domestic bill of rights

In order to be free to live as I see fit, I hereby declare that I have the following rights:

• I can clean anything anytime I want to.
• I can organize any space I want to.

And so do you!

haiku philosophy

Haiku are for physically busy people who have spaces to experience nature and reflect on it.

navigating by heart

Do I have anything to say that's worth hearing? What specifically can I transmit that someone would want to hear?

Smells like depression.

I'm at the point where I drive myself to avoid the emptiness of hanging out with myself – just like everyone I know who is running hard from depression.

I remember savoring moments, stealing them, rejoicing in the magic of being alive and being uniquely myself.

How do I find myself back there from here?

the moon outside time

I can record my thoughts for anyone who might read them. I don't have to have a designated audience.

How much of what I have read has been just that: a howl across space and time with no idea who or when is on the other side.

boredom is the mother of creation

When you are bored, CREATE, don't consume.

Let the fertile void within you open to the cosmos so you can give birth to something beautiful and new.

kimchi family tree

In an ambitious mood right before a road trip, I purchased vegetables for the next round of kimchi.

I’d decided to branch out, so I bought a tremendous amount of daikon, mei choy, leeks, and carrots. I also found some bird’s eye chilis and a precious jar of genuine wasabi powder.

(Items labeled ”wasabi” are often plain old horseradish colored green and mixed with hot mustard. I had originally planned on using fresh horseradish as the wasabi component of my kimchi, but there was no fresh horseradish, so I was delighted to find genuine wasabi.)

I ran low on time before the road trip. I was in a quandary. The vegetables would be worse for wear after a week in the fridge. During the early stages of fermentation, vegetables require a lot of care. If I jarred them up and left them for a week, they might bubble up, and overflow the brine, leaving the top vegetables dry and susceptible to mold. I needed to start the vegetables in a big container and include enough brine to protect them no matter how vigorously they fermented.

The day before I left, I set the vegetables up to self-brine in a 2-gallon mixing bowl. I sliced the vegetables and mixed them with salt to draw water out of the vegetables and make the brine. I stirred them every few hours to disperse the salt evenly. That evening, I added leftover brine from an earlier batch of kimchi and stirred some more.

Right before I left town, I put a plate on the veggies to weigh them down and topped with a generous quantity of salt water. Ordinarily, I try to self-brine as much as possible and keep the salt water to a minimum. In this case, I wanted to make sure that the vegetables would be okay on their own for a week. I covered the bowl and went on my trip.

I returned home to the smell of fermentation. I peeked in the bowl and saw nice bubbly brine without any signs of undesirable growth. I went to bed untroubled and slept the sleep of the just plain tired.

The next morning, I got out my half-gallon jars, canning funnel, pickle weights, and air gaps. I went to work.

I sliced a couple apples and a big ginger root and layered them in the first jar with the fermenting vegetables.

The second jar got spoonfuls of vegetables interspersed with handfuls of bird’s eye peppers (about half an ounce of dried peppers).

The third jar got lots of vegetables and occasional careful sprinkling (less than a teaspoon total) of wasabi powder.

I had only a hazy idea of proper quantities of any of these seasonings.

I’m excited to see what happens.

the teapot lid scandal

Blearily, I boiled a kettle and set about making tea. 

The lid of the teapot sat, wrong side-up on the counter, broken along the lines of a six-pointed star. Right in the middle was the round button handle of the lid, right-side up. It looked like a strange pottery flower that someone had deliberately created and left as a message to me.

It also looked like it had fallen gently and broken during normal use and been left there so I would know it was broken and not waste time looking for it.

I decided to make myself a cup instead while I pondered the mystery of the broken teapot lid.

My husband denied everything and prophesied that no one else would admit to knowing how the lid broke, either. Other potential informants were still sleeping. I was tempted to awaken them, but did not.

I threw the broken lid away. 

