Rules for waiting, and a giveaway

March 15th, 2009 - 32 Comments

Spoiler alert: Blame it on the early stages of a woozy flu, hormone depletion, sleep deprivation, or the dark bluster of the Ides. This post is somewhat post.

The other day I was talking to my friend Amy Tiemann on the phone. On the phone, that’s right. How very 1.0. And she and I were in mutual agreement that life in these times can be summarized as follows: “How can people live in this world without going insane?”

Ain’t that the truth? But it’s not a new thing. More like an awakening to the way sentient beings have always been. These days the race to the next next next next new thing seems like a 75 rpm refrain. Rpm? How vintage! Everything is in an accelerated state of obsolescence. We cannot get to the next thing fast enough. As though it leads somewhere else, somewhere other than here.

Newspapers? History. Banks? Yesterday. Jobs? Obsolete. Conversation? Over. Time? Out.

These days you read a lot in these parts about Is the Blog Dead? I’m old enough to remember when that question was leveled with far more gravitas as Is God Dead? It’s spelled differently but it’s the very same question. It’s a kind of intellectual diversion from the real question; the only question there is which is Am I Going to Be Dead?

Or as I ask myself, Am I Going to Be Dead before I Twitter?

This is the kind of chatter, or should I say tweeting, that just exhausts me. I’ve been present at far too many revolutions already. They last a blink, a nano, before they crest into the oblivion beyond. Oh ye of unrelenting enthusiasms, aren’t you tired yet?

***

I’ve been reading far too much about Jane Fonda. I can’t quit. Ever since I read this profile in the Times about her brave return to Broadway at 71, and picked up on the fact that she was chronicling every inch of the ascent on her daily blog and Twitter. I’m obsessed with her, and it looks like she shares the obsession. Fonda is the icon of obsession for my generation, but she always seemed to hold herself at a remove. She always seemed to immerse herself in the great matter and the real questions. You can now read that in her dotage, for instance, she dotes on a dinky fluff-dog. You can read about her self-doubt and insecurities and think for a minute she’s just like us. Then you see pictures of her A-list BFFs: Redford, Tomlin, Hanks. “Oooooh I am so happy. I’ll twitter during my breaks.” She never stops, even though of course one day, and relatively soon, she’ll stop. In the meantime, she’s miniaturized herself, at least in my view, into 140 characters. To say that she is connecting with other people in this self-directed way is to say that these people from another story in Sunday’s paper are “making love.” Nothing could be farther. (Made ya look!)

***

Last week I had a disturbing and provocative dream. My husband, daughter and I were groping our way, on white-knuckles and knees, up a Sisyphean incline. It seemed we were going somewhere. Inching forward, sliding back, defying gravity. Ah yes, to the beach! At the peak of this grueling pitch, you could see the endless sky and ocean filling the horizon beyond. The massive swells and darkened depths. My husband and daughter hurried ahead, carefree. I had reservations. Gripping a paper shopping bag, I was anxiously collecting things you might think you need for a day on the sands of life: snack crackers, juice boxes, water bottles, seedless grapes, string cheese. I was desperate to fill my bag. Not yet, not yet! As I clutched after snack wrappers, my family disappeared into the downward slope. Just then the sea rose up to a perfect, towering vertical tsunami like the height of the stock market in October 2007. Everyone, everything would be swallowed by it. Everything would go.

This was no day at the beach. This was the answer to the unspeakable question.

Also last week I got an unexpected delivery in the mail. A special book, Rules for Old Men Waiting, a debut novel 23 years in the making, sent from a bygone friend. This friend is an elegant and erudite fellow from the old school. Someone who has illumined my life with intelligence and manners. I haven’t heard from him in awhile. The note with it said, “I just finished this book and thought of you throughout. I found it be richly told, wonderfully crafted and lovingly profound. That’s you.” Maximized in 140 characters.

I’m reading it now. And when I finish it, I’m going to return the favor to someone who has made it this far, on white-knuckles and knees, to the precipice of this post. I’m going to share the wisdom I’ve been given, the gift of true friendship, a living connection, with one of you. Because that alone is what keeps the world sane.

Leave a comment and take your prize. It is bittersweet fulfillment to know this chance won’t come again, and to let it go.

Update: The book has gone to Kelly, who has a short time left in a long wait.

Getting around the peanut ban

March 12th, 2009 - 11 Comments

She rolls into the room with a salty grin.

Mom, here are two things I think would be fun.

