Author Archives: Anna Sims Bartel

Excuses, excuses

I’ve been reading a range of books on how to live better, manage tasks better, be kinder, explore more — you know, LIVE.  I’m always fascinated by how many of them articulate the same kinds of common sense we’ve been hearing for years, yet make it sound fresh and important and attractive.  Which is vital if you’re someone like me, who has a great deal of common sense and yet a whole host of excuses for being stuck in a rut.  It’s MY rut.  It’s not uncomfortable.  I’ve made it sort of homey, papered it with possibilities and laid out a few nice cushions on the floor.  And I spend a lot of time there.

But these writers say we should explore!  We should take risks!  And be uncomfortable!  And the bummer is, they’re right.  Sometimes the discomfort is as small as giving up the precious quiet cup-of-coffee minutes of a baby’s nap to write a blog post; sometimes it’s as huge as cold-calling for consulting gigs.  Sometimes it’s in between, like meeting the new neighbors and trying to decide what if anything to make them for a welcome dinner.  I guess I’m more of an introvert than I thought.

The most important tool, I find, for staying stuck in my rut is the excuse.  I rarely even have to offer them to others — I use them on myself.  I’m truly gifted at rationalization.  But there’s a point when our knowledge of ourselves makes even the best excuses evident: when we wake up in the morning with back pain because we keep skipping our exercises, well, then, there’s really no excuse for skipping the exercises.  No matter what I tell me.  If we want a particular kind of job, then all our brilliant excuses for postponing the search are going to be, well, stupid and self-defeating.  And I don’t know about you, but I dislike feeling stupid and defeating myself (though again, I am excellent at both: this is one area where you really don’t want to run with your strengths).

How, then, do we get past all this?  I’m on the fence about that.  Surprise.  I am really liking Scott Belsky’s “Making Ideas Happen” and its Action Method; I also really like the gentler, more spiritual approaches of Patti Digh.  I am drawn to the clarity and categorization of Strengthsfinder, but I believe in the broader, more mindful approach of, say, Parker Palmer.  As much as I appreciate what she’s doing, Gretchen Rubin’s “Happiness Project” makes me a little itchy — perhaps I am just allergic to the tone of direct achievement and 20/20 hindsight when I feel myself groping around in the dark.  And Seth Godin is always appealing, but usually more as a shot in the arm, maybe-I’ll-take-up-mountain-biking-while-I’m-churning-out-utterly-brilliant-novels kind of way.  Mostly, I think, what I need is a Natalie Goldberg-esque kind of practice, a daily writing-cum-meditation that helps me see what’s in play and sit quietly in its presence.

What I DON’T need is a computer that has stopped connecting to the internet anyway anyhow…but that’s what I have.  Now I have to see if I can fix it, or see if I can find someone who can, for cheap, or buy a new one.  All advice welcome.  (And yes, that’s my excuse for late posting.  I’ll get back to it, I promise.)

🙂

On the flurries

It has been snowing lightly off and on for weeks.  Months, I believe. Forever, in fact.  Which is enough to drive anyone a little crazy, especially toward the tail end of a long Maine winter.  But another kind of flurry is complicating things too: a work-flurry.

I’m someone who has always sought and valued routine, even though I’m a little bored by it.  My preferred mode of living is comfortable routine with fun variations and surprises.  So why, you might ask, am I pursuing this life of writing and teaching and consulting?  I guess because the pull and excitement of those fields, coupled with the attraction of time with kids, just seem more magnetic right now than the security that used to be so vital.  Last week I felt comfortable with that.  This week, with all of the following things happening, it seems a little nutty:

  1. two offers to teach courses at area colleges over the summer;
  2. one possible collaborative book project to develop and write;
  3. one academic book chapter awaiting final comments from the editors;
  4. one article to write for the very cool L/A Magazine;
  5. one fabulous blog to develop and maintain;
  6. one other blog I’ve been itching to start;
  7. one gardening workshop to host for local folks;
  8. one GARDEN to plan and plant (seed-starting only at this stage, but still);
  9. one board committee meeting to chair; one larger board meeting to attend;
  10. one book discussion session to facilitate in a monthly meeting at our public library;
  11. one book discussion series to plan for the fall for the library/Maine Humanities Council;
  12. the usual array of doctor’s appointments and work-related travel and family life to manage.

