Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Spring awakening, and the world looks different

    Ah, spring. The trees are ablaze with blooms, the ponds are abuzz with frog calls, the mornings come earlier, and the evenings last longer. Time to shake off the drowse and inwardness of winter and stand, blinking, in the sunshine. At least, when it isn’t spring showers, then maybe stand under an eave, or stand right out in the soft rain, as long as you don’t have to be dry at your next stop.

    I am enjoying the blossoms of spring. I am also writing again. Some of the quietness on the blog was from my own misalignment – in the year I announced I was going to write about greener living, my husband and I started house shopping for a larger place, farther from town. Oops.

    Now, I’m just over 2.5 miles from my work, and I can bike to work, and if I walk or drive 1 mile, I can also bus it downtown. But, moving to a bigger house in a neighborhood without sidewalks and no corner store, I couldn’t blog about being green without, well, lying, and I stopped writing. And then we packed and moved, and I was busy with work and the distracting buzz in my head and body that comes with change. Oh yeah, and a surgeon opened me up and took out something (non-malignant) that should not have been there in December.

    Excuses, excuses.

    This isn’t meant to be an excuse post, but instead a flag of something new. After all of that change and resettling, I feel different.

    I loved the old place – it was the happiest most lovely place I’d ever lived, happiest most loving person I’d ever been, and I didn’t want to risk leaving behind any of that well being. I was also thrilled to walk to work….while I could theoretically walk the six mile round trip to and from work from our new place, I haven’t yet. Other changes, after a lifetime of tea drinking, I am experimenting with coffee (er, a milky mocha that has a dash of coffee, not the straight espresso enjoyed by my dear husband). But, something about going under anesthetic and losing a piece, moving house, and changing your caffeine vehicle has triggered a reassessment. I am, in essence, reading my own tea leaves and pondering the future. This happens to me periodically.

    r is for rebecca
    Exhibit A of many – “R” is for “Rebecca” mini-sweater ornament

    Maybe because I was sedentary, I spent a fair bit of my free time this winter knitting. Socks, scarves, purses…my Christmas gifts to the women in my family were homemade. I made small ornaments for my niece and nephew. I ended up with some gift yarn from a colleague, I had several of my own projects to complete. I knit and knit and knit.

    But now, facing warmer weather, when the thought of wool in my lap is a bit less appealing, I’m questioning all of that knitting. How many scarves can one person wear? Maybe more socks than scarves, but the cost of the yarn plus the hours of work…means the socks end up being multiply expensive. I’m happy to knit, and I’m even happy to spend a little on quality yarn for my free time, but I started to wonder what all of that knitting was doing for me. What I was expressing or replacing by knitting.

    After some quiet pondering, I remembered what I already knew, that it is satisfying a creative urge, one that I’m having trouble satisfying at work. Interestingly enough, this has been a theme that I’ve pondered before. OK, ok, I get it. Time to make a change in my job description to get a little more creative during my day job, let’s see if that calms the knitting drive.

  • Music and breath heals

    A grasp of fresh air, originally uploaded by Bindaas Madhavi
    A grasp of fresh air, originally uploaded by Bindaas Madhavi

    I tweaked my back two weekends in a row. I have some history of back pain, largely stemming from a jaunty twist in my spine (scoliosis). And, because I bend towards my knitting, bend towards my computer monitor, and otherwise stress out my upper back and neck, my upper back gets cranky now and then.

    Once I’ve tweaked it, it is a long process of hot baths, ibuprophen, bodywork, arnica gel, and mostly just rest and time to undo whatever kink or constriction I’ve triggered.

    Boring.

    My interesting stories are the divergences from this pattern: I have had two experiences of spontaneous improvement in my neck/back pain: through pranayama breath, and at a music concert the other night.

    Pranayama heals

    The first spontaneous release I’ve experienced was in a yoga workshop taught in Ann Arbor by Navtej Johar at Sun-Moon Yoga. During the session, the pranayama breath work (shown in the photo above) released the kink that had stuck my neck for days. I have used pranayama breathing some since then, not enough considering its powerful effect that day….To encourage my practice, I recently picked up the Pranayama iPhone app by Saagara from itunes. I used it recently to relax during a bout of insomnia, and last night to further relax my back and neck. It helped!

    Music heals

    The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
    The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

    Sunday night was the only other time I’ve experienced seemingly “spontaneous” healing. I think I whacked out my upper back on Saturday by trying to move some largish rocks we have in our garden. I woke up Sunday morning kind of sprung behind my right shoulder blade. Later that day, I attended a concert at Rackham Auditorium. It was a reading by Alex Ross of his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, accompanied by Ethan Iverson on the piano. While I enjoyed the crisp and funny writing, I found the turbulent 20th Century history revealed in the lives and concerns of its composers daunting.

