I forgot the tide pools

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In my last post, I mentioned taking redundant photos of Haystack Rock from the beach in Oregon (and I shared a couple). But I forgot to add say that one day at low tide 

... a bit lower than this ...

I ventured across the jagged rocks at the foot of Haystack Rock to snap some photos of the tide pools exposed by the receding ocean. So, to offer a change of mood from recent politically heavy blogs, here’s one with no purpose other than to share amateur portraits of some lovely creatures that inhabit the liminal space between sea and land.

I'm sure there's a message here, too—maybe something about resilience and tenacity in the face of radical change. But I won't belabor it.

              

                              

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Entering 2107

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Not a bad view to welcome the new year, eh? We just got back from a trip to Oregon, welcoming the new year on the coast, and then moving on to Portland for the biennial National Multicultural Conference and Summit (NMCCS), a gathering of (mostly) psychologists—about 800 of them this year—who are interested in multicultural issues. I had originally waffled about whether to attend this conference, but after the election, I knew I needed to be there. Given the state of the nation, it was the perfect way to return from the coastal retreat to the cultural fray.

            

The time at the coast was, predictably, relaxing and rejuvenating. We were welcomed by a rainbow, proof that we were at the right place. Then for three days, we bundled up for cold walks on the beach, ate good food in small local restaurants (which were pretty quiet, once the New Year’s partying was over), took multiple redundant photos of Haystack Rock and some of the beach as it changed colors, and conversed with gulls accustomed to handouts. 

                                    
 

We slept with the window open and the ceiling fan on so we could hear and smell the ocean during the night.

And then, re-entry. NMCCS is something of a haven for people who are committed to diversity work. I think it’s the only place I regularly hang out where I am, along with other white people, in the numerical minority for days. My queer identity is a part of the “multicultural” programming, but the (relative) invisibility of this identity means that my whiteness marks me as an outsider, for a change. An important position to experience occasionally—more often than I typically do.

The beauty of this space is that people collectively assume that those around them are firmly invested in issues of diversity and work against oppression, so it’s never necessary to defend or explain a position that honors these issues as central (rather than peripheral) to how we do psychology and how we function in the world. As a result. it’s a remarkably non-judgmental gathering. People generally trust the good intentions of others, grant space for “mistakes,” and honor growth rather than perfection in understanding the experiences and perspectives that folks bring with them.

I always learn here, and I always feel challenged in realizing what I didn’t know. This year, it had an added impact for me: it was one of several recent experiences that have left me in a reflective mood about my own place in the world—appropriate for a new year. More on that later.

So, let me take you on a quick tour of my time at the conference and some of the insights I gleaned while I was there. I was very aware from the start of the vigilance that folks who gathered for this event are feeling in the wake of November’s election, with frequent references to the incoming administration and the mixture of anger and anxiety that its ascendance evokes. Both the pre-conference reception and the opening plenary began by describing this conference as a place of safety, where “all of your complex identities” are welcome, a place to “enjoy feeling brave,” to “renew your strength, encourage, and be encouraged.” It seemed clear to me that other folks came to this conference guided by an impulse similar to mine: to join with a like-minded community in nourishing energy for the challenges ahead. Sprinkled among these comments were summons to “carry the water, even when it’s not popular” and “speak up anyway.” These words of encouragement reminded me of a Martina McBride song, “Anyway,” which suddenly seems totally suited to this moment in history. Excerpts:

Anyway

You can spend your whole life building
Something from nothin'
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway

You can chase a dream
That seems so out of reach
And you know it might not never come your way
Dream it anyway

…..

This world's gone crazy
It's hard to believe
That tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway

…..

You can pour your soul out singing
A song you believe in
That tomorrow they'll forget you ever sang
Sing it anyway
Yeah, sing it anyway

I sing
I dream
I love
Anyway

If feeling beseiged, these people were also inspired and inspiring. “Don’t let anyone take away your power,” one speaker urged, “the struggle is as important as the outcome.” More than once, I heard the presidential campaign and election described as a backlash—and this framed as good news: Those who resist diversity wouldn’t work so hard to stifle, deny, and discredit it if they weren’t frightened by how far we’ve come, what a force we can be for change. An empowering perspective that certainly inspires me to more action!

So, besides these general messages, what else did I learn? I’ll just mention a few sessions to suggest the flavor of the conference.

In one session, elders from several indigenous groups discussed their experiences with colonization. Most of the material they discussed was familiar to me from previous events and workshops I’ve attended. But drenched in two hours of references to colonization, this information took on a new quality that changed my gut sense of indigenous experiences, erasing any impulse to exoticize and leaving only the reality of systemic, persistent, to-the-bone deep marginalization. And remarkable resilience. 

