Category: 2007-08

Everything written or posted in 2007 and 08

It’s Lonely Here on the Wagon

So I quit drinking a while ago.
It was the right decision, for me.
I am addicted. I am
an alcoholic.
I never expected it to be easy; or for life to remain static.
As I see it, I am more present; I am more awake
than I have been in years.
Don’t get me wrong
I — have — hard — days;
Days when stress makes my brain, heart, and thirst buds scream.
I have days when I want to make it all go away!
This is sometimes why
I drank in the first place.
But the more difficult thing, surprisingly,
has been — from — time –  to –  time
I am lonely. And I face,
my old friends are gone
because I drank too much.
And my new friends are gone
because I don’t.
I wasn’t a happy drunk
nor was I particularly sad.
I was sometimes quiet.
I know people who got really loud,
and others overtly friendly, even one
who used to cry.
But now I see drinking, apparently,
didn’t make me ‘fun’ (enough.)
Those people that I gathered with, who seemed
to accept me as one of them;
It must have been that I just didn’t get
in the way.
I was accepted,
because I was a hard drinker, amongst
h a r d  d r i n k e r s.  And now,
I am s o b e r and I feel alone.

Nothing rings louder than a s i l e n t phone;
an empty email box or when one remembers an annual party, uninvited.
We could throw the party, I could make the call, but I’ve tried over time,
and now I’m thinking, they wouldn’t come.

Today it’s an aching heart I deal with;
A feeling which once, ironically,
I would have drowned out with a friendly glass

(or two, or five) of Merlot; anything to forget
this
f e e l i n g.
I have to face it, I am alone in my choices. Alone,
with my memories,
of people I thought were friends.
I am a lot more interesting sober; but I guess not
more fun.

My drinking friendships seemed to have disappeared.
Though I would never have said they were
d r i n k i n g friends.
I thought they were …
Well,
to be honest I thought they were
just f r i e n d s.
You know that phrase that is said when an alcoholic starts drinking again?
She’s “fallen off the wagon.”
Well, all I can say is it’s awfully lonely,
here

on the wagon.

Melody Harrison Hanson
October 31, 2008

This is incomplete as a poem, but full of real issues and emotions.

I Am Destruction

I wake with the familiar headache.
Deeply tired.  My bones in protest.
Emotions already chafing; dazzling, fluorescent, raw. Ablaze.
Coffee the first panacea of the day.
Sip by sip, its power over me if not to heal, then to awaken.

Slowly flooded by familiar disappointment.
Weary, I begin to See myself.
I am Destruction.
I am Broken Promises wielding their power.
The surge of rage,  justified.
It hurts.
My body adjusting to an awareness
of this old enemy within.
Destruction’s impact yet unknown.
Fury toward the innocent who contribute to the chaos
of my life and toward, the hell inside.

10/27/08
by Melody Harrison Hanson

My father was addicted to his rage – he admitted that to me at the end of his life. He wielded it over our family in pathological ways that nearly destroyed my Mother, and at times I feel it in me to either consume me or destroy me. I fear, more than anything, the legacy of that rage in my life.  More than alcoholism, more than depression or even debilitating insecurity. Rage is the ultimate nemesis. The curse he left for the next generation; for me.

I Laughed at Religulous

10/03/08

Recently I sat with friends laughing together at an interview with Bill Maher about his new movie “Religulous.” He is intelligent and quick-witted. He has obviously thought a lot about why faith is so ridiculous to him. Yes, I laughed and I enjoyed laughing, because he is funny and mocking, and that is a form of humor I like and I ‘get’.

But in the end, as I sat with my discomfort settling around me, I recognized that he is mocking us, thoughtful & thinking people of faith, as if we are ridiculous and he did it by finding the most absurd folks possible and listening to them ramble. Yes, I get it Bill – religulous …. You found what you were looking for, ridiculous religious people.

Perhaps he was only having a good time poking fun — it certainly makes for a funny movie — but I am left with people of faith struggling tortuously for a comeback, when they don’t even know that they are being mocked. It’s a journalistic style, but it’s deceptive and mean spirited.

It was all in fun, the movie, and yet it is a sad commentary on religion today and on those who purport to be people of faith. And especially, I think of Christians, because I am one, who apparently are not living a life of integrity, power or higher thinking.

Maher likes to say that Americans are stupid, and as a rule I tend to agree with him. We are like dumb sheep, or how else would be put up with a multi-trillion dollar debt to be passed on to our children, as a result of an unjust war, ridiculous fiscal planning, and unwarranted governmental power? Like the civil rights protest of the 60’s; we ought to be taking a stand on things that matter to us – whatever it might be. But we don’t, simply accepting that this is it. Duh. It is stupid.

