mayaland
Last week at the library, we checked the first Harry Potter movie on a lark. I had read the first book to the kids last year (I read all the books when they were coming out, adored them) and Luc has the Lego Harry Potter game on the ipad, so they were familiar with the world and the beginning of the whole story, and I knew what was coming. So, in spite of there being some concern that the later stories get kind of scary, we settled in a watched. Big surprise, we all loved it.
So, back to the library we went, totally stoked for the next movie, only to find, to our delight and surprise, they also had Harry Potter 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.1. A moment’s consideration and yep, we got them ALL. Plus, 7.2 is on its way from Netflix. We’ve been watching part of a movie a night, finished the Order of the Phoenix (5) last night, and, at our current rate, will sit down for the last installment, 7.2, on Christmas Day.
Full on Harry Potter Christmas Marathon for the win! Woo hoo!
But it’s tricky. One of the (many) cool things about the Harry Potter series is, of course, that the stories age and mature as Harry does, in both complexity, depth, and intensity. This means, however, that the books about Harry as a sixteen or seventeen year old really aren’t written for the eight or nine year olds who might have loved the first books when Harry is eleven or twelve. I hear parents talking about “holding off” on Harry because they are worried that the stories are too scary or intense for their kids in the later books. But, of course, the readers (the kids) often want to blast through them, no waiting. What to do?
Luc particularly can get scared by something in a movie and then be troubled at night by visions of monsters or just feeling spooked by the dark. But he really, really wants to watch these movies, is totally into the story at this point. I can’t blame him! Our approach has always been power over media, rather than media having power over us—and couple that with a strong conviction that a person should decide for themselves what they want to think, learn, experience, read or, in this case, watch, and what we have here is an opportunity to help Luc watch Harry Potter in the least scary way possible for him.
Because here’s the thing. I really wanted to see Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because, although I haven’t read the book, I had heard amazing things about the main character and the actress playing her (all true)—BUT I also had heard there were several intense scenes of sexual assault. NOT something I want to see, at all. But imagine how silly it would sound if Paul were to say to me “I don’t think you can handle this movie. You aren’t allowed to watch it.” I’d laugh, or slug him maybe. How dare he think he can decide what I can watch?! He knows better, haha.
Luc, a human just like me, deserves the same freedom to watch Harry Potter and not be impacted by the bits that are too much for him (his choice what those bits are) just as much as I should be able to watch the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and not watch the bits I don’t want to (my choice, the sexual assault scenes, too dark for me). And I want to help him do that.
So, how does one have power over a movie? Easy. First and foremost, the Pause button. If a scene gets too intense, we pause, get up, get some snacks, thus breaking the emotional build up created by the images/sounds. We talk about what is going on in the story, or about how the effects were made, or how the acting, or the camera angles, or the color palette, or the sounds, or the set design, create the mood, and the talk breaks the trance of the movie, which automatically makes it less scary.
Also, for Luc, talking about the CGI artists who make a monster (like the Basilisk, say) puts it right in the world of Luc drawing on Tux Paint, something he does almost every day. He starts thinking about the choices they made for, say, the scale pattern on a dragon, or how its leg joints work, decisions he’s faced when drawing his own dragons on the computer, and he gets it. He’s a digital artist too, who loves to draw spooky monsters. And digital monsters aren’t really scary.
Basically, when the emotional impact of a scene isn’t something you want, you don’t have to just succumb to it. Choose and pick the bits you want. Leave/break the rest. Power to the viewer!
Other tricks….watching an intense bit with the sound off reduces the scary a LOT. It’s surprising how much of the mood of a scene is created by the music and the sound effects. Once Luc knows what’s going to happen, the shock factor (a big part of being scared in movies) is gone, and we can rewind and rewatch with the sound back on. Another way of diffusing the intensity. The scary bits are usually only a few minutes long, it’s really no big deal to rewatch a little bit.
Or you can reverse that approach and just listen—the classic Cover Your Eyes strategy. Luc will sometimes listen only and have me tell him what is happening. Then, when he knows what to expect, he can rewind and watch the scene. I did this with Dragon Tattoo (being, as I was, in the theater and unable to pause)—I covered my eyes for a couple of scenes and got the gist from the dialogue (or the, um, screaming. ugh.).
