Sylvia's Journal

Today has turned out to be a day of still and slow – something I had not expected when I woke up this morning. I thought that everything would be conspiring against slow. We had a lot to do to prepare our home for yet another home exchange that starts tomorrow. Most of the work of these exchanges is the removal of clutter. As it turned out, it was the mental decluttering that happened. Several unrelated experiences conspired towards slow and still. I finally saw how the strands came together. It produced an urge to write.

First, I watched Dr. Paul Lam’s video of the Sun Tai Chi form he adapted especially for people with arthritis. He himself was diagnosed with arthritis in his teens. Attenuating the effects of arthritis became his life’s purpose and journey. He has created a movement complete with swag such as plastic wristbands, pins, shirts, badges and more in addition to countless videos and online streaming opportunities.  I have been practicing this form of Tai Chi through a library program that started in the middle of the pandemic. Our teacher offered the classes free to the community, first on Zoom, and finally live at the library green or in the Community Center. Dr. Lam recommends practicing every morning for at least 30 minutes. With my once-a-week practice it is no wonder that, after two years, I am still making many mistakes. And so, this morning, I decided to watch him for free on YouTube and wondered whether I should buy his DVD. That would also mean buying a DVD player for my MacBook just when I had decided to reduce acquiring more stuff.

Dr. Lam’s movement are slower than what we practice. I could see the benefit: there is more balancing (ever so slightly) on one leg, and the stretched muscles have a moment to settle, even if it is for a few seconds. Slow and steady indeed.

I then did my morning meditation which is done through an app of a 7-week coaching program that starts tomorrow on Positive Intelligence. From what I have gleaned so far, the program focuses on two main things: recognizing the parts of oneself that sabotage one’s efforts towards a happy and fulfilling life (especially His Majesty the Judge, assisted by several saboteurs) and our wiser self, the Sage, that doesn’t get triggered and/or move into judging mode. The judge and his saboteur cronies may make us feel good and be helpful in the short run, but never in the long run. The meditations that are part and parcel of the program are about body awareness, and the cultivation of a sense of presence to replace common tendencies to either live in the past (thinking about what is done or should have been done and other regrets) or the future (plans, things to do). The meditations are slow, mindful, and manage to still my perpetually busy mind. Slow and steady indeed. 

The quiet and stillness of watching Dr. Lam and my morning meditation was quickly undone by a long list of unread emails. As if to call out to stay on the path of slow and still, one of the emails contained a link to a remarkable blogpost (Barefoot). I brought me back to still and slow again. The midday meditation anchored me even more in still and slow.

One of my goals for today is (or was, more likely) to finish reading a new book, titled ‘An Invitation to Quaker Eldering.’ As Clerk of our local Quaker meeting, I feel the need to understand the idea of eldering better, and learn how anyone can ‘grow’ into eldering. Several Quaker Elders describe their experiences as Elders, including the authors of the book, who managed to put into words the great mystery of spiritual formation.  They write, “The [spiritual] formation may be a slow process, and it may be hidden from us. There may also be the equivalent of sudden growth spurts. Sometimes we are formed on a noticeably bumpy path, which may involve finding ourselves in the refiner’s fire (Malachi 3:2), submitting to burning away of that which inhabits the fullness of God’s spirit within. It is yielding as clay to the potter’s hand. (page 37). 

Burning away, another metaphor for decluttering. My reading of the book is slow, but not of the ‘slow-and-steady’ kind. Rather it is slow because I am constantly interrupted by mind chatter, to do lists and seeing the clutter around me that needs to be removed. All this gets in the way of the kind of deep dive reading of the book that I would prefer over a fast skim through. 

The feeling of getting rid of stuff that gets in the way of quiet, still, slow and steady is liberating and makes me want to believe that one day I can summon still, quiet,  and uncluttered at will.

I have always wanted to attend the Northampton Friends Meeting when we are staying a weekend with Sita and Jim. But on Sundays we tend to leave to return home and there is no time. This time because of the long weekend our day of our departure was on a Monday. We had another whole day to fill with activities with the kids. Why not start slow: I wanted to give the local Quakers a try.

