We're in an age where it seems as if anything could be possible. We have gently swushing sidewalks that move us in airports, instant communication across miles at the touch of a button or slight voice prompt, gadgets in our kitchens that replace hours of manual labor, and roaring vehicles that dash from one point to the next with reliability and comfort. We have a seemingly limitless supply of information at our whim and wish- on everything from underwater microbiology to the worship practices of ancient cultures we'll never need to know about. This is truly a Golden Age of progress, technology, and learning. We have medical advances that people never dreamed of, and the medicine goes far beyond mere bodily function and crosses into matters of the mind and soul, it seems.

Yet somehow, in the midst of all of this, mankind is regressing. Not all, of course, but I look at the progresses we've made in learning and education and wonder where things went wrong for many industrialized nations, especially the USA and UK. I've compiled a list of the things that I feel our society is losing grip of, abstract things that need to be found and tagged and set on a museum shelf for future generations to ponder...

1) We're losing our ability to focus.


I sat on the couch next to my husband the other day, watching Penelope (which is an excellent movie, look for a review soon!) and attempting to play Civilization III on my laptop while I watched the movie. Michael gets irritated with this habit, he would love to just snuggle and be still, but I feel a need to keep my hands busy. I check my email addresses, blog, StumbleUpon account, and icanhascheezburger.com way too often. One email at work can send me frantically running about the store, forgetting whatever project I had going on. I'm not the only one like this, I know. We're bombarded by such a constant influx of information, suggestion, demand, pressure, and appeal that we often do not know which way to turn. This fractures whatever concentration we could get in between soundbytes and drivel, and we're left with no focus and a whopping migraine.

2) We're losing the art of conversation.


I recently ate at a pleasant little restaurant in Grand Rapids. At a table near us there was a very young couple sitting nearby. Typical 'Abercrombie' style teenagers, the boy looked disinterestedly around the restaurant while the girl sat and texted on her jeweled phone. She had a tight tee shirt on that read: 'All I need is love... and jewelry!' paired with a miniskirt. Please let my kids become nuns before they hit that age...
When we left the establishment, he was still staring vacantly into space while she texted. This isn't the first time I've seen things like this, and I've noticed that people's conversations are more fractured, more shallow, less meaningful. People are more apt to stick to their opinion, you don't see as much real give and take in conversation as could be comfortable, and many people seem disinclined to really, really engage in a stimulating intellectual conversation that isn't about themselves. Maybe the science fiction books were right when they predicted a culture that merely grunts and squeals at each other, while communicating on giant holographic screens. Or did I even read that...?

3) We're losing our ability to entertain ourselves.



I remember being a kid in rural Michigan. We were poor, dirt poor. I had very few toys, and my dad was bipolar and would often send us out of the house for hours on end. Although it seemed rather cruel, this was excellent for me. I learned to plant things (they occasionally grew, I figured out the whole growing seasons/watering gig a decade later) from seeds I found in the fields. I learned to dig clay out of the ground, separate it from the sand, and sculpt tiny earthen bowls, dolls, and play food. Most things cracked and crumbled, but it was great fun, and completely free. I found bricks of some forgotten project of my dad's and drew a fairy tale scene on every last one, I picked whatever wild fruit was in season and ate it until my belly ached. My sisters and I mad mudpies and picked flowers and wove grasses and ate snow and jumped in fallen leaves and made elaborate structures from pine needle beds. We didn't know the meaning of the word 'bored'.
Many of the privileged kids nowadays have one gadget after another. Even low-income kids have plenty of stuff to do and buttons to press and boopy sounds to hear and creepy disembodied voices to tell them what button to press next. They are surrounded by so much stimuli that their brains kind of melt into a pile of goo, I think. Take a kid out of this constant bombardment of bullcrap, and they get the fidgets.
Even us grown-ups have an almost chemical dependency on 'fun'. We spend a great deal of our income on vacations, gaming equipment, gambling, porn, food, reading material... you name it. You stick most of us (me included) into a bare room with no electricity or screen of some sort, and you'll soon have a screaming nutcase on your hands, whereas many people of old would whittle wood or stitch fine embroidery, or build something out of matchsticks, or write memoirs (on paper, with a pen) or engage their brain in something other than mindless reality shows.


