Her big brown eyes shown with loving softness as she grabbed her seat belt and looked at me. She didn’t say “Thanks, mom, for picking me up in the rain.” (She would normally have to walk home from school the four blocks to home.) But her eyes said it all. I see a board member at a cocktail party this past week and she says, “You know, you are really great at boardsmanship, I was telling a friend how well you handle our meetings…” Someone interrupts us and we move on to talking about other things. This morning I step out into the crisp Fall air after a good overnight rain. The air is damp with the smoky smell from my neighbor’s chimney. All my Autumn plantings have gotten a good soak so I won’t have to drag out the hoses. It is Thanksgiving week and I am reminded of all of the ways I feel gratitude. In a book by life coach, Martha Beck she talks about the importance in those moments to acknowledge those feelings with “Just This.”
I realize my life and probably everyone’s lives are filled with those “Just This” moments – a smile, a kind word, a sunset, a flower, a cloudless sky, the touch of a hand, an “I love you mom” hug. We probably miss as many of those moments as we get – maybe more, worrying about the future, worrying about the past, living in the fear we are not enough or sometimes, too much.
I have been there, clouded by what’s on my to-do list. Sometimes it’s because I am too focused on what I want to happen instead of being in the moment, absorbing and being grateful for what does happen. Holidays are like that. In my head as I make up the menu and shop for groceries I think about what I want our Thanksgiving day and dinner to be. It probably won’t be anything like what I imagine, but it might be better. If I can stay present to the day, acknowledging and being totally in the moment, there will probably be so many more “Just This” opportunities. So this Thanksgiving week, I give thanks for all the little things and some bigger ones: a great place to work, a community of people who believe the world can be a better place and work toward that end, a dedicated and fun staff, beautiful daughters, loving family and friends. I remind myself today and this week to find all of those “Just This” moments that are born of total presence.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Many Faces of Terror
In 1886, novelist Joseph Conrad wrote: “Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, capabilities and audacities are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”
Consider these numbers: 1 in 3 females will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. Children who witness violence are more likely to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and were at greater risk than their peers of having allergies, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, headaches and flu.
The commemoration of the attacks of 9/11 reverberated on the airwaves all weekend. Somber and solemn sitting in my living room watching television, I was grateful to be an American citizen proud of my country and the community we created post 9/11. It also reminded me of all the victims of family violence that I worked with for the first 15 years of my career, and survived myself. I couldn’t help but think of the women and children, day in and day out who live with terror.
I watched as firemen, police and emergency workers shared their stories on the front lines of the days and weeks following the attacks looking for survivors and then bodies. I listened while some of the first responders recounted their sleepless nights, restless days and struggles with finding inner peace long after they left Ground Zero. I went inside the Trade Center with the cameramen who were following the life of a probationary fireman at the time of the attacks and how incredibly hard it was for all of them to get back to a normal life after 9/11.
And I kept coming back to the child with the phone cord bruises around his neck and the countless faces of women with broken noses and teeth, arms, fingers and legs. I remembered the days and nights I would lie awake thinking about someone I had just met in the shelter, wondering if they would make it out for good from a relationship that was an everyday nightmare. I recalled the woman who couldn’t stand to hear the door bell ring and the child who couldn’t hear loud noises.
Terror is terror. A plane, a fist, a closet, a no way out. It is awful, horrible, catastrophic, sick and more. It makes us afraid, angry, sad, confused, and terrorized. It is violence; violence that makes our world shrink as we come face to face with the expression of our belief in the safety of our surroundings. If Conrad is right, no wonder women struggle to feel more than the world’s reflection of who they are would have them believe.
9/11 introduced terror to those of us who had not been intimately acquainted with it. In our new understanding perhaps can come compassion and commitment to help one another, to remember what being a neighbor means. The first flight I took after the tragedy the pilot spoke over the loudspeaker and asked us to introduce ourselves to each other. Maybe if we could do that everywhere, we might interrupt the terror that still hides in our homes.
Consider these numbers: 1 in 3 females will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. Children who witness violence are more likely to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and were at greater risk than their peers of having allergies, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, headaches and flu.
The commemoration of the attacks of 9/11 reverberated on the airwaves all weekend. Somber and solemn sitting in my living room watching television, I was grateful to be an American citizen proud of my country and the community we created post 9/11. It also reminded me of all the victims of family violence that I worked with for the first 15 years of my career, and survived myself. I couldn’t help but think of the women and children, day in and day out who live with terror.
