Author Archives: dinafried

A Post I Don’t Want To Write

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Herbert Lanks, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

High above Cayuga’s waters
There’s an awful smell
Some say it’s Cayuga’s waters
Some say it’s Cornell…

I can’t honestly say whether the story of the Cornell gang rape would have hit me as hard as it did if I weren’t a Cornell alum. I’m sure that any similar story, no matter where it happened, would evoke the same reactions of revulsion, anger and despair, but its association with a place I idolized as the turning point in my escape into my own life opens up even deeper wounds.

Thankfully, I was not a victim of sexual assault at Cornell. My “me-too” stories–far tamer, but still incidents that never should have happened–took place at other locales. They include gropes on the rush-hour subway when I was a young teen, some asshole in hip, liberal Northampton MA calling out from the parking lot by the Thornes Market walkway to lift up my shirt so he could see my breasts, and a post-graduation trip to southern France with my college boyfriend where a strange hand unzipped our tent in the middle of the night and reached into my sleeping bag to fondle me. When I woke enough from my fuzzy sleep and figured out that this hand was not the hand of the person sleeping beside me, I screamed, and the hand slowly withdrew, zipped up the tent flap, and disappeared into the darkness.

My boyfriend woke up and when I told him what happened he said, “I can understand where he was coming from. He must have been horny seeing all those topless women at the beach.”

Just thinking about his response makes the air stick in my throat all over again. Should I be surprised that he was also a Cornell alum, even if he wasn’t a frat boy? The crowd I traveled in–artsy folks tinged with a love of sci-fi and re-enacting the Middle Ages–stayed as far away from frats as possible. Even 50 years ago, when overt sexism and objectification of women was much more of a cultural norm, the women in my orbit, all knew that frat parties could mean serious trouble,

I’d like to think that 50 years of feminist consciousness raising would have made more of a difference in what’s considered acceptable behavior on a college campus. But despite the administrator’s milquetoast statements–straight out of the crisis communication playbook I taught my business students at UMass for 20 years (deny and minimize offensiveness of the act)–there’s an underlying maxim that boys will be boys. A short suspension, perhaps an essay-writing assignment (which the administration denies, but whether or not it’s true, is it that much different from writing I shall not rape on a blackboard 100 times?) a generic “rape is bad” statement, and a pretense of an investigation where they claim to not have found enough evidence, and all can be well. Until the next incident. Nowhere do they apologize: to the victim, or to the rest of the women on campus. And though the Cornell administration does make a few hand-wringing remarks about the awfulness of the incident, nowhere do they say what strong and definitive steps they’ll take to change a campus culture where drugging and raping women is just part of the party.

But this may be because Cornell can’t singlehandedly change a culture that’s pervasive in all our institutions. Just look at the personal histories of the current leaders of our country. And we wring our hands, because boys will be boys. In 2016 when the current occupant of the White House jolted the airwaves with his “grab ’em by the p*ssy” remark, it should have been the end of his campaign. Instead he got elected. And elected again.

Jane Doe deserves not only an apology from Cornell. She deserves to have her entire tuition refunded (which she requested and they denied). She also should have free access on Cornell’s dime to the school of her choice. And while I’m glad that the prosecutor is re-opening an investigation, I’m not in favor of prison for the Cornell 7, because the prison system is also part of the problem. I do think those that graduated should have their degrees revoked with felonies noted on their record. And if there were an effective program to get these men and others to truly understand the daily harms committed because of this cultural mindset, and a way for them to spend thousands of community service hours educating others on respectful treatment of women, that would be true restorative justice.

And I also think they should be branded as sex offenders for the rest of their lives–as should the many others who commit similar acts and get away with them. But nothing will really change even then, until the term “sex offender” actually means something.

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Labyrinth

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I was planning to blog about tackling Bruch’s Kol Nidre last week, a piano/cello duet centered on the prayer that opens the Jewish Holiday of Yom Kippur. And then I realized I wrote a piece about this very topic three years ago.

This shouldn’t have been surprising, since every year I tend to drag this piece out of my small collection of sheet music to help me connect to the holidays. I am ambivalent about many aspects of traditional Jewish practice but I absolutely love this piece of music, even as I’m still struggling to play it at a level anywhere near my bar of satisfaction.

