Sylvia's Journal

Archive Page 219

Convergence

Published March 13, 2009 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

Outside the sun is up and the snow gone but it is very cold; a spring teaser. I am staying inside, in my pajamas, maybe even the whole day as there is no reason to leave the house. All my work can be done via a computer screen and a phone line.

I woke up from a dream that included a plane (the Iron Lady) that toppled over on the ground. “A silly little ground crash,” I explained to the woman sitting next to me with a petrified expression on her face. “It’s nothing,” I said and then in my mind imagined what the crash would have been like if we had been in the air. The tour leader of our outing in the plane came to our rescue and gave us necklaces made from African beads. I declined as I had most of them already. Although threads of the dream stayed with me for a while they are now mostly gone, because I already started to work and work, I learned, interferes with dreams (even though we encourage people to work towards their dreams).

Waking up was accompanied by a piercing headache and nausea, a lousy combination. I am usually quick to wake up and get myself into fourth gear but not this morning. Maybe it was the week old cabbage soup I had for dinner last night, standing at the kitchen counter while reading Heifer International’s beautiful magazine. On impulse I went to their website to see if they have a job for me in the Boston area, I like what they do and how they do it and suspects it has more impact than what I do. But they only have one job in Arkansas for an operations director at a salary that I could not afford (maybe I could in Arkansas). In the process I discovered they organize trips to the places they have made an impact. What a great idea. This could be a source of revenue for MSH, we have plenty of places to show to rich people who want to be more relevant to the work of the world.

I have been on the phone already for hours trying to figure out whether I shall be going to Ghana next Saturday and it looks like I will not, since I can’t reach the people I need to talk with to start organizing stuff. Not feeling all so great, cancelling a trip seems like a good idea.

I had my hair cut yesterday and in the process learned the gory details of a marriage disintegrating with years of resentment spilling out like angry flames from a house on fire, devouring every last bit of self respect and confidence that my hairdresser had left in her. It is the opposite of the 70-year old predator female from yesterday’s entry. But once again the law appears to side with the predator, the unfaithful and greedy husband this time. And then I read a story about the bailout and the banks and realize that everything converges on this one phenomenon: the strong, the rich, the ones in power always win (male or female), no matter what. It could make me a cynic, especially if it comes to me in such large doses from so many different directions.

Juicy babyboomers

Published March 12, 2009 Home , On the road Leave a Comment

It was pitch black when I woke up this morning – the one hour forward is actually a setback because I am getting up and leaving home in the dark again, but not for long.

Kristen and I flew back from DC in a very full plane that was one in a series of continuous departures from the crowded USAID terminal; as if everyone wanted to get out of DC. Back home I found Tessa and Steve busy packing for their trip to Steve’s family up north in Canada; the dog restless, knowing something was afoot. Axel was chairing his town committee at the town hall, doing community preservation business. The house was empty.

The trip to DC was, except for the travel part, very enjoyable. I like traveling with my younger colleagues and hear about the courses they take and the learning they do. I also like to hear about their families. Their parents are about my age and it is interesting to hear perceptions about parents from our daughters’ cohort. We also talked a lot about group dynamics, my favorite organizational studies topic. And so the trip was more fun than I had anticipated.

The half day workshop had been advertised as a ‘Health Systems Strengthening Roundtable’ in the international health community that resides in and around Washington. One participant came all the way from Richmond. We had exactly the number of participants that could be seated around the very large conference table, representing various organizations that we sometimes compete with for government grants or contracts, and sometimes collaborate with. A few colleagues from our organization’s offices and projects in DC attended as well; people I only knew by name, or not at all.

The design for the workshop, not quite tested in that specific form, worked nicely as each part built on the previous piece and was introduced, as if scripted, by a pertinent question from our audience.

A friend of Tessa, just out of college and job-hunting in the field of international health, happened to be in DC. I had invited her to attend as it would give her a much better overview of what we do than me talking to her for an hour. I was not sure I would recognize her as I had not seen her in 15 years – from 8 to 23 makes a big difference. But I did; her face exactly as I remembered her as a bright-eyed 2nd grader.

After the workshop our new Washington-based colleague La Rue joined us for lunch. La Rue and I are travelling together to Ghana in 2 weeks and we have communicated so far entirely by email and phone so it was time to meet in person. I spent much of our lunchtime listening spellbound to her stories about her family which, in structure and age, matches mine: 1 older sister, 2 older brothers, 1 younger brother, and both of us born in the early 50s. We also had been in a house-on-fire early in our life. But there the resemblance ended; I grew up in a Holland that was on the rebound after the war and with university-educated parents; she grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in Southern Indiana in a small house without indoor plumbing.

