Mar 21, 2016 Climate Change is Real!, Daily Life
Climate Change is Real: Day 3 of my Lone Vigil
©March 21st, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
©March 21st, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
6:58 a.m.: I awoke BEFORE the alarm on my i-Phone went off (yes, yes, I’ve succumbed completely to the many enticing temptations of this instrument from Hell, including using the Record function, checking the weather, checking how many miles I’ve walked, looking up abstruse things on the Internet, and so on, but I AM a responsible driver, please note).
I did not groan or moan. No, sir! I was wide awake, and ready to face the elements. I WAS going to be on time, dammit! I was!
Heated up yesterday’s coffee (I know, apostasy for a true connoisseur of coffee), poured it into one of the three trusty travel mugs which I’d bought from that Satan company, Starbucks, three or four years ago, and which has stood me (and us) in good stead over that period, let the dog out, wiped her snow-clogged paws when she returned, got abluted, got dressed, and ready to go out at 7:30 a.m..
Then, I realized that I needed this and that and the other, and when I had found the gloves, put on extra socks, taken out the unused ear-buds for my i-Phone, and headed out, it was 7:47. (Warren, I need more practice being there on time at 7:30. What did your devotees on the road think when they saw that there was no one there for the last two days of last week, and the first day of this week at 7:30 a.m.? They’ll think you’ve abandoned the cause. So sorry! I shall do better tomorrow!)
It was 28 degrees, and the snow blanketed everything. The sky was white, and the ground was white, and my coat was a chillingly pale ice-blue, my scarf a beautiful indigo ikat one, just for contrast, and my cloche hat was a dark forest green (this is for those who care about fashion and such things, you understand). Thus attired, your fashion icon (NOT) stood at Warren’s intersection, and, checking her time, noted that it was 7:53 a.m. Pah!
As soon as I got there, the first car that went by gave me the universal sign of approbation (or, rather, the passenger did): The thumbs-up. Yay!
I began to sing, first in Bhairav thaat Vibhas, one of my absolute favorites, and meandered up and down the aroha and avaroha, then doing several slow gamak taans, and then some paltas. The tamboura drone mysteriously switched from E to F drone. I think it must have been on shuffle. Not to be deterred, I went along with the shift. I sang Miyan ki Todi. Todi is a late morning raga and its mournful tones suited the mood of the snow drifting down steadily, increasing in speed as time went on …
… as did the cars, although they were somewhat slower than usual. I got nothing but smiles, waves and thumbs-up signs for the first fifteen minutes from several people. After that, it was just grim-faced commuters too focused on the weather to think about the Climate, or my husband’s “Climate Change is Real” sign. Draw your conclusions, folks!
I drifted into thinking about the Fibonacci series, for no particular reason, except that I got tired of singing aimless paltas in Todi (this vigil is certainly causing me to discipline my singing) – so, I tried singing sargams going up and down the scale, using 1, 12, 123, 12345, 12345678, 12345678910-11-12-13, and back again, up and down the scale. The nice thing, of course, it that it comes to 32, so it fits neatly into two cycles of teental (a 16-beat rhythmic cycle in Hindustani classical music). I could develop this as an improvisational diving board, I suppose. I communed with this for a while, and enjoyed myself. (And no, I am not some mathematical whiz, far from it, actually!)
The snow drifted steadily down, and the landscape was beautiful around me. I wondered about the two geese I’d seen taking off from the Fells from right behind me on Friday. I wondered if they’d made it. I’m sad about the birds, very, very sad. Just read about Adélie Penguins at a colony in Cape Denison being decimated. I also read a more optimistic report that they might have just picked up and moved one. Whatever the case might be, I fear for all animals, and for people everywhere. I also feared for the beautiful bulbs I’d planted in the fall, and which had just begun to come up. I was sad.
Sadness did not possess me, however. There’s something lovely about standing there, defying the elements, or celebrating them, rather, and singing in the snow. I recommend it, especially the getting up early part (no, seriously! I might be turning into a morning person, heavens forfend)!
