Be Prepared

Friends of ours in South Dakota moved their modular onto undeveloped land even before their water and septic was completed. Their 13-year-old son said after two months of hauling water and waste, "Mom, I just want to be able to take things for granted again."

His words have more meaning than he intended, I think. With ice storms, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters, many people are seeing how easily electricity and clean water are lost. The news showed how people affected by the ice storms disaster, for instance, moved into hotels for warmth and their TV. Many ate daily at restaurants. Most complained they were running out of money by using these strategies to cope with a situation which seemed it was never going to end. One woman on her front porch said she and her family didn’t know what to do with themselves.

I’m not a dooms-sayer, but preparing for disasters indigenous to an area just seems like common sense. My thoughts follow the tract of each person being responsible for themselves. As individuals we can gather candles, flashlights, a battery radio, spare blankets, bottled water, a camp stove, etc. on hand. We can set aside canned foods in a special corner and rotate them through our meals so the supply is kept updated. We might even want to stay in touch with simple pleasures like crayons and paper, a deck of cards, story-telling, etc.

I found an interesting story in the news several weeks after that huge tsunami hit the islands a few years ago. While those in ‘civilized’ areas were struck immobile by the immensity of the destruction, those on primitive islands handled the same situation differently. When search and rescue helicopters reached them, rescue teams found people burning their dead, boiling water, and rebuilding with materials blown in on the tide. They didn’t wait for a handout like those who were used to ‘government subsidies’ and Red Cross. They knew what to do for their own survival.

In 1983, I was made to memorized a list prepared by Hopi Elders which alerted me to my need to be prepared. These ten items have since been written, and the list gets passed around the Internet frequently. It just surfaced again with the announcement, "We are the ones we’ve been waiting for." Every time I read this list, I rethink my responses to each item. The practice helps me stop taking things for granted.

(The Hopi Elders sent forth this message after a four day vigil.) "We have been telling you to tell the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour, and there are things to be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relations?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

"The Elder then clasped his hands together and said, “This could be a good time!"

A Dog Blessing

Dogs are not one of my favorite creatures. They pant and drool and chase the deer from the mountain meadow behind our house and scare the wild turkeys away from the seed offerings I place on the hillside. For those reasons, we prefer to live in our cabin without one.

But, on the morning of the memorial for our oldest daughter, a mixed-breed bitch, who was predominately pit bull and belonged to a neighbor, decided to protect us. She chased something around the edge of our eight-sided home at 3 AM. Her bark could be heard bouncing between the boulders of the ravine in which we live. We hollered. We pitched stones. We cussed. She would slink away, then return to warn off invisible attackers.

During the following weeks, for some reason known only to her, she wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t release her sudden protective hold on our property. We called her owner who dragged her away, but, every day, she arrived and begged for some kind of understanding, it seemed, with her eyes. She reminded me of our oldest daughter, who had left and returned so many times in the course of her life. For this reason and more, the dog broke my heart as she whimpered when we told her to leave, only to return the next day for whatever attention we would give.

I couldn’t get over the feeling that this white and scarred dog had a purpose; one I didn’t know anything about. I wondered, because of the timing, if she might have a message for us from our daughter, one last word to pass on before her spirit loosened from this world after making sure we would be OK without her.

After two months of her staring at us through the sliding glass window and loudly chasing anything that moved near the house, I decided, one night, not to make her leave. I found comfort in her even snoring that rose from under the house. I drew around me the energy blanket of her presence and sent a grateful prayer for her existence.

In the morning, she was gone and hasn’t returned

Personal Reflection

Maybe I could have been a better step-mom. Well, maybe I could have been a better mom too. I intended to be, better, that is, than my own mother and her mother. When my husband and I came together for our second marriages, we fully believed we could blend his son and daughter with son and daughter. I had the vision that I could be like Maria in ‘The Sound of Music’ and sing us into togetherness. I tried my darndest to do just that, offering up games and cute ideas and family projects as the way to fill everyone’s hearts and make us into a cohesive family unit.

What I never expected to find were kids who didn’t want to play my games or dance or sing or do projects.
I was dealing with instant teenagers and didn’t have a clue what that was like in the late 70s in Concord, CA. I had no idea of what had gone on before in their lives, what pressures and stresses had occurred between them, their father and mother. I also realize now I had no clue what had happened to my own children in my divorce and my all-consuming steps towards independence.

I had believed it could be as simple as the ex-nun’s story of feeling the grandeur of life and loving it all. I never considered that any of our children might be damaged by babysitters or step-fathers or that they might run away with their friends to drink and party under the BART station tracks for a lark.

I knew what I’d done as a teenager. I never dreamed it could be worse.

So in hindsight, I admit I was a dreamer. I was a full-fledged practitioner of denial and built mountainous barriers to keep me from facing the reality of their experiences.

I was finally able to get real at a family counseling week in Southern California for my husband’s daughter, Linda. Without a doubt, I got the message to leave myself out of the relationship between my step-kids and their dad. They didn’t need another mother. At that time, they weren’t interested in having me as a friendly aunt or a friend, period. I learned I needed to step away from my own children’s lives too. With two years of counseling and grief, I came to learn boundaries because without them, I was out of balance with my own world, too much in theirs, and not enough in the place where I needed to live.

I needed to love myself enough to accept the things I couldn’t change.

Reflecting on the past now, maybe I wasn’t quite so bad as a mom and a step-mom. The only thing I know, for sure, is that I tried, and I took to heart the lessons I learned along the way.

Emoting and Emotions

When I was six years old, we got our first television. Neighbors came and returned to watch movies and programs with us, or so I thought. The story goes that my facial expressions and involvement in the moving scenes were as much a part of the entertainment as the actual programs. I would laugh or cry or thrill with the story line. I became the characters and lived their lives with them. According to my husband, I haven’t changed one bit. In fact, when I write my own stories, I’ve been told I’m inclined to be grinning stupidly as I madly type across the computer keys or sobbing hysterically as I’m finishing some devastating encounter.

I realized this fact for myself and noticed I emote, not just the first time I write a story line, but on every rewrite. In “The Spirit Bundle” I have a scene with a husband dying. I still cry every time I read it, but at least I’m no longer keening.

To determine the best way to describe all kinds of emotions, I tried to become clinical. I analyzed sections of best-selling novels by counting words in paragraphs and whether they were short words or long, and what kind of verbs were used. With the classic authors I like, I mix-matched adjectives to test shades of feelings and meanings and diagramed sentences to determine how tension was paced in a chapter. In my own work, I made a particular scene into a poem then returned it to prose. One short story was revised twenty-seven times.

What I’ve learned is that I can copy what others have used to create tensions, pathos, fear, anxiety, jealousy or shame, but the best way to illustrate these emotions is for me to be willing to dig deep into the well of my own experiences.

Living other people lives through movies and books as a kid and teenage was a basis for understanding what emotions are. Being honest about my own feelings and learning to describe how different parts of my body react to such feelings as fear and love, hate and passion, and all the rest have come back to me as a two-fold gift. When I develop scenes and characters for my readers, I’m getting more in touch with my own reactions and feelings. Hopefully whoever picks up my stories will be touched as well.