A Story Like the Wind

A Story Like the Wind		Fifteen years or so ago — I know this because of the receipt I used as a bookmark — I first read Laurens van der Post’s two novels, A Story Like the Wind and A Far Off Place. They were so powerful that I couldn’t read any other fiction for months. They also stuck to me, little images that have enriched my life.
A Far-Off Place		For example, I’ve thought often about the time that the main character, 13-year-old Francois, behaved sharply and turned away from the adults who were trying to console him for the loss of his father. One of them, ‘Bamuthi, the Matabele leader on their homestead in the African bush, looks at the rest and says, “I give you a little fountain choked with mud.” They all nod, because they know the answer to the riddle: “the heart of a fatherless child.”

I lost my father when I was two, and it took me many many years to clean the mud out of the fountain.

I recently picked them up again and found them just as engrossing, even though the author is an egregious side-tracker. In the middle of a storyline, he switches into an earlier storyline and from then into an earlier one, or perhaps a digression into the natural life of babboons or elephants or lions or perhaps a long philosophical exploration of relationships between people and between peoples … so that sometimes it is hard to keep track of where you are in the original story. But the digressions are so full of rich detail.

I found myself tearing off little bits of paper to mark passages to go back to. Here are some of them:

In A Story Like the Wind:
‘Bamuthi: “Then a man-child also had to learn how to sing and above all to dance; for dancing and singing were the best ways he had of showing gratitude for the good things of life. Song and, above all, dancing were the surest ways of helping a man to endure the great trials of his existence; they were needed at birth, marriage and before war to strengthen his heart. … at the moment when the final loss of his shadow was upon him and those he loved, to drive away the power of death and revive the desire to live.”

Hiding courtesy kevinzim

Francois successfully shoots a huge, rogue elephant, Uprooter of Trees, that is drunk on fermented fruit and running amok across the homestead. Family friend and wild-life conservationist, Mopani: All he could get himself to do, therefore, was to talk at some length of the unfailing knack life seemed to have of confronting a man at the most unexpected moments with problems as large and dangerous as had been old Uprooter of Trees. Human beings, he stressed, always knew more than they allowed themselves to know. One of the things they never knew clearly enough was the power they possessed of overcoming problems even if they were thrice the size of Uprooter of Great Trees.

Mopani: “Have you ever known a more beautiful evening? I’ve heard it said somewhere that human beings should look on all things lovely as though for the last time. But this is the kind of evening which makes me want to look on it as if for the first time.”

Mopani: Remember always, Little Cousin, that no matter how awful or insignificant, how ugly or beautiful, it might look to you, everything in the bush has its own right to be there. No one can challenge this right unless compelled by some necessity of life itself. … Life in the bush is necessity, and it understands all forms of necessity. It will always forgive what is imposed upon it out of necessity, but it will never understand and accept anything less than necessity. And remember that, everywhere, it has its own watchers to see whether the law of necessity is being observed.”

In A Far Off Place:

Francois’ father, Ouwa: the real art of living was to keep alive the longing in human beings to become a greater version of themselves, to enlarge this awareness of life and then to be utterly obedient to the awareness. … Unlived awareness was another characteristic evil of our time, so full of thinkers who did not do and doers who did not think. … All this, Ouwa would ad, meant living in terms not of having but of being… For what, he often asked was the difference between the ‘Bamuthis of this world and the Europeans of Africa, if not that the Europeans specialized in having and the ‘Bamuthis in being.

And my favorite chapter in both books comes when Francois and his friend Nonnie, who have both lost everything and are traveling across the Kalahari with two bushman friends, sitting by a fire at night when Xhabbo asks a mime riddle than no one gets, and when he explains it, they all roll on the ground with laughter:

Nonnie: “Oh Coiske, do you know, until this moment, I thought we could never laugh like that again. I feel almost guilty that we could with Fa and your Lammie… “

Ligntning my first try courtesy of Kuzeytac

Xhabbo’s reply: “[we] know that the sadness in you is no longer without a name and has found its voice. When sorrow finds a name and a voice, it is like the lightning you see calling and the thunder speaking after it to say that soon the rain will fall on you again.”

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Reading Science Out Loud, Round 3

I have a stack of books on the floor to add to the catalog of science books I’ve read out loud to my husband. I may miss one or two that have gone back to the library. This is the third installment in this list of very interesting books that have fed our joint curiosity. Round 1 had an emphasis on evolution and paleontology, and Round 2 branched out from neurology and human biology to measuring time and observing natural disasters. This round is a little broader, including music, geology, astronomy, and even some cosmology. It’s fun when things we’ve read before come around again in different contexts.

