There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
--- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."
---Allan K. Chambers

Lately, I've been feeling like hell. Honestly. There's just no other way to put it. Just the local news, the world news, man-made disasters like the gas prices, other natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes. Just everywhere I look , I see pain -- it's just been damn depressing. But everyday, I still look for something inspirational. Some days are harder than others, and that can be depressing in itself, looking for grass growing in the cracks of the sidewalks; but in a way, the lack of something simply put and beautiful makes finding that something inspirational so much more valuable.

I just got this in an email and found Fred's Faculty Greeting so extremely refreshing, I'm posting it here without permission, but I bet he wouldn't mind. Enjoy!


Welcome New Alums – the Class of 2008!

The 58th Memphis College of Art commencement on the lawn was held on Saturday‚ May 10‚ 2008. At this ceremony‚ we celebrated the conferral of 46 Bachelor of Fine Arts and 5 Master of Fine Arts degrees. We also conferred our very first Master of Arts in Art Education degree. The commencement address was delivered by our very own Coleman Coker‚ MFA 1994‚ Studio Arts. Coleman is an internationally prominent architect and founder/principal of buildingstudio‚ currently headquartered in New Orleans. He received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and a Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies from Harvard University. He has held the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the University of Arkansas and is currently the Favrot Chair at Tulane University School of Architecture.

This year‚ the Faculty Greeting was delivered by Fred Burton‚ Professor‚ Fine Arts. Fred’s captivating greeting was delivered with passion and heart and deserves to be shared.


The Faculty Greeting:

Hello. I'm (pause) Johnny Cash …
Just testing … I’ve always wanted to say that.
My name is Fred Burton. I’ve been teaching at MCA since 1987‚ and I’m a professor of Drawing. I would very much like to welcome all of you:
President Nesin
Vice President Strickland
Honored guests
The Board of Trustees
Distinguished faculty
Our wonderful staff
And most especially . . . the 2008 graduates‚ their families and friends.

It’s an honor to share this moment as you move on from MCA out into the wide‚ wide world.
Now‚ every semester I pin quotes onto the walls of my classroom for inspiration‚ and there is one quotation in particular that I think about most often. It’s by Osho‚ an Indian philosopher. He said‚ “Knowledge is not information‚ it's transformation.” Of course that’s true‚ because I know that our graduates view the world very differently now than when they first entered MCA. So‚ in order to prod that process along a bit‚ and with a quiet nod of thanks to the late American Indian painter Fritz Scholder for his words of inspiration‚ here are a few things for our graduates to ponder:

From now on:
You are your own movie.
You are not finding yourself‚ you are creating yourself.
So live with intention‚ and have faith in yourself.
Continue to learn.
Set lofty goals‚ and have heroes because they will show you what is possible.
Live a creative life because the world needs that now more than ever.
Your art is now your passport to the entire world‚ so try to live in as many places as you can. Go to Barcelona‚ Berlin‚ Florence‚ Paris‚ Vienna‚ and beyond because travel will enrich your soul.
Live with beauty: with flowers‚ music‚ books‚ paintings and sculpture.
And now that you know how it’s done‚ keep a record of your time.
Also‚ look for the unknown‚ for it is all around you. Read well. Listen and speak well. Know your country‚ know the world‚ know your history‚ and know yourself.
Take care of yourself physically‚ mentally and spiritually. Be good to those around you. You owe it to yourself.
And do everything with passion. Give all that you can.
Remember‚ life is short‚ and art is long.
I want to pass on some final advice from Peter Schjeldahl‚ an art critic who currently writes for New Yorker Magazine. These are his Ten Commandments for Artists:
“Work‚ work‚ work‚ work‚ work‚
Work‚ work‚ work‚ work . . . Don't whine.”
Thank you very much.

Professor Fred Burton
May 2008

---

Finally, carbs are good for you again.

I've been waiting for this to happen. The diet world has finally revolved back into saner, more-friendly universe -- the Resistant Starch Galaxy, just past Carbohydrate Way.

GOOD. Potatoes: you know I never doubted you.