I have often had to explain Quakers to people in Africa, which is hard enough, but at least most of them adhere to one religion or another and there is some common vocabulary. But try to explain Quakers to a 7- and 10-year-old who have no idea what religion is all about, have never set foot inside a church and whose dad gets kind of triggered when hearing words like Bible, Jesus, or God.  Some years ago, the parents told us that they had decided to give their kids a good religious education and joined a church. I was both surprised and happy until I looked at the calendar. It was April 1.

I received permission from the parents to take them to the local Friends Meeting. I made sure there was childcare, and off we went. The threshold to the Quaker ‘church’ for kids who are raised in an atheist household is low: they don’t have to get up early and rush out of the house, they don’t have to dress up, they don’t have to know their bible, or bring one, they don’t have to be quiet for long, and they don’t have to sing hymns.  I could tell they were a little curious because there was no sign of resistance. They still wanted some sort of an explanation of what would happen, but I didn’t know anything about the children’s program, what they would do, or how many kids there would be. What I could tell them with certainty was that the grown-ups were going to sit in silence in a room with other grown-ups and that chances were the silence would last the entire hour. “What? Saffi said, an hour long of boring?” They could not imagine such a thing.

As it turned out, they were the only kids, with two adults staying with them, a ratio of one-to-one, in a room full of books and art supplies. Instead of Saffi clinging to me and not wanting to be left alone with strangers, as I had imagined could occur, they immediately started to explore the possibilities. Their eyes always light up when there are art supplies because that feels like home, which is full of art stations.

Ten minutes before the end of the Meeting for Worship the kids came in to join the grown-ups. Saffi’s managed the silence by coloring in the Quakers-for-kids brochure that included two mandalas and a blank square to draw one’s idea of a peaceful world. She drew a globe with twinkling stars. Faro’s silence was complete as he didn’t bother with the coloring, his brochure left untouched. He sat in silence, probably intrigued by the large TV screen with some 25 little flickering squares representing the remote attenders.

They both had a good experience – you cannot go wrong with them when there are books and art supplies. The kids brochure contained some queries that were about values (sharing toys, seeing something good in someone who annoys you, etc.) – I tried to pry answers from them but it seemed that they had either not explored the queries during their time in the children’s room or done too much of that. Faro had used the time to start working on his Halloween costume. 

We stopped at a coffee shop for Axel’s once-a-day allowance of coffee with caffeine, and then drove to a local harvest festival. Such festivals are everywhere in this very agricultural part of the state. We looked at vintage cars which was boring to all of us except Axel who reminisced about his and his friends’ first cars. We finished the day with more child’s play, but now of the physical kind: jumping and sliding with hundreds of other kids. It was quite a contrast with the beginning of the day. 

Once again, the parents came home with their spectacular botanical art pieces.

In our family we try to give each other Christmas experiences rather than gifts. For the last few years this has meant gift certificates for a workshop of choice at Snow Farm, an arts and crafts center that is close to Sita and Jim’s home in western Massachusetts.

Sita and Jim are enjoying their gift this long weekend in a workshop on Botanical Drawing. Their accomplishments after just one day are already spectacular. We are looking forward to seeing more great works today.

While they are enjoying their time of total immersion in art, we have the kids to entertain. We made it through day 1, leaving me exhausted, even though we didn’t do anything strenuous entertaining a 7- and 10-year-old. Our activities included apple picking in the morning. But this was not the apple picking we did with our kids. Instead of working to get apples (walking, bending, stretching), our picking was limited to filling a bag from a bank of baskets filled with apples, and then having cider donuts and apple cider (hot for us and slushies for the kids) – a caloric uptake instead of a caloric expense.

Next stop was a lovely playground behind a local school where we sat in the sun and occasionally participating in taking a seat on a double seesaw (“trust me, if you and your brother are on one side and your grandparents on the other, you will stay up!”).

Next stop was an expedition to Target to buy some unmentionables, which landed us in a giant traffic jam. As a result, our promised lunch at a place called The Brewery in Northampton was delayed to long after lunch time. Although the name of the restaurant suggests otherwise, there is a menu for kids. Faro, at 10, considers himself above that and choose the adult (massive) hamburger, accompanied by a large coca cola (not usually allowed by his parents). Axel is still getting used to being a heart patient for whom alcohol and coffee are no longer recommended. That was a little difficult in a place called The Brewery. He had to accept occasional sips from my (small) glass of beer. The roles are reversed, I used to be the one sipping from his (large) glasses of beer.

