I had a peculiar childhood. I was the only child of older parents and spent most of my time among adults, or in my own made up world. I was good at things, good with words and good with math and good at climbing trees and building faerie houses, but the one thing that stood out most was that I could draw, the way some people have perfect pitch. Even as a first grader I could draw with perfect perspective and put almost anything I saw down on paper. Not only that, but I had this loose, kind of impressionistic style that was way beyond my age. It was kind of my parlor trick, the rabbit I would draw out of my hat to impress people.

It's odd, because I had a pretty privileged life, that I never had an eye exam until I was twelve. And at that time it was discovered that a) I had no measurable depth perception and b) I was blind as a bat. Glasses were a revelation, but I never liked wearing them until at sixteen I got contacts. I drew the way I drew because the world looked flat to me, so it was easy to translate what I saw to a piece of paper, and because I saw the world as impressionistic blobs and swirls. But, crisis/opportunity, that ability to put what I see on paper stuck, regardless of contact lenses and possibly in spite of art instruction, and I got to keep my gift.

The other source of major pride was my ability to jerk my snoopy, overbearing, mean-spirited mother around.  I was an expert at leaving trails of red herrings, at very calculated deceptions and delicious defiance. I drover her mad and I was very proud of it. Actually, I'm still proud of myself.  I didn't bother often with being mad at her for being the way she was, I just figured out how to have the life I wanted and to be entertained by the process and how to get out of there as fast as possible without sacrificing my future (I much preferred being a sixteen year old starting college to being a sixteen year old runaway). It was a great learning experience and it's served me well all along the way. So thanks, mom!

Looking back from the grown-up perspective, I'm most proud that I learned to make myself happy, beyond most immediate circumstances. It's a good skill to have. And I still like doing artwork.

World peace.
Discovering my superpower.
Winning the lottery (although I supose I would have to buy at least one ticket...)
My 120th birthday. With a long hike and then some yoga and a party with all my friends.
Finishing the outbuildings and greenhouse we haven't started yet.
A year round harvest next year with the cold frames that are going in in the spring.
My 70th anniversary with Krissy.
Finding my coyote claw necklace - which of course is hiding, being trickstery and all.
Love and life and all the sweet juicy everyday goodness of it all, every single today.

It's complicated, isn't it? I can see a lot of ways that things aren't working but not necessarily how they would work better. I can appreciate a lot of compelling and yet nearly opposite viewpoints, everyone from Ayn Rand to Michael Moore, but putting ideas into actual practice often yields very different results from making a good argument. So many ideas that seemed good on the surface have fallen apart, everything from communism to capitalism, all kinds of socialism, and economic systems are inextricable from the political systems they occupy. Very complicated. Somewhere along the way, it seems to me that systems fail because kindness and generosity are overwhelmed by fear and greed - either at the top of the economic hierarchy or at the bottom or somewhere in the middle, people are looking out of the corner of their eyes and worrying about getting all they can -- screw everyone else, screw this stupid system, I'm taking what I can get.
The way it is now, we live in such a non-global economy in a very global culture.  I think I should be sharing more because I have so much, but the truth is, in my economy and world I have very little and we barely break even. I can't complain about needing to rewire our house when a lot of the world doesn't have electricity to start with, but we still have to scrounge for the money even to do the work ourselves. We're waiting for help to put in our new hot water heater and haven't had hot water for about a month. (It's been less of a problem than you might think - and luckily, we have a place to go shower.) I wouldn't be able to walk past masses of starving people and worry about my hot water, but I don't walk by them and so I have to consciously decide to think about issues that aren't in front of me and consciously decide how to help, what to give and what to give up and it's hard. I don't know how to fix this.
But then also, the disparities sometimes pay off. It's only in the places where there is some "extra" in the economy where research gets done, advances are made, we screw up enough that we start figuring out how to do stuff in a more ecologically sound way, stuff like that. Good stuff. But it's hard to know how to think about it all. I mean, on the global scale, it's all a choice, so are the starving people in third world countries in effect paying for the research that went into our Prius? (And by the way, we only have it because it's a company car. It's a nice car but I wouldn't buy a Prius.) The whole world could live modestly on what we've got as a planet, but would the folks living really well be willing to give anything up? I don't think that's likely. And I don't know what would be sacrificed if that happened.
It's complicated.

