Singing for our Lives

Last Thursday night, Nashville in Harmony performed it's season finale concert, "Mosaic...Voices for Change." I was honored to be on the stage with 97 other performers whom I consider family. We were joined by 4 spoken word performance artists from Southern Word and Gregory Stallings, an inspiring young vibraphonist and son of one our members.

We left everything on the stage. In talking with several chorus members, they are still recuperating from the physical, emotional and spiritual experience.

Our message was strong, clear and challenging...today's youth needs our support more than ever, every voice counts, be a change agent in the face of adversity and do not allow bullying to continue its erosion of our community. This message was inspritational for most, but challenging and uncomfortable for others. I view their discomfort as progress. When we speak the truth with love and tenacity, it should make people who are sitting in the shadows squirm in their seats.

My greatest hope is that they'll be compelled to act for we are not only singing for our lives, but for the lives of our children.

When "it" was a pronoun

There are days when it seems I have an ok handle on IT and Social Networking applications. And then there are days when trying to get: 1)this tag or 2)that button or 3)a blinking link on the Penuel Ridge website or email marketing campaign or Facebook page makes my head explode.

When will the cranial plug-in be functional so that what I think will appear on the screen?

Is there an app for that?

Have I lived in the woods so long that all the IT knowledge has blown past me at 80 mph on the freeway in a shiny red sports car?

Shit.

Shadow Selves

Do you feel it too, a presence in the air that doesn't have a shape or form, but is there nonetheless? A few days ago, someone referred to "it" as "shadow selves" coming out in people so they can be seen, dealt with and released.

Maybe more explanation is warranted. I see people acting in ways uncharacteristic to their normal way of being. I hear people saying things they would not normally say out loud; hateful, biting, hurtful things usually locked up in their heads.

Maybe that's it. Maybe so much has been held in and not spoken or acted upon that the pressure valve has to be released or their heads will explode.

I've a not-so-charming habit of saying what's on my mind, even when it might have been prudent to keep it to myself. When I do manage to leave "it" unsaid, "it" shows on my face. No, I'll never do well at the poker table.

Maybe it's the heat? Maybe it's a shift in the Universe? Maybe the world needs a collective colonic.

For me, I'm going to tiptoe quietly through this minefield of human expression gone gritty.

I'm suddenly reminded of a quote, "We don't see the things as they are, we see things as we are."

If that be the case, then maybe I should be an observer of how I'm expressing myself in the world.

Dang it...might be time for another ah-ha moment.

Independence Day

Stuck in the muck of mediocrity.

That's how it feels to be me at the moment. This is the time of year when I go deep, to shine light on that which is ready to be released, a declaration of independence of sorts.

This usually results in a list, a renewed sense of purpose, swelling passion to propel me to the other side of now.

Problem is...it's not coming to me as readily as in years past. This may call for a turning inward with flashlight in hand to ferret out what might be hiding in the shadows.

Hmmm...

Life Marches On

Yesterday I became a great aunt. Today I found a hair growing out of my chin. It seems I'm entering the Crone phase of my life. Then why am I still ovulating?

Silence

Since moving to the retreat center in 2005, silence has become a welcomed part of my daily existence. Having moved from the center of the nation's 4th largest city, it took a while to embrace silence, both aurally and emotionally. But embrace it I did, except for today.

When there's a retreatant in the main retreat house who chooses to be in silence during their stay I too am in silence by default. Miss Mocha finds this silly and picks the most inopportune moments to take her squeakiest toy upstairs and give it a good workout. So there she is squeaking away and I'm shushing her while the retreatant is giggling in her room. So much for silence!

I had both arms wrapped lovingly around silence today, until about noon. By then, I was about the climb the walls wanting to hear music, dialogue, the sound of a raindrops on the window pane. I'm not sure why today was any different than past times when it was the breaking of silence that unnerved me, but I confess on this Sabbath day that something's niggling me under the surface.

Most likely, the contributing factor to my can't-sit-still-in-my-seat condition is the anticipated death of my biological father. He's been diagnosed with colon cancer, that's spread to his liver, lungs and lymph nodes in his chest. He's under hospice care in Austin, with my sister acting as primary caregiver.

