. It was an eye opener:
stretches that had felt like literally nothing when I was younger are now like trying to open a frozen lock.

Except, of course, I am not metal.
I am living flesh, and gentleness unlocks me.
_________________

Here is a metal object that needs my attention:
I brought home this little Underwood typewriter to test, and it almost works... I think its only problem is a build-up of greasy dust.
I will start with odorless mineral spirits and a toothbrush on the type bars, which stick.

Reindeer ^ is pulling glass bulbs to Winter Village. (Thank you, Tracy, for the Radio Flyer!)

L & M & Annette came over yesterday afternoon for banana-oat pancakes (these are so good, even with no-added-sugar, people asked for the recipe (I add 1/2 cup flour because it's too liquidy)), served with Gala apples baked with cinnamon and plant-butter.

As Penny Cooper (in my right hand, below) had hoped, we decorated the Girlettes' tree again this year. (Another use for a towel woven by Joanne: tree skirt!)

As I was cleaning my apartment, I became fed up with all the LONG hairs I shed, so I took my pinking shears and cut my hair.
It's even a little shorter than this now:

The Girlette calendars arrived Saturday--I am going to take them to the post office this morning on the way to work. (Again, warm enough to bike--in the mid-30s!)
I'll mail them media mail-- hopefully they'll arrive by the weekend.

Enjoy the descent into the dark, everyone. . . It's velvet!

Traveling Toward...

Good things are traveling to us, of which we know naught.

Santa and her reindeer will be On the Road!
(This was my card a few years ago, but they head out every year.)

BELOW: “Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem"; detail of the Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475) by Hugo van der Goes, Flemish, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Other kinds of things are on the way too, of course.
Like, did you know, our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are falling toward each other [per NASA] at the rate of [mumbledy mumledy numbers], and it's looking like we will collide in some 4 billion years? That's around the same time the Sun dies,  so one or the other, good-bye Earth.
_____________________

Yesterday I was browsing through blog posts tagged 'Christmas' (on l'astronave), and saving photos to post online (like, on FB where no one saw them before)--or to repost them here because I love them.
And I have been blogging so long, I forget some of my posts.

Especially some little oddments, like my holiday Costello:

Gosh, reading my posts, I can see that I was down last year more than I realized. Mostly because of work--and there, mostly because of the bad ending with Ass't Man, who left within weeks of our final falling out around Halloween.
(I'd confronted him about his disturbing (to me) behavior when drunk, and in shame (I think), he got defensive and counter-attacked...
And that was the end of that.
[Funny to think he would tell this story entirely differently.])

The idea of reincarnation has been so helpful to me this year.  The idea, that is, that this life is a repeating Spiritual Psych Lab... gives me permission or space to acknowledge feelings, especially ones that appear to exist contradictory to fact.

I mean, last year I knew I was sad and mad about the bad ending with Ass't Man, but I felt I "shouldn't" care so much about this guy who had so often been a jerk to me.

There're other ways to think of it, though, that aren't so tit-for-tat. Relationships aren't a balance sheet. There are a lot of X-factors.
If I add in the idea of reincarnation, it makes more Storybook sense:
This person was someone I am connected to karmically--we've met before in other lives (or, to be less fantastical, I have met the type before in this life)--and I want it to work out, get better, this time. And then it doesn't, and I have feelings about that.
Simple.

That doesn't have to be literally true to be helpful.
Telling the story that way creates a wedge, a little opening where I can feel what I feel, without feeling it needs to be logical.
I don't have to defend it intellectually.
[Adult Child of an Academic Family, here. ACAF.]

Musing on reincarnation, I had a funny little thought about my mother too:
I would very much like to meet her again.

I felt a little exited by the idea of seeing her, like I used to feel when I was going to visit her in my twenties--a decade when she was doing pretty well.
I always remember that on one visit, her downstairs neighbor told us that our laughter had kept her awake until 3 a.m.--but we were so happy, she hadn't wanted to call up and tell us to be quiet.

A mental-health diagnosis never really fit my mother.
Her story was so much more complicated than "a chemical imbalance". That is true for a LOT of people.

I mean, the WORLD is out of balance--how do we stay on our feet?
Various ways...
And some people don't.

