Onecakebaker

Have you heard of intactivists? These are people who think that the foreskin is very important. A cartoon supporting their point of view was published recently in Norway and Jewish groups rose up to protest it and that’s how I found out about it. It seems the more strident the other side gets, the more radical I get….I NEVER used the words “paid in blood” before last year. See the link below to read my article that was published in the Jewish Women Archive, Jewesses with Attitude, on June 3, 2013:

http://jwa.org/blog/dagbladet-dawkins-intactivists-how-demonizing-choice-makes-militancy

I’ve been getting philosophical about my bees and wrote a whole essay about it. I’m looking for a home Any suggestions? This is how it starts. What do you think? Does it belong in the Hadassah magazine?

Musing from the top of the food chain

On April 8, 2012,  a volunteer beekeeper brought me a swarm of bees and a beehive. It happened to be the day my father-in-law died, at the age of 83 after a long battle with heart disease. All the bees needed was space, flowers, and a source of clean water to drink. I washed out and filled a blue ceramic birdbath, and cleared a space near my back fence for the beehive to sit.

Suburban beekeepers like myself are sheltering as many bees as possible, because in the farms of America, Colony Collapse Disorder is ravaging the bee population. The bee population needs a certain number of hives to maintain genetic diversity and perhaps adapt around whatever is causing CCD.

Perhaps because the bees arrived on the day of my father-in-law’s death, I started to ponder this coincidence. I remembered that his original last name, “Trzmiel,” means a type of bumblebee in Polish. He was in the American army, in 1948, when he changed it to Tramiel, and he often stressed that “miel” means honey in French.

Before long, I started to look at the bees as kindred spirits. Watching them foray out to gather nectar and pollen, I began to associate them with Jews sent to work in labor camps during the Second World War. My father, a half-brother and half-sister, my father-in-law, and my mother-in-law, all passed through Auschwitz.

After a year, it was time to check on their health and gather some honey. I borrowed a bee suit and helped the beekeeper take the hive apart, pick out three of 20 or so combs that were in there, and put the hive back together. She complimented me on my remarkable sang-froid. I had to deal with getting the honey out of the combs.

When I proudly showed a friend the honeycombs a couple of hours later, I saw only the honey. She pointed out that there were quite a few bees crawling around on those combs, covered in honey.

But I am a Tramiel, and the sight of those struggling bees shook me up. I felt sympathy for them. More–I felt guilty for taking their honey.

Honey was leaking out of the broken honeycomb and drowning the worker bees that I hadn’t even noticed. The bees stuck in the honey were struggling to escape, trying to climb out. The honey was too deep, and there was nothing they could grasp to pull themselves out.

So I rescued them, providing clothespins they could use as escape routes from the honey and a container with clean water where they could clean themselves off. Then I felt better, although—having made the mental leap to compare the bees to camp workers—I was not unable to decide if I was I the Joint Distribution Committee, a liberating army, or HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).

But do the bees I freed from the mess of honey suffer from survivor’s guilt?

What is the limbic system? The oldest part of the brain, what one of my therapists called ” the lizard brain.”
And in driving us to the comfort of the lizard, it messes up our personal lives.

Here is a picture of it, from an online course on brain anatomy –from San Diego State University. I think. I just know the URL, heck it could be South Dakota State University.

