It's SNOOOOOOWWWWING!!!

As a result, I haven't spent this evening doing what I wanted to do for this newsletter, which was to talk about Elfreda Chatman's theories of information behavior that I'm observing play out across the US right now.  Instead, because SNOW!, I put the Nutcracker on Youtube and accidentally landed myself on the Kirov version at the Mariinsky Theater, and even on my phone, found myself sucked in to the dynamic and precise dancing, the perfection of the colors... the size of that stage!  It's ginormous!  And all of this got me actually thinking more about the history of ballet, and the context of ballet in Russia and it's evolutions in this week's newsletter.

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost. -- Martha Graham

Since I don't have to worry about driving in it, I can get excited about it!  We live at the top of two hills. One is about a half mile down, and the other is about a third of a mile down to the same elevation, both mean that there's a real possibility of car sledding which is not fun.

As a result, I haven't spent this evening doing what I wanted to do for this newsletter, which was to talk about Elfreda Chatman's theories of information behavior that I'm observing play out across the US right now.  In brief, Chatman's theories are basically studies of dysfunctional information seeking behaviors.  There's the Small World theory, information poverty, life in the round, and normative behavior.  I want to come back to this topic in a future newsletter because exploring the life in the round theory and small world theory in particular explains so much of what I think we're seeing with the rejection of facts by a very vocal group of people.  I want to re-read the theories in particular to see if there was a recommendation for overcoming these behaviors.  

Instead, because SNOW!, I put the Nutcracker on Youtube and accidentally landed myself on the Kirov version at the Mariinsky Theater, and even on my phone, found myself sucked in to the dynamic and precise dancing, the perfection of the colors... the size of that stage!  It's ginormous!  And all of this got me actually thinking more about the history of ballet, and the context of ballet in Russia and it's evolutions.  

Peter the Great really wanted to modernize Russia, bring it into the Age of Enlightenment from a feudal state.  He (and no doubt a fair sized court) traveled all over Europe and learned things to bring back, technical and cultural.  One of these things was ballet.  I think most people think of Russia as a sort of extension of Europe, and it really is not.   The Tzars were autocratic rulers.  There was no Magna Carta type document outlining the rights of citizens.  There were no rights for citizens.  Any rights the landowners had were exclusively at the will of the state, which is to say the Tzar.  

Russia even then was a shockingly large country.  With Eastern Europe to the west, Kazakistan and Mongolia to the south (and for reference, Mongolia is north of China), and bordered on the east by the Pacific.  I'm still boggled by its size and I knew that it reached to the Pacific, but to be north of China, and not just China but Mongolia, "the far East".  Well.  Big.  It's just really really big.  When one thinks about the disparity of identifiable cultures and languages in Europe (and, well, really any part of the world), how many did Russia have that are basically invisible to us because it's all encompassed by "RUSSIA" (or when I was younger, "The Soviet Union").  That Russia could stretch that far, even then, is nearly inconceivable & fascinating to me.  

So Peter the Great brought ballet back from Europe, along with ship building and various other new learnings. One of the criticisms one will hear sooner or later about the stories in ballets is that they're fetishization of indigenous and/or cultures perceived to be 'exotic'.  I think this is mostly wrong, outside of where one would see the "Spanish dancers/Mazurka" represented as part of the court scenes in the ballets. Only maybe the Chinese.  Peter would have been using the European stylistic dances to show that they too were a country "of the world", the rest of the dances would be from countries that were distant enough from St. Petersburg that the nearest border might very well encompass Russians that had much more in common with the bordering countries than central Russia.  Peter wanted to recognize and celebrate the breadth of the country.  Sort of a pride in 'these are the extent of my lands'.   

More recently, i.e., the beginning of the 1900s, with Ballets Russes (who, while comprised of Russian trained dancers primarily, never performed in Russia due to The Revolution), the 'primitivism' exhibited in pieces such as Rites of Spring, was not based on their exotification of the Native American indigenous stereotypes, but on solid classic Russian/Siberian shaman & folk traditions (hence the subtitle, "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts").  Claims of appropriation ring hollow when it is truly their own culture/s they're reflecting.