We could skip whole scenes, too, but usually reducing impact is enough.
Sound like a lot of work? It’s not. And for Luc, if he wants to watch, I want to help him do it in a way that makes the whole thing a success for him. I loved Dragon Tattoo, amazing acting, powerful character (Rooney Mara ROCKS), but, in the theater, I wished for a pause button when the tension was getting too high. At home, we have all the power, and we use it.
“So, would you just let your kids watch anything?”
Yes, if they wanted to watch something, if the desire came from them, I want to help them do that. That isn’t the same as having R rated movies running in a room they are in, and it isn’t the same as them watching silently, on their own, without our help in processing whatever it is. They don’t WANT to watch just about any adult movie they’ve ever catch a bit of as they scroll through the channels. They aren’t interested. Harry Potter is an example for Luc, just as Dragon Tattoo is for me, of a story we want, even though some parts are more intense than we want. So far the Harry movies haven’t been a problem for Sophie at all, who is sucking them up, just like me. And Paul was untroubled by the violence in Dragon Tattoo. Everyone is different. Everyone gets to pick for themselves what their boundaries are. And we all help each other with our choices, because why not? We’re all friends. We’re all on the same team.
Huge upside: the four of us have had some amazing conversations as a result of our Harry Potter Marathon. School (Hogwarts), corporal punishment (Snape, and then Delores and her quill that writes in your blood), changing views of children by society (how beating children used to be the norm, for example), the press (the Daily Prophet), slavery (Dobby and the house elves), racism (mud-bloods), economic disparity (the Weasleys vs. Harry), the afterlife (Nearly Headless Nick and other ghosts), sports culture (the Quidditch cup), and friendship and loyalty (Ron and Hermione)—all these topics and more have been discussed, sometimes heatedly, over the last few days in the yurt. Not to mention the story, and the art, writing, and meta-level of creating the movies. I wouldn’t trade these conversations for anything.
Really, anyone who thinks watching tv/movies is a “passive” activity has not watched anything at our house, that’s for damn sure. The idea of it is downright laughable.
I’m sure 2011 will go down in our memories as the Harry Potter Christmas, haha. It has been a tremendous amount of fun. I bought Luc a Gryffendor hat yesterday for a last minute Christmas present. Heck, I dreamed I was at Hogwarts last night. We’re all in deep at this point.
Half-Blood Prince tonight. If it really gets to be too much, we’ll put it aside for another time, but so far everyone is loving it, including Luc, who knows he has all the power he needs to control his experience of the movie. Which, if you ask me, is a heck of a lot better than seeing him as a potential victim who needs protecting (who wants to be seen, or see him or herself, as helpless?), and much better than controlling him (saying no) and thus setting us up as adversaries. This way I’m his ally in watching as much as he wants, in the way he wants, and he gets to feel powerful, AND watch Harry Potter with his family. It’s a win for us all.
Paul made this image while doing a photoshop tutorial. He really has captured some essential Luc-ness I think. Luc himself named the image, identified the flaming werewolf sword as such, and promptly made up an elaborate story for it.
I never knew ninjas wore crocs, did you?
On Sunday, a gal who last year bought one of our goat babies, took our whole herd of four goatie girls home to her farm an hour southwest of here. We helped load the girls into the truck, waved goodbye, and then Sophie and I went inside and curled up on the sofa and cried. It was a really hard decision, one we talked about for more than six months. One of the reasons I chose this gal to take them was that she was happy to take them all together—two mama and baby pairs, the two babies having never left our place, never been away from their families—I was glad, when they were shaking in anxiety in the horse trailer, that they were standing together, pressed close, not alone and separated. But still, yesterday and today I have felt both relieved and terribly sad.
Sophie was two when we first got Lucy and Fancy. Lucy was only eight weeks old. I would put Luc, barely walking, on my back and three of us would take our goats on walks through the forest every day. Over the next five years we mid-wived goat births, played with goat babies, learned to milk them, plus how to make different kinds of yoghurt and cheeses. When Luc got old enough he and Sophie would spend hours out in the goat yard playing with our growing herd, and since we stayed home a lot in those days, it was wonderful to have this source of fun and adventure right here in our yard.