Another workshop examined the roles of allies to marginalized groups, couched in terms of using the word “ally” as a verb rather than a noun: to be an ally is to take action, not just to invoke supportive rhetoric or adopt symbolism that carries no commitment to actually do anything.  One woman suggesting the term “accomplices” as a replacement for “allies” because it implies active engagement, even in the face of resistance. This was a challenging discussion for me. I agree with this position, and my agreement is another element in my personal reflections.

And then there was a session on aging. First, we shared hopes and fears about aging. Predictably, the fears were mostly about physical and cognitive decline and about social isolation. The hopes were mostly about remaining vibrant, presumably until the very moment of death. One African American woman who grew up in the rural South, living in a multi-generational home told us that aging and death had never carried any particular stigma because in her world, both were so integrated into life. Her comments led us to the topic of ‘good’ dying (and the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I recommend it highly). From there, we shifted to the ageism implicit in the concept of “super aging,” and from there, we were off on a conversation about daily microaggressions, those well-intended words and acts that are meant to be kind, but are actually patronizing, even infantilizing. I’ve written about this plenty of times here, so I won’t go on about it.

I left the conference feeling inspired by the community and the political power I’d just experienced. Then, the night we got home, I awoke around midnight to a feeling that something was missing in my life. I went back to sleep easily, and just before I woke up the next morning, I had a dream that left me feeling alone and lost, aimless. After a long talk with my partner and some reflective walks, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m hunting for something I used to have and now don’t. I have to find out what it is, and the answer is almost certainly related to this conference (OK, and maybe the beach). I joked with my partner, “Maybe it’s just a dog.” But honestly, I think it’s something more, some sense of purpose. Just what it will look like isn’t clear. But I’ve been here before, and I know a few things about my process at this juncture—words like patience, openness, exploration come to mind. I know I can’t force it, but I also know I have to be actively engaged in the search.

I’m confident I’ll find it, whatever it is. Meanwhile, the process itself brings a sense of meaning that feels good. As the woman at NMCCS said, the struggle is as important as the outcome.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Deletion and erasure

Writing entries for this blog, I sometimes bump up against this imaginary, but somehow very weighty, line between what’s appropriately “open” as I explore my experiences of retirement, aging, and life in general and what’s “too personal.” In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking about a topic that hangs right close to that line, making me hesitant to discuss it here. But it seems important as part of the complexity of life as I get old, so here I go. It’s about death. Not death in general, but the death of someone who holds a singular place in my life, and about questions her dying has raised that haven’t been raised in the same way by earlier losses. 

One of our trips this summer was to a memorial service, a “celebration of life,” for one of my sisters. She had died in January after a long decline from a head injury, so her death was not a surprise. But it was, as these things tend to be, a shock nevertheless. She lived in Oregon, and we hadn’t been particularly close, but we had kept in touch over the years—mostly by email, often sharing political rants. I had visited her last November, knowing it would likely be the last time we talked. So it was some time after her death when gathered with other family members last month to scatter her ashes in the ocean off Ecola Beach, her favorite stretch of the Oregon coast. The wind made it impossible to cast them out over the ocean, so we took turns tipping her ashes from the container into a little inlet so that they would wash into the sea.

Just after we got home from that trip, I received a reminder email from an e-card company that my sister’s birthday was coming up. This reminder would usually trigger a rather casual process of finding an appropriate card and crafting a birthday message. In earlier years, when she was still communicative, I’d likely have sent her an email, too. If it was a “major” birthday, I might have sent flowers. But this time, it was different—and not just because I wouldn’t be sending the card. Seeing her name in that email stopped me in my tracks. I was stunned, paralyzed for a moment. The message offered me the option to “remove this reminder” for future years. Staring at the screen, I thought of a column I had very recently read called “My Digital Cemetery.”

The column I was recalling talks about the dilemma of how to manage digital “contacts” when someone dies. It’s a thought-provoking piece, which I recommend, not because it has answers, but because it so makes you think about the meaning of identities and of relationships—and of what happens to those entities when someone dies. It’s couched in digital terms, but the questions are far squishier than the title suggests. When I first read it, I set it aside, thinking I might blog about it at some point.

Now, seeing my sister’s name and being offered the option to delete it, I noticed my internal monologue. How could I remove her name, remove her from this list? That would imply … acknowledge … that she isn’t any longer. But why not remove it? There is no logical point in continuing to be reminded of a birthday that isn’t any longer. Besides, I don’t really need reminders of her presence in my life (for all of my life). With no digital record of their existence, I still feel a twinge when I see or hear the birthdate of other family members who’ve died (and there are now four).

