Mardi Gras Meditations

Today will be an unusual Mardi Gras for me--although my usual Mardi Gras is fairly blah:  get up, go to work, come home, go to bed.  No festive drinks, no parade, no interesting foods.

In some ways, I'm more of a Shrove Tuesday kind of gal--but I don't celebrate that holiday usually either.  One year I did make pancakes, which led to a good poem, but a lonely meal.

Today our Meet and Greet fell neatly into Mardi Gras, so we broadened the scope of Meet and Greet to be a Student Appreciation event.  Our campus director will be grilling burgers, on charcoal grills we bought yesterday.  We will have salad and veggie burgers too--and all sorts of treats.

I have spent lots of time in the past week getting ready for the event.  Yesterday I was hardly in my office at all.  I was the one buying stuff:  hamburgers and veggie patties, salad, frozen sheet cakes, paper products, sodas, water.  And later in the day, I went with the campus director to buy grills.

There are days when I think back to grad school, and I say, "I can't believe my professional life has come to this."  Some days I say it with a sense of wonder.  Other days, my emotions are different.

At the end of my work day today, unlike many people, I will not be heading to a bar for Mardi Gras drinks.  I will go to church.  Our assistant to the bishop will be with our church for a visioning session.  We've had an offer on our property.  We have 4 acres, unheard of in South Florida.  We've been approached to sell the 2 acres closest to the busy street, and then we could build on the back 2 acres.

As one might imagine, we now face many questions.  Should we sell?  If so, what should we build in the back?  Do we have a larger vision than just a church building?

My mind immediately goes to the absence of affordable housing in our county. Could we build a building that had affordable housing units along with a small worship space?

But we're a small church, in terms of humans--could we really be landlords to all the people who might move in?

I like the idea of a retreat center that makes up the bulk of the church: lots of small sleeping spaces with communal bathrooms with shower spaces. We could use the sleeping spaces during shelter weeks, where we give homeless people a temporary space. We could host retreats. We could do so much with a retreat center.

I'd love an indoor labyrinth--what a great addition to a retreat center. It would be protected from the elements--and the vandals that targeted our past outdoor labyrinths.

I love the idea of a better kitchen. Right now we don't have a stove because of code restrictions and the cost of retrofitting our current kitchen. It would be great to have a more industrial kitchen, even though we don't really need it right now.

I love the idea of artist studios. I would love for my church to become a center that studies the intersections of creativity and spirituality.

Of course, part of me resists the idea of taking on a building at all. Buildings do need so much care and attention--and money--as the years go on. But a building can be a blessing too, with space for lots of groups and various ways to care for the community.

The church building we have right now is very dated--it hasn't been updated much at all, and it shows it. It would be so wonderful to start over. It's a wonderful opportunity. But it's also a heavy responsibility. I'd really like us to get this right.

I'd really like to know what "right" looks like.

Installation Art for Transfiguration Sunday

Over the past several years, I've really enjoyed thinking about different ways of decorating the sanctuary--beyond paraments and banners and flowers.  There's a fine balance--I don't want the focal elements to be too distracting.  But I do want to see if I can create something non-verbal and non-musical that can add to people's understanding of the Gospel, that can help foster a different attitude.

Yesterday was Transfiguration Sunday, a festival day where we celebrate Jesus going up a mountain with a selection of the disciples.  While there, his clothes and face glow, and Moses and Elijah (dead prophets) appear.

I wanted to create some sort of piece that would speak to that.  I had shimmering gold cloth and gold ribbons and lights.  I had a vision for a piece suspended high, but I wasn't sure how to do it.

Then I saw my wedding veil, with its wired headpiece, and I had a plan.  I got to work an hour before the Sunday service started, and created this:

It's not exactly what I had in mind, but nothing ever is.  As I developed my plan through the week, I worried that it would evoke something different:  a ghost or something Christmas-y, or something from a wedding.

Here's how it looks from a distance:

I like that it evokes the crown that Jesus will soon wear after his transfiguring time on the mountain top:  the crown of thorns.  I like that I used Christmas lights and ribbons to end the season of Epiphany.

And then after church, I took it all down:  time to prepare for the much more somber time of Lent.

One Step Forward, Ever Sliding Back

I didn't write yesterday because I lost track of time thinking about what's left to do with home repair.  My spouse and I had a long conversation about the pros and cons of certain kinds of microwaves and the over-the-stove space where we'll put it.  It's interesting to think about having a convection oven as part of the microwave.  Would I use the convection oven part?  Would it be more energy efficient to bake a cake there than to heat up the whole stove?

Will I ever bake a cake again?

Before I knew it, the morning had slipped away.  It was time for my afternoon hair appointment--but sadly, not before we discovered that the dryer wasn't working.  Yes, the dryer that's part of the washer-dryer combo that we bought 2 months ago.  Grrr.  One step forward, ever sliding back.