We've broken tea crockery before. I knew that you can't buy a replacement lid for this teapot. I had made a mental note to save the lids of any broken teapots. I couldn't recall whether I had ever actually done so, and, if I had, where I had put them.

The teapot was somewhat worse for wear and tear. It had lost the edge of its inner rim, but the damage was stable, and it still worked perfectly fine. I could buy a whole new teapot, but I didn't want to.

I rummaged through likely corners, finding a white lid from a slightly smaller teapot. The fit was precarious, particularly with the broken rim of the teapot. Digging deeply through the top shelf of another cabinet, I found a teapot lid the exact size and color of the one that had broken.

My husband watched my victorious hunt while he spread peanut butter and raspberry jam on his morning toast. We chatted all the while, and he returned to his man-cave, toast in hand.

My sleeping son stirred, and I moved to the side of his bed to see if he would awaken. As soon as he opened one of his eyes, I spoke.

“Do you have a story about how the teapot lid came to be sitting broken on the counter like a perfect flower?”

“Yes.” 

That one word told me the rest of the story.

“It almost looked like it was sitting there and just decided to break. All the pieces were right there, so it must not have been much of a shock or there would be pottery shards all over the kitchen.

“How about I make some tea?”

more reinvention

I had some leftover white chicken meat I was going to put on a salad. The chicken was a little dry, so I wanted to marinade it in some kind of dressing for a few hours before making the salad.

My husband had bought a new kind of salsa, which turned out to be blah and uninspired. I decided to use it as the basis for my dressing. I mixed in some coconut yogurt for its creaminess, and a few other things until the dressing was smooth and tangy.

While eating the salad, I realized that I had reinvented French dressing.

I don't like French dressing.

sam what am

toxic caterpillars
feathery clouds drift
against the sky

unsettled weather
the stellars jays scout
nesting sites

empty teacup
a crow tries to chase
a seagull

play it again

write what's real
expectations drain
into the earth

summer salt
the junco flicks
her white tail

abandoned projects
the tsk tsk tsk of insects
in the maple

and rolling

housework
oh give me space
to breathe

evening light
an old pickup growls
its way home

stretch my wings
head for the mountain
over yonder

haiku keep on rolling

A little loose on the seasonal references and juxtaposition, perhaps, but at least they have kireji.

give the girl
some paper
her tea goes cold

same old view
every single day
fresh breezes

morning prayer
inspiration
move me brightly

when life gives you rainbows

Share them.

The second one shows the double rainbow more clearly.

While this one reveals a portal to a magical world.

don't go breaking my top

Santa Claus brought me a Whirl-o top: 

It has an LED that lights up when it spins. 

It has a tin gizmo that you flick with your wrist to get the top spinning. 

It launches itself from this gizmo when it gets going fast enough. 

Until today, the LED lit when the top got spinning and went off when the top slowed down. 

After a spectacular launch earlier today, 

the LED started lighting when the top was stationary and turning off when it got moving. 

The top glowed on the kitchen table for a few hours. 

Soooo, after trying to fix it by launching it a couple score times, 

I decided I would have to put on my big engineer glasses and 

take it apart. 

After locating it online so I could show y'all, 

I noticed an 800 number on their website. 

I decided to call and ask, 

expecting to get a bored order fulfillment clerk who would think I was a Class A Idiot 

for thinking they might care to help me fix a $10 toy. 

Instead, I got an excited person who was quite interested in what had gone wrong. 

He explained it to me in some detail and told me 

what I needed to do to get the top functioning again. 

The second hardest part was finding a tiny Philips head screwdriver 

(which appears to have gone missing from my eyeglass repair kit.

 I decided to go ahead and use a tiny flat head screwdriver. 

Don't faint.) 

I got the three tiny screws out. 

After some fiddling and a few test drives 

(cleverly NOT putting the screws back in until I had verified the fix), 

I found the middle spot where the guy had told me the tiny spring fitted. 

The top then returned to its customary behavior. 

