Know Thyself--or Ask My Mom 1001; 23

Feedback is a good thing. Feedback is like a bathroom mirror—it gives us important information about ourselves, like: “is food stuck in my teeth” and “am I wearing something really inappropriate” and “who is the old coot looking back at me.” Feedback is Reality Check. Not all feedback is created equal, as we know. My Mom’s feedback, for example, is not always easy to accept, but it is generally pretty easy to interpret, because she is not constrained by niceties, like: feelings. She shoots opinion from the hip. Her aim is uncanny. Often it is unerring. This kind of feedback can be brutally hard to process without also feeling worthless, but over time, if adapted to, it is highly to be feared.

For example, Mom is always telling my brother that he needs to lose weight. (Well, she says that to a lot of people, but I noticed that she has said it to him a lot. She says it to me sometimes, too, but I’m removing myself from this conversation to maintain some semblance of perspective and fun.) That is brutal. Mom is pretty blithe about it; she doesn’t care if everyone hears, because I know in her (particular kind of) mind the thinking is: “I believe this = this is therefore fact = therefore everyone agrees with me.” I know her thinking because I am her daughter, and we share a bloodline of Mean French Women—in our case the Sassingers. She has often stated, in a generalization disguised as fact, that “French Women Are Mean” because her Grandma Sassinger provided her with the hard data, in the flesh. Her mom continued the data, and as I often tell my Mom, she is a good case example, herself. (Note: I love my mom dearly. I also can’t stand her, need her, avoid her, fear her, am confused and amused by her, disagree and agree with her, disregard her, seek her counsel, and understand and don’t understand her.)

I think my brother dreads birthdays in some small fashion, because Mom always—always—brings him a homemade Angel Food Cake, because Angel Food is less fattening than a really good cake like, say, Upside Down German Chocolate Devils Food Cake. And she does not put icing on the boring Angel Food cake, either, because icing is Fattening. I advised her, this year, to skip the whole Non-Fattening Cake routine and bring a Dairy Queen frozen ice-cream chocolate cake with the works. And to never bring up words related to “pounds, fat, weight, you need to” etc. I’m sure the Sassinger in her would whisper “don’t listen to this wimp ”--(c'est moi, naturelment)--but the Real Physical Personification of Mom laughed and said she’d think about it. Despite her fate-locked delivery of Final Judgement, I value her feedback, because it is Real. Hopefully, she will pay attention to some feedback from a fellow Mean French Woman (although I’m a lot more diluted than her and think I favor my Dad’s predominant Irish Cherokee line, personally); it might make her very pointed arrows slice through to the truth with a little less barbed destruction and a little more of a clean cut.  (Wait, would that be a good thing?) 

But feedback comes in many flavors. My dear brother also celebrates birthdays with friends and neighbors and children and strangers who don’t notice his shape at all.  Because, despite a few extra pounds, my brother (whom I love, trust, suspect, look up to, disregard, and always am dazzled by, except when he shows his stubborn right-winged shallow side) is a highly charismatic, fearless, quick-witted, strong, ephemeral Irish Cherokee kind of guy. And we all know what those Irish are like. And those Cherokees.

And those French. Together, the World Mix of Values Thought is complex and confusing enough to produce World View Feedback of sufficient depth and conflict to keep us guessing and on our toes.

Which feedback should do, eh?

The Person Who Thought Too Much 1001;22

I have a reputation for thinking too much.  I like to analyze, and then analyze my analysis, considering other viewpoints as much as possible.  Its my version of "getting high".  Some people don't appreciate the attendant verbalization of all that thinking.  Ah, Thinking. Its a burden to bear, but old habits are hard to break.  Its especially hard because I do it in my head to pass the time, and I have to consider what I can do instead of live in my head, some activity to break the habit. 

My first thought on how to give up too much thinking is to go the "Be Here Now " route--the moldy hippie standby slogan from my youth, famously associated with the mystic and weird Ram Dass http://www.yogalifestyle.com/BkBeRD.htm, formerly Dr. Richard Alpert.  He was every joint-smoking, hippie college student's hero back in the late 60s and early 70s.   He was a Harvard psychologist who went off to India when it was the thing to do, changed his WASP name and got spiritual and sexual.  He did it in the company of the famously hallucenogenic-drug-researching icon, Timothy Leary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSFuEOA9wc.

More than any teachings he spawned, I remember his face postered in the dorm rooms of fellow wannabe-freespirits with the "Be Here Now" slogan.  That meant, I supposed, that it was a no-no to think too much.  One's best bet was to follow whatever was in front of you and not give too much thought to what was lurking down the road.  It was all very interesting, we felt we were rebelling, and maybe we were--I'm quite sure I was at the apogee of my shallow-thinking potential then.  But ol' RD, despite his flouted "e-z" slogan, was way more into mood-altering drugs than I can really manage time-wise and budget-wise.  Blocking thoughts through alien transmissions aka drugs is not something I'm interested in.  So I must chalk off the "don't think because your mind is on drug vacation" plan.

