FALL IN LOVE: NASA HIGH DEFINITION EARTH PICTURE

Fall in love with our gorgeous planet all over again. How lucky are we on this beautiful blue orb? Here's NASA's recent release of its high-definition photo. And remember the one we all flipped out over when it was on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue--taken from Apollo 17?

One has romance, one has clarity; we need both.

I never thought about AIR from a design point of view, but now that I'm gazing at this floating sphere, I'm thinking: Hey, we have air that is perfectly proportioned, each element balanced for optimum life. Air pollution is a design problem--and the catastrophic speeding up of earth's global warming is a result of air pollution. Or rather, it is a problem of ruining what was a gorgeous design that makes possible the life we cherish.

SCORE FOR THE CHILDREN VS. HOLLYWOOD LORAX

Some of you may remember how grumpy I was about the new Lorax movie coming out next spring. The book is so haunting and beautiful. The movie, judging by previews (which seems perfectly fair to me) has all the subtlety of a branch falling on your head. Which is to say, deadening.

Dr. Seuss' story didn't need the addition of an adolescent love story; nor did it deserve to have the awful reality of a polluted, desecrated landscape cheerfully colored and covered up. After all, where's the power of the moral if everything looks lollipop pretty?

"Unless...Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

Well, typical: I groused. But the children actually did something. A 4th grade class from Brookline, Massachusetts, went to the movie's website to learn about how Hollywood was handling one of their beloved books. They didn't like what they saw.

So they decided to do something about it. They ran a petition at Change.org. and within days, got 57,000 people to sign up and demand that Universal Pictures add some messaging about pollution and global warming to their website. Their suggestions were fabulously clever.

And they won! These 5th-graders made a huge difference. So moms, once again, time to learn from our children.

Your voices matter. Let's keep up the good fight; let Congress know that we want an end to toxic air pollution. Hey! Homework can be fun!  

BREASTFEEDING ON FUNNY OR DIE: MOMS STAND STRONG!

I was appalled when I read an article about how the online comedy website Funny or Die pulled down posts and suspended the account of comedien Ahna Tessler--because she was shown breastfeeding. Facebook's been doing the same thing.

There are many things you can say about breastfeeding in public. They range from, "aww, gross, mom"--words known to have come from my small sons' mouths shortly after they grew out of the stage of wanting a breast in their mouths at any and all times.

Other reactions might be: "Privacy, please." Or, "How wonderful, what a treat to witness such a basic, intimate human bond...usually kept so private..."

But obscene? I looked up the word, just for a reality check. Abhorrent to morality or virtue? Designed to incite lust or depravity?

Really?

The non-feeders among us--in this case, the authorities on various websites taking down these pictures-- should come to terms with their own lust, if that is indeed what breastfeeding incited in their....breasts. But it is hard to argue that breastfeeding is at all obscene, much less an affront to a viewer's sense of propriety, when the web--including Facebook--is littered with photographs that are in fact pornographic. Are these authorities taking down pictures of barely clothed bodies in suggestive poses....in their advertisements? Or does paying the bill change the terms of engagement?

I can remember a time when "Awww, gross, mom" was a boy's response to scenes of (what we used to call, do we still?) French kissing, heavy tonguing, in a movie. Web authorities seem to have matured past that particular stage of development. But breastfeeding in public remains a weird taboo.

Sometimes kids need fast food. (Wonderful image above from Amadori.) You don't have to breastfeed in public if you don't want to. You don't have to watch it being done, either.

But let's not get carried away. Breastfeeding babies is not now and never has been an obscene act. Any obscene association (if there is one) is in the mind of the viewer. And we can leave sexual fantasies where they belong. In the imagination, or the privacy, of one's home.

Moms have plenty more important things to worry about.

PUTTING CONSERVATIVES BACK INTO CONSERVATION

Here's a recent interview with Rob Sisson, president of Republicans for Environmental Protection. His thoughts provide a refreshing change from the overheated rhetoric we're getting from the extremists who don't "believe" in global warming and don't want to protect our air and water from pollution. 

THANK YOU, JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ, FOR CREATING YET ANOTHER MAGIC CIRCLE

I just got home from an amazing evening at the home of Jacqueline Novogratz, a friend who came into my life about a decade ago. Jacqueline is the author of a marvelous book called The Blue Sweater, about her life's journey along the path that led to the founding of the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund.

You know how sometimes you meet amazing people and think, hmm, why has this person come into my life just now? I felt that way when I met Jacqueline, but it was years before I saw the answer.