All through the day there were attacks of the ‘gimme’s’ and statements I needed to verify with the parents. At first Faro indicated that his younger sister would gladly buy him a toy out of her pocket money. Then there was an attempt to buy an expensive toy (from the ‘nerf’ family of toys, which seemed to me like weapons). The parents had explicitly forbidden him to get these toys until he was 18. That didn’t keep him from trying over and over to get us to relax the parents’ rules. I think Faro has all the potential to become a great negotiator because of his skill in wearing people out.

After lunch he had pressed us into going to nearby Newbury Comics because he had 15 dollars burning in his pockets, not real dollar bills but the agreement from his mom that they each could spend 15 dollars from their pocket money during their outing with opa and oma. Despite that limit, he kept bringing me boxes of something he wanted that cost 50 dollars or more. His sister on the other hand picked up endless small items but never expressed a need to buy them. I was amazed at the cost of everything. I was also struck about the wealth we have that allow such shops to succeed in their business and how our grandkids take that abundance for granted. 

Back home we parked them in front of the TV and navigated dinner time when no one was hungry after out late lunch except mom (dad was playing music someplace in Amherst). I tumbled into bed at 8:30 and fell asleep within seconds.

I recently finished a book about particle entanglements (The Age of Entanglements by Louisa Gilder). I didn’t understand anything about the physics part, but I loved reading about the lives of these young scientists in pre-war Germany and their amazing intellect. I am always drawn to the articles about particle mechanics and particle dynamics in our weekly New Scientist, even though I don’t understand next to nothing about the topic. I am intrigued by Schrödinger’s cat (dead and alive at the same time) and the idea of multiple universes.  I also love novels about metaverses (the Midnight Library by Matt Haig and Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore).  It’s just that the entanglements and multiple realities resonate with me because I am living in a time of undeniable entanglements and multiple realities (cultures, perspectives). That is, I believe, the draw.

The most problematic entanglements that I experience at this moment are with the companies that order and organize my life. There is Amazon. Axel and I are paying Mr. Bezos an annual fee to be part of his clever ‘Prime’ scheme. It is seductive because we get to read each other’s books and listen to each other’s audiobooks. Not that we do that a lot – we have very different tastes – but it nice to know that we can.

Our two daughters have always disapproved of us trusting an Amazon AI device (Alexa) that let us turn things on and off with a simple voice command (“Alexa, good night). They say our trust in AI from large companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google) is misplaced. And they are probably right. 

But how to disentangle ourselves without moving off the grid? Our libraries, work documents and communication channels are all controlled by these three companies. 

I got a taste of our entanglement with Amazon yesterday.  I decided back in July that there was no point in paying two Prime memberships and canceled mine which ended yesterday. Alexa promptly stopped following our commands. Instead, she proposed an action that we didn’t ask for. It may not be a very serious consequence (which our daughters will probably rejoice in) but who knows what is to follow?

A couple we are doing a home exchange with refused to connect on WhatsApp (“it’s evil”). I had already canceled all my social media over a year ago (no sense of loss there), however WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, is an important communication tool to stay in touch with friends and coaching clients faraway. It serves as a backup when my client’s electricity goes out in the middle of a coaching conversation. I know there are alternatives like Signal, but it will take a lot of effort to convince my network to switch (it may not even be available to them). And what if it that still idealistic company gets absorbed by another evil company?

Many of these companies start out with a lofty mission statement about making the world a better place through technology. But then they get rich, and greed takes over. The ramp goes up, and if it ever goes down, lots of people are dragged down because they got, well, tangled up in the mess.

We will find out in the next couple of days what other fallout there is from my attempt to disentangle, from Amazon, which is only partial because it still stores my books and sells stuff I want, and Axel still has his Prime membership. 

I can’t even begin to think about my entanglement with Google because it is massive and scary. There are more entanglements with smaller companies who have my username and passwords (some used and re-used at other sites). From time to time, I get a warning that they are invaded by dark forces – many of those sites I don’t even use anymore, but I am still entangled with them. Cleaning that mess up will take time I would like to spend otherwise.

