Belonging

Insider's jokes, there is something special about getting them. They are usually very subtle and require some sort of in depth knowledge of what is going on.

Families have them, television series have them, businesses have them. Getting them implies that you are not just part of the group, you are intimately attached to it in some way.

What I am thinking of isn't even really always a joke. It is an aside, a comment, a manner that is a very good way of drawing people in, of bringing them closer, or letting them know you understand who they are without actually saying so. It can be a look between people, a phrase used with a double meaning, an idea hidden between the lines for the very discerning.

Poorly done it makes some people feel like outsiders, but well done, it only appears to the ones it is aimed at. Used this way it is powerful, because we all like to belong -- even if we are loners -- and there is nothing like the intimacy of sharing something that seems to be just between us.

Bedrock belonging, something I think is a deep yearning and seldom met need in this day and age.

Forever

Every so often I have one of those aha moments when I realize something that is kind of minor, but has had a long lasting effect on my life. Today was one of those.

I have a small odd little plastic brush whose top rotates from one direction to the other as I brush lint, fur, hair, dust, whatever, off my clothing and furniture. It doesn't have a name on it, but I believe it was called a miracle brush back in 1970 when I received it from an aunt as a wedding gift. Up until my last move I had several things that hailed back to that distant time, forty odd years ago!

I had three small corning ware casserole dishes with glass tops, one speckled blue roaster, an angel music box from the Black Forest...and this brush! Now this brush is the only thing I brought with me out of all of these infinitely useful things. It works perfectly and has saved many items from being discarded over the years and many outfits from being ruined as I dashed out the door for appointments and pictures.

I simply brush it across the dirty area and clean it by brushing it backwards on a rag (or my jeans leg!) Today I saved a huge cleaning bill by using it on a red embroidered bedspread that had collected lint and dust sitting on a shelf for months.

I'm sure my aunt never thought her gift would be the one to out last everything -- including the marriage!

Changes

I can't change the weather, or the news that comes through the television.

I can't change your favorite color, or make the neighbor's dog stop barking.

I can't do a million and one things, maybe even more, but there is one thing I can do.

I can decide how I will spend the next five minutes and after that I can make a decision on the the next five. Sometimes I can do this for a whole day. Sometimes I can't.

Sometimes I have to do what you want, but then I still have the option of choosing how I feel about that. It's one of my little pleasures in life -- feeling good in the moment.

Somehow that makes up for all the things I can't do.

My Teacher

It is both the strength and the weakness of a great teacher that draws me in.

In the strength I see those things I wish to emulate and to learn.

In the weakness I see those things the strength sits upon.

The Teacher becomes a mirror reflecting back my fears with the face of hope.

What If

I have a head cold. Not a big deal unless you are the one who has it.

It could be worse. It could have settled in my chest where I am much more vulnerable to this sort of thing and which is more likely to become something serious.

Still, it reminds me how important perspective is.

Last year if I got a cold like this it was annoying, but not life threatening. This year after just losing a friend to what she originally thought was a head cold, or sinus infection it is more worrisome.

Wondering "what if" is a totally useless occupation in this case. If I am going to indulge in it I am really allowing myself to feel the fear and suffer through things that have nothing to do with the reality of me. In fact I am putting my body through stress it doesn't need to go through and that could be damaging all in itself.

Imagination is not always a good thing.

The Art Of Perception

My life comes from inside of me. Here I find joy and contentment, entertainment and peace. When I look out through the windows of my eyes I see things differently than you do. I hear things differently too. We are different people and that is okay with me. I think it is okay with you too.

You come to me with questions that make me think you are unhappy. I offer you what I have, what I know; I don't know how to do anything else. I want your life to be as good as mine. I don't want to change you, but I wish you could be happy too.

We look for the differences; where do these things come from?

This is all I have, look at it, pick and choose what works for you. I think it is something you have to find for yourself.

Pucker Up

I get used to jumping through hoops. It started early on when my mother said do something and she meant now, not after I thought about it, or when I decided it was okay, but the moment she said it. To a certain degree this is imperative for young children. If a car is coming a parent cannot afford to debate the issue with a three year old, but these commands need to be used sparingly.

A child who is never allowed to question, or taught to think for him, or herself, is an easy target.