Jacqueline radiates life force, an energy that goes beyond charisma, though she has that, too. She is intense and driven and idealistic and profoundly good and caring. She and her team--for she would be the first to say that her work is never done alone--change the world for the better. Jacqueline is a connector; she runs circles round many, but she also draws circles around people, bringing them together, creating a safe place to let down guards and open hearts.

This evening thirty or forty women gathered to hear about a fascinating new book written by Sarah Murray, Making An Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre, How We Dignify the Dead. When her father died after a long illness, Sarah decided to learn more about grieving. She traveled around the world reporting on the rituals different societies have developed around death and mourning. And she began to think about her own death, how she might prepare for it, and what her legacy might be.

We were each asked to talk--for no more than a minute-- about what we wanted our legacy to be. As I am the sort of student who takes limitations very seriously, I thought and thought until I had narrowed my response down to fifteen seconds (not quite understanding that I was undersharing...) It was quite simple: I hope my children (for they are the ones for whom I hope to leave a legacy) will say, "She tried to make the world a better place."

Note emphasis: "tried"

I've had death on my mind quite a lot recently, with the sudden passing of my longtime friend (and college professor) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Grieving is such a strange and complicated process. You reel in a line of memory, and there, trailing behind the fresh grief, needing just a yank to pull it up, comes old pain, long-buried, covered in muck and weeds, suddenly exposed and raw, tangling round your heart. Its been like that.

I've been thinking about Elisabeth's legacy to me. She was someone who wanted to make the world a better place. And I believe she succeeded, with her writing, with her therapeutic work, and with her friendships and her teaching. Her new book about prejudice against children, Childism, is a significant achievement towards an understanding of the ways in which we, as a society, do not act in the best interests of our children.

Jacqueline is a person who is making the world a better place--in everything that she does. When I realized that my career as a magazine editor was at an end, that I no longer relished another such job, I went to talk to Jacqueline several times for advice about how to move forward. I realize now, looking back, that there was nothing specific she could tell me. What I wanted to learn from her was right there in the way she felt about her work, and in the impossibly enormous scope she gave herself.

Tonight, I realized with a start how important a light Jacqueline has been shining in some corner of my soul over the last five years as I've worked my way towards doing a new, different kind of work, one with which I feel profoundly engaged. I'm thinking now of our small effort with Moms Clean Air Force to fight air pollution on behalf of our children--to stop the pollution that is harming human health, and bringing on global warming, and the attendant climate chaos with which we are already struggling. It is getting worse; this is a legacy we are leaving our children and grandchildren. Will this be our biggest legacy? (And what of our childism in our disregard for our children's future?)

Jacqueline is the sort of person who makes others believe it is necessary to at least try to make the world better by your having passed through. Each of us has that capacity, and each of us needs to feel safe enough to unlock it. Each of us needs our Elisabeths and our Jacquelines, people in our lives who help us see the importance of hopeful, hopeless work--because making the world better is akin to emptying oceans with tablespoons, and at the same time, one must believe it is possible--and it is. As I got to know Jacqueline, I realized that I wanted to feel about my work the way she did; I wanted that passionate intensity, and that belief that it was serving a larger cause, and even if in a small way, doing good.

Jacqueline talked about the legacy she carries in her heart from her professor at Stanford, John Gardner, who, in the course of a long and distinguished career, at age 56 founded Common Cause. She met him when she was a grad student and he was in his late seventies, and as she describes it, they started talking and didn't stop until he died a dozen years later. She talked about how she wanted to give to others what he had given to her. Of course she is doing that; I could see it in so many of the faces of her colleagues and friends gathered this evening. I thought about what Elisabeth had given me, and how I wanted to share that...and though I have not had that singular focus in my life, until now, I understand that it is never too late to at least start trying to do something that feels impossibly ambitious.

If I had thought about a legacy fifteen years ago, I probably would have said, my children are my legacy. My children are, of course, their own people. I cannot claim them, though I did all that I could to set them on a right path-- which for the first years led towards me, that they would know I was always there for them, and for the next few years led away from me, that they would know they were free to move on-- and I held their hands along the way as long as I could.

My answer this evening fit into fifteen seconds. I hope my children will one day say of their mother: She tried to make the world a better place. But really, I could whittle it into a two-second pitch: She tried. If my children turn around and themselves try, and keep trying, I will have given them a meaningful legacy.

I'd love to extend the circle here, and ask you for your thoughts about your legacies. What do you hope your legacy will be? How do you want to be remembered? Do you think about that at all (without me posing this question) and does it guide you in choices you make?

