Reflections on the eve of travel

September 18, 2013 / njmyers / 3 Comments

My husband and I leave tomorrow for nearly 4 weeks in DR Congo. We will celebrate the ordination of the first women in the Mennonite Church of Congo, listen to choirs, build church partnerships, revisit old haunts. I will write, Vic will do audio and video. I have written a number of posts about this (see the Congo menu) but this one sums it up.

I started thinking last night before I went to sleep about how much preparation I have done for this trip. I cut off those thoughts immediately because, although they were good thoughts, I knew they could keep me awake for hours. I will give them free rein now since I am all packed (though Vic isn’t) and all I have left to do is clean the house and finish up the instructions for Patti, our house/cat sitter.

I thought how the first recent trip I made to Congo, last May, had been full of revelations. The possibility of genuine friendship with Congolese. The mad joy of worship that went straight to my heart and gut. African resilience and warmth. The money bugaboos. Mistakes that could be made and redeemed. The possibility of church partnership–this, above all. It was a revelation to me that the church offered the greatest possibility for genuine international connection of the sort that I had not yet known, in all my extensive international experience. Church partnership offered the possibility of ties based on mutuality and warm personal relations as well as working through differences and misunderstandings.

The second trip, in July, to celebrate the centennial of the Mennonite Church of Congo, confirmed and deepened the revelations of the first trip. But it was also full of lessons about my own limitations. My physical fragility: I injured my knee first thing and limped through the whole three weeks. My ability to make mistakes I was cautioning others against (a wrong turn in the Brussels airport). My psychic fragility: I came to hate the swarming crowds that greeted our delegation of 30 North Americans.

Above all, that trip was a lesson in how unprepared I was to carry out a dream that had emerged between the two trips, to write a book about the church. Shyness and fatigue overcame me when it came to taking notes, talking to new people, or even making connections with people who had written or been featured in the book I’d edited–a collection of centennial stories called The Jesus Tribe.

And yet I needed to go back. I knew this but I didn’t know how or why. I only knew that there were things I needed to do before I could know if, why, and how I would continue this Congo connection. I began doing those things immediately after I returned. I have written about that here. The preparations included signing up for spiritual direction, losing weight, getting in shape, finishing and publishing a book, working on the church partnership, praying, meditating, becoming a member of the church we’d been attending for two years, working on my relationship with my husband, working on my confidence and self-esteem, writing and more writing, and deepening and broadening my ties with Congolese Mennonites. And then things fell into place and now here we are, about to actually do it.

By the way, I watch bemused as Vic suffers the crisis of confidence that I felt during my second trip–“I thought I could do this but it is harder than I thought.” He’s technologically gifted but dealing with A-V involves a whole new set of technology, which is still spread out over our dining room table.

I have inevitably high expectations of this trip and of myself. In the past I would have tried to knock down these expectations because expectations have seldom served me well. They have led to disappointment. And there has always been an element of magical thinking in my expectations–the possibilities, the signs, mean that it was meant to be this way. I took some magical thinking with me on my second trip.

Now I can say that I have almost none of that. I have done my homework and prepared as best I know how. While I have little control over the outcome of what happens from now on, I do know that I have cleared the channels for Spirit to work through me. This is not a magical expectation but an openness to magic because that is how God works.

As miraculous as anything is the sustained certainty that I have about being on this path. I have no doubt that, for whatever reason, I should be doing exactly this. But “should” is the wrong word. There is no “should” in what I am doing. Nor is it like the voice of God in the night calling me with a definite mission, a task. I have not been moved by someone’s challenge, an altar call. It is, rather, a somewhat plodding necessity, one thing leading to another, a combination of joy, duty, problem-solving, obligation, opportunity, revelation, adventure, relationship.

Love is the single word for it. It is a bit like parenthood. You start it and then there’s no turning back. Turning back is not a possibility, nor would you want to, even if it were possible, because it changes who you are and shapes what you do in the world and you become attached to all involved, including the person you have become.

The pipeline and the prairie

September 5, 2013 / njmyers / 2 Comments

I followed the big digger being hauled down the country road that is the most direct route from the YMCA to our CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm. The combination of yoga and veggie pickup has made Tuesday morning the highlight of the week, but this was the last time I would be picking up vegetables. The truck was going 25 mph but I was in no hurry.

