What is Faith in Ambiguity?

Faith: belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit,etc.

Ambiguity: doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention

Photo by Mike Adams

"What do you blog about?"

Again and again, at my first writer's conference, I was asked what my blog was about and what kind of writing I do. I tried answering this question multiple different ways.

"Oh, I write some funny stuff and some think-y stuff."

"I write about ducks."

"I write about my kids. My kids all have ADHD. I guess it's a blog about ADHD."

The most surprising thing to me was that when people heard "Faith in Ambiguity," they usually asked me if the blog was about my faith.

"No," I would say. "It's about my faith in ambiguity."

Obviously, this wasn't clear, even to me. I learned many things at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, some of them tactical, some of them inspirational, that will make me a better writer and a better blogger. None were more important than this:

I am funny, but I am not a humorist. I am a writer who writes about an idea. That idea is faith in ambiguity.

What is faith in ambiguity? Faith in ambiguity is about asking questions, questioning assumptions and taking a second look. It is about carefully listening to both sides of an argument and then throwing both of them out the window to look for the truth that neither side has found, in the dirty, dark place everyone forgot to look. Faith in ambiguity is about making the joke that gets the laugh of recognition but that no one was brave enough to tell.  Faith in ambiguity is about owning every part of being human, every part of being alive–the illness, the pain, the addiction, the embarrassment, the fear, as well as the love and inspiration. It is about showing up, fully human, not knowing the answer to anything, and saying so, and then laughing until you wet your pants because it is all so ridiculously hilarious.

Why, you might ask, would all this uncertainty be good? People find great comfort in answers and the faith they hold that there is a reason and order underlying everything. Ambiguity–faith in ambiguity–seems to fly in the face of that comfort. And I really think that it does. People who want their bee hives to remain unprodded will probably not like this blog as much as people who are strangely fascinated by a sudden exodus of bees. That is OK with me. I stopped being comfortable years ago with the answers that were served to me like bland porridge, and started seeking my own. But, apart from personal temperament, I think there are some excellent reasons for having a little more faith in ambiguity, all around.

Not knowing means we can experiment. If we are already sure that the earth is flat and traveling to the end will cause a person to fall off into an abyss, there is no reason to circumnavigate the globe. It takes a doubter to come up with that. All explorers are, by nature, doubtful people–the ones who want to see evidence with their own two eyes–our kindred souls rejecting their breakfast pablum in search of more savory fare that may conceivably exist, if only they look far enough.

Science is a function of uncertainty. Whether or not you think you like science, my strong guess is that you enjoy electricity, access to emergency health care and Starbucks WiFi, all of which are the products of somebody at some point supposing that a) this is not really all there is and b) it could actually be better. People who push the boundaries of the world forward, causing creation to unroll in a direction heretofore unimaginable, are not contented souls. They have itchy minds, full of wonders and doubts and problems to solve. I write because my mind itches something awful and the only way I know to scratch it is to inflict the questions I have on the rest of the world.

When we don't know, we can ask. Asking is a profoundly powerful act–one that binds communities together in humble service and mutual respect of one another. In a family, in a church congregation, in a classroom, in an office, if you want to empower the people you find yourself traveling along with, ask them. Ask them for advice. Ask them how to work the TV. Ask them what they really want from their community. Then listen. We cannot ask if the answers sit on our tongue, melting like lozenges that make everything taste like oranges. Our mouths have to be clean. I have learned to ask children for help and to tell them I am not sure and, because of this, they see that they can become a person of importance with me. They are dying to be asked for their assistance, and I find adults to be no different.

When we don't know, when we are not sure, we can have compassion. I may think you were rude to me just now, but what if really you are in terrible pain? What if I misunderstood? What if your intentions, all along, have been aimed toward helping me and I could see you as nothing but a bully? Ambiguity makes me pause. The data is not clear. Is that child behaving this way in class because their parents are bad parents or because the delivery of my curriculum is not working for them? Is it ADHD or boredom? A terrible attitude or perhaps a crippled sense of self? If I am not sure, I look again. And again. Doing so makes me a better teacher, mother and friend.

The long arc of justice is and always has been a function of the shedding of our collective assumptions. We don't think black people are lesser creatures deserving of bondage and abasement. We know they are. We know gay people are crazy. We know what kind of parents are the wrong kind. We know so much of which we have no experience at all. We are never free from the repetition of the same cruel injustice over and over until we stop knowing. If history is any guide, we should be very, very concerned about the things that we think we know.

Faith in ambiguity is the doubt of the mindful, the practice of asking "Why?" of everything, but most especially, of ourselves. Faith in ambiguity, is not, however, a license not to choose. The worst thing we can do, in my opinion, is fail to choose. In the absence of choice, Life drags us along by our ankle and we hit our heads repeatedly on the concrete as events fly by us, which we have observed but never been the author of.  Life presents you with decisions, and, if you are like me, you consider everything from the polarity of the earth to the astrological signs of the people involved, and then belabor that decision until it is worn down to a tiny nub of a thing, chewed through with agitation. And then you just select and live with the result. Every time you do, you end up upright, able to say, at least "Oh, well, that was not the best decision I ever made."

Faith in ambiguity is also not ignoring the facts. It is not sticking your fingers into your ears and saying that nothing is clear so you are going to ignore overwhelming evidence in favor of whatever inclination it is easiest to bear. Not knowing leads the scientist to conduct her experiment, a mathematician to find his equation, a philosopher to observe and enlarge on our views of humankind. It does not, on the other hand, alter the course of history in any meaningful way to throw out the controls, pretend that two equals three and suppose a new and implausible kind of human. It's just make-believe.  Faith in ambiguity is about facing the facts. If there is crap on the living room floor, it is about saying so, not imagining that really there is a Tootsie Roll. What is in question here is really the motivation of the dog.

