Category Archives: Blogging from A to Z

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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.

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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…Β  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.

 

 

 

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L is for lust

L is for Lust, another of the 7 sins.

I’d better talk about the photograph first! I took the picture of my son, playing outdoors before my friends’ wedding! He volunteered to play as the guests arrived and played from memory, dressed in his grandfather’s tuxedo. L is for love as well as lust….

I have said that we are all human and all have the potential for all feelings. But lust… now that is complicated to write about.

noun
1. intense sexual desire or appetite.
2. uncontrolled or illicit sexual desire or appetite; lecherousness.
3. a passionate or overmastering desire or craving (usually followed by for): a lust for power.
4. ardent enthusiasm; zest; relish: an enviable lust for life.
5. Obsolete. pleasure or delight.
desire; inclination; wish.

Now those aren’t all bad. And don’t we as a culture celebrate sexual desire in the “right” context? We don’t agree on the “right” context as a culture or a world yet.

verb (used without object)
6. to have intense sexual desire.
7. to have a yearning or desire; have a strong or excessive craving (often followed by for or after).

I am reading four books concurrently. Perhaps I have a lust for books. Is that a sin or a feeling or an exaggeration?

I found a mystery called The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl. This is set right after the civil war and is a murder relating to the translation of Dante’s Inferno. The characters include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, MD. Part of the plot includes the Harvard Corporation putting pressure on to stop publication of the translation because many of the Harvard faculty and alumni don’t approve. “Modern” Italian is scorned compared to Latin and Greek andΒ  there is argument about whether it is too Catholic. Discrimination all over the place.

And what does this have to do with lust? I came across my copy of a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, translated by John Ciardi, and started reading that. The circles of Hell as he describes them don’t exactly match the 7 sins: he has nine. The Second Circle has the souls of the “carnal, those who betrayed reason to their appetities and who abandoned themselves to the tempest of their passions.” The dead people are insubstantial and are blown about by the winds, forever denied the light of reason and of God.Β  There are couples there. This circle has less suffering and Dante feels compassion for the lovers.

But further down is Circle Eight with the panderers and seducers. These are punished much more cruelly and suffer more deeply. And Dante feels that it is more deserved…. Circle Eight has many others: flatterers, hypocrites, thieves, evil counsellors, sowers of discord. Each level descends and indicates a worse sin.

L

The third book is Come as you are by Emily Nagoski, PhD. A friend gave this to me for my birthday and it’s a wonderful book about the myths, mysteries and current science about sexuality, male and female. She writes that we have ideas that are NOT borne out in scientific testing and that many people who feel sexually “broken” are not broken at all. We all have the same parts, just arranged differently, and then our family and culture and experience add to that, and it becomes confusing!

Currently, she writes, 30% of women in testing have responsive desire. That is, they don’t have “spontaneous desire”. Our culture is still getting over men owning other people and owning women, so the cultural “ideal” is that we all have spontaneous desire. But it turns out that we don’t all have it, and there is nothing wrong with those who don’t, including the men! She writes about everyone having both an accelerator and brakes related to sex and that some people have a strong brake and others have a strong accelerator. Above all she stresses that the best thing is for each person to experience pleasure and their own definition of pleasure! That can be complicated for a couple, especially when they expect the other person to be a certain way…. the most loving thing is to find out what a person is really like, not pressure them to fit a cultural idea.

And lastly I am reading a romance, by Nora Roberts. It is very interesting to read it concurrently with the other three. Especially when the couple is “overcome” by “desire”. Certainly the romances I have read nearly all have the same idea about the heroine: when she meets her soulmate, her body knows it and she will be overcome with desire. What’s more, her body is always right even though the two of them argue and resist their true love! This is the myth in romances and it doesn’t match Dr. Nagoski’s book at all! She writes about nonconcordance: that is, that the brain and the body are not always in agreement. Men have a genital response which agrees with their brain response of “sexually appealing” about 50% of the time. Women’s genital response agrees with their brain response of “sexually appealing” only 10% of the time. And if you want to have a happy spouse or partner, it is the brain that you want to appeal to, not the body. If you think about it, there’s not much more of a bigger turn off then someone saying “Your body isn’t responding the way I expect it to and therefore you feel x.” That’s silly, isn’t it? If we want to know what someone is feeling, aren’t we all more complicated then pure body language? Dr. Nagoski also distinguishes between “sexually relevant” and “sexually appealing”, which are not at all the same. An ad for a car with a nearly nude female model draped on the hood may be sexually relevant and not at all appealing to me… I think, yeah, using lust to sell cars and objectifying women again. Unappealing, in fact. I think we have to get past the terrible damaging myth that if a woman is interested in sex with someone, that indicates true love — or that a woman will only be interested in sex if it is true eternal love!