Then came the hard part, 

which was getting the screws back in properly. 

This top has always worked amazingly well 

(the all-tin ones spin longer, but the LED model is way cooler). 

It has had hard daily use from most of the members of my family, 

who are a little jealous that I got the coolest toy for Christmas this year. 

I can now say that they have wonderful tech support. 

The Retro Space Blaster is coming out soon, 

and will certainly be on my wishlist to Santa this year. 

ta da!

A few weeks ago, I was looking to update my celery spread.

I'd been spreading plain tahini on celery, but I wanted something that spread more easily. I also wanted a little saltiness.

I mixed the tahini with a little lemon juice to brighten it, and thinned it with a little water to make it a nice, spreadable consistency.  I added salt bit by bit, tasting as I went. I added more lemon juice, more water, more salt and stirred and stirred.

When my new spread was pretty tasty, I thought I could do a lot with this basic sauce. I could spice it up. I could add parsley and olives. I could cut the salt, thin it, sweeten it a bit, and serve it over fruit.

I was really proud of my invention.

Right up until the moment I realized that I had just painstakingly reinvented hummus.

warning: may cause clipping

The Overton window is outside the bounds of the Overton window. It's a rhetorical device masquerading as political theory. It attempts to put bounds around the acceptability of political discourse. You can try to move or stretch the window if you don't like where it is, or try to figure out where it is and meekly stay within it. If you're in politics, you'd like to control it, keep your opponents within it, and move it in your direction.

The idea and expression of where the Overton window is seems to sharply depart from what Actual People (tm) think and say about the issues. As a box, it's far too small to be useful.

Let's deprecate it and move on to more fluid ways of thinking about public discourse.

swinging your fist

You don't have the right to:

• Take another person's life.
• Shoot a human being.
• Hurt anyone.
• Assault someone.
• Coerce anyone.
• Touch another person without their permission.
• Harass anyone.
• Bully another person.
• Threaten a human being with bodily harm.
• Interfere with someone else's bodily integrity or self-determination.

If you do any of these things, you are not exercising your rights. You are violating the rights of another human being.

alarm buzzer

alarm buzzer
finally you can
go back to sleep

how parenting is like management

You're responsible for everyone and everything.

You know that one person can't do it all herself, so you form support networks and delegate responsibilities to the kids.

You know that a well-organized, well-cared-for crew is both more pleasant and more effective, so you plan ahead to keep things running smoothly.

You're a master of logistics. You can organize a tricky release schedule or a 3-week camping trip for 10. You have a clear sense of the effort required to pull off a venture, and you can scale preparations to both the task and resources available.

You're flexible and think quickly on your feet. Life tosses you a lot of curve balls, and you have the grace and the experience to hit the sweet spot when it does.

You've honed your set of priorities so that you spend your energy on tasks that are worth the effort. You have a good sense of when an  emergent issue needs immediate attention and when it will distract and dissipate energy from more important goals. 

You remain calm and centered even in difficult circumstances.

You know that people aren't difficult on purpose just to annoy you. They are difficult because they need something they're not getting. You have the understanding to cut through the crap to get to the essential issue and the tact to solve the problem so that people feel good about the solution.

was that so hard?

dated 20 July 2017, 2 weeks after breaking that cuboid bone

I'm sitting in the ice asana, with my broken foot semi-propped on two pillows and the other leg arching around the edge of the pillows.

It's a posture that has become second nature in the past two days. Since my misadventure with the garden step, I've spent a lot of time in this chair, ice-pack-wrapped foot hoisted high. 

It's ridiculous, and I often think that I should just take up my bed and walk. My left foot soon clues me in that I can't just walk away from this problem. One minute, I was an ordinary able-bodied human, and the next I was splayed on the concrete with a broken foot.

"It's not bad," the doctor told me when he'd seen the x-rays, "just a bad sprain and an avulsion fracture."

