Soul Mosaic

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

I always liked this saying and recently someone on the children’s writing email list I’m on, provided some background to this saying:

According to The Columbia World of Quotations, an article in the Catholic Digest (St. Paul, Minnesota, Oct. 1960) quoted Eleanor as saying this as a warning to wives of future presidents. So, a bit of trivia in today’s gift.

I am a softie when it comes to animals. I love everything that comes through my backyard. I have a nature journal with 3 years worth of entries of the comings and goings of geese, ducks, babies, rabbits, snakes, baby racoons…if it came through my yard and I saw it, it’s in my journal, along with stick figure drawings, pond maps, and occasional photographs.

I collect news articles about animals. Even my husband, a computer person who never prints anything, prints out any news story he sees about animals and gives them to me because he knows I love them. (the articles and the animals 🙂 ) So suffice it to say, I love animals.

But…maybe not roaches. Or bugs. I honor their right to live in peace…I just don’t want them near me….. So, maybe when I say I love animals, maybe it’s not as perfect a love as I initially said? I try, but like any human endeavor, even though I say I love animals, and I do, there are no “absolutes.” You can say “I love “X” wholeheartedly” And maybe in that moment you feel that, a momentary seeping out of the eternal love in our souls. Yet sometimes the actual execution of that love falls way short of what we aspire to in our heart. Like me with bugs.

Life is full of grays. We try to soar to mountaintops, sometimes we can’t even make it past anthills. Still, I don’t think it’s wrong to “aspire” to mountaintops and even when we can’t make it all the way there, it can be a gift to someone to say “I wish to give you this, even if I can’t.” The reality of human existence is, we aspire to heaven, but we live on earth, so gray is where we end up. It still doesn’t make reaching for heaven wrong. And it still doesn’t invalidate that compassion and love are there.

So when I saw the CNN Headline this morning: “Luck runs out for pigs caught in flood,” I sensed there was another one of those gray moments. Apparently about a dozen pigs caught in the flooding in Iowa, “who escaped their flooded farm, swam through raging floodwaters and scrambled atop a sandbag levee in southeastern Iowa” were then shot by Des Moines County sheriff’s officials.

At first there is the awful pain you feel at what seems a cruel fate. And I imagine everyone who read that had an initial moment of outrage and “why did they have to shoot them?”

Even the local officials felt compelled to explain that the animals hoofs were puncturing the plastic sand-filled bags that made up the levee. They noted you can’t have that happening because it destroys the levees and puts thousands of people at risk. They went on to note that they consulted veterinarians and other state agencies in deciding what to do, and also stated that “out of about 36,000 pigs in the Oakville area, officials estimated that only a thousand or so were left behind when the floodwaters came through. ‘We trucked them as far as 200 miles away to other hog farms so that they would be taken care of.'”

I noted many things in their words – the biggest of which was compassion. They went to great lengths to save as many animals as possible. They went to great lengths to consult experts to find the best answer. Of course they wanted to avert animal right’s activists from condemning them, but there was tremendous concern showed too. They were caught between a rock and a hard place. These were not heartless people just killing off helpless animals for fun, these were men and women who really cared…about the animals, about the people they are sworn to protect. They were caught in a situation that had no good choices and sometimes, the best answer falls far short of what you want to do.

I suspect everyone was upset. Of course these animals are killed in a slaughterhouse everyday. Nobody argues that. I eat pork chops and chicken and steak. I think the reason people felt upset in this case, including the sheriffs is because these pigs demonstrated something we could identify with – These animals showed spunk, spirit…they SURVIVED. And in the face of such a heroic effort, your first inclination is to save them, honor them. Not shoot them. Again, that’s the eternal love coming through. If it were roaches and they showed that kind of spirit, I’d want to let them live. You just have to respect such an effort in the face of such vulnerability. And I think that’s the human heart feeling that connection with another living being, and wanting to help. I think it’s wired into us, it’s in our deepest natures, to want to be kind. I’ve heard it said that everyone loves something. I read an article recently that said the Mafia doesn’t do ‘hits’ on Mother’s Day because mothers are sacred and apparently, even Mafia hit men love everyone’s mothers enough not to kill their sons until the next day. Bizarre yes, but still, everyone loves something…..we may choose to follow a negative path in life. We may choose to deny the goodness within us. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there and it does seep out even when we think it’s not there.

