Spirited Woman Blogger Team

My Left Leg View of Life

I’ve always been pretty good at logic and analysis, calculating and thinking. Having just begun feeling in earnest late into my 30’s, I am still somewhat new to it. (Yes, that’s a bit of a joke as all of us feel—yet it is new for me to give credence to my more intuitive and creative side). And just when I think I have the right brain-left brain, head-heart thing in balance, whammo -- I get hit with a lesson -- a lesson that involves the mind-body connection.

For the past four years I’ve been studying and practicing (but not yet mastering), a form of Pilates that has virtually changed my life. The discipline has eliminated back pain and frequent headaches, and has built strength I never knew was possible. A good example of the principle “simple not easy,” it’s not a mere workout routine but rather a new way to sit, stand, sleep and breathe, 24-7. Who knew it would impact how I think and interact with others?

Among other things during these focused four years, I have been striving to balance my weight on both sides of my body, rather than using only my right side for strength, straining and stretching my left mercilessly. My posture has improved vastly, and my leg strength is -- well, more or less is -- balanced. So what a surprise when a Chi Gong instructor, someone I regard as a masterful, intuitive teacher remarked to me: “Andrea, you walk with your weight on your right side only, barely skimming the surface with your left foot. What are you holding back from yourself and the world?”

He went on to explain how my lack of left side physical connection to the earth could be restricting my connection to my right brain, that feeling-based center that I have come to realize is the driver of everything. Damn, damn, damn. I thought I was doing so well.

Preposterous Pop-Ups

Behold the marvels of the pop-up book, a masterpiece of skill and delicate three-dimensional art that is sure to nudge the imagination of Spirited Women like us to unparalleled new heights.

Pop-up books are really engineering marvels -- I'm talkin' paper engineers, whose intricate and often bizarre movable art constructions make ideas come to life for readers. There are pull-tabs, for example, with vertical slats that "transform" one scene into a totally different scene.

Recently I sent The Pop-Up Book of M.C. Escher to a friend who loves the intricacies of art and architecture. She loves the book, as I was quite sure she would. Told me she spent an entire afternoon "trying to understand how Escher got so many dimensions into a single plane," and then confided, "I could sort of figure out the mobius strip image, at least." She summed up her impressions of the book with, "Escher's art is so inventive and intriguing; the images are endlessly fascinating." That pop-up book is inspiring her to create more complex art of her own!

Last weekend, at another friend's "giveaway party," I saw a book with an intriguing title: The Pop-Up Book of Phobias. Sure enough, in that 1999 book by stand-up comedian Gary Greenberg, there are huge spiders (to depict arachnophobia), and other pop-up delights to illustrate fear of:  flying, enclosed spaces, dentists (a huge dental drill seems to come right off the page toward you), tall buildings, and crowds.

The Pop-Up Book of Sailing Ships is another wonder. It shows every detail of ships, from mastheads to riggings, from the time of Christopher Columbus to the modern day. 

The very first pop-up book appeared way, way, way back in 1306, and was about astrology. Since then, most pop-up books have been aimed at adults, but now there are loads of pop-up books for children (and for childlike adults). Some children's pop-up books feature Sesame Street or Disney characters, or Babar, etc.

Have you ever peeked into a pop-up book? If not, I would encourage you to run (not walk) to your closest bookstore and head for the pop-up section -- sometimes it will be in the children's area. You will be amazed, thrilled, and delighted beyond your wildest dreams at what you discover.

