The calm before and after the storm

Well, week two of classes is about to start, and already things are hopping. Last week, I had three meetings, and I already have a bunch of "extra" stuff to do (writing recommendations for a couple students, writing an evaluation of a colleague, organizing some meetings I will be running this week, etc.). This semester has sure ramped up fast!

So I'm particularly glad that, last weekend, I took a little time out to enjoy the quiet, the calm before this particular storm. And in a way, coming after some weather we had, it was also the calm after the storm. We kept having snow every single day for at least a week. It was never enough to cancel school, much to Dexter's consternation, but it was really pretty. And seriously cold. There wasn't a single day where the high got above about 23 degrees for more than a week!

(This was the view from my desk...)

I went to a friend's house to talk fiber, and we bartered some things that I wanted & she wasn't using anymore for some things that she wanted & I wasn't going to use. I got a bread machine out of the deal and made a loaf of whole wheat beer bread--woohoo! It was a little heavy, but tasted good, and it made the house smell good. Every once in a while it would make a noise or two, and we'd wonder what was going on in there. I kept checking it by shining a flashlight in its little window; you know, making sure it was making bread in there just in case it decided to do something else.

I got to work on a knitting project with a deadline. (Today I barely finished that project in time for the baby shower it was intended for. Yikes!) Here's a photo of what my desk looked like a week ago--you'd think it was a fiber workstation, not a desk:


One of my favorite things about the day was the color of the air and snow and trees and dried plants in the fields as I drove to & from my friend's house. We have such gray, dreary skies most of the time in Ohio in winter, and on that day the sun came out. All of a sudden, there were colors visible that hadn't been there on the gray days. It was kind of like being in an Andrew Wyeth painting. My mood lifted despite knowing I was about to walk into the chaos & challenge of the spring semester. No matter: I was surrounded by beauty.

(Here's the sun just going down.)

We were back to gray gray gray today, and that was hard. But it's nice to remember that, when the sun comes out, I'll have all these colors to look forward to.

Hope you see some good colors today!
Karen

Good for what ails me

During the last couple weeks of the semester, things tend to get rough. That happened for me this year; and, possibly because I hadn't been through that particular ringer for a while (what with being on sabbatical in the spring and all!), it was particularly rough this past December.

So on the weekends I took some time to take care of myself, putting work aside for a day or half a day and indulging in the things that make my inner self sigh with relief, and even sing.

I played with yarn...

(This is the heel of a sock I knitted for my Secret Santa recipient.)

(I made a pair of wrist warmers for a friend who has helped our family this past year.)

(These are gift card holders--cute! even if I do say so myself.)


... and, thanks to a friend who let me come visit them, I played with these guys:


My friend warned me, "They'll be in your face. You might decide you like them better from the other side of the fence." She was right about one thing: they were certainly in my face. But I LOVED it! They nipped my scarf and my hood and my hair, sniffed my face repeatedly, bumped into me with their noses, and one (the younger one, on the left) even tried to steal my mitten right out of my pocket! It was great.

It was hard for me to get good photos because they wouldn't pose--they were too busy checking me out, and way too close for me to get them in the frame properly...

(Notice the coon hound getting into the act too, as she dashes by in the background!)

But, in the end, maybe these photos do a better job of reminding me what it was like to be with them... There were a few quieter moments--moments when they were a little more serious (or maybe just less goofy) and I stood next to them and listened what they had to tell me. I didn't understand a lot, but I got one message from them pretty clearly: the earth is strong and solid and will hold you up just fine.

Whew! It was nice to be reminded of that.

And then, after a moment of being profound, they'd go back to nipping my scarf.

Here's my favorite photo because it's the view I got the most often:

Sniff sniff, everyone!
Karen

A Merry Christmas indeed!

We had a nice holiday break here--a little bit of resting, a little bit of straightening up the house and doing chores, a little bit of visiting with friends, a little bit of visiting with family. It's been a nice mix of doing some of the things we don't normally get to do when we're busy-busy with work.

(Here's Dexter playing at a holiday concert--one of three he played this year!)

We instituted a new practice at mealtimes in 2009: we hold hands, and each of us says what we're thankful for in our day. We used to do this only on special occasions--Thanksgiving and Christmas, mostly--but I realized that if I want us to be aware of what we have and what we should notice and be grateful for, perhaps we needed to articulate that more than twice a year.

The side effect that I like the most is that, on a bad day, when we're cranky or frustrated or sad about something, this activity makes us find something to feel good about. It's not that the bad stuff goes away or problems are solved, but we realize that they're not the only thing that's visited us that day; we've got something to be thankful for every day, something that stands on the other side of the balance, and we have to at least notice it and acknowledge it. That's a really great thing, some days...

