“Careful studies of how women feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television. Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework.”
–Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Quote on page 221.
Every fall, large brown spiders appear and build big beautiful webs in my garden. Here’s one that built a web right outside my back door.
I’m fond of these spiders, even though they catch bees that I’m also fond of. (Later in the day, this spider was busily wrapping up three bees that had landed in her web.)
I think these spiders are Araneus diadematus (“Cross Orbweaver” or “Garden Spider”), but I’m not sure.
Posted in Cool stuff, Life
“As I’ve defined it, self-compassion entails three core components. First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental. Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering. Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it. We must achieve and combine these three essential elements in order to be truly self-compassionate.
This means that unlike self-esteem, the good feelings of self-compassion do not depend on being special and above average, or on meeting ideal goals. Instead, they come from caring about ourselves—fragile and imperfect yet magnificent as we are. Rather than pitting ourselves against other people in an endless comparison game, we embrace what we share with others and feel more connected and whole in the process. And the good feelings of self-compassion don’t go away when we mess up or things go wrong. In fact, self-compassion steps in precisely where self-esteem lets us down—whenever we fail or feel inadequate.”
–Kristin Neff.”Why Self-Compassion Trumps Self-Esteem.” Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. University of California, Berkeley. 27 May 2011. 14 October 2011. http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/try_selfcompassion/
Growing up, we called it The Happy Tree. The strong oak stood rooted in the fertile soil of the Santa Clara Valley, its silvery gray limbs reaching for the brilliant blue sky as they shaded one end of our carefully tended back lawn. Prickly oak leaves fell year round; brown and sharp against bare feet, they formed a rustling pillow beneath the blankets we spread for summertime picnics.
“Yum,” my dad always said, biting into a saltine cracker slathered with butter. “Squooshed caterpillars for lunch!” He bugged out his eyes, and my mother—her long slender fingers cool and beautiful—laughed and called him handsome.
Giggling, my sister, brother, and I repeated, “Squooshed caterpillars!” and shoved crackers into our mouths, the rich crunchy buttery goodness smearing our tongues and lips and coating our hearts with joy.
After lunch, drunk on butter fat and family love and speckled with cracker crumbs, we three kids raced out into the color-drenched California sun and tore around the acre-and-a-half garden. Our imaginations blossomed, green and full. We mounded pine needles into low-walled rooms for play forts. We raced as horses in thundering herds across the lawn. We were schools of fish darting along the garden paths, and magicians wielding thick magnolia bud wands. We played store, trading hedge leaves for lemons. We leapt through sprinklers like fairies leaping waterfalls, threw ourselves belly-down like fat dolphins to slide the wet length of the plastic Slip-and-Slide, and crept like spies deep within the dark dense bushes around the perimeter of the yard.
Always, in the end, we returned to The Happy Tree, ships to anchor, and lay exhausted and exhilarated in its protective embrace.
Trees, so many trees in that garden: oak, pine, liquid amber, magnolia, birch, lemon, eucalyptus. As we grew, the trees grew, until the oak overshadowed the house and eucalyptus branches cracked and fell into an enormous mass onto the ground and I crawled into the center of that nose-tingling pile and spent hours telling myself strange Pollyana-esque stories of living alone in the trees.
Thirty years later, when I bought my own house, I chose it for the trees in its garden: apple, orange, lemon, peach, nectarine, plum, all tall and mature and full of fruit. And I planted trees of my own, the first among them an oak, whose sturdy branches today bustle with squirrels and sparrows and from whose crown crows and blue birds call.
Happy Tree, Too.
Posted in Life
Ever since 1979, I’ve been keeping track of the books I read, writing the author’s name and book title in long hand in a journal with lined pages and a blue cover. This year, I reached the final page, and I began to wonder what would happen when I filled it up. Maybe, as I wrote the very last entry, I would die?
I wrote the final entry on July 14.
Didn’t die.
On July 16, when I finished reading another book, I flipped the journal upside down and started making entries on the blank back side of the last page, figuring that I can keep going, back to front.
Now I wonder what that means. Maybe, as I write in reverse, I’ll regress?
Confession time: after my brother died two years ago, I stopped writing fiction.
I couldn’t stop writing nonfiction; my job demands that I write reviews and compose class material. But writing nonfiction is easy. It’s straightforward, consciously controlled composition. Line your ducks up in order and watch them waddle off in a tidy row, quacking happily.
Fiction is a different matter. To write fiction, I have to relinquish conscious control and let my subconscious speak. Barking dogs need to scatter the ducks, who fly off in unexpected directions, squawking. After my brother died, I didn’t want to hear what my subconscious had to say, didn’t want to scatter the ducks. It was just too painful. So I stopped up my ears.
Then a few months ago, I realized there was a short story I wanted to write, a story based loosely on my brother’s death. This month, I wrote that story. It’s called “Liminal Eyes.”
Being able to write “Liminal Eyes” was the last step in the slow process of reclaiming my life after my brother lost his.
I’ve gathered that short story and seven others in a collection titled Liminal Eyes and Other Unsettling Tales, which I’m publishing myself, in paperback and electronically. Here’s an image of the front cover.
I’ve been doing CrossFit for about six months now. Ow! It kills me. It is awful. I love it.
My place of pain is Hercules CrossFit: http://www.herculescrossfit.com/
My role in the workouts is to make everyone else feel good because I’m so bad. Typical early workout: everyone else gets praised for hefting serious Olympic weights. I get praised for dropping the bar safely when I fall down.
Posted in Exercising, Life
The picture makes it looks like I’m having fun, so I suppose I must have been. The water was clear, the sky was blue, the birds (herons, bald eagles, crows) were numerous and beautiful. But I suck at kayaking.
Carolyn kayaking
I saw J.J. Abrams’s new Star Trek movie this morning.
It’s hard for me to explain what seeing this movie means to me. When I was a kid, the original TV series was in its first run, and I watched each episode religiously.
“Religiously” is not a metaphor here: I worshipped the show. All throughout each episode, I sat in one spot on the floor in a rigid position, double-jointed knees bent so that my legs were arranged in a V pressed flat on either side of me. Somehow that uncomfortable position made me worthy, made me part of the action.
I clipped the episode descriptions out of the guide in the daily newspaper and taped them into a log book. I arched my left eyebrow and murmured “fascinating” at every opportunity. I bought Leonard Nimoy’s records and played them over and over. I made up Mary Sue fanfic stories to tell myself as I fell asleep at night.
My younger brother called me Spock.
Brian thought of himself as Captain Kirk. Several times before he died of ALS last year, we watched Star Trek Generations together–the movie in which Captain Kirk dies. Brian made me promise to tell the readers of his blog that his last words to them were the same as Kirk’s last words in the movie: “It was fun.”
Anyone who knows anything about ALS knows that Brian wasn’t referring to the disease.
My dearest, deepest wish is that my brother could have seen the new movie. Seen fearless Kirk, fists flying in the face of death, more than forty years after his first incarnation.
Maybe (*spoiler alert*), in some alternative universe like the one in the movie, Brian lives and is watching Kirk and Spock and our beloved crew resurrected on screen.
Maybe when Brian’s young son, Joey, watches the young, fatherless Kirk drive hellbent for that yawning crevasse in the plains of Iowa, he’ll think of his dad. And know what Brian meant.
Posted in Cool stuff, Life, Reviews
Tagged ALS, Brian Hill, movie review, my brother, review, Star Trek, the future begins