We have a deeply held desire
to not be dead. This according to ethicist Thomas E. Finucane at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Finucane ought to know, since he is a geriatrician and so has undoubtedly seen how strongly humans cling to life. I heard him last week during a seminar about longevity put on by the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism . Life looks a lot better as we get closer to leaving it, was his wonderfully succinct point. This becomes easier to understand with age, of course. It also explains the stories I've heard from people waiting for (mostly) loved ones to die, a process that often takes a while as the light of life dims.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Watch your language
This week I'm at a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism seminar on aging. Or do you say longevity? How are we supposed to talk about old people? A number of speakers have talked about the inadequacy of the terms we use, usually "senior" or -- yikes -- "elderly." I've heard "pre-elderly," too. We in journalism lead and follow the culture with respect to language. We create trends and/or wake up to them. The aging we have always had with us, only pretty soon there will be more of them in this country as a percentage of the population (20 percent by 2025 will be over 65). A little word we unconsciously use about people who are older and doing things we don't normally associate with being old: ah, he's 82 and still playing virtuoso violin. The verbal culprit is still, because it bespeaks our values: we don't expect this to be happening when somebody is 82. Well, we are in the process of changing our expectations of what people who are older can do, because people who are older are also healthier than ever before. We shall see what they can still do. Thanks to Abigail Trafford, author of My Time and a veteran journalist, for this fine point about language.
This week I'm at a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism seminar on aging. Or do you say longevity? How are we supposed to talk about old people? A number of speakers have talked about the inadequacy of the terms we use, usually "senior" or -- yikes -- "elderly." I've heard "pre-elderly," too. We in journalism lead and follow the culture with respect to language. We create trends and/or wake up to them. The aging we have always had with us, only pretty soon there will be more of them in this country as a percentage of the population (20 percent by 2025 will be over 65). A little word we unconsciously use about people who are older and doing things we don't normally associate with being old: ah, he's 82 and still playing virtuoso violin. The verbal culprit is still, because it bespeaks our values: we don't expect this to be happening when somebody is 82. Well, we are in the process of changing our expectations of what people who are older can do, because people who are older are also healthier than ever before. We shall see what they can still do. Thanks to Abigail Trafford, author of My Time and a veteran journalist, for this fine point about language.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Press three for a list of the ways technology has not improved our lives
My cell phone had run out of juice, so I had no way of knowing whether the person for whom I waited half an hour had called me to say she would be late or simply couldn’t make it. I was waiting, primed to tell her all about my bad day. A collection agency has repeatedly been calling me for the past two months looking for my husband, who unfortunately has a common name. So he is occasionally mixed up with others who share his name, though not necessarily his habit of paying bills on time. Last time a mix-up happened, we ended up with a free subscription to an art museum. This time we, or I should say I, have been the less than happy recipient of persistent phone calls to a phone listed in my name only looking for a deadbeat who shares my husband’s name.
Since my husband and I pay our bills on time, I’ve never had an up close and impersonal encounter with a bill collector. If it weren’t so unpleasant, I might feel sorry for the people who do that sort of work. As it stands, however, I do feel irked about the following, and please listen carefully, as our menu of annoyances is long and has recently changed:
Being called once a week by an automated dialing program (“Hel-lo! I’d like to speak to Will-ee-um the Five Hundred Nel-son! If-you-are Will-ee-um the Five Hundred Nel-son, press one!”)
Hearing a bizarrely perky electronic voice ask for my husband by a bizarre nickname (“the Five Hundred”?) that isn’t his, a nickname I can’t be entirely sure of because the bizarre electronic voice isn’t entirely clear (Is there anybody out there whose nickname really is “The Five Hundred?” They’re looking for you, pal, and they’re not the type to give up.)
Not being given an option to say the collection agency is making a mistake (“Press sixteen if we have the wrong household and this deadbeat doesn’t live here”)
Not being believed after I press option 1, even though I am not “The 500” deadbeat, to tell them they are making a mistake
Being asked for my husband’s birth date, the last four digits of his social security number, the other telephone number our household uses, and the quality of our marital relationship (“Are you still married to him? Why don’t you ask him why he’s using your telephone number?”)
Being told that I need my husband’s permission to discuss the details of what the collection agency is calling about (“Hel-lo! We’re calling your phone repeatedly to reach your husband even though we never asked your permission! Press one if you think this is absurdly sexist! Press two if you think this might be harassment!”)
