Ineffable

 

Everything important happens again and again and if you don't believe that, you are not looking hard enough at the right things.

You may not recognize it for what it is.

You may not appreciate it for the way it happens.

Because it is not personal, except it is if you see it.

Life begins again and again. Reanimated, repeated, resourced.

Grains of sand yielding becoming more and more of what they already are.

Cells dividing.

Seeds exploding.

Evolution furthering what already is.

It is the glory of life on a grand scale.

Not Suzy, or Billy, but the spark of creation replicating itself for all eternity in everything that is.

That's the glory of  being part of Creation.

Gratitude

Gratitude is like a light beam. The farther it gets from the source the larger it feels until it spills out over my entire life.

Today is the day after Christmas, so I guess it could feel like a let down, but for me it just got brighter.

I found places for some of my favorite gifts, took pictures of them there and sent texts to the people who got them for me. For me this is playing. I love looking for just the right place for just the right thing. Designing and redesigning my life is one of my great joys.

And -- my son called to tell me how perfect my gifts were for him. I really shouldn't get credit for that. I simply listen when he talks so that I am aware of what is important to him and I know what he does so that makes it easy to find gifts he can use. Then I have the fun of shopping for just the right clothing, soft on the inside as well as the outside and warm with  appropriate construction. It's like a treasure hunt that I have the fun of doing and then get glowing appreciation for. Both gifts for me!

Same for my daughter and sister who loved that I seemed to find gifts they adored. 

I don't buy gifts for everyone for every occasion, but occasionally I find the exact right gift for someone and then I get so excited. It is not a miracle, nor is it work. It is only the result of paying attention to what they say and do.

I think that is one of the reasons I love being with people one on one. It is possible to have a deeper, closer relationship that way. If someone is important to me I really want to know who they are and what they like. Now. Not ten years ago. Now.

I am grateful for the people in my life that I love!

Joy

I am celebrating this Christmas like it is the last one ever! Who knows. At my age that is always a possibility and besides it is just a nice way to live.

Searching for just the right presents for each person, even some I don't usually buy gifts for, gave me twice as much joy this year. 

Making a Christmas pie, baking Christmas cookies and even making a special meal for just me to eat has filled the house with good smells. My nose is the fastest way I know to fall into a wonderful memory.

I do not feel sad at all, which feels a little funny given the circumstances this year.

I simply feel blessed to have such wonderful people in my life, to know that next year we will have a new president, and that the covid vaccines are out there.

Ten months of unspeakable darkness and horror has taught me to find joy in the smallest things and for that I am grateful.

I am more than grateful.

I find myself joyful!

Gifts of the heart

One good thing about Christmas 2020, for me at least, is that people are trying to be sure no one feels left out, or alone this holiday season.

In the past it seemed as though there was a goal - that two or three hours spent eating Christmas dinner and opening presents on Christmas Day in frantic cheer.

This year that will not happen for many folk, but there is a sort of continual excitement leading up to what would have been that time.

People calling, people writing, people taking time to make sure that no one is forgotten. Dropping by or mailing presents, sending cards, calling every day. these scattered minutes are so dear to someone with loved ones.

I would rather have a daily dose of love, a call from my son, or bestest, than all the presents in Santa's sleigh.

The gift

 

Christmas opens my heart so wide it is painful.

It is as though I can feel a thousand times more than normal and everything touches me deeply.

I look at the truly good people in this world, the ones who not only give, but think and do loving things all the time. People who don't just act nice, but ARE nice and they break my heart. I want to wrap them up and keep them safe forever.

I wonder what my son will be when he is old and frail and dependent on others. Will they be kind to him? Will they treat him gently and love him for real, not just as part of some job they do?

He gives and gives and gives. 

I have never known anyone with less who gives so much, all the time. Stopping to help a woman on the road and giving her one of his bungee cords to keep her load on her car. Spending time listening to people who need to be heard. Caring for his family day and night even when he is worn out or not feeling well. Caring for animals as though they were people. There isn't a mean bone in his body. No passive aggressive actions, no doing for appearances sake only. He is the real thing.

