What the Flower?

Ideas for bringing peace into the classroom:
This, quoted from the National Peace Institute course, "Teachers Without Borders":

"What the flower? One teacher spoke of how, in her work with high school students, their use of profanity, (the f-bomb) was getting on her nerves. She asked them if they would substitute the f-bomb with the word flower. Thus, instead of saying "What the f.....?!" They would say "What the flower?

She said that, much to her surprise, they really took to this practice. Not only did it solve the issue of profanity, but it also made them smile every time they said it, and it brought more joy into the classroom."

Small, simple, inexpensive ways to change the paradigm. I  think this is flowering cool!

Louis

Louis I Miss You

My grandfather, Louis, he's been gone
38 years ago this month
Tall and quiet, his angular face lined and serious
I still wonder if
he would be less serious
had his life been different.

Last time I saw him he bought me pancakes,
at his regular breakfast place.
"A short stack," always the same order.

Later, saying goodbye
Grama told him,
"Louie, give her some dollars."
(She called him Louie and gave him orders)
He fished in his pockets and
handed me four dollars in earnest
I had to take them, guiltily
Being a grandchild even at 19.
The last gesture I would ever know
from him
it broke my heart
and still does.

His oldest son, my Dad, has survived to live much longer
At the dinner table I say,
"Tell me about Grandad"
"He went around to the bars
In Milwaukie and as far as Sellwood
Selling his father's cheese. Grandpa made
Cheese in his basement."

I wonder what that cheese tasted like,
and what my Grandad looked like in 1910,
A kid of 12
Driving a horse cart around town
They wrapped cheese in cloth then
I wish I could have been there.
What a trick of fate that life does not let
the children know the elders
except in memory and story

Grandad, this is your story,
Us sitting in the pancake house
I'm telling you about college.
You are telling me about the railroad,
The Southern Pacific, because I asked.
What a fine man you are,
able to drive horse carts and fix
trains.

Passing Sugar Tree Road: A Valentine

I want to live on Sugar Tree Road,
even though it is only a green highway sign passed in a blur
from I-70, Missouri -
Before the thunderstorm that dumps
sudden waters from a featureless sky.

Lincoln campground, Illinois,
we pitch the small tent.
Eat 3 bean salad and deli meatloaf with
wine from styrofoam cups.

 Fireflies zip through the trees between
our campground and the endless cornfields.

How dear the night, your certain breathing,
miles from home in this
wet mid-western air
Lightening flash in rhythm
with the fireflies like a show.

I've never been here, I've always been here,
You are my heart's home.

Quinceanera Para Todas las Muchachas ~ una fantasia

The Mexican tradition of quinceanera is a little girl's dream. On or near a girl's 15th birthday she is  given a party which includes a very fancy Cinderella dress, several handsome young male attendants who can dance plus a gala for all the relatives and friends. The party lasts for hours, giving the guests lots of time to offer recognition and applause.

A few days ago in Zehuatenejo I watched this kind of party from a restaurant next door. The D.J had turned the loud speakers up to '11' if you get my reference here to off the charts loud. I know this party was for a young woman named Stefani Vargas. It was an extravaganza held at a beach front restaurant which I figured must have cost over 2500.00 dollars U.S. Lucky Stefani, her parents had to be part of the upper middle class in Mexico.

After watching the dancing and adorations from a distance, I went up to the cashier desk and began a conversation with the young woman who was working there. In the course of our talk (her English was very good) I learned that her name was Isabel, and that she was going to school during the week, and working at the beach on the weekends. She was eager to practice her English, so I was bold and asked her if she had had a quinceanera. She shook her head with a sad little smile.
"My family could not afford it." Our eyes met. It opened a conversation about life. We talked about our childhoods, and we shared that neither of us got parties like this one.

Her deep brown eyes  radiated positive and kind energy. She, of all girls, deserved to be celebrated. The unfairness of the world intruded into my beach day.
 In my own childhood there were financial limitations, and of course a grand party on this order was never even in the cards. It is not a Germanic trait to spend money on frivolous parties, which last for a day and then are just a memory. It is not practical, especially when there are nine children who would all have to get one.

A few days later in the park in Mexico City my friend Liliana and I were just about to start our yoga practice together. She pointed to a group near us, some boys and one girl who were dancing. She told me "They are practicing for a quinceanera dance."
"Ah", I said, "Yes, I just saw this."
 I asked her if she had one of those parties.
 "No." she said, with a shy little tip of the head. " My family could not pay for it."

