Tucked under the signature of my Florida driver’s license are two words in blood-red that indicate that I am an organ donor.
This means that if I were in a fatal crash, my kidneys, liver, lungs, corneas—even my heart could be harvested for transplantation. Harvested and transplanted, two very agricultural-sounding terms for the brutal evisceration that must transpire before another human being can benefit from these vital organs.
Image via Goodreads
Eleanor Vincent describes the impact of such a supreme gift from a mother’s point of view in her poignant memoir, Swimming with Maya: A Mother’s Story. When her 19-year-old daughter is left in a coma induced by a crushing fall from a horse, Eleanor struggles to make a heart-rending decision. What should be the fate of Maya’s healthy organs? Especially her heart. In the end, Maya’s heart is given to middle-aged Chilean businessman and father of two young children. Along this bumpy ride to full acceptance, Maya’s mother, whose husband no longer played a role in her daughter’s life, begins to think of Fernando, the heart recipient, as her daughter’s adopted father, “a kind of benign benefactor.”
Without telling anyone . . . I appoint Fernando the titular head of my family—a family that has shattered on the physical plane but one that I reconstitute in the ghost realm of my imagination. Seeing Maya’s continuing life through transplantation offers me a spiritual replacement for the searing physical absence of my daughter. She is dead, yes, but not entirely. Fernando experiences her vitality. As the home of Maya’s heart, he becomes a father figure for my daughter. As long as I see it this way, I don’t have to conduct the tug of war between my pain and his healing all alone. (216)
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Image via Goodreads
Like author Eleanor Vincent, surgeon and writer Richard Selzer describes the sense of comfort the emphatic, but soothing, lub-dup, lub-dup conveyed to the ear of the fictional Hannah, who made an equally heart-wrenching decision to donate her husband Sam‘s heart so that its recipient Henry Pope can live. As she lowers her ear to Henry’s chest, she senses her husband’s presence:
She could have stayed there forever, bathed in the sound and touch of that heart. Thus she lay, until her ear and the chest of the man had fused into a single bridge of flesh across which marched, one after the other, in cadence, the parade of that mighty heart. (27)
Clearly, organ donation of a loved one is dear, costly in both physical and emotional terms.
The designation “organ donor” has been on my driver’s license for a long time. I am not young, like Maya, or even in early middle-age, like Sam, So, I ponder, if donation became an option, would medical people even want my organs? Would my husband sign the papers to authorize such a donation? Now he says “Okay” to the kidneys, lungs, and corneas and possibly other tissues. But No! to my heart.
Your heart belongs to me, he says.
The case, apparently, is closed.
Do you know someone who has participated in organ donation either as a donor or as a recipient? Have you? Other thoughts?
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I’m celebrating my blog-i-versary. One year ago yesterday my first blog post was published. Thank you, thank you for making this first year so rewarding and memorable!
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
So says Charles M. Schulz. Valentine’s Day is interpreted by many to include cards, chocolates, candlelight and roses. Some even break the bank buying expensive jewelry. Valentine’s day was named for a Christian martyr dating back to the 5th century, but according to Arnie Seipel in an essay for NPR, its origins are dark and bloody even, beginning with the wild and crazy Romans and their feast of Lupercalia.
During the Middle Ages tokens of love were first expressed by handmade paper cards. In the 14th century Chaucer helped romanticize the holiday with his love quotes like “love is blind” from The Canterbury Tales and his Parlement of Foules, featuring an assembly of birds gathered together to choose their mates. From the Renaissance to the Victorian Age and beyond, poets wrote sonnets extolling romantic love: Shakespeare, known especially during this season for Sonnet # 116, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous lines “How do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways” in Sonnet # 43.
Today, Valentine’s Day is big business. In 2011, sales reached $ 18.6 billion. This year the figure will probably exceed 20 billion. Seipel quotes Helen Fisher, a sociologist at Rutgers University, who says that if commercialization has spoiled the day, we can blame only ourselves for buying into it. But the celebration of Valentine’s Day goes on nonetheless. Even with some sayings on candy hearts we never imagined:
A few candy heart sayings updated by social media: Courtesy Google Images
Years ago, candies like these were hand-picked for that special one, but many valentine cards were home-made. I remember making valentines for friends at school or punching cut-outs for classmates and dropping them in to the big, square box decorated red and white for Valentine’s Day at Rheems Elementary School. Stories in our readers illustrated children making, not buying, Valentine cards for friends:
“The Surprise Valentines,” Gray and Arbuthnot, Scott Foresman & Company, 1941.
Do you remember making or receiving hand-made valentines? Are you holding on to an old Valentine card for sentimental reasons?
Vintage cut-out card, Cliff Collection 1966
Your thoughts start the conversation—or keep it going. Thank you!
But January 2014 was tough in Florida: two nights in the 20s and several days around the freeze point. And so the plants in my garden took a beating. The impatiens, in spite of being covered, froze to death. The pentas bushes were reduced to black, ashy stems and had to be trimmed back. Daughter Crista, the green thumb in our family, assures me they will come back strong.
Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden. . . . It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks
Welcome to My Garden: dead impatiens, live asparagus fern
If you live in Hawaii, my garden may seem forlorn. Alaska your residence? Well, then it may look just fabulous.
Wisteria and passion flower vines are gone, leaving a naked metal fence, still bent where it took a hit from a falling oak tree branch. What remains? Red sister, rose bush in a planter, aloe shoots, asparagus fern, bromeliad with perky red flower.
Soon the passion flower and wisteria vines will intertwine to soften the metal fence. The pentas will flower up, and I’ll buy new impatiens. There’s hope!
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
Genesis 8:22 KJV
Do you like to garden with either indoor and outdoor plants?
I remember Grandma and Aunt Ruthie paging with intent through the Burpee seed catalogs in February or March each year picking out the varieties they like best. What about you?
Now you are probably thinking . . . age 72 is a long way off, or it’s just around the corner. Either way, it’s a question worth pondering.
In 1700 the average life expectancy was 37. In fact, 40 would be pushing it. Yet, in that very year Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born and lived to be 88. More impressive is the fact that at age 72 she invented mixed media collage and eventually created “an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Botanica Delanica.”
Image: Courtesy of Good Reads
Poet Molly Peacock, author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany begins her life work at 72, recreates the “Aha!” moment for Mary Delany early in the book:
One afternoon in 1772 [the recently widowed Mary Delany] noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium. After making that vital . . . connection between paper and petal, she lifted the eighteenth-century equivalent of an X-Acto blade . . . and began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper.
Then she snipped another and another, beginning the most remarkable work of her entire life.
“. . . if a rose had a round watch face” (65)
Her most famous and popular image is the Damask Rose, appearing on postcards, place-mats, tea towels, and canisters. The main flower includes about 71 pieces of carefully cut papers, covering the gamut of pinks from slivers of red to blush and “under-the-finger-nail pink.”
Nodding thistle, a cousin of the dandelion, with swirling foliage
Operatic Opium Poppy
The theatrical-looking opium poppy is cut from a single green piece of paper. “The whole effect is of a kimono-like gown billowed by a breeze, like the robe of a star soloist falling down from her shoulders” upside down (118).
” . . . lines swoop and swoon with freckled energy” (141)
Mary Delany’s output was phenomenal. In 1777, the year she constructed the passion flower, she cut out her collage/mosaics at the rate of one per day, and between the ages of 77-87 creating one every four days (185).
For the passion flower, Mary Delany cut out 230 petals scissored “like little grass skirts, where the strands of grass are attached to a belt” (169). She made up her colored papers . . . washing whole sheets of paper in varying hues. In the case of the passion flower, olive, loden, beige ivory for the leaves, and the flower rust, red, purples, deep and pale pinks, lavender. To the pigments she added gum arabic, honey, ox gall to prepare and preserve the papers. All done on a matte black background, always on dramatic black.
Mrs. Delany was born into the aristocracy with a wide circle of friends which included composer George Frederic Handel and the satirist Jonathan Swift. John Wesley even courted her. Yet her posh outer life was checkered with challenge: an arranged teen-age marriage to an aging drunken sot, problems with cash flow, at mid-life the loss of her soul-mate, Patrick Delany, a man who knew her worth, then deaths of close relatives, and finally her own illness.
Yet like her flowers, cut with a blade, not outlined by a brush, Mary Delany blazed a path for herself with a scissors, scalpel, tweezers, and needle. Combined with her imagination and gutsy determination, she made art that endures.
Age is the sum of all we do.
Charles Bulkowski, quoted by Molly Peacock (343)
The root of the word inspiration is “breath.” What activity do you do that inspires you, gives you energy?
Or takes your breath away – maybe even give you a second wind?
What will you be [still] doing at age 72?
The career of flowers differs from ours only in audibleness.
A man must have dreams–memory dreams of the past and eager dreams of the future. I never want to stop reaching for new goals. – Maurice Chevalier
Then the Lord answered me and said: “Write the vision And make it plain on tablets, That he may run who reads it. Habakkuk 2:2 New King James Version (NKJV)
Between your dream‘s inspiration and its manifestation, there’s going to be a lot of perspiration. Daily Devotional: The Word for you Today, January 2, 2014 entry
A [wo]man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams. John Barrymore
MEMORY
Yesterday is today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. Kahlil Gibran
Memory is the script of the soul. Aristototle
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our [grand]children. Charles R. Swindoll
God gave us memory so we might have roses in December, (January, February . . )
From my JOURNALS 1996-1998
Gratitude is the heart’s memory. French proverb
Puttering is creating a fresh interior landscape. Sarah Ban Breathnach in Simple Abundance
Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste for power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children or merely role models. Elizabeth Dole
On Music:
“The auditory nerve is very closely connected to the limbic system so that sound (i.e. music) does not have to go through the cortex of the brain but goes directly to the heart, the senses.” unknown source (noted April 9, 1998)
Rhythm in music imprints language on the brain in a way pure auditory words will not. Slower tempo in classical music develops a framework for learning to occur. NPR report on “The Mozart Effect” (1998)
What Makes a Moonbeam Audible for you?