In 2002 there was a runaway cow in Cincinnati, escaped from the slaughterhouse. Here’s how everyone reacted:

“Runaway cow a folk hero

By Barry M. Horstman, Post staff reporter

For days, it’s been perhaps the most mooooo-ving story in Cincinnati.

In a week filled with major news – the execution of a Cincinnatian for the first time in nearly a half century, black entertainers’ boycott of the city and the countless feel-good stories of the Olympics – tri-staters are preoccupied, of all things, with a missing cow.

No bull.

Since escaping from a local slaughterhouse by jumping a 6-foot fence at Ken Meyer Meats in Camp Washington Feb. 15, the 1,200-pound cow has become daily fodder for radio talk shows, TV newscasts and office chatter.

Curious onlookers peer toward a heavily wooded area in Clifton where an escaped cow is believed to be hiding. (MELVIN GRIER/The Post)

Dubbed Moosama Bin Laden by one DJ, the cow has evaded police and officials from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals while crossing Central Parkway and entering Mount Storm Park in Clifton, where it was last spotted by one TV station’s helicopter ”Cow Cam.”

”The problem is, this is a free-range cow that isn’t going to come to any human,” said SPCA general manager Harold Dates. ”And when you weigh 1,200 pounds, you can pretty much go anywhere you want to go.”

At City Hall and from coast to coast, where CNN and other news outlets have chronicled the four-hooved fugitive’s run for freedom, the cow’s fame grows daily.

If and when the runaway 7-year-old cow is captured, Mayor Charlie Luken plans to give it the key to the city. In the meantime, WLW-AM talk-show host Bill Cunningham, never shy about doing anything to beef up ratings, will continue referring to it as Charlene Mooken, while his counterparts have settled on nicknames ranging from Heidi to Bessie.

Everyone from Marge Schott to Fifth Third Bank has offered to do whatever it takes to prevent the cow from ending up on a hamburger bun, the latter by offering the cow a starring role in its next ”Holy Cow” home-equity loan ad campaign.

Similarly, Chick-Fil-A, a fast-food restaurant that features a cow in ads urging people to steer clear of red meat, is offering 100 free chicken sandwiches to whoever catches the cow.

Frustrated in their repeated attempts to lure the light-colored Charolais out of Mount Storm Park’s thick underbrush, officials Thursday devised a new strategy: using three other cows as bovine bait to draw the cow into a corraled area.

Today, officials – professing no fear that the scheme could backfire and leave four cows on the loose – plan to truck in the new cows and place them in an area contained within about 30 10-foot temporary fence sections. Water and food also will be set out to make it look like there’s a big cow party going on inside.

If the cow falls for the trap, officials will swing the gate on a happy ending to the saga. If not, they’ll move on to Plan B: trying to bring her down with a tranquilizer dart, a far less attractive option that requires carefully hauling a 1,200-pound animal out of a hilly, brush-covered site.

Until the cow is captured, police plan to close Mount Storm Park to the public. In recent days, the cow has been spooked not only by the joggers and dog-walkers who routinely use the park, but by dozens of gawkers who have come to watch the man – er, cowhunt.

The major concern of Cincinnati police, said Lt. Kurt Byrd, is preventing the cow from wandering onto nearby Interstate 75. ”If a 2,000-pound car runs into a (1,200)-pound cow, it might be pretty ugly,” Byrd said.

Assuming the cow is safely recovered, it will have earned a permanent reprieve from the grim fate that awaited it last week at Meyer Meats.

”There’s no doubt this cow will be living the rest of its life in the most comfortable situation that can be provided,” said the SPCA’s Dates.

Whether that is on Mrs. Schott’s estate or some other farm remains to be determined. Regardless, it’s an udderly satisfying way to wrap up the story.

As Byrd pointed out, contrasted with the decidedly unpleasant local, national and international stories that have dominated the past year, the missing cow tale comes off as a welcome respite for Greater Cincinnatians weary of bad news. ”If this is our major news story,” he said, ”it speaks pretty well for Cincinnati.”

Publication date: 02-22-02″

The mayor wants to give the cow a key to the city. Chick-Filet was giving away chicken sandwiches. A loan company wants to use the cow in a commercial, and even Marge Schott, the contentious, controversial former owner of the Cincinnati Reds offered it a home on her farm. And Marge Schott’s personality was well characterized by someone’s comment that they weren’t sure what was worse: to be killed at the slaughterhouse, or to have to live with Marge Schott.