Casting about for other obvious solutions (most things in my life literally are obvious, lying around my house in an obvious and untended way, waiting to be noticed, which is why I try to eliminate most things in my life and thereby damp down the seduction of thinking about things; I ask you, is it overly-deep to consider what to do with dirty clothes, 2 cats, shoes, things that need cleaning, food, ...?), I think "garden."

When I walk into my backyard, full of plants growing in meandering intensity and tucked amongst trash-picker-inspired objet's d'interest, I stop thinking about things.  I go from spot to spot, checking out how much vine the snake gourds have added on last night, if the green beans have got beans yet, if the basil has given up and died from the hot weather.  Weeds lure me especially--its a long-ingrained pleasureable sensation to grasp a weed by the base of its stem, and feel the "tug" when it comes out spot-clean, root and all.  I prefer hand-weeding to hoeing, any day. It turns off my brain, no 2 ways about it.

I've thought about it a lot--of course--and agree with Mom that weeding is a real and potent form of meditation.  This particular Be Here Now method is not, however, listed on Ram Dass's or anybody else's website besides my own, that I know of.  So you heard it here first, Pilgrim: weed-pulling takes you Away to Where You Want to Be. Cleanses the stuffed bosom of those heavy thoughts.  Dampers the chain reaction to any thought stimuli other than that which fills your hands with dirt and flora.

But weeding is seasonal, and not conveniently handy when I'm in most social situations. So maybe if you have good suggestions for me to loosen the belt of my brain muscle and loose the over-think drive, you could share them with me.  It could be very useful to turn IT off , sometimes.  Yes, I'll admit I'm obsessed with growing old, and ok maybe I think about it more than is comfortable for Being Here Now. Frankly, as a control freak,  I'd like to be an expert at it.  But I confess, its a lot to think of all at once, the "we are all going to die no matter what" kind of thinking I'm fond of.

I will never, I know, give up thinking entirely.  It's a habit, good/bad but definitely ingrained.  I sign off this deeply-thought-through missive with a small anecdote which has comforted me for many years.  It might be some comfort to those of you who are in my boat.

My friend the formerly-New York, currently-vegetarian lawyer said this to me, in a Ferndale, Mi restaurant over a lentil salad,  when I whined that someone had told me I thought too much:

"You don't think too much; they don't think enough."

Thank you, Ray.

'Nuff said.

Mulberries and the Universe 1001; 21

The self-made mulberry tree in my backyard is in fruiting season. It’s a black mulberry, which means the fruits are tasty—white mulberry tastes like cardboard. Black mulberry is quite sweet, no known nutritional value, and its tree grows madly wherever some bird drops it off after processing his/her own nutritional needs. That is how my particular 4-year-old, 12-foot, backyard mulberry came to be: some bird dropped it next to the fence, where I didn’t weed all summer, and it took heart. It apparently believed in itself. After it became a certain size and I noticed it scraggling up, I couldn’t bring myself to harsh its buzz, so I let it grow. It’s a very easy tree to grow; weed trees, my parents called them with a bit of a sniff. Personally, I’m growing some unknown and interesting varieties of weeds in my yard anyway—one looks like a lusciously thornless thistle, and one looks like Jack’s beanstalk before its growth spurt. We’ll see.

So mulberries are sweet spots with darn good shade in just a few years, but they have a couple problems as a food tree: the fruit falls inconveniently all over the ground when ready to eat, and have teensy stems on each and every berry which make strawberry stems look like wimps. Mulberry stems don’t just slide out, they require tugging, and the berries are so small that its not time-practical to clean a lot of them. Even I, with a casual eating attitude, don’t want to just eat the stems—it’d be fiber for a lifetime in one serving, even if they weren’t an unpleasant chew experience. I have at times cleaned enough to throw in pancake batter, and they are wonderful.

Mulberry’s other potential drawback is the method-of-harvesting thing, which after a little research actually has become a high point. If you have ever seen “Under the Tuscan Sun” (one of my personal ‘comfort movies’), you’ve seen the olive-harvest scene, where they lay sheets on the ground and shake the tree, tumbling the ripe-enough olives off the branches. This is exactly the practical and fun way to harvest mulberries, and it makes a good show for the neighbor kids, whom I’m always trying to subtly convert to gardening. I discovered the harvest method by googling “mulberries”. (I also wanted to make sure before eating the berries that this was, indeed, the mulberry I remembered from my distant youth and not some clever imitation that would embellish my final moments on earth with writhing painful gut spasms and foaming at the mouth and stuff. I strongly urge any tasting of unknown things to be presaged by a hell of a lot of checking. Food poisoning is serious business, I can tell you.)

