Eclectic Muddlehood

In a quiet moment of realization this evening, I glimpsed the amazing bittersweet wholeness of my life in this day.  This mostly ordinary day. 

 Last weekend was the mad dash to haul everything out of our apartment and across town to our new home.  I now sit surrounded by mountains of boxes and baskets and bins filled with the assorted junk our family has collected over the years.  Because of the short timeline for our move, we did not make even the most remote effort to sort through things while packing up, so that process has begun on the other side of the move as I begin to sift through boxes.  Some boxes were packed hurriedly just last week.  Others have been patiently waiting for me to cut them open and rediscover their contents for eleven months now, resting quietly with the silverfish in our apartment’s detached garage.  I am taking great delight in opening these packages full of long (okay, relatively long) lost treasures.  It is not even so much the tangible objects themselves, but the joyful memories they trigger that come washing back over me and filling me with beauty and peace.

About twenty months ago, I was struggling to sense that beauty and peace.  Apollo and Artemis were just barely four months old and at least one of them demanded every ounce of me every second of every day.  My mother-in-law came to help for two weeks and we completely wore her out.  As her visit wound down, she offered to take us to brunch at IHOP one morning and we all jumped at the chance to avoid cooking and the cleaning that comes after it.  Patris Maximus and I sat across the table from each other, each eating with one hand and cradling a momentarily sleeping infant in the other.  Our eyes met, our minds merged and our voices spoke as one.  We had to get out of Northern Virginia.  Three kids.  One income.  A job that was killing my husband.  A mortgage that was killing us both.  And one day all three of those children would be in college at the same time.  That one exhausted, desperate conversation led to months of research.  Where could we go?  Where could Patris Maximus get a good job?  Where would have a better cost of living to average salary ratio?  Where those places also homeschool friendly?  Once we had a short list of locations, he went job hunting.  The job he left for is not the job he has now.  And the city we landed in was not where we pictured ourselves at first.  But here we are.  Last Monday night, after all three children were snoozing away in their new room and new sibling bed, Patris Maximus and I sat at the kitchen table across from each other.  With both hands free, we each sipped a glass of wine and sighed.  Still exhausted, but no longer desperate.  Contentment permeated the room.  This.  This was what both of us saw in each other’s mind’s eyes, at that IHOP, months and months ago.  This house.  This job.  This homeschool community.  Our family.  Happy.  So last night, with the deep power of the New Moon flowing freely, I lit the flame and blessed our hearth, welcoming the prosperity, knowledge, courage, and love that I know will fill our days here together in the heart of our new home.

 Amidst this overflowing ecstacy, as is the nature of this Life, there is a ribbon of piercing sorrow, as well.  The last of my grandparents, my paternal grandmother, left this Life for whatever lies Beyond this week.  My family has known that moment was coming for some time now.  But even when we have notice of its arrival, Death still manages to surprise us all when it finally does arrive.  She was a strong Irish American woman who lived a long full life.  I am grateful she got the chance to meet the twins at my brother’s wedding two years ago, but I am even more grateful for a glass of iced tea she and I shared on her front porch about five years ago just before I crossed the threshold of motherhood.  It was a warm late-March-in-Texas kind of afternoon.  I was newly pregnant with Athena and Patris Maximus, along with thousands of other American soldiers, had just crossed the Kuwait-Iraq border the night before.  She and I sat in silent sunshine for some time before an ambling sort of conversation began to thread its way through our afternoon.  At some point we stumbled upon the topic of death and dying.  She shared with me the fact that she knew exactly how close she and Death were getting to crossing paths and that she was ready whenever that chance encounter should take place.  Until then, she laughed and said she would be grateful to enjoy every day God had left to give her.  Carrying that conversation in my heart, I have known for the last several years not to fear the inevitability of her passing; that it would come and she would meet it, secure in the life she had lived and in her faith.  That is not to say there is not sadness today.  There is also deep reflection.  A special friend gave birth to a precious, healthy baby boy this week as well, in what I hope was a healing natural birth after the traumatic cesarean birth of her twins.  Throughout the last few days of her pregnancy, she radiated with strength, love, beauty, truth and peace as she bravely walked the path towards her new son’s birth.  One death.  One birth.  Without any real conscious effort on our part, the wheel continues to turn, bringing the full range of human emotions to us with each awe inspiring revolution.   