Sure, we're making leaps and bounds in technology and medicine. We have smart cars and programmable microwaves and intricate scheduling tools. But has any of this made us any smarter? I think that we're actually losing our ability to innovate. Having less things made people more resourceful in older days, still does in third world countries. I am still astounded by people who just cannot manage to assemble a healthy meal for their families out of what's in the fridge or pantry. If you've grown up having every single need accomodated, you will never have a reason to invent, say, a fork that heats a bite of lasanga as you pick it up (please tell me someone is inventing this).
Our loss of ability to create is somehow connected with my next point:

5) We're losing art.


Quick, think of a great, original graphic artist of today.
Did you say Banksy? Audrey Kawasaki? Those were two of the very few that came to my mind. But if I cast my mind back to older times, dozens, if not hundreds of names, styles, and art forms come flooding to my brain. Sure, there's the compounded years to account for, but I really believe (and so do many artsy people I've spoken to) that we are in an artistic dry period. Very little beautiful or really unique has come out of the past several decades. I cannot blame it on computers- I have seen some utterly gorgeous things come off Photoshop tutorials- but I think I can blame it on easy access to cheap art supplies, limited attention span, a need for mass-production, and an arrogant refusal to embrace anything of old.
I'm not complaining about any modern artist, I just think that our learning approaches and schools are structuring so much method and technique into an art class that the essence of beauty and creativity is lost.

6) We've lost our innocence.


This is not something ongoing. It has happened, and it is, I fear, permanent. We have been bombarded with racism, war, sex, violence, cruelty, disaster, human conflict, injustice, and everything in between or that is a combination of any of those. We laugh at coarse humor, we mock people who try to live a good life, we believe nothing right and everything tawdry and wrong. There is an internet forum (or twelve) for any deviancy known to mankind, with rabid supporters and detractors.
Children are not allowed to be innocent. If they are kept from knowledge of things adult for a while, they are instead pasted with corporate merchandising, slogans, and drivel. It is nearly impossible these days for me to find an affordable pair of shoes for my little girls without Dora, Nemo, Tinkerbell, Barbie, or those most hideous Bratz affixed to multiple surfaces of the vinyl. Why do our kids need this? They don't, but some corporating somewhere feels that they need the 'brand recognition' from infancy.


... so what is it going to take to win back our innocence, our attention spans, our true cultural identity? I'm not exactly sure, but I do know that it requires a severance of some ties. We cancelled our cable months ago and haven't missed it. We instituted a 'no licensed character' rule for clothing and acessories (not all grandparents adhere to this, but we're getting there). We bake our own bread, churn our own butter, and sew our own curtains. It's just a beginning, just a very bit of the surface, the brown part of the onion. Eventually, hopefully, we will have a patch of land somewhere with an off-the-grid straw bale house and multiple inventions working inside, a pantry stocked with home-grown preserves, and a cellar lined with homebrew. There will be a loom in place of a television, and out-loud stories in place of an expensive sound system. There will be herbs growing on the roof and mushrooms in the basement. Goats will nibble on our flowers and fruit trees will shower white petals on the gravel drive, hopefully. A huge kitchen will invite people in to sit and chat, argue, pray, read or draw. We hope for a hub of human activity, a source of learning and inspiration, a refuge from the storms of unrest outside.


It's a dream. We'd like to re-discover some of the roots of our human civilization and re-establish traditions of comfort and family.

Labels: art, conversation, culture, innocence, knowledge, learning, losses, modern, rebellion, society

Fifteen minutes into this year’s vacation, the speedometer died on our 2004 Hyundai Sonata. Although chagrined, we kind of wished it had happened one week previous, when Mike got pulled over doing 43mph in a 25 zone- then we would have had a legitimate excuse!

We researched the issue online, but found no other similar issues, no help, no diagrams. The Web is not quite as useful as people make it out to be.