I need to write to soothe my itchy brain, and I am so grateful that you show up and apply aloe. What I really want for this blog is to create a space on that internet that holds apart the crushing walls of surety and ill humor and allows us to laugh at silly, stupid things and to speak our mind respectfully without fear of retribution. I want to have this be a place where people come to take a second look, and sometimes to stop and giggle between those hard glances. So, I have this mission to spread a little faith in ambiguity out into the world–just cast out my little whirling dandelion seed of an idea upon its breezes–and see what happens.

Are you in?

It All Comes From What Died Before.

Photo Credit: Flickr by Vanessa Vancour 

I have been very productive today. The sun is out, my yard seems ablaze with the possibility of springtime, and I am shrieking with childlike delight at each earthworm I discover in the leftover decay of winter. Because I practice permaculture–or try to–piles of leaves that have fallen on everything and degenerated under a heap of snow and ice are not a problem for me. Rather than coming in like a maid after a drunken party to clean up the vomit and broken bottles, I am an archaeologist searching for treasure that was left by the world while I waited, snug in my house. Winter has been sitting on my eggs.

Underneath the thick mulch of rotting aspen leaves which I laid on my vegetable bed last fall, there is soil as dark as coffee grounds. And as I lift a handful, worms thick as small ropes slide out from the loam, tiny soil organisms writhe in the embarrassment of sudden light. I am laughing, jubilant. I get it. All possibility is born of decay. It all comes from what died before. I am full of life, writhing with the inner action of soil-turning worms making my waste into fodder for new growth. The world knows, for the most part, two paradigms–rot and cultivation–but this speaks to another.

Putrefaction. The smell of wasted talent, days of usefulness that lie behind one, dreams that will now go unfulfilled. The necessity seems that I lie rotting on the ground, overcome with my pain. "Tara is ill now. Tara is in pain. She can't be asked to make this difference, contribute this service, offer this opinion. She has fibromyalgia and suffers with it terribly." Born of compassion or born of the easy, simple neglect we often show a friend whose illness has taken them from the sphere of our common activities, these thoughts turn me to something corrupted by my illness, unusable as a piece of moldy cheese left too long in the refrigerator. I want very much that the world should notice my need for a comfortable chair, or a call to ask how I am doing, but I never wish that the world would leave me alone to wane quietly in a corner. I am not ready, at thirty-six, to rot.

Cultivation. The tilling of soil, the turning of earth to loosen it for planting, to add fertilizer, to remove rocks, to rake. We have all been doing it as long as we remember, we know how to do it and know that it is right. The work of it seems somehow to be God's work, in particular. And yet, and yet...Just the same as we know, we know the necessity of a positive attitude, a forceful insistence on taking the bull by the horns, conquering indecision, being the author of our own lives, advocating, pushing forward, coaxing the plants to produce. And yet...

I let things lie. I let them compost in place. I cut down the vegetables of last year's garden and leave them scattered about the soil, as messy as the floor of a child's room. I layer down compost, manure, straw, leaves, water. And I practice faith in Nature, which has been making things grow, unaided by humans, for time immemorial. I simply help by moving Her ingredients to the right place. The mistakes of last year–the odd tomatoes, the funky asparagus, the Brussels sprouts that didn't produce in the first year–they are all still there, making that soil richer and wiser. That soil will have a history that can be read in the deep blackness of its crumbly soft meal.

I let myself lie. I makes decisions slowly, letting all of the scraps of consideration slowly turn into something fine enough to use. I am composting everything I ever was, wanted to be, or planned and failed at all the time. No dreams are swept away, just tucked under a protective layer of mulch. The girl who wanted to act, the woman who first married then divorced, the mother who thought she could protect her firstborn son from the world through her vigilant insistence on wooden toys, the runner, the vixen, the addict, the student. They are all in there, steeping in the mingled history of my terra firma.

Because I have swept no parts of myself into the corner of a landfill, I remember what it was to be a teenage addict, and I love addicts, as well as teenagers. Because I have not scorned the twenty-two year-old child who brought my first son into the world, full of ignorance and theory, I remember that I do not know how hard the parents of my failing students may be trying. Because I remember living through a divorce, I stop, catch my breath and try again in my current marriage, over and over and over. Because I have failed and not forgotten, I have humility in my roots, nourishing the leaves and flowers I dare to put forth anew.

I am not better than I was. I am just a product of the power of sunlight and water put to organic matter. I am proof that humanity always moves, transforms, wakens, alters, when we make full use of ourselves.

The War on Women Moves into My Duck Yard: a Video Documentary

I must confess that I have lost my cool. Recently, my adrenalin has surged more than once as I have heard the deluge of news detailing exactly how old white men around the U.S intend to make my life more difficult. Apparently, some of their plans include legislation to interfere with my right to obtain contraception that will prevent me from producing hordes more male children with attentional problems, and other insulting things. I promise, though, that I won't go too far in this vein, since I have no intention of researching this post well enough to make a well-reasoned political argument, and I want all of the lovely Catholic women, who offer to pray for me, to continue reading my blog. We all know where I am headed with this, anyway.

I am going to talk about ducks.

While white men with power and influence are bossing women around all over the U.S., white ducks are doing the same thing in my back yard.

In case somehow you didn't already know, we have pet ducks–two males and two females. That is at least one male too many. Let me explain their living arrangements. They have a fenced area of my large back yard, which they have entirely purged of grass. There are two coops built back there, which were intended as ladies and gentlemen's quarters. They choose, however, to sleep in the same one, all together, every night. In the summer, we fill up two or three baby pools in our side yard for them to swim in (and drink from) which need to be replenished with fresh water every day. In winter, when we can't use our hose outlet, they get no ponds and we have to fill large thermoses from our sink and hang them on nails for them to drink. Ducks don't need to swim, they just like to. During this pond-free time, they grow to resemble waddling cotton balls that have been used to clean someone's butt.

