Category Archives: Politics

Gardening In Winter


Gardening in Winter

As of late, I have been remiss in my blog postings. Distracted, swept along by the sheer flood of news surrounding Trump, his family and associates, I struggle to clear the space to write about the importance of maintaining gratitude.

It’s not that I don’t think about it. I do. After 119 posts, I wonder what is new that I can offer on this subject. Subjects have varied; but the essence, that of mindful attention, is consistent. Sameness, order, a sense of reliability has its benefits.

It turns out I garden all year long— if not in reality, in fantasy. This time of year, when any day can be cloudy and damp, snowy or sunny I attend to my indoor garden of houseplants. For added fun, I pour over plant pictures in a gardening catalogue and plan my spring garden.

This year, I decided to experiment and bring a shaggy but still blooming petunia pot in for the winter. Five months later, to my surprise, as you can see from the picture above, the plant has filled out and continues to bloom. I check it every day. Every few weeks, I place the plant in my kitchen sink, spray it with water, and fertilize. Indoor plants, especially those that bloom, are subject to white fly. Once a month, I spray it with Neem, to hold off the bugs.

Today, I was rewarded with a full array of bright purple petunia blooms and two yellow brachcolla blooms. The process, mindful attention to the health of my plants, makes me smile. I poke my finger into the soil and test for moisture. I scan the leaves for changes or invaders. Green growth is soothing and calming. The surprise mauve African violet bud lifting its head is delightful. The connection to nature is obvious but the close at hand encounter is what is most meaningful to me.

The contrast of watching an African violet bud unfold in contrast to the chaos of our political structure feels profound. In my own home, I am able to create beauty and order as I attend to the needs of each plant.

But not everyone is a gardener or inclined to caring for houseplants. The challenge in maintaining a sense of gratitude is to notice. I believe that everyday, there are opportunities to feel uplifted by the experience of kindness and of beauty, as well as an appreciation of one’s own effort and/or the effort of others.

For myself, my roots to gardening go back to my Dad who dug the soil and planted tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, radishes and peppers during WW II in our fenced back yard. He was a creature of habit, very disciplined and taught me well about the importance of noticing and attending. As soon as I had a little tiny plot of earth in my first condo, I planted petunias next to the steps. I recall the joy of making a difference in the aesthetic  quality of entering my space. I felt a surge of gratitude then and after, again and again, as I maintain an effort at generativity such as with the seeds I scatter in this post.

Mental Health Is On My Mind

Courtesy of Ann Telnaes
Washington Post, 2.5.2019

Not a day goes by without my considering what effects Trump’s random, impulsive behaviors have on the mental health of our country. I’m not alone. On February 7th, The Boston Globe carried an opinion piece titled Institutional silence on Trump’s mental state in which Doctors Lee and Glass sound the alarm on “malignant normalcy.” They state,

Human beings are very adaptable, and there is almost no degree of pathology we could not grow accustomed to, unless those with clear knowledge of what was happening were to speak out. Based on the experience of physician compliance with Nazism, we now have the Declaration of Geneva, the universal physician’s pledge that recognizes either silence or active cooperation with a destructive regime as running counter to medicine’s humanitarian goals.

The authors take issue with the American Psychiatric Organization’s decision to enact a gag order on any member who speaks out about a public figure. They advocate the present need for public discourse by mental health professionals as a first step to having clarity and empowering the people.

Many of us, with or without mental health credentials, live through each day with the knowledge that our chief executive is a rogue president with a mental attitude that permits him to behave without accountability.

The past month has been bookmarked by two events.

  • The government shutdown during which 800,000 or more public service workers were cut off from their pay while expected to perform their jobs.
  • At no point in his 80 minute speech did Trump speak of, address, express regret, or hold himself or anyone in his administration accountable for the hardship caused by his decision.

It is telling that nowhere in his State of the Union speech did Trump express concern or reflect on the challenge to prevent a future shutdown as the next budget deadline looms.

For the past two years, we have suffered through Trump’s blasphemous, irrepressible ego trip, placing himself in front of adoring fans, holed up in the residency or at Mar-a-Largo, in commune with Fox news, texting his observations and pronouncements as if they were executive orders.