But it hasn’t really affected our vacation negatively, not that much, yet. Determined to learn from every event that has touched my life, I gleaned a few tidbits from this as well:

Learn Math
Between Niles and Grand Rapids we were on a bit of a deadline, having an appointment at the GR Apple store for the Genius Bar to look at the failing battery in my MacBook Pro. Twenty minutes of battery life means less blog posts for you people, so we all know that must be amended!

So just how do you figure mph when not only your speedometer is dead, but your odometer as well? You use those handy dandy little roadside mile markers and the extremely awesome iPhone stopwatch. But the math… uh, hang on. Michigan’s freeways have a 70mph speed limit, and we usually travel at a comfortable 80mph (no one can ticket us for saying this, right?) keeping up with traffic. Eighty miles per hour works out to 0.75 seconds per mile, which is exactly 0:45 on the stopwatch. Since we are pseudo-scientific and prefer a larger core sample, we clocked two miles at a time, which worked out to 1:30 minutes.

My husband, the Ruby developer and basic genius, could not figure out the simple math equation to come up with those times. I wonder how many high school and college graduates are wandering around in this world, lacking the basic math skills to cope when their machines fail them. Math is almost a lost art amongst many people that I’ve talked to. Why?


Pick your Pacecar
Using a stopwatch gets lame after a few minutes, and once we realized that we weren’t going to make our appointment anyhow, we were able to relax and just follow people. First we followed a Scion, which, by our calculations, kept a nice steady 80mph for half an hour. When the driver got distracted by his cell phone and coffee, we picked a Chrysler driven by (I swear) one of the Hardy Boys. He popped off at South Haven, so we were forced to watch our tachymeter (which works just fine for now) for rpms. Every now and then we’d find another ‘pacecar’, only to be disappointed when it sped up or slowed down drastically, or just left the road.

When we pick a culture to identify with- a religion, a way of life, a political party, a certain set of friends, a cause- we often think that it will be paired with us for eternity. This rarely is true. People change. You change, I change. Politics shift, situations arise that necessitate a deeper search for meaning and identity. Religions suddenly mean more or less. Leaders fail, leaders rise, new leaders are continually found. Saving whales seems to be less important today than saving the environment, and this will possibly fall by the wayside in the future when a new crisis is ushered in. Your friends will up and move away, or have babies or get married or find Jesus or lose their sanity.
If you absolutely must align yourself with something bigger than you, pick something steadfast. One good friend instead of a party crowd. One true, abiding faith instead of a series of empty religions. A realistic set of principles and morals rather than a trendy philosophy.

The things that are your personal pacecars should not lead you to the edge of the road and into a ditch.

Break Your Gauges
Once the rush was over, we just sat back and enjoyed the drive. The sun was low over the hills and trees, slanting out across the sky and filling the car with gold. Summer’s glory was spread richly throughout my homestate, and it was enjoyable. Our eyes did not have to flicker back and forth between the road and the instrument panel. Sure, we didn’t have the luxury of cruise control, but who really needs it? We were finally in true vacation mode- no worries, no time limits. We figured that if we were going too fast and got pulled over, that we would just explain to the police our mechanical problem, and if we were going too slow- who would care?

How often in life do we judge ourselves by a gauge of some sort? I remember being 18 and single, with absolutely no boyfriend possibilities on the horizon. Just about everyone that I knew was either paired up or heading for it. I wasn’t particularly anxious for a relationship per se, but I did feel awfully awkward being one of the only single people. I began to cast around for a potential mate, and decided on a perfectly dreadful young man in my Bible study class- arrogant, aloof, and not particularly attractive. Nothing ever happened between us, fortunately, and I soon learned to set my gauges to being happy single. I think that I had to be perfectly happy in my singlehood in order to fall in love with Michael when I met him.

I try very hard (but often fail) not to compare myself to those with better cars, jobs, homes, or bank accounts than myself. I also try not to be guilty when I have something better than someone else! I used to look at the other moms who had it all together- savings account for each kid, tidy and well-decorated home, the trim little figure. Now I just try to make sure my kids are fed and clean and happy, that my home is welcoming and comfortable to us and others, and that art and literature are a part of every aspect of our lives, because that is what makes us happy.