I was surprised when I read my previous post that I described my experience as mostly positive. But perhaps that was because I gave myself more time to dig into it. This year, I didn’t bring out the piece until a week before the holiday, thinking that the arrangement I found on-line, which was solely for piano rather than piano/cello, would be easy enough to re-learn quickly with all those extra years of practice and so much prior familiarity. I don’t know whom I was kidding. What I will confess is that after three days of what felt like torturing myself, I gave up.

Too late to learn this in time for Yom Kippur. Next year I’ll start a month ahead.

Or maybe three months ahead.

Or maybe on Passover.

But what did impress me, and what was different was that I didn’t mentally beat myself up for throwing in the towel, as I might have in previous years. I didn’t unleash the litany of my self-critic, Eloise, nagging on about what a terrible musician I was: yada, yada, yada. I just said to myself, I don’t have the capacity to learn this right now, and put the pages aside.

And on Yom Kippur eve, the only time I go to services outside of b-mitzvahs or my mother requesting my yearly witness for reading the Torah, I went to my local synagogue and heard two high school students, Ben and Amita, play this piece with effortless elegance and grace. This is a wicked hard piece of music (at least, in my humble opinion) but their performance did not center on virtuosity. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a performance; they just played from the heart.

In one of the Jewish practices I’ve become attached to, taking the entire month before the New Year (Elul) to work in tandem with a chevruta (spiritual friend) to reflect on our life and contemplate renewal for the new year, we’ve talked about the notion of a labyrinth–how each year, it can feel frustrating to be confronting the same issues; yet, we’re still going slowly forward and around, so that we’re not stuck in the same place. We’re facing them from a different point in the circle. So here I am writing about playing Kol Nidre again–but from a different point on the labyrinth. And while next year, I might dream of playing this piece with half the fluidity of Ben and Amita, that probably isn’t going to happen. Even if I decide to start re-learning it tomorrow and make it a year-long project.

Yet, whether I’m curious to see what will happen and where I’ll be on the labyrinth next year. Maybe, I won’t even want to challenge myself with this hard piece of music. Maybe I’ll suddenly become enamored with tap dancing or bungee jumping. Or maybe I’ll decide my true calling is improvising my own musical melodies. Or maybe I will dig in early enough to see what learning it can teach me. In any of these cases, I’ll be learning something about myself, ideally with a focus on the newness of the moment, rather than on all the past baggage.

And if we think of any moment as a brand new opportunity, what a wealth of possibilities that could bring to healing–not only ourselves, but to the many troubles experienced today in the world.

Shana Tovah!

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What’s in a Name

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Rose_Papa_Meilland.jpg

 

Thirty-four years ago, on Rosh Hashanah, I stood on the banks of the Connecticut River and ceremoniously, with the help of my chavurah, changed my name to Dina, a name I have now had for nearly half my life.

I’d been playing with the name change for about a year. My birth name, Deborah, never felt like it fit me. In fact, the only people who ever called me Deborah were my mother when she was angry at me, and a third grade teacher I didn’t like. Debbie, the diminutive I did identify with, was beginning to feel more and more childish, but shortening it to the more adult, “Deb” always felt like something was cut off, or like the name of a sports jock, not a poet.

Another reason I made the switch: there were so many Debbies in my life, I felt boxed in by the herd. Two of my close friends growing up were also named Debbie. And I can’t even count the number of times, I’d call a schoolmate. This is Debbie, I would say. And they would say, Which one? Which made me feel so anonymous and inconsequential. To make things even worse, there was an up and coming folksinger named Debbie Friedman, and a few people thought it was me. I didn’t know you sang, they said. Since one of my secret ambitions had always been to be a folksinger, I was miffed that this other Debbie Friedman had made the cut when I hadn’t.

So it was definitely time to break out of the box and become my own person.

I chose Dina because I wanted to stick with a D-name that sounded Jewish and was easy to pronounce. I also wanted it to be different, but not too different–just a little off the beaten track. While transitioning into the change I wrote my name as Debbie Dina Friedman, which I then changed to D. Dina Friedman on the official state documents a few months after that Rosh Hashanah ritual, paying the 60 bucks and being officially done with my birth name.

If I could do it again, I’d dump the initial D in front. I still like it, but it creates a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic hassles, similar to those my partner and I saddled our kids with when we gave them a double unhyphenated last name. But other than that, I’ve been very happy with the name change, which helped me open to seeing myself in a new way. And I was grateful to the many family members and friends who gracefully transitioned to calling me by the name I wished to call myself.