It was a symbolic end to the vegetable season. I was one of only 10 members in Farmer Theri’s CSA this year. Her season has been cut short and she couldn’t plant her back plots at all because they were marked to be dug up to lay the Enbridge replacement pipeline. The diggers have just now churned up her barnyard.

Last haul

The digger was headed for another segment of the pipeline not far away. A dotted line of dirt piles marks the pipeline’s path across Michigan. Somehow I expected the tunneling to start in the west and proceed east, like the oil. Instead, the digging might start anywhere along the line and proceed in either direction. Here it moves mostly east to west but in a broken line. The dots will eventually be connected.

Meanwhile I work on my part of the story. I’m not doing anything heroic like getting arrested for sitting in a company driveway, like my friend Sandra Steingraber did to protest fracking in upstate New York. I am just trying to see that the small grant Enbridge is giving our township for “environmental restoration” gets used appropriately. This is in addition to direct compensation to landowners. It’s pure guilt money and not much: $15,000 for the long scar Enbridge is drawing across the belly of our rural township.

I wrote how the township committee responded enthusiastically to my proposal to do something for my favorite piece of wetland, the rare wet blooming prairie a mile from my house. I tossed that ball into the court of Chickaming Open Lands, the conservation group that manages the prairie. Yesterday the development director called back.

“We talked about it,” she said, “and what we’d like to propose is a boardwalk out into the prairie so people can see it better.”

That was exactly what the township committee had proposed, but I hadn’t mentioned that detail to the Chickaming people. I was elated. Maybe it would be easier than I thought to get a politically conservative township and a liberal conservation group on the same page.

I called the township supervisor and reported the conversation. He seemed pleased but he said, “I was just down at the firehouse. You know, everybody has a project they’d like to get funded.”

Of course. Conversations will go on although our ad hoc committee was supposed to make this decision.

Still, he promised to link up with the conservation group. We’ll see. I’m not taking bets on where this project will stand by the time I get back from Congo in mid-October. But I’m voting for the prairie.

Food stress

August 14, 2013 / njmyers / Leave a comment

Yikes. This is what happens when I let up just the least bit on the diet discipline. I am up 3 pounds from my goal weight, which, by the way, lasted only that one week. The weight comes back right to my midriff, a ballooning muffin top that I can feel growing by the day.

I just dumped into the trash the cinnamon rolls and Pringles that my latest houseguest didn’t finish. I didn’t even compost them. They would poison the animals that check out the garbage. What possessed me to buy bread, chips, ice cream? The stress of not knowing what to feed people.

The food thing is really the biggest stress of having houseguests. This is true even when it’s our kids, whether it’s their food restrictions or ours, or the changing tastes of the little one. We develop our own eating and food prep patterns. As a good hostess I am attentive to the tastes of my guests and I don’t feel quite right just making them eat the way I do day by day.

I just read an article about Bill Clinton going vegan. He entertained the reporter, who was expecting tasteless food. Of course, some wonderful chef had laid out a feast of all kinds of wonderful salads and dips and beany things–things I know how to prepare, and also how much time it takes to do so. Sure, it is wonderful to go vegan, and you can make things taste really good as long as the people you are serving have a sense of food adventure and you have time and you don’t mind missing the mark sometimes with a dish.

But my guest for much of the past two weeks was a teenager from Congo who was accustomed to an entirely predictable diet of rice, fufu, manioc greens, meat, and fish (not so much the fish). Back home she’d also had a chance to develop a taste for soft bread and chips of all kinds, as well as sweets, especially vanilla ice cream. So after I had watched her picking at my healthy vegetables and mostly leaving them on the plate and taking her slender self away from the table to chat with her 2,000 facebook friends on my iPad, I started giving in to her tastes and let her pick her diet off the grocery shelves, rather than trying to cook up, juice, and salad-i-fy my bounty of CSA produce. In the process, I got off track myself because I don’t like to prepare two or three different dinners.

I can’t blame Deborah for those 3 pounds. My body is just trying really hard to get fat again. There is no such thing as a weight-maintenance diet for me. It is lose or gain and I’m gaining, fast. Gotta go back to losing.

