Peg Kerr's Journal

This feels like more on the same theme: See Nesting, Thrifting, Pictures and Dismantling. Now that the bookcase is down entirely, I am eyeing my bedroom like a blank canvas and I have been working to determine my own taste and preferences as I consider how to fill it.

It feels quite odd, in a way. I am in an acquisitive mood, almost like a magpie eyeing shiny things to bring home to its nest, which feels unusual. For much of our marriage, the house felt more like Rob's house than my house or our house, just because of the enormous amount of stuff he put in it. We didn't have money for decorating, and it seemed pointless with so many things in the way. And so I buried the desire to make purchases, the desire to make my home my own. There didn't seem to be any purpose to it.

Now it is my house. What do I want it to look like? I am craving...beauty. I am seeking out the elegant, the exquisite, the unique.

On the other hand, as I have been culling Rob's possessions, I have been going through a long period of GETTING RID OF THINGS. It feels weird--and perhaps counterproductive?--to be acquiring again, bringing things into the house. What's more, the places I have been looking have been thrift stores and estate sales. I am keenly aware that this is stuff stocked often because people have passed away. No need to have lovely things if you aren't around to enjoy them. Swedish death cleaning starts for many people around my age.

So I am acquiring, but trying to do it with careful judgment. Just a few small things, and only if they truly capture my attention as beautiful.

Image description: Background: floral porcelain. Upper: a miniature winter landscape oil painting in a gilded frame. Center/lower left: four elaborately floral teacups. Lower right: a small table with a six-volume set of books (an antique heirloom set of Shakespeare), supported by brass bookends shaped as books.

Magpie



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This week, both theme-wise and visually, is a follow up to last week's card, Arthritis. As I've been doing physical therapy on my hand, I've also been thinking a lot about the aging of my body in general. My foot has been hurting, where I broke my toe and had arthritis flare last summer. My joints in general feel stiff and tight, and I KNOW I should be doing weight-lifting. Frankly, I hate it, and it's hard to make myself do it.

As the same time, work is going through a weird time. We have a new bishop-elect, but she hasn't started yet. A couple of my coworkers have already found new jobs and it is very probable that more will follow. We had lunch with the bishop-elect, and to our relief, she said she isn't going to be making staff changes immediately. But I know changes are coming. I have to think about what I want (and will learn what is possible) with the knowledge that my 65th birthday is coming up next year. What about retirement? I have to research Social Security, which is extra complicated by the fact that my work situation could unexpectedly change, and I'm already drawing social security benefits. Figuring this all out, with factors outside my control, will be tricky. But I can't ignore the situation. My life is going to change, whether I like it or not, and that will be uncomfortable.

In the middle of thinking about all of this, I ran across a video by a motivational speaker that I'm been pondering ever since. He was saying that discomfort is something that you need to learn to tolerate and even embrace, because when you are uncomfortable, that is when you make the most life-satisfying changes.

I've been thinking about that, and I've realized it is true. I got a black belt in karate because I was willing to go to class and do a million slow kicks and sweat and work hard. I even got a concussion from sparring. At our final black belt exam, our instructor told us, "Think back to your first white belt class, and how many other people were there. Think of how many of them have fallen away for one reason or another. You are the few, the very few, who stuck it out. And you are the ones who will be getting a black belt today."

Writing a novel is like that, too. I am not one of the ones for whom writing is effortless. I have to tolerate discomfort of the uncertainty, the blundering about trying to figure out a plot, the hours spent in front of a keyboard. But I have two novels published, and I'm about to pass 40,000 words on my third.

I will have to ramp up the exercise program again. Do the mobility stuff, do the weight lifting stuff. I have to figure out what my work life will be like under all of these changes, and if that isn't meant to be, what my retirement will be like. It is ironic that as a species, we are wired to seek comfort. We want to be warm, and fed, and to cuddle with our mates and to have no troubles or worries. But that is not what is best for us.

Boats are safest anchored in sheltered harbors. But that is not what boats are for.

