Irrational Exuberance

As we watch Alan Greenspan leave his post as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board after 19 years, everyone’s talking about his famous phrase “irrational exuberance,” his term for the tech stocks bubble of the 1990s.

No doubt I’m not the only blogger this week (and maybe a few preachers will get into the spirit) contemplating that phrase and the wonder of it. I can’t help it, and if it’s a cliché by now, forgive me!

ir·ra·tion·al adj.
1. Not endowed with reason.
2. Affected by loss of usual or normal mental clarity; incoherent, as from shock.
3. Marked by a lack of accord with reason or sound judgment: an irrational dislike.

exuberance noun
1. joyful enthusiasm 2: overflowing with enthusiasm [syn: enthusiasm, ebullience]


Of course I’m not thinking about economics, like he was, when expressing these words in the same breath. I’m thinking about the utter joy I feel, in spite of the darkness in the world. And it's irrational because it's not of the mind!

If we listen to our minds, then all the bad news is the end of the story – especially when we worry about the future.

What is beyond the bad news? What is beyond the loss of job, loneliness, financial pressures, relationship trouble, disease, environmental disaster, war, depression, grief?

If there is something beyond – someOne -- then we have to get out of our heads (yes, Nicholas) and into the Other.


Art from album "Broken Existence" by
00 PAEBAC 00 (artist unknown)

It’s hard work. And I’m not just talking about the Power of Positive Thinking. I’d call it something like Powerful Being.

I’d call it Irrational Exuberance.

Tara: sacred or just special?

Last summer I connected with Tara in Ireland, a sacred site with monuments older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.

Previously, the only connotation I had for "Tara" was in "Gone with the Wind." Well, Scarlett's family was Irish, and the revered Irish place called Tara inspired the name of their plantation. Some say "tara" means a hill of great prospect and that you could see most of Ireland's counties atop it.

The Hill of Tara has profound history. It was the seat of prehistoric and historic Celtic kings. It's where St. Patrick went to confront pagans and their ancient religion.

Before I even left the US on university business, while still in the Detroit airport, I fell in love with the Tara brooch (8th c.) pictured in my Dublin travel guide. It became my goal to see it in Dublin's National History Museum, which I did, in the room full of ancient brooches used to fasten cloaks closed. The tara brooch was discovered near the Hill of Tara, County Meath, in 1910.

Later that week on a day trip into the countryside around Dublin, I visited Tara. I saw the ancient stone monuments and the Mound of Hostages, a tomb dating to 2500 BC. But when I saw the yew trees in the churchyard, I felt I was meeting old friends.

Yew trees are the oldest trees in the world. They're used in churchyards because they're thought to protect the dead, and they're associated with kings and power. I felt their power, more than anything in that amazing place. To be in the presence of a living thing hundreds and maybe thousands of years old! I remember my mom saying she was a tree worshipper, and I'm pretty sure I inherited that from her.








Many graves in Ireland are decorated with Celtic crosses, having a circle where the cross arms intersect. It is said that St. Patrick wanted to honor the Celts' pagan worship of the moon goddess and so incorporated the circle/moon into the symbol of the cross. I think that's pretty cool.

Don gave me this cross for Christmas.

Note: Since this post, I discovered that the trees were not yews, but beeches. I left a comment shortly after the post to make the correction, but all comments have disappeared from this and most posts this year. :(

Tree of Life

I love sycamore trees.

I don't remember seeing a sycamore as a child. I don't know if there were any in my small Michigan hometown. I heard about a sycamore tree in Sunday School. There was a story of a short man, a tax collector, who climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus, for he couldn't see him over the crowd. Jesus went to him, looked up and talked to him, inviting him to a meal at the house where he was staying and thereby blessing him for his perseverance and curiosity. But I didn't see details of the tree in my imagination, just the man.

I didn't know what a sycamore looked like. Besides, I've since learned that the sycamore-fig in the Luke story is not the same tree as the North American plane tree or the European sycamore. It is an evergreen that bears fruit, important to Middle Eastern life in biblical times, as much so as olive trees.

I first was conscious of a European sycamore in Paris with my sister Nan in 1997. I don't know when I first knew they were sycamores, those trees that line the Seine between the Pont Neuf and the Pont de la Concorde. Maybe I read about them in a travel book.

Our first day in the city it rained, and we walked along the Quai du Louvre under umbrellas, under the sycamore trees.


The mottled patches of the trunks were more vivid in the rain, and I took my sister's photograph leaning against one of them. She wore black agsint the tree's giraffed skin in shades of apple green, cinnamon, taupe and charcoal.

There is a sycamore near the building where I work on the park-like campus of MSU. In winter especially, it looks like a ghost tree amid the oaks, beeches and maples whose bark spans a spectrum of black to grey and brown.

I think now that the sycamore is my glimpse of God, of mystery. It is pale and unearthly at times, its almost white branches hard to see against winter's snow. As for Zaccheus, the tree provides me a view of the divine.

