Lori Finding Joy

I’ve moved a lot over the years, but the one constant has been finding a good place to walk in the woods.  When I lived in Memphis it was Shelby Farms; in Hallowell, it was Vaughan Woods.  Even though I’ve lived here in Massachusetts for 4 years, I really hadn’t found a good spot until a few months ago when I discovered Riverbend Farm in Uxbridge.  It’s part of the Blackstone River State Park, which is in turn part of the Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor.  Quite ironically, it also happens to be right next door to my doctor’s office…which I have been going to ever since I moved here. 

Better late than never, right? 

There are a number of hiking trails throughout the park, but my favorite is the southern half of the Towpath trail that follows along the Blackstone Canal.  The Canal was constructed in 1827-1828 as a way to move goods between Providence and Worcester, particularly to the mills that were established throughout the region during the industrial revolution.  (There’s a detailed history from the National Park Service here, along with a map of the park.)  I was surprised to learn that the boats were actually horse-drawn; the horses walked the towpath alongside the canal, pulling the boats through the water alongside/behind them. 

Eventually the railroad put the canal out of business.  These days the canal is full of turtles and fish, and there are also tons of birds, chipmunks, dragonflies and butterflies.  It’s a very lovely place to walk, particularly on a sunny day: 

 I’m guessing the path is about a mile and a half long from the visitor’s center down to the Stanley Mill, so ~3 miles roundtrip (from points 8 to 12 on the National Park Service map).  It’s long enough to feel like a substantial walk, but not so long that it tires me out.  The path itself is very flat and shady, excellent for walking even on hot days.  I also find there to be a good balance between having enough people around to feel safe walking by myself, and yet still feeling contentedly alone in the woods (although for obvious reasons it is busier on the weekends).  And while there are occasionally families there with small children, it tends to be more of a grown-up crowd, many with friendly dogs in tow (leashes are required).  I assume this is because there are no barriers between the path and the canal, and it would be all-too-easy for a small child to fall into the canal.  I have also seen a number of kayakers, though towards the mill end the canal is full of pond algae and I can’t imagine it’s great paddling.  

***

Monday morning I started down the path and met a young man and two women.  The young man waved excitedly to me, and as I was wondering why on earth this stranger was flagging me down he announced with a tremendous amount of joy and glee: “We saw lots of turtles!”  As I got closer I realized he and his friend had Down syndrome, and the other woman was some sort of aide.  We briefly chatted about all the great turtles sunning themselves in the pond before continuing on our respective walks.  

I’ve thought about this encounter all week.  Mainly, I’ve been thinking about joy, and how wonderful it is to see someone – even a total stranger – express such joy.  And how very rare it is that we find it in our daily lives — even though it is there, always, whether we see it or not.  It also struck me because I too feel such joy walking here; particularly when I’ve got Krishna Das or Deva Premal with me on my iPod it can feel like a holy place, rather than the remnant of the industrial revolution that it actually is.  However, Madeline L’Engle, one of my favorite authors, once wrote: “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God”.  Even in my most agnostic of moments I find it difficult to argue with that sentiment.  

(In this case of course, God is represented by a turtle, which much to my surprise is apparently not that far off base.)

I spent this past week taking some time off from work.  I hesitate to call it vacation, even though it technically was vacation time.  It just didn’t feel like a vacation.  Mostly, it felt like one long vet appointment. 

On Tuesday the cat went in for her annual shots.  I had been dreading this for months, since getting her into the carrier is a production of Olympic proportions, involving at least thirty minutes, a locked bathroom door, my winter coat, and enough mewing to wake the dead.  I should have known something was amiss when getting her into the carrier took all of sixty seconds; my celebrations were entirely premature.  