    I was excited about the concert because I wanted to hear the music of the composers I’d read about. I also sometimes lose track of time, and so I was late for the performance and stressed out when I arrived. They wouldn’t seat us because the piece had started, so I waited, fretting, in the hall for the a slight break to be seated. Well, Rackham has very comfortable seats, and once I settled into our row, the soothing notes of the piano, even playing intellectual 12 tone music, which I’d expected to be annoying, had a physical effect on my body.

    I don’t know what Ethan Iverson was playing in that particular moment, but in the middle of the performance that included Babbitt, Bartok, Gershwin, Ives, Ligeti, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Webern, I felt a muscle next to my shoulder blade go into a release that felt like an inverse spasm. It was a kind of drumming pattern of releases and then slight recontractions, but without pain. I don’t know what it was exactly – I’m going to guess, based on my experience with pranayama, that what might have helped was a relaxation in my own breathing in time to one of the pieces. Or, perhaps my absorption in the event let some other process take its course in my back. I doubt that new age spas around the world play a selection of 20th century classical music, but maybe they should. The concert had an unexpected and salutary effect on my body!

  • The tension in public storage of personal memories

    I’m pretty much unable to draw, though I doodle a lot when I’m thinking. Photography has been my visual outlet, and I’ve long loved taking photographs and sharing photographs with friends and family.

    It took me a long time to give up my film camera, but when I converted to digital, it was permanent and now my old film SLR just sits there. I used to print lots of doubles of photographs to share with friends, but with digital files, I simply upload my photos and use Flickr to host my “photo albums.” My bookshelf of photo albums abruptly ends at that point, and now all my recent photo album holds is photo Christmas cards from friends and family featuring their kids. I enjoy the ease of sharing photos online, and given the loss of a few hard drives, I value that Flickr is storing my photos for me off-site.

    Until recently, my online photo album caused no angst. I don’t have kids and haven’t acquired a stalker so I feel unperturbed about hosting personal photos online. But, an interesting thing just happened to remind me that my personal photo album is public, and therefore not entirely mine.

    It took me a while to notice the add person to photo link in Flickr. But I love tagging things, so when I did notice, I immediately thought of some photos that I had uploaded that had other Flickr members featured (this feature is less interesting for non-Flickr members).  At that point, I went on a tagging spree and labeled them.

    I received a response that I should have anticipated. In my tagging frenzy, I’d tagged a friend in a photo I’d taken several years ago. In my photo, she’s seated with a man with whom she’d had a stormy relationship. Flickr had dutifully emailed her that I’d tagged her in a photo, and she had probably gone to look and perhaps been surprised by the reminder of that relationship.

    She wrote:

    I got this message via flickr.  Would you be willing to remove this photo from your page.  [NAME] is in it and I would like to look at your site without being reminded of him.

    What’s interesting to me about her note is that:

    1. That photo had been online on Flickr for several years, and she probably saw it when I first shared it with her after the event, but since the photo was buried underneath several years of more recent photos, it was below her notice until I tagged her and Flickr notified her.
    2. Once it was tagged, it was not only more obvious to her, but it was also more findable by anyone looking for information on her online (a current love interest, a parent)…

    My response was complicated. I realized I had been thoughtless and may have caused her pain, and I felt like a bad friend. At the same time, I was reluctant to remove the photo, even though I had had a negative interaction with her ex that very day, because he was part of my memory of the event and the image was within what I considered my personal photo album. Additionally, since Flickr is my photo file storage application, and the photo was taken at least one hard drive crash ago, I didn’t even know if I had a copy of the file on my computer anymore.

    It’s odd to me. I didn’t even like the guy, so it should have been fine to delete the photo, but that didn’t feel fine. In my mind, my Flickr site is mine first, and shared second, but, of course, that’s not how anyone else experiences it. And, the adding people functionality made that tension more apparent. My compromise in this case was to keep the photo on Flickr, but to label it private, so it was no longer visible to her and was not findable by anyone else.

    Note – in 2019 given flickr’s new owner’s change to the terms of use, I’ve moved my photos to Google Photos, so my flickr archive is much, much smaller now. 

  • Surfing the web, not surfing the waves, in Hawaii

    We had a lovely, wonderful, amazing, restful trip to Hawaii in March.

    The one thing I noticed, though, was that wireless internet was ubiquitous. Even at our sweet secluded little B&B near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (Hale Ohia).

    I suppose the problem isn’t that there was wireless internet, the problem was that I was using it while I was on vacation.

