Category: creativity

Camping on Fire Island

Published on by mbcoudal2 Comments

Why can’t life be more like camping?

I took the darlings camping to Fire Island this weekend. We got there via subway, commuter rail, a ferry ride and a long walk.

We left NYC on a crowded, rush-hour Long Island

finding shade

Railroad. Four hours later, we were sitting around a picnic table near our tents, listening to singing birds in a bush and roasting S’mores.

As I pushed our canvas cart through Penn Station, (Deliver me not into Penn Station!) balancing backpack and toppling cooler , one of my darlings said, “You look like a homeless woman.” Knowing Lorenza Andrade Smith who is beautiful, kind and homeless, I took this remark to be a badge of honor.

In my own defense, we used or ate every single thing we brought. Admittedly, the journey to the campsite was not as much fun as the experience at the campsite.

Once there, the best parts were:

  • the empty early morning beach
  • watching my son go for a run on the beach
  • diving into the frigid Atlantic on a steamy day. And once in the wave, having that momentary panic of not knowing which way was up!
  • a cold shower in the communal bathhouse
  • seeing the antlers of a deer emerge under the boardwalk
  • in the shine of our flashlight, catching a glimpse of a fox running from our site
  • on the middle-of-the-night bathroom run, meeting a father and son with lanterns who followed a toad wherever it led
The worst parts were:
  • mosquitoes
  • mosquitoes
  • mosquitoes
My take-aways:
  • Nature is incredible
  • Find shade
  • You don’t need your iPhone to be happy (the kids left their phones at home!)
  • My kids are awesome
  • We need each other
  • We can lean on each other

The whole camping experience had an Outward-Bound bonding experience for the four of us. We were resourceful. Of course, the kids bickered, which usually drives me crazy, but they also engaged in long conversations and activities, such as counting one another’s mosquito bites, which I think, numbered 72. Seriously. (And we were using strong insect repellent!)

As usal, we couldn’t have done it without our friends.

  • The aforementioned Lorenza Andrade Smith who inspired us to camp
  • Our church’s Boy Scout troop and the Scout Mistress Louisa Anderson who lent us the three tents
  • Joanna Parson who encouraged us and was going to join us but instead got theater work and gave us her campsite (So we had bedrooms and a dining room/kitchen)

Maybe life is like camping — a lot of work, a lot of fun, and too much sun.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

How Women Can Have It All

Published on by mbcoudalLeave a comment
flowers in Pennsylvania

On Wednesday night I came home from a work trip to Elizabethtown College, where I was leading communications and organizational change workshops for United Methodist Women. I hung out with my fam and then flopped on my bed with the latest issue of The Atlantic. I LOVE their cover stories; the issues on single women, obesity, and parenting have given me a lot to blog about. (For example, see Letting My Kids Find Their Own Happiness.)

My first reaction — and I feel bad about this — was sheer jealousy. As the author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, admits several times in the article, she is elite. Ms. Slaughter worked for the Obama administration and is now a professor at Princeton College. Sure, I have an advanced degree and a decent job. But as I consider new ventures in the coming months, I don’t get to pick between national policymaking and the Ivy League. (Or do I? Perhaps, it’s true, we women aim too low?)

I feel held back from success, not  just by the age of my kids and the demands of my work, but also by my husband’s chronic illness. As a friend commented on Facebook, “I’d like to have written that article, but I’ve been too busy having it all.” So yes, I was jealous. I wasted time comparing my achievements to Slaughter’s and I came up short. But as the saying goes, Don’t compare your insides to others’ outsides.

I found a lot to like in The Atlantic Article on Having It All, including Slaughter’s suggestion that kids’ schooling hours should match parents’ working hours. As an after-school teacher, (yes, I have part time jobs to go with my full time job), I think kids should stay longer at school. And they should do fun stuff, like drama and sports and art. We all need more time to play. Let’s make work and school more playful and creative and then it’s not such a drag.

One missing ingredient in the article is the need for everyone to create a supportive community, not simply have an awesome spouse. I know I get by with a lot of help from my friends and family. You can pursue happiness  –and remember the pursuit is guaranteed, not the attainment — if you have a village behind you. I’ve written about the three things we need for community: hard work, passion, and diversity.