The last year or so, however, more and more it has been me going out to feed and milk, as Sophie and Luc have grown into other interests. It isn’t that I wanted my kids to do more of the work—I enjoyed the work of it, exercise that benefited other creatures, plus being outside early in the quiet mornings, I liked all that, the smell and sounds of the barn—but taking care of the goats was becoming something I did away from my kids, instead of something I did with them. That wasn’t what I wanted. And although we all loved them, the kids want to go into town and play with friends more and more, rather than stay here at home, not to mention traveling, something I’ve never been comfortable doing with lactating goats. “Goats” was becoming an item on the incredibly crowded to-do list. But Fancy, Lucy, Emma, and Sally are people, not to-do list items!
So we talked about letting them move on, about our priorities, about what was best for them, for us, for Sophie, for Luc, for me. And we talked about it some more. And some more. And finally it seemed like it was time.
I went and sat in the barn on the empty milking-stand yesterday. There were still whirls in the straw on the ground where they had made their beds their last night there. But they’ve gone to a family with six children, horses, other goats, and dogs, a farm with pastures and barns, to a gal who grew up with goats and is comfortable with them, calling them “her babies.” I think they’ll be fine. I think I’ll be fine. But I miss them.
In the same week we sent our last chicken, Whitey, to live with my Aunt and her chickens. Whitey was our last chicken left standing, and it didn’t seem right to be a chicken on her own. Chickens want other chickens around, and we didn’t want to get more chicks. Sophie and I don’t eat eggs anymore and Luc increasingly won’t. Not to mention that Henry wants to chase them….
So our little micro-farm has been disbanded. For now anyway.
It’s so weird not to go out and milk goats in the morning! Weird not to be worrying about them on cold nights, or timing my day around when I have to be at the barn. Weird not to hear animal sounds from the barn out there. It’s so quiet!
All things pass. What will be our next adventure? Maybe bees again this spring. And maybe a few beds of greens….
Or maybe something else entirely.
Yesterday I walked by Luc spread out on the bed with a bunch of animal, dinosaur, and fish books, turning the pages in some kind of methodical search.
“Watcha doing?” I said, balancing a mountain of laundry with the skill of a circus performer.
“Well, I’m testing my hypothesis,” he said, only he pronounced it hypofosis. “That reptiles do not have compressed hair horns.”
I kind of did a slo-mo about-face. “Wha–?”
He kept turning pages. “Well, rhinoceroses have compressed hair for horns so they must be mammals, even though they have skin and armor like a dinosaur, but maybe reptiles would have to have bone horns, because they don’t have hair because they are reptiles. So I’m looking for skulls to see who has skulls with holes where the horns were, and who has bone skulls with bone horns. Because the hair horns would probably decompose but the bone horns would still be there, probably. See?”
Okay. This kid is six. He’s never been to school, loves video games and legos, is free to watch as much tv as he wants, and this is how he chooses to spend his morning. Plus, he correctly used hypothesis in a sentence and clearly understands and can apply the scientific method.
I think we can safely say that the unschooling is working.
And here’s one thing I’ve come to know in this unschooling life so far: kids free to follow their interests learn at the speed of light. There is no baggage in the way, baggage that says learning is boring, hard work, or full of someone else’s agenda. Stuff just flows into their heads unimpeded, connections are made, knowledge is easy.
Free the children! Free the children!
Here ends today’s public service annoucement.
And did you know that thing about rhino horns being hair? I didn’t.
In my late twenties, I studied astrology. I figured, if it worked, it meant there really was a plan, because for heaven’s sake (pun?), it makes no sense that the details of our lives could be linked in any meaningful way with the star patterns. I particularly liked Medieval Astrology, it’s so cut, dried, and predictive—they were all about life being predetermined back then, so their astrology was all about events, not personality. Your personality didn’t really factor into your fate. Maybe I liked it because Medieval Astrology was created by believers who thought it was a science. Those old writers were so certain of what they spake!