I initially thought to start the image with a bed of nails, but I couldn't find an image like that in the public domain, and so I decided to make it a bed of brambles instead.

Image description: Bottom of the card: dry, cracked earth overlaid with brambles with sharp thorns. Card center: a bronze statue of a woman lying on her side. Behind and above her is a lush flower garden.

Uncomfortable



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I wrote in my holiday letter at the end of last year that I know that 2024 will include a lot of changes.

Fiona will be starting her plumber's apprenticeship program and getting married.

Delia will be graduating from college and moving from Wisconsin to find a job in Minnesota.

As for me, I know that my job will be changing. I work in the office of the Bishop of the Minneapolis Area Synod for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Her second and final term will end this year and a new bishop will be elected the first weekend of May.

The bishop's staff serves at the pleasure of the bishop, and so we all have to tender our resignations and then wait to find out whether the new bishop (and at this point, we have no idea who it will be) will hire us back.

Since we work for a church-based organization, if we DON'T get hired back, we get no unemployment. I guess that the custom is that we would get three months of severance. But that's it.

What's more, the synod is struggling financially--we get the money for our budget from what people put into their offering plates in our congregations on Sunday mornings, and between the pandemic and inflation, that number has dropped substantially. I have a hunch that while the staff is being shaken up anyway, it might look like it would make the most financial sense to combine my position with one of the Assistant to the Bishop positions. So my job is looking increasingly precarious.

I have been trying to gear myself up for the changes to come. Even if I get to stay in my job, I fully expect that I will be losing my boss (the bishop) and my supervisor, someone with whom I work very well.

At the Epiphany service at my church, we followed the custom we've been doing the past couple of years: everyone was offered a sticker with a word on it, something to contemplate in the coming year.

My word was "Acceptance."

I have often joked that I am a Gryffindor but with high-security needs. Brave, when I need to be (and I have needed to be, especially since losing Rob), but change is still hard.

In fact, I did a Hard Thing in the week that this collage covers to try to get ready for that change. It didn't work out (Peg says vaguely) but I will keep trying.

Change is a-coming. And I will have to accept it when it does.

I do rather like the way this collage turned out. When thinking about 'change' and acceptance,' I was thinking about some of the principles of Zen Buddhism, about balancing stones. Stones may seem changeless and immovable, but the sea will polish them away and tumble them over, and as they grow smaller, you can pick them up and carry them around. I think the curves in the outline of the phoenix are mimicked by the shape of the stone heart, and the slant of the fiery bird is echoed in the slant of the words.

The bird, of course, is a phoenix, the mythical creature that dies and is reborn in fire.

I can feel the sparks starting to stir under my own breastbone.
I know they will get hotter.

Image description: background: semi-transparent picture of a rocks that have been smoothed by the ocean. Lower right corner: three rocks piled one atop the other, with an open bloom tucked in at the side. An old-fashioned key rests on the top one. Lower center: the word 'Acceptance' is written. Center/left: a bird made of fire (a phoenix) with wings outspread. Upper right corner: a heart shaped from smooth pebbles. The word 'Change' is overlaid over the heart.

Change and Acceptance



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When you set out to make major upheavals in your life, it takes some serious self-examination if you want to do a good job of it: remembering, pondering, cataloging, prioritizing, and daydreaming about alternatives.

That is what I have been doing this week. It has been very uphill work, but I hope it will pay off. I also hope that Elinor Dashwood will be able to explain more soon!

I tried two or three various approaches to this collage, so it took a bit longer to make than usual. I looked at various images for mirrors, and I experimented with skewing the first image I found but wasn't satisfied with the result. I had to hunt a bit to find a nice-looking mirror held at the correct angle. And then the picture of me holding up a mirror and looking into it just seemed too simple to be satisfactory or complete, and I decided to add the lotus for enlightenment and an owl for wisdom. When I came across this particular owl, I was immediately struck by the idea that it looked as though it could be peering in the mirror, too, which I thought added a slightly humorous touch.

