Good morning, friends. It’s a lovely sunny Sunday morning here which is so refreshing because we have had quite a bit of rain here lately. It makes me feel peaceful and hopeful. New readers, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting– Second Half. On Sundays, I either share a poem I have written or I share a poem written by someone else. Please share your poetry with me and other readers, in the Comments section. Today’s poem is from a book of poetry by Kevin Anderson. I love his poetry because it follows the same format of adding to and thus, cleverly changing an original thought or idea, to something more profound. This poem is from the book Now is Where God Lives.
I’m a deep person. I enjoy meaningful, interesting conversations. A lot of the time, small talk annoys me and bores me. I usually get off on intensity. But honestly, lately everything just feels way too intense. Lately, all the irons in the fire feel way too hot and I can’t find tough enough gloves to avoid the heat. I’m a little raw these days. I found this poem this morning, which was cut out and pasted in one of my journals. I’m sorry, I don’t know who to attribute it to, but I found it to be very helpful and I hope that you enjoy it, too.
Never
Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. – Proverb
Never look for something you do not need to do
Never put your trust in one on whom you can’t rely
Never try to be someone which, for you, would be a lie
Never try to control something that cannot be controlled
Never worry about aging, or the process of becoming old
Never try to run the lives of children you hold dear
Never try to live a life completely based on fear
Never try to make okay that which simply is not
Never try to cover up something you have just forgot
Never act if you are doing this life yourself
Remember you have to participate and there’s really lots of help
Never forget to remember that you can have some fun.
You don’t have to make trouble to do it, only let it come.
My grandfather loved to garden and he had a gorgeous bleeding heart plant that I can still picture to this day. Isn’t it wonderful when certain things in nature remind you of people and places and things that you have loved along the way? New readers, Fridays are devoted to the “outside pleasures” in life. Welcome to Favorite Things Friday!!! On Fridays, I typically list three favorite anythings that have added joy to my life and I strongly encourage you to add your favorites to the Comments section. You can never have too many favorites. Please see previous Friday posts for more and more favorites. Here are today’s favorites of mine:
The link above takes you to a feel-good story in the news. (Those are hard to find these days, aren’t they?) The news story talks about how a cleaning person at the hospital helped save a COVID patient’s life, by talking to him daily and by giving him hope and inspiration by talking to him about their families and about their shared faith in God. This man was so ill that a priest had even delivered his last rites. Miracles are all around us, and this story is a good reminder of that fact and also about the power and beauty of human connection.
Trip Splitter App – My friend just mentioned this awesome app yesterday. This is an app that makes it simple and organized, for people to enter their individual expenses, when on a group vacation. It then makes it easy to divvy up “who owes who what”, at the end. (Does this wording remind you of anything? Who’s on first? That’s what I said. Who? Who.) I love simple and useful apps that make life just a little bit easier. This app sounds worth its memory space on your phone, for sure.
Finally, my favorite word for the day is a Korean word. The word is “son-mat” and it “describes the specific, irreplaceable flavor of someone else’s cooking.” (NY Times) My husband’s colleague, who lives in New York, only recently got his first take-out pizza since before the coronavirus crisis began. He told my husband that the pizza was the best pizza that he had ever tasted. Ever. “Son-mat” is a word that should exist in every language, in my opinion. There is something very special about something cooked by someone else. We all bring our own uniqueness and love, to even foods as simple as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
“Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us *exactly* the way we are *and* that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that.” – Anne Lamott
Growing pains hurt. We are collectively going through a lot of growing pains these days. I remember clearly, one summer when I was a young teenager going through a lot of physical growing pains. I must have been having a major growth spurt. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to a total throbbing ache in my legs, night after night. The pain was so persistent and nagging, I thought that it would never go away. But of course, the pain did go away, once my growth spurt was over. The pain was intense enough that I remember having it, but it got resolved, naturally, once my body had grown into its adult proportions.