We had to turn the water off in late October this fall, five months ago. So yesterday, I looked at my four white ducks, who have been happily sloshing around in puddles of their own feces for the last few weeks, since things have begun to thaw, and decided that they could really use baths. This was how Project Empower the Duck Hens got underway. It began innocuously enough. The hose which extends out to our side yard, where the ducks live, is currently frozen just under the surface of the ground so I had to lug around my good garden hose from out front and use it to fill their turtle sandbox pond.  Naturally, it got all covered with poo. (Duck husbandry is not the romantic avocation you have been led to believe.) Having done this, I decided to sprinkle my oldest duck a little. Usually ducks like this, but today, having seen no hose water since 2011, Aflac had forgotten what it was and decided it was probably battery acid. He ran away, quacking in terror. (I have written his very funny history elsewhere, and you should read it.)

The systematic oppression which I have intimated is going on this mating season is being perpetrated thus: In the video below, please meet Nibbles and Sweet Pea. Currently, Sweet Pea, who is the bustier, larger duck, is being confined to the "non-bedroom" coop by Q-Tip, one of our two male ducks. I believe this is a misguided attempt on his part to compel to produce ducklings, much as the GOP is apparently compelling women to bear young. (Whoops, sorry.) Sweet Pea is laying eggs, but she is doing it only at night, in a separate coop, so he has her sitting all day in a coop on some utterly imaginary eggs, and for this she is denied food and water and, today, a bath. Men.

Observing this situation, my eldest son and I started guarding the pond so the poor girls could take a bath. Here, poor little Nibbles, my runty female with a voice like a squeaky toy, is attempting to get clean when she is rudely chased away from the bath which these asshole males clearly believe is theirs.

Understandably, Sweet Pea was a little too scared to get in, even though Rowan was holding the males at bay. Finally, we got her into the pond (which I couldn't film because of the water and feathers flying everywhere), but the boys escaped and bullied her and her sister back out again.

At this point, we got fed up with the Patriarchy of the Pond. Here you see Rowan, removing the offenders and my youngest, attempting to restore justice to the world. (Note Rowan's coldly delivered scientific explanation of the natural scheme of things and Mikalh's deeply empathetic reaction to the situation. That's my kids, in a nutshell there, in case anyone cares.)

The result of this twenty-minutes-long line drawn in the sand was, basically, that the girls got to bathe at least long enough that they now resemble ducks and not pieces of wadded up cotton stuck to a tush. We couldn't really keep the boys at bay for any length of time. They were hellbent on making sure the girls could not have access to the water, the food or their freedom.

What instinct governs this behavior in male ducks, and male humans, is difficult to say. My assessment is that we must remain forever vigilant, protecting our sisters in their baths from the nefarious attentions of misogynist and power-hungry white drakes, who wish to stand on our backs and crush us, to prevent us from bathing or from leaving our coops.

It takes a village to protect the liberty of one waterfowl. We are all of us, sisters.

The Quackers: From back L:-Sweet Pea, Q-Tip, Aflac. R-Nibbles.

Weirdly, my mother has also written on this subject this week. Apparently my ducks inspire writers in much the same way that that the Madonna inspired painters of the Renaissance. They have their own genre.

The Collected Works of Duck (all on the subject of these particular ducks)

By me

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back
The story of why the Hell I have these pet ducks and how this proves I am crazy.

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

Why it's OK to kill your pet, as long as it's a duck.

Duck Rental
A business enterprise I am thinking of starting.

By my Mom

I Don't Get It
Humans have a tangled relationship with animals. (Reflections on why her daughter–me–killed the duck.)

Ducks are Not Nice People
Thoughts on why ducks are really not as you have been lead to believe.

My Husband is Saving the World with Faith in Ambiguity

Updated 1/16: I included the YouTube of his sermon below, so now you can actually watch it.

Despite being very annoying, and having a strange sense of humor, my husband sometimes does cool things.

One cool thing he is doing is delivering this sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe today.

He has written a lot of very good sermons, all of which can be found on his blog, All Things Reasonable, but this one is the best so far.

It is the best both because of his amazing development as a writer, which I can't say enough about, and because he is so right about what he is saying.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they know a bunch of things that they actually don't know. And so we fight with our spouses and kids. And so we go to war. And so our political system is broken. We don't know how to separate what we know from what we believe.

What might be possible if we could do this one, critical thing?

The Emperor's New Fabric of Space and Time, and Other Pet Peeves

For a writer, I have a really adversarial relationship with metaphors. Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

Case #1: When, in 2007 and 2008, our country's financial system suffered a sudden seizure, and everyone's house was abruptly and magically worth much less than it was before, I became very annoyed by the conversation about bubbles. I am the mother of three boys, all of whom were at one time toddlers and, as a result, I am very, very familiar with bubbles. Here is what I know:

1. The nature of bubbles is that they are a spherical body of gas contained in a liquid. 
2. Bubbles are always circular, no matter the shape of the wand. 
3. The blowing of bubbles bring countless hours of joy to toddlers. 
4. When spilled, bubble soap will leave a dark gray stain on your carpet.

I also know this: There was definitely not a bubble that caused my house to be worth $50,000 less than it was six months prior. If that were the case, there would be tell-tale soap stains all over the United States. So, I kept saying, will somebody please tell me what actually happened here?