As I write, my thought tonight is this: if I were queen of the world, I would give a giant party for all the girls who never got a quinceanera. We would all wear whatever fantasy dress we wanted and there would be lots of handsome dancing men. We could have crowns, corsages, giant cakes each with our own names. We would dance for days, while every name was spoken, every woman given the greatest attention for a moment, even for one moment. Una fantasia - a fantasy, my fantasy.

In the small dusty town of Kapula, known for its pottery, a little girl about age 5 smiled at me while I sat in the sun waiting for my friends. She wore a shirt which read: 'I believe in Fairies'.  I pointed to her shirt and read the words in Spanish, except I didn't know the word for 'fairy'. (It is 'hada'). She didn't know English, and seemed not the understand that I was telling her what her shirt said. Maybe that does not matter. Little girls must believe in things one cannot see, in other worlds and magic. How else can we exist in this messy place which, at best, minimizes the feminine, and at worst denigrates it?

So, tonight my fantasy is to lift all the women up, all the poor, all the vulnerable everywhere. You all have been invited to my fantasy party where we are princesses and queens, where we dance as the belle of the ball, where we smile our beautiful faces from our lovely selves, where we know we are special because we are women with the power to nurture life and the world.

Good night all sweet princesses who never got your shining party. You have been invited to my fantasy. It is yours too, amigas mias. In every step we take into the future, we can take it with the thought that we are royal, important, gorgeous and strong.

Yellow Butterfly

Yellow butterfly, touching
touching down, rise, touch, rise,
over the hot sand.

This body I inhabit longs to follow
look closely into yellow wings for shapes like
conversation with a stranger
This body, she knows
if she follows you will be fast gone
and so
she sits, she waits with longing.

Night terrors, she lays, quiet and still
asking
Divine mother, the butterfly of the mind
flying cosmos flight for certain, to touch this mind reeling
She knows - I know you are there
We call out, llame', rock me, find me,
 tell me I am all fine, just as I am.
Then the night comes to cover the mind in sweet sleep

and the dawn brings better thoughts
and yellow butterflies as bright as the clear sun.

Christmas Ornaments I Have Loved and Lost

It is time again to take the boxes of winter holiday/Christmas acoutrements out. We gathered a fine noble fir from one of my yoga student's farms, and it sits waiting for decorations. A year has passed and my ornaments have diminished each year. I haven't purchased any lately, with the kids all grown, and barely able to arrange a time to come and see a tree. It has become an exercise in remembrance now, each ornament, where it came from, why I bought it, who made it, what year it represents and how much it appeals aestheticallly to someone looking at my tree with no knowledge of the history.
Silly, this stuff of mothers, but there it is.

Here is the history of ornaments passed, as well as I can remember them:  (If I forget one of you, please forgive me, I have had too much on my mind as of late and doubtless when I am much, much older, the memory of you will return).

The first lost ornament would have been about 50 years ago, in Salem, OR. My Dad's folks came to Christmas day, and I was 6, so excited for our holiday and gifts, special foods. Ah, the child's view of Christmas. When Grandad came in the door, I pulled him over to our tree to show him my favorite ornament. It was one of those glass balls, painted in vivid colors, with *glitter* liberally covering the orb of it's surface. I held the bauble - we called them baubles- in my hand and said, "Look Grandad!"

Quiet Grandad, (Louis) humored me and smiled at my enthusiam. He was such a good, kind man. My ardor for the bauble reached a peak, and my hands squeezed it tightly enough that I crushed it. Yea, my little child hands made the glass ball break with the sound of a 'pop', and it fell to the floor in sad shards. I was mortified. Grandad did not know what to say. Luckily everyone knew it was an accident, and my parents did not make me feel bad. But oh, I missed that ornament, I missed it every year. It had a twin, but the twin was the lesser pretty of the 2, so every year I would either avoid that twin when we decorated the tree, or I would gingerly hang it, with a sad little heart.

The second lost ornaments happened many years later, when I was a mother. When my boys were little I made salt dough before Christmas, and we would sit around the kitchen table fashioning our Christmas ornaments. My kids are very creative, and I knew that years later I would cherish their creations, just as I cherished their child selves, fun loving and free.