Someone yells jump and they are conditioned to jump. Fine sometimes, but this same conditioning makes one quickly click on the Internet command that says, you are being attacked by a virus, click here immediately! If you do that, you screw up your entire computer. Or other people with authoritative voices bully a child into behavior they would never participate in if they were responding and not reacting.

That is the secret you know. Children need to be taught to respond, thoughtfully, carefully and from a place of strength. Simply reacting to situations becomes an emotional response. Emotional responses are lovely when they make you cry over poetry, or blink back tears when you hear a favorite song, but they destroy your credibility at work, or if you need to make a difficult, but valid point.

Avoiding reacting and doing it well is an art. It requires practice to stand your ground and state your thoughts quietly with resolve, but not confrontationally. It is easier to make a point, or win a debate if the other person is not upset with you. You want them to remain calm. Learning how this works takes time and some practice, but it certainly simplifies life.

There's a fine line between "kissing up" and the art of dealing with difficult people and the most successful people learn it early on, but even "kissing up" is better than jumping through hoops without thinking.

A good kisser is thinking, just not necessarily in the right direction!

Families

Born into a family with brothers and sister, mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and even what my mother referred to as kissing cousins, I barely knew what privacy was, let alone who I was.

There was always someone around and yet it was still possible to be lonely. I never questioned that then. I find it understandable now, but still rather amazing.

Large families like mine were invaluable teaching aids. Sharing, caring, loving -- these things were simply part of life. Never questioned, in fact, taken for granted while I was plopped down among all this living and learning. There were other, slightly less savory things learned and taken for granted too and that is what made life more difficult as I grew older.

First of all, my expectation of everyone else having had these same experiences of people and family turned out to be a false one. Secondly, not everything I learned was necessarily something I really wanted to carry forward. Only there was no list of these things for me to peruse as I did the unthinkable and moved far away from the world that I grew up in.

It has been one long experiment: doing what I knew to do, living how I'd always lived and learning from the resulting good, or bad feelings what worked and what did not. I was able to discard some of my habits immediately with the pliability of youth and desire to make things better. Other things took longer to change because they were so deeply hidden within the folds of my thoughts and actions that I had no idea they had anything to do with what was going on in my life. I am sure there are still things here that need work and if and when I am able to discover them I will weed them out or prune them, or do whatever I am able to do with them.

I discover other things that seem to be more strictly me and these too need to be nurtured, or disposed of depending on the feelings that spring up from them. It has taken me a lifetime to bring this garden of diversity that is me into some kind of focus I can understand, but lately I am finding myself more and more at peace here, almost as if I am part of a new big family. One with an unlimited number of aunts, uncles and cousins, but also one with a much larger house where privacy is the norm and I have more time for contemplation.

In the company of me there is no to take the blame, or the accolades for the peace, love and joy that surrounds me moment to moment. This is the jumping off point for the rest of my life. There may not be any great splashes, but there are bound to be moments when I am so immersed in it that I lose perspective. That is what it is all about.

Life isn't over until it's over. In the meantime it is a learning process.

Getting There!

Everyone needs a friend who will tell it like it is. Without that I can go on deluding myself forever and delusions are not the foundation for happiness, or any sort of lasting content.

It's like building a castle out of sugar cubes. One big rainstorm and the thing starts to disintegrate.

As much as I want to feel good, I want the kind of feeling good that comes from real stability, from a sense that what I'm dong will hold water so to speak.

Imagine living fifty feet from the spring and dying of thirst because no one told you the spring was there, or how to get the water out of it.

If I have to walk across the hot burning sand to get that water, I may not go.

A real friend will tell me the water is on the other side. He might even hold my hand and he might even give me a shove to get me going.

It might make me cry initially, but in the long run immersing myself in that cold clear water will help me.

How?

Who knows? I need to get there first!

Being Me

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to take stock of one's life and by opposing, take control........ I know I have finally stepped onto the way that defines my own being.

Of course there are other ways besides opposing, but realizing that I don't like, or can't live with, the status quo is the first step.

What comes next depends on both me and the world, but I always have the opportunity to learn from the experience. I may learn to leave well enough alone, or I may learn more effective ways of dealing with it, but the fact that I'm willing to learn is huge.