Photo by Justin D. Miller

Case#2: The fabric of space and time annoys me. My husband and I still argue about this. Admission: He got an A in college physics and I dropped remedial algebra four times and took only Bio. I still think I'm right. Every time I am watching some science show that is explaining the Universe to me, I find myself sitting in the living room with my family, while everyone quietly nods in understanding as some physicist explains with delight that our current understanding of reality all rests on the factual finding that space and time are knit together into a fabric. This, apparently, is the keys to the kingdom. 

Except, hello, no fabric! Why does everyone just accept this? How does this make any more sense than the explanation that the Universe behaves as it does because of the activities of tiny goblins? One could say that there is overwhelming evidence that microscopic, invisible goblins have been controlling all natural phenomenon. The fact that you see no goblins is immaterial as long as the logic of the goblin theory holds true. (All of my well-educated, scientifically minded readers now hate me. I'm sorry. I still don't buy your fabric of space and time. I think that shit is the same stuff the Emperor was wearing in the old fable.)

by Scott Robinson

What drives me crazy is not that people use metaphors to explain the truth. I use them all the time. (For example, when I tell you I am ready to kill my children, I very much hope you will not phone the police.) What irritates me is that people don't seem to know they aren't real. My husband keeps telling me there is in fact a fabric of space and time, but what the Hell does he know about fabric anyway? I have to keep watch on him to make sure he doesn't shrink my sweaters. That's how much he knows about fabric.

I just want to someone to explain how these things actually work, in the sort of foolproof, replicable way that one writes a recipe, or an elementary school science fair procedure, without a bunch of enormous bubbles or imaginary swaths of textile inserting themselves into the conversation. If people are unemployed and homes and retirement savings are lost without recourse, we should not get distracted with the behavior of theoretical effervescent spheres. 

And I'll believe in your fabric of space and time when you goddamn well make me a dress out of it.

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

I originally published this post back in September, when no one read my blog but my parents and three personal friends. I am now re-publishing it because of the enormous demand for human interest blog pieces about ducks. I think it can really make a difference. (It can't, but you should read it anyway.)


This post is Part III of my pet saga. Parts I and II can be found here.

We have pet ducks, which live in the fenced side yard of our half-duplex suburban home. These ducks are a cross between pets and a sort of fucked up 4H project gone awry.

The rationale for that situation is explained in Part II of my pet saga, so I won't bore you with it. Suffice it to say, I have a few screws loose in the pet department. Long story short, we ended up with three male ducks and two females, which is somewhat like keeping a low-security prison shower with three testosterone-driven convicts on PCP and two witless pacifists who keep dropping the soap.

The suggested ratio of males to females in a flock is actually one to six. Siren, the third and last-acquired of these males was immediately placed on Death Row at the time his gender was identifiable, since having more male ducks, we knew, was not advisable. Female ducks, it seems, are sometimes "mated to death" in these types of circumstances. So much for the romanticization of Nature.

Ultimately, though, I wouldn't let my husband kill him. In theory, I didn't have an ethical problem with this idea. We eat meat, and I am not stupid or unconscious enough to be interested in pretending that it isn't, in fact, flesh that we are consuming, and flesh, at that rate, which generally once belonged to an animal living in very unhappy circumstances.

Xavier, worshiping us.

However, I had raised the darn duck almost from birth and, for purely emotional reasons on the part of myself and my two youngest children, I withdrew my yes vote on culling Siren. The measure died on the floor, to the extreme irritation of my dear husband, also a former vegetarian, who had, and has, a serious interest in raising animals for meat and killing them himself, so that he can feel more comfortable about eating meat. (This may hearken back to some sort of male, hunter-gatherer imperative still in his DNA, or it may be because he doesn't really love any of our animals, besides the dog, who worships him with a comically abject devotion.)

It is actually very strange that I should end up even considering committing pet homicide. I became a vegetarian, on my own, when I was six, due to my gradual discovery of the obvious hypocrisy involved in both loving animals and eating the bodies of other animals. I maintained this custom my entire childhood, despite the fact that no other member of my family ever became vegetarian until I reached adolescence, and none permanently. I was even vegan for a time. I stopped being vegetarian when I was twenty-eight, at the point when I realized that I no longer felt that the rationale I'd once had for being vegetarian would endure my entire adulthood, and when my body seemed to be demanding a higher protein diet.

I still felt, and feel, that we have an ethical responsibility to consider the conditions of animals that are raised to become meat for us. I dislike factory farming, and we inch every year closer to our goal of buying meat only from ethical sources. This year we are buying half of a local cow, whom we will meet in less than two weeks, before her death. I no longer feel uncomfortable with the food chain aspect of meat consumption. I don't necessarily feel that this denotes a lack of compassion on my part, and I say that having stood on both sides of this argument. I think life is infinitely more complicated than almost anyone will admit (hence my faith in ambiguity, I suppose). At any rate, the beneficiary of this cognitive dissonance, the duck lived on unharmed.

Our adolescent ducklings, being menaced by the mean adult ducks.

Fast forward a year and a half to last Thursday morning, and we find the duck in question, inside his electrified, predator-proof enclosure, with a severely injured wing, obviously broken and with an open wound, cause unknown. After this unhappy discovery, I suggested that my husband, who was home sick from work with a bronchial infection, call the kind and knowledgeable woman who had given us another of our ducks, and ask her for advice, while I went to work.

Thank God for poultry mentors.

While expressing no irritation at all at being disturbed in the middle of tending to her own menagerie of children and feathered friends, Vivian suggested that we might take Siren to a vet in Espanola, whose prices were not unreasonable, but that, following that, we would likely need to rehabilitate this drake in our house, perhaps all winter.

Upon receiving this news, without a tinge of angst or internal conflict, I declared that we needed to kill the sucker.

