catalyst

New buds grace these branches at the Couple's Garden Retreat on January 3, 2012 in Suzhou.

Year of the Dragon

I tend to forget that the catalyst to any change I ever want to make is simply me. We have the control to remake our habits, to take at least some step to be the person we want to become, to act in ways we admire. “Our own life has to be our message.” We shouldn’t rely on other people to propel us toward this, shouldn’t wait for an accident to push us into action. It takes effort to change and to start that change now. But I want to live in a way that won’t give me nightmares.

Heidi Go Seek Blog, Heidi Howland

Sources of inspiration are everywhere in life- in the bowl of ice cream that causes me to close my eyes and enjoy a moment of creamy pleasure, in the sound of my mother's voice echoing with advice through the corridor of time, and in the relationships we chose to forge with others- especially our significant others. My boyfriend and I are both setting off on separate journeys for the spring festival holiday. Before he left China, he spent several days with me in my tiny apartment outside the city of Shanghai. The night before he left on his trip, he cooked dinner for me and five of our friends. We went shopping together for the ingredients, and I served as prep cook under the guidance of his calm and assured voice scuttling around the kitchen happily doing his bidding. My knowledge of things culinary is restricted to the bile and bitterness my mother passed on to me when she tried to meet the standards of my grandmother's soup spoon and homemade fruit pies and consistently failed. In the kitchen, my mother was never good enough.

Watching Jon wash the dishes as I sat around the table with our female friends enjoying a steaming cup of jasmine tea after the meal was finished, I was proud of the man I had chosen. Linda and Charo-Summer asked where I found a man like Jon.

"Can you find a Jon for me?" Linda said.

Reuben, Linda's boyfriend, was not pleased with her comment, so I just laughed, but surrounding my thoughts was a warm glow radiating from a relationship that's blending human ingredients into a catalyst for affirmative and upbeat change in the year of the dragon.

The Company We Keep: Truth

TRUTH?

"I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms." -Casanova

Introduction to Chapter Twelve: The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story by Robert and Dayna Baer, Crown Publishers: 2011

The Company We Keep explores how life in the CIA distances operatives from family and friends, shifting the priority and focus from their private lives to their professional lives. The quote above refers to the lies and half-truths CIA agents tell informants, family members, lovers, spouses and friends in the course of an ordinary working day.

Note: Casanova was a recognized womanizer. Today, his name remains associated with the art of seduction: Cultivating activities that gave pleasure to the senses was a primary focus of his life.

Peter Pan and Pharmaceutical Fanfare

What can you buy for eighteen American cents in Brazzaville?

Eighteen American cents or .27 CFA (Central African Francs) buys one 10 mg tablet of Roche Valium over the counter with no prescription necessary at the Pharmacie Mavre in downtown Brazzaville. Pfizer”s Celebrex, on the other hand, is two American dollars a pop for one 200 mg capsule. I discovered this pharmaceutical fact when the left side of my neck decided to stiffen up like the legs of the dead cockroach I left belly up overnight on my kitchen floor.

I prefer the 180-degree freedom of a flexible neck so I can- for one important reason- negotiate the pedestrian perils of Brazzaville’s hazardous streets since I am sans my Mazda. When my peripheral vision is impaired, the risk of getting struck by oversized SUVs populating Brazza’s streets skyrockets, so the pain cramping my neck and shoulder had to be eliminated. The first drug cocktail of Valium and Celebrex took me by surprise because I did not realize I should have split the 10 mg tablet down the middle and swallowed only half of its blue magic. Because it was the early hour of the start of my weekend, and I had no place to go, I watched my feet sloppily crisscross a crooked path down the straight-line highway of the cool white tile blocks below. Foggily listing possibilities for the day’s activities, I ruled out operating a motor vehicle or swimming laps in the Villa Washington pool. My mental abilities were resisting the idea of order and responsibility when I began to read the instructional insert in the box of Valium. Under the heading Effets Indésirables Possibles de Valium Roche 10 mg, I discovered this side effect:

Difficulté à coordonner certains mouvements and remembered the pharmacist stressing two words, cinq milligrammes, emphatic in her articulation when she instructed me on the dosage of the drug.