Anyway. Learning all that astrology was like learning another language. There are bits, saturn, cancer, fourth house. There are ways of linking those bits up, moon in taurus in the fifth house, conjunct the ascendant—this is a specific flavor an astrologer will know, just like “stacks of dishes and dirty diapers but a hummingbird lands on the feeder and its all okay for a moment” is a specific flavor a lot of moms will know. Then you can link the links up and get these complex sentences that add up to a person’s whole life….
My astrology teacher used to describe it like this: the cosmos has decreed that you are going to get X flavor at Y time, and you get a drop-down menu of options on how that flavor is going to express itself. Pick one. A Sun conjunct Neptune, for example, can be 1) loss of identity, 2) a drinking problem, 3) becoming lost in fantasy, 4) taking on a new religion, 5) becoming an artist. All similar in a “dissolving your sense of yourself into something larger” kind of way. You can see there is a continuum from enjoyable to problematic ways to express X so it behooves us, if at all possible, to select the option that is the most constructive use of that decree. Do the best you can with what you have to work with.
Pick an option from the list, or an option will be chosen for you.
I don’t think much about astrology these days but I find I still think this way: trying to select the best possible expression of the energy of the moment. If life is crazy, can it be a crazy party with silly adventure and costumes? I mean, instead of overwhelm and futile attempts at regaining control…? Or if life is feeling prosaic and, um, dull, can I stay home with tea and a pile of books and snuggle in for a quiet art-of-doing-nothing week? Rather than complaining about how nothing happens, being sad about my life choices, or buying a new car, haha…?
Anyway, I was thinking about this this morning, about the current drop-down menu. 1) Depression, 2) head-down-working-till-it-passes, 3) coffee, pushing through, ra ra ra!, then crash, 4) sitting in the forest not thinking, just listening, 5) playing with the kids, give my day over to them, to playdough and glitter glue and dress up. No solving problems, no getting stuff done, no heroic effort. Just hang out.
Different expressions of the energy of…no energy.
Guess what I picked.
Grimmly, over at his Ashtanga Vinyasa Krama blog turned me on to Heather Morton‘s backbending videos, and I thought I would give the first one a try, seeing as how I am pathologically afraid of becoming a hunchbacked old woman who can’t look up. Backbends are easily the weakest part of my practice, and, of course, Ashtanga’s Primary practice, which is what I do, has very little in the way of backbending work. I’ve expanded what there is using the David Williams trick of extended a lot of the Up Dogs by five breaths, instead of a single inhale, and this has done a lot to improve my ability to bend back, but I hit a plateau. So, when Grim was talking up this video I thought, okay. Let’s do this thing.
First off, mother of god, this woman has a flexible spine. I mean, she can do things SOPHIE can’t do. When Sophie is impressed with your backbend, you know you’ve got it going on. And she just stays and stays and stays in these anatomically impossible positions… Thankfully there isn’t too much of that in the first video, mostly doable stuff, hangbacks, cobra, locust, setu bandha, urdhva dhanurasana. I can do remedial versions of all of these, meaning, I can do them, I just can’t bend back very far in most of the (compared to Ms. Morton anyway), and man, she stays in them a long time. I actually would have appreciated just a touch more support for us backbending-challenged folks, just a mention of “beginners may stop here” or something. She does give a couple of variations for the basic hangback, but even her most basic is off the chart for me (at her duration, anyway) and a touch more help there would have been appreciated. She does offer many little verbal adjustments in her patter that are helpful in staying longer, and staying safe, and these, I think, are the video’s best strength.
But anyway, the length of her stays in these asana bring me to the title of this post. The emotions that come up when I try to do any of these long backbends are nuts. Panic. Anger in response to the panic. Flushes of heat then cold. And…well, PANIC. Panicky panic. It’s totally weird. I’m standing in my safe little yurt, my kids playing around me, bending back—and not very far may I add—and my body is shaking and breaking into cold sweats (not the regular work-out sort of sweat, more like when you are about to throw up, you know what I mean?) and I am freaking the fuck out, only quietly, to myself. All this after only a few breaths, no way can I stay in as long as she does, a few breaths and I’m done for. (I should mention I’m not talking about PAIN. I’m not doing anything that hurts.)
Is this typical for backbending? I know backbends affect the nervous system pretty strongly, so…maybe? Forward bends create the opposite in me, relaxation, sleepy ease, inward calm. If one physical position can create one kind of emotional/chemical response, it stands to reason a different physical position could create a different response. I just never expected anything so dramatic! Did I mention the panic?