Anyhow, with gratitude being a more visible presence in our life, it was easy to see this year that Christmas presents were the icing on the cake--something we definitely didn't need, but something we were happy to enjoy. And I have to say, it was especially magical this year that each of us got something we really, really wanted (the thing at the top of the "dear Santa" list) and something we really were happy to get even though we didn't expect it (something not on the list but definitely right for us).

I didn't get photos of everything, but here are some highlights...

Patrick has some helper-friends who are very cute--one new, one an antique.

This is one of my favorite gifts--a mini Turkish spindle, hand made my Ed Jenkins. It's a thing of beauty all by itself, and then it makes beautiful yarn as well!

Here's another of my faves:
Bobbins for my spinning wheel! Yay! My gifts seemed to have mostly followed the fiber-and-chocolate theme this year. Awesome!

Speaking of fiber, we didn't have any hay for the baby Jesus's crib this year, so we gave him some wool roving:

(Every once in a while, we come down in the morning to discover that someone has "rearranged" it...)

Even the cats loved their presents!

(Apparently, the kitchen table is a popular place for toys to try to elude their feline predators... but it never works.)

Poor Dexter--he was the one person whose knitting gift I did not finish in time. Here's how far I got by Christmas morning on the socks he specially requested & picked out the yarn for:
He's being patient, thank goodness. I've started the 2nd sock by now, but even if I went by the "Christmas has 12 days" rule, I don't think I'll be finished in time. Oh well. He seems to be sufficiently distracted from this shortcoming by playing "Spore," a computer game in which you evolve from a single-celled being to a space-exploring civilization (I use the term loosely).

All in all, it was a fabu Christmas.

I hope you enjoyed some unexpected gifts,
Karen

On discomfort

In the last week before Thanksgiving break, I was called on to present something about my work to my department colleagues. It's a new event that we've opened up to students as well, hoping to build community among faculty and students and share our scholarly/research work with each other. I put together a presentation called "Wounspe Lakota" (sorry I can't reproduce the proper diacritical marks there), or "Lakota Lessons," explaining some of what I learned on my sabbatical adventure--what it taught me about Lakota culture (inside and outside the classroom) and how that has changed my work as a teacher and/or scholar.

I had presented much of the same information near the beginning of the semester at a brown bag lunch for faculty from across the university, so I was ready. And the talk for faculty had gone amazingly well. It was great material, and I did a good job of presenting it. In fact, it was one of the few times in my life when I can remember thinking "wow, I'm doing good! I'm hitting this one out of the park!" (That kind of confidence is not my usual m.o., sad to say.)

(Here's the image I used, with "Wounspe Lakota (Lakota Lessons)" plus my name and whatnot printed in the cloudy sky, as my "title page" for the talk...)



So when I was presenting the talk for the 2nd time, in November, to a packed house, and things were NOT going all that well, I was a bit surprised. During that talk, I remember wondering why the same material was really not making a dent in my audience at all. It was awful--no one was smiling or nodding or anything. (Well, two of my colleagues were, but that's it.) It was as if I was presenting the material to a wall. I've since figured out a few key differences:
-- in the earlier presentation, my audience was faculty colleagues--mostly my friends, really--at a lunch; they were all interested in the topic for various reasons (it touched on their research, or they were interested in learning more about Native American issues);
-- in the November presentation, the room was packed, but mostly with students, most of whom I did not know;
-- in the earlier presentation, people were there because they wanted to be;
-- in the November presentation, most people were there to fulfill a requirement (a professor had told them they had to go for part of a class assignment); they had little, if any, real interest in the topic.

And, truth be told, I think I did a better job in the earlier presentation, mostly because I felt like what I was providing was really worth something to my audience; they cared about what I was saying, and so they interacted with me. In November, I felt myself getting nervous, and talking faster, and saying things in a less sophisticated way to try to reach my audience, try to make them show me they were hearing me. I didn't do as good a job, quite frankly. And I knew it.

I also faced some criticism from a faculty colleague whose opinion I respect. She has given me a challenge to re-think my position that I can't publish about this material because I would be intruding on Native American intellectual property... She thought that the way I went about my study was different from what literary scholars typically do, and that I need to think harder about how what I did may offer a chance to re-theorize about how someone like me (a white woman) engages in scholarship on Native American literature. It was a lot to think about, and I'm excited about the possibilities, and I'm thankful to her for pointing out my faulty logic. But it did sting a little.