As the details of funeral arrangements have been set, I found myself realizing that the funeral itself will not be a time for me to say my own good-byes.  I will be unavoidably focused outward in several directions.  Athena is filled with challenging questions about death and dying as well as, inquiries concerning ancient and modern rituals associated with the end of Life.  I know these questions will continue to pour forth throughout the weekend and will continue to require my mindfull attention.  Apollo and Artemis will be their delightfully annoying, uncontrollably wiggly selves and will need quiet tactile distraction and redirection.  My father could certainly use his family’s focused loving support as he finds his own way through his and his sister’s grief.  This leaves little energy left for me to turn inward myself.  So while the funeral Saturday morning will not be the time or place, the Rosary service Friday night feels like the perfect opportunity.  When I was a young girl, my grandmother gifted me with a stunning pale blue Austrian crystal and gold rosary, a sort of coming of age gift.  Although, as a teenager and young adult, I stepped off the narrow path of Christianity to explore and experience a wider range of spirituality, that rosary has always been a gift I have cherrished fondly.  Tonight I am in the process of excavating this beautiful, tangible piece of my grandmother’s own beauty and strength to bring with me tomorrow night. 

Patris Maximus and I have agreed that I will attend the Rosary service alone without him or the children and that will be my moment to turn inward.  To all at once hold close and let go.  To meditate on and connect with the powerful cycle of this Life.  I will offer up my gratitude for the life she lived and the gentle ease of her actual moment of passing.  I will embrace the power of the dance that Life and Death perform together for us day in and day out.  I will celebrate my grandmother in death and the new life that has graced my friend’s family hand in hand.  And we will all know peace.  On that, another mostly ordinary day.                

Athena has a bit of an addiction to nature programs and nature documentary films.  She adores watching them and is facinated in general with life science.  Today, while I wrestled Apollo and Artemis down for a reluctant nap, Athena parked herself in front of the television to watch the latest episode of the PBS series Nature, which was entitled, Silence of the Bees.  In brief, the program was about the hive collapses and mass extinctions in honey bee populations around the world and the work that is being done to solve the mystery.  Apparently, during part of the program there was a detailed explanation about honey production including the fact that honey bees bring nectar back to the hive in their stomachs and regurgitate it into the comb and tada; honey.  Athena took a minute to process this information, met me at the door to the twin’s bedroom and turned to me with an accusatory, but quietly horrified tone.  You’ve been putting bee barf on my toast? she asked, looking at me incredulously.  I was at a momentary, yet amused loss for words.  I guess I have. I answered.  Have I been eating any other animal barf? she suspiciously questioned.  I don’t think so, honey. I responded thoughtlessly.  She glared at me and muttered Please don’t call me that.  I simply said, Yes dear. and excused myself to the bathroom for a private, out of earshot giggle fit.

….this weekend, so we decided to go out and buy a house!

 Actually it’s not quite as random as it sounds, believe it or not.  Our lease on our beyond lame luxury apartment is up at the end of August.  At first we were not sure what to do, seeing as there is a small chance of us winging our way to Australia in about a year.  We considered staying in the apartment and barely tolerating dealing with the substandard service and neighbors, but I eventually vetoed this course of action for the sake of Patris Maximus’ blood pressure and general stress level.  Then we also considered renting a house, but discounted that option since there is also a possibility that we will stay put right here for years to come.  So we began poking around to see what was out there for purchase and we were pleasantly surprised. 

 It took us one week of house hunting and research to decide we wanted to buy a new home instead of a pre-existing one.  Our last house was a pre-existing one that we struggled with constantly.  It was, in general, a good home.  But Patris Maximus spent many hours repairing stupid construction mistakes that caused all sorts of issues.  We decided that buying new would give us warranty protection should any of the same issues arrise.  So we began hunting around to see what sort of inventory homes were available and how desperate the builders were to off load them.  After our experience with buying a home in an insane market four years ago, we were enjoying the luxury of being rational.  Methodical.  Cautious even.  And then I saw The House.  And I fell in love.  And Patris Maximus fell in love with the price tag and the builder’s financing offer that expires this weekend.  So we took it.  

I am itching to dash off to the hardware store for paint samples, but the packing and cleaning here must come first.  In less than three weeks we’ll be home! 

An iPod was a dangerous purchase for me.  In one short week, I have transformed into an avid podcast junkie, hungrily devouring a gluttonous feast of free knowledge.  Independent news media brodcasts, quirky history lectures, public domain classic literature, Zen master teachings, and much, much more are making their way onto my new toy and being rapidly downloaded by my brain.  My internal dialog is gleefully turning over bits and pieces of different information and making new and crazy interdisciplinary connections. 

 In a children’s book we own by Jon Muth, entitled Zen Shorts, a panda bear shares a unique flavor of Zen Buddhist wisdom with three young children by telling each one of them a short story.  Although Athena and I have read this book over and over again together, I never quite understood the first story told.  I just could not quite reach the meaning behind it and it remained slightly blurry, like a picture just a hair or two out of focus.  Listening to a podcast the other day, something inside me turned and the picture finally focused sharply.  Now, I get it. 