Is Trump unfit to serve? Do we need a psychiatric evaluation to decide? Until and unless there is adequate data that motivates a Cabinet member on the necessity of an evaluation, how we gain perspective, be it through reading, listening, and absorbing various viewpoints, is up to each individual.

In the meantime, each of us is accountable to ourselves and to the community we share.  Our own mental health is dependent on what each of us does each and every day to maintain our own well-being as well as to contribute to the well-being of our social and community networks.

For myself, I intend to address my worry about “malignant normality” by being mindful, calling my representatives, and sharing my opinion. As always, I am grateful to my readers who run alongside as I struggle to make sense out of what, these days, seems surreal.

 

 

 

On Slow Waking

 

Faye, circa 1950’s
photo by Marv

For the past week, I’ve been ensconced at Pine Manor’s Winter MFA Solstice residency in Chestnut Hill. I was one of the first alumni to graduate in January, 2009. Thanks to their generous policy of encouraging alumni to audit classes and attend alumni events, I return twice a year for inspiration, learning and collegiality.

Every year, I focus on a particular aspect of craft and writing. In years past, as a memoir and personal essay writer, I’ve selected classes in creative nonfiction. This past year, perhaps because of the swirling events of Trump’s presidency, I have returned to writing poetry. The form, succinct and compressed, forces me to hone in, shape words in a rhythmic form, and highlight the essence of my subject.

I write free verse, using narrative, craft particulars and associations to shape my words. As of late, I have struggled to find the “right” words to fit my subject and fill the page. I’ve begun to wonder: does the possibility of so much free form limit my imagination?

I am grateful to report that midweek, I attended a class taught by Dzvinia Orlowsky on the Villanelle and Pantoum forms. We read and dissected Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song, Theodore Roethke’s The Waking and two more. Villanelle is a form that uses repetition of lines to highlight the poet’s themes and intention.

As an Octogenarian with far more years behind me than ahead, the experience of probing the contrast between Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and Roethke’s “I learn by going where I have to go”  tapped into my own personal dilemma about creative focus and time.

In aging, one can rail and narrow one’s options as Thomas so aptly reveals or in contrast, one can follow one’s instincts or intuition and expand as one lives as Roethke unveils. It was remarkable join my classroom peers, all decades younger, in exploring and articulating the options.

On his recent 91stbirthday, my brother joked, “I’ve never been this old.” There is such truth is that simple statement and with it, the question of how one proceeds facing the “sunset years.” For myself, I am grateful to have returned to poem making in order to try to harness the light, caste the mauves, blues and lavenders of topics that compel me to write.

At the same time, I am grateful to experience validation of the path I am on, the belief that experience is the best teacher— a mantra I followed in all my therapeutic work with others. My choice of poetry classes was intuitive. It now seems significant that Roethke wrote the poem In Waking in 1953, a turning point in my life. I was a junior in college, far from home, emotionally adrift from my family and learning life long lessons I continue to embrace.

In Roethke’s words—“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.” I am grateful.

Fall Leaves & Mourning

Photo taken from the back patio window

There is something about fall with its bold colors, each leaf distinct, the explosion of red, orange, yellow pigments in artistic play, a cacophony of hues.

I am especially grateful for the turning of leaves this November,2018. Days before the midterm, I am fraught with anticipation and anxiety. Will there be a falling?

The cleansing sweep of leaves represents change, the falling away of what has been in preparation for what is to become. I am grateful for the wisdom of Mother Nature’s seasons.

To thrive, trees must rest. To rest, trees must give up their leaves, strip down, be prepared for the weight  of cold and the blanket of snow which will bed, protect and ultimately melt moisture into the roots and provide nourishment for spring’s resurgence and growth.

During my fall childhood, as I walked the mile route to and from school, I scanned the sidewalk for “special” leaves— the perfectly pointed fiery red maples, the curved yellow oaks, the russet chestnuts. Upon arriving home, I slid each leaf in between the pages of Mom’s discarded Woman’s Day magazines. At season’s end, the magazines bulging with stems peeking out, I tucked them away in my room under a heavy book.

