Scientific Ink

Category: Life

  • Ashes to new roots, and a blessing

    Spring has arrived in Michigan, and this is a good thing.

    It has been a rough winter, personally. January was particularly grim. I lost my dear friend and mentor Beverly Rathcke, we lost our long time cat companion Floyd. So it was good to start digging in the garden, always lifts my spirits and grounds me in the present.

    We participated in the Global ReLeaf of Michigan tree sale/fundraiser by getting a few bare root trees and shrubs. I got them last weekend and we put them into the ground that very morning. And we sprinkled a little of Floyd’s ashes under each one and urged him to help them grow!

    That was last week, and that felt good.

    Well today it turned from lovely to perfect. At her death, my friend Beverly had given some statues to me. And today we retrieved her garden Kuan Yin from her back yard and brought it to our garden. Now Kuan Yin sits overlooking the springwater pond that Dave and his dad retouched last spring. The garden is graced by love now with the ashes of a beloved pet and a gift from a beloved friend in the form of the Bodhisattva Kuan Yin.

    A blessing.

  • Social Nation and Social Quotient

    Social Nation
    Social Nation

    I love books and am a complete sucker for tests that allow me to measure myself and gain insights into how I might be more effective and happier at work. I’ve taken the Strengthsfinder, Myers-Briggs, DISC, and more. I received an advance copy of Barry Libert’s Social Nation: How to Harness the power of Social Media to attract customers, motivate employees, and grow your business. It seems to encapsulate a fair bit of good thinking/common sense on social media. From my perspective, what makes it interesting is its summary combined with “custom” feedback in the form of its online test.

    The Book

    Libert starts the book by outlining how the spectrum of necessary skills for business is extending beyond the physical and intellectual into the emotional and social. His argument is mastery of the entire spectrum is becoming necessary, and his book is designed as a primer on entry into social community building.

    So, after I received my custom evaluation (see below), I went on to review the 7 principles for building my social nation and 10 pitfalls to avoid.

    Both of these are summarized and available from the Social Nation Book website resources section, so I won’t reiterate them fully here. I very much appreciated Principle 3: Mind your Online and Offline Manners, which include behavior guides such as “pretend you’re offline” when thinking of what to share. No one wants to hear me droning on and on about my cat in person, so I probably shouldn’t do it on my facebook page or twitter stream. And, I should refrain from saying something curt or even nasty in email or on a message board just the way I would if that person was sitting across from my at a conference room or dinner table. Good rules to follow.

    My Social Quotient

    According to the social quotient on SocialNationBook.com, my three top strengths are: transparent, adaptor, and collaborative. I mostly agree. The full descriptions of each of these strengths are available at the end of the test and in the meat of the book. They are well named, so I won’t repeat those definitions here.

    I tend to think I’m quite transparent, and I feel like my emotional nature plays immediately across my face, but I am also a quiet person, so sometimes people have a hard time getting to know me. And, I can be socially awkward (shy…) and so retreat to silence when I get overwhelmed instead of opening up. I don’t really have many fears about social sharing websites, though that sentiment is not always shared within my household, so I’ve had to become more thoughtful about what I personally share to respect that I’m not a solo actor.

    The adaptor description from the test seems to fit with my Arranger Strengthsfinder theme, someone who enjoys being flexible and responsive to dynamic situations. I’m a project manager at work, and enjoy making plans, and then really enjoy changing them to fit new information. And, I see things from multiple angles simultaneously, empathizing with different people and looking for the best win-win-win outcome. I can vacillate when that way is not clear. For a project manager in particular, I have an uncharacteristic easy-going personality and outlook.

    And, I completely agree I’m a collaborator. I found being a solo ecology researcher (my PhD training) to be draining and hard. I very much prefer working in a team and taking advantage of diverse skills and perspectives. And, I sometimes make the mistake of discounting my own wisdom or intuition in favor of the perspective of people around me.

    Does the fact I liked the online test best mean I prefer the parts that are ABOUT me? ;).

