Noticing the beauty here today

I sat on my front porch, watching the rain pelt the sidewalks, streets, and the lovely highbush cranberries in my front yard. They are one of my favorite plants in my yard, and not just because they provide a wall of privacy between me and the street. The skies were grey and moody and the wind was gusting and purposeful. I sat alone on my porch and I looked at the small rings of delicate white flowers that come each year on the cranberry bushes. They are the precursors to the berries, and one of my favorite moments in the lushness of spring that we can mark by flower: crocus, daffodil, tulip, lilac, lily of the valley, bleeding heart, iris, and the tiny pink circle of buds surrounded by soft, rounded little white flowers of the cranberry bush.

I love spring rains. But after a couple horrible years of flooding in the area, rain has taken on a different edge for me. I used to welcome with abandon the rushing rain, the rivulets in the street, and the puddles in the driveway. I still love it all, but there is now some part of me that also says, “Please don’t give the Kickapoo River too much. Please don’t take away people’s homes or crops, or shops.”

I sat on my porch, tucked against my house and out of the rain, considering how things come and go. A fine mist covered my bare arms and legs. I was cold. I sat watching the white flowers of the cranberry get dashed to the ground. Little white flowers dotted the steps of my porch, the front sidewalk. I wanted to see the bushes one more time the way they were before the rain wiped them out.

I wondered if it would be the last time I would see these bushes this way. Every year, my garden gives a gorgeous parade of flowers and plants. Who knows what will happen between now and the next blooming of the highbush cranberries. I don’t have any plans to miss them. But it did occur to me that you just never know. It did occur to me as I sat watching the rain that it’s good to soak those beauties in, to really notice them, and to be glad that I get to be here at the same time.

Women and men: equally different

When I was about 19, I remember a man who I was attracted to talking about another woman. David said, “Yeah, she sure knows how to make you feel like a man.” He said it to another man, and I overheard it. I was meant to overhear it; it was a message for me, an underscoring of a complaint that this man had made to me already. I, apparently, didn’t know quite as well how to make him feel like a man.

At the time, I remember being disdainful of his attempt to scorn me into more womanly behavior. My thinking at the time was along the lines of “Buddy, if you don’t know how to feel like a man, how is any woman supposed to fix that for you?”

I was annoyed that David wanted me to be kinder, softer, and gentler so that he could feel stronger, more in charge, more able. He wanted me to need him more. This has been a theme for me with men. Men like strong women…they are turned on by their charge. But the actual dealings with strong women can leave some men feeling like they’re not quite sure where they fit, what they’re needed for. 

Looking back on this situation twenty-five years later, I can see David’s point better. I still think that men and women have to feel their own inherent strength and value first and foremost. But I can also see the ways that we can bolster one another and value what is different about being a man from being a woman.

We’ve spent so much time and energy working to give women equal standing, equal value in the world. We surely have a ways to go in this good work. But equal doesn’t mean the same. We are—men and women—pretty distinctly different creatures.

It may be that I’ve just become kinder, softer, and gentler. I’m rather exuberant about what I like about men. That’s okay with me. Because today, the way I see it is that while we are different creatures, we all just need to know that we’re loved and respected.

This conversation got me thinking about how, after years and decades of gender battles, conversations, and ponderings, men and women still fall pretty neatly into their classic categories.  

Not all men. Not all women. I know it gets messy and that there is a grand spectrum. But in general, women tend more toward the feeling, caring for others, scene-setting, and socially collaborative end of the spectrum and men tend toward the individualist, analytical, get-it-done, and fix-it-up end of the spectrum.

And we all need to feel affirmed and accepted for wherever we happen to fall along the spectrum. I think back to David and that’s really what he was asking for: he wanted me to honor him, to respect him, to delight in his “man-ness.” Why shouldn’t he want that? And why shouldn’t I give him what he wants if it doesn’t hurt me?

When we are living in the physical world, the divide between men and women can seem more obvious. Forgive me for all the ways this isn’t true, I know there’s nuance that I’m glossing over.

But even after all the years of women’s liberation, and the fact that the both genders have become more adept at what has been traditionally “women’s work” or “a man’s job,” we still break down by gender in so many ways.

The other day, my car needed a jump. I didn’t even consider calling any of my women friends, although they certainly would have been perfectly capable of jumping my car. Is this because I think women are less capable? Hardly.

