Well it’s back to the battle today

“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” —Dr. Maria Montessori

we try out some Montessori

I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, ca. 1900) and Montessori-based education. I’ve written about it here before. Although it can feel overwhelming, this sense that an entire child’s future rests on my ability to do parenting “right.” I read an article recently that questioned that thinking, that said that we should be thinking of educating children more as being a gardener, rather than being a carpenter. Basically: not worrying about it so much. Not thinking of parenting as a verb, as something that you do, but as a relationship. We shepherd our children, we cultivate the ground they grow in, but we’re not actually trying to shape them, as we would a board, into a specific design.

Yet: my struggle is that I feel like there are many things being done wrong by parents today. There’s this sense in the article that most parents do things more or less right, and that most children end up more or less okay. This assertion I question. I, myself, have struggled for a long time with something I hesitate to call mental illness, because it feels more common than that. It feels literally ubiquitous, in the sense that this cosmic unease—or angst, or a kind of low-level anxiety—is everywhere. Everyone has it. I’ve written about my struggles with depression, and I’ve written about my struggles with disordered eating.

It is, of course, that eternal question of nature versus nurture. When things go wrong with our children we want to blame nature, but when things go well, we think we’re doing a great job.

And I feel like many things are going wrong with children these days, and not just children, because children grow up to be adults, and adults and children together make society. There is much I see wrong with our society right now, much I believe needs to change. Maybe if we focused a little bit more on our children, on the ways in which their needs are and are not being met (or maybe I say so because I happen to have a preschooler) we might see some changes at a larger societal level.

I just hunted online for my possibly apocryphal article (which, I believe, really did make the case that the kids were going to turn out okay), and it turns out that the research is actually from a book by Alison Gopnik titled The Gardener and the Carpenter.  Maybe I heard about it on my new favorite (that’s a stretch—I have so many favorite podcasts right—but I wish to God they’d do an episode about Carl Jung) podcast, “Hidden Brain.”

It turns out that Alison Gopnik makes exactly the point I’m trying to make, much better than I could, about the problems with the carpentry method, and the gardening method that she supports is akin to Montessori.

Referring to the carpentry model, she says: “the main harm is that it makes the process -- the life of being a parent -- anxious and difficult and tense and unhappy in all sorts of ways that are unnecessary. And I think it makes it that way for parents, and it makes it that way for children… the carpentry story is one where you're so concerned that the child come out that you're not giving the child the freedom to take risks and explore and be autonomous.”

Even though children of carpenters can be considered more successful: “in some ways, they're doing much better. They're achieving more, they're less likely to take risks, they are less likely to get pregnant or to use drugs. But that goes with a kind of anxiety -- high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear …that is what you would predict from the carpentry story.”

So, Montessori. Although whenever I mention the word, especially to another mother, I find my listener’s eyes immediately shut down: already they’re hearing, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it this way instead.”

Which, in short, is what I am saying. But I’m not saying: worry more about how you’re parenting. I’m saying: trust your children to follow their own path. Prepare their environment, make it safe, and then get out of their way. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re doing the right thing, but trust that what they’re doing meets their current developmental need, whatever that is.

I find it so difficult to put this essential Montessori principle into words. It is, as Dr. Montessori wrote herself, the “secret of childhood,” but the more I learn about it the more I see these principles borne out by research again, again, and again, not just for children, and not in work that uses Montessori terminology. It seems to be not just the secret of childhood, but the secret to happiness, to contentment, to joy.

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Take, for instance, the idea of focus. That particular intense concentration that children use in order to grow, to explore, to learn to do the things that they need to do in order to be complete human beings. The focus that a baby has when she is learning to crawl, or walk. It is one of the things that initially drew me to the practice, all the blogs with moms showing pictures of their children with what I now call Montessori face: a look of intense focus. Of inner drive and determination.

independent baking

"We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.”  --Dr. Maria Montessori

I’ve begun to think of those moments when my daughter is in deep focus as sacred. To interrupt her, to ask her if she needs to drink some water, or to teach her how to construct a tower, or to say we’re leaving for the library— any of these things interrupt the neural pathways that she is building, the pathways that she will use for the rest of her life when she is deeply immersed in something invaluable to her.

In short, it is flow. I take for granted that you’ve read Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow? Or that, even if you haven’t, you know what I mean? Flow is that right-brained state an artist enters into when he is painting, or a writer when she is writing, or a violinist when he is practicing. Full immersion into a timeless eternal state, where one may as well not be in one’s body. Again and again, in study after study, in book after book, I read about flow as being the one essential element to happiness. People are happy in their jobs when they can find flow. In their lives, when they have a hobby that allows them to slip into that state. That old saw “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is about flow. I keep reading self-help books, and they constantly refer to the concept of flow, and how essential it is to recover true contentment. (Designing Your Life is the book I read most recently that mentioned the concept.)