Having to spend time online reviewing my husband’s credit history, itself a tediously detailed tour that stretches back for years (“Gosh, what the heck did I buy in March 2004 that cost that much?”) and includes credit cards you no longer use, plus several chances to refuse offers from three different credit bureaus for newsletters you don’t want that will give you advice on financial sobriety
Finding a mistake and having to open lots of pop-up windows to figure out how to correct it and praying I don’t close the wrong window since I can only see my credit history for free once a year
Not having the computer hooked up to the printer so I can print out the credit histories (because there’s an annoying incompatibility between my laptop and printer that I have unsuccessfully tried for weeks to resolve)
Has anything like this ever happened to you? If so, press one if you resolved it; press two if you think technology is a hassle; press three if you know where Will-ee-um the 500 is.
My cell phone had run out of juice, so I had no way of knowing whether the person for whom I waited half an hour had called me to say she would be late or simply couldn’t make it. I was waiting, primed to tell her all about my bad day. A collection agency has repeatedly been calling me for the past two months looking for my husband, who unfortunately has a common name. So he is occasionally mixed up with others who share his name, though not necessarily his habit of paying bills on time. Last time a mix-up happened, we ended up with a free subscription to an art museum. This time we, or I should say I, have been the less than happy recipient of persistent phone calls to a phone listed in my name only looking for a deadbeat who shares my husband’s name.
Since my husband and I pay our bills on time, I’ve never had an up close and impersonal encounter with a bill collector. If it weren’t so unpleasant, I might feel sorry for the people who do that sort of work. As it stands, however, I do feel irked about the following, and please listen carefully, as our menu of annoyances is long and has recently changed:
Being called once a week by an automated dialing program (“Hel-lo! I’d like to speak to Will-ee-um the Five Hundred Nel-son! If-you-are Will-ee-um the Five Hundred Nel-son, press one!”)
Hearing a bizarrely perky electronic voice ask for my husband by a bizarre nickname (“the Five Hundred”?) that isn’t his, a nickname I can’t be entirely sure of because the bizarre electronic voice isn’t entirely clear (Is there anybody out there whose nickname really is “The Five Hundred?” They’re looking for you, pal, and they’re not the type to give up.)
Not being given an option to say the collection agency is making a mistake (“Press sixteen if we have the wrong household and this deadbeat doesn’t live here”)
Not being believed after I press option 1, even though I am not “The 500” deadbeat, to tell them they are making a mistake
Being asked for my husband’s birth date, the last four digits of his social security number, the other telephone number our household uses, and the quality of our marital relationship (“Are you still married to him? Why don’t you ask him why he’s using your telephone number?”)
Being told that I need my husband’s permission to discuss the details of what the collection agency is calling about (“Hel-lo! We’re calling your phone repeatedly to reach your husband even though we never asked your permission! Press one if you think this is absurdly sexist! Press two if you think this might be harassment!”)
Having to spend time online reviewing my husband’s credit history, itself a tediously detailed tour that stretches back for years (“Gosh, what the heck did I buy in March 2004 that cost that much?”) and includes credit cards you no longer use, plus several chances to refuse offers from three different credit bureaus for newsletters you don’t want that will give you advice on financial sobriety
Finding a mistake and having to open lots of pop-up windows to figure out how to correct it and praying I don’t close the wrong window since I can only see my credit history for free once a year
Not having the computer hooked up to the printer so I can print out the credit histories (because there’s an annoying incompatibility between my laptop and printer that I have unsuccessfully tried for weeks to resolve)
Has anything like this ever happened to you? If so, press one if you resolved it; press two if you think technology is a hassle; press three if you know where Will-ee-um the 500 is.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
I’m with him
The last time I can remember tears coming to my eyes about an American public event is 1986, when the Challenger shuttle exploded. It happened again this week, though, as I read the remarks of Sen. Barack Obama on race in America. Once again, I felt American.
Obama made me proud to be American, and his speech is not at all about how wonderful it is to be American. Obama acknowledges with eloquence that we got problems here, race problems, and have had them for centuries, since before the Mayflower. It’s a terrible history, and my temptation is to conjure up some of those crimes, in order to validate my white liberal guilt ticket once more.
But there’s more. The more is hope – as in the audacity of hope, the title of Obama’s popular book, a title he got from a sermon by his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (I incidentally wish we could hear as many references to the sermon that originated the book as we have to Wright’s sermons that have discomfitted white people.) I don’t think of hope as naïve, or white, or black, or even Christian. I think of it as divine, necessary and definitely not cheap.