So I was really uncomfortable with how things went, and unhappy. I felt I had let people down (including my department chair, and the people with whom I studied at Sinte Gleska). I let myself have a good cry about it that night, and reminded myself to try and separate my feelings from my performance so that I could figure out how to do a better job next time. I felt so uncomfortable that I had that "gotta run away" feeling, a taste of the flight part of the fight-or-flight reflex.

As I calmed down, still feeling extremely uncomfortable, I reminded myself, too, that discomfort is what we need in order to make a change. If this thing made me really uncomfortable, that meant that it would help push me toward doing something different.

And then something really weird happened. Over the four days following the November presentation, I got sick. Except I really wasn't all that sick. On the worst day (the 3rd day), I felt run down and had a sore throat, like I was coming down with a virus, and I stayed on the couch all day in my pjs, taking REST as my main job for the day. But the virus (or whatever it was) never blossomed; I got better instead.

(Here's a photo from November, the little creek on the edge of campus reminding me to let it flow...)



I'm really thankful that I didn't have the flu (like many of my students did), and that I never did feel worse than that Saturday, but it also made me intensely curious. Was I just worn out from working too much? Was that fatigue that made me feel sick? Or did it have something to do with that all-over discomfort that I'd had after the presentation? Did my disappointment and discomfort with my performance make me physically sick?

In the end, it may have been a number of things that made me ill. But I can't help but wonder about the links between how we feel emotionally (or spiritually) and how we feel physically. And I can't help but think again about the things I've been learning as part of my spiritual studies for the past few years, including a class called "Lakota Teachings in Health" when I was at Sinte Gleska for a month. Perhaps this incident was another way of helping me learn that our physical well-being can be inextricably linked to our spiritual well-being, that how we feel has everything to do with how we feel, so to speak...

So I'm taking this as a signal to try to take better care of myself on all fronts--emotional, spiritual, and physical. This is not easy to do in the season of hurry-scurry, of course! But it's certainly worthwhile to try, and it's certainly better than ignoring the "information" I got from my body and spirit that week.

I hope you find a moment to take care of yourself this week,
Karen

Wheels that are turning

Wow, nature is sure letting me know that time is indeed passing!

For about two weeks, we had absolutely gorgeous leaves on the trees. We have a lot of silver maples around here, so the colors were brilliant reds and yellows as I walked to & from school. Temperatures have dipped and then gone back up again. Twice. We even had an overnight frost already!


There was a day, about a week or so ago, when it was very windy, just after a day of rain, and those two days brought down almost all the leaves around here. (The photo above: a Golden Rain tree, quite beautiful! It held onto its leaves a little longer than everyone else.)

Everyone is raking or blowing or mowing the leaves now, and the trees are just about bare. It's almost shocking to really take in the bareness of the branches. There is SUCH a difference...

And of course, with the time change, it's darker now way earlier than it feels like it should be. The sun really starts declining in the west around 3 or 3:30, and that's just a little unsettling. (Here comes the dark! Get your chores done and get inside!)

But it's more than just the number of daylight hours that's different... it's the quality of the light, the way it feels, that I've really noticed. Maybe "declining" is a good word for it. Like the leaves, the sun is showing us the dying of the year, showing us our movement toward night and death and quiet and sleep. Not necessarily a comfortable place to be, especially when I've grown up in a culture that fears and shuns death and decay...

Death is awful. It takes something or someone away from us; it brings pain and regret and grief. (Is there any emotion more painful than grief?) When death takes something away from you, one of the worst feelings is that you can't fix it, no matter what you do. It's awful.

But this year I realized something: that the beauty of the fall leaves and the reminder of death came together. I actually thought, as I drank in how beautiful the sky looked, and as I now enjoy swishing through the leaves on the sidewalks, that this is death--this, too, is what death means. There's beauty here. Maybe this year I'm on the verge of learning something new about death...

And it helps that at the same time all this was happening, I was teaching Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" to one of my classes. He has such beautiful and heart-wrenching things to say about death. (I'll copy here a photo of "Uncle Walt" toward the end of his life...)


In the 6th section, where he says that the grass seems to be the "beautiful uncut hair of graves," he ends that section with this, about the dead:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

(I just love that poem... I'm glad I get to explore it again every couple years with my students...)

For us, the living, the turning of the wheel of the year means that we'll be able to see the ways in which life quite literally continues even after everything seems to die. We'll witness the miracle of re-birth in the spring. But for now, I'm happy to contemplate death in a way that's not scary, that makes room for mourning but also appreciates its unique beauty.