I watched as firemen, police and emergency workers shared their stories on the front lines of the days and weeks following the attacks looking for survivors and then bodies. I listened while some of the first responders recounted their sleepless nights, restless days and struggles with finding inner peace long after they left Ground Zero. I went inside the Trade Center with the cameramen who were following the life of a probationary fireman at the time of the attacks and how incredibly hard it was for all of them to get back to a normal life after 9/11.
And I kept coming back to the child with the phone cord bruises around his neck and the countless faces of women with broken noses and teeth, arms, fingers and legs. I remembered the days and nights I would lie awake thinking about someone I had just met in the shelter, wondering if they would make it out for good from a relationship that was an everyday nightmare. I recalled the woman who couldn’t stand to hear the door bell ring and the child who couldn’t hear loud noises.
Terror is terror. A plane, a fist, a closet, a no way out. It is awful, horrible, catastrophic, sick and more. It makes us afraid, angry, sad, confused, and terrorized. It is violence; violence that makes our world shrink as we come face to face with the expression of our belief in the safety of our surroundings. If Conrad is right, no wonder women struggle to feel more than the world’s reflection of who they are would have them believe.
9/11 introduced terror to those of us who had not been intimately acquainted with it. In our new understanding perhaps can come compassion and commitment to help one another, to remember what being a neighbor means. The first flight I took after the tragedy the pilot spoke over the loudspeaker and asked us to introduce ourselves to each other. Maybe if we could do that everywhere, we might interrupt the terror that still hides in our homes.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Good Intentions: Eliminating Terror with Terror
“So they killed that guy?” My 13 yr. old said to me as we drove to school with National Public Radio playing in the background on the morning after learning of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Before I could answer she said, “Cause, like, he was in another country. Is it OK to just go into another country and kill someone?”
“Ah, well, yeah, I wondered that too, honey. That is a really great question because it doesn’t seem right does it? What I understand is that the US Military went there to capture him and he fired on them and they fired back and killed him.”
“Is it like normal to have world wars that last this long?” my youngest said with thoughtfulness. “Because don’t wars just like usually end in a couple of years? Is this normal?”
“Yes, this has been a long bunch of war-like conflicts. But there is a lot to it.” (I could feel them both slipping away from the conversation now and I found myself drifting, too.)
At 12 and 13 years the Iraq presence and really all of the Middle East presence, is all they have ever known. They were watching the Lion King video the morning of September 11th. The conflicts have been a part of their whole lives, much like the Viet Nam war was for me growing up; always in the backdrop of whatever was on the world stage until I was old enough to have an opinion about it. Of course, there were other domestic conflicts too: civil rights, women’s rights, the murder of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy among many others that lost their lives fighting for voting rights or protesting the war on college campuses. I remember how afraid I was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, asking my father from my six year old view of the conflict, if we were all going to die.
My daughters’ questions point to their way of seeing the world, not with bravado but with some sense of order or justice. I feel the fears in them that our actions bring up—the randomness that it implies. If we can go somewhere and shoot someone, can’t someone else do that to us? Sure this guy isn’t sanctioned by any vote of the people, he isn’t elected, but might another group of people see the actions of a President of the United States as invasive and come here to do the same?
My sister was working in the World Trade Center on September 11 and she made it out that day. Would I be unable to hear the angst and fears of my daughters if my baby sister had been killed? I have mixed feelings today. I believe in our system of justice that calls a person innocent until they have been proven guilty. In a world of terrorism, perhaps that is naïve to hold on to that standard. What is acceptable I wonder then and what just furthers the energy of terror so rampant now in our world? My daughters’ questions remind me how fear begets fear. When is it OK to break the law, even international law and what ultimately will it bring us?
“Ah, well, yeah, I wondered that too, honey. That is a really great question because it doesn’t seem right does it? What I understand is that the US Military went there to capture him and he fired on them and they fired back and killed him.”
“Is it like normal to have world wars that last this long?” my youngest said with thoughtfulness. “Because don’t wars just like usually end in a couple of years? Is this normal?”
“Yes, this has been a long bunch of war-like conflicts. But there is a lot to it.” (I could feel them both slipping away from the conversation now and I found myself drifting, too.)
