The above image is from bedouinweaving.com.

Just finished the first draft of a story on a Charlottesville, Virginia, woman who is helping Negev Bedouin Women market their traditional, hand-woven rugs in this country–and not as a money-making endeavor for herself.

Political realities forced the Bedouin to end their traditional nomadic life in the middle of the last century. The Negev Bedouin’s settled in villages and towns as the poorest of the poor. The men took factory jobs, but the women–once integral to herding, harvesting, weaving, and home-keeping were left without anything useful to do or any way to make money.

Prue Thorner, the woman I did the story on, was visiting family in Israel when she discovered that the Bedouin women of the tiny village of Lakiya had begun weaving traditional rugs as a cottage industry–marketing them throughout Israel through the unlikely medium of high-speed Internet. And they were looking for a way to reach overseas markets.

Ms. Thorner went to work to create a non-profit that would sell these rugs directly to Americans. She takes enough of the sales price to cover expenses, the rest of the money goes directly to the Bedouin women.

Here’s a quote directly from Prue Thorner:

Someone suggested that I should triple the price of the carpets, put an ad in the New Yorker and they would sell thousands of them every year. And I said, “you know something? This isn’t what this enterprise is about. This is about helping women one at a time to carry on in their traditional ways and not destroying their culture. so it’s a fundamentally different paradigm.”

I’m so glad to hear of an American offering help to another culture that doesn’t bring with it any pressure to Americanize. Sounds very sober, doesn’t it? As in live and let live . . .

  Charlie rescued these from an old house that was being emptied way back when I first knew him. Wherever we’ve lived, they’ve always gotten the place of honor in our gardens. Whenever the garden gods get planted and flowered, that place feels like home.

I love their peaceful faces and the way they seem to relate to each other. They are separate, but they are so obviously interconnected. Just the way I want to be with the people I care about.

Over the weekend I finished up the second draft of my second, very short book, working title: God Is. Now What? One of my main points is that we cannot use religion or spiritual practice to hide from reality; in other words, we have to live in the real world, exactly as it really is and learn to handle all the ambivalence, indecision that reality produces inside us–not to mention anxiety, confusion and down-right fear. Faith, in other words, is not about us feeling comfortable–it’s about us doing what we can that’s actually helpful.

Back to my foxes. Molly’s comment about their looking thin really struck home. Much as I love seeing them out my window, I also wish they weren’t there, trapped in this little dot of woods in the middle of this city. I wish I could get Mr. Scotty to beam those foxes out to the woods and fields around my house, where I’d never see them, but I know they’d be okay. But Mr. Scotty, unfortunately lives on TV instead of in the real world, and those wonderful, magical foxes are stuck in the city. And,comfortable with it or not, I seem to be the closest thing they have to a keeper.

So, that’s the reality I have to face–uncomfortable as it is. The question for me to consider is: What’s the most helpful thing I can do for those foxes, given their situation?

The scrub outside my window is also overrun with birds, squirrels and bunnies–about whose presence I’m completely un-ambivalent, and whom I feed without any worry at all. With the foxes, however, I’m stuck between worrying that they’ll starve and worrying that they’ll become to acclimated to human contact. So what I’ve decided to do is buy squirrel food–which has cracked corn and peanuts in it, both of which seem to be part of foxes natural diet. It’s the best way I can think of to handle the uncomfortable reality of my marooned–and wonderful–foxes.

When I was drinking and using, I always went for the quick fix that made me feel better. Sobriety–and a life lived in partnership with H.P.–is tougher sometimes, but that’s okay with me. You see, I like living in the real world–even though it makes me have to have all these difficult feelings about things such as marooned foxes.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

A colleague took pictures, and I thought it would be nice to post them since I’d written about them. Aren’t they something magical to have show up outside one’s office window? We’ve been debating whether or not we should feed them. Any thoughts would be welcome.

I had to give a talk last night in a town where I lived when both my drinking and my head were beginning to go bad. It’s a place that I cannot drive through without finding off a sense of hovering unease.