Evolution...growth of any kind, is dependent on this quality in me.

The Inner Connection

I have been having so many coincidences in my life lately.

I'll get a feeling and it turns out to be true, or reminds me to do something that needs to be done right away.

For example: I took my sister to run an errand at the hospital. I dropped her off at the door and told her to call me when she was coming back down and I would come back and get her. I parked the car far away in a parking lot and sat there drinking my coffee and reading a book I had just bought at the Book Barn. After a while I began to think, what if she discovers she doesn't have her phone? What if my phone isn't working? Maybe I should just drive up there and see if she might be out looking for me. All of this took about fifteen seconds when my phone rang and she said, "I'm out here and I'm ready."

Last week I had this feeling the person who was coming to visit me might have come early. I went over and opened my apartment door thinking I might go down and wait for them downstairs. What a shock! As I opened the door, they were reaching up to knock on it!

I knew a friend was playing in a tennis tournament today too and I wanted to kind of think some good thoughts their way. I completely forgot as the day wore along until suddenly I remembered. My sister checked her watch. Their match was just beginning.

I think nature provides some sort of connection between us that we don't understand.

Pictures Of The Heart

Pictures are such an amazing part of my life.

I look at them and see myself when I was younger, much younger and know how I looked as an infant, or a child. I can still "see" my mother, or father even though they have been gone for a long time.

I am able to gaze on my grandchildren from a distance and look at their photos next to the ones of their parents when they were that age.

And then there are pictures of the heart, those scenes described to me by friends that I will never see in print, but which still have a way of invading my life in soft moments and these will never fade.

I suppose they are the oldest sort of pictures there are, the only ones that existed before cameras and great artists, kind of antique photos of the most priceless sort, but no matter what sort they are, pictures are a huge part of my life.

Life's Little Tweaks

What do you do, where do you go, when everything that you've based your life on doesn't make you happy anymore?

That is a question most of us have to answer at some point in our lives. It may be that we simply need to shift the focus a bit, move a little closer to some friends and away from others, or re-adjust our eating habits, or change jobs. It may mean taking a long hard look at what we have been clinging to for security.

The idea of any port in a storm is good, but when life becomes one long storm, maybe I need to head out towards some specific port where the values are a little more stable.

That old joke about what happens if you keep doing the same things and expecting different results? It's no joke. Something has to change if I'm not happy. The hubris of stubbornly doing things one way because I always have, or because Mom did it that way, or because I am afraid to change, will eventually kill me -- in spirit if not physically.

I have honestly found it necessary to start almost completely over at least twice in my life, but there have always been little changes here and there. I'm not the woman I was at eighteen, or thirty, or even fifty and I'm not the woman I will be at seventy, or eighty, or ninety!

I can be content and even happy if I allow myself the luxury of being honest with myself.

Pssst....Did you hear?

I hear people say, "Things are just fine the way they are." Well, sure they are, that's all we know. It's good to be satisfied. It's comfortable to be around things I know and understand. But even nature changes things. Every thing changes.

That's how we got where these things are

The problem is that in a world where email takes seconds to go around the world, we expect change to happen now!

Even in our high tech universe where life has changed so drastically at an escalating speed over the past one hundred years, there is a learning curve and I don't think it has changed too much. We just hear about it more.

Could we destroy the world? Absolutely. Other species have died out, there's no reason to believe human beings couldn't find a way either. But I think it's unlikely. We'll make, we have made, grave errors, but they are still localized enough that the rest of the world can learn from them and eventually will learn something from them.

I'm less concerned about the technology and environmental hazards than our cultural trends.

The greed, impatience and intolerance of human beings rivals that of some of the most heinous animals on the planet. There is a we and them thinking that is devastating. It keeps us from doing more important things and becomes a handle for the true political manipulators to use to control us.

The last thing in the world some politicians want is to get rid of those things they use as part of their platform. All they have to do is profess to be for or against certain words that arise from ignorance and their chances soar. Thanks to these key words they get people to vote for things that are absolutely not in their best interests and the politicians know this. Hate and fear mongers sell votes.

I suppose even these things will eventually work themselves out over time, but it could be so much easier if people quit trying to control how others look and love and live and make a bigger effort to work together to improve life for everyone.