We've been estranged for more than 20 years. I'd like to think I can get to a place of forgiveness before he dies. Time for some meditation and healing and maybe a visit to Austin.

Rules for the Dance

Scansion, macron and breve...OH MY!

I'm up to my elbows unlocking the door to reading and writing metrical verse. I know, stop with the sexy talk.

Seriously, this is fun and it involves math and maybe even a little music. Anything that can make me buddy up to math isn't all that bad, considering I've held a grudge against it since the 2nd grade.

"Rules for the Dance", a book by Mary Oliver, is both technical and inspirational.

Not to worry...I'll still be cranking out the free verse, but it's good to stretch the brain and appreciate works from another era.

I wonder though which came first...the rules or the verse?

Seriously Y'all...

Yesterday, I was evaluated for vocational aptitude. The testing took 3 hours and covered math skills, spelling, reading comprehension, vocabulary, spacial relations, hand dexterity skills, etc... Believe it or not, this is part of the a program I've applied to that would pay for knee replacement surgery. It's really a proactive program based on the premise that the state would spend less money providing restorative medical care to folks than having to pay out social security, disability and housing for the rest of our natural lives. Job training and placement after the restorative medical care is part of the program. That's all fine and good except I already have a job and restorative medical care will help me keep my job and housing.

I was concerned about being tested for math. It wasn't my strongest subject in school and I actually considered buying some flash cards to brush up. Pause for a moment and have a seat at the multiplication table without a calculator. See? I shouldn't have been so concerned. I whizzed through the addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division problems. Then I froze. Before me were fractions, percentages, problems involving fractions and percentages, solving for "n", solving for "y", solving for "x" and then the dreaded pi (and I don't mean apple). The room went dark, I saw stars and thought I was going to faint. I looked at the kind-hearted state employee in charge of the testing and mouthed the word "help".

Sweaty palms and a dry mouth didn't deter me. We plowed through his neat pile of papers and then we came to what I can best describe as a questionnaire. A list of 60 or so statements that I would read and then indicate whether the statement was: a) very much like me, b) somewhat like me, c) not like me at all. The focus of the questions seemed to be skewed toward learning/study habits, i.e. "I like to learn in a room with bright lights." or "I like to sit at a desk when I am studying." You get the drift. So I'm plowing through these soul-revealing questions when I get to one that causes me to burst out laughing and utter, "You have got to be kidding me!" Here's the statement:

"Lifting and moving things helps me show others how strong I am."

Seriously y'all...it took a few minutes to recover from that one. I was so throwed off I answered "a" instead of "c".

But I've saved the best for last...the Manual Speed and Dexterity test. Seriously y'all...I asked the dude if I could have a copy of it to post on my blog, but he firmly said, "no". The best way I can describe it is ugly geometric wallpaper from the 70's. A patter sort of like this:

v

^

*

v

^

*

v

^

*

v

This pattern was printed vertically on the page, 28 sets of these inverted V's and 19 rows of them running left to right. (really sorry I don't have the visual for you). Anyway...the instructions were for me to draw a vertical line from the bottom of the v to the top of the inverted v as many times as I could in a 5 minute period. Seriously y'all...I just looked at the dude and asked, "really?" He said, "yeah." So off I went, drawing straight lines, the whole time talking to the testing dude and letting him know what I'd really like to do is draw some diagonal lines, maybe a few flowers and a smiley face. Testing dude was amused.

So...after 3 hours of testing, the end result was I had the greatest aptitude in the following professions:

1. Poet

2. Fish and Game Warden

3. Radio/TV Announcer

Seriously y'all...could that not be more perfect?

Answers, I Have Answers!

Show of hands...how many of you sat in Philosophy 101, freshman year of college, pondering the following:

"If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

OK...you can put your hand down now. The answer is........NO!