First, the cat has a seemingly impossible (but apparently common) yeast infection in her right ear, which necessitates that twice a day I have to give her ear drops.  I thought in the grand scheme of cat problems this would be a piece of cake, but it turns out that the drops have to be refrigerated.  And it turns out the cat is less than pleased about having cold liquid dropped into her ear, forcing me to either a) corner her and hold her down or b) sneak up on her when she is sleeping, depending on what she is doing when it’s drop time.  Afterwards she runs away, hunkers down, and gives me the stricken “You Meanie” look that makes my heart hurt.  I don’t blame her one bit.  Since I’m the sort of person who anthropomorphizes her spoons, let alone the living and breathing animal I share my house with, I’ve spent the past few days feeling like Dr. Evil and hanging my head in shame.  Happily, ten minutes later she seems to forget all about it – but she now runs and hides every time she hears the fridge open.

 While we were at the vet’s, the subject of the cat’s heart murmur came up again.  She needs some dental work, for which they would sedate her, but she needs to see the kitty cardiologist again to make sure her heart is healthy enough for sedation.  As I was mentally adding those costs up in my head ($600+), the vet mentioned that since the cat is now 10 years old she really ought to have a blood panel done. 

 (Have I mentioned that when I went to the shelter two years ago to get a different cat, this one bolted out of her cage and clung to me for dear life?  That she made it clear I was not leaving with out her?  That she without a doubt saw SUCKER written all over me?)

 So yeah, we did the blood work.  And that’s how we found out she probably has the beginning of kidney disease, but they need to do a urinalysis to confirm.  This is why I am spending the weekend trying to figure out how to get a cat that insists on peeing in kitty litter 4 inches deep to instead pee in a teensy bit of plastic pellets.  Then I get to drain her pee into a plastic cup, which will sit in my fridge until Monday morning when it can be dropped off at the vet.  

Joy.

 The good news is that we caught it pretty early, and it can most likely be managed for a few years.  The bad news, of course, is that it will eventually get worse and she will die.  The pragmatic part of me fully accepts that this is true for all of us.  But the pragmatic part of me was also the part that got ignored as it screamed “YOU SUCKER” as she happily purred on my shoulder that day at the shelter.  

She’s a good purrer, this kitty; in fact, she purrs so much she drools.  And I am the idiot who lets this extra-soft furry thing nestle against my neck and drool into my hair.  She is the idiot that does this even after I have shoved her into a cage; driven her miles away to be poked, prodded, and stuck with needles; and then drop cold stuff into her ear canal as she dozes away in a sunny spot on the couch. 

 In her defense, I do hand out the food.  

In my defense?  When I was in the third grade I wanted a cat more than anything else in the world.  I read every book on cats that the library had, and must have bored my teacher to death with all the prattling on about cats I did that year.  My mom was vehemently against having pets, especially the sort that excrete.  At the end of the school year my teacher, Mrs. McGaran, sent a letter home to my parents telling them that she really thought I was a great kid and would be responsible enough to take care of a pet.  My mother was less than pleased, but that summer we got a cat and my fate as a cat person was sealed for life.  And now, wherever eternity may be, Mrs. McGaran is laughing her ass off.

Well.  That was a long and unintended absence from blogging.   I don’t really even know where the past three months have gone – it’s all been a blur.  I mean, it’s July, for pete’s sake. 

So.  Let’s just dive in and talk about kirtan, shall we?

Several years ago I started having serious anxiety issues, mostly related to work, and my doctor oh-so-gently suggested I needed to find ways of calming myself down that didn’t involve my dear pals Ben and Jerry.  So I took up yoga and meditation, both of which truthfully made me feel pretty silly – even though they helped.   I was mostly practicing at home (with the curtains shut), and started buying yoga and meditation CD’s.  Somehow I managed to stumble onto a Krishna Das album, and it was like the world exploded – in a wondrous, “it’s full of stars” sort of way.  I didn’t even know that his music was kirtan; in fact I don’t think at that point I’d even heard the word kirtan.  Listening to it just seemed to fill some void I didn’t know I had. 