We say what we most want for our children is happiness, but really we deprive our children of the concentration that brings it, every chance we get. When they’re born we immediately pack their playrooms with every possible brightly colored electronic gadget that sings and dances, with rotund jovial cartoon animals that never occur in life, with screens and noise and color and sensation—anything to distract them from the horror of life— that must be what we really believe, right?—and then we wonder why they’re unable to put their own toys away, why they can’t sleep, why they’re having tantrums, why they’re so upset. All they need is a calm, safe place to discover the world and all we offer them is distraction.

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Take, for another, the Montessori idea of self-reliance.

Or self-trust, self-motivation, self-esteem — whatever you call it. The idea that I can know myself, deeply, intimately, and believe, at an intuitive level, that I know what is right for myself. I have come back to this self-reliance in my own life as I’ve begun intuitive eating, learning that my own body’s fullness and hunger signals can be trusted. Again, it is something that reoccurs in my reading so often, especially on the self-help websites I frequent: the number one predictor of happiness is intrinsic motivation.  (Like here!  Link: "Self-Reliance Is the Secret Sauce to Consistent Happiness")

Anyone can be shamed into doing anything. It’s a method of force, like physical pain. As soon as no one’s looking, though, we’re going to go back to the thing that we really wanted. When we become ashamed of ourselves, we lose our ability to trust our inner intuition. For a child, self-trust depends on learning that the way I want to play the blocks is a manifestation of my own imagination, and of no one else’s. It means teaching children that their desires can be trusted, and followed, and that they lead where they should go.

It’s one of the things I’ve read about early-childhood education that has the most data to back it up: this understanding that saying “good job” actually subverts children’s sense of self, because it takes away their ability to rely on their own intuition and motivation.  Link:  "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson

"In short, 'good job!' doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure." --"Five Reasons To Stop Saying Good Job," by Alfie Kohn

"Excess praise can be damaging to our children's intrinsic motivation (working just for the pure pleasure of it -- not to please anyone else)." --"Break the Good Job Habit" by Aubrey Hargis

It’s so counter-intuitive, right? Because we’re saying that what the child is doing is good! We’re supporting him! We’re telling her she SHOULD trust herself! Aye, there’s the rub: US adults, from the outside, telling children what to do, what’s good, what’s bad, instead of allowing them to discover the world for themselves.

The reason we don’t say good job is not because we don’t think our children are doing a good job. It’s because we don’t want them to be reliant on other people to think that they’re doing a good job. We want that sense of satisfaction to come from inside, rather than from outside.

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely."  --Alfie Kohn

I continue to struggle with praise as an adult, as a writer. All I want as a writer is external validation. In the form of publication, or an agent or an editor telling me that my words are worthy of reproduction. In the form of money. In the form of an audience, of you, reading these words. It’s not enough for me simply to write them, to produce them for the joy they give me, the sense I have of order coalescing as I organize my sentences. I want you, reader, to tell me “good job.” Preferably in the comments.

So. Is it any surprise that I want something different for my daughter? Something different than what was given to us by our parents, and what I’ve consistently watched other people give their children: shame, and guilt, and constant reliance on external validation.

A brief story: we toured a Montessori school (Bridgeview Montessori) and the director said that she’d sent her daughter to Montessori preschool, but then to kindergarten at a traditional school. When she and her husband figured out that it wasn’t working for their daughter, they brought her back into Montessori school.  Even in that one brief year, she had unlearned this ability to trust her own intuition, her reliance on intrinsic motivation, her own inner sense of self. The girl would bring her drawings up to the teacher and say: isn’t this good? Is this what you wanted? Is this how it should be colored?

The Montessori-trained teacher would have to answer: what do YOU think? Is it good for you? Is that how you wanted your drawing to come out? Can you talk to me about it?

That’s after one year. Only one year of traditional school.

“...it's particularly ironic because school was actually designed as part of trying to get people trained for an industrial world. In a sense, school was designed to make robots, in that it gave people skills that now robots are capable of doing. And in a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need -- innovation, creativity, risk-taking -- are exactly the ones that we're not encouraging.”  --Alison Gopnik

When I say I want this self-trust for myself, I mean that I’m thinking of starting remedial Montessori workshops for adults. Because I have 41 years of that kind of programming to counteract. It’s why yoga has been my heart-song for the last however many years. In yoga, the teacher says: allow your body to be what it is today. Listen to your body, the same way in Montessori we say: follow the child. In yoga, the lights are off and I’m on my mat myself, no one to impress, no teacher to show off for. Even though 99 percent of the time, I’m thinking: did that impress her? Or: oh no, I’m not doing it right.

The other crazy thing about Montessori is how it actually works. Every principle that I’ve taken seriously and implemented consistently has had unforeseen benefits and astonishing success. It works.

