Sylvia's Journal

Looking for a particular quote from Goethe about synchronicity, I found so many (synchronicity at work?) that I wondered whether I should not simply start to read all his books.

A number of encounters and coincidence have swarmed together this week and elevated me to a different space; a space from where I look down on myself and what is happening around me and I see, as if magnified, the swirls of good and bad and the few (very few) little eddies of calm of my surroundings.

Not knowing what is cause or effect I can only notice that some remarkable events have happened in the last few days; each one resonating with me much like strings resonate at their fundamental or overtone frequencies. [The metaphor is rich and enticing. Fundamental tones…? Overtones…? But first there is always the act of making sound, and the resulting melody.]

Part of the sound making yesterday came from Annabel who plays an instrument that is finely tuned with mine. I met her a few years ago through a colleague who introduced us. She is from South Africa and I now think we may have a common Boer ancestor, some desperate and/or enlightened spirit who traveled through Holland in the 1600s on his way to South Africa and possibly dropped a seed in the low lands.

She came to MSH yesterday for what we call a Brown Bag Lunch presentation, invited by my colleague who was sick and asked me to introduce her. So I googled her and read some of her most recent essays on ethics, leadership and change, topics of utmost importance to our work. She spoke to us about these topics and about adaptive work and the interconnectedness of systems, weaving a pattern that I recognized. It matched one I am weaving in my head as I am reading Otto Scharmer’s (Theory U) on my Kindle in the spare minutes that dot my day as I wait for this or that to start, to load, to begin. Did she resonate with my overtone or fundamental frequency?

Her talk also created some disharmony in the audience that painfully illustrated the points she was making – unnoticed by those who took it as a false note (her fault, not theirs). It reminded me of discussions after a concert with music too modern for some people’s ears. Not understanding, they criticize the composer rather than questioning their ears. It was one of those swirls that causes upheaval and kept me thinking about what I saw. Being both in the wild waters and above it, I was able to resist being swept away.

There were more Goethe quotes, and I saw (read?heard?) more of the fundamental tones. Who was this man who said things sometimes so deep, sometimes so funny? The Kindle allows me to satisfy my curiosity instantly for pennies – long dead authors are cheap. I download a few of his works, Faust, a biography, in under a minute. Now I have all this wisdom quite literally in my pocket. I think Kindle’s next frontier is to implant the technology in the brain for direct download onto neural paths (and duckboards).

I was pooped last night when I returned home but the day was not done. First there was the bone density scan; I am in that age category now and besides, the scan machine at the doctor’s office needs to be paid off. A quick interlude at home, eating leftovers while Tessa and her friend Cara cooked falafel, then off to a committee meeting of our Quaker community where Ken regaled us with stories of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, gambling, crime and dour Mennonites(joyless women in dresses with droopy flowers and men in straight and boring suits) trying to save the people from Sodom and Gomorra. We did our Quaker business wearing Mardi Gras necklasses and drinking herbal teas.

On my way home I chased, unwittingly and unwillingly a fearsome bunny that had emerged prematurely from its burrow. Its unusual presence on that cold night, amidst piles of snow and ice reminded me of my first encounter with Gwendalle, half Cherokee, half American, who told me, some 18 years ago, that chance encounters with animals are never chance. I consulted Jamie Shams’ Medicine Cards which tell me: “Here is the lesson. If you pulled Rabbit, stop talking about horrible things happening and get rid of “what if” in your vocabulary. This card may signal a time of worry about the future or of trying to exercise your control over that which is not yet in form – the future. Stop now! Write your fears down and be willing to feel them. Breathe into them, and feel them running through your body into Mother Earth as a give-away.”

From a website about superstitions related to rabbits, I learned otherwise however: “It is lucky to meet a hare, but unlucky to see it run across the path. Should it cross the path of a wayfarer from right to left, his journey will be disastrous; if it scuds along the way before him, the issue of his affairs will be doubtful for some time; but if it crosses from left to right it is a lucky token.” I am afraid it did not cross from left to right. I guess I better take Jamie Sams medicine.