It takes a lot of time and money to pick out the differences in people; time and money that could be better spent focusing on our common needs.

Brackets

Nothing stays the same forever.

If there is one lesson in life I have finally learned: it is that things change. And in general the idea that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction does seem to apply.

There are so many ways of dealing with something like this. I can feign ignorance and pretend I didn’t know it would change, I can try to plan for the change and manipulate things to come out the way I want, or I can learn to roll with the punches and just accept that if I want to do the deed I must pay the price.

This last one is what seems to apply in my life. For me it seems that for the second, more moderate way to work, things must be a little more middle of the road.

It is hard for me to stand in the middle of the road and look out at the glorious beauty just beyond my reach. I ache for the extremes. I seem to have a need to immerse myself in something so far that I burn.

Knowing that to step over there means I will suffer the pain of separation when the time comes does not seem to deter me. I know that now.

Part of standing on top of the wave means eventually sliding into the trough and troughs can be dark, desperate, lonely feeling places. Learning to turn trough-time into a time for introspection and a personal moment when I can test my faith in my own beliefs makes it not only endurable, but also a time of growth.

There will always be another moment in the sun as long as I hang in here. Burning and Aching are two sides of the same experience. Accepting them as natural brackets makes this journey a slightly smoother one.

Let Me Entertain You

It helps to be a fan of something, no matter what it is.

I think that might be why people used to keep track of the weather. It was the one thing guaranteed to change everyday before we had Internet and television and smart phones. Before we even had libraries that everyone could access, we had the weather.

In some ways windows are the oldest venues for entertainment. Any window in a storm so to speak and if you just happened to have some beautiful scene, or garden, or distant mountain you could view, the entertainment value zipped right up there.

I once spent a year sitting with an elderly woman who liked to watch what went on in her alley. She waited for the school children to pass by at lunch time, and after school. She knew the can collectors and trash pickers by sight. If it rained we watched the drops that hit her lilies and dripped from the gutters above our porch window. It was a world that held endless fascination for her, because it was her world.

Taking ownership for some small part of this vast universe seems to up the ante for everything too. We become intimate with some aspect of our lives and notice those small nuances others miss, or perhaps don't care about, but we do care. We care because they are our things, our thoughts, our stories. I think that is a basic premise for living. Before there was mass communication we had intimate communication.

We knew if our neighbor walked by with a limp she didn't have the day before that maybe she could use a little help. We understood the tone of Uncle Mark's letter was really an invitation to visit, because he was lonely. We loved the excitement and tension of a thunderstorm, or sweet beauty of a spring rain. A sunny day brightened our thoughts before there were soap operas to tug on our heartstrings.

I think being a fan of something, whether it is the weather, a person, a neighborhood, or any of today's media opportunities is a basic part of being human.

Who Me?

Someone writes. "You know how you don't really think of your actual life as being compelling. You sort of just live in the mundane-ness of it everyday."

That really is true. I see myself as a simple person who lives a simple life doing ordinary things. I am always amazed if someone else sees it differently, or if someone even acts like what I'm saying, or doing is particularly unique.

I look in the mirror and see the same person I have always seen. Brown hair, hazel eyes, nice smile, but average, average, average.

Anything that belies that vision confuses me. I wonder what I am missing.

Frugal elegance.

Cooks on television always have their ingredients carefully measured out so they just need to dump them into whatever they are cooking and voila! Likewise carpenters on television demonstrate how easy it is to snap, screw and tap all those carefully cut pieces of wood together and create a chair, or table, or whatever the project of the day is. Even if you never watch TV, if you have put together a jigsaw puzzle, you have experienced that ultimate satisfaction of snapping a piece into just the right spot and feeling the satisfying click as it sinks into place.

Today my life felt just like these moments. The bills are paid. I was able to visit my daughter and granddaughters and share my photos with them. My car moved quietly and efficiently from one place to the next. I was able to buy the few necessities I needed at a local store and come home to walk my dog, on feet without mind numbing pain.

There is an innate satisfaction to a day like today when everything seems to go smoothly.

Once upon a time I looked for drama and excitement. Now I dream of simplicity.

If I have just enough to take care of the basics I find myself not only content, but actually happy. There is no sense of guilt, or feeling that I am wasting anything and there is no sense of dread that I cannot fend for myself. Just being able to pay the bills is a luxury I will never take for granted again. Living life on my own terms is a blessing. These are the good years.

