There are times to climb mountains, and times to write great novels, and times to strive and times to race – and there are also times when it’s enough to just sit and chill…
Cormorants and a seagull sit on posts in Bellingham Bay, Washington (photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell).
Photo of Lake Padden in Bellingham, Washington, by Karen Molenaar Terrell.
“Rudeness is merely the expression of fear. People fear they won’t get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower.” – M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel
So, like, when did being bitchy become a good thing – a thing to be proud of? I posed that question to a young friend the other day. I’d seen someone wearing one of those “Proud to be a Bitch” tee-shirts or something, and I found myself wondering about it – wondering when rudeness became something to brag about. My young friend gave me an answer that I thought was kind of profound. My friend said that young people get their cues about what it means to be an adult from older people – they hear older people cussing and swearing, see “grown-ups” driving aggressively, observe their frustration with work, and their impatience with life – and, because they want to look like “grown-ups”, too, they copy what they see and hear. The only difference, my young friend said, was that young people don’t have the life experience and history, yet, to go along with their cussing, frustration, and impatience – they haven’t really “earned” the right, yet, to swear and be bitchy.
My friend’s thoughts about bitchiness sent me all kinds of directions. I had to wonder, for instance, what kind of example I’d been for young folks. How many youngsters had learned how to be rude and impatient and frustrated by watching me? Now THERE was a humbling thought. Ahem. I quickly moved on from that one to other ones…
What is it that makes us, as human beings, proud of our anger – proud to have “told someone off”? I decided that was all about ego, really – wanting to prove we are somehow better, braver, stronger than other people. And THEN I thought about that and came to the conclusion that a) in my own experience, yelling at other people has never seemed to convince them I was right, or changed their ideas about stuff, and b) it doesn’t take a whole lot of courage, really, to spout off one’s opinions and beliefs, and cuss and swear and be rude.
It is my belief that it takes a lot more chutzpah to love – it takes a lot more courage to trust in each other’s good will and humanity, than it does to scream obscenities at each other. In fact, when I think about it – the times when I’ve been the rudest are the times when I’ve been the most scared that I wasn’t going to “get my share” or I was going to be left out somehow, or forgotten or over-looked or harmed in some way.
And something in that last paragraph just made me think of a time when I found myself trying to break up a fight in a parking lot – one guy sitting on top of another punching his face bloody, banging his head into the concrete, and a ring of other guys around them – I found myself in the middle of the circle trying to yank the one guy off the other one, screaming, “Stop it! You’re going to kill him! Stop it!” Instinct (and, in retrospect, a kind of foolishness) had put me in the middle of that circle – there’d been no thought given to what I was doing, and so I can’t claim any special kind of courage there. But – and here’s the part that still gives me a kind of awe when I think about it – after security guards had hauled away the brawlers I stepped back and found that another woman – the parent of one of my former students – had stepped into the circle with me. I remember saying to her, in a kind of wonder, “You’re here, too!” And she said, “I wasn’t going to let you stand here all alone.” She HAD thought about what she was doing – she HAD made a conscious choice to put herself in harm’s way for another human being. She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t yelled. She’d just stood there beside me. Now THAT was courage. Oh gosh. I’m tearing up right now as I think about it.
“There is too much animal courage in society and not sufficient moral courage.” – Mary Baker Eddy
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” – Gandhi
“Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.” – Gandhi
“A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” – Gandhi
“It’s a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.” – Pete Seeger
I remember on Election Day when I was a little girl my mom and dad would go off in a car together to vote. My Dad supported one political party, and my mom supported another – but they cheerfully got in the car together and went to the polls to cancel out each others’ votes. They weren’t angry with each other because they disagreed about politics. They didn’t yell at each other, call each other names, cuss each other out, or think the other person was somehow an inferior human being – lacking in intelligence, reason, logic, and good sense. Nope. They loved each other. They respected each other. Although they’ve since then become members of the same party, at that time, they totally disagreed with each other about American politics – and it was alright.
They were a wonderful example to me.
Although one of my parents was, then, a Republican, and the other was a Democrat, although one was religious, and the other not – they shared the same values. Both my parents valued honesty, integrity, kindness, generosity, fair play, compassion, the beauties of Nature, and having a good sense of humor about oneself. They brought their children up to value those things, also.
Here are some useful things I learned about the exchange of ideas and opinions from watching my parents interact with each other:
I’m really grateful I grew up with the parents I did. I think it would be a marvelous thing if everyone treated each other with the same respect my parents gave to each other as they drove off to the polls on election day.
I appreciate that in the Christian Science movement there’s no official authority telling its members how to vote on issues, or which politicians they should try to elect. Members are expected to vote as individual conscience and understanding dictate. And this, I believe, is as it should be.