Yes, protein is good for you. But I say never trust a diet that consists mainly of pork rinds and bacon -- and no bread. If I've learned anything this far in life (besides "never try washing a cat by yourself"), it's that just about everything in life works better with balance.

And, balance seems easy, but it's incredibly hard. That's another thing I've learned.

And, lock your car doors even if you are at a cemetery. Never run out of toilet paper. Never think more Beaujolais actually makes you more interesting. Never say never. But nevermind, all that's for another action-packed day.

Right now, it's time to kiss a potato, and celebrate the truth about carbs.

Not only do certain carbs rev up the fat-burning process with resistant starch crystals, but research shows they can prevent certain cancers, may fight diabetes and heart disease, and helps boost your immunity -- which is exceptionally good news for patients taking immuno-suppressing drugs in therapeutic doses like you may be doing with aplastic anemia treatments.


It boosts your immune system
"When you have low levels of good-for-you bacteria in your digestive system, it’s very difficult to fight off disease,” says Joanne Slavin, Ph.D., R.D., a nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota. Resistant starch may boost the growth of probiotics, the same kind of healthy bacteria found in yogurt that keep bad bacteria in check.


More talk about probiotics later. But for now, read the entire article here.

"What foods build platelets?"

That is the big question I asked myself over and over and asked the professionals around me the same. "I tell people green, leafy salads," one tech told me. "It may not be the entire truth, but at least they least something good for them."

But I don't think she was too far off the truth. Spinach has a lot of good, red blood cell-building iron in it, plus fiber.

Sure, cooked spinach may not have all the nutrients of raw spinach, but it never hurt Popeye.

Protein is a good thing to eat when your body is running down. Fish is an easily digestible form of protein that is rich in healthy fats like Omega oils, good for the heart. Don't get me started on wild salmon, not yet anyway. But if you don't like fish or you are more in the mood for a comforting food, this recipe is a good one for protein with the egg and cheese.

Besides the ease and the completely satisfying taste, what I really like about this is you can make it on a Sunday, cut it into portions and refrigerate it or even freeze it, and it reheats perfectly -- even in the microwave.

The smell of this fills the whole house with comfort, and bonus: I modified this recipe to omit half the fat and a good percentage of calories of the original recipe with that reduced amount of cheese, but the flavor is still totally there.

This is also a good recipe for anyone avoiding the white flour and extra maybe not-so-healthy fats in a typical pie crust.

I am stuck on quick and easy Crustless Spinach Quiche:

1 large yellow onion, diced
1 Tbsp or so of olive oil
1 (10 oz.) package frozen, chopped spinach (thawed)
1 1/2 to 2 cups shredded cheese*
2 slices American cheese, folded and cut into chunks
6 large eggs, beaten with a whisk
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/8 tsp ground black pepper

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly spray 9-inch pie pan (I use a Pyrex glass one) with cooking spray.

2. Heat oil over medium heat to saute diced onions in olive oil until they are mostly softened with some of them a bit caramelized-brown around the edges. Sprinkle 1/4 tsp salt on them for luck, then add the thawed spinach, mixing onions throughout the spinach, cooking the spinach just enough to remove any excess moisture.

3. In a large bowl, mix eggs, cheeses, salt and pepper. Add spinach mixture and stir to blend. Scoop into prepared pie pan.

4. Bake in preheated oven until eggs have set and edges are browned (about 30 minutes). Let cool for 10 minutes before serving.


* The original recipe called for 3 cups of shredded Muenster, but I used half of that amount, substituting a six cheese bagged mix of asiago/mozzarella/parmesan/asiago/provolone/romano. You can use any shredded cheese you want, and it's excellent. I added those American cheese slices in just to have a chunk of melted cheese here and there. En-joy.

Dontcha just love the word "whisk"?

The other day, someone said, "I was keeping up with everything for a while, but you don't write much about it anymore on some of your blogs." And while I was thinking about how true that was, and how *no news is good news*, someone else standing with us said, "Well, that's actually good thing."

It is a very good thing.