Her stories could fill a book; not one she would write as it is not all that happy, especially the current chapter. It is about the kidnapping of her demented father, and a marriage that was tricked on him by a woman in her 70s who is after his assets. She has a daughter in the same business and they have gotten themselves quite wealthy over the years, with many houses signed over by husbands now dead.

La Rue and her siblings have been in court several times but the laws don’t protect them or their father as marriage is quite sacrosanct and the law, rightly so, protects women from men, not the other way around. I thought this was a good thing and suppose it mostly is, but not in this case. The children have to visit their father under police escort and at least half of his estate will go to the new wife.

Aging women as predators, I never would have thought that possible; according to la Rue, it is unfortunately quite common as they discovered during their research and days in court. And the hunting grounds are wide open and filled with a wide choice of juicy victims: wealthy baby-boomers who have lost touch with their children while they amassed their riches, sliding into dementia with no one to protect them. I am happy that this is a problem we won’t have.

Fragile poems, messes and stresses

Published March 11, 2009 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Washington D.C.

Yesterday was a long day that ended at 9 PM at the Melrose hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, in a 3 room suite. A bill that matched it in size was pushed under my doorway this morning.

When I travel I don’t get up at 4:30 AM so yesterday started slow and late. Axel cooked me breakfast, leaving me time to admire Lobster Cove, spectacular in its post snow-storm appearance. Everything was covered in frozen snow – the kind of white that looks blue in the sun. It made me want to pull out my watercolors – to catch the snow on tree trunks and branches, best painted by not painting it, as negative space. On some of the branches the wet snow had melted and then frozen again; ice crystals that sparkled in the sun like jewels. To complete it all a bright red cardinal settled down on a high branch, chirping as if there was no tomorrow. It was a fragile and tender nature poem – for now the sun was helping it come to life; soon it would kill it.

I dropped the car off at the Shell station near work to fix the slow leak in one of the tires. A little gremlin is piercing the outer wall of our tires. One month ago we replaced one tire and now this one on the opposite side has the same problem. We are puzzled by this and soon some 200 dollars poorer; but then, we know that the tires and the car are old and worn. The Korean mechanic circled the pinhole that he could do nothing about with yellow paint. He put the tire back on, it’s a slow leak after all, and did not charge me; he knows I will come back. My belief in the basic goodness of people is coming back, even if it is simply good customer service.

I travelled to Washington with Kristen on the 7 PM flight. These flights used to be full but now, like all others, they are only half full. We sat next to a discombobulated woman from the Commerce Department who panicked when she did not see her purse. When she found it (inside a larger purse) we all sighed and laughed. She was going home to DC and clearly in need of some R&R. She had taught businesses in Rhode Island about export rules and restrictions. When she discovered that we were ‘in international health,’ (in developing countries even) she blessed us for our good work and I kept my skeptic mouth shut, trying not to reveal how we are all tripping over each other in places like Afghanistan and Ethiopia, doing HIV/AIDS work. And that there is money in doing development – some people even derive a very good living from fighting poverty. That’s when shame takes over from pride. But I let her bless us nevertheless. As far as tax dollars go, I feel like I am spending them quite responsibly (we did not take an earlier flight to avoid an extra charge of 50 dollars and instead waited for 2 hours in the airport.)

We have been asked to do a 3 hour session to teach our peers about management and leadership of health programs. We have done a similar event about one year ago. Kristen will do more now and I will do less. We have no idea how many people will show up. There does not seem to be a registration process. We are prepared for one person, for 30 or anything in between. The event is part of our continuing crusade to have those who assign clinicians to run health facilities think about the management and leadership tasks that need to be done before things get messed up. It causes a lot of unnecessary stresses in people and systems. I know this first hand, as it happened in my own family. We have been doing these sorts of events for years and keep being surprised that this is not obvious to others that people need to learn how to manage and lead.

Unmarried snow

Published March 10, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

My day was full of interruptions throwing my plan to write all day out of the window. First there was the gasman who came to deliver gas to Steve’s and Tessa’s place where the heat did not work. Despite a full tank he could not get it going. Luckily Axel did. Not having heat in something that is more like a camp in this weather is a serious matter.

Then there was physical therapy where my huge upperarm bruise created quite a stir and required the expert opinion of the chief PT. She declared I was lucky. I had not ripped a tendon (such a thing would have required a surgical intervention) but rather some fibers on the belly of the muscle. This explains why I can use my right arm but not lift anything heavy. She did suggest I see a doctor (which I did, another interruption), apply ice and keep my upper arm up (try it while you are standing or sitting). At the doctor’s office Gail, one of the nurse practitioners, had seen these kinds of bruises before and counseled patience and heat. I like the heat more so I follow her advice.