Thinking about Buddhism led my mind to review some of the independent media coverage of the recent earthquake in China and mix a bit of that with a behavioral psychology lecture to leave me wondering exactly what will the future impact on the world stage be when China becomes a country run almost entirely by only children.  Nothing personal against only children or adults who were raised as only children, but I know how much my childhood as a eldest child has flavored my adult self and how I sometimes approach life.  In most societies there is a fairly balanced mix of people who expereinced a variety of childhoods as only children or one of many, as the oldest, the youngest or the middle child, as a child with solely sisters or solely brothers or with a mix.  And all of those factors contribute to who those children become as adults.  So what will happen when the adults in a society are no longer a mix of those experiences but a fairly homogenous group of childhoods?  How will that affect that particular society’s dealings with other more heterogenous ones?  Just curious.

Speaking of eldest children, did you know that Alexander the Great’s erratic behavior later in his life could possible be corrolated with the typical clinical pattern of late stage alcoholism?  “Raging drunk” would not be an inappropriate term.  Another recent podcast had me alternately laughing and gasping in disbelief as the speaker took on the idea of major turing points in world history being decided by individual players who may or may not have been seriously impared by a wide variety of alcohol or drugs.  He reviewed plausible data that could lead one to conclude that not only Alexander the Great, but also Napoleon, Churchill, Hilter, Stalin, JFK and who knows who else spent most of their days fairly messed up.  Even days that they were required to make extremely tense and delicate decisions affecting many nations and their citizens.  The things they leave out of the textbooks continue to amaze me! 

 Well, as I typed this little bit of bloggery, my iPod has been hard at work downloading and synching and all that jazz.  So, for now, this podcast devotee is off to feed the need once again.  At this rate, I’ll never get any better at housekeeping!

Everybody knows the Buddha said Life is suffering.  These days he is practically a pop culture icon.  But as I was listening to a Zencast podcast titled “What Is Buddhism?” yesterday evening, awareness entered my being. I already perfectly understand what it is like to be fully awakened. My thoughts were blown over by this clear and simple, yet almost awesomely unbelievable personal truth.  I have already had a true taste of enlightenment in this life.  

 I listened to the speaker describe some basic Buddhist principles and a feeling of familiarity came over me.  His voice in my ear reminded me that feelings are not good or bad.  They just are.  A feeling arises and it is truth, my truth in that moment.  If I fight it, try to push it away, it is sure to get bigger, scarier, and more painful.  It will take me over.  And this is suffering.  If I can remember to relax, let go with my whole being and just embrace that feeling for what it is– the truth of the moment– it will pass, and I will understand peace.  As he went on to describe this process specifically in the case of a death of a loved one, my mind wandered away from his voice to the opposite end of life’s spectrum.  In my mind’s eye, I saw myself simultaneously at a little over two years ago and a little less than five years ago.  In labor with my children. 

For me, my natural labors required of me the same basic principles of Buddhism.  A contraction would take hold of my body and if I fought it, my entire world would narrow to just that feeling.  It would become overwhelming.  And in the case of my first labor, somewhat scary.  If I tried to control it, I felt even more out of control.  Soon enough, I learned that if my mind and body let go of all control, if I simply embraced that feeling as my truth in the moment, everything changed.  I relaxed.  I felt happiness.  I felt peace.  I felt at one with everything.  In the midst of the sensation, I could see all of life, past, present and future connected to and spread out before me.  Even more inspiringly, during my second labor, I learned to stay in that place.  To hold onto that connection even between contractions.  It was the most holy and most sacred I have ever felt.

 Realizing this yesterday, hands dripping with dirty dishwater, I smiled.  Not to say the Buddha had it wrong, but my personal truth is just a tad different.  All of life is not suffering.  Life is labor.  Life is a cycle of contraction and expansion.  Up and down.  A pendulum of sensations.  If I could remember to embrace these cycles mindfully the same way I embraced my labors, could my entire life be filled with the same sense of connectedness and peaceful bliss I experienced during the natural labor of my three children?  Just the potential of that idea is enough to make my spirit soar.  And yet again, just like that, I discovered another facet of the myriad amazing gifts motherhood and my children have brought me.  With a thankful heart, I finished the dishes, turned off my iPod and went to hug the little hooligans.

