Mom's Poetry

My mother, Susan H. Caldwell, has recently started to write poetry, and she sent me some of her work.

The first poem talks about a trip to Spain she made in the early 70s, doing research for her dissertation on Spanish romanesque churches.  At the time, Spain was still under the thumb of General Francisco Franco, a fascist and a promoter of "Traditional Family Values"...

1972 – Segovia, Spain                                           OUT OF PLACE

Noon, sun-filled plaza

                  bounded by hotels, restaurants, small cars

                                    atop Segovia’s hill.

Pink cathedral, Gothic, at the far end;

                  aqueduct (unseen) down the hill—

                                    Roman, of course. 

Children shriek at play;                   girls jump

                  low to the ground over elastic ropes

                                    in patterns unknown to me.

Alone. Sola. Sola: I await…

                  the opening of a museum? a library?

                                    exposed by the sun of Segovia.

                                                                        (Mostly I wait to go home….

                                                                                          to Vermont, to my children.

                                                                                                            Did I dream them?)

Looking up from my journal, I see

                  people looking at me, looking at me.

                                                      I am sola.

Men go alone; women go in pairs, in groups.

                  Every woman escorted—

                                    all but me.

Skirts hang below their knees;

                  My skirts end above.

                                    (My jeans are also wrong, it seems.)

Question:  what am I doing here, sola?

                  Researching un tesis doctoral?

                                                      (Even I don’t buy that story.)

                                   

                                                                                                            So, I must walk…

Along Segovia’s winding alleys

                  seven Romanesque churches await me.

                                    Stone walls, arches, weathered sculptures…

Sola, I find solace in old stones 

                  in whose crevices flowers flourish—

                                                                                          out of place…

                                                                                                                              like me.   

The second poem talks of my father's descent into Alzheimers.  Too young...  It was hard on all of us, but especially my mother, who took care of him for 17 years, ten of them with him at home.

I Remember His Forgetting

“Numbers don’t have the same meaning for me,”

                  he said.  “I mean, like they used to.”

He, who scored 99 percentile on the GRE—he said that.

                  I didn’t believe him;

                                                      but he couldn’t balance the checkbook.

Camping in Colorado among the trees and birds became

                  a nightmare—or at least a bad dream. 

                  He didn’t seem himself somehow.

                                                      Although the sun was shining…

At the first campsite, I followed his directions

                  as we erected the tent with its aluminum poles

                  and blue plastic covering, and pegs pounded

                                                      into the ground, to anchor it.

At the second campsite, he couldn’t put up the tent.

                  I had to figure it out on my own, visualizing

                  the various steps.  It sort of worked,

                                                                        but I was scared.

I supervised the packing up as we left; he followed

                  my directions…                  sort of…

                  He was puzzled; I was frightened.                   

                                                                                          I was cross.

Our dog Tom left us. 

                  He ran up the hill and

                  sat down on our campsite.

                                                      He didn’t want to go home.

              

Billie Hinton and Claire Caviness

This summer I discovered an author, and a character, I love.  The author is Billie Hinton, the character is Claire Caviness, who is one of the main character in her novels claire-obscure and Signs That Might be Omens.  In the first novel, Claire is a young woman, recently graduated from college and working in a bookstore.  She meets and moves in with Finn, a medical student who is--odd.  He does not sleep with her, for reasons that become clear later in the novel, but he clearly tries to possess her.  Soon she meets another man, Raoul, who has a thing for rescuing women who need it.  Raoul's best friend is Bingham.  The plot is psychologically interesting, and the writing is dream-inducing.  The entire novel is written in the present tense, so all the action (actually set in the 1980s as becomes clear due to details in the book-- no cell phones, music, even Claire's clothing) seems immediate, as if one is living through everything right along with Claire.

The second novel, Signs That Might be Omens, opens in 2004, twenty years after the events in claire-obscure.  From there, it fills in what has happened in the intervening years, passing back and forth from the novel's present to different points in the past and from both Claire's point of view and Bingham's, who is, it seems, Claire's soulmate.  It seems, at times, that the entire book is about near misses, but perhaps these two need their life lessons before they can truly come together.

Both books seem to resolve, and yet do not.  I think I read (but cannot find it now) that these are the first two books of a planned quartet.  If so, I certainly look forward to the upcoming novels!

Both books speak of dreams, as does a third book I read by Hinton, The Meaning of Isolated Objects.  I was not surprised to find that the author is also a Jungian psychotherapist.  These books are available on  Amazon for Kindle.

Mindfulness

The Buddha was asked, "What do you and your disciples practice?" and he replied, "We sit, we walk, and we eat." 

The questioner continued, "But sir, everyone sits, walks, and eats."

The Buddha told him, "When we sit, we know we are sitting. When we walk, we know we are walking. When we eat, we know we are eating."

Most of the time, we are lost in the past or carried away by the future. When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present movement, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace, and love.

This was posted for an online retreat in which I am taking part, and it made me think of my studies of eating disorders and disordered eating.  So often what happens is a lack of mindfulness, of awareness, of what we eat, and how much we're really eating, especially in the cases of bulimia and binge-eating disorder.  In both of these illnesses, the sufferer loses awareness, at least in the short term, and also control.  Eating becomes automatic, it is detached from actual hunger, it is not serving the body or the psyche well, because too much food makes one sick, and although the eater may temporarily feel comforted about what is eating him or her, ultimately the binge will result in self-recrimination and more psychic distress.

In contemporary western cultures, it's really no wonder that such a disconnect would happen and cause illnesses like these.  Meals are no longer the communal events they once were:  we eat meals in the car, we eat meals in front of the TV set or a book, we eat far too many meals alone! We're doing other things when we eat, and not really thinking of what we're eating or how we're eating it.  What is more, we aren't doing as much of our own cooking, choosing fresh ingredients with care to make the best food we can make!  I know I eat far too much "food heated up", and I actually like to cook and am pretty good at it.

Preparation also leads to mindfulness.  A Lean Cuisine lasagna may taste fairly good, but you're certainly going to feel more connected to a lasagna you carefully made from scratch:  you'll think about the individual ingredients, the amounts of herbs and seasonings, the finishing touches before you put it in the oven.  Even worse is when you pick something up in a drive-through to eat as you rush off to work in the morning.  You could be shoveling cardboard into your mouth for all the enjoyment you get out of it.  Sometimes it's unavoidable, but try to taste each bite of your breakfast burrito as you eat it.  Pull over if you have to.  Be mindful.

I have something of a history of binge-eating, though not, I think, to the point of a clinical diagnosis.  Sometimes, if something is bothering me, or I'm feeling sorry for myself, I'll start eating a favorite (forbidden) food, like potato chips or chocolate, and I won't stop until it's all gone.  I might savor the first few bites, but soon I'll just be gobbling it up without thinking, or, worse, thinking I have to get rid of it before anyone finds out I have it.  (Forbidden food, remember?)  The last thing I'm doing is being mindful when I eat like this, and as a result, I don't know if I'm even tasting it properly.  I think the next time I find myself on the verge of this sort of a binge, I will try to stop, breathe, and be fully aware of each bite.

Are there any things you do that lack mindfulness?  Do you think that cultivating an awareness of your actions would improve your enjoyment of life?