Happy Birthday, Amadeus

A celebration of the wonders of musical genius, the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a good day to contemplate my muse, Joni Mitchell (herself inspired by Mozart to begin piano at age 7).

If I'm trying to start writing a poem, and creativity lags, I can put Joni on the Bose, and words will come. They can't help themselves.

The 1971 “Blue” album has been a favorite of mine for 3 decades. My favorite song, “Carey” is on this album. "The wind is in from Africa . . ." -- oh melt me.

Another sweet song on “Blue” is “Green,” and who knew, besides Joni, who or what it was about?

Back in 1996, shocking the world and her family, Joni Mitchell announced that she wanted to find the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was in college, unbeknownst to almost everyone. Turns out that the song “Green” was about giving up this baby.

". . . Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed
Little Green, have a happy ending.
. . ."


Joni and her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, found each other in March of 1997 through the internet. Their relationship is complicated. (What mother-daughter relationship isn’t?)

Joni Mitchell calls herself a painter first and musician second. Many of her paintings can be found in her CD cases.



Joni’s voice has grown deep and dark with decades of cigarettes. The range is gone, the clarity suffers, but her soul is still evident in the lyrics of her recent CDs.

Joni Mitchell inspires me through creative expressions of who she truly is. She keeps digging. She’s fought it out in relationships over the years, she’s made mistakes. But she keeps digging down to her Self.


How do you bring that truth to the world?

Every day is new.

What do you do with ugly?

I want to restart the thoughts from Tuesday’s blog “Rather be doing something else?” about separating life into dualities, such as beautiful/ugly, work/play, right/wrong, win/lose (hmm, may I say Spartan basketball?), etc.

In reality, do opposites exist? Does virtue, for example, have an opposite?

Krishnamurti tells a story about a beautiful home and garden walled off within an ugly, foul village. He says, “To deny ugliness and to hold to beauty is to be insensitive.” We want to be in the beautiful place, but what do we do with the ugly? Shut it out? Resist it?

I hope you'll read the whole story in the link above (click on "story - if the link doesn't work, click here: http://tuljo.store20.com//krishnamurti/commentaries_on_living_series_1/1956-00-00_commentaries_on_living_series_i_chapter_20_), but this statement sums it up:

“The good is not in the garden, away from the village, but in the sensitivity that lies beyond both.”

Of course there may be action we can take to help change what is ugly and unpleasant. But there will always be unpleasantness, and we can't fix it all. Like, there may not be a thing I can do about the strip malls that clutter up and uglify our cities.

Awareness of all that lies around us takes practice. With that, if we find a way to accept what is ugly, unpleasant and problematic along with what we find attractive, pleasant and fun, we just might find that sensitivity to what lies beyond.

And then what?

MSU vs Michigan tonight

While I’m still sending waves of peace and harmony, I’m going to play with competitiveness, o.k.? Ha!

Back to my favorite sport: MSU men’s basketball.

Michigan (13-3) and Michigan State (15-4) are still even in the Big Ten with 3 wins and 2 losses.

Michigan State has won 12 of its last 13 against Michigan.

MSU is ranked #11 in the country. Michigan is unranked.

It will be a fun matchup tonight at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor.

Go Spartans!

Click on the title "MSU vs Michigan tonight" for a preview of tonight's game.

Click here for Coach Izzo's comments going into tonight's game.

Trivia:
1,500-800 Club - Paul Davis, above, (1,492 points, 801 rebounds) needs eight points to reach 1,500 for his career. In doing so, he will become just the second player in MSU history to record 1,500 career points and 800 career rebounds, joining Greg Kelser (2,014 points, 1,092 rebounds). Davis would also become the 31st player in Big Ten history to reach this milestone.

1/26/06 Update: Kudos to Michigan for pulling out an upset last night! MSU dominated the first half, ahead by as much as 13 points. But it was all Michigan in the second (with some help from officiating, but I'll try not to blame it all on that), and they beat us 72-67. I must say this Michigan team is stepping up. Tough loss.

Catch the Wave

The day is full. I’m sending out waves of peace and harmony today. Open up and receive it. All is well!

(Click on the title "Catch the Wave" and read a cool article about this. You can send out the wave too!)

Rather be doing something else?

How much of your life do you look forward to being somewhere else?

That was today’s Buddhist wisdom for the day from Beliefnet.com.

I confess, I’ve been looking forward all morning to my lunch hour when I could work on a new blog post! And I’ve also been looking forward to seeing a movie after work with my friend Inge: “End of the Spear,” the true story of the American missionaries killed by Auca Indians in the 1950s.

While there’s nothing wrong with looking forward to a pleasing experience, I know that I’d rather be doing that thing I look forward to, and so how completely in the NOW can I be? This reminds me of my sister’s recent post on her blog about getting work done before play. We tend to divide up our experiences that way: work and play.

Recently I’ve tried to look at household tasks – and other traditionally “unpleasant” aspects of daily life -- as elements of life that contain beauty, tried to find ways to not split the world into dualities of like and dislike, beauty and ugliness, work and play. If I live in this moment and accept what is happening without resistance, I find I live more completely. And why wouldn’t I want to see beauty in everything?