If you are one of my morally distinguished readers, who is a member of PETA, I must apologize at this point. My former self would be aghast at this decision, and so would many people who do, in fact, eat meat, if my casual acquaintances are any basis for judgment.

Here is my explanation, for what it's worth:

The duck was suffering. Or at least I assume he was suffering. Duck suffering is perhaps not very easy to distinguish from the absence of duck suffering, both involving the tendency to waddle around looking doofish and occasionally commence gargling water full of one's own feces. At any rate, I assumed that there was pain involved in the situation, as the wound looked relatively nasty. I really couldn't live with the idea that this animal should be made to feel continuous pain with no relief.


The second consideration was financial. A year or so ago, we paid close to a thousand dollars to treat our dog for a kidney condition. He is a member of our family, and I would do it again. However, we temporarily accrued debt to deal with him, and I hated that. When we acquired ducks, I knew that I wouldn't be willing to shell out big bucks for their medical conditions. I worked, while in my early twenties, at several vets' offices, and, during that time, paid out what must have been close to a third of my income, having various tumors removed from pet rats, spaying bunnies, and treating them for stomach impactions, which they suffered due to the unwitting consumption of non-food items such as candles. I carefully tended all my animals on my negligible wage, and made that care a big priority in my life.

And then I had children.

Following that series of events, I altered my financial priorities in favor of garnering every resource, often quite limited, to put toward their care and enrichment. I love my animals, but they are not my kids anymore because I already have enough of those. I was not going to pay out any considerable amount to care for an animal that was originally intended to be dinner for my husband. (A proviso: had this been one of the "pet ducks" which eats out of our hand and which we particularly like, I am not sure how we would have made this decision. It was made easier by the fact that it was this particular duck that was injured.)

The last factor we considered weighing against Siren was the fact that there is absolutely no damn way I was living with an adult duck in my house. Believe it or not, people do this . And more power to them. I once kept rabbits loose in my house, which I intended to litterbox-train. This project was not a success, as far as my carpet was concerned. Most recently, I long-term fostered two cats while friends were on vacation, which resulted in six or more trips to the vet with abscessed puncture wounds, a bunch of highly stressed cats, and a completely ruined carpet in my sons' room. This resulted in a great exhaustion for questionable house pets on my part. I'm kind of over it.

as posted here

Ducks poo a LOT. They are hands down the foulest creatures I have ever kept, with absolutely no regard for hygiene and a total absence of common sense. I am probably never going to be willing to raise ducklings indoors again, in an enclosed area, let alone a ten-pound adult Pekin . We have one bathroom, three bedrooms, a small galley kitchen and a living room which does duty as office, family room, dining room, and study. This was a straight-up no go.


I guess what I'm saying is that if we were rich and had a bigger house, and if my husband was somewhat more like Albert Schweitzer, Siren's life could have been saved. And I could also have had a separate room where I could keep hedgehogs hidden from Mike. But I digress.

There was, however, at least one problem with proceeding with a plan to humanely dispose of this duck.


Mikalh, my six-year-old, was distraught in the morning when he heard that Siren was injured and might need to be put down. So, telling him that we executed the duck was going to be a problem, if we went through with it. Here, I felt torn. I tend to believe that if you don't want to tell your children the truth about something, it may be that you should re-examine what you're doing, rather than tell the lie. That said, I don't believe that it is OK to traumatize your children in order to avoid experiencing momentary moral discomfort. Mike and I talked about it and concluded that we were willing to minimally evade the truth but not willing to tell a lie which would require an entire fabrication of the truth and become a false tale oft retold to Mikalh. We decided we needed to be forthcoming.

However, when Mike had gotten as far as saying "You know how Siren was hurt this morning...," Mikalh stopped him.

"Now you are going to make me feel sad."

He made clear that he didn't want to talk about it, and we decided to honor that. He still hasn't mentioned it, five days later, although we feel sure he generally understood what would happen.

Anyway, the end of the story is really the end of the duck.

Mike took him over to Vivian's house, where her husband very generously showed him how to kill and prepare the duck for consumption. My oldest son went with him, always having wanted to be a part of this long-awaited event. Later, the two of them came back with a smallish kitchen garbage bag filled with what remained of this duck we had raised from his second day of life and set it in the sink. I think I felt a little sad, a little conflicted. But not too much.

Devin (my eleven-year-old) cried when he first came in from soccer practice to see the bag, but then he took a shower and came down having quietly resolved within himself whatever grief he experienced, and reckoned with the reality of the situation. Mike talked with him about why we did this, and what it means to eat meat; the importance of confronting the truth of it, rather than blissfully ignoring it while we dine on the sundered flesh of an unknown animal whose life was a made a continuous misery for the sole purpose of our consumption. He understood, if only intellectually.

I think my take-away is that our human relationship with animals is tortured and strange, full of illogic and pretense. My mother, inspired by the same experience, wrote a blog post on the subject, more thoughtful and more comprehensive than what I have written here. (You should read it.) For myself, I feel somewhat more honest an omnivore today than I was before last Thursday. I know that Siren lived a happy life, even attaining the rank of patriarch during his time with us. I raised him, let him learn to swim in the sink, fed him every morning, changed his pond water, raked up tons of poop-sodden straw, and spent hours watching his antics as part of the flock.

It represented an enormous investment of time and money, if all we were going to take away was a duck roast. So, in some strange way it was possible to see him as both a pet and a commodity at the same time.

In the aftermath, peace has descended on the duck yard. My long-exiled, original duck, Aflac, is now waddling around happily with the rest of the flock, rather than having to maintain a safe distance from any giant antagonist. The females appear to have forgotten Siren. Or, at least, they behave, in every respect, the same way as if nothing had happened. We are thinking we can now get another female, which would be a lot more useful than our testosterone-mad prior flock. Life hums on.