I went back to the article, hoping it would help me think this through. The author, Rob Walker, a tech writer for the New York Times, talks about the names in his digital files as a catalog not only of contacts but of his personal history. Each name, he says, is a reminder of a person, a relationship, experiences that collectively make up his own past. He admits that he does occasionally delete names—but never those of people who have died. He attributes this to the sense that erasing those names would be participating in the impression that they were gone, whereas in truth, they live on as part of his own history. “What I’ve lost is part of who I am,” he writes. “So is what I choose to save.”

But here’s what still puzzles me: Why, then, is it easier to erase the names of people who are still alive? They, too, have contributed to who I am, what I have experienced. They, too, are part of my history. It must be that death changes the meaning of these markers of someone’s (prior) existence by adding the reality of their (current) non-existence. It’s the simultaneous realization of both states of being that is so troubling, that makes the reminders startling in the short term and twinge-inducing as time goes on.

She’s gone, I say to myself, so why not delete her contact information? It serves no purpose. But, I reply, what does it mean if I do remove it? But if coming across her name occasionally makes me sad, then why would I want to keep it in my list? Or do I need to feel sad? Is that very sadness, the shock or twinge, such an appropriate response to loss that trying to avoid it amounts to negating the importance of relationships? Maybe this is the difference between deleting living and deleting dead contacts: coming across the names of still-living people doesn’t usually elicit great sadness, so deleting them isn’t an act of avoidance. But coming across the names of people who have died can cause a sense of great existential loss—the awareness of something deeply, finally, and irretrievably gone. And that feeling keeps alive the duality of loss and life, allowing us to live with relationships that have ended. Deleting those names amounts to erasing the possibility of moments like the one I experienced, moments that keep present the truth of a now-gone relationship.

I know that plenty of philosophers have explored this existential moment—I did the requisite stint as an avid existentialist in college. I also know that authors, poets, playwrights, musicians, artists, and spiritual teachers have mined this moment in far greater depth than I ever will. But oddly, none of that prepared me for the particular, peculiar moment when I saw my sister’s name, Judy, and was asked whether I wanted to delete it.

I have no answers here. Just musings. And Judy’s contact information, still in my phone.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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A weekend at the shore … and a confrontation with existential angst.

 This is a story in two parts about, first, a trip to the Oregon coast and, second, reflections on matters less … um … uplifting. Like death and terror and The Hunger Games. It all fits together, odd though that may seem. It’s complicated, though, and it took me a while to decide whether to write this blog. But here it is. So come along for the twisting journey from seagulls to existential angst.

It all began when my partner and I set out last Wednesday for a trip to Oregon. Our sojourn began with the purported reason for the trip: a panel presentation in Salem. The panel focused on the movie “Ballot Measure 9,” which details the events surrounding Oregon’s 1992 experience with virulent and even violent anti-LGBT politics. We both got to talk about the parallels between Ballot Measure 9 and Colorado’s Amendment 2, which happened in the same year. It was a great event with lots of folks in attendance, good discussion, and welcome political energy.

The next morning, over an excellent breakfast, we shared one of those wonderful conversations that make these friends so special. On this particular morning, we talked at length about life, aging, and dying. Our collective fear of death, despite all the philosophizing to the contrary. The difficulty of accepting its inevitability. The denial that makes us search for a cure to this or that, as if the end wouldn’t come if we could just cure this or that. And the realization that we (individually and collectively) keep doing things to prolong life (or at least to avoid shortening it). We take vitamins, eat blueberries, drink milk with Omega 3, exercise, avoid second-hand smoke, get regular check-ups, etc., etc.

We do these things in the name of improving the years we have, even as we cling to the rhetoric telling us that they’ll extend our life (indefinitely?). We do them even though we know that more years doesn’t necessarily mean more good years. As one of our friends put it, citing a Ted Talk she’d heard: Let's be clear: the years we add aren’t young years.

This wasn’t a morbid conversation, but a realistic one. We all die, after all. As I once read, despite all the magic of modern medicine, the mortality rate remains stubbornly at 100%. It was really good to have this discussion with such thoughtful people ... in this case, people who are much younger than I and who therefore have a different relationship with aging. It felt like a relief. I think about all this often, but don’t often have a chance to process it much.

But before I continue with this train of thought—because it will clearly not be as fun as photos of the Oregon coast—let me share tales of days on the beach, which is where we headed after breakfast.

Unlike our earlier Oregon trip where we were somehow blessed with lovely sunsets in the midst of storms all around, this time the weather was ferocious, and the sea shared the mood. It rained hard as we drove to the coast, watching rivers raging and spilling over their banks, the wind pushing the rain horizontally across the road. But we got lucky with the weather once we arrived. It seemed to stop raining every time we went out—and started again each time we got in the car or returned home from a walk.