Oh, and my muscles are WEAK. I thought I was doing okay, but holy cow, I’ve got burning achy muscles the next day after doing this vid. Maybe if I get some strength the shaking will go down…? I’m sticking with it but easing up a little because if it’s too intense, I’ll start dreading it. Must balance the motivation that comes with the excitement of doing something new, plus the motivation the comes from the ambition to do fancy poses, with the anti-motivation of trembling freak-outs. Too much anti-motivation, too much dread, and I just won’t get on the mat. This is the voice of experience talking.
Always something interesting going on in the practice.
And, not that I’ll EVER do anything like this, but here is Heather doing something…impossible.
For more of that, see her youtube channel. Watch out that your jaw doesn’t hit anything sharp when it hits the floor.
Ten gorgeous, whimsical, surprising sculptures made out of books and words were given this year to various libraries in Scotland, all anonymously. The beautiful pieces were left in nooks and windows and corners, to be found by librarians sometimes days later. Here are some teaser images….
This one has all kinds of tiny details, from the words floating in the cup of tea, “Nothing beats a nice cup of tea (or coffee) and a really good BOOK”, to the words in the teabag, “by leaves we live,” and more.
Part of a larger piece, a wing made of thousands of exquisitely crafted feathers.
A baby dragon, hatching out of a book egg!
I just love this whole story, the generosity of spirit, the playfulness. In a world full of self-promotion and “look at me!” to give such lovelies anonymously seems, well, kind of wonderful. At the same time I sort of hope the artist comes to light. I’d like to know more about this person, see more of her work, give her some joy back. I guess she’s getting that, though, privately, with all the press the pieces have gotten.
Read the whole story with lots and lots of photos of all ten pieces. Really, go read it! We read it this morning over breakfast and it made us all happy. What a gift.
I ran across this lovely short video about a single mom who, rather than work full-time-plus to pay rent on a house, built a tiny house out of a shipping container for herself and her daughter for $4000.
Our yurt is positively palatial in comparison! And comparison can be a real problem when you choose to not do the mainstream path—I’ve found I have to be really careful what two items I’m comparing. Setting our tiny, ramshackle wabi sabi complex of homemade buildings up against a big MacMansion with a room for every activity, well, the yurt starts to look kind of lame and crowded, and how dare I not have a pantry, how dare my kids not have their own rooms, this is ridiculous, how can we live like this? But compare our yurt to Lulu’s (in the video) shipping container, we have so much room! She paid about $4000 for her set up and we paid about $40,000 for ours. That was about $20,000 for the yurt kit, about $10,000 to build the bathhouse, about $7000 for installing a kitchen in the yurt, plumbing, and wiring the place for electricity, and $3000 for assorted fees and building permits. (That’s 2003 prices.) Add on several thousand a few years later to move the Noah House onto our property. And now we’re building the bedroom and I think we’re about $2000 in on that one… Anyway, it’s incredibly modest compared to the $300,000 houses in the development down the road, and incredibly RICH compared to Lulu’s $4000, 10 times as rich! Be careful who you compare to! If you must compare at all, pick comparisons that make you feel good, at least. But maybe don’t compare at all! That’s tough, though. We’re human, after all.
But even more important, perhaps, be careful WHAT you compare: my kids see their friends who have entire rooms all to themselves and they think, man, I want my own room. Luc has said many times, “when I grow up, I’m going to live in a mansion!” And I totally get that! (They’ll have their own space as our bootstrap building projects progress, but it’s a slow process.) But the choice isn’t as simple as “live in a tiny house” vs. “live in a big house.” We live in a tiny house, with a tiny mortgage, which means I don’t have to work, which means the kids can stay home and live lovely unschooling lives. So the real choice is “live in a tiny house and unschool” vs “live in a big house and go to school.” About which the kids are very clear which choice they prefer.
Lulu says it in the video, that she would rather live in this tiny, wabi sabi house and be with her daughter while she’s young, than to work full time and lose that. You only have so many hours allotted to you (and you don’t know how many till they’re gone). Do I want to spend them at work, paying for a big house? Or do I want to spend them with my kids? No question there. Kids win, hands down.