But first we are getting together with my brothers and spouses this weekend in North Dakota. Most of us struggle with the weight thing but I don’t see us getting together to go on long walks. We will eat together (all healthy food of course) and sit around talking and laughing and arguing. I’ll probably pack on another pound because that’s just the way it is. A good time will be had by all.

How to eat a lot of veggies

July 30, 2013 / njmyers / 4 Comments

Today’s haul

What were we thinking, joining two CSAs this year?

I was thinking you can never have too many fresh vegetables, even if you are only two people and even if it is a bumper-crop year for the farmers who are growing your vegetables.

I was thinking I’d freeze or juice all those extra veggies.

We made this decision back in February, when we were hungry for vegetables and summer.

But now it is July and we are getting a big box of vegetables every Sunday and Tuesday and it is one mad scramble to keep up. My goal is to eat or preserve everything, wasting nothing grown by the labor of our farmer friends.

The scramble this year includes scrambling eggs. One CSA gives us eggs and I didn’t have the heart to tell the farmer we are pretty much vegan. They are really good eggs. I eat one every now and then. When we have guests I make a lot of eggs for breakfast. But right now I have 20 eggs in the fridge and one guest arriving for six days. Can she eat three a day? I will not force feed her.

Zucchini is always a losing battle but I was doing really well. I was down to only three until today, when I got three more. Time to freeze again.

There is a trick to eating a lot of vegetables: make them smaller.

Juicing is one way to do this. You can cram a lot of vegetables into your juicer and they trickle out as pure nutrition, minus the filler.

However, because of excess supply I have skewed my juice recipes toward greens and cucumbers without the balancing sweetness of apples and pears, which are not yet in season, so my juices taste like they are really good for you but … not really good.

Cooking is still the easiest way to make greens smaller. Stirfry, stirfry, stirfry.

My favorite way to make kale smaller is to tear it up for a raw salad and then massage a dressing into it until it wilts down and turns really dark green. A sweet balsamic vinegar, salt, and olive oil work well. The massage reduces the bitterness of raw kale as well as its volume. I can eat a lot of kale this way.

Both our farmers are having really good cucumber years. You can’t cook cucumbers. You can’t freeze them. I don’t like pickles all that much and I really don’t like making them.

Today I got a fresh supply of cucumbers. I thought we had been eating a lot of cucumbers in our salads and using them in juice but I dug 10 cucumbers out of my fridge from previous weeks. Sadly, one was ready for the compost bucket.

I juiced a cucumber and tasted the juice plain. Yuck. I juiced another with an orange. Not bad. Eight to go. Oh. Plus four that I got today. Twelve cucumbers to use before Sunday, when we will no doubt get more.

The principle of making vegetables smaller applies in a technique that is opposite from juicing: extracting the water from them. This works especially well for cucumbers. It also can apply to cabbage and zucchini.

So I sliced up a lot of those cucumbers and a red onion in my food processor and mixed them with a little salt. After a half hour I squeezed out the water. They’d wilted down by about half. I tossed them with a little sugar, cider vinegar, and oil. This salad will keep for days in the fridge.

My husband and I grew up on this salad, a staple of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine. I guess our ancestors had a lot of cucumbers to deal with.

Vintage salad in vintage bowl

Go-o-o-o-oal!

June 8, 2013 / njmyers / 7 Comments

I shouted this to my husband this morning and he didn’t know what I was referring to at first. Oh. You reached your goal weight. Good.

I’ll admit it was a bit anticlimactic because I’ve been hovering close to 145.8 for two months and actually reached it several times but never on Weigh-in Saturday until today.

My reward on Weight Watchers online was a star that was larger than other milestone stars and it bounced. I was offered the option of setting a new goal and reminded that my healthy weight was 109 to 137. Yes I know but I’m not going there yet, if ever.

So I chose the option of maintaining the current weight and then checked my food tracker and saw that I was now allotted 32 points for the day instead of 26—a 23 percent increase. I spent three extra points on a slice of rice millet toast with coconut butter and honey, along with my usual small bowl of cereal and fruit. (I have been craving sweet recently and ate several spoonfuls of that Trader Joe’s organic honey from India yesterday.) I am now feeling quite full.