SLOWING DOWN AT THE NOGUCHI MUSEUM

On Saturday afternoon I took myself over to Long Island City to visit the Noguchi Museum, something I've been meaning to do for years. It is a serene, quiet place. I have never seen so much of Noguchi's work gathered in several rooms. The sculptures need space around them to breath, as even the smallest of them have powerful presences--but here they are a bit crowded. Still, lucky visitors.

A fountain had a smooth basin carved into the top so that the water simply spilled and gurgled quietly over the sides. I admired the gesture of his signature, carved in stone but so fluidly that it looked as if it had been inked with a brush.

That chunk of glaciated marble, so white it was blue...Noguchi incorporated the drill holes of the quarry into the piece...But I was overwhelmed as soon as I entered the museum. I noticed that I did what I always do when I'm on a "checklist mission": I started racing through the first cavernous room, my eye bouncing from one piece to another.

Luckily, there is a movie of his Noguchi's life playing in a continuous loop in a dark space tucked off to the side. I walked in and sat down, catching my breath somewhere around his marriage. He didn't like being married, and never had children. He wanted to entirely free to do whatever he wanted to do, without any attachments or encumbrances.

The movie slowed me down and got me into a better frame of mind for looking at art. Funny how that can be so challenging, especially if the trip is vexed by delays in transit systems and such. I was transfixed by the vistas of pieces he had designed for buildings all over the world, and I began to get a grasp of what Noguchi wanted to do, the intention of his work. I watched as the film showed Noguchi working on his stones, using large sanding devices and or hammering the face with smaller chisels.

Noguchi designed and built his museum. I don't know if he was involved in the placement of the pieces but I noticed several lovely juxtapositions of sculpture and garden; even in winter the few trees he placed outside have a strong presence.

He was clearly deliberate about every aspect of the presentation of a piece; strips of metal and slabs of wood made up pedestals. His dealer, Arne Glimcher, said that Noguchi would grow very attached to some of his work, and even if he had sold it, he would say, no, that's too good to give away, I'll make another one just like it for the client. Did anyone ever notice, I wondered? Did anyone ever have a strange feeling that they didn't have the same piece with which they had been smitten?

Sometimes, someone in the movie said, Noguchi would feel that he had cut off too much of the stone, and that would make him unhappy. He would leave it for a few days, while it healed, and when he returned to the piece, he could see where to go.

I found myself peering at the sculptures. They are handsome and strong in their entireties, but that day, to me, they were even more marvelous up very close. I'm a rock hound; I can be distracted for long minutes by patches of boulders, and my suitcases after a vacation are full of rocks.

But I couldn't take a picture of any whole piece; I couldn't even figure out how to see them in their entirety, and it was a strange feeling. I decided I wasn't ready for it. Sometimes I approach books that way, too...I can't see the entire book, I get lost in sentences of transcendent beauty, and lose the shape, the architecture, of the whole edifice. This, of course, means I must return. And I will.

What Noguchi managed to do to the surfaces of the boulders he worked seems to have brought forward something essential about their nature, whether smoothed to a boot-polish black...

... or cut away so that the red seems clotted, ready to bleed out. Or meaty.

The only piece I did capture in full was one that looked like a heart tilted sideways. Or heaving itself hotly up out of the snowy ground. 

THE COMPUTER POTATO RETURNS TO HER DOWN DOG

I suppose no one ever makes a resolution to spend more time becoming at a computer potato, though I certainly spent last year acting as if that had been my intention.

So as the year turned, I resolved, as did everyone else, to get fit. Though I walk almost every day--and could log a dozen miles easily--I gave myself a slide last year, what with intestinal parasites (India nearly a year ago already!) and writing deadlines and the paperback tour for Slow Love and the startup of Moms Clean Air Force (check out our video of Ayelet Waldman, whose book The Bad Mother is fabulous).... My preferred airplane meal is a bag of Teddy Grahams and peanut (for protein) M+Ms, which is fine if you are on a plane once every three months but a bit more problematic when that's dinner five nights in a row.

What to do? I don't like walking in freezing weather (not that we're having so much of that...ahem, global warming, everyone, pay attention! Resolve to connect with this issue and be a force for change!)  I love to run, but have hurt a hip several times in running. Cycling? I've been really wanting to train there--on the inspiration of my son Alex who loves cycling, but I'll have to buy a bike. And the cold...etc. What to do, indeed?

