Sylvia's Journal

This morning we held our usual Music & Imagery session. We meditate and go ‘inside,’ then return with whatever we found there and commit it to paper. Although the technique is used in therapy (by the ones who lead the sessions) for us it’s not a therapy session but rather like a folk dance with a group of women (some in Quebec and others in Massachusetts) who have become very special to each other. 

We share our experiences of the world as it is. Today it was a rather depressing conversation. About Ukraine of course, but also the pandemic and the ones that come after, and then I throw antimicrobial resistance on the fire and whoosh, we’re all depressed. And there is more, that article in the New Yorker about destitute Afghan women sitting in the middle of the road in wintry Kabul, babies clenched to their chest… It’s too much to bear. All day long I walked around with a large brick in my stomach (or lungs) that got in the way of breathing. And then I recognize and marvel at my luck and privilege.

One of the things that led to my depressed state yesterday was listening to an interview of our friend Jerry Martin about the link between meat and pandemics. I told Jerry that he managed to get to simplicity on the other side of complexity, rather than simplicity on this side of complexity. The message is very disturbing although it had one high note at the end. He reminded us that we were not totally unprepared for the pandemic: it was after the 2005 avian flu pandemic that researchers started to work on MNRA vaccines which has allowed many more people to survive COVID-19.

For about two years now I have been baking our own bread.  In April 2020 I took an online workshop on bread making that was organized by our local library. The title of the workshop appealed to me: five minutes a day no knead bread. Up till that time I had assumed and accepted that I could not make bread. All my effort resulted in bricks, dense hard loaves that were basically inedible.

Ever since that workshop I have been wildly successful in making my own bread. I have developed variations to the master recipe, experimented with different grains, including the spent wheat from Axel’s beer making. There are only four ingredients in the basic recipe: water, salt, yeast, and flour. No preservatives, so you know what you’re eating. Because of that the bread doesn’t stay “fresh” for very long. But that’s never a problem because it tastes so good.

We have some division of responsibilities in our household: I make the bread an Axel makes the beer.  After my mishap early January, breadmaking became his responsibility since it was impossible for me to do with my right hand in a cast. 

And so, it was time for Axel to learn the trade. I tried to explain the different steps. One of the important things to do once you have taken the bread dough out of its container, is to quickly “cloak” the dough to keep the gas bubbles inside. This produces the holes in the bread. 

Apparently, my explanations were not good enough. Goaded by my, “you should do this only for 20 to 40 seconds,” Axel was frantically turning the ball of dough in his hands, not understanding where the ‘cloak’ was supposed to come from. The cool refrigerated dough became more and more sticky as it warmed up in his hands, sticking to everything as the seconds ticked by.  He didn’t understand the “cloaking” part, not the theory and not the practice. We watched some YouTube videos, but because the hands of the baker were so fast and the clip so short, that even playing it over and over did not get the concept or practice across. 

This morning Axel announced that he will master this, seriously! If we don’t want to buy bread, he will have to be the bread maker because I’m still in a brace until the middle of February.  His second attempt was already much better: it was a thin loaf that was so delicious that we ate the entire thing for lunch.  When I come out of my brace in three or four weeks, we will be able to share bread making responsibilities and I better get started on learning to make beer.

I have been upgraded (or downgraded) from a plaster cast to a plastic brace with a lot of padding and Velcro. The break is healing but not yet fully healed, hence the brace. My fourth and fifth digits still need to be immobilized for at least 3 weeks.  

It remains difficult to write by hand. This morning one of the members of my Music and Imagery group suggested that I do my drawings with my left hand. I did. I even wrote the titles of my drawings with my left hand. Axel mentioned that this will be good for my brain, forcing it to rewire my writing circuitry. I think my brain is generally in good condition, what with all the reading and studying I do. But I should probably have started to practice writing with my left hand several weeks ago. Right now, my left-handwriting looks a bit like the writing of my six-year-old granddaughter. In the coming weeks I will be doing several interviews over Zoom. I don’t think note taking with my left hand will be possible quite yet. I will have to record.  Luckily, technology will help me with the transcribing.

Talking about technology, a few days ago I attended a demo of a platform called Gatherly. I would like to use this with one of my clients that is embarking on a (mostly remote) strategic planning process in the coming year. I am so impressed with the young people who are creating these amazing platforms (Wonder.me is another among many) that allow us to be together-apart in ways much more interesting and fun than Zoom, Google Meet or MS Teams.