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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On Being Single

In Bridget Jones' speak, I am a "smug married." Happily married to someone I've known for over half my life. But along with that comes wanting to live vicariously through my single friends' dating chronicles. I miss that excitement of meeting someone new. The freedom of being able to do whatever I want on a Friday or Saturday night. Samantha Pinney, our Knowing Pains writer of the week, is a positive, fun-loving person who embraces life every step of the way. This story showed me a different side of her, that sometimes single life is not as carefree as it seems. Enjoy! Molly

I was trying to get dressed for work. Clothes were strewn about the room though I kept reaching deep into the back of my closet for more. Wrong fit, wrong color, wrong look. Tears welled up in the corners of my eyes as my emotions crept to the surface. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took a few deep breaths trying to collect myself. Relax. Focus. Exhale. I stood up and pulled a wrinkled outfit together from the floor, grabbed my sunglasses and purse, took one last look in the mirror, and burst into tears.

It wasn’t always like this. Relationships came and went. Some stayed with me more than others after they ended. One left me devastated for more than a year. But until recently it never occurred to me that there might not be a next relationship when the last one came to its conclusion. Even during the dry spells – over months, over years – I still felt optimistic, never mind stumbling through drunken flirtations and depressing dates. I still had hope despite the tidal waves of emotion that bowled me over me from time to time.

There was the egotistical, but geographically desirable and wittily sarcastic, Dave. We liked the same articles in the New Yorker, listened to the same music, had the same taste in food, movies, and men’s cologne. We dated with the understanding that it was casual. No strings attached. I googled “casual sex.” Articles and testimonies suggested that casual relationships rarely ended well, but he filled a void in my life – physically and mentally. I briefly considered the outcomes and decided that I was empowered, not compromised. I was there by choice, not necessity. At least, that was my mantra. Naturally, things didn’t end well – not because either of us got more attached but because one day he just didn’t return my call, and I never heard from him again. I know he’s still in San Francisco. A question mark dotting the Bay Area landscape, another part of my past I catch myself thinking about from time to time. In my delusional moments, I imagine that he has a girlfriend or wife, maybe a child, a big golden retriever, a house in Tahoe or on the coast where he invites friends for the weekend. And I have to wonder – did I miss the obvious? Could it all have been mine for the taking? Does everyone fantasize that their ex’s have gone on to lead far superior lives than when they were with you?

Fortunately, common sense and anti-depressants save me from myself when doubts about my past decisions arise. And a hundred different quotes about fate, circumstance and the unknown. And my girlfriends, who insist he was always a loser. God, I love them. But increasingly, as I get older, each failed relationship takes a little more out of me, and my resilience diminishes ever so slightly.

Finding Your Roots—With Your Own Shovel

Most of us aren’t famous enough to merit an hour on Who Do You Think You Are?  If we want to find our roots, we have to do it ourselves.

Research is fun. Thanks to the Mormons and the internet, you can learn a lot about your origins without ever leaving home. But traveling to a foreign country and showing up on the door step of long lost relatives is more like being on Fear Factor.

My first trip to France was before the internet, and my search required a lot of leg work. I scoured Franche-Comté before I found an address to visit.

It was a balmy Sunday afternoon. As I approached the property I saw people at a long table covered in beautiful floral cloth. There was heaps of food, loaves of bread and wine all around. Over the fence lay sheep skins from the mutton that had grilled all day. Idyllic country French. These were my people.

I called out, assuming they’d be thrilled to meet me. But I was young and naïve, and they were suspicious. They’d probably seen European Vacation. Like the Griswolds, I had lousy language skills and too much enthusiasm. But unlike the Griswolds, I had the right family. The patriarch could have been my grandpa’s twin. Thankfully, they took a chance on me and opened their gate.

After an interesting day and a five-course dinner, I still didn’t know what they thought. I didn’t sense an  instant familial bond. Could I ever go back?

A Spirited Woman is fearless. So after many years, I mustered the courage to try again. This time with fluent French, a pile of genealogical documents, and a phone call in advance.

Confession: I didn’t call from the US. I stewed over it, worried about being a pest. Then the point of now-or-never arrived—I finally placed that coup de téléphone two days before driving into their village.

For reinforcement, I scanned Rick Steves' tips on language and culture. He says the French are a serious people and find over-friendliness a sign of senility. I begged my husband to give his constant grin a rest.