All this internal nattering was wheeling through my brain on the last evening of last year, part of which I spent at the last performance ever of Merce Cunningham's dance company. A sad passing, that. The angular, taut MC way of movement has been etched into my consciousness as long as I've been watching modern dance, and because of his relationship with John Cage, who was active at Wesleyan, I was exposed to quite a bit of their way of seeing bodies move through space, to say nothing of sound moving through space and time. It was thrilling. Ah, college. A time of limitless possibilities, all manner of fabulousness and nonsense too, and who could tell the difference and why would anyone want to?

The last dance of the legacy tour was in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, and the extent of my critical evaluation is this: it was a glorious performance.

Because there were no curtains and the stage was in full view before the performance, those of us who got there early to nab a good seat could watch the dancers warm up for 45 minutes. That, too, was an incredible treat. Many of them went through yoga moves.

Somehow I ended up tucked on a bench along with a small chorus of dance veterans, many of whom were well into old age--choreographers, dancers, producers, designers. The woman next to me, who was at least 80, sat quietly as people came up to pay obeisance, but she became quite animated during the show, laughing at certain moves, clapping, sighing appreciatively, murmuring. She provided quite a good guide as to what to notice.

During the warm up one dancer bridged herself up into the yogic "wheel pose"--Chakra asana? Urdhava Dhanurasan? ah, the infinite possibilities of the web, the unknowability of answers revealed therein...It is a back bend with feet and hands on the floor. The dancer held it for a while.

Those beautiful, fit, lithe, strong, bodies, capable of spontaneous leaps of joy. How divine in their expression.

My elderly neighbor watched this bridge arch up, sighed heavily, and said, "Ohhhhh, I used to be able to do that."

I watched that bridge arch up, sighed heavily, and thought, "Ohhhh, I used to be able to do that."

It used to be one of my favorite stretches.

Then I thought about all the things I used to be able to do. I used to ski down Colorado mountains. I used to be a waterskiing counselor in Vermont, for heaven's sake, slaloming across the mirror surfaces of Lake Champlain at sunrise. Heaven. I used to run four or five miles, easily. I used to roller skate the roadway around Central Park at dawn. I used to...

Suddenly it came to me: I do not want to become a person who used to be able to do that.

I want to be able to do that wheel pose. And more.

I am of an age where the road divides. One way is banked with sloth, torpor, entropy, and what-have-you kinds of nonsense, throwing everything into a gloomy shade. The other road is full of hairpin turns. They require flexibility and a nimble spirit. Much more exciting. The sun shines, and the views are better.

Why, oh why, is it so very hard to keep doing the things that are good for you, and that actually make you feel good for a long time?--and why, oh why, is it so easy to slip into the ways that end up feeling bad, mere seconds after they felt good? That is the question I will ponder, when I'm not mindlessly caving into sloth, torpor, entropy, and other kinds of nonsense.

So off to yoga class I went, to learn, once again, the moves that open heart and limb.

P.S. Went to a few classes. Shocked to see how much flexibility I had lost...and how much my body welcomed the stretches and began to move towards the poses. The yoga does stay in the body, somehow.

Then I read that horrifying New York Times piece about how yoga wrecks your body.

During my next class, all I could think was, your ribs are going to pop out. Your spinal fluid will seep out spill down your insides and your bones will grind together. Your hips will be thrown out of joint... Yes, I have a vivid imagination, but when you read that piece and learn of the injuries people have brought on themselves....you'll see why fear suddenly moved into the middle of my practice.

So I wrote to Katrina Kenison, the author of a beautiful book called "The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoir". I happen to know through some correspondence with her that she is devoted to her yoga practice. I wanted another take on that article--and I wanted reassurance. Here's what she wrote:

my gentle advice to you is to replace fear in your yoga practice with compassion -- for yourself, for your body, and for where you are.  Go slowly and feel your way.  Breathe.  If you are paying attention, and caring for yourself rather than trying to compete with some thirty-year-old on the next mat, you are not going to get hurt.  Anyone who pops three ribs in a spinal twist is brain dead.  I was really shocked that the Times would publish such drivel, but life is too short for me to pick away at all the erroneous statements and illogical conclusions therein (although a few of my Kripalu classmates have done a good job of that!).  I do know that when I practice regularly, gently, my body feels lighter and less stiff and my hips and back don't hurt.  And when I don't, everything aches all over and I feel about ten years older.


And here's a great response from yoga teacher Bernadette Birney, who writes about how yoga has always been about power--and that must be respected!  I love her story about how she became a yoga teacher; there's a lesson in it for all of us, no matter what our dreams of becoming....