And this Sunday is the changeover to daylight savings time.  Which is nice, because it will mean that the baby gets up at 3:30 instead of 4:30 am.  So we’ve got that going for us.

Seriously, why do we do what we do, especially when it’s volunteer or really low-paid?  For me: I’m itching to make these things work.  I’m in the relationship-building phase of a number of initiatives and it all seems worth it right now.  What are the things that pull you in many directions?  How do you manage their competing priorities?  And how do you stay sane during it?  It’s like the snow at this time of year, isn’t it: you never quite know what those clouds will produce, and you surely don’t know if it’ll stick.  But you know that seasons are changing and you know you can’t stop time, so at some point you just hold out your hands and try to  be grateful for what lands.

It’s Sunday morning, people

And at our house that means we have room for some of these:

  • Baking some bread (again, from The Italian Dish’s recipe);
  • Watching the smallest among us explore his space and his (distressingly loud) new lion roar;
  • Making smoothies (yoghurt, banana, frozen raspberries and peaches, oj) and trying them out on the baby-who-might-we-hope-to-god-be-outgrowing-his-dairy-intolerance;
  • Carefully assisting the drinking of said smoothies and cleaning up as we go;
  • Appreciating Ezra’s careful pronunciation of “tusks” and “scientists,” complete with his gloat that he can, in fact, pronounce difficult words like “tusks” and “scientists”;
  • Discussing (with Len, lest you mistake my childrens’ early interests) austerity  and Warren Buffett’s idea about managing the federal debt and generally airing our concerns about the future of our economy;
  • Contemplating what if any further seed-starting should happen today, now that we’ve got the tomatoes, parsley, dahlias, zinnias, and marigolds underway;
  • Revising my new work-management plan, which is basically a chart with the five categories of “work”-type stuff as columns and a range of different projects or tasks below — my strategy is to use this to keep the responsibilities before me, and to commit to checking off at least ONE of the things in each column weekly.  I’m curious, in this first week, to see where the check-marks naturally fall.  If you’re interested, I can post the chart;
  • Planning a new blog post on getting things done, based on a little facebook research I did recently…I figure if there are strategies that are shared by freelance techies; writers with full-time day jobs; perpetually curious students; professors with serious media addictions; and moms with multiple jobs, both paid and creative — well, then, perhaps they are useful strategies.  Worth a shot.
  • Wondering if it is going to snow about an inch every day for the next two months like it has for the last week or so.  I am weary of the overcast.

What are you up to today?

Parasaurolophus attack.

Parasaurolophus attack.

Uh, oh, I have to go.  I’m under assault by a parasaurolophus.  Right here on my desk.  It roars.

On writing as an act of generosity

I am a big fan of generosity.  I love the notion of giving, of gift as interaction and interaction as gift.  And I’m a big fan of writing.  But it has only recently occurred to me that those might be the same thing.

Naturally, there are many writers whose work felt like a gift to me — Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Billy Collins, and many more — but it felt private.  It was the emotional counterpart to my teenage habit of hugging a book to my chest as I snuck off somewhere to read (since I was not supposed to be reading but rather doing something “productive” like washing dishes).  I cherished the words and the stories and I felt wildly privileged that they spoke to me.  To ME!  But as I got healthier and wholer, I came to see that the larger political significance I’d always attributed to stories was perhaps the same thing as this deeply personal conversation, just on a broader scale.  As these and other writers opened my eyes and my soul to the wider world, and as I learned (ironically, well AFTER my PhD in Comparative Literature) how many other eyes and souls were out there, doors ajar, because of their writing, I came to see that this is their gift to the world.  Barbara Kingsolver, in fact, talks about this in a video she did way back when Animal Dreams was first published (which I can’t seem to find today); she says, essentially, that the most important thing she can do for this broken world is to put her butt in chair and write.  It’s true, she tends to work on the macro level, I think: witness this excerpt from a conversation with David Gergen about how stories structure and define our world, our nation, our communities:

“DAVID GERGEN: –but through your own novels to invent a new set of stories for us, is that what you’re about?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: It is in my own little corner. That’s what I’m trying to do. I love what Joseph Campbell said about mythology. He said that our stories are what holds us together as a culture, and as long as they’re true for us, and as long as they work for us, they–we thrive. And when they cease to become true, we fall apart, and we have to reconstruct them or revitalize them. We have to come up with new myths.”

