Month: January 2011

Dear Friend:

I’m just writing to say that I am totally digging citrus fruit this week. Especially oranges and grapefruit. I like their heft in my hand, their textured peels, the sweet smell of sunshine that explodes into a stale room when you open one.

I’m just writing to say that I truly know my Scandinavian blood this time of year. How it sings its melancholy songs in my ear unless I go outside and move, fast, in the arctic air. Then all I can hear is the crunch of my boots and the warm blood pumping through my body.

I’m just writing to say…

…that I still love working with students, their energy and brightness. Three of them improvised in my front yard when the snow wouldn’t pack for them.  Their hugs and their laughter kindled a flame in the cold. (I’m enclosing a photo)

…that in January, happy thoughts – not just those sad ones that sometimes pop into my head – can as easily bring me to tears as to laughter.  Its a toss of the dice every time, to see which it will be.

…that the long winter nights are too quiet.

…that I’m thinking of you and wish you were here for the sharing of citrus and laughter and brisk walks. And to fill the silence with our endless talking.

I guess I’m just writing to say…I miss you.

Love vs Power?

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:

“…Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience…

…And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality…”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
16 August 1967

Where does creativity come from?

I am reading Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet by Matthew Fox.  The book is provocative, as is its author. (Fox, a proponent of Creation Spirituality, was censured by the Vatican, officially “silenced”, and dismissed from the Dominican order)  To illustrate, the title of Chapter 5 asks the question:  “Is original sin the refusal to create, and is redemption the liberation of creativity?” I haven’t gotten as far as Chapter 5 yet, but I am interested to read Fox’s answer.

Back in Chapter 3 (“Where does creativity come from?”) which I read earlier today, the following quote struck me:

“Artists need an inner life just like everyone else.  They also need an outer life, that is to say, a cosmology, an awareness of how we got here and what “here” constitutes in its holy vastness and its unimaginable diversity and creativity.”

As I thought about this concept, two artists whose work has had a significant impact on me came to mind.  The first is Faith Ringgold, whose story quilts offered an entirely new idea of art and the artist’s role to me when I viewed them for the first time in the late 1980s.  The second is my cousin, Stephanie Failmezger.  Stephanie has created a medium she calls “bead mosaic”, which is unique and which she often uses to express her cosmology.  Her latest piece, made up of 24 3-inch beaded quilt squares promises to bring together her influences (such as Mexican art) and the profound spiritual vision underpinning her artistic vision.  While Stephanie and I don’t share the same cosmology, the appeal of her work is that this subtext is expressed so eloquently that her pieces can, literally, be read on many levels.  They speak to the heart even while the mind is grappling with the technique used.

While I don’t have any hard and fast answers to the question asked in the title of this entry, I do believe that it is worth asking not only where creativity comes from, but who is the one doing the creating?  These are questions I am trying to answer for myself.

(I encourage you to check out Stephanie’s work at the following link http://www.facebook.com/pages/SRF-Creative-Studio/113765095304197 )

Florentine Hash Skillet

The recipe for Florentine Hash Skillet was found in an article (in Eating Well magazine) on healthy, fast breakfasts, and is a rarity I couldn’t pass up:  a recipe for one serving!  Of course, I also couldn’t pass it up since it has just 226 calories and is a good source of vitamin A, folate, calcium and iron. Oh, AND it takes about 10 minutes to make, start to finish!

As usual, I deviated slightly from the original recipe.  First, I had fresh spinach so I used that rather than frozen (I cooked the potatoes a little by themselves since fresh spinach didn’t need the same time in the skillet that frozen would have required).  Also, as you can see from my photo, I added some additional vegetables to the recipe.  I had sliced mushrooms, diced red peppers, seeded grape tomatoes and sliced black olives (left over from homemade pizzas with friends the night before).

I don’t use any kind of rating system, but rest assured, all recipes I post have been delicious enough to be deemed “blog worthy”.  This one is no exception!

(Full recipe can be found on the recipe tab, above)

Politics of Spirit

Saturday night I was at a party at The Chrome Horse Saloon.  I arrived looking forward to spending the evening with friends, then did something a little out of character for me. I introduced myself to a stranger who seemed interesting.  What followed was a lengthy conversation which ranged through some pretty cerebral territory: political ideologies, epistemology, scientific inquiry, and changing the world.  Granted, this wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was both fascinated and energized by the discussion.

In fact, I was energized enough that the following morning I found the excerpt, below, from Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, which was tickling at the back of my brain during part of our discussion at The Chrome Horse.

“We capitalists have a long and crippling history of believing in the power of external realities much more deeply than we believe in the power of the inner life. How many times have you heard or said, “Those are inspiring notions, but the hard reality is…”?  How many times have you worked in systems based on the belief that the only changes that matter are the ones you can measure or count?  How many times have you watched people kill off creativity by treating traditional policies and practices as absolute constraints on what we can do?

…But the great insight of our spiritual traditions is that we — especially those of us who enjoy political freedom and relative affluence — are not victims of that society: we are its co-creators. We live in and through a complex interaction of spirit and matter, of the powers inside of us and the stuff “out there” in the world. External reality does not impinge upon us as an ultimate constraint:  if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment…

If our institutions are rigid, it is because our hearts fear change; if they set us in mindless competition with each other, it is because we value victory over all else; if they are heedless of human well-being, it is because something in us is heartless as well…

Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world.  Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility — and a source of profound hope for change.”

“We the privileged have conspired in our own imprisonment.” Pretty powerful stuff.  I know this is true for me, on the level of my daily choices and interactions, especially when I choose out of fear.  But I have also experienced change/transformation at the personal level, and this has been a spiritual process brought to fruition by action.  If, as the women’s movement attested, the personal is political, what we can do in our own sphere can also be achieved on a larger scale.

Therefore, I can’t help but imagine the possibilities open to us at the societal level if we were to bring the transformative power of spirit and consciousness to our political and economic constructs!  What world might we co-create then?  In a week in which we are witnessing the politics of divisiveness and hate at the national level (the shootings in Tucson, the Westboro Baptist Church) and locally (the movement to impeach the remaining members of the Iowa State Supreme Court ) it seems important to remember that we can step outside our comfort zones to create something new in the world.

What that new world might look like would make for a another great conversation at The Chrome Horse Saloon.


Clarity

In the night, the sickle moon shines over my shoulder.  Fingers stiff with cold, I thrust the shovel under new snow. Bend and lift with my knees. Throw the shovelful aside.

Thrust. Bend. Lift. Throw… Thrust. Bend. Lift. Throw.

The night, the cold, the moon, the repetition. Muscles tire, grow sore, slow.  Just before I finish, I straighten from my labor.  Moon and starlight sparkle across the backyard snowfield; something unseen drops with a rustle to the ground.

In my soul an unrecognized clenching releases.  I breathe deep, taking the cold down into my lungs.  For one crisp, clear moment everything pauses in the crystalline silence.

On the street, a car careens around the bend and the moment passes.  Suddenly I am freezing, thinking only of the warmth which waits inside.