Category Archives: 7 sins and friends

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V is for vegan

V is for vegan, in my alphabet of feelings.

Wait, you say, I am not vegan.

Yes, but have you ever felt vegan? Have you ever felt vegetarian? Have you felt voracious?

We are very protective of our diets. When people make a big diet change, some become food fascists for a while. They can be very vocal about the change and about how their diet is endorsed by an on line doctor or naturopath or dietician and how everyone else should try it. Not everyone. Some people are very quiet.

Vegan isn’t in Webster 1913, though everything2.com has a number of writeups under the word vegan.  The definition at Dictionary.com:

noun
1. a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet.
2. a person who does not use any animal products, as leather or wool.
adjective

3. of or relating to vegans or their practices:  vegan shoes made of synthetic leather.

Have you ever tried being vegetarian? Vegan? Or are you firmly ensconced as an omnivore and sometimes even wish you were a carnivore…. Just for a moment, try being one that you’ve never tried. I have never tried being a vegan. What associations come up with the word and do they annoy you? Are they accurate or are they just assumptions attached to that word and that “group” of people. Maybe some vegans have no choice and not enough to eat.
My daughter is off to college soon and she plans to try being vegetarian. She says that it is partly that she just doesn’t like meat much and partly because meat is costly to raise and partly that she disapproves of eating meat… but she still likes fish and shellfish. “I will be a pescatarian,” she says, “except I may eat meat sometimes if I go to someone’s house, so that they don’t have to cook especially for me.”
My daughter got home from a three day orchestra trip and made breakfast: not vegan.
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U is for ursine

U is for ursine. Have you ever felt ursine?

Ur”sine (?), a. [L. ursinus, from ursus a bear. See Ursa.]

Of or pertaining to a bear; resembling a bear.

Ursine baboon. Zool. See Chacma. — Ursine dasyure Zool., the Tasmanian devil. — Ursine howler Zool., the araguato. See Illust. under Howler. — Ursine seal. Zool. See Sea bear, and the Note under 1st Seal.

I am thinking of my sister again. My mother called me tiger and her bear. “Chris bear” was one of her names. Have you felt tigerish or ursine? We talk about a temper like a bear or hibernating when we aren’t feeling very social and then there are teddy bears and care bears and last night I saw the new Jungle Book movie.

I know the book well and loved it. I spent much less time with television. The movie is a mix of the book and the Disney version and I am considering the deviations. Sher Khan did not kill the wolf leader in the book, though he did influence some pack members. And the ending is changed and an interesting change at a time when we are afraid of the disconnect that many of us feel from nature. We are afraid that too many people and that sin of greed are destroying species and destroying the world.

And so I do feel ursine. Sometimes it feels unbearable. Sometimes I want to rear up like a grizzly bear and tear down the veneer of civilization. Sometimes I just want to sleep as deeply as a bear and dream…. dream of playing with my sister.

In my photograph, two cars have crashed in the Octoblast and one has been ejected forcibly: that is my sister bending over it…..

 

 

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T is for tender

T for tender, in this alphabet of feelings.

Look at the Webster 1913: such a rich variety of meanings. Dictionary.com seems to have toned them down and we have lost the quotations: from the bible, from L’Estrange, from Shak: I realized, oh, Shakespeare…..

Ten”der, a. [Compar. Tenderer (?); superl. Tenderest.] [F. tendre, L. tener; probably akin to tenuis thin. See Thin.]

1. Easily impressed, broken, bruised, or injured; not firm or hard; delicate; as, tender plants; tender flesh; tender fruit.
2. Sensible to impression and pain; easily pained.
    Our bodies are not naturally more tender than our faces. L’Estrange.
3. Physically weak; not hardly or able to endure hardship; immature; effeminate.
    The tender and delicate woman among you. Deut. xxviii. 56.
4. Susceptible of the softer passions, as love, compassion, kindness; compassionate; pitiful; anxious for another’s good; easily excited to pity, forgiveness, or favor; sympathetic.
    The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. James v. 11.
    I am choleric by my nature, and tender by my temper. Fuller.

When my daughter was two, my cousin visited with his wife and one year old. My daughter was delighted with this younger child and she was very tender and kind to him. On the third day I realized that she had interpreted “family” as they were now part of the family.

“Camille,” I said, “They are leaving tomorrow. They are visiting us and they have a home.”

She gave me a look of horror and then terrible disappointment. She revised the meaning of family: family doesn’t mean live together. That is how she interpreted family, which is completely understandable. I was sorry to make her so sad, but I didn’t want her to be shocked and sad the next day. She was still loving to the younger cousin and sad when they left. I apologized to her for the misunderstanding.

5. Exciting kind concern; dear; precious.
    I love Valentine, Whose life’s as tender to me as my soul! Shak.
6. Careful to save inviolate, or not to injure; — with of.
    “Tender of property.”Burke.
    The civil authority should be tender of the honor of God and religion. Tillotson.
7. Unwilling to cause pain; gentle; mild.
    You, that are thus so tender o’er his follies, Will never do him good. Shak.

