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Book related memories….    continued….   

From Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly:

“Worrying about scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we’ve been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we’re angry and scared and at each other’s throats.”

“We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.”

“Because cynicism, criticism, cruelty, and cool are even better than armor – they can be fashioned into weapons that not only keep vulnerability at a distance but also can inflict injury on people who are being vulnerable and making us uncomfortable.…. Someone else’s daring provides an uncomfortable mirror that reflects back our own fears about showing up. creating, and letting ourselves be seen.”

The fields around where I live and the roads and paths where I go for a walk are for the time being flanked by wild flowers, so I’ve had the chance to pick daisies during my walks.

In today’s post I have included material that I did not include in the previous one because I had thought it best to keep it short.

In the part on Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate’s book I had intended to also refer to Brené Brown’s chapter with the title Wholehearted Parenting [6], in her book Daring Greatly, because it has some relevance to the topics of their book. The quotes above are from her book. Also, I had intended to further support their arguments with a short extract from  Gabor Mate’s book, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, which I am currently reading, and hopefully, will write about in the future. The extract is related to the topic of interdependence of causal factors and how understanding issues or events requires our considering a whole range of interacting factors:

“We have seen that the individual’s brain circuits are decisively influenced by the emotional states of the parents, in the context of the multigenerational family history. Families also live in a social and economic context determined by forces beyond their control. If what happens in families affects society, to a far greater extent society shapes the nature of families, its smallest functioning units. The human brain is a product of society and culture just as it is a product of nature.”

I had also selected some more poetry by Sarah Ruhl. Below are an extract from a poem about racism and whiteness, and a poem about fear of mold and other things….

“I don’t want to fear / the life cycle anymore: / death, mold, endings.

It is absurd to fear the / blue mold on a tomato.”

And

“In places my skin is so white it’s blue.

Crayola retired the crayon called Flesh in 1962,

The same year Martin Luther King Jr. was

Arrested for leading prayer vigil.

Now that crayon is called peach and

Crayola offers apricot, black, burnt sienna, mahogany, sepia.

My skin is whiter than sepia, whiter than apricot.

The white crayon in Crayola doesn’t work on white paper.

It’s like spitting into water.

So most white kids when they draw their  /  own faces don’t color in the skin…..

White kids pretend our skin is the shade of   /  paper and leave the outline alone….”

And an extract by Margaret Renkl from her book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (p. 218), on how she understands and has experienced grief and loss in life, and the grief that follows the death of loved ones, in particular:

“This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through.  Of closure. It’s all nonsense. Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.

It is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape, the muscles that are doing your work in the world. And like your other skin, your other eyes, your other muscles, it too will change in time. It will change so slowly you won’t even see it happening. No matter how you scrutinize it, no matter how you poke at it with a worried finger, you will not see it changing. Time claims you: your belly softens, your hair grays, the skin on the top of your hand goes loose as a grandmother’s, and the skin of your grief, too, will loosen, soften, forgive your sharp edges, drape your hard bones.

You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall.”

Finally, I wanted to share a couple of links, one to an audio recording of the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8COt1n3jDqA, and one to Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us With Brené Brown podcast Be True To Yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPo_r0zlcPg

In this episode she talks about trust in friendships throughout our lifespan and other relationships. She comments: “Trust is build in the smallest of moments” & “Trust is a sliding door moment”.

So, to come back to Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, I first read it when I was 21. In this 1982 Greek translated edition that I own the publisher describes it as “a revolutionary fairy tale” and claims that “some readers believed that the psyche of the free is found in Jonathan Livingston Seagull”. This edition includes some beautiful photographs of seagulls mostly in flight by Russell Munson. I had forgotten most of the story apart from the fact that it was about our inherent right to be free to be ourselves and to follow our dreams. The memory of the book would sometimes surface in my mind when flocks of seagulls flew over my house or when on certain occasions some have touched the ground probably looking for food.

It was quite interesting to listen to the story again, four decades later, at this stage of my life. This time round the story felt to a certain degree like an allegory for the life of Jesus. It also seemed to have elements of New Age spirituality. In any case, the story is about a seagull’s unbounded passion for flight and unquenchable thirst for achieving perfection in what he loves most.  Jonathan is different to other birds in his flock because “for most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating.” Jonathan believes that freedom is the very nature of one’s being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside.

One salient message is that we should not let others tell us what we can and cannot do, even if sometimes following our passions can take us away from places and people that we hold dear. Jonathan’s lack of conforming to the norms does not go down well with the other seagulls and eventually, his unwillingness to conform results in his expulsion from his flock. As an outcast but free bird nonetheless, he continues to learn about flying, coming closer and closer to his goal of achieving perfection.  After certain adventures and encounters with other gulls Jonathan feels the urge to return to earth to share what he has learned and to spread his knowledge. He soon finds himself around other outcast but passionate seagulls…

Three quotes from the book:

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?”

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.”

“We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.”

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Book related memories….

“Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, being in charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse…..” Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not

“What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society.” Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, Hold on to Your Children

“There is still plenty to go around— plenty of flowers, plenty of seeds, plenty of bugs— but the creatures in my yard are not interested in sharing. For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.” Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Walking in a spring rain   Sarah Ruhl, Love Poems in Quarantine

Sometimes bullies feel / like the weather – but they  /  are not the weather.

These last few weeks I’ve been busier and running more errands than usual, but in between I have managed to do some reading and listening to things that interest me. I will begin with a quote by Maria Shriver Kennedy from her newsletter, which is related to Easter [here in Greece tomorrow is Palm Sunday]. She writes: “So on this Palm Sunday, as we approach Holy Week, may we all regardless of our religious identity or lack thereof—think of our lives and the lives of others as holy indeed. Do you know how you would treat your life if you really viewed it as holy? Do you know how you would treat others if you saw their lives first and foremost as holy? I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, and I believe that I would be gentler….. So this week, my hope is that we each attempt to treat each other and ourselves in a manner that is holy, that is kind, that is gentle, and that is compassionate.”This is also my wish for this Easter period and beyond.

As I wrote in a previous post I am trying to finish reading books I left halfway. One that I’ve completed is the book that Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate have co-authored, Hold on to Your Children, which discusses the negative impact of peer orientation on children’s development and their relationship with their family, the flat lining of culture and how parents and teachers can reassume their nature-appointed roles as the mentors and nurturers of the young, as the models and leaders to whom they look for guidance. They write that we need to give our children the freedom to be themselves in the context of loving acceptance— an acceptance that immature peers are unable to offer, but one that we adults can and must provide.

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate discuss many valuable themes, but I will very briefly focus on competing attachments, which is less discussed. The authors stress the importance of children’s relationships to their adult caregivers / parents and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. The book restores parents to their natural intuition and offers alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control and strategies for restoring or preserving the child-to-parent relationship. A lot of vignettes are included of cases where things have gone awry between peer oriented children and parents and teachers, and the consequences on children’s safety, development and maturation. The book explores many aspects of the main theme in detail. Additionally, two important related topics worth reading are the increase of bullying and the making of bullies and the challenges with raising children in a digital age.

The writers ask the question: If parenting skills or even loving the child are not enough, what then is needed? They go on to discuss in detail the indispensable special kind of relationship without which parenting lacks a firm foundation, which developmental psychologists or other scientists who study human development call attachment relationship.

They write: “Only the attachment relationship can provide the proper context for child-rearing. The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach. For a child well attached to us, we are her home base from which to venture into the world, her retreat to fall back to, her fountainhead of inspiration. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship. All the love in the world cannot get through without the psychological umbilical cord created by the child’s attachment. The attachment relationship of child to parent needs to last at least as long as a child needs to be parented. That is what is becoming more difficult in today’s world. Parents haven’t changed— they haven’t become less competent or less devoted. The fundamental nature of children has also not changed— they haven’t become less dependent or more resistant. What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society. Even parent-child relationships that at the beginning are powerful and fully nurturing can become undermined as our children move out into a world that no longer appreciates or reinforces the attachment bond. Children are increasingly forming attachments that compete with their parents, with the result that the proper context for parenting is less and less available to us. It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.”

They add: “In adult-oriented cultures, where the guiding principles and values are those of the more mature generations, kids attach to each other without losing their bearings or rejecting the guidance of their parents. In our society that is no longer the case. Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children’s primary sources of orientation. What is unnatural is not peer contact, but that children should have become the dominant influence on one another’s development…… Culture, until recently, was always handed down vertically, from generation to generation. For millennia, wrote Joseph Campbell, “the youth have been educated and the aged rendered wise” through the study, experience, and understanding of traditional cultural forms. Adults played a critical role in the transmission of culture, taking what they received from their own parents and passing it down to their children. However, the culture our children are being introduced to is much more likely to be the culture of their peers than that of their parents. Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation….”

Another book I’ve recently completed is Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, a memoir by Margaret Renkl.

It contains short chapters with introductory illustrations by her brother.  Renkl’s narrative left a sense of familiarity. Her descriptions of the natural world, mostly the world of her back yard and street, and her awe and empathic connection to the creatures and plants in it resonated with my own thoughts and feelings in relation to nature and creatures that cross my path; however, unlike her I don’t know the names of all the different species of birds, insects and plants. This experience of awe and empathic connection that has in my case resulted in my feeding and taking care of almost a dozen cats in my garden, something I had never planned on doing, but happened gradually after the passing away of our dogs, as the garden became a free zone for stray cats.

This is a photo of the ladder from which my husband fell off as he was trying to screw the new polycarbonate glass sheet on the pergola, which is too heavy for me to move and has now become a playground for our female cats.

