it's not about me

Working on issues about my father's death a month before my third birthday, I went further into what I have inside me about what my mother felt at the time. And I realized that a lot of her confusion came from issues she had from when she was a child and her parents divorced. I've felt that I was as a child terribly caught up in her confused feelings, because I didn't have any other role model of what I might feel about my father's death. But now I see her feelings came from her past, they had very little to do with what was actually going on. All that confusion and guilt is her stuff, it doesn't have anything to do with me. It is a weight I suddenly don't need to carry any more. My first reaction is shock at being less important and my second reaction is to feel confused and out of balance. It isn't easy being freed.

balance

The weather has turned spring-like here and the days are longer.

research areas

For a post-tenure review I need to write a description of my current and future research, and I decided I wanted to write about the past as well. I have done history of the space program, history of women in science and engineering, and history of forestry (environmental history). Amazingly when I try to put that all together it actually looks not like random wandering but like a a coherent story. I'm asking very much the same questions about forestry that I was about the space program, about the intersection between research and everyday practice. The history of women in science weaves in and out of that.

white flour

I put the bread I make for the kids in the bread machine last night on the timer, so it was ready just before we got up. It is made with a cup of old-fashioned oats and three cups of bread flour. I don't eat that bread any more, I make grown-up bread with oatmeal, barley bits, coarse ground whole wheat flour, milled flax, and vital wheat gluten. But today I was tempted by the smell and decided not to make a big deal of denying myself, so I ate one piece. I did check my blood glucose more often, curious what the effect would be. I spiked briefly to 150, though by 1 hour after eating it I was down to 135 (my goal is to be under 140 at one hour). At two hours I was at 95, which suggests that my body reacted to the spike by producing too much insulin, too slowly. It shows how careful I have to be if I want to keep my blood glucose from swings, which if nothing else make me feel hungry at the strangest times.

trusting the process

I have recently subscribed to a daily meditation that I like very much: the Almost Daily eMo's from Geranium Farm. Today Barbara Crafton writes:

Spiritual grown is usually not thunderous; it is usually incremental, in tiny steps, a little at a time. It is the direction of all the creatures of God--we are all hard-wired for growth. Diminishment is not our vector; our vector is toward greater depth. We are made that way.

That is particularly what I needed to hear today as I struggle to bear facing some difficult stuff in me.

big government

I showed part of a video in one of my classes today, "The Electric Valley" by Ross Spears from the James Agee Film Project. At one point Arthur Morgan's son talks about the controversy that forced Morgan to resign as head of the TVA. He says that the greatest loss is of Morgan's vision of what good public administration can do to improve society. I heard it as a socialist vision of social engineering, and what struck me is how foreign that now seems. I once wrote an article about practical uses of satellites that assumed the concept of the public good as a justification for government programs, but the concept is fading fast. The film was made in 1983.

ashes

I've been thinking about a friend who said that she liked Ash Wednesday because it is the only day we get to walk around saying publicly "I am a sinner." That sounds negative and it had some of that edge for her, but I think it also felt positive to her because she wasn't the only one doing it. I started thinking how to put that in more positive terms. I decided that it is a good feeling to walk around with the message on my forehead: "I'm not perfect" instead of being afraid that people expect me to be.