2020 Archives - Adulting: Second- Half

I Am Proud

I am really proud of you. You dealt with a difficult situation, an extremely difficult year – a year filled with unknowns and trepidation and fears, and you handled it. You have one very tough experience under your belt, and the good that has come of this, is that you realize that you are stronger than you ever knew yourself to be. You dealt with disappointments and losses, and you took them on the chin. You learned to live in the moment, to savor the simple things in life, and you learned to have true compassion for yourself, and for others. You grappled with a wide array of extreme emotions, from yourself and from others, and you came to an understanding that life is much more complex than black/white, right/wrong – in short, life isn’t always as clear cut as we want it to be.

I am really proud of you. You learned this year, that gratefulness for what you do have, is the true sanctuary of the heart. You got exposed to so much in life, that you may have taken for granted, and yet, you also got the realization that there was a lot of distracting, superfluous stuff in your life, that was easy to shed, for a clearer path of where you want your life to lead. Through a very muddling, confusing, chaotic year, you were able to get clear on your highest values.

I am really proud of you. You had to spend a lot of time with yourself in 2020, and sometimes that person (yourself) is the hardest person to get to know. We tend to be the toughest, most judgmental critics of ourselves. There was a lot of time for “reflection” in 2020, and sometimes what we see in the mirror isn’t all that pretty, but when we learn to love ourselves, flaws and all, we are better unconditional lovers of others. I am proud that you came around to the gift of self acceptance.

I am really proud of you. You may think that you are all scratched up, weather beaten, bruised and vulnerable. You may feel exhausted and spent, but you are not what that small part of you sees. You are beautiful. You are made pure by the faith and the hope and the love, that kept you going. You may feel like you are hanging by a thread, but that thread you are holding on to is a steely, unbreakable golden thread. This golden thread keeps you connected to the miraculous experience of living life’s overwhelming, enticing and exciting adventures. This year you experienced the full array of what it means to live life on a precarious playing field, with its own terms, and you are humbler and better for it.

I am really proud of you. You shine. I can’t wait to see what is in store for you next. You have proven to yourself that you are resilient, kind, bold, able to face your fears, thankful, and deep. With all of that in your armor, no matter what awaits, you are prepared for it, and as always, your adventures in living, will be awe-striking. Go forward and upward from the ashes of the old you. You have a new layer of light that will help you through any experience that lies ahead on your path, and you have realized a strong connection to your inner compass. And that unbreakable compass that dwells deep inside of your heart, will never, ever steer you wrong. You know this now, more deeply than ever before. I am really proud of you.

Shelling

We were shelling on the beach over the weekend. The shells that had landed on the beach were unbelievably beautiful and varied. It had been a long, long time since there had been such an unbelievable array of colorful and unusual shells for the taking. It turns out that times around the full moon are supposed to be the best times to find truly unique shells on any particular beach. We found large conch shells, and clam shells that were so brightly yellow and orange, you would have assumed they had been painted. There were piles of pearly snail shells which were so neatly arranged that my daughter wondered if someone had collected them and put them there, but it turns out, these piles were all over the beach, like leopard spots. I got excited and inspired enough by the experience, to order a book about the different varieties of shells on Amazon. It felt like a brand new, interesting experience, even though I have been shelling on beaches since I was a little girl. I got excited and reacquainted with the treasure hunt feel of it all, all over again.

Friends, this year has been an incredibly difficult and somewhat disillusioning year. A lot of things that make us energized and excited have gone dormant under layers of worry and concern and fatigue. But those things which arouse and delight us, are still there, underneath it all. Like finding a long lost piece of jewelry or another treasured thing, long considered gone forever, the experiences which make us feel moved and aflame, will happen again. We will surprise ourselves with the remembered feelings of delight and aliveness which these dormant experiences will bring us, when life starts to feel lighter again.

The beautiful shells that appeared on the beach, were always there. Some of them are hundreds, maybe even thousands of years old. It’s just that they got covered up by heavy sand and high tides from storms and winds and tossing seas. But on a calm, cloudless day, the sun shown its light on the glistening shells, and the moon smiled her blessing on the banquet of abundant gifts which she had bequeathed to the beach combers. And as the beach combers picked up their perfectly lovely gifts, to examine them closer and to hold them gently in their hands, near to their peaceful hearts, the shellers remembered how perfectly, naturally loved they were, and how perfectly and naturally loved, they have always, always been.

Sacred Gift

Happy Thanksgiving, my dear readers. I hope that you know how thankful I am for you. If you don’t know this, please read yesterday’s blog post. It is my “thank you” note to you, and it is filled with sincere love and gratitude from me, to you.

This Thanksgiving holiday is going to be strange and different for many people. It’s going to be somewhat sad and reflective for a lot people and that’s okay. Thanksgiving doesn’t require “forced gratitude.” Gratitude brought about by shame is not a good feeling. In fact, it’s not really gratitude, it’s just ugly guilt. “Shame on you, for feeling sad or lonesome or angry or scared or bewildered! You SHOULD feel so happy for all of the good in your life! Don’t you know how good your life is, compared to so many others?!” (that’s just ugly, judgmental yucky stuff, and that kind of thinking doesn’t bring about any kind of genuine feelings of gratefulness. That kind of thinking just tries to add shame and guilt, to a feeling that is so akin to love (gratefulness), that there is absolutely no room for all that negativity in love’s and gratefulness’ purest forms.) Feelings are just feelings, friends. As a dear friend told me one time, “Just because someone else is having a heart attack, doesn’t mean that your broken toe doesn’t hurt.”

