Part of Our Living

We made a day of it at the Sheldon Art Gallery's Dia de los Muertos celebration yesterday. Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a centuries-old spiritual tradition which celebrates the continuity of life by honoring the dead on their return to Earth for one day each year. 

Sheldon Art Gallery hosted lovely occasion. If you're familiar with the building envision the museum's Great Hall elaborately decorated papier-mache sculptures, masks and papel picados (punched-paper art pieces) hanging from the windows. The occasion was complete with flowers, music, food, families, chatter, and an ofrenda (altar) which was set in one of the shadowy exhibit rooms.

The graveyard picnics and candied skeleton trimmings of the Dia de los Muertos celebration offer some visual continuity with Halloween occasions. But it's a more reverent occasion than Halloween for me. Dia de los Muertos encourages people to speak of the dead as they truly were. The table is set with the departed person's favorite foods, and their vices. Candles illuminate the path the spirit would take to sit at this noisy table of people.

Dia de los Muertos pushes a person past their own fears of mortality. It inspires a person to coquettishly laugh in the face of those fears and throw a big, colorful party with food, music, flowers and (why not?) skeletons. I like the idea that dying is just another part of our living.

Weekend Report

Reading with N: Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

Laundry Loads: 4

Pumpkins Painted: 2

Costumes Readied for Halloween: 1

Miles by Bicycle: 14

Cleaned Bathrooms: 2

Times I Washed the Dishes: 12

Breakfast(s) in Bed: 1

Hours of Tennis Playing: 1

Paper Flowers Made @ Dia de los Muertos Celebration: 3

Dinner Line-up: Creamy-Carrot-Dill Soup, Bread, Spinach Salad

Reading: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

If only I'd had time to get a haircut...sigh...there's next weekend, I suppose!

This Time Last Year

Glass Factory Tour in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

What Doesn't Mix

I would like to thank Governor Dave Heineman for "...calling a special session of the Nebraska Legislature to have a thoughtful and thorough public discussion about alternative solutions that could impact the route of the pipeline in a legal and constitutional manner.”

Wordstruck

I spent the whole weekend reading. One of those sleepless, sort of overly emotional weekends where I behave like some lovesick adolescent. I suppose wordstruck, rather than lovestruck, might be the best way to describe my weekend fling.

I could talk about little else, carried my books with me, fell asleep for cat naps with my glasses on. It was cold and rainy on Saturday morning so I curled up in fleecy socks to read this article by Megan Daum about my hometown of Lincoln Nebraska in the Smithsonian Magazine. It's a lovely examination of the self effacing and down-to-earth people I come from.

Then there was this article about a couple buried 1500 years ago in a position of mutual admiration made me unreasonably happy.

I also developed a crush on a book by Bill Bryson. I can't tell if I'm committed enough to finishing it, but it was a lovely little fascination for a hour or two.

So I returned to my cubicle at work this morning with a sort of sleep deprived, cloudy-brain, distracted feeling. Like I'm walking on air. Words will do that. When somebody arranges them in just the right order or when I'm open to them from the receiving end they'll sort of float me around for a little while in the nicest way. 

The Pumpkin Next Door

If Sponge Bob and a Zombie were to have a Pumpkin Love-Child...

Sticking With It

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive." - Merce Cunningham

I came across an article last week that talked about the neurological benefits of dancing. The medical evidence suggests that people who dance are less likely to have strokes, less likely to suffer from dementia, and less likely to have Alzheimer's disease advance rapidly. Evidently dancing stimulates brain activity in a massive way. Dancing tunes your brain and your body to listen for the melody at the same moment as you'd inspire a set of motor-skills to respond.

It wasn't the medical findings that surprised me so much as the whole slant of the article. When I'm dancing, really dancing I rarely consider my brain. In fact, that's part of the thrill. Feeling like there is a direct communication that occurs between my body and the music. The sensation that each moment, each movement happens in isolation without a sense of what comes next.

I've made a habit of dancing this year, actually. Turning on loud music or something soapy and sweet and letting myself move. I've been surprised to feel self-conscious or even awkward about it. At certain points in my life it was easy for me to slip into dancing. A particular curl to my toes was all it took. The music was optional. I'd dance where and whenever I felt like it. Muzak in the mall, dance clubs, wedding receptions, various messy apartments in my twenties...

Maybe everyone shrinks a little from these things as we age. My life has a sense of permanence now. I don't wake up every morning or take up every moment as though everything before was nothing. The permanence of things will cling to me, even when there's a jazzy tune being played. My body has limits it didn't have. My life has features and relationships that stick. But dancing can still sort these things out, I just have to get past that initial sense of awkwardness.  But I've been pleased to find that both my life and my brain are malleable enough to respond once the music starts.