But not all people value that. The world is more inclined to care for the rich man, the showy man, the man who whines and complains.

I just want my son to meet people like him when he is old and fragile. He has earned that. If I could pick a Christmas gift, that would be it.

Traditions

 

As a child our Christmas tradition was simple. A week before Christmas we bought a big tree and my dad wired it to the woodwork on either side of the corner it stood in. Later we decorated it with old family heirloom ornaments and a gazillion single strands of tinsel. 

It was important to me that we establish traditions for our children, so around the second week in December we would drive out to a tree farm where my husband cut down the tree we all chose and we drove it home. Then we would string popcorn and cranberries and add them right after he put the lights on. Later we ate my iced Christmas cookies, drank hot chocolate and decorated that tree.

Soon, though, the children were involved in other things. Christmas concerts at school. The church's nativity scene play and the Community Theater's Christmas program. These took a lot of time, especially the last one. I worked on costumes, my husband played Santa in the suit I made, our oldest son usually had a solo or two and performed, or danced in whatever the program was that year. Our other two children were actors, elves, and extras. Rehearsals were long and late and there was no time to go look for a tree on the farm.

We bought an artificial tree and it lasted right up to the end of our marriage, Towards the end I left off the bottom two tiers and stuck it through the hole in our umbrella patio table, so the cats would not tip it over. With a big Christmas skirt, it was perfect!

Now I live alone. The boys are one on each coast and even though my daughter is nearby, there is the quarantine from COVID 19 to deal with. Still, traditions are important. 

I put up my small fake tree with the realistic pine cones and hung the macaroni angel, my grandson's singing ornament with his face on it, the ornaments friends and family have made recently and topped it with both a star and the ornament we put on Community Player's Christmas tree every year.

Wrapping presents to put underneath it is still one of my favorite things to do. The traditions have morphed a bit, but they are still recognizable in the joy I feel each year digging deep to find them.

That is the secret to traditions, I think. They have to grow with the times to stay alive.

In the moment

I saw someone's emotional response out in public the other day and I felt sad. It was a made for TV moment, right off the screen. It was what I hear and see so many people do anymore.

Simply mimic what they think is the proper, or cool, response according to made for consumer's propaganda.

A "Whoot." An inauthentic exclamation. An overstatement that cheapens the moment. A way of commercializing real feelings and responses.

All the hand raising, whooping, hollering, and craziness for public consumption is camouflage for the real thing.

An honest smile, watery eyes, heartfelt joy and simple silent awe often get lost in this sort of buffoonery and it makes me sad, because the people losing it are not even aware that they have been desensitized.

Life is not all about the glitter and show. The truest gifts touch so deeply that there aren't any really appropriate responses. There is only un-evinced gratitude and awe and maybe a smile, or hug.

And that is okay.

Loving

 

All my life I have loved and been loved, but it wasn't until High school that I realized people could leave my life. 

I was four when we moved away from Champaign and I remember my mother saying that I said, "Well I have friends now. When are we going to move?" I wondered what she meant at the time. I barely knew Julie and Paul, the kids across the street, but I think what she really meant was that she didn't like moving.

My mother was born and raised in one house, in one town, and had one true love all her life. She died before he did, so she never really lost anyone.

We moved quite a bit after I was four, but my family was always there. As long as they were with me, I was home. I thought that the whole world was as stable as that until the first guy I really dated, broke up with me. It hurt. I had never had someone walk out of my life before.

Eventually I grew up, got married and had three children. In the movies that was happily ever after. In real life it was miscarriages, foster care and adoption before giving birth. It turned out my husband was seldom faithful, but I thought my children were forever.

And that turned out to be true.

Those children are mine forever. I will never stop loving them. They are not mine to keep, not objects to be owned, but they are human beings that are such a part of me that my love could go around the world a million times and still be as strong, or stronger than it ever was.

Nothing will ever change that.

My Thots

 

I wrote my first thot nearly 22 years ago. At the time it was written to get a response from someone else who wrote a thought every day and suddenly missed a few.