Hello out there? Are there any serious and thoughtful, articulate and/or intelligent people of faith? Please stand up!? Or perhaps Maher just didn’t look for them. I know many, many of them. Shame on you Bill Maher.

It comes down to the fact that faith is just that, a stretch, a reach for something that can not be proved. CS Lewis said: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one … Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Harsh commentary on keeping yourself from loving others. Ultimately loving or believing in God takes strength and for me it is daily work! But in the end, it is a choice I have made, for today, tomorrow, hopefully for my lifetime. I just hope if Bill Maher stuck his camera in my face  I’d be ready to argue against the stupidity and ridiculousness and error of my ideas, I would be able to say:

“I’m not perfect. My faith, often feeble, and slightly awry from anything mainstream, is something that I work out daily with a lot of ‘fear and trembling.’ I have many ‘what ifs.’ My faith is personal and if others’ can’t actually see how it makes me a slightly more involved citizen, kinder & more loving, willing to admit I’m not even close to perfect, to admit I have many doubts but of this I am certain that believing gives my life hope and without it I’d be crushed by this life;  I am willing to change. If my faith doesn’t make be more thoughtful & responsive to others’ opinions and needs, then shame on me.”

Melody

These are my opinions and do not reflect the thoughts of any religious organization.

Going Quietly Sane

How hard can it be? Some days, too hard.

As you crawl back into bed, pleading with the universe,

To make it all disappear.

You can’t drink away your fear and so,

You choose sleep. It’s the only option,

When you must make your mind stop.

Furtive thoughts, disbelieving truths, you are

Just plain scared. And of what?

Your heart races from thinking too much.

Hands shaky. Breathing in, out. Counting down, 100, 99, …

To slow down your heart,

Your head whispers lies.

You lay there for an unknowable amount of time,

Moments lost forever.

Irretrievable.

Just Gone. And at a certain point you realize that

The panic that quietly stole your day — the lies

From the pit of your heart are untrue.

After incalculable hours lost, never to be retrieved

You get up. You paint your face,

Coif your hair.

You put on pink, the happy color,

The disguise. Just imagine yourself strong.

10/23/08 MHH

My Mother’s Love

My Mother’s love is like no other.
It affirms; its power is profound.
In my mother’s arms
the child in me feels safe.

My Mother’s love is like no other.
It wounds; its hold like a vice;
The power my Mother holds,
wounds the girl in me,
and strangles
the woman I will become.

My Mother’s love
holds the child in me
in a place I want to escape.
I am safe and yet
caught,
strangled by ancient, overgrown vines.

Who am I?
My
Mother’s
Love.

by Melody Hanson, 2004

Madness! My Brain on Recession

It is also what my brain feels like today.  I’m starting to really have a pit in my stomach about the state of the economy, every day I am aware of the cost of the most basic things.  I just feel down by it all, dragged down.  It is all madness!

(These are trees really played around with in a program called Picnik. )

I Fear the Pain of Wanting

Sometimes I want,
Want so hard I fear it will break me in two.
What I want hurts inside, not because
I can’t have it … but,
Because the wanting,
Waiting, anticipating fills me up so full that I know I will burst.
I explode with the knowledge of it.
The pain is liquid fear,
Need rushing through me, pulsing, crushing
Flooding into all that I know to be true.

Sometimes when I know, with certainty,
I just know that I cannot have what I want,
I fear the pain of wanting.
The empty place inside so full of longing.
I fear it because a longing that deep, that clear,
Will only hurt.
Hurt for so long that what I know, what is goodness and truth,
What will be there, with certainty continuously
Begins to take on a quality of something else.
Endless, my longing and my reality go on and on, intertwining.
Sometimes, when I think of what I want,
I hate myself.

Sometimes wanting is enough
To remind me that I am still alive.
But other times, wanting is enough to curl me up,
Curl me up into a tomb-like, cold, scary place
Where I am suffocated by my own
Wanting.

melody harrison hanson, june, 2007

Music Makes Kids Smart

The policies of George W. have forced many cuts to local school budgets over the last eight years.

One cut  we have felt is that 4th graders at our elementary school can no longer learn a string instrument until 5th and they may cut the Strings Program all together.

Emma is in fifth. Since third grade she’s taken the standardized tests required by George W, which tell us what we already knew, she’s extremely intelligent.

Someone should tell old Dubya, that study after study has shown that learning music can make kids smarter.