A Confession: I must admit that I haven’t been as good as my husband is about using resources. I found I was more wasteful with water than I liked It’s only more recently that I’ve become less so. I used to be impatient about composting (although I WANTED to compost), so I let him take care of it. Now, I do the composting. It took me a few years (about eight years ago) to stop buying bottled water, and remember to take my own to work. Now, we never go anywhere without carrying our own water. I recycle that which needs to be recycled, but I need to stop buying things in packaging, period! So, I’m going to sew little cloth bags in which to put perishable vegetables, and take those to the market when I shop, instead of using the “recyclable” plastic bags they provide.
And I think: If it takes me, an informed person, SO LONG to get going on doing the right thing, how can I judge those who don’t even try? Those who live in glass houses, and so on.
And YET, try we must.
That is why Warren’s vigil matters. That is why we must keep on repeating its message. If the GOP likes to invent facts and hammer away at them so much that people believe them to be true, why should it be harder for us to speak the TRUTH? All we have to do is repeat true facts, and THIS mantra over and over and over:
Climate Change IS real!
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Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #ClimateVigil, #Recycling, #Saving the Planet, #using the Fibonacci series to create patterns Hindustani vocal music
Mar 3, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning
Saturday is My Day of Rest
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 2nd 2013
It’s Saturday, March 2nd, and I am in a foggy, unspecified place in my body and mind.
Having (as usual) slept only a few hours every day of this week, while beaming out energy and enthusiasm at school in a tightly focused way every single day of this past whole week, which had come hot on the heels of a semi-lazy, semi-busy vacation week, I am now a hollow shell.
I dealt with curriculum.
Gave a test.
Assigned a complicated and (I think) interesting project based on John Steinbeck’s book The Pearl, facilitated class discussion, finished up that book (begun well before vacation week), then taught verbs, participles and perfect verb tenses, and began to teach the Holocaust unit. Assigned and began teaching Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter.
Teaching the Holocaust Unit is the hardest thing I do every year. I use the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum and ideas as some of my resources. I have read an enormous amount on this subject and immersed myself in it for over fifteen years. Yet, I cannot bring myself to remember every single detail. I have to re-read some of it. It’s too much for me. I know all the numbers, and have read the books of several of the famous writers. I know all about the different concentration camps, the infamous Nazis who conducted their horrible experiments, the leaders of the Third Reich, the euphemisms adopted by the Nazis for their terrible practices. I know all about the Nuremberg Trials, the huge disaster that was WWII and the burden of collective guilt, not only in Germany, but several other European nations. And I know about the brave souls who individually (Schindler, Irena Sendler, the Bielski brothers, Miep Gies, others) and collectively saved several thousand Jews (the village of Le Chambon in France, and an entire country — Denmark). It’s all too much to comprehend or internalize. So, I map out the unit into perpetrators, bystanders, victims, resisters, rescuers and survivors. Because we read about it, and discuss it all from this perspective, it helps me and my students deal with the enormity and mindless nature of a whole era as revealed in Friedrich and Night. I show clips of interviews with survivors and rescuers/resisters. I show non R-rated movies and several scenes from the less-horrifying but eye-opening parts from R-rated movies. We read moving excerpts from Primo Levi’s books. We read poems. We discuss weighty matters of morality and philosophy as well. We inquire into the nature of evil. We look into Hannah Arendt’s statement about “the banality of evil.”
And each teenager in my class comes away from this experience a “sadder and wiser” person, arising the “morrow morn.”
But all that hasn’t happened for the classes yet. The students are still at the beginning of the unit.
So, where was I? Ah yes, I was still dwelling on this past week of work which assailed my senses and my soul.
I facilitated a meeting with Green Team members at my school on Monday, and with the Executive Director of a local organic farm, as well as with the Recycling Co-ordinator for the town in which I teach. We discussed how we would begin composting wasted cafeteria food in our school (and transport it to the local farm for the soil and chickens). It was a good meeting, despite all the difficulties we were sure to experience when we did begin to follow through on this idea.
After the meeting, the kids, the other teacher and I did our usual, mad, panting, breathless, crazy-whirly recycling for the whole school — dragging the huge, blue recycle bins down the hallways of all five floors to the South Parking Lot, where the giant Casella recycling dumpster stood, and emptying out all those bins, for the Casella people to deal with on Wednesday.
Note: We are all of us girls (well, two women teachers and the rest of them were girls. Our one boy was absent)!
Where are the schoolboys in any worthwhile effort, like saving the planet? The girls informed me that some of the boys laugh at the school’s recycling efforts (although our bins are full!).