At 12 and 13 years the Iraq presence and really all of the Middle East presence, is all they have ever known. They were watching the Lion King video the morning of September 11th. The conflicts have been a part of their whole lives, much like the Viet Nam war was for me growing up; always in the backdrop of whatever was on the world stage until I was old enough to have an opinion about it. Of course, there were other domestic conflicts too: civil rights, women’s rights, the murder of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy among many others that lost their lives fighting for voting rights or protesting the war on college campuses. I remember how afraid I was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, asking my father from my six year old view of the conflict, if we were all going to die.
My daughters’ questions point to their way of seeing the world, not with bravado but with some sense of order or justice. I feel the fears in them that our actions bring up—the randomness that it implies. If we can go somewhere and shoot someone, can’t someone else do that to us? Sure this guy isn’t sanctioned by any vote of the people, he isn’t elected, but might another group of people see the actions of a President of the United States as invasive and come here to do the same?
My sister was working in the World Trade Center on September 11 and she made it out that day. Would I be unable to hear the angst and fears of my daughters if my baby sister had been killed? I have mixed feelings today. I believe in our system of justice that calls a person innocent until they have been proven guilty. In a world of terrorism, perhaps that is naïve to hold on to that standard. What is acceptable I wonder then and what just furthers the energy of terror so rampant now in our world? My daughters’ questions remind me how fear begets fear. When is it OK to break the law, even international law and what ultimately will it bring us?
Sunday, February 6, 2011
A Tribute to Those Who Nurture
Longing for the child she abandoned at 14, Annette Bening’s character in the movie “Mother and Child” lives a grouchy life. The scene opens to her reluctantly caring for her ailing mother and her own dour spirit. The grief of releasing her baby when she herself was still a child turns into the wall we all know a little bit about, any of us who have ever longed for something we lost or something that never was.
Checking on my sleeping daughters I flash back to the days as toddlers when they came to me and the long nights of pain and sadness they endured when they had been moved around from group home to my home. Safety brought with it the remembering of trauma endured and our first year was marked by both great joy and deep sorrow. Once, after a solid two weeks of interrupted sleep, I was stunningly awake as I had never been to this god of nurturing and loving two helpless human beings.
“As the world goes by, all I know is I want to be wide awake/Seekers of status quo, I say let them go, I want to be wide awake/fear for all of its fury can’t hold a flame to any soul that cries, I want to be wide awake, awake.” (Christine Kane, Wide Awake)
Awake. Like jumping into an icy pond. So at times I have fallen asleep. Nurturing while sleepwalking changes my creativity and my parenting, I see that now. My mind wanders to my mother’s obsession with feeding the seven of us. It was/is her creativity – her deep joy channeled into the thing she had to do. And anyone who nurtures others 24-7 knows the drain of energy that comes with outer focused nurturing. And yet, it is our creativity, our soul’s joy channeled into caring that feeds the life force. I bake bread weekly; make soups, have learned Indian, Chinese and Thai cooking. I make cookies and scones; tend a garden in the summer. How many artists: painters, potters, songwriters, writers and sculptors works are channeled into people who were fed well in childhood? Am I my mother’s novel?
Elizabeth Layton raised five kids, battled depression for 35 years and became a published painter in her 70’s. Her depression went away.
Watching the movie Secretariat the other night with my daughters who are now 12 and 13, one comments and the other agrees that it is “wrong for that mom to abandon her children for the sake of that horse.” I breathe in deeply that sentiment, knowing I might be my mother’s great works and they might be mine.
Checking on my sleeping daughters I flash back to the days as toddlers when they came to me and the long nights of pain and sadness they endured when they had been moved around from group home to my home. Safety brought with it the remembering of trauma endured and our first year was marked by both great joy and deep sorrow. Once, after a solid two weeks of interrupted sleep, I was stunningly awake as I had never been to this god of nurturing and loving two helpless human beings.
“As the world goes by, all I know is I want to be wide awake/Seekers of status quo, I say let them go, I want to be wide awake/fear for all of its fury can’t hold a flame to any soul that cries, I want to be wide awake, awake.” (Christine Kane, Wide Awake)
Awake. Like jumping into an icy pond. So at times I have fallen asleep. Nurturing while sleepwalking changes my creativity and my parenting, I see that now. My mind wanders to my mother’s obsession with feeding the seven of us. It was/is her creativity – her deep joy channeled into the thing she had to do. And anyone who nurtures others 24-7 knows the drain of energy that comes with outer focused nurturing. And yet, it is our creativity, our soul’s joy channeled into caring that feeds the life force. I bake bread weekly; make soups, have learned Indian, Chinese and Thai cooking. I make cookies and scones; tend a garden in the summer. How many artists: painters, potters, songwriters, writers and sculptors works are channeled into people who were fed well in childhood? Am I my mother’s novel?