What makes us feel tender? A sleeping child, a lullaby, a new baby, a very young animal, new plants or flowers…

8. Adapted to excite feeling or sympathy; expressive of the softer passions; pathetic; as, tender expressions; tender expostulations; a tender strain.
9. Apt to give pain; causing grief or pain; delicate; as, a tender subject.
“Things that are tender and unpleasing.” Bacon.
10. Naut. Heeling over too easily when under sail; — said of a vessel.

⇒ Tender is sometimes used in the formation of self-explaining compounds; as, tender-footed, tender-looking, tender-minded, tender-mouthed, and the like.

I bruised my daughter’s tender heart when I told her that they were leaving, but I did not want to lie to her or take her by surprise…..

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S is for sloth

S is for sloth, the sixth of our seventh sins.

I took the photograph of my daughter a few weeks ago. She can’t be accused of sloth, though, because that was the day after a 12 mile mountain bike race. She came in first in the women’s 18-26 division. She also came in last, because she was the only one….

Dictionary.com at present:
1. habitual disinclination to exertion; indolence; laziness.
2. any of several slow-moving, arboreal, tropical American edentates of the family Bradypodidae, having a long, coarse, grayish-brown coat often of a greenish cast caused by algae, and long, hooklike claws used in gripping tree branches while hanging or moving along in a habitual upside-down position.
3. a pack or group of bears.

Webster 1913:
1. Slowness; tardiness.
These cardinals trifle with me; I abhor This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome. Shak.
2. Disinclination to action or labor; sluggishness; laziness; idleness.
[They] change their course to pleasure, ease, and sloth. Milton.
Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears. Franklin.
3. Zool. Any one of several species of arboreal edentates constituting the family Bradypodidae, and the suborder Tardigrada. They have long exserted limbs and long prehensile claws. Both jaws are furnished with teeth (see Illust. of Edentata), and the ears and tail are rudimentary. They inhabit South and Central America and Mexico.

Just think of meeting a sloth of bears, eating blueberries, in the summer… I would not feel slothful then. And looking at the examples from Webster 1913, are we more slothful and sloppy with language than Franklin and Milton?

S

Sloth is a sin… but my daughter earned her rest…. and we all need to relax and rest sometimes and change our course to pleasure, ease and sloth…..

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R is for ridiculous

Ridiculous. Silly. I can’t do S for silly because another of the 7 sins starts with S.

My sister and I could be so silly together. I bought the ridiculous Dr. Suess Christmas hat one year. On Christmas morning my sister wore it and then played with a Sesame Street style puppet. A monster puppet, where you could put different arms and eyebrows and eyes on for different moods. She and the puppet had a discussion about which arms the puppet would wear! And then she put all the velcro monster parts on her cashmere sweater! Ridiculous!

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The last photograph is my sister with her daughter, being goofy and ridiculous. My sister died in 2012 of cancer…. I hope she gets to continue to be goofy sometimes on the next plane of existence and I miss being ridiculous with her!

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Q is for querulous

Welcome back to 7 sins and friends…. Have you ever felt querulous?

1. full of complaints; complaining.

2. characterized by or uttered in complaint; peevish:

a querulous tone; constant querulous reminders of things to be done.
Querulous is like a sophisticated version of whiny.
I used it in an alphabet poem, for querulous quail. And the truth is that I thought of myself and my sister as the quail. Right before that was One old orangutan’s pompous pronouncements were being ignored by many merry meercats. My sister and I and our cousins again… and the orangutan was my father. My mother did the illustration…. and it does look like my father when he was in THAT mood….
Alphabeasts

ambulating antelopes
bellies bearing beer
carrying cantelopes
deride damp deer

elegant elephants
feeling fitly fat
give generous gifts
handing hippos hats

ignorant iguanas
jealously jeer
keen kindly kites
lilting laughing leers

many merry meerkats
nearly never notice
one old orangutan’s
pompous pronouncements

querulous quail
reject reports regarding
shimmering snow snakes
tearing through tunnels

undulating ungulates
veer vivaciously
wondering why whales
xerox xylophones

yellow yaks yell
zip zap zoo!

Q

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P is for pride

Pride is the fifth of the seven sins, in our seven sins and friends.

Which of the following is a sin?

1. a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.
2. the state or feeling of being proud.
3. a becoming or dignified sense of what is due to oneself or one’s position or character; self-respect; self-esteem.
4. pleasure or satisfaction taken in something done by or belonging to oneself or believed to reflect credit upon oneself:civic pride.
5. something that causes a person or persons to be proud: His art collection was the pride of the family.
6. the best of a group, class, society, etc.: This bull is the pride of the herd.
7. the most flourishing state or period: in the pride of adulthood.

Two quotations come to my mind:
Pride goes before a fall.
Death be not proud.