Makes one despair.
Mothers and Fathers: Please teach your sons (and daughters) that the planet is not for pillaging and plundering, despoiling and tossing away. There’s only one planet.
I guess it’s time for me to give another rousing speech at lunchtime over the mike. Every time I did that in the fall, I got a few more volunteers, some of them boys, but then they faded away.
What else?
Went to a Baby Shower for a friend/colleague at school on Thursday, and that was beautiful — such events are always moving, especially for those who are already mothers, but for everyone else too, because one sees a different side of all these harassed and harried school-teachers, who take the time to be together. Everyone brings something good to eat. There are all these lovely platters of (mostly) healthy, nutritious food, veggie platters, the healthier variety of chips and yummy dips, fruit, and of course the obligatory dreadfully frosted carb-heavy cakes and cookies. There are piled-up presents, streamers and pretty tassels. We clear up a space in the school library, set out the food on pretty table-cloths, put up streamers, and shower the star of the afternoon, the new mother-to-be with love. And she is always tender, radiant and full of hope and beauty. I wrote a poem, after being urged to do so by some of the teachers there. And I posted it on this blog-site on Thursday, which eased my sense of guilt with not writing something the previous day (at least, I think I didn’t write something. Perhaps I did).
On Friday, after the regular, exhausting, unending round of classes which I taught (I teach one hundred and seven students a DAY, and that’s nothing! It was one hundred and twenty-five a day last year, which nearly killed me and the other English teachers on the other two teams — math, science and history teachers don’t have it so bad, although everyone reported being exhausted last year!), I ran my Poetry Club, put out food for the kids, made hot chocolate for them, and we wrote. Well, they wrote. I usually do, but yesterday, I was busy facilitating. I didn’t have time. So, that was a wasted chance.
Then, dinner at The Punjab in Arlington with my family. That’s always very nice, and we three are VERY goofy and silly together. Then, there was music at night with daughter and husband, after which, I fell, exhausted, into a species of sleep.
All of today was spent in a strange, cocooned state. Tired beyond imagining, feeling the weight of the ages press down upon my shoulder-blades, and with feet that alternately felt numb and tingling with tiredness, I did nothing at all, not even fun things.
I didn’t write anything yesterday, and nothing much today. At least I wrote a poem on Thursday, I console myself. Yes, it made me happy, but it doesn’t satisfy me. I want the high that comes with writing stories every day, writing poems every day, having interesting and inspired thoughts.
I’ve been reading Alexander McCall Smith books. When mindlessness strikes, I turn to mental comfort food, and McCall Smith’s books and P.G. Wodehouse’s books are for good vibes and good prose. Dick Francis books, and occasionally the less grisly Robert Parker, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky books are for a sense of life lived in danger (compared to my tame and happy existence). Of course, there are the usual J.K. Rowling books, some grab-me sci-fi for sheer pleasure, or an Oliver Sacks book at hand for sheer pleasure or familiar, but in-depth, moving humanistic science . Mind you, I’m not talking about my other literary loves. This is the daily fare for someone who can read unfamiliar or weightier books only during school breaks, and during the summer.
Watched a TED video showcasing Amanda Fucking Palmer, which was very moving in a strange way, especially because I don’t actually like her music or her face, although it is extremely compelling. I am able to separate my personal likes and dislikes from my respect for artists (musical artists or artists who do performance art) who do what they are compelled to do. I like John Cage, for example, but am not moved in the least by his music (or lack thereof). I LOVE Yoko Ono, but her actual art does nothing for me. We need such artists. They challenge our preconceived notions and push us to think beyond our “comfort zone.”
And of course, I love, love, love Neil Gaiman (and have done so well before his rise to fame and fortune, since the early 90s, when his Sandman books came out), so if he loves Amanda Palmer, I am prepared to love her too.
So, this was my past week.
Right now, while I type all this, my husband is making fritters. I hear my daughter singing upstairs, and I need to help her with her guitar practice.
On that note, I bid you all adieu.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Recycling, Alexander McCall Smith, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Baby Showers, Elie Wiesel, English Teachers, Facing History and Ourselves, Green initiatives in school, John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, P.G. Wodehouse, Poetry Club, Primo Levi, Teaching the Holocaust, Yoko Ono