I'd say my mother's 'diagnosis' was, to put it simply,
"She was a sensitive soul, and the world was too hard for her."
___________________

Penny Cooper said, sometimes things are too hard for the humans.
And then she went back to roasting marshmallows. (The Girlettes are not really interested in human psychology.)

[This ^ was at Winter Solstice, in Housemate's backyard in 2019. What was one thing that was traveling towards us? Covid-19!]
___________

The idea that the soul would try, try again... that disastrous endings aren't the end forever... I like that.
Even if it's not truel, there are lots of souls like that living right now, and factoring in the idea that This Is Not ALL of It, when I meet them, I can enjoy them, remembering I AM NOT THE SAVIOR (which my mother wanted me to be).

We're not going to work out all of our karma, get it all lined up and sorted--and we can't do it for each other anyway (though of course we help and hurt and otherwise influence each other).
But as St. Paul said,
"Beloveds, work out your own salvation."

Isn't that a curious thing to say? I used to think that sounded mean.
But really, it's a high calling:
ultimately, you are your own. You "belong" to you. Or to the Universe, if you like.

This in no way means it doesn't matter how we treat one another!!!
Rather, the opposite.
We are glass ornaments, and it helps to treat each other gently.
But if you don't like an ornament, or it's broken and cuts you, you can set it down . . . and walk away.

I am trying to say too much, too simply here.
But it adds up to a kind of jolly message, in my mind:
RELAX.
Bad things happen--or things that feel bad to us--like galaxies colliding and suns exploding. It is the law of nature.

Friendships end.
People "unalive" themselves. [I think that word, unalive, is a work-around so social media sites don't flag you?Anyway, I kind of like it!]

It's not that these things aren't tragic.
They are!
But... they are not the whole story.
______________________

Well, anyway, the upshot is, I am in a much better mood this Advent. It helped to feel angry at my mother this fall, for the first time.
And it helps to acknowledge that last year I was just plain old sad about Ass't Man, even if he didn't "deserve" it (a ridiculous concept anyway.)

Advent is a time of Traveling Toward...
All these atoms, or souls, or stories going round and round and bouncing off one another... It's too complicated to chart.
Scientists aren't even sure that the Milky Way and Andromeda WILL collide. Much less are they sure of the weather tomorrow.

I am pretty sure, however, that L & M and Annette are coming over later today for banana pancakes. And the house is a mess! So that's how I'm going to move: toward cleaning it up.
And next week, Marz will be here, and I'll make Christmas Eve dinner.

Here Marz is ten years ago! She is hanging Mr Robinson, the Flying Angel of Christmas. (This was the tiny one-bedroom we shared the first coupla few years after she moved here. She slept on the couch for two years. My goodness.)

And then, we will wrap up the first quarter of this century.
It did not go as I'd hoped (though I am personally happy and well enough).
You too?
I remember on New Year's Eve 1999 thinking maybe we were on the edge of a peaceful prosperous world.
*PEALS OF CRAZED LAUGHTER*

Stop it right now, you all! says the Angel. [from 2018]

Well, as they say in Reincarnation:
Everyone's got karma, or we wouldn't have incarnated here.
Or as St. Augustine said, we're all just pilgrims here.

But sometimes we get it together. Souls have fun!
Starsky & Hutch in the North Woods (2017)

This ^ is my adaptation of a photo-manipulation/paint-over by fan artist extraordinaire, Mortmere---her original is S/H on a snowy beach: "Wonderland", here.

One more favorite--below--my minimalist manger from 2020, the pandemic year when we were locked down.

"Fear not!"

Saint Lucy’s Day

Saint Lucy’s Day, December 13, “the year’s deep midnight...”

“I am every dead thing, / In whom Love wrought new alchemy.” 

—John Donne

1. Saint Lucy Bear, on the way to being repaired by me, several years ago. (This is one of my favorite photos.)

(The box on her chest ^ is her broken “roar” box—made more like a mewing sound. She is holding her glass eyes-on-wire-stalk.)