The pandemic has forced us to go inside because we could not go outside. This appears to have triggered tremendous creativity and innovation. Not just in the technology field, but also of art in its many shapes and forms. There are amazing pieces of music being composed. There is so much art rising out of pandemic despair. 

Although I am not much in pandemic despair – we are weathering the pandemic under extremely lucky conditions—and I’m not creating new things in an artsy way, my brain is very busy with sense making.  I am reading and studying a lot, absorbing other peoples’ great ideas and thoughts about teams and group processes, converting them into approaches to deal with challenges my clients are throwing in my lap. I am going a bit out on a limb, especially about team coaching. My next, more advanced, team coaching training won’t start until another two weeks from now and practicing my new craft under supervision is even further out in the future. Fake it till you make it?

With new variants of the no longer novel coronavirus, I hear less and less people saying, “when we get back to normal again.” Although we are adapting, we cannot quite suspend the longing to connect with each other the way we used to.  Is this really the end of our familiar world? 

I am reading Station Eleven, which was released as a TV miniseries in 2016, created by Patrick Somerville based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel.

At that period (2014-2016) I still worked at MSH. I was marginally involved in one of several projects funded by the US government, to predict and prepare for pandemics. Americans were shaken only a little bit by SARS and MERS, and then by Zika. But life continued pretty much the old way. Our former president, who’s name shall not be mentioned, stopped the funding of any project related to pandemic preparedness. The elaborate and painstakingly built network of institutions around the world, collaborating on pandemic preparedness, lost its funding and weakened as a result. We are now paying an enormous price for that pennywise and pound-foolish act.

And so now I’m reading this dystopian story of Station Eleven, where society has completely collapsed and the few survivors of the ‘Georgia virus’ must fend for themselves and learn to live without electricity, without fuel, without healthcare, without medicine, without jobs and shops, without money and banks, and without any form of governance other than arms and power.

It is a dark story, with occasional sparks of caring and compassion. But it is a story nevertheless that has sprouted out of the imaginative mind of Emily St. John Mandel. Not real.

But then I read the NYT (1/19) story about a mink farms in various parts of the world that have turned out to be reservoirs of coronavirus. It explains the concept of spillback, when a virus first spills over from animals into humans and then spills back into animals again, where it can freely mutate and jump from species to species. The preventive measures that we take as humans seemed very insignificant in stopping this very clever virus. It is a story about the consequences of how we treat animals for profit. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. This is not an imaginary story that came out of somebody’s imagination. This is real.

Nearly two months after my last few entries, a dream drew me back to my diary. It was about worries. Worries to not be able to check in for a flight to Wuhan – of all places – because I hadn’t planned for an airport farewell. That farewell (to whom and with whom got lost in the wake up) had taken more time than anticipated. For reasons unclear now, I either had not looked at my planner, or forgotten the trip altogether, I realized within an hour of the scheduled departure of my flight to Wuhan that I still needed to collect my travel documents and suitcase from my home. Trying to flag down taxi cabs that could get me from the airport in Paris to my childhood home (in the Netherlands) in a totally unreasonable time filled me with worry until I met an old and always cheerful friend from college who said, “Why don’t you relax and take the next flight to Wuhan?”

Oh how right she was, worry is such a waste of time. I am listening to a lovely little book (Into the Magic Shop) written by a neurosurgeon (James R. Doty) on what he learned, as a young child, from a remarkable meditation teacher who had taken him under her wing inside a stripmall Magic Shop. “Worry is a waste to time,’ she remarked to the to the young man, who was at that time living a rather bleak existence in a bleak part of a bleak town, barely a teenager. Or, as I learned in Nigeria, decades ago, “when you worry, you go die; when you don’t worry you go die. So why worry?”

Worry consumes enormous amounts of energy, shallows our breathing, reduces our peripheral vision, releases more cortisol into our body than we need, which then weakens our immune system, etc. In short, worry is bad for us. I think I have been worrying about so many things for a full year now (COVID, elections, violence, vaccines) that extricating myself from this state of mind has been a big challenge for way too long.

On a more intimate level, worrying has also been about ruminating about past decisions and anticipating that bad stuff will happen in the future. This is why I have made a commitment at getting better at meditation, even if it is only 20 minutes each day. I am still very inexperienced in my meditation journey, but with a year of daily practice under my belt, I am getting just a little better at fighting the worry Ninja.

