Gertrude Bell: Mapmaker. Statemaker. Of Arabia.

Ah, Gertrude. My soulmate, my nemesis, my role model.

She is my soulmate because we are both white(ish) women who have taken a deep interest in the Middle East, making it the object of study, scholarship, and advocacy.

She is my role model because she was a woman who surpassed her menfolk colleagues in bravery, ambition, tenacity, and, in most cases, accomplishments. Back in the 1920s, of all places!

She is my nemesis because she was a British imperialist who got all up in the Arabs’ business. But to be fair, that was definitely in vogue at Whitehall in those days.

I tend to feature historical women that are uncontroversial, that I can say with almost no compunction, this is a life well-spent. Yet here I feel I diverge from that tradition. Not to say that Gertrude Bell’s life wasn’t well-spent. As intimated in my opening lines, I deeply respect and admire much about her. But whenever you get into the Middle East— or when you, specifically, get into the Middle East by way of France, America, or Britain—you’re getting into murky moral territory. Not bad, necessarily. But murky. And with serious implications to the present.

Who was Gertrude Bell? She was a British writer, traveler, and statemaker extraordinaire whose most lasting legacy was helping to establish Iraq as a nation-state. The daughter of North England iron-workers, Bell excelled as a student at Oxford, took an interest in the Middle East, got involved with a guy who died at Gallipoli (think: Turkey, Mel Gibson, running, Adagio in G, freeze-frame dying). Rendered a single lady, Bell turned all her attentions to making political history.

Bell had traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, writing about her travels and drawing maps of previously uncharted areas. By the 1910s she was playing an important role in the British colonial government and worked with the likes of T.E. Lawrence (you know, of Arabia) and Winston Churchill, scoring an invite to the male-dominated Cairo Conference in 1921. This was the conference that helped determine the borders of the British colonies—oops, I mean “mandates”—that were established in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, of course, having so recently been ass-whooped in World War I and losing their substantial Middle Eastern holdings to the Allies (though Turkey was able to speed-build a state before the British and the French could get their grubby hands on it).

As far as smoke-filled rooms go, Bell and Lawrence were smoking on the side of the underdog. Both promoted the regimes of brothers Faisal and Abdullah, two of the leaders of the Arab Revolt—literally, a revolt by the Arabs against the Ottomans during WWI, which had been partly arranged by the British to weaken their enemies internally. They kinda owed the guys, but then a lot of promises were made back then. The British were quite the international heartbreakers.

By the end of negotiations, it was decided that Faisal would be the king of a newly-created state called Iraq, while Abdullah would preside over a similarly newly-created state called Transjordan, Jordan for short. (Okay, that name change actually came later.) These regimes would be far more “indigenous” than having British dudes run the show, for sure, but it should be noted that neither Faisal nor Abdullah were “indigenous” to the areas they ended up ruling—both were from what is now Saudi Arabia. Also, it took a while for the British to actually, you know, leave. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Gertrude Bell spent much of the rest of her life in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. She spoke Arabic and Persian, had what was quite a strong understanding of local politics, conflicts, and culture, and even helped to establish the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in Iraq. Her crazy idea was that art and artifacts from the region should maybe stay there to be featured in regional collections, rather than being shipped halfway around the world to the British Museum or the Louvre. Power to the non-European peoples.

She died in 1925 from what appeared to be an overdose of sleeping pills. In a 2007 review of a new book about Bell, Christopher Hitchens said that she was one of those “English people who thought other peoples, too, deserved their place in the sun.” It’s a nice sentiment, and it’s also an implicit statement on power. As I, an American with no Middle Eastern heritage, have undertaken and continue to undertake study of Middle Eastern countries, as I learn Arabic, as I go on photographic tours of Lebanon, I recognize in myself the paradox of Gertrude Bell. Is it a good or a bad thing?

(Proof that Bell is still remembered fondly to this day: Naomi Watts may or may not play her in an upcoming film. With Robert Pattinson, our most beloved star.)

More or Less Like Family, Part I

By Molly Bradley The village Mouit was like living on a beach without the water: just a vast expanse of shore with buildings spattered here and there on the sand, with no logic to it.

We were there for a brief stay to explore another part of Senegal. The group of students I was traveling with would reunite in the nearby town of Saint Louis at the end of the week, but for now, we were scattered in separate families in the village of Mouit. We’d left our host families in Dakar to be hosted yet again: a home away from home away from home. Instead of feeling further removed, it all started to feel pretty much the same. Family became a very relative term.

Aside from my parents, I grew up with just one sibling (and, only later, a dog). My family is by no means quiet, but it’s not large. Four people can only be so rambunctious.

Unexpectedly, the family that adopted me in Dakar was even slimmer. I called my homestay parents Aunt and Uncle, Tata et Tonton, because my ‘sibling’---twelve-year-old Malik---was their nephew. It felt more or less like family.

So it was alarming when approximately nine and a half flailing sets of limbs accosted me as soon as I walked in the gate of my Mouit homestay family. Nine of them were chattering children, spanning roughly seven through twelve years old. The half-set of limbs only constituted half a set because it belonged to a baby carried by one of the girls, and the baby didn’t quite have control of all her components. Her eyes stuck to me that whole first night.

They dragged me to meet my homestay parents. Neither spoke French, but both were all easy smiles and steady nods. The village was Wolof, but my language still wasn’t up to native speed. I tried to gesture a Hello, Thank you for having me, I’m very grateful, but fell upon no convenient mimes for those words, save a wave for the Hello. We stood smiling a few moments, motionless. Then my father left the fenced complex. As chief of the village, he presumably had better things to do. My mother smiled, shrugged and shuffled off.

Good to be home.

The complex was made up of a few small rooms, each a separate low boxy building. My siblings indicated my room, where I could put down my bags.

“This is Binta’s room,” said one of the girls, in French. Only the girls had accompanied me into the room. They were all watching me.

“Her room,” another girl said, pointing.

Another person had materialized. This girl was older: it was in her height; the way she held her face; her body. This fifteen-year-old (I asked her age later) was more womanly than I would probably ever be, judging by my own body at twenty years of age.

Binta watched me with a slightly curved mouth. Either that was her neutral face or she was smiling just a little, watching the adopted tubaab try to clumsily inhabit her bedroom. Binta commanded the space. I felt flustered by it.

“Thank you,” I said to her. “C’est vraiment gentil.” That’s really nice of you.

She just curved her lips and walked out.

 ***

I spent the evening with more siblings than I could count in what functioned as the family room. It was where the kids spent all of their time when they weren’t in school or doing chores. This was because it had a TV. Mouit was a unique village in that regard: it was typical of rural Senegalese villages in most ways except for the fact that it had electricity. Like most places in the world, the TV sapped not only electrical but human energy. It had most of us hooked most of the time. There was no end to the soccer and the Senegalese soap operas.

I finagled some conversation out of a few people. For the most part, any questions I asked were met by a rush of eager voices that I didn’t have time to distinguish before they fell abruptly silent again.

There were a few older teenagers, mostly boys, already in the room when I came in with the younger kids. They occupied the mats to the right of the television, backs against the wall, alternately watching the screen and flipping open their cell phones. Every now and then, when they got their phones out, a few of the younger ones would look over with obvious envy.

Toward nine in the evening, a man walked in. He looked relatively young. He stood in the doorway awhile, watching the screen. No one glanced his way. I was at the very edge and toward the back of the mat where all the kids crowded. Eventually he sat between the door and me, his back against the wall, on the concrete floor.

Given how close his face was to mine in the dark, it seemed odd not to acknowledge it. I turned to him and said hello in French and asked his name.

His mouth moved, and he let his breath play in and out of his lips before he said, “I’m Mamadou. I don’t speak French.”

Was that English? It was definitely English.

