Sylvia's Journal

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?

The year 2009 arrived inside a blizzard which left the most beautiful snowdrifts around our house and lobster cove. We hunkered down inside eating comfort food, starting with leftover soup and turkey and ending with hot chocolate and cognac (separately) while watching movies. I fell asleep about 15 minutes into 2009 after wishing the girls a happy new year, one across the driveway, the other a couple of hundred miles west.

The old year ended in a fog that I had, unwittingly, created around me to protect me from dark thoughts. All through the day I was trying to finish things left undone or half done in 2008 but did it like a zombie. I took care of OBTS Board elections stuff, cleaned my office, made only minor headway in finishing half read books, replied to some emails and mended clothes; but instead of feeling good and productive I felt increasingly depleted. I was, what we call in Dutch, wandering with my soul under my arm while my back and shoulder muscles became more and more tight as if carrying a load that increased in size as the day wore on. Something was brewing inside me but I could not get a handle on it until Axel announced he had made a reservation to spend 10 days in Costa Rica with Anne and Chuck starting next Wednesday. His trip would overlap mostly with mine, if it will ever get approved.

Then the tears broke through the façade that I had so carefully constructed around the new knowledge of the lump in my breast. Axel would be leaving the day after my ultrasound and mammogram. I tried to imagine him gone the day after I was told the unspeakable. He realized it was probably not a coincidence that he was slow in making the reservation and had not clicked on the ‘buy’ button on his screen. He never did. There is only a small window during which Axel can travel in January, before the start of his classes and the arrival of the new fireplace and construction crew. This realization produced more tears (mine), that fell into the very hot bath Axel prepared for me to get my soul back where it belonged and my muscles unknotted.

It was only fitting to end the year with water as the most prominent element. For the ancient Chinese water was a metaphor for the path of wisdom, soft and yielding (yin/feminine/dark/winter) yet also persistent. Eventually water overcomes all obstacles in its course. I did not feel very enlightened yesterday and surely not wise but the water had a healing influence on me. Now, with some distance between my current and yesterday’s state of mind I can be more philosophical about my new predicament and see it as yet another chapter in our journey, part of the ebb and flow of our life that we have lived so much more intensely than ever before. Every morning when I get up to write I do that within spitting distance from Lobster Cove with its daily reminders of ebb and flow. The Chinese call this stream that surges forward the life force (ch’i). I hope it will carry us in the right direction in this new year.

The water did its healing work last night and let me slide peacefully out of 2008 into 2009.

We are back in winter and back at home. The short distance on the map made a world of difference otherwise. I woke up to snow on the ground as if we needed a reminder that we are back in the north.

Yesterday morning in Falls Church we got up fairly early for a vacation day but we did not want to wait until our hosts’ guests arrived. We would have emerged out of the guest bedroom directly into the living room in our jammies. This is OK with friends but not with total strangers. We had a delightful breakfast with our hosts and their visitors, an elderly couple, during which we heard all about how they are trying to raise a community out of poverty through networking and coalition building between civil society groups, government agencies and private citizens. The issues of rural American poverty are actually quite similar to those I see in developing countries. The common strategy is about building trust which comes from sitting together and talk and listen, not necessarily from orchestrated meetings (at least not at first). We ended our breakfast with an orange juice toast to Obama who knows how to harness local energies like that. We are all hopeful that he will continue to do this.

We drove into DC proper to visit our friends Tisna and Fred and admire the results of the long and painful renovation of their enormous brownstone near Dupont Circle. It was indeed magnificent. We also discovered that Tisna was hobbling around the house with a cane after a fall from an attic ladder on Christmas Eve. Son Victor who is an EMT diagnosed a sprain rather than a break which saved them from having to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in a city hospital emergency room. Aside from both being Dutch, the same age, married to an American and working in the same industry we now also have a defective right ankle in common.

We had a lunch with several Dutch (Northern European/Lowlands) delicacies and then headed to the airport. We drove through the center of town and noticed much activity related to the inauguration: houses on the route being washed and painted and scaffolds for seating being erected amidst the general confusion of tourists who look at their maps rather than the traffic when they cross the streets.

National airport was also in a state of confusion. Delta claimed it had something to do with New York’s airports not releasing or accepting planes on schedule. We watched whole plane loads of passengers being reshuffled from one gate to another and back again and then squeezed into smaller planes. To our great surprise everyone remained in a good mood and despite the downsizing of the plane no one was left standing at the gate when it closed. Our plane was also hours late (presumably for the same reason) and got us to Boston several hours behind schedule. It was probably thanks to the very funny ground staff and flight attendants who saved the day with their good sense of humor, that no one was getting angry or agitated. In fact we were a jolly plane load that got deposited in Boston.

Despite our late arrival we came home before Tessa and Steve returned from work. There had indeed been a party, as we jokingly suggest when we leave the house for a few days to the care of our children. We could tell that from the bags of empties by the front entrance (but no empty kegs and at least the bottles were not hidden). The kitchen and living room were cleaned and most signs of a party had been erased. I did notice that the Palin action doll lay splayed (as if being quartered) on top of a vase amidst dried out roses. It is nice to have such grown up and responsible kids.