I want to officially say thanks to Siren for the year and half of entertainment he provided. If there is an afterlife for waterfowl, here's hoping he will enjoy years more of gargling heavenly poop-water and chasing girls.

 R.I.P. SIREN 

March 2010-September 2011

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours: Words that Cut to the Bone of Truth

I invite you to re-visit this post from last December as part of A Writer Weaves a Tale's Old-Post Resurrection Hop. Check Sandra out. She's a brilliant writer and her blog a way-station for talent.

Words that cut to the bone of truth, sawing away muscle and fat, leaving bare the skeleton of what it means to be human, in all its starkly bloody glory.

Words that take me to the heart of who I am and what I feel.

Photo by Mark

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours

5 AM. The pain of my fibromyalgia has woken me up to send ripples of flame that spread down my forearms and lick the web between each finger, bringing me moment by moment further from the sleep my body desperately needs. A deeper, hotter fire pours down the column of my spine and fills my sacrum, making it a vessel of aching cramp. A persistent nausea pulls at my insides. 

In the war between discomfort and exhaustion, discomfort has won. I will get up. I will write.

Photo by Jilly

2 PM. The baby that my arms still remember, who smelled of a fresh sweetness as bafflingly ambrosial as a morning bakery, the boy whose soft possibility touches the core of my longing to want good in the world, that boy is sobbing on my couch, having been physically and mentally wounded in his daily battle with Life. 

His cries feel like jagged glass, like punches to my stomach.

At this moment in time, his soul is a crushed tin can beneath the foot of the world. His body curls inward, protecting himself. He is a fetal image again, a sprouting bean, or something bent-maybe not yet broken. I catch my breath, and beg myself for the capacity to remember that this is just a moment in time that can pass. 

If I let myself live inside that strangled sob, inside that inward-bent body, I may soon be crushed again myself, as I was when I had to pass through Scylla and Charybdis to become a grown woman myself. But I will not let him pass through alone, if he could know someone is with him and that he is loved. 

Something is always torn and bloody when a child is birthed. New tears rend me as they grow and I let myself feel the disquiet of Life as it shapes the men they will become. Sometimes all I have to offer these children is an outstretched hand.

Photo by Jenny Downing

6 PM. My church community has gathered in the darkness of December around an elaborate double spiral of pine boughs in our icy church parking lot, to usher in the winter solstice. 

The planning for this has been halting, filled with confusion, miscommunication, and emotional exhaustion. Leading up to this moment, I have felt more than once like stepping away from the project. 

Community is never what you think it is. It is always unkempt, filled with unintended power struggles and accidental slights; with the tireless wars we launch daily in the practice of attempting to live together.

Chanting begins, led by teenagers with a chant they have learned at a youth con, "Spiraling into the center, the center of the web, we are the weavers, we are the woven ones, we are the dreamers, we are the dream..." The background is punctuated by the sounds of the reverse signal of a backhoe that is moving snow nearby into great useless dunes by the roadside. 

Our community-elders, young children, teenagers, adults are moving into the center of a spiral, holding tiny pine cones to drop into a fire as an act of letting go. Upon reaching the center, they receive a candle and place it where they wish among the boughs on the arm of the spiral leading out. I am directing a child on crutches in an icy parking lot, listening to a persistent beeping, but, more-so, I am enveloped by the intention of the ritual. 

I desperately need to let go. I need to leave the self I thought I was in the light of summer in that fire and walk out with a new self, strong enough to meet the challenges Life has chosen, in its dazzling randomness, for me to face. I will do this, even if I must do it while prodding a crippled child whom, unbeknownst to me, I will later learn has already fallen with his crutches on the ice and suffered a concussion.

Photo by Kristine Coblentz

"Return again. Return again. Return again. Return to the home of your soul. Return to who you are. Return to what you are. Return to where you are. Born and reborn again. Return again..."

The comfort of the truth of these words washes over me. Where sweet encouragement to cheer me would sour in my ears, the beauty of darkness juxtaposed with light, the Truth of Nature and of being human holds me like a child in a mother's arms, comforting me with reality.

Litany. In the greatest darkness. Response: The light is reborn. Out of winter's cold. The light is reborn. From our deepest fears. The light is reborn. When we most despair. The light is reborn.  The light is reborn. The light is reborn. 

To end the ritual is my part. I lead the crowd inside, where seven children, fourth grade to ninth, guide us all competently, confidently, and gorgeously in the act of welcoming in the four directions and putting the ritual to rest. 

They say, finally, these words that I have written for them:

"The wheel of the year spins inward toward dark and quiet, outward toward light and creation. Again and again, it spins, and our lives spin with it, through happy times and sad, new inspirations and times of letting go.

Our lives mirror the beauty of the turning of the wheel.

We hope you will stay with us for cider and social time and that you will take with you the collective light of this community into the dark places you must go this coming year, and use it to germinate your dreams." 

I am bursting with pride in my community. We are raising bold children who know beauty, who can lead, who can think. We have wisdom among our elders in Los Alamos that would be the envy of any convocation of sages. Our families are vibrant, seeking, and strong.

In this moment, it is worth it to be human in a community, to suffer through emails that I don't understand, to bake a dozen cookies while getting ready for work, to attend meetings at the end of exhausting days, to struggle with how to live in beloved community.

I think that it is worth it to love the poetry of dark and light, to love the shadows that play around the edges of our lives, for the depth that they add to living.

If I live with more pain because I take the time to see them, I say I live, too, with more beauty.

Photo by Patrick Kelly

 This song makes me catch my breath and remember.