That’s how growing pains work. They are painful enough to remember, but not painful enough to do any real major harm. In fact, that ache is just a reminder that a real and major metamorphosis is happening. We will never forget the collective pain and angst that 2020 has brought to the world, but we will come out of the other side of it all, stronger and wiser and better than before. The important thing is to remember that God/Universe loved and supported us before 2020, God/Universe loves and supports us through 2020 and God/Universe will love us when we reach the other side of all of this tumult. The important thing to remember is that no matter how intense the pain is, it is temporary, and in the meantime, we are always being held in the hands of a Great Love. Always.
“Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you are there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those staring outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.” – Glennon Doyle
I have been doing a lot of reading lately. Reading is one of my most favorite activities in the world and one of the silver linings to this whole social distancing thing, is that it gives me an excuse to do a lot more reading. I honestly consider reading to be an enormous part of writing. You get a level of intimacy with writers that you wouldn’t get with the average Joe who you meet on the street. Writers and other artists give you deep intimacy, outside of your own intimate circles. Creatives share their fragile, bared souls with strangers.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a particularly political person. I really want this blog to mostly be a sharing of what it is like for me to be in this “cocoon” stage of life, in between Act I and Act II of my adulthood. Hopefully, by writing this blog, I selfishly bring some outpouring and validation for myself, which also hopefully, resonates with others. Still, there were a couple of interesting Comments yesterday about the George Floyd death and the implications that it has had on all of us in society, that makes me feel the need to touch on this subject a little bit more. I can’t ignore what is going on in our world, no matter how many times I quickly flip past the news, to numb out, on a silly “reality” show. The blog’s starting quote is from Glennon Doyle’s new book UNTAMED. (excellent read, by the way, and I must give a shout out to James Madison University in Virginia. Glennon and I share the same alma mater!!!)
I am white. I was raised in an upper middle class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA. My public high school had graduating class sizes of over 600 kids. In my graduating class, three of my fellow students were black. Interestingly, our principal was a black man. At James Madison University, I belonged to a large, popular sorority. One of my sorority sisters was black, in all of the four years that I belonged to my sorority. My husband and I have raised our four children in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. We have always chosen suburban neighborhoods to live in, that had excellent public schools, frankly, because we didn’t want to pay for private school for four children. My kids’ experience with minorities in any of these schools, has been limited. This was not by design. This is not a fact which I am proud of. In fact, I often thought that my children’s limited contact with people different than us, was a major disservice to my children. Their schooling experience has been limited to white, suburban America. That is not representative of the real world. And yet, my kids will most likely be living and working and raising their own families with people who have come from all over the world, from every kind of experience which one can imagine. But if you haven’t been exposed to much different than yourself in your life, how well can you really empathize with other people’s viewpoints? How do you really know where other people are coming from, when your experiences have been very limited to “people just like you”?
What I am learning about myself, through this pain that our country is experiencing, is that I shouldn’t be so defensive about the label “racist.” I don’t hate anybody because of their background or the color of their skin. I know from every inch of my heart, how wrong that is, but it is also wrong to pretend that I understand other people’s feelings and experiences. It is wrong to assume that everyone comes from the same worldview I have, largely because my worldview has been created from my own limited experiences. Everyone has different experiences in life, and a lot of these experiences come from factors that are uncontrollable. None of us got to choose the color of our skin, our parents and siblings, the country we were born in, the financial status of our family of origin, the religion we were raised in (or not), our height, our genes etc. etc. Nobody gets to pick these things. Yet all of these factors have a whole to do with who we end up being as individuals. All of these factors have a whole lot to do with our perspectives of the world. All of these factors influence our views, our ideas, our morality, our emotions, and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives and other people.