“I’m from the Gambia,” he added.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m from---well, I’m American. But my family lives in France. I grew up there.”

“America, France,” he repeated. “It must be beautiful.”

He asked me my name.

“Mama,” I said with a wry smile. “They named me after the other Mama.”

“Oh, yes, the baby,” he said. Host families commonly named their tubaabs---white people, or foreigners---after an existing family member. Ordinarily this family member was one older than the tubaab, which made chronological sense---you name someone new after someone who’s been around longer, right? I, however, had been named after the baby, who was still staring at me in the dark.

“But, no,” Mamadou said, “I mean your American name.”

That was a first. We’d become accustomed to giving out our “Obama names” whenever anyone cared enough to ask. Obama delighted people here. It was the most recent great thing about America today, amid all the other great things, thought most Senegalese. Obama was now synonymous with America.

“I’m Molly.”

“Molly,” he repeated. “Molly.”

He was silent awhile, but in the glow of the TV I could see his lips still moving, playing with the name. Even though English is the official language of the Gambia, the names are mostly the same as those in Senegal. After all, it’s just a little crumb trapped in Senegal’s big gullet. It sits there small and quiet, almost blending in.

 ***

He was from the Gambia and he was making his way upward, traveling steadily toward the top of Africa. He’d left his family three, four years ago, he said; what was left of his family, anyway. It sounded sinister when he first said it, but he clarified that several of his brothers had already left to do what he was doing now: working to make a little money to send back to their family, and a little money to get themselves somewhere else.

Mamadou wanted to go to Europe. Or America.

“England. I think England is nice,” he said. “Maybe I will go there, then America. Or maybe France, but I don’t think I will like France so much as England, or America.”

“Why?”

“I was told it’s very like Senegal,” he said.

He kept saying that he just had to get to Europe, and then he’d list the places he would go: Germany, maybe; England; America. . .

I began to suspect he may have thought they were all next door. I had neither the opportunity nor the heart to correct him. A few times I said, “Well, America’s really far from England, so. . .” He only paused, said “I see, alright,” nodded a little, and went on.

I noticed that a few of my siblings were glancing over at us from time to time. Not really when Mamadou spoke, since a lot of the time he spoke it was to no one, commenting on a character in the soap, or to wish---somewhat rhetorically, since he said it so softly and was paid no heed---that the television were tuned to a different channel. But when I replied, a few bright eyes in the dark flitted our way, then briefly about the room as though to see if anyone else had heard, then back to the TV. No one but the two of us, though, said a word.

We talked intermittently through the few hours we sat there in the family room. My host family was hosting him, too, for four months while he worked in the onion fields owned by my host father. There were a lot of fields, he said. My father, the chief, owned several. Mamadou worked and watered them from five in the morning until about five in the evening. Then he came home for dinner and a night’s good rest. I went to bed around the same time he did---nine-thirty, ten---while the rest of the family sat up later. It was a little embarrassing that, at the end of a day during which I had not exerted myself at all, I had no more stamina than a man who’d worked twelve hours carrying heavy buckets of water in the hot sun. I decided it was mental fatigue, the Wolof and all. Yeah. I had to believe I was doing some pretty challenging stuff in Senegal.

Looking Forward: Solitude.

I landed on the North Island of New Zealand in November 2008. I was alone, except for a mammoth North Face backpack, stuffed to capacity with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap and two dozen chocolate-chip Clif Bars. I planned to spend the next four weeks by myself, farm-hopping, if you will, as a participant in an organization called WWOOF (“Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms”).

For seven nights, I slept in a trailer on the lawn of a couple in their sixties, who sold produce at local farmers’ markets and ate only raw food. Bedtime came early at this particular household, and I spent hours each night reading by flashlight in my bunk, a hot water bottle nestled at my feet. I felt fragile---emotionally, because the quiet made me nervous, and physically, because I was too unsettled in my new surroundings to stomach the mountains of raw vegetables that were served for dinner each evening.

The next ten days were spent on a small family farm so implausibly lush, I was certain I’d found Tolkien’s Shire. There, I met Jo, a single mother who---on a daily basis---baked bread, practiced yoga, milked goats, trimmed roses, tended an unwieldy flock of chickens, and kept a vegetable garden. She taught me to make pavlova and strawberry jam, clean chicken coops, care for the animals. And at the end of each day, I retired to a cozy cabin in the backyard. I was alone, but exhausted. My body ached in a way that felt satisfying, even pleasurable. I slept soundly.

I ended my trip on Great Barrier Island, where I washed dishes at a local fishing lodge in exchange for a bed and free meals, many of which happened to include lobster. The people there were patient, generous, relaxed. The fishermen---who wore rain slickers and thick white beards, just as I expected fishermen would---took me to sea and taught me to properly cast a line, never batting an eye when I ultimately chose to eat gingersnaps on the boat’s deck rather than participate in the unsavory task of gutting the day’s catch.

One morning before I left, the lodge owners allowed me to take their station wagon to the beach (a terrifying experience, as I’d had no prior experience driving on the left-hand side of the road). When I finally arrived, nauseous and a little shaky, I found the sands deserted, with not a single other beachgoer in sight. And so I spent that afternoon alone, with a book and a sandwich and a sweater to guard against the wind.

I might, at one time, have found this solitude frightening. But on that day I felt adventurous. Like a daring traveler. A wanderer. A pioneer.

Today, as a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time alone. Depending on my mood and the rhythm of the day, I find this both liberating and lonesome---there are times when I can’t stand the quiet; there are others when it’s nothing short of sublime.

Solitude, I’ve found, is its own kind of wilderness. Becoming familiar with the terrain requires a certain amount of exploration, and a bravery I can’t always find.

But what a pleasure it can be to surrender sometimes---to wander, to get lost, to accept the challenge.

Soak

January comes and suddenly I have the urge to soak myself in a hot tub. The impulse usually only lasts for a few weeks and the total number of baths that I take in a given year never totals more than a few. But it's that hopeful time of year again and baths have been on my mind, and here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

1. Epsom salt baths: When I was 17---on the night of graduation from high school---I found myself at one of those mandatory parties that schools throw in order to keep young graduates safe. There was a psychic. Or maybe she was a fortune teller. Whatever the case, she was someone making vague claims of mystical powers and I sat and listened to her. I don't remember a word of anything she said to me about my bright future, but I do remember that she told me that I was someone who should take an epsom salt bath at least once a week. I've never been prone to sports-related injury (a lack of sports playing improves those odds) so I can only imagine she sensed in me a propensity for stressful thinking and thought a good soak would help me. I've been thinking about her advice ever since, but it wasn't until this past weekend that I actually endeavored to buy one of those strange milk carton-shaped containers of salt and have myself a soak. It's looking like that total number of baths I take might increase in 2013. This watery soul is hooked.

2. Clean tubs: I recently asked my mom how often she cleaned our tub at home growing up. Her answer shocked me into realizing that it wasn't through bad luck or particular misfortune that my tub always looked grimy (though I'm tempted to blame city pipes and mineral deposits). My tub looks grimy mainly due to my persistant resistance to scrubbing it as often as I should. Clean tubs require elbow grease.

3. There are no bad baths, only bad bathtubs: And bad tubs don't matter so very much. Ours is installed backward. The drain is at the opposite end from the shower head and if you take a bath, the slope of the tub leans the back of your reclining head precisely into the faucet. This doesn't matter. I crane my neck to one side and slide on down anyway. The water feels just as good at an angle.

4. Bringing my camera into the tub elicited a series of panicked jokes from my husband about things "going down the drain." That's okay. I needed to photograph my own toes in order to get across the point of all of this blathering which is that if you have a tub, try a good soak. It might surprise you.

