Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Friday, January 02, 2004
THANKS
As I wrote in one of the comment threads, thank you to everyone who sent New Year's greetings by comment or e-mail, and especially for all the unexpected kind and generous words. They're all greatly appreciated. How wonderful it is to know I'm starting this year with many, many more friends and companions than a year ago, and how grateful I am for your encouragement to keep thinking and writing here. Cassandra is one lucky girl.
5:05 PM
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HOGMANAY
M.'s greeting from Scotland in the comment thread forced me to do a search on the word Hogmanay, which I confess I've never heard before. Here's what I found at an edinburgh site
Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year, celebrated on 31st December every year. Never being slow to spot a good excuse for a party, the night involves a celebratory drink or two, fireworks and the kissing of complete strangers – not necessarily in that order.
Where did the word Hogmanay come from?
Nobody knows for sure. Various suggestions have been made over the years and they all sound pretty good from where we are sitting:
-from the Gaelic oge maidne ("new morning")
-A Flemish combo of hoog ("high" or "great"), min ("love" or "affection") and dag ("day")
-Anglo-Saxon Haleg Monath ("Holy Month")
-Norman French word hoguinané("gift at New Year")
Maybe we can encourage language hat to weigh in on this one, since he also sent "Hogmanay" greetings, but not from the same place!
4:43 PM
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Thursday, January 01, 2004
2004!
This morning I woke in a mood so good it surprised even me! Why? I wondered. 2003 has not been a particularly terrific one for me personally; in fact it brought some significant challenges that have by no means abated. The world situation is far worse than it was a year ago, on just about every level, and I feel even more helpless than I did then. There's no reason to view 2004 as a potential new start on either of those fronts, so this morning's cheer was no false and foolish optimism, yet it has persisted all day: through my readings of the news, lunch among the wheelchairs at my father-in-law's retirement home, political discussions about the Middle East, and remembering my mother-in-law's death exactly a year ago yesterday.
What's going on, I think, is a manifestation of my intention to try to control my own attitude in spite of everything that is uncontrollable. At times this is, of course, impossible. But I am trying to remember, and bring into conscious action, the fact that our attitude is actually the one thing over which we do have control. Victor Frankl wrote movingly about discovering this during his years in German concentration camps, and since reading him I have asked myself, "What would I do? How would I cope, if I were imprisoned, without hope?" When it finally dawned on me that this is what life IS, that we are all imprisoned within it, and forced to make our peace with the fact or not, I began to try harder to understand what that might mean.
Since 9/11, the vortex of violence and abuse of power in our world has made this "prison" all the more apparent. Where can we find refuge? In nature, which we are well on the way to destroying? In organized religion, with all its corruption, competition, and hypocrisy? In other humans, separated as we are by continents, on the one hand, and selfish individualism on the other? In consumerism? Technology? In existentialism or nihilism?
There is so much that I would like to change, ideally. But as I've thought about other people in other parts of the world, not only am I overwhelmed with gratitude for the circumstances of my own life, but I've realized that the despair, fear, and claustrophobia about life in general that we in the west, and America in particular, now feel have been experienced by others for millenia. Nothing has changed about the human condition when confronted with massive, abusive power, except our capacity to wreak havoc on a larger and larger scale and our instantaneous awareness of disaster and suffering. It's just been brought home to us, like a totally unexpected terminal diagnosis from which we recoil both collectively and personally in typical stages of anger, denial and bargaining.
So we can remain stuck there, despairing and hopeless, or we can live into a different reality. People have always found meaning in circumstances they would never have voluntarily chosen, and there are many equally valid paths they have taken, from risking their lives by openly opposing the corrupt powers and principalities, to living simply according to an entirely different set of values than the prevailing culture, achieving an inner equanimity and peace than cannot be destroyed and that radiates out to others.
