Dancing
My friend Josie sent me a link to a YouTube video. It made me so happy, I put it in with my other links. Check it out:
linktext
"Aren't Us"
September 11th, 2001 has been on my mind lately. I just enrolled in a new drawing class, and so I have been looking through some of my drawing/painting exercises from past art classes, and I came upon pieces I had done in 2001, months before the horrible event. Looking at those dates—May 2001, August 2001—I could not imagine what it felt like to not know what I was about to know.
And the other day, in looking through an old textbook, searching for teaching ideas, I came upon a poem I had never read before:
“September Twelfth, 2001”
by X.J. Kennedy
Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,
Aren’t us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.
Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.
Hostage
I have been fascinated with the news of Ingrid Betancourt’s rescue from FARC, her Columbian captors. They kept her and many others in the jungle for seven years.
I watched her interview with Larry King the other night. She spoke haltingly. She apologized for her English. Something n her eyes caught me. She seemed both pained and impassioned. She looked—I don’t know how else to say it—like truth.
In my sheltered world, I cannot imagine Betancourt’s experience.
When King asked her about her initial capture, she said,
Well, the — it’s difficult to understand how just by like — I mean immediately you are into another situation. I mean you are a free woman and then you become a prisoner. And when you become a prisoner, immediately you receive orders, all kind of orders — sit here, stand there. I mean that’s it. You just you don’t have the possibility of — I mean even moving to take your bag or anything without asking permission.
Throughout the interview, she would not give specifics of the horrors she experienced and saw. She said, “There are things that have to be, you know, I mean, I think that many things happen in the jungle that we have to leave in the jungle.”
So when King asked her, “What was the worst thing you experienced?” She did not give a specific answer. Instead, she answered in the abstract, and her answer made my heart go cold:
“I think that the worst thing is realizing that mankind—that—that—human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.”
Normally, in writing, we have a rule: show, don’t tell—the idea being that the concrete is more powerful than the general. But her general statement about humankind knocked the wind out of me. Perhaps it was the look of her there in that Paris Hotel—so humble, so kind, so forgiving and so utterly astounded “that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.”
Exercise
I want to be the flexible person who goes with the flow, lays back, finds the silver lining, enjoys the moment. Instead, I have moods. I have sides, as in, “I have never seen this side of you” or “I do not like this side of you.”
Aging forces me to deal with limits I did not used to have. Once I could run without injury. Now, in the 50’s, I have injuries. And those injuries keep me from exercising. Exercising releases endorphins. Endorphins put me in a good mood. Lately, without them, I am in a bad mood.
Depression and anxiety take me to dark places. I do not enjoy the journey—the sense of dread that sits in my gut. And it doesn’t help to tell myself, “Snap of it. You have privilege. You have shelter. You have food on the table.” Logic does not speak to emotion.
Yesterday, I completed a writing exercise assigned by my critique group—to take a draft of some manuscript and rework it into another category of children’s literature. At first, I resented the exercise, but as I worked on the puzzle of it, I noticed my mood lighten.
I guess exercise comes in varying packages, yes?
Shadow
A recent obituary about the children’s book illustrator Tasha Tudor offered one of her favorite quotations:
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
—Fra. Giovanni Giocondo
Gloom often haunts me, and it has been present over the past months. The quotation appeals to me because it makes wonder if that shadow of gloom is a literal curtain that can be pulled away. Finding the string that manipulates the curtain—that’s the trick.