As Lulu says, a big house can be nice, but who says you can’t have a great childhood without such a luxury?
For a really nice description of wabi sabi, try this page.
Thanks Lulu, for making this video! It helped me remember some of the reasons we got into this tiny house thing to begin with.
I ate macrobiotically (is that a word?) for a while in my twenties and I hated every minute of it. I tried to like it. I really did. And there were a few nice meals in there, I’ll admit, in two years, there were a couple of times when it was okay. But really, I ate food I didn’t like for almost two years and that just totally sucked as a lifestyle. Plain brown rice, sauteed greens, miso, honesty now, I did not like any of that stuff, at all. But I soldiered on because I’d read all these people who were doing it saying how much they had grown to like it all. If you just stick with it, they said, however improbable it may seem, cooked greens would start to taste good. No really. I would just start thinking plain millet , plain brown rice, plain cooked squash, all that stuff, was delicious. I’d start to like it, if I just stayed the course.
This never happened.
Once I got out of that quagmire, I swore that I would never again eat food I didn’t like. Never.
When Paul met me, he said I ate like a cockroach. Okay, there was probably a bit of backlash.
Then, a few months ago, I started doing the green smoothie thing. I also read some raw vegan stuff, because the green smoothie is kind of a mainstay of theirs. And here we go again, over and over raw folk were saying your taste buds change, cooked food, animal products, all of it, it will start to taste bad. You will start to crave the green stuff—raw this time, but still, this is the same wacko line as before, isn’t it? Does anyone really, actually, seriously, like salad?
Here’s the thing: it’s only been a little while, what, maybe eight weeks or something since I started with the smoothies? But lately, I’ve been finding myself wanting, nay, craving, SALAD. And not just any salad, not the salad I used to eat loaded up with feta and/or blue cheese dressing and/or heaps of chedder, with a couple of lettuce leaves underneath it all, groaning under the weight of my dairy “salad.” No. I want a dinner plate with a mountain of baby greens, maybe a few raisins, a splash of dressing, and that’s it. And I want it almost every day.
What is happening to me? I nibbled the kid’s ham sandwich yesterday and it was like YUCK. The grease on my tongue felt gross.
ME? Turning down HAM?
I don’t know why it didn’t take with the macro thing. Maybe it was all the weird foods, umeboshi, wakame, etc. Maybe, as the raw people say, it was because all that stuff was cooked. I’m still committed to not eating anything I don’t like. But now, I’ve the green smoothie thing for breakfast and then a giant omg-r-u-really-going-to-eat-all-that salad for lunch. Greens are taking me over, like some kind of alien infestation.
They said it would happen. But I did not believe them. I’ve heard all that crap before. Yeah, yeah, thought I, I’ll become so virtuous I’ll be one of those people who smile beatifically while they eat their rabbit food. I’ll probably wear a fucking halo. Right.
Did you know you get brand new taste buds every seven days or so? Seriously. I’m coming to believe it. Anyway, my taste buds have certainly changed. And in just a few weeks. I mean, I’m gobbling salad. ME. And if MAYA LASSITER comes to like greens, then clearly the END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH. Or, possibly, there is something to this raw food, green smoothie, revolution, after all.
Hey, if any of y’all try this, let me know!
And, you know, I might, probably, rebound. You might find me twitching in a corner, covered in pizza and pasta and chocolate cookies. I’m not making any pronouncements, not taking on any labels. I’m just reporting that after a couple months of drinking a head of lettuce/spinach/kale/chard every morning (plus a couple bananas, an apple, and maybe some berries), I’m craving salad, me, reaching over and picking out the greens from Paul’s plate, just like I’m a goat.
So that’s…weird.
I’ll keep you posted.
We went to my grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving, over the river and through the woods—we used to sing that song when I was a kid and we were making the trip to her place. It’s the small town my father and two aunts grew up in, birth to high-velocity escape post high school. None of the three of them now live there, they’ve scattered, not too far, but far enough. For years we all went “home” for holidays, then for years we didn’t, and now, with Grandma in her late eighties and not doing so well, we seem to be returning again, with a sense of nostalgia and the real possibility that each time might be the last.