In the beginning they were unique and thought provoking.

Later on they would be a bit more ecstatic.

And for a long while they often had something really worth saying.

That being said, they seem to have evolved into a form of therapy for me during the past couple of years. 

After reading a few of my older ones, I am disappointed by where the newer ones have gone.

Is that important, or is it just another 2020 moment designed to destroy everything?

I honestly don't know, but it is something I am seriously thinking about.

Puzzle

 

If  hearts holds the love of a family close, what happens when parts of that love pull away?

Is it like cookie dough at Christmas?

Are there people shaped holes left behind?

One for Dan and one for Sue and one for Terry Lou?

Can they be reinserted, slipped back in like living jigsaw puzzles that click together with a satisfying snap, or are they like uncaulked seams in a working shower? Messy. Leaky. Awkward.

I think most mothers would take them either way.

Your child is your child no matter what.

Cursed?

If it's not one thing, it's my mother!

I write this as a mother. 

As the mother!

My son has had a very rough year. Lost his old job, has become an independent contractor facing winter, has a money pit of a house and all sorts of other things.

Today his dog bit the delivery man who reached over the fence with a package. It is a rescue dog he has been working with since they got her and it wasn't a bad bite, but still . . . the dog bit the man.

I feel bad because the delivery man was delivering a package from me.

My son is the epitome of patience, peace and goodwill. He says not to worry.

I am a guilt ridden mother who generally really doesn't worry about too many things. Like why is he late getting home, etc., but this?

I'm starting to worry that whatever comes next might be the last straw. That one straw that is keeping the money pit upright,  amid all its leaks and creaks, ancient pipes and cursed plumbing.

I am imagining opening the bathroom door to find my son stewed in a hot bath of plaster chips and a hundred years of dust, only to hear evil laughing echoing through the halls behind me.

Of course that won't happen.

I don't live there.

But his wife and son do.

With the dog.

A little Christmas adventure

Sometimes window shopping online pays off. 

Today I found something that spoke to me of a friend and the price was astounding. Etsy, Ebay, Amazon, and others were asking as much as seventeen times what the man on Marketplace was!

And what really made the day was the journey.

I found it, confirmed it, and drove two towns over to pick it up! 

I haven't been anywhere, or done anything since last March so this was a real adventure.

I went to the bank to get some money, drove over there and went to the wrong house, but I didn't panic. I just called him on the phone. He answered and I walked next door.

Tomorrow I'm going to the post office. 

I'm mailing a big box of books to my son, a box of sketches to Bestest and this to someone I am hoping will be very surprised.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Euphemisms

 

Most people know about euphemisms. They are words we use to make ugliness sound better, more acceptable, less repugnant.

Women of my generation took this idea to lengths I'd never realized until I read a book by Roxane Gay called Hunger. That book is very appropriate for this time. A time when women are allowed to talk about the unspeakable. A time when the unimaginable may be voiced without shame, although it still feels shameful and difficult to talk about.

The first time I had sex I did not expect it. I did not want it. I said, "No." many times. I pushed him away firmly but gently, so I wouldn't hurt his feelings. It didn't stop him. 

Afterwards he said we made love and I wanted him to feel for me the way I had felt for him, so I thought maybe he was right, but I felt awful.

Every morning after that he would come up to my bedroom at his mother's home and do it again. I would push him away and whisper, "No," so his mother wouldn't hear and when he didn't stop I would threaten to tell her. I even threatened to call out for her help, but I didn't want to embarrass him, or her, or shame myself, so of course I did not. Sometimes I barely slept trying to figure out how I might escape him in the morning.

I hated making love with him, but he wouldn't stop. 

I couldn't tell anyone. I didn't want them to know and I didn't want them to think bad things about me, or him, so I finally began telling myself I was a modern girl. I made love just because. He went into the army and we agreed to date other people when he wasn't home. He said men couldn't be expected to be celibate. 

