living on both ends - an exploration of best and worst

gone for a week..

I am sure all will be well.

at odds

WORST- My surgery was in February. That is when the remission from the rheumatoid arthritis/lupus symptoms started. The symptoms started back up about a month ago. The pain, the fatigue, the lack of energy.

It’s called a flare. The physical fragility is discordant from the mental image I have of myself. I cannot reconcile who I am with how I feel.I'm not sure I have what it takes to live with this illness.

the importance of being eldered

BEST- We call it the Bloody Ear Barber Shop. The boys dad was the first barber, and made the first cut to the ear, which resulted in the blood that birthed the name. I became the second barber, and my clippers, scissors, plastic cape, and metal comb are stored in the grey shelves in our butler’s pantry. The oldest graduated from the BEBS sometime in his junior year of high school, and took his place at the Lackawanna Barber Shop, with the smell of bayberry and the ancient National Geographic magazines. The youngest is still content to sit on the kitchen stool, and tell me “not so short” and “make sure it’s even”.

But this story starts with the 16 year old, and a choice he made last week to re-open the BEBS. The last few times He asked me to cut his hair, he was not pleased with the results, and I was not pleased with the resultant verbal flaying of my character and barbering skills, which admittedly are slim to none. So, the agreement was that he would take his place with Julio at the Lackawanna, or he would take his chances with me. But either way, he would take his haircuts with an acknowledgment that his thick, fine hair is difficult to cut the way he wants it, and there would be respect given for trying.

So we are in the kitchen, the 14 year old is there too, and the 16 year old gets mad because his bangs are too short. They are microscopally above his eyebrows and that means he may not get the date he wants for the weekend. I struggle with returning an automatic response that is equal to the response that I am being given. An equal and opposite reaction is my motto, underneath, of course, it is a learned self-protective way of life. And when he pushes me verbally, I push him back harder, verbally.

It ends with him leaving the kitchen, and the air heavy with the weight of too much said, and relationship wounded.

The 14 year old looks at me, sighs, and states “You were a bit forceful Mom. I think you are better than what you returned.” He hugs me, and walks up the stairs. It is eldering at its best.

So, when the air feels not so heavy, I approach the 16 year old and apologize for my response to his grievous statements toward me. Tell him it is hard for me to hear how he sells himself short, that his physical appearance is what matters the most to him and to others. But mostly, tell him that I wish I could not react so negatively with his disappointment with me. He softens, and tells me he is sorry too. There will be time later to renegotiate the rules of the BEBS.

Then, I walk upstairs, and thank the 14 year old for his wise and timely eldering. He smiles, he knows that is who he is, and the air is not so heavy anymore.

Faith and Practice

It was the morning of a Quaker Breakfast Forum at our meeting on clerking. It was also the day after we received the call that L’s sister had died. I helped him make the flight and car arrangements; and although I knew it was coming, the force of the news was strong, and the tears that flowed through most of the day surprising. It wasn’t possible for all of us to go back to Wyoming to the service, it wasn’t practical to leave the boys alone. I would stay, he would leave on Tuesday.

But the next morning found me at the Forum, deeply listening and holding the facilitator and the group in the Light as we discussed Friends process in clerking and coming to a communal “sense of the meeting”. At the end of the meeting, after the moment of silence, I told those members of our community who were at the Forum about the death, and then we moved over into our two-hundred year old building, L found me on the old hard benches, and we settled into silence. I was full of my sister-in-law Sara.

Our meeting clerk opened our Faith and Practice and read the following:

And this is the Comfort of the Good,
that the Grave cannot hold them,
and that they live as soon as they die.
For Death is no more
than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
Death, then, being the way and condition of life,
we cannot love to live,
if we cannot bear to die.
They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided
that love and live in the same Divine Principle,
the Root and Record of their Friendship.
If Absence be not Death, neither is theirs.
– William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

Sara came to visit us four years ago. She came to meeting with us, she and I spoke of faith and Light and journeys. If I had to choose one word to describe her it would be open – she lived her life with open arms and an open heart.

On the morning she left our house those four years ago, she told me she had found hope in her faith journey again. That there was place in Christianity for someone with questions like hers. Two months later she was diagnosed with metastic colon cancer.

I am grateful that we had that time together. There were over six hundred souls at her funeral, I am not alone in being grateful to have had time with her.

read and think

The Perils of 'Populist Chic'
Mark Lilla

excerpt:

Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

YES.