Thing 2

I admit to having very little patience for reading philosophy. Wading through pages of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 backgrounders is no exception. I crave the excitement of "hands on" -- to play with the tools, see how they work (or don't) and think about what I might use them to do.

Reading, well... I'd rather be reading something else, like Meredith Hall's incredible memoir, Without a Map, which I just finished. Egregiously betrayed by all who mattered to her, Meredy maps the road she walked from disrupted childhood to middle age, from desolation to wholeness, forgiveness, and unconditional love. Here's a taste, from the concluding chapter:

I forget that I am fifty-five years old until I look in the mirror. An average, lumpy, middle-aged woman, I move in the world in another body, my younger body, a body I lived in sometime in the past ... But the mirror reminds me I am a middle-aged woman. I have grown invisible in the world ... I resist this invisibility ... but I understand that what I am resisting is not just the inevitability of becoming no longer seen... What I fight is this certainty: I am slipping along toward erasure, toward no-body. I will die. Once, I was young and vibrant; now I am in the middle and eclipsed; soon I will be old, and then I will be gone. Every time I walk unnoted among people, every time I glance in the mirror, every time I look down and see the ropy veins of my hands, I have to tangle, in a quiet, stunned moment, with this underlying truth: I am far along the path...

Each glance in the mirror startles me not only because I am suddenly, shockingly, a middle-aged woman, but because I am so much my mother... Mostly the eyes, my mother's eyes that stare back out at me from a life lived and ended ... In the mirror, her eyes speak to me from before those years of illness. Middle-aged woman, my mother, she is a shadow moving just ahead of me, calling back with news...

I am memory. Everything I have been is carried here in my body. I am written, the pain and the great love, the surprises, the losses and the findings. The young woman's body I live inside still, that unforgotten home, is a text. It is engraved with memory, my life. Psychologists believe that grief and trauma are taken up by our bodies and held, that we envelop the memory and build it into ourselves, make it part of us, write it into our cells. We think we have mostly forgotten, but our bodies do not.

And we remember love. I have often wished that my children could remember all the tender floating hours of being nursed, of being held into my heart, stroked and safe. I believe now that they do remember, that their bodies know love and safety. If this is true, then I, also must carry my mother's love, my father's. Whatever else may have gone wrong, whatever of grief and loss is carried by each of us, so too is love. Nothing is lost.

Thing 1

So, here it is -- the results of my best electronic paper-dolling; would that I could look as good as the avatar! Funny the way one becomes connected with the image -- I don't like seeing her without bangs almost as much as I don't like seeing myself without them.

My first post and on to Thing 2.