I think I would gain weight on 32 points a day to say nothing of the 49 extra allotted each week for indulgences, which I seldom dip into very far. So basically I have to keep doing what I have been doing recently. Pretty boring.

Slow weight loss is good but 8 months to take off 22 pounds is ridiculous. However, I was already eating healthily and exercising quite a lot when I started so it took extra discipline. Plus I am 68 and I really do think it is harder to lose weight as you get older.

I was within a pound of goal at the 6-month mark, when I bought all my new clothes. It just took me two months to take off the last pound.

I don’t think buying the new clothes prematurely is why the last pound took so long to come off. My body and spirit were just needing to let up a little on the discipline. When you start eating maple syrup by the spoonful and heading straight to the olive bar at Whole Foods, you know you need something you haven’t been getting.

(We now have a Whole Foods in the nether reaches of Michiana though not yet a Trader Joe’s. When TJ arrives we will have at last joined the United States of Couth. Plenty of uncouthness here to go around still—every brand of all-you-can-eat excess fried fast cheap gloppy yummy to-go supersize self-destruction available, by car no sidewalks.)

Last September I wrote that I would be ecstatic to get back to what I weighed 7 years ago when I was feeling fat in Japan. And I am! Who-hoo! But this morning I am also thinking there are a few things I don’t like about weight loss. (Discipline isn’t one of them. I enjoy being disciplined. It brings its own rewards.)

1. It comes off where you don’t need it to. Like my face and hands. One friend who hadn’t seen me for months said she missed my round cheeks. I do too. They made me look like my sweet mother. Now I look more like my thin-chinned Aunt Irene.

Thus losing weight does not solve all my appearance problems. I must keep working on my posture. I am still an older woman and look like one though truly I feel much younger than I did a year ago.

2. I become judgmental. I feel superior to and sorry for all the obese people who are walking around the track and huffing and puffing on the machines at the Y. I am smug about having nipped my weight problem in the bud before it got that bad. And I feel a tinge of scorn for the other obese people who are sitting around watching their kids swim or do gymnastics rather than moving themselves.

Reminder: Even 22 extra pounds sapped my energy and made it really hard for me get my butt moving. Those who are working out are heroes. Those who are sitting represent what I felt like doing 8 months ago.

3. It can make you want to give advice to others. Everybody who loses weight wants to do this and I am no exception, though I try to rein myself in and talk only about my own experience. During this personal campaign I came to the stunning realization that I am responsible only for myself. I am not responsible for the way other people eat except those who eat at my table.

In fact, the more I talk about it the more I may turn people off. I may inspire guilt rather than courage. But writing about my effort has been good. It has helped to keep me focused and accountable just a bit beyond myself.

So thank you for reading and cheering me on.

Hovering

May 25, 2013 / njmyers / 6 Comments

I guess I have found my weight maintenance, as opposed to weight loss formula: stick with the plan except have seconds every now and then, or a few evening snacks. I have been doing this for several weeks because the strict discipline I need to actually lose weight is flagging. Obeying my body and indulging my spirits, I am letting up a little. And indeed, I am holding steady.

But I am hovering half or three-quarters of a pound above my goal, which is 145.8. (I did see it once but it disappeared by my weekly weigh-in day.)

Why that odd number for a goal? It is 10 percent below the weight at which I signed on to Weight Watchers. It is actually more than 10 percent below my starting weight, because I lost more than 5 pounds on my own before WW. But I read somewhere that losing more than 10 percent at a time isn’t good because it encourages rebounding. Maybe my body is saying, you already lost more than your 10 percent, let’s just keep it there for a while.

But this is very boring. I want to reach a milestone. I want to see what bells and whistles WW online offers when I reach goal and 10 percent at the same time. (Those little stars and words of cyber praise bring a silly kind of satisfaction.)

What I really want to do is throw the discipline out the window.

However, what this low hovering is teaching me is that if I think losing 22 pounds is hard, guess what. Keeping them off is even harder. Because I’ll have to keep up the discipline without the reward of seeing weekly progress.

I’ll have to keep up the three miles a day or equivalent.

I’ll have to keep counting points and stick close to the minimum.

I’ll have to keep drowning the evening snacking urges in herbal tea.