So why is it that an animal who 24 hours later would be transformed into something for a weekend cookout, caused such an outpouring of support? Why does everyone want to save THIS cow and not the others? Or that Chick-Filet will give away free CHICKEN sandwiches, and somebody had to kill the chickens, to the person who saves the runaway cow that was supposed to be a beef sandwich?

I think it’s that moment of recognition that something we usually view as food, can have spirit…a dignity, just like us. It’s a heroic fight by an underdog. We ourselves are often life’s underdogs. So when we see something fighting back against their fate, we want to save it. The momentary shut down of the rational left brain which gives way to the expansiveness of the heart and soul calling for us to love unconditionally, even to love an escapee bovine. I guess there is that place deep inside of all of us that loves in spite of us. It’s that well of compassion that sometimes surprises us, and shows up at odd and usually illogical times.

I feel compassion not just for the pigs, but for the sheriffs and the people in the flood in Iowa. So many have their lives and homes disrupted or destroyed. Heroic pigs were killed. And good men and women had to do it, because they were caught in the imperfect situation of life, where you sometimes have to do painful things when you’d rather soar to heaven, because the only choice life gave you is between bad and worse.

My wish for all in Iowa is for a quick recovery from floods….and peace of heart. I’m sure the pigs are in a place where they understand and are even better off now.

To the rest of us, I wish peace in those moments where you want to offer another the world, and your reality comes up short. Welcome to gray. It’s okay. Heaven is still there in your heart.

Remember, it’s the intention that matters…that moment of one’s heart full of love….not the execution of the wish. It’s no less of a gift to say “I would give everything in my heart if I could, even as I know I can’t.” Or to slightly alter a line from Yeat’s poem, (He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven): “but I being mortal, have only my dreams.” Dreams can be nice gifts too.

By the way…the outcome on the runaway cow? She was saved. At artist Tom Lohre’s website where I got the above story, there’s a whole series of stories about this, along with video and a picture of the rescued cow, who was renamed “Cinci Freedom.” Tom, who usually paints important national events like shuttle launches and Mount Saint Helens, did a painting of the “Clifton Cow.” Cinci now resides on the Farm Sanctuary Shelter in Watkins Glen New York. To visit Tom’s website, click here.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I am not much of a clothes person, just neither my interest, nor my strength. Mind you, I admire people who make wardrobe an artistic expression of themselves. It’s their talent and I acknowledge and admire it. I do better with paints on a canvas. To each his own. No competition required. Instead, more often now, I just laugh at my foibles here.

Where I can walk into a bookstore and immediately process hundreds of topics and book locations and see order and clarity when hunting what I want, I walk into a clothing store and see chaos and confusion. And we won’t even discuss that I’m no longer 20 so many of the styles I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and I wouldn’t look right in anyway. Over the years I learned to figure out the things I like to wear and how to find them, and shopping online allowed order and quiet.

But even if you take all that out of the equation, the simple fact remains…I am at heart a simple person. Intricate complicated wardrobes are just not me. Even more, I am married to a man who could not care less about my wardrobe, and enjoys and I think, even prefers me in simple attire, relaxed, happy, and focused on enjoying each other.

I have to laugh to remember this, but I am a person who spent 8 years in Catholic grammar school wearing uniforms…and LOVED it. I never admitted it to any of the other girls who always griped about these horrible uniforms and why couldn’t they wear their nice clothes. I was secretly relieved. Uniforms leveled the playing field – it took wardrobe out of the picture. People were more able to react to each other as persons because the artificial concept of what you had on, was removed from the equation. So whether you couldn’t pick out nice clothes, or didn’t have the money for them or preferred T-shirt and jeans….none of it mattered. And I liked it that way. And it was less complicated for a non-morning person. You got up and every day you knew what you were wearing. No struggle to figure out what in God’s name to put on.

Even later in life, after I’d learned to do the high heels and makeup and dresses and got fairly comfortable with it, and was slim enough to wear what I wanted….I was still secretly relieved to work in a hospital for 15 years wearing uniforms because again, no questions of what to wear. Sure I had to decide “dress today? skirt and top? slacks?” But still, uniforms limit the confusing options. And deep down inside, that simple child still would rather be in T-shirts and jeans.

