It Takes a Village - Sometime, Our Own

September 28, 2011 Residing at the Helm Being Your Own Village Simple survival requires us to be in possession of many skills. The pursuit of dreams requires many more. Most individuals rely on the support of a village, whether peopled by relatives or community members, to effectively address the numerous ways we need assistance. This can mean anything from asking favors of acquaintances and leaning on loved ones for support to paying a skilled artisan to handle specialized tasks. However, each human being is born with the capacity to be their own village. We embody many roles throughout our lifetimes, all of which are representative of our capacity for self-sufficiency and self-determination. In different moments in our lives, we are our own counselor, janitor, caregiver, cook, healer, teacher, and student. Our willingness to joyfully take on these roles grants us the power to maintain control over the direction our life’s journey takes. In times past, human beings learned all of the skills needed for survival. Today, the majority of people specialize in a single discipline, which they hone throughout their lives. Thus, many of us feel uncomfortable standing at the helm of our own existence. We question our ability to make decisions concerning our own health, happiness, and welfare, and are left feeling dependent and powerless. But the authority to take ultimate responsibility for our lives is simply a matter of believing that we have the necessary faith and intelligence to cope with any circumstance the universe chooses to place in our path. Proving that we can each be our own villages through action enables us to accept that we are strong enough to exist autonomously. Cooking, cultivating a garden of fruits and vegetables, undertaking minor home repair, or adopting a healthier lifestyle can help you reassert your will. Being your own village does not mean embracing isolation, for a balanced life is built upon the dual foundations of the inner and the outer villages. Rather, being your own village is a celebration of your wondrous inner strength and resourcefulness, as well as an acknowledgment of your innate ability to capably steer the course of your life. Sometimes we need to be our own village and utilizing all of our skills and learning more.

Looking for Mr. Right

"Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep...

Wait for the one who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you're just as pretty without makeup on... The one who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have you....

The one who turns to his friends and says, 'that's her.'"

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Two Notables

It's the birthday of British novelist Rosamunde Pilcher (books by this author), born Rosamunde Scott in Cornwall, England (1924). The author of 27 books — romance novels and popular women's fiction — Pilcher is best known for her 1985 The Shell Seekers, a worldwide best-seller that described what it was like to live in Britain during WWII. Its success helped her 14 grandchildren go to college, but it didn't change her life "stupidly," as she said, with mink coats or Rolls Royces.

Pilcher's most recent book was Winter Solstice, published in 2000. She told the trade publication Book Reporter then that she was unlikely to write another book, adding, "But we shall see." Pilcher turns 87 today.  She said, "Budding authors, be self-disciplined. It is a lonely job. And LISTEN to experts."

On this day in 1888, the newly established National Geographic Society began producing the National Geographic magazine, a scientific journal with no photographs, for their 165 members. The small group of men had as their mission "the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge."

In spite of its global interests, National Geographic was rather a family affair when it started. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, an early investor in the first telephone company, was the first president of the Society; when he died, his son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, took over. Bell personally financed the expansion of the magazine, hiring Gilbert Grosvenor, the man who would soon become his son-in-law, as the editor-in-chief. Grosvenor eventually took over as the Society's president ... and then his son held the position ... and then his grandson.

Along the way, the magazine transformed from a dry, scholarly periodical with a dull brown cover to one renowned for its coveted maps and pioneering photography, and the Society grew from a small, elite group to one with millions of members, funding projects like Jane Goodall's studies of chimps and Jacques Cousteau's underwater exploration. All of which suggests, given the five consecutive generations of family members at its helm, that nepotism isn't always a bad thing.

It's Never Too Late

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Benjamin Button (Slightly Adapted)

From the movie: 'The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button'

Mary Oliver

It's the birthday of poet Mary Oliver (books by this author), born in Maple Heights, Ohio (1935). She had an unhappy childhood and was sexually abused as a very young girl. She spent most of her time outside, wandering around the woods, reading and writing poems. She once said to a reporter: "I don't talk about my childhood because it's time we all get a new subject." She wrote a poem about skipping school to spent time outside, called "Violets." It begins: "Down by the rumbling creek and the tall trees — / Where I went truant from school three days a week / And therefore broke the record — / There were violets as easy in their lives / As anything you have ever seen / Or leaned down to intake the sweet breath of."