I hope you have a chance to linger over something beautiful today!
Karen

P.S. In other news of wheels that are turning: we had a march on campus & through a part of our town in support of SOCIAL JUSTICE, and in support of our faculty colleague who was handcuffed at gunpoint at his office. It went really well--it was a great turnout, including faculty, staff, students, and even some community members & children of faculty/staff. The speeches were really good, and the feelings among the group were great. I hope it turns out to be a raising of energy and strength so that we can all continue working on behalf of social justice, continue speaking out when something goes wrong... As several people said there: this is just the beginning; our work has just begun.

P.P.S. As far as I can tell, there haven't been negative repercussions from my letter. Most of the feedback I got was quite positive! No matter what, I'm proud that I worked up the courage to say something out loud about how I felt... Here's hoping I can keep that up!

Speaking out... even if my voice shakes...

My usual m.o. here at the university is to try to fly under the radar. I figure if I work my butt off, teach the heck out of the stuff I'm here to teach, and keep my head down, everything will be fine. If the administrators here hardly know my name, that's okay with me; I'd rather not be the subject of discussions, opinions, etc. I don't like the idea of people saying negative things about me, of course, but I also think it would turn my head too much if I knew they were saying positive things about me.

(A side note: I almost feel that way about student evaluations as well. They are certainly more useful to me in terms of knowing what's working in my classes & what's not, so I pay attention to them. But I get really uncomfortable being evaluated. Unlike my colleagues, I have never checked my reviews on the "rate my professor" web site.)

I'm working very hard--and have been for some years now--to develop that inner knowing that Emerson writes of (I'm teaching some of his essays this week), that voice that tells you whether something is good or not, true or not, and doesn't need to listen to the opinions of external voices. It's hard for anyone to develop this skill--that's why Emerson had to argue for it!--but I think it's especially hard for women, or at least women of my disposition and my generation, to turn off the voice that says "don't do that, it might make people upset/unhappy/angry."

So today is a big day for me because I'm stepping out of the shadows, stepping into the public square to speak my mind, and it scares me a bit. I've written a letter to the editor of our school newspaper, which covered the story of my colleague's incident last week (the incident I described in my last post). Maybe in a future post I'll share that letter; suffice it to say it's critical of the actions of the police, both during the incident and since then.

Have I just made a huge mistake? Maybe. Will it come back to bite me? Maybe. But those things are less important to me, at this moment, than doing what I think I need to do. I'm drawing strength from my guardian angels (ignoring, of course, the question of whether they're there; I need them, so they have to be!), walking carefully forward, and doing the best I can. And if it was a mistake--if I have to deal with a mess later--then I will ask for help and walk carefully then, too.

Tomorrow I might have different advice, but today it's this: Stand tall! Walk strong! Speak out, even if your voice shakes!

Karen

Gone fishin'?... and a pressing issue

So... I've been writing every day--lesson plans, journal musings, memos, e-mail messages. But blog entries? Not so much.

I've actually had ideas about entries, things I want to write and communicate about, but find myself stymied because I want to include a photo; every blog should have good photos, right? And the process of uploading stuff from my camera to my computer seems like such an insurmountable task these days. Maybe I'll find some quiet time tonight--I wonder if I could spin or knit while my computer is crunching away...

School is intense, particularly after having LOTS more unscheduled time recently. I keep looking at my calendar and thinking, "who put all this stuff on here? I need to fire that person." :)

Life has brought me some beautiful and intense things to process the last couple months. We went to South Dakota in late July, and I was able to go back to the rez and visit, participating as an observer/supporter at the Hollow Horn Bear Sun Dance. I have no photos of it (it's not allowed; and anyway, you wouldn't take photos if you were participating in a ceremony in church), and it meant so much to me that it's difficult to put its impact into words. But I'll give it a try... soon...

For today there's something else on my plate. I've got a little time to meditate before heading to school, and quite frankly, I need it. A friend/colleague of mine was the victim of police threats the other night, a gun pointed in his face while he was working late in his own office. IN HIS OWN OFFICE.

You've probably heard of DWB, "driving while black"; this seems to be a case of WWL/H, writing while Latino/Hispanic. I'm astounded, and feeling a jumble of sadness, outrage, and disgust. I'm worried about the place we're bringing up our son. I want to take to the streets and shout about how I am not going to put up with this kind of crap in my town and on my campus. And at the same time, I feel called to send healing to the whole thing, to muster any kind of energetic powers I can to help my friend and his family, my colleagues, our students. We're all so shocked and hurt by this, and in obvious need of healing. (Maybe even the cops involved need some help--certainly, some clear-sightedness about what they did...)

I think maybe the next few weeks will be a balancing act of sorts--learning how to carry the fire of fighting for social justice while also carrying the waters of healing. (I am an Aquarius; carrying water is my job, right?)

I'm off to do that work.

May you find peace today,
Karen