Gift

 This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What's the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?
 

While I’ve had several great gifts this December (a leaf shredder and a worm farm stand out as ones I really, really loved), the most memorable gift was my ring.  When Kathy and I were first together we’d gone to Santa Fe for a conference. While we were there we’d gone to the square and bought matching $25 turquoise and silver rings.  We’d each worn them ever since.  When we got our wedding rings (also silver and turquoise) we tried to wear them instead but they weren’t very comfortable and so we went back to the $25 rings.  This fall, I looked down one evening and noticed that the stone had fallen out of my ring.  It upset me a lot.  I began to wear my wedding ring instead, but I really missed having the other ring. The day before my birthday, Kathy and I went out for dinner.  At the end of the meal, Kathy gave me my ring back with a new turquoise stone in it in place of the one that had fallen out—best gift I could have been given!

Achieve and Defining Moment

What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.

I feel like I’ve already answered this question in several of the other Reverb10 questions: the one about 11 things, the one about future self, etc.  So here goes again.

 Next year I hope to find more peace and balance in my life by focusing more on sustainability and less on consumption, more on things I can do and make myself and less on things I buy, more on ways to stay centered and focused in the present and less on things I hope for in the distant future, more on enjoying whatever is in front of me (or breathing deeply into it when the situation is not enjoyable) and less on grabbing after something I don’t yet have.

 Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year.


 

Two series of events stand out this year:

•              Becca’s going to college and then coming back home and all the changes and reexamination of life that those have meant.
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•            The gardening-green yoga sangha-master composter- Roots & Wings – permaculture interweavings in my daily life.   This is causing me to not only rethink daily physical decisions (what I use, where I go, what I eat, etc.) but also my moral and spiritual approaches (how to make moral decisions on behalf of future generations, a theology for God and the kingdom of God that would better reflect a sustainability model,  language choices I make that move away from an anthropocentric worldview into a worldview that takes into consideration all creation).

Ordinary Joy

Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

            There were so many joyful ordinary moments this year that picking out one as standing out wouldn’t do justice to the year.  I’ve tried this year to stay focused on the idea in the following quote by Wu-men:

“Ten thousand flowers in spring,

            the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer,

            snow in winter—

If your mind is not clouded

            by unnecessary things,

this is the best season

            of your life.”

I’ve enjoyed watching the birds at the feeder this winter, sitting on the front porch in the evening being surrounded by fireflies or bubbles, watching my kids play videogames together, listening to bird calls, playing ball with Chase, lying in the hammock and looking up at the clouds and trees, sitting down to dinner, working in the garden, feeding the worms, canning tomatoes, listening to Macy purr, kneading bread, and so much more—all ordinary, joyful moments.

Soul Food

What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul?

            Food that stood out for me this year were of two very different types.  The first was a meal at Per Se in New York City.  The restaurant itself with a view of Central Park and Columbus Circle, where there were two or three waiters for each table, was in and of itself an experience, but each course of the food was memorable.  Except perhaps for the meal we had at Buddakan for Dan’s 25^th birthday, I don’t think I’ve had a more memorable meal.

            The other food that stood out though was the weekly food Kathy cooked from the things we grew in our garden and from the CSA.  We had the most amazing meals—soups of all kinds, vegetables like kohlrabi I’d never heard of before, much less tasted, and casseroles and dishes from a wide variety of cuisines that used what we were growing.  I loved sitting down to those meals and tasting those tastes, knowing that we were eating as locally as possible, as healthily as possible and as “tastily” as possible.

Photo

Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

The picture was taken on a beach in Dennis Massachusetts in early September, when Kathy and I were spending a few days up at the Cape. In many ways, while I also love forests and fields, beaches –or any place where water and land meet- are the most natural non-work setting for me.  There I can relax, reconnect with my more reflective spiritual side, and just be my non-work self. I don’t like the Cape beaches much during the summer—too many people, too much noise and too much disturbance.  Once Labor Day comes and goes, though, the crowds empty out and, whether it’s warm enough to swim or windy (as it was the day that this picture was taken), the beaches are fairly empty.  They’re perfect for walking along, sitting on, or just watching the wildlife that makes them home in the off seasons.  

New Name

 Let's meet again, for the first time. If you could introduce yourself to strangers by another name for just one day, what would it be and why?

           

            My first reaction is to say I don’t want to meet by another name.  I’m not trying to become someone else.  I’m trying to become more uniquely me and part of who I am is the name I’ve had since birth- Susan.  I’ve had alternate forms of my name.  My mother called me ‘Susan Gay’ (especially when she wanted to show either her irritation at something I was doing or her extreme approval), one of my best friends in high school called me ‘George’ (I called her ‘Dave’.  These were both base on our last names and made a lot of sense because in an all-girls’ school it was easy to yell out ‘George’ and only have one person look up, while calling out ‘Susan’ might apply to a group of people), and my godmother called me ‘Sue’ (for some reason I’ve never understood nuns and ex-nuns tend to do that with my name).  I’ve been called by lots of appellations- Professor, Reverend, Doctor, and mother.  But I’ve always stayed Susan throughout it all.

       When I thought a little longer, though, I realize that I’ve been given one other name that I’ve come to accept as my own and that fits me, though I’m not sure I can explain exactly why.  It’s the name Ishah Ezer.  It was given to me one year by my students at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. One of the things I’d learned the first year I started teaching at Sing Sing was that inside a prison, men have two names—the legal name (the one that appears on my roster) and their prison name (the name they’ll answer to in class). As I learned the names of my students-- names like Cipher and WooWoo – it was usually impossible to match them with the legal names on my attendance roster. For about 90% of my class, those names had no connection with each other and I wasn’t sure how they originated, though once in a while a student would share a story about the origin of his name.

       One year I was teaching Introduction to the Old Testament to a group of thirty men who were part of the New York Theological Seminary certificate program.  We were doing Genesis 1-3 and I explained to the class the meaning of the Hebrew words a’dam (human), ish (man), and ishah (woman).  We practiced the formula from Genesis 2 that ish + ishah = a’dam.    As we practiced, someone made the point that they were each an ish and that I was the only ishah  in the building and that, to practice their Hebrew, they’d call me ishah for the rest of the class.  A little later in the same lesson that the woman was an ezer c’nego for the man, a phrase that means a partner, a helper.   A student in the class pointed out that that’s what I was for them, a helper helping them transform their lives by partnering with them in education.  ‘Ishah ezer’ he said,’ that’s you.’  The name stuck and for years afterward I’d be walking the Sing Sing school building and hear someone call out ‘Hi Ishah’ and know in my deepest being that, just as I’m ‘Susan’ in most settings, in a few I’m also ‘Ishah.’

Travel

How did you travel in 2010? How and/or where would you like to travel next year?

            Aside from a trip to London and a trip to Minneapolis, my travel was by foot and (mainly) by car.  When weather and time allowed for it, I went to the college, to my office at the church, and on nearby errands by foot.  Most of the time, though, I’d be splitting my day between working in a local place and a place out of town and so I’d have to drive.

            For 2011, if transportation options were better and cheaper, I’d love to be able to take public transportation when walking (or maybe even biking if we get the bike rack at the church!) isn’t possible.  As far as travel, if we could both get the time and afford it, I’d love to both see some new place outside country (Greece, Egypt, Norway, or Argentina would be on the top of my list) and also visit some area of the United States that I haven’t explored.