But as anyone who has a house or a car or a vehicle or a life of any kind knows, there will  always be the work of maintenance to do, the work of restoration, the work of planning ahead.  So, before I slip into despair, let me remind myself of what we've accomplished this week:

Below is the before shot, the empty space:

But these long shots don't show much.  Here's a close up:

We thought we'd leave the space by the stove empty (the lower right part of the picture), but our new table fits there neatly.  We have an eat-in kitchen!   We can move the table out when we entertain. 

I am in love with the color of the cabinets.  I am in love with the easy close doors and drawers.

I am interested to see how it will all look with a counter on top. I hope we can find a manufacturer who can do it:

 Here's the backsplash that we're thinking about:

Same pattern, different finish:

When I think about the disaster that our house was a year ago, I'm amazed at the progress we've made.  I am so hoping that it continues!

Women's History Month and Our Scholarly Beginnings

It's been a long time since I've been on a traditional college campus during the month of March.  I wonder if Women's History Month is still celebrated at all.  I realize that March has other appeals for traditional campuses:  basketball competitions and spring breaks and such.

When I was in grad school at the University of South Carolina from 1987-1992, the campus did a lot to celebrate March as Women's History Month.  The Women's Studies department put together a one day conference, in fact.  For me and my fellow grad students, we did our first presenting of papers at that conference.  From there, we went to both regional and national conferences.

I went back to my complete CV, where I keep a list of everything I've ever published or presented.  I need to sit down and do some updating--I am feeling like I need to take a week off of work just to get caught up on all the various types of updating I need to do.  But let me not get sucked into that spiral of regret.

The CV tells me that I presented my first academic paper at a conference in 1990.  Here's the title of the paper: An Early Portrait of Patriarchy: The Cenci.  My CV also reminds me that the Women's Studies conference was system-wide, so we had people from all over the state of South Carolina come to campus to present similar papers.

The following year, I presented Oliver Twist as an exploration of domestic violence, and in 1992, this was the title of my paper:  “We Wretches Cannot Tell Our Wrong”: Fallen Women in Gaskell, Barrett Browning, and Rossetti. I look back and see the outlines of my dissertation beginning to stitch together in my grad student brain.

Here's my dissertation title:  “My Relations Act with Me as My Enemies”: Domestic Violence as Metaphor, 1794-1850. My dissertation looked at 6 Gothic works or works with Gothic elements:  The Cenci, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and . . . ?  How strange that I can't remember for sure.  My dissertation is packed away in a box, and I don't have an electronic copy, so I can't check.  Was it "Goblin Market"?  The Monk?  How can I not remember?  My dissertation argued that the authors were giving us important information about domestic violence and a realistic depiction of how violence operates in families, but they worked in the Gothic tradition because they couldn't speak about domestic violence openly.  We think of the Gothic as full of non-realistic elements, like ghosts and superhuman powers, but it was a way for authors to document real life too.

Well, it was twenty-five years ago, after all.  Wow.  No wonder my CV that contains all of my presentations and publications is so long.  I wish I had done more than keep a list.  I can't remember some of these conference papers from just the title, and most of them are probably long gone.

I'm also thinking of many of the pieces that I wrote for a website, Living Lutheran.  I foolishly assumed that I could retrieve them at any time from the site.  But the site has morphed several times, and they're no longer available.  Happily, I still have most of them.

I am the kind of person who keeps all sorts of stuff that will likely never be needed in the future, and that includes lots of drafts of lots of writing.  I have begun to trust electronics and the various back ups, so I no longer keep lots of drafts on paper.

On this first day of Women's History Month, it's been interesting to look back on my early days as a scholar.  I'm thinking about all the female scholars and authors and all that has been lost to history.  I'm giving thanks that we have as much as we do from our literary foremothers.

The Kitchen Rebuild Has Begun!

Yesterday I came home to find some cabinets have been hung--hurrah!  I was expecting the contractor, but I thought that the drywall repair after the electric work would take up the whole day.

I've been sorting some home repair pictures to prepare for this post.  I was looking for a before picture.  Here's a blurry picture of the whole half of the house, with the kitchen in the back, after the wonderful flooring guy finished the floors and before we started moving things back:

I love the empty look of it all.  How sunny and bright.  I miss that.

We kept that space fairly free, knowing that the kitchen cabinets would come in boxes and we'd need a place to put them.  Indeed, they took up much of the living room and dining room:

Last night, we moved the stove back to where it will live now.  In his design of the kitchen, my spouse wanted to avoid the narrow galley of the original kitchen, so we're not filling in the space to the right of the stove.  The cabinets on the west wall will end where they do now:

The upper cabinets aren't as deep as some cabinets we've had.  They're much taller than most cabinets we've had.  I think we can make this work.

