Or so says the note on my teabag this afternoon (love Yogi Tea for Meditation and their thought-provoking teatag quotations). It came at a good time, at a moment when I’m feeling rather finite and hampered by so so so much that need to get done.
This rose is blooming in my garden right now and has a delicious grapefruit-rosy scent. Unlimited, indeed.
John was sorting through a bunch of memorabilia last night that his mother shipped down to us. She’s downscaling and cleaning out the garage.
It occurred to me as I saw John’s name on various articles, awards and papers, that his name is still the same as when he was a young’un (duh, but it was the first time I’d really felt the implications of that). When I see my name on the items from my youth, it feels like relics from a different person’s life–that of the girl known as Jana Bouck.
I love my married name. I love it so much that I never for a second even considered keeping my given name (it’s French, it’s short, it’s easy to spell!). But it hadn’t hit me before…the loss of continuity from my girlhood self.
Jana Bouck is relegated to the dusty boxes on our storage shelves. Jana Remy is me.
PS: I think this is the first time I’ve written out my first and last names on my blog. That ought to send the search engines spinning my way with greater accuracy…(hoping I won’t regret it…)
This weekend I scraped off the tattered bumper stickers from our car (Another Family for Peace, Live Simply so Others May Simply Live, and Just Say YES to Equal Marriage Rights) and put on three new ones. One of them, “Question Authority,” was John’s first choice. The others: a large peace symbol and “Consume Less, Share More” were more of my choosing.
However I had a musing this morning that affirms the significance of the “Question Authority” slogan for me. As I was writing a comment on John’s post about the temple ceremony portrayal on the HBO show “Big Love,” I had a strong flashback of something that happened many years ago but almost made me cry as I recalled it today.
I’m not someone who has a strong tie to talismans, but I do find that certain items bring back a lot of memories. For example, I can tell you when and where I’ve acquired every item of furniture, or books, or the plants in my garden…I love the stories of “things” (which is probably why I love my chosen profession so much).
Many years ago John gave me a simple pair of earrings that had small white flowers dangling from them. I will emphasize the small part (I’d say there were about 4-5mm in diameter). Now those of you who’ve read my New Era story know that part of my affinity for flowers and gardens comes from a particular moment with my Dad when he gave me encouragement after my amputation surgery. So these small earrings that John gave me I wore to my Dad’s funeral and then every time after that it was in some small way linking me to my Dad and to that special moment that we shared. I took to wearing these earrings to the temple, given that they matched my white clothing nicely and because they reminded me of how special my Dad was to me and they represented my carrying his memory with me in a symbolic way. It seems silly now as I write this, but it was important to me at that time–I’d grieved so deeply when he died.
So one day when I was stepping out of the dressing room at the temple and going to the area to wait for the next endowment session a female temple worker stopped me and told me that my earrings were inappropriate and I would have to remove them before I could pass into the ordinance areas of the temple. I questioned her lightly about why and explained that I’d worn them frequently in the temple before. “No dangly earrings are allowed,” she said firmly.
I went back to my locker and curled up and cried as I took off the earrings. I don’t know what has happened to them since then and I don’t remember ever wearing them again.
So many things in my life have happened that are beyond my control…the loss of my leg, the loss of loved ones, and a lifetime of related health problems. And for much of my life I submitted the dictums of LDS authority, surrendering much of the control of my life to the sometimes-arbitrary though often-institutionalized leadership of the church. Perhaps this is why I have some ‘control issues‘ now. There’s a headiness to being able to chart my own course and decide what I will wear and when, or what I will drink, or where I will spend my Sunday mornings.
And today I put on these earrings before I even knew I’d be writing this post. They are reminding me of flowers, family, and how much some things change and how much some things stay the same.
UPDATE: As I was teasing back the layers of this memory while I ate lunch on my back porch (love the new table!!), I remembered one more very salient detail: the temple experience happened during a time when John did not hold a temple recommend (because of his loss of belief) and I was going to the temple alone. The earrings were a tie from me to him to my father (a man whom he had loved and respected so much). Again, such a small thing, but it’s funny to remember how badly I was already wounded then and I was struggling to find comfort in the smallest of object and rituals. Of course I didn’t stop being LDS because some stranger didn’t like my earrings. But I was so fragile then and it couldn’t help but contribute to my feelings of sorrow, of loss, of doubt, and of weariness with a tradition that no longer gave me the strength for my journey.
I was reading a bit of Thoreau this morning (for a research proposal that I’m drafting) and came across this passage…
We have complicated our lives by seeking so much more than is needed: “From the cave we advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and bough, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we do not know what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think…We no longer camp as if for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”
The design of our “shelter” has become superfluously complex and so expensive that it bankrupts our very existence: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” To Thoreau’s way of thinking, how much better it is not to own a house–only to be enslaved to its care and upkeep–but to feel “at home everywhere” and anywhere! “Rise free from care before the dawn and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. . . .Enjoy the land, but own it not.”