When your child learns to play a musical instrument, not only does he learn how to make tunes, but he also enhances other capabilities of his brain as well:

* A 10 year study involving 25,000 students show that music-making improves test scores in standardized tests, as well as in reading proficiency exams (Source: James Catterall, UCLA, 1997).
* High school music students score higher on the math and verbal portion of SAT, compared to their peers (Profile of SAT and Achievement Test Takers, The College Board, compiled by Music Educators Conference, 2001).
* The IQ’s of young students who had nine months of weekly training in piano or voice rose nearly three points more than their untrained peers (Study by E. Glenn Schellenberg, of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, 2004.)
* Piano students can understand mathematical and scientific concepts more readily. Children who received piano training performed 34 percent higher on tests measuring proportional reasoning – ratios, fractions, proportions, and thinking in space and time (Neurological Research, 1997).
* Pattern recognition and mental representation scores improved significantly in students who were given a 3-year piano instruction (Dr. Eugenia Costa-Giomi study presented at the meeting of the Music Educators National Conference, Phoenix, AZ, 1998).
* Music students received more academic honors and awards than non-music students. These music students also have more A and B grades compared to non-music students (National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 First Follow-Up, U.S. Department of Education).
* More music majors who applied for medical school were admitted compared to those in other majors including English, biology, chemistry and math. (“The Comparative Academic Abilites of Students in Education and in Other Areas of a Multi-focus University,” Peter H. Wood, ERIC Document No. ED327480; “The Case for Music in Schools”, Phi Delta Kappan, 1994)

Other research also linked music making with increased language discrimination and development, improved school grades, and better-adjusted social behavior.  Why does this happen? What is at work here?  and why is George Dubya making decisions that force cutting music programs around the country?

Why Dubya, why???

The Place of Nowhere

I wish I were a drinker.
My thirst is an itching wound; an irritation, a constant need. My albatross.
It will remain; a heavy calling. Uncomfortable.  I long for satiation, even as I am arguing against it.
Ice cold, tart, sublime. It will fill me up. Cradling my heart,
that beats too fast;
I want the panic to recede, and so, for a moment I submit to its tender lies, so gently disguised.
The thirst of a drinker, remains. It calls to me. But it is not my calling.
It lies and tells me it is but a moment; infrequent, even good.
It utters frantic, believable thoughts. Yes, believable. You can. You want. You deserve. Your heart is dry as a bone.
Your need is great.
Lingering, it hangs like the moon in the daytime sky.
Calling, enticing, bewitching. A constant source of light.
Beautiful, as it lures me back to that place of forgetting.
I wish I were a drinker, because I will always thirst.
But then I remember what is so easily forgotten,
The lack.
The Emptiness.
The place of Nowhere.
Even still, I long for it.It caresses me, it lures.
The seduction of a drinker is constant.
10/17/08 MHH

Five and a half years I have known that I am an alcoholic – most of five, of which I was unable to face the truth. In that time I have studied the disease and I came to face with the truth that this thing,that is my albatross, although difficult is just that ‘a thing.’  And we all have Things. Mine, yes, is tragic at least to me.  I mean how pathetic that I can’t drink. I love drinking. I really do.  It’s fun. It’s is social. It brings people together. It’s ‘normal.’ Yup, those are the more subtle lies (for me).

Anyway, I guess I just need to say that although I have felt a great deal of shame, that is no longer true. Yes, alcohol had me it its grip, but no longer. I feel freer than ever in my life. And although it does call me, whispering in my ear, seductively at times, I just tell it to shut up! Seriously I am reduced to telling the Liar in my head to shut the fuck up!

I have been sober, since July 2008, and almost daily I remind myself that my life IS worth living —  covering up is weak, feelings are important, and most of all my children and husband need me!  May it always be so that I listen to that strength inside that help me shut out the lure of being a drinker.

Ten Things I Gave Up Because of the Recession

Ten things I gave up because of the Recession  … Not in order of importance.