“Do the unexpected. Take 20 minutes of your day to do what young people all over the world are dying to do: vote.” – Rick Mercer (Canadian Wit Extraordinaire)
“Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy has always believed that those who are entitled to vote should do so, and she has also believed that in such matters no one should seek to dictate the actions of others.” – from Prose Works by Mary Baker Eddy
I appreciate that in the Christian Science movement there’s no official authority telling its members how to vote on issues, or which politicians they should try to elect. Members are expected to vote as individual conscience and understanding dictate. And this, I believe, is as it should be.
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science church, was a strong believer in separation of church and state. She writes, in Prose Writings: “Progress, legitimate to…
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At some point last spring I got into my pictures file on my laptop and searched for “tulips”. A lovely picture of a yellow tulip with a perfect red stripe down its middle came up amongst all my other tulip photos. I wondered how I could have missed this one before. I titled it “Tulip with Red Stripe”, worked with it a little bit to bring out the colors, and posted it on fineartamerica.com. Yeah. So… yesterday I was walking by a colleague’s desk and the red-striped tulip picture came up on her screen saver. How, I wondered, did my photo end up on her screen saver? I searched around on my computer and found a file of sample pictures provided by microsoft – and the tulip picture was in there! After a little investigating I discovered the photo was actually taken by a photographer named David Nadalin. I know – yikes, right? I immediately took the picture off my fineartamerica.com page, and then found David’s phone number and email address, and left him messages explaining what I’d done with his photo, and how I was trying to rectify my boo boo.
After I left my messages for David I went into my Facebook account – both the author/photographer page and my personal page – to see if I’d posted the photo there, too – and, sure enough, I had. Feeling the need to set things straight there I posted David’s tulip picture on both pages, along with an explanation of the mistake I’d made.
In the meantime, David had graciously replied to my email message, and I was relieved to discover that 1) he is a good sport and 2) he has a well-developed sense of humor. He wrote, in part, “That photo of mine is in every copy of Windows 7. So anyone running that would figure out pretty quickly where it came from. 750 million people have a copy of that one already…” SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION PEOPLE!!! That sort of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Yup. When I mess up, it is on a grand scale. No small little insignificant mess-ups for me. Nosiree, bub. I mess-up BIG.
So back to Facebook. I found David Nadalin’s page and sent out a friend request to him – after reading his email response it was obvious, to me, that he’d fit right in with my way cool and kind of eclectic community of FB friends – and he accepted my request! – and then his wife (whom I’ve discovered is a wonderful photographer in her own right) came onto my page, too, and – long story, short – David and his wife, Carol, are now both my Facebook friends!
Having the opportunity to laugh with my new friends, David and Carol, and my old friends, too (who, I’m pretty sure, are not at all surprised by anything I do at this point) about my 750-million-people-goof ended up being the highlight of my day. I love when stuff like that happens. 🙂
photo by David Nadalin
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Last night as the family sat around the television watching the evening news, our son Xander suddenly stood up – like he’d just awakened from a dream or something – and, shaking his head to clear it, said, “What the hell just happened there? We went from, like, 20 reports of death and mayhem to winning a prom date with Seth Rogen…”
We all started cracking up, but after we’d stopped laughing, I started thinking about what Xander had said, and it gave me pause.
Lately it’s felt to me like… well, like our society is under some kind of mass hypnotic spell or something – like there’s this sort of slow-boiling rage and fear continually swirling around us now. I’ve felt it in myself when I’m trying to negotiate traffic to get to work on time – this impatience with the drivers around me who aren’t doing what I think they should be doing to allow me to progress in a timely fashion. And I’ve seen this rage and fear played out on the television, too – ads about painful and debilitating diseases that pharmaceutical companies run to try to sell their drugs (which, the ads admit with a soothing-voiced narrator, sometimes bring on worse side effects than the original disease) – political campaigns based solely on the negative traits of the opponent, shootings in our local schools, quarantines of people who aren’t actually sick but happened to have traveled from the wrong continent, horrific accidents involving drunk drivers and texters. And it’s occurred to me that my society is being mass hypnotized – being controlled through fear by folks who want to sell their drugs and their politics. It really stinks.
I’m thinking that maybe it’s time to wake up.
In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes: “Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.” And “The press,” Eddy writes, “unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases and by printing long descriptions which mirror images of disease distinctly in thought. A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it.”
I’m thinking it’s time the world wakes up from its “stupefying illusions”, turns off the television, unplugs itself from the nonsense on the internet, too, and takes a stand. In the words of Ma in Grapes of Wrath: “I ain’t never gonna be scared no more. I was though, for a while it looked as though we was beat, good and beat. Looked like we didn’t have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like nobody was friendly no more. Made me feel kind of bad, and scared too. Like we was lost and nobody cared… But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. And we’ll go on forever, Pa… ’cause… we’re the people.”
Right ON, Ma Joad!
Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them…Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? …for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. – Matthew 6
…behold, the kingdom of God is within you. – Luke 17:21
…when has a little financial shortage ever stopped Good from happening? – Karen Molenaar Terrell (from The Madcap Christian Scientist: All Things New)
photos by Karen Molenaar Terrell
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 