My enlightenment unfolded as follows:

Driving home last Sunday, I was anticipating pulling into the gravel drive to see a herd of deer grazing in the open meadow to my left. This is not a daily occurrence but it was one of those classic Tennessee evenings where mist was hanging thick, turning the dusk-before-dark air into a glowing white billowing sheet. The deer are inclined to leave the protection of the woods when they are shrouded in this mist. Anyway, I pull into the drive, turn on my high beams and what do I see before me, not deer, but a very large, very old tree fallen across the meadow.

Yikes!!!!! My immediate thought was for the safety of the 20 people who had been there all afternoon and evening for a retreat. I carefully drove down the meadow to get a better look, praying under my breath that I wouldn't find a body or vehicle trapped underneath. Hindered by the mist and a soggy meadow from a very wet spring, I decided to retreat to the house for a little fact finding.

All was quiet, everything was in order, there were no notes, voicemail messages or emails announcing that anything out of the ordinary had happened, like the toppling of a 40 foot tree. This puzzled me. I went over the events of the day in my head. Slept in late (till around 9:00), hung out at the retreat house all morning, prepared for the arrival of guests at 2:00, left the retreat center at 3:00 for chorus rehearsal. Yep, nothing out of the ordinary there and no big crashing noises. The sleuth in me deduced that the tree must have fallen between the time the guests left at 7:30 and I arrived home at 8:00. Hmm.

Not satisfied with my sleuthing, I checked in with the guest who was staying in the small cabin at the edge of the woods. I asked her if she knew what had happened and her eyes got big as she said to me, "I heard a big crack at about 7:30 this morning, then there was dead silence followed by a whooshing sound, then a crash!." She continued, "I didn't realize what it was until I went to my car around noon. It's a good thing it fell where it did or my car would be pancake!"

I'm sorry...did you say 7:30 this morning? Holy Nancy Drew, I slept through the whole thing, had gone about my day picturing the world around me intact, not knowing someone had advanced the carousel in this slide show!

Now I have to rethink this whole philosophical question. Is the answer NO? Well, from my experience of that day, YES. From the experience of guest who heard the tree fall, the answer is YES. So I guess the answer is....

IT DEPENDS.

Life's funny like that.

and the dish ran away with the...

I am baffled.


When was another utensil added to the standard place setting at the dinner table? Fork to the left, empty space in the middle for the plate, knife and spoon to the right nestled atop a neatly folded napkin and to the right of that, a cell phone.


Apparently, modern society has added the cell phone as an essential mealtime tool, but that's not what has me baffled.


When did we transfer our personal power to the ring tone? Or more importantly, to the person dialing our cell phone number? When did responding to a ring tone become an involuntary reflex like breathing or blinking or digesting a meal?

I Screamed

My good buddy J and I went to dinner last night. After a spicy Korean meal that left our sinus cavities twinging, there was only one thing to do...eat ice cream!

We stopped at the local Baskin-Robbins and discovered this:



To our left we see the "Whirl of Change" flavor, peanut-nougat ice cream whirled with chunks of chocolate-covered peanut brittle and a caramel ribbon.



Over there on the right is the "Straight Talk Crunch" with caramel ribbon, chocolate pieces, candy red states and crunchy mixed nuts swirled into white chocolate ice cream.

Since I intend to vote early this week, I thought it appropriate to put my voting reflex to a test. There they were, side-by-side and the dude behind the counter was anxiously awaiting my decision. He muttered under his breath, "The Straight Talk Crunch is no good. That red candy leaves a bad taste in your mouth."

"A scoop of Whirl of Change please," shot out of my mouth quicker than a too hot potato. I blew the smoke off the end of my trigger finger and dug in.

For the record, change tastes very, very good.

In Search of...

One of my daily reads is Hahn at Home. Lori is re-entering the dating scene and asked her readers for assistance in composing a personal ad. The entries are in and #5 contained the best question I've ever read:

"Will you drive out in the dark of night to find me a pain pill/ice cream/thesaurus?"

If she finds a woman who can truthfully answer 'yes' to that question and do it without being asked, she has hit the jillpot!

Good luck Lori.

