blackberry…
honeysuckle…
the heady swoon of privet…
tumble down amidst the blossoms
…the deep cool stream of life…
drunken with the scent of bliss,
the surface laps irrelevant…
the deeper dive,
the will survives…
another spring bears fruit.
Archives for category: Emotions and Actions
Heroic poses
No one ‘noses…
It’s a tumble-down, fumble-clown, mossy hill to roll…
Trice we might
Try as we might
As long as we laugh,
It’ll be okay.
My son talks with me a lot.
The conversations are often challenging, but words cannot convey the depth of love, pride, and amazement I feel when he asks questions that I doubt many 15-year-olds ask anyone.
And society teaches us that Autism is a disability. Makes you wonder.
Now, he may wish I were dead before this is all over, but I’ve decided to start writing about our conversations.
Some of the topics don’t belong on a blog that’s not rated “mature”, so I’m afraid you won’t hear about those (except in thickly veiled terms). But many of them seem quite universal. And having these conversations with a young adult who looks from a very a-typical point of view sheds a sometimes poignant perspective on the topics.
“Mom, am I a bad person?”
My heart wrenches, just remembering those words.
This question arose in the car on the way to school one morning, the day after he had told me about three incidents at school.
Incident 1:
“I kinda got in trouble today because I threw fluffy seeds on a kid when we were outside.”
Oh, he didn’t like it, huh?
“No, I guess not.”
Well, it might help to remember that, just like you can’t stand it when other people sing, other kids at school have their things that they can’t stand. So maybe this kid doesn’t like fluffy things.
“Yeah, maybe.”
So, why did you do it, anyway? Did you mean to upset him, or were you teasing him? Or you just wanted to see what he’d do?
“Well, I was doing this story in my head where this other guy and I were doing a joke to throw fluffy seeds on him, and see if it made him turn fluffy… And that kid just happened to be there.”
Oh, so you were doing a story, and it wasn’t even about the kid you threw the seeds at?
“Right.”
Oh, okay. Well, just try to remember that you don’t like people singing around you, so it’s nice to be considerate of others when you do things to them, and ask yourself if you think they’d really like it. Okay?
“Okay.”
Incident 2:
“Well, there was this other thing that happened…”
Yeah? What was that?
“Well, I kinda went ‘Arrghhh’ (gesticulating a lunge) at SingerBoy today because he was singing and I didn’t want him to.”
Ooooh… Wow, that’s pretty agressive! So this is back to having consideration for others, isn’t it?
“Yeah…”
So, what did SingerBoy do when you did that?
“Well, he kicked me in the… you know…”
(I’m sorry – I couldn’t help but laugh…) Gee, I hear that really hurts!
“Yeah…”
So you must have really made him mad. Maybe he thought you were picking a fight. And you know, maybe his Dad has taught him to fight back when someone picks on him…
(silence)
And you know he really loves to sing… Just like you love to do your stuff. You wouldn’t like it if someone lunged at you for leaving bits of sticker paper on the floor, would you?
“Well, no…”
Incident 3:
“This little kid asked me what I was playing on my DS today, and I said, ‘Well, you don’t really need to know; it’s rated Teen’. And then he said, ‘Oh, Ghost Recon. That’s nothing. I play Halo.”
Such confusion. To the literal mind, never in the world would a 10-year-old be playing Halo, of all things! So I focused on the tone of voice.
You know, it sounds like you might have been talking a bit like a Know-It-All… People kinda don’t like Know-It-Alls…
(silence)
Do you know what a Know-It-All is?
“Well, I guess not… Someone who knows everything?”
Explanations ensued. How we make friends. How we think about other people’s feelings. How we try to get along with others (amazingly, he was actually listening).
How, in a school, where EVERYONE has something that drives them nuts (since it’s a school especially for kids with ADHD, Autism, Asperger’s, etc.), it’s especially important to understand that we never know what’s going to push someone’s buttons…
(silence)
Do you know what “Push Someone’s Buttons” means?
“Well, no…”
More explanations.
The things we take for granted, assuming others automatically understand…
All in that 30-minute ride home. It was enough of a dose of parenting to last us both all night. I tend to focus so much on trying to help him understand “appropriate” (read: expected) behavior, hoping he’ll get less-blind-sided by life that way.
Yes, he thought about it, so much so that by the next morning, he was worried that he might be a “bad person”.
Geez, is there any part of parenting that’s not guess-work?
I wonder if priests feel this way when they hear confessions. At least with my son and our long commute, we can spend the aftermath doing damage control.
It’s far more fun spending half an hour telling my kid how awesome he is, and how the other kids might have gotten ‘talks’ too (since in many cases their actions deserve a little discussion, as well), and watching the smile and raised eyebrows of relief spread across his face… than it is to lecture on how we should behave in order to keep out of trouble.
Thank goodness both sink in.