But it was also while I was living in this town that I made the switch from television to radio, and so “came home” professionally. It’s where I was when I first began freelancing for NPR–long before I knew what I was doing, of course, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Lack of chutzpah has never been my problem.

I talked about all this last night–as well as about some of the stories I did when I was there; specifically one on rock-climbing and another on the actor, Paul Newman, as a race car driver. And it came to me that while I was warming up to be a full-blown, drunken nut case, I was also doing some really, really good work.

It strikes me that sobriety is not just about making amends for the damage we do; it’s also about retrieving our self-respect and our sense of self-worth. It’s important for me to recognize that even when I was heading off the rails–even when I was off the rails completely–I wasn’t all bad, and I didn’t do all bad things.

Sobriety, I think, is first and foremost about getting really, really real about ourselves. And then getting comfortable with that realness. In our pasts, as well as in our right nows.

I almost never have time alone at home. Charlie doesn’t work and he’s a real homebody, so he’s usually in our house whenever I am. I’m alone on the road when I travel, but almost never, ever within the walls of my home. Charlie’s just always around, making me laugh, keeping me company helping me out…telling me how to boil water, feed the cat, organize the kitchen cupboards. Charlie, you see, is a bit of a hoverer.

Well, Charlie spent all of last weekend away, helping his brothers and sisters sort through my beloved mother-in-law Lola’s stuff in order get her house ready to sell. Lola died about six months ago, and so it was simply time to do this.

I didn’t go. I was really tired from the fundraiser and, besides, there really wasn’t much I could do. I would have no idea what to do with Lola’s unfinished quilts or her 10 years worth of old Look magazines.

So there I was. Charlie-less for two whole days.

My pre-Charlie years were my drinking years, and something about having him not around brought back the ghosts of how the inside of my head felt during those bad and desperate times. The chatter, the fear, the worry, the financial and emotional chaos–I could remember them all vividly. And I was so, so glad to be sober–so glad that the remembered, horribly reality of active addiction was no longer my reality. It was alarming to revisit my drinker’s head so vividly, but I think that visit just made me feel more grateful for sobriety.

The weekend was great. I gardened, wrote, washed sheets and hung them out on the line, worked out, read, had a lovely, restful, sober time.

The weekend made me grateful for Charlie as well. The ability and desire to enter into the give and take of a good and enjoyable partnership with him has been one of the great gifts of sobriety. And you know what? I even kind of missed the old guy’s hovering. At least a little bit

My work office is in a small city of maybe 45,000 people. I’ve written before, I think, about the scraggly lawn outside my window that’s backed by scraggly woods. Charlie installed a bird feeder for me, and I also sprinkle food directly on the grass and dirt for birds who prefer to ground feed. I can have a couple of dozen birds at a time, along with a half-dozen squirrels and a bunny or two. Once I had two deer. Now I seem to have attracted a pair of gray foxes.

They are healthy looking animals–sharp-faced, bright-eyed, about as big as medium dogs with big brushy tails and perennially perked ears. They don’t seem particularly nervous as they, too, eat my bird seed.

I do so want those foxes to be all right. I love seeing them, but I do wonder how they got here. It’s got to have been as unconventional journey to this place for them as it’s been for me.

I’m glad they’re here; I’m glad I’m here. They’re welcome to as much birdseed as they can eat outside my window in the scraggly grass amidst the equally scraggly trees

I had to go to traffic court last week.

Way back when, on Virginia primary day, I had to drive all over this part of the state, visiting polling places and reporting live from them. The day was a nasty and cold day, with wet, spitting snow. Charlie, who worries, sent me off in his Toyota truck with 4-wheel drive. (As an aside, he and I are an interesting study in contrasts–I’m the original yee-hah girl, he is Mr. Caution. It makes us very good for each other. He keeps me from spiraling off into outer space on a whim; I keep him from being an old stick-in-the-mud.)