My parents, however, were hurt by my rejection of the name they chose for me, and continued to call me by my birth name. Being a parent myself, I understood their unhappiness, but ultimately, this should be just one more step in parenting’s continuous process of letting go. My father, to his credit, would call me Dina when my mother wasn’t listening, but I could tell he struggled to do it. My mother, to her credit, addresses envelopes to Dina (or usually just D.–I guess that was the reason I kept the D. before Dina) but still continues to call me by my birth name.

As my family sat around the table this Rosh Hashanah, our conversation suddenly turned to road apps–how to find a decent one that did not succumb to the arbitrary renaming of Lake Ontario. While I do believe, as Shakespeare said, that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and that we have the absolute right to change our own names, we do not have the right to unilaterally change the names of things around us, especially when there are others involved with equal stakes in the outcome.

Fantasizing is fun when you’re three or four. My grandson erupts into laughter if all of a sudden he’s Grandma and I’m Manu, or if both of our names are Poop and his preschool teacher is Miss Poopy. But at some point, we need to grow up and face the fact that renaming a body of water, or plastering your own name on an arts center dedicated as a memorial to a much better person than you does not change the hard reality of who you are. Even when I became Dina, I didn’t magically morph into the wiser, cooler me I might have wished to become. (And I didn’t become a folksinger, either.) I was still me with all my quirks and flaws, though perhaps with a little less self-limiting baggage, and a clearer vision of who I could be if I worked for it. But that’s the operating word: working for it.

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Shouting into the Void

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True confessions: I subscribe to far more Substacks, blogs, writing sites, daily poems, daily prompts, magazines, news reports, activist mailing lists, and social media groups, than I can possibly keep up with.

So my day begins with a delicate dance of choosing what to read and what to ignore. Actually, I’ve revised my habits so my day begins with a brief meditation followed by 30 minutes of exercise before I even look at the onslaught of text in my email box, but once I’ve opened the lid on my laptop, the rush is on. So many little tentacles of info competing for my attention, and all of them are just a small slice of the wider pie of projects and activities I’ve committed to, not to mention the obligations of maintaining my home, nurturing my family, and being a good friend to the many people who matter to me.

Somehow, I don’t think this issue is uniquely my problem. Likely, many of us are swamped by the competition between our life’s obligations and our desires for how we might want to spend our time. Being rained on by torrents of electronic words only adds to the flood.

So, I get it when I write a blog post and there are absolutely no reactions. But it’s still an eerie feeling–like shouting into the void.

Artist: Sam White; retrieved from newgrounds.com

Does *anybody* hear me? Does *anyone* think what I’m writing is worth listening to? 

Absolutely not, says my inner critic, whom I’ve decided to name Eloise. No one cares about your stupid weekly dribbles.

Should I stop blogging? It could be a relief to take one more thing off my to-do list! 

My initial reason for starting a blog was to do what all authors are told they need to do. The goal–stated by every marketing workshop I attended and every resource I read was to build a platform by acquiring a large degree of subscribers. That never happened, and as I’m not generally someone who plays the long-term patience game, I could have quit after the first year, when my most recent books were considered old news anyway. But the surprising thing was that I found I really liked blogging. Taking the time to think about some tidbit from my life or the wider world and its relationship to the themes I’m passionate about–creative expression and social change–has been invigorating. And trying to encapsulate that thought into a short 500-800 word post has been a formidable and stimulating writing challenge.

Besides, Substack continues to seduce me with a challenge of how many weeks in a row I can post a blog. And this is something I can control, even if I can’t control the number of people in my subscriber base.

What’s also satisfying is the feeling that I’m not just spouting words on paper to an amorphous audience. I’m writing to a bunch of friends, as most of my subscribers are people I know. (And I’d love to meet the rest of you!) Because of that, I’m determined to stay authentically myself and not hide behind some ostensibly wiser but more distant “author mask.” And it tickles me thinking that if you’re able to take some of your very precious time to read some of these musings, it might lead to more connection between us. If you react, or comment, or let me know in some way, then I can feel more connected, too.

Which is why the posts with no reactions at all leave me a bit lonely and off-kilter. But seriously, no shade! I wish I could read every Substack post from every single friend I subscribe to, and I can’t. Though I do try to prioritize reading posts written by friends so that I can get to at least some of them some of the time. And I’m going to make it a point to react more, because I often read and don’t react–out of busyness, or laziness, and now I’m realizing how great it would be if if the void I’m shouting into could echo back. Yes! I hear you!

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Kale, Mindfulness, and a Smoothie Recipe

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Mercury is not currently in retrograde, but earlier this week, there was a 24-hour time period when I was convinced that supernatural forces were taunting me with one of my biggest pet peeves: wasted time.