It’s only with hope that I can feel the energy necessary to tackle the difficult conversations needed if we as Americans are to acknowledge the burden of our racist history and how it is more or less present today – more present for those who feel disadvantaged by it, including those white people driven by resentment of perceived preferences based on race. Obama very rightly said that white people don’t experience white privilege, especially if they relate to the immigrant experience, which is one of hard work, not birthright privilege. That’s my own family’s frame of reference. I watched the Reagan coalition get built in my household of origin, as my working-class Polish-American father grew old, grew fearful that he would lose what security his hard work had provided, and grew into a Reagan Republican. Resentful white people can’t be guilt tripped about white privilege, and so the raising of consciousness about white privilege hasn’t exactly attracted them in Kansas, or anyplace else where people will vote their interests and these days their resentments.
Obama is as much white as he is black, a recognition that doesn’t get articulated very often, though it underlies the sentiment that he’s not “black enough.” And so Obama gets to articulate what is needful for both the black and white communities because he belongs to both. “White community” is itself a phrase worth noting – far less used than “black community.” (Try Googling it.) “White” doesn’t get used as frequently because it is the default in our majority-white society. But white people don’t see it. I first understood it when taking part in Community Study Circles, a race-relations discussion group. I’m not holier than the rest of white society, but I have been privileged enough to begin having the conversations about race that our society needs to have. It works better than either sweeping race under the rug or nursing resentments, even if stoking resentments opportunistically fires up a certain segment of the voting public.
The last time I can remember tears coming to my eyes about an American public event is 1986, when the Challenger shuttle exploded. It happened again this week, though, as I read the remarks of Sen. Barack Obama on race in America. Once again, I felt American.
Obama made me proud to be American, and his speech is not at all about how wonderful it is to be American. Obama acknowledges with eloquence that we got problems here, race problems, and have had them for centuries, since before the Mayflower. It’s a terrible history, and my temptation is to conjure up some of those crimes, in order to validate my white liberal guilt ticket once more.
But there’s more. The more is hope – as in the audacity of hope, the title of Obama’s popular book, a title he got from a sermon by his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (I incidentally wish we could hear as many references to the sermon that originated the book as we have to Wright’s sermons that have discomfitted white people.) I don’t think of hope as naïve, or white, or black, or even Christian. I think of it as divine, necessary and definitely not cheap.
It’s only with hope that I can feel the energy necessary to tackle the difficult conversations needed if we as Americans are to acknowledge the burden of our racist history and how it is more or less present today – more present for those who feel disadvantaged by it, including those white people driven by resentment of perceived preferences based on race. Obama very rightly said that white people don’t experience white privilege, especially if they relate to the immigrant experience, which is one of hard work, not birthright privilege. That’s my own family’s frame of reference. I watched the Reagan coalition get built in my household of origin, as my working-class Polish-American father grew old, grew fearful that he would lose what security his hard work had provided, and grew into a Reagan Republican. Resentful white people can’t be guilt tripped about white privilege, and so the raising of consciousness about white privilege hasn’t exactly attracted them in Kansas, or anyplace else where people will vote their interests and these days their resentments.
Obama is as much white as he is black, a recognition that doesn’t get articulated very often, though it underlies the sentiment that he’s not “black enough.” And so Obama gets to articulate what is needful for both the black and white communities because he belongs to both. “White community” is itself a phrase worth noting – far less used than “black community.” (Try Googling it.) “White” doesn’t get used as frequently because it is the default in our majority-white society. But white people don’t see it. I first understood it when taking part in Community Study Circles, a race-relations discussion group. I’m not holier than the rest of white society, but I have been privileged enough to begin having the conversations about race that our society needs to have. It works better than either sweeping race under the rug or nursing resentments, even if stoking resentments opportunistically fires up a certain segment of the voting public.
So I’m with Obama. I think his hope is both audacious and realistic. Also very American. The way forward is together, but the arc of history is mighty long as it bends toward justice. I pray I live long enough to see hope trump hate.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Poor Oprah
Critics have taken aim at her new reality show The Big Give as crass and exploitive, however well-intentioned. She’s under attack from a vocal wing of Christian conservatives, armed with computers and emails, who say that her newest book pick, A New Earth, is blasphemous and spiritually dangerous. And A Course in Miracles, being taught by Marianne Williamson on the XM Radio show Oprah and Friends, is even more spiritually pernicious.
On the other hand … Oprah has made a career and fortune out of making tasty lemonade out of unlikely lemons. So let’s look at it from another angle.