One six-ounce glass of wine, weekends only.

Etc.

All of this will have to continue after I reach that magical, mythical 145.8. Reaching my goal changes nothing. I may be able to let up a little, like I have been doing recently, but not a lot.

What has to change is my mentality. Setting a goal tricks you into adopting discipline. Eventually you will reach the goal and, unless you can immediately set another goal, you have to concentrate on the intrinsic rewards of that discipline. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

The fact is, my tummy feels much better going to bed on chamomile tea rather than Trader Joe’s Sesame Sticks. I can’t even drink two glasses of wine anymore without getting a headache. The thought of cheesecake turns my stomach. If I crave anything it’s veggies and brown rice and some sweet, ripe papaya.

My daily exercise makes me feel good and sleep well. My energy level is at a new normal, much higher than before. Even though the midriff bulge isn’t gone, it’s hideable. I like looking in the mirror and I like trying on clothes.

I have to remind myself of these things and be grateful and pat myself on the back. That’s a good shoulder stretch, too.

Goals, objectives, and God

May 11, 2013 / njmyers / 2 Comments

In my professional life I learned to sling the jargon of strategic planning. I know the difference between goals and objectives. And I know how to write reports and proposals that make it sound like the life of an organization or a person can be arranged in a logical hierarchy: the overarching mission, then the goal, then the objectives that serve as milestones toward the goal.

Generally, however, I don’t believe it. I think life is much more organic, less predictable, and both more difficult and fun than that. Life is not logical. Life happens in the unpredicted cracks in the sidewalk of your consciousness. This is true for organizations as well as people.

But recently my life has surprised me by sorting itself into goals and objectives. True, it has done this in an upside-down way. The objectives have come first and the goal has emerged more slowly, but now that the goal has emerged the objectives make sense, they hang together. They clearly lead to the goal and are necessary if I am to accomplish it.

The goal is to write a book about Congo through the lens of the joy of worship music–écrire un livre sur Congo à travers le prisme de la joie de la musique d’adoration (I am running everything through a mental or Google translator these days).

I was not able to articulate this goal until very recently, although versions of it popped up now and then over the past year. I have only sensed the need for a Next Big Thing, a major writing project, without being able to define it.

Instead, certain objectives presented themselves one by one. I have been acting on these objectives without knowing the goal, in fact, because I didn’t know the goal. I didn’t know what the Next Big Thing was but I could do each of these smaller things that presented themselves and captured my attention. (I have blogged about all of these but won’t pepper this post with links.)

1. Learn. I edited a book about the Congo Mennonite Church in late 2011 to early 2012 and in the process learned the church’s fascinating history, something I hadn’t learned in my three years in Congo back in the seventies.

2. Go. But my involvement with Congo Cloth Connection predated that, and I went to Congo last May with that project. I had a great time and my love of Congo Cloth expanded to include Congolese church music.

3. Network. Following up on both of these things, I decided to go to Congo again for the centennial celebration in July. Thus in the space of a few months I was drawn into a network of warm relationships with Congolese Mennonites.

4. Deepen. Last fall I began working with a spiritual director and established a meditation practice.

5. Publish. I decided I couldn’t move on to a Next Big Thing until I decided what to do with a manuscript that had been languishing for several years in the “what am I going to do with this” pile. In the course of a few months I revised and published it as The Dream Matrix.

6. Energize. The July Congo trip had worn me out. I decided I needed to lose weight and adopt a diet and fitness regime for maximum energy. I have done this over the course of the past eight months: Weight Watchers, gluten-free, mostly vegan, 3 miles a day. Two-tenths of a pound to go as of today to reach my goal (objective!) weight.

7. Flow. My daughter-in-law gave me a Christmas gift prompt that led me to adopt the word “flow” as my theme this year, to keep all these streams flowing and moving in the same direction. It worked when I needed it most, in the first quarter of this year.

8. Dream. Publishing The Dream Matrix prompted me to lead a dream class in church and pay attention once again to my own dreams. Some of this sequence has emerged through those dreams.

9. Partner. The Congo relationships have continued to blossom as I work on a partnership between my church and a congregation in Kinshasa, host visitors, and address cross-cultural challenges.