And I know it!

Home Again

Somehow going on vacation is much easier than returning from it!

Duh, you say? Well, it doesn't seem that simple to me. I had many things to coordinate before leaving. Closing up my apartment so that workers could come in and do some major work in the bathroom while I was gone. Dropping the dog off at my sister's in another town about an hour away. Visiting with friends who were kind enough to drop me off at the airport three hours away and pick me up when I returned. Trying to pack for winter weather in the same carry on bag I packed in the middle of July and since I do not have laundry facilities in my apartment I had to coordinate doing the wash along with the sort of three day pre-travel schedule I set for myself.

Coming home should have been simple. Get off the plane, drive home, pick up the dog and go forward, but life is never that easy in my world. It was like some giant secretary took an invisible finger and scrunched all those things that happen around the end of one month and the beginning of the next along the calendar so that when I woke up Thursday morning I hit the floor running. I quit running when I finally got home about 8:30 PM last night, dog in tow and crashed on my bed for a five hour nap that twisted my sleeping pattern like a pretzel, but which I desperately needed.

Now I finally have time to just sit back and savor the last two weeks! I have memories and pictures and even tiny videos of my time in Denver. Time spent with my son and daughter-in-law and beautiful baby granddaughter. It always amazes me when I get to visit them. They cram so much living and loving into every hour of the day I am in awe.

When I was raising my children I had ideas and thoughts about how things should be, what priorities were highest, where in the grand scale of life, time and effort and compassion should be apportioned, but like all people there was always that niggling thought that I might be off track. Now, as the mother of grown children and grandmother of more children I can sit back and observe the results of those years and I have to say I am pretty much content. What I might not have gotten right, my children seem ready, able, and willing to improve upon, but in general they make me feel really good. That's not a small thing in my opinion.

So, now I am home from vacation and it was a good one! I think that is what vacations are really for. They take me out of my ruts and lift me up so that my perspective has time to align itself, get all the kinks out and leave me ready to drop back into business as usual renewed.

Time gnaws away...

And I am melting like some iceberg off the north pole, or perhaps a witch in the land of Oz. Everything around me is yielding to the pressure of this relentless, almost silent creature who devours seconds, minutes, hours and days, a creature who leaves its mark on the gnarly old oak tree outside my window the roof of my eleven year old car, the lines on my face.

There is no garage, or cage, or suit of armor that is strong enough to stand between me and Time. Like acid, or wind, hail, or fire, it devours everything in its path, but unlike those other things, it also builds receptacles filled with memories and thoughts.

The by product of Time may be wisdom. At least it can be wisdom.

Youth is a beautiful thing, but it is not everything. When I look at some of Time's most exquisite creations I see unimaginable sweetness in the wisdom of those faded eyes, soft strength in that white or silvery hair, comfort in those gnarled and wrinkled hands.

Our universe is an art gallery of immense diversity, a zoo of incredible species, a diorama of infinite proportions.

Each one a corroboration between Time and its project.

Watch Out!

I wish we could dispense with stereotypes in this world.

There is always an exception. There are always lots of exceptions!

So, unless I can find some way to know ahead of time which are which, the stereotype is both worthless and time consuming.

That is a best case description of it.

A worst case description is the fear and hatred that comes from people who believe they do have some value.

Which stereotype falls closest to you?

The Next Step Up

Some things in life cannot be justified. They simply are.

And the funny thing about that is these are often some very important things in the grand scheme of things.

And the other funny thing about that is they are different for everyone. Almost no one has the exact same basic secondary wants and needs.

We all need food, shelter, attention of some sort, but where that attention comes from, what form it takes, how it manifests when I manipulate it, that can be worlds apart in people who even live in the same house, let alone cities, or states apart.

It is possible to honor each others' differences and I think our ability to do that defines us.

In fact, that may be the single biggest challenge in today's world. Learning to accept and value people who are different requires a level of tolerance and desire for understanding that allows for a step up in the evolutionary scale.

Are you ready for that?

Burning

Most people trust in some kind of order to their universe, a feeling that certain things are relatively reliable like gravity and the rotation of the seasons, or the sun coming up.