Now to be clear, it is not healthy to live a resigned life, feeling victim of all of the factors that you could not control. Each of us has an ability to better our own personal experiences with factors that we can control. We can control our own efforts, our own attitudes, our own perspectives, our own choices and our own actions. And that is what each of us must keep a focus on, the factors that we, individually, can control, with the idea that what we say and what we do and what we think, not only has a major impact on our own lives, but also on the lives of others. No matter what our race is, we must all own the power of what we can control, the personal viewpoints and choices which are helping to influence the overall creation of our own lives, our families’ lives, and the experiences of our communities, our countries and our world.
For me, I think that the labels that get thrown around a lot, like “racist”, “racism”, “privilege”, are such loaded, hateful words that it puts me in a defensive mode. And when I’m feeling defensive, I’m not open. My ears are shut down to other viewpoints because I’m feeling shame that feels unfair and unjustified. I have a good heart. I know that and I know that most people in the world have good hearts, too. I have decided to use this horribly sad time in our history to stay open and to try to learn. I am trying to move past the labels to a deeper understanding. Defensiveness keeps me closed and limited. Understanding and connection comes from an open heart. I hope that soon after the raging anger and hurt, which we all have been experiencing, dissipates, all of us can come together with open hearts and elevate our united experience together, so that all our descendants don’t have to deal with the rehashing of these same problems over and over, again. These societal problems can be solved. We have that power. And if we truly open our hearts to new ideas, and perspectives, and a unified vision of a more peaceful, beautiful world for all of us, we will be shown the path to make it so.
“No matter who the threat is, no matter what the threat is, you look them in the eye so that they know you’re human.” (a Black Lives Matter demonstrator in Whitefish, Montana, who stood up to an angry man who was inches away from her face, talking about the advice her late father had given to her)
“There is no law that we can pass that will change an individual’s heart. We must create spaces for open communication between law enforcement officials and the communities they serve. These serious conversations will lead us to better outcomes. It’s hard to hate up close!” – Senator Tim Scott, South Carolina
In a tensely angry moment, I purchased the above pin. The purchase came after a day of running errands with my daughter, last week. As we all know, last week was very tumultuous and emotionally charged. My purchase came from a moment of helplessness at my very core, where I wanted to hug every person of color whom I came in contact with, in order to show that I truly care about George Floyd’s needless death. I wanted to show that in my deepest humanity, I felt sick and sad and scared and yet even hopeful about the whole situation, but in reality, I also felt entirely uncomfortable, too. I didn’t know what to say to anybody, and I felt very ill at ease and anxious to get home. I remained silent and awkward in every store, although I did try to convey my heart, through my eyes, the only part of my face that was showing, above my mask. In the car, my daughter mentioned that she had felt the same level of agitation and helplessness that I had felt. We both noticed the races of the other people who we had come in contact with, more than we ever had before. It was a strange awakening. So, in my anger and in my sadness, and in a mix of shame and righteousness, I purchased the above pin.
I proudly showed my new piece of attire to my sons. They winced. “Wow” and “Okay” is all that they said. I was surprised by their reaction. In my emotional moment, I honestly thought that I would probably get some “cool mom points” for my purchase. I imagined that by me wearing that pin – me, a middle-aged, well-heeled white woman, with nice clothes, a designer handbag and coming out of a snazzy car, would be making a statement, everywhere I went, without having to say one word.
But then I calmed down. That choice didn’t seem particularly brave. It seemed sort of defensive and it lacked self reflection. It pushed the problems of society away from me.
In my settled-down self awareness, I decided that no child, no matter what the color of their skin, needed to see me adorned with “the f-word”, no matter how many pretty flowers were surrounding it. Instead, I started researching racism on-line. I downloaded the book How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I am currently reading this book, slowly and carefully, watching for any signs of defensiveness I may have, that could cloud the open mind, which I have always prided myself for having. I am currently scouring my own beliefs, and the hidden, subconscious aspects of my own character that do not, in any way, reflect what I want for me, and for my family and friends, for my country and for humanity.