5. Candles. Light them.

XIX. Savoie

When I go to the Chambéry train station to pick up Clémence for her weeklong visit, I have a panicked moment where I think I won’t recognize her. We were practically kids when we were together before, strangely privy to witnessing each other’s lives for a handful of weeks that summer. We’re still in that part of life where six months can turn you into a completely different person. Who knows if we’ll still know each other after two and a half years?

This is what I’m thinking about, shivering in my red coat on the platform as the snow falls on my shoulders. I keep peering down the tracks, first left and then right, not knowing which direction her train is coming from. I tell myself that in these last couple months alone in Chambéry I’ve just become unaccustomed to having friends around---that’s why I’m nervous. But still.

Each time that Clémence and I see each other, one of us is always speaking in a language that we don’t entirely understand, fumbling through unfamiliar verb conjugations and fast-spoken idioms. One of us is the leader, and the other is the follower. The follower must do and say as the leader does and says. Since that first time that she spent a month with me in Ohio, Clémence has not been back to the U.S. We are always in her country and her language. And for that, I constantly feel like a child around her, stumbling along in her footsteps.

But the second she steps off the train, I spot her strawberry blond hair and her funny white eyebrow that changed color after she went to college. We catch each other’s eyes and beam.

In that moment I remember that even though we don’t actually know that much about each other, we love each other in a way that feels unconditional. I rush toward her and she rushes toward me and we collide in a hug like in a scene from a movie.

T’es voilà! I say, tears streaming down both our faces. You’re finally here.

On Flying

Over the holidays we took a short trip up to Pennsylvania to visit my husband’s family. We decided against moving after all and it would be our last trip for awhile with the baby coming in just 7 (!) short weeks. It was a quick weekend trip, but the timing was perfect to see some snow, only Charley’s second time seeing it. He was thrilled; watching it float down through the air was just as magical as I remember. I was glad that at the last minute Charley and I decided to accompany Matt on the trip. Originally I was going to stay home, I’m just getting too big and am exhausted all the time. But seeing his face in the snow made it all worth it. He and Matt spent all day Saturday before New Year’s sledding and building a snow fort as close to six inches blanketed central P.A. I sat by the big picture window in my sister-in-law’s house and watched them from afar, it was almost as much fun. Charley is getting so big, and everyday I have to let him go a little bit more. I read Catherine Newman’s “Bringing up Birdy” on the flight and it was the perfect companion to the trip. In the memoir she is expecting her second just as her son is about to turn three, almost my exact situation. She writes first about the pregnancy and then towards the end about juggling two kids. I was taking notes for that part! After February feels like this scary unknown, but one that I’ve maybe navigated before. Much like driving a well-traveled road through the snowfall. You know the road is there and you know where you are going, but the journey is still frightening.

We had a layover with our flight both ways, and since we booked so last minute (the morning of) our seats were all over the place. The first leg of the trip I managed to sit across the aisle from Matt and Charley. I could kind of lean over and see Charley, but mostly Matt entertained him. The second leg the plane was very small and we switched so that I could sit with Charley on one side and Matt was across the aisle squished next to a larger gentleman. It felt comforting to be near my baby again. I’ve noticed I’m a more nervous flier now as a mom. I grip the seat tightly and for the first time in my life, I watch my son instead of the runway during takeoff and landing. I want to make sure he’s okay, and he always is.

On the way home I ended up several rows behind Matt and Charley and it was nerve-wracking. I wanted to see my little guy and know what he was doing. I had to trust that he was ok with daddy. The very last leg of the trip Matt gave me his first class ticket (he had been bumped before we booked our tickets) and they sat some twenty rows back in coach. At first I was a wreck! It was fun to be in first class, but I kept thinking how much Charley would like the mini water bottle they gave me and the cookies and blanket. I worried about him and it struck me, this is what being a mom of two will be. I have to let go of my firstborn just a little bit and focus on the baby. I have to trust that I’ve taught him well in three years and let dad take over a bit. It was hard, and as soon as the plane landed and people were departing, my eyes scanned the crowd for them. And there was Matt with a sound asleep Charley in his little yellow striped leggings thrown over his shoulder. He told me that he had slept the whole flight.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Samantha Shorey is an essay writer and film photo taker from Portland, Oregon. She recently moved to a small New England town to get her masters studying communication and culture at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research focuses on the way people create authentic identities online.  Samantha's blog Ashore looks at everyday life through metaphors and a camera lens, mostly in close-up. She believes photos should look more like memories and in Motown records on Sunday mornings. Even though I love (I mean, really love) browsing bookstores, back-cover paragraphs just don’t work for me. They’re all plot synopsis, and no “this book made me realize that love is the bravest choice!” or “this book made me ugly cry on public transportation.”

So, I asked my friends Laura and Meg for a recommendation over coffee at Stumptown in New York. Both of them are heart-stirring writers, and they’re my go-to girls for books that make me feel.

After our chat and a little iPhone voice-memo magic, here are five books to make you feel hopeful, encouraged, understood, inspired, and interested---respectively.

Recommended by Laura Marie Meyers | Little Things and Curiosities

Love Walked In by Marisa De Los Santos When people ask me for book recommendations (which happens a lot because I’m a full time writer!) my number one choice is Love Walked In. I’m a sucker for characters that stay with you long after you’ve finished the book---as if you might actually run into them somewhere. With names like Cornelia and Teo, they were so unlike anyone I’ve ever known that I wanted to find pieces of them in people around me. This book follows so many different types of love that you’re not really sure which is the most important---whether it’s the love of a child, or the love of a family member, or the love of a lover. It’s about every type of love.

And really, I’m a sucker for the title. I love the ide of love walking in---as if it was somewhere else and then stepped through the door. Like Love was out doing it’s own thing and it wanted to drop in on you one day. Love walked in? “Oh! Hey, Love! It’s been a while, fancy seeing you here!”

Recommended by Meg Fee | The Wild and Wily Ways of a Brunette Bombshell

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed Dear Sugar is a collection of advice columns written by Cheryl Strayed, previously written under the pseudonym “Sugar”. Advice columns are usually all about the person asking for advice and not the person giving it. But, she totally turned the thing on its head and decided to talk from her own personal experience.

I think this book is so great because every time you think you know the advice she is going to give---it isn’t. Her advice just calls attention to what the person is actually telling her. They already know the answer. She tells people that they have to be guided by their truest truth, and that is an immovable thing.

Two of my favorite pieces of advice from her are: “every last one of us can do better than give up” and “we have to reach in the direction of the life we want.” I think about that last one a lot. Real change is happening on the level of the gesture. It’s one person creating a tiny revolution in their own life.

Recommended by Samantha Shorey | Ashore

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six.” If you’re that type of person---and I definitely am---then High Fidelity is a book for you. Rob, an English record storeowner, narrates the story in the days after his live-in girlfriend moves out of their apartment. Hornby’s writing is funny, full of emotion, and punctuated by music references and “top 5” lists.  I’d like almost any book about heartbreak, but this one especially captures the messiness and uncertainty of this in-between age---the unquietable desire to love and be loved, but the fear of being tied down. In times of happiness and in times of sadness the question is the same: is this all there is? or will something better come along?

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck Walkable City is the perfect book for cocktail party conversations with the hip and urban. After reading it, I’ve started quite a few sentences with “did you know _____?”. (Did you know that additional highway lanes often make congestion worse because of “induced demand”?). Being from Portland, Oregon, I have first-hand experience with a lot of the things that Speck says make a city walkable---and ultimately, wonderful. His argument is so compelling because it has less to do with buying into “being green” and more to do with the tangible things that make life better. Cities have corner coffee shops, chance encounters on the sidewalks, easy errands, and less time spent in traffic. All of these are the reasons why cities like mine and San Francisco, Chicago, New York and even Charleston are attracting disproportionate numbers of the bright and creative.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion I’m pretty sure Joan Didion is my spirit animal! Slouching Toward Bethlehem is a collection of her essays about California and the counter-culture movement, written in the style of “New Journalism”. It isn’t removed third-person newspaper writing---her sentences have such extraordinary presence and clarity. She’s inspiring to me as a researcher too, because she’s acutely interested in the way people live their every day lives.