 Men may do more housework and child rearing than ever before (thank you!), but women are still the primary caregivers predominantly. And most women like it that way. Sure there are women who like to work on cars and build buildings, but this is still, mostly, men’s work. And most men like it that way.

Men carry pocketknives; women carry wet-wipes.  

But what about doctoring? Don’t we need both pocketknives and wet-wipes? What about engineering and management and leadership? Don’t we need both sets of skills?

When we get in an office environment, the required skills for success don’t break down as seemingly naturally (naturedly?) as they do in physical work. The other day, I was talking to a CEO about all the women he has in his upper management. It’s a great team. One of their enterprises is deep-sea drilling. The CEO told me that while a couple women have gone through the training, all of them have dropped out before taking a job in the harsh, physical conditions that the job requires.

I’m happy for the woman who wants to try to do such a thing that she is able. And I’m not at all surprised that it’s men—big, burly men—who do that work.

There was, for a time, an argument that men and women are fundamentally the same and that our differences arise from our nurturing. I would invite anyone who is still under this delusion to raise one of each and see what happens. Okay, individual anecdotes aren’t compelling data. But just be around mothers raising babies for a couple decades. It’s abundantly clear that boys and girls are drawn to different projects, excited by different activities, comfortable in particular clothing, and landing—for the most part—firmly on their gender’s expected side of the spectrum.

We can be uncomfortable about this reality, or we can simply accept it and do our best to equally recognize, compensate, and respect what a man is, what a woman is.

Go ahead, baby, make me feel like a woman.

A garden, a surprise

When I was a kid, one year my family had a garden plot in a community garden. I remember loading up into our big, brown, Buick station wagon. The five kids, the hoe, the rake, the shovel. I don’t know that I did much of the digging or hoeing or weeding, but I remember the fun of being there all together, watching our garden grow.

My mother has always had gardens. She had whole yards of tomatoes and peas and cucumbers and kale and lettuce and green beans and basil and oregano and thyme and rosemary. When I was a kid, a raspberry patch took up the whole south side of our house. And marigolds. Where ever my mother gardens, you’ll find marigolds. Sometimes the big, one-colored bright yellow or orange ones, but mostly the smaller, more private, more nuanced, and behind-the-scenes yellow, orange, and red combinations.

“Marigolds are good for gardens,” she tells me. 

My last garden of my own was many years ago. I had a big garden on a piece of land and I loved going out in the hot sun and watering the plants, weeding around the onions, propping the tomatoes into place. But as the summer progressed, I went out less and less until I felt, finally, that I had abandoned my garden. Several weeks later, I returned to the garden with my kids. We first went to the strawberry patch. We had these amazing ever-lasting strawberries and they lived up to their name. There were still strawberries, well into the summer.

After such encouragement, we went and looked at the rest of the crops. There they were! Full, beautiful cabbages, ripe tomatoes, onions ready to be harvested, broccoli, and more chamomile than I knew what to do with.

It was an enlightening moment for me. The land, especially the land around here, with some of the richest soil in the country, is ready to grow food. I just need to help a little bit.

I’m ready to do it again. Today, my kids and I start planting in the garden in my back yard. My mother helped me get it ready. We took my compost and we threw in some worm casings and a bunch of dark compost from a local farmer. It is small and it looks great. I wouldn’t have done it without help, but now that there’s a black patch in my backyard, I’m excited to be out there. I’ve been watering the plot every morning.  My kids and I are off to the farmers’ market to pick up some plants. I saw some beautiful tomato plants there a couple of weeks ago. I hope to find some kale, and some cucumbers. My mom started basil inside and she gave me fifteen of them to put in my garden.

As these things happen, some friends brought me raspberry bushes from their garden. I put them on the south side of my garage, close by the garden. Isn’t it funny how once you start something, suddenly the rest of the world tends to support it?

If it’s in my backyard, maybe I’ll be better about tending the garden. Molly, my five-year-old, loves to weed. And watering is fun for everyone. We’ll put up some structure for the cucumbers to climb on, and maybe we’ll even have some green beans. We’ll see how it goes. Who knows what we’ll end up growing.

One thing we know for sure: there will be marigolds.