Once my social and economic gauges are completely broken, I know that I will be not only a happier person, but a more effective one. What gauges do you need to break in your life in order to be happier?

Labels: comparison, learning, life, life lesson, perspective, relaxing, speedometer, travel

Every third weekend in July there is an art fair here in Cadillac. Replete with food, entertainment of all kinds, art ranging from mediocre to spectacular, and fun kid stuff- it is a lovely break in the middle of summer.

Several years ago, my little sister Julie, then just a scrawny teenager, began painting faces for a few bucks a pop. She'd set up a little stand at the art fair, arrange a semi circle of paint pots and glitter applicators, and sit down. The kids would throng the stand, sweaty dollars in hand, and come out decorated with butterflies, cobras, flowers, lightning, lizards, and nearly everything imaginable! I have had the opportunity of helping out on the off-year, making a few bucks while plying the two-dimensional art that I don't often get to.

Its been a while since then- all of us girls have our own kids now. My sis is still thin- but a lovely lady today, the worship leader and a pastor's wife at her growing church. We've missed a few years due to childbearing, work, not being around... but for the most part Julie's been there most every July, painting faces in the hot July sun.

This year I got to help out again. And I learned a few things that I thought I'd share:

1) The most wiggly of children is capable of extreme stillness if they know the payoff is within reach.
I had kids that could not stand still in line, yanking on mom's or grandma's hand while they shimmied and squirmed and knocked my paints over. The minute those kids were in the chair, and received a friendly admonishment to sit still or we couldn't paint their flaming guitar- they were a statue. Some kids try so hard to sit still that their faces scrunch up and they tremble just a bit.

2) This is the closest I will ever get to being Santa or the Easter Bunny.
Seriously, I have never seen kids stand in a boring line for so long other than to sit on Santa's lap! We even had kids stand in the rain! They would wait, studying our sample boards intently, being just about as good as kids can be. Some would wait for well over thirty minutes. I don't think I've ever willingly stood in line for anything for that long, but maybe as a child time meant something different to me...

3) Children are precious.
This is a platitude, I know. I have never been a fan of the mini-human. Sure, I have my own kids, but I have never chosen to be in the company of children- noisy, dirty, irritating little snots that they are. But for some reason I don't feel this way any more. Maybe its maturity, maybe its the simple fact that my own three noisemakers are at Grandpa's this week and I miss them. Or maybe it is just that, in a world full of vileness and apathy and greed and war, there are these tiny spots of innocence where all it really takes to set the world right is a handpainted rainbow (with sparkles, mind you!) on a thin, sticky little arm. Every single child that sat in my painter's chair was a darling capable of melting any hardened heart, if given the chance. There was the young girl who asked me if her painting was 'permnanent', the little boy who wanted a whole-face skull in order to scare his grandparents, the tiny tykes who could barely voice their choice of painting (a cupcake, inevitably), and the very serious little girl who needed to customize every color of her forehead tiara painting.

4) Glitter can cover a multitude of evils.
I have come from an artistic family. My mother is a phenomenal painter, my dad sculpts & draws, my middle sister is a wonderful decorator and has a good eye for color, my youngest sis is an amazing artist, and you regular readers know what I do. So I'm not your average gimpy street fair face painter, with a catalog of one soccer ball, one primary color rainbow, and one unrecognizable puppy. Julie and I have a pretty good repertoire of designs, all using multiple tones, color gradients, and fine detail. However, there is the odd brush stroke that cannot be undone, the line that bent when the arm or cheek moved. There is the lizard leg that went just a tiny bit canterwonky, or the flower petal that reaches out a quarter inch beyond its peers. A good dusting of fine cut iridescent glitter can make it all look better...

