Accents

Having been teases mercilessly all week by my roommates at GA, I was glad to prove them wrong with this simple quiz. They swore up and down and all around that I had a “Jersey” accent, I swore I didn’t.

Here’s the results of the test to prove I don’t. So there, Karen and Diana!
:-P

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Mid Atlantic Also known as a "Philadelphia accent" but also heard in south Jersey, Baltimore, and thereabouts.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Travelogue, part 2

After we finished touring around the Japanese Gardens, we drove down to a Japanese restaurant and had sushi/teriyake for lunch.

Melanie suggested next that we tour the Portland UU Church, which we did - we had an hour long tour conducted by their Director of Religious Education, Cathy Cartwright. It's an amazing church, grown so much they took over the church next door, and have expanded to a full city block! How wonderful to be a part of a growing vibrant community like that! I'm a little envious, I do admit.

We also had the best little adventure, looking for a winery by the name of Hip Chicks Do Wine. We used Diana's GPS system, and followed right into the heart of an industrial park. Well, you can just imagine our confusion - no vineyards, no greenery whatsoever. A winery, here?

Sure enough, we turned the last corner, to be greeted by a nicely painted garage door and small human door, in lavender, and a very small sign announcing Hip Chicks Do Wine. Hmmmmm...

We slowly opened the door, a bit hesitant about what we'd find inside ... it was dark as we first walked in, and we couldn't see much as we waited for our eyes to adjust. We walked further into the building, and sure enough, we found a warehouse full of kegs of wine, and a small tasting area. And was that wine yummy! We bought a few bottles of wine to enjoy in our room, and Di bought a bottle to take home as a gift for Brad. I'll be ordering some in the fall, after I have some spending money and a job!

After the winery, we dropped Melanie off, and picked up Karen for dinner. We found a nice Thai restaurant downtown, and crammed in a fast dinner so Karen could make it back to her evening session at UU University. Here we are looking at pictures of each other's children.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
~ The Rubiyaiyat of Omar Khayyam

More to come ...

Diana's and Robin's Travelogue

It's Wednesday morning, and we have had two magical days on the west coast. On Monday morning, we decided to rent a car when we arrived in Portland, and drive out to the ocean. We wouldn't be able to get into the hotel room anyway, and I had never seen the Pacific Northwest. So we picked up Karen at the airport, and the three of us piled ourselves and our luggage into a minivan (they had no cars left in spite of Brad's excellent speedy reservation work while we were en route!) so they upgraded us very cheaply due to Diana's smooth pleading!

The drive was magnificent! Here's a picture of what the scenery looked like - not great, it was from my cell phone as we were driving down the Cascade Mountains toward the beach. Most of these pictures will be cell phone pix, I left my fully charged camera sitting on my desk at home.

When we arrived at the beach, we were amazed! It's stunning. We meandered up the coast, starting at a tiny sweet beach town. We pulled over any time we found an overlook point, or a sign for a beach, or even a road name that sounded intriguing (like Falcon Beach Road). But the best stop of all we named "Full Bladder Cove", because we finally all had to pee quite badly, and made Di pull over at the first available spot. Not sure we would have tried that turn off, because it didn't indicate a beach view, but we suspected there might be a toilet there. We did indeed find an outhouse.

But the best beach spot of all was Full Bladder Cove! It was stunning. Lots of rocks on the beach, and a small cave! Diana and I climbed down to the beach and walked into the cave. Di snapped this picture there. This is the view from inside the cave. At the very back (only about 15 yards in, I would estimate) was a small shelf that made a slightly lumpy chair - I called it the Epiphany Chair. It was truly a magical place, and we might not have found had it not been to pressing full bladders!

We continued up the coast, and eventually found ourselves at the mouth of the Columbia River. We found a good restaurant, where I treated myself to Dungeness Crab and Provolone cheese cakes with fruited rice, and Di and Karen had something boring that didn't include seafood, since neither of them like seafood. They both claim their meals were good - I am doubtful, since in my opinion nothing beats a seafood dish right straight out of the ocean!!!

We finally made it to our hotel at about 10 pm (now up for 21 hours straight) and talked for about an hour before passing out.

On Tuesday, Diana and I continued to explore while Karen attended her UU University sessions. We first went up to the Japanese Gardens, where we ran into a DRE friend of mine named Melanie. The gardens were so peaceful and soothing, and amazingly beautiful. Here's a picture of us in front of one of the waterfalls and a Koi pond. Throughout the gardens, there was a constant sound of trickling water, through streams, waterfalls, fountains, and other delightful surprises tucked under trees and shrubs, or hiding in a tiny nook. We were told the one thing to not miss while in Portland was the Japanese Gardens, and we both were so glad we chose that to start our morning.

I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.
~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

More later ...

Passages

Today was graduation at my children's charter school. The graduation was beautiful; it made me cry. I was pondering why I cried so hard this year when I didn't even have a child graduating. One reason was that I did know all the students who graduated very well, and the daughter of one of my dear friends graduated, and I've known her since pre-birth and will miss her very much at that school!

But that wasn't the true reason why I became so emotional. I realized it was because I have had the privilege of watching a graduate blossom and take wing. I have seen the potential realized, and it has been good. In spite of all my frustrations with that school, there is something very powerful there that I continue to believe in.

When I drove home, I stopped at the mailbox and found one precious and hard-earned piece of mail that was very welcome. My teaching Certificate of Eligibility with Advanced Standing! 25 credits and one shit-load of work later, I am now a genuine teacher.