I need to remember the hero’s journey. The hero has to try and fail several times. And the hero has to leave, even if that means going on a business trip to Pennsylvania!

“You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited.” (From Joseph Campbell on The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers)

As I set out on a new journey professionally, I know that I will fail. Like Odysseus, the homeland will be in sight and then the winds will whisk me back to the sea. Yet I will adapt. Each of us must make our own quest. With flexibility, creativity, and community, we can pursue happiness (a.k.a., have it all).

Happiness is not found in professional or material success — though give me that success and I’ll let you know. Honestly, success is found in having good relationships and in creating beauty and in being in nature.

So pursue happiness. When you embark on that pursuit, you become the mythic hero on a quest. You become the hero of your own life story. And you can have (or pursue) it all.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Living Simply

Published on by mbcoudal3 Comments

I was really psyched that my friend Lorenza stopped by last night and my daughters got to meet her.

Lorenza Andrade Smith journeys around North America, voluntrarily homeless, offering kindness and communion to the people she meets. She and I met after the United Methodist Communicators (UMAC) conference last fall. I’m glad she’s loving New York and its beautiful diversity. She has to leave NYC at 5 pm today, arriving in Texas two days later via Greyhound bus.

Lorenza inspires me because of her simplicity, her non-traditional life and her ease with people.

She travels with one backpack and one rolling cart.

photo by Catherine Jones

We talked about Facebook, (of course!). We talked about how we use our phones to take photos. Lorenza talked about having her iPhone stolen at a $3/day hotel in Mexico. We talked about not being able to find Cath’s iPhone somewhere in the house.

We looked at and laughed with Lorenza about her Facebook photo folder, “Tall People and Me.” She may be small in stature but she is a superstar to me.

We talked about camping. And how the kids and I are planning a camping trip to Fire Island in a couple of weeks. We have no idea what we’re doing. We wished she’d come camping with us. She invited us to camp with her on the streets.

After such a nice relaxing conversation, it was time for Lorenza to go. She wasn’t sure if she’d be sleeping again in Central Park. I wondered if Riverside Park might be better. In Central Park, the previous night, they’d turned on big lights and hustled people awake and into the middle of the night. Lorenza thought that was due to the Tony Awards nearby. But I think they do it all the time.

I walked her to the subway station where she was looking for a single woman she’d met earlier. (She can engage in conversations better with women when their men are not around.)

I felt sad to see her walk away from me. I worry about her. This is one problem (of the many) when you love people. You worry about them. (She said she worries about herself too.)

Not long after I returned home, Char said she liked hearing Lorenza’s stories. Even though the stories are not easy to hear — they are honest and inspiring. Stories are what keep us going.

Lorenza connects with people, sometimes by telling stories and sometimes just by listening and laughing.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Day of Rest

Published on by mbcoudalLeave a comment

I rode my bike very fast across the walkways in Central Park to get to my day of rest. (I note the irony.) I thought I’d take a short cut behind Belvedere Castle. But I hit Shakespeare’s Garden and endless steps. Shoot. I had to slow down. I had to bounce my bike up and down the steps.

I do not like being late. Yet I am frequently late. 

I got to 95th Street and Fifth Avenue but felt lost. I’d expected a church. Instead, I got a mansion, a beautiful retreat center, the House of the Redeemer, just off the park.

Our small group from Rutgers Church talked about times we’d felt refreshed. We reported that we’d felt relaxed during a storm with the lights out, while laid up in the hospital, on vacation in the Caribbean, or pausing for a moment when we ran near the ocean. I felt relaxed just talking about relaxation.

But I could not rest long. At lunch time, I had to bike again back across the park to meet the kids at the post office to renew and reapply for our passports. (I avoided the gardens.) I don’t know where we’re going, but I know we must be ready to go.

We will probably be late for wherever we are going. We will probably go the wrong way. We will probably hit steps when we least expect them. But I bet the place will be better than we had imagined, once we do arrive.

Hysteria

Published on by mbcoudal4 Comments

I learned a lot from this movie in which many Victorian women have pleasure at their doctor’s hand. Here are my take-aways:

1. Female pleasure cures many ailments.

2. While many Victorian women sought help from doctors, it is likely that their husbands were not able, willing or interested in doing their duty. So, alas, women turned to Hugh Dancy.

