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Posts Tagged ‘gratitude’

Spelling Gratitude: T-E-C-H H-E-L-P

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 23, 2013| 2 Comments »

Life begins where your comfort zone ends. (Karen White, author, “Sea Change”)

My desktop background reflects where I am on my life’s journey in an odd sort of way. I change the picture frequently—just because I can. It displays family memories, a season, a humorous notion, or an uplifting thought or scene. For a few hours I decided it would be fun to rebel against responsibility, so I let Donald Duck stand behind all my icons. He claimed that he wasn’t cut out for adulthood.

I knew when I gave him center stage he wouldn’t be there for long, and eventually chose a sign that fit the moment better: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE FEARS. It made me smile, yet expressed truth at the same time.

Now, as I talk on the phone to my nephew, Alan, I want to pretend to be Donald Duck and let someone else do the work. Alan is my tech support. I am trying to renew my virus protection on my laptop and it has FAILED. It lets me know in bold, bright, horrifying color. Alan is calm. He is a genius nerd who knows his stuff. I imagine my world locked inside these 0’s and 1’s, swallowed by a monster virus.

“Okay, simultaneously hit Control and J,” Alan says. “That will bring up your recent downloads.”

And it does—the first time. That download doesn’t complete either. My throat is as dry as desert rock on a-120 degree day. My laptop has other plans. it seems to be saying, I’m loading down, sister. taking a nap instead.

I catch sight of my desktop pic and sigh. Won’t feed the fear, but I could use a glass of water.

My nephew remains on the phone. He leads me to safe directions. I see the promised land and read a most precious word: INSTALLED.

Halleluiah! I have passed through dangerous land without being hijacked, robbed, or killed.

“Thank you,” I say, feeling as if I just gave a miracle worker a twenty-five-cent tip.

“Well, if computers worked all the time, we tech-savvy people wouldn’t have anything to do,” he answers.

He’s right, but that doesn’t diminish my gratitude one megabyte.

pic from the Optimism Revolution

don't feed fears Optimism Revolution

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Bye Bye, Plane

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 18, 2013| 2 Comments »

Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. (John Lennon)

Canceling our vacation plans seemed so strange I didn’t unpack for at least twenty-four hours. We expected to travel to the west coast. However, a family emergency demanded that we stay here, one of those no-brainer situations. Anyone who can spell the word emergency—and many who can’t—understand how that happens. It’s called reality. Insert any situation here. Little imagination required. Our emergency looks like it will be resolved, possibly even erased. Don’t know. That answer is left to the unknown future.

After the shock lifted, time appeared, hours of it. Sure I expected to make friends with a sequoia. That may happen eventually. Instead I tackled a manuscript that had felt like stirring congealed concrete. I finished a major edit.

Next I faced a physical issue I’ve been avoiding. I love parks and the outdoors. A three-to-five mile walk in a nature preserve equals love. I can think like a poet, examine the lines of trees, and follow the flight of a bird from a branch into the clouds. Within the past few months that experience has meant a big pain in the knees. Arthritis? Probably. That Art-form has visited many, many folk. And he doesn’t leave after a casual hint or two. He fights until bone rubs against bone. I have one finger in that condition. The rest of my body isn’t that far gone. It isn’t ready to plod through mountains, hills, and glens either. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up, however. Mr. Arthritis absorbs the couch potato.

My doctor referred me to a specialist. This ten-day space, the time to think, led me to accept vulnerability. I decided to live in the as-it-is present. Of course visions of the past show up as I recognize my awkward, uneven, old-lady gait. I recall my mother as she grasped the handrail and ascended the stairs one at a time.

She didn’t complain about how much each step hurt. Now, I appreciate the difficulty of those movements. She had knee replacements during earlier days of the surgery. She didn’t waste time complaining about her lot in life. Not much point to it. I pray that I can follow her example.

In the meantime beauty exists everywhere: in a sunburst, laughter, a recent uplifting conversation with my brother, Bill, and sister-in-law, Lisa. It appears in words and songs, in encouragement, and in the gift of simply being.

Jay and I will probably make plans for another vacation—some other time. Chances are we’ll actually make it through security and all the way to our destination. I create chaos without at least a little structure. But, for now, my husband and I have been repeating John Lennon’s words frequently. Yep, life is happening all around us, and I feel blessed to be in the midst of it.

enjoying scenery on a detour

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Roadblock, Fire, and Worry

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 11, 2013| 2 Comments »

The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day. (Donald Barthelme)

I’m making good time on my way home from an errand—or at least I think I am—when several fire engines, smoke, and a local news team block the road. Fortunately a recreational facility is close by with a driveway large enough for a reasonable exit. I have no idea what happened. Perhaps the six o’clock news will provide a clue. I’m grateful that help is present and there is another route home. It means backtracking and extra driving time, but it sure beats up-in-flames.