1) What is you favorite utensil?
my hands are very useful.
I have some wooden spoons I like too and these long cooking chopsticks and a pet spatula.

2) Do you like non-stick pans?
Ewwww.
No.

3) Have you ever made your own waffles or pancakes? (or do you like a simple cereal?)
Yeah, my worst experience was making some from the Thrive recipes - I don't eat wheat so I'm always looking for good alternatives and I love most of the recipes in this book, but seriously, did he really try making these things??? They were little piles of pudding. We ate them anyway. With spoons.

4) Do you use/ like cloth napkins, no napkins, paper, towels, or jeans? (it's okay either way ;)
Prefer cloth.  Also like to lick my fingers. Sometimes will lick other people's fingers too.

5) What are you having for lunch, if you're not having lunch, then what's your favorite food? (or you can answer both)
Just had lunch a little while ago, miso soup with spinach, little tiny cubes of tofu, and scallions. I am a little addicted to miso.

It is so tempting, so many times a day, to pretend that whatever I'm experiencing was inflicted on me. The dog is driving me crazy, that really bad driver pissed me off, I'm happy because I got paid more than I expected. It came from somewhere and it's because of something and that something IS NOT ME, no, you can't make me be responsible for that! But in that whole Victor Frankl, even in a concentration camp there's that space where you choose your response kind of way, personal freedom is inescapable and it's identical at heart with personal responsiblity. You know that thing that everyone says and I have no idea if it's true but that thing about how the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity? It should be true if it isn't. Anyway, it's just like that. It isn't that personal freedom and personal responsibility go together, it's that they are just one thing with two words stuck to it. And there isn't an option not to have it.
I am going for the world's record for run on sentences. What do you think?
My personal little NaNoWriMo - 50k words in one sentence...

It seems to me that we're all built almost completely out of caring, maybe too much of it sometimes. What we care about varies from person to person and then we start caring about those differences and we get in big fights about it and have wars and do stupid things. Sometimes we let marketers and advertisers convince us that we need to care about their things and that we'll be happier by caring about those things but it isn't true. We invent religions to tell us what to care about and new age bookstores and fashion magazines. Some of us follow sports teams and care about them passionately - we just don't know what to do with the caring, there's so much of it, and we seem to need to put it somewhere. I think I'm in favor of a bit more apathy, kind of benign apathy, seconds on end of not being personally invested in anything in particular and letting all things just be what they are. Maybe I will start a religion of apathy - but of course, if the followers are any good at it at all they'll never show up.

Don't you all have this fantasy about going back in time and getting a re-do with the benefit of what you know now? I mean, countless movies are based on this idea, it's gotta be pretty universal. Anyway, I know I have it. Sometimes I have the conversation that I wish I would have had with someone I haven't seen for years, if only I knew then what I know now.  But the thing is, I'm still having the real-time conversations where I only know what I know now, no matter what age I am, and later on I'm sure I'm going to want a re-do for some of these too. That whole thing about how you can't step in the same river twice and all - I know by the time I get my other foot in it's all changed. So all in all, I think the best thing about getting older is continuing to be alive and getting to have more experiences, make more mistakes, have more imaginary conversations in the future where I tell myself how I could have been so much more clever in this moment, step into more rivers just that one time. It's just getting more days, more kisses, more joy, more sun on skin and chilly mornings and more warming up the cold blankets with body heat at night, more conversations and books to read and music to hear and more time to maybe learn to juggle or ride a unicycle. The best thing about getting older is the time involved, and everything that holds. Just more. I don't ever want to leave.