Technology post script

After writing the post this morning about television and other technology (see below), I went for a walk with my five-year-old daughter. We walked past a phone company. Outside, in front of the building, Molly puzzled at a piece of archaic technology standing at the entrance: a phone booth. “What is it for?” she wondered.

Molly has recently learned how to dial her grandmother’s cell phone number and she delights in talking on the phone. But this thing didn’t look like anything she knew about.

“It’s called a payphone,” I told her. I explained how you put in two quarters and push the buttons and then it calls someone.

“Can we do it?” she asked with all the enthusiasm of a kid investigating a new game.

I didn’t have time to stop and make the call; someone was waiting for me. I would have offered for Molly to use my cell phone to make her call, but that was hardly the point.

Life without television: what does that look like?

A few years ago, I wrote a story about turning off the television and doing other things with our lives. I admitted such things in the story as that I could count on one hand the number of movies I’d watched in the past two years, and that my kids don’t watch any television, and very few movies.

It was fascinating to see how people responded to that. “Whoa…Anne, you’re kind of hard-core, huh?” Even in my world of Waldorf parents, where limited media is meant to be a value, I was a pretty extreme example. My thirteen-year-old recently shocked her new friends when she mentioned that had never been to a movie in a theater before. She has since seen “The Lorax.”

Yeah, well. There are a lot of reasons for keeping them out of theaters. Yes, one reason is that I think most media produced isn’t worth my brain space. This extends to my kids. I marvel at the cliché and stereotypical plots and characters that I have seen. Anyway, big, loud, and dark rooms don’t seem to appeal to my children.

Also, I have so many things that I want to do in life that I don’t do already. How do people manage to watch a bunch of television, movies, and do the rest of their lives? I don’t get it.

I don’t feel particularly pious about this. I don’t feel hard-core. We’re just living our busy lives. And we have lots of books to read and lots of games to play.

Most of the time, after sitting for two full hours with someone, watching a movie, I want my two hours back. Or I want to wipe some of those images out of my brain. Or I want to actually talk to the person I was sitting with.

I completely get the idea of cuddling up with popcorn and someone you like to watch something fun. I can do that. But if you want to sit for two hours and look in my eyes and talk to me, I’m much more likely to enjoy the night. And I’ll make the popcorn.

It may be that I exhaust people. But I do make excellent popcorn.

My house isn’t media free. We have computers, we do watch some things. My children know how to look up their songs on YouTube and my oldest still at home has an email account now. She also has her own cell phone. I am on the computer plenty, although I try to shut it down when I’m not actually working so it doesn’t call to me.

The Washington Post recently weighed in on the technology question with kids. Waldorf Today reran the piece, which you can read here. It talks about two Ninas, one who goes to a Waldorf school with no technology and one who goes to a school with a technology focus. Both are high-end Washington, D.C. schools.

So, what about you? Do you watch television? Is it on just for your favorite shows? Do you keep in on all the time, like company? How do you find the time to do everything else and still watch television? What would you do without television?

What is your top priority of the day?

How easily I can fool myself at dawn. When the sun is creeping in my window and my bed is soft and warm, it is easy to imagine I’ll have time later.

If I just roll over and close my eyes again, I’ll be better able to deal with what comes today. And somewhere in the mix of that day, I’ll find the time to stretch and move and breathe deeply and sit quietly.

But it’s mostly a fantasy if I don’t get up before everyone else. It turns into a struggle to hide in a room somewhere, turning off computers and phones and ignoring doorbells and people who just walk in and say, “Helllloooo?” I love those people who just walk in and say “Hello.” I could spend a lot of time with them.

If I am to write, to move, to sit still, dawn is the moment. So much easier to do it first: to greet the sun and do the work that I love, that I crave, that my body and my mind want. Good morning, new day. And now what?

Sleep: How do you let go of the day?

The other night, I spent a fair amount of time with one child who was scared. It was midnight and I was tired. But there was no way that this one was going to sleep. So I sat beside her until sleep came.

Children get scared and don’t sleep. The dark is scary, the open closet door is scary, and under the bed is scary. That lurking unknown something is scary.

But sleeplessness doesn’t end in childhood. Adults, too, have a hard time sleeping. We call it insomnia or anxiety or restlessness. We may not worry about the open closet door. But we lie in bed and wonder how we’re going to make the mortgage payment, or whether our son is actually going to his college classes, or if our boss will support our project, or if our marriage is falling apart, or if we should move to Tibet.