Elizabeth Layton raised five kids, battled depression for 35 years and became a published painter in her 70’s. Her depression went away.
Watching the movie Secretariat the other night with my daughters who are now 12 and 13, one comments and the other agrees that it is “wrong for that mom to abandon her children for the sake of that horse.” I breathe in deeply that sentiment, knowing I might be my mother’s great works and they might be mine.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Re-Construction
I count myself in the middle to the tail end of the baby boomers. We are re-constructionists. I and many of my friends bought houses in which we replaced original windows and doors, heating units and installed central air conditioning units. Some of us eventually re-did the house altogether, opening up kitchens to living areas and replacing countertops and cabinets. Some of us replaced these items because there were more energy efficient iterations of them on the market. Some of us tore down walls to collaborate and communicate more effectively.
We look for houses with good bones, we value what is there, but we are eager to make it better to fit the needs of our families. I saw an article about house design not too long ago that tracked the opening up of the kitchen to other living spaces side by side with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. While there had been a small spurt of new construction with a more closed kitchen recently, most of us are not going back there.
Good bones. We’re not about throwing everything out. In a way, we are bridge builders, working to connect the dots between our parents’ generation and the offspring we have. My daughters roll their eyes, but occasionally they are humming to a Joni Mitchell tune. They asked to have a couple of Earth, Wind and Fire songs put on their iPods. My peeps are zumba-ing to Lady Gaga and Usher.
Good values. Community, connection, collaboration. These are probably the re-building blocks of my generation. Call it what you will: decentralized management styles, emotional intelligence, new value propositions, I call it “women in the workplace.” Women couldn’t help but bring their authentic selves to the table. This “let’s make sure everyone is connected” mentality permeates the new work environment. We couldn’t help it.
Technology has helped the employed mom and dad juggle work and family. As a tool, it has increased our ability to connect with one another. A snow day turns into a conference call/on-line meeting day. With Microsoft Communicator on my desk top, the geographic size of my responsibility shrinks to my desktop, less time traveling means more time on task.
My grandparents’ generation forged new territory, continued settling the west, built around the outer loops made possible by interstate highway legislation passed during the Eisenhower administration. My generation, and those who come after us, will re-build, holding on to values and physical spaces but seeing them just a little bit differently. Perhaps because of the increasing scarcity of land or the valuing of that land and the earth’s resources, we are not as willing to keep stretching and making a new outer ring. The future belongs to those who are bridge builders, who can challenge all of us to see the good in what was, and stand on the shoulders of those ideas and take them another collaborative step closer to a more perfect community.
We look for houses with good bones, we value what is there, but we are eager to make it better to fit the needs of our families. I saw an article about house design not too long ago that tracked the opening up of the kitchen to other living spaces side by side with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. While there had been a small spurt of new construction with a more closed kitchen recently, most of us are not going back there.
Good bones. We’re not about throwing everything out. In a way, we are bridge builders, working to connect the dots between our parents’ generation and the offspring we have. My daughters roll their eyes, but occasionally they are humming to a Joni Mitchell tune. They asked to have a couple of Earth, Wind and Fire songs put on their iPods. My peeps are zumba-ing to Lady Gaga and Usher.
Good values. Community, connection, collaboration. These are probably the re-building blocks of my generation. Call it what you will: decentralized management styles, emotional intelligence, new value propositions, I call it “women in the workplace.” Women couldn’t help but bring their authentic selves to the table. This “let’s make sure everyone is connected” mentality permeates the new work environment. We couldn’t help it.
Technology has helped the employed mom and dad juggle work and family. As a tool, it has increased our ability to connect with one another. A snow day turns into a conference call/on-line meeting day. With Microsoft Communicator on my desk top, the geographic size of my responsibility shrinks to my desktop, less time traveling means more time on task.
My grandparents’ generation forged new territory, continued settling the west, built around the outer loops made possible by interstate highway legislation passed during the Eisenhower administration. My generation, and those who come after us, will re-build, holding on to values and physical spaces but seeing them just a little bit differently. Perhaps because of the increasing scarcity of land or the valuing of that land and the earth’s resources, we are not as willing to keep stretching and making a new outer ring. The future belongs to those who are bridge builders, who can challenge all of us to see the good in what was, and stand on the shoulders of those ideas and take them another collaborative step closer to a more perfect community.
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