I didn't understand why the boys I dated didn't try to make love to me. I wondered if it was because they could tell I had already done it and was a slut? I felt trapped by what I had done with him.

Eventually he came home from the army and we got married like people do who have already made love. On our honeymoon he gave me all kinds of slutty outfits and wanted me to wear them when he did it to me. It made me feel used and unloved, but I didn't want to make him sad.

We were married nearly thirty years during which I had lots of bad feelings about his truthfulness and faithfulness and doubts about his love for me, which turned out to be well founded. I made lots of excuses for him. I blamed myself for not being loving enough, good enough, kind enough. When my doctor told me I had chlamydia I couldn't figure out how I got it. 

Now I wonder how I could have been so deluded for so long, but it felt right at the time. At least it felt as right as anything else in our relationship did. 

Now I prefer solitary living.

Corrections

Water finds its own level and so do people.

Eventually.

Some of them just don't live long enough for this to happen in a way we find socially acceptable. 

But if they did.

They would.

Change does not happen over night,

Or in a month,

Or often in a year.

If it took forty years to create something,

You might expect it to take ten years to recreate it.

If you want to get it right.

Socially compromised

 

It's not what you say that matters.

It is what you do!

Saying you aren't afraid of COVID-19, or that wearing a mask is a sign that you are afraid, is the reasoning of child. I'm not ascared of you!

We don't allow children to choose whether or not they get immunizations, or stay away from friends who have the measles, because they are not mentally mature enough to make those decisions.

284,000 people have died from this virus and people are worried that their freedom is threatened by wearing a little cotton face mask. 

Has anyone mentioned how dying affects your freedom?

Has anyone thought about how they'd feel if you came up and strangled their grandmother? Giving her this virus is tantamount to that. 

COVID is a weapon that people not wearing masks carry with them everywhere. They are a danger to society. Ignorance does not dissolve that blame.

Let people register for the right not to wear a face mask. They will then be on a an easily identified list. People who refuse to wear a face mask and social distance can then be refused medical care  That care should be reserved for those who cared enough to at least try not to spread it. When it comes down to the last ICU bed, why give it to someone who actively made others sick? Or didn't care if they did?

There are consequences for actions and they should fall first on the shoulders of those who asked for them.

Two sides of the coin

 

There are people in this world who are good. Extraordinarily good, kind, caring people. They are not perfect, but they do things for the right reasons.

I don't know why they are this way. I used to think it was nurture, but I am beginning to believe it is nature, because they come from the same families that less kind people do.

These people think about what they are doing. They don't just react and if it feels good to them, continue. A lot of people do that. They mistake feeling good for helping others, when they are not really doing that at all. They believe that if it feels right, it must be right.

Unfortunately, many things that might feel good, or right, in the moment, are only enabling. Their long term results can be tragic. Passed down from generation to generation like sacred cows, they create untold misery for children grandchildren, great grandchildren. All in the name of goodness (nee: feeling good.)

The flip side of these people are the extraordinary ones. Their lives are not necessarily any easier, but the gifts they give, freely and without strings, have a lasting influence. The quiet, good natured, common sense and intelligent responses they pass on are the stuff of everything good in the world.

We are not in this world to create drama. Histrionic, pitiful, poor me, passive aggressive, manipulative, enabling people often think they are very good and they may mean well, but it doesn't change how damaging they are.

Our role models walk softly and respond carefully.

A series of unfortunate events

This starts out with no good deed goes unpunished and moves on from there.

My son called me, like he often does, and we talked one our headsets while he drove around running errands. 

I took him with me, via the headset, as I took my daughter a bunch of Christmas decorations I no longer used.

Then, still talking to my son, I decided to treat myself to donuts and pulled into my favorite store. I took the keys out of the ignition, then remembered I needed to put my mask on before getting out of the car. Leaning over, I popped the ear bud off of on of the wires on my headset!

I love this headset. It makes my isolation so much nicer because I can talk to people for hours if I want to while still doing chores, so I hurried to try and find the ear bud on the dark car floor. The contrast between the sunny day and dim floor board made it impossible to see, so I gave up, grabbed my purse and went in to buy donuts.