10. Write. Writing this blog has catalyzed each of these developments because I write my life—I write about it and I write my life into being if that makes sense. But in addition, just as I was beginning to dare to articulate my goal, an opportunity came up to write—to travel to Congo in September and October of this year to report on the ordination of the first women in the last branch of the Congo Mennonite Church that had been holding out on ordaining women. Choirs will be there. I know some of these women. My husband and I are beginning to plan our trip.

All of these objectives just happen to lead toward this newly articulated goal. This, my friends, is how I experience God. God is in the gift of the goal, God is in the timing of each of these so-called objectives. Maybe God is the great Strategic Planner.

This organic life

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013 / njmyers / 4 Comments

I need to put the hummingbird feeder out. The birds are due any day now or perhaps they’re already here and snubbing us because I haven’t put the feeder out.

This thought arises suddenly and makes me think of the miscellany of my to-do list. It is rich and shapeless, everything wanting to be done at once.

Sitting on the porch, watching the colorful birds of spring (indigo buntings, siren-yellow finches, rose-breasted grosbeaks) and wood ducks looking for a nesting place in our woods—this is high on my spring to-do list. Alas there is no water on our property so it is not prime wood duck real estate but they come looking every year because we have great tree holes. We also have a hawk nest this year so beware, little birdies.

Wood nettle shoots are at their prime. I must go out and snip another bagful. I took a mess of nettles to a church potluck yesterday (steamed briefly, tossed with olive oil, garnished with violets). Every year I introduce more people to this spring delicacy. It takes some faith to bite down on plants that will sting like crazy if you grab them raw but immersion in a hot bath makes them sweet and safe. I don’t like the more common ditch nettles, however. See my post last year on this.

Having dreams is on my weekly agenda. The only preparation I can make for the communal dreaming class I am conducting for nine weeks at church is to have dreams myself, and I don’t have a lot of control over that. As it turns out, I often don’t even bring up my own dreams because other people’s dreams fill the hour. The dreams are rich and amazing and reveal their meanings as we talk about them. I discover again that I am quite good at helping people interpret their dreams. Some shared images appear in our dreams. Speculating about what this means.

I am praying daily for friends of a friend who are being held captive in a foreign land. This requires making time and place for the prayer to be received (that is, knowing what I should pray) and offered. It is not a prayer to be breathed at my desk although I do that, too. I usually go out with the trees, to get their help.

Helper trees

I am thinking through and consulting others about aspects of a partnership between my congregation and a congregation in Kinshasa that I know well from two visits there last year. Especially, how do you address or get around the vast economic differences without opening great cans of worms? I write up a proposal and send it off to a few people for vetting. This is difficult and necessary headwork in a project that is, for the most part, a work of joy and spiritual enrichment.

I am deciding what to do about biking. What would it feel like to give it up? Why did I have a sudden surge of jealousy when Vic asked how I would feel if he decided to buy a new bike (and I didn’t)? On the other hand, why am I enthusiastic about the idea of funding scholarships for Congolese students instead of buying a new bike? Sorting out my own feelings. Sorting out the state of my body as well as my spirit.

I just arranged for an energy healing session to address my recurrent UTIs, which have now become resistant to most antibiotics. This is related to the biking question because I can’t afford to keep having UTIs and biking seems to instigate them sometimes.

And it relates, in turn, to dreams, because I had a dream in which energy healing was being done on an Atlantic beach. I was to take my turn at healing and being healed before even putting a foot in the water. The ocean represents Soul waters for me. Also, the Atlantic links us to Africa, so perhaps it is a reference to my next trip to Congo.

That trip is taking shape and moving up on the to-do list. I may post about that soon.

Maybe my to-do list is not shapeless so much as organic, one thing merging into another and branching into yet others.

Celebrations, shopping, setbacks

April 29, 2013 / njmyers / 1 Comment

Last week was the 44th anniversary of my marriage to the tall, lean, shy cute guy. He is still tall and lean. He is much less shy than he was when we were 24. And he is even cuter. I really lucked out.

We celebrated in Chicago. I went with him for his weekly 3-day work stint and shopped for new clothes while he worked. The way I look at it, his anniversary present to me was the new clothes. Mine to him was looking good in them.

He’s not here right now so I can’t show you how good we both look.