Sticks and rocks and bits of dirt. Lost objects, found objects, battered seashells, torn clothing. Trees with funny shapes. Weeds. Sounds of thunder and wind blowing hard through leaves and rain falling. The sound of kittens purring and that way that hounds kind of talk-bark themselves into a good howl. Grey hairs and soft skin and lips. I want a museum dedicated to juicy warm lips. And hands, ones with spidery long fingers and little short plump ones and some with wrinkles and all with warmth, hands that do massages and piano playing and hands playing guitars and hand drums and knitting...maybe that's it, a museum dedicated to hands. Or maybe it's eyes - looking into them, looking out of them, batting eyelashes over them, all the different colors of them, the tears that come out of them, maybe it should be a museum dedicated to eyes. No, I think it really is about the sticks and the rocks and the bits of dirt. And the ability to see them and love them. That's what it is.

Are you kidding me? I don't have to walk miles every day with a bucket to haul unclean water back to my family. I don't have malaria. I have more than enough food - I have to be conscious of not eating too much! I have a washer and dryer and changes of clothes and electricity and a computer and high speed internet and a car and a bicycle. I have a great relationship with a wonderful partner. I have lovely (sometimes ornery) animals who live with us. I have a home. I have space for a garden. I have a dogwood tree in my backyard and daffodils that come out in the spring and moss grows on the ground all by itself and other than the poison ivy hedge growing along one of the fences, a great living space.
Fortunate implies some other option - for someone to be fortunate, there has to be a concept of unfortunate. Some people are truly unfortunate in their circumstances, others in their choices, and lots of people a combination of both. Some of the people who are walking miles for dirty water may be happier day to day than someone else living in the suburbs and shopping at Ikea. Not that the unhappy Ikea shoppers would cheer up if they switched places, but there is something a little subversive about having enough to want too much.
Some people just default to unhappy - like the grinch, their hearts are just a few sizes too small. That's an unfortunate circumstance, but also maybe a choice. Well, I hope it's a choice, because then they have options, right? I don't want to think that the unhappy people are stuck that way, like the way my mom said if I made a face it would stick. Except she was sort of right I think - if you hold your face the same way all the time, eventually it does stick. I think unhappiness is like that too: if you look at the faces of old people you can see who got stuck in unhappiness, in the idea that they are just unfortunate, who held their face that way for too long and it stuck, who hung on to their miseries.
I am fortunate that I kind of default to happy even in the worst times, and that I have this wonderful life, and that I refuse to take that for granted or cling to miseries. A good combination of choice and circumstance.

Krissy's niece (does that make her my niece-in-law?) got in a bunch of trouble today. She's 14 and not allowed to "date" yet. Whatever that means, and as if you can prevent any part of that from occurring. So, her mom found these sexually explicit emails from a boy on a myspace account that mom told her she could only have if mom had access to it.
My first thoughts here are, you don't have to show an ID, you just have to say you're 18, so why in the world would you give your parent that kind of power? She seems like a bright girl, am I missing something? Does she actually need a worker?
And then my next thought is, is mom trying to train her to be sneakier and a better liar? Because, really, that is the only option.
I rarely give other people the opportunity to make decisions for me. Even when I was fourteen, I had figured that out. On the other hand, I don't want to make decisions for other people - I'm a control freak about my own life but not anyone else's. Once in a while those boundaries are fuzzy - if someone posts crappy pictures of you, are they yours or theirs? Well, obviously, if they don't like you or care how you feel, that's out of your control zone and you just have to let that go. What about medical care...how much research are you required to do to know what is really happening to you? For me, the answer is, as much as I can possibly do. Not something I'm trusting about.
There is some distinction between power over and empowerment, but basically - for me at least - personal power and empowerment hinges on self-responsibilty. If I screw that up or let it slip through my fingers, that's on me.