And of course that’s what she does: her stories enable us to connect to the land and the people who work it; to understand the histories of human movements and failures; to imagine ourselves into a capacity for managing heart-wrenching, world-churning change that right now seems certainly fatal.  But what’s brilliant about Kingsolver is that she works on the micro level as well.  Her characters and her language are so compelling, so utterly moving and hilarious and desperate and comforting, that we can’t help but be drawn in.  As a reader, I’m in awe of that.

But now I find myself thinking, for the first times in my life, as a WRITER too.  It feels like hubris, and perhaps it is. But I’m slowly, slowly catching up to the notion that when we have a gift to give and we believe in generosity, then we have to give it.  Even if it is our writing.  Even if it is a painful exposure or a risk or an embarrassment, or whatever it turns out to be.  Maybe we have to do it.  (I’ve had little angels tell me this before — angels in the sense of folks who show up to say wise things or be there when you need them — the most memorable of which was a guy at a conference in San Francisco years ago who came up to me after I’d spoken in a seminar to ask what my book was called.  I said I hadn’t written one, and he asked why not, and then he held my eyes while I squirmed.  “This isn’t about ego,” he said.  “The world needs to hear what you have to say.  You have to get out of the way.”)

So here I am, trying to get out of the way, though a little confused by the whole thing and unsure of what comes next.  I am grateful for the readers I have and hopeful for more; I am grateful for the extraordinary writers (novelists, bloggers, poets, and authors of all stripes) who inspire me every day with their bravery and their brilliance.  I am grateful, I suppose, for the gift I’m perceiving and for those of you who are out there to give it right back by receiving.

Resurfacing

You know how when you get sick and worn down, nothing seems significant anymore?  And that which does is mostly depressing?  Yeah.  That’s been the past week.  But we’re all starting to get better now, which gave rise to a fit of afternoon food production around here: lentil-sausage-pesto soup and citrus olive-oil cake and even some bread dough.  Recipes are offered below.  But I just wanted to register not only this fine achievement but also an important realization: when we’re low and off-kilter and sick, we consume.  When we’re grounded and whole and healthy, we produce.  Perhaps this is not the most important thing I’ve ever noticed, but then again, perhaps it is.  Resurfacing does more than let us gasp for air — it reminds us how to swim.

Recipes:

Lentil Soup: from Smitten Kitchen (scroll down the page some to find the actual recipe amid all the hoopla and enthusiasm), but I like it best with garlic sausage instead of sweet italian; kale instead of chard; and a cup or so of pesto to keep things lively.  It’s gorgeous.  Oh, and the garlic oil they rave about?  I haven’t tried it.  I’m sure it’s brilliant.  But who has time?  This is quick, healthy, and totally delicious.

Citrus Olive-Oil Cake: sorry I can’t share it.  It’s from Rustic Fruit Desserts, about which I often rave, and I probably need permission.  Pester me if you want me to look into it.  I will mention that we used only grapefruit and orange rind and substituted lemon extract — which makes me wonder if you could use all extracts in a pinch? — and it was terrific.  I used a pretty fruity olive oil and next time will go milder.  I mean, the cake itself is GORGEOUS, but with such a strong oil, you end up with a bit of aftertaste and -feel.

Bread: this one cracks me up.  I’ve been flirting with bread-baking for, oh, fifteen years or so.  I mostly spend a lot of time to make something kind of mediocre and so I bail.  I think I really need to get a sourdough starter and try again.  But this was a last-ditch effort at ordinary yeasty hearth bread, and I tried it because it’s no-knead.  So a lot less time.  I figured it would suck, but whatever.  Here’s the thing: it’s really good! It is, so far, hands-down the best bread I’ve ever made.  The coolest part is that you make the dough, let it sit out for two hours, and then refrigerate it for as long as you want.  You cut off a chunk to make a loaf (my dough will make about three loaves, I think), shape it and set it out to rise for about 40 minutes, and then you bake it on a pizza stone.  Absolutely delicious, and with a better crumb and texture than anything else I’ve made.  Maybe bread is like garden soil: we all think we have to maul it for best results, but if we can get out of the way and let it do its own thing, it’s brilliant.  Recipe is here.