That child was the one who wanted to get home from school, throw on whatever and run out to play. Play – biking, baseball, climbing trees and fences, playing in the dirt, imagining through my play that I was on all kinds of adventures – that was the goal. I wore clothes because you had to.

I always loved that in the Nancy Drew books, her clothes were given one sentence: “Nancy went home and packed for her sleuthing trip, then headed for the airport” and the rest of the 130 or so pages were about finding hidden doors, crawling down dirt tunnels, chasing bad guys down deserted roads, and escaping from being tied up in a basement. I would love to be as dressed up as Nancy Drew (not to mention have her lean frame these days), but only have to devote one sentence to it: Deb went shopping and picked out some clothes that looked nice on her, then went to the bookstore. 🙂

Now in menopause, I find I’ve come back full circle to that child who just wants to play and doesn’t care whether society approves of what I put on. In fact, as I get older, the more I feel society demanding something of me in any area of life, the more inclined I am to tell society to take a flying leap off a short pier. And some things on my body hurt more now – high heels I always looked good in but they kill my toes, heels, and arches, and I’m in pain for days afterward. These days, my biggest priority is not to turn heads as I walk in a room…I prefer to not even be noticed, after all, I’m a writer…writer’s like to be anonymous observers of life….my biggest priority is not to turn my ankle walking in shoes too narrow for my wide foot, or feel abdominal pain because the waistband on my slacks is causing my insides to hurt. I did crab at the man in the shoestore one day about why don’t they carry heels in wide sizes. I said, “don’t you think people with wide feet like to wear nice-looking shoes?” He just shrugged. Not really his problem. I was just frustrated. These days I spend most of my time in very expensive running shoes which make my feet feel good. So much for wide heels. The bottom line is, my biggest priority these days is comfort and doing what I was sent here for in the first place before time runs out.

I wear clothes because I have to…they arrest you if you don’t 🙂 . And yes, I am a grown-up, sometimes you have to and should dress up…so I can, and I do. And by the way, for anyone out there who loves clothes and it’s your talent in life….that’s wonderful. Indulge and revel in it. It’s your strength, celebrate it. But it’s not mine and I’ve finally reached a place in life where…I am okay with that. I really understand that for me, it doesn’t matter. My body just wants to return to the simple….to the child. And by that I mean “child-like” not childish. Child-like is the ability to retain the knowledge gained in life and have depth, but to keep the open “beginner’s mind and awe” of a child. You drop the weight of answering to society for the reward of discovering joy in everything out there in the world….even just a bunny rabbit at the back yard feeder. Child-like is what Jesus was talking about when He said you had to become like little children to enter heaven. He wasn’t advocating we all start acting like two-year-olds and throwing tantrums, He simply meant, let go of all that is unnecessary and instead, view the world and life again, using the wonder-filled eyes of a child seeing things for the first time. And maybe He knew that at least by menopause, heaven is not forcing wide feet into tiny high heels, which is hell. 🙂

As an aside about dressing up, I have found simple can be elegant – I always admired the actress Stephanie Powers. Very glamorous Hollywood type. Yet, she seemed as at home in Khakis on the African plains with her friend William Holden, as she did in evening gowns at a Hollywood premiere. When she dressed up, she wore simple, classic styles and avoided “trendy.” She chose classic and it worked. So when I do dress up, I look for that ….even though I don’t have her budget. 🙂

So, it was with all this mulling through my head that I came across the May/June 2008 issue of AARP and saw the interview with Jamie Lee Curtis. I have always enjoyed Jamie Lee Curtis in movies, especially the funny ones, such as A Fish Called Wanda or True Lies. It’s not that her other works are bad, just I like her ability as an actress to poke fun at herself. I suspect that’s part of the real her showing.

For whatever reason, someone discovered a few years ago that she is an interesting and intelligent interviewee. In addition to this current article, I have these two others about her – one from 2006, another from 2007. In each I kept underlining and circling things, and finally just tore them out and kept them. They are sort of a progression of installments as she navigates midlife, and the bits of wisdom she’s learned along the way.

In reading each, I found a person I’d enjoy having tea with, many of the same struggles, foibles, questions and insights. And grounded, down-to-earth. No pretense. No BS…even when talking about her flaws….especially when talking about her flaws. From the 2006 article in More magazine she said: “How can I sell a book about self esteem if I’m not willing to acknowledge that I too have self-esteem issues?”