Pride goes before a fall: Proverbs 16:18, King James Version, Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Here is the whole chapter: http://www.christianity.com/bible/bible.php?q=Proverbs+16&ver=kjv

Proverbs 16:5 is also relevant. Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord: though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished.

And then Death be not proud is from John Donne: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44107

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

___________________________________________

I am ambivalent about pride. I have mixed feelings. I find it easier to be proud of my children than myself. I am aware of my faults. Also, when I am really proud of something, I am more liable to mess up! To say something arrogant, to not pay attention, to lose my keys, to hurt someone’s feelings not on purpose! An analyst wrote that in their household, whoever has the best week, the most accolades, has gotten a prize or had a really good week: that person is in charge of the cat litter box for the next week. I think that is so sensible, to keep everyone grounded and connected to the daily tasks and remind us that even if we do something brilliant, the cat litter box still needs attention and the bathroom still needs to be cleaned. It is hard to keep a swelled head while scrubbing the toilet. I am proud that my children both did chores every weekend and my son still pitches in when he is home from college!

And now… the cat is reminding me….

I took the photograph in 2012 and came across it yesterday. Sometimes we get lost in a fog of pride or fantasy or emotion……. service to others and basic tasks like cleaning ground us again…..

 

 

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O is for open

O for open.

What does feeling open mean to you?

Dictionary.com lists 42 adjective meanings, including:
34. not constipated, as the bowels.

That one made me giggle, but I am thinking of open as in open to other people and open to discussion and open to change. Walking outside and seeing birds and deer and the spring here exploding in flowers and small new leaves opens me. I get tired in clinic and by the end I am grumpy and think: no more people. Ick, people. But I love clinic and miss it when I have been off and sick. I missed hugs from my patients!

With 42 different adjective meanings, think about how amazing it is that we think we know what someone means when they use the word open…..

 

O

With all of the discussion generated by the US presidential election, I am also thinking about an open society. A friend said that we have to be open to discussion but we also have to listen to each other. And listen to feelings.

I think of Sweet Honey in the Rock singing “Would you harbor me?”

Would you harbor me?
Would I harbor you?
Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew
a heretic, convict or spy?
Would you harbor a run away woman, or child,
a poet, a prophet, a king?

The lyrics are here.

I took the photograph yesterday. I was trying to focus on my neighbor in the background, but I am open to seeing the grasses instead….

 

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N is for normal

N is for normal. How often do you feel normal? Are your feelings normal? Are mine?

I kept my books from when I was little and I have some of my mother’s too. Some we wore out. I am thinking of Nobody is Perfick, a book by Bernard Waber. The illustrations are fabulous as are the sentiments from a kid’s point of view. Peter Perfect is held up as a model to all the other children: he is polite, he says thank you, he says please, he doesn’t roll in the glorious mud….. but…. the ending is very satisfying.

Does normal mean average? No one is the perfect average. Does normal mean the cultural norm? Are animals normal? Maybe we are all normal all the time: if a sparrow is normal and a deer is normal and a cat is normal even when she is acting like there is a phantom in the house…. maybe we are all normal too….

N

And since we’re on children’s books, I started playing with N words, inspired by another great children’s author….

Normal is nice, normal is nutty, normal is naughty and nasty and new. Maybe it’s nearly narcissistic to need to know that no one is not normal. It’s nasty to natter that Norman’s not normal. It’s naughty to name a normal nematode Abnormal Norma. Nodes newly known nearly never need normalcy. It’s not nice to knock nude nuts. Knight knapping is not as nice as night napping… nighty night!

Bernard Waber’s website: http://www.bernardwaber.com/

nematodes: http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/nematode/soil_nematode.htm

I took the photograph of my daughter and two friends at an October beach Hawaiian birthday party…  the coldest Hawaiian birthday party I’ve been to, so the girls were gathering wood for the fire.

 

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M is for mourn

M is for mourn. We mourn for losses. Mourning is part of being human and we have to give grief room and space. How can we love and feel intimacy without also feeling grief and mourning?

M

I wrote a poem the day my sister died. I had flown home four days before, after seeing her in hospice, 7 years of cancer. I flew home the day before her birthday. My birthday is three days after hers. She died the day after my birthday. It has now been four years.

An apology, a love note and a remembrance

I step outside into a fine mist rain.

I am enfolded in cloud.

The dog still wants to be walked.
The cats want their treats.
The bunny rattles her cage.
The fish will want feeding at the usual time.

My heart lies stunned in my chest.
The dog does not pull.
I walk measured.
He waits.

The rain comes harder.

I hope that where you are, is joy.

The crows harsh caws comfort me.
I answer.
They watch from the tree tops as we circle.

I am enshrouded in cloud.

We are back to the house.

I try to remember.
I have the birds.
I have the trees.

We go in.

first published on everything2.com with other poems for her here: http://everything2.com/title/An+apology%252C+a+love+note+and+a+remembrance

I don’t know who took the photograph. Probably my grandparents.