I don’t wear the pin that I purchased. Instead, the above pictured pin, has a rightful place on my cork board next to my desk, where I keep pictures of my family, our dogs, trips that we have been on, and other images that are inspirational to me. The pin still serves as an excellent reminder . . . . a lovely, forceful reminder to me.
We’ve reached another parenting milestone. Our fourth and youngest child passed her driver’s test and is now a licensed driver. That’s the role of the youngest child, isn’t it? She gets to be the grand finale of all of the major milestones of childhood and parenting, in our family. She gets to be the exclamation point to all of the little triumphs along the way. Walking. Talking. Potty Training. First day of Kindergarten. High School Graduation. What a mixed bag of emotions, these grand finales bring to us parents! Relief. Pride. Wonderment. Nostalgia. Melancholy. Delight. Lightness. And some Heaviness. Confusion. Excitement. Mostly Love. Love. Love. Love!
I was the eldest child in my family. I have always been able to empathize with my eldest son about how hard it is to lead the way, and to forge the family path. It’s hard to figure out “cool” without an older sibling to lay down some hints along the way of the rocky path of adolescence. Our “oldest kid” lessons always came the hard way, with our parents, our teachers and our peers. The younger siblings had someone to watch carefully, and then, by careful observation, they got the ability to choose to either emulate our lofty triumphs and/or to avoid our brutal mistakes. We were the family guinea pigs. The younger siblings never had quite the glaring spotlight shown on them, as we eldest kids had on us, a light that was often so bright that it blinded us and made it hard for us to make a move. Interestingly, I think that the younger siblings both resented us oldest kids, and yet also, secretly found great relief, in that hard fact, of little less of a spotlight being shown on to them.
Even though I was the eldest child, I see that it can’t be easy for my daughter to be the youngest child, either. She doesn’t get the novelty of being the first to do almost anything. She gets parents who are little more tired, a little more worn for the wear, a little more jaded, and a little more heavy of heart, and yet a little more possessive, when she passes each of her milestones. Our familial tethers on her, are probably a little harder for her to loosen, than the ones that were connected to her three older brothers. Today, as she takes her first solo drive in the car, the rope of our mother/daughter bond, is getting stretched a little further, once again. And to me, as her loving mother, that feels wonderful and terrible, exhilarating and horrifying, all at the same time. And even though I will do my very best to try to hide my feelings, I know that she will feel them and soak them all in, along with her own mix of pulsating feelings. My daughter, my youngest child, will once again, use all of the strength and determination in her, that she has developed along the way of her childhood path, to be the fabulous, energetic exclamation point to all our family’s adventures in parenting. And I will be in the background, smiling wildly, while quietly, blinking back some tears.
Sundays are devoted to words in poetry form here at Adulting – SecondHalf. I write a poem or share a poem that I have found by another author that has deeply touched me. I strongly encourage you to publish your poems in my Comments section, but if you are shy, just jot a few poems down today, in your own private journal. It’s cathartic. I promise you. Here’s my poem for the day.
THE TREES STAND TALLER
Across the lake, lies a jungle of trees.
During the day, all of the life, teeming within the trees, is deceptively quiet.
The trees put on a calm, serene front.
They are tall, green soldiers, standing at guard,
As the lake dutifully reflects the stillness, for which the forest tries to portray.
The trees shade their inner inhabitants, promising them protection,
And respite, from the harsh, depleting rays of the sun.
But when night falls, all comes alive. The sounds are roars.
And though you can’t see anything, you know that the woodland houses
Majestic, wild creatures who can no longer remain quiet nor still.
Their howls are primal. The thicket has come alive with calls and cries.
The intensity and the mystery of it all, pulsates every one of my senses.
Fear and excitement are just different words for the very same sensations,
These sensations that are electrified through me and within me,
As I stare into the darkness of nightfall,
And in my mind, I picture the trees in their usual, reliable spots,
Even though I am not really able to see them, in any shape or form.
I feel wondrous bewilderment and almost reckless abandonment,
Frozen in wonder of the mysteriousness of it all.
