Joy in the morning

This morning, just before I woke up, or maybe as I was waking up, I had one of those rare dreams that you remember. It was vivid. A joyous mash of my trip to Colorado and a wonderful lunch I had yesterday in Oklahoma. It was all transported to my old home in Dublin, Georgia.

The backyard began as it was, but was somehow transformed to a great garden maze. The colors were brilliant with flowering trees everywhere. The old cherry laurel tree was full of brilliant humming birds. An impossibly yellow woodpecker was on the neighbors fence. Somehow my fathers tomatoes were changed to rows of corn.

It was beautiful. Just before waking I thought, "Dad will love this."

There is nothing like waking to joy in the morning.

Atticus' daughters

I have started three different blogs and diverted each time.  Travel can do that to me.  My trip has taken me across the panhandle of Oklahoma, where dusty wheat stubble and abandoned homesteads paint images of the dust bowl.

New Mexico was singed by fires, but here in Southern Colorado the air is crisp and clear, the mountains are just tinged by the rising sun, and a snow capped peak is just over the next ridge.  I decided this morning, surrounded by all this beauty, to write about one of my first trips.  It was the journey that I now realize played a part in opening my mind and expanding my perspective about the world and it's people.

I had lived my life in rural Georgia where people around me had shown a civility that melted away as racial tensions in the south came to a head.  People I had respected began to use the "N" word and to speak with a vicious venom that frightened me.  I am going back in time to a different type of journey, to the early 60's when the adults around me began to show their human frailties, and their prejudice.

Just before I turned 13, after a summer of escalating violence and demonstrations, four girls, my age, were killed when a church was bombed in Birmingham Alabama.  I identified with them and from that moment on looked for something to help me understand what was happening around me.  The adults were wrong.  I lost my faith and looked for something that could help me find a moral center.  (Alright, moral center is my older way of thinking about it, but that truly is what my 13 year old self did.)

Then I read a book.  It was a journey, a trip to a different place and time to an earlier version of Alabama than the one that I saw burning, but to a version that had the same forces that were driving the horrors of the day.  To Kill a Mockingbird.  Harper Lee gave me such a personal gift when she shared her father through Atticus Finch.  I was Scout sitting on his knee as he talked calmly and wisely and with a truth and rightness that I so  needed to hear.  I became one of Atticus' daughters.

I have found many other of his daughters, women of an age, who found strength and hope from Atticus, and steered by the compass he set. Sin is to go against your heart, to willfully do what you know is wrong.  I think we all have the ability to know right from wrong.  It sometimes takes energy and courage to make the right choice.  Thank you Atticus.  It is a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Humane humans

Humane humans

My friend Celeste wrote about civility and my mind started wrapping around that word.  Civilized, civilization, civil, civil war.  We need a better word for it.  Civility makes me think of cold politeness, of manners that hide contempt.  Civil is defined as acting just good enough to not be seen as rude.  Civilized seems just barely so.  Civilization has applied to cultures that were monstrous.  

As herd animals, we cling to groups that are as tightly knit as a family group or a loosely formed as strangers in an elevator.  A nod and a smile as you enter and the connection is made.  We scream at drivers in our cars, we cut them off.  And yet strangers instinctively help when help is needed, comforting injured motorists or survivors of some tragedy.  What part of our brain drives these behaviors?  How is it that some circumstances trigger help and compassion and others rage and animosity.  How can we change our environment to generate more of the former than the latter.

You know how it happens.  Some point of contact, a look or smile or circumstance, humanizes the stranger who may have cut you off.  You suddenly see them as like you, lost or frazzled or just having a bad moment.  It is like a release, your anger melts and you feel better.  On the other side, you are desperate to merge in heavy traffic, a some kind soul smiles and waves you in.  Kindness.

That is the word.  We need more kindness.  Kind.  A synonym is humane, the original spelling of the word human, but changed 300 years ago.  Could it be as simple and as complex as kindness.  We learned the secret in kindergarten.  Do unto others?  Simple, but not easy. 

No wake

No wake

Ever have a day that needs a soft touch, when it seems the slightest ripple will make you overflow?