Below are some excerpts from Renkl’s book:

“….. there is another game I play in church with Mother Ollie’s hand. I take it in my own and pat it smooth, running my finger across its impossible softness, marveling at the way it ripples under my finger, as yielding as water. My great-grandmother’s skin is an echo of her old Bible, the pages tissue-thin, the corners worn to soft felt. I gently pinch the skin above her middle knuckle, and then I let it go. I count to myself, checking to see how many seconds it can stand upright, like a mountain ridge made by a glacier in an age long before mine. Slowly, slowly it disappears. Slowly, slowly it throws itself into the sea.”

“Safe, Trapped: Inside the nest box, the baby birds are safe from hawks, sheltered from the wind, protected from the sharp eye of the crow and the terrible tongue of the red-bellied woodpecker. Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow’s beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.”

“Flowers that bloom in the garden are called flowers, and flowers that bloom in the vacant lot are called weeds.”

“I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”

Finally,  poems from Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl, playwright, essayist and poet.

On homesickness, back when I travelled

….. And I thought:  / at home in the world  /  The endless desire to be / at home in the world……

Differences between me and my dog

 …. She eats from a bowl on the floor;  /  I eat from a bowl on the table.

She always bears small irritations with grace;  /  I sometimes bear small irritations with grace……

Crossing

The water rushes / and it doesn’t stop rushing.  /   We help each other cross.

Shelter

To love a house not  /  because it’s perfect, but  /  because  / it shelters you

To love a body  /  not because it’s perfect but  /  because it shelters you

Books as food

 Change the body by / what you fill it with; and so   /   too the mind – with books.

 Freedom

I will interrupt   /  my own mind. Instead of others   /   interrupting me.

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Hospital ward 111

Some drawings, a meditation practice and a poem

“Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.”
[from Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not by Florence Nightingale}

“Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”
Florence Nightingale

“No stride is lost when we keep walking!”  Vassilis Vasilikos,  prolofic Greek writer, served as MP and Greece’s ambassador to UNESCO.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My husband has landed himself in hospital for a few days after falling off a ladder while working on a pergola, which resulted in his breaking several ribs.  As a result I’ve spent many hours in a hospital ward with six beds all occupied by men with different health issues, some having undergone surgery and others in the process of going into surgery. While sitting quietly by his bed as he naps I’ve had time to observe and think. Mabel Osgood Wright wrote that there is no greater garden for human-nature study than the flotsam and jetsam of the hospital.  Hospital contexts easily bring us in contact with an inescapable vulnerability that has to do with our often having little control in relation to our health, which is also a significant aspect of our common humanity. Despite our individuality, our diverse identities and backgrounds, experiences, personalities, characters, neuroses and defenses we all share this deep vulnerability and we are all inherently susceptible to suffering.  Hospitals are places where circumstances bring very different people together and where we experience or become witnesses to how things we often take for granted, when we are more or less healthy, like our bodies, our moving our limbs, showering, peeing, getting dressed, eating, breathing, swallowing, can suddenly fail us or may require strenuous effort and assistance from others.

Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is a clinical professor of medicine and one of the foremost voices in the medical world today, shining an unflinching light on the realities of healthcare and speaking passionately about the doctor-patient relationship. She is also a founder and editor of Bellevue Literary Review, the first and now an award-winning literary journal to arise from a medical setting. It provides a forum for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction about health and healing. Ofri reads poems to patients and hands out free copies of poems and this literary journal to the medical and nursing staff.  One of the poems she often reads is a poem written by John Stone, a cardiologist and poet, for a graduating medical class, who believed that literature could instill in young physicians the importance of their patients’ and their own humanity. He created one of the first medical school courses combining literature and medicine. Below is a short extract from his poem: Gaudeamus Igitur [Therefore, Let us Rejoice]

For the sun is always right on time  / and even that may be reason for a kind of joy

For there are all kinds of / all degrees of joy

For love is the highest joy

For which reason the best hospital is a house of joy

even with rooms of pain and loss    /    exits of misunderstanding

For there is the mortar of faith   /   For it helps to believe

For Mozart can heal and no one knows where he is buried

For penicillin can heal   /  and the word   /   and the knife

For the placebo will work and you will think you know why

For the placebo will have side effects and you will know  /   you do not know why  /

For none of these may heal

For joy is nothing if not mysterious

For your patients will test you for spleen   /   and for the four humors

For they will know the answer   /   For they have the disease

For disease will peer up over the hedge   /    of health, with only its eyes showing……..

I also like to think that in hospital settings for many people on both sides of the fence good wishes for others arise spontaneously.  So, I will end this short piece today with two versions of a loving kindness practice, which cultivates unconditional goodwill for all.

A loving kindness practice / meditation by Sharon Salzberg:

May you live in safety

May you have mental happiness /peace / joy

May you have physical happiness / health / freedom from pain

May you live with ease

A loving kindness practice by Jon Kabat Zinn:

May she, he, they be safe and protected and free from inner and outer harm.

May she, he, they be happy and contented.

May she, he, they be healthy and whole to whatever degree possible.

May she, he, they experience ease of well-being…