  • Rest in Peace Beverly Rathcke, Thank You!

    My friend and mentor Beverly Rathcke passed away on Thursday, January 6, 2011. She died comfortably at home in Ann Arbor after a short illness.

    Beverly was my faculty advisor for my PhD dissertation in ecology, and in that role she helped me think critically and write clearly. Yet, she fostered more than my scientific interests, she recognized and encouraged the creative artist in me, pushing me to explore my interest in and talent for photography. We attended music and dance concerts together. And, she catalyzed the transformation of my perspective and thereby my life by introducing me to my meditation practice, Siddha Yoga Meditation.

    Her beautiful Old West Side Ann Arbor bungalow served as a gathering place. She brought out the gourmet chef in all of us, as we competed to offer potluck contributions that could stand beside hers on the dining room table. She invited others to cook, drink, dine and dance in her home, and was always grateful when someone wanted to clean up the piles of pots and dishes created during a collaborative cooking event.

    Cooking paella
    New Year’s Eve, December 2006. We made paella in Beverly’s kitchen. Yum!
    From left, Dave, Victoria, and Beverly (foreground).

    She lived a full and enthusiastic life and had, in my opinion, a good death, on her own terms, surrounded by devoted friends. I was honored to be with her and her friends in the days preceding her death as she slipped from consciousness. During the last few days I have met friends of hers new to me, and I have been impressed by her good taste. May I be as fortunate in my friends and in my passing. I feel so grateful to have known her.

    Beverly Rathcke's students from the 1990s.
    Beverly Rathcke (center, in blue), surrounded by her University of Michigan graduate students from the 1990s and their families.
    Taken at her retirement party summer, 2010.

  • Comfort in shared experience, even of grief

    I am grateful for Great Writers. They connect us to each other, connect us to ourselves, through voicing what is glimmering on the edges of our consciousness. By expressing these things, they bring them into focus and validate them.

    grave
    Grave, taken in Ellmau, Austria

    My father has been gone for over a decade now. When I was a child, he “left” me once before when my parents divorced, so his death was a second loss of him. After that first loss, his commitment to me was clear. And somehow that experience of commitment continued after his death.

    At the time of his death, I felt that the handful of people that would lay down in traffic for me had decreased, never to be replaced.

    Although I do not feel his presence now in a specific way – we don’t hold conversations, he doesn’t haunt me – he is with me now in some ineffable way. I experience that his love for me has expanded and envelops me, like a warm coat.

    So, I was interested to read just that experience described in a recent New Yorker article on Roland Barthes’ mourning for his mother. In William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life, Proust described the trajectory of grief to a friend this way:

    “You will know a sweetness you cannot yet conceive. When you had your mother, you thought a great deal about the days when you would no longer have her. Now you will think a great deal about the days when you did have her.” Once [his friend] has adjusted to “the terrible experience of being forever thrown back on the past, then you will feel her gently returning to life, coming back to take her place again, her whole place beside you.”

    That’s my experience. I was angry as he was dying, I fretted about his poor health and poor self-care, focusing on our impending loss. And now, after the initial shock, over the years, I have felt his presence, his love, expand again in my consciousness. Perhaps a trick of the mind, a self-comforting chimera, or maybe simply this is what adulthood feels like. No matter how this happened inside my head, I am thrilled to see it is not only my experience, but the experience of others, captured by Proust.

    Even in the loneliness and isolation of grief, there is union or communion across the separation of time.

  • Tour de Troit

    Today I enjoyed a leisurely 30-mile-ish bike ride around downtown Detroit on the Tour de Troit. We started at Roosevelt Park, by the amazing ruined Michigan Central Station, whizzed downtown and through Campus Martius by the Compuware building, crossed the Belle Isle Bridge and spun around the circumference of Belle Isle before stopping in Gabriel Richard park for a break. We then went down Jefferson Avenue, wandered through the gracious tree-lined streets of Indian Village, and then eventually through the Wayne State/Medical Center Campus.