First, I want a sister. A little sister. I just think it would be neat and fun. Is having a sister fun?

(Pause)

OK, then, how about a Wii Fit?

Buy the book

March 11th, 2009 - 7 Comments

I just put a gawd awful button on the right side of the page over there so you can buy Momma Zen directly from me. Why this took me three years to accomplish I do not know. I’m slow getting out the door.

I kinda thought there were rules, or at least simple courtesies, about this sort of thing. Like that the publisher wanted to sell it. Or like bookstores would stock it. Nah, not so much. Lately the book has been in short supply everywhere I go. Last weekend I spoke to 400 people in Palo Alto but the Stanford bookstore supplied only 30 copies to sell to the hundreds of folks in line. What?! Heck, Georgia sold ten times as many boxes of Girl Scout cookies without a backward glance. Now I see that Amazon has sold out twice in the last month, making people wait two weeks to get it. So forgive my cluelessness, but I’m taking matters of the heart into my own grubby hands.

Ask and you shall find. Knock, and the good old US Post Office shall open your mailbox and pop one inside.

And to think I practice mindfulness. It’s always a good time to start.

Ten minutes from the other normal

March 10th, 2009 - 11 Comments

Bear with me, because this story is one very long exhalation before a breath of fresh air.

I can remember, with all the shiny embellishment of my well-oiled memory, that day of paralyzing dread and mortification. The day Karen P. Hughes stood on the steps of the Texas Capitol and began her steely assertion that her client, George W. Bush, had been elected president.

It was days after the undecided election of 2000. I was a relatively new mother, my baby just one year old. The air quaked with my fear for our future. I was a new mother, but I was a very old PR hand. And when I saw Hughes take the stance before the cameras, indispensable mouthpiece to a crime in progress, I was shocked with the horrifying intimations of what was to come.

This can’t be happening, I wasn’t alone in thinking. Except I’d been in the business, and I knew how it could happen.

***

I’d spent 20 years as a public relations person, until the weight of my freight and unfulfillment sent me packing. Don’t get me wrong. Speaking the truth can help groups and individuals get along. Communication can build good things. But I could no longer do the heavy lifting for my most prized clients, the revered and well-paying corporations hell-bent on getting you to overbuy, overpay, overindulge, overborrow, overinvest, overeat, overdrink and overmedicate – and slaughter the competition besides.

Although she had hitherto been unknown to me, I confess I despised Karen P. Hughes, and not for what she said and did on those steps or in the years after. In my egoistic view, she had already robbed me, but had just begun the process of blinding everyone else.

For starters, she had stolen my name, Karen, which means pure.

As your average local TV reporter, she’d shredded what standards remained in my early calling, journalism.

She and her gang had stolen my great state from the real deal, the inimitable Ann Richards.

She’d debased my profession, PR, with the indelible stains of deception and malfeasance.

Before long she’d be touted as distinguished, even genius, a bestselling author, a role model, a mentor, a diplomat and the most trusted advisor to the leader of the free world. This took all my faith away. As a publicist, I could attest that no PR person should ever be elevated to that echelon of counsel. I’d learned that clients who thought they had a “PR problem” never really had one. What they invariably had was a product problem. A very bad product problem. And that’s what we had.

***

Even before Bush’s first term was up, Hughes left to write a memoir, Ten Minutes from Normal, which turned out to be nothing but a PR ploy on the road to getting him reelected. She went on an audacious promotional tour that had her booked into schools and churches and libraries where eager audiences sanctioned her folksy tales by swallowing them whole. Everyday for two months I had to drive past a private Catholic high school in my neighborhood with a big banner strung end-to-end across its facade. Karen P. Hughes: Ten Minutes from Normal. There she spoke to another full house. I felt like the only wide-eyed bystander of an ongoing rampage.

Now they’ve stolen our schools.

They’ve stolen our churches.

They’ve stolen our towns and cities.

They’ve stolen our hearts, our minds, our goodness, and our faith.

Hughes earned her reputation as the best PR person in the world, but it turns out I needn’t have worried so much about it all.

***

I’ve been recalling that title, Ten Minutes from Normal, quite a bit lately. If you’ve read my book or heard me speak, you know that we are never ten minutes from anything or anywhere. We are never away or apart from reality. From life as it is. From truth. But if you are in the practice of systematically fabricating another reality, one you pathologically regard as your alternate reality, an empty construct of self-serving delusions and hyperinflated lies, if you practice naming up as down and wrong as right, then you most certainly are at least ten minutes from normal.