Feel free to comment also on any of the categories about: visions, dreams, memory, music, or something else. I will always reply!
Still time to vote for my story in Sonia Marsh’s My Gutsy Story Contest. Thank you, thank you to all who have already voted. You make a difference!
Today I have reached a milestone, 100 blog posts and counting. Thank you, thank you for all your clicks, views, and commentary so far. I am commemorating this event in pictures.
“Sunshine and Rain” by Ian Christopher Beaman
Blogging is like life, up and down, sad and happy, rain and shine, day in and day out. Here is how Ian sees his Grandma/NaNa, picturing me with a split image, one eye blue, the other rosy pink. Does he see me as both a realist and an optimist? I can only surmise because I don’t know what is going on in his six-year-old mind. The bluest eye sees cold, hard facts; the other eye views life with rose-tinted glasses. A balanced view, if you ask me! Also, if you notice, he pictures me as being fruitful too: bushels of apples in the tree.
Did I say blogging is like life? Here’s the inside scoop on what writing blog posts is really like:
But I love every minute. Really, I do!
Most importantly, I get to send stories out into the ether and then “talk” to you after the writing is posted. We make a connection.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and then love will be seen at its height.
E. M. Forster Howard’s End
My heart leaps up when you join the conversation.
Now it’s your turn:
What blog post is most memorable to you? What would like to see more of? Less of?
Voting is still open for My Gutsy Story.
To read the story: http://soniamarsh.com/2013/12/rising-above-the-pettiness-to-focus-on-the-positive-by-marian-beaman.html
To vote for my story: http://soniamarsh.com/2014/01/vote-for-your-favorite-december-2013-my-gutsy-story.html Thank you!
A matryoshka doll also known as Russian nesting doll refers to a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other. The first Russian nesting doll set was carved in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, a folk crafts painter. Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed as a traditional Russian peasant. The smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby carved from a single piece of wood. Much of the artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be very elaborate. The dolls often follow a theme, from fairy tale characters to Soviet leaders.
My own matryoshka doll from Ukraine is usually nestled between two volumes on my library shelf: Arthur Gordon’s A Touch of Wonder, and A Treasury of Religious Verse. But now on display during this season the largest doll tells the story of Christ’s nativity . . .
. . . and, un-nested, the story of his subsequent life on earth unfolds, culminating in the Crucifixion and Ascension.
Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul. Emily Dickinson
Hope is like a road in the country. There never was a road, but when many people traveled it, it came into existence. Lyn Yutang
Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. G. K. Chesterton
There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides. John
Stuart Mill
CHANGE
Change means something good is coming, — even if I don’t yet understand all it will mean. Joe Sherer, Missionary Messenger, November 2011
Until God opens the next door, praise him in the hallway. Orebela Gbenga
PROGRESS
You’ll be amazed how much distance you can cover taking [life] in increments.Little things add up; inches turn to miles, We string together our efforts like so many pearls, and before long . . . you have a whole string!”
Staying the Course by B. J Gallagher quoted in Wednesday, October 12, 2013 entry in Daily Devotional: The Word for You Today
DISTANCE
“Distance lends enchantment to the view,” explaining why events of our youth are enveloped in such a rosy cloud. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Ozarks
Travel helps one see “how [American] ways look from a distance.” Molly Hughes, A London Family (1870-1900)
STRESS-BUSTER
“. . . concentrate on breathing to quell the mind’s restless forays into the past and future.” Geoffrey Cowley, “Stress-Busters: What Works” Newsweek, June 14, 1999.
Quiet zone, low light, deep breaths . . . ah!
Try to let go of being in a state of readiness. Yoga instructor, October 2, 1999.
NIGHT-CAP
Have courage in the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. And when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. Victor Hugo
‘Tis the Season:
from It’s a Wonderful Life. Clarence the Angel leaves a reminder for George Bailey: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”
Add a quote or respond to one you’ve just read. I look forward to your comments! And I will always reply.
Below is the link to my entry in the Gutsy Story Contest now in progress on the website of awarding-winning memoirist Sonia Marsh:
Diane Ackerman published years ago a “lusciously written” book entitled A Natural History of the Senses. My students enjoyed reading passages from the book for their summary assignments. Both poet and scientist in her approach, Ackerman has since written Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden, a book I have relished reading for its keen observations. Here is a passage:
Many things catch light prismatically–fish scales, the mother-of-pearl inside a limpet shell, oil on a slippery road, a dragonfly’s wings, opals, soap bubbles, peacock feathers, metal that’s lightly tarnished, the wing case of beetles, spiders’ webs smeared with early-morning dew.
Author Kathy Pooler’s blog post yesterday, December 5, 2013 features actor and author Bryan Cohen who shares the knack of tapping into one’s senses to access childhood memories.
Plain and Fancy 