Funny things the Nutcracker makes me think about.  

In other snow news, hot chocolate with a bunch of eggnog & a healthy splash of bourbon is really quite amazing.  Much better than the too sweet but still tasty marshmallow.

I expect the snow to be gone by the time this arrives with you all, it was fun what little of it we got to see.

With love and curiosity, even when it takes me down a totally different tangent than I was aiming for,

--Susan

A Long Time Ago, In a World That Seems Very Far Away Now

Once I was a map librarian.  Maps tell us where we've been, where we're going, where it's possible to go, and at least point us in the right direction of how to get from here to there.  Within each map there is a multitude of stories - the ultimate choose your own adventure.  Besides being guides, they are also often beautiful to look at with their contours of the land, the winding roads, the grids of streets... there's more in this week's newsletter.

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.”
-- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Maps tell us where we've been, where we're going, where it's possible to go, and at least point us in the right direction of how to get from here to there.  Within each map there is a multitude of stories - the ultimate choose your own adventure.  Besides being guides, they are also often beautiful to look at with their contours of the land, the winding roads, the grids of streets...  They are found in glove compartments, on phones, in boats (and it's possible in a few goats), in books, suitcases, and planes... and apparently in chimneys as well.

This week a story came across of a 17th century map found stuffed in a Scottish chimney and restored by the National Library of Scotland.  The video in the article is well worth watching, if only to witness the painstaking delicate care that goes into a restoration like this.  It is amazing, with tweezers, mysterious liquids, microscopes, and the gentlest, most patient love as it all comes back together.  I've often wondered if I should have gone into archiving.... and then I realize, I don't think I'm patient enough to do so!

Watching this map come back together reminds me that it's almost time for our annual puzzle.  Every year under our tree, the New Year leaves us a gift to start on New Year's Eve - a puzzle.  Maybe this year we'll find a map puzzle left for us to work on.  Or maybe it will be something else.  Puzzles are very soothing for my brain.  Something about the intermittent reward of finding a piece that fits, and the process of putting things in their place, of making order out of chaos.  It's possibly part of the wiring, given where I landed professionally!  Information and stories are puzzles in and of themselves as well, a key character fits here, a little piece of information fits there, and together they open up a whole new part of the puzzle that wasn't available before.  

Maps, even ones that haven't fallen apart, are a type of puzzle.  A master skeleton key that leaves the decisions to you, the reader, to make a decision about.  They are all about opening up possibilities.

When you look at the maps and puzzles in front of you, what possibilities and opportunities do you see?

With love and curiosity,

Susan

It's Thanksgiving!

Thank you for supporting me and reading these newsletters.  It means so much to me that there are people who are interested enough in what I have to share, that they would subscribe to a newsletter I write!  

I hope everyone is having a most fabulous Thanksgiving weekend! I will be back next week with our regularly scheduled newsletter!

💕 💕 💕 💕

With love and curiosity,

--Susan

The New Not Normal

"You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it."  -- Maya Angelou.

Not Normal At All

We settle into the new not normal. The state of the union is not normal and must remain unsettled until things are set right again.  So what have I been thinking about this week?  Information literacy, understanding the other side (or not), and listening. 

Information literacy is critical.  And I think this election has shown just how far away from information literacy we have in this country right now.  Both sides are polarized by fake news, it's all over - Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others are pledging to try to reduce the fake news sources passed through them.  The echo chambers have grown, and people seem to be more interested in what's going to engage their outrage than they are in understanding what's actually going on with any sense of nuance.  Some of the conspiracies are really outlandish.  The polarization means we're talking past each other because we're not only not on the same page, arguing the same thing, we're not even reading the same book.  