Tomorrow I have an appointment to see the gynecologist who found the problem I didn't know I had and helped save my life, starting with a routine, yearly exam and a simple blood test. Am I excited about telling her "thank you"? Yes and no. Cold metal tools, latex gloves and paper gowns, no. Feeling better and and on the way out of the woods that I was in? That would be a big yes.

The hardest part about being sick is different for everyone. Things have to be done in stages. For me, one of the hardest parts was admitting that I was sick, at all. Oh trust me, it's fairly easy to admit the truth when you are lying in a hospital bed for 13 days with your mother curled uncomfortably but into a recliner to one side of you and an IV pole attached to a PICC line your other arm. Staring into endless needles of high-powered steroid after steroids and a few bags of chemo, handfuls of pills that burn, more handfuls of pills to keep the others from burning -- this is only the beginning of what some people feel. All I could imagine was how painful and trying it must be for other people whose treatments were longer and more complicated. Painful and trying but truly hopeful. I could hear the 4-year old child next door screaming and crying and throwing things when the medicine carts would roll into his room. I felt exactly the same way he did, but until lately, I haven't really cried about it. And I almost threw something yesterday, but I didn't.

Stage One. Now, Stage Two.

With a lot of therapy inside and out, for the emotional side of illness and for the other things that I haven't talked about here that fell away from my life in the past year and a half, my deal to myself is to enter a new stage, to understand and heal from the inside out on my own with pills you can't see. But maybe now that I am at the point in retrospect where I can admit that I *was* sick, and now I cry in fits of panic and fear about what happened, that's hard for me to deal with. but it means that I can start moving on now and I will.

Remember me telling you that one day, you'd look back and see how far you came? Remember that my mom said "You have to feel bad to feel good?" Well, I guess I'm here to at least tell you that, yes, you get there. In small steps , you falls and recovery, and you get there.

Another reason I haven't talked much about what has been going on was because it's very hard to keep my balance on a tightrope and look down into a cavern underneath me. So I didn't, I don't, and unless your motivation works best that way, I think no one should.

So, my point, and I do have one: now it's time to talk about other things. Now it's time to talk about things like staying healthy, body-wise and emotionally. Let's talk about nutrition like I said I would, and about things that can keep you and your blood healthy. I want to talk about the positive things that will happen to you despite the illness. I didn't forget I said I'd do that for you if you Googled here looking for some positive thoughts. I owe a lot of people a lot of things here, so it's time to start.

That sounds like we need a recipe. Yes, a recipe. If you feel up to it, cooking can be a a truly therapeutic thing, all around. Plus, you need good nutrition to heal faster. This I know from experience. So get out your whisk.

"We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting space for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you're craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own..."
~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I think it's wholly fascinating that joy and trauma are so close to each other -- laughing oftentimes looks like crying, and the reverse. Sadness is a degenerative state. Happiness is a regenerative emotion. Luckily and sadly, neither one of them are permanent. To me, life seems to melt from solid to liquid, evaporating into gas only to condense back into a solid, usually after a long, hard freeze.

I believe in a higher and all-encompassing power of good. I'm not setting out to convert anyone. But I just know that when I've learned, it means that it's been revealed to me past the bad and into the good -- things like learning the difference between strength and denial. Strength is active, denial is passive. One holds you down in a moldy basement gladly, the other lifts you up to see the stars in the darkness of night. To begin again, you must realize that fear takes many forms -- anger, hate, mockery, repression, apathy, loneliness, pettiness and so on -- in my life, fear equals letting go. I've had to let so many people go, naturally and unnaturally, which is not something I am innately good at. Lately especially, I've had to practice letting go. I replace fear with hope. But still every time, letting go hurts beyond words, years, and sometimes beyond a lifetime.

But I've also learned that replacing fear with hope equals peace. And peace feels like a soft, heavy, warm blanket that sinks down on you and then through you, all the way to your heart.

I am never good at letting go of people I love. I'm not even good at letting nearly loved people go. Which I'm realizing to myself that I "nearly love" a lot people, and I cherish them sometimes more than they can themselves, and I have a hard time giving up on them. It's not something I do on purpose, but I see the potential in just about everyone.