Now all I have to do is find the right match for a job. I admit to being nervous. I am working very hard to trust that the universe will provide what I need to live a life of bliss and joy.

The Squeeze

If we want to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others-in terms of engaging in social action, helping our family or community, or just being there for people when they need us-then sooner or later we’re going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what’s happening don’t match. We feel as if we’re between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

There is often a discrepancy between our ideals and what we actually encounter. For instance, in raising children, we have a lot of good ideas, but sometimes it’s challenging to put together the good ideas with how our children are, there at the breakfast table with food all over themselves. Or in meditation, have you noticed how difficult it is to feel emotions without getting totally swept away by them, or how difficult it is simply to cultivate friendliness toward yourself when you’re feeling miserable or panicked or all caught up?

There’s a discrepancy between our inspiration and the situation as it presents itself. It’s the rub between those two things-the squeeze between reality and vision-that causes us to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular on this journey of awakening the heart.

~ Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chodron

Last night, helping my middle child with homework left from our farm adventure last week, was a trial in how much compassion and patience I could muster.

We were both overtired. I’d subbed at her school yesterday during Earth Olympics. That’s the experiential and sustainable version of Field Day in other schools. We were outside all day, doing activities like fire-starting with a bowdrill, building a cob oven, throwing sticks at rabbit cones a la indigenous throwing stick style, purifying stream water, edible weed walking, and building natural art. I was a runner – escort service for children needing the nurse, toilet – or break relief for the teachers between groups. It was a fun day, and I was tired from hiking up and down steep hills all day.

My daughter was exhausted. She’d been at Earth Olympics, and then had a school dance that evening. We won’t even try to go into why a decision was made to allow the students to hold a dance on a Tuesday night on the evening after they’d been outside all day in extraordinary physical exercise.

And she was frustrated, because the farm scavenger hunt wasn’t finished, there were three other students in her group (one of whom had already left for the year to travel with her family, the only other student who works as hard as my daughter). And no one appeared to be helping with the last bits of the assignment. She was trying to accumulate the last pieces of information, including finding Latin names for all the produce grown by the CSG. She was beyond exhausted, in tears, and losing it big time.

I did manage to calm her down, gave her a 15-minute time limit to finish as many as she could before she had to go to bed. I reminded her that her team had probably completed more work than any other team there, and that she’d put an additional number of hours in on top of what her team accomplished that day. That it was her drawing in the final report, her poem in the final report, and that she would be handing in the project. The teacher would know who did all the extra work, and she would receive the credit.

She managed to get another half dozen Latin names in her 15 minutes, plus complete one essay answer on how invasive species change ecosystems (none of us had noticed that we hadn’t answered that question). And she went to bed and left me the most heartbreakingly beautiful thank you note, thanking me for my patience.

You can only imagine the cringing I was feeling inside, as I reflected on my lack of patience with her last night, how annoyed I was that she was taking this assignment too seriously. I was also annoyed with the lack of foresight in that school about giving assignments over a time with so many activities at the school, and no time during school to work as a group. I was annoyed that I had no chance to sit down and recover from a long exhausting day, as I carted both older children back and forth to the dance, ran to the supermarket to pick up chips because we’d forgotten to buy them on Sunday.

These were welcome words this morning, a reminder that I need to take the time to breathe through the difference between my ideal and my reality. That big squeeze that Chodron talks about is a daily reality in my life, and my challenge is to walk between my vision and reality, and find the compassion to continue to give to others, and help them find a peaceful way to live.

My dream is to enable my daughters to find that peaceful place inside themselves.

The Hike at Genesis Farm

On Friday, I took a field trip to our local Community Supported Garden, with my middle child's class. They had a final exam on bioregional studies, in the form of a scavenger hunt. I had a blast, even though the temperature was 40 degrees higher than the night before, and 20 degrees higher than the two days before (upper 90's F).

One discovery was to be the highest point of the farm. We decided to visit all three points (on three different very steep hills (verging on small mountains) and take photos, so that we wouldn't have to trudge all the way back up after finding the highest point.

One of the pieces of the scavenger hunt was to be a poem about the day. My team of girls decided they'd get more points if EVERYONE in the group wrote a poem. Then they decided that included me. So here's my contribution to the group effort, all about the climb to the top.

The Highest Point at Genesis Farm
by Robin Slaw

Heat rising in fiery blasts.
Steep hill to climb.
Short breathe, dry throat,
Wondering if we will make it to the top.

Pounding head, vision doubled,
Skull baking in the heat of the sun.
Path rising endlessly before us,
Will we make it to the top?

Hill crested.
Shade of the grandmother tree inviting.
Flop down, restore breathing,
sit up and look around.
Did we make it to the top?

Crickets buzzing, birds singing.
Twenty more feet to go.
Gulping water, wiping down faces,
eying the top with questions.
Will the top be worth the trip?

Arising with groans and expletives,
We trudge the last remaining feet,
heads down, counting the steps,
Are we there yet, at the top?

Muscles quivering, we raise our heads
and wonder at the view before us.
Effort forgotten, amazement awoken,
We whisper our awe to the world.
Did we make it to the top?

Distant blue mountains, shimmering in the haze.
A hawk soaring in the currents above us.
Breathless with wonder, overcome with the beauty.
Was it worth it, to make it to the top?
Yes!