How do you identify a good resource?  How do you read to understand bias, both in your own bias as well as what's against your bias?  How do you identify who to trust in this world when truth can and often is stranger than fiction?  Why should we support newspapers when we can get the news on tv and the internet for "free"?  So many questions.  So many things that require just enough more effort that it seems a lot of people would rather let outrage filter take over.  

One of the things I've heard a lot over the last two weeks online is the exhortation to 'try to understand the other side.'  I even linked one of those articles here, as I was trying to process what was going on with the disparity in perspectives before the election.  And the more I hear 'you have to understand', and the more I see what the president-presumably-elect's actions are, the more I think that I *do* understand and I understand the common ground between me and anyone that I "need to understand" is tenuously thin. 

The argument seems to be that there's a large group of people who feel like their way of life is being lost and... I understand that because they're not alone in that.  They think everyone else is getting something they're not getting, but that's not the case. And they think because their way of life is disappearing that... everyone's way of life should disappear to support their idyllic fantasy nostalgia?  Nah, bro.  And honestly, with the outrage coming from the republican side of things, it seems a lot of people didn't really want a return to some economic stability, they wanted a world in which they could use slurs, get away with  lynching and rape, because... because why?  Illusions of power they never had in the first place.  And don't get to take now... but only if we all step outside of our civic comfort to read all the guidelines and not just do easy things like wearing a safety pin (wear it, I don't care, but it's not nearly enough effort towards the change we need for anyone to allow themselves to feel good about). Call, write letters, petition, show up in person, have difficult conversations, listen, and think about whose voices you are prioritizing.

Listening is hard. Echo chambers, by their nature, echo  the voices of those who surround us.  These voices become loud and drown out other voices.  This in combination with the inclination to favor outrage and emotive reactions rather than facts and reality - where reality is what happens, not what someone is trying to create by manipulating the present - means it's almost impossible to hear other voices.  For me, this has been playing out in two ways.

One is the first which I've already talked about - "you have to understand the other side."  As someone that leans left, but is also pretty finicky about information literacy as a matter of professional necessity, the ugliness and extremity that I see sends me into near shut down.  As they say, you can't reason with crazy.  And you can't really have a transformative conversation when you can't expect good faith or best intent. In the best cases, having a conversation seems to take an approach that is closer to hostage negotiations than anything else. The patience to return, time and time again to common ground, working from there to convince...  These voices we're being told we need to prioritize to understand are white, mostly men's voices.  Which... don't we already prioritize those voices? Is this a demand that we continue to only prioritize white men's voices?  Because that's sort of what this feels like... 

The second way this has been playing out is that I have been consciously trying to prioritize the voices of my friends of color, my lgbtia friends, and my alternatively faithed friends.  Which brings me back to the safety pin for just a moment.  Part of what I was thinking about when I was pulling apart safety pins as a sign was the voices of my friends for whom it was just another sign of ineffective white allies.  The people of color on my facebook thread on the topic were the ones who were the ones agreeing wholeheartedly with my concerns about the safety pin.  White people were the ones who were really defensive about how they were gonna wear it because it might comfort someone.  I think maybe because I've been trying to prioritize non-white, etc voices for a long time, I have a different perspective on the effects of colonization as well, and how people who have had to exist with the effects of colonization feel obliged to act in a particular way to signs of power.  One of which is now a safety pin - it's a signifier of privilege that may, or may well not, be of assistance in any given situation.  But hey, if it makes you feel good, or you think it's going to help someone else, go for it.

There's been a lot of populations who have been telling us that things are real bad.  And when Trump was elected they were all, mmm, yeah, so here we are again.  They weren't surprised. It's just another day with more of the same.  Maybe a lot more of the same, but it's the same America they've been living in and telling us about.  It's just about to get worse for a bunch more of us. Whose voices do we choose to prioritize? And how do we do it? Do we actually ask them what they need or do we decide and tell them what we'll provide?  I say we in this case, as a white woman with recognized privilege, as someone who is being asked to talk to "my people" because you don't ask the victim to educate the victimizer (bullies tend not to listen so well to their victims, as it turns out).  