	Jourdain, R. (1998). Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. Harper Perennial. From tone to melody to harmony to rhythm to … A systematic and cumulative exploration of how humans experience music, from the physics to the neurology to the differences that practice and training make. Great beginning for deeper study.
	Levin, J. (2002). How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. New York: Anchor Books. This one was a bit of a mind bender for me, given my totally inadequate education in physics and topology. But what wonderfully big ideas, thinking about the size and topology of the universe and how such things can be explored.
	Sobel, D. (2005). The Planets. New York: Viking. When we finished an earlier book, my husband had all sorts of questions about planets and the formation of our solar system, and this book has many answers. It progresses systematically from the genesis of the sun out to the Kuiper belt and Pluto’s ambiguous status. For each planet, it explains what is known and how we know what we know.
	Angier, N. (2008). The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.. New York: Mariner Books. This was a real tongue twister to read out loud, since the author was trying both to inform and to entertain. Many very witty passages, but also a general exploration of the state of knowledge in physics, chemistry, geology, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and astronomy. This book touched a lot of things we had already encountered, but introduced new ones. A new idea for me: the origin of the universe in the Big Bang is estimated at 13.5 billion years ago. Now I understand better news stories about how far back we can see.
	Fortey, R. (2005). Earth: An Intimate History. New York: Vintage Press. Using descriptions of rocks and geological history from Hawaii, Sicily, Newfoundland, Scotland, and several places around the globe, the author discusses the evolution of plate techtonics theory — as well as the rise and fall of oceans and continents. Bell Island off the west coast of Newfoundland is more similar to Wales in terms of fossils and rocks than it is to the east coast of Newfoundland. Lovely to think about how that can be.
	Fouts, R. & Mills, S. T. (1998). Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees. Harper Paperbacks. Can chimpanzees learn language, if we use a gestural language like American Sign Language instead of a vocal language? Roger Fouts taught chimpanzee Washoe several hundred words in ASL that she combined in novel ways. She taught ASL to her adopted infant chimp, Loulis, who was not exposed to human signing, thus demonstrating that “language acquisition is based on learning skills we share with chimpanzees.” Very interesting exploration of language acquisition, and another chip away at our sense of human uniqueness.

Memory Cues

Todd Kashdan is a psychology professor, researcher, and author of the new book, Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. When I asked him in an interview what he wanted to explore in the future, he said he’s curious about what keeps some marriages vital and vibrant over the very long haul. He thought he might live long enough to get well past his diamond anniversary (6oth), so what could he learn from people who have kept their marriages good to the end.

Based on my own 28 years of experience being married, I nominate shared memories and frequent strong hugs.

My husband has a much better memory than mine, so he’s the one who can refresh me with stories about what happened when our children were born or what what the food was like when we splurged and ate lunch at the Tour d’Argent in Paris in 1981. I do remember the service there being like something out of a fairy tale — invisible hands anticipating every need.

I attach memories to things, which is why I’m sometimes loath to give them up, even when they are worn out. We have a couch we bought together about 30 years ago — after 18 months of searching through D.C. area furniture stores and sitting on a lot of surfaces that one thought were great and the other thought were either ugly or uncomfortable. We agreed on a Flexsteel model with soft, slightly fuzzy, dark russet upholstery. My husband says to this day that the salesperson said the fabric wasn’t suitable for small children, but I have trouble believing I would have agreed to that. I do remember right after it was delivered, when our old really really ugly couch needing a cinder block to support the middle was hauled away and we both had trouble sitting casually on something so new and pristine. We also felt we were so far apart — our old couch was a bit smaller, so we could each nest on one side and easily stretch out a leg to touch the other.

Since then, our couch has absorbed so many family memories. I lay on my left side on it for the last 3 months of my first pregnancy — doctor’s orders. I rested on it with baby daugher and broken ankle (another story!)

Baby and Broken Ankle on couch

My children made forts and tunnels and castles with the cushions. We all used it as a refuge when ill. During the years when my husband couldn’t sit flat in a chair and we stopped going out to theaters, we clocked many a Saturday night watching a movie and drinking fine wine while sitting on the couch. I learned how to stretch a little further to reach him with my foot. Now the buttons have disappeared inside the cushions and friends complain about how hard it is to get up from it, it sags so much. The fabric has survived 2 children remarkably well, but there a few places that are worn through, even a tear or two. We need a new couch. But what we want is this couch, just 25 years younger.