Dad would’ve known with one look at the tree what it was. They were all over our farm. And he grew up as a semi-orphan in several farm households—far distant from his small city home—fostered in exchange for labor. He had plenty of emotional space to fill with wondering about the world around him, and he made excellent observations. Decades after his seedling years, Dad liked to make wine out of anything he could find around the farm in sufficient quantities, including mulberries. His wine was very sweet stuff, but he loved making it for the pleasure of learning about it—and for drinking it. It was very special because it was literally the fruit of his labor, and a personal kind of nourishment, as was nearly everything we consumed on the farm: food on the hoof or from the ground. Americans are awakening to the awareness that our farm-based culture of living off personally-procured food is endangered. Self-sustenance begats gratitude for supplying basic needs, and fast food with no emotional investment encourages obesity. I’m delighted with neighbors who have ducks and chickens in their urban yard—they are in a process of personalizing their food. And learning stuff.

But Dad is no longer around to lend personal experience to the use and fate of my mulberry tree, alas. So the next best thing to his personal experience is my beloved Internet, my personal Library of Alexandria, which has answers or at least opinions and keywords for any question I can pose. I think of Dad when I use it, for matters such as gardening. I think of how so many people, with personally-accrued knowledge like his, have contributed to world-wide personal advice. The internet is a repository of the wisdom of our species. When writing was “the latest” technology, around 6,000 years ago, it was used charily because it was so little understood. To understand it was a privilege of rank and wealth and the luxury of time to learn it. The storied Library of Alexandria was a much earlier attempt to pool all knowledge, back in ( ). As Carl Sagan reverently elaborates in the first episode of the TV series Cosmos, books and written knowledge from all over the known world were aggressively sought and collected by the Library of Alexandria. The collection was vast and esoteric and awesome, and ultimately destroyed by fire.

So I was thinking about Dad, and how he’s no longer my source of hands-on knowledge of things flora. I was thinking about the Library of Alexandria and the incredible collection—not to mention the incredible (incred-bible) lust for gathering all recorded human knowledge which it symbolizes. Unfortunately, both the wonders and the inanities housed in Alexandria’s Library were destroyed, and we will never know them. The sad part is that the collecting of them contributed at least in small part to the destruction of them—they were all in one place and one disaster finished them off. Chances are the individual books, scattered throughout the known world at the time, would never have been unearthed anyway. Still. Sigh.

Then—there’s the Internet. Certainly light-years beyond Alexandria in its stored knowledge (right, Mr. Sagan?). Certainly awe-inspiring. If by some chance the Internet goes down in flames, the chances are good that much of the knowledge on it will be covered and retained, by many dispersed methods. But aside from potential catastrophic destruction of our modern-day unified source, the Internet is a repository of the memory of the human race which I find cosmic, beautiful, and comforting.

Dad is gone, and his wonderful, personal, loving knowledge of the world around him is gone. I can’t call him up and ask him, “Hey, how do I make mulberry wine?” We can’t share the pleasure of reviving and handing over hard-won survival knowledge. But I take a lot of comfort in my fellow humans from this. We all step in to carry on the important stuff. We are all, to some extent, each other’s keeper. We are all the recipients and benefactors of the love and accidents of learning. Alexandria tried, with the technology it had in hand, to take care to preserve knowledge—any knowledge—for the light of learning. Alexandria unfortunately was not built to survive fires and centuries. The Internet has more going for it, although over time its survival will surely be threatened as other technologies are created. And I have no doubt some other forms of preserving knowledge will surface. History says this trait is firmly embedded in humans.

But knowing I can access the personal knowledge of “billions and billions” of minds whenever I want/ need the knowledge is a wonderful thing, an overwhelming thing. People have strived, for millennia, to learn how to survive. We have cared—first through oral stories and then a mere 6,000 years ago by written records—to preserve and share our hard-won testing of knowledge. Our ancestors cared enough to preserve knowledge because they were driven to point the way for their children. They were, if not altruistic, at the least driven to preserve their DNA with their increments of knowledge. For their immediate offspring, the offspring of their neighbors, fellow citizens, and ultimately for their unknown children thousands of years, light-years, distant from them: us.

Carl Sagan posits (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) that we, human beings, are descended from the stars; that unfathomably ancient cosmic dust from exploding suns sifted onto our tiny planet from incredibly vast distances and formed the proteins that began life on our planet. So in a way, from the inception of the universe to the moment I spend here typing on my laptop for an internet audience of my vastly-distanced cousins, serendipitous occurrences have wended their way to the subject of the mulberry tree in my backyard, and a way to utilize its fruits.

Because between an exploding sun and earth, things happened. Because some protein strands were once too stubborn or too lucky to quit. Because people learned to relay information, and preserve it. Because every small thing on the planet is unaccountably and intrinsically precious for what it knows. Because everything we strive to understand every day is important. Because some bird left a seed in my yard where I couldn’t easily destroy it. Because my Dad was curious about the world. Because I am his daughter, and because there are children living in the world who can see my actions.

I can freeze the mulberries with the stems in, and look up how to make wine.