Not that I was immune to surprise - I truly want to believe that most people are operating from best intentions... and that faith has been deeply shaken. However, I think that despite being shaken, it's also the only way to step forward through to change, by recognizing, and asking others, to step into their best possible being. 

The story that comes to mind about some of this is the story of the stone soup.  A stranger came to a very poor town.  The harvest had not been kind and tensions were running high.  The stranger was very hungry and asked, for a while, person to person, "can you spare some food?" No, no, no, no. Finally the stranger asked someone who said "Yes, you may borrow my biggest pot."  In the center of town, the stranger set a fire, put the pot on the fire and put a stone in some water to boil.  Someone came along and asked what was happening and the stranger said, oh, I'm making stone soup!  It'll be the most amazing soup *ever* if only I could get an onion or two.  Well, that wasn't a big deal, and the stranger got a couple onions.  Pretty soon someone else came by and asked what was going on.  The stranger said, making stone soup!  I've got a couple onions, but you know what would make it amazing?  Some carrots... and well, that wasn't such a big deal and so now the soup had onions and carrots.  This continued all afternoon, and the scent of the soup drifted all through the town attracting people who would find well, it wasn't such a big deal to contribute a....  anyway, dinner time rolled around and the stranger had way more than enough for everyone in town to eat.  For some of the townspeople, this would be the first solid meal in a while.  

Society is requisitely communal in nature.  People are meant to take care of each other.  As Melanie Dewberry says, "We belong to each other."  Maybe our tribes have grown too large and we haven't grown from the small territorial mentality of our ancestors to the hive mentality of a city.  But for us to succeed as a nation, we must take care of each other.  Destroyed fabric of society and culture benefits no one.  

So time for us to step up and figure out how to effectively take care of each other. 

In solidarity & curiosity,

-- Susan

So that happened...

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
-- Anne Frank

What To Say?

I'm so disappointed after the progress of the last 8 years (and yet with so far to go).  We haven't done enough, there was so much more to do and now this.

As we face the work that remains to do, we must keep telling the stories that need to be told. Civil Rights, the Holocaust, Stonewall & the LGBTQIA movement, Standing Rock, and the history of this nation.  

These are terrifying stories.  I am afraid it will get a lot worse for people before it gets better.   So listen to what we're being told, and then need we step up and figure out how to do this work that needs to be done.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Maya Angelou, 1928 - 2014

The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action (excerpt) by Audre Lorde

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.

And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone can we survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

(Originally delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is much work to do. Everyone is tired of hearing white people say, "We have to do better.  What should I do?"  It's time for us to step up and figure this out for ourselves. Listen carefully to what the people, all the people, are telling us.

--S

Stories, Maps, and Journeys

Going to just start right off with the quote that inspired me tonight that Gwynn Raimondi posted to FB tonight (if you haven't, you should check her out - she's awesome!).

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here. ~Sue Monk Kidd

It summarizes so perfectly what draws me to stories - fairytales, mythology, and legend in particular.  The narrative that gives shape to our understanding of who we are - as individuals, as communities, as nations.

Stories don't have to be told the same way every time. Sometimes we need to shift and adapt them to meet the needs of evolving times.  I feel strongly that we are in one of those times now.  It is very (well, fairly) clear to me how I go about changing my own stories.  The ones I tell myself when I am recognizing patterns in myself that I like, or that I don't like and want to change.  Those I am slowly learning to change, it takes time.

I look out into the world and I see stories out there, too.  Stories shared time and time again, that need to evolve. The communal archetypes are even stronger than for the individual archetypes we struggle with in our personal lives.  Changing the minds of many is harder than recognizing it's time to change your own mind.  Recent studies have shown that even trying can sometimes cause people to retrench even deeper in the beliefs they hold.  Which is why arguing on the internet rarely (if ever) changes either sides' minds...