Can someone help me figure out what this blog is about?
Is it about being Mormon (or not)?
About living simply?
About an atypical OC family?
About all the world that’s found in a flower photo?
About procrastinating one’s dissertation writing?
About a girl who hasn’t yet figured out that she’s all grown up now?
If you order a pair of pants and they turn out to be just a bit on the small side (as in, they fit and you can breathe, but they are definitely ‘snug’). Do you send them back for a size that would be a bit roomier–maybe even too roomy? Or do you hold on to them with the assumption that you’ll soon lose enough weight for them to fit well?
This passage moved me today, as I contemplated those experiences in our lives that result in a shift of faith. From Aaron Sach’s The Humboldt Current
For much of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson kept a print of Mt. Vesuvius hanging in the front entryway of his house. He had actually climbed the great volcano once and made a point of noting the sensation of warmth in his soles and the experience of peering down at the caldera, “the hollow of salt and sulphur smoking furiously beneath us.”…Perhaps it was meant to inspire him to live with more fire and intensity, to embrace the present–to imagine that at any instant, like the villagers of Pompeii and Herculaneum, he too might be swallowed by ash and frozen in place.
Emerson started living for the moment when he started losing his faith. He started losing his faith when his wife started to die, in the fall of 1830, when he was twenty-seven. Before Ellen, the church had been his world; now his buttresses were fracturing. Deprived of his imagined future, he tried to savor every present moment with her. When she slept, he read, to distract himself…Facing utter aloneness, he turned not to God but to the physical world. Through much of Western society, science was beginning to challenge religion, and, from now on, immersion in nature would anchor Emerson’s philosophy.
Within two months, Ellen was dead. Emerson felt a void that could not be healed by any eventual salvation. He couldn’t live in the future tense. Within two years, he had left his pulpit. A couple of years after that, he would start writing his first book: Nature
.
During the months between Ellen’s death and his decision to abandon the church, Emerson reached a watershed in his intellectual an spiritual explorations. In March 1832, on one of his daily visits to Ellen’s tomb, he suddenly ripped the lid off her coffin and stared at her remains. Then, pondering ashes and dust, he urged his congregation, in consecutive sermons, to focus on the “virtues,” even the “pleasures,” that were near at hand…He exclaimed: “Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.”
Pic above is mine of Emerson’s gravesite (flanked by his second wife Lidian and their daughter Ellen) at Sleepy Hollow cemetery
I keep vacillating between getting another haircut or growing it out. Not the world’s most important decision, but…
during the summer it’s always nice to have hair long enough for a ponytail,
but then again, short hair dries so much faster when one is swimming often.
I think for now, my lack of decision means that it’s growing out. But I’m not sure I’m really committed to it. I saw a vid of me teaching the last time I had long hair and I realized that my hair is just so fine & thin that it doesn’t really look healthy when it’s long. When short it has much more body. So what to do?
Being a crunchy-granola gal, I’ve tried in all kinds of ways to reduce my carbon footprint and overconsumption of resources, including water. But I have to say that it’s just agony for me to go without a daily shower. I’ve been experimenting with “skipping a day” and that whole day that I do, I feel off-kilter and gross. I don’t particularly want to spend time with non-familial humans when I haven’t showered. And running my hands through my day-old hair grosses me out.
I’m all for re-wearing clothes until they’re dirty, but I think I’m a big fat FAIL at not bathing. Like when I saw Heather’s post today, I realized, wow, the only times I’ve gone three days without bathing have involved hospitalization (meaning: I’ve had surgery and couldn’t).
My difficulty with not showering might be a result of my uber-sensitive nose–if I don’t want to sit next to me because of the unwashed smell, it’s pretty tough to feel normal. Of course it might just be that I’m a particularly greasy-stinky human and so I have to bathe more than most people.
What do you think? Any sympathy or advice for this shower-addict?
Did that crazy meme where you do a google search to see what you need (to play along, enter “[your name] needs” into google and report your findings). My top 10 hits:
1) Jana needs psychotropic medications
2) Jana needs A Home
3) Jana needs your help
4) Jana needs to get her ass back to new york
5) Jana needs a bang trim
6) Jana needs the help
7) Jana needs at least version 1.4 of Java®
8) Jana needs to find that peace and soften her anger towards her Father
9) Jana needs ya Very Happy
10) Jana needs to stand up for herself
with a bonus #11:
Jana NEEDS MORE COWBELL!. JANA COWBELL!
PS: I undoubtedly need a lot of help, a bang trim, and to get back to New York…