Often, as it happens in childhood, I moved on to my next project, forgetting the beauty left behind until spring or even the start of the next fall, when I would begin again. All these years later, still drawn to the search for “special leaves” such as the floating oak leaf caught in the spider’s web framed in the patio glass door, shown in the picture above.

A week has passed since the awful human carnage of faithful Jews, several near my own age, at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, daughter of a first generation Yankee father and Lithuanian immigrant mother, I watched television images of congregants in mourning and men in black hoisting caskets of their beloved ones. I read about and listened to  stories of the deceased—men and women in the throes of their lives including a married couple wed in 1954 at the Tree of Life Synagogue, the same year as Marv and I were wed.

As my heart wept for the fallen,

I gazed upward

to the bold red/orange/yellow

leaves in change,

leaves in color, leaves falling.

 

Each precious one

soon to transform

into paper thinness

likes bones to dust,

eleven spirits in flight.

May the beauty of fallen leaves bring comfort to those who mourn.

Finding Calm & Compassion

Junior Blue Jay
McCauley Library
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology

My home, located across from the Charles River, surrounded by trees, is a choice nesting site for birds.

Yesterday, as I finished whisking off the frayed bed sheet I’d thrown over my lemon tree to prevent freezing, I took note of a tiny grey bird tucked into the corner of the top step. Its stillness compelled me to pause and take note.

Still and barely breathing, the flutter of feathers at the edges, she was clearly alive. I surmised she was a fledging Blue Jay from the truncated tail, striped blue/black, just the beginning of a familiar tail.

Imagine what that first effort of fluttering one’s wings and leaving the nest must feel like. How many poems and stories have transformed this common experience in metaphoric language to describe separation and gaining mastery?

Often, in the spring, fledgling robins hit the windows along the front of the house. In their efforts to fly, I hear the “thwack” on the glass and run to the garden to see if a bird has fallen. There were one or two who were quite stunned but in time, regained their wits to try again.

I worried about this young one. She seemed sturdy and well fed, her coat soft and thick, her breath steady. Would she muster the energy to fly again? And if not, if she stayed through dark, what would I do?

In the moment, there was nothing to do. By dusk, just as silently as she had come, she left, leaving no trace except in memory, where she nested still.

What was it about the presence of that gentle, calm creature on the back step? As I recall her image, I breath slowly and more deeply.  Given the horrifying story of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi this past week, the fledgling Jay’s calm was a gift.

Like so many of my friends and family, I struggle with reactivity to the day’s events— they pile up, build into crescendos of anxiety. The fact that she landed on the step in the window of time when I stepped out was fortuitous.

I was drawn to her soft presence. Softness— and by extension, compassion, being the operative word for what has been missing in the day-to-day world in our October, 2018, headlines. Be it compassion for the children in “temporary” detention centers longing for family or the caravan of refugees with visions of America “The Beautiful,” this tiny creature embodied both the freedom to fly and the risk of vulnerability.

When I decided to write this week’s blog on the encounter, I wondered why I hadn’t taken a picture of the bird and had to resort to the internet for a likeness?  Upon reflection, I worried that my attempt to get “the perfect shot” might startle her.

I am grateful I had the presence of mind to step away and provide safety. In so doing, I was able  to gain perspective, as well as to write and share the meaning of the experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Truth Telling: Part Two

Christine Blaisey Ford taking oath
Thanks to Win McNamee/Pool

Is it because I am a woman, a therapist with a trained ear, who has listened to countless women with similar stories, that I believe Dr. Christine Blaisey Ford’s story?

There are so many ways in which Dr. Ford’s narrative felt compelling and believable. As television cameras rolled, her voice shaking with anxiety, I again bore witness to a sexual abuse survivor willing to walk through the trauma of truth telling—this time, to a national audience. I took note of how she paced the telling of painful details, and her deliberate effort to be even-handed in her story as she declared only what, as a highly trained psychologist and woman under sexual siege, could she ascertain.

The day we awaited the release of the FBI report to the Senate, I tuned into Rachel Martin’s NPR interview with Missy Bigelow Carr, a long-term friend of Judge Kavanaugh. She did not believe Dr. Ford’s account and could not consider any part of it as true.