John Ciardi: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-ciardi

More on Dante: http://www.worldofdante.org/inferno1.html

Mathew Pearl’s website: http://www.matthewpearl.com/

Nora Roberts: http://www.noraroberts.com/

Dr. Nagoski’s blog: http://www.thedirtynormal.com/

 

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K is for keen

K is for keen.

Welcome to 7 sins and friends, about feelings and whoa, am I behind! I am supposed to be up to N! Time to catch up and I am keen to do it! Hopefully my words will remain keen and entrancing.

1. finely sharpened, as an edge; so shaped as to cut or pierce substances readily: a keen razor.
2. sharp, piercing, or biting: a keen wind; keen satire.
3. characterized by strength and distinctness of perception; extremely sensitive or responsive: keen eyes; keen ears.

Now the folks in the picture are very keen as well: they are trying to win theΒ  Kinetic Sculpture Race. The winner gains the title of most mediocre. The kinetic sculptures are human powered and have to travel on land, by sea and through mud. The water here today is 50 degreesΒ  and is not much warmer at the end of the summer. They have to be keen to paddle through that water! Every sculpture has to carry a teddy bear and bribes for the judges and officials… it is kinetic madness….

4. having or showing great mental penetration or acumen: keen reasoning; a keen mind.
5. animated by or showing strong feeling or desire: keen competition.
6. intense, as feeling or desire: keen ambition; keen jealousy.

K

7. eager; interested; enthusiastic (often followed by about, on, etc., or an infinitive): She is really keen on going swimming.
8. Slang. great; wonderful; marvelous.

I am still keen for this contest, even with catch up due! What are you keen for? And of course it’s a keen contest with lots of keen contestants….

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J is for joy

J is for joy.

Do you feel joy sometimes? Are you joyous? Joyful?

From Webster 1913: The passion or emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good; pleasurable feelings or emotions caused by success, good fortune, and the like, or by a rational prospect of possessing what we love or desire; gladness; exhilaration of spirits; delight.

From dictionary.com: the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.

I took the photograph two weekends ago. My daughter was racing, category 2 mountain bike race, three laps, four miles each. I was walking the course backwards with a friend. We had to be alert and step off the path every time a rider was coming. There were around 100 riders in category 2, all ages, men and women. We stopped to take photographs and cheer for everyone and especially our team!

A rider on the first lap had an asthma attack from all the pollen, and we walked him back out. I walked the bike while he concentrated on breathing. We stopped again to take pictures and then he could ride out. I walked on, listening for bikes, and there were trillium along the path….

I don’t think I can feel joy unless I also admit grief and all of the other feelings. It’s like weather, emotions come and go and may or may not feel like they make sense. If we refuse a feeling, it just seems to get stronger and rather panicky and keep bothering us…. until we treat it like the guest in Rumi’s poem.

Grief comes, and can be sweeping our mind clean for a new joy.

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I is for introverted

I is for introverted…. welcome to 7 sins and friends where we are welcoming and admitting all feelings, even those we don’t approve of, as human and as ours.

From dictionary.com
noun
1.a shy person.
2.Psychology. a person characterized by concern primarily with his or her own thoughts and feelings (opposed to extrovert).
3.Zoology. a part that is or can be introverted.

Odd. Introverted sounds much more selfish than I think of it! I think of introverted as people who get energy from being alone and who like to play in their own minds! I tested as more introverted than extroverted on a Myers Briggs test at the start of medical school, in the 1990s. I thought then that I was an introvert. But the test merely expresses people’s preferences, so everyone can act in an introverted or extroverted way, depending on their mood and how they are feeling at that moment. And part of continuing to grow is to learn to use the parts of ourselves that we avoid or that are poorly developed. I tested as an introverted thinker and what did I avoid? Exactly what I am writing about: feelings. I had to do a lot of work over the years to develop that part of me and I avoided it until my mother died. Then I had to do the work and it is well worth doing. Not that anyone is ever done….

adjective
4.Psychology. marked by introversion.