The irony is that articles about teenagers all essentially say the same things. Have good boundaries and agreed-upon limits with your children. (Montessori: freedom within limits.) Teach them how to do things themselves rather than doing them for them. Give them autonomy and responsibility rather than helicoptering all over the place. It seems like so much of what we’ve done with the millennial generation, all the evils that are blamed on them, is exactly the opposite: our fault. The boomers, the Karens. We’ve given them no freedom--not to go outdoors, or to get jobs, or to hang out with their friends--and instead have given them limitless addictive technology that may literally be killing their brains.  ("God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” says Sean Parker, Facebook's first president.)

"...that parent can take on the most important role of parenting, that of teaching the child to take care of himself by demonstrating how it is done."  --"When It's Time for Them To Get a Life," by Jim Fay

"An emerging adult who takes the time to deeply reflect and raise their own self-awareness about their innermost desires can be guided by them if they have at least some clues from listening to who they are and what they value.”  --"How To Help My Young Adult Find Their Purpose," by Jennifer Miller

"While some parents may think that they are helping their children to make better decisions and to fix the consequences of their actions, research has shown that parental codependency may alienate children from their own feelings and distance them from self-determination. Ultimately, parents may want to consider setting up boundaries for their children, and also for themselves."  --"Failure to Launch," by Mark Banschick

I become more and more frustrated because not everyone shares this view. The first two essential parts of Montessori education are prepared caregivers and a prepared environment, and I fear I am giving my daughter neither. I do my best, but I’ve been taught to be a voiceless people-pleaser my whole life, and despite my attempts to the contrary, I am not always finding the courage to speak up in favor of autonomy, and joy, and creative freedom, for her or for myself. Plus, these things are effing expensive. I applied for financial aid at a local Montessori school and was told that their financial aid maxes out at 30 percent, meaning if we were to qualify for the maximum, and send Sagan to school part-time for three days a week, school would still cost $5000 a year. This, despite Dr. Maria Montessori explicitly designing the method for poor children.

Then I read the data about how important Montessori is, and how it’s even more effective when children come from disadvantaged or impoverished backgrounds.  It can erase differences between income levels.  “The difference in academic achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end of the study," says the National Institutes of Health.  "The Montessori Method is not only superior to all alternatives, but categorically so," says America Magazine, in this article.  "The scientific link between executive function and school success couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and classrooms of our youngest learners," says Mind in the Making, a nonprofit founded by Jeff Bezos (himself a Montessori alum).  

Still, despite the evidence of these and many other studies, education in this country is not based on science. Nothing in our country is based on actual scientific data, least of all the precious minds of our most vulnerable. As a country, we continue to use outmoded, outdated, hundreds-of-years-old traditional pedagogy.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the elementary school in our community be torn down and rebuilt with a $90 million state grant. Money that would pay for 1400 teachers, or to retrofit our public school into a Montessori one, as this low-income school in rural South Carolina did.  (Link:  "Public School Makes the Case for Montessori for All.) It feels like a purposeful attempt to ignore the reality of what is involved in good education for all children. Because a well-educated populace would mean that people have the courage to become active. They wouldn’t be consumed by anxiety and diseases of despair, cocooned inside their houses and their devices. Freedom means the courage to take action: against climate change, against racism, against children’s concentration camps.

“How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: 'your will must disappear and mine prevail!'—how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?”  --Dr. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World

Two three break

A perfect example

What I want for my daughter, from friends and family, for her second birthday (or for Christmas, or any subsequent gift-giving occasions):

-Above all, clean air, water, and earth:  to remember that what we want most for our daughter is a future unpolluted by plastic waste, uncorrupted by vast consumer monopolies, and that our most ardent wish is that money not be spent in her name on things that are destroying her future.
-tools.  Actual tools, sized for a child’s hands, tools that actually work and do things, not sets from Amazon or Target or Walmart.
-sports equipment
-an actual basketball or football or soccer ball
-a baseball bat or baseball glove
-a tennis racket
-a ukulele
a small-sized lacrosse stick (preferably used)
-real, small-sized things, made of cloth or metal or wood, not plastic.  Homemade things, things made by artisans, or craftspeople, paid a living wage.
-framed art
-real rain gear.  Not something cute from a box store, but something that will keep her dry and warm if we decide to go and play in the rain.
-Brownell binoculars
-a sturdy wooden steps tool with two steps
-a crinkle cutter
-child-sized baking and cooking implements (not sets; not toys)
-a Waldorf hand kite
-a Waldorf art book
-anything from these sites:  michaelolaf.com, How We Montessori, amightygirl.com
-anything from etsy.com
-anything from a B corporation
-solar panels for our house
-an electric car [Karl learned to drive when he was 3.  Just saying.]
-a spaceship
-rock-climbing holds
-a child-sized guitar
-a go-cart
-a magnetic chess set
-art or music or gymnastics or children’s yoga classes, which we find it difficult to afford
-two days a week at Montessori school
-peace on earth
-that you match whatever you spend on gifts for hers dollar for dollar with investments in her college fund, or in divested mutual funds
-To remember that we are raising our daughter as an anti-consumerist.  To remember that you are not just buying her gifts but you are spending your dollars on a future for her—either one with an ocean emptied of fish and flooded with plastic soup, or one with a functional, joyful civilization not riven by climate chaos.  To remember that *you* are the one supporting that future for her in how you spend your dollars.  In fact, how you spend your dollars is the only real way you are building a future for her—one way or another.

