Graduation Day!

Today, I graduate with my Master's degree in social work!

I have aspired to a new level of cognitive functioning,

there's only one appropriate way to celebrate...

UFO's Abound

I awoke this morning from the static of a dozen unidentified flying objects outside my window.

Chirping and tweeting. Searching for love and, hopefully, picking tics out of my backyard.

I'm familiar with some birds.

The vultures that crash through the uppermost branches in the pine trees outside my front door are anything but inconspicuous.

I can spot a mallard.
If I weren't blogging, I'd call it a duck.
I heard one this afternoon in a water tunnel under a field, echoed not only by itself in the reverberating cavern, but by a brood of ducklings trying to keep up in the dark.

Seagulls.
Robins.
Blue things and red things.

Beyond that, these flutes of the air are a mystery to me.

To center myself, I have devised a plan to get to know these birds.

I choose a favorite call, and then look with all my might for the source. My first pick sounded, to me, like the Simpson's portrayal of an Irish leprechaun.

While tying up my peas this week, I finally spotted the culprit - a surprisingly recognizable finch:
The Cardinal.

I sense this longing among my peers to reclaim what's been lost in the last few generations.

A connection to the land.

An understanding of how things work.

A sustenance based on community.

Beauty in imperfection.

Simplicity and the work that comes with it.

An awakening to the voices around us; the birds and frogs and millionfold mysteries that make our world a living and functioning place.

A new amour propre, that values the self in relation to these things in the present. In the process.

Next on my list, a bird that switches from high, punctuated notes, to low fermatas.

I don't care to know it's name, but I hope to awaken to its presence.

It grounds me in my own.

Two loves

I had another revealing dream.

I dreamt I was lying in bed, walking my eyes over the curves of the sheets.

Then I realized...this was not my bed, but my hometown.

And I knew it intimately.

I knew it completely. Every rise and fall, every veer and surge in the land.

I loved it, because it comforted me, sustained me, and possessed me,

and I it.

As I came to see the details,

the molehills of humanity in the hollows of this hallowed ground,

I began walking the streets of my city

as though they were the halls of my high school. I knew

everyone I passed.

I felt great warmth for each of them. And I worried, with them,

over their concerns. Health, financial, familial, what have you.

But despite our daily worries, there was security in our amity

and goodwill.

We were connected, and stronger for it.

Then an idea turned everything grey,

stuck somewhere between black and white.

I put my hands in my pockets and continued to walk the streets,

a little more bent, biting my lip as I chewed over the idea

The full potential of my two loves could not be reached together.

Justice

2,977 US civilians on 9/11/2001.

100,000 Iraqi civilians since.

Bin Laden on 5/1/2011.

I believe in justice (Tzedakah), but I'm not sure I believe in justice (Mishpat).

Soldier's Poem

Inter-Is

Last night I had a series of complex dreams in the style of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible.

There was a family that lived in the hollow of a mountain. Water flowed through the hollow but pooled in front of their home. The home was simple at times, otherwise decrepit. It smelt like dust and burnt wood. There were four children. An angry oldest child (13) who was sometimes a 'bully' and sometimes a 'trouble-maker', two younger boys (10 and 8) and a girl (6). There was a thin mother in a worn cotton dress that came down to her mid-calf. And then there was the father, an abusive man who I mostly only saw from afar. He was normally working or drinking.

In this dream, my conscious took turns inhabiting different bodies. In most dreams I observe scenes like a puppeteer. Hovering. Meddling. In this dream, I literally saw through the eyes of the different people I embodied. For example, when I was the six year old girl, I was walking behind my mom on a hill and noticed the bruises on her legs as the dress lifted with each step. My imagination met my eye level. I remember thinking how pretty the shapes of the bruises were, but how I didn't like something about them. Maybe the color. My imagination met my age level.

Most of the dream were scenes with overly simplistic plot, but deep emotion. I remember being the "thirteen year old bully", and sitting on the porch with the dad while it was raining. I remember these mixed emotions of fear and joy. I was anxious to be that close to the man, but exuberantly happy that he allowed me that close. In that mix of emotions, I became overly anxious about the rain flooding the house, the splash back from the porch dampening my clothes, and the noises of my siblings inside and how each overheard word made my father shift in his seat. I wanted to run in and 'pound some sense' into my siblings. I remember so much detail. The smell of the rain. The fog over the water. The sound of the man's weight on the chair as he rocked back and forth on the rotting floor boards. How his uneven whiskers moved as he smoked his pipe.

In a more dramatic scene, I remember being the ten year old boy and hearing my six year old sister scream, so I ran to the water and saw that my older brother was motionless at the bottom, caught in some seaweed or trash or something. So I dove in to try and pull him up, but I was too scared, and began frantically swimming towards the top. I saw my mom running towards the water, and I felt shame at not having my brother with me. She came splashing into the water, and became hysterical. I was afraid she would drown, and so I tried to pull her to shore, but I was so small compared to her, and she was treading water, holding me tightly. Later I dreamt the same scene, except I was the mother, horrified that I had lost my son. I swam out and saw that there was a rope around his neck, and realized that my husband had done this. I transitioned from this fear that I had lost my son, to this even deeper fear that immobilized me, and I clung to my ten-year-old. The dream was so strange, because when I was the ten year old, I saw something around my brothers neck, but assumed it was accidental. Any guilt or blame was on me. When I was the mother, I put things together differently.

What really struck me about this dream was that, every now and then, I was myself as a social worker, 'assessing' the family. After being several of the children, and after being the mother, suddenly I was coming to realizations like, "Mother is borderline MR...". Also, when I was the children, I felt scared, hungry, angry, cold, anxious, but never embarrassed. But suddenly when a child welfare worker was there, I remember being conscious that I was covered in dirt or poorly dressed. I remember feeling stupid, and worse, that my mom was stupid. And sometimes, depending on the child, I began to hate my mom.

I was the social worker, but not any more than I was the mom or the six year old. And yet, as the social worker, after having 'lived' as the mother and her children, I thought about how best to break up the sibling group in foster care placement. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom or the six year old, but as the social worker I detached and used the power inherent in my role, but without understanding those involved as I obviously had the ability to do. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom, but I didn't share my power. I had my own idea of what was best for the family, forgetting that I was the mom.

Passover

Passover

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .

and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

~ Lynn Ungar ~

Simple Gifts

Simple Gifts:

Yo Yo Ma and Alison Krauss

Beautiful