Is the story in the film I'll see after work a good example of finding beauty in horror? Yes. But I'm not just writing here about results, i.e., the fact that good came from tragedy in the story. How can I find beauty right now, without attachment to a result?

Hint: This woman scrubbing the barn floor (could be me!) might see green grass and birds through the door, the barn cat jumping from pillar to post, feel the breeze blow through the barn, smell the hay, etc. Besides the pleasure of having a clean barn floor!

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish writer and winner of awards. I first came across his work when I read about his 2001 novel, My Name is Red, after which I bought it and began reading it. I never finished it then, but I’ve started it up again.

Interestingly, and as these things sometimes go, Mr. Pamuk is in the news these days for telling the truth about how the Turks massacred Kurds and Armenians. It looked as though he would be drawn up in Turkish court for defaming "Turkishness," but in light of Turkey’s desire to be accepted as a member of the European Union and its sweeping changes toward a more tolerant society, the case was dropped today.

This post is about something Mr. Pamuk wrote, something I read this morning in My Name is Red. It’s in a chapter where a tree is speaking (!). It says,

“I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning” (p. 51).

As much as I get pleasure from this world -- nature, people, food, beauty-- I also want to find the meaning behind the surface.

I read in Rumi (another writer born in Turkey -- back in the 13th century) this morning:

"There is a happiness and a sadness

that are just figures on a bathhouse wall. Move through the
world naked, noticing the pictures

that live. Inner joy and grief are different from artful
appearance. Take off your

phenomena-clothes when you enter the soul’s steam bath: no
one comes in here with clothes on. "

(Rumi quote from Coleman Barks' translation of "Beggars" in a book of Rumi poems titled The Soul of Rumi)

Apple Cake

When I have time and energy, I love to cook and bake from scratch. I work full time, and so most days I cook simple meals. Once in a blue moon, I bake. Today, I just had to make a cake. My husband Don had to go in to work, and it's Sunday. He needs a treat when he gets home! And so do I.

I have three favorite cookbooks: Joy of Cooking, Betty Crocker and The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. I love other cookbooks, but these are the three I turn to most.

So I found a recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook that called for ingredients I had in the house (living in the country means a 15-minute drive to the store): Apple Cake with Caramel Frosting. Oh man, those chunks of baked apple in the cake, and homemade caramel frosting oozing down the sides -- does anything taste better?

Why I love Paris

It's as if I never saw Paris back in 1975 when I studied abroad at age 18. I didn't connect with the city much in those 3 days on my whirlwind scouring of Europe and its history in 8 weeks. I recall chasing along the Champs Elysees in a caravan of minibuses and eating spaghetti at a cafe, of all things. Not stellar Paris memories.

So my visit with my sister Nan in 1997 just after our mother died with Alzheimer's -- a sort of gift to ourselves after the strain of caregiving -- felt like the first time. Our hotel was just a couple of blocks from the Tuilleries gardens. So we'd find rest by the fountains there at the end of a long day of walking the city, the sun setting behind the Arc de Triomphe.

Three more visits since then have confirmed what many people feel: There is much to love about Paris. Here are my top 10:


1. Pain aux raisins
2. Pont Neuf
3. The Van Gogh room in the Orsay Museum
4. Picasso Museum
5. Shakespeare & Co. bookstore
6. Walking on Ile Ste Louis
7. A concert in Ste. Chapelle
8. The sycamores on the Seine
9. Laduree tea salon
10. Erhart's Mary Magdalene statue in the Louvre

The fountain photo was taken by my sister Ginnie ("Boots") on one of our trips.

MSU Men Annihilate Iowa

The only sport I love is MSU men's basketball. I am attached to the players. They're like family. If I miss a game, or even part of a game, I sulk.

Today we killed, I mean killed, the ranked (#23) Iowa Hawkeyes. (We're ranked #12.) The score: 88-55. That's Iowa's first Big Ten loss in four games.

This photo is of Maurice Ager, my favorite Spartan. He scored 25 points this game. Now that's elevated.

In the Big Ten MSU is now tied at 2 wins and 2 losses with Michigan and Illinois. Wisconsin is 4 and 1, Indiana and Iowa 3 and 1, and Ohio State 3 and 2. The Big Ten is the best league in the NCAA. And there are so many teams vying for top of the Big Ten, it's going to be a gripping couple of months watching them fight it out.

Winter in Michigan

Considering I'm on dial-up at home here in the country, I'm pleased I finally got the blog done and uploaded a photo! So I'm going to practice again.


Unfortunately, the best photos I took this morning with the fresh snow on the evergreens were with the date feature on. By the time I went back out without the date feature, some of the snow had melted. But I still found some pretty shots.

This is new!

Here's hoping I'll learn how to do the blog thing. After myspace, I've been feeling too little flexibility. Maybe being able to post photos more easily at blogger will help me stick with it.

I took some shots of the farm today. Lovely winter in Michigan.