Oprah is everywhere. You can’t escape her: reality show on ABC-TV Sunday, The Oprah Winfrey Show same network everyday, web cast that reached 139 countries as half a million people log on Monday nights to listen to Oprah and a soft-spoken, non-mediagenic German guy who looks and sounds like a college professor talking about consciousness. Then there’s Oprah and Friends on the radio. O smiling at you from the green March cover of O the Oprah Magazine as you stand in the checkout line at the grocery store. O’s reading club badge on 3.5 million paperback copies of Tolle’s book.
We could also go not much farther back and talk about Oprah on the campaign trail in December, the January announcement of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The Oprah Store, a retail outlet in Chicago, opened in early February near Oprah’s Harpo Studios.
There are at least two ways to look at this: Oprah is successful way beyond her dreams, as she might put it, or there’s no escape from her if you don’t want to buy her message. Some people seem to love to hate her, since Americans love it when idols fall even as we wait for the next one to survive the cut and make it to the top. Maybe at least some of us feel as strongly or ambivalently about Oprah as we might about America: big, well-intentioned, sometimes mistaken. Some have compared her stature to God, but the more apt comparison may be America, the land of big hearts and big bottoms, hard work and strong opinions, optimism and shrewdness, curiosity and consumerism, and stuff to eat, drink, read and think about.
Oprah is America, and she’s a black woman who doesn’t much resemble Uncle Sam. She’s certainly a face of America in the 136 countries around the world where her TV show is broadcast. Those who criticize her language about God and spirituality invariably forget that her worldwide viewing audience uses different names for God. Just as one size doesn’t fit all, one word doesn’t fit all. Tailoring for a worldwide mass audience is tough.
So is teaching. Oprah is often a didactic entertainer, giving us lessons she really wants us to get. So in an online classroom she can dispense with some of the conventions of entertainment, get away with looking at the camera and talking at an audience, and go ahead and ask really intelligent questions. Unlike many, Oprah has a lot of faith in people’s basic intelligence. She’s picked challenging books and authors like Tolstoy, Faulkner and now Tolle. You can’t say she’s not ambitious.
You also can’t say she does not learn from mistakes. She abandoned the Jerry Springer style, trash-TV talk show format in the middle 1990s and chose a more edifying, and profitable, path. She made author James Frey sit under her wrath on network TV and apologized for her earlier defense of the A Million Little Pieces author accused of fabrication. She has even made fun of some of her own mistakes. After all, recanting makes for more shows.
So, Oprah may stumble here and there. But a woman who believes in The Power of Now, author Tolle’s earlier book, knows that “now” constantly changes. A lot of us are staying tuned, though not necessarily to reality TV or esoteric spirituality books. In the meantime, pass the lemonade.
Critics have taken aim at her new reality show The Big Give as crass and exploitive, however well-intentioned. She’s under attack from a vocal wing of Christian conservatives, armed with computers and emails, who say that her newest book pick, A New Earth, is blasphemous and spiritually dangerous. And A Course in Miracles, being taught by Marianne Williamson on the XM Radio show Oprah and Friends, is even more spiritually pernicious.
On the other hand … Oprah has made a career and fortune out of making tasty lemonade out of unlikely lemons. So let’s look at it from another angle.
Oprah is everywhere. You can’t escape her: reality show on ABC-TV Sunday, The Oprah Winfrey Show same network everyday, web cast that reached 139 countries as half a million people log on Monday nights to listen to Oprah and a soft-spoken, non-mediagenic German guy who looks and sounds like a college professor talking about consciousness. Then there’s Oprah and Friends on the radio. O smiling at you from the green March cover of O the Oprah Magazine as you stand in the checkout line at the grocery store. O’s reading club badge on 3.5 million paperback copies of Tolle’s book.
We could also go not much farther back and talk about Oprah on the campaign trail in December, the January announcement of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The Oprah Store, a retail outlet in Chicago, opened in early February near Oprah’s Harpo Studios.
There are at least two ways to look at this: Oprah is successful way beyond her dreams, as she might put it, or there’s no escape from her if you don’t want to buy her message. Some people seem to love to hate her, since Americans love it when idols fall even as we wait for the next one to survive the cut and make it to the top. Maybe at least some of us feel as strongly or ambivalently about Oprah as we might about America: big, well-intentioned, sometimes mistaken. Some have compared her stature to God, but the more apt comparison may be America, the land of big hearts and big bottoms, hard work and strong opinions, optimism and shrewdness, curiosity and consumerism, and stuff to eat, drink, read and think about.
Oprah is America, and she’s a black woman who doesn’t much resemble Uncle Sam. She’s certainly a face of America in the 136 countries around the world where her TV show is broadcast. Those who criticize her language about God and spirituality invariably forget that her worldwide viewing audience uses different names for God. Just as one size doesn’t fit all, one word doesn’t fit all. Tailoring for a worldwide mass audience is tough.