Dodging between rainstorms (if not raindrops), we watched the stormy sea ...

were greeted by Mildred, my gull friend from our last trip (whose a little pixelated in this photo; she's third from the right in the group photo) ...

         

cruised along the shore, spotting pussy willows in new bloom, huge logs thrown up by the storm, and trees left suspended by eroding soil ...

and explored tide pools ...

During these lovely moments, our earlier conversation about death slipped into the background. But it was to come back to me, wrapped in a book I’d been reading.

On the plane trip to Oregon, I was reading The Hunger Games. I was curious about the hype surrounding this book / movie, and I had heard an NPR story that presented it as an anti-war allegory. So I decided to read it on this trip and got well into the first book of the trilogy before we arrived.

Then, one night, snuggled down in our nice cottage at the coast, I had a really awful dream about fear (terror, really) and betrayal and a sense of inescapable danger. I didn’t dare go back to sleep, and spent the next couple of hours trying to figure it out—in the shower, walking on the beach. It finally made sense to me in the context of the book and our earlier discussion of death. The story line of the book was the story line of my dream—not the details, not the characters, not even the events. But the feelings. And that story line shared a feeling left over from our earlier conversation about death and its inevitability.

I won't be finishing that trilogy. Partly because I think it's an awful story, made worse by at the fact of its incredibly positive reception and large following. But the larger reason is that it touched something so terror-stricken that to return to it would be insane.

Clearly, I don't feel so casual and intellectually distant from death and its inevitably—or its approach. But I sure don't need to encounter the stark reality of it through a story that's so disturbing in its own right. Instead, let me sort it through in the company of friends.

The rest of our time at the coast was wonderful, full of walks between raindrops, good food, and interesting conversations, capped off by dinner at a restaurant with an amazing view where Charlize Theron once filmed a movie scene.

I’ll definitely be back—to the Oregon coast and my gull, Mildred, that is. Not to The Hunger Games.

Beach donuts and my gull, Mildred

What a wonderful weekend! They've been having a very dry winter in Oregon, but we were promised rain and snow from arrival to departure. This was the rare weekend designated for  snow on the beach. 

Somehow, though we managed to be in the donut hole between storms virtually the whole time. To our great pleasure, this meant lots of beach time with spectacular sunsets along with lovely, precipitation-free visits around the Oregon coast. These included spotting whale spouts from the observation tower and eating actual fresh seafood. And all the while, storms were visible in every direction but overhead.

This lucky whim of the weather goddess created  many opportunities for me to try out my new phone/camera. A photo travel log: 

En route to visit my sister outside Portland, we spotted this old (very old!), falling-down house. Amazingly, it seemed to be kept from tipping over by a single, scrawny tree.

So this was interesting itself, but around it were other trees that got me pondering: 

Trees would make a great projective test, sort of like a Rorschach inkblot test. Consider this: if you were to describe your relationship to your family in terms of trees, which of these would you pick and what would it mean: 

the scrawny one holding up the house, the wide-branching one standing nearby but apart from the house, or the double-trunk one across the driveway? Talk about this amongst yourself. No need to offer a public reply. Unless you want to, of course.

On to the coast to spend time walking the beach and discussing important matters with friends. Like which beach to walk on, how much home-made apple pie can we eat tonight and still have some for tomorrow, whether it’s legal to use pop abbreviations in the game of “Boggle” (e.g., lib as in ‘women’s lib,’ or rad as in ‘that’s rad!’). That, and matters of life and meaning and assorted endeavors that each of us is pursuing, conversations as satisfying as the food and surf.

That donut hole phenomenon made for some brilliant sunsets. Each evening, there were storms to the north and south of us, but we had a clear, brilliant view of the setting sun. I got caught in that serial photography thing. I took the “perfect” picture only to look up and see another view even more gorgeous. So I took that picture, only to look up … I imagine everyone has been there. 

            

Throughout the weekend, I was followed by this lone gull. I am certain it was the same one and that she was following me specifically. She spoke to me. I named her Mildred. Here are a few shots of her …honestly, she was around wherever I went!

So, now that I have mastered (hah!) the camera on my supersmart phone, my next goal is to figure out why I keep losing contact with my email. Maybe it has something to do with the time the camera froze because it (and my hands) had gotten so cold in the wind and sea spray (and the 26° weather) that neither hands nor phone worked. Or maybe it was the time I dropped it in the damp sand. But I don’t think so. I think I just screwed up some setting. I’m just overconfident enough to get in trouble with this thing.

More camera tales to come, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, what do you think about that tree question?