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Posts Tagged ‘acceptance’

Solar Light, Inner Light, Places in-between

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2017| Leave a Comment »

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)  

Outdoor solar lights line the walkway to my brother-in-law’s house.  They were a birthday gift from my older son’s family—so recently that the lights have not yet absorbed enough sun to shine. Their brightness exists as a potential, a promise.

Yesterday, I sat and watched as my daughter-in-law skillfully assembled the lights. My younger son and oldest granddaughter planted them.

My right hand is bound in a brace; I’m clutching a tissue with the other. Even if I were uninjured and well, I would have a better chance of repairing a cracked raw egg than understanding line one of the directions. I am recovering from a respiratory infection—on an antibiotic long enough to see significant improvement. I have a doctor’s okay to travel, but I am not fully recovered.

Recovery, another form of beginning. Illness and setbacks cause me to forget the internal light that needs time in a different kind of light.

My husband and I laugh about life’s absurdities with our second son Steve and his fiancé, Cecelia. We joke about our childhoods, the inevitable roadblocks that affect everyone.

I see the light in my family’s eyes and recognize it as love.

The sky is late-May blue. The assembled outside lights are not yet needed.

What matters is what lies within.

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One Fractured Metacarpal: One Unexpected Time-out

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 14, 2017| 2 Comments »

Hope is like the sun, which as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind. Samuel Smiles (1812-1904)

Ordinarily, I can type almost as fast as I can talk. Right now, my left index finger is doing all the work.  My dominant hand throbs with a fractured metacarpal. Eighty typos occur before the first intact sentence appears: backspace, retype, rewrite—with one crooked index finger.

Pause. Pray. For a miracle… Not to find patience. I have a better chance of seeing greed disappear on the political scene.

Then family love floods in. Jay cooks; I always prepare our meals. He offers to take me to appointments even when he will need to give up favorite activities, since he does not have the gift of bi-location. My sons call, available to give as much… more…than they have. My younger son is researching voice-activated writing possibilities.

My hand remains broken. Sweet chords wait inside my guitar until we can meet again. Many weeks from now.

My almost-daughter-in-law keeps in close touch. A neighbor offers to help. My friend, Ann, offers to scrub my kitchen floor on her hands and knees, her specific suggestion. The best way to approach a friend in need. Ann would understand; she is blind.

I type with slow uncertainty.  One hand, one finger. Pain.

From darkness comes light. Eventually.

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Bon Voyage, Little Green, You’ve Been a Faithful Car

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2017| 3 Comments »

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. (Warren Buffett)

My older son was 21 years old when he helped my husband buy my car. Now he is married and has two daughters, ages thirteen and nine. My younger son was in on the decision as well. He was still in high school. He now has an MBA and a precious seven-year-old girl.

Both of my sons served as car-buyer assistants again. A brand-new Toyota will be arriving soon. Jay will be driving the 2018 vehicle. I am more comfortable with fewer buttons and an older fashioned style. Sure, I’ll learn the bigger-and-better, eventually. I learn in installments. A different kind of car payment.

My 1997 Toyota waits in the rain, not yet to be moved to the junkyard—for its parts to be organ donors for other needy vehicles.  

The car waits to help someone else, my almost daughter-in-law, my friend and confidante. I pray little green holds out for at least another year until Cecelia graduates.

I don’t recall the old car’s cost, but I had no idea it would be loyal to me for twenty years, more if someone I loved didn’t need little green for whatever is left of the car’s engine life.

The Toyota is a good car brand, but like anyone or anything, it needs maintenance and attention. Oil changes, an occasional tune-up, the mechanical version of you-are-important-to-me. I will notice what you need.

Sometimes the price of human love is high, but since love is priceless, the cost isn’t an issue. At other times, all that is needed is presence, a face-to-face smile, a sharing of frailties.

Value is what you get, a value that can’t always be measured.

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Murphy’s Law and a Two-good-friend Antidote

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 21, 2017| 1 Comment »

What can go wrong will go wrong. (Murphy’s Law)

My computer is unplugged. Temporarily. A few minutes. No more. Its battery is at 69%. I checked two seconds ago. Then, the screen goes as dead as the inside of a serial killer’s conscience. The blackout has just destroyed 83 pages of edits.

On my final manuscript.

Scheduled to go to my publisher.

Today.

Yes, I do know how to write complete sentences. However, under the circumstances, my mind isn’t thinking in complete thoughts, especially as I realize the do-you-want-to-recover document I was editing contains an uncorrected way-too-common phrase I changed on page one.