I have learned not to attach too much importance to objects. I made my wedding dress myself out of cream-colored wool challis that we found in an enormous fabric warehouse in Alexandria Virginia. It held memories too, for example, of the Thanksgiving when I put in what seemed like miles of hem while watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Wedding dress hem

I edged the hem with lace handmade by a friend. But after the wedding, I neglected to have it professionally boxed up, and a few years later found it full of moth holes. At the time, I thought “I hope this doesn’t say anything about our marriage” — and it hasn’t. But now I have only the memory of an object that holds memories…

Shared memories and lots of hugs — and shared curiosity.

Mrs. Tim – Spending Time with a Friend in Fiction

I am mindful that I can affect the shape of my life by choosing carefully the people that I spend time around. If a book or movie turns out to be about people who are mean or small-minded or boring, I ponder whether I really want to finish it.

I have a collection of books that I re-read, like eating comfort food, when I need to spend time around people who are cheerful, brave, persevering, humorous, tolerant, wise — that is, in addition to the time I spend with my husband, children, and real friends.

I’ve been re-reading D. E. Stevenson’s series about Mrs. Tim for the last week or two. Mrs. Tim is an army wife in England from the late 1930’s through the late 1940’s. The first book actually grew out of the author’s diaries that she lent to a friend who wanted to know what life as the spouse of an army officer was like. The friend and her husband found the diaries so interesting and entertaining that they urged her to publish them. She pepped up her first set of diaries to make a book about a fictional character, Hester Christie — married to Captain then Major Tim Christie. The second book was based on her war-time diaries and required almost no pepping up because as she puts it, “there was enough pep already in my diary for half a dozen books.”

The last two books occur after the war when Major Tim was stationed in Egypt and Hester was left to manage alone — her children are both in boarding school except for holidays. In the third book, she works as a general dogsbody in a hotel, where she observes and participates in several stories of life being put back together after the war. In this book, Hester has an interesting discussion with her good friend, Brigadier Tony Morley about immortality. Tony had just finished a long conversation with a minister who had given a good sermon.

“Mr. Weir knew at once that I was really interested and came halfway to meet me. When people go halfway to meet each other something happens — something important.”

“Yes — but what is it?” I ask with interest.

“You give a bit of yourself and receive a bit of the other fellow, and you are both richer. … That’s one reason why it’s worthwhile to be alive,” continues Tony. “It’s a sort of immortality we can all achieve.”

“Immortality?”

“Yes. We all want to achieve immortality. We all want to leave our mark upon the world. What use is it to have lived if we leave nothing behind us when we die. One way to achieve immortality is to have children, another is to write or paint — but not everybody can achieve offspring or works of art.”

“I’m beginning to see.”

“It’s easy,” declares Tony. “if we go about the world giving bits of ourselves to people we meet . . . it’s worthwhile having lived . . . we leave something behind us which goes on–and on.”

I love these books because they are about the ordinary heroism of everyday people, finding ways to get along in their own particular times. Their times included all-out war, but they still squabbled about how to spend the money allocated to the officer wives to run the Christmas party — how much should go for decorations, how much for children’s gifts. Hester is observant and laughs kindly at herself and others.

These books may still be on the shelves of your public library or through Inter-Library Loan, and in a pinch they are available from Amazon.

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, also titled Mrs. Tim Christie,

Mrs. Tim carries on: Leaves from the Diary of an Officer’s Wife in 1940

Mrs.Tim Gets A Job

Mrs. Tim flies home

A Brilliant Solution

My husband and I were talking about our experiences raising our two children. I was amused that he remembers them fighting all the time, and I hardly remember them fighting at all. He himself was an only child and I was the second oldest of 5. So I guess that’s the difference between upward and downward comparison.

The discussion of arguments did make me think of one ongoing conflict that the two of them resolved in an absolutely brilliant way.

It happened when we got our first family computer. They both wanted to use it, and had the predictable arguments, “You had it for two hours yesterday…” “Yeah but you had it more over the weekend…” “But I need it more because…” “But that’s what you always say…”

Here’s what they finally worked out between them.

If one was using the computer, the other could come say at any time, “I want to use it in 30 minutes.” That started the clock, and possession turned over at the 30 minute mark. The one giving it up could say, “I want to use it in 30 minutes,” in which case the clock started again.

What made this so effective is that there was no more reference to the past, no accounting for who had used it more, no squabbles about who needed it more. The solution was absolutely simple, in the best interest of both, and they stuck to it.

I don’t think I’ve seen any other quarrel resolved so effectively.