Upon the bitter green she walks

Why feminism is worth fighting for

My second post of 2018, and my first since June.  I am writing less briskly but I am still writing. That’s important.  Last year we moved to Wareham, Massachusetts.

I spent last summer driving back and forth to Maine for Sagan’s immunizations, and working on the new house.  The move was in September--a whole year ago now--and the walls and windows remain unfinished and the house itself is a work in progress.  Also, and we may be the only family in New England to have consciously made this decision, we are living without internet.  The discussion continues to be whether or not there is a way to get internet (including smart phones) that would not involve having life taken over by it—and I can’t think of a way.

So I am living without it, like the Amish.  It makes it difficult to maintain a blog, although I’ve been intending to since Sagan’s birth.  In order to put these words on paper, and then onscreen, I must close myself in a room with earplugs, and harden my heart to the banging on the door, and somehow find a way toward a creative self.

My last adventure was attending all three days of the “International Fiction Now” conference at Brown University, a 50-minute drive from Wareham, just for the gorgeous pleasure of hearing sentences strung together.  It was a celebration of the work of Robert Coover, to whom I can’t help but refer now as “Bob.”  It was a stunning assortment of writers.  And also rather misogynist.

One of the things that happened in my two-year hiatus, in addition to me birthing a daughter, was the #metoo movement, to which I listened, enrapt.  (When one does not have internet, one listens to the radio during all waking hours.  As if one lived in 1944.)  Having a child makes you realize the inequities between men and women like nothing else.  I was struck by Robert Coover’s story the final night.  Yes, it was absurdist.  Yes, experimental.  It’s more or less a story as a joke, a story as a concept—but like so many of his stories there’s much more going on, and underneath the surface is a wife cooking and cleaning and raising children for a man, a man she has sex with in the moonlight, a man for whom she toils.  And I kept finding these women at the edges of the conference.  The wife at the end of Jonathan Baumbach’s story “Baby,” who announces to the author of the story—busy writing his collection of short stories with a one-year-old baby as main character—that lunch is ready.  Were I so lucky as to have someone announce that lunch were ready for me.  Dorcas Palmer in Marlon James’s reading from “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”  Even the beautiful younger women, in their sixties, or seventies, accompanying the decrepit male writers who read at the conference, in their eighties and nineties.  These women, most second or third wives, were the ones doing the child-rearing, the dishes, the laundry while their male partners wrote.  I thought this, as I thought of my own daughter at home.

In absolute numbers the percentage of women writers reading at the conference, in the sessions I attended, was 38 percent—11 men to seven women.  It reminded me of this interview I heard on NPR: “If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50.  And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” —Our Feminized Society
[the quote is from Geena Davis, and her Institute on Gender in Media--lots of great stuff in her interview, and at the Institute's Research page]

Even that doesn’t represent the truth of it, because 100 percent of the late-night sessions—the key evening speakers, the elder statesmen of the conference—were men:  Ben Marcus, TC Boyle, Bill Kennedy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and of course, Bob Coover.  The women, even such impressive names as Edwidge Dandicat and Siri Hustvedt, were relegated to the afternoons.  And the highest percentage of women was in the first-night session, with six readers—four women, two men. Six readers crammed into one session that went late into the night, at a smaller venue, with each reader given less time.

As the New Yorker so succinctly puts it:

But the balance is so hard.  Especially now that I understand the visceral tug of motherhood.  I mean that literally:  I feel it in my viscera.

Most of it is the sheer pleasure of mothering.  It’s pleasurable.  The oxytocins bursts after childbirth and during nursing—the largest injection of the love and happiness hormone that human beings ever experience.  I understand why women keep doing it.

“Joy has been the great surprise of motherhood.”  —Karen Russell, "Orange World," @NewYorker [again] #karenrussell #orangeworld

From the novel “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti:

“On the one hand, the joy of children.  On the other hand, the misery of them.  On the one hand, the freedom of not having children.  On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose?  The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do.  The doing is what seems hard.  The having seems marvelous.”

Spoiler alert:  she decides not to have kids.  Spoiler alert:  and still has time to write a novel.

My main feeling after hearing “Orange World” by Karen Russell was jealousy.  She, too, had a “geriatric pregnancy.” Her discussion of breastfeeding and the joy of having a child into your late thirties can only be autobiographical.  So I assume, without having the time or inclination to google. But she took that time and wrote it, used it to make this exquisite, violent, crepuscular story.

