Sylvia's Journal

What was I thinking when I assumed that my first full day at home would be a normal workday? With a 12 hour jet leg I was hardly able to concentrate and do work-work (as opposed to self-care work). I wandered out of Abi’s massage studio with massage brain as Axel calls it, rather unfocused. Finding Axel in the coffee shop next door was a significant victory.

By then it was nearly lunch hour and going out for lunch seemed the right thing to do. We drove slowly through a picture perfect winter wonderland and under bright blue skies to Ipswich, congratulating ourselves on living in such a beautiful place. I traded in the noodle soups of the last few weeks for a steaming bowl of chowder but I am still drinking buckets of tea.

Lunch made us forget that Axel had an early afternoon appointment with the brain injury specialist in Boston. Forgetting things is, apparently, quite common for people who have been whacked on the head. He called, apologized and was rescheduled. We are, once again, grateful that Axel is only forgetting things, nothing worse (like some of the patients he sits with in the waiting room).

After lunch it was naptime – something I am not all that good at usually but this time it was easy. I had planned to go for a long walk on the beautiful and balmy winter day but the waking up from my two-hour nap time took too long and then it was dark again.

Sita gave me a ukulele for Christmas. The instrument was waiting for me when I got home, all tuned and ready to play. And so the most strenuous thing I did yesterday was to practice A, C and F chords. I can now strum ‘This old man,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ and a few other tunes. All I need is a campfire and some people to sing along. I can’t wait for it to be summer.

For the last leg of this interminable trip my luck turned and I flew back on a plane with every other seat empty. It departed on time and the bad weather I had seen approaching while still in the terminal moved out of the way without disturbing us.

I finished the Pol Pot book and then spread out over three seats and fell into a deep sleep of total exhaustion, filled with images of the damage he’d one. When I woke up I felt like a zombie, as if I had been a victim myself.

My entrance into the US wasn’t so great after this magnificent trip. The immigration official treated me as if I had done something wrong with a long list of questions barked out in staccato. It showed how easy it is to intimidate people when you are in uniform.

When I called Axel on touchdown to tell him that I would be out in less than 10 minutes because I had no checked baggage I discovered that he hadn’t even left Manchester. I was indeed out in 10 minutes and after having been on the road for 36 hours that final wait for Axel to arrive was the worst of the entire trip, partially because it was laced with disappointment and anger. Not a very good reunion after an absence of 3 weeks. I pouted most of the way home in between dozing off a few times. By the time I came home the pout was over and all (nearly) forgotten.

Tessa and Steve had left me Rangoon crab to welcome me home – a delicacy from another part of Asia. And then I unpacked the presents which included two ceramic lobsters given to me by the team in Kampong Cham, for Axel, for our house on Lobster Cove. I had discovered these nailed to the doors of traditional houses, off the main road to Kampong Cham. They hold incense sticks or flowers. I never had time to go to the market and find them and then did not need to as they were given to me as a gift.

And that was that. For today Axel has arranged a massage at 10. Not by a blind person and not quite so inexpensive. Still, a massage is exactly what the doctor prescribed and it makes up for the not so great homecoming.

I waited too long to write after waking up and so lost much of the detail from the vivid dreams. The parents of my friend Sietske showed up even though her dad is no longer with us. He was last night, the setting was Cambodia, which looked heavenly. I had to prepare for two sports events, one was swimming and the other rowing and I was having a hard time preparing for both and then finding the stuff I needed for competing (like a swimsuit and a boat). It was one of those dreams where things don’t come together.

I hardly needed a dream to tell me that I am not ready for this trip. I am leaving tonight and the passport/visa issue has still not been resolved. I am now trying to work magic on the arrival side. My Bangla friend and colleague Sayeed wrote me an email with the words: ‘send me your arrival information.’ That was all. The barebones email comforted me, he wants information. I gave it to him.

Unlike my previous trips through Dubai that always included a stay at an obscenely luxurious hotel, this time I fly right through, with only a couple of hours in the middle of the night during which I have to change terminals. I will be travelling for about 24 hour straight to arrive in the morning in Dhaka. I am sending some prayers into the universe for upgrades in the hope that someone in NWA, KLM and Emirates is listening.

Yesterday was a day of nonstop meetings because nothing could be postponed anymore. Everything that had been postponed had landed on yesterday’s calendar. There are nonstop demands on my brain’s left hemisphere; the neurons charged with understanding, categorizing, framing, planning, evaluating, judging, conceptualizing, and deducting are over stimulated leaving the right side of my brain literally at a loss for words and unable to compete. It is only in my dream states that it gets some words in edgewise.