  • At one point, after Ms. Carr asserted, there’s a lot of holes in the stories of Ford,Ms. Martin observed, it is common to have holes in one’s memory, that you can’t recount, necessarily, the address where it (the assault) happened.
  • Well, that there’s holes are one thing. But lies are other things.  I mean…fear of flying not true. The second door on the house —again, the data, the history shows that this—the second door was put on four years before the therapy session that apparently was about this incident.

Dr. Ford did state that she had a fear of flying and yet, acknowledged that she did fly. I understood that although the fear of flying limited her options, that in special circumstances such as trips across the country to visit her parents, work commitments, and testifying to Congress, she found a way to cope.

At one point in my life, when my children were young teens, I developed an intense fear of flying. For days before a necessary professional trip, I practiced specific coping imagery. On the day of the flight, I sat in an aisle seat to assure my mobility and during the trip, I often closed my eyes to envision safe landing and walking onto firm ground. Like Dr. Ford, I understood the power of specific strategies for coping.

Making no sense to her architect or her husband, Dr. Ford insisted on a second door years before her secret propelled the couple into therapy. The need for protection was so strong that even the embarrassment of double front doors for all to see did not prevent her from such an unusual and unaesthetic decision. The extra door meant safety and safety was all.

There is no turning back from the disregarding, vitriolic Senate Supreme Court election we have lived through this past week. Just as Dr. Ford feared, she was deemed a woman who “ruined a good man’s reputation.” She needed more than two front doors to keep her safe from President Trump’s egregious, inflammatory words in which he mocked her testimony to a cheering and raucous crowd in Mississippi. I was appalled and disgusted by his careless and hurtful rhetoric.

  • After all this, for what am I grateful? I am grateful to find the words for this blog.
  • I am grateful for Dr. Ford’s courage to stand before so many and lead the way for other silent survivors to step forth and participate in a dialogue about sexual abuse that is long overdue.
  • I am grateful to add my name to the many women and men who believe Dr. Ford’s truth and stand by her. May she stay safe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Truth Telling

Christine-Blasey-Ford

Ten years post retirement from my therapy practice, I shredded drawers of client notes— at least fifty per cent of which involved stories of both sexes who suffered childhood and adolescent molestation by a parent, uncle, cousin, boyfriend or girlfriend, priest, acquaintance or malevolent stranger.

To a person, each one struggled with the emotional burden of “double living”—that is, in the retelling, each individual faced the specific events and relived the emotions of the experience. It’s one thing to tell a therapist, a trusted preofessional trained to help contextualize and manage sudden and unexpected violence to one’s body. It is quite another to sit before an all male Senate Judiciary Committee in Circa 2018, the age of Trumpism, and reveal what up to a week and a half ago was privileged and private information.

I am grateful to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford who has bravely come forth to tell her story to the American people. Months ago, she decided to write a letter to her Congress woman in order to “do the right thing” when she realized that Brett Kavanaugh was the very person who had attempted to rape her and muffle her scream.

Dr. Ford speaks for all my sexual survivor clients, especially those who were muted and intimidated into silence and were not able to confront their abuser.

I am grateful to Dr. Ford’s therapist both for her careful note taking (which is no small task) and for her willingness to hand over her notes to Dr. Ford to ascertain credibility to her story.

This has been a cliffhanger week for me. I have been on edge since re-watching Anita Hill’s dignified struggle to answer Joe Biden’s tortured and specific questions about Clarence Thomas’s licentious “come on” in 1991. In the presence of her mother and father and loving relatives, this Baptist raised, private woman spoke truth to power and was thanked with humiliation.

I recall a family session with a client who shared her abuse as a child by a male caretaker only to be rebuffed by her mother. As hurtful as her mother’s judgment and lack of empathy were  in that moment of truth telling, my client shed her muted self and lit the growing flame of self-respect.

Judge Kavanaugh is fighting for approval so as to be appointed to the highest court of our land. Dr. Ford is fighting to maintain her self respect in sounding the alarm about allowing a man who has a history of drunken violence against a woman to vote upon protocol, procedure, and laws that will effect women for decades to come.