I also believe that most people find a sense of goodness somewhere in their lives, a place where love and beauty are possible even if it appears they have not actually manifested in the moment. Something to strive for, reach for, live for.

Babies find it in their primary caretaker, parents in their children. I hear the yearning for it in old Irish ballads about mother. I see it in the dreamy eyes of teenagers reaching for their newest idol, or protesters wanting some new Utopian government. It is what religious orders refer to as a calling.

It is easier for it to be something unreachable like God who can never be truly proven to fall, or fail, but it doesn't have to be. It can be in the name of a beloved, in the name of Stan, or Shams, or Jesus. It can be a guru, or teacher, a role model, or even a lover. It is what brings out the very best I have to offer, what is worth living and dying for.

It is a reason to be.

The more aware of it I am, the better my life is. It makes everything else more bearable at the least and extraordinary at the best. It may change over time, but its existence is critical.

I think it may be our way of accessing the spark of life.

Sometimes I burn so fiercely I think I will die from the joy of it.

Reassurance

It is amazing when children grow up and become real live adults.

I am in awe of mine.

They do all the things we used to do only they do them better and with even more love.

If I ever needed to be reassured about the value of my life, seeing this does it for me.

Hope Begins With Me

What if you are held responsible for all of your actions, even the ones no one knows about?

The way you live, the groceries you buy, or don't buy, what you do with your garbage, how you talk in front of your children and grandchildren, the thoughts you think at night as you go to sleep?

You are you know. Everyone is. Eventually the world we live in will reflect who we are, because eventually what was only an after thought in this generation will become something bigger and bigger and bigger.

Today's world is the result of what came before today. It is no accident. It is the direct result of how you voted, or didn't vote, how you spent your money, your time, your thoughts. You can pass the buck, but you can't escape.

What is the answer? I honestly don't know, so I do the best I can to be simple, honest, generous with my time and spend the money I have as wisely as I know how. I may not make all the right decisions, but I try to educate myself with as much truth as I can find. Being wealthy may make me look successful and wise, but it won't save my great grandchildren from a world that is rapidly going downhill. That's going to take more of us doing what is really right, not just carrying signs, or shooting people, or throwing our weight around, no matter how good our reasons, or causes are.

Saving our world means that, one at a time, every single solitary human being, needs to find a way to do the right things for the right reasons. As long as one human being goes to bed hungry, one person dies from a disease there is a treatment for, one person is discriminated against because of something that does not actually hurt another, we are so far off the beaten track we wouldn't recognize it if we were carried over and laid gently right in the middle.

Don't tell me that "right" is the key word here, that everyone has a different description of right. I am talking about concrete things, not ideas. I am talking about adequate food, shelter, health care, useful employment and clothing. Once that is genuinely taken care of we can debate the rest.

Every step every one takes in this direction is a step towards hope.

Twice Blessed

I am a grandmother.

I used to think that meant being old, gray haired and tired, but now I know differently. For one thing I am not any of those things, but I am so much more,

Being a grandmother means being twice blessed.

My children have grown-up and given me beautiful grandchildren and I am given the gift of new joy and old memories.

I look at my grand children and think how I never wanted their parents to grow up and yet I really did. Children are a chance to discover just how much love I have. I don't just love the way they make me feel. I want them to really experience the very best life has to offer. I want them to grow up strong and healthy, self sufficient and maybe even wise and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

That is not a job to take lightly. It isn't all laughter and giggles. Sometimes it is saying no, or even making them momentarily unhappy so that in the long run they can find contentment and joy.

Sometimes

Sometimes life is too busy to spend much time writing and this is one of those times.

Right now I am busy just living it, but tomorrow I am sure I will have more to say!

The Way

Isn’t it amazing how I go about doing things? I want to be more in tune, become more aware, expand my consciousness, and so how do I begin?

Well, sometimes that means going out like today to listen to a friend read her review of theatre in the city, or go to McGurk’s to listen to live Irish music, or sink into a Patanjolie meditation complete with live flute music. All of these things expand my world in different and wonderful ways.

The funny thing is that all of these really just pad the way. In the long run all of these beautiful experiences must be assimilated into who I am, where I am, how I am.

I have to go, not outside myself, but inside myself.