On dancing and seeds and grace

grape hyacinth budHere’s my afternoon: starting seeds with Ezra in the basement; coming upstairs to find Len and Chi home from the grocery store and provisioned with a tasty new beer (well, Len, anyway); dancing with both babies to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.  Her song “Bonus 2,” which is essentially First Corinthians brought to extraordinary life, always reaches out to me — but today, as I held my small fevered Ezra in my arms and danced, it was transcendent.  To sing those ancient words of love to my son, through Lauryn’s music, to feel the rhythm move through the bones of this old white Colonial, well, I was shaken.  I was lifted up.

I don’t often write about spirituality, or at least not as such.  It’s partly because I feel those are kind of private issues, and also because I’m uncomfortable with the ways articulations of our own faith can end up looking or feeling like advocacy or pushiness to others.  I confess, I’m also tired of the self-congratulatory tone of lots of the writing out there on religion.  And also, let’s face it: I’m a seeker who was raised Quaker (more in the secular humanist end of that spectrum) in a kind of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do sort of way.  So I have no sense of authority, only a heart full of questions and gratitude.  I tend, then to use the language of mindfulness or grace, since the former is more of a practice and the latter more of an acceptance of what seems an obvious and widely accepted truth.  For me, there are lots of interchangeable words that describe what I have faith in: love, beauty, the sacred, harmony, nature, the universe, grace, providence, serendipity, the Way, the Light, truth, hope, and of course the many permutations of god.  It is clear to me that music is sacred, as are the gifts of all artists and growers and makers and seekers — all creatures, and especially those who offer up something of beauty, who uncover or create or otherwise act with generosity in this sad and broken world.

I’ve been trying to read Margaret Wheatley’s So Far From Home, though it’s hard, because its premise is that we cannot change the world; we can only accept our powerlessness and do our best to live whole and beautiful lives by doing the right work because it is work that needs to be done.  That living, that standing in contrast to the crazy and the broken, is itself transformative.  I buy this, mostly, because it seems smart and truer than anything else I know, but I’m not wise enough or whole enough to live within it.  I’m trying.   Most days, I’m still seeking, perhaps too anxiously, for that “right work,” unable to accept that where I am is enough.  But on a day like today, that truth rings out: of course it’s enough.  Perhaps not forever, but I don’t live in forever.  I live right here, right now, right in the middle of all this beauty, surrounded on all sides by grace.

Heard this morning, II

Len and Ezra in the kitchen, while Len does laundry and Ezra plays with his animal habitat sticker book (which may be the biggest bang for our buck toy-wise EVER):

Ezra: I like slithery snakes.

Len: I’m not a big fan of the slithery snakes.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of eels?

Len: Not a big fan of eels either.  Or slithery snakes.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of crabs?

Len: Sure.  I don’t mind crabs.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of lobsters?

Len: I like to eat lobsters.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of frogs?

Len: Sure.  I could get behind a good frog.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of orca whales?

Len: Well, they can be kind of mean.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of humpback whales?

Len: Yes!  I’ve actually seen humpback whales from a boat.

Ezra: I’ve seen humpback whales from a castle.

Len: Really?  Where was this?

Ezra: Down in Portland.  I saw humpback whales and orca whales and dolphins and crabs and lobsters and snakes and eels and frogs all from a castle down in Portland.

Which is truly awesome.  And makes me wish there WERE such a castle and that we could go there on this blizzardy day.

Making MORE, not less, of ourselves

But, but, but...here I've been working so hard to make MORE of me!

But, but, but…here I’ve been working so hard to make MORE of me!

I know I’m not always in the best mood in the morning, but it was still a shock to see this on the cereal box.  And to realize that this is what my (mercifully pre-literate and mercifully male) kids have been staring at.  And to realize that this kind of message is everywhere.  How broken is that?

I know they mean well, that it’s a weight-loss message, but still.  Come ON, Cheerios.  Surely you’ve noticed the whole self-actualization agenda that is at least trying to keep pace with our nation’s long-term self-hatred protocol?  Maybe this is another reason why I shouldn’t eat Cheerios.

