My mental circus, inside and out.

Check out the Antarctic adventures of this sister on Motime.  It's wonderful writing, reminiscent of Annie Proulx.

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 30, 2006 20:06 | link | comments (3)

Two women

Emma was rambling around the second hand stores yesterday with her son, who was putting together a Halloween costume, when he said, "The problem with this, Mom, is that you just don't know whether you'll end up wearing the clothes of a dead man."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Emma has encountered two disabled women lately who have caused her to reflect on body, art, and life.  She met Rosie at a benefit for a dance company.  It was held in the empty room of a mall, and all the young dancers were challenged to dance as long as they could, with people pledging money per hour.  An old family friend is in the dance troupe, so Emma went with grandson Max, who was very shy at first, hiding behind a chair, but by the end was jumping around imitating the dancers.  Emma talked to Rosie, who was in a scooter, and had some deformity of the feet.  Rosie was the financial director of the dance troupe and had encouraged all three of her children to participate in creative movement and dance, even though she herself could not dance, at least not in a traditional sense.   And yet she had bestowed this gift on her own children, now grown and gone, and seemed peaceful and happy as she watched the latest young dancers who had come under her care.

Last night, Emma met another disabled woman who is a literature and performance professor at a neighboring university.  A regal person with the mixed accent of the well-traveled, Petra talked about how she was traveling all around the country and the world putting together theatrical productions that bear witness to the disabled and disabling.

Two middle-aged women with canes.  Two women who took these physical conditions and transformed them into lives helping others reach new possibilities.  Incredible really.   After caring for her disintegrating mother, Emma knows how potentially close disability is to everyone's experience.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 29, 2006 19:35 | link | comments (1)

Desperately need a Halloween costume that takes only 5 minutes to make.

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 28, 2006 19:45 | link | comments (1)

Jericho

Emma always likes a good apocalypse, and so has been watching Jericho, the post-nuclear survival TV show which happens to be conviently available on demand.  When Emma was much younger, a good nuclear holocaust looked much more like The Day After, with pasty, ulcerated people wandering around the ruins in a daze and then dying.  These were so graphically, realistically violent that everyone *worried about the children watching,* and being traumatized for life. When Emma visited the 9-11 Ground Zero, the images in the NYC museum were very much along those lines, people covered with ashes and dust, and fine paper drifting down on the city like the trace of bodies. 

So now Jericho, which is the most benign apocalypse one could possibly imagine, just a group of people in this town behaving pretty much like what America thinks it outta be, people looking out for each other, quelling disorder, protecting the crops and sharing the foodstores. We are definitely not in the world of Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog.   Is it because the threat has changed somehow?  The bombs go off in the distance.  They do not touch us.  Not really.  We conveniently find abandoned trains stocked with food.

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 28, 2006 09:12 | link | comments

Thoreau's dying

There's a fabulous talk by Joseph Goldstein on audiodharma.  It's so full of thoughtful interpretations and advice on the dhamma that Emma has been listening to it quite slowly.  There's a point at which he talks about the death of Henry David Thoreau.  (Emma is a *huge* Thoreau fan.)   Thoreau was very young when he died of TB, but as he was dying, his aunt was trying to convince him to make his peace with God, and he told her, "I did not know we had quarreled."  More wonderfully, he said that there was "as much comfort in perfect disease as in perfect health."  Goldstein interprets this from a Buddhist perspective, that Thoreau was wise enough to know that awareness accepts with equanimity--is at home with, finds peace in--the flow of experience, whatever it brings us.  What a wonderful being Thoreau was, whether he was making a principled stand against slavery or watching the pond.

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 26, 2006 20:20 | link | comments (1)