My alarm is synchronized with the BBC report on the FESPACO (film) festival in Burkina. I listen to the daily report while taking my shower. I try to imagine what it would be like to be in Ouagadougou with tens of thousands of people trying to get into theatres that aren’t necessarily designed for crowds. Maybe they are now but when I was last there it was a small harmattan-dusted town with rattling taxis that held together with wires. I have never felt enticed to go there and witness this remarkable event. This morning an Ethiopian woman living in Ghana was interviewed, exactly the two countries I am in between now.

My dreams where full of symbols that would give a psychoanalyst a field day. Now I was on a train track in a car anxiously waiting for a train from the other side to pass me on the right track; then I was in Haarlem giving my car keys to a young American woman who did not know the city. At one point I took a short piece of red USB extension cable out of the hair of an old man. In the dream we all wondered where that came from, just as I now wonder what the dream symbol dictionary would have to say about this artifact of our time – connections through wires.

I drove home from work yesterday in the light. Spring is indeed coming. It is wonderful to arrive back home in daytime. The carriage house at the beginning of our driveway looked stunning in the late winter afternoon light; something it rarely does in its otherwise drab pale yellow color. I sat in the car in the driveway for awhile trying to figure out what will happen to this nice light at this specific time when we return to daylight savings time. I think it happens this weekend. This manipulation of time is something that I never can get my head around. It is as if those specific neural tracks in my brain are always temporary; shaky connections that are put in place twice a year and then removed to storage, like our duckboards. I have a similar thing with time zones when I travel to the Far East and back. It’s probably the same circuit.

I went to yoga class again after a two week absence. I am still unable to do any of the poses that twist my upper arm and shoulder. The balancing that I was so good at before the accident is now a real challenge; it used to be easy to do the Eagle pose but now my performance is dismal. Axel promptly recommended remedial action, as men are wont to do; I declined and wondered why I keep telling him things that will elicit advice when that is not what I am asking for. I have enough things to do like flossing and shoulder exercises and icing and feel guilty enough not doing all that. The icing is for my 3×3 inch deep purple bruise on my upper arm from the fall on Sunday and my rotator cuff tendonitis on the other side of the arm. The bruise is similar in color (but not in size) to the bruise after the accident that covered my entire upper right side of my body. It’s a beautiful plum color with yellow edges and brings back tons of memories of that intense time.

It’s amazing how quickly I am used again to the cold after the warmth of Ethiopia, a testimony to the adaptability of our systems. It was bitter cold when I got up yesterday before dawn and it took awhile for the car to heat up. But that is why we have winter clothes.

With a good, fast and reliable internet connection again I can take advantage of the many webcasts that are offered for free. In the last two days I ‘attended’ two of them. One was a lecture about a history of AIDS in the US which was fascinating in content; the other one was fascinating in process. The designers of the latter created a community of 100 plus people that produced three ‘poems’ together while exploring modes of working together that was based on Ralph Stacey’s Managing the Unknowable, all in one hour. At the end I was sad to log off. People from all over the world had signed in to this amazing interactive session about human systems dynamics and collaboration.

I celebrated the resilience of our species with two colleagues at the end of the day in a restaurant that comes with many memories, happy and sad, in Somerville. Alison was the reason for us getting together. She is on a sort of bereavement sabbatical as she deals with the emotional and organizational aftermath of her father’s passing. We toasted to deep friendships and ate comfort foods that our resilient bodies took in without any form of protest.

Back home I found the living room disassembled and the fireplace lying outside in the snow. It was a fireplace that was no good and that we had had much too long. We could never light a fire during a storm or even the slightest wind because it would smoke up the house and then we’d have to open all the doors and windows and the fire alarms would go off…..all very much the opposite of the kind of ambiance we were trying to create. It was also an energy-deficient, sucking heat out of the house through the chimney and cooling off the house overnight while heating the air around the chimney outside.

About one half year ago Axel had gone out to do research about green fireplaces and ordered one. We still don’t have it but now we are at a point of no return, with a hole in the wall, a chimney dismantled and our living room furniture under wraps; just when Alison gave me a bag full of beautiful lamb’s wool that she found in the parental house clean up. It is good for a huge knitting project that will last the rest of the winter (and maybe include the next). But such a project requires a functioning fireplace and so I cannot get started quite yet.