One of the personal essays in this book, On Self Respect, is the most important piece of non-fiction I’ve ever read. In it she writes “People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.” Without it “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out . . . their false notion of us.” As a people-pleaser, it’s a bit of tough love that I’ve always needed.

On finishing what you've started

I started thinking about resolutions early in December, and I finally settled on something specific just in time for the New Year. I knew I wanted to dig deeper and put down roots. I wanted to focus on paying attention and following things through. I had a sense of what my intentions would be for 2013, but I knew I needed something a little more tangible to measure my progress and keep myself on track. Our little dining area is crammed with shelves and shelves of books, a combination of the two libraries and reading histories we brought into our relationship. Over the course of a meal, it’s not unlikely that we’ll pull out one or two, a bilingual dictionary or a novel or a theoretical tome, and mull over its past or flip to a familiar passage. I love our little library, but I’m always aware that it’s laced with a funny little secret.

The truth is, there aren’t so many books on those shelves that I’ve actually finished. Sure, I’ve read zillions and zillions of pages, if you consider them all together, but finishing one whole book is another thing entirely. If you pull out any of the books that are my own, you’re likely to find a bookmark stuck halfway through, or a worn first few chapters followed by crisp, untouched pages through the end. In some cases, I even stopped just a few pages before the end.

It’s not that didn’t love those unfinished books—in fact, I’ve claimed many of them as my favorites. Mostly I’ve just been drowning in reading assignments for the past few years and never felt like I could give my full attention to one whole book before sailing into the next. And maybe, in some cases, I liked those books so much that I didn’t want them to end.

Whatever the reasons may be, those unfinished pages are calling to me, especially now that I’ve got a little more time to attend to them lovingly, rather than whizzing through their pages in a race to some imaginary finish line. I think I set each book aside with a pang of guilt, but also with a glimmer of hope that I’d come back to it sometime in the future and finally do it justice.

A change in my reading habits is just one small example of the attention and depth I hope to cultivate this year, but I think it’s a good place to start. I’ve left plenty of loose ends dangling over the past few years, and I think it’ll feel just right to return to those characters and stories and ideas, one by one, and find out how things turned out.

How to See in the Dark

Sibyl, In the past few months, my family has suffered two major tragedies, and a few minor ones.  Now every time my husband leaves the house and doesn't answer his cell phone I think he's dead.  Most of me knows this is irrational, but until he gets home or contacts me, I'm a bit of a mess.  I can't afford the $170/hr to see a shrink, but sometimes I don't know how I'll move through the world without feeling at any moment someone I love could die or be hurt.  How can I move past this?

Sincerely,

Irrational

Dearest Irrational,

I have good news and bad news.  Since I know it would calm your anxiety to get it out of the way, let's start with the bad news.

You are not going to get past this.  It is going to become part of who you are.  These traumas, whatever they are, are changing and shaping you.  Who you become in the face of them is up to you.

We'll get to that.  Before you can worry about who you're going to be, you have to survive these first traumatized months.  First of all, explain to your husband that for right now, you need him to answer the phone every time you call.  He doesn't have to talk, he can answer with a text that just says "I'm here".  But for right now, that is what you need -- to know that he is alive.

It is perfectly okay to be Irrational right now, when life makes so little sense.  It’s okay to be a mess.  It’s okay to put your hands on his face every time he returns to you, and say, “I thought I lost you.  You’re back.  We’re home.”

If he really objects to this imposition, put a time limit on it, "I just need this for the next 2-4 weeks.  Then we can reassess."  Trauma is a huge relationship litmus test, so if he can be there for you in this, you will only get closer.

Now for some good news: you don’t have to go it alone.   Of course you can't afford $170/hour for a therapist.  Who can?  That fee is absurd.  I don't know where you live, but I bet there's a clinic or a graduate school nearby that has therapy interns that could see you for as little as $25/session.  If you live in California, and any of your recent tragedies are from violent crimes, you can get therapy through a program called Victims of Crime.

So, with a little bit of research about clinics, schools, and resources in your area, you can see a therapist that you can afford to help you through this time.  You'll have to go through this dark period of your life no matter what, but you shouldn't have to go through it without a guide.  Therapists are trained to walk alongside folks who have experienced tragedies while holding the lantern to help them see the way.

So, with your supports in place, you'll be able to dive in to the crux of the matter.  These recent tragedies have pulled the veil off of your life and you are seeing humans for what we really are: ephemeral.  Our lives, no matter how bright and beautiful, will one day pass away.  It is a horrible panic attack-inducing truth.  But it is also what makes our lives have a sense of urgency, what propels us to ever do anything of consequence, what gives us something worth fighting for.

When my beloved father died, I spent a grief-stricken winter laying face up on my bed, immobile, staring at the one lonely snowflake I had hung from my ceiling, reciting my favorite poems and feeling the chill of a world in which my anchor had been pulled up.  I was adrift.  And terrified.

So, when it came time to register for classes at my university, I signed up for an intense course in Death and Dying, in which we read 12 books about death; theological, philosophical, and personal texts.  The professor's father was dying as he taught the class.  He and I spent several afternoons in his office, laughing at the absurdity of death and sitting in silence at the horror of it.  It was insane to immerse myself so fully in my grief, but I had a therapist I trusted and my fiancee by my side, so I dove in.  I needed to make sense of the world before I could commit myself fully to living in it.

Perhaps you are not about to take such an undeniably intellectual pursuit.  However, do something to make sense of your world, or you will find yourself trying to control it in odd ways.  Pulling out bits of your hair and lining them up in straight rows, restricting certain foods to cheat death's knocking, calling your loved ones obsessively -- I've been there, I know this behavior.  But how you face these tragedies will direct a good portion of your life.  Don't judge yourself for however you experience grief, but strive to get the better of it.  Just the fact that you wrote in to this column shows you are ready to face these fears.

Finally, do something that makes you feel really alive.  Take up boxing, write a poem every day, hike the hills behind your house, sing at a monthly open mic night.  Whatever it is, choose something that brings you close to the core of life, but does not throw you over.  Grind your feet into the earth, finding your shoring beneath you.

Remind yourself why you want to remain a citizen of this world.  Give yourself visceral experiences of the beauty of this life, despite the pain we inevitably incur.  Love so fiercely that death has no lasting sting, just a dull ache that reminds you that what you’ve lost lives on in you, propelling you to further bravery in loving.

Love,

Sibyl

A List of Resolutions

I’m not normally very good about New Year’s Resolutions.  In fact, I typically skip them altogether.  It seems when January 1^st rolls around, my life is already in a state of chaos and/or change or I have already adopted any ‘resolutions’ I might make.  But this year is different.  This year I find my life in a near constant state, I’m not planning any moves, I already have a job (or two) that I like, things are stable. So the door is open for resolutions.  After listening to the goals and commitments of my friends and family for years, I finally have my own resolutions.

• Be a grown up: Put away money for a rainy day, update important things like health insurance and retirement plans, get a handle on my taxes and generally be a responsible adult.
• Be a great friend: make the phone calls first, send long emails, write letters. I treasure my relationships, especially those with my friends---its important to act like it.
• Take care of me: develop healthy eating and exercise habits.  My sister once told me that she exercised because she feels (and I agree) that she’s pretty awesome and “that much awesomeness deserves to last as long as possible and be as healthy as possible”.
• Read to expand my horizons:  Books about science, religion, and interesting biographies are on my list, as well as dipping into poetry and essays.
• Set goals: I’m kind of a float-through-life gal; setting goals on a monthly basis will help me stay on top of my resolutions and give me a rush when I cross things off.
• Direction, dreams, and discovery:  These are my keywords for 2013.  I’m not one for corporate dreams or following a set path, but there are still things I want to accomplish and places I want to focus my energies. I want to see where projects or ideas might lead me; it’s thrilling and exhilarating to think about all the new things I might do, learn, and create.