I have to talk back to that part of myself now and then and say ‘shut uphhhh.’ That is one good thing about flying for so long –I get to use my meditation tapes which consist of hours and hours of silence. I usually fall asleep in the middle of that silence.

The day ended with a nice Mexican dinner in the next town over with Axel, Steve and Tessa. While eating hot armadillo eggs we listened to Tessa’s enthusiastic account of her interview at Suffolk’s art school. She’s determined to get that BA within the next 2 years. We think that it is a good idea.

Every time one glitch is ironed out another pops up for this trip to Bangladesh and Cambodia – it is going to require a tour de force or miracle to get the passport with the Bangla visa to me before I leave on Friday. Right now it is at the embassy in DC and apparently today is a holiday and they are closed. My departure, tomorrow night, thus becomes an act of faith that everything will work out in the end. According to a Nigerian saying ‘everything will work out in the end. If things haven’t worked out yet it means you haven’t come to the end yet.’ The end will be when I stand at the immigration counter at the airport in Bangladesh and a uniformed man tells me I can or cannot step into the country. In the latter scenario Emirates will have to take me back to Dubai and I can finally see the camel races or the shopping mall with the ski slope. But I will miss the event for which I travelled to Bangladesh. That would be very unfortunate.

I worked from home yesterday because of the ice, sleet and rain. The winter weather advisory was stated strongly enough to keep me (but not Tessa and Steve) from driving to work. In the end it wasn’t as bad but I was happy to skip one commute on slippery roads. It seems I have another chance at slippery roads (an ice rink I am told), today. But since it is my last day of work I have to drive in.

All through the day I ‘attended’ meetings by phone that I should have attended in person. I walked around the house with the phone clipped to my belt and my headgear in place. It’s a more productive way of attending meetings because you can multitask without anyone knowing. During my last such meeting of the day I prepared a great lasagna.

Last night Axel was elected to chair a town committee he has been a member of, after something of a quiet palace revolution that built up to this event over a couple of weeks. I saw many of my theories and beliefs about leadership acted out up close, and it was fascinating to watch from the sidelines. This new leadership role is one that suits Axel like a glove and even before he was elected he was already busy mobilizing and aligning the dormant energies in our town around issues of preservation of the town’s cultural, architectural and natural patrimony.

“Oh,” said the perky radiology technician only minutes after the ultrasound was completed, “it’s just a cyst. It will go away by itself. These things come and go, not a big deal.” She surprised me with her big smile and confident tone just when I expected a stern but compassionate looking specialist to come into the ultrasound room and give me the bad news. It took me the rest of the day to unwind from being taut like a compressed spring for two long weeks. You don’t know how (up)tight you are until you can relax. I had snapped earlier at Axel like an angry turtle for not being ready to go, a full hour before we had to leave for the hospital; he could see the tension and worry while I pretended everything was just fine.

I remember from our Beirut days how we were always on high alert for bombs, explosions, kidnapping and such. We were in a permanent state of adrenaline overdose. The permanence makes that you stop noticing. Until one night when we walked back from a midnight movie in safe and quiet The Hague and a car backfired and the adrenaline surged back in; then we realized the difference. I can relax again but getting back to that state was not that easy.

I arrived, still in a daze, back at work at noontime and was immediately drawn into a meeting about a project we are part of that operates in two of Pakistan’s more complex places to work: the Free State of Jammu and Kashmir and the much larger North Western Frontier Province. The project is part of ongoing post-earthquake emergency aid. The conversation was about ownership and leadership and how to get this when much of the aid is brought in and spent by outsiders.

There was no breathing space between this and the next meeting and so I remained in my daze, trying to concentrate on what was being said while holding an internal dialogue with myself about what was going on in my life.

And somewhere in the backdrop where pieces of conversation about my upcoming trip (this Friday) eastward and schedules being changed (someone forgot that Chinese New Year is being celebrated in Phnom Phen), only one of the two visas stamped in my passport and still no itinerary. So now there is this big mess of feelings, relief, anxiety, worry, anticipation, excitement, sadness that have glommed together like that most disgusting ball of spent chewing gum that teenage Sita built over many years and that she hid somewhere in our house.

All through the night the verb, image and action, of ‘snaking’ twirled through my busy mind. First there was the snaking as in ‘snaking across borders and boundaries’ that was probably a result of watching the TV program on India before going to bed (the borders part). Progress of the journey was presented as a red line snaking across a map of the subcontinent.