The snow day was a nice way of easing into work again, light work that is. Not quite the intensity of work (in between the massages) we did in Ethiopia. Axel and I both went to physical therapy with sympathetic right upper arm and shoulder pains – mine still accident related, Axel’s probably not but who’s to tell. We learned that everything is related to everything else. All the icepacks, so heavily used in the second half of 2007, then put away, are migrating back to the kitchen again.

The work included a half-hearted attempt to empty my mailbox in pursuit of the elusive objective of ‘zero mail.’ It is a nice idea but it needs constant upkeep. Once you are back to overflowing emails there is no advantage to having been successful before, no increased skill level. It’s all about discipline; or could it be obsessive-compulsive behavior?

This morning I got up at 4:30 again. Somehow the 8 hour time difference with Addis has disappeared like magic. I slept a full night, as I always do when home, full of irretrievable dreams, not unusual either, and was awoken by my alarm. I had forgotten how to turn it off, so Axel woke up as well.

During my absence Axel and our neighbor Bill from across the cove, who share a deep interest for finding artistic and architectural treasures related to Lobster Cove, poured over a Winslow Homer picture of our cove. It did not quite make it into his collection of masterworks as the critics called it a bit messy, but Axel and Bill liked it and now I want to know where it hangs. Imagine that, Winslow Homer was here!

Tessa and Steve stayed home for the snow day as well. That made for a quick disappearance of at least two of the three large pieces of cheese I brought back from Holland, one for each couple. I am guarding the one unopened package that is destined for Sita and Jim – we have to send it by mail as it may not make it if left here and Sita is off to London and then Cologne in a few days. I have never sent cheese by mail. I’d hate to lose it; real Dutch cheese is nearly as good as a Winslow Homer – if only we could get the real Dutch bread to go with it all would be perfect.

Coming home to a snowstorm is the best homecoming – as long as it starts after touchdown. We drove home from the airport in a light snow which turned into a veritable snowstorm sometime in the early hours of Monday, March 2. Everyone was advised to stay home, which we all happily did. I was grateful that our return from Amsterdam had not been today and wondered where the planes would be diverted to, if they left at all.

Back home I played with my new toy, a Kindle that had finally arrived and which should make packing reading material for my next trip so much easier – it can hold a 1000 books and the pages read like regular pages, not like a computer with a backlit screen. It’s an amazing technology that even allows switching from reading to ‘being read to’ if I were to get tired, with a choice of a male or female voice. I promptly started downloading multiple volumes of the Great Books of the world, all free of charge. That should keep me pleasantly occupied while waiting in airport lounges.

In the evening we went for dinner at the St. Johns as if it was just a regular day that had not started 8 hours earlier for me and about 6000 miles away. On the way to their front door I made a tumble on the ice that was hiding below a thin dusting of snow and managed to fall on my bad arm; the arm with the rotator cuff tendonitis that was already in bad shape from a wrong move as I pushed my suitcase out of my hotel room on Saturday night. I had iced it in the plane and it had finally calmed down and then the fall, requiring more ice and having Axel cut up my dinner.

When bedtime finally came around I barely noticed hitting the pillow. I woke up at my normal wake up time and resumed my life in the US, celebrating my safe return with breakfast in bed. We watched the mess on the roads on TV while sipping our Ethiopian coffee. Life is good!

The rest of the day I put away my travel gear, sorted through my emails and started organizing my next trip, three weeks from now to Ghana. The snowplow allowed for some diversion as did a call from my friend and former colleague Carol, the one who was supposed to meet my sister in Mali but didn’t – even though they flew back in the same plane. We had a lot of catching up to do – stories mostly about children and health.

Grand-dog Chicha loves snow storms, especially the aftermath, when looking for sticks in the deep snow makes it all the more exciting. When the snow melts we discover how excited she was when all the poops become visible that were so nicely dug under and covered up. Tessa and Steve then have to sweep the lawn with their poop removal implements while we watch and are glad it’s not our dog. Friends with grand children report similar sentiments.