Also, it made me want to dance around my living room.

Kirtan is basically call-and-response prayer, sung in Sanskrit and set to Indian (or Indian-influenced) music.  It often starts out slow and mellow, building to a crescendo of voices that makes your heart swell.  I know to a lot of Western ears kirtan may sound weird, and the idea of chanting ancient Sanskrit words that you don’t know the meaning of seems odd.  Plus, I’m sure the idea of chanting the “Hare Krishna” in particular brings up notions of those guys in robes wandering around Times Square, their heads shaved perfectly bald.  And let me just say, for a Christian-baptized white girl from rural Maine, this is exactly the sort of thing that would raise a few eyebrows amongst the family. 

But.  There’s something incredibly joyful about kirtan.  Joyful in a way that the church music I grew up never really was (to me, anyway), and certainly not in the manner of popular music (although I read that Krishna Das once referred to Bruce Springsteen as the Boddhisattva -enlightened one- of New Jersey, which seems a pretty apt description).  And, y’know, shouldn’t religion be joyful?  If you are singing the names of God, shouldn’t you be happy about it?  And really, as religions go, is chanting ancient Sanskrit texts any weirder than believing in the virgin birth, or that Joseph Smith unearthed gold plates in upstate New York? 

At any rate, I’d sort of forgotten all about kirtan these past few years.  Truthfully, I’m not feeling all that religious these days.  Personally, at this juncture of my life (what with the whole “war on women” and all) I find it difficult to embrace any male-dominated institutions, and that pretty much rules out all formal religion at the moment.   When I lived in NYC I dabbled a bit, figuring that if my great-grandmother could exchange the Episcopals for the Jehovah Witnesses I could certainly explore eastern religions.  I took meditation classes at the Shambala Center, and then went to an ashram on the Upper West Side one evening.  It was rumored to be the one that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about in Eat, Pray, Love.  I have no idea whether or not it really was;  all I know is that I managed to show up on a night they were chanting “the Geet”, the longest chant of them all –pages and pages of dense Sanskrit.  Plus I was horrified that men and women had to sit on different sides of the room.  I never went back, and it was the end of my religious experimentation.

But lately my anxiety has been creeping up again, forcing me back to yoga class, and what do you know–my yoga teacher plays kirtan.  And in the second class there were songs by Krishna Das and it was like the sun started shining again. 

(One twenty-something guy was not particularly thrilled with the music.  He asked the teacher, “You got any Peter Frampton?”  I’m still cracking up over it.) 

I don’t know the words.  Or, to be exact, I don’t know what the words mean, although it’s easy enough to Google the chants and get English translations.  This bothered me until I read on the Krishna Das website that he thinks it doesn’t matter if we don’t understand Sanskrit – the music speaks to us in different ways, and that’s what is important.  I also worried that as a white Westerner I had no business appropriating another culture’s spiritual music for my own more-or-less secular uses, but it turns out Krishna Das was born in Jersey.  And since I know plenty of people who claim “Amazing Grace” is their favorite song but they haven’t stepped foot in a church in decades…well, I’m pretty sure an agnostic finding joy in kirtan isn’t the end of the world.   And while kirtan has its roots in a deeply patriarchal culture (don’t even get me started….), modern kirtan has several women practitioners.   

Here’s one of my favorites — it starts out slow and a little…gravelly, perhaps, but builds into something lovely.  Unfortunately this YouTube recording cuts off at the end, but nonetheless: it makes me ridiculously happy.  The lyrics and translation can be found here.  I particlularly like “victory over the darkness of suffering” bit, and in particular the notes that read:

It’s OK to forget, to be forgotten,
to be left behind,
It’s OK to be betrayed, strung out on everything
that everyone has ever done to us and we can’t ever forgive…
Because
The breath of the One breathes in us.
Breathes us.
Even when we don’t know.

Amen, amen, amen.