2. Modeled on “Saint Lucy”, painting by Francesco del Cossa (b. Ferrara, Italy), c. 1473, National Gallery, London, UK:

‘oranments’

This week at work, I am sorting ALL Xmas, ALL THE TIME.
One minute before our holiday potluck lunch, I unpacked this sweater. I immediately put it on and wore it to the break room.

oranments
mostly little
round

I. A plan, a plan

I'd made barbecue with chicken thighs from the food shelf--what I would have brought anyway for my hot lunch Weds.
I ate in 5 minutes and went back to sorting.

I am on a roll: must get the last stash out this week!
A coworker commented we've never gotten so much Xmas stuff out before. Because there's been no plan.

I suggested one:
How bout if we sort and price Xmas donations as they come in throughout the year? Then on Nov 1., it's a matter of just putting it out.

Big Boss agreed this was a good plan.

II. Another plan

You know who has plans?
Vigilantes.
The guy who shot the health care CEO was carrying a manifesto. (I don't know anymore about it--I'm not following this closely.)
That struck me because Tim McVeigh also carried a manifesto when he blew up the Oklahoma City federal building...

Violence is so tempting when you feel your cause is righteous.
So much less sexy, so much more tedious are the works of pacifism...

"There is plenty to do", Dorothy Day said, "for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.
"The works of mercy, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner...."

--"In Peace Is My Bitterness Most Bitter", 1967

There's a manifesto.

III. Lemon juice on oats

Speaking of bitter, it's  –7ºF (-14C) here this morning.
I'm baking a squash as an excuse to have the oven on. And I'm eating a big bowl of hot oatmeal and blueberries. It's my day off-- I'm going to stay in, put on Christmas carols, and clean/organize my apartment. Like, I need to gather up a bunch of stuff to take back to the store.

My Kenyan coworker had been pestering me for a lemon squeezer.
I kept telling him I was sorting Xmas, but he kept asking every day.
As these things go, though, sure enough on Day 5, I saw a lemon squeezer in incoming donations.
He was overjoyed!

I asked him why he wanted one, and he said, "Mine broke."

"But what do you use it for?"

"To make lemon juice for porridge."

Lemon juice in porridge? He said he would bring me some, and he did! He and his wife grind oatmeal in the blender and make what is a thick, hot drink with lemon juice and "a little sugar".

I wasn't going to tell this nice guy that I'm not eating sugar, so I drank it, and it was very little sugar, as it turns out. It really was a zingy, oat drink. Unexpected!

The Marzipan just called--she is writing the last paper of the semester! (It's a few degrees colder in Duluth, but both cities are due to warm up in a couple days.) It's unexpected to me--and impressive-- how hard Marz has worked this, her first semester, even on the one class she ended up disliking.

I only work hard on things I like.
Like the store.
I didn't want displays to be Christmas only, so I set up the few Hannukah things we have on the endcap you first see when you walk in the store.
At first it was gold and blue, but stuff sold right away, and now it's pretty random. Anyway, not Xmas. (But, oops, I should've changed out the red cloth from the last display--will do that tomorrow.)

Concert at Winter Village

 What is she playing ?

‘Winter Village’

It cracks me up, what the Girlettes come up with – – like, their name for their Christmas set-up this year – – ‘Winter Village’. Where do they get this stuff?

I was thinking I had to make it really elaborate for them, but I’ve just been sticking odds and ends in – – and then, it snowed for them! (They have snow but we are having a brown and cold December.)

You can see in the background the Christmas print I started – – I did add green and that makes it a lot better, but I’ve only made a few of them. I actually ended up sending a bunch of commercial cards. I’ve been a little disheartened at what a messy printer I am, no matter how careful I am. I always get smudges on the cards. Finally I decided just not to worry about it! They’re still nicer than commercial cards. Can an AI design a uniquely smudged card? (Well… probably.)

Save the Darlings!

Save yourselves, tiny humans!

Sometimes we are so adorable, I am suffused with affection for us and really, really root for us to come through this period of history okay. At least for some of us to come through the climate changes ahead, keeping intact some of  the cool stuff we've figured out.

Even little stuff...
Like, all the contemporary Xmas ornaments I unpack at work are not the same old crap. There are some clever designs. Here, a kitten realistically batting at something (I put the tree there), and a gay Santa with his guys.
Commercial, yeah, but made with talent.
NOT that this stuff is what I'd choose to survive... though being plastic, it probably will.