From a vague recollection of my dreams it seems that my mind is already in Ethiopia. But my body is still very much in Manchester this morning. And so is my suitcase; open, half packed for a high altitude Africa experience that requires thinking, rather than the automatic packing response I have for more tropical climates. My colleague Liz who is already there wrote me that it is chilly and pants and sweaters are in order.

I was going to pack light and hand carry my luggage. But the combination of cool weather clothes, Axel’s order for at least 2 kilos of Yergecheff coffee, plus the prohibition by my physical therapist of having anything heavy compressing my shoulder made me abandon that idea.

Yesterday I spent the entire morning, four long hours, in a small and overheated room listening to one powerpoint after another, a show put on for our evaluators. It was a bit much for me – they didn’t let on but I pitied them since they also had an afternoon like that, and today another whole day. I tried to imagine what it must be like to get 20 years of experience in a particular set of interventions (management and leadership development in developing countries) compressed, distilled to its essence, dumped in one’s lap like that. But they appeared engaged and attentive and asked good questions. The poor things also have to read thousands of pages and travel to Nicaragua, Nigeria and Peru.

I stayed late at work to clean off my desk for the next 2 weeks when I will not be sitting at either my home or office desk and my attention is elsewhere. I drove home following Tessa and Steve in the direction of Manchester by about a half hour and consulted on the phone which route to take – it is nice to have scouts like that. Their advice was good and despite the rush hour I made it home in one hour.

Dinner was ready, cooked by Steve and Tessa, and a harbinger of spring: asparagus (not quite from the US but no longer from far Peru), ham, eggs and boiled potatoes. After dinner I packed half my suitcase and went through my travel prep routines while Axel educated himself on CPA politics and practices and then caught up on a movie that we have been watching in turns to arrive at the place where I left off. We finally watched the ending of the movie together, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, with Ingrid Bergman, and cried over its sappy and beautiful ending.

The movie is about leadership, focused perseverance in particular, but men would call it foolishness and stubbornness. It is based on the life of Gladys Aylward, a missionary in China in the 1930s who became a foot inspector and travelled through the countryside to enforce the new law against the horrendous practice of binding the feet of young girls.

This movie was the second in a row we watched about harmful practices that males have imposed on women in various parts of the world to keep them down. The other was Ousman Sembene’s Mooladé about female genital cutting in Mali; also a story about leadership, courage, perseverance, or, if you are a frightened old man who sees power slipping away but still wants to be right, foolishness. I am grateful for all these courageous women in the world, the known and the unknown heroes who added so much to the wellbeing of us all.

Yesterday was President’s day which is, for reasons I don’t understand, about buying cars. We would have loved to go out and buy a newer car, especially since our two cars combined are a quarter of a century old and have driven half a million miles. But this has to be postponed. Axel is taking the older of the old cars to our guys over in New Hampshire. They get a kick out of keeping old Subarus on the road. We hope there’s still some life left in ours as there is not enough money in the bank to buy another car while keeping an emergency fund for when the unthinkable happens.

Although it was officially a holiday, there was work to be done by both of us. Axel’s was town business; mine was halfway around the globe. First there was a phone conversation with colleagues in Kabul; then one with Bruce from Chicago who is heading to Northern Pakistan to do what I did in Cambodia. And then there was more writing and reading. It was also time to prepare for our talks during the next two days with a team of evaluators who are coming to check out how we have done as a project and make recommendations about more such work, after our project runs out next summer.

I am employed on a 5-year contract that has been renewed four times now since 1986. I can only hope that it will be renewed again in 2010 but there is no guarantee and this contract could be the last. Although we do know that our new administration’s philosophy is favorable to the work we do, we don’t know what it means in terms of money set aside for such work, now that the talk is all about shovel-ready projects and other boosts for our own economy.

I am back at my physical therapist for work on my right shoulder. The Depo-Medrol/Lidocaine shot in my shoulder, last Thursday, has done the trick and reduced the pain but there is work to be done with muscles and tendons around it. Once again I marvel about the intricacies of the muscular-skeletal construction of our bodies and how everything is connected to everything else. Massages and yoga are good and I am encouraged to continue these practices. I checked out a new yoga teacher closer to home and liked her style. It appears she is a follower from the same tribe that produces most of our local yoga teachers.

