Sylvia's Journal

I spent the 6th of June in Easthampton, marveling at Faro who, at one year has moved into another phase: he is walking, albeit it very hesitantly and only when he is not in a hurry. That is very sensible of course. early on Friday morning I headed partway home, to Marlborough, to attend the 2nd of our 3 required face to face trainings.

Since our first intensive training, four months ago, and countless hours of coaching, my confidence has gone up a few notches. But then, when I compare my level of proficiency to that of our coaching trainer it feels like I have light years to go. And so we move forward to the next (and last) retreat in September and another 50 hours of practice coaching!

During the weekend I had one major insight, triggered by one of the (33) coaching principles that inform our education: “There are no mistakes.” Although my brain was willing to go with that statement, my gut was not, until I understood at a more cellular level what the implication is of this principle. That understanding all by itself made the 30 hours of instruction worth it: when there are no mistakes there is no blame (of self and others) – what a liberating thought!

I returned home and the end of Sunday, with just enough daylight left to squeeze about 25 asparagus beetles, some in the act of procreating, between my fingers. But the damage is done: many shriveled up spears, prematurely ending the asparagus season that started so auspiciously. We are learning that having left the dried out stalks over the winter is partially responsible for this invasion (not a mistake but something we didn’t know any better at the time). I also harvested the radishes, all with tiny teeth marks indicating that they are (somewhat) attractive to other critters. The abundant harvest of arugula and pakchoi was mostly clean, we tolerate tiny holes in the leaves, and immediately consumed.

Early on Wednesday morning my sister woke me up with the long awaited news that her grand baby Romi Aline had arrived early morning of June 5th in Amsterdam, which was also her 69th birthday; what a magnificent birthday present to receive from her daughter, who is also my niece!

Romi’s arrival has increased the number of my parents’ great grandchildren to 3, with another scheduled to arrive in 2 months. I hope they watch from someplace.

Today I took the day off to celebrate Faro’s first birthday. I was the first grandparent to watch one year old Faro. We celebrated in a local restaurant where Faro practiced his newly acquired ‘goodbye’ skills, waving his entire arm willy nilly to unsuspecting patrons especially those closer to his age.

He had his first strawberries, whipped cream, angel food cake, garlic spinach, cod (oh, no, I forgot, he is a vegetarian), and breaded eggplant . Jim said I had poop duty tomorrow but I won’t be there. I will leave at some ungodly hour to get to Marlborough, halfway back to Manchester. I will be sequestered for 3 full days in a Marriott conference room to complete retreat number 2 of my coaching program. I will miss his 1st birthday party. All the other omas and opas, one aunt, one uncle and one cousin will come out west to celebrate the day. Faro will be 1 year and 2 days by then.

Sunday evening we started with a WorldCafe-ish introduction to the two day event organized by my pharmaceutical colleagues about medicines in Universal Health Care. Sita was hired to capture the conversation on a 16 foot knowledge wall, which she did in her usual awe-inspiring way.

Axel checked in with us at the end of each day, seeing the progress in Sita’s scribing and gauging the progress of the meeting by the level of energy in the room. He met colleagues from Ghana, Ethiopia and Bangladesh – the fact that he was Sita’s dad helped with the introductions.

The joy of working with Sita is that we get to have all our meals together. On Sunday we ate Lebanese (Kebabji), on Monday we ate at Kramer’s bookstore café and tonight we ate at a greasy airport joint, bringing to an end this intense workweek for me and an friends-and-art vacation for Axel.

On the way to the airport, while Axel was deeply engaged in conversation with the taxi driver, Sita knitted this experience together with all her other scribing events, reflecting on what she learned in others and/or missed in this one. Sita is better schooled in system dynamics by now than I am. By putting one and one and one together she is intensely aware of the messes that people have created by thinking in a certain way and is dismayed when she sees similar thinking, intended to end the messes, create more of the same. It is why Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem out of the same consciousness that created the problems in the first place. But we do.

She is seeing the cataclysmic events or trends from the last years (Katrina, Sandy, tornadoes in Oklahoma, violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and the rise of chronic diseases, missing mussels in Lobster Cove) not as exceptions and rare and disruptive occurrences, but as the new normal. Where I am still thinking of black swans, she quoted someone present at the World Economic Forum as saying, “these are large blinking neon swans.” If we choose to ignore them we do so at our own risk and peril. Afghanistan, New Orleans, Oklahoma, Syria, the morbidly obese and the Jersey shore or far away from Lobster Cove but it could be different.

Pondering all this I flew home while listening to Ludovico Eunaudi’s Divinire and reading about Gloucester and Charles Olson. The combination of sound and word made me want to write poetry, seeing hope and possibility behind this veil of worry, concern and pessimism (“no,” says Sita, “realism”). But there is no chance of that. I was distracted by the fish, chips and tartar sauce sloshing around in my unsuspecting belly, and in thousands of other bellies. There is some digesting to be done before figuring out what to do next (and before my cholesterol check blood test tomorrow).

I woke up this morning, back at our homestead, feeling a slight twinge of nostalgia and a vague sense of loss. The loss was about the sadness I imagined as F was saying goodbye to her surrogate parents at NMH, but also the sadness of not being able to return to Afghanistan this summer to see her real mom and siblings. Given her high and scarfless profile at public events and in public places she was advised to remain in the US for the summer before settling into Bates for the next 4 years.

Her American experience has opened her eyes to perspectives that had never been in view as she grew up in Afghanistan. She wrote a paper why gay marriage is OK, roomed with a Jewish girl and later with a Russian girl whose grandfather had fought against her grandfather in Afghanistan. She can now separate the people from the issues and make independent judgments. She honed her managerial skills at the rec center of NMH and read the whole bible as part of a class for Catholics only, to which she asked to be admitted. She has developed a theory about geography, destiny and the great religions that is a refreshing view on a very divisive topic in her homeland. A return will be hard because she will be a lone voice. It is good to know that SOLA, and so many others, are working hard at creating a critical mass of such independent thinkers. It is a life’s work for many extraordinary people we have come to know, inside and outside Afghanistan.

Watching the class of 2013 cheering and throwing their hats in the air, the proud smiles of parents and friends also made me nostalgic. I remember my own graduation. It was 1970, a time full of possibilities and open roads. Looking back I can say that, indeed, roads opened and I have travelled a long way, both literally and figuratively, exceeding my wildest expectations. It’s just that now I can’t walk these roads as well as I used to – the crippling ankle pain is beginning to close off those roads that aren’t paved.