Watching reels on IG, you see the most amazing humans doing all sorts of amazing things.
The drive and focus and strength of Ronaldo, the legendary Portuguese soccer player, FLYING through the air to head the ball into the net... here, in slow motion at 1:10.
A screen cap from a reel, Look . . . a Ahead...

He's famous and earns millions, but people share all sorts of genius, for free.
Like this pianist who plays classical piano for her chickens--here, with her rooster on her head--the rooster crows at appropriate passages! (I can't find the reel again--search piayano.)

Last night I finished skimming the disappointing Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.  It offers no special insight, or much insight at all -- it's just a play-by-play of events (interesting enough), and then the trial (not even interesting).

There's very little linking to what's going on now...
It's like the publisher said, "add the rise of modern extremism", and so the author wedged in some references here and there, along the lines of,
"Also, the Proud Boys attacked the US Capitol".
Yeah. Got it.

It would have been so interesting if he'd, say, interviewed modern militia members and asked them about Tim McV.
(I get the sense he lined this entire book up at his desk.) Unimpressive.

BUT, what did impress itself upon me was how clever and energetic humans can be. Though we're not necessarily aiming our energies in the right direction.
McVeigh researched how to blow up the OK City federal building mostly on his own, and carried it out alone... But it's as if Ronaldo flew through the air to knock the ball into the WRONG goal. And hundreds of lives were lost or ruined…

I often think, what would we be if we got the fertilizer we needed all along?
Not fertilizer to blow up buildings. (Amazing! such basic materials.)
No, I mean, of course, if we received the  optimal sunlight, air, water, food... and LOVE we needed to grow well.

One of the only lines in the book that perked my ears up was a lawyer saying,
"There was very little love in Timothy McVeigh's life."

His childhood was no more grim and mediocre than millions of others though. (Of course, millions of others voted for Trump, so there's that.)
But most people don't have the ENERGY to do serious harm on their very own initiative, like he did.
What if he (we!) harnessed our energy to do serious good instead?

Or even minor good, like playing piano for the amusement of chickens.

__________________

bink and I went to see the disappointing Wicked the other day.
It's ridiculous---the movie is only PART ONE, and it's as long as the entire Broadway show.  Result: it's long and b-o-r-i-n-g.

However, I would totally recommend you go for the last half-hour!
The part when the story finally takes off (finally)--and they sing the rousing "Defying Gravity".

The other thing worth watching is the powerhouse who plays the Wicked Witch--Cynthia Erivo. She stood out playing Harriet Tubman in Harriet. Ariana Grande is good--obviously an amazing voice--but she lacks twinkle.
Erivo is uranium.

In interviews, Erivo is very laugh-y and bubbly, but she can look tough (below, doing a personal work out--she talks about the importance of physical care to protect her voice, etc.).
She is another in my line-up of images of Murderbot--and my top pick to play the character in a movie.


Off to work now--a day of throwing out a lot of Xmas rubbish, probably... But remembering how fond I am of us, nonetheless.

Pour love like syrup (What I'm Reading)

Another strange cutie ^ that surfaced at the thrift store--made in Japan, so probably 1960s. With an amanita mushroom! They are all the rage now, have you noticed? Foraging started to come in. . . a dozen years ago? and now mushrooms are on everything. "Put a mushroom on it!"

At work I'm sorting boxes of Xmas stuff that've been saved for two years, or more... It's being brought down from the rafters, and I've been throwing out half of it. For instance, components for Victorian Christmas Villages, which don't really sell and we already have a lot of. Hanging wooden plaques that say 'Magic' and 'Believe' do sell, but we have too many. MORE resin Santas.

Yesterday when I left work, the Xmas shelves were still pretty full, and it's getting too close to the holiday for everything to sell.
I think.
This is my first year tracking Xmas sales, but I notice Michael's Crafts has already put their holiday stuff on sale--for 70% off. Of course the thrift store has no plan or pattern... I'll suggest we put ours on sale too this week.