Notes on photos: The first three photos are creative-commons licensed searchable images that I found on Flickr. The fourth is a photo taken by my incredible, inspiring friend Kristine Coblentz at the Solstice ritual last night. She should also be credited with taking a huge leadership role in creating that ritual and having it be what it is. Her vision inspires me. The fifth photo was taken by me of my son Devin at our church's UU Nativity Pageant last Sunday, when he was a sheepishly smiling Caesar Augustus. The last photo is used with permission by my talented friend Patrick Kelly, whose gorgeous photographs can be found at http://photos.pmkelly.com/. Go look at them.

Another life saved by a sick sense of humor.

#ReverbBroads11 prompt: Name and explain the one guilty pleasure you can't live without. Then explore the idea of how you would feel if you gave that thing up for a year. via Neha at whereyouarehere.blogspot.com

Let me explain. A terrible accident has happened. I have allowed myself to be swept up in the enthusiasm of writing and pretending to be a grown-up writer, and ended up here: Writing on an assigned prompt with a group of women. 

I hate both assignments and being part of a large group of women. In both cases, it's because of the rules that I just can't seem to follow. This post being a good example of that. 

Hello, ladies, it is good to meet you. I will introduce myself and my blog today by announcing that I indiscriminately hate both members of my own gender and the activity in which we are all engaged here. I will now show myself to the door...

Shakespeare speaking at a Writer's Convention

The guilty pleasure I cannot live without, not even for the length of time it takes to make a good impression?   Snark. 

Snapshot #1:

I am standing at my locker, first year of middle school, in direct violation of the official stay-the-Hell-away-from-your-locker-between-classes policy, attempting to extract some item which, naturally, I have forgotten. The principal, a twig-like ghost of a man to whom I have never before directly spoken, comes upon me and regrettably asks the following question: 

"Are you at your locker between classes?' to which I reply..."No."

Twenty-five years later, I would still 100 times rather serve detention than have answered that question any other way.

Snapshot #2:

I am twenty-five, lying on my own bed, in a country cottage in the primordial redwood forest of Camp Meeker, California, engaged in the act of giving birth to my second son, Devin. I have reached that critical, consuming part of childbirth just past transition labor where I will soon begin to push. My midwife, an officiously capable ex-hippie in her fifties, is urging me to get on my hands and knees, which I do not want to do, in order to ease my labor. In order not to appear rude and to accommodate her obvious concern for my well-being, I assure her, 

"I will. I promise. Just as soon as I am done having this baby."

Snapshot #3:

I now work as an instructional assistant and teach reading to kids. One particular lesson component for second graders a few months ago centers around using descriptive words in writing. It includes a minimally passable example of descriptive language titled Student Model, depicting a red bicycle, which I read to my group of three boys and one girl. In order to then solicit a response of some kind from them, I add,

"But this is not what you guys write. You write", I say dully," 'I like my bike...because it is cool.'" 

 "You want to bring the reader in and make them see what you see! Like this: 'I love my bedroom. It has pink walls and a canopy bed. I have a tiara tattoo on my wall and a bedspread that says Princess. It is my favorite place in the house.' by...MICHAEL."

Michael, and everyone else, erupt in uproarious laughter, having already become long used to Ms. Adams' Reading Class and Comedy Half Hour.

My dog got into the garbage. And lived. Because I wanted to take a photo and post it on my blog. Otherwise, I'd have just asphyxiated the sucker. There. Another life saved by a sick sense of humor. 

I'm going to have to cheat on this assignment. I cannot actually imagine what would happen to me if I gave up Snark for a whole year. All I can reasonably say is that I would stop being me. Which, I guess, is why I find it so difficult to give up for family reunions, staff meetings and parent-teacher conferences. 

If I stopped being snarky, I guess I would just have to rely more on my other defining traits. 

Like compassion. 

And I'd probably end up working in a leper colony. No, a sanctuary for hedgehogs with leprosy. And no one wants that. Least of all the hedgehogs.  So, just live with it, people. OK?

My husband says these amazing, insightful, horrifying true things to people.

My husband delivered a Forum (not a sermon, but more of a speech followed by discussion) at our church this last Sunday on 9/11. Below is a link to the text format of that address. His talk was about the lessons of September 11, 2001, and where we are ten years later. They asked him to talk because they knew that he would say something unexpected, brilliant and provocative. I agree. I was afraid it would be too provocative, so I was hiding upstairs in a room full of middle school kids. Once I found out that no one had stood up during his talk and threatened to hurt him, I was sort of sad I missed it.

I think Mike is really smart, and not just because he can do all my sewing and computer maintenance. He is one of those people that really says all of the things that you think of saying to other people, or groups, but you never do because you are afraid they will all hate you. Wait, I'm talking about myself...

You should read his blog.

This is the logo for Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 
designed by the brilliant and talented Kristine Coblentz.

Green Chile and the Quest for Human Fulfillment

For many years now, I have watched with great interest as customers lined up outside of Smith's each fall to have their boxes of Hatch green chile roasted. I do really like green chile. I get some delivered each season in my farm box from Los Poblanos and I use it to make green chile stew (the recipe for which appears on a link under the banner above).

For the first five years that we lived in New Mexico, we didn't have a chest freezer, although we badly needed one. That being the case, I never went and got all that green chile, since the idea of keeping all of it in my under-sized frig-top freezer, alongside numerous loaves of bread, bags of shredded cheese and other oddments, seemed irritating. This summer, however, we went ahead and bought a chest freezer from Lowe's, which is now already almost all the way full, setting aside the fact that we are receiving half of a butchered cow some time in October as well. My understanding is that this will be an extremely happy cow, and therefore, the meat will fill us with great happiness. Anyway, I digress.