No wake.

Those are the days to find that friend who calms you.  The one who can tell you don't need action, that you need solace.  Solace, a beautiful word. 

No wake.

Some people go through life creating wakes.  They churn everyone around them.  They work themselves up over anything just to find that adrenaline rush.  They leave a rooster tail behind them and a wake that lingers.

No wake.

There are days when that wave is great, and action and motion is just the ticket.  But the dose must be measured when it is time to idle.  For those in perpetual motion, who's throttle is full on, look for the sign of need for safe harbor.  Divert.  Change craft. Change scene.  Change something.

No wake.

Continuum

I learned my concept of time from my 10 year old self.  She could not understand how grownups could forget what it was like to be a child.  She worried about that when she turned 10.  Ten was so old, you used all your fingers to show your age.. you were too old to use your fingers to show your age.  The first graders were small.  Life was passing quickly, it was nearly over.  I was really worried about how getting older would change me.  It seemed to me that adults didn’t do anything that was fun.  They didn’t skate, they didn’t ride bikes, and they didn’t dam the creek and trap tadpoles and crawdads.  Now my mother was saying I was too old to do things, like jump on the bed, or hide my dirty clothes under it.

The day I turned 10 I hid in the cool space between the cherry laurels and the house.  I was as depressed as a 10 year old can be about aging.  I thought forward to who I would be in another 10 years.  It took my breath away.  I’d be so old, then I thought about 30, 40, and hit the impossible, 50.  The 50 year old me would be nearly dead, and not doing anything fun.  She would never climb a tree. She would certainly not remember me.  I wondered.. could I make her remember me?  Would it matter?  Would she be any different? 

So she had an idea, she would save the day.  She looked around at the shadows of the trees on the brick of the house.  She felt the coolness of the dirt and looked up at the clouds above her.  She “saved the day”.  That’s what she called it.  She  did it once in a while.  She even had a chant:  “Now is now and then is then”.  The days she saved were not big events, just ordinary times.  Sitting in class on a hot day with a sticky crinoline with a bulletin board of agricultural products and the smell of the school sweeping compound in the air.  Tracing a shadow on butcher paper.  Running down the road at dusk with a group of  kids.  The joy of climbing a tree. 

When I was 50 I climbed a tree, just for her.  I owed her.

I so like that little girl.  She raised me.  She thought about things and made choices that were mostly good.  She created in me a concept of myself as a continuum. I think of her as a separate person who exists forever at points in time.  I like her.  I wish I could go back sometimes and help her.  Help her understand, give her a hug, ease her worries.

She did a good job.  I do remember.  I have the brilliant captured moments of the boredom of a classroom, the joy of running at dusk after a hot summer day.  I have a perception of myself that feels grounded yet separate.  And I am still looking out for that older me.  The one who will be 80, that separate person who will be me.  I worry about her and want to take care of her.  To help her the way that 10 year old helped me. 

I like to travel, but I’m going to save some trips for her.  They won’t be hard, not Machu Picchu or rafting the Colorado, but they will be full of wonder.  I will save her something beautiful to see for the first time.  She can thank our little friend for that.  After all she started it.

The angle of repose

the angle of repose – from 0° to 90°, the maximum angle to the horizontal at which rocks, soil and other objects will remain without sliding, or the maximum angle at  which an object can rest  on a slope without sliding down.

I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose a number of years ago, when I was working around a large number of engineers.  It was the first time I had heard of the concept and I was taken by the beauty and imagery of the term. The angle of repose, what a poetic engineer.   Why repose?  The word is such a rich one.  The Free Dictionary gives several definitions in the noun form of the word: resting; freedom from worry, peace of mind; calmness, tranquility.  The verb form takes the word a little further:  to lay down; to rest or relax; to lie dead.

As  the object  of this repose, I find retirement has taken me further from the slipping point than I had  been in a while.  There have been times when the angle was quite steep yet I felt solid, and others when only a slight elevation would have made  me slip.  We are not engineered objects.  It  is more  than friction and gravity that keeps us clinging to our spot.  This  blog will follow my travels  as I navigate  the angles that I seek, and those that find me.