And like magic, the next day is a good day.
Swirling vortex, sheer force of will …
Tornadoes possess the powerful ability to clear and raze anything that cannot withstand their relentless forces…
Outer tornadoes may be seen clearly with the physical eyes, and felt with the outer senses. They instantaneously generate fear and respect as well as sympathy and kind actions.
Inner tornadoes clear the ground in intensely personal ways, sometimes undetected by our inner radar before they barrel through our lives… They mysteriously transform in ways that may become apparent to others only over time…
Here’s the finished version of the sketch I posted two days ago…
I added color, hoping this will carry the eye about the piece more so that the different components pull together and tell a story.
The eyes open the window to the soul…
They also comprehend and mis-apprehend…
One look into a person’s eyes can reveal a lifetime of emotion, experience, revelation, and connection.
Hope (that’s her in the upper left corner…), even the tiniest hope, can light(en) fresh buds to spring from amidst the wilted refuse of exhausted promise…
(techie note… this is my first – completed – piece with digital watercolor. the ink-work was done by hand with a fountain pen. i think i’m hooked…)
I love meditation. But this post is not about meditation; I’ll get to that later.
This post is a cautionary tale and a case for comparison.
I will never volunteer this story to my son… And I do NOT recommend that you try this.
I studied architecture in university. Instead of whining about it, I’ll just say this: it proved challenging for a budding Type-A Personality.
At the end of first year, when the last student had presented, the last critique had been rendered, and the enthralling opiate of sleep deprivation had kicked in, some friends and I piled into a vehicle (the more anonymous the better…).
We had swimsuits and beer. One of the party (not the driver) said, “I know where the highest cliff on the Anonymous River is.” Cool. We had all been teetering on edge for weeks in studio anyway… Jumping-off sounded like the thing to do.
So we drove.
Later: vehicle parked, swimsuits on… add beer. Don’t forget about the sleep deprivation. Scramble through the woods to the clearing.
There lay the river? No. There lay rocks, an edge, and sky.
My friends busied themselves opening beers. I’d already had a couple so I walked over to The Edge. I looked down.
(A contractor told me once that I have “calibrated eyeballs”. I had judged the distance between two objects from 40 feet away, and had been off by only 1/8”. Yes, I’m bragging, but it’s also true.)
I looked down at the water, and guessed 75 feet. There were rocks, too.
I looked up at the sky, and I thought of the previous year… and all the years before that, when I had so carefully avoided unreasonable risk.
I muttered to myself, “Well, if I don’t do it now, I never will.” I leapt – eyes wide open.
Have you ever fallen so far that you had a moment to think to yourself, “Man, this is really far!” before you hit? Your arms and legs start to flap uncontrollably from the air resistance.
I landed in a pike position. It felt like dissolving into concrete. I survived.
Exhilarated, I climbed back up the cliff, and did it again. This time I landed on my side, with arms and legs flailing… (Did I mention the beer?)
Twice was enough.
A week later, I found myself still trying to hide the bruises on my legs from my parents, and starting to feel back pain at work. Finally, I went for an x-ray.
The physician called me to look at the film, and as I wondered what those tiny bits of gravel were doing around my cervical spine in the x-ray – where bones should have been – I distantly heard him say: “Frankly, I don’t know why you’re standing here. You should be dead.”
My Mom, who happened to work for the doctor in question, shot me a look that could have finished the job… if I’d made eye contact.
Thus began six weeks of physical therapy, a budding romance with a home traction device, and an introduction to a variety of meds that put the beer to shame. That’s how I spent my summer.
It was about 12 years before I began to call myself “pain-free”, and even now, 30 years later, I dare not water-slide, bungee-jump, or ski… Mountain biking is probably out of the question, too. All for about 10 minutes of fun.
So maybe it suffices to say, “Kids, don’t try this”. But for years I carried a guilty secret that I sometimes whispered to my friends when I offered to tell their teenagers the scary story.
That leap thrilled me more than anything else I had ever done in my entire life.
I hoped that I would never actually be asked to sit down with a tween or teen to talk about it, because I didn’t want to lie. Now the dilemma’s resolved because I can end the story like this:
Plummeting through 75 feet of free fall might sound fun… but if you meditate, you can get the same thrill, minus the pain and the look of death from your Mom.
It does take a little longer, though… unless you’re a Dzogchen natural. You never know unless you try.
Please don’t go cliff-jumping, unless it’s into the Great Unknown.
I put together this little video…
We had a remarkable snow here in Atlanta a week or two ago.
On one of my walks I was struck by the sight of the melting snow running undernearth the crust of ice on the street.
It looked like the pavement was crying… reminded me of an essay I had written on Heartbreak…
jittery
flittery
all a-twittery
until the wink kicks in.
fluttery
cuttery
sometimes buttery
sometimes laced with gin (no, vodka)
leslee hare 