From July till December, our ‘aging-in-place’ project has filled me with worries (forward and backward), what with all the decisions (smart and not so smart in hindsight), and the oodles of money involved. Now, actually aging in our new place, downstairs, I let that worry Ninja go, but another one has appeared.  A new project has started next door after one of our neighbors of 50 years died and his housemate vacated the premises a month ago, leaving us with a considerable mess to clean up. There are once again decisions to make on what to spend money on and what not, the color of the walls to be painted, the furnishing of the place.

With our grandchildren’s homeschooling likely to go on until the end of this school year, and their parents often at wits’ end on how to manage this colossal challenge, we invited them to come and live next door whenever and for as long as they wanted until the end of the school year. That way we can look after the kids when their parents cannot.

I keep getting sucked back into the energy-draining ruminating and anticipating routines, wishing backwards and forward, that get in the way of being in the here and now. I am calling on all the wisdom from the West and the East to counter that tendency: Pilates on Monday, Yoga on Tuesday and Tai Chi on Thursday. And in the meantime, we are still in the depth of winter and cannot have the social contacts that usually help us get through this endless winter.

Mary Oliver’s ageless poetic wisdom spoke to me this week: [“Still, what I want in my life/is to be willing/to be dazzled—/to cast aside the weight of facts/and maybe even/to float a little/above this difficult world….”]. I have been dazzled.

Inspired and full of hope I end this week of seeing possibilities, being encouraged by kindred spirits from all over the world. I feel very blessed to get that much support and energy when the affairs of state (MA, the USA and the world) deplete me.

I got some clarity about why, as my guru Judith E. Glaser said “9 out of 10 conversations miss the mark.” It’s because of vantage points and horizons. It’s all about where we stand and what we are looking at.

Matt Taylor clarified the idea of vantage points for me – conversations miss the mark when one is talking from a philosophical vantage point while another is busy engineering, already descended to logistics or a task vantage point. Either one can turn the other off, which usually happens when one doesn’t see where the other stands. 

Bill Sharpe clarified the notion of three horizons – what we are looking at. One is talking about the current horizon, another about his or her faraway aspirational 3^rd horizon and then there are those who are focusing on the 2^nd horizon where the present is being brought steps closer to the 3^rd horizon via experimentation and innovation. In his book ‘Three Horizons, the pattering of hope,‘ Sharpe explores his intuition “that we have within us a far deeper capacity for shared life than we are using, and that we are suffering from an attempt to know our way into the future instead of live our way.”

And finally there is my current author compagnon,  Margaret Heffernan who is reading her book ‘Unchartered’ to me. She kicked over some beliefs I have held for a long time, retold the scenario stories (Shell, South Africa) I already knew and added may more, all seems to have an unlimited supply of stories about what is possible when one has passion, perseverance, patience, and fellow travelers. All stories create a sense of awe as people accomplished (together with many others)  things most people would have considered impossible. She writes, “you cannot solve social problems without social processes.” It seems intuitive.

We had our 4^th New Moon gathering of our 7 months Upcreation! journey on Friday. Part of the day we joined with our European friends who unhooked when it was bedtime for them, while we, on both US coasts, in the middle, and in Canada, continued to meet for another half day until it was bedtime for me (to continue with the Asia/pacific folks after that and resuming with the Europeans the next day. For us east Coasters it is a full day on Zoom (10AM till 8 PM). It sounds horrible but this group is special and wonderful to be with for all the hours (we do break preiodically).

coWe are all trying to right something that is horribly wrong or call something into being that only exists in the mind’s eye. We ended the day with the creation of a model (Pre-Covid it would have been with atoms, but now with bytes) of the patterns we were seeing in our various stands, and finally a Haiku describing 6 months from now, 1 years from now, 5 years from now and far into the future. It was fun, validating and inspiring.

And then, to close this week about possibilities and hope, there was our usual Saturday morning ritual of Music & Imagery with my M&I sisters from near and far, that ironed out the moments of despair and the resulting knots in my stomach, caused by our angry president. I try not to listen to the news too much because it gives him way too much free airtime, poisoning the ether with his vitriol.

This is a line from David Whyte’s poem by the same name. I am listening to an interview with him in which he speaks to our current experience of uncertainty. There is much that resonates with me. I know that everything is waiting for me, to step up, to take a stand, to participate actively in creating a better future. As a small, though not insignificant gesture, I filled in my absentee ballot today – I haven’t decided whether to drop it off at the town hall (no, I won’t use the USPS) or vote in person at the local school on November 3, but just the blackening of the dot next to the Biden/Harris line made me feel better.