Those are the most destructive ten minutes in the world.

These days, which must be the very last days before we land on our rock bottom, these days seem to me to be really ten minutes from normal. Only this normal is going to be the real normal. Normal here we come! Normal here we are!

Fellow travelers, we are home at last. Free and brave. My message today, after all this ugly grumbling, is to take heart. This land is once again our land. I am once again proud to call it my own and to give it my name. This very minute is nothing but normal.

We are going to be okay. Thanks for sticking it out with me.

A little off the top

March 10th, 2009 - 9 Comments

I am working on a long post which probably won’t be half as revealing or uplifting as this one, courtesy of Georgia:

OK, so there’s this contest at school called WordMasters and you fill out this paper and turn it in. So today at lunch I see my friend M and run over to her and start to hug her, then these two girls in her class come over to me saying that I won the contest and I got excited, so I went over to my friend C and told her what they said but I wasn’t quite sure if I believed them. Then C and I went on the bars and told JL, H, and JG. They got so excited that they picked me up. Then we went inside and I got a paper that said: Congratulations! Your child, Georgia Miller, will receive recognition in the next Spotlight Assembly for their achievement in the WordMasters Meet. Grade: 3 Award: First Place!!!

Oh and I also got my bangs cut.

Tall trees grow in full sun

March 9th, 2009 - 5 Comments

Still soaked from the shine of your full attention, I offer my thanks to the mothers of Palo Alto and everywhere whose lives met mine at the Mothers Symposium at Stanford on Saturday. Tremendous, great good went into it, and tremendous great good will come.

You’ve inspired me to offer my own retreats, my own programs, as many as I can, wherever I’m asked. Please ask.

And to those of you reading, yes you, who were there: I’m so honored to know you by name.

In gassho.

Great minds don’t think

March 5th, 2009 - 4 Comments

Before I leave you for a weekend of higher learning, I’ll offer this link to a compelling tribute to the lost genius of the novelist David Foster Wallace. It’s in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

“I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

The article traces Wallace’s unfulfilled “preoccupation with mindfulness.”

“They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.”

Give yourself the time to read it, all, along with this excerpt from his unfinished work. I know you have the time, and I pray you have the attention.

Me talk pretty one day

March 4th, 2009 - 8 Comments

A little feedback:

Mojo Mom Amy Tiemann is the wind at my back today. Click on her Quote of the Day before midnight tonight to see how she is counting down the days to the debut of the new edition of her book, which I can’t wait to read. Without expectation, maybe?

Over at A Room of Mama’s Own, everyone’s favorite pseudonym MPJ finally took a leap and overcame her dread of a dusty old book. Everyone, go cheer her on until she crash lands at a happy ending!

And good grief, the folks at Mutual of Omaha snagged some of my aha moments for the launch of their new feel good ad campaign. Find Cheerio Road on the lower right, bringing up the bottom. I especially like their timing, because we all know by now that the aha in the insurance industry isn’t me, it’s them.

Edited to add: Oops! Time’s up. My moment in Omaha is over. They ripped me off their website because they don’t like my sense of humor. And I don’t like their sense of theft. The ahas just keep on coming, don’t they? That’s okay. The only readers who were clicking through were, naturally, in Omaha.

The all day Thin Mint diner

March 4th, 2009 - 9 Comments

Where you can never be too thin or too rich.

Cafe crème d’thin – Place two crushed Thin Mints in the filter basket and add grounds to brew your morning coffee normally. I’ve never tried this myself so you might just want to make regular coffee and enjoy a robust cup of Thin Mints on the side. You still get all the flavor and triple the thinness.

Healthiest thin mint oatmeal – Microwave a cup of healthy instant oats in super healthy soy or no-fat milk for 1-2 minutes until desired healthy doneness. Crumble a Thin Mint on top. For a healthier version, do not add a tablespoon of chocolate chips.

Mid-morning power thin snack – Eat 12 Thin Mints in under two minutes.

Mint thick lunch smoothie – Vital energy in a glass! Empty a box of Thin Mints into a blender. Add crushed ice and a cup of mint chocolate chip ice cream. For extra thickness, add a whole peeled organic banana, but the truly thin do without the added trouble and calories.

Afternoon power thin advantage – Challenge yourself! Eat 24 Thin Mints in less than a minute. Power down and you’ll make short work of it before you look up even once!