A few hours ago I had a sense of caution. I needed to control it before it broke out into full-blown panic. I had passed up a road I knew well. A sense of foreboding followed. I didn’t know why. Something troublesome felt imminent. I drove with excessive caution. Strange, but after seeing the roadblock, the flashing lights on the fire trucks, and the chaos in the street, I felt in control. Concerned, definitely. But I was okay, for no understandable reason. Sure, I could pray for the folk involved. But this was not the time for me to get in the way. My ’97 Toyota isn’t equipped to put out a fire.

Life offers strange twists and turns. Yet this much I know, worry is a circular road that doesn’t go anywhere.

By the way, I’m taking a short hiatus from this blog, but I’m coming back before the end of the month. Happy journeys to all.

driving

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Once Upon a Maze of a Dream

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 7, 2013| Leave a Comment »

A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life. (William Arthur Ward) 

While we are having coffee one younger woman in a group of friends mentions that she had a dream about me. I helped her get somewhere.

One man who has known me for a long time laughs. My poor sense of direction is well-known, and he makes a point of it. I can’t deny it. Turn me around twice; I can’t tell which way is up.

“We were walking,” the young woman says.

“Well, that’s different.” My friend grins and pretends to make left and right moves almost simultaneously.

Actually, I’ve been known to get turned around in a shopping mall, but I would rather discuss moments of discovery instead of loss.

Later, as our small group disperses for the day, the young woman looks over her shoulder and calls back, “Thanks for helping me find the bathroom in my dream.”

I smile in the car as I drive home. Apparently my influence had nothing to do with philosophy, wisdom, the answer to an eternal question, or even the missing ingredient in a recipe. However, it did focus upon a basic need. And the story gave me a laugh—another important part of life.

Sure, I would like to play a major role in other people’s lives, but when I think about it, that sounds like a pretty huge burden to bear. Besides, sometimes even talk that would appear innocent can hurt. “That’s my husband,” I told a woman in the Y pool one day. “We’ve been married for 42 years.” I would gladly have retrieved and swallowed those words if I had known she lost her husband after nine short years of marriage.

There have been times when I have met folk I once knew well and they don’t remember anything about me. Then I speak with someone I scarcely knew years ago and they recall intimate details. Life doesn’t always make sense. I’m not sure it is supposed to. I do know that there is a complicated maze to get from here to there, even for the most fundamental needs.

I am grateful for my dreaming friend. Actually she has shared some significant moments of discovery that I treasure.

Peace, laughter, and joy to all along the way.

laughter words to inspire the soul

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Somewhere Under the Rainbow

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. (Agatha Christie)

Rounding I-465, entering I-74 and heading for home, trouble begins. No umpire strikes us out. An act of nature interferes. When my husband and I left St. Louis the temperature registered in the car at 99—before noon. There was enough humidity in the air to boil an egg. Now that handy-dandy gauge on the dashboard of my husband’s car indicates dramatic change: 88, 84, 78…70. Deep, dark clouds hover. A rainbow appears to the left, but to the right the darkness promises action. I pray for gentle rain at least for the next hour and a half. That’s all the time we need to reach home base. However, the blackness swells.

Breathe, Ter, Breathe!

The first lightning, almost a straight line, appears ahead, along the center of the highway. Not a pleasant omen. Within two minutes the electricity has spread. Then hail falls along with enough rain to be a waterfall. Visibility almost nil. Jay turns on his warning lights. Fortunately the car in front of us does also. I can no longer see the color of the vehicle. It was dark blue or black. Now it appears white, like the sky. Two loud splashes alongside us let us know drivers in the left lane don’t seem to be alarmed. They travel as if this day were blue, cloudless, and traffic-free. All we can do is inch ahead, hope the hail doesn’t grow larger, other drivers don’t pull anything crazy, and the storm ends.

I think about our visit with Jay’s aging mother and hope I left kindness behind. Somehow, I suspect we will make it through, but no one ever knows for sure—even on a day that appears perfect. The sun is present; it will return, I tell myself. Then I imagine calmness in my husband and pray it touches him. After all, he is fighting this battle. I am only present within it.

I wonder if one of those daring drivers decides to pull in front of us—and hits our car and not open highway, would my thoughts turn to times when I missed opportunities to do good, or said unhelpful words? Don’t know. Just speculating. And I’m grateful when that chance doesn’t happen.