When I wake in the morning, and walk into the dewy grass and stare at the trees
Far across the lake, I smile in perplexity. The trees are statues again.
The day sounds are gentle chirps and the whispering of breezes through the leaves,
I half expect a maiden with seven small men to appear, in whistling cheer.
Was my experience with the night, all in my imagination?
Was it all just a vision from the deepest recesses and caverns of my sleepy mind?
Does the night really change everything? Is darkness required to really come alive?
The forest is the same. It is deeply rooted and entwined,
I know that under the dark shade of night, the trees still stand their guard,
In their place of solid sentry, held for centuries.
So why does the forest seem to be such a different place, in the light of day?
My guess is that the trees delight in the aliveness of their inhabitants,
Who only feel safe to come out and play,
Under the cloak of the darkness of shadowy midnight.
Which state of being do the trees prefer? Do they like the stillness of the day?
Or do they prefer the humming, restless mystery of the night?
I think that the forest intrinsically understands that both lightness and dark,
Are necessary for the fullest expression of life.
The trees stay still enough, and quiet enough, and strongly rooted enough,
To fully appreciate and bathe in this intrinsic wisdom,
To just be themselves and to experience all of the complicated states of being,
For their tenure of life on Earth, in their very own spots, in the forest of other trees.
And no matter the time of day or of night,
The trees stand taller, reaching for the Heavens, grateful for the wisdom of this truth.
I’ve neglected to mention that we have added a new member to our immediate family. During these unusually tough times, we’ve enjoyed such comfort and distraction and amusement from our current fur babies, Ralph, our Labrador retriever, and Josie, our rough collie, that we decided we needed another fur friend, to make our family complete. Well, I should say, the kids and I, decided that getting a new puppy would be a wonderful, uplifting experience, while having to remain so “holed up.” My husband was a very reluctant member of the puppy band wagon. Nonetheless, knowing me and loving me for decades now, my husband knows that I love “a lot” of my favorite things. We have four kids, and we have always had a menagerie to go along with the quartet of kids. So with my husband’s grudging blessing, about two weeks ago, we brought “Trip” (as in “third dog”, or in the spirit of this year of the 2020 quarantine, “instead of a . . .”) into our home and into our hearts. Trip lives up to his name. This little Boykin spaniel is quite the Trip! And as what always happens, with all of our dogs, Trip is quite besotted with my husband, which is something that Trip and I totally share.
Happy Friday, friends!! On Fridays, we keep it very light and on the surface, here at Adulting – Second Half. I call it “Favorite Things Friday” and I typically list three favorite items, books, songs, websites, etc. that make the material girl in me, just a little giddy. Please check out previous Friday postings for more favorites. I strongly encourage you to list your favorites in the Comments section. We could all use a few little pick me uppers during these tough times, and good ideas are appreciated by all.
My first favorite for today is what is going to be happening in the Sunday papers, this very Sunday. Make a point of buying the Sunday paper, if you don’t already get it. Over 70 syndicated cartoons are going to put six hidden symbols in their columns to honor our teachers, medical workers, delivery people, grocery store personnel, medical researchers and food service workers. What fun! Read about this cool little hunt, here:
My second favorite was brought to my attention yesterday by a friend who plans to buy this shirt. You can find all variations of them on Etsy. This way, by wearing this shirt, you can say how you feel, without having to always “say what you feel.” Here is one example:
And my third favorite is this dumb little joke that I saw earlier this week, on the internet. My family all thinks that this is a very stupid joke, but I think that the joke is so stupid, that it’s hilariously funny. Plus, it’s short and those are the only kinds of jokes which I can tell to people, with any kind of success. Here’s the joke:
Two ducks were swimming along. One duck said, “Quack!” The other duck said, “OMG! I was just going to say that!”
Groan! I know. Have a great weekend friends!! Remember, the best is yet to come!!!! A little birdie told me to tell you that, so I repeat, “The best is yet to come!!!”