I’ve been doing some spectacular reading though.  During the course of Sagan’s incubation and infancy, I read all seven volumes of Proust.  If we named her after the Princesse de Sagan, then I knew I must read the entirety of “In Search of Lost Time."  That is the gift Sagan gave me by being born, the gift that K. gave me by originally suggesting we name her after the astrophysicist—that now I have become acquainted with these other Sagans, too.  The ultimate aristocrats for Marcel Proust, and the nom de plume of Francoise Sagan.

My favorite Frenchism within "In Search of Lost Time"—he spends a lot of pages describing aspects and vernacular of the French language, some of the funniest parts, if you're acquainted with French—was how Francoise, the housekeeper and a much more important character than you’d expect—called the Princesse de Sagan “la Sagante.”

La Sagante.  That’s my daughter all over.

Francoise—another woman who hangs around doing the cooking and cleaning for a man that writes. Or doesn’t write, but sits and broods about writing.  (Not dissimilarly to Coover’s main character.) She dusts his pages.  And rearranges them.

As does Francoise Sagan—her book Bonjour Tristesse stunned me.  Somehow also she rearranges Proust’s story and retells it, all those hundreds of thousands of words in 100 slim pages.  How is it that more people don’t read this book, or talk about it?  Or know about it?  Because it was written by a nineteen-year-old girl?  It strikes me that there are so many teenaged girl heroines because it’s not until later in life that women get beaten down by being told what they are not to do.  Joan of Arc, Francoise Sagan.  Albertine.

I am writing about misogyny in a blog post I will never publish because I am afraid of a misogynist backlash.  What will Bob Coover think?  What will Rick Moody think?  What will William Kennedy think?  Will any of them ever read my novel in which a nineteen-year-old girl is beaten by her boyfriend?  Is it misogynist that I have written this scene?  Or is it misogynist that we don’t have more novels in which this ubiquitous violence is explored, discussed?  Two women die every week at the hands of their domestic partners.  Not in the US, in Britain.  In the US it’s four a day.  And it isn’t even news.  When was the last time you heard a story about domestic violence on TV?  Or are you too busy watching puppy videos?

My daughter makes me want to be a better feminist.  I want this violence not to touch her.  I want discrimination and self-doubt not to hamstring her as it has hamstrung me.  Most men, and many women, still claim such discrimination doesn’t exist.  Yet I see how already it affects her.  How all of the characters in Winnie the Pooh (save Kanga, the mother--natch) and Sesame Street are male.  How people respond strangely when she collects spiders, or spends half an hour staring at a bulldozer—and respond gushingly when she kisses a stuffed animal.  I see how my friends with boy children are embarrassed when their sons clutch at baby dolls.  Children aren’t stupid.  Millennia of evolution have caused them to be exquisitely sensitive to our every nonverbal, subconscious response.

Girl children know.  I know.  You know.  They know.

Johnson, Vermont

My room at the Vermont Studio Center

It is my fourth day here.  Every step here has felt a sloughing off of skin. On Sunday, as I moved in this direction, passing through Massachusetts and into the mountains of Vermont, I felt like I was moving back in time, or deeper inside myself. Already I find myself hungering after my work, the work that I’ve postponed for so long.

I am typing these words in a studio named after William Matthews.  Every morning, when I don't oversleep, I go to the meditation room and sit, smelling incense, doing my best to think of nothing.  After, I come to this studio with a blessed expanse of hours--thirteen, if I was to use them all--just to write.  My studio is small with a view of the Gihon River.  The Gihon, which in the Bible flows from Eden, and which here flows from Eden, Vermont.

I watch a coalesced skim of surface ice float by.  Last night it was 23 degrees below zero, with a windchill of minus 40.  I relish this cold as if were a rare wine.  I have no excuse to be outside.  Frequently the internet goes down.  I have no excuse to be there either.

Meals are prepared for me, shopping is done, I am cleaned up after.  I pace my room.  I rest my head against the window and watch the ice.  I read.  I post chapters on a corkboard.  I comb my sentences for excess words, again and again.  My fellow artists sculpt wall-hangings made of patchwork salvaged wood, sew metal, experiment with traditional oil technique and sing on the side, and take full-semester classes on Old Testament literature with Marilynne Robinson.

This morning, in explaining to a fellow resident why I prefer yoga to Pilates, I said it was not for the exercise but for the self-forgiveness it cultivates.  Last night, in a lecture on creativity and meditation, Jon Gregg, a founder of the Vermont Studio Center, told a story about Pablo Picasso.  Picasso, when asked what the most important thing was in his life answered simply:  self-trust.

These two things:  self-forgiveness and self-trust.  They're what I'm here to learn.