It all started with the kale, which I’d been eyeing in the garden as it grew bigger and shaggier every day. I knew I should harvest it, but there were so many more perishable things to attend to: cherry tomatoes to pick, cucumbers and zucchini that were still holding on, larger heirloom tomatoes finally ripening, peppers, eggplant, the first blush of fall raspberries, grapes. The kale can wait, I kept telling myself. It’s hearty, and there are so many other things I need to cook and eat.

But last Monday, despite two time-consuming Zoom meetings and a bunch of activism homework, I looked at the yellowing lower leaves and decided the kale really shouldn’t wait any longer. I gave all six plants a severe haircut, gathering the leaves in a large plastic bag. Way too much to eat before it went bad, the only option was to freeze it for soup and smoothies. So I set about the process, which involved washing, chopping, and rewashing two colanders full, plunging them first into boiling water, and then into a large pot of ice water–a chore in itself to make room for in the fridge. Afterwards I gave my hands a workout squeezing the chopped kale into little balls, which I prepared to freeze on a cookie sheet before transferring them into freezer bags.

It took me an hour to wash and chop the first batch, which I did sometime midday, and then it took until mid-evening before I got back to the project–the boiling, cooling, ball formation, and then a repeat for the second batch. It was about 10:30 pm, and I was almost done when I saw it in my hands among the kale shards.

A little worm.

I’ve been gardening long enough that one worm to remove is not going to bother me. But I also know that more often than not, worms travel in packs. So I checked the kale balls on the cookie sheet that I’d spent the last two hours putting together.

Sure enough…a tiny little worm or two hiding in every single ball.

What got to me most was not the ruined kale (it’s pretty easy to get good kale in the fall in New England) but the lost hours, time when I could have been working on writing or activism projects, or shortening the list of household and administrative chores I’d put aside, or finishing my PT exercises, which I was now going to have to stay up late to do.

But in my quest toward mindfulness I didn’t let myself get as upset as I might have been. The moments spent on the activity were not unpleasant. I was kind of enjoying the quietness of the kitchen, the meditative quality of chopping and washing, getting some time for my brain to roam where ever it wanted as I went about the rote aspects of the task. And the shimmering bright green color the kale turned in the boiling water remains a pleasant memory, even days later.

I had a harder time staying mindful the next day when I left my car headlights on and was delayed an hour and a half getting home because my battery had died. It’s hard not to scold myself for my lack of mindfulness that led me to leave them on in the first place, but I’m over it now. And I just looked up what to do about worms in kale. They’re likely cabbage worms, based on the holes in the leaves–which I did notice as I was chopping and washing, but attributed to old age or a few bites from hungry beetles, rather than a major infestation. Apparently, planting marigolds or applying plant extracts can help. I’ll think about that for next year.

In the meantime, I have one previous batch of frozen kale I already put away for smoothies. And in the summer, I’m substituting cucumbers instead. And I am very mindful when I drink my morning smoothie, because in addition to being filled with protein and calcium, it is always utterly delicious! Here’s my recipe:

–2 scoops of whey protein powder (I use Terra’s Organic vanilla–which does not taste grainy. There are also vegan options, but I haven’t tried them.)
–1/2 cup of plain kefir or Greek yogurt
–Splash of beet juice
–Splash of unsweetened cranberry juice
–1 mini cucumber, or 1/3 of a big cucumber (or a small ball of frozen kale if you have some that isn’t worm-infested)
–1 tablespoon of hemp seeds
–3 frozen strawberries (can substitute raspberries or blueberries)
–2 slices of ginger

Blend and enjoy!

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My Father’s Files

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Tomorrow is my father’s birthday. Had he not died a year and a half ago, he would have been 95 years old.

Last month, during a weekend visit to my childhood home in Queens, I read through a chunk my father’s files. My brother had already started this process and created a spreadsheet with name of each folder, a brief description of the contents, and suggestions on what to do after I reviewed it. A few folders were labeled, “keep.” Most said “read and discard.”

And even though I’m the one often chiding my partner about his insistence on holding onto things he doesn’t need, I found it really hard to throw most of these files away. Not because there was anything extraordinary. Mostly I read through correspondence related to his job: thank you letters from people who appeared on the public affairs talk show, Straight Talk, which he produced for WWOR-TV (way before it was owned by Fox) as well as several letters of appreciation and a smattering of complaints. Not surprising, since he didn’t shy away from controversial issues in the talk show, nor in the documentaries he wrote and produced for the station, though he was meticulously ethical about the obligation to present different points of view, back in the days when the FCC’s fairness doctrine demanded balanced media.