The Secret to the Life I Live

Brian Andreas makes me laugh and cry and sometimes ponder the mysteries of life. He's a wry, quirky, talented writer/illustrator whose words speaks for me when I have none . Today, I was browsing through his website and stubbed my toe on the following:

The Secret to the Life I Live:

The sound of what cannot be seen

sings within everything that can

and there is nothing more to it than that.

So I ask you, what is the secret to the life you live? Feel free to leave a comment. If this is too heavy for you to contemplate, something silly will do just as well.

Oh, you can check out his website here.

The Water Between Us

When I was a child I lay in bed at night and looked out at these
islands. "There's no sense sailing to San Miguel," my father always said. "There's nothing out there." Sometimes when the wind shifted and blew in from the southwest I could hear seals barking and a sound like women singing, and I wanted to swim to San Miguel. It stood for the separateness I felt from my family, for the mystery of how identity is formed. Now I find I can't say I am one thing without saying I am another: as these islands are defined by their relationship to the coast, so is my sense of aloneness rooted in the context of family, and because of it, I knew the ways in which I was different, and how the "water between us" could be bridged by what we share.

It is not my custom to use this blog as a forum to articulate the merits (or lack thereof) of books, music, art, etc... The way I see it, all genres of expression are subjective and what resonates in me may not resonate in you, heck, it might downright repulse you.

This blog started out with an excerpt from the book "Island, The Universe, Home" by Gretel Ehrlich. I didn't read this book, I ingested it and in less than 48 hours. Yes, it resonated with me, particularly this passage.

I think it's safe to say we've all felt, at one time or another, disenfranchised from our family, that they didn't understand us, we didn't speak the same language, they were from another planet, I had to be adopted, etc... For me, this passed as life experience and a little wisdom crept into the creases of my know-it-all brain, but in reading this today, I realized the water between me and my family is getting harder and harder to bridge because we share so little.

This bugs me.

Meeting Myself Coming and Going

A friend is grieving. Her grief is being exacerbated by the behavior of the deceased's adult children. But this post is not about her, you see I ran smack into myself, listening to her share accounts of their actions. She doesn't understand why, less than 24 hours after their father's death, they've had a dumpster delivered to his house for a literal and metaphorical purging.

My father and I have been estranged for more than 20 years. I recently saw him at a family wedding and once again appreciated the decision I'd made. I wonder how I will react when he dies, what relationships (healthy or otherwise) he's formed over the last two decades and how my reaction may impact those who are closest to him. Will reconciliation come? Do I even want reconciliation?

I think about my step-father, who died a year and a half ago. My mother was his third wife. He had children from his first marriage, but shared very little about them. From what I was able to learn, his children were estranged from him by their choice. He was such a wonderful father figure to me, I can't imagine what could have happened to create that void, but it existed.

So...here I sit, wondering.

Bubbleville

Hello Everyone, Laura asked me to be one of her guest bloggers while she has her hands full with Penuel Ridge responsibilities. Being one of her EastWord writer's group friends, I was happy to say "yes".

I'd like to share a writing spawned from a conversation we had two months ago at writer's group. I kept this a secret from everyone for 3 or 4 years until the subject of "living in a bubble" came up on this particular evening. I was inspired to speak up because of Laura who bravely shared one of her childhood bubble secrets. Thanks, Laura, for inspiring me to talk and to write about my embarrassing realization...



Bubbleville

Imagine my horror. Imagine the look on my face. Imagine the feeling in the pit of my stomach. Imagine the anger, and imagine my utter embarrassment that night as I sat in front of my big screen TV watching that movie. It was one of Michael Moore's controversial documentaries. Which one I don't remember. (Bowling For Columbine maybe?) But what I DO remember is the 10 minute American history lesson that was similar to a commercial in the middle of the movie. It was an animated account, similar to a South Park snippet, of how white men back in US history set sail toward Africa, kidnapped the local residents, and brought them to the US for the sole purpose of using them as slaves on their plantations.