May your 2013 be everything you could hope for and more!

Lessons from a Birthday...

Dear Clara, Birthday season has come upon us! In our little family of three, there is yours, then mine, then the holidays, then your father’s, and then the new year, all in a row.  And our extended family is pretty close to our timeframe too–I guess we were all fated to be together.  But the rapid succession of all our celebrations made me think of what I’d always like you to keep in mind on your own birthdays in years to come:

• Wear something new: Even if it’s a little thing . . . there’s something about bringing something new out of the package, cutting the tags and having that new, shiny, or crisp feeling.  It just adds the right start to the day, and going forward you’ll always associate that item with the day you celebrated another year.
• Call you parents: I never really thought of this growing up, but your birthday is actually more emotional for a parent than for the person celebrating.  It is the day, after all, that their life changed forever when you came into their world.  Don’t forget the fact that they are celebrating in their own way too.
• Don’t forget to celebrate in your own way: When you’re younger, celebrations come easily.  There are parties, there are friends, and there are always much-ado’s about birthdays.  But as you get older, and work schedules set in, and bills need to get paid, and hundreds of other things crowd our mind, not the least of which is our uncertainty about being yet another year older, it’s easy to say that we don’t want to celebrate.  That’s bogus.  You don’t always need a big party, but do something to mark the occasion---you will be more likely to embrace the year ahead and the gifts it brings.
• Don’t be upset if people forget your birthday: It happens.  Some people are excellent about remembering birthdays, but some people slip, despite all of their best intentions.  If someone calls late, don’t hold it against them.  Accept their good wishes for you, that’s what counts.  Someday it might be you that forgets . . . despite all of your best intentions.
• But remember how nice it feels when people do remember: Try to be the person that remembers.  Take notes of important days, keep a calendar, set up reminders.  You might not always get it right but if you try, it’s much easier.  Think of how special it makes you feel when someone goes out of their way to call or write a card or do a surprise for your birthday, and try to be the person that does that for other people.  They will remember you for it, even if they don’t always thank you.

I wish you only the happiest of birthdays over many long years, and remember that I will be with you, in some way, for all of them.

All my love,

Mom

Barbie and the Blonde Normative

While shopping for Christmas presents for the young children in my life, I was able to get reacquainted with the toy aisle, with all the nostalgia and wonder that entails. It’s a feeling akin to what happens when I step inside my childhood closet, still so snugly preserved in my room at my parents’ house, which overflows with shelves of vintage Barbies, Littlest Pet Shops, Polly Pockets, trolls, stuffed Disney characters, and Happy Meal toys of yore.

The kid part of me rejoiced in the possibility of the toys and was immediately drawn to all those that are obviously aimed at the female gender. The social critic in me, however, registered shock at the sheer catastrophe of gender and racial normativity that the American toy aisle promotes (i.e., the marketing aimed at boys vs. girls; the way dolls default to white, blonde, straight-haired, blue-eyed). This caused me to reevaluate my own historical relationship with toys and the ways in which toys shape our understanding of the world from a very young age---and what, potentially, could be addressed to improve them in the future.

Take Barbie and her absurdly voluptuous figure which, achieved in a human, would probably point to severe physiological abnormalities and health problems. Incidentally, when Barbie appeared on the toy scene in 1959, many mothers were indignant about her “sexy” image. But despite this she went on to become the standard-bearer of dolls for the next half-century because Mattel understood that little girls often like to think forward, to what they aspire to be when they get older; and Barbie’s body, distorted as it may be, represents our society's ultimate feminine beauty ideal. Also-- while Barbie has brunette, redheaded, and minority friends, the woman herself is always as white, blond, and blue-eyed as her legs are long.

My own Barbie drawer, by the way, overflowed with blondes. I had roughly forty Barbies with an approximate demographic breakdown of 96% Caucasian, of which 96% were blonde. A good portion of the non-blondes (and non-whites, for that matter) were Disney characters---Jasmine, Pocahontas, Belle and Ariel. Other non-blondes included a Hawaiian doll and a 1996 Olympic gymnast that I named Dominique in honor of Ms. Dawes. A rainbow coalition it was not. More likely, it was probably a contributing factor to an early childhood desire to be blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and blonde.

A slightly more inclusive and educational doll franchise is the American Girl line, which features tweenish girl characters of diverse backgrounds from important periods in American history. Each doll comes with multiple cultural outfits and her own series of books. Of course, most of the characters are white and a good number are blonde, but there is an effort at representation of minority backgrounds, most notably in characters like Addy, Kaya, and Josefina.

However, these characters’ stories don’t necessarily do much to present complexity to minority stories: Addy is a runaway slave, and one of Kaya’s playsets is a horse, saddle, and tepee. While there are definite positive efforts going on here, it would be great to be presented from time to time with minority characters who aren’t merely historical and tied to a mythic essential identity---instead, maybe breaking with tradition by having a Native American girl living in the 1970s, a black girl living during World War II, and giving children of color someone to identify with in the now (or relatively now)---which, unlike white children, they often don’t have readily available.

(A possible response to the minority doll question: American Girl’s popular “design-your-own-doll” feature, which encourages girls to choose the hair color, skin color, eye color, and facial features of their doll to ostensibly resemble themselves.)

And while we're on the normativity train, lest we forget that the toy industry also has the teensiest tendency to reify gender categories and designate which types of toys boys and girls “should” want to play with, usually tying into concepts with wider implications like respective household roles, occupations, and standards of appearance. So few playthings for the over-4 set are gender neutral---really, the marketing of toys is probably one of the earliest socialization experiences we have, when it comes to gender traits and aspirations. More could be said on this, but I think this kid kind of sums it up.

I'm wondering if the upcoming gender neutral EZ Bake Oven is a sign o' the changing times? Or a testament to the power of the individual to contest the deeply-entrenched normative stereotypes in the toy industry?

Reflecting on milestones: 2012

This column first appeared on Stories of Conflict and Love earlier this week. I have always been attached to the process of documentation and the rituals of recording memories. Different notebooks have held disparate thoughts across eras of my life, with their pages threading together class notes on violent conflict in Africa to poetry to to-do lists to workshop outlines to endless nights of worry. For the past four years, I have lived out of a suitcase, shedding belongings and an attachment to 'stuff' and hoarding memories instead. The notebooks have been the only possessions of mine that have traveled everywhere, truly everywhere, stretching suitcases till they bloat. And even though they now sit neatly on a shelf in Boston, there was no arrangement or system to how they were organized. The only rule was that every page had to be filled before a new notebook was commissioned to be my wandering companion.

January 16, 2012 was the beginning of a new notebook, for no reason other than its predecessor running out of pages. On that day, I copied down Mary Anne Radmacher's poem, "Living Eulogy:"

Under that, inspired by Katie, I started making a list. Every year, Katie tracks goals she'd like to meet before her next birthday. Page 1 of this new notebook mirrored that format and, below Radmacher's poem, I started outlining my own hopes for 2012.

Some were laughably simple, almost thrown in there the way you write "laundry" or "grocery shopping" onto a to-do list: for the painless joy of crossing those items off. #12 on my list was "throw a party." There had been plenty of parties in my nomadic life. There was the table dancing in Guatemala---ceaseless dancing on tables, it seemed. There were the nights in Cairo when we all gathered in that penthouse apartment and sang our lungs out to Queen. I remember the night Elijah walked me to Tahrir to hail a taxi and I could still hear Bohemian Rhapsody in the background. But then the moving, the ceaseless moving, took its toll and the parties were mostly farewell parties, for me and for others. #12 on the list was not (just) about buying Solo cups and cheap wine. It was about being embedded in a community long enough, feeling its grounding enough, to host snippets of it in my home "just because." Not because anyone was leaving, not because it was a birthday. Because it was community.