According to a Facebook post, here’s what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is facing.

The Violence Against Reauthorization Act of 2013 passed the Senate 78-22. The following 6 Representatives voted against it— Senator Grassley, Senator Hatch, Senator Graham,Senator Cornym, Senator Lee, and Senator Cruz.

These Senators are NOW ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and will be  questioning Christine Blasey Ford.

May Dr. Ford stay strong and speak her truth. In gratitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Real-Life Storytelling in Film

Grace Lee, Film Director                Ann Hornaday, Film Critic

We’ve just returned from a week of learning about voice and ownership in film, Marv’s and my fifth season at The Chautauqua Institute with Road Scholar. As a writer, I am drawn to topics that edify and explicate literary aspects of the creative process. What better way to understand process than to listen to an astute interviewer dig into the background, motivation and story of the birth of a film.

Day five, Ann Hornaday, film critic for the Washington Post interviewed Grace Lee on what prompted her to begin her film career with “The Grace Lee Project,” in which she interviewed women named “Grace Lee” from all over the country. As an Asian American who grew up in Missouri, she was the only person she knew with her first name, but upon moving to New York and California, she realized there were many women with her full name. Likening the name “Grace Lee” to the “Jane Smith of Asian-American names,” the germ of her project was born and she set out to interview Grace Lees all over the country.

When I started asking other people about the Grace Lees they once knew, they were always stereotypically perfect, over-achieving Asian Americans. They went to Harvard at age 15, were excellent violin players…devout Christians, and I was none of those things. (Chautauqua Daily)

During the making of this 2005 film, she met Grace Lee Boggs, an Octogenerian Chinese-American woman who lived and worked as an activist-writer in a predominantly African American community in Detroit. A decade later, Lee returned to Boggs at age ninety to make a film titled “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.”

As a writer of memoir, as a clinician who savors story, the film clips and discussion of how Grace Lee and her camera crew followed Boggs about on her daily encounters mesmerized me. Earlier in the week, listening to Ken Burns and his two writer colleagues, I learned the value and importance of weaving “stills” and back footage into the story line.

I attended Wayne University in Detroit in 1953, just at the time whites were fleeing to the suburbs as African Americans were moving into  neighborhoods. As a sociology major, I went from door to door, interviewing whites and African Americans about their neighborhood concerns. Wariness of the “other” was everywhere. I was on the fringe, unaware of Bogg’s world, encased in an academic bubble.

Lee, who had taken on the Grace Lee film as a way to research the stereotypical Asian-American as “passive,” commented how she had studied social history and the civil rights movement in college but also had never heard of Boggs. She zoomed into Boggs life, thereby transporting me to a time before the women’s movement, before Betty Friedan’s book, to Boggs’ 70 years of living in and advocating for the African American community.

After a week of film clips and discussions from film directors and writers, I am appreciative and grateful for the special visual and auditory qualities of documentary film story telling. I wish I had known about Grace Lee Boggs when I was a student at Wayne; she was such an inspirational woman. Thanks, to Grace Lee.

 

 

 

Why Gratitude?

Marv pondering in the garden

People are skeptical about gratitude; I can’t blame them. It’s not easy to tune into or away from events in this uneasy, the sky is falling,-wait-is-it-real-or-fake-news-time, in our country’s life.

I’m often asked, What is there to be grateful for? I understand. We are all anxious these days. Anxiety can cloud vision, focus, and point of view. I need not remind you who is president, who fawned over Putin, as we learn day by day how much of our way of life is being threatened.

Nonetheless, I believe, with focus, we can train ourselves to pause, take a breath and consider that which is in reach and palliative within our own small orbit. If you have read my blog on the benefits of time in nature, you know that by a daily practice in which I attend to a houseplant or walk out into my garden and pause, I am able to move into a state of appreciation for the color or shape or smell of what is before me.

The key is embracing possibility—that in the course of one’s daily activities, there are limitless options to notice and feel appreciation and gratitude. For me, the benefit of pausing and slowing my pace are immediate. I can feel my mood shift and for no other reason then to experience calm, I am grateful.

