Sylvia's Journal

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.

We never made it to Chinatown, partially because we didn’t get out of the house until it was well into the afternoon and also because we did not need to. This allowed us to hang out a little longer with Sita and Jim before they headed back West to their home and the kitties who will, by now, have been introduced to the vacuum cleaning robot. It also allowed me to receive the cookbook present that came in the afternoon mail. I picked a recipe that did not require a trip to Chinatown.

We dropped off my passport and all the required passport pictures for various visas at work and then turned around to join the shopping mall traffic that looked just the same as regular rush hour. Back home I tried my hand at a hearty Tibetan soup from ‘the other China’ that had the bread and butter part integrated (toasted barley flour and butter) and so makes dinner a one pan and one bowl soup. Of course the butter was supposed to be yak butter and the meat yak meat. The American adaptation was pretty good although it required several bowls and pans, and looked nothing like the illustration.

Tessa and Steve gave us all sort of household and kitchen stuff for Christmas that is usually given to newlyweds – it was a commentary on the content of our kitchen drawers and shelves. We didn’t think we needed anything new and matching but somehow we produced this child who likes things to be just right, which means matching. It is probably a reaction to the general messiness of our house. We now eat our food with shiny (and matching) silverware from China and beautiful sparkly new (and matching) wineglasses from France; even our well worn placemats were pushed aside by new ones from India; all on the condition that the old stuff leaves the house. So Sita and Jim went home with the ousted cutlery with the handles that had started to crack but we held on to the wine glasses and old placemats (for now).

And now we are off to DC to celebrate Chris’ 60th birthday. His wife Carol decided that we are to be one of his presents. It will be a short trip, we return on Monday afternoon, but hopefully just long enough to see some friends in addition to celebrating the important milestone.