    I sometimes used it for recreation (goofing around on Ravelry.com looking for a pattern for the yarn I brought). We sometimes used it for vacation research – for instance, I used it to find a highlight on Kauai – the amazing quilt/fabric shop – Kapaia Stitchery. And we used it to keep up with local/current events (wait, was that an earthquake? OMG).

    But we used a little too much to keep up with work. You might argue that some of it was in self-defense, we were clearing the email brush to prevent any stress conflagrations at the time of re-entry. Think of it as a back-burn or firebreak. Yet, that strikes me as the self-delusion of an email/work addict. And, to be fair, sometimes the strategy backfired – the email traffic might also ignite little stress events during the R&R, drawing us into the work mind we intended to leave at the office.

    We both do client work and have folks who depend on us, which makes going incommunicado a challenge and a little bit scary. I do believe that setting things up so they succeed especially in my absence is a sign of good work. So, perhaps I didn’t trust myself enough to leave completely? I’ll have to keep trying and keep vacationing to solve this conundrum.

    Do you find checking in on vacation restful or stressful? What’s your optimum prescription for rest and sanity with email on vacation?

  • Place of Refuge – Pu’uhonua o Honaunau

    On the Big Island in Hawaii is a national park called Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, or the Place of Refuge. The place is special, white sand, black lava stone walls, ki’i figures bearing their teeth at the wind and the water, tall palms swishing their fronds in the wind. There are usually a few sea turtles bobbing around in the waves and happily grazing algae. Sometimes one pulls itself out of the lapping waves for some warming sunshine.

    In the park, there are some lava stone walls and platforms, some buildings and figures, but mostly it contains peace and beauty.

    What’s important to know is that inside these walls was safety. Historically, the place of refuge provided an escape valve of sorts out of the strict rules of Hawaiian society. To my superficial understanding, that traditional culture had strong kapu – or what we might call taboos – protocol for who is allowed to do what where. Some sound social-caste-driven – commoners couldn’t touch the shadow of nobleman – others seem much more about alignment with ecological forces – letting land or fishing areas lie fallow to recover from harvesting pressure. There were also political struggles. Those who had transgressed the rules or been on the wrong side of a battle could reach one of these zones of…is it forgiveness? or maybe absolution?…and enter a process to be reincorporated into society.

    A hut near the entrance holds the bones of priests, and it is their power, in my language perhaps the power of their intention, that gives this place its power of peace. The place is magical. Maybe it is the warm sun, the closeness of sea turtles, the graceful swaying of the palm fronds. Or maybe the years of peace and renewal in this spot has left an aura of deep calm.

    While there are moments of transcendence and sublime beauty, life also contains moments of annoyance, small-minded prejudice, mistakes of inattention, bad luck, and bad intentions. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place where we can go and be forgiven?

    Of course, the spell breaks when envisioning larger transgressions, or repeat offenders. And, while I cannot imagine setting this up for a larger society, this place does inspire me to create openness and forgiveness for myself, for the day to day departures from intention, misfires, and missed opportunities, for the ways in which I find myself lacking and lecture myself on doing ____ better, more often, or never again.

    As I near my 40th Birthday, my goal is to carry that safe place around for myself and for those close to me. My meditation practice is the practice of building that space, and my meditation room is its physical manifestation.When I am calm and at peace, I create peace around me. When I let myself become disturbed, I disturb.

    What is your place of refuge? How can it be extended to increase your own well-being and that of those around you? How do you nurture your hope?

  • House Blessing

    We moved into a new place in August. For a while there we were almost camping because we had the kitchen ripped out…it didn’t feel exceptionally homey.

    Our fabulous Ann Arbor construction crew gave us a working kitchen in our bump out just before Thanksgiving. We moved our plates, spices, glasses, and cookware into the kitchen the weekend before family arrived from Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

    And, then, with the help of Dave’s family cooking at the house, china plates from my family, delivered a few days ahead so we could wash them, mashed potatoes and appetizers from Fenton, sweet potatoes from Kalamazoo, and ambrosia fruit salad from Rochester Hills,  we had a great meal. The place was full – we had fourteen for Thanksgiving dinner. Six from the “Greiling” (Johnson) side: my aunt and uncle, my cousin and her family of  four (hubby, two kids, and one on the way), and three on the “Bondy” (Sopt) side.

    And, because of lovely memories and shared traditions, several more people were there in spirit. My Grandmother Greiling, whom I never met, shared her china with us. Grandma Higbie’s pie safe held the desserts, and Dave’s Grandfather Bondy contributed beautiful flower arrangements. I wore pearls my father gave me, and a bracelet from my mother.

    I am thankful for everyone who blessed our home that day – to inaugurate our kitchen and celebrate with us. Now, finally, after a few months in the house and a handful of days in the new kitchen, the new place feels like home.