P is for Popcorn

A Short Homage to Popcorn

I love the taste of it. I love how peculiar it is: did people back centuries ago discover its properties by mistake? I love its many coats and dressings. I am grateful for popcorn, and its fun factor. It contains all sorts of good things for your body: protein, minerals, vitamins, and fats.

Oh, Oh, Older

I dropped the gratefulness ball. I'm back with Oxytocin but I couldn't write intelligently about it at all. Neither Oceans, which I love. Nor obstetricians, whom I also love and respect. Thank God for obstetricians, who save mothers' and babies' lives every single day!

But, today I am grateful for getting Older.

Babyhood was probably a hoot. I was born in Uganda and spent much of my babyhood on someone's back, and the rest of the time naked learning how to dance or playing in the sand. But I remember nothing before I was three.

Then young childhood was spent trying to avoid having to speak to anyone, and learning the joys of reading and using my imagination.

And being a kid was pretty ok I guess, I was taken for fun hikes in the Rockies and we went to England for a year. I learned to play the piano and the clarinet. I loved doing homework. Still terribly tormented by shyness, and self-conscious about my crooked teeth, frizzy hair, and knowledge of words with more than two syllables.

Adolescence? Terrifying, creepy, and awful, mostly. I was the weird kid in school, never had a date. But I still loved reading, which kind of saved my life, except when I got a little Older I started traveling and spent hours in the Rockies on my own.

So, being a young adult is kind of weird in this society, at least it was in the seventies because we didn't know what we were supposed to do. Anyway, I did it and emerged with a baby in the eighties, and then life was just a whirlwind, magnificent, crazy, uplifting, we had a farm and lots of babies....

Babies grow older. They get bigger and then they also turn into adults, usually. Mine did anyway, except the last one who is still an adolescent. It's a fun trip, having kids. I wasn't a career woman. I raised children, had a farm, created two non-profits, stay married for a really long time.

Middle age was fucking awful. I spent about ten years thinking I could please all the people, all the time. I twisted myself into a pretzel, to no avail. I trained to be a midwife, but a wee bit too late so now I can only work illegally. I'm some kind of a legend in the birth world here, which is bullshit because I know very little really.

Now I am getting Older. Turning sixty this year, I hope. No more pretzel. I am starting to say no, and it's a little freaky. Some people don't like it.

So, I am mostly very grateful for the chance to be old, I'm not there yet but I am getting a glimmer of what it might be like. Of course the body changes in weird ways, kind of like adolescence. But you get to be yourself because what the fuck, you might as well, right? You might as well say what you want to say. Of course I always like to try to not hurt people, but I am learning that its not always possible.

So here's a big L'Chaim to getting OLD!

Grateful for N

I've gone through several names during this temporary visit to Earth. My parents wanted to name me Adam, but then I was a girl. So my birth name was Nicola. Shortened to Nicky, then Niki.
Then I got another name, actually a whole new persona, an alter ego, and this name was Rivka, not even a name I've ever liked very much. But many, many people feel tender and warm about the Rivka person: she is a doula and birth attendant, and a friend, and a teacher/mentor.

Toni Morrison has the same problem:
"Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford, and still thinks of that as her real name. She picked up the nickname “Toni” in school (from her saint’s name, Anthony), and Morrison was the last name of her long-ago ex-husband. To this day, she deeply regrets leaving that now world-famous name on her first novel". NYMag
"Myself is kind of split. My name is Chloe. And the rest is… that other person. Who is able to feel, or pretends to feel, or maybe really feels, or at least reacts to celebrityhood. " (The Guardian Interview)

So, we're stuck with names we didn't ever really grow in to, and I am always grateful for Niki, who keeps me grounded and reminds me of who I really am.

Niki runs, and sails, and plans things for next week, and says she'll be there in five minutes. She drinks a wee bit too much, and swears a little too much, and she wants to live in many places for the rest of her life, and thinks Rivka is a bit of a weirdo, and a bit of a wuss.

I am so grateful I'm me, and her, and them.

M is for Mother

My mother died almost exactly two years ago. I miss her pretty much every day. We didn't have a peaceful relationship, far from it. But I knew I could call her anytime, if only to chat about plants.