Take the time to view this TED Talk video by Sir Ken Robinson.  He takes a humorous, yet pointed, look at what he believes to be the crux of the problem with the world’s public education systems.  Founded less than 2oo years ago as a response to the Industrial Revolution, public school systems were a crisis managment method for educating the children of workers to grow up, replace their parents and become workers themselves.  He points out that as the system has progressed and developed, it has become about fostering less and less creativity and limiting the parts of the child where growth is fostered.  This cannot continue.  I’ll let him tell you why.

Sir Ken Robinson on “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

Creativity is just as important to education as literacy and we should treat it as such.
~Sir Ken Robinson~

I have heard this statement countless times in the last four and a half years in any number of locations, always in reference to the fact that I have taken my children somewhere with me that others dare not venture with their own or anyone else’s itty-bits.  Most recently, it was at a Major League Baseball game on a balmy Tuesday evening.  I have always been somewhat befuddled by this comment and the compliments on our children’s impeccable behavior that inevitably follow.  Are our children really that well behaved in comparison to the populace at large?  I seriously doubt it.  But we do take them out places few other children under five years old can be observed sometimes (much less three of them all together.)  So I think the positive observations about their behavior are mostly due to a lack of decent compariosn.  We often take them to museums, outdoor concerts, sporting events, camping trips, and so on.  It seems only natural to me to do so.  The foreign concept is that I should keep them shut up under lock and key until they are a “suitable age” to venture out into the world they are already very much a part of.  Young children are consummate observers.  They crave exposure to the great wide world and learn something new about life approximately every 2.3 seconds.  They absolutely teach me something new on a daily basis with their thoughtful takes on their experiences.  Possibly more importantly, I would go totally insane and probably turn into Total Psycho Mommy if I was trapped in my house for the first six plus years of their lives.  My children and I love venturing out.  As matter of fact, Athena wakes up EVERY morning and while munching breakfast, asks me excitedly, Where are we going to go today, Momma?  She is often totally put out when I occasionally tell her we are staying home to catch up on chores and other mundane household tasks.  Perhaps it’s the fact that we have a family full of extroverts.  Perhaps it’s the attachment style parenting.  Perhaps we’re just crazy.  But whatever it is, we feel that our children are real people in their own right and they are already citizens of the world.  Why not take them out to fully experience it?

It is a sad scene, often repeated over and over again in this country with a terribly messed up birth culture.  A mother learns she is pregnant with multiples.  Her thoughtless, institutionalized doctor fills her head and heart with crushing, fear inducing phrases- high risk, preterm labor, bed rest, preeclampsia, mandatory c-section, TTTS, long NICU stay, placental failure, survival rate, danger, death and on and on it goes.  Most Americans truly believe twins and triplets will always be premature, always be tiny, always be born via c-section and always end up in the NICU.  A dear friend, and fellow twin mother, has assembled an absolutely gorgeous montage that makes one simple fact poignantly clear.  Expectant multiple mothers have options.  Lots of them.  And they should have hope.  Hope for fully developed, huge, safely and naturally birthed multiples.  I know many of the mothers and babies featured in this film.  They are real women who believed in themselves and their babies.  They worked very hard to take excellent care of themselves during pregnancy and to surround themselves with highly trained, but also highly supportive professional care providers.  The message here is a powerful one.  One that I hope with all my heart reaches many and at the very least inspires a few to replace fear and pain with hope and faith as they welcome their own precious multiples into the world.

Natural Childbirth of Twins and Triplets

For more support and the chance to talk to real mothers of multiples who have had amazing experiences like these ones, try the Parenting Multiples forum of MotheringDotCommune.

As I begin tonight’s post, I have no title in mind as of yet.  Basically this is because I don’t really know where this particular post is going.  All I know is that I really, really wanted to blog tonight.  The past three nights, I’ve had a significant problem getting to sleep.  I’ve been seriously plagued but what fellow spiritual truth seekers might recognize as the monkey mind that chatters on endlessly at you, evading every possible attempt at controlling it (or at least slowing it down just a little.)

I feel the energy around and within me shifting majorly.  From my personal energy to the energy of the Earth itself, things are massively in flux.  I have watched from the safety of my American home, the natural destruction that ran rampant across the globe these past few weeks.  Big earthquake in China, little earthquake in Washington, DC even.  Cyclone in Burma.  Tornados in the United States.  Thousands upon thousands of lives ended suddenly.  Patris Maximus says the Earth is purging herself.  He views humans, Matrix-style, as little more than a virus these days and he says Mother Earth’s immune system is simply fighting back.  I have more hope for our species than that, but Gaia’s energy is surely churning big time and I don’t need evening newscasts filled with footage of the devastation to know it.  Our family energy is shifting also, but so far thankfully, without the accompanying destruction.  Patris Maximus is settling into his new and better job with a new and better company.  We are looking forward to a most financially secure future.  And to a future where our dreams of overseas family travel are much more achievable.  We may even find ourselves walking the expat path in Australia a year or so from now which is equally exciting and intimidating.  The Triad of Chaos is undergoing many developments themselves.  Athena continues to push the academic envelop, but we seem to be in a period of marked acceleration that I have noticed is almost cyclical base on the seasons with her.  Artemis recently took two days to give up diapers completely and even though they are still about six weeks away from the two year old mark seems suddenly much older to me as she walks about speaking in paragraphs and wearing big girl underwear.  And my sweet Apollo.  His favorite phrase has recently become Check it out, mama!  He radiates so much pride in his daily accomplishments, it practically makes my heart burst. 