But my concerns were pointless. Yesterday we received a warm welcome from a gregarious distant relative, a teddy bear of a man. His parents, who had originally welcomed us, recently passed away, but the oldest son, Jean-Daniel, couldn’t have been more gracious. He took us to the local chateau where an archivist helped us research our roots back to 1632. Later we met the neighbors and enjoyed a lovely dinner. Afterwards, Jean-Daniel invited us to a big family picnic next Sunday.

But here’s the clincher. Jean-Daniel said that during my first visit I brought an American Christmas ornament (I didn’t remember). Every year since, they have hung it on their tree and thought of me. The truth: You can’t always predict how people are going to feel about you. Just do what’s good and assume the best. . . but do call ahead.

- Nancy Adair  nancyadair2002@yahoo.com
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Inertia (Or… Is it mojo or nojo?)

Recently, I met a colleague for coffee to get caught up on networking and her job status. We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas so there was much to cover with each other about our lives. It was surprising to discover that despite her busy and successful schedule, Kimberly felt she was at a cross roads when it came to her professional life.

I can relate – for some time now, I’ve been wrestling internally with the direction of my professional life and the needs of my family. My career is in a really, really comfortable place and that’s the problem. Like Kimberly, in order to grow means committing a significant amount of time and energy for several years.  Theoretically, the pay-off can be big, but it’s not guaranteed. The challenge is that I no longer have the stamina or desire to put “the nose to the grindstone” to make this happen. I am confident I can do it – I just don’t have a burning desire to do it.

Then I picked up Marshall Goldsmith’s newest book on “mojo.”  Goldsmith defines mojo as “that positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.” Our fearless Spirited Woman leader, Nancy Mills, is a wonderful example of a woman with major mojo. Nancy is passionate about impacting women’s lives through Spirited Woman and that energy is apparent in her tireless hours of empowering people around the world. When reading Goldsmith’s checklist on evaluating your present situation, it turns out that I have more “nojo” than mojo…

Goldsmith described nojo best in a section on inertia. When people do not find short-term satisfaction or happiness or long-term benefit or meaning from an activity, that’s when inertia kicks in. We continue to repeat our current activities and since we don’t change our behavior, the inertia continues and creates frustration, boredom or depression. The good news is that Goldsmith provides an excellent evaluation tool to determine specific activities that cause inertia for you. You can download it for free.

Of course, it’s not possible to have 100% mojo in all parts of your life but Goldsmith certainly makes it easier to target what points or activities tend to drain you. Once you know, then you can take steps to redirect your energy, outlook and/or attitude.

Where do you suspect nojo is present in your life?  What about mojo? What are those activities that bring you joy and the time just flies?  How can you incorporate these elements into your nojo activities to bring more meaning and happiness?

- Allison Blankenship, http://www.allisonspeaks.com,  http://www.UpsideTheBook.com
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Manchurian Han Banquet - The Imperial Feast of the Nouveau Riche

I believe the most elaborate meal on earth is the Manchurian Han Banquet. Originally intended to celebrate Emperor Kangxi’s 66th birthday it is now mostly served to China’s nouveau riche.

This famous meal would take many chefs three months’ of traveling to different provinces to gather all materials, then three weeks with many assistant chefs to prepare, and finally three days to try and test all the one hundred and three dishes. In addition, there are the eighty-eight small dishes with their eighty-eight different condiments.

And the eighty-eighty medium dishes with their eighty-eight different peicai. Peicai is matching food, such as celery to go with Peking duck, dried vegetable with marinated pork, black fungus with fish fillet, chives with pig’s liver.

This lavish meal is set out on imperial-yellow tablecloths with matching seat covers, both embroidered with colorful clouds and dragons. Waitresses would dress up as Qing dynasty princesses, and pour the most expensive Big Red Robe tea into three-legged cups, styled after 3,000 year old wine-offering tripod.