Fresh and easy garden mint dinner soufflé – Line a pie plate with crushed Thin Mints. Spoon contents of eight chocolate flavored pudding cups into the center. Top with two fresh mint leaves from your own garden. Remove the leaves and it’s ready to eat!

Afterthinner emergency – You’re out of Thin Mints. Quick, contact your favorite local Girl Scout before her 8:30 bedtime.

Dedicated to our beloved long-distance cookie customers. Your crumbs are in the mail.

My BFF has PPD

March 3rd, 2009 - 17 Comments

When will it end? When you stop asking.

AWHFY?

Here’s a cool website with a glossary of text messaging acronyms. Every 8- to 28-year-old knows these already. You may not need it, except to make sense of what I’ve written here. DRIB.

Since I put my cell phone on pay-as-you-go, I’ve seen the actual price of idle chatter. Texting costs even more, so I don’t need to learn the language. I don’t need to text. I don’t even need a phone.

I love it when I find one less thing. Finding three less things makes me feel rich!

Today I want to write about PPD. Post partum depression. And all the other kinds of PPD. Last week the economist Paul Krugman diagnosed one aspect of our big sickness as post-partisan depression. It’s part of the larger post political depression and post prosperity, privilege, privatized, Pollyanna, Pottery Barn depression. Even reading this may give you post-post depression. DBEYR.

Seems like everything in life is post-something else, and nearly all of it is depressing. Someone far more ordinary than me once observed this truth and called it, of all things, noble! BTDTGTS!

Recently I said as much to a friend and mother. “Every mother has PPD. I don’t see any other way.” In some cases, PPD is medically diagnosed and treated as such, in other cases, not. I say it is universal not to make less of it, but to make more of it. Motherhood is a profound spiritual transformation. It is a passage that shatters your physical self, emotional self and psychological self, and thereby your total self image. Your every idea of self. Poof! To say it is depressing is to say it mildly. We are, in PPD, dead mothers walking. NUFF.

“Do some women handle it better?” my friend wondered. Boy, it sure seems so, but seeming doesn’t make it so.

My wish is that no one handles it. Or rather, that we handle it not by handling it, but by inching forward to the other side, taking all the hands and help we need, letting go of all the old ideas that constitute our pre-partum delusions of what we are. Only then can we be completely reborn. Yes, just as we feared, our children are the instruments of our self-destruction! CRTLA.

Is there an afterlife? AAMOF, it’s right here. But I’m not certain that I’m over my PPD. I’m pretty sure I’m still suffering from it, and making everyone else suffer along with me.

On that emoticon, :-)))))

It will be over when the Dow goes down to 5,000. DAMHIKT.

The artist formerly known as Mom

March 1st, 2009 - 14 Comments

My mother’s name was Artice. It was an unusual name, and it brought her unusual attention. Almost everyone thought, on first hearing, that her name was Artist. So she was an artist, and she was a mom. I am a mom, and it’s taken me a long time to realize that I am an Artist too.

A few months ago, the photographer Denise Andrade came up to my house and before she could knock at the front door I opened up a side door from the bedroom and hollered for her to come in. So she came in through the bedroom. I suspect that’s the way she comes in most places, through the hidden chamber, to the real you. She said something right off that she will not remember, but that I will not forget, since it is something that I would never in my right mind say about me. She said:

You have a cute figure.

I think that’s why she got pictures that looked like this. Like no one I’m used to seeing, but who must live around here off a side door to a hidden chamber.

Now I’m not supposed to be hidden. I make a point of being all up front and in your face. But even that pose, you know, that Zen pose can get stale and predictable. I’m so glad I didn’t fool Denise for one minute. She has an eye, you might say, that doesn’t sleep. That’s a big-time Zen compliment, but I’ll leave it to you to find out what it means.

I asked Denise to come over because I wanted updated author photos. Because I want to be up front and in your face. Because the last ones were taken three years ago, and because a lot can happen in three years when you get to be my age. So then Denise went and made me look about 30 years younger.

A friend I haven’t seen or spoken too in 15 years saw one of Denise’s photos of me online and said, “Is Zen the secret of ageless beauty?” Zen is ageless beauty all right, but Denise is the secret.