There was another file folder where he kept his attempts to market his outside writing: TV scripts and plays in his early years, before he settled into his professional life, and a memoir he attempted after he retired. That file was filled with rejection letters from agents back in the days when agents actually wrote letters and didn’t simply ghost you. I threw away all the ones that said, blah, blah–doesn’t meet our needs, but I kept the ones that were specific, like this one from May 1, 1952:

I even kept this nastier one, because, hey, chances are we’ve all gotten letters like this once in a while. (I have, at least. I hope those of you who are also writers haven’t.)

Even though he never sold any scripts, he persisted. Because writing for the sake of writing, whether or not it got published, meant something to him. In fact, falling asleep every night to the clack of his manual typewriter was one of the first inspirations that led me to becoming a writer.

I’m hoping I’ll find just the right moment to shred all my embarrassing teenage diaries, love letters from old boyfriends, angsty journal entries, and more angsty journal entries disguised as faltering poems and thinly disguised failed fiction, because, yes, I also hold onto things I really don’t need, and because–God forbid–I don’t want my children or grandchildren, or any other relatives stumbling upon them after I die. But at the same time, I’m thankful to my father that he kept so much of his life intact in those folders, and that I can choose some of them to hold onto, even if he’s no longer there.

Happy birthday, Dad!

Stanley Friedman, age 91. Photo by Shel Horowitz

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A Memoir of Music and Transformation

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Can art change our lives? Why does creative expression matter so much?

And to whom does it matter? Should “great art” be confined to those who’ve achieved some recognized level of skill/talent/recognition in a world where we don’t define value as the impact it makes on others, but on its ability to be commoditized. Or should we equally appreciate all attempts of creative expression (even if some may touch us more than others) as an offering from one soul to another, and perhaps a mutual healing?

These are questions I’ve been thinking about ever since I returned to piano and stuffed all the baggage about my musical family, creativity, and judgment (by both self and others) into Imperfect Pitch, a memoir, I’ve yet to publish. But recently, my good friend, Lanette Sweeney, (whose blog, Paying Attention: A New Mindfulness Method, I highly recommend) told me about Vijay Gupta’s Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation.

Like me, Gupta had perfect pitch. And like my younger child, he started Suzuki violin lessons at four years old and figured out in a couple of weeks how to play all of Book 1 when he was supposed to be standing on a pizza box and learning how to bow. But unlike either of us, Gupta was, perhaps, a child prodigy, or perhaps pushed into that box. His very scary, overachieving parents, who hit him when he wasn’t practicing enough or to their liking, and several years later shamed him for only coming in second in a prestigious concerto competition, brought him 90 miles into New York City several times a week, so he could train with highly ranked teachers. By the time he was nine, he was touring as a soloist. At the age of 19 he became the youngest player to ever gain an orchestra position with the LA Philharmonic–the dream dangled before many conservatory students who labor and train for years to try to “win” a job with a reputed orchestra.

But for Gupta, this was not the dream. As passionate as he was about the music he played (which is obvious in the memoir from his descriptions of pieces he performed) he felt empty. Still reeling from his parents’ abuse and subsequent estrangement, he turned to overeating and alcohol to numb his pain. Until he found himself with a small group of players giving a “charity performance” on Skid Row in LA, where the audience, not adhering to the classical concert etiquette of deathly quiet listening to the point of doing everything you can to suppress a cough, freely emoted whatever they were feeling as the musicians played.

As Gupta listened to the stories of the audience members sharing their lives and their pain, he began to see the reactions of people in Skid Row as a sort of reciprocal music, a mutual gift. He realized that the musicians weren’t there in the role of experts or to change or heal people. In fact, through the experience, they were the ones being healed. Without knowing it, Gupta says, every time I walked into a shelter or clinic with my violin, I was loosening the grip of my own story, rewriting my relationship to my instrument, to my music, and to myself. 

Gupta founded Street Symphony, an organization where professional musicians and community members engage in musical collaborations and perform in homeless shelters, prisons, transitional housing and other spaces that are often deprived of the ability to create and engage in artistic collaboration. Its core programs include a songwriting and mentorship series led by survivors of homelessness and trauma and a project inside the Los Angeles County jails that brings together professional musicians and incarcerated artists for shared rehearsals and performances.” Gupta explains in this three-minute video why these kind of collaborations matter so much (and also gives us a taste of his juicy playing).