Dishes range from the ordinary to the bizarre: four-delicacies soup, gold thread porridge, lotus prawns, sweet-scented osmanthus and dry scallops, mandarin duck thin milk, panda tasting bamboo, phoenix spreading the wings, braised shark-fin phoenix tails, tiger skin and rabbit meat, dragon and phoenix heartthrob, French bean goldfish, pearl and white jelly fungus, osmanthus and pigeon eggs….

Among these dishes is the One Hundred Happiness, consisting of one hundred carps’ whiskers meticulously collected, cooked, and arranged in the shape of one hundred different writing styles of the character shou, longevity.

Another one is a vegetarian dish which looks like a painting. On its top left hand corner shines a red sun with golden rays under which soars white cranes above luscious tress and colorful houses. The sun is made from a carrot, its rays pickled radish, the flying cranes tofu cut into different shapes. The trees are seaweed and the houses different kinds of mushrooms.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to taste this imperial banquet – or would even want to. But I feel satisfied just by looking at the pictures of its amazing dishes.

Mingmei Yip, http://www.mingmeiyip.com
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Three Cheers for Sara Ganim!

As most of you probably were, I was glued to my TV set last week, watching the riveting Jerry Sandusky trial from Pennsylvania.  When the "guilty" verdict was announced and the defense team gave its eloquent summation of the trial, I was heartened and relieved.

Later I found out, through ESPN coverage, about the pivotal role of reporter Sara Ganim in bringing the Sandusky story to light.

Sara Ganim, 24-years-old, is a crime reporter for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Patriot-News. Ganim started covering the sex abuse scandal at Penn State two years before it hit the national headlines, when she was just 22. She broke the story that a grand jury was investigating Penn State Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky for sexual abuse.  As her editor commented, Sara put in literally hundreds and hundreds of hours, and miles and miles of driving and lots of shoe leather -- tracking down legitimate leads, following up on tips, combing through court documents, interviewing people, piecing the extraordinary puzzle together.

Ganim's hard work paid off!  On April 16, she became one of the youngest newspaper reporters ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. The staff of her newspaper also won a Pulitzer, the first in the paper's 157-year history.  While champagne flowed in the newsroom, Sara wiped away tears and said a brief, heartfelt thank-you to the ebullient members of the staff, then...she called her mother to tell her the news!

Being a newspaper reporter is nothing new for Ganim. She started reporting as a 15-year-old high school sophomore in Florida, was a freelance reporter for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and later a news intern for the Associated Press. Ganim graduated from Penn State, where she wrote for the school newspaper, in 2008. While still a college student, she had a part-time reporting job covering the courts and crime beat for the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania.

"I have a police scanner on my nightstand. I work 60-hour weeks digging and investigating, chatting up sources, and peeling back layers until I find amazing stories," she writes on her personal Website. Ganim, whom Newsweek magazine recently named one of the "150 Fearless Women in the World," has a bright future.  And is the personification of a Spirited Woman.

Here is Sara Ganim, speaking on TV after the verdict was announced in the Sandusky trial: http://wnep.com/2012/06/22/sandusky-trial-sara-ganim-speaks/

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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Empathy is Contagious

If there is one thing that seemingly separates humankind from the animal kingdom, it is our ability to control our reactions to external events.

There are of course exceptions. If something is thrown at us, we might duck or we might swerve instinctively to avoid another car. These reactions happen outside our conscious control and only after the event do we think, “Phew, that was lucky”.

For most events in our modern world, we perceive something and then make a decision on how to respond based on the input from our senses. Our amazing self-awareness gives us the ability to moderate our response.

Of course, if we are blessed with ’sixth senses’, this increases our ability to make even better decisions. Not least because of the source of the wisdom we can then tap into.

If we do fly off the handle at something or lash out in response to someone crossing a boundary, we often regret it later. In the heat of those moments, we can describe ourselves as acting ‘animalistically’.