3. The doctor needed a little relief as well. Hugh’s vulvic massage technique became a hardship, causing his cramped hand and overwork! Poor dear!

4. The doctor, while doing his duty, asked the female patient things like, “Is that all right?” Sweet! (The expressions on the women’s faces were priceless!)

5. Settlement Houses for the poor did (and do!) a lot of good. Especially when a headstrong woman like Charlotte, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, was in charge.

6. In running the Settlement House, Charlotte had a secret agenda — to empower women. Love that! (Also, she refused to put down socialism — the French would agree!)

As you probably know, Hysteria is about the invention of the vibrator. This is the first movie I can think of in which female pleasure is seen as a cure-all. But even in this movie, the women are seen as slightly silly or “hysterical” if they want or need sexual enjoyment. (For example, Charlotte is too busy tending to her flock at the Settlement House to need this middle-class luxury of sexual release! “She’s a tough case.”)

In most mainstream movies, it is a given that men must seek pleasure — usually from flawless, scantily clad woman wearing black lace. In this movie, there’s a bit of lace but it is found in a high collar or a long skirt. When the women are pleasured by the doctors, they are fully dressed, and their lower bodies are hidden behind a velvet curtain (which resembles a puppet theater).

This delicious movie opens in a week. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about another feel-good English movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which senior citizens discover that they are still entitled to pleasure. First, senior citizens and now women! Such radical notions coming from England — all adults are entitled to pleasure! We’ve come a long way, baby.

The Cherry Orchard

Published on by mbcoudal3 Comments

Chris was so proud of his translation of Chekhov’s play and was pleased when it was so well received (see my My Beautiful New York and the Cherry Orchard). He was thrilled to be nominated for the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Revival.

Tonite was the awards ceremony. He called home several hours ago (I didn’t go because the tickets were pricey). He said he’d doubt that he won because he’d been seated in the back, in the middle of a row.

He was wrong. He won. He called us and reported to us on speakerphone that in his acceptance speech he said, “My father told me to be brief and my mother told me to be grateful, so ‘Thank you.'” But then after walking away from the mic, he walked back to the mic and thanked Dianne Wiest several times. (She was his champion!)

He’s not the only one who’s proud. The whole family is. We’re waiting for him to come home. We just made signs and hung them on the front door. Chris worked very hard on this translation. He’s always worked hard. Though he has challenges, he does not let his challenges keep him from leading a creative, artistic and productive theatrical life. This is no small feat. And I’m glad that his work was recognized for the genius it is.

20120506-222346.jpg

Other Religions

Published on by mbcoudalLeave a comment

I love experiencing other people’s religions. There is something true in all of the worships.

Today I was at our dear friend’s Bat Mizvah. It was a bit long. So my mind wandered and I got thinking, the Jewish service is more kid-friendly than the Christian service.

Seems on most Sunday church worships, if your kid’s a little loud or cranky, people glare at you. But at today’s synagogue service, people smiled at the noisy baby. And nobody seemed to mind all the restless teens milling about, ostensibly heading to the bathroom, but probably just stretching their legs. People are nice. When I was a little lost in one of the books, some usher-type guy came over to instruct me, kindly, on the proper page number.

What I really loved? The 13-year old Bat Mizvah girl led the service. She delivered the message. She read a ton in Hebrew from the Torah. I think it’s beautiful when kids — especially young women — can be seen and heard in a religious service.

I like hearing what kids have to say. Like I like eavesdropping when I drive my girls anywhere. They usually talk about relationships. And say things like, “Do you like ____?”

I think the bible reading was about relationships today too. Bible stories are usually about relationships, rules, myths, and journeys. And churches and synagogues are usually beautiful spaces to listen to stories, especially when they are stories told by girls or women.

Art and Writing Heal

Published on by mbcoudalLeave a comment

I am rarely sick. I know this has to do with my genes. But I wonder if my basic overall good health has anything to do with my morning routine. Every morning, I get up, drink coffee, and write about my life. I started this more than 15 years ago, a la Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Studies have shown that daily writing about stress, anxiety and trauma boosts your immune system.