At Quaker Meeting the idea is to still your mind. I couldn’t for the life of me. It was as if my mind had a life of its own, resisting all attempts to be quiet. I practiced the advice from my meditation tapes and focused on my breathing. But my mind would invent stories, project images that triggered stories and endless to do lists. And when I kept returning to my breathing it tried to intervene physically by making me hot, then tired and then uncomfortable in whatever position I was sitting. While at a cosmic level I was ready to be ‘one with the universe and listen for God’s voice,’ at a cellular level this was being thwarted with a stubbornness that surprised me. Maybe what I was experiencing was the prototype of all good and evil battles that have plagued mankind, at its most personal manifestation.

Axel stood up and spoke about compassion, and so I tried that angle for awhile, being compassionate with that frantic and busy part of myself that cannot rest – but I found it was only feeding it, making it more active, as if I was stroking the ego of, well ehh…, my own ego. When the hour was over I realized that my travel and rather hectic life has been undermining my ability to live in the here and now and surrender to a more quiet rhythm in life’s complex score. I am always anticipating, thinking about what needs to be done next, learned, fixed, gathered, followed up, written, packed, acquired, understood or activated. But there is nothing in there about slowing down, closing or silencing.

I bicycled back from Meeting while Axel passed me by in the car. We arrived home at about the same time, had another fishy meal in the absence of Tessa and Steve, and then drove to Salem’s visitor center. Our friend Merrill who is a story teller for the National Park Service, was on stage to tell stories about the underground railway in Essex County. It was a superb performance that has lessons and morals that are just as valid today as they were then, and once again, it was all about compassion. And I realized that the morning’s experience in Quaker Meeting had reminded me that compassion and being hurried cancel each other out. This was confirmed, I learned later from a video on TED about the same topic, by a group of seminary students who were asked to do a sermon about the Good Samaritan. As they hurried from their class to the church, preoccupied with their performance, most did not notice or pay attention to the man doubled over in pain who was sitting in their path to the church.

It is Valentines day, or Valentimes as Sita used to call it and, although overcommercialized here, still a day to express gratitude to certain people. We sent a bouquet of WBUR roses to Tim and Rhonda who live in Orange and were, on that fateful afternoon of July 14, 2007, picking blueberries near the Gardner airport. We owe them much. The flowers are on their way according to Mr. Fedex, but to the wrong address, an apartment just down the street from them. I hope they get to their destination nevertheless.

Axel gave me a cyclamen plant, pink, for love, and it reminded me of both our mothers who managed to keep these plants alive for years on end. I don’t think I have ever gotten one still looking good after two months. Tessa got a mini version, so we can compare notes. The amaryllis is also coming out today in all its pink and red and white colors – as if it was planned that way.

Axel cooked us a steak-au-poivre dinner that included a spectacular flambé of brandy soaked jus with flames spiking high above the stove and smoke that set all the fire alarms off – leaving us cooking in the ice-cold winds that came from open windows and doors on all sides of the house. But the dinner was wonderful in spite of the wind and smoke. I especially liked the sauce that was not only brandy-spiked but also thickened with lots of heavy cream. Axel had tried to copied Jim’s meal from last Saturday – the smoke part was similar but for the rest not quite up to Jim’s standards if I am honest. Practice makes perfect, apparently; Jim has done it before.

The day ended with a delightful movie about a stodgy British shoe manufacturer who changes his line to produce kinky boots for crossdressers against a backdrop of much psychological drama, such as not living up to paternal expectations, and then all ends well.

That ended an intense workday that was, apart from another set of doctors’ tests, mostly filled with writing for a new book that we hope to have in production later this year, about leadership of course.

And now back to planning our flight for today. There are gusty winds all around Beverly. In order to get to the calm areas with clear skies that are further north and west, we’d have to get through the gusts one way or another. I am waiting for advice and instructions from my pilot buddy Bill, while Axel left for a Valentimes massage.