What I loved most about this book was Gupta’s humility and honesty. So many “music memoirs” I’ve read sound snotty, making me feel (as much as I might want to be) like I’m not really “a member of the club,” but this book focuses on the flaws of being human–Gupta’s, his parents, (whom he describes with admirable understanding, despite the way they treated him) and the many people the Skid Row community he encounters in his work with Street Symphony. Highly recommended as a story of #artforchange and why music–or any creative pursuit–absolutely matters.

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Open Without Overwhelm

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Tonight is the first night of Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), a time when it’s customary to engage in heshbon hanefesh, searching of the soul. The goal is to attempt to “wipe the slate clean” by engaging in an intense process of forgiving others for past wrongs, forgiving yourself for “missing the mark” and setting aspirations for personal growth during the new year.

Even though I’m a non-observant Jew who’s been leaning further and further toward atheism, I’ve found this process extremely useful over the past five years–ever since a friend and I started engaging in it deliberately and mindfully, sharing things we read or did that inspired us, and checking in frequently over the month to discuss our insights and support each other in our goals for personal growth.

Yesterday, as I went outside to meditate, the sun was just beginning to creep over the mountain, and I thought about the direction I wanted to set for this year: Open without Overwhelm.

I have a pull toward taking on new projects and activities because I enjoy the freshness that they bring to my brain–and to my heart. Yet, I’ve gotten my life to a place where I don’t want to give up any of the things that nurture me, so it’s easy to fall into an anxious frenzy of having too much on my plate.

How can I do both–be open, without overwhelm? Or overload?

The night before, despite some niggling anxiety around confronting new social situations (which I’d never had until years of pandemic isolation left me out of practice) I went by myself to an improvisational singing group of complete strangers. This was one of the few group singing activities I’ve tried since I got my voice back. I keep telling myself I want to join a chorus again, but truth be told, I’m really not sure I’d be able to handle it, yet. What I liked about this group was that it was low-stress. I could drop out whenever I wanted to and there would be plenty of other voices to carry on. Since we were mostly improvising whatever we wanted (occasionally someone in the group would act as a conductor and give us a part), I could sing in a range that was entirely comfortable.  What surprised me was that it wasn’t musically boring, or weird, or like some big cluttered mess–as I feared it might be. Instead, my musical brain felt happily stimulated in figuring out what I could add to fit in to the pieces we were creating.

Yay! But, oh no! Another thing to add to the calendar. Thankfully, it’s only once a month.

I’m still thinking the key to all this is to be fully present and grounded in the joy of the moment–even if at times that’s easier said than done.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling the need to recommit to the soul-nurturing activities I’ve already taken on, because it’s so easy for them to become pro-forma–another thing I check off the to-do list without always being really present when I do it. And if I can’t do something with full presence, attention, and joy, maybe it is time to take it off the list for a while so that when I come back to that activity, it feels new and fresh. This has kind of happened unintentionally, as I’ve had little time for piano because of all the PT I’m needing to do. So the few times I have made time for piano, it’s become especially enjoyable.

And more good news: the PT is paying off! I’m seeing clear improvements in my posture and mobility, especially in my thoracic spine. When the spine is open, the heart is open. And that is the ultimate aspiration.

Writing is another thing I’ll never give up, though I’ve done significantly less of it over the past few months. But yesterday, I decided to start my morning with a prompt from the amazing Seema Reza of A Little Less Lonely.  Seema put out a group of thirty prompts (one/day) in April for National Poetry Month. Here it is, August, and I’m still wading my way through. Her prompt for Day 22: What do you remember about the earth?

My answer:

So, every day the sun comes up, and today there’s a solar eclipse. But the view where I am will be minimal–only 16% at the peak. And it’s at the same time I have an appointment with the eye doctor because my new far-sighted glasses are blurry. What a metaphor! But seriously, they only function at a pinpoint distance. Not any closer or farther. And I’m not willing to accept that, because my goal is to be expansive in my sight, not more constrained. So I’ll miss the partial covering of the sun by the moon. Maybe afterwards I’ll spend some time pulling weeds and opening pathways in the garden, where I do know the earth, and where the feel of the earth on my hands will be one of the best gifts of the day. But I must be mindful. The ubiquitous onion grass I spend all year trying to yank is flowering, and the best thing, for now, might be to leave it and enjoy the blossoms.

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