Whyte is reminding us about the importance of silence. To create it, to seek it, to turn our hands and eyes away from the screen, up to the heavens, or birds or the flaming foliage of our trees. That is exactly what I am going to do as soon as I have posted this writing.

It take skills and courage to seek silence. I meditate 20 minutes every morning and try to engage in short mini-mediations during the day (failing most of the time), as a shield against the  relentless, noisy and incessant chatter wherever we turn our ears and eyes.

I often invite this chatter into my life by not being able to say no to yet another invite for this or that intriguing, appealing, inspiring course, this or that meeting on Zoom. We can now say ‘yes’ all the time because there is no getting into cars or planes, most of the time no money to pay – we can participate in everything.  

And so I found myself on two Zoom events at the same time, one coming softly in through my hearing devices and the other through my computer audio. When a Facetime call with my husband and daughters announced itself on my two screens, a third input, I realized the folly of what I was doing. I left all the meetings, to find out that the call was a pocket dial – sent to me by the heavens via my granddaughter who pressed against her grandfather’s back pocket. I turned my computer off, and my head towards the late afternoon autumn sun. Silence at last.

It is probably also not a coincidence that I am being asked to become the next clerk of our Quaker Meeting. Quakers know a thing or two about silence, being comfortable and fully present in the silence, where everything is waiting for you. If I was somewhat reluctant to even consider the request yesterday, I am now thinking about it, because, I suppose, the heavens spoke to me by whispering into my ear that phrase of everything that is waiting for me.

I am enrolled in  bunch of initiatives that are all converging towards a seeking for a new Operating System (OS) for our societies, now that the previous OS is no longer working. Otto Scharmer and his Theory U, accompanied by tens of thousands of his team’s disciples (I am meeting more and more online through the free EdX Ulab course) comforts me, knowing all these people are also laying the groundwork for OS 4.0.

I am part of another (worldwide) group, Upcreators in the Americas, Asia and Europe. My fellow Upcreators are also a force for change, maybe on a smaller scale, but every scale helps. I meet people everywhere who are experimenting at a global, regional, and (sometimes very) local level, with amplifying the conditions for creating OS 4.0 and challenging the assumptions and mental mentals of the previous OS. They too are laying the tracks for OS 4.0. And then there are my fellow coaches around the world who I meet through a variety of events (all online); they too are full of hope and energy and resolve to co-create this OS 4.0 for the society. Like a baby in its final days before birth, something is kicking hard and ready to be born.

I am inspired by all this learning and conversing and experimenting and innovating. Something has ignited in me and I have started the first hesitant steps to do my own experiment, very locally, in the town I live in – to come up with a set of initiatives that will help us, resilient New Englanders that we are, to get through our first ever pandemic winter. No one here has experience with a pandemic winter, so that’s where I’ll start – after 40 years of very global, this winter I am turning my energy and attention to my very small town.

Our neighbor Charlie died. He was 97 years old. He was born in Croatia in1923. I turned to Wikipedia to understand where Croatia was on the political map at that time and found a confusing description of allegiances and annexations and nationalist fervor that make it hard to say he was born in Yugoslavia. But what I was able to discern is that Charlie’s parents had been, for most of their life, citizens of the Ottoman empire. This is a good illustration of Elize’s Boulding phrase that the present spans 200 years: from 1920-2120 (the year the oldest person on earth was born in and the year some of those being born today will pass on).

This realization is a good antidote for the impatient all-or-nothing-thinking of the immediate now that dominates our media and, often, my own thoughts. Giving rise to panic and a lot of anxiety.

I don’t know how Charlie came to US, whether he came alone or with his parents, but what I do know is that he enlisted in the US army to fight the Germans in WWII. He was a gunner during the second world war, sitting precariously atop a fighter plane under a glass dome, shooting at German planes. It’s a miracle that he survived this profession with its high death toll. He lived another 75 years after that, first as the neighbor of my in-laws, and then being our neighbor as we moved into Axel’s parental home.

Charlie and Axel have known each other for 58 years. It was a sad day for Axel and Charlie’s current housemate and his brother, old men themselves. They valiantly cared for Charlie in his last precarious months, acting like home health aides, calling 911 more than once over the last 6 months.

Death bring with it a flood of memories. It was Charlie and his fellow engineers who lived next door and exposed Axel to strong liquor and the manly companionship that he missed as an only child. They’d go fishing in their aluminum boat with much alcohol on board.

