Usually on Saturdays at daily headspa we have a bit of a lark with the weekly topic. We've been digging into it, doing things with it all week and it's time for a bit of fun.
Researching sense of place, this week's daily headspa topic, we came across the fact that this Saturday is the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.
The author Elie Wiesel was a prisoner there and that place shaped his entire existence. His mission and purpose in life is to remember it and to tell its story. He brings his readers not only into that experience, most particularly in his haunting book "Night," but also into all the questions about life, evil, God, the very nature of existence that this reality fused into his being.
We felt it was worth the departure from our norm for Saturdays. There's a connection here to our core mission, expressed lightly in the daily headspa mantra, "enjoy yourself." We firmly believe that people at peace within themselves, at the deepest levels, recognize their interdependence with all of life and that recognition has the power to prevent another Buchenwald; to bring liberation to the Buchenwald situations around the world today. Yeah, what we do is fun, but it's serious fun.
Showing posts with label sense of place. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sense of place. Show all posts
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
knowing me by my place
The homepage of our website, daily headspa, is always a photograph of the day's calendar page. On one post-it-note on the page is a quote relating to the topic of the week; on another is a link to the main blog where we do different things with the weekly topic for every day of the week: Mondays introduce it, Tuesdays get into it a bit, Wednesdays really dig in, Thursdays do something about it, Fridays go out looking for it, Saturdays have fun with it, and Sundays make some sacred space around it.
On yesterday's homepage post-it-note quote, I used a quote from Mark Strand. I was really happy to come across a quote by this contemporary American poet because he links me to a couple of places that are important to my story.
Strand went to college with my parents at a place called Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was a place of myth and legend in the family because of how it shaped my parents lives. They met there. They were there at a pivotal time in history, the time of Korean vets on the GI bill and co-op jobs in New York City and Detroit when those cities were both full of jazz and bustle.
I made a pilgrimage there with my dad a couple of years before he died. Paul and I were living in Cleveland and dad came up for his birthday in August. Summers in Ohio are perfect for road trips; all green leaves and blue skies. We called in a Ye Olde Trail Tavern for a beer, home to dad's famous pizza making feats of old. And we caught up with a good friend of theirs, a woman named Sue Clauser who wrote "A Girl Named Sooner" and screenplays for the show "Bonanza." She also told us about traveling the world on freighters, and the time she wrote the screenplay for a Johnny Cash movie about an illiterate man. The Man in Black used to call the house to sing to her, checking to see what she thought of the lyrics for songs for the movie. I remember her sun porch, a cool drink, and the stories.
I knew Strand went to Antioch but I didn't know he also went to Yale, one of my old haunts. That place shaped my life every bit as much as Antioch shaped mom and dad's, but for different reasons. I didn't make pizzas there, but I ate plenty of them. I'm not feeling particularly nostalgic about the old ivy-covered walls but maybe that's because I remember it in the spring and fall, two seasons that we don't get here in the tropics. That place opened doors for me that I never thought were possible...this place I'm at now is somehow because of it. And that's good enough to look back on it with a smile.
On yesterday's homepage post-it-note quote, I used a quote from Mark Strand. I was really happy to come across a quote by this contemporary American poet because he links me to a couple of places that are important to my story.
Strand went to college with my parents at a place called Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was a place of myth and legend in the family because of how it shaped my parents lives. They met there. They were there at a pivotal time in history, the time of Korean vets on the GI bill and co-op jobs in New York City and Detroit when those cities were both full of jazz and bustle.
I made a pilgrimage there with my dad a couple of years before he died. Paul and I were living in Cleveland and dad came up for his birthday in August. Summers in Ohio are perfect for road trips; all green leaves and blue skies. We called in a Ye Olde Trail Tavern for a beer, home to dad's famous pizza making feats of old. And we caught up with a good friend of theirs, a woman named Sue Clauser who wrote "A Girl Named Sooner" and screenplays for the show "Bonanza." She also told us about traveling the world on freighters, and the time she wrote the screenplay for a Johnny Cash movie about an illiterate man. The Man in Black used to call the house to sing to her, checking to see what she thought of the lyrics for songs for the movie. I remember her sun porch, a cool drink, and the stories.
I knew Strand went to Antioch but I didn't know he also went to Yale, one of my old haunts. That place shaped my life every bit as much as Antioch shaped mom and dad's, but for different reasons. I didn't make pizzas there, but I ate plenty of them. I'm not feeling particularly nostalgic about the old ivy-covered walls but maybe that's because I remember it in the spring and fall, two seasons that we don't get here in the tropics. That place opened doors for me that I never thought were possible...this place I'm at now is somehow because of it. And that's good enough to look back on it with a smile.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Some Days are More Zen than Others
Some days on daily headspa are more zen than others. Paul's poem on today's post, This is Where I Live, This is What I Do, has the flavor of a mantra, or the type of mindfulness reminder of place and moment that you'd find in meditation. I'm glad he wrote it and that I was reminded of it today when I needed it. That's the way with spiritual disciplines, they are practices; things one needs to encounter over and over not because you've forgotten or are unable to learn but because the act of encounter and re-encounter is an end in itself even as it is a pathway to a place both familiar and always new.