Faith, hope, and devotion: my strengths have sometimes also been my weakness. Even though it all hurts every time, I'm not giving up one, single thing that I believe in today. In fact and despite it all, I will probably add even more things to believe in tomorrow. In other words, I will strengthen through trauma with joy.

"Happy Birthday to me."

"The squeaky wheel gets the oil," she said.

My mother is the one who taught me with old sayings and phrases. "Your granpap always used to say that. 'The squeaky wheel gets the oil'…"

How disturbing, I thought. How many times within a week did he have to confront someone acting like a squeaky wheel, I'd think, to work that into a conversation enough to say it all the time? The questions kept pouring in: What did he do for a living? Where am I from anyway? Why doesn't the word "yonder" come naturally to me, why don't I already just know these saying and phrases? And how can I weave this new one that I've just learned into a third grade conversation without sounding like Benjamin Franklin, reincarnated. Luckily, I never found the opportunity to work this phrase in at such a young age.

I remember lying sprawled across my mother's bed which was gigantic to me at the time and was covered with a white chenille bedspread. There I was, thinking again. Nothing unusual, just thinking and staring up at the ceiling, and enjoying that it was night again. Taking a break from that, I watched my mother putting on her makeup in the bathroom. She looked irritated with her hair. (Her word would be "aggravated".) I have no idea why or what I asked her, but it lead to a brief conversation on gray hair and wrinkles. "Why do people get gray hair and wrinkles?" I asked. "Oh, just getting old. It happens to everybody." I secretly panicked at that thought as she tucked her hair back here and there and gave herself a final inspection. "…just thank God it doesn't happen all at once."

It wasn't a normal answer for anyone my age, I'm sure; but it made good sense to me in that mildly edgy, comforting way. I considered it and nodded. I think she's tall and pretty, I thought. She looks mad, but she's not. She's being funny in the face of it all. And yes, I did think these thoughts when I was little. Probably because of all the answers my parents gave me at a young age -- they made me laugh and think at the same time. Maybe not always in that order though.

"In order to have a friend, you must be one." And "always return something in better shape than when you borrowed it." Pointing up between rain clouds one afternoon just beginning to go evening, she remarked on a small hole between the clouds just big enough to see the blue sky behind it all. "There's just enough blue in that sky to patch a pair of pants." As only a 15 year old high school girl can do, I looked at her in a way that suggested she'd just whipped that one out of her aluminum space-bonnet on her long, boring rocket ship journey from the planet Mars. "Nope, your Mama Sue used to always say that…'There's just enough blue in that sky to patch a pair of pants'…"

Why? I asked. "Beats the heck out of me, but I think I can see what she was getting at."

"Make new friends, keep the old. One is silver and the other gold." If I ever had to describe my mother, I'd just start by listing off all of her friends. She has a vast array of friends. Each one is unique and different, like a special, handcut gemstone all set in a solid gold crown she wears like a party hat when they're all get together. Everyday is a birthday when she's with friends. And it's an honor to know her friends.

"Quality over quantity," is how we both live. But to look at the exquisite examples around her, she has both. She has friends from 50 years ago and some from 50 minutes ago. Maybe you've already met her – yesterday in a checkout line at Kroger's most probably, or at a crafts fair three years ago. Or at a campsite in the mountains, or just passing by as you walked your dog. "I'd talk to a rock if I had the chance," she told me once as I rolled my eyes, after sitting outside for 45 minutes in a sizzling hot car, just waiting for her to stop making friends in the McDade grocery store. "She never met a stranger," is how my dad put it. I bet sometimes, he wished she had.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with rocks. But she's a little more choosy than that. She chose her friends, and they chose her. "You can always tell someone by the company that they keep." I know that's true. And when I look at my mother's friends, I see angels and healers, cooks and artists, actors and comedians, Buddhists and Christians. Different and same. Daylight and dark. With just enough blue to patch a pair of pants.

When I look at my mother's friends, I see my mother. And happiness, acceptance, and laughter. Lots of laughter. And that is the best gift she could ever give anyone, and the best gift she could ever be to me.

"Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be." That is how I can describe my mother on her birthday today, and for many more to come.


Happy Birthday, Mama!
xoxox --bny