And there were parties. #12: done.

#15: Take a night photograph I am proud of. You see, this one correlated to #25: Learn to shoot my camera on manual. I "knew" how to use my camera on manual. I taught photography workshops for crying out loud. But it always felt a little foreign. The photos always felt nicer on 'automatic'---as though anything nice in life ever came out of automatic. The night photos, in particular, always felt shaky. All of me felt shaky at times this year. Shooting the camera on manual, dragging it along and having the weight of its strap tug on my shoulder at night, was a challenge not because of its mechanics, but because of my own wobbliness. And then Milos happened. Greece and I have the kind of relationship that melts anxiety, such that this photo can be taken, such that elbows can sit steady and skirted legs can plant themselves firmly on salty ground and hair can billow in the wind and I can hold my breath long enough to defeat the blurriness.

#15: Take a night photograph I am proud of. Done. It is not a particularly original image. Add a cat into it, a skewer of souvlaki, and some cheesy reference to "Greece is for lovers", and it's a generic postcard. But it is clear, unshaken, and taken by me, and that makes it a cherished first. Done.

Then there were the trickier dreams. #21: Create a home. This is not a to-do item of the "laundry" and "grocery shopping" variety; it is not the kind of goal one can fulfill by focusing hard enough or trying harder or by finding the perfect rock on a Greek island onto which to perch her elbows to take a not-blurry night photograph. The irony behind this wish is that I did not expect it to be fulfilled until the fall came, and the suitcases were unpacked and put away, and I lived in Boston with the ability to firmly derive my identity from being a graduate student. Jerusalem snuck up on me. It insisted on not being ephemeral. It demanded lasting love. It required commitment: the purchase of the space heater, the unavoidable conversations with everyone on the street from the baker to the laundromat operator. The evaporation of any desire to avoid conversation. I did not think 2012 would hold two homes, but it did. Some would argue that the very existence of multiple homes speaks to the lack of a solid, meaningful one---but, in this case, I'll take the polyamory.

I cannot pronounce #21 done; no home is ever 'done', the process of making one is never complete---let alone the process of creating and sustaining multiple homes in one's heart. But #21 is the kind of item I would never like to cross off a list and pronounce 'done' in the first place. I simply wanted to know it was possible.

Some of the items on my 2012 wishlist stand unfulfilled, but I am determined to give them another try. See #14: Keep an ideas notebook. I have a noisy brain, the kind that I am trying to make peace with, rather than silence. Particularly in moments of euphoria, ideas zoom through it and most of them remain uncaptured, evading me in the moments of calm when I try to revisit them. When Kim sent me a notebook with "Ideas" scribbled on its cover in February, it seemed like the perfect moment to slow down and start jotting down the thoughts born out of elation or enthusiasm before they become too fleeting to ground. The pages of that notebook are still blank. I still want to try in 2013, because I want the mornings after ideas to be just as alive and enlivening. #14: not done, decidedly not done. But still salient enough, necessary enough to stay on the wish list for another year.

Then there were the wishes that remained unfulfilled, but I am willing to let them stand as such. They either became less relevant as the year passed or I grew readier to live without them. I never entered a contest (#7) with my writing or photography in 2012, nor did I send 12 handwritten letters (#25). I wrote new columns in 2012, including this one, and I published photo-essays, but I never quite went through with clicking submit and having my work evaluated by a panel of seriousness. I penned endless cards and thank you notes and Christmas wishes and Congratulations on your marriage, but 12 handwritten letters never quite happened. I could dissect why that was, I could investigate the desire behind those items in the first place, but they do not burn brightly enough any more to necessitate that. As such, #7 and #25: unchecked, peacefully so.

Unlike those items, there were those at which I failed abjectly, and disappointingly. #1: Worry less. In my final Gypsy Girls Guide column, on January 3, 2012, a mere day after my birthday, I wrote that I wanted 2012 to be the "year of the exhale." I knew then, as I know now, that a human being cannot go on worrying at the level and meticulousness that I do. I was aware that it was time to let go of some of the anxiety, of the post-traumatic stress, of the grief, of the intensity of conflict zones, of the emotional minefield of work that I did not know (or want) to do unemotionally. I wrote then:

It is not journeys I long for this year. It is not novelty or fireworks I crave, though I welcome all of this into my life and am open to it if it comes. In 2012, I am willing a quiet mind. In 2012, I want to banish Ray LaMontagne for Damien Rice and his belief that I can “look into my eyes and see that noone will harm me.” Some former smokers say that months after quitting smoking, an exhale comes and they breathe deeply, making it all worth it. In 2012, I am living for the exhale.

2012 endowed me with journeys, novelty, fireworks---and some exhales, too. But I was naive to think that those would come without more moments that cut an inhale short, trigger a gasp, or make me hold my breath till I turn blue in the face. Exhaling was beautiful and needed, but if I am to keep writing, and reflecting, and living with intention---as Mary Anne Radmacher would have it---then I need to learn not only to wish for the exhale, but also to master creating it myself and living patiently with the moments that render it elusive. I failed at worrying less this year. In the scheme of life, this is a more costly failure than having failed at other items on the wish list. I am slowly realizing that in my life, item #1 from year to year will continue to be Worry Less, until it, too, is rendered unnecessary. Until this wish has been scratched off the list, edged off by other priorities, sufficiently conquered, or---perhaps more realistically---until I make peace.

Looking Forward: Happy Homes.

My parents’ garage is a deep and cavernous place, worthy of a treasure map. There are shelves of old dishes; teetering stacks of luggage; Christmas ornaments in cardboard boxes gone slack with age. Propped against one wall is a giant foam-core poster of the Sex Pistols, which I rescued from the curb outside a Hollywood record store when I was in high school. Lining another wall are piles of VHS tapes: Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Disney Sing-Along Songs. In the middle, there’s a stationary bike. An old washer and dryer. A butcher block. And in the back corner, a dining table from my childhood, a set of six wooden chairs, and a loveseat wrapped in plastic, never used.

I learned during my recent trip home for the holidays that these last few items were being saved for me. “So you won’t have an empty house,” my mom explained one night over dinner, “in case you decide to move back to L.A.”

---

My dad once told me a story about arriving in Hawai’i for the first time. Even though he'd never been to the islands before, he felt, to his surprise, as if he was returning home. (My family would later spend seven years living in Honolulu.)

A similar thing happened to me when I moved to Brooklyn, and fell in love with it in a way I’d previously assumed only happened between people. “It’s ‘The One,’” I told a friend shortly after.

Even so, I figured I’d spend a few years in New York City, and eventually return to the West Coast. Los Angeles, after all, has always been home base. It’s where my parents live, and my brother and his growing family, too. Years ago, when it was only one of two cities in which I’d ever lived, I couldn’t imagine building a life anywhere else. Slowly, though, that's starting to change. And I wonder, what do you do when the city you love most is thousands of miles away from so many of the people you love most?

The short answer is, you Skype. You text. You email. But how do these things measure up to conversations in the flesh? Hugging someone hello? Having a seat at family dinners?

I don’t know where I’ll make my home in the future, but I do know---instinctively, and because they’ve told me---that above all, my family wishes for me to be happy and to be living as full a life as possible, wherever I choose. On the flip side, I believe that “home” can be anywhere, as long as you’re with people you love.

When it comes down to it, my time here in New York may comprise just a chapter in my life. Or, maybe, it will be the story of my life.