The story I see playing out right now in so many ways is the archetype of civil and human rights, the fight between the colonizer who assumes manifest destiny, and the colonized, the invaded, those stolen from their homelands and forced overseas as slaves then "released" into Jim Crow, of women who are just objects that can be used and thrown away with no repercussions.  

There is a shared arc of oppression.  It has played out this way too long. The archetypes are strong because the story has ended the same way, written by the 'winners'.  Representation showing diversity is important for this reason.  Showing alternative endings.  A multiplicity of middles. All the worlds of new beginnings.  

How do we tell the stories of #blacklivesmatter, and Standing Rock so that these stories have a fighting chance of ending differently?  How do we re/tell the story of America so that we don't have Trump as the end of this experiment?

Am I too idealistic for thinking that the stories we choose to tell, and how we tell them influences the ending of the stories?  Maybe.  Maybe not - but I might not be patient enough for the alternatives to surface with enough power to shift the dominant narrative.  Maybe that's the best I can do? Is *not* be patient and continue to advocate for a plurality of endings. A diversification of the stories.

When stories die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.  Another friend posted something about how there's a way of life dying away in 'middle America'.  Multiple articles and analyses are pointing at the culture war about to erupt is not based in race or class, but in urban vs rural (I think it's more complex &, if you will, intersectional than this analysis, but this is how the media is simplifying the message).  This is but one of these articles/analyses from Cracked (I know - but it's actually a good article). 

The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.

I believe it's possible for multiple things to be true.  I believe their way of life is dying and there are good and valuable perspectives that are disappearing.  And I believe also that entwined in that is *also* a whole lot of horribleness that really does need to die. How do you untangle those stories so something new can arise? And totally fair to ask - how do we untangle the stories of the city? How do we untangle the stories of the planet?  How do we untangle the stories of ourselves and let go of what we need to let go of?

Evolution is hard.  There's a lot of points of friction.  Maybe those points of friction will change the story this time?

In other news, there's a new map out of Japan that corrects for the varying warping that happens when you take a spherical object and flatten it.  More about the The AuthaGraph World Map. How we portray the places we live is a part of our stories.  What remains unmapped also is a part of our stories.  How we treat those we find in far away lands... Someone commented that one of the many things they may have liked in the judging of this map was the fact that Japan is in the center of the world instead of  off to the edge.  And maybe it was, but then, why should it not be given the creator and the audience?  I've always wondered why not have maps where Australia's at the top.  I mean, there's no real reason other than apparently north is "up" that the north pole appears at the top of the map. It's just one of many possible interpretations.  When one looks at the maps of the USA, county by county who votes for who, there's a lot of land mass that appears to vote for Republicans.  And when you break it down by population, less land mass often controls the outcome, because more dense urban locations. How does this distort perception of what is "right?" I like looking at different ways to literally map information - the insights are endless.  

Maps, like stories, tell us where we've been, and where we can go.  Sometimes we're creating the map for ourselves as we try to create new stories for ourselves -- a call to adventure, a journey.  Sometimes it's trying to find a nearly forgotten path that once we knew well.  As we go along our journeys, map or no map, distorted or true, as Kurt Vonnegut said,

At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Read the diverse stories.  Raise the diverse voices.  Create kind alternate endings that honor thebestof what we can be.  We can no longer afford to excuse the worst.  We must learn together to evolve and change our collective stories.   

With love and curiosity,

--Susan

Great Expectations...

Don't Make Me Get The Flying Monkeys.

Weather is notoriously difficult to predict in the Pacific Northwest. Oceans, multiple mountain ranges, even the smallest change in trajectories means weather could land quite a long ways away.  And also because of all the variations in land masses, we have microclimates.  What's going on in one spot, might well be very different only a few miles away.  I've been too snowed in to safely drive at times when only a few miles away the roads were bare and wet.  All of which to say... The Big Storm barely even caused my wind chimes to move.  Thursday, and even parts of Friday were way more stormy.  The rains preceding the supposed "event" on Saturday morning had us preparing right up until... nothing.  And so we stayed home safe and sound and cozy and enjoyed a quiet weekend.  