She is on a quest to get real and the evolution over those articles shows. She ditched the golden brown hair and is now silver. In 2004 she did an article with More magazine that included a picture of her – no makeup, unflattering spandex…midriff bulging – her point: A way to make amends for making many women feel less than they were when she was doing movies with a Barbie-thin frame. She wasn’t advocating going after obesity, but rather the point that she does pilates and yoga, exercises, and eats carefully and yet “This is what I look like….I’ve had to accept that part of me.” She even named her midriff “Midge.”

Progressing through the 2007 Ladies Home Journal article and the 2008 AARP article, she continues her quest for real. She speaks of overcoming alcoholism and drug addiction, being a better mom, wife, and human being, and confronting such questions as: “Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? Why am I here? Am I nothing but a body?”

In this latest article, she continues the journey and among other things, talks about aging, clothes and paring down: “Getting older means paring yourself down to an essential version of yourself.” She turns 50 November 22nd and sees herself peeling away the layers more and more and notes that “I have not one second of anxiety about turning 50.”

Frankly, neither did I when I turned 50. In fact I found it liberating to be out of my 40s. Something about reaching a milestone and for whatever inexplicable reason, I felt like I could start to let some things go, shed them, be me again and take back that freedom that comes with getting older and knowing you aren’t 30 anymore, you don’t want to be 30 anymore, you’re better than you were at 30 in so many ways, and you’re actually happy to do what you please and make a fool of yourself and the hell with what people say.

Jamie Lee Curtis mirrored my thoughts. She went on to say that “My style is a distillation …I’ve let my hair go gray. I wear only black and white. Every year I buy three or four black dresses that I just keep in rotation. I own one pair of blue jeans. I’ve given away all my jewelry, because I don’t wear it.” She wants to “jettison what no longer serves her.” She noted that she recently got rid of a pair of black boots and no longer wears high heels…. “Too uncomfortable. Don’t need ’em. Gone.” In evolving this way, she becomes new again.

Her first insight into this new simpler approach came years ago when she and her husband attended the Golden Globes. She described herself as “wearing some borrowed dress that wasn’t me, my hair was done in a way that I never wear my hair, and I had earrings on. And my husband said, “You know who is the most beautiful woman in the room?” And I was hoping he would say me. And he pointed across the room at Jessica Tandy. She was sitting at a table wearing a cream-colored silk-shantung pantsuit. Single strand of pearls, short white hair, a little lipstick-nothing else. And I thought, ‘He’s totally right.’ There was none of the pretense, none of the trying so hard.”

She talks about being older and seems to like it, thinking “there’s an incredible amount of self knowledge that comes with getting older. I feel way better now than I did when I was 20…stronger…smarter in every way….less crazy…..” She added that “as we get older, we say goodbye to a lot of people….and discover our capacity to love and communicate and have intimacy–real intimacy, not the superficial intimacy we had in our youth. Strip away all the bulls—; be done with that.” Her goal now is to “jettison what no longer serves her” and she aspires to “essential being. Nothing extraneous.”

In a 2002 article she said that she hoped to someday feel sure enough of herself to “look like just me” and say to magazine editors “This is what I wear, this is how I wear my hair…;I’m going to look the way God intended me to look.” She admits that she’s not a spiritually perfect person. “I’m flawed and contradictory and fraught in many areas. But I’m better. I’m growing, and that’s all I really want.”

I raise my cup of tea to her. She said so many things that I’ve felt and wondered if I was the only one. I embraced her thoughts about “shedding” and “being essential only” and know exactly what she meant about coming to an age where you suddenly realize the amount of power you have inside you to love and to communicate and to want, demand, and give REAL intimacy — soul connection…not that kind from my 20s that left you feeling scared, competitive, inadequate.

So now I will go upstairs to change from my comfortable sweats, and put on my shorts and T-shirt to work through my day, doing work I feel I am being called to do….work that draws on every last experience, failure, mistake, despair, wonder, and love I have internalized over the last 52 and 1/2 years. Later this year, also in November, like Curtis (guess we’re both Scorpios?), I will turn 53, and I will revel in that and take more of my own power back from society.

And I know the questions she asks, and I ask them of myself almost everyday –  Why am I here? Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? Good questions.