This one I'm pretty pleased with.

Image description: Background: water droplets trail down window glass. A woman (Peg) looks into a hand mirror. An owl behind Peg's shoulder also peers into the mirror, its head cocked in apparent curiosity. Foreground: a pink and white lotus in full-bloom is superimposed over Peg.

Self-Examination



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

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I'm going to be a little bit cryptic about this one, because it involves something I'm not quite ready to talk about yet (note the Elinor Dashwood tag, which I use when I want to be reserved about something). But this collage is about a conversation I had this week with someone I really trust to give me solid life advice. What this trusted person told me is that it is time for me to make a specific life change. A big one. Huge. It will mean a lot of life upheaval. And while what she was advising to do is something that has crossed my mind for several years (since the pandemic started), I think that she made her case so well that I am seriously reassessing things. I think I am going to do it.

If I can.

The first card in the tarot deck is the Fool. The zero card. The Fool is usually depicted as a beggar or a vagabond, wearing ragged clothes & stockings. He is gazing upwards toward the sky (and the Universe) and is seemingly unaware that he is about to skip off a precipice into the unknown. Over his shoulder rests a modest knapsack containing everything he needs – which isn’t much (let’s say he’s a minimalist). The white rose in his left hand represents his purity and innocence. And at his feet is a small white dog, representing loyalty and protection, that encourages him to charge forward and learn the lessons he came to learn. The Fool represents new beginnings, having faith in the future, being inexperienced, not knowing what to expect, having beginner's luck, improvisation, and believing in the universe.

This is the Fool as depicted in the Rider–Waite deck:



I've sometimes told people that I'm a Gryffindor, but one with high-security needs. What I am thinking of doing, what I am actually going to start trying to do will definitely take courage. But--if I am lucky, if my faith in the future is justified--it might address some of those needs that have been unmet for so long.

The background of this collage is a card that my kind mentor gave me when we ended our session. Although you can't see it, I posed for the picture on my back stoop (where I fell and got my concussion last year). The stick on which I hung my sack is my karate bo. I used a picture of my daughter Delia's dog Violet for the dog at my heels.

(See this earlier post I made about The Fool).

Image description: Against a background of words of life advice, Peg stands in the pose of the Tarot Fool: looking at the sky, holding a stick with a sack of possessions in one hand and a stem of flowers in the other (didn’t have a white rose and so used a bunch of silk peonies). A dog capers at her feet.

Reassessment



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

I read a Facebook post essay this week that gave me much food for thought. The writer recounted his experience going through his possessions as he and his wife were downsizing, and his realization that he achieved peace and satisfaction at his discovery that what he had, in the end, was ENOUGH. Someone in the comments recounted the tale of Joseph Heller the time he went to a party at the home of hugely rich hedge fund manager. Another guest told Heller that the host had made more money in the past year than Heller had made from thirty years of his royalties from his book Catch-22.

Heller retorted that on the contrary, he had something much preferable that his host could never hope to have. He had enough.

The essay made me think about the line I discovered in a list of life goals that Rob wrote out in his twenties. He wanted to be not poor--but not rich, either. He just wanted enough.

That impressed me. I thought it was rather wise.

I realized over the course of this week that in fact, I have been mulling this concept over in a number of different aspects of my life.

Of course, I have been posting quite a bit over the past few years about culling possessions in the aftermath of Rob's death. What is the right amount of things, of stuff, to have around? How much is enough?

What is the right balance to strike in things like my diet? My exercise program?

I have been thinking about my neighborhood, because there has been, unhappily, a rise in crime in my area, and I have been thinking about personal security. How much of a sense of safety is enough? (I have in the past jokingly described myself as a Gryffindor with high security needs).

I have always said that part of the appeal I find in tarot is that it emphasizes and guides toward moderation.

Edited to add: see also my comment about the children’s book The King’s Equal.