Two (planned) meetings-by-phone cut the day further into pieces and then it was five o’clock, officially ending my workday and just in time for the arrival of Nuha. We were ready to celebrate her 27th birthday. She came up by train from Boston and got to experience one last gasp of winter before she heads back to her desert home in May. Dressed in my red coat, like a cardinal, and with my camera she took off in the new (wet and heavy) snow to explore Lobster Cove in winter. red_nuha_in_snow “In Saudi Arabia,” she said breathlessly, when she returned, “we would call this snow like a girl who has not been married.” “Yes,” I replied, “that would be virgin snow. We use the same word.” Unmarried snow – I like it.

Nuha brought me a present and I had a gift for her. We are easy gifting objects because we both love scarves and so that is what we gave each other. Three scarves from Ethiopia for Nuha and one from Saudi Arabia for me plus a small vial of musk oil (promptly and expertly administered by Nuha behind my ears and on my wrists) and prayer beads that were selected to match the color of my eyes.

Axel had cooked a Surinam dish that had simmered all day in the slow cooker and required the making of roti, Indian bread we only knew from restaurants or ready-baked in the store. They came out alright but did smoke up the house so we had the windows open. This caused the candles on the birthday cake to go out on its way from the kitchen to the table, a chain reaction of unimportant events.

nuha_bday The cake with its pound of butter was yummy as long as you forgot about the butter; which Axel did but then regretted later as his stomach protested for hours afterwards.

I drove Nuha home to Cambridge with the remnants of the cake to feed to her brothers and friends. During our 45 minutes ride I learned much about how girls in Saudi Arabia find love, or at least a good match – quite a challenge, especially when you are a free spirit like Nuha. On my way back I listened to Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren who was telling us what we as taxpayers got for our 700 billion handout to the banks and companies like AIG: not much. The abuse she and her co panelists uncovered is maddening especially in light of the strict regulations we at MSH are held to when it comes to using public monies. If I don’t have a receipt for something that cost as little as 25 dollars I don’t get reimbursed. I wonder whether I should continue to believe in the basic goodness of people.

The last activity of the day was translating for Axel the last 3 weeks of Peter ‘s Zeur kalender captions. Some of these are impossible to convey in English, like the retro-curse ‘dekselse kwajongen!’ or ‘Flikker nou maar weer eens op!’ If anyone who reads this can help me, please! The many internet Dutch-English translators were stumped.

White

Published March 9, 2009 Dreams , Home Leave a Comment

Yesterday’s near spring weather, the blue skies and the balmy temperatures have gone and we are back to winter. All the exposed mud is covered again by snow, which is prettier but it does feel like a setback.

My huge blue, purple, bright red and violet bruise on my arm remains. I decided not to bother my local doctor on weekend duty; instead I solicited two opinions from my brother and his wife, by phone, and combine it with a catching up phone call that was due anyways. Both said something that is a variation on a familiar family mantra. My mother, also a doctor, best expressed the mantra by saying “It will be over before you turn into a boy.” It is a nice way of saying that you are making too much of something.

Despite the injury I had much exercise yesterday, the kind that does not involve the biceps: biking and walking. The biking was to Quaker Meeting where I practiced silencing my busy mind (and was only partially successful) and was reminded about Lent which requires, in the orthodox traditions, giving up something of value. Nancy spoke about this and suggested that for many of us the thing to give up may well be ‘being too busy and trying to do it all.’ I could relate to that and took it as an exhortation and ended up not doing as much on Sunday as I had originally intended.

I did bake a cake with about one pound of butter in it which I will not disclose any further. Coming back from Quaker Meeting I felt too wholesome to make a cake from a box. In hindsight I should have because the cake I made may not be as fluffy as the cake boxes advertise. But the frosting was to die for (it would, with more than half a pound of butter). Tessa had the leftover frosting on a slice of bread; something that Dutch kids have for breakfast when not having jimmies on their bread (or sometimes both). The birthday cake was for Nuha who turned 27 but we got our signals crossed and so we did not see her and offer her the cake as we had hoped. This is postponed until today when she will come up, and we will treat her to a belated birthday dinner.

After the baking Axel and I went for a very long walk at the Ipswich Audubon reserve which brought back thousands of memories to our time as young parents. The park was a regular weekend outing when Sita was very little and later, when Tessa had joined us. They went to vacation nature school, we learned about sugaring, animal tracks, mushrooms, fed the chickadees from our hands and made up stories about who lived in the rockery. All that came flooding back as we sat watching the activities of beavers by a quiet, semi-frozen pond. It made us feel a little old but the memories were sweet. We also resolved to go kayaking through the reserve as soon as we are physically fit enough for this, later this year.

I wonder whether the large bruise is responsible for my tiredness. I took a long bath yesterday and went to bed before 9PM, to wke up from a dream in which I had a cat sitting on my head, at about 7 AM. That’s when I discovered everything was white again, except my upper arm.