  1. Coffee shops. Though I still drink good coffee at home, I no longer get that when I am out and about.
  2. Book Stores. My husband swears I could read for about two years (or longer) on the books I currently own, but I have given up purchasing books.  That’s a compulsion that is hard to change but important.
  3. Sentry grocery store. I love the beautiful atmosphere including classical music, but I’ve given it up for the prices at Woodmans and Trader Joes.  And frankly, I don’t miss seeing wine on every corner associated with all the good food I like.
  4. Shopping. I no longer shop for ‘entertainment.’  Okay, don’t judge.  It is something that I enjoy(ed.)
  5. Eating out. We just don’t do it.  Before it was a way to stave off boredom, an anecdote for laziness, and somehow a ‘reward.’
  6. Cambodia. Enough said.
  7. Our Dishwasher. It broke, burning out in a blaze of glory and it won’t be replaced for a while.
  8. Furniture in our Living Room. Our cat George has issues related to peeing and we’ve lost furniture, rugs, pillows all because of it.  They won’t be replaced for a very long time.
  9. Gourmet cheeses. Yummmmm.  The older the better.  Stick to grocer Sharp Cheddar.  Oddly difficult for me.
  10. Canceling magazine subscriptions that we don’t read, except PASTE magazine, which is awesome and you get a CD of cool new music each month.  (By the way, no more CD purchases, dearest Tom.  We have to stop!)

On the short list for what’s next: Piano tuning. It hasn’t been tuned for three years and it won’t be this winter. Vacations & travel of any kind.  We’re considering cutting Cable although we’ve had ongoing family debates.  The faux Persian rug in our den will not be cleaned.  I’ve been thinking of giving up red meat anyway, because my bad cholesteral is high, but it’s also pricey!

What have you given up if anything?  It doesn’t have to be a neat TEN.  It is interesting how our priorities change as we deal with the prices at the grochery store and the pump.

Albert Einstein and Naming My Blog

I like Albert Einstein.  Of course he was brilliant and quirky, with that crazy hair! But did you know he was a person of faith? I love that he thought for himself (well duh, with relativity and all.)  But he had a real contempt for authority.  Question everything he said. I love that!!

But I especially liked learning that he was slow to develop verbally.  Our youngest was as well. And Einstein thought that his verbal challenges allowed him “… to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted.”

Jacob’s language challenge has been something I have known about and worked to get help for, since he was eighteen months old (I will write about that some day).  I am inspired and filled with hope for my son, learned to speak slowly and who by everyone’s estimation is “delayed” academically.  It all stems from some things doctors have recently identified.  Perhaps Jacob will also learn to see the world differently as he makes his way in it.

“There is no limit to life, when your imagination and mind are vivid and developing.”

This gives me hope.

As a child Einstein “was so fervent about his beliefs that on his own he composed  hymns, which he sang to himself as he walked home from school.”  Lovely!  We like to compose music in our household!  (My kids have a band Squirrel Ticks.  Have you heard them?  I should post a few songs here.)

At age 12, just as he would have readied for his Bar Mitzvah, Einstein suddenly gave up Judaism which he had practiced on his own up to then as his parents rejected the Jewish traditions. As he later put it,

“The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness, that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.”

Einstein did retain from his childhood religious experiences a profound faith in, and reverence for the harmony and beauty of the mind of God expressed in the creation of the universe. In his 50s, Einstein rethought his faith, as he did many times over his lifetime, based on what he called the “spirit manifest in the laws of the universe” and a sincere belief in a “God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.”

Do you believe in God he was asked?

“I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

Do you accept the historical existence of Jesus?

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.  No myth is filled with such life.”

I’m intrigued with how he thought, how he “worked” at his faith, how he was impressed by the lavishness of the Creator and of the person of Jesus Christ.

And I love this: “… the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious…” I am in so much agreement!  And it is Einstein’s words that were the inspiration for the name of this blog and that echo my own heart as to the mystery of faith, belief or disbelief, science and much of life.

If you’re interested in subscribing to this blog, thank you!  I can’t say how often I will write.  And my musings are quite random and tend to depend greatly on the family schedule.  Thank you for reading and please, leave a comment or opinion!!!  I’d love to hear from you.

Quotations from a TIME.com article on Albert Einstein.  Read the complete article here.

Phantom Love

You can’t just say you love me. Love isn’t words.
Love is time — spent over the span of a life.
Words are a phantom love.

I can’t mend your hurting heart.
I don’t even know why I should try.
Empty, adrift. You are searching for something.
Crying out, and I hear you.
But I cannot help.

You can’t just say I’m sorry.

Love is known through a lifetime of being, searching, knowing.
Love is acceptance. Endurance. Forgiveness.
Each of these is evident — if you love.

What is it that I am to you?
Do you feel you cannot provide for me the things I crave?
I am fully aware and accepting, that I am the woman you both shaped over time.
Strong. Capable. Faithful.
Afraid. Careful. Wounded.

You don’t have to heal me, that task is all mine.
All you have to do is BE,
with me,
in my life.

You can’t just say you love me – show me, you don’t regret, that I am.

Show me.
Just be.
With me.

 

 

(May 21, 2008)