So is teaching. Oprah is often a didactic entertainer, giving us lessons she really wants us to get. So in an online classroom she can dispense with some of the conventions of entertainment, get away with looking at the camera and talking at an audience, and go ahead and ask really intelligent questions. Unlike many, Oprah has a lot of faith in people’s basic intelligence. She’s picked challenging books and authors like Tolstoy, Faulkner and now Tolle. You can’t say she’s not ambitious.
You also can’t say she does not learn from mistakes. She abandoned the Jerry Springer style, trash-TV talk show format in the middle 1990s and chose a more edifying, and profitable, path. She made author James Frey sit under her wrath on network TV and apologized for her earlier defense of the A Million Little Pieces author accused of fabrication. She has even made fun of some of her own mistakes. After all, recanting makes for more shows.
So, Oprah may stumble here and there. But a woman who believes in The Power of Now, author Tolle’s earlier book, knows that “now” constantly changes. A lot of us are staying tuned, though not necessarily to reality TV or esoteric spirituality books. In the meantime, pass the lemonade.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Monday, March 03, 2008
What I'm reading
The Namesake. By Jhumpa Lahiri.
This story of immigration, assimilation and cultural dislocation really drew me in. For Indian-Americans, it will be explicitly significant, but as a Polish-American whose father was raised abroad and who moved up the economic ladder and changed classes, I shared the where-do-I-belong disorientation. The conflicting pulls of loyalty, love, duty and desire are rendered with great subtlety. The seductions of the New York life called my name some decades ago. What's most remarkable is her ability to present characters with sympathy but not indulgence. Gogol's wife makes awful choices. The names change, but the immigrant story remains as fresh and relevant as it has in America for centuries, literally.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Man with a red-state accent
I found Kareem Salama through a couple of hyperlinks off Beliefnet's Idol Chatter column. He is an Egyptian-American country and western singer raised in Oklahoma who provides the music for this video
about American Muslims which is charming and funny. What is equally refreshing is an interview he did on Fox News last year. He might convert me -- to country music.
I found Kareem Salama through a couple of hyperlinks off Beliefnet's Idol Chatter column. He is an Egyptian-American country and western singer raised in Oklahoma who provides the music for this video
about American Muslims which is charming and funny. What is equally refreshing is an interview he did on Fox News last year. He might convert me -- to country music.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
What I'm reading
Emotions Revealed. By Paul Ekman.
Psychologist Paul Ekman is a smart cookie who has worked with the Dalai Lama at the latter's Mind and Life dialogs. He's done cross-cultural research on the facial expressions that accompany emotions, so he can make the argument that some feelings and their outward show are universal. More interestingly, he shows that emotions are not experiences which we can control. We get angry when someone gets between us and a goal. Even babies do. All of which is to say, you can't try to not be angry. Anger has evolved as a useful response. I bet it was more useful before we had traffic gridlock. In the meantime there are things we can do about our emotional behavior. He talks about developing the habit of attentiveness -- know yourself. The book offers the empirical underpinning for the therapeutic process of working on our bad habits; not surprisingly, it is better at analysis than the how-then-shall-we-live part.
Emotions Revealed. By Paul Ekman.
Psychologist Paul Ekman is a smart cookie who has worked with the Dalai Lama at the latter's Mind and Life dialogs. He's done cross-cultural research on the facial expressions that accompany emotions, so he can make the argument that some feelings and their outward show are universal. More interestingly, he shows that emotions are not experiences which we can control. We get angry when someone gets between us and a goal. Even babies do. All of which is to say, you can't try to not be angry. Anger has evolved as a useful response. I bet it was more useful before we had traffic gridlock. In the meantime there are things we can do about our emotional behavior. He talks about developing the habit of attentiveness -- know yourself. The book offers the empirical underpinning for the therapeutic process of working on our bad habits; not surprisingly, it is better at analysis than the how-then-shall-we-live part.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Giving up + taking on = shifting somethingAs a Quaker, I miss the liturgical calendar of the Catholicism of my youth. To everything there really is a season, including the third snow of the week just outside my window. Lent, which begins today, is a big deal for many Christians, especially Catholics. When I was little, we got little Lenten cans in which to save the money for the candy, or anything else, we gave up. The money went for missions. It was unfortunate spiritual pride that made me want to fill up my can: I gave up big time. Today I understand spiritual discipline, paradoxically enough, through my practice of Buddhist meditation and watching my awareness. Today I am highly aware of how difficult it is to work without a cup of coffee, since I am fasting. In doing some research on Lenten disciplines, I came across the idea that if Lent is about self-examination and self-discipline, one could also take on a practice instead of merely giving something up. I'm adding sacred poetry to my Lenten reading: The Soul is Here for its Own Joy edited by Robert Bly (doesn't sound very sacrificial, does it?) and (in a more orthodox vein) The Poetry of Piety edited by Ben Witherington and Christopher Mead Armitage, which really ought to have had T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday:
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual for only one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are ...