    The Detroit Free Press said there would be over 2,000 riders. I really can’t say, but it seemed like there were a lot of cyclists. The police escort was great. They blocked the roads for us and zoomed up and down the line on their motorcycles. With their support, we cyclists enjoyed the roads all to ourselves – no fear, no stoplights, easy biking.  It was an easy pace, sometimes we were quite slow in the pack, or held by police at a particularly busy intersection, and other times we got to speed along once the pack was stretched out. The experience was one of light effort (except at the end, when I was tired and cold) and a fizzy joy in the freedom of the streets.

    Along the route, I saw many things, and noticed a few other gaps.

    The foremost highlight was the Belle Isle Bridge, which is still lovely, and of which I’m inordinately proud as my great grandfather and I think his brothers moved to Michigan from Wisconsin to work on it. Greiling Brothers Construction Company was part of that project.

    I noticed the absence of the old Uniroyal plant, which was just to the south of the bridge on Jefferson Avenue. It had striking “mural” of tires on its walls. Now it is a field – apparently a quite polluted one at that (though there’s now a cleanup plan). I also looked for the Mexican restaurant, Armando’s I think, we frequented when I was young. I think the building was still there, but no longer a restaurant.

    I thought of more family history in that areqa, vague to me now. I think we had fancy relatives who lived in or near Indian Village. I recalled  a family friend who lived in the Whittier apartment building on Detroit’s Gold Coast of high rises overlooking the Detroit River and Windsor. We went by the Roostertail on Jefferson Avenue, site of my senior prom.  Memories flooded back of family stories and of time spent with family driving from our home in Grosse Pointe to downtown Detroit along Jefferson Avenue. We came to festivals at Hart Plaza, we came to dine, we came for ballet class for me and my sister, we went to dance events, and we came to go to church.

    As we cycled through Detroit, we passed by neighborhoods that were new to me –  new subdivisions just off of Jefferson Avenue.  We passed through neighborhoods that looked passably prosperous such as Indian Village. And we passed through neighborhoods with trees circling houses no longer there, burned out houses, empty lots, and rough looking homes and commercial buildings. We saw lots of liquor stores and dry cleaners. I don’t think I saw a grocery store. I’m not sure all of the dry cleaners were open. We saw urban gardens in reclaimed plots in the Woodbridge neighborhood.

    Some of it seemed very ordinary. Just people going about their Saturday. We saw folks mowing and weed whacking lawns, three football games, and one basketball game on a desolate lot overlooking a manufacturing plant. We saw lots of kids waving frantically as the parade of bikes went past, thrilled when we waved back. Many adults waved too. Most of the other passers by were either happy or amused to see us. Only a handful were laughing at us.  I witnessed only two incidents of negativity, both by irate drivers annoyed by having to wait for the cyclists to pass.

    We ended the ride back at Roosevelt Park, in front of the ruined Michigan Central Station building. A great day. Lots of memories, and some signs of hope to savor.

  • Pie Cherries – Reason #357 to love Michigan

    I love Michigan. I love living here for many reasons:

    • The weather is fine for knitting much of the year,
    • Snow lining tree branches is gloriously beautiful,
    • Spring ephemerals and flowering trees are a miracle after ice and sleet,
    • Fall is crimson, fiery orange, and golden leaves, enjoyed in crisp sunshine and then tossed by moody winds, and
    • Summer is grand – sultry, sunny, and replete with yummy local fruit.
    A photo of cherries
    Michigan tart cherries – yum!

    The king of local fruit is the sour or tart cherry. The tart cherries are a semi-translucent red, like captured sunlight, which they are. They make the most amazing cherry pie. Oh, and they don’t travel well, so they’re not something that gets hurled across the globe with abandon:  you have to enjoy them right here. And maybe because of that, for me, they’re also connected to memories of other summers and other pies.

    I sat on my patio this evening, pitting these cherries with a hairpin, feeling their juice running down my forearm to my elbow. More than most things these days, these cherries are a signal of a particular place and a particular moment in the season.  Slurp in the summertime.

    Coming for dessert tonight?