We live someplace in time, under the rainbow, through the storm, among possibilities. I wonder what today holds.

pic from Positive Thoughts page

rainbow lights through trees positive thoughts

 

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I Love My Brother, The Toddler Version

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 24, 2013| 2 Comments »

The world is like that—incomprehensible and full of surprises. (Jorge Amado)

This photo of me and my brother is over sixty years old. It needs a caption: You mean this is my sister and I’m stuck with her? Or, that wasn’t a kiss, it was so slobbery I thought you were a Great Dane. I can’t use the informal word, pic, for any of the photos I found hidden in our attic. They belong to the time of rotary phones and black-and-white television. Folk wore suits and dresses, even to sporting events.

I can be found among my brothers easily in the collection. I’m wearing the frills. And yet the expressions on the faces of my family remain universal: Enthusiasm. Joy. Excitement. Wonder. Change the hairstyles and put jeans and sweatshirts on the people in the scenes and they couldn’t be distinguished from one taken in a modern family fifteen minutes ago. Although I’m not sure how to describe my brother in this picture: surprised maybe, definitely cute.

Little people remain little people in any age, in any culture. For me life didn’t exist beyond that floral stuffed chair and my back yard, Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa and my brother, Bill. The future extended no further than alphabet soup for lunch or a picnic with Aunt Bette and Uncle Harold. Childhood seemed eternal.  Even at the advanced age of five, the fact that I would one day become a grandparent would have sounded as outlandish as Jack climbing the beanstalk and facing a giant. Actually, the giant appeared more believable. After all, I had scarcely reached the height of an adult’s naval by that time, probably not that high. I was a runt from the day I was born at four pounds and seven ounces.

Children believe life is what they live, wherever it is. In peace or in war. In the city or country. In a healthy home or one where love is only a word.

The multiple scenes of a baby girl in a silly floppy hat give me the notion that my family was excited to begin a new generation. Not everyone has had that experience. People tend to expand their own experience into another person’s thinking. One of my favorite quotes comes from Anais Nin, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

Perhaps that is why I find it so important to tell my grandchildren how innately good they are, every time I see them. At least once. And to encourage them when they show compassion for others. Nine-year-old Kate talks about setting up a benefit for a friend in need. No, I have no idea how she would do it. But that won’t stop me from encouraging her. The world is filled with surprises, and even if those surprises aren’t wonderful, if children learn they have power deep inside, they will be okay. At least eventually. That is my prayer.

Bill and me 08192013_0000

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Perfect is Only an Adjective

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 5, 2013| 1 Comment »

There’s something ugly about the flawless. (Dennis Lehane)

As a child I thought perfection was attainable. Expected. On multiple levels.

On an achievement test my sixth-grade teacher emphasized how important it was to erase completely. Pencil residue could be picked up and two filled-in boxes would mean an automatic wrong answer. I sat in the back corner of the room and sighed. That day had been particularly difficult, although I don’t recall why.

Not far into the test I needed to erase. The process became gruesome to this literal student. I moved so slowly through the pages that I eventually gave up. The next year the psychologically ignorant teacher positioned us in rows according to the grade we got on that test. There wasn’t enough room for the last two rows of desks—they were shoved together. I sat in the dummy section. After all, if we cheated the answers were bound to be wrong.

I must admit that seventh grade turned out to be fun. I sat next to the class clown. However, the image that teacher had of me stuck and showed up in my grades. Once again, why bother?

Then, that winter we were given an assignment to write a one-act play based on a book by a Catholic author. Mine was taken from “Fabiola” by Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, first published in 1854, a, thick book from my parents’ book shelves. It spoke of persecution in the lives of early Christians in the catacombs during the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian. My teacher did not believe I had read the book much less written the play. My parents needed to verify the fact that I had chosen each word with the required fountain pen at the kitchen table. I had to bring the book to class so that both the principal and teacher could see that I had not plagiarized my assignment. Strangely, I was not frightened. I knew the work I had done was honest.

I won first prize in the Greater Cincinnati area from that one-act play. My grades improved drastically. Yet I was the same child, in the same row. By then I wouldn’t have chosen to sit anywhere else.

Those students I sat next to weren’t dummies either. Perhaps their skills didn’t include diagramming sentences and answering multiplication tables within a given number of seconds. I have no doubt that those conjoined rows housed kids who eventually owned their own businesses or who became beloved parents and grandparents, exemplary citizens, military heroes. They became folk who could find that glitch in a car’s engine no one else could find. Many probably graduated from college and earned degrees because they had learned to work for what they wanted.

They created common miracles no one ever chronicled. We are all important—in different ways.

(pic from Positive Words to Love By)

dogs and differences Positive WoRds

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Wondering During a Cemetery Wandering

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2013| 2 Comments »

May my silences become more accurate. (Theodore Roethke, poet (1908-1963)

My husband leads me along a winding, unmarked road in the cemetery—I trust him to direct us out again. There were color-coded lines along the middle before the roads were freshly oiled. Now, I depend upon Jay’s sense of direction. For me north, south, east, and west could just as easily be called here, there, nowhere, and the dark side of the moon.