News

Congratulations, Lys & Mike, on your engagement!

Heirloom Apple Tasting

Something about the cold air, the dark house each morning of last week made me more fully realize it's October. With the leaves dying off I decided to attend an heirloom apple tasting in Nebraska City over the weekend.

Evidently the United States once harvested an estimated 15,000 apple varieties. These days your local grocer sports maybe 10 varieties (Granny Smith, Red-Delicious, Braeburn, etc) in their produce section. The heirloom varieties have been nearly wiped out of the marketplace except in these niche orchards scattered around the country and populated each October by apple addicts like myself, I suppose.

I selected the Arbor Day Foundation's Preservation Orchard as my weekend destination. It has a limited harvest of 165 different heirloom apple varieties. The orchard was rather picked-over by the time we arrived on Saturday, but we had the good fortune to sample three different varieties. Each one had a distinctively delicious personality that made the cold air, the dark house of each fall morning a little more inviting.

Dial "N" for NASA

N called NASA this past week. Yes, ~that~ NASA, to extend an invitation to the Astronomy Fair her school is putting on next week. They might be interested. You never know. She left a message. 

Blackberry Morning

I was standing in my kitchen this morning, checking my work email inbox from a hand-held Blackberry. N asleep upstairs, the cats purring at me, my feet in socks and slippers, NPR playing on the radio, the smell of coffee thick in the cold, morning air.

I had a moment of imagining the late 80s - early 90s  version of myself looking at this scene with a sense of awe and a lot of questions.

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Personal Soundtrack: Extraordinary by Liz Phair

Safety Belt

Me: Honey, you don't have to get buckled in. It will be a while before we drive off.

N: Yeh, that's OK. (pause) I just like to have everyone know I'm safe in case the car explodes or something.

Me: Really?

N: Yeh.

Me: That's planning ahead.

N: (self-satisfied-shrug) I know.

Occupy Wall Street

"A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is." - Paul Krugman

Bug

"We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics."  (Bill Vaughan)

The Pipeline

The phrase "tar sands" came into Lincoln's common vernacular about 8 months ago. While TransCanada had been working on its Keystone XL pipeline route for more than three years, the steady citizen resistance started in earnest this past year. TransCanada's idea with this pipeline was to tap into Alberta's  tar sands, the second largest crude oil resource in the world, to meet looming oil supply shortages.

I've been impressed by the public opposition to the pipeline. In an era where people are increasingly cynical about the public process, this opposition movement turned out about 800 people to attend the public hearing in Lincoln last week, and 1000 for the Atchison meeting. The I Stand With Randy critics of the TransCanada project are correct to say a major leak could ruin drinking water and devastate the mid-west's economy. TransCanada is also correct to assert the energy security and job creation benefits the pipeline offers.

It's not pipelines I distrust so much as it is the corporate interests involved. I think we're running out of oil and it's unlikely we'll conserve more and consume less of it in the foreseeable future. Is conservation possible? Yes. Probable? Nope. Sadly I think we live in a world that needs this pipeline to be built somewhere. Where and to what degree of stewardship the pipeline is constructed is directly proportional to the amount of push TransCanada receives from its opponents. And that push has been steady and strong from Randy and those who stand with him. 
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Attention any Nebraska folks in DC, VA or MD, please come to the DC State Dept. final public meeting on Friday, 10am-2pm at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue (Reagan bldg). Wear RED.

Prescott Park

About three years ago I was part of a group of parents who dreamed up the idea for an Outdoor Classroom for Prescott School that would benefit teachers, kids, and the neighborhood. Yesterday morning was one of a series of work-days for the park. We spent about four hours working and, when you crunch the numbers, our time accomplished the following:

• 75+ volunteers engaged
• 62 shovels present
• 7 wheelbarrows in steady use
• 3.5 yd3 of clay soil moved, by wheelbarrow, to 2 large planter boxes
• 8 yd3 of mulch distributed to garden beds and walking paths
• 78 prairie plants planted
• 3 yd3 of sand levelled into a bed
• 146 tree cut outs set in the sandbed and QuickCrete-d
• 62 chocolate chip cookies consumed
• 2 blisters on my hands worn through the gardening gloves

Sigh. It was a good morning.

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Dinner Line-up: Zucchini Frittata and baked potatoes (N's cooking)

Looking Forward To: Fright Night @ Morrill Hall 

So Long As We're Counting: Congratulations to my friend, Matt, who completed a cross trainer workout of 40 miles in 4 hours, 12 min, and 1 second. He defeated 700 aliens & saved New York...again. Well done!