On the positive side, I am entangled with my family and friends, many of which have come to support our Afghan adopted daughter and shower her with gifts.

S. has arrived in the US after languishing for 13 months in a center in Abu Dhabi. When the Taliban stormed Kabul, and with that took control of Afghanistan, S. was one of hundreds of thousands who desperately wanted to get out. Attempts to be evacuated by the Dutch military with her older sister, who carries a Dutch passport and happened to be in Kabul at that time, failed twice for both. The third attempt got her sister back to Holland, but S. was not able to make it through a sewage ditch into the airport and went home. I heard all that from her sister. Left to her own devices after that she jumped on the first opportunity to get out and landed in Au Dhabi. Little did she know how long she would stay there. Her brother also got out and went straight to the US and lived at a military based for months. These three siblings that we had gotten to know when we lived in Kabul, had rolled out over the earth like drops of mercury.

We had indicated early on that we would sponsor S. to come to the US. It was an opaque process that was never clarified despite emails, letters and phone calls to US officials in Abu Dhabi. I learned quickly that the center’s adjective (‘humanitarian’) was misplaced. It was more of a detention center. There were those inside and those outside, but no chance to mingle. We stayed in touch via WhatsApp and Botim (Abu Dhabi doesn’t allow phone calls via WhatsApp). I was able to get two friends in Dubai to drop off things she needed. Other than that, there was nothing I could do to get her out. I had even imagined flying there but I would not have been allowed in. 

The horizon of hope (to get out of there) moved from month to month. The first 2 months in that place seemed like an eternity, then 3 months more, then half a year. Finally, after 13 months, without much notice, she was put on a plane to NYC and from there to DC. She lost her iPad, because it had run out of juice during the long trip and nobody told her that electronic devices that cannot be turned on are confiscated. Welcome to the US! I assume she was welcomed by IRC who has taken her under its care (up your annual donation to them!). She was assigned an overworked caseworker, an Afghan woman, received a Smart card and some money ($300), and dropped off at her brother’s apartment in Silver Spring. His resettlement had gone so much faster than hers. All of this was a big surprise to me. Nothing for 13 months and then suddenly, she’s here. 

She is getting her footing in the US. My network has mobilized many more networks and the universe is raining gifts on her: free career counseling and job search advice from a dear friend, a good as new computer from our neighbor. Another friend took her to the library to get a card and an explanation of DC metro’s public transport system. Not that it makes the stress go away of solving major problems like housing and getting an income, but knowing that there are many good people helps in this bewildering experience of America. It is hard to imagine her journey since mid August 2021. I think of Mr. Rogers famous quote, “look for the helpers.’ They re everywhere!

I am not taking the place of her mother, but we have adopted each other as another mother-daughter pair. She sent me a picture of herself, radiant in a local gym that is run by the municipality and that allows her to get out of the cramped apartment (3 adults and 3 children in 2 rooms). Today she attends a workshop on finding a job. I admire her mettle.

Today, as I was looking through the pictures on my computer, I ended up deleting hundreds of them. They were pictures of workshops from around the world. In most cases I remembered the places and some of the people and I wonder what difference these events made. The energy of people engaging with each other about their work is visible in many pictures. The intensity of the conversations, the aha’s..but I know such energy can be fleeting. People leave a workshop on a high, and then something about their work environment sucks it all out. Not everywhere of course. I have come to realize that it all comes down to leadership and the behavior of the leaders. If they believe in, what USAID calls CLA (collaborating, learning and adapting), then the energy will stay, because people can talk about what doesn’t work for them, or share their ideas and spark off creative conversations. But if the leaders don’t really believe in this approach to working together, because they have a need to control things (and people) or are attached to a particular way of working that suits them and their personality (but not others), or when there is a fear of what will happen if they let go of control, then I am pretty sure that collaborative spirit will eventually lose its power.

Deleting those pictures was very liberating. It is the end of an era and opens a new chapter. It is the end of my life’s chapter as a trainer, facilitator, and workshop leader. I have good memories of all these events and count myself very lucky I got to travel the world. But that chapter is now closed, I am done with that. It feels great. My next chapter will keep me professionally engaged through individual and team coaching, leaving me lots of time to engage in local political action (to reduce my fear and sense of helplessness about the November elections), my various hobbies and maybe travel a bit more to my home country now that COVID-19 has finally found me. I won that fight thanks to an immune system that will protect me for the next few months.