I was delighted to find the quote by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to post on the homepage of daily headspa today. Rawlings wrote "The Yearling." Not as flashy as the books by the more current JK Rowling, but it did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
My connection to Rawlings is through a place, her place in Florida. Here's what wikipedia has to say about it:
My brother and I went to the University of Florida which is in nearby Gainesville. Our family went out to the Yearling Restaurant once, a dark-paneling sort of place more cracker shack than eatery. More like a fish camp, really (fish camps are a middle Florida institution; rickety old places covered in Spanish moss and creaking with the tales of old fishermen). While we were there the power went out. I remember filling up on Sprite while we waiting for light to eat by. And I remember eating "cooter" or turtle. Mostly, I remember being there as a family, having a tiny adventure together in this exotic place off the beaten track at a time when the family connection was stretched as far as it ever had been...we kids were moving on and we wouldn't be back again.
I was delighted to find the quote by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to post on the homepage of daily headspa today. Rawlings wrote "The Yearling." Not as flashy as the books by the more current JK Rowling, but it did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
My connection to Rawlings is through a place, her place in Florida. Here's what wikipedia has to say about it:
In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72 acre (290,000 m²) orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought the place to international fame through her writing. She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her Cracker neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land.[6][7] Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in her writings.[8]
My brother and I went to the University of Florida which is in nearby Gainesville. Our family went out to the Yearling Restaurant once, a dark-paneling sort of place more cracker shack than eatery. More like a fish camp, really (fish camps are a middle Florida institution; rickety old places covered in Spanish moss and creaking with the tales of old fishermen). While we were there the power went out. I remember filling up on Sprite while we waiting for light to eat by. And I remember eating "cooter" or turtle. Mostly, I remember being there as a family, having a tiny adventure together in this exotic place off the beaten track at a time when the family connection was stretched as far as it ever had been...we kids were moving on and we wouldn't be back again.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Song of a Place
On the daily headspa blog we've just started a new weekly topic - sense of place is what we're looking into this week.
In the first post of the week today we brought up the way music connects us to place, using an interview from a program on Sunday night here in Australia with Lucinda Williams. You can read that excerpt, get to the vodcast with Lucinda, and find out more about Nacogdoches, Texas here at today's post on daily headspa.
In reflecting on the topic and the post myself tonight, I remembered this poem by Dennis Brutus: It's not a song, but it's title evokes the way music and memories of place are so often fused. Poetry is music anyway, eh?
Nightsong: City
Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;
from the shanties creaking iron-sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell;
the long day's anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.
The poem, which I found in a book I bought in one iconic place where I have lived, London, reminds me of another iconic place that is so very special to me, Alice Springs in the central desert of Australia. It's a place I want to sing to, a place of sand and rocks and violence and the day's long anger. It makes sense to me that the poet is a South African freedom fighter in terms of this connection to Alice, a place with its own still open wounds of struggle and colonial racism.
Dennis Brutus was imprisoned on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was also imprisoned. Tonight I am remembering a time of singing in Alice Springs, singing freedom songs in the community choir; songs about Robben Island. For me it was a time and place of great connection to other people, to the land, to a sense of place that, while not my own, nevertheless drew me in.
In the first post of the week today we brought up the way music connects us to place, using an interview from a program on Sunday night here in Australia with Lucinda Williams. You can read that excerpt, get to the vodcast with Lucinda, and find out more about Nacogdoches, Texas here at today's post on daily headspa.
In reflecting on the topic and the post myself tonight, I remembered this poem by Dennis Brutus: It's not a song, but it's title evokes the way music and memories of place are so often fused. Poetry is music anyway, eh?
Nightsong: City
Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;
from the shanties creaking iron-sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell;
the long day's anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.
The poem, which I found in a book I bought in one iconic place where I have lived, London, reminds me of another iconic place that is so very special to me, Alice Springs in the central desert of Australia. It's a place I want to sing to, a place of sand and rocks and violence and the day's long anger. It makes sense to me that the poet is a South African freedom fighter in terms of this connection to Alice, a place with its own still open wounds of struggle and colonial racism.
Dennis Brutus was imprisoned on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was also imprisoned. Tonight I am remembering a time of singing in Alice Springs, singing freedom songs in the community choir; songs about Robben Island. For me it was a time and place of great connection to other people, to the land, to a sense of place that, while not my own, nevertheless drew me in.
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