The thinking I've done about this helped determine the design of the card: back when Rob was alive, when I was most exasperated with the glut of his possessions, I used to say that if it were not for his insistence on keeping so much stuff around, my bedroom would ideally only contain a simple bed and a vase with pussy willows.

Enough



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

It's difficult to describe what the last week in Minneapolis has been like if you're not living here. If the verdict in the Chauvin trial had not come in, this past week's card would have been about the National Guard occupation, which was extraordinary, unlike anything I've seen in my entire life. (A headline that I photographed and planned to put over photographs of boarded-up buildings read "Guard Tightens Grip on Metro.") That's what it felt like, with military vehicles trundling by in long processions, armed guards on the streets, toting firepower, and pallets of barriers piled up at all the highway on-ramps, ready to close off highways at a moment's notice.

People were on edge as they went about their business. And then the word came down that the verdict would be announced within the hour.

I know that people were listening around the entire world as the verdict was read, and the city gasped out a big exhale of relief.

Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three charges.

I thought about joining the gathering at George Floyd Square afterward. (The photograph here shows the street leading up to it, strewn with flowers.) I did not. Instead, I sat in my home and thought of him, and all the people who fought to seek justice.

(Compare the design of this week's card to last week's.

Convicted



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

*Deep breath*

Okay.

This is maybe the most complicated-in-thought card I've ever done (the card is at the end of this rather long post). I will try to explain it, and doubtless, some will be TL;DR and/or I may miss the mark in explaining it (if so, sorry!), but, well, it is important to me. And it's been the result of/prompted by the sort of deep reflective inner work that I hoped this project would spark, so I'm pretty pleased with it. Both aesthetically and what it's opened deep within myself.

The card started with my tuning into one of the prayer gatherings being held at 8:00 a.m. every morning while the Chauvin trial is going on, hosted by the organization Healing Our City (some of the organizers have ties to the Minneapolis Area Synod for the ELCA, my employer, and several of my coworkers are tuning in every day).

The day's reflection leader, Rev. Frenchye Magee of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist, invited the listeners to reflect on an image, a plant growing in a fractal pattern, which is common in nature, as we considered the thought, "What we practice of the small becomes the practice of the large." Large changes, she explained, begin with the smallest changes we make in ourselves as we engage in the work of social changes and justice, and those changes spiral out, becoming an opportunity to repeat the pattern in ever-enlarging arcs of love and hope and healing that transform the world.

As I thought over the next few days about this meditation, I made the connection with what I am doing in my own life. Last week's card, Books, was about the small, laborious changes I am making in my own life to open up space for something new. This past week, I shipped off my wedding china to a company that deals with used china as part of this downsizing/changing process (see the teacup in the upper right).

"Wait a minute!" you cry in outrage. "Stop right there! How dare you turn a meditation about the changes necessary to bring about social justice into a rumination about downsizing and decluttering. How self-centered and self-absorbed can a white woman be!" Well, yes, but please give me a moment to explain. I promise I will tie it all together.

I have been studying the concept of hygge for the past couple of years, and as I have been dealing with All of Rob's Stuff, I have become aware of the Swedish term döstädning, or as it's called in English, Swedish Death Cleaning. As I have struggled to go through all of Rob's stuff, I have sworn to myself, time and time again, I WILL NOT DO THIS TO MY GIRLS. I am aware that I have to make the hard choices, the small changes--but it's not only about simplifying my life to be kind to others after my death. I need to be aware of the changes I need to make in my mentality--caring more about people than things--not just in preparation for my own death, which hopefully, will be a long ways off yet. But also it's necessary to open up space for the life I truly wish to live.

There is nothing like becoming a widow to make you think about preparing for death. I saw how Rob became less and less tethered to his possessions as he lay dying in the hospital. He didn't care to read or open his laptop, and he didn't show as much interest as expected in the gifts we brought him, certainly far less than usual.