We spent a week in the Loire Valley, between Nantes and Angers. We stayed in stately old chateau (it is available on Airbnb, here), the ancestral home of a dear friend who invited us and some others to accompany him and his wife to the chateau. We learned about the interesting bi-continental family that started when a French artist married his American wife. Their offspring settled either in France or in the US and some in both places. As a result, there are now dozens of cousins who speak English, French, or both. 

We were settled in the ‘red room’ with its 14 feet ceiling and large windows looking out on the spectacular grounds on one side and on another wing on the other. The windows have three positions: closed, wide open or half open with some ingenuous hardware that keeps them in that half open position. There are no screens which means we had to share our living quarters with flies during the day (especially in the kitchen), big noisy flying creatures at night that were attracted by our lights, and occasionally bats.

I learned that bats are an integral part of the biodiversity that creates the world’s most famous grapes. They don’t only eat mosquitoes (of which there were few, may be because of them) but also the grape worm and other pests that would affect the harvest. Once you know that, all thoughts of tennis rackets or baseball bats (so often used in the US to get rid of these creatures) evaporate. It is about co-existence. And the flies in the kitchen? You get used to that. I grew up in a house without screens and was used to wasps and bees and flies freely flying in and out of the house. Now, in the US, if we spot one fly in the house, we go after it with a vengeance. It’s all about context!

Of course, we drunk much wine, which was produced by the vineyards belonging to the chateau or to other chateaux. We did not visit a vineyard and now I wished I had because our fellow travelers did. They brought back interesting literature about wine making and biodiversity.

Since the internet had been knocked out by a storm before we arrived, we never had access to the whole wide world. I had not bought a French sim card. I had bought an E-Simcard in the US that I never got to work (which is a whole other story). I turned my phone off for the entire week. At first it was a little strange to not be able to look something up, send pictures and messages, but I soon got used to it, and liked it. Of course, I knew that the next week I would be fully connected again, and had a husband who was connected.

The cooking responsibilities were fluid and easy. We bought fabulous food at an outdoor market where we could have easily stayed a whole day and buy three times as we could possibly eat in a week. The cheeses, the sausages, the seafood (mussels, live langoustines – related to crawdaddies), and vegetables were all very tempting. In our little group we had people who loved to cook and improvise (using the refrigerator remains from the previous group that had stayed there – we called this soupe-frigo), and we had people who liked to clean up. It was all very easy and amicable which is not to be taken for granted when you live with people you have never lived with and even some we didn’t know before we got there.

We had access to enormous variety of produce from the chateau’s ‘potager.’ A large patch of land that was leased to a professional grower who serves restaurants nearby, and us if we so desired. It was enclosed by a 2-meter-high stone wall to keep the wildlife out.  We learned that everything was grown organically and in alignment with the phases of the moon and the mood of the universe. 

The chateau has an ‘Orangerie,’ where the countless citrus trees overwinter. In the summer they are outside. They were heavy with fruit:  oranges, lemons, kumquats, limes, and all sorts of other citrus varieties I don’t know the name of. While these trees are outside, the inside is taken over by one of the cousins who is an artist and holds workshops there. We had full access to the space. Axel produced a lovely woodcut of a water lily, one of the many flowering plants around us. The sights and views inspired me to create a treasure hunt in rhyme. It was a place that instantly released our creative juices.

When my in-laws lived here (from the early 50s until my mother-in-law died in 1993) the house they lived in remained essentially the same. They moved from one side of the house to the other and made only one change, removing a wall to make their TV room bigger. That was all, in all these years.

I remember when we visited them, before 1993, this was a quiet neighborhood with only the sound of the foghorn, waves, and seagulls. We experienced this kind of quiet in Finland. Coming back was a rude awakening. For one, we have a construction project in our backyard. It already made for one noisy summer last year when the foundation and framing was done and continues to do so now. Masons cladded the chimney with fieldstones that had to be lifted onto scaffolding using a squeaky flywheel and cut noisily with a stone cutter, from early morning till the end of the afternoon. This lasted for weeks. And now that this is done people across the cove are building a new house in and on the rocks which has required blasting and now produces loud noises from big trucks that are being loaded with rock debris. And when the construction noises calm down there are the landscapers with their noisy and polluting gas-powered landscaping equipment, mowers, blowers, and trimmers. It is never quiet anymore.