A poem for you today, by William Matthews, in whose spirit I write:

On the way to the rink one fog- and sleep-thick
morning we got the word fuck spat at us,
my sister fluffed for figure skating and I in pads
for hockey.  The slash of casual violence in it
befuddled me, and when I asked my parents
I got a long, strained lecture on married love.

Have I remembered this right?  The past is lost
to memory.  Under the Zamboni’s slathering tongue
the ice is opaque and thick.  Family life is easy.
You just push off into heartbreak and go on your nerve.

All you need is love

To take good care of houseplants

So I decided I needed a garden project and since the garden is still covered in at least two feet of snow and it keeps snowing, even though allegedly I can start my beet seedlings--according to the gurus--I repotted the plants that had been sitting in the windowsill languishing. You can see their poor shriveled leaves in the above photograph, but also that it's trying its darnedest to flower.  I can be a bit too laissez-faire in all of my housekeeping endeavors.  If the plant is living happily sitting in water, then it can't be doing too badly, right?

Except maybe it's not living that happily

Seriously, it lived in the water for more than a year.  And I'm keeping the ivy in its vase.  But when this one with the speckled leaves died, I decided I needed to rescue the other one.  The glass is found glass from the land.  I like to think an old moonshiner used to live here, but it's probably just someone's garbage glass pile.

Here's what the roots looked like

So now I have a plant living in my office, facing towards the sun, yearning with its chlorophyll towards spring, as do I.  It's long and spindly, and the new cat hired to kill field mice keeps trying to eat it, but it sits in my window and makes me happy and reminds me that occasionally I do successfully dig in dirt and make things grow.  The too-early seeds, planted in a neighboring pot, withered when I uncovered them too early.  But whatevs.

And here's what it looked like at the end

Note that it is still dark out in the above photograph.  We finally had the time change a couple of weeks after I did this mammoth repotting project, and now we're getting some light in late afternoon.  Do you think it'll still flower?  I have my doubts.

We didn't know what to think

A traditional Cape Cod hockey game -- a sport endangered?  Or is that just a caption to tie this cool photo with my post?

On my desk, for a while, has been sitting a front page of the Bangor Daily News with an article by Amateur Naturalist Dana Wilde. He says what I have been saying for a long time. Everyone wants to believe that climate change is a hoax. Everyone wants to believe that science is wrong, even if it manages to be right about absolutely everything else, specifically the electronic device I am using to type these words, the invisible electrons carrying them over wires, the satellite dish riveted to a spruce on my front lawn, the nether-regions of space, and whatever invisible blogger server distributes these words, these very same words, directly into your computer or tablet or phone or e-reading device. Yes, the scientists are right about computers. They're just wrong about carbon dioxide.

Several readers reassured me earlier this month with a few pats on the head that climate change, if it's even happening, is a natural occurrence that's nothing to do with us and moreover, to jog me out of naivete, that global warming is a hoax. Don't worry, be happy, we were sagely advised in the 80s.

Here are some points I've heard meant to reassure me there's no need to worry about climate change or global warming:

-It still gets cold in winter.

-Earth's climate has always changed and always will change.

-Global warming is just a theory.

-There is no proof that the exhaust from my car hurts anything.

-Scientists are often wrong.

-Scientists fake climate research findings.

-Global warming is not mentioned in the Bible.

-There was no Y2K disaster (or 2012 Mayan disaster, I could add).

The problem I have with these arguments is that I believe in the existence of computers, cellphones, penicillin, bone marrow transplants, and internal combustion engines. I also believe in photosynthesis, DNA, infrared light, blood types, and the theory of relativity, although I have never seen any of these actual items or processes with my eyes.

What I mean is that the same method of study—namely, “the scientific method”--has led to microchips, life-saving chemistry, and electronic communication.

At this point, maybe I'm preaching to the choir. But I encourage you to rethink your presuppositions when it comes to science, and particularly the scientific method. How have all of the scientific advances of the last 200 years come about? By the persistent and dedicated effort of scientists on an endless pursuit of absolute truth, of matter in motion, of data tracking. Data doesn't lie. It can't. We're the ones who are lying.

I was excited to hear an ad on Maine public radio for Union University, the first college in the US to divest its endowment from investments in fossil fuels. No, I haven't done it yet. I quail. But we'll do it, or we'll die.

Divest. Protest. Grow vegetables.

Joy and peace

“A disaster that no one could foresee” is what Chris Christie said on Jon Stewart last night, about Hurricane Sandy. Really, Chris? Really, when environmental activists have been telling us that this is exactly the sort of disaster we could foresee if we continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

It's like Chicken Little running around saying the sky is falling, and then everyone acting surprised when the sky falls. Except Chicken Little in this case is the best science we have, the cutting edge of all scientific and technological progress over the last two thousand years. We just don't like what the scientists have to say. We cease liking science when it tells us that we have to use technology to adapt to ecological limits instead of using it to bypass them.