It’s a beautiful town, once an active port town with lovely historical district, and a waterfront full of amazing old cypress trees.
This is the view right off the edge of the old town square, ancient canons still in place for tourists to snap photos on, no railing, just a sudden drop off into water and rocks and a dead fish the kids were mightily interested in. I love old cypress with their knees and their improbable life out in the middle of the water.
We got there just at sunset, long shadows, everything gold and red. Here is Luc in part of his pirate costume and his amazing hair:
Shadows don’t get any longer than that! You can see some of the lovely old houses that line the waterfront road in that one, and in this one:
Look at those venerable old crepe myrtles and two hundred year old houses! They’re old by American standards, anyway. I always think about how many slaves must have kept these huge old houses running back in the day. I’m not supposed to think about this, but I do. The houses in these pictures are small compared to the truly amazing houses a few blocks over, gorgeous old mansions right on the water. Gigantic compared to the tiny mill houses, so small you can see clear through them, a couple of blocks in the other direction, tiny whole houses that would fit inside my yurt. They’ve been recently gentrified and look adorable now, but they probably housed multi-generational families of mill workers a hundred years ago. Any beautiful old southern town is full of these contradictions. I read an amazing book written by a runaway slave, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the diary of a woman who lived in hiding in this very town in a space the size of a small closet for seven years. A short history of her life is here, but I highly recommend her book, it’s free at the above link.
My granddaddy lived his whole life in this town. He fought for civil rights in this town. There was standing room only at his funeral, people of all colors filling up the aisles. Put your back to those big houses and you see the water again and the two old cypress where his ashes are scattered. You can just make them out on the horizon behind that closer pair. We boated out, drank some of his homemade scuppernong wine and remembered him while we sprinkled his body in the tea-colored water. I always think of him when I see those trees. Contradictions, packed tight in one 360 degree view.
Isn’t Sophie beautiful in this light? She’s never lived here—neither have I—but I wonder if this place will have any trace of the feeling of “home” for her? Probably not. She’s a yurt girl, her and Luc a mongrel mix of Paul’s Southwest Spanish and Apache, plus my poor Southern farmer and a dab of Cherokee for flavor. But some of her genes came from this place. It’s good to go back and remember all these things. Where will my kids call home when they are my age?
- MAYA LASSITER is a writer of fantasy novels, an unschooling mom, a yogini, a goat keeper, a yurt dweller, and an all-around cool person. Except when she's a boring ninny. Hopefully she won't post on those days.
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today's yoga practice
- sunday
February 6, 2012 | 10:06 amFull Primary with Sharath’s CD.
- friday
February 3, 2012 | 7:17 pmIntermediate to Tittibasana, Swensized versions of most of it. Felt wonderful. I think I might start doing this more often.
- thursday
February 3, 2012 | 7:15 pmFull Primary.
- wednesday
February 1, 2012 | 11:58 amFull Primary.
- tuesday
February 1, 2012 | 11:57 amSKIP!
SHAME. -
Archive for today's yoga practice »
- sunday
twitterage
"stefan grossman is the real deal, if you ask me: I’m still playing my little parlor guitar most evenings, someti... http://t.co/f897eh7Y"yesterday"another overheard conversation: Luc is sitting on a skateboard, rolling through the yurt, la la la, thinking abo... http://t.co/HsEh0jqg"3 days ago"a conversation overheard: Luc is fascinated by war games. Playing “army men” with a thousand little people, anim... http://t.co/iTMt9FlN"3 days ago"the SS Novel 2012 is underway: This past Sunday I officially started a new novel. [Fireworks!] It had been so lo... http://t.co/8JD1fF3O"6 days ago"like i needed a second daily yoga practice: Because my days are just adrift with wide open spaces of nothing to ... http://t.co/VmqJCuXp"8 days ago
"Dusi's Wings" April, 2003. . . .
"One thing fantasy can do for us is to give shape to the mysterious in the world; another is to make emotional yearning concrete. The early sections of "Dusi's Wings" do just that...there was a strong grasping towards the spiritual in fantasy here that was very promising, and I look forward to reading more by Lassiter." --review, Tangent Online.