Charlie was a survivor. What finally did him in was a double pneumonia, sometimes referred to as ‘the old man’s friend.’ I like to think he is now in a better place, maybe in the New York section of heaven where he is undoubtedly running in RBG. I wonder what they’d be talking about. May be I can guess.

The undercooked mushroom toxins that completely floored us a month ago have long since gone. That part of my body is back in good shape. But hamstrings and abductors and laterals are not. I seem to tear anyone of these easily, small mishaps in everyday life. It’s a pain, and it costs me a fortune every week for body work: chiropractor, massage therapy and physical therapy. Navigating stairs up and down has been painful.

The good news is that our bedroom move from upstairs to downstairs (a significant construction project) is moving along at a good clip. During the week our yard looks like a truck sales lot when the various tradesmen are at work, all masked and with a limited number of people working inside. I am so excited about the new bedroom suite that sometimes I cannot sleep, my brain picturing myself in our new room. We are intensely grateful that we can do this and, hopefully, age in place with comfort and ease.

Aside from mushrooms, muscles and construction, I am using some of the time that is left as a volunteer with EthicalCoach. I recently acquired a new coachee in west Africa and continue to support the organization in other ways as well. It has been a wonderful experience so far. I developed new friendships with some extraordinary people all over the world in the process.

Although there are a few potentially interesting assignments on the horizon, for the moment my income producing coaching practice has dwindled to just a few people; some of my clients have decided that it’s time for them to fly solo, and I agreed; no more need for our calls. I will miss them as I have gotten to know them well and grew fond of them, learning as much from them as they from me.

The word ‘solo’ reminded me of my first solo flight. When my flight teacher told me to drop him off at the traffic control room – I knew what it meant: it was time for my first solo flight. I remember the moment well: I was both scared and excited – scared because being by yourself in a plane without your instructor is just that, scary, but excited because we both knew I could do it. The experience of after my third takeoff and landing was close to ecstasy (I’d done it!), affirming and validating all the learning I had done.

And speaking of learning, I am part of all sorts of learning communities, some of which I wished I had encountered earlier, but no regrets. There too I am connecting with people around the world, having conversations with someone in China, in Senegal, in South Africa, in Lesotho and Angola. Again, I am so grateful that I have a good computer, electricity and a fairly good internet connection, and, as one new friend called it, an ‘enriched’ environment, which means that I am surrounded by people I can trust and call on. Blessed I am indeed.

Some weeks ago (when it was still summer), a few humpback wales showed up at Singing Beach and even gave a full breaching show. We missed it but saw it later on the news. Axel and Sita had detected something that looked like fins in the distance between Lobster Cove and Baker’s Island, but I didn’t think much of it. Waves often look like fins.

Sita had been scouring the horizon for Great White Sharks – they are present up and down the east coast of the US, further south, but there are a few near the Massachusetts coast according to a shark tracking app.  A woman in a wet suit was killed by a Great White, not that far off her home’s pier near Harpswell, in Maine. As the crow flies (and the Great White swims), it’s not that far away from us.

I have tried to convince our daughters that a Great White Shark (some are over 10 ft long) would risk getting beached in Lobster Cove at low tide. But they are cautious and don’t like it when I swim out to the mouth of the cove and back.

I wonder if all these sea creatures are coming close to the shores to check out whether we are still there, what with the havoc created by the novel corona virus (is it still novel I wonder?).

The deer and bunnies are also out in great numbers and eyeing our juice greens. We bought some dome shaped plastic cups on sticks made by the Have-A-Heart company that act as a repellent because, the product information says, they give the animals a whiff of blood from another animal (one of their own maybe?).  It worked for the beans, but not for the lettuce. Peter Rabbit could have told us that.

The summer is racing by as it always does, but this time it feels even more as if this was the summer that wasn’t. Not for the weather, we got two heat waves, but for the absence of events that mark the summer weeks like open air concerts, sport events, parades, celebrations, wedding and other parties, etc.

We can count ourselves lucky to be living in a place that would be a summer vacation destination for many: a house on a cove with its own beach, kayaks, a surf plank, and place to start a summer evening beach fire (with or without s’mores). Instead of going out for dinner, we cook gourmet meals and do not skimp on the wine. In the morning we have breakfast just above or on the beach as we see fit, depending on the tide. And Axel’s dory and lobster traps provide us with the gifts of the ocean (not all the time, but enough to bring the cost of the permit and bait down to something reasonable). Although we worked hard for our (nearly complete) retirement and are plucking the ripe fruits now, we also had an enormous amount of luck that got us to where we are now.