5) Our children are becoming normalized to mass production.
Julie and I painted our sample boards ourselves. Although we are the artists on the black canvas boards, and we are the artist on the peanut butter-smudged cheek, there is just not a way, really, to have every five-minute paint job be the exact same. Most kids would pick a painting off the board, then watch us apply it to their arm. Often, a confused look would cross their face when this strand of unicorn hair was longer, curlier, or more aqua than the strand on the board. Very few kids minded, and most were happy to have something unique, for them. But I realize their confusion when I watch a cartoon, or wander a toy aisle. Images of Disney princesses and Bob the Builder pass before my eyes- licensed character that have to look exactly like the next one. Mass conformity is scary. Keep your kids away from it if you can.

6) Incredibly simple things can make a child's day.
As an adult, I have somehow lost my ability to just be delighted. There is always the next thing to get to, a load of dishes to be washed, a bill unpaid, a headache forming just beyond the worries of the day. My favorite paintings to do are face. When you do a kid's arm, they pretty much get to watch it unfold, and are generally happy, but unimpressed with the result. When you do their face, however, they don't know what the heck is going on. They can feel the fine wet bristles tickle their face, they can see Mom's head nod in encouragement, and they can see what shade of yellow I'm using next. But they see the whole work all at once, in a mirror. There is generally the same reaction- an open mouth, glowing eyes, a little gasp. They linger over the mirror, almost touching the still-wet paint, afraid to smudge the little bit of art on their person. It is a moment of sheer delight, and they usually skip away happy. I need to find some things that delight me, and remember to just shove everything else out of my mind and experience that gasp, that uplifting of the shoulder blades, that joy.

I bet you do, too.

Labels: art, art fair, children, face painting, fun, kids, learning, painting

Children learn what they are taught. This point is driven home to me every single day of my life lately. Sometimes, its good. Michael and I have a very loving discourse, and the kids have picked this up for us as well. There's an awful lot of hugging, loving, and pet names in our home.

They learn the other side as well. Just the other day, I was struggling to start my brother-in-law's notoriously difficult weed trimmer. After nearly yanking my arm off, the miserable thing started, sputtered, and died just before I could turn the choke off. I stormed into the house, arm and shoulder wrenched in pain, grumbling loudly;

"Aargh!" were my exact words, "Stupid, blithering piece of crap machine!!"

Kid #3, always sympathetic, came up to soothe me,

"Whatsa matter with the crap machine, mommy?"

If I hadn't corrected her (between laughs) she may have grown up thinking of a weed whacker as a crap machine. I suppose it wouldn't be too far from the truth, but it is an incorrect label, and disrespectful to boot.
They are tiny parrots- always beside us, mimicking our words, our ideals, our style of dress, and our very lives.
If we teach criticism, they will be critical.
If we teach racism, they will learn to hate.
If we teach fear, they will be paranoid.
If we teach consumerism, they will never value anything...

They unconsciously pattern their life after our own, whether we acknowledge that fact or not.

Can you believe that some person has that much trust in you? That much blind faith, to just repeat every action and sound and inflection of voice? Humbling.

For some reason, the bad things are ever so much easier for them to pick up than the good things. I hang up my towel every time I use it, but I think it will be another ten years before my own kids do that- threats notwithstanding!
But I have taught- by accident- some of the worst things my children do and say. I regret these acutely every time they are bounced back at me, and all that I can do now is provide a better example. We are all attempting to love more and be angry less.

Some things your kids will pick up on their own. I don't know where my third child got her precocious ability to entertain, or where my second child got her passionate heart for the missions field. I don't know where my first child's unreasonable fear of aloneness came from, but we're dealing with it with all of the patience we can muster.

It's important to remember that your children will only be this impressionable for a few short years. If you must scream epithets at the nightly news, wait until your kid is out of the house. If your appetite is out of control, learn to curb it for the, not just you. Be loving to your spouse and those around you, and teach respect for others, for nature, and for self. Don't focus on the empty ritual of religion- for the kids- but rather find the root of your belief and teach your child about what your faith means. They perceive far more than you know, and they will reject empty tradition far faster than they will reject true meaning.