Proud that I could keep the headset on while doing this, I bought two donuts, chitchatted with the salesperson who liked my elephant shirt and went back out to my car.

That is when I realized my keys were not in my purse. Panicking I started pulling everything out and putting it on the hood of my little Honda Fit. Then I saw the keys! Inside the car on the passenger seat.

Another customer came over to see if I was okay and the woman in the store came out, but I said I would call my daughter and she would bring me the keys. I called and told her where I thought my spare was at home and settled in to wait.

I knew it would be at least thirty minutes for her to get to my house and back to me, so I looked around for a place to sit. During this time when you cannot sit in stores or restaurants, I thought I was out of luck, but then I saw a concrete bench across the street by an ice cream store

Thank goodness I had my son to talk to and thank goodness it was 46 degrees out, because I hadn't worn a coat today. I waited for nearly half an hour and walked back to my car, but my daughter never came.

She had had trouble finding my jewelry box where I kept the spare key and then, in her hurry to get it to me, got lost and passed the donut shop. When I called her we had to figure out where she was and she had to come all the way across town back to me.

But I got the key. The automatic button to unlock the car wouldn't work, but the key unlocked the door. I drove home, found the earbud on the floor and got back into my house.

Two budding cold sores and several trips to the bathroom later, I fell asleep under my weighted blanket and slept for two hours! 

All's well that ends well.

Right?

Christmas miracle

There are people in my life that I cannot share anything with because just talking to them opens a door to all their anguish and hurt. They do not see that their own decisions cause nearly all of their problems. Instead they turn it around and tell me they cannot live like I do. By that they mean self-centered and selfish.

They believe that having any boundaries is selfish. Having any rules mean. Having any personal preferences petty. They prefer to be pecked to death by their children, job, friends, and life in general. In fact, that seems to be the only constant in their life -  they must suffer to be happy.

I don't believe I am self-centered or selfish. I just have limits and I believe people who are independent are ultimately happier than those who are enabled and tied to someone else's generosity.

On the flip side are the people in my life who find peace or joy in most days of their lives. My son, who lost his job in February loves the new life he's made for himself as an independent contractor. He likes the work, the people he works with, the whole shebang. The only problem is not making enough money for anything extra. Today he found out his ancient furnace is dead and gone. That means it will take thousands of dollars to replace it, or they are going to have a very cold winter.

An amazing couple, who has always told them, "If you if ever need anything, please let us know." heard they were in trouble and gave them a check for the whole thing! It is the closest thing to a Christmas miracle I have ever personally experienced.

I believe that good things can happen without all the chest beating and weeping some people feel is necessary in life. You may need to rethink, or re-plan, or get lucky, but as long as you don't give up and keep on doing honestly kind and good things, life is doable.

In fact it can be awesome.

Seasoning

 

In the beginning she tilled the ground, broke up the clods of earth and let air and light into the soil. The next day she scattered seeds. Some in rows, others in mounds, and tucked them all in under a warm blanket of soil.

They began to grow, knowing not from where they came, so their curious little minds began creating stories.

The peas, winding their way up trellises believed that the light called to them and in their hearts they heard it saying, "Higher, if you love me rise higher."

The beans grew straight and narrow, knowing it was the only way.

Pumpkins spread, lazy and careless, wanting only to loll about on the soft earth and enjoy their being.

The oregano, basal and garlic scented something beautiful in the air.

But the peppers were hot and alert and spread among all the others, asking questions, creating needs. The peppers were not content to be. They needed to know from whence they came. They wanted to know where they would go and so the stories began.

Soon the beans and peas were kneeling and begging forgiveness for not being enough. 

The pumpkins burst forth into bloom, hoping it was enough.

The seasonings quivered in the light.

And the peppers went right on heating things up.

Until one day she came out.

Picked them all,

And ate them.

Eye

The eyes have it!

No matter how old someone gets to be, their eyes peek out through the wrinkles and furrows with the intensity of their being.

Always look people in the eye.