And, no, I did not wait hours before hitting save. The save button would have a hole in if it were made of any earth material—including diamond.

Glitch two—some missed connection with my new Microsoft Word. No-o-o, a two-letter word that now has at least ten syllables.

Time to breathe before starting over. Two friends help make that happen, Ann and Shannon. They are coming for lunch and a personal concert. Fortunately, lunch has been prepared ahead. Simple. Homemade soup and tossed salad. Bagged tortilla chips. These two women appreciate. Excess is unnecessary.

Ann is blind. I pick her up from home and lead her up the steps leading to our house. She has no difficulty finding her way. Her sunshine greeting, light coming from her spirit, encourages me.

I realize there is no way I could have started over on my manuscript in a milieu of internal darkness. Shannon is already at the house and she is talking to Jay. Her laughter greets us as we enter the house.

We begin our afternoon with music. Neither of my friends could come to the Get Lit Festival last Saturday sponsored by Post Mortem Press. (Lit refers to Literature, not buzzed.) Local artists and writers brought their art to sell. I read a short section from my next middle-grade urban fantasy. I also played and sang three songs.

Nathan Singer from the Whiskey Shambles, rocked the program. He has an established following.

However, Ann and Shannon cheer as I play two songs on my guitar—just for them. Jay claps as well, even though he has heard my music so often, I close the door so he can concentrate on something else, anything else. A song may be incredible, but any sound repeated 7, 468 times requires ear canals as calloused as my fingertips. It’s called survival.

My heart lightens by the time I get back to start-over mode. And that is valuable because one beat after I get to the last page, Murphy’s Law shows up again. The computer freezes. Donkey-stubborn, won’t-get-out-of-bed, it refuses to budge.

My unprintable response remains in my husband’s and my memory since the computer is comatose now. It couldn’t hear if it were a living being anyway. Moreover, I reserve questionable language for the computer. I reboot the gosh-darned thing and pray my story has lived.

Trembling, I consider one of the last changes I made. Perhaps one of the angels my friends left in the house is present because I remember two edits. They are both intact.

Bye-bye, manuscript. Have a good time being formatted into a fantasy kids can enjoy where the good guys win. And hello, real life. No, I did not use the hammer or axe on my computer. The old thing will, however, be replaced. My birthday present from Jay.

After all, the innate beauty in life returns. Eventually. Murphy’s Law never destroys goodness completely.

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One Bloom, One Moment, and a Lot of Yesterdays

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 14, 2017| 4 Comments »

I am much less sure about most things than I used to be. But I feel the pull of the love of God all the time and I don’t care nearly so much about not understanding. (Barbara Cawthorne Crafton)

My father died in December more than a decade ago. I brought home a few of the plants from his funeral and hoped they would survive at least the winter.  I could never forget my dad. However, proper botanical maintenance has never been one of my gifts. My older son joked that if killing plants were a felony I’d be on death row.

Nevertheless, one of those pots survived—even now—and occasionally blooms. It has a flower now.

“Hi, Dad,” I say, as if the white flower carried a heavenly listening device. “What’s it like on the other side?”

Dad doesn’t answer. I suppose I’d be totally freaked if he did, but I move the pot and blossom from the corner to a more prominent position in the sun. My memories answer, though. Too many of them. Hours later. Some are as bright as the sun that shines so bright I wear a baseball hat so I can see the computer screen.

Other memories appear as dark as the Good Fridays of my youth. Always somber. Filled with thou-shalt-nots and guilt.

Somehow storms never coincided with Good Friday and a halo-sun never rose on Easter. Meteorology and religion don’t speak the same language.

I think about a book I’m reading, The Alsolife, by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. I’m not halfway through, and yet I’m tempted to begin reading again from page one. Then again, perhaps I should wait until I’ve read the last word of the last chapter. Then, I’ll read again with a fuller perspective.

Sometimes today is more than I can absorb, and this is a super-busy week.

The Alsolife explores existence in a fuller context, not as a linear concept—but as past, present, future, the universe—existing as one reality.

Forget aiming toward focusing on punishment. Hell. War. Hate… Choose forgiveness. Sounds right and good. And yet, Reverend Crafton describes how bitter the experience of real-life hurt can be, understood, maybe, only in context with the whole.

I recall a Holy Saturday more than a half-century ago when I thought I would be a corpse the next morning. I lived, but in the aftermath, I believed a morgue would have been a better Easter celebration. Years later, I would see the day differently, with a husband, two handsome sons, and three incredible grandchildren. Color and beauty returned. One moment never remains forever, and yet nothing from the past can be erased.