Now that's out of the way...
Three things to cover this week: a seasonal diversion, the election (I know, I know, bear with me), a happy distraction, and exciting news!

For the seasonal diversion, Halloween is right around the corner now!  In our house this is the most exciting, fanciest season of the year.  The girls have traditionally started asking to decorate in late July.  We are usually able to hold them off until early September before bats and skulls and pumpkins start appearing. I don't think it's just the promise of candy that they get excited about.  It's when Claudio joins us, Claudio is a nearly life-sized skeleton that hangs out in the living room.  We have a cat skeleton we got at the same time as Claudio last year, right after our beloved (but very old and very smelly) 19 year old cat went to join The Ancestors.  I gave it a sugar skulled face and we named it after smelly cat.  Now she sits in the window all year 'round.  We have a leg & arm that often live under the couch... it's pretty humerous... There's the Medusa Lisa (Mona Lisa as Medusa) that lives above our fireplace.  Skulls, skeletons, gravestones, glitter skulls...  

But why?  I think it's the dress up and the masquerading as someone else.  Every year by November 1, they know who they'll be next year.  In fact, M2, my youngest, already knows next year and is contemplating the following year.  When else do you get to try on another costume?  Or to try on a new persona, if even briefly?  Or combine two into one (zombie Amelia Earhart?  Oh yeah!)?  This is the only time of year, and in this culture the only time in life where there is explicit cultural permission to experiment so obviously.  Yeah, it doesn't stop all of us from embracing "every day is Halloween", though maybe we tone it down a little, but... we are in the minority...   

With regard to the election: Short and sweet.  Nasty Women Vote.  And then we hold our candidates to their campaign promises and advocate for them to do the right thing rather than the convenient thing.

Ok - that's srsly enough about that!  And after that last debate, we all need something distracting.    I *strongly* recommend putting on your favorite chill out album and meditate on these adorable pictures of kittens for at least 15 minutes...

And the exciting news!  I have bookplates!  I cannot wait to show them to you!  There was a bit of a learning curve with one design, but other one came out perfectly & is in my hot little hands even now!  The reprinted design is supposed to arrive on Saturday, then it's just a matter of getting pictures of them for my site, and packaging them up!  There are two different designs - one is based on the old library book checkout card and says 'From The Library Of'. The other says 'Ex Bibliotheca Curiosa' (which translates as "From the Magical Library Of") in the midst of a pretty border.  Usually the phrase used is ex libris, which means 'from the books of', I know of my friends though, we don't just have books... we have lots of books.  We have magical, wonderful libraries of our own beloved books.  These bookplates will be $12.95 for 20 (compare 10 for $8.95 or 18 for $18) and you'll be first to know when they're ready to go!  I really could not be more excited about them!

And my parting thought on that topic tonight is this: 

Storm Watch 2016!

“Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...
It's about learning to dance in the rain.” 
― Vivian Greene

I know, right?  Here in the Pacific Northwest, it's the first big storm of the fall season.  A big storm, followed quickly by the dregs of a typhoon (literally), followed by another big storm.  So far it's just been heavy rain.  The wind is likely to start very late tonight or early in the morning.  The remainder of the typhoon hits Saturday.  High winds, more rain, on already drenched, possibly super-saturated ground, destabilizing massive trees.  It would be nice if we didn't lose power, but... we'll see.  It's a watch and wait situation.

So to set the atmosphere for this post (so to speak), a song to start with - The Storm by Big Country.

And what does this have to do with the Mythic Librarian?  Big storms are the stuff of story, legend, and memory.  The story of great great great grampa who made it all the way home in the big storm and then succumbed to the (cold/falling tree/etc) between the barn and the house.  The time when the tree fell and missed the house by eight feet and "just" took out the deck.  The tree that fell and took out the house.  The time the snows came and shut everything down for two weeks, a month, two months.  The laughter and groans of having to find the matches and candles.  Lighting a fire in the fireplace for heat.  Trying to set the candles so that they illuminate the words in the songbook so we can sing songs accompanied by a guitar huddled together in the dark.  Listening to the pinecones and branches and rain pelt the roof.  The silence as big, wet snowflakes drift down.  The wind rushing through the trees in a midsummer surprise storm.  