Reflections on Resilience

I have been away from my blog too long. First there were the holidays, which always eclipse everything else. Then I traveled out west to visit my mother and help out in those small ways that make things run smoother — getting ready for the conversion to digital TV, fixing the email connection, cleaning out a cupboard or two. Then I had the dual pleasure of visiting good friends in San Diego and having a press pass at the conference at Claremont Graduate University called Applying the Science of Positive Psychology to Improve Society. Have no small goals! My summaries are posted on January 30 and 31 of Positive Psychology News Daily.

Resilience from Alaska Mom's Photo Stream

Now that I’m back at my own desk looking out my own window at the bare trees in the woods, I’ve been thinking about resilience again. I got a call from a reporter who was exploring the question, Why aren’t people unhappier in this time of economic trouble? I did a little looking around, first finding an online resource, The Road to Resilience, published by the American Psychological Association and Discovery Channel in the wake of September 11.

Ann Masten wrote a paper about resilience being “ordinary magic” — when people’s adaptive abilities are in good working order, they can withstand hardship. At the Claremont conference, Chris Peterson and Nansook Park talked about hardship causing character strengths to be developed or discovered. And even though it was a long time ago, we haven’t totally lost our collective memory of coming out the other end of the Great Depression. From people who were children then, we can still learn about gratitude for the blessings of the intervening years.

I’ve written about ways to build resilience — a PPND article called Resilience in the Face of Adversity and a short paper about how to prepare for and deal with the emotional impact of layoffs — available from my resources page.

Perhaps status stress — keeping up with the Joneses — goes down because we all feel at risk. It is a shared adversity.

I also think we are fortunate to have leadership that is eloquently optimistic and that calls on us to participate in the recovery. My mother keeps feeling sorry for President Obama because of the difficulty of his job. But I think, that’s why he was elected, that’s probably even why he ran. Difficult times make openings for greatness.  That was certainly the case with Abraham Lincoln who had even bigger problems to address.

I’d love to hear your ideas.

A Fine Movie, Children of Heaven

My daughter recommended Children of Heaven to us — a movie about two children in Iran dealing with a big problem on their own. The film by Majid Majidi won numerous awards when it came out in 1997.

The movie starts with shots of the hands of a shoe repairman repairing a very worn set of rose-pink shoes.   It proceeds to the little grocery stand where 9-year-old Ali puts the sack holding the shoes down outside while he goes in to pick out some potatoes. A man comes by to collect garbage and picks up the sack of shoes at the same time. The shoes, the only ones owned by Ali’s little sister Zahra, are gone.

Children of Heaven

The movie is all about the way the two children deal with the loss of the shoes without telling any adult — not their parents who can’t afford new shoes, not their teachers when they show up late for school, not the athletic director at Ali’s school when Ali wins first prize in a long-distance race and has trouble holding back tears because he really wanted to win the third prize, a pair of tennis shoes.

For pictures of these two beautiful children, I refer you to the picture gallery at the official movie site.

I found myself in a funny spot while I watched this movie. I so wanted the adults to understand and take this trouble away from the children. Yet I could see that dealing with it on their own made both of them grow — in physical strength, in resourcefulness, and in love for each other.

That’s what trouble does — when people come through it well. But of course, they don’t always do so.

So there’s the perpetual tension for parents between protecting their children from trouble that might crush their spirits and leaving them open to grow strength by dealing with trouble on their own. That’s if we get asked, which these parents were not.

Note to parents:  Eleanor Chin is writing a 3-part series on ways parents can help their children develop authentic independence.  Start with Don’t Push the River: Autonomy and Healthy Development.

Reading Science Out Loud, Round 2

About six months ago, I wrote about a new entertainment that my husband and I had taken on: I was reading science books out loud to him. I had just finished reading the second book, where both were about paleontology and geological evidence for the evolution of living things.

Since then, we’ve completed 10 other books on a wider range of topics including neurology and memory, evo devo (evolutionary development), geological catastrophes and plate techtonics, e coli and what scientists have discovered using it as a model organism, and most recently, various techniques for establishing dates for everything from the solar system to tooth enamel of individuals born before and after atmospheric nuclear tests. I updated the original post whenever we finished a book, thus keeping a reading log for us. Today I decided to bring half of the books forward into this posting, since the other was getting too long. 5 to 7 book reviews seem enough for one posting.

I found I was overusing the word ‘fascinating’ as I wrote short blurbs for them. The things that scientists are figuring out are so interesting, and the techniques to explore them so ingenious, that it is hard to use any other word. We keep finish a chapter thinking, I didn’t know that!