Friday, February 01, 2008
I'm in charge here
said Mother Nature before leaving in a windy huff after depositing 10 inches of snow that fell heavily in our driveway, street, schools, etc. At the feeder outside my window is one grateful nuthatch, sharing dining quarters with two chickadees. Our letter carrier seems happy that enough shoveling has been done on the block that he can do his work, come rain, sleet or however many inches of snow. At seven a.m., the view consisted of unbroken planes of white, but the plow has finally come through on the street. We routinely refuse to admit that weather always has the upper hand, although my sister the airline reservation agent will have a busy day today. I love having a grocery store four blocks away, though if I were as smart as all the old folks I saw in there yesterday afternoon, after the snow had begun, I wouldn't have had to return today. It's winter. What do you expect in Chicago ?
said Mother Nature before leaving in a windy huff after depositing 10 inches of snow that fell heavily in our driveway, street, schools, etc. At the feeder outside my window is one grateful nuthatch, sharing dining quarters with two chickadees. Our letter carrier seems happy that enough shoveling has been done on the block that he can do his work, come rain, sleet or however many inches of snow. At seven a.m., the view consisted of unbroken planes of white, but the plow has finally come through on the street. We routinely refuse to admit that weather always has the upper hand, although my sister the airline reservation agent will have a busy day today. I love having a grocery store four blocks away, though if I were as smart as all the old folks I saw in there yesterday afternoon, after the snow had begun, I wouldn't have had to return today. It's winter. What do you expect in Chicago ?
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Oprah's new pick
No, it's not Hillary Clinton. I'll make hay another time about the correlation between Oprah appearances for him in Iowa and South Carolina and his victories there. Meantime there's a new book club pick, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. Number 38 already at amazon.com. O singled out The Power of Now a few years ago and thereby helped sell a few hundred thousand more. I interviewed Tolle in 2003 for Religion News Service when he published Stillness Speaks, which followed The Power of Now. You can read it here . He was then slightly reclusive, or at least not much given to lots of publicity. The O platform is quite the change. What I'm struck by is his use of "purpose" in his title. Post-Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, purpose got borrowed a couple times by other authors. Eckhart is an original, however, and so much more O's style than Warren. I'm staying tuned, and am in line for the webinar with him and O.
No, it's not Hillary Clinton. I'll make hay another time about the correlation between Oprah appearances for him in Iowa and South Carolina and his victories there. Meantime there's a new book club pick, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. Number 38 already at amazon.com. O singled out The Power of Now a few years ago and thereby helped sell a few hundred thousand more. I interviewed Tolle in 2003 for Religion News Service when he published Stillness Speaks, which followed The Power of Now. You can read it here . He was then slightly reclusive, or at least not much given to lots of publicity. The O platform is quite the change. What I'm struck by is his use of "purpose" in his title. Post-Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, purpose got borrowed a couple times by other authors. Eckhart is an original, however, and so much more O's style than Warren. I'm staying tuned, and am in line for the webinar with him and O.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The birds got confused Last week my husband and I enjoyed our annual retreat to Starved Rock State Park along the Illinois River near the town of Utica. During the winter on a weekday, the place is deserted and we can walk for miles without seeing anybody. We saw things we hadn't seen before, including LaSalle Canyon, with a semi-frozen waterfall. We could walk under the falling water; the rock area was iced and slippery. Equally awesome in a much different way was the flood covering the parking lot of the visitors center. The Illinois has been swollen by snow melt from our temperatures in the 60s in January. We saw park benches and picnic shelters sitting in the river water. We also didn't see things we usually see, namely, wintering bald eagles. Usually a dozen can be found roosting and fishing along the river. This year we saw one on the wing, disappearing. We asked at the lodge (a handsome building of WPA vintage, a memorial to truly useful public work) about the eagles. The birds got confused by the warm weather, someone told us, and were around, but not always.