Remarkably, some animals have been known to exhibit examples of natural empathetic behaviour. Perhaps interestingly, this is often seen in situations where they are in proximity with humans, either domestic or in zoos. Empathy is after all nicely contagious.

There has been a case of a baby hippo befriending a tortoise so much so that they became inseparable.

A cat in Brazil adopted a bird which hurt itself when it fell out of its nest and couldn’t fly. The cat, called Chiquita, reportedly raised the bird as if it was its mother. They ate from the same plate and the cat even used the bird to catch other birds for it to eat.

There are cases where a dog suckled a kitten and even where tiger suckled piglets. The latter case was in a controlled situation in a zoo though where a tiger lost her cubs and was going downhill rapidly. Her carers gave her some piglets and instead of eating them, she fed them.

At the other end of the spectrum, we should also remember a black widow spider's name comes from her propensity to eat her mate.

What I Control

Today I was talking with a friend who, like me, turned fifty this year. After a lighthearted lament about physical aging, we shared one treasured outcome of this age: the settled-in quality that comes from knowing ourselves so well. We both agreed that regarding our many personality traits, good and bad, knowing and accepting ourselves is the most important thing.

Understanding what sparks our spirit as well as what pushes our buttons gives us the ultimate freedom, the ultimate control. We can choose to limit our experiences to those we prefer, or we can manage our reaction to those things (usually provoked by other people) that cause stress. Clearly this knowledge and subsequent liberty is not limited to those fifty and over. But it is an interesting phenomenon. At about this age, those who would hide their apparent flaws begin to admit their humanness, and those who would refrain from acknowledging their unique strengths begin to name them, out loud. Finally, because we have conscious awareness, we can control our experienceof the world. Can you hear the choir singing “Hallelujah!”?

Toward the end of our conversation, my friend, who errs on the side of humility, declared: “One thing I’m not is controlling!” And thus began an afternoon of self-analysis regarding the issue of self-awareness… and control.

A master of self-control, I’ve never been one to try to control other people, perhaps because I would abhor the idea that someone would do that to me. But I have tried to control the universe, and anyone who knows me well would likely smile at this statement. During this 50th year, I learned that control is a myth. It is futile.

Perhaps trying to the control the universe – life and death, fate and providence – for fifty years simply makes one weary. Now I smile at the thought that I was ever in control of anything. Except my experience.

Cool Thoughts

How grateful I am for the "cool thoughts" that kept me on an even keel this past week, when the temperature hit 110 degrees one day, and 105 degrees the next.

Here I am, a Spirited Woman with a million tasks I'm trying to accomplish, but when mega-heat shows up on the scene, I melt. There's no air-conditioning in our apartment because we rarely get those 100+-degree days.  We do have a very effective fan, and the occasional cool breeze comes through the windows and the door leading to the deck.  But sometimes the fan and the breezes aren't enough to keep me operating at my best efficiency. All my resolutions to keep plugging away seem to dissolve, like a scoop of ice cream under the hot sun.

The other day I watched with disbelief as the red dial on my L.L.Bean deck thermometer climbed up to, and hovered at, the 110- degree mark. This was just as I was in the middle of some intense editing projects that had looming deadlines. I had to keep my cool!

So I went right over to YouTube, to hear one of my favorite singers, June Christy, do her classic Something Cool with the Stan Kenton Orchestra. That song always puts me in a cool mood.

As I listened to the always-cool June C., I poured myself a very tall glass of iced tea. And (a suggestion from my "cool" hubby), I ran a small towel under cold water, then put it in the freezer for fifteen minutes before I wrapped it around my neck. Hooray -- I was finally beginning to chill out!

Yes, I could have escaped to an air-conditioned movie or restaurant for several hours, and we do have a pool here at the apartment complex, but I had work to do, so I was attempting to make myself "think cool" -- and eventually I succeeded. Today it's a very livable 85 degrees, and all's right with the world.

Stay cool!

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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