clinging to the curtains

"Mr. Yamashita, 87, who survived the recent tsunami by clinging to a curtain after waters flooded the hospital where he was bedridden, said Japan had neglected to teach its old tsunami lore in schools." - New York Times, April 20, 2011

 this will be a short post. i am thinking today about my little sister, who suffers from a disease that is largely self-inflicted. she is young, with brains and beauty and a wicked sense of humor. but she forces herself to waste away. her job requires that she interact daily with elderly alzheimer's patients who, even as they fizzle out, sometimes mutter words of wisdom about living each and every day. my sister meanwhile has a tenuous grasp on life, her hold on this world as thin as her bones. i wish she could learn from her patients, or learn from mr. yamashita, an elderly bedridden man who survived the tsunami by hanging onto a curtain.

"auntie b" yesterday made me laugh by talking of her adventures on MUNI (the san francisco bus line). once in awhile, for whatever random reason, a bus driver will stop suddenly and announce: "ok, everybody off!". nobody wants to leave their seat by the window, or give up on their destination.

and then there is my sister. i often let oliver throw pennies into fountains, and for every penny i wish for my  sister to regain her appetite for life -- and with the urgency of an old man hanging above mad ocean water -- to demand that the bus drive on.

create.

i spent a lovely afternoon at deep eddy pool (the oldest swimming pool in Texas, built during the depression by the WPA). the pool is fed by the frigid springs of the colorado river, so no matter how hot it is, the blue-green depths of deep eddy at least give you one guarantee: you will be cold.

oliver and i went with my good friend "auntie b"-- we'll call her -- and we talked about soap operas, adventures on the public bus, and enchiladas mole. and then we got onto the topic of life-fulfillment-and-satisfaction. how do you get it? deep eddy brings you close, but leisure-filled snow-cone days by the pool aren't it. we agreed that the humans have an innate drive to be creative (a drive usually killed sometime in the elementary school years). auntie b speculated that somewhere between childhood and adulthood we became afraid to create. or too apathetic to even think of what we would create, much less start creating it. i feel that has happened to me... being a teacher or a mother or an athlete or even engaged in social causes isn't enough. there is something within that yearns to build or paint or write something. in bold letters. with yellow paint. or to capture an image so powerful, that it expresses the seemingly unexpressable. so with that thought in mind im posting a photo taken by bryant austin, who sold his belongings to fund his passion for whaling photography. the resulting work is so stunning, and the eyes of the whales so wise, that tears roll down the faces of people viewing his work.

click here for a link to today's new york times article on austin and his whale photographs.

democracy is so hollow now.

"And I’m really realizing again that, you know, democracy is so hollow now. I mean, we don’t have power. This is not democracy. We are controlled—we have been controlled by the government and the Tokyo Electric Company, you know, a private company. This is a big lesson to be—for us to be humble, in front of a natural—big natural power, power of nature. And we have to really look for a lifestyle and a way of thinking again, to live again with harmony, in harmony with nature."

- Keibo Oiwa, Japanese cultural anthropologist and environmentalist

it has been a morning haunted by morbid thoughts: a squirrel, hit by a car, twitching uncontrollably on the road as cars sped past. just a small death on the corner, easy to ignore. then: a report from the calm voices on npr. the rating of the disaster at fukushima plant raised to level 7-- the same as chernobyl. but only 29 died from chernobyl, npr quotes a japanese official. try 250,000. and if numbers don't properly convey the scope of suffering, read  voices from chernobyl. hear the stories from the people themselves:

"We came home. I took off all the clothes that I'd worn there [Chernobyl plant] and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain… You can write the rest of this yourself. I don't want to talk anymore."

and i want to scream. i am reminded of another passage of the book about chernobyl that i can only paraphrase. a man was describing the beauty of belarus after the chernobyl explosion -- the glory of the sunshine and the verdant pastures, of men and women tilling the soil, and of children playing in the sand. i imagine a cerulean blue sky and red flowers. but the man goes on to say that this was an illusion: beneath the beauty was poison. the people were oblivious. cancers were already growing.

to me this is a metaphor for how we live today. the leaves are shining outside my window, people are enjoying their morning. they are ironing their shirts, and heading out for the day. while radiation blows across the pacific, while milk in arizona and california turns dangerously toxic, while the basic human rights of a US soldier are violated on US soil, and while the congressional budget makes astronomical cuts to environmental protection, children's healthcare and public education.

but the words of keibo oiwa, a professor from japan, seem to calm me somehow. he is right, democracy is hollow right now. and that feeling of hollowness is universal, global, and transformative, like the japanese earthquake itself, which shifted the earth's axis 6.5 inches and displaced water in my town's local aquifer.   let the earthquakes and the injustice be the "big lesson" that bring a "new way of thinking." is it childish to hope for that?

destination: maui?

i started this "secret" blog (which i don't share with friends of family because i'm afraid it will keep me from being honest) in order to keep ourselves focused on our desire to live "deliberately" (or in the words of thoreau, "to live deep and to suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life"). "papa p" has for too long been staring out the window of a corporate law office (an aside: i once had an office colleague who became something of an expert on squirrel behavior because of all the time gazing out the office window, watching life -- specifically rodent life -- unfold).

we've positioned ourselves well for our dream of breaking free-- of burning the khaki pants and ties. for six years, we've been living well below our means. even when we had two full-time salaries, we didn't buy furniture or electronics...when "baby o" was born we didn't buy a house and he sleeps in a second-hand crib. other than traveling and eating well (you gotta suck out the sushi of life too!), we've kept it pretty simple. so we have found ourselves in a place where we can do something unconventional, and where "papa p" can leave his job (he is the main breadwinner by far) and plunge into the wild ocean.

i'm in the process of being interviewed for an english/language arts teaching position at a public school in maui. how i got to this point is a long story. we've decided that if i get the offer, we will go. living on a resort island in the middle of the pacific aint cheap, and a teacher's salary doesn't buy much, but we are blessed to have the savings where we could do this without any financial stress. for now, im just trying to meditate on the important things: will i be an excellent teacher (i don't know, i can only try), and will i enjoy it (student teaching was a mixed experience)? i don't want to spend so much time dreaming about bamboo forests and pineapple trees that i forget the incredible challenge of teaching-- especially teaching underprivileged kids.

i was telling "papa p" that if we get this chance, and if i find teaching to be fulfilling, i could have such a beautiful life that i feel i don't deserve. who should be able to live this way, when people in brazil are living in landfills and people of iraq wake and sleep to the sound of gunfire?

pictures of garbage

last night we finished watching "wasteland," a documentary about the work of a daring, brilliant and big-hearted artist named vik muniz. muniz made the "garbage pickers" of the world's largest dump in brazil the subjects of a series of portraits, illuminating both the unimaginable poverty and fifth in which they live and work, as well as their grace, beauty and intelligence. his art creates this shocking contrast between the vast wasteland -- a sick reminder of the gluttonous way we live -- and the human beings who dig through it. poor people who, like poor people worldwide, are thought of as inferior, somehow less-than-human. yet like all humans they are these magnificent gems who carry on their shoulders (along with the trash) ambition, profound loss, intellectual curiosity, and passion. my favorite portrait is the one posted above.

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