Blue

Published March 8, 2009 Flying , Home Leave a Comment

Under blue skies and temperatures that had brought people outdoors everywhere, Bill and I flew north to a deserted Skyhaven airport near lake Ossipee in New Hamsphire. I landed, taxied off the runway, then back on and headed west to Concord. This airport was a little busier with lightweights, little planes like hours and even a helicopter vying for airspace. The gusting winds blew a lightweight a little too close to our plane. He wasn’t doing his radio work very well and also flew too high. But I got a chance to look at it from close up and it looks like fun. I might try one in the summer at Plum Island where I have seen them parked.

From Concord we flew to a lovely small place near Keene where I learned there is an ice-cream stand near the airport, something to remember for when summer comes. As we taxied to the apron a man was waving to us. This turned out to be our aviation doctor who holds the power to let us fly or ban us from the skies, every two years. Of course he has his own plane. Both Bill and I have contributed to that plane, and will continue to do that, every two years, with out-of-pocket payments that no insurance company will reimburse us for.

Bill took over and flew us back to Beverly the remaining 50 nautical miles where we arrived exactly when the plane was due home. I gave Arne a postcard of an aviation painting from Ethiopia. I am trying to get him started on an ‘aviation art’ collection from developing countries. It is a slow collection process because aviation is usually not part of the artist community’s experience in those countries. The postcard joins a woodcarving of Garuda, the Hindu god of pilots, from Nepal that hangs above the desk. For Bill I brought a bag of Ethiopian coffee beans. eth_air

I got home just in time to join Axel on an outing to Gloucester to get native shrimp, pretty much straight of the boat. During the few short shrimp fishing periods – most of the time shrimp fishing is out of bounds – you can get enormous bags of the small shrimp for very little money and eat until to you’re full. Across the street from the shrimp place is the Fisherman’s Brew pub which happened to have its Grand Opening and so we joined a noisy crowd of beer testers, 5 different varieties. Only the stout did not get our thumbs up. The small fish shaped plank with five 6 oz glasses was accompanied by a platter with smoked fish, cheese and olives. This became our lunch.

We drove to Salem to join Kairos and Christine who had ventured out of Boston and Cambridge with thousands of other city folks. The occasion for us getting together was the Mahjong, Contemporary Chinese Art exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum; an exhibit that delighted us both in its organization and the quality of the pieces. We drove back in a girl car and a boy car. The girls got home first, made tea and talked about pregnancy, childbirth and raising children in various languages – Chris is 7 months pregnant. The boys went out and bought exquisite wine after a long study of the contents of two wine merchants in Manchester by the Sea that surprised Kairos who thinks we live among country bumpkins. We consumed the exquisite wine with the shrimp and sat around the table for hours, discussing China, Japan, architecture, movies and becoming a father late in life with few (but very strong) expectations for this baby (we predict sparks in about 15 years).

Just before I tumbled exhausted into bed I examined my sore arm and noticed that the bruise on my upper right arm had grown bigger and was edged by dark blue lines. We contemplated going to the emergency room but the prospect of a midnight wait in an emergency room shoved the thought aside. We home remedied with a bag of ice. This morning the colors are more subdued but it is still sore, and being my right arm, interferes a bit with normal functioning; a visit to the doctor might be in order.

Shifting burdens

Published March 7, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

My major accomplishment yesterday was the removal of about 250 emails from my in-box. One could argue that, from a systems perspective, this is no accomplishment at all because many were simply transferred to other people in in-boxes, and thus only ‘shifted the burden.’ My other, minor, accomplishment was that Liz and I have stuck so far to our ‘next steps’ timeline for Ethiopia and pushed things along as planned (which is fast and against some odds).

Where I made no progress is on the travel calendar front. My counterparts do not, or cannot, plan this far ahead for reasons I do not know– two weeks for Ghana, five weeks for Afghanistan (or Ethiopia but no longer Zambia). I am all set to go to Ghana but the most critical person for the success of this trip has not responded to either plan A, plan B (or plan C which says ‘cancel.’). I know he has an iPhone but I know little about the strength of signals wherever he is. Signals from Afghanistan have been equally absent. One of the things I have learned over the years is to never make assumptions about reasons why I am not getting any responses and so I wait, with (e)ticket in hand and passport somewhere between Washington and Boston. There are still two weeks between now and my next scheduled departure.

I never left my house yesterday and spent too long sitting in front of computers, despite the granddog’s attempts to get me out. Today I will get out. Not just out but also up. My flying buddy Bill has planned a practice run north into NH, then west and then back to Beverly. The practice concerns landings, four of them, with full stops and maybe one go around, in Skyhaven, Concord, Jaffrey and our home base Beverly. Our timing appears to be perfect as the sky is blue and the temperature springlike.

Overtones

Published March 6, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

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.

Neural duckboards

Published March 5, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

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.

Interactions

Published March 4, 2009 Home Leave a Comment

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. winter09-004

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.

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