Science is telling us we are destroying our world. And we're not listening.

Everyone should stop what they're doing right now and go read this interview, "If Your House Is on Fire," with the naturalist and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Riverwalking. Some quotes:

“Toxins in the water, radioactive waste in leaking tanks, acid in the oceans, and climate chaos. And we’re too busy to protest because we have to buy the kids the right kind of shoes for the soccer tournament? What kind of love is that?”

“There’s a disconnect in our culture separating what people do from what they really care about. I love my children and my grandchildren more than anything else. I care about their future. I love this world with a passion. The thought that we might be losing songbirds, trading them for something I don’t care about at all, like running shoes, makes me angry. And still I drive to the store and buy running shoes.”

“The worst offenders are happy to implicate and entangle us in every possible way and make us blame ourselves for climate change. We have to do our best to shake loose of that entanglement and never turn our rage against ourselves or allow self-criticism to dissipate our anger toward the real culprits. Of course each of us should be using less oil. But when I hear people piously say, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us,' I say, bulls***. I didn’t cut corners and cause an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I didn’t do my best to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency and every other agency that might have limited fracking. I’m not lobbying Congress to open oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean. I didn’t cut funding for alternative energy sources. Big Oil is pouring billions of dollars into shaping government policies and consumer preferences. And what do we say? 'Oh, I should be a more mindful consumer.'”

Interviewer: Does having a discourse in moral reasoning mean we need to listen to climate-change deniers?

Moore: No. Perhaps a scientific discourse would engage deniers in a debate about the facts, but a moral discourse isn’t about science. It’s about right and wrong.

Debates about the causes of climate change have become distractions. If your house is burning down, you don’t stand around arguing about whether the fire was caused by human or natural forces. You do what you can to put out the damn fire. You throw everything at it, and then you hold your breath, because there are people inside that house....

Moral arguments are trump cards, whereas economic arguments can always be overridden by matters of principle. Yes, you might profit from keeping slaves, but it’s wrong. Yes, you can profit from ruining children’s futures, but it’s wrong.

This final quote is the one that kills me:

“Many of us wake up in the morning and eat a breakfast of food we don’t believe in and then drive a car we don’t believe in to a job we don’t believe in. We do things that we know are wrong, day after day, just because that’s the way the system is set up, and we think we have no choice. It’s soul-devouring.”

So many people are asking questions about Connecticut, about these horrifying acts of terror coming from inside of ourselves. We want to believe that if we ban the gun he used, if we lock all of our elementary schools up tight, this kind of horror can't happen. Instead, I believe our society is a snake eating its tail, and things like that will continue to happen as long as our souls are being devoured from the inside. I used to live a life like that, the one above, and every day I had to stuff down the horror I felt at living, stuff it down with our cultural addiction of choice, an addiction to cheap consumer goods, cheap food, distraction.

The Appalachian Trail saved me from that life, led me to a life of story; story in all things. Being honest with each other, telling each other stories—these words here, included—is what will save us.

Moore absolves us of our guilt, as Christ did before. Can we all remember that at Christmas? Our guilt is washed clean. Clean as snow, as white as a white Christmas.

All we need is to take action, together. Believe. We can join together and make a difference. Inspired and unified human action brought down slavery, brought down colonialism, brought down segregation, brought down the Vietnam War, brought down apartheid, brought down the Berlin Wall, brought down, most recently, an Egyptian dictator supported by the United States.

We can unite, too.

I'm making a proposal. Our enemies are transnational petrochemical industries. The only way we can fight them is with money. Yes, I'm complicit, as are most of you. I'm culpable. I own petrochemical stock, through my mutual fund, my meager retirement savings. But there are ways to take a stand even there. We can bond together and ask our financial power-brokers to divest themselves of petrochemical stock. To invest in trains, local agriculture, education, science, and alternative energy. If we speak with one voice, eventually they'll listen.

For additional inspiration, a list, from McSweeney's 40. Egyptian students studied the Serbian youth movement called Otpor! that overthrew Milosevic and From Dictatorship to Democracy, a handbook for activism written by a UMass Dartmouth professor. The handbook lists 198 possible nonviolent actions, and McSweeney's published their favorites:

        1. Public speeches

        6. Group or mass petitions

        7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols

        8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications

        9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and bookshelves

        12. Skywriting and earthwriting

        17. Mock elections

        19. Wearing of symbols

        20. Prayer and worship

        24. Symbolic lights

        25. Displays of portraits

        26. Paint as protest

        28. Symbolic sounds

        30. Rude gestures

        33. Fraternization

        34. Vigils

        38. Marches

        46. Homage at burial places

        51. Walkouts

        52. Silence

        54. Turning one's back

        62. Student strike

        69. Collective disappearance

        71. Consumers' boycott

        117. General strike

        119. Economic shutdown

        141. Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws

        148. Mutiny

        153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition

        158. Self-exposure to the elements

        162. Sit-in

        163. Stand-in

        164. Ride-in

        165. Wade-in

        166. Mill-in

        167. Pray-in

        179. Alternative social institutions

See? We have power, too.