Life gives us a lot to consider. And for many of us, the chance to lie down in the dark may be the first moment of the day for these many considerations. Our minds start the work of processing that conversation with our sister, that interaction with the rude store clerk, the beautiful bouquet of flowers that our aunt sent.

Oh, but to sleep. How can we do anything without sleep? Sweeter than the purest nectar, sleep is a balm, a tonic, a literal life-saver. If this doesn’t ring true to you, if you are one of these people who say, “I only need five hours of sleep a night,” I encourage you to look at the research. It says things like people who sleep eight hours a night live longer, healthier lives. They don’t gain weight as easily. They have better sex. They’re more productive and have fewer accidents. They are happier.

We improve so many of life’s struggles with sleep. So what do we do when we’re too scared to sleep? Too anxious to sleep? Too thought-full to sleep?

There are a lot of answers to those questions, of course. But the shortest and easiest answer I know is: we pay attention to our breathing.

Breathing doesn’t get as much respect as it might. Sometimes, we take it for granted. But it is nothing less than the source of our lives. And that source is pretty powerful. When we watch and listen to our breath, we calm ourselves, we steady our minds, and we ease our bodies. It is impossible to have a steady, calm breath and a racing, frantic mind. The two don’t go together. If you manage your breath, you calm your body. Then you can sleep.

Going to sleep is about letting go. It’s about trusting that life is working. It’s about knowing that you’ve done what you can for one day and that the only thing left to do is to sleep.

When I was a kid, I was lucky to have some key lessons in how to sleep better. When I was very small, my mother would sit by my bed and tell me that it was time to pack up everything that happened during the day and put it on a shelf until tomorrow. This wasn’t a literal packing up of toys and books and clothes, but a psychological packing up of worries, excitements, and wonderings. I didn’t need to forget about them; they would be there for me to unpack in the morning. But there was nothing to do with them at bedtime. It was time to sleep. That shelf might have been heavy some nights, but it held the work for me while I slept.

I also remember a friend of my parents sitting with me one night at bedtime. I was excited and didn’t want to sleep; there was a party in the next room. This woman changed my world by telling me that I could breathe through my toes. She talked to me about breathing deeply and feeling the breath come in through my toes, go all the way through my body and back all the way out again. Over the years, I’ve developed and learned a lot more about breathing and relaxation, but breathing through my toes has gotten me through a lot of life.

As an older child, at about eighteen, when I was filled with existential angst and deep concerns about the state of the world, another woman gave me another trick that changed everything.  

She said to me, “You need a worrying time.” The idea is simple: don’t ignore your worries, but don’t allow them to take over your whole life. Give them their time, each day. As a young woman, I spent twenty minutes a day worrying. I’d pack a lot into those twenty minutes. I’d consider all that could go wrong, I’d grieve for the small girl in Nicaragua who lost her whole family to the war, and I’d wonder what would happen next in my life. If any of these thoughts came to mind during the rest of the day, I could assure them that they’d have a chance the next day, during worrying time. Other than that, they had to leave me alone.

Over time, worrying became less of an issue for me. Today, I still sit for at least 20 minutes a day, and I practice—not worrying—but focusing on my breathing, and allowing my thoughts to come and go without following them, without getting caught up in them.

When we can train our minds to be calm and let go of thoughts, even for just a time, we can go to sleep more easily.

At midnight, I asked my girl to consider her breathing. She was unconsciously holding her breath, something fairly common for many people. At first, she was annoyed with the idea, her mother’s perpetual focus on her breath. “I can’t,” she said in exasperation.

But I ask her to keep trying. You’re going to focus on something, so what’s it going to be: the creature in the closet or the calming in your chest?

Then I just started a little thing that works every time. Imagine the clear blue sky, I said. The sun is warm and the air is still. Maybe there’s a little yellow butterfly whispering about. The sky is clear, blue, soft and calm. Breathe that blue sky into your feet, I say. Breathe that blue sky into your calves…your knees…your thighs. Relax into the clear blue sky. Fill your body with the clear blue sky. You are the clear blue sky.

She can’t resist the lull of the words, the soft images, and the overpowering gentleness of the kind blue sky. By the time I reach her head, she’s already asleep. We’re both ready to let go of the day, and let sleep do its magic.