Then there was the snaking across boundaries that my fellow Quaker Ken did by attending a (conservative) Quaker church meeting in Washington State and stumbling on territory if not hostile to then at least uncomfortable with the presence of a gay man in their midst. His recounting of this experience led to a fascinating conversation at a committee meeting last night about engaging with the unknown ‘other.’ The Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov once said: ‘The first spontaneous reaction to a stranger is to imagine him as inferior, since he is different from us.’ Ken’s encounter proved, once again, the power of conversation to open the gates between two states (of being) and seeing each other’s humanity.

But there was also the snaking that electricians, chimney sweeps and plumbers do by using a long object to get through narrow passageways that humans cannot negotiate. This sort of snaking is about unclogging and/or (re)connecting something to itself. I can’t help but think that this action has something to do with the X-ray and ultrasound that will be taken later today to find out what this lump is all about. Something is clogged inside me, making me hold my breath right now.

Today is supposed to be the real day of new beginnings; back to school and back to work, new presidents and all that. Ghana too gets to have a new president. My friend Brian saw his efforts and those of thousands of others, to get the opposition to rule for awhile, crowned by success. Brian, who was first introduced to me as Brain, hopes to remain in the inner circle of the new administration. I am following things with great interest, partially because I have never had a connection to someone this close to political power. Brian was one of the facilitators of the Ghana leadership program that took off exactly one year ago. Since then we have talked a lot about leadership in Ghana and now he gets to help translate all the talking into action, much like Obama gets to do on this side of the Atlantic.

There is little that feels like new beginnings for me. I am tackling an overflowing email inbox, finishing tasks left incomplete in 2008 and reading stuff I should have read months ago. The weather is cold and grey as if to help and keep me inside. It’s a boring start of the new work year. Instead of preparing for my upcoming trip I get to review other people’s work. Everything about the trip that is supposed to start on Friday is still in the air. It is as if it isn’t on the agenda and no one is expecting that anything needs to be done. Is this all a dream?

Yesterday was one of those days when the urge to create gets so big it bursts. Axel finished his somewhat overdue Christmas card project (no redubbed New Year’s card project) although the cards are not yet in the mail (that’s the management part of creation). I finished my knitting project, started a quilt project, and, not to forget the exercise/learning intentions for 2009, did some dari-rowing. Then Axel suddenly rushed out of the house and returned with a bouquet of anemones with colors so vibrant that I had to find a way to preserve them. I tried to do this in water color but I lost my color mixing touch. Nevertheless, the still life (‘blue vase with anemones’) came out pretty nice given that I had not painted for a long time.

We ended the holidays last night with DJ, Tessa and Steve at a Chinese restaurant, starting with a pooh-pooh platter that should be renamed ‘instant death:’ all sorts of goodies hidden in thick and oily coatings of flour and sugar. I tried to pick the shrimp and chicken out of their greasy jackets but it felt a little naughty, like not being a team player in this caloric super bowl. Of course the food is only an excuse to sit around the table and catch up. Not that there was much catching up to do, given that DJ starts his day reading this blog and thus knows more than Axel does about what’s happening in the Magnuson/Vriesendorp household.

The light in the cove this morning is beautiful in the way only cold landscapes, with the right light and at the right time, can be beautiful. How I wish was fast and agile enough to catch the surprising mix of colors in a water color painting. But the colors can only be seen when the sun is at the right angle and the moment is fleeting. In a matter of minutes the flaming oranges and pinks are gone and only blue, white, grey and brown remain; it is still beautiful, but the spark is gone.

Yesterday we saw an exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum, Axel for the second time, of polar landscapes painted by a handful of artists in the last few centuries. These people went to great length to paint, and at great costs, the land-,sea-, and skyscapes they saw at the end of the earth (this is also the title of the exhibit). The intensity and majesty of the pieces they produced would have seemed fantastic and imaginary had they not had proof they had been there through eyewitnesses or photographs. Even in our far from the end of the world place, in winter, I can see glimpses of what they saw, at no greater cost than getting up in time.

Earlier in the day we had gone to see Fatou in her new apartment, a tiny space in an enormous mansion that has ‘moneypit’ written all over it. It is OK for one person but her son has come back from military duty in Oman and landed in the only place he could. She has given him her spacious bedroom, the biggest room in the apartment, while she sleeps on the couch in the living room until he figures out what next.

She greeted us wearing an Obama sweatshirt and when we left she added an Obama hat to the ensemble. Like me, it was her first presidential vote and we congratulated each other on our unblemished voting record. As Fatou always does, she fed us African food, a Mafe stew (beef in a spicy peanut sauce) that made Axel break out in hot pepper sweats and then, as she also always does, she sent us home with a couple of African meals for later.