Anyway, long story short, in Charlottesville a very nice cop pulled me over, because Charlie had forgotten to get his truck inspected (Virginia requires that this be done yearly). I didn’t mind the ticket as much as I minded the time it took to write it. There I was trying to get this young man to write faster so I could go report!

The deal about such tickets are, if you go to traffic court and can produce a proper inspection sticker, they will dismiss all charges. So, of course, I had to go. What a bore to have to drive all the way back to Charlottesville (70 miles) by 9 a.m. on a work morning! But a necessary bore, since I didn’t want the ticket on my insurance.

Anyway, I showed up at traffic court and there (also waiting to show her current inspection sticker), was a dear–and I mean really, genuinely, dear–old friend from before sobriety. And it hit me like a blast directly from H.P.: I still owed this woman an amends for my behavior. I have no idea why I’d never sought her out to make one before, but I hadn’t and now here shewas.

We were so glad to see each other. We caught up, talked about life, and then–out of the blue–I just told her I was sorry for the extravagantly emotional way I’d behaved at times during our friendship. And she apologized (needlessly, I felt) for not recognizing that I was in trouble.

I immediately felt close to her again. All the fun we’d had, all the good talks, all the good stuff just came tumbling back, fully alive, into my heart. Made amends are miracles, in my opinion. How else can you explain their healing power in our hearts?

The fundraiser, by the way, is going swimmingly. I think I’ll still have a job when it’s over!

Forty years ago, my husband, Charlie, was at a Jimmie Hendrix concert in Hampton, Virginia. It was supposed to be the first of two that evening, but the second one was canceled because Martin Luther King had been assassinated.

I was living in Houston, Texas, around Rice University. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t stunned and didn’t grieve and didn’t feel that the world was sadly diminished when Dr. King was shot. I suppose there were plenty of people who did not feel that way, but fortunately I didn’t have to know them.

I’ve read several enormous biographies of Dr. King. He was as flawed as the rest of us, but my goodness, he lived in a way that touched the best in us. And still touches it today.

As for the here and now–my beloved public radio station starts its fundraiser today. I get to go on the air and do my best to raise my own and everyone else’s paycheck. This means coming face-to-face with the fact that I have absolutely no job security.

But you know what? I so don’t care. I love what I do. Besides, I don’t really believe in security. I believe in doing the next right thing and letting whatever happens happen.

Or at least, I try my best to believe in that . . .

Thanks so much for the help. This is fun! I found the rules and here they are:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1) What was I doing 10 yrs ago?

I was living in a trailer in the woods in Amherst County, Virginia, working in a co-curricular life at a woman’s college in a job created for me by one of the deans. Which was quite brave of her, considering I have only a partially completely bachelors degree and a partially completed masters.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

1. prepare Wednesday’s author interview.
2. be home when the vet shows up to treat my aged Head Cat.
3. Do 30 minutes on the elliptical, lift weights, and stretch.
4. pay the mortgage (such a pleasure for anyone who’s been a practicing drunk.)
5. eat dinner with Charlie and try to stay awake long enough to watch a movie

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Bananas, oranges, folded-over potato chips, and sugar-free fudge sauce on crackers

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Oh golly, can I decline? All the people I’ve known who’ve got a lot of money seem to be obsessed with either owning things or doing things that cost a lot. I really, really just like hanging out as I am now.

5) Three of my bad habits:

1. Doing too much
2. Doing more than too much
3. Doing one more thing after I’ve done more than too much

6) 5 places I have lived:

1. Greensboro, N.C.
2. East Northfield, Mass.
3. Houston, Texas
4. Charlottesville, Virginia
5. Singers Glen, Virginia

7) 5 jobs I have had:

1. Restaurant owner (and chief cook)
2. Summer Stock actor
3. T.V. Talk show host
4. Convenience store clerk
5. public radio reporter

5 peeps I wanna know more about:

1. Syd
2. Kathy Lynne (gotcha!)
3. Shadow
4. Molly
5. Michael