Monday, January 21, 2008
On MLK Day: remembering the Chicago Freedom Movement
I was 13 the summer of 1966 when activists marched in my Chicago neighborhood, Belmont-Cragin on the city's northwest side. The demonstrators sought an end to slum housing and segregated housing patterns. I was much more interested in the Beatles; my vague memory is of marchers on Central Avenue, a few blocks from my home. I have no memory of the hostile reception the marchers received. Dr. King was in Chicago that summer; in one of the demonstrations, he was hit in the head by a rock hurled at him during a march in Marquette Park/Gage Park, on the city's southwest side. He said later that people from Mississippi should come North to learn how to hate.
The Chicago Freedom Movement is regarded by historians as a failure. Measured by its immediate effect on housing patterns, that's true. A seed fell in my heart, one heart, which is where freedom takes root (as well as in laws). I don't remember exactly when I began the habit of quizzing my parents whenever they used the term "colored" to describe black people -- what color ? Sure, it was obnoxious, and my father died a frightened white working-class Democrat defected to the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. But it made a difference to me, and in the next few years I volunteered for the brand-new Head Start program during the summer, and the Chicago Area Lay Movement (CALM) to tutor kids who lived in the south side projects on Lake Park.
A recent local newspaper column prompted me to look up King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
Its eloquence is breathtaking -- a man sitting in jail writes this. King could as easily speak for justice as he could write his own name: two habits. This is a radical letter that calls on us to be extremists for love ("Jesus Christ was an extremist for love, truth and goodness") and carefully explains the grounds for civil disobedience. Dr. King's image has been softened over time. But history is memory for those who were there. King was radical. The Declaration of Independence was radical in its time, too. Having missed the MLK special at the Church of Oprah this morning, I'm glad to have spent some time today reading this forceful letter.
Monday, January 14, 2008
At home beyond
I was saddened to learn that the Irish writer John O'Donohue, who had a bestseller several years ago with Anam Cara, died on Jan. 3. I loved his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace . It forced me to remember the beautiful in art and literature, especially poetry. O'Donohue was a poet, one of the few philosophers I can think of who transmuted the dry abstractions of philosophy into poetry: "our joy in the beautiful is as native to us as our breath," he wrote. I didn't realize he was an environmental activist as well as a writer, and a former priest as well (that part sure figures). Tributes at his site from people intimately familiar with him and his work are lovely. The last lines of Beauty:
As twilight fills night with bright horizons
May Beauty await you at home beyond.
Rest in peace, John O'Donohue.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
People just want to be heard
While doing some reporting at a preschool this morning (I like those tiny chairs, and the walls are always covered with pictures of animals like Wilma Walrus) I had occasion to talk to one of the children's parents. She is an architect trained in the Philippines. Somehow she started to tell me about her father's role in World War II, helping Americans find occupying Japanese soldiers, after the Americans shot her father's cousin, not knowing who or what they were dealing with when they first encountered the Filipino men foraging for food. The Philippines were an important part of the Asian theater in World War II -- it was that country to which Gen. Douglas MacArthur promised to return. Every person has a story, and this woman has a bookful. Listening is a great discipline.
The sun was shining -- the weather is unnaturally warm for January -- and another generation of four-year-olds is getting ready for kindergarten. At this stage in their lives everything is a lesson; both my 4-year-old subjects said the best thing about school was playing.
While doing some reporting at a preschool this morning (I like those tiny chairs, and the walls are always covered with pictures of animals like Wilma Walrus) I had occasion to talk to one of the children's parents. She is an architect trained in the Philippines. Somehow she started to tell me about her father's role in World War II, helping Americans find occupying Japanese soldiers, after the Americans shot her father's cousin, not knowing who or what they were dealing with when they first encountered the Filipino men foraging for food. The Philippines were an important part of the Asian theater in World War II -- it was that country to which Gen. Douglas MacArthur promised to return. Every person has a story, and this woman has a bookful. Listening is a great discipline.
The sun was shining -- the weather is unnaturally warm for January -- and another generation of four-year-olds is getting ready for kindergarten. At this stage in their lives everything is a lesson; both my 4-year-old subjects said the best thing about school was playing.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Holding Kenya in the light
Evangelical Christians say they "have a heart for" something that especially worries them. We Friends "have a concern." I have a concern for Kenya in light of the violence following the contested election there. Kenya has more Quakers -- 300,000 -- than any other country in the world. (The US has 200,000.) Kenyan Friends have visited us at Illinois Yearly Meeting, and that was spiritually refreshing. Because some of our members have ties to Kenyan Friends, including marital ties, we have access to more information about Kenya (another good blog is here) from people who are there in order to understand what has happened and, more importantly, why. This is helpful, and also hopeful. The press has not done a good job of providing any kind of context, another illustration of messed-up priorities.