In all seriousness, though, this has started me thinking about the range of ways our culture invites us to be less than we are, and not just physically (though that encompasses not only weight issues but the whole range of gender-normative behaviors and style).  Jobs are stultifying enough that most of us have to compromise most of our selves in order to earn the paycheck and the benefits we need; educational programs force us into outdated molds of specialization; even cocktail-party conversations (I think; I can barely remember that far back) expect a short answer to the standard question: What do you do?

Here’s what I’d like to say to that, today: I raise two pretty awesome little boys in ways I hope are feminist and respectful and empowering.  I read whenever I can.  I write (academic work, poetry, this blog, articles, children’s stories) and seek to write a lot more.  I hope and plan to get paid for writing.  I serve on the board of a major community action agency and chair its committee on community impact.  I used to teach college and build community-partnership and community-based learning programs.  I have a PhD and often wonder if and how I can put that to appropriate use again.  I consider teaching options.  I lead discussion groups for our state humanities council and my local public library.  I crochet and I sew, and I especially like working with upcycled and repurposed materials.  I work on recovering from a childhood that bizarrely merged great privilege with great difficulty.  I fix things that need fixing, when I can.  I talk to my neighbors and pitch in where I can.  I hope to build a community of moms where I live.  I discovered recently that I can kind of draw.  I struggle with how to balance my type-A-ness, which I need but instinctively dislike, with my husband’s more relaxed approach to life (type L?  L for Love?), which I admire but which doesn’t privilege order as much as I need.  I like getting older.  I like lifting weights and am kind of glad that my family’s propensity for osteoporosis makes it kind of non-optional.  I chastise myself a lot for not lifting often enough, though, and I’m working on that.  There’s more, but there’s always more, and that’s the POINT.

You see my resistance to the language of “less”?

Patti Digh has a great bit in her totally fabulous book “Life is a Verb,” in which she mentions a study where a guy asks kindergartners to raise their hands if they are painters.  All the hands shoot up.  Dancers? Ditto.  Singers?  Yes.  Then he asks college students the same thing, and hardly any hands go up.  “What happens in those years,” she asks, “between five and eighteen to our sense of joy and possibility and personal command of the universe?”

Personal command of the universe might be a bit much to ask, but the SENSE of it is glorious.  It’s the sense of our largeness, our infinite capacity, our minds and hearts as generous and accepting and brilliant as they were born to be.  Mindfulness practitioners often say that when we try to meditate, it’s like sitting inside a closet crammed with the detritus of our lives.  And as we practice more, the disappointment is that the same crap never really goes away.  But the closet gets bigger and bigger, becoming a room, a cathedral, an airplane hangar, and soon the wide blue sky.  A few old pairs of cleats and some back tax files don’t bother us nearly as much under those circumstances.

I find it’s the same thing with our general sense of self.  Bad hair, bad skin, an achy shoulder, a snide remark — all these things can fester if we keep ourselves small (ironically, often the same thing as keeping ourselves “secure”).  But if we admit our largeness, our GREATNESS — in the sense of our participation in the grand drama of human events, not some weird ego trip — then who really cares?  We are who we are, and we deserve to surround ourselves with people who love us and things that give us joy.  We deserve to celebrate exactly who and where we are.  More grains, Cheerios, by all means.  But please don’t try to make less of us.

On Nemo, of course

Image

It’s not like we can write about anything else today.  At least, not those of us who live in the 3-foot zone.  But it does help to remember a few things:

1. This is one of the few winters where a storm like this wouldn’t make it impossible to see out our driveway.  Some years, it’s been like a cavern, with snow banks eight feet high on either side.  This, all things considered, is not all that severe.

2. We haven’t lost power!  Hurrah!  Celebrations!  Naturally, I kept expecting us to, so we had the woodstove on all night (including a 2:30 am run to reboot).  And then we had to do some emergency baking — Mimi’s German Apple Cake, from Rustic Fruit Desserts (the best such cookbook I’ve found).  These are not awful things.

3. Kind neighbors are glorious: one such just snowblowed (snowblew?) out the worst of our four- and five-foot drifts.  I heap blessings upon him and his family.

4. There were brownies.  From the day before.  All chewy.  And Len was too sick to really compete for them (yes, I will make this up to him, but for Nemo, well, it was what it was).

5. The beauty of all this snow is astonishing, and if you catch me at the right moment, I am even capable of seeing that.  Witness.

6. And we are, after all, heading inexorably toward spring.  See?

Bulbs in pot