Telling Stories and Listening

I’ve learned so much about stories in the last month, more than I’ve known in a long time.  Not since I was a child have I listened so closely to them.  And I’ve learned to become a story teller, which is perhaps even more significant.

I was reminding my mother that she used to say to me “you can do anything you put your mind to.”  “I said that?” she asked.  And “yes!” was my reply.  She hadn’t remembered saying it.  She’s old now and feels like life has closed down upon her.  So I told her what she used to say.  It’s like a mirror now, to look into the things you once said to me and to see yourself reflected back in the words that I repeat to you now, I said.

“I’m too old to do things now,” she said.  So I told her about how I learned to play the violin in middle age.  Everyone says the violin is the most difficult instrument.  I don’t know whether that’s true or if it’s just something people say.  But I began to play when I was past forty.  I had no teacher.  I didn’t even have a very good violin to play.  It sounded like I was torturing the cat.  Even Paganini would have found it difficult to pull music out of that wood.  Yet I persisted.

Why did I persist at such a complex and seemingly impossible task?  It’s strange but soon after I began to hold the violin it felt like something I used to know how to do but had forgotten.  Learning to play felt more like remembering than learning.  So I let my imagination take hold and I pretended I could play.  I pretended just like children pretend.  I was Paganini right down to the beautiful, powerful, sonorous Il Cannone that I held (in my mind).

Ask the family members, ask the neighborhood dogs (you know they hear frequencies that we cannot hear).  Poor neighborhood dogs.  I’ll never know what wretched torture they endured as I learned to keep my bow on one string while I scraped and squeeked.  But now I have a genuine violin tone.  I morphed into the violinist that I was imagining over time, after innumerable hours of play and pretend.

“You are probably the reason for my confidence, Mom,” I told her.   She had instilled that confidence in me by telling me anything I set my mind to and I set my mind to this music.   I must have also possessed a natural ability that I didn’t know I had, but don’t we set our minds to the directions we sense belong to us by some natural right?

Notably, I did not decide to become a physicist in middle age!  I never chose anything remotedly connected to math!

Your mind has hidden in its secret depths lovely surprises if we would but trust the fact of our being here to serve a purpose unique to our own natures.   So, I suggested to my mom that her mind would set itself toward aspirations appropriate to her age and to all the experiences she has lived in long years.  Perhaps in her love of growing things and the outdoors, perhaps from her beautiful sense of color — perhaps she might take up painting, for instance.

I knew an elderly man once who began painting for the first time in his life at a nursing home.  He painted wonderful pictures.  No one including the man himself had realized he possessed such ability.  Once he had lived the active life.  And now he lived a contemplative life painting landscapes. And he could tell you stories about the pictures too, about the foxes that lived deep in the woods.

Illustration adapted from picture here

Squirrel siblings in greeting

Our backyard habitat:  so I ask you Republicans and Democrats, can’t we just get along?

The Squirrel is Back

Millet that was part of last year’s squirrel food germinated and grew in this year’s backyard habitat.  And it’s reached maturity and has begun to produce.  So this year the squirrels have started getting it fresh off the stalk. 

They are quite the acrobats.  Sometimes the stems bend under a squirrel’s weight, but these guys always manage to win their prize. 

So, another great thing about a backyard habitat turns out to be one’s never knowing what will happen next.  We had never anticipated that some of the uneaten seeds in the wild bird food would begin growing of its own.  And these millet plants not only please the squirrels, they’re very beautiful.  So, next year we might just plant some deliberately.  Meanwhile, these plants are great.  They’re close to the house so we get a front row view of the squirrel acrobatics.

Please note:  This squirrel has nothing to do with their ACORN!

“Audacity” Deserves Another Look

Joe Conason of Salon’s piece on Sarah Palin is so representative of contemporary “progressive” thought that it pays revisiting.  He asks — in that sanctimonious way so beloved by his tribe:

Why should we pretend not to notice when Gov. Palin’s ideas make no sense? Having said last week that “it doesn’t matter” whether human activity is the cause of climate change, she said in debate that she “doesn’t want to argue” about the causes. It doesn’t occur to her that we have to know the causes in order to address the problem. (She was very fortunate that moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t ask her whether she truly believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited this planet simultaneously only 6,000 years ago.)

Since Mr. Conason and his readers cannot make the inference themselves, we who support the GOP must be careful from this day forth to fill in the passages of reasoning over which they cannot ever seem to leap:  that “global warming” and its purported causes is irrelevant.  We used to have a whole lot of people who cared about the thing you call “the environment” (we used to call it “nature”) and we used to call these people ”conservationists.”  Madonna and Al Gore insisted that the name be changed because it sounded too much like “conservative,” and therefore might have brought forth bipartisanship on a topic that concerns everyone.  Horror, people agreeing.  Cannot have that.  Plus Madonna thought it might hinder her marketing if people were encouraged to care about serious things.

So, friends, in order to seem to monopolize the issue it was renamed “environmentalism” and became the trademarked and copyrighted property of the Left and nature be damned.

However, as Sarah Palin has so gently tried to point out to Katie Couric (a discerning intellectual of leftwing politics), people can do a lot to counter effects of pollution and habitat destruction.  We can still care about clean water, clean air, wild animals, and wilderness with or without a theory of global warming.  The inference that if global warming is natural that various helpful actions are still possible (besides wringing  one’s hands in despair) is not an idea that Left-wing thinkers can “get” unassisted. 

We have to tell them that  Sarah Palin actually knows something about “nature.”  She can still see it from her front porch.

You know, it’s too bad that Gwen Ifill didn’t ask Sarah Palin the question about whether she believed that humans and dinosaurs existed during the same geologic period.  Palin could have simply said, “No.”  And that would be the denouement of Conason’s little fantasy.

PHOTO CREDIT CLICK

Global Baloney

I found this posted at Holycoast:

Data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has indicated a dramatic increase in sea ice extent in the Arctic regions. The growth over the past year covers an area of 700,000 square kilometers: an amount twice the size the nation of Germany.

With the Arctic melting season over for 2008, ice cover will continue to increase until melting begins anew next spring.

The data is for August 2008 and indicates a total sea ice area of six million square kilometers. Ice extent for the same month in 2007 covered 5.3 million square kilometers, a historic low. Earlier this year, media accounts were rife with predictions that this year would again see a new record. Instead, the Arctic has seen a gain of about thirteen percent.

William Chapman, a researcher with the Arctic Climate Research Center at the University of Illinois, tells DailyTech that this year the Arctic was “definitely colder” than 2007. Chapman also says part of the reason for the large ice loss in 2007 was strong winds from Siberia, which affect both ice formation and drift, forcing ice into warmer waters where it melts.

So, is it melting or not?

I’m not a scientist, and I make no claims about global warming one way or the other.  The candidate I support, John McCain, takes the issue seriously and says the U.S. needs to take action.  I am skeptical, myself.  Once “science” became politics, it stopped being science.

Anyway, before we get too gung-ho, it might behoove us to find out what’s really going on.  In the meanwhile, clean air, clean water, preservation of wild places, and respect for wild life are not partisan issues — or they shouldn’t be. 

I found the beautiful photo above at the the Brit’s Embassy.