In the evening we sat by the fire to paint and to knit while we listened to Elizabeth Gilbert read from her own book (Eat, Pray, Love). Inspired by the exhibit Axel pulled out the water colors, and I worked on a piece of knitting that had been waiting since my carpal tunnel operation, for an as yet unknown baby to be born in the new year.

It is not a good idea to try to get sand out of your ear with your finger. By doing so I had packed it in hard. Someone was going to help me get it out but never got around doing it before I woke up. It was one of those complex and gauzy dreams that disintegrated as soon as I let daylight into my eyes. It left me wondering about the sand, another one of the five Chinese elements (minerals). Although harder than water, this element is, in the end subdued by the soft and flowing water. Or was the image of sand in my ears about something I am not willing (or able) to hear?

We had breakfast in bed for the third morning in a row. These slow paced and drawn out mornings are the best parts of my days off. But the vacation days are slipping fast through my hands, like wet sand. I am dreading the moment that the alarm has to be set again at 4:30 AM.

I am in limbo regarding my travels. I am supposed to leave in less than a week and have no ticket (not even an itinerary to look at), no passport with visas, no approvals and no designs. This is nothing new but on some days I have less tolerance for the overload of ambiguity. I have more trips, equally vague, on the horizon. They are like planes stacked for landing, all up in the air, none cleared to land.

We visited our friends the St. Johns yesterday to wish them a happy new year and give them their supply of Christmas mustard. They were off to a skiing weekend in Vermont. I can’t imagine alpine skiing anymore but they still do. We haven’t even tried cross country skiing yet despite the perfect snow for such an activity. We went for a late afternoon walk in Ravenswood and noticed the myriad of ski tracks, remembering our many ski outings there. Something is holding us back from bringing the skis out from the barn. Maybe it is better to have the fantasy that we can still ski than trying it out and discover we can’t.

We have been rather negligent on exercise since the winter started. There are weeks that go by with us mostly sitting in front of a computer. To start the new year I brought the rowing machine that we picked up at a yard sale last summer up from the basement, where it got no use. It now sits in my cleaned out office. I am combining a 30 minute row with a 30 minute Dari (Farsi) lesson which makes the rowing less boring and me more concentrated on the Dari lesson. I hope to enhance the taped lessons with a real teacher sometime soon. That way I will be more clued in on the conversations around me when I am back in Afghanistan, a trip planned for later this year.

This morning I woke up without anything in my head to write. I wondered whether this was a signal that my blogging days were coming to an end. I listened to OnPoint on blogging yesterday which left me feeling silly about my daily writing, especially the public part of it. I can still write, like I used to in pen in a spiral bound notebook, why do it in public?

But then after the shower (that water again) the words composed themselves in my head and so it seems I am not done yet.

The last few years I have received a Christmas present in the mail from my boss fourth time removed (the boss of the boss of the boss of my boss). It is always a thin booklet (travel size) that is published by the Trinity Forum. It is also always, in one way or another, about truth and about people who speak truth to power. The title of this year’s present was a quote from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel acceptance speech in 1974 (One Word of Truth). The booklet was about his speaking truth to power and the context in which that took place. I read the booklet from beginning to end with hardly a pause. When I was in my twenties I practically inhaled Solzhenitsyn’s books but I read them as two-dimensional pieces of prose (great writing, great stories). Now I understand that there was a third dimension to his writing and life that has something to do with speaking truth to power.

It’s a nice ideal but I am not sure I could actually do this. The price always appears to be unimaginable suffering and many losses. Yet it is this stripping down to the basics that all the great souls talk about as their redemption and saving grace. It’s what made them great. But right now, if I had a chance, speaking truth to power seems impossible; I am too attached to stuff.

To counterbalance this weighty topic I baked cookies in the afternoon. They are called The Night Before Christmas Cookies, a recipe I got from a Christmas cookie book that I took from the theme-of-the-month shelf at the Manchester library. They came out too perfect too eat; beside I know how much butter there is in them; but they are very photogenic.

In the evening we went back to the theme of the day, truth telling, by watching the Frost/Nixon movie. I had watched the whole Nixon drama from across the Atlantic without the kind of emotion that Axel remembers. Some people claim that Nixon comes out too good, a flawed human being who suffered much because of his mistakes rather than the tricky-dick crook he was. I don’t care, the movie was about something else, about being recognized, seen as significant, important while deep down not believing one is worthy of this and how that powers our actions, sometimes making us stupid, sometimes making us bad, or both as in Nixon’s case.

I left the theatre curious about the girl in the movie, the one who flew first class from Monte Carlo and then abandons her life plans to follow Frost and become part of a historical drama. Who was she and what happened to her next?