Take yesterday, at the grocery store. The temperature was 90. The air, humid. Late in the day, I was not in the mood to shop. But first thing, in the produce department, I was greeted by a gracious man I have endlessly seen unloading greens and propping them up for display. “Hello,” he greeted, with his wide smile. My smile in response was instant.

Before I knew it, I was caught by a loud conversation between a young boy sitting in a grocery carriage with his mom. He was talking vegetable talk— “yellow tomatoes, yum,” as his mother leaned over the display of tiny fresh fruits, filling a box to the brim and handing her boy one after another as a snack. The scene was intimate and sweet; it filled my heart. I was grateful to bear witness.

Near the finish, as I came up the aisle, an elderly man in a wheel chair turned the corner. Had I continued, we would have collided. He paused. I moved back and tucked myself into a cheese corner to let him pass. We made eye contact; he nodded with appreciation. “You have the right of way,” I quipped with a grin. I noted another special moment.

Can we be “in the moment” all the time? Maybe not, but we can take note of a moment some of the time. If we pay attention, scan and focus upon what intrigues, engages, inspires, delights, stimulates, stirs—you name it—one can gather gratitude and appreciation in small ways throughout the day.

Every minute, we have choices in how we approach our lives. Each experience is ours, to take in. The minutes, the immediate connections to others and the environment, add up. I hope you will seek gratitude in some way every day.

 

 

 

Mental Health and Mother Nature’s Nurture

Monarch Butterfly
on Asclepias tuberosa

The past three mornings, I’ve flown into my garden after checking the news in the aftermath of Trump’s worrisome press conference with Putin. Sharp pruners in hand, I tackled the wild, over-grown forsythia shrub at the driveway entrance. Branches, thin and flexible, stretching to the sun, had bent and curled between and betwixt one another in pursuit of the sun.

The first day, I followed each branch to its rooted undergrowth. Bending and reaching, I cut each one at its source. After an hour and a half, my back signaling “enough,” I turned to the lilies, always in need of tidying. Uplifted by the sight of yellow, vivid red, crème, and fuscia flowering, I plucked yesterday’s wet and drooping blossoms, filling half a bucket. Creating order is good for one’s mental outlook.

On day two, I began to shape the shrub. I targeted meandering, spiking branches and snipped at the nods between two leaves to encourage a soft, wavy pattern. As I moved up and down, over and around, I shaped and re-shaped the dancing tendrils. The focus on the task at hand, somewhat challenging, lifted my spirit.

On the third day, I was contented with the tamed, undulating shape and tended to the few dry, dead clusters at the base. At the last, I stepped back and scanned each side. Pruning is art. My vision complete, I sighed in gratitude.

When the world is wild with anxiety and worry, when I cannot stop checking the news, the garden calls. It is enough to set a goal, even a mindful walk and to proceed. The esthetics of the space— the variety of species, the coloration of purple and red astilbe, white, rose and yellow zahara zinnias, the dogwood, and the mooga pine and peach azalea shrubs—offer variety and delight. Our minds and bodies entrain (tune with) the shift in pace and rhythm.

Now that the frogs have returned, their heads peer out above the water’s edge along the rocks of the little pond. I missed them terribly in late spring; for over the years, I had come to rely on their presence as the garden awakened. But nature can be unpredictable. Last year, across the driveway from the forsythia, an Asclepius (butterfly weed) carried by a bird, no doubt, appeared. I wanted to pluck it from the bed of lilies and zinnias but Crystal, my gardening helper, cautioned me. It could attract butterflies.

Late yesterday, in my car, stopped for traffic at the driveway’s entry, I glanced to my left and there, perched on the edge of the Asciepius, was a monarch butterfly. It hovered, flew and set down again. I grabbed my iPhone and stepped out of the car.  In seconds, a shimmering green hummingbird darted below the butterfly and in a flash, sped away. The butterfly lingered on, flitting to and fro, setting down once more as if she knew how much I wanted to capture her spread winged. I’m grateful to share my picture; I’m grateful to Mother Nature for nurture.