I got a pile of books at the store yesterday.
I'd given away my copy of The Long Haul (1990) and was happy that one finally came in. It's the autobiography of Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School, where people learn nonviolent tactics for social change.
Rosa Parks didn't just decide one day not to give up her seat (though many others did)--she'd attended a workshop at the school.

The Spanish kids books are for my sister, who is tutoring a girl from Ecuador in reading.

 

A couple others are for Marz, because she'll be studying the Soviet Union next semester: one of Martin Cruz Smith's Soviet mysteries featuring detective Arkady Renko, and The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, though the last Romanovs died this week in her Russian Empire class, on the last day of the semester. (The author, Robert Alexander, lives here in town.)

I don't know how much they'll look at the Cold War pop culture in the US, but Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture (2001), below, is fun, with lots of lurid movie posters and the like.

I started reading ^ Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023) last night.
It follows the trail from Ruby Ridge and Waco to McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, and on to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers of January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The book was published in 2023, and now here we are, and their friends have been elected to power.

I don't know that I'll keep reading the book though--I don't need to know, step by step, what TmcV did, and with whom, and it's a lot of that.

I prefer the related American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), by Chris Hedges.
And, have you heard Christian Piccolini, who was a white supremacist leader in the 1990s?
He writes and talks about being young and disconnected and ignorant, looking for "identity, community, and purpose"--and, most importantly, belonging-- and finding it in hate groups, who recruit exactly those youth.

In Christian's TED Talk: "My descent into America's neo-Nazi movement & how I got out" (Dec. 2017), he says,"Hatred is born of ignorance. Fear is its father. Isolation is its mother."And what brings people out of hate groups is "receiving compassion from the people they least deserved it from, when they least deserved it."

He ends with a challenge:
"Find someone who is undeserving of your compassion---and give it to them."

It's not this simple, because it isn't literally possible, but I do wish we could pour love like syrup & butter, all around, on all sides.
Some people are hardwired-psychotic, but most people are pancakes, and a lot of them are dry.
And sometimes we are dry...

Pouring love is a practice, not a feeling.
(Hope is not a strategy. Wishing is not an action plan.) 

What fills our pitchers?

If you ain't gonna study war no more, you gotta study something else,  offer something else, and PRACTICE and do something else--
as Myles Horton's Highlander School teaches: "Conflict can be used to encourage people to work for a better society."

I see some people, some friends going down the rabbit hole of 24-Hour Bad News, so they are swamped with fear.
I suggest we only need, and can only tolerate, a little bit of bad news. A little bit of awareness of conflict spurs us on;
too much drags us down. (Everyone has a different tolerance.)

But this stuff--the Bad Stuff--has a pull. It radiates Importance. It makes us  feel we are Doing Something by reading about it.
But really, it can drain on our abilities. And with the Internet, it's constantly on tap.

I have a friend who used to read the news obsessively. She said it was our "duty" to be informed. But there's no inherent virtue in knowing the news, and she never DID anything because of what she read.
She just told you about it, vibrating with distress.

She was--and is--a good, nice, loving person in general, but I didn't like to spend much time with her. Being informed about bad things seemed more like an addiction that drained her, not a practice that sustained and supported her.

Then, a year ago, she had a brain injury that damaged her ability to read and, slightly, her memory. She came over for tea a few weeks after DT won the presidential election. I'd invited her, but actually I was dreading seeing her, thinking she'd be radiating terror.

Instead, she said nothing about politics.
It was great!
Did we really need to work ourselves into a lather of distress, without coming up with something to do, to boost our resilience, to HELP others (and ourselves!), like we would have in the past?
No!
I always found that useless and self-indulgent.

Yes, things are bad.
Things are always bad, and they can get worse. It's the law of nature: things fall apart. Entropy wins.
It's truly terrifying to consider. And it is the work of consciousness, the work of civilization to consider,
What helps?

My friend Kathy Moran, who died at fifty-seven, used to say, "There's a million ways to make a better world. Find your way."
And find things that sustain you on your way. Solace.

Here endeth my sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent.
But I don't mean to be preaching like I have answers, I am trying to figure this out for myself...
And it is literally pancake day--I make pancakes with ripe bananas for sweetness for bink on Sundays.
Yay!