In the evenings we dined out, totally busting out of our vegan gluten-free regime. I did not count Weight Watchers points last week. Consequently my weight rebounded a bit, a minor setback. The pleasure was worth it. I am happy to get back to simple high-veggie, low fat this week.

I’m not complaining but the shopping was hard work. The first day I went to Oak Brook Mall, my old favorite. It was torn up for relandscaping. It was raining. And it was a case of the usual overabundance of bad selections. I have trouble with overchoice, with finding the gem on the rack of garish. Give me a small shop filled with my kind of clothes.

But I dutifully trudged through every department store and every possibly appropriate shop, selecting a few things here and there. The most thrilling purchase? New bras perfectly, professionally fitted! (Too much information? Stop reading, guys.)

At the very end I found the little shop that had my kind of clothes, J. Jill. I didn’t buy much because I was already shopped out. I found the essential black knit dress I’d been looking for to wear under my Congo Cloth jackets, linen crop pants, and a pink linen shirt. Now I know where to go online to look for simple, well-made clothes. Most important, I’ve tried on their sizes.

The second day was more fun. It was sunny. I spent it in my old stomping ground, Oak Park, where we’d lived for nearly 30 years, visiting old shops and new. I didn’t buy all that much–cute shoes at DSW, bargain tees at my familiar Gap. I found a new swimsuit at the Sports Authority where we’ve always shopped. I made a run to Trader Joe’s for tea and wine and to Olive & Well for black current balsamic vinegar. When it comes to shopping I like some predictability.

By the third day I was getting a UT infection from too much rich food and wine and not enough water. That, too, is predictable. This is probably way too much information but it may be of interest to other UTI-prone old ladies who bike: The UTI, which I’d begun treating, got worse after I got out on the bike a few days later for my first ride of the season.

I fought this problem two years ago when I was training for a century. Do I want to have to deal with it again? I’ve been getting ready for a new bike but now I’m having second thoughts. Giving up biking would be a real setback.

Meanwhile, the real celebration is going on in the woods. Spring is busting out all over. I just want to sit and watch.

The view from my front porch

Life is like spilled beads

April 22, 2013 / njmyers / 2 Comments

I dream of sorting tiny beads. It’s not just me. I have kids “helping.” Of course every time the beads come into some sort of pattern they get messed up. And then we start over.

I don’t know what this is about except life. Cooking, cleaning, writing, losing weight, working on myself. Nothing is ever accomplished, done, satisfactory. Expecting it to be so is futile, given the material and who’s working with it. I’m not God the master artist. I’m just a bunch of easily distracted kids and this is really, really demanding work, making sense of life, making progress in life.

I dream this after starting Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, a novel about the lives of Ursula, who, every time she dies (the first time right after birth), goes back and relives the same life up to the point of that death, which she or circumstances now prevent, until the next death happens–maybe only months or hours later this time. For example, it takes her three or four tries to survive the great influenza epidemic of 1918. After infancy she has vague but urgent premonitions before the last thing that killed her happens and she takes a small evasive action. When I left off last night she was 7 and was beginning to experience déjà vu in other things as well.

This is an intriguing premise for a novel but mind-boggling to think about. (I recommend anything Kate Atkinson has written.) Another mind-boggler I’ve read recently is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. That one plays with time and the idea of parallel universes, parallel lives, subtly, not in a sci-fi way.

The thing I live for is to see patterns and connections. Thus the beads in my dream. Now I see them, now I don’t, and there is very little to hold them in place once I do see them.

Take weight loss, for example. I was following a formula that was working. The last few weeks I’ve been following it strictly and it hasn’t worked. The scales register a gain. If it is the scales, why does it act up in that particular way? If it is my body, same question.

And on a larger issue, every time I think I am in general becoming more disciplined and purposeful, I have a day like yesterday when I watch hours and hours of TV and read novels and get no exercise and exceed my food points.

I guess that is no great mystery. I was a tiny bit discouraged by the weight gain. What the heck nothing works anyhow I may as well be a lazy slob.

But church was good yesterday and the dream class I’m leading there went really well again. At first the dreams are like spilled beads and then we begin to see the patterns.

Today I’m ready to get back to the bead sorting. Having fun doing it.