“How do you know which way is north. . . or west?”

He shrugs, smiles, and looks ahead. His map is innate. Perhaps he understands his place on the globe the way I intuit a new recipe.

We celebrate an unusually cool breeze at the end of July and read the names on the tombstones. I see my maiden surname. I don’t know if these people were related to me or not. The lush rolling hills are covered with angelic shapes, traditional tombs, and huge monuments chosen to stand out, to hover over the others. Yet, we don’t stop to honor the grand and the glorious. The persons buried there are just as dead as the ones under the flat, almost lost markers in center plots: mother, father, or beloved son gone too soon. I consider those lives. Who were they? Who am I to those I meet?

Wasps abound in the grass. They hover over the dates on the tombstones: born this date, died another. Real life includes plenty of unavoidable stings. I just don’t want to be the one who wields thoughtless ones during anyone’s “dash” time on this planet.

I take Jay’s hand. I’m not wearing a watch. My at-home agenda will wait as the silence absorbs me, and we trudge up a gravel hill into the afternoon sun.

listen to your heart

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The Inside of a Ping Pong Ball, The Outside of an Egg

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2013| 1 Comment »

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken. (M. F. K. Fisher)

I wanted to get in trouble when I was in sixth grade so that I would be given a unique punishment: Write 500 words on the interior of a ping pong ball. However, I was sure that the punishment would be changed, suddenly, inexplicably, the second I chose to play the role of rebel. Besides, for me out-of-line felt as uncomfortable as drowning.

Actually, I have no idea what I would have written, probably something based on fantasy. Too many decades have passed to know for certain. I know the real me hadn’t emerged yet. It was inside that ping pong ball—or probably a better metaphor—my egg hadn’t hatched yet. While many people yearn to be young again, give me over-sixty and retired any day. Sure, it brings plenty of problems. I didn’t have arthritis then, and I didn’t need to get up at night to relieve a complaining bladder. Yet, in those days I wasn’t aware that the world held almost infinite possibilities. A zit on my chin signaled disaster. And no amount of logic could have convinced me otherwise.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why I love to get eye-to-eye with my grandchildren, let them know they are not second-class citizens because they are under age eighteen. I can’t spare them crises as they grow older, but I hope to ward off as many unnecessary traumas as possible.

“You are a natural swimmer,” I tell Rebe. Then I ask Kate to make up one more song, on the spot about a topic I give her: rainbows, sports, sunshine. The subject doesn’t matter. And most of the time my poor hearing doesn’t catch her lyrics. Doesn’t matter. My girls need to know they can do whatever they choose to do. They have potential that can break open and grow at any time. They are not the nothing inside a ping pong ball—like I thought I was.

No one is.

cracked-egg

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Street Closed: Back Yard Open to Deer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »

You can’t wait for inspiration. Sometimes you have to go
after it with a club. (Jack London)

Our street is blocked because of utility construction—gas line work. No parking on either side of the street. Enough noise to get the ears in the neighborhood accustomed to the upcoming Fourth of July blasts. And, of course, there’s the joy of trying to maneuver in and out of the driveway. Sure, I realize I’m lucky. I have a house and a car. More important, I have a husband of forty-two years and three granddaughters. The car may be seventeen years old, but it starts—most of the time anyway.

But, unexpected inconvenience can masquerade as the end of the world. Well, with enough flare for drama, it can. So, at dusk I decide to look out the back window of the house after the workmen have left for the day. Two fawns lay resting in our yard. Their peaceful pose would make a great photo for a meditation page.

I sit at my dining room table in between separate realities: In the front of the house, a ravaged scene, divided into light and blacktopped squares covered with huge metal plates. Signs along both sides of the street read—no parking Monday through Friday from 7:00 A.M. until 5:30 P.M. Rocky rectangles of sidewalk.  In the back yard the two young deer remain on the grass. Plenty of grass nourished by weeks of rain. Green provides a rich buffet for buck, doe, or fawn from the top of the hill to the bottom. City reigns from one window’s view, nature from the other. What I see depends upon which scene I choose.

No season lasts forever. Even construction. Although I have seen more of it in recent winters. Perhaps that isn’t so bad either. Not in an economy where folk need jobs and lines need repair. Maybe I won’t take that parking place in front of my house for granted when the work is completed. It’s possible. Then the deer can return to the front. Of course, they ate all the tulips years ago. There are plenty of weeds, however, to make a fine dawn or dusk meal. Eat, nature, and enjoy.

sign in Albuquerque, New Mexico

closed from Inhabitants of Burque Albuquerque construction

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