Time will tell.

---

Last week, the day before I returned to New York, I had a conversation with my parents, about my future, and theirs.

“It doesn’t matter where we end up,” said my mom. “We know how to make a happy home.”

It’s true. We do. Happy homes follow happy people.

The rest, I trust, resolves itself.

Needing the New

Growing up, whenever there was a school vacation (regardless of length), I felt compelled to be different upon my return.  A three-day weekend prompted me to scavenge the mall, seeking out a perfect GAP t-shirt that would make all of the other seventh graders drool with corporate envy.  A week over Easter meant a new haircut or an unhealthy amount of time spent laying in my pool, trying to cultivate the perfect golden brown skin-tone (I am half Irish; this is not easy).  Summer break?  I needed to travel to far-flung places to build my sophistication arsenal.  I needed an accent, or at least a fake one.  I needed to lose weight or gain muscle, to learn gymnastics or grow three inches.  I needed, on that first day of school, the look in my friends’ eyes that said, “you’re a better you.” The world we live in, of course, both helps in creating this need for change and makes achieving it all too easy.  A quick perusal of the magazines on newsstands right now showcases too many “new you!” headlines to count, whether it be how to lose 10 pounds fast or reverse aging or try a new hairstyle that will change your life; flipping open the same magazines reveals advertisements and articles geared towards becoming your best self, over and over and over again.

And now, the pinnacle of the makeover madness, the holiday designed to remind us, yet again, that we’re still striving; that we will, in fact, always be striving: New Year’s.  Stressed and strung out from too much family time and too delicious gingerbread men, bloated from the eleventh eggnog cocktail and bleary eyed from waking up to play Santa, we look at New Year’s and think, “yeah, that sounds good. I’ll resolve to be better.”  Because who couldn’t stand to be a little better?  And because, of course, the resolution is the easiest part.

My need for drastic change has subsided over the years.  I remember distinctly returning to the hometown I’d moved away from when I was thirteen.  I was now sixteen.  Since leaving, I’d spent a summer abroad in Germany.  I’d stopped wearing bell bottoms (so unfashionable!) and moved on to bootcut jeans.  My hair was longer and less frizzy, my skin was beginning to emerge from under its sea of zits.  I rang the doorbell of an old friend’s house and stood on her porch, trying to cock my hip out just so.  She opened the door.

“Liz!” she said, flinging her arms around me.

“Hey,” I said, my irrational teenage heart sinking.  “I thought you’d hardly recognize me.”

She pulled back and looked me up and down.  “Nope, I recognize you perfectly.” She caught the look in my eye and frowned.  “Why?” she said.  “Did you not want me to?”

“I just wanted to be, you know . . . different,” I mumbled.

She swooped me into her arms again.  “But I,” she said, “wanted to see Liz.”  While I was disappointed, she got exactly what she wanted.

The ten pounds, the red hair, the black, brown or green hair, the tan, the pale skin, the contacts, the new dress: all of it is to get you that much closer to a person you like, not change you in the eyes of anyone else.  My friend would’ve recognized me no matter what.  The question was if I had become the person I wanted to recognize.  If I had become a person I could like.

This New Year’s, I’m resolving to stay the course.  Like many people my age, I’m learning to love myself a little bit more every year, and any drastic left or right turns might impede that journey.  I resolve to enjoy exactly who I am right now, and exactly who I may be in a week, or a month, or a year.

Happy New Year’s to everyone.  May your night and all the subsequent ones be bright.

Lucky Peas

Happy 2013!  It's officially that time of the year when people flock to their favorite social media sites to proclaim their resolutions to the world. Realized or not, most goals are to lose and gain at the same time.  Lose weight, gain confidence; lose a bad habit, gain a healthier lifestyle; lose the bad attitude, gain a positive outlook.  My resolution for this year is to improve myself on a daily, not yearly, basis.  Every morning should be viewed as a fresh start, a clean slate, and a day that we can all choose to be a better person.  Whatever the goal might be, there is also another important component to this day---the food.  There is a variety of dishes deemed as lucky and many would argue are a necessity on any true new year menu.  A plate full of cooked greens and black-eyed peas symbolize monetary growth and good fortune, pork represents abundance and progress, and fish is thought to promote a long life.  Being a vegetarian means I usually go for double helpings of the greens and beans then hope for the best.  My favorite way to ring in the beginning of a year is to indulge in an overflowing plate of the classic southern dish known as Hoppin' John.  There is a variety of ways to make this dish, but I always take the simple, meatless route.

Hoppin' John

2 cans black-eyed peas (washed and drained)

1 cup vegetable broth

1/3 cup chopped red onion

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 minced garlic clove

1 teaspoon dry thyme

lemon juice and zest

cilantro

fresh spinach

rice

In a pan, saute the chopped onion and garlic in olive oil until the aroma makes your mouth water with excitement.  Add peas, broth, thyme and bring to a boil.  Once the stew is bubbling, turn the heat down and simmer on low for 45 minutes to an hour.  Serve over a bed of spinach and a heaping mound of rice.  Spritz with lemon juice and garnish with lemon zest and a few twigs of cilantro.   Hoppin' John may not be the most eye popping dish, but it's definitely a recipe for good luck and a full belly.

To You and Yours

Happy New Year! We hope 2013 brings new adventures, familiar comforts, and endless inspiration. Thank you for being a part of the Equals Record community!

Fondly,

Elisabeth & Miya

34

My mom didn’t call me on my birthday each year at the exact time of day I was born, and tell me the story of my birth. She didn’t sing the Happy Birthday song to me over the phone, and she certainly did not send me to elementary school with little love notes tucked into my lunch bag on my birthday. She used to say that my father was a baby about his birthday, by which she meant that he liked for all of us to make a bit of a fuss over him each year. For her own birthdays, she told us not to bother, to save our money, that she didn’t need anything, and that she would cook her own dinner. We never listened, of course. For her 70^th, she was particularly adamant, but we planned a fancy private dinner anyway.  We ended up celebrating in the hospital, as she lay next to us in a coma. We joked --- because what else was there to do at such a time --- that she would go to any length not to celebrate her birthday. But, then, she baked the most amazing birthday cakes when we were little. There was Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, a guitar, baby blocks –-- all homemade and elaborately decorated by hand. Most recently, she broke out her cake decorating tools for my nephew's first birthday, creating the perfect Elmo cake for him. Generous gifts turned into generous checks as we grew up and preferred to pick out our own things. I celebrated my 21^st birthday in London, during my semester abroad. On my mom’s urging, I took my five roommates out to dinner, courtesy of my parents. I remember shrimp and sake, wine and great friends. The only low point of the evening was the bill, reflecting an exchange rate grossly in favor of the pound, and the fact that Benihana in London was a bit fancier than its American counterpart.

I celebrated my 34^th birthday a few weeks ago, the first without my mom.  It was a quiet day spent working from home, with frequent interruptions from friends and family via phone, text, and of course, social media. In the quiet spaces between each birthday message, I thought of my mom. Part of me waited for her phone call all day, because how could it be possible that my mom, the person who gave me life, who more than anyone else should celebrate my birthday, would never do so again? A silly thought, perhaps, after ten months of grieving and learning to live without her, but the knowledge that she couldn’t find a way to wish me a happy birthday made her death so much more real.