What ties it all together was something prompted by a song included as a part of worship in another Healing Our City gathering later in the week: People Get Ready:

People get ready
There's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesel's hummin'
You don't need no ticket
You just thank the lord
(See the ghostly train at the top of the card.) The song, as well as all the thinking I have been doing about making small changes in my life, made me remember J.R.R. Tolkien's great story "Leaf By Niggle." (You can listen to a lovely recording of the story being read here. Which is coincidentally where I got the script spelling out "Leaf by Niggle" in a font based on Tolkien's own lettering, that you see overlaying the ghostly train. Niggle's perfect leaf, dappled by dew, is underneath.)

Niggle was preoccupied by his own concerns, his hope of painting a perfect tree, leaf by glorious leaf. He is annoyed by the constant demands put upon him by his neighbors, especially the intrusive Parish. The constant interruptions cause him to neglect his work; in turn, his inability to finish his work caused him to be insufficiently concerned about his neighbors. Finally, he was called away from his work because he had to go on a long journey on a train, clearly a metaphor for death ("There's a train a comin' / You don't need no baggage / You just get on board"). It is not until he undergoes a series of small changes (in a realm that reflects Tolkien's Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory) that his heart opens up to his neighbor Parish, and in return, he discovers his Great Tree, a real living tree, as he pictured in his imagination but could not quite capture.

Luke 12: 13-21 tells the story of the rich fool, who cared only for building barns and piling up his wealth, until God required his soul to come to death, and what good did his riches do him then? A related parable is the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31: a rich man thinks only of his possessions and his own pleasures, ignoring the downtrodden Lazarus outside his gate until both come to death, and what good did his riches do him, in comparison to what he should have done for Lazarus? (“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again [in Dickens' A Christmas Carol]: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”)

What should we do for Lazarus? What should we do for Parish? What should we have done for George Floyd, who had his life cut short by death? What small changes do I need to make in my life to open myself up to them? I hasten to explain that I'm not trying to say that de-emphasizing possessions is the work here; it's part of it, but mostly I'm pointing that process out as a metaphor for the work. I hope I can escape self-absorption, and make the changes to turn my attention away from mere things to the people around me: my neighbors Lazarus, and Parish, and George Floyd. And I have to make the small changes to root unhappy patterns out my life, including, yes, the inner racism I am training myself to see, the small selfishnesses, like putting away and getting rid of the old familiar things in my life that are no longer appropriate to the life I wish to lead. And in doing so, I think I can open myself up more fully to truly seeing and helping my neighbor.

It is difficult. It will take many small changes. But death is one of the few certainties in life. It puts so much into perspective, and things become so much clearer.

(So...did I manage to tie it all together? And did you actually read through all the way to the end???)

Changes



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

I keep thinking about Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which he said:

”...Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

I’m grieving about the property damage, yes—-the terrible loss of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery bookstore particularly hurts—but people are more important than property, and the protests over the death of George Floyd are righteous. Justice for George Floyd trumps everything. Echoing Lincoln: could it be that all the burnt buildings, all the destroyed buildings are divine justice, a mere drop in the bucket of expiation for the robbing of black Americans of their economic justice? The stolen wages of slavery and sharecropping, the redlining and higher mortgage rates for would be black homeowners? The denial of GI penefits, jobs and pensions?

A comment on Twitter last night: don’t expect people who are shut out of the benefits of the social contract to adhere to it.

(I’m still glad that the neighborhood watch saved the Nokomis Library last night from the knuckleheads who tried to burn it down.)

Edited to add: And I wholeheartedly append to this post naomikritzer's comments below.

Here's a new card I made tonight that I quite like.

I've taken the Strengthsfinder test, and my very top strength is "Strategic."

The Woman Who Copes Ahead - Committee Suit
I am the One who plans ahead to make the future as successful as possible. I can instantly plot the best path through the maze. I am the Ant who brings in the harvest, who keeps an eye on the clock and the calendar, who saves for emergencies and retirement and always remembers to pay the insurance bill. I am gifted, wise, confident, and clever. My family benefits from my foresight and organization.