Love them, nurture them, and let them grow up. And remember, always, that its up to you whether or not a weed whacker is a crap machine.
Photographs © 2007, courtesy of Arielle Smous

Labels: copying, kids, learning, legacy, parenting

My youngest is enamored of liquid soap lately. When she is sent to wash her hands, we often have to go rescue the sink ten minutes later. I know its a phase, and they've all gone through it, leaving me slightly poorer in the household goods department. I'd rather have them with clean hands than filthy.

But I got an insight last week into what spurred this interest for her. I had, once again, sent her to wash sticky hands, and subsequently forgotten about it. When, several minutes later, my brain became aware of the fact that the bathroom water was still running, I dashed into said room prepared to give her the stock 'water wasting' lecture (that's lecture #103 in my Mommy repertoire)

She was standing on the stool, smothered in liquid soap, the water running uselessly. Her chubby little hands were working, rubbing the soap vigorously all over her skin, with the stuff glistening from fingertip to elbow. I somehow overcame my initial reaction (screaming) and sardonically asked her if she was done.

"Yup!" She nodded, sticking two fingertips under the water to rinse, "Now my hands will be clean for allllllll day!"

She hopped down from the stool, having only removed 0.03% of the soap, and headed for the towel.

"Oh, no you don't!" I caught her and set her wriggling three-year old frame back onto the stool.

"Mommy!!" She protested, "The soap makes me clean!"

"Only if you rinse it off," I countered, turning on the water and grabbing a washcloth, "if you leave the soap on, it's sticky and makes more dirt cling to your hands..."

She was already on to her next activity in her mind, and after three children, I should know better than to try to reason with a toddler, but that little conversation stuck in my mind. My kid thought that soap makes her clean.
Well, it does, but it makes you clean by loosening dirt and grease particles from the surface of your skin, and binding with them, and then the bound dirt washes away under the water. If you soaped up and never rinsed, well, you'd have as many sticky doorknobs and fridge handles in your house as I do!

How many of us smother ourselves in something cleaning or bettering, but never utilize the true benefits of it?

I have seen people immerse themselves in Biblical (or other) teaching, but never put any of the learning to use. This is just as useless as un-rinsed soap!

I myself am guilty of this- as an incredibly insecure person, I have turned to sharp criticism to cloak my perceived shortcomings. This affects every relationship that I am in.

I have watched my own father listen to and read the Bible day after day, year after year, only to go and gruesomely fail his own marriage, lie to people, cheat in business, and generally be a semi-criminal. The Bible teachings, meant to grow us personally, have only coated him, not penetrated into his soul and washed away the lust, avarice, and dishonesty.

I have watched people that are somewhat prone to hedonism turn to severe teetotaling, rather than learn to moderate their lifestyle. In the presence of freedom, their minds cannot handle their own bend to possible badness, and they feel the need to smother themselves in rules and legalism. The exact thing that Christ came to free us from, and they've ducked right back into it!

I have watched people smother themselves in substance to dull the pain of existence, smother themselves in self-indulgence to reward some inner childish inclination, or smother others in criticism, mockery, flattery, whatever fulfills some perceived need.

What we need to do with the good things in our lives- the teachings and lessons and Bible readings and self-discipline- we need to allow the root of it penetrate our thick skins and get down to do what it really needs to do: change us from within. A coating of something good will eventually wear off, but in the meantime bad things can stick to it:

If you smother yourself in Bible teaching without learning, you will find yourself confused.
If you smother yourself in rules without true basis or reward, you will find yourself self-righteous.
If you smother yourself in substance to dull the pain without getting to the root of the pain, you will find yourself ill.
If you smother yourself and others around in criticism and reprimand without love and peace and kindness, you will find yourself alienated and alone.

When Kid #3 smothers her hands in soap and doesn't rinse them off, they get dirty faster, regardless of what she thinks. She will learn, in time, to rinse thoroughly.

Hopefully, she will learn faster than her mommy and her grandpa did how to really separate the dirt from the good.

Labels: Bible, children, Christianity, dirt, kids, learn, learning, lessons, life, parenting, personal change, rinse, smother, soap