I hear the train a-coming

Isn't it funny sometimes where the internet takes you?  Sometimes I'm wandering down rabbit holes, and I find something like Filthy Creations. 

The Scanner No. 4

Udolpho Vol. 26

The art on the cover is by Gerald Gaubert: Jael & Sisera from The Song of Deborah, which I mention only because I played Jael in our middle-school production of Judges, driving a stave through the head of an imaginary man in a dome tent set up on the gym stage.

I don't know why it makes me so happy that people were publishing literary journals in Aurora and the Isle of Wight from 1988-1991, literary journals that specialized in horror and gothic fiction, and that people today are celebrating that there used to be these physical objects that had beauty, and we can still preserve them with the bits and bytes we use today--all these things makes me happy.  It makes me think that this little putting together of bits and bytes that we do on the internet--this act I perform now, typing on my keys--has value.

I was thinking the other day about art, how perhaps what I mean by art is an object that carries meaning.  I've been thinking that gas should probably cost $100 a gallon, if we're going to cease carbon emitting, but that means we would have to stop buying cheap plastic crap and start making things again.  Things like wardrobes.  Boats.  We'd have to grow trees and cut them down to harvest.

And then we'd make them into literary journals and make woodcuts from the cross-cut milled cedar dipped in paint we'd figured out how to use our minimal petroleum products into, and again we'd be creating objects that carry meaning, objects that have beauty.  Or maybe we wouldn't.  Maybe again I'm just subsumed with optimism, for whatever reason.  Or maybe I'm just reading too many books about sailing.  Three at the moment, including:

On the Water by Nathaniel Stone

Given the merest assistance the blades release themselves from the water.  Press down slightly on the handles of the oars while gently twisting the grips toward you a quarter turn. In an elegant instant the spooned blades abandon the stroke and feather into nearly horizontal forward flight toward the next catch.  Release leads to recovery; remember, reach for the toes and slide into a crouch on your way to the catch.

Bearing gifts we travel so far

When I'm away from civilization, I long for Wikipedia and Flickr and YouTube, all of the digital distractions that masquerade as genuine tools for accomplishing things. But I forget about online shopping and celebrity gossip and angry birds and all the other endless rabbit holes that I can fall down. I forget how much time I lose here. Nonetheless, I'm happy to be reconnected, if only for a little while, with friends from my past. Instantaneous email is good, if it means I can maintain relationships with people I love. Even if it comes at the cost of Britney Spears impersonator video clips.

And one of the things that comes of returning to the inter-web is a return to these pages. I've been planning a coming-out-of-the closet post for some time now, so here goes: I wouldn't be writing here, in public, if I didn't home to make my living eventually, not as a farmer or an adventurer (although I wouldn't mind either of those sideline careers, if possible), but as a fiction writer. And not just any fiction writer, either. As a novelist.

Dare I admit it in public? It's merely an undercurrent in this blog because I'm hesitant about being public with my darkest and most private dream. There are people who keep whole ASPIRING NOVELIST!!! blogs, and I couldn't be one of them. The only reason I've managed to write here is by exploring other topics: adventures, backpacking, farming, hiking, sailing, bicycling, music, art, electronic media. Nonetheless, the beating heart of all of it is my true, secret desire.

If I have to be brutally honest, I'd say that the real reason I cast off from boat life was because I couldn't figure out a way to be both a full-time sailor and a full-time writer. I know people do it—I just couldn't figure how to be one of them. As I get older, more and more I believe life is about clarifying, again, annually, monthly, weekly, sometimes even daily—what do I want?

What do I want most? What is my heart's desire? How can I pay attention to my own inner teacher, whatever you call it, the Holy Spirit living inside me or my own truest self or both of those things in alignment?

Maybe it's returning to my desk, the basement office I built for myself here in Chattanooga, that's makes me realize the progress I've made in the last three years. Maybe it's the recovery I've made from what I experienced as a major setback in October. My electronic life is slowly returning to neutral—I'm recovering what files I can from hard copies, old computers, email, and compact discs, and finding more than I expected. But loss always makes me ask that same question—what do I want? Am I on track?

And my answer is, simply—yes. I've found a place where I can sustain myself, where, as I wrote a fellow missionary-kid friend this evening, I'm “in danger of putting down roots.” I've completed an intermediate draft of my first book. I've published. I believe, and hope, that with each word I scratch on paper my prose becomes stronger. I live more sustainably now, in closer connection to the earth, in closer connection to my own body, in closer connection to my own values. I have people in my life whom I love, who love me back.

Not a bad way to celebrate the last month of the year.