My friend wrote a beautiful piece when I let her know that my midwifery certification had arrived just hours before my mother died:

I sit here now, in Bali, at dawn, in the quiet as birds awaken... and cry for your Mother's passing. This is HUGE... as the Human StarGate that opened to bring You Earth~side, has been destroyed. One door closes and another opens, and you become a CPM. My head is shaking in wonder. I believe that when a woman's own mother passes, she becomes the new Wise One, a role you are very prepared for. And... how perfect that your CPM popped through as that door was slowly opening to allow your mother to slip through to the other side.  

The doorway between our world and the next, is one and the same, it swings both ways, opening for Birth and opening for Death... 

And this is what I wrote: Tribute to my Mother.

I hope that people can have a last peek at the smallish whirlwind that was my mother.

Grateful for L

Found

Woke with a memory of Lydia, when she was

just fourteen, with a loose-toothed smile and 

dirty blonde hair, looking at me like I could fix things.

She told me a poem in my dream, we were standing

by the water of the Thames, then we were older, and

the water was still green and grey, dirty. 

No one was dying yet. There were papers. It was urgent.

“Trawling the street in front of

the police station, Emma’s photo in one hand and

your letter in the other,

waiting for tomorrow.”

And Sara keeps asking me about the seeds, those white,

pearly things in my dirty hands. Like teeth. Like a broken but

immensely valuable gold chain, tied in knots, the kind you can spend

hours shaking apart, and still never undo.

Oh, all right, the seeds, the smooth, time-heavy warmth and Oh! 

the promise in those seeds, the seeds:

promises of flowers, Lydia with her funny smile, and lovely Sara, and Giotto with his broad loving backs, and those round, white, eggy, fragile seeds.

And the love that no one can ever paint just right, so we make do with poems, and flowers, and dreams, and still life, and real life.

Grateful for K

I am grateful for Kampala. I was born there, and that fact taught me a lot about preconceptions, judgement, belonging, wandering, colonialism, love, subservience, race, heat, memory, and dogs.

Preconceptions are sometimes funny. When my son says his mother was born in Uganda, they look at him in a funny way, and the cartoon balloon springing from peoples' heads reads: "you don't look very dark".  Also, people have thought that my parents were missionaries. That's a laugh too, especially if you knew my parents!

Judgement is one of those things we all do. I have my prejudices, although I'm not going to air my dirty laundry here, I know that I am judged for many facets of my existence. Being born in Kampala gave me an early insight into people's prejudice and knee-jerk need to pigeonhole.

Belonging, ah! belonging! A thing I've never felt. I spent my first three years in a paradise that was, as most paradises are, a touch unreal. From there I was swept off to Calgary, the land of snow, cowboys and Dallas gas men. I felt like the only girl in the whole town with crooked teeth and frizzy hair, and a dad who thought "puck" was a swear word.

Colonialism, that bugbear of the 20th century. I have though long and deep for much of my life about how colonialism has transformed our world. Of course, every generation always thinks theirs is the first to experience big events. I know that colonialism is an ancient practice that springs from one human's need to dominate another.

Love.

Subservience. In Malawi, when I was a skinny traveller eating mangoes, an older woman called me "memsahib". That was sad, and struck me down.

Race. Another place we can hang our coats of distrust, hatred, otherness, prejudice.

Heat! I love feeling the air at 37 degrees, or blood temperature. I love feeling sweat on my face, I love the sun, I love a rainstorm at 4pm, I love never having to wear a jacket.

Memory: When I finally returned to Kampala when I was 23, twenty years after I had left, I emerged from the plane and smelled a smell that felt like home. Fruit, sweat, woodsmoke, an unidentifiable perfume that the tropics emit. I went to the market in the center of Kampala - that was after Idi Amin but before the Ruandan genocide and before Kampala grew into the huge city it is now. I remembered the market. Nothing else remains in my conscious memory.

Dogs: When my mother was pregnant with me, her neighbor had two German Shepherds that were trained to kill anyone who entered the grounds of his house unannounced (read black Africans looking for work or begging). One grabbed her arm with his large teeth and wouldn't let go. My lesson learned was that dogs are very loyal, obedient, and can be killers. Ditto people.

Wandering - the opposite of belonging. Cavafy speaks better than I do on this one:

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley

It's the Joy in Your Heart

Today I am grateful for the joy I've felt throughout my life on this planet.