Now, on this Friday afternoon, I celebrate a moment of silence, sun, the quiet and gentle support of my husband, friends both new and old, family, and the peculiar gift called life—even if I never understand its secrets.

 

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Young at Seventy? Oh, Okay.

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2017| 1 Comment »

The only way out is through. (Robert Frost)

I don’t know the age of the woman to my far right in exercise class, but I’m impressed with her attempts to follow the instructor’s directions. She has a pronounced dowager’s hump and an unsteady gait, yet she shrugs, holds onto a chair, and fumbles with a length of elastic tubing used to increase strength.

Later, Jay and I chat with some friends, a couple who also attended the class.

The wife says the elderly lady told her at the end of class, “I wish I were seventy again.”

I smile, as if some angel were trying to get through via direct line, since I missed the subtle cues.

I am seventy. Sure, I have limitations. The mirror is far more truthful than I would like. However, this seventy-year-old blogger can tread water for an hour. Two hours with an intervening bathroom break. My balance, despite vertigo issues, isn’t bad. I can play with my grandchildren—on the floor—and then get up again, without the help of any mechanical device. Or groans. Gracefulness may be another issue.

Perfect doesn’t exist anyway.

Goals for improvement? Yes, I’ve got plenty of them. Some reasonable, some not. That doesn’t mean I need to live inside expectations. (Easier said than done.)

At home I haven’t finished breakfast dishes. There is laundry sorted in our tiny hall; mundane chores fill my schedule and complicate my priorities. And, uh oh, did I double book something this weekend?

As the four of us share my husband says something funny. In Spanish. I laugh. My knowledge of the language wouldn’t fill a tortilla, but I understand. Right now, life is good. The only way out…? Through. Every day. Up, down, and around as the path leads. Sometimes days and choices become difficult. At other times, they are as ordinary as a spin through the wash machine.

If or when, I reach the age of the woman in today’s class, I hope I have the courage and self-acceptance to struggle among the younger seniors, yet know inside my fragile body, my spirit is whole.

Whole, always whole, even in the most broken places…

my left hand, small, heavily veined, arthritic, yet capable

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So, What Do I Tell a Photo of Me As a New Bride?

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being. (Elizabeth Edwards)

Instead of buying cards for my husband, I make them. Simple, fashioned from photos. Personal, displayed for just the two of us to share. He taped the most recent ones along our bedroom windowsills.

In one of my designed-for-him creations, is a picture of the two of us at our wedding reception. We look more than a tad younger—because we were.

In my mind, I speak to that young bride accepting a bite of cake from her new spouse, as she offers a bite to him. Gently.

Intellectually, I knew I wouldn’t be twenty-five forever, but the turn of the century was more years away than I had already lived. An eternity from a new bride’s perspective.

You have an…I pause…interesting road ahead.

No way could a photo of a long-ago-me hear my thoughts, and yet I feel a sudden urge to protect this former image, as if a flat scanned photo had listening power. Not everyone who attended my wedding would be alive as time moved through inevitable days and years. I would lose parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends. A pulmonary embolism in my lung would bring life-long change.

This young-bride-me didn’t know what crises would arise, what joys or challenges. I thought I was strawberry-blonde hair and a well-shaped, pain-free body. (My hair is the only thing that remains remotely the same.) However, wonder also awaited. Two sons. Grandchildren. The joy of art and words. New friends. Love for my husband that reaches deeper than romance.

“Hey, just enjoy the moment,” I say. “As fully as possible. Celebrate who you are, and who your husband is.”

The phone rings—one of my newer friends. “In fact, I think I’ll follow that advice right now.”

picture taken in the Redwood Forest during a California vacation

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Organizing, Inside and Outside

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2017| 2 Comments »

Right now, I am trying to be in a place of calm, a place where I can chill out and then handle the chaos of life better. You don’t just get it overnight; you have to work at it. It’s a daily struggle. (Jackée Harry)

I have a bookcase, better described as cheap than inexpensive. It is a strictly functional piece. The back is as thin as a pizza box and leaves some shelves open, vulnerable. Perhaps, a dark wall showing through would make a nice decorative touch. However, my office also serves as a toy room. (Stuffed cow, twin watering cans, and children’s books get the sturdier case.) The room’s ambience has a more turned-over toy box look than showroom feel.

Items from my shelf frequently fall out against the wall. However, an old phone book has dropped from the top and set off an avalanche. Books, papers, and notebooks followed like sheep to slaughter.

