Random reflections on this autumn day

• I'm one year retired. No regrets. I love my free time and am enjoying life in a whole new way. 
• Since I retired, I've published three books: a poetry collection (Movements Through the Landscape); a memoir about growing up in Tarrytown, New York (A Town and a Valley. Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley); and a meditative book about gardening (The Gifts of a Garden). All of them are available for purchase on Amazon. I am working very hard to market the latter book, although I'd like all of the books to sell a bit if possible. Sending prayers into the universe for support.
• Marketing books is a job unto itself. I wonder how well other authors do this job.
• Forty years ago, I started working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. A wonderful workplace, one I will never forget. It changed my life in all good ways and showed me what good leadership really is (professional generosity and wishing others well). 
• I think about those friends and colleagues who are no longer with us. I wish they were still here--Liza, Thu, Debby. You left us too soon. 
• I think about friends who are ill and what they go through every day, living with anxiety and the knowledge that they cannot do what they once could do. 
• Enjoyed visiting the new Munch Museum: Munchmuseet in Oslo today with my husband. We visited the old Munch Museum at Tøyen when I first came to Oslo; I was only vaguely aware then of Edvard Munch's paintings. Over the years I've developed an appreciation of his works. The museum is worth visiting. 
• We ate dinner at Villa Paradiso (Italian restaurant) afterward. I thought how nice it was to do this together, go out on a Saturday afternoon, and I mentioned to him that we should do things like this more often. He agreed. He will be retiring soon, so it will be interesting to see what life will be like then when we have more time together. 
• Munch was preoccupied with sickness, death, mortality (his mother and sister died of tuberculosis when he was young). Illness in general, including mental illness. His was not a very happy life. But he was an amazing artist. The acknowledgment of our mortality. Some say it becomes more acute once one turns sixty. All I know is that I've been living with this knowledge since I was a teenager and watched my father experience heart attacks and strokes. His first heart attack occurred when I was twelve years old; he died when I was twenty-nine. Mortality became real to me as well once I read Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'Spring and Fall--to a young child' as a teenager. Perhaps I shouldn't have read it and internalized it. But I did, and it has stuck with me since then, especially the last two lines: 'It is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for'. Do we mourn for ourselves, for the knowledge that our lives will eventually merge into the river of time that sweeps us all onward?
• Everyone ages. Some are more afraid of it than others. Some feel the need to change their faces and looks in order to stay young-looking. But it doesn't really work. It changes how you look even if it may make you look younger, and if you are a celebrity, everyone comments. If it changes how you look, does that change who you are? Do you really believe that you are younger? I don't judge others if they want to go down this road, but I think it is probably easier to just accept the gradual changes associated with aging. Look in the mirror. Or don't. My mother would have said 'just live your life. Get on with it'. She was right about so many things. 
• Does having faith make it easier to deal with one's mortality? Perhaps. I'd rather have faith than not have it. But no one knows what life is like after death, since no one has come back to tell us about it, except Christ. And one must accept his words about eternity, in faith. 
• Faith is defined as 'complete trust or confidence in someone or something'; also 'a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof'. Our society requires proof, evidence, hard facts. Hard to come by where the afterlife is concerned. If someone we once knew and loved rose from the dead before our eyes, I think we would freak out completely. 
• I am now a gardener. That is my identity for at least six months of the year. I am happy in that knowledge. Working with the earth completes me. I don't need much else when I am in my garden. My soul is happy there. It's where I find God. That's all that matters to me. 
• I share my garden photos with others, and they tell me that I am a master gardener. It's nice to hear, but it's not why I share the photos. I want to share the beauty that my soul 'sees'. I hope that others find peace and serenity the way I have found it. That's why I wrote 'The Gifts of a Garden'. 
• I think about so many things when I am working in my garden. There is something about weeding that encourages reflection. I connect with my garden in a silent communion; we talk without the actual utterance of words, but they are uttered in my head. I've learned that if you treat living things well, they will shine. They will do their best to be the best versions of themselves that they can be. If it's true for flowers and plants, it's true for humans (and animals) too.
• As a country (the USA), we need less emphasis on what divides us, and more emphasis on what unites us. The media have had far too much to say about what divides us. But we can choose to listen to it, or to not listen to it. I choose the latter, most of the time. Many women I know have done the same. There is no point in becoming an angry person if that anger does not lead you in the right direction, toward something positive--changing yourself or the situations that infuriate you. If you are constantly angry at everything, your anger is not rational or logical. 
• The orange-haired man appears to be imploding. It had to happen at one point. He's an old man now and he looks it. His behavior borders on deranged. How he's kept up the facade for this long is anyone's guess. 
• As Tania Tetlow--the new president (first woman president) of Fordham University--states, 'we build a common good with ethics, empathy, and faith'. Not with amorality, hardness of heart, and lack of faith. Humans must have hope in order to go on. Our job as Christians is to appeal to that hope in every person we meet. 

Autumn's call

 

I love this beautiful illustration and text about autumn. The illustration was done by Danielle Barlow; she has done illustrations with accompanying texts for each season. I just checked out her website and it is so worth visiting:   https://www.daniellebarlowart.com/    

Enjoy!

Two girls graffiti

Just thought I'd share a recent photo I took on one of my walks up along the Akerselva river. Normally all you see on abandoned buildings is scrawl and tagging. But this was art, and it's lovely. Zoom in to see the nuances in the colors used for the hair. Nice work. Too bad there can't be more graffiti like this.

Vincent and Theo Van Gogh

I have been meaning to write a short post about the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum - The Museum about Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam - The Netherlands). My husband and I toured the museum in August; I found it to be one of the most interesting and emotionally-engaging art museums I have ever visited. I cannot remember that I have ever been moved to tears by an art exhibition, but this one had that effect on me. Van Gogh’s life lends itself to this type of reaction—he suffered from epilepsy, depression, and lack of self-confidence, and at the age of 37 shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers, France and died two days later. He was very close to his brother Theo who supported him at different times during his life; Theo died six months after Vincent and the two of them are buried side by side in Auvers. After Vincent’s death, Theo’s wife saw to it that Vincent’s paintings received the recognition they deserved; she came across in the exhibition as a generous and compassionate woman who had great understanding for her husband Theo and his close relationship with Vincent. 

I think the museum did a great job in depicting the emotional depth of the relationship between Vincent and Theo—you really felt and understood the empathy and love that Theo had for Vincent, and the utter humanity and frailty in their individual lives. I found myself thinking—‘there but for the grace of God go I’ as the expression goes. Because we all suffer from lack of self-confidence or from depression at times; and if you have experienced these then you have empathy for others who are weighed down or destroyed by them. By the time I got to the section that showed a photo of the gravesite where both brothers are buried, I was quite sad. I have never seen the Robert Altman film from 1990 about the Van Gogh brothers—Vincent & Theo—but I want to get a hold of it so that I can. It received very good reviews when it came out; I don’t know how I missed it--perhaps because I had just moved to Oslo and was not paying attention, or perhaps because the movie never opened in Oslo at all.

It is not easy to watch people you know and love sink into depression or mental illness. I have seen that happen in my own family and in friends’ families as well. It is terrifying to watch the descent into severe mental illness like schizophrenia; daunting to witness what chronic depression can do to a person’s overall health. It makes you realize that the brain is the last great frontier in a research sense—how the brain works, why do certain aspects of normal brain function go awry, what are emotions really and where are they based? There are so many questions that remain unanswered to date, and one can only hope that some of them get answered in our lifetime.