Lately I've been remembering two different "teachings" that I was given. One came long ago from a healer, an alternative medicine practitioner, who told me that the distress I was feeling was more from "fighting" the situation in which I found myself than from the situation itself. "Acceptance" does not need to mean "giving in". It means learning to discern what we can do from what we cannot do, and using that discernment as the basis for conscious choice of action and attitude, rather than feeling helpless, overwhelmed, and stuck in "why me? why now?" Even in the most extreme situations, we can either be bitter, fearful, despairing, and self-focussed, or we can be loving, courageous, and interested in others, regardless of the fears and sadnesses in our hearts. Looking around the nursing home today I could see this playing out: elderly people whose buoyancy and attractiveness to others, or lack thereof, had little to do with the extent of their infirmities, or good or bad fortune, and much to do with their attitude toward life.
The second teaching came from a priest who has spent much of his life working in terribly difficult situations during the civil rights struggle here, and in the political turmoil of Central America. I had expressed a sense of feelng of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the world's problems, and wondering how to choose where to put my energy. He nodded and agreed, saying for years he had felt torn, wondering if perhaps he shouldn't have left Central America. He also admitted that he had always felt drawn toward environmental issues, and yet much of his ministry instead had had to do with race and civil rights. "I've decided, finally," he said, "that it doesn't really matter where you 'go in'. Just choose something, and do it to the best of your ability. That's all. That's all any of us are asked to do."
It moves me, the way we try to honestly share our struggles with these issues in our writing and communication here with one another; I'm grateful for the tolerance extended on both good days and bad ones. Lots of times the hardest part of the day for me is when I first wake up; maybe that's why I was so grateful to start this year relatively effortlessly and happily today. Recently I read the following exchange in Shunryu Suzuki's "Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness". Close to the bone:
Student: When I am fully awake I have, maybe, a little control over my desires, but in the morning...
Suzuki Roshi: In the mornign you have trouble. I know that. So that is why I say, "Get up!" [knocks on the table]
Student: How do you do that?
Suzuki Roshi: Just do it! Or else someone will come and hit you! [gives a kind of humorous growl]
Student: I did just get up a couple of times - I jumped out of bed. But it was such a big thing!
Suzuki Roshi: Yes. A big thing. So if you can get up pretty well, I think your practice is almost okay. That is a very good chance to practice our way. Just get up. Okay? That is the most important thing.
5:00 PM
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
HAPPY NEW YEAR
As the year fades, a few images in pale blue.
I'm uncharacteristically at a loss for words. This year is impossible to quantify, sum up, encapsulate. For me, it has been the Year of the Blog; that, and you, have been the central adventure and discovery. But, vodka martini in hand, I find no words available in which to wrap these experiences. there is only the awareness of that citrus zest that changes the mundane into the memorable, the mysterious.
We're about to place a call to Reykjavik where our quite wonderful Icelandic next-door-neighbors are celebrating the New Year five hours ahead of us. I think of Jenny and Geoff in Australia; Yuan in Beijing; Nancy in India; Mark in Bonn; Mary in Scotland...Wherever you are, Happy New Year. May it be truly happy, filled with both peace and delight.
I felt stir-crazy today. Wanted to go somewhere. But that wasn't going to happen, so instead I went to the library and got books about far-away places. I'm sure I'll enjoy the books, but what was restorative today was being in the stacks. I love it there - the dust on the black shelves beyond the sliding metal bookends, the dim light until you press the switches for the timed fluorescents, the colors of the spines, and most of all the foreign languages: country after country, worlds upon worlds just waiting to tell me their stories. If only I could read all those languages! Instead I'm grateful for translations, and run my fingers wistfully along the titles that have received no such attention and remain enigmatic behind their covers and their strange alphabets.
Today three books came home with me: The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin; The New Life, by Orhan Pamuk; and Jose Saramago's The Cave. That should do it for a while.
After I got home, J. suggested we watch a DVD he had rented, a German movie titled "Mostly Martha", about a female chef. It was marvelous, but when it finished at 7:00 pm, having watched incredible food being prepared for two hours, I said, "OK, we're going to the store." At nine-thirty we sat down to a dinner of pasta with pesto and sauteed zucchini and red bell peppers, veal marsala, and salad, followed by coffee and cannoli. Lest you are wondering, this is not the usual fare around here, but sometimes you have to seize the moment (and the saute pan). Now I'm glad I can curl up under the comforter with my books.