http://its.sdsu.edu/multimedia/mathison/index.htm

The web site says:
“The Limbic System is the area of the brain that regulates emotion and memory. It directly connects the lower and higher brain functions. It influences emotions, the visceral responses to those emotions, motivation, mood, and sensations of pain and pleasure.”
It is the first part of the brain to evolve. It was with us when we crawled out of the sea. It chased mastodons and hunted and gathered. It still rules sometimes. Right under the modern part of the brain that memorizes poetry and plays piano, \ it is always looking for food, wants to scuttle away from loud noises, pursues the opposite sex to mate, and when faced with danger, makes us want to hide under a rock. That’s limbic comfort.
But modern people don’t have many rocks handy. Hiding behind my computer is as close as I get. At the same time, I know that we were not meant to hide under rocks, so I push myself out of my comfort zone every day. Maybe I have an overdeveloped limbic system, but for me life is a walking contradiction. I do good, but feel like doing the opposite, more often than I admit.
Do this, my cerebrum says, when I go to plant a garden or read the paper, It is what you said you would do. It is the right thing to do.
I don’t wanna!. my limbic system says. My husband is still in bed, and we could be mating instead of reading the stupid paper.
Write that blog post, my cerebrum says. It’s what you are good at. You signed up for NaBloPoMo.
I don’t wanna! my limbic system says. There’s LOLCATSz I haven’t seen. I want to read OTHER people’s posts so I can feel superior.
And my poor husband. He has a cerebrum that has thoroughly beaten his limbic system into shape. But my cerebrum goes to sleep at night, and my limbic system makes me bother him. And if he says no, or just fails to wake up because he’s sleeping, you know what? My limbic system fills me with anger at being rejected, and I go sleep in the other room because I can’t stand to look at him.
But I love him. So while we have very good intellectual conversations a lot of the time, out of nowhere, my limbic system sees a threat, or food, or a rock to hide under, or otherwise gets triggered, and I hate him.
See-saw, back and forth, good impulse, bad impulse. It’s goofy.

Why is it so goofy? Evolution.

Evolution works likes a broke owner of an old house. Instead of starting fresh with a new design, one stopgap change gets aggregated on another,duct tape on a pipe, a second water heater put in without replacing the old one, patch on patch, in small steps, so that each step of evolution looks almost identical to the one before. It’s why we still have our appendixes and gall bladders, and why our eyes work the way they do, which is not very well.

And our personal history messes us up. How many times have you heard your parents coming out of your mouth? How many fights from your young life are you spoiling for?

There are many patterns learned when we are young. Maybe we were told we liked vanilla ice cream better than chocolate (my mom did this to me) so often we still believe it. Maybe we learned not to talk about what goes on at home. Or maybe we were taught to like hot peppers, or garlic, or dislike salt. Or show love by nagging.
THOSE patterns can drive us just as hard. They feel as basic as fear of heights, fear of loud noises, hunger. And they are, mostly, unconscious. But just as we climb trees and mountains, go to rock concerts, and become anorexic (or just stick to a Weight Watchers eating plan or any other diet) we can beat those patterns. If we know what they are.
Knowing mistaken patterns, from instincts, from functional thoughts takes a bit of skill, and a lot of detachment, and distance from rocks to hide under.

Which is uncomfortable.

It’s the lizard brain.

Evolution works likes a bad remodel of an old house. Instead of starting fresh with a new design, one change gets aggregated on another, in small steps, so that each stop of evolution looks almost identical to the one before. It’s why we still have our appendixes and gall bladders, and why our eyes work the way they do

And deep inside our big modern brains, the ones that make us thinking beings, the older parts of the brain still exists, sitting and pulling our strings without us knowing it.  So right under the part of the brain that memorizes poetry and plays piano, is the part of the brain that wants to scuttle away from loud noises and hide under a rock.

There are also patterns learned when we are young. Maybe we were told we liked vanilla ice cream better than chocolate (my mom did this to me)  so often we still believe it. Maybe we learned not to talk about what goes on at home.  Or maybe we were taught to like hot peppers, or garlic, or dislike salt. Or show love by nagging.

THOSE patterns can drive us just as hard.  They feel as basic as fear of heights, fear of loud noises, hunger. And they are, mostly, unconscious. But just as we climb trees and mountains, go to rock concerts, and become anorexic (or just stick to a Weight Watchers eating plan or any other diet) we can beat those patterns. If we know what they are.

Knowing mistaken patterns, from instincts, from functional thoughts takes a bit of skill, and detachment.

Which is uncomfortable.