From the time she was young, she knew that writers didn't make very much money, so she sat down and made a list of all the things in life she would never be able to have — a nice car, fancy clothes, and eating out at expensive restaurants were all on the list. But young Mary decided she wanted to be a poet anyway.

Oliver went to college, but dropped out. She made a pilgrimage to visit Edna St. Vincent Millay's 800-acre estate in Austerlitz, New York. The poet had been dead for several years, but Millay's sister Norma lived there along with her husband. Mary Oliver and Norma hit it off, and Oliver lived there for years, helping out on the estate, keeping Norma company, and working on her own writing. In 1958, a woman named Molly Malone Cook came to visit Norma while Oliver was there, and the two fell in love. A few years later, they moved together to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Oliver said: "I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours. [...] If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did."

She published five books of poetry, and still almost no one had heard of her. She doesn't remember ever having given a reading before 1984, which is the year that she was doing dishes one evening when the phone rang and it was someone calling to tell her that her most recent book, American Primitive (1983), had won the Pulitzer Prize. Suddenly, she was famous. She didn't really like the fame — she didn't give many interviews, didn't want to be in the news. When editors called their house for Oliver, Cook would answer, announce that she was going to get Oliver, fake footsteps, and then get back on the phone and pretend to be the poet — all so that Oliver didn't have to talk on the phone to strangers, something she did not enjoy. Cook was a photographer, and she was also Oliver's literary agent. They stayed together for more than 40 years, until Cook's death in 2005.

Last year, Mary Oliver published her 20th collection of poems, Swan (2010). It includes the poem "Beans Green and Yellow":
In fall it is mushrooms
gathered from dampness
under the pines:
in spring I have known
the taste of the lamb
full of milk and spring grass;
today it is beans green and yellow
and lettuce and basil from my friends' garden —
how calmly, as though it were an ordinary thing,
we eat the blessed earth.

She said: "I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay."

Two Days Before 9/11

And, on the heels of Mom coming home from the hospital
after having quite a traumatic experience.  Nothing REALLY bad just that she hated being in the hospital.  Who doesn't?

Hope
Knows no fear.
Hope dares to blossom
Even inside the abysmal abyss.
Hope secretly feeds
And strengthens
Promise.
Hope passes beyond,
Far beyond
The abyss of despair.
Let us not underestimate the power of hope.
No matter how fleeting its life,
It offers to us the most convincing
And fulfilling power.
Yesterday's failures
Must be forgotten.
Tomorrow's new hope
And new fulfilment
Must be cherished.
Hope is not a momentary flicker.
Hope is Eternity's slow, steady,
Illumining and fulfilling height.
Hope is sweet.
Hope is illumining.
Hope is fulfilling.
Hope can be everlasting.
Therefore, do not give up hope
Even in the sunset of your life.
By Sri Chinmoy (August 27, 1931 – October 11, 2007) an Indian spiritual teacher, poet, artist and athlete.

Ernest Hemingway - Life and Death

It was on this day in 1952 that Ernest Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea (books by this author). For years, he had been living in Cuba and working on an epic novel about the sea, but he couldn't quite get it right. So he decided to publish a small piece of it, just 27,000 words long, which he called The Old Man and the Sea. He released it in the September 1st issue of Life magazine, which cost 20 cents. That month, it was published by Charles Scribner's Sons for $3.
The Old Man and the Sea was a big comeback for Hemingway. His last major work had been For Whom the Bell Tolls, published 12 years earlier in 1940. In 1950, he published Across the River and Into the Trees, a novel about a 50-year-old colonel dying of heart disease who is on his final duck hunt and thinking about his romance with a beautiful 18-year-old Italian countess. It sold fewer than 100,000 copies, all the critics panned it, and there was a general feeling that maybe Hemingway's best days as a writer were passed.
The Old Man and the Sea changed all that. The Life version sold more than 5 million copies in two days, and it was a best-seller in book form, as well. Hemingway said: "I'm very excited about The Old Man and the Sea, and that it is coming out in Life so that many people will read it who could not afford to buy it. That makes me much happier than to have a Nobel Prize." The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize, and two years later, Hemingway won the Nobel. He was unable to attend the ceremony because he had been injured in two plane crashes on a hunting trip in Africa, but he sent a speech to be read aloud. In it, he wrote: "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him."
The Old Man and the Sea was the last book that Hemingway published during his lifetime; in 1961, with his physical and mental health deteriorating, he committed suicide.