Evangelical Christians say they "have a heart for" something that especially worries them. We Friends "have a concern." I have a concern for Kenya in light of the violence following the contested election there. Kenya has more Quakers -- 300,000 -- than any other country in the world. (The US has 200,000.) Kenyan Friends have visited us at Illinois Yearly Meeting, and that was spiritually refreshing. Because some of our members have ties to Kenyan Friends, including marital ties, we have access to more information about Kenya (another good blog is here) from people who are there in order to understand what has happened and, more importantly, why. This is helpful, and also hopeful. The press has not done a good job of providing any kind of context, another illustration of messed-up priorities.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Gone to the dogs
One of the things I have always loved about being a journalist is the opportunity to learn new things. This week's lesson: canine couture. Who knew? Well-heeled dogs, and their owners, everywhere, but not this cat person. In the course of work for the Fox Valley Park District at a dog obedience class, I met two Maltese, one of whom was distinctly mini-Maltese, being a puppy. Each was wearing an Oscar Newman sweater -- the seasonal variety, of course, for December. (Oscar is being a little possessive about images of his upscale sweaters, but click on the link above for a peek.) Modern Dog magazine chronicles the lifestyle of the urban dog, and Paris Hilton did something useful in this world in designing dogwear .
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
What I'm reading
The Amber Spyglass. By Phillip Pullman.
This made me want to re-open my Milton, and nothing has ever made me want to reopen Milton after studying him out of (self-imposed) obligation in graduate school. I don't generally like darkly lit dystopian works, but this one is less dark, curiously enough, even if the principal characters do go to the land of the dead. This was the first of the trilogy I actually liked, perhaps because I finally grew to like Will and Lyra. And I really liked the Gallivespians (is he nodding to Swift there? probably). The scope of the series is so apparent here -- its ambitious character that borrows from so much of literature to ask again some of the great, timeless questions. Pullman is clearly an excellent student of literature, which he evidently concentrated on at the expense of keeping up with theology. In some ways his is a very old-fashioned view of the superiority of Enlightenment rationalism, though with souped-up contemporary physics. The controversy over Pullman's atheism is well-covered at Idol Chatter by Donna Freitas, who told me when I interviewed her about Killing the Imposter God, her book on Pullman, that she envied my encounter with it for the first time. I'm curious enough to dip back into Milton and, even more so, Blake.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Existential question of the day
I dropped in today to the local senior center, which is cheerfully called The Friendly Center. I played two hands of bridge (lost one, darn it) and heard some stories. Having recently been with a group of Presbyterian women who wanted to learn more about telling their own stories to their families, and also because I was there prospecting for local history, I was conscious of how many years of personal history were in the room in the lives of those 135 people. Bernice, who will be 98 in January and looks like she's in her 80s, shared some of her history with me, including having a grandfather who was a lamplighter in Chicago's Marquette Park. She was aboard TWA flight 847 when it was hijacked by two Lebanese gunmen in June 1985. She was among the first group of people let off the plane because the hijackers had decided "to let the old ladies go," she said. She was 75. She remembered the name of the heroic flight attendant who spoke German and could communicate with one of the hijackers, the captain's name, the name of the Navy diver who was the single fatality during the protracted ordeal. (There were 152 people on the plane.) People remember little pieces of history, which is a much bigger story. A propos of something else (the game trophies bagged by her late husband, a hunter) Bernice's friend Viola asked, "What are you supposed to do with your memories?" I hope I learn the answer.
I dropped in today to the local senior center, which is cheerfully called The Friendly Center. I played two hands of bridge (lost one, darn it) and heard some stories. Having recently been with a group of Presbyterian women who wanted to learn more about telling their own stories to their families, and also because I was there prospecting for local history, I was conscious of how many years of personal history were in the room in the lives of those 135 people. Bernice, who will be 98 in January and looks like she's in her 80s, shared some of her history with me, including having a grandfather who was a lamplighter in Chicago's Marquette Park. She was aboard TWA flight 847 when it was hijacked by two Lebanese gunmen in June 1985. She was among the first group of people let off the plane because the hijackers had decided "to let the old ladies go," she said. She was 75. She remembered the name of the heroic flight attendant who spoke German and could communicate with one of the hijackers, the captain's name, the name of the Navy diver who was the single fatality during the protracted ordeal. (There were 152 people on the plane.) People remember little pieces of history, which is a much bigger story. A propos of something else (the game trophies bagged by her late husband, a hunter) Bernice's friend Viola asked, "What are you supposed to do with your memories?" I hope I learn the answer.
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