This morning when I walked around the small peninsula where we live, I counted 7 construction sites and 12 houses that weren’t there, or didn’t look at all as they do now, when my in-laws lived here. I sometimes wished I could take my long-gone in-laws for a walk around the neighborhood and watch their expressions. 

I know what has changed. When Axel grew up here, most houses were summer houses and at that time, summer houses were for the summer, not requiring the same creature comforts as their rest-of-the-year homes. People who lived here all year round like my husband’s parents, weren’t wealthy. Now our neighborhood is populated all year round; properties are snatched up by people with much wealth who either pull down the old houses or renovate, leaving only the bare house frames intact.  For years now there hasn’t been a summer without some construction project nearby. On the day Axel’s mother died we got phone calls from real estate developers asking whether we were going to sell. We now have several real estate companies in town and construction companies, all running booming businesses, creating more wealth and more wishes for more and better.

Everyone seems to be bitten by the bug that whispers in our ears (“not good enough”) – even we are bitten by that same bug. All the advertisers and happiness gurus are telling us that we could be happier, if only we lose some weight, buy this or that, get new clothes, renovate our kitchen or bathroom, or meditate every morning.  I did the latter for 2 years and have stopped doing so. It didn’t make me happier or calmer.

Knowing that most people in the world are sleeping in hot and buggy places, without screens on the windows or air-conditioning, and millions don’t even have a home, I wonder how we could ever be dissatisfied with the beauty and abundance around us. If only we could be satisfied with what we have, rather than indulge in dreams about more and better.

Hours after we arrived back home from Finland, we found two carloads of people in our driveway. A friend had left messages on our phones while we were in the air to ask if she could come by with her family and guests to swim and play in Lobster Cove. And then our grandkids arrived and moved in for a week that included a camp in the area for our granddaughter and much down time for our grandson filled with Lego building and, when no one paid attention, screen time.

I was back to work with a rather hectic schedule that included much screen time as well but provided some income to pay off our Finland credit card debt.

The rest of July passed quickly, as summertime tends to do. July is a birthday month for three of our family members who all reached a birthday with a 7 in it: Tessa turned 37 on July 2^nd, Saffi turned 7 on July 25^th and Axel turned 76 on July 30^th. So, it was party time!

On July 30 we celebrated all 3 birthdays with a Lobster Cove beach party which was made even more riotous than it would have been any other year. Tessa’s gift to Saffi was an enormous blow-up unicorn (which took some ingenuity and time to blow up) that can sit 6 adults comfortably (including 4 cupholders and space for a cooler) and many more kids. Once it was blown up the kids played in it on dry land for a while before it was transported on the heads of two adults into lobster Cove where it remained the rest of the afternoon to entertain kids and adults alike.  Having a unicorn like that in our backyard inspired me to write a story (that has no ending yet) about Saffi and her unicorn. I hope it can attract an illustrator and ideas for adventures (here) – a crowdsourced book if you will.

At some point a police officer arrived to inquire who was partying since someone had called the police to complain. We told him we lived here, and he apologized. We wondered who the anonymous caller was. We think it may have been a neighbor across the Cove who treats part of the beach below her house as private property and had noticed some people had installed themselves for the day. It’s an attitude that galls me – this concept of ‘mine’ when a beach should be for everyone to enjoy, especially when the temperature rises above 90 degrees (F). The legal rights of coastal property owners are unclear and open to some interpretations – lawyers seem to be the only ones who always benefit from this ambiguity.

We only deal with this issue when dogs come running into our yard, sometimes crap there, lick out pans used for outdoor cooking, or lick me while snoozing in a hammock. These dogs are poorly trained and do not listen to their owners’ calls. I have no patience with dog owners who cannot control their dogs. They come to our beach because the main Manchester beach (Singing Beach) is closed to dogs between May and October. If the dogs stay on the beach and their owners pick up their poop, I am fine with dogs and people alike enjoying Lobster Cove.