I'm in love with the color.  We took lots of care in choosing the color, even ordering samples of the stain on various types of wood.  But I know there's always a risk that the color will be very different from what I had in mind.  Happily, that's not the case.

I'll be interested to see how it turns out.  I suppose it's time to start contacting Corian manufacturers so that we'll be done sooner rather than later.

The Poet in the Body

The other night when I was unloading the car, the neighbor pulled up in her truck.  She hollered, "Pay no attention to her.  She's just pregnant."  She laughed, and I noticed her friend in the front seat of the truck, leaning over to puke, just the tiniest bit of vomit.

As they went to the house, her friend said, "Shut up.  I'm only 4 days late."

I kept my own counsel.  If I hadn't heard the exchange, I might have thought they'd been drinking or had the flu.  Later I thought about how odd it was that a possible pregnancy never entered my mind.

These days, my thoughts return to the situation of our physical bodies quite often.  I have friends with very rare conditions:  one friend has kidneys that make cysts and another friend has a body that creates non-cancerous brain tumors.  Most of my friends are solidly in the land of middle age or older, so there's vast terrains of discoveries--not unlike adolescence, but without some of the fun discoveries about what bodies can do.  Or maybe the fun discoveries are yet to come.

Or maybe as we age, the fun discoveries don't revolve around our bodies but our spirits.

I'm still thinking about whether or not I could weave any of this into a poem that wouldn't be trite or cover ground that's well covered by past poets.  I joke about being rather medieval in my view of the body, that we're holy spirits trapped in a prison of flesh; some days I'm joking, but other days I feel that way.  It's a troubling theology, but it's also pernicious and hard to root out of my consciousness.

It's interesting to reflect on this theology/mind set that often leads to me feeling like I'm a spirit at war with a body.  It's only been lately that I've been trying to have a goal of working in partnership with my body--we each have different strengths and weaknesses.

I have no idea how many years I'd need to live to be able to integrate my body and my mind and my spirit into one unified self.   I often joke that I have less trouble understanding the concept of a three-in-one-God (Creator, Savior, Holy Spirit) because I feel fragmented myself.  Once again, I'm not really joking.

I wonder too, if I lived in a time with fewer stories on the news of physical assaults against the body, if I would feel this way.  I feel like every time I turn on the news, I hear about another priest's molestations or some other powerful man who has taken advantage of women in all sorts of sickening ways.   We live in a time of human trafficking and pornographic images at every turn.  It's exhausting.

I don't have a neat way of ending this post.  It's time for me to get ready for my walk.  Let me stare at the sea and get my thoughts ready for the day.

Poetry Tuesday: "Cassandra Considers the Dust"

I woke up feeling like I had dreamed about home repairs for much of the night.  None of the houses in my dreams was my current house.  In the dream just before I woke up, it was a beautiful Victorian in disrepair, and I was not only remodeling it as living space, but also putting in a beauty parlor upstairs.

We are in that stage of home repair when I feel like we will never be done.  I am not surprised my dreams reflect this state.

It is interesting to read The Uninhabitable Earth while making these kinds of housing decisions.  Why buy the beautiful but expensive copper tiles for a backsplash if we're just going to get out when we can figure out how?

My Facebook feed is a mix of people, and the theology minded among us are keeping an eye on the decision of the United Methodist Church about a way forward when it comes to LBGTQ issues.  Here, too, my inner Cassandra wonders how we've all let ourselves get so distracted by issues that do seem important, until one ponders the trajectories of climate change and the current decisions we're making.

I'm also tired of how hard it is to know where to put some of my stuff.  Parts of my closet aren't easily accessible, and I've filled up the few shelves that are open with books and other stuff that needs a flat space.  Part of me has been waiting for the house to be restored--why move things twice?  Part of me worries about the front bedroom, the part of the house that is most tipping toward chaos, and how much it looks like an episode of The Hoarders.

I thought of my poem about Cassandra and the question of the dust.  Let me post it here for our Tuesday reading pleasure.  It was first published in Southern Women's Review, and I included it in my latest chapbook Life in the Holocene Extinction.



Cassandra Considers the Dust 



By day, she talks to her patients
about the implications of their high
cholesterol levels, their spikes
in blood pressure, their weight that creeps
ever higher. As she prescribes
medication, she recommends more
exercise, more vegetables.

She stays late at night to monitor
the ones who succumb to surgery.
She has split open chests
to scoop out the gunk that clogged
the intricate roads of the interior.
She has reshaped routes and patched
together with delicate stitches.

She leaves the computers on the ramparts
to keep watch. She thinks of monks
in distant monasteries who chant
prayers while most of humanity dreams.

She drives home to her dark house.
Inside, she turns on one dim
light. She doesn’t want to see
the dust. She can’t remember
the last time the house enjoyed
a deep cleaning.

She thinks of rising oceans
and wonders how long
until the house sinks
into the sea.
She leaves the dust
to its own devices.