We made ornaments every year for 5 or 6 years, marking the year on the back. In time, we moved to a house near the ocean, where lots of racoons lived. Can you see where this is going? Well, I could not, because I stored my Christmas boxes in the basement, where I had left a window open to vent the clothes dryer. (The previous owners had never seen fit to install a dryer vent, just one of those little things one misses when looking at a prospective house). So one day I went downstairs and found my boxes ravaged and a feast of salt dough had ocurred right there in my basement, the lovely carefully decorated creations of my children from so many years were now in shreds, or completely gone. First I was aghast, then I was very angry, and lastly I could not help wondering how acrylic paint and fixitive tasted to these hoodlums of the woods. They were huge racoons, by the way, they came up to the windows and looked in with absolutely no fear.  They were as big as a large dog, but with human like hands. I had to not think of that too much. I made new dough and coaxed an ornament or 2 from the boys, but then they got too old for that sort of thing, and salt dough became a thing of the past.

The most recent ornaments lost were those I purchased while living at the coast, in one of those upscale Christmas shops. Glass, again seemed right, it cannot mold, be eaten, or dissipate into a mush over time. The peach ornament I bought the year my youngest son was liking peaches.. I wrote on it in indelible pen "Amery 1994, A peach of a guy" which. of course, he was. Every year that cute little peach came out, to remind him and me, of our mutual affection, and of the year, receding further and further into the past, of his connection, however brief, to peaches.

You see, I think these connections to our past selves is important. I think many, if not most of us are swimming in a sea of newness, without connection to what many events over thousands and millions of years conspired to bring us to this moment, with this combination of elements which allow us to survive and thrive.

So, I have delayed the telling of how I lost the peach. It was because I moved, and I had a few years where I had no room for a full tree, plus the floors in my home are now formica over concrete. And, I used a bare tree branch for a tree, "My Christmas twig" I called it, and it was easy to brush past and bump, knocking an ornament off it's tenuous little hook on twig. If that ornament were made of thin glass, and hit a hard surface, that is the end of it. So, I lost a peach, and a favorite blue glitter pine cone that way. Se la vie.

Maybe loosing long saved ornaments is part of the practice, a zen kind of opportunity. The chance to let go of the material world, even when one has infused it with all kinds of sentiment and meaning. Maybe this is truly advance training for the bigger stuff. The heart break of loosing loved ones, the ultimate experience of having to accept and let go, as we all have to do at some point, inevitably, inexorably and unequivocally.

 My ornaments, my existential teachers. I will make new ones, find others, do with less and carefully love what I have left in my meager little Christmas box of life.

6th Period Reading Class

ELD room at the High School in a smallish town,
Tim O"Brien is the subject on the page, his book,
"The Things They Carried" - so poignant for me,
I was their age, 13, 14, 15 when Vietnam
was a place of misery and death
for my generation at the mercy,
of my parents generation.
 how to translate, to people who were 4 when the
Twin Towers went down in that apocalyptic cloud of smoke.

I gather my courage in response to the quiet apathy of these
who are the reading challenged, who come to class and zone out,
Who read words which are only words, empty of inspiration
Who do not know yet how to ask, because they do not envision
the questions yet.

For ten minutes I speak -
Of the men in my life and their own war stories.

Louis, my quiet grandfather
Driving his horse cart in France, age of 19,
the cart full of supplies
and he stops at a stream for water to bring the horses
while he is away, a bomb destroys the cart

And his son, alive then because his father survived
the war to end all wars
Robert becomes a navigator
flying planes to drop bombs
On targets in Japan.


My brother, alive because these fathers survived these world
wars,
he becomes a pacifist,
even as the draft lottery has his name at 18
registered or jail

56,000 of my generation perished in that one.

The students stopped their fidgeting, their eyes focused in my direction
It is dangerous to speak of politics,
but a story paints a picture,
A story carries the listener
makes the speaker human.
They listened, quietly for the first time in that hour.
A truth fell upon the room like a soft blanket.
A pretense was pulled away.

And when I came to the end, I hardly knew what I had said,
as though the spirit had take over,
and all the words flowed from some other consciousness,
from some deep pain of the recent Iraqi amputee,
from the old Vets for Peace who were not allowed
 to march in the Auburn Veterans Day
parade,
from William Stafford, and all the men
who dared to be the rare CO's
in WWII - The " just" war.

From the young vets now, only the age of my sons,
committing suicide or drowning in alcohol
It came, from a higher place and
The wounded and dead helped me tell it.

I only hope to honor them
by breaking the cycle
somehow
someday
by
telling
stories.