Okay, I guess it’s time to organize. Not reorganize. Most of my life is filed under miscellaneous.

First, I empty the bookcase and place it against the desk instead of the wall. If my system doesn’t work, escaped items can be retrieved under the desk. As backup I have a stack of magazines in the way—to protect computer wires. Yes, someday I’ll get a nicer bookshelf. For now, I’ll deal with what I have. I’m satisfied with functional.

Each stack of items becomes less defined in the small area. How did all this fit in one bookcase to begin with? Ooh!  Sun Magazine. Did I finish reading this July article? I am hesitant to throw away my favorite periodicals. Focus, Terry, focus.

Somewhere in the chaos I find the manuscript for an unpublished story I wrote fourteen years ago, not bad, but it needs editing and development. Time to keep on trucking—continue to steps two and three. In the present, possibilities to follow.

I think about real life, how much I’d like to tackle the whole of a world situation, settle it. Now. I can only send out a pebble onto the water and let the ripples flow. Toward justice, peace, recognition of all people.  I pick up one item in my mess and face my limits as well as my strengths. The existence of a flaw does not deny a talent. For anyone.

The three photos of my mundane work space below combine to show art coming from chaos. In this picture, a MiFrame program did most of the work. In the everyday, it isn’t as easy.

I see you; you see me. As we are. We grow from there.

organizing

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Coincidence, Followed by a Chance to Give

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2017| 2 Comments »

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. (Albert Einstein)

My sacred agenda is being tested. The sky is blue and the outside temperature holds in the low sixties—for a few hours anyway. My husband and I plan to explore a new subdivision in the neighborhood, to see how many new homes have sprung-up, while we enjoy spring in February.

And my mate is taking a lot longer to get ready than I expected. I tend to take on a little too much and move as if I were rushing out of a burning building. He enjoys the spontaneity possible in retirement.

Finally…finally we set out—at least an hour later than I wanted. However, he must have been listening to angel time. I was deifying my plans.

In the new development, Jay and I meet an incredible couple who are also walking along a cul-de-sac toward the back of the newer section. Three lots display sold signs; each area has not yet been excavated.

M and D will be moving into the neighborhood next week. They are much younger than we are. Nevertheless, we share common interests with them. I am buoyed by their capacity to actively care for others. Their church, close to the poorest areas of the city, assists the homeless.

“What items do you need most?” I ask.

“Socks and gloves,” M answers.

I remember a pair of socks we received in the mail as a gift after donating to an Indian foundation. I have never worn the socks because they don’t match anything I own.  A thought crosses my mind. Obviously, I have more than I need.

I have two more pair of socks that have never been worn, as well as red gloves I’ve been saving for that day when one of my old-faithful-pink-knitted-bargain-store specials, falls from my pocket and finds its way under the tires of a truck in a parking lot. 

The items are not as thick as I would like them to be. Maybe they would be useful in layers. I suspect the church will accept cash for whatever their ministry needs.

“I’ll drop some things off at your house after you move in,” I say. “And just leave a bag outside.”

Perhaps we will see M and D again after I drop off a bag or two. Maybe not. Either way, these two people were blessings.

I forgot about all the miscellaneous chores that were so essential a few hours earlier, and I focused on ways I could help someone else. Sure, the laundry can’t wait forever, but a rinse cycle that begins a few hours late won’t delay the world’s spin on its axis.

Something or someone? I’m grateful for the difference.

socks-and-gloves_li

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Groundhog’s Day in Sunny Blue

Posted in positive thinking, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude. (Karl Barth)

Today is Groundhog’s Day, although the critter isn’t on my mind as I drive a familiar route home. The sun is out. Six weeks until spring—or six times seven days of winter, however you want to look at it. Essentially, the cold doesn’t last forever. Nothing does.

Right now, I look at the strong contrast between blue and shadow. I think about hope and try to see its expression in nature, in recent events. Not many of those moments fit into the world scene, although a few examples of courage stand out, people risking high-ranking positions to protect folk ousted because of prejudice, fear, hate.

In my middle-grade fantasies I write about good being stronger than evil. (The first book came out in 2015; the second should appear in May.) In the real world, I pray for awareness. How do I find it and stay with its power? Good can only be strong when it shines past the gray, inside the gray, despite the gray.

Tomorrow, or at any moment, the dullness can reappear. I celebrate the temporary and all that leads to gratitude.

I’m home before I realize my car is in the driveway. My gratitude list is not yet completed…

blue-sky_li

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