Everything I’m making right now is a gift for someone and is not bloggable for awhile (is that even a word?).  Also trying to motivate myself to start packing for a big move in May, while increasingly becoming obsessed with Bollywood movies.  (The India fixation continues, apparently.)  I will undoubtedly have a good deal more to say about that in the near future, but in the meantime I heartily suggest you take a few minutes and watch my former guitar teacher’s new video:

I can, *ahem*, be a tad obsessive about things.  In the months leading up to our Ireland trip last spring I was eating Anne Enright novels for breakfast and had The Frames constantly looping on my iPod.  I also spent several train trips gazing at my laminated fold-out map of Dublin, and spent many long baths poring over the tourist booklets I received from the tour company.  When that plane took off, I felt prepared. 

But I really wasn’t prepared at all.  I realized that despite my historical family ties to Ireland, I really didn’t know much about the country’s history.  There was the great famine, of course, which is why my great-great-great grandparents left County Kerry for Canada, and I knew a little bit about the Northern Ireland Troubles, but I really had no idea about much else.  I guess one could say that learning things is one of the points of traveling, and I did learn some things during our trip, but I found myself really wishing I had spent more time learning about Ireland’s history.  I think I would have appreciated certain aspects of the trip more, but also would have had some context and would not have necessarily had to take a guide’s word as the truth. 

Next spring I’m going to Scotland.  I had hoped to go this fall, but for a whole series of reasons it’s going to have to be next year.  Plus, the more I read the more I think I’d rather go in the spring (the best time is the summer, but the prices double/triple).  This means that instead of having six months to obsess, I have 15 months!  This trip is also fueled by family lineage, though tracing my roots has been difficult.  When your mom’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather have the Scottish equivalent of John Smith as their name, it’s almost impossible to figure out whether or not you have the right one. And then there’s the coin toss of a different branch on my family tree; they may have been Irish or Scottish – but every generation seems to have invented a new way of spelling it and, again, good luck figuring it all out.  At any rate, while I may be forever cut off from the specifics, there’s still metric tons of Scottish history and culture to learn about, and I’m determined to cram into my brain as much as I can between now and departure time.  I’m trying to balance modern culture with the historical stuff, so there’s a smattering of everything right now:  

1.                  Monarch of the Glen (tv series, several seasons available via Netflix on-demand)

2.                  Dougie Maclean (musician)

3.                  The Thistle & Shamrock (traditional Scottish and Irish music, often with a twist)

4.                  Scotland:  The Story of A Nation by Magnus Magnusson

5.                  The Outlander series (fiction)

6.                  The Stone of Destiny (movie, also available via Netflix)

7.                  BBC’s Learn Scottish Gaelic lessons

8.                  BBC Scotland news 

One of the things I’ve been learning about, other than that Caledonia was what the Romans called Scotland, is Scotland’s upcoming referendum in 2014 on establishing its independence from Great Britain.  I’ve seen a couple of pieces here and there on both the BBC Scotland site and in the NY Times, but today’s NY Times opinion section has a great op-ed piece about it that includes some history. 

The other thing I have learned?  The cat hates the sound of bagpipes.

Remember that Mojo Nixon song?  

So I finally finished a quilt.  It’s a small wall hanging-ish sort of quilt, I suppose, maybe big enough for a baby quilt (but I’m not giving this one away, so wall quilt it is).  This was my “friendship quilt” project last year with my quilt guild.  I said I wanted “scrappy log cabin blocks”, and the lady who drew my name made me six log cabin blocks – two blue/yellow, two blue/pink, and two blue/purple.  It was simultaneously nothing that I ever would have thought of and just what I wanted.  I hand quilted circles all over it and, as they say,  voila:

I love the yellow, and I love how the pink sets off the blue.  And I love that from far away it looks wonderfully artsy, but up close there are all sorts of little bits of odd fabrics.  Cats, dogs, clouds, princesses, flowers….

…and the very King himself.