I have a Polaroid picture, taken shortly after my birth, of me and my parents. They look so young –-- only a few years older than I am now –--- and as I look at it, I realize I have so many more questions for my mom. At three and four years younger than my sisters, and arriving as my parents neared 37, my sisters have teased me forever that I was a mistake. My mom always reversed the negative, telling me that I was a pleasant surprise. Always petite, she gained 50 pounds while pregnant with me, and used to say that she never lost it. In short, she joked that I ruined her. But I also know that I was an easy baby, happy and content to sit in my high chair, while the older kids ran in circles around me. I know that as the baby of the family, and perhaps because of my striking resemblance to my mom –-- both physical and in temperament --– I got away with more than my sisters sometimes did. But there is so much more I want to ask, especially now as my husband and I navigate the start of our own family. I want to know about her own losses, and whether she worried about having kids later in life. I want to know if she compared herself to her peers, most of whom started their own families years before my parents did, as I find myself doing at times. I want to know what my birth was like, and how she felt having a new baby while trying to celebrate Christmas for my older sisters. And, of course, I want to know how she managed to raise three kids under the age of four, without losing her mind.

I sat with my mother-in-law this past week, fascinated as she told stories about the adoption process they undertook, in bringing my sister-in-law home from Korea, close to 30 years ago. The birth story she told is so different than many, as Kendra didn’t arrive until close to her first birthday, but the gist of the story was the same. Regardless of age, of skin color, of biology, Susan knew immediately that Kendra was hers. And that was it.

We’re connected to our mothers –-- whether by nature or by nurture –-- in the most intimate of ways. As babies, we're soothed by their touch, their smell, their voice. As adults, that connection runs even deeper, and I daresay, the loss even more overwhelming. It's a daily work, this loss, continuing to humble me with each passing month. As I enter a new year, in more ways than one, I thank you again for traveling this road with me. Here's to light and love in 2013.

A Christmas Present

A lovely video by Molly McIntyre

When We Are Older This Will All Make Sense and It Will Be Too Late

Sibyl, I have spent a significant amount of time pursuing one career direction, and now I am unsure if that is the right way for me. This is not unusual, but I am unsure how to decide on a new direction. Early 30's still feels too old to just try out some other career paths. I have worked in religious institutions or social services or both or 5 years. Now I would like to try something more creative . . . yet I am unsure where to go or what to do. How do I explore options while still affording to live? What can I do to both explore and survive?

Sincerely, Ummm

Dear Ummm,

I am so glad you brought this up.  True confession time: Sibyl has no idea what the heck she is doing with her life.  Like you, I have invested a considerable amount of time, energy, and debt in following a life in the "helping professions", only to find that it is an unsustainable way for me to live.  So, I am striking out into the world with writing and other creative pursuits, terrified at the outcome but totally sure that it is what I need to do, anyway.

I have learned some things along the way, which I will now share with you, dearest Um.

1. A life of service will suck you dry and spit you out when you have nothing left.  

My father was social worker, and when he would get home every day, I would ask, "How was your day?"  His one word response was invariably, "Crazy."  Whenever I pressed him for more answers, he just said, "It's a thankless job."  And that, my friend, was that.

Despite this harrowing harbinger of the life to come, I idolized my father and followed his footsteps, pursuing a life of helping others.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.  In college and graduate school, I heard a lot about the way the work feeds you from within, and how your thanks is in the process of helping others.  This was enough for me, in my twenties.  I worked my ass off at low-paying jobs, and did indeed find the work rewarding.

However, I realized that although I enjoyed this kind of work, I had some life goals I wanted to complete, namely, having a family.  So, I set out to get knocked up and have a child.  This is when I found that having a job that pays you very little to take care of other people's emotional needs does not work well with being a parent, which consists of being paid absolutely nothing to take care of another person’s EVERYTHING.  Like you, I realized I needed to create or I would be left with nothing.  Art poured out of me like my desire to "save the world" once did.  But for whatever money work in social services provided, art provides even less.  What to do?

2. Make a list of all your creative interests, no matter how foolish.

Let yourself really dream here.  Do you want write, paint, be a film critic, cook, front a band, report the weather?  Be ridiculous.  Write, "I just want to be Vincent Gallo."  Okay!  Now we're talking.  Look over your list.  Where do you find the MOST energy?  It is important to tell your inner critic to go take a nap when you do this.  Instead of listening to that nagging voice that says "You'll never make a living that way!", listen to the one that tells you that what the world needs is more people doing what they love, what makes them truly come alive.

There are tons of practical exercises like this in the book The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron.  I suggest you pick up a copy and start the twelve week program she outlines, as soon as possible.  It's a great way to start your explorations while still living your day-to-day life.

3. Get water from a stone.

Have you decided on what creative path you're most interested in exploring?  If you chose filmmaking, you don't need to know what you want to make films about, you just need to start researching film schools, and go from there.  Look up unpaid internships (I know, I know) at your favorite magazine and write for them in the time you used to spend watching sitcoms.  Volunteer at your local artist collective and talk to people who actually do make a living as art-makers.  The way they’ve pieced together their lives could surprise you.  For instance, it may make a lot of sense to combine your helping profession efforts with art-making -- they could inform each other in beautiful ways.

Again, tell your inner critic to take a vacation while you're researching artist residencies in Maine.  Or, better yet, sit that critic down, and say, "You're RIGHT.  I'm never going to save for retirement and buy a house if I follow my creative goals now.  But giving everything I have to others has not made me millionaire either.  So guess what?  I'm going to do what makes me happy.  And when I'm drowning in debt, you can say, 'I told you so', and I can go make a masterpiece on my canvas.  You're right, but I win."

Here's what you need to do, Ummm.  Figure out the very least that you can live on.  One fancy coffee per week instead of five?  Awesome.  Brown bagging it every day instead of eating from food carts with your friends?  Excellent.  Turning on the heat in only the direst of snow storms?  Pull up that blanket!  I know that you've probably been living a life of almost-poverty taking care of others for so long.  But believe me, this is different.

Investing your time and efforts in art-making actually is enriching, in the way that all our professors told us that lives of service would be.  Okay, so you don't have a living room that could be featured in Ladies' Home Journal, and you can't go on vacation and post a picture of your feet with a fancy drink by the ocean on Facebook, but guess what?  You get to be you, and you get to be awesome.

You will always be that interesting person at a party who is not just talking about what milestone your baby has reached, but has a new project or idea you're working on that you want feedback from your friends about.  You'll always have something to do on a Friday night, because you'll be in your studio.  So, you don't have all the material bullshit and security our culture seems to uphold so much, but look how that's working out for those folks?  Rich, secure, and absolutely terrified of losing that wealth and perceived security.  Be bold, risk big, and yes, get mad about the fact that art-making doesn't pay actual dollars.  Do it anyway.

3. Don't go it alone.

So, you've spent all this time taking care of other people, and you're ready to follow your own dreams for once.  Guess what?  All of that time you spent caring for others spiritually and physically was not wasted.  It was all a part of your creation as a soon-to-be artist.  You not only became a person of substance, who actually has something to create art about, but you stored up a ridiculous amount of good karma.

Being there for others means that they are now going to be there for you.  They'll say, "That Ummm, what a good guy, he came to the hospital when my dad was sick, and now he's striking out as an artist and needs a leg up, why don't I buy one of his pieces, or, at the very least, invite him over for Sunday dinner."  You've got to find your people, and chance are, you already have, since you've devoted your life to loving humans.  Lean on them now.  Let them take care of you in the ways you've been taking care of them.  Help comes from the most unexpected places.  Reach out, and see the lovely (and materialistically helpful) ways your community responds.

It will not be magical, it will happen because of all the work you have already put in.  Everything is not going to mysteriously go your way once you set your mind to what you want to do, don’t buy that bull.  However, it will flow back to you proportionally to what effort you put forth.  You want to explore?  Really excavate!  Don’t hold back.  You get out of the creative life what you put into it.  Stop ummming and start risking, give up the fallacy of security, and be who you are, big time.

When we are older, all of this will make sense to us, and we will say, “Oh!  I should have started this or that sooner.”  But it will be too late.  Right now, contrary to what you are being told, is not too late, because it is all we have.  Dive in right this second.  I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

In solidarity,

Sibyl