Recently, I have been absorbing a great deal of information about evolution.  I have been learning about how dynamic the process seems to be and how elegant.  How all life is locked in this amazing dance with the planet, following the rise and fall of periods of relative stasis and little evolutionary growth, followed by mass extinction events triggered by dramatic changes in the planetary ecology and sudden, necessary and brilliant leaps in evolutionary development to regain the stasis of old in the environment of the new.  This pattern has struck a deep spiritual chord within me.  I do not need the fossil record or geological data to know that this indeed is the truth of life.  I can see it and feel it within me and within my own lifetime on a much smaller scale.  This is the pattern my own development has taking over this first third of my life.  Periods of little growth in any aspect of my life are followed by periods of massive upheaval which precipitate massive personal evolution.  As best I can tell, the last period of upheaval has recently ended with Patris Maximus securing his new career.  So the major shifting of energies within me is the personal evolution in motion.  This is a new type of experience for me this time though because I am aware of the pattern suddenly.  So the viewpoint is different.  How the evolution is manifesting is different.  I like it.  I like the consciousness of it.  I see countless paths before me and can sense the incredible potential of each one.  I like the feeling of controlling the creation process a bit more than usual and actually analyzing the paths one by one before stepping out.  However, the energy is highly intoxicating, hence the monkey mid and the trouble settling to sleep.

Athena and I recently finished listening to a fantastic unabridged English translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh which I actually remember reading in high school.  She loved it and wants to know if we can renew it from the library and listen to it again.  I am delighted to do so, since I was appalled to realize that the version I was fed in high school was highly sanitized and barely the same story.   I am also struck by the universality of the themes of the poem.  Here is the first story.  Ever.  Or at least the earliest story published that modern humans have been able to locate and translate so far.  And it is still, some seven thousand years later, highly relevant to the human condition.  The hero’s journey, the longing for lasting friendships, the brotherhood of warriors, the grief of loss, the fear of death and what follows, the loss of innocence, the trade off of innocence for knowledge, the journey to becoming fully human.  These are still themes present all around us today in everything from books, and movies to politics and religion.  Our struggle with the human condition and our basic mythology has not changed for over seven millennia.  I am not sure whether that comforts or depresses me.  I was also surprised to discover how much of the early Judeo-Christian scriptures are Sumerian mythology rewritten.  I did not recall the entire telling of a global deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh the last time I was exposed to it, but there it was with its subtle differences from the Noarchian version, but the same myth none the less.  A pantheon of gods and goddesses instead of just one decide to punish humanity.  The fowl that finally finds land after the rains is a raven instead of a dove.  But the basic story is the same.  A friend in the film and television industry tells me jokingly that there are only really a handful of original movie plotlines and every movie ever made falls into one of those basic archetypes.  I guess that is more of an eternal, universal truth than either she or I realized. 

So after all of this evolution, many things remain the same.  They take on different forms but their essence remains constant and unwavering.  There is hope in that, I think.  And despair.  But if I may be permitted a cheesy philosophical moment, that is the true nature of this life experience.  Balancing the dichotomies of our existence, blending the familiar with the new and walking the paths of our ancestors while simultaneously forging a path of our own.  And that is where my monkey mind has led me this breezy Texas night.  To the edge of the next path.   

In honor of our shifting curriculum plans and Kindy Girl’s near completion of most of our Kindergarten work, I have decided to update everyone’s (except mine) blog names on both blogs.  Sooo….

By official decree:

Kindy Girl will hereafter be refered to as Athena, Goddess of Wisdom

The Master of Destruction will hereafter be refered to as Apollo, the Sun God (and twin brother of Artemis)

 The Mistress of Destruction will hereafter be refered to as Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and of the Hunt (and twin sister of Apollo)

 Big Daddy will here after be refered to as Patris Maximus

The Triad of Chaos will continue to retain their original group name when refered to as the awesome and powerful collective they continue to be.  Hopefully, future confusion will be minimal!