	Kandel, E. (2006). In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind. New York: W.W. Norton.
	Gazzaniga, M. (2008). Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. Ecco Publishers. A discussion of what distinguishes humans from other animals, including considerable insight into the way the brain functions. Not one picture!
	Chester, R. (2008). Furnace of creation, Cradle of destruction. New York: Amacon Press. A fascinating exploration of earthquakes, volcanos, and tsunamis. Includes a lengthy discussion of plate tectonics and how the theory grew out of earlier continental drift and seafloor spreading theories. The descriptions of specific disasters — from the Krakatau volcano and tsunami to the the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami — are a good source of humility for humans.
	Zimmer, C. (2008). Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. New York: Pantheon Books. Fascinating exploration of the social life of e coli in biofilms that are much hardier than single cells, as a wide variety of forms, from ones that live cooperatively in our guts to others that turn our immune systems against us, as factories for the insulin that I depend on, but most of all for the sheer number of biological discoveries that scientists have made from working with it.
	MacDougall, Doug (2008). Nature’s Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. This book was a complete surprise. Who would think that the techniques for measuring ages of things could be so interesting and could lead to so many insights about the history of the earth and all the things therein? From carbon-14 dating to uranium-lead dating to potassium-argon dating — as well as counting tree rings and ice layers in glaciers — all leading to new insights about how the earth formed, how its chemistry changed over time, and the way rocks form, break down, and form again, with zircon crystals from older rocks embedded in younger ones.

My eternity list — another definition of happiness

Ghost Riders cover

I came across an intriguing way of thinking about happiness in Sharyn McCrumb’s novel, Ghost Riders. (pp. 205-206).

A character is sitting with a friend on a mountain, the air is not too hot, the sky is cloudless, and the laurel is in bloom.  She says, “It’s so peaceful here.  I’d put this day on my eternity list.”

What’s an eternity list?  She explains it based on the theory from an [unidentified] English physicist who theorized that every moment in time lasts forever, that time may seem to flow, but it is actually separate nows, “each existing forever in its own dimension.”

So she speculates that maybe that’s what heaven is – “getting to live forever in one really wonderful moment.  So the more happy moments there are in your life, the better your chances of spending eternity in a good place.”

Resilience from Flickr

Of course there are many unhappy moments in anyone’s life.  As I wrote recently in my PPND article on resilience, adversity is part of the human condition.  But at any given moment, there are a range of possible responses, some with happier consequences than others.  Face the misery inherent in your life, yes, but don’t take on any more than necessary.  

I shall start thinking about saving up my own eternity list — moments of communion with family and friend(s), moments of deep engagement in writing or working out details or talking about things that fascinate me, moments of physical beauty or pleasure, moments of knowing that what I am doing matters.

Autumn Savoring

Japanese Maple

Earlier this year, I wrote about savoring on an early summer day, watching and hearing and smelling the glories of new life as it is emerging. Now it’s autumn and time for a different kind of savoring as leaves fall and trees become more and more bare.

It’s still a heady sort of savoring. There’s a special sharpness to it because it is so transitory and because it heralds the beginning of winter, a time of bareness and dormancy.

One day I walked down the hallway.  In the room on the right, the sunlight was filtering through the crimson leaves of the Japanese maple outside the window, giving the whole room a soft pink glow.

Carpeted Driveway

Another day, the wind blew strongly, carpeting the driveway with yellow leaves.  It was a sudden change, from a tree full of yellow leaves to bare limbs in just a few hours.

An especially good way to savor autumn is to go walking in the woods. We’re lucky to have many acres of woods behind our house with many kinds of trees. We’ve taken several walks this fall, watching the change from week to week.  I made a conscious catalog of things that I was savoring:

• The crunchy sound of leaves underfoot
• The soft rustle of wind in the trees, followed in seconds by a rainfall of yellow leaves
• Looking up through leaves that looked like a stained glass window with sunlight coming through tiny panes of green, yellow, and golden brown.
• Finding a “green and burning tree” — with one side still green, the other crimson
• Crisp air that tingles on your skin

I picked up a number of leaves for my husband to photograph for me — to capture not only the mix of trees we saw, but also the different states of change and the range of colors.

Sycamore, Tulip Poplar ...

Oak, Cherry, Sweetgum...

Maple, Beech, ...

Bryant and Veroff describe savoring as “not just the awareness of pleasure, but also conscious attention to the experience of pleasure” (p. 5). Perhaps that’s why it is so much easier to savor autumn than midsummer. At any given moment, I am aware that the view I am seeing, right now the sunlight coming through the last remaining yellow and crimson leaves at the back of my yard, will no longer be there in a matter of days, if not hours. There’s an urgency that makes it easy to focus conscious attention.

References

Bryant, F. B. & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.