The point is that I have, up to now, been frustrated in my efforts to be the right sort of person, which is, of course, the sort of person who buys locally harvested chiles and cows and keeps them in her freezer. So, I thought to myself, smugly calling to mind my new chest freezer-NOT anymore!

My mother lives across the street from Smith's, and is now retired, so I felt she would be in the unique position to do reconnaissance and determine when one might undertake to have their chilies roasted without waiting in a line fifteen people deep for over an hour. I tasked her with the mission of retrieving the chile and having it roasted.

I, quite naturally, failed to give any other specific directions as to whether the chile should be mild, medium or hot, since this hadn't occurred to me. My mom went and selected a random box of chile, which the checker then told her was "hot". She replied that this would have to do and took it to be roasted.This blog entry would not be complete without adding that my mom ended up having to wait in line for at least half an hour anyway. Such is the advantage of motherhood.

Happily, I arrived home Friday to discover a black garbage bag on my counter filled with warm green chilies and a house redolent with the aroma of New Mexico. Now, all that remained was to peel, seed, chop and store all of this chile before it could go bad. Easy.

Being no idiot, I donned vinyl gloves to do this job. (Actually it may be more accurate to say that I was once idiot enough to process quite a bit of chile with my bare hands, and that having hands that burn for hours with an invisible fire may be a wonderful home remedy to cure nail-biting and masturbation, but I have not felt the need to repeat the experience.) Hardly having stopped long enough to hang up my purse, I  stuck my hand deep into the womb-like warm garbage bag to retrieve one large handful of green chilies which I ran under cold water in a large bowl in my sink. I painstakingly doffed as much of the skin as I could manage, and virtually all of the seeds. This took about ten minutes, and only needed to be repeated thirty-four more times.

Interestingly, green chiles omit something like a toxic gas that causes one's throat to tickle incessantly, so, for approximately three hours, both before and after preparing dinner, I coughed and retched my way through the entire bag of green chilies, with the added steps of running each small batch through my Ninja food processor and filling Zip-Loc quart bags with approximately a pound of chopped green chiles, squished flat to freeze. A gas mask would have been useful.

The Ninja lid won't seat well on the blending container and I am contemplating throwing it out the window.

Since I had no choice but to labor through the entire process myself, I forced my mother, who was suffering from a mild stomach flu, to stay in the kitchen through the entire process, so that I didn't die of boredom, and also so that anyone who had to deal directly and immediately with my six year-old was not completely covered in capsacin.

At the point that I had to interrupt the chile production line to serve dinner, my kitchen looked somewhat like a chlorophyll bomb had been set off. Bits of green chile pulp and skins clung to every surface and were intractably cleaved to the tile, as if an entire legion of flu-ridden kindergartners had wiped boogers on the floor and left them to dry for several hours.

The thing I really found striking about this is how many people do it. The conversation between my mother and me centered around our disbelief that anyone not completely hamstrung by outdated notions of Protestant work ethic would undertake this project in their spare time, merely to avoid having to pay slightly more for green chile which has already been processed and frozen for them in convenient tubs. But, then again, it is a peculiar blind spot of mine that I tend to be shocked that anyone else is willing to do foolishly difficult tasks that I perform myself. (For instance, I continue to be shocked that lots and lots of women bear children, despite the obvious discomfort and work involved.)

Somehow, I seem to have arrived at full-fledged adulthood continually surprised and appalled at the amount of actual work that living requires, as if I had very recently been rudely awakened from a prolonged daydream wherein servants attended to my every whim. My natural tendency to eschew work is, however, at odds with my continual pursuit of attaining Perfection. Not that I'm ever actually striving for perfection. I set what seem to be modest goals, and then either abandon them or somehow enlarge my goal, so that I have never quite arrived.  I believe both that this is a somewhat dysfunctional state of affairs and that it is an inescapably human thing to do, and that either I can play along and keep myself entertained with the pursuit or face the consequences of a life lived as a series of half-measures.

As pertains to cooking, I am not the sort of person who would end up being interested in trying to make Beef Wellington or Baked Alaska. I have somewhat less than the necessary culinary fortitude and a great deal less than the required amount of interest. I am willing to spend hours making Christmas dinner, but, on a regular basis, meals must be produced in an hour or less and be something that children will probably eat. That said, I do enjoy cooking, and I am excited by fresh, high quality ingredients and variety. So I tend to pay a fair bit of attention to food and food preparation, which is why I would end up doing something dumb like processing green chile into the evening at the end of a long and overwhelming work week.

I once (well, three times actually) made red chile sauce from scratch using the dried red pods I bought from Los Poblanos . These needed to be seeded, de-veined, roasted and then processed through a blender (which, strangely enough, I still possess ten years after the lid went permanently missing) before being set in a slow cooker with cubed pork loin to make carne adovada. On that occasion, my kitchen looked less like a booger bomb and more like an especially bloody battle had recently taken place. The carne adovada was delicious, but hardly so much so that it justified the ridiculous labor involved in making it.

Anyway, the green chile finally got done, I got to use both my new freezer and my new food processor (complete with lid) and, happily our major weekly housecleaning was scheduled for the next day. Last night I used it to make green chile stew. It was hotter than Hell, but it tasted both of New Mexico and of the pursuit of human fulfillment.

And I have twelve more bags of it for later.

Warning to Sith-Prone Readers

Have you already learned the right way of thinking and living and now you are content only to remind yourself of this, and share this good news with other people? Do you believe that what is most important is that we place our faith in Jesus/Science /Nature and not allow it to be tested by events, alternate points of view or objective reality? Then you will hate my blog. Remember, only a Sith deals in absolutes! That means that if you are so very certain about right and wrong, you are probably a Sith. However, I do intend to post recipes that can be appreciated even by Sith-prone people.