Hemingway wrote: "The shark swung over and the old man saw his eye was not alive and then he swung over once again, wrapping himself in two loops of the rope. The old man knew that he was dead but the shark would not accept it. Then, on his back, with his tail lashing and his jaws clicking, the shark plowed over the water as a speed-boat does. The water was white where his tail beat it and three-quarters of his body was clear above the water when the rope came taut, shivered, and then snapped. The shark lay quietly for a little while on the surface and the old man watched him. Then he went down very slowly. 'He took about forty pounds,' the old man said aloud. He took my harpoon too and all the rope, he thought, and now my fish bleeds again and there will be others. [...] It was too good to last, he thought. I wish it had been a dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers. 'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'"

It's the birthday of writer

Art of Life

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~ Stella Adler

Love Cures All

Hope is not the closing of our eyes
to difficulty, risk or failure.
It is trust that if we fail now,
We shall not fail forever.
And if we are hurt,
We shall be healed.
It is a trust that life is good
and love is powerful.

Author Unknown

But Very Much Appreciated!

Mary Oliver Poem

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Covered Bridges in Vermont Collapsed in Hurricane Irene - SO SAD!

Hi Bonnie,

Yes, our session with Dr. Favorite went very well.

He's amazing.  Really interactive (unlike most therapists)

and skilled, a great listener, has goals, keeps us moving

but with compassion, intelligence and empathy.  I think

he's God's gift to us at our time of need, don't you?

I'd be happy to go see Ma more often in lieu of you coming, again.

You don't have to do that.  I can pitch in---more than--next week.

Take her to the doctor on Wed.  The whole shabang.  It's not

necessary that you come---unless YOU WANT TO.

Next Tuesday at 11 AM is the new season of THE VIEW.

Let's all be sure and watch that.  Hope Ma doesn't have an

appointment at that time!  Monday, there's no Camelot.

Nor Tuesday.  It starts up again on Wed.  Besides, Ma would

need a passport, remember?  It doesn't look like she'll be able to go,

and I know she wouldn't agree to riding 3 hours, anymore, in the car.

So, think about if you'll go with me just the two of us, sometime before it ends

Oct. 30th.  I know it's difficult for you to be in Michigan and not take Ma, but

she wouldn't go.  Too far.  She even told me she can't ride to Ann Arbor, anymore.

I've made some good inqueries into assistants for Ma.  I came right

home and got right on it.  Will let you know what I discover as I

turn up good leads.  But I spent about 2 hours on it today after our

session with Dr. Favorite.  He gets us going.  He's amazing.  I'm so

happy we went to that talk at the library and met him, and he took

us on----aren't you?  He's trying to work out he schedule to continue

including you on the calls.  Maybe start meeting on Fridays in the future.

Tonight, I'm distraught over the covered bridges in Vermont collapsing.

I've been reading about several of them and watchng You Tube Videos

of one totally coming down in the wake of Hurricane Irene.  Built in 1870.

Plus much damage has been done to 2 beloved covered bridges in Woodstock--

the Quechee Bridge and the Taftsville Bridge---both of which I know/knew well.

This is a travesty, as the trusses were built by hand in the 1800's and can NEVER

be replaced, again.  They can build them out of steel and modern technology,

but the glory and nostalgia of the origins of these bridges are now gone forever.

People aren't aware of what's happened in Vermont.  The travesty that's

just occurred.  I wasn't, either, until I started hearing about it and reading

up on it this evening.  Now, I'm devestated, too.

I wrote to Mary and another carriage-driver friend in W. Windsor, VT

and am awaiting replies.  I'm in shock--as are millions of folks in Vermont.

All for now.  Nighty-night.

Luv,

PEP