I

verb (used with object)
5.to turn inward:
to introvert one’s anger.
6.Psychology. to direct (the mind, one’s interest, etc.) partly to things within the self.
7.Anatomy, Zoology. to turn (a hollow, cylindrical structure) in on itself; invaginate.

I took the photograph behind a church in town, walking around on Sunday. I had not been behind it and didn’t know that there was a labyrinth. A labyrinth makes me think of introversion, all the turns and walking a path in a small space, focused and yet open to whatever thoughts arrive.

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H is for heal

H for heal, healing, healed.

Heal is not used as a feeling as much as healing or healed in conversation. Unless you are a healer and you hope to heal someone. But we use healing frequently or say, “I need to heal from that.” What do you want to heal from? A physical, a mental, a spiritual or an emotional healing? They are all tied together and we need them all. I am working with a massage therapist, once every two weeks. I chose massage for healing because my sister and father had died 14 months apart and about ten months later I thought, I need some help. And the thought of discussing my family was horrifying. I thought, I don’t want talk therapy. Let’s go at it from another angle: heal and help the body and the mind will follow. I feel much better now….

verb (used with object)
1. to make healthy, whole, or sound; restore to health; free from ailment.
2. to bring to an end or conclusion, as conflicts between people or groups, usually with the strong implication of restoring former amity; settle; reconcile:
They tried to heal the rift between them but were unsuccessful.
3. to free from evil; cleanse; purify: to heal the soul.

verb (used without object)
4. to effect a cure.
5. (of a wound, broken bone, etc.) to become whole or sound; mend; get well (often followed by up or over).

H

I am a family doctor and one area of healing that we should use more is going outside, going for a walk and going in the woods. Why? I was feeling gloomy yesterday am and walked down the wooded paths in my neighborhood. The birds are celebrating spring. A deer stood watching me on the path, immobile in hopes that I wouldn’t see her. A sapsucker was up in the top of a dead madrona tree. I only walked ten blocks, but the new information from being outside and watching and listening, blew the gloom right out of my mind. The brain is geared for new neurological information using all the senses. We do NOT use them for computer and especially not for television. So go outside and blow the cobwebs away! And if you have a feeling you are not comfortable with, take it for a walk and show it birds and squirrels and just let it be present. Be kind to it and yourself. Heal.

I took the photograph Saturday. I walked into my lower yard and the deer and a yearling were startled. I stopped and the deer did too. She kept looking at an evergreen to her right, and at last the cat walked out from the lower branches…. If a cat may look at a king, then a deer can look at a cat….

 

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G is for gluttonous

Welcome to 7 sins and friends, where I am writing about a feeling for every letter of the alphabet…. including the 7 sins.

I spelled gluttonous “glutinous” first…. a quite different feeling. I had to look up the spelling of gluttonous.

  1. marked by or given to gluttony<a gluttonous appetite>

Now I need a definition of glutton:

a :Β  one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating and drinking
b :Β  one that has a great capacity for accepting or enduring something <a glutton for punishment>

When I started this topic for the A to Z challenge, I had to look up the 7 sins. I could only name four and I always want to include murder. I get the ten commandments a bit conflated with the 7 sins.

Gluttony is an interesting sin and I did not think of the second definition. I have only seen it used in “glutton for punishment”, but the way the definition is written, I wonder if Nelson Mandala could be seen as a glutton ….. his courage in enduring imprisonment for so long. That meaning would not be a sin, would it?

G

When my daughter was in grade school, her sitter’s family hosted an exchange student from Uzbekistan. He was a teenager, very thin, and he seemed appalled by the US. He showed us slides from home. They had electric power for an hour or two a day at most. The cooking facilities were out door stone ovens burning wood. I think that he considered us to be gluttons because not only did we demand more than one meal a day and snacks, but also we demanded different food at each meal and always look for something new! And we ate until we are obese and then obsess about losing weight!

I spent a year as an exchange student in Denmark in high school. I continued with the language in college and got a scholarship to translate a book one summer. The book is Livsens Ondskab, by Gustav Wied, written in 1899. It is fascinating and very dark and funny. It is about a small town, fictional, but this town has a “Glutton’s Club” where the richest men get together and have fabulous rich meals. The meal descriptions are glorious. But their goal is to eat as much as possible and more…..

I am in the Rotary and love it. The Rotary helps 9000 exchange students world wide: I think that going to another country, another place, and trying to understand and be understood is one of our biggest hopes for peace.

My daughter made the cake for my birthday last month!!! mmmmmmm

 

 

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