Writing and art is good for the soul. And maybe the arts are good for the body too. Since January, I’ve not only been writing longhand in a spiral notebook, but I’ve been updating my art journal. I am repurposing the hardcover book, The Rules of the Game by Georges Simenon. The library was discarding this book.

The paper in a hardcover is much lovelier than in any spiral bound notebook. For me, the challenge is that the words are already there. Sometimes the words hinder and sometimes they help. Sometimes the words peek through and sometimes I paint over them.

One of my darlings has strep throat. Of course now the whole family feels a little sick. Even me who never gets sick. I think I will take two aspirins and write or paint in my art journal.

To learn more about making an art book, link to Effy Wild’s Book of Days.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Published on by mbcoudalLeave a comment

I am a sucker for a sub genre of movies that I like to call, Learning to Love Again. The first time I noticed this theme was in the brilliant movie, Shadowlands. And now there’s an even better one — The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Each of these retiring English characters — a civil servant, judge, housewife, grandmother — heads to India as if they were put out to pasture. What they find is life and love and one another.

Walking out onto 57th Street after seeing the movie on Monday, I felt uplifted — as if I just had a deep, funny and meaningful conversation with a best friend. As I commented on my friend’s Facebook status, “The movie is cheaper and more effective than therapy.” The movie made me feel that all things are possible. Just because I’m ageing doesn’t mean my life’s over. Adventure still lies ahead.

Each character is transformed in some way. From their transformations, I offer you these life lessons.

  1. Quit with the negativity — one character sees only what’s wrong and drives everyone away. Stay optimistic.
  2. Forgive yourself — the Tom Wilkinson character believes he has ruined someone’s life, but think again. Don’t hold yourself hostage to events of your past.
  3. Work — the character played by Judi Dench gets a job for the first time in her life. Work adds purpose and a bounce to her step.
  4. Embrace your enthusiasm — the character played by Dev Patel has a big dream. And you need a big dream to infect those around you to make big things happen.
  5. Life is a privilege, not a right — there are beautiful, wise, struggling people everywhere. Notice where you are and treasure your life. Carpe diem.
  6. You can still have sex when you’re old — this is refreshing.
  7. Age naturally — what a thrill to see movie stars like Maggie Smith with furrows, wrinkles, smile lines. Thank God, she looks real, not botox-ed, nipped and tucked and fake.
  8. Travel — immerse yourself in a new culture. See your world anew. Forfeit old stereotypes.
  9. Remain open — the thing you think will be extraordinary may not be; but the thing or person you don’t expect to change your life will change you for good.

If you see the movie, and I hope you do — it opens May 4th — what life lessons did you take away?

International Exchange

Published on by mbcoudal2 Comments

My girls from Botswana were so beautiful and so full of joy. The first of my 7 Rules of Living is Pile on the People.

Hosting two 17-year old girls from Southern Africa stay for a week brought us so much laughter. Hosting international students, in our case, amazing musicians, was meaningful on so many levels. We learned about their country, culture, school, and families. We learned about ourselves.

I fancy myself as someone who makes international friends easily. And when I was a kid, I dreamed of having a big, multi-racial, multi-ethnic family. It just feels so right to get to know and love people from other countries.

Growing up in suburban Chicago, we hosted Claudio, (I think he was from Brazil), for a couple of weeks. The Coudal kids (and mom) loved him like crazy. It’s amazing how quickly you can fall in love with people.

“Your kids are so great,” Lolo told me when we were all out to brunch yesterday. Yes, yes, I agree.

But she also said, as my kids were teasing me about my how bad my cooking is, “Girls, you are so mean to your mother. And your mother is so nice.” That made me feel good and bad. Good because, hey, she noticed how exceedingly nice I am, but bad, because my girls do put me down (as only teens and preteens can do). Do my kids tease me too much?

It’s a generational thing, I think — parents today, tolerate our children’s gentle jibing. We are not perfect and we know it and accept it. But throughout the day, I mulled this over. On the sidewalk, I bumped into my neighbor and confided my worry in him. He reported that his daughter puts her mother down too.

I have to think about this a little bit longer. I’ve already called a family meeting for tonite. On the agenda?

1. The kids were great international hosts. Let’s do it again!

2. Respect your mother.

3. Pile on the people!