To go along with the song, at the time that album came out, my brother got the album for Christmas.  That was the year I got Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy.  Which I read in all of two days. It starts out when Merlin is very young, and during a huge storm, there is a village raid.  So with this song and the images from the book melding in my head, the intensity of the storms so well described, the feelings evoked by both music and book - I cannot hear a storm, or that song, or see that book, without remembering the others. An impression, to be sure!

Elemental forces, beneficial and useful in some conditions, are wild and savage under other conditions.  To overlook this is at our own peril.  The shifting climate change that we have started the process of means we'll see more of the extremes of weather, rising oceans, hotter summers.  Finding ways to live in alignment with the elements is ever more important.  To be aware of and opt for alternative sources of energy. To acknowledge and adjust to different regional needs for conservation.  Like sun and moon have been given personalities in stories, so too have air, fire, water, and earth.

Tonight Ursula K. Le Guin comes to mind. Specifically, her poem, A Measure of Desolation: February 2005. 

Again and again    the landwind blows,
sending back the rain
to the house of the rain.
Seeking, seeking,    the heron goes
longlegged from creek
to thirsty creek.
They cry and cry,    the windblown crows
across the sky,
the bare clear sky.
From land to land    the dry wind blows
the thin dry sand
from the house of sand.

Is that what's happening tonight?  The landwind is trying to send back the rain to the house of the rain?  

And another shift - to Shakespeare: 

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, 
   Thou art not so unkind 
      As man’s ingratitude; 
   Thy tooth is not so keen, 
Because thou art not seen, 
      Although thy breath be rude. 
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 
   Then, heigh-ho, the holly! 
      This life is most jolly. 

   Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, 
   That dost not bite so nigh 
      As benefits forgot: 
   Though thou the waters warp, 
      Thy sting is not so sharp 
      As friend remembered not. 
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 
   Then, heigh-ho, the holly! 
      This life is most jolly.

If I start going down the trail of songs, this may never end, and so perhaps it's best to end the songs and poetry with this song, that never fails to bring up wandering in the woods on dark and stormy nights -Sit Down By The Fire, The Pogues. 

And how can we discuss storms without acknowledging Storm from the X-Men?  One of the early black superheroes, and first black heroine playing a major role!  

Who brings me to Oyá and Maman Brigitte.  With the terrible Hurricane Matthew hitting Haiti, Haiti, like Oyá and Maman Brigitte seems to stand between the worlds, between life and death, awash in wind, rain, and terrible flooding.  Oyá is the power of the wind to return everything to its original state, blowing away anything that might have been created or changed since the beginning.  She is also the patron of the marketplace, and change to established order.  Maman Brigitte offers healing and justice, and oversees death.  

If you have a few extra dollars, consider donating some of them to Haiti.  Need some recommendations?  Gotchu, fam.  

Haitian-led orgs you can contribute to directly for relief efforts:

• Konbit Mizik,

• Haiti Communitere,

• Art Creation Foundation for Children (ACFFC),

• Sakala Haiti,

• SOIL,

• Fondation Aquin Solidarité ,

• Volontariat pour le Développement d'Haïti,

• Lambi Fund,

• MADRE,

• Sowaseed,

• Konbit Solèy Leve.

Non-Haitian Orgs with proven track records in Haiti:

• Doctors without Borders,

• Roots of Development,

• Partners in Health,

• Border of Lights,

• Nova Hope for Haiti

And perhaps, if you feel called, leave an eggplant for Oyá and some nettles, or rocks from a cemetery for Maman Brigitte, and maybe some rum for both of them - they've been working very hard lately!

Where ever you are tonight, whatever the weather outside, may you be warm, dry, and safe.