by Chris Austin-Lane

My daughter is afflicted with some sort of horrible rash.

These rashes are actually fairly regular occurences, she seems to have rather sensitive skin. Not only does she freak out if her shirt is too scratchy, she gets contact dermatitis more often than anyone I'm been familiar with.

Last night, she was just beside herself with near panic about being itchy, literally writhing and crying out for long periods of time. While we could have gone to the ER, it didn't seem like they would have anything quicker acting than the tube of whatever stuff that we had from last time.

So it seemed to me that the best thing to do is to help her master her reaction to the itchiness. For the first time since I've started meditation, she allowed my imprecations to take big belly breaths and to count them to enter into her sphere of potential actions. And she took to the "imagine you are in a forest and it is safe and warm and you are being held up by the ground" visualization/calming thing quite well. She was laying on a cloud that could not itch her skin. A bit later, she even could calm her response to the itchiness, feeling the itchiness just as sensation, not as a cause to panic (thank you Gordon R. Dickson). She did need a gentle hand on her belly to actually slip into sleep, but still, she had a good bit of rehearsal of the "It hurts, but it's ok, I am in charge of my reaction" stuff (though she was un-impressed with my prayer: "Please help her to feel better, or to be able to feel better about not feeling better.").

But then we parents figure out that the laundry this week was washed in a new detergent - extra softening oils and fragrance oils! We've since rewashed a bunch of school clothes and are hoping that the redness, itchiness and swelling will soon be gone.

by Chris Austin-Lane

I find myself, in this rather strange but pleasant state to which I've located, without any small children. Somewhere along the line, we became parents of middling children. My daughter is now awesomely close to an adult - a bright sparkling mind which alternately delights me and keeps me honest (the other day a nun was asking her about Zen, and she said, "I know how to sit still and calm my heart"). My son, while still in the "sort of terrible, not quite reasonable 2-3-4-5"s, is having the sort of emoting that 5 year olds do, which is definitely a step away from the atavistic lifestyle that 2s and 3s bring with them. And he can assemble the complex modern legos by himself! And, heck, the two of them together cleaned our bathrooms out with fairly minimal supervision recently! It doesn't make sense really.

California is distinctly less self-consciously liberal than our home town. Folks have a dislike of politics and a certain reserve, a certain tendency to allow people to make their own way or not. Our grocery store doesn't come with an active listserv. We can't email our neighbors that we've put a book shelf into the street, or complain about the water pressure. School social events seem like the closest thing to 1950s style cock-tail hours that I've experienced. It's hard to compare fairly a place we've lived in for 4 seasons (cool, cooler & rainy, warm, often foggy) to a place where I couldn't walk outside without running into several people that had held my kids as babies, but in California there seem to be calmer and less argumentative people, and perhaps a bit less willingness to argue about selling meat products in the co-op or about how to arrange pick up to be as safe as possible.

My daughter has the plan to move back to Maryland when she's 18 (she also still has the plan to live with us always) and misses her roots there, but is finally making enough friends to get by with. My son describes things as being like in Maryland or as being after Maryland.