So if you’re an artist, like a writer, and you need a stunning author photo for a book jacket or something, even if there is no book jacket in sight, especially if there is no book jacket in sight, you should go straightaway to Denise and invite her in through a side door. Sometimes you have to get a photo first, and then the book jacket shows up. I know. This one here is the photo my Dutch publisher chose. That’s right, Dutch as in the Netherlands as in Amsterdam, where Georgia and I are going, courtesy of my Dutch publisher, in April, to celebrate the Dutch translation of Momma Zen.

Song for reasons of eating

February 26th, 2009 - 10 Comments

There were several items in the New York Times this week that got me salivating. But the one that cut closest to home was this one about the minstrel and erstwhile Zen Buddhist monk, Leonard Cohen: “On the Road: For Reasons Practical and Spiritual.”

As you might expect, the writer finds it paradoxical that Cohen has decided to re-take the stage at this late age. The story’s hook is that Cohen’s road tour is a mystical mingling of the sacred and the secular. The writer thinks that is notable, but I’m certain Cohen doesn’t. He’s not mingling anything. He is simply singing for his supper, because he’s broke.

Can anyone relate?

Cohen doesn’t pit the practical against the spiritual and make a divine quest out of it. There is no difference between the two. There is no either and no or. That ideological distinction is only in the mind of the writer. And it might be in your mind too. When you’re hungry, and you are broke or near-broke, it’s a good time to get your ideas about spiritual versus practical out of your mind and strap them to the bottom of your feet. And then walk the heck out of them.

Eating is a divine act. It is a mingling of the practical and the spiritual. Pass the ketchup.

A painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger. – Zen saying

Cohen is the kind of icon to whom we all lay claim. In truth, I have no claim. I was born a poor, illegitimate music lover and I heard my first Cohen when he was all but done as a singer, living as a mountain monk, and his Ten New Songs was released in 2001. A fellow Zen practitioner gave to me. When I heard Cohen’s bottomless voice surfacing from somewhere deep beneath his navel, when I heard the pure, raw, spare simplicity of the words, I was amazed. “Damn,” I thought, “this guy has spent serious time on his butt.”

But there’s a time to get up off your butt, and it’s about the time you realize that coming or going, walking or sitting, standing up or lying down, you’re always on your butt. Run out of money and what are you going to do? Put your butt on the road.

“Past mind is ungraspable. Future mind is ungraspable. Present mind is ungraspable. With which mind will you eat this rice cake?” – Zen koan

So everyone’s struggling now. Who’s not struggling? Since last summer, every idea I had of my illustrious future has been chewed up and swallowed. Every previous source of income has vaporized. These days I do many, many things, and I do anything for money. Little dribs that come when I need it most. Little sums that get me through. Funny, I actually see more possibilities now. There’s far more tunnel, to be sure. And there’s more light that shines in from all those cracks in the way I thought my life would go.

So come on now, everybody, sing along. Let’s sing and then have supper. You’re invited to my place for dinner, you see, because it’s all one place.

Ring the bell that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

– Leonard Cohen

PS My friend Ted says you can find the unfiltered Leonard here. And you can find Ted here.

Fan of the undergarments

February 25th, 2009 - 18 Comments

Please read this article I wrote about my favorite Mormon mommy blogger who isn’t a fan of the undergarments and other interesting bits.

Someone asked me if I didn’t also read that other Mormon mommy blogger, that ex-Mormon mommy blogger. The one who is drop-dead funny, skinny, blonde, rich and popular. Yes of course I do. Anyone who hasn’t yet dropped dead probably does. It’s alluring. Hers is an altogether better looking, smarter sounding life than mine. She has so many readers talking back to her that she has to close her comments. When that happens, it’s no longer communication; it’s entertainment. Damn funny entertainment. Entertainment is good.

And yet a long time ago I came to my own crossroads about my entertainment choices. I came to the spot where I learned, the way all hard lessons are learned, how far I could go by entertaining my own good looks and cleverness. How long I could last on my acerbic wit and abrasive tongue. How far I could fly on style and chemical highlights. One thing I learned is that too much chemistry can lead to the day your hair falls out! And so while I find entertainment entertaining, I do not find that it goes the distance on a daily basis. I don’t know about your daily basis, but my daily basis often requires a stronger salve.

Faith is what goes the distance. Not a certain kind of faith, mind you. But faith in action. Faith in trial and error. Faith that cannot always be trivialized or repudiated. Faith that is sometimes difficult and demanding and entirely unreasonable.

On faith alone, then, go and read whatever you like, but read the article too.

My pitiable little comments are open.

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karen maezen miller

paradise in plain sight