I believed him. Not bad meant that it didn't need surgery or to be casted. A boot and crutches for 6-8 weeks would do the trick.

Yeah, but, not able to walk or carry much of anything for a couple months? The past few days have stretched into eons. So many things I do require two good feet. I never knew how many before I had a foot that couldn't bear weight at all.

Every small task is a challenge requiring careful planning. There's something strangely good about this; it focuses the attention on the present moment.

I was not doing a good job of focusing on the moment or on my body, and so I broke my foot. The broken foot forces me to focus on my body and its every move. A spiritual lesson delivered from foot to brain.

My foot is my teacher. It teaches about balance and vulnerability, synergy and interdependence. It teaches me to be graceful about my awkwardness and sanguine about my instability. It teaches me that ramps are long and crutches wide. It teaches me how to pull my pants up while balancing on my right foot. It teaches me how to ask for and accept help.

healing view

dated 15 September 2018, 2.5 months after breaking the cuboid bone in my left foot

My foot, which seemed to have been improving, has lagged significantly the past two days. It's been grousing more and capable of less.

In body meditation today, my body informed me that it is fighting a war on two fronts right now. I'm fighting a cold as well as healing my foot. My body is diverting energy from my foot to deal with the virus. 

In healing my foot, there seems to be a regular cycle of pushing it a little, having it seem fine, and then having to scale back for a few days to give the body a chance to do a little remodeling. It feels like healing the foot depends on a little regular motion and weight-bearing to sculpt off the rough bits and show where the foot needs to  bend and bear weight. Take the foot out for a test drive and then tinker with it for a few days.

The last push was hard (full-on walking, on two feet with no crutches for half and then two-thirds my waking hours. This put significant wear and tear on my foot. The subsequent repair-and-revision phase will take a few days.

haiku retrospective cvi

the thin stream twists
from one teapot to another ~
morning oolong

spent tea leaves ~
the scent of almonds
and cinnamon

17 June 2000

undercover

the soul of the land
wears
a shroud of grass

In the coastal hills of California, the shades of the grass mark the seasons. During the rainy winters, the hills turn to vivid green velvet. You want to reach out and pet them, to feel their lush texture under your fingers.

As the dry season progresses, the grasses die and are bleached in the sun. The hills turn gray-green, then reddish green, greenish brown, dun, and then through all the shades of gold from bright to so pale it's almost white.

As the grasses die, they reveal the native plants that still hang on despite the invasion of European grasses. Adapted to our long dry season, these plants know how to manage their moisture, biding their time until the greedy grasses lose their grasp.

congress of fears

dated 19 July 2017, two weeks after breaking my cuboid bone

Every night, when I take my weary body to bed, I check in with my foot to see if it's getting everything it needs to heal. The foot aches, tingles, burns, and sends forth shooting pains to let me know how it feels about the current state of affairs.

Soon, other parts of my body clamor for attention. The right leg tells of the extra load it's been carrying. The muscles -- arm, shoulder, back, abdominal -- involved in crutching me around signal their stress. My low back and thigh muscles complain about the contortions that are required to keep the foot safe and happy.

Before I can sleep, I preside over this congress of sad body parts. I listen to their complaints, massage away little pockets of tension, shift around trying to make everyone comfortable. 

Let go, let go, it's okay.

I had some dental work yesterday, getting two teeth filled without an anesthetic. It was fine, a bit uncomfortable but not really painful. On the way home, my son (who had been numbed for his fillings) and I had a spirited discussion about pain relief medication.

I use pain medication conservatively. I'll get numbed for a crown, but not most ordinary fillings. I used opioids post-appendectomy, but not with most injuries. Drugs can mask pain, but pain is INFORMATION. Pain tells us when something is wrong, and it can help us avoid hurting ourselves further.