Reading the package insert induced drowsiness, so I decided to hug my favorite overstuffed pillow with its paisley blue flowers decorating my dreams and visit Never Land for several hours of unobstructed deceleration of life.

Later in the week during a lunchtime conversation with my Congolese coworkers, they informed me that in Brazzaville, we are responsible for our own bodies in the pharmaceutical sense. Self-prescribing medication for ailments, fevers, aches, chills and/or shoulder pain replaces the tightly controlled physicians’ prescription system in the States. As long as customers at the pharmacy can pay for their treatment, they are afforded the option of picking and choosing drug cocktails that they personally feel will cure them. Before slapping down the money at Pharmacie Mavre, I did; however, read about Valium in a medical manual I found at work, so I knew its ups and downs. Celebrex was a drug I had encountered previously and was aware that it could destroy my stomach lining or increase my risk of a heart attack.

Despite stumbling on the actual dosage for the first time around- ten milligrams is simply too much for my nervous system to absorb- my shoulder pain has disappeared and the 180-degree sweep of my neck is back in action. The risk of getting struck by an SUV has decreased and life moves forward.

Descending Sweetly

Once upon a time, I descended into a reckless romance with a man committed to another. He described this woman as his Significant Other, abbreviated SO. Nothing between us breached the pleasures of flesh, but disconnecting from our three-month marathon of teasing- stimulating words, arousing paragraphs, and unfulfilled promises- beckoned for a descent that I now understand as opening spaces inhabited by creativity and light.


The Descent
William Carlos Williams

The descent beckons
          as the ascent beckoned.             
                           Memory is a kind  
of accomplishment,                      
          a sort of renewal
                           even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
          inhabited by hordes
                           heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
          since their movements
                           are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).


No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
          formerly
                           unsuspected. A
world lost,
          a world unsuspected,
                           beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness.


With evening, love wakens
          though its shadows
                           which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
          grow sleepy now and drop away
                           from desire.


Love without shadows stirs now
          beginning to awaken
                           as night
advances.


The descent
          made up of despairs
                           and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
                           which is a reversal
of despair.
          For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
          what we have lost in the anticipation—
                           a descent follows,
endless and indestructible.

Toilet Bowl Flooded My Bathroom Blues

I am awake later than usual because our apartment complex hadn't had water for the past three days. Today, water began its dreamy flow to the parched at around four in the afternoon. After I showered, I set to work filling my black garbage can with what I call security water for dry days. There was a knock on my door. My neighbor arrived for coffee, and while we were chatting on the couch, I heard the splish-splash of an overloaded garbage can while noticing H2O winding its way through my bedroom and spilling into the sitting room where we were engrossed in a conversation about German sausage.

Get the broom and squeegie. Flooded the house again.

When will I learn? And that's my toilet minus the seat. The seat fell off about the time I moved into the apartment. A toilet seat is not essential to one's bathroom experience, and I feel better off without it because it habitually pinched my bottom for the one or two days it was still attached to the actual toilet.

more medicines, but less wellness

THE PARADOX OF OUR TIMES

- His Holiness the Dalai Lama (also attributed to other sources)

Is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers

Wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints

We spend more, but we have less

We have bigger houses, but smaller families

More conveniences, but less time

We have more degrees, but less sense

More knowledge, but less judgment

More experts, but more problems

More medicines, but less wellness

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values

We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often

We have learnt how to make a living, but not a life

We have added years to life, but not life to years

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back

But have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor

We have conquered outer space, but not inner space

We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted our soul

We’ve split the atom, but not our prejudice

We’ve higher incomes, but lower morals

We’ve become long on quantity but short on quality

These are the times of tall men, and short character

Steep profits, and shallow relationships

These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare

More leisure, but less fun; more kinds of food, but less nutrition

These are the days of two incomes, but more divorces

Of fancier houses, but broken homes

It is a time when there is much in the show window

And nothing in the stockroom

A time when technology can bring this letter to you

And a time when you can choose

Either to make a difference.... or just hit, delete.