I kept rewinding and reviewing that portion of the movie over and over. I was absolutely stunned that I had lived to be 47 years old and did not know this. I may have been just as perplexed at the fact that as a person with above average intelligence and a 4 year college degree I had never even been CURIOUS about how slaves got here. Yes, an hour before that movie I could have told you slaves were African, but if you had asked how those Africans came to America I suppose I would have said "the same way the white man did". And I would have been right - to an extent.

Knowing this about my past might make it easier to believe this as well: I was born and raised during the Civil Rights era and that, too, is not a memory of mine. But let's keep our focus for now on the "Where'd the slaves come from?" elephant in the room.

How CAN someone who was born and educated in the early portion of the second half of the 20th Century come out of it not having learned such a critical part of US history? I must have been living in quite the airtight bubble.

Was it imposed or self-imposed? Was every student in my high school in the same big bubble? Or was this one of my own sub-set bubbles? Did my history teacher choose to skim over the topic or was it missing from the text? Was I living in Bubbleville instead of Chapel Hill? Did my parents choose not to bring it to my attention at home for the same reasons they never brought the JFK or MLK assassinations to my attention? Was it protection? Apathy? If they passed up "teachable moments" such as those, then how could I expect them to bring up something from the past?

Could it be that it's as much my fault for not knowing as it is anyone else's? As an adult looking back I recognize that my childhood was a sheltered one. And I am grateful to my parents, for the most part, for that. And I know I wasn't an A student with boundless curiosity for things outside myself, outside my bubble.

But do you think any of this has to do with the fact that I was raised in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, at the time a rural community of approximately 800 people south of the Mason/Dixon line and not far from Pulaski, Tennessee, the hometown of the Ku Klux Klan? And do you think it has anything to do with the fact that I went to Forrest School for 12 years?

Yes, that's Forrest with two Rs, as in Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Thanks, Laura, for letting me fill in and rant a bit in your absence.

Peace To All,
Cathy Purdom
7-7-08

Posture

I've been thinking about posture lately. Not the "sit up straight young lady or you'll get a hump in your back" kind of posture but the metaphorical posture we take with others, whether it be intellectual, emotional and yes, sometimes physical.

Is this a hard-wired homosapien trait or the remnants of a caste system we as a nation claim to abhor? This oneupsmanship seems to me an exhausting way to live.

This is what I want...to be fully present with others in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Is that too much to ask?

Real and False Selves

...an excerpt from Seeds by Thomas Merton

At the heart of Merton's spirituality is his distinction between our real and false selves. Our false selves are the identities we cultivate in order to function in society with pride and self-possession; our real selves are a deep religious mystery, known entirely only to God. The world cultivates the false self, ignores the real one, and therein lies the great irony of human existence: the more we make of ourselves, the less we actually exist.

"The more we make of ourselves, the less we actually exist." Kinda rubs up against manifest destiny and the American way wouldn't you say?

Guess Where I've Been?

Makes you wanna cry!

What Is To Come

When I awoke this morning, the sky was again gray. A dim light behind the clouds assured me Helios, crowned by the shining aureole of the sun, was on course. As the morning progressed, the sky grew darker, denser and threatening. After being up a few hours, I opted to return to bed with a cup of coffee, muffin and a good book. Mocha was kind enough to share my bed with me. Her residual body heat warmed me as I snuggled under the thick comforter.

The luxury of time to read, write and contemplate has been mine since moving to Tennessee. I've squandered this gift at times, but today am immersed in a timely and important book that would serve us all well to read:

Authors Susan Kuner, Carol Matzkin Orsborn, Linda Quigley and Karen Leigh Stroup dare to propose we shift our perception of life-threatening and chronic illness from a battle to a doorway through which we can walk into a life lived fully. All four women are initiates of breast cancer. Their intimate and poignant stories translate well to the experiences, questions and struggles with any disease that enters our lives uninvited.

As I gaze out the window in my sitting room, goldfinches, cardinals, chickadees, tufted titmice, nuthatches and woodpeckers are feeding feverishly. I've grown to trust their prognostication skills over meteorologists. Their rush to fuel up tells me snow is coming, and soon.

Wrap yourself in warmth and embrace the gift of today.