My son thought my avoidance of pain meds was moral. I specifically unpacked the issue of dental pain meds for him. I don't like the sensation of being numb. Most minor dental work isn't (in my experience) as painful as the shot in the gums to prevent the pain. I sometimes stay numb for 12 hours or more after the procedure. There's often soreness from the shot that lingers for a few days. With all that, I'd rather experience a little discomfort, and even some outright pain, during the procedure than deal with the aftermath of being numbed.

Lying in bed after that discussion, I smiled at my unorthodox methods of pain management. They go back, I realized, to my preparation for natural childbirth. I read so much about working with the birth energy, letting go of fear, and working with the pain instead of resisting it. I learned how to do it, and now here I am, over 18 years after my last childbirth, managing dental procedures and broken bones with the same tools.

I haven't thought much about childbirth tools in decades. I remember reading Grantly Dick Read's Childbirth Without Fear, trying to incorporate its lessons into my very being. 

The chief lesson was that fear makes pain much more intense. If you can meet the pain directly, without fear, you can handle it. You can experience the pain and learn what it has to teach you. You can ask the pain for its messages and incorporate them in your healing process.

a ladle story

I got my daughter a soup pot for Christmas last year. I had an image in my mind of the perfect soup pot for a single 20-something who likes to make a week's worth of soup on the weekends. It should be smaller than either of my soup pots, with a heavy bottom so that the soup wouldn't burn. It should be beautiful in its simplicity, well-proportioned with handles that make it easy to stir, to scrape out, and to clean.

I am often disappointed by reality when I have this perfect image in my mind. I go to a reliable store where I have found many beautiful tools and look at their selection. If I can't find what I want, I ask, and they lead me back to show me the too-big pots with thin bottoms and barely-welded handles.

That is not what I want for my child. I want a simple soup pot that can be a trusted friend through my daughter's life. I want a soup pot that whispers love and care to her every time she uses it, a soup pot that makes her life easier in difficult times.

I finally found the paragon of soup pots, and it made beautiful soup for my daughter through a winter of record storms.

In the autumn, my daughter said that she loved the soup pot, but that she wished she had a ladle to go with it.

After Thanksgiving, I embarked on the search for the perfect ladle. I had its twin in a drawer in my kitchen. All I had to do, I thought, was to find one just like mine.

I visited store after store, looking for that ladle. At every store, I found crappy black plastic ladles. At a few, I found flimsy metal ladles in awkward shapes.

Cheap tools are okay if you don't use them very often, or if they fill a function that's not that important. When you do the same task over and over, though, your tools take on greater importance. Dull knives, inadequate scrub brushes, and underpowered appliances can turn a humdrum chore into a major ordeal.

I debated whether ladles are that important. Perhaps a flimsy, inadequate ladle was better than no ladle at all. It could be replaced with better quality later, when the perfect ladle presented itself.

And yet, and yet, once you have a bad tool, it's difficult to justify replacing it with a better one. I struggled for decades with the Food Processor from Hell before getting a new one. Did I want to gift my daughter with an inferior ladle that would annoy her every time she served soup?

Finally, at a high-end kitchen store, I found the perfect ladle. It was much nicer than my ladle. It was forged of a single piece and had a turned lip that promised to serve soup beautifully. It was lovely to behold. It balanced exquisitely in my hand, and I could swing it easily from a single finger.

When I looked at the price tag, I had second and then third thoughts. Could I justify spending that kind of money on a tool that serves a single function, even one that has been designed with such care and built to last?

I eventually decided in favor of the ladle. I declined a bag and left the store with the ladle swinging on one finger. It was dazzling in the sunshine. I walked back to my car slowly, enjoying the feel of the ladle.

A man approached, on the other side of the street, walking in the other direction.

"I envy you your ladle," he called across the street, "I have a ladle, but it's a crappy black plastic one."

"It's for my daughter," I replied, and briefly recounted the search for this ladle and how I had balked at the price.

"She will love it," he assured me, and continued up the street.

I imagine him going to that kitchen store and buying his own perfect ladle.

My misgivings had vanished.