And at the same token, there should be no shame in feeling wonderful this Thanksgiving. In fact, there is no shame if you loved this entire year. There is no shame, if 2020 was your best year ever. We all could use some uplifting this year, and someone else’s joy and happiness, does wonders for raising the energy that surrounds all of us. I pray that there are more of you lovers of 2020 out there, than I think there is, in my simple mind.

Honestly, if I had to pick just one beautiful gift, which I feel that I got from this 2020 experience, it was the gift of having to really look for all of the good, in even seemingly bad situations. It is easier to feel deep, genuine gratitude for the people, places and things in your life, when you are faced with the real possibility of losing them. The gift of acute attention to every blessing in my life, was probably the most sacred gift of 2020. Other years, the good in my life was often taken for granted, or maybe even sometimes “expected”, with an air of entitlement. 2020 brought a “humbling” to a lot of us, but with this humbling comes authenticity. And when you are your most authentic, true self, your feelings are deep and they are raw and they are intense, but remember that includes all of the good feelings, too. When you are being your truest, realest, most authentic self, love and gratitude are incredibly wonderful feelings to experience. Dare I say, I am profoundly thankful for my own gratitude this year, because I feel it at depths, I never, ever knew before.

Mt. 2020

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Happy Labor Day. This is the right way to do a Monday, isn’t it? My family just woke up, fully rested and restored. The morning is bright and still and quiet and calm. I saw this meme the other day and I thought to myself, that is exactly what we are doing here in 2020. We have been assigned a whole range of seemingly insurmountable mountain tops. We have reached peaks of anger and frustration, and pinnacles of rage, in so many facets of our society. But on this day that reminds us about just how much we can achieve when we labor together, we realize that we are the chosen people, to move these mountains of fear, and pain, and shame, and anger, and inequalities, and sickness, to the side, in order to clear a path for all of us, to walk into a brighter tomorrow. We are the chosen people of 2020. We know this, because we are here. We are being trusted to move the mountains. Someone knows that we are strong enough, yet have malleable hearts and open, bright minds, in order to see beyond the terrifying heights, to the beautiful valleys that stretch beyond the rocky mountain ranges. As long as we all remember to see it as our sacred task and duty, for all of us to labor against the problems, instead of “us against each other”, we will make it. We will move mountains in 2020. We are the chosen people. It is time we start acting like it.

Sky-Blue Pink

I took the photograph, seen above, while driving home, just me and my husband and my daughter, from taking our youngest son up to his apartment, close to his university, where he will live, with his best friends, while taking his sophomore college classes, online for this semester. We helped him to unpack (as much as he would let us do it). We went to the obligatory grocery store trip, to make sure that our son started the fall schooling season, all stocked up with nourishment (which made us feel better about the ultimate good-bye), and then, we sat in the apartment with our youngest son and one of his friends and our other son, who is a senior at the same university. We ate take-out burgers and cupcakes and we laughed and we lingered until we felt the obvious energetic itching, from all of the boys, for us to leave, and to make our way home, to our own fall schedules and individual lives.

I felt strangely quiet, yet peaceful, on the way home. I knew that this was the right decision for our family, to allow our boys to have a go, at a makeshift try, at a less-than-normal year at college. It makes a mama’s heart happy, to see her children excited, and joyful and bursting at the seams for a little more freedom, a little more independence, and a little more hope – at any age, but especially during these difficult times.

As I stared out of the window, at the beautiful sunset, it felt like the perfect gift from the Universe. The sunset was a lovely closing curtain on what has been one of the strangest, longest, scariest, yet in many ways, most meaningful summers of our lives. This beautiful sunset officially closed out Summer of 2020, for me. I will never forget this summer for the rest of my days. None of us will. But I have a strange inkling that how I am reflecting on all of the events of this past summer now (the long summer that really started for us, in the middle of a shell-shocked spring), will soften and change, as I survive past it and I absorb the lessons that it has brought to me and to our family and to our whole world, for that matter. I have a deep, knowing sense that the jarring events of the summer of 2020 will blend more perfectly with the ultimate destinations of each of our lives, and that this blending will happen in an unusually, entirely unexpected, beautiful way. I think that ultimately I will remember 2020 as a sky-blue pink year – a year that was more beautiful than I initially thought that it was, mostly because it was so vivid, and jarring, and colorful, and unexpected and memorable. It will be a year that reminded me and my family and my friends and all of us, about the fragility (and therefore, the breath-taking preciousness) of the gift of living a life. If there was ever a year that made us soak in the individual quiet moments, 2020 would be it. If there was ever a year that asked us to reflect, 2020 would be it. If there was ever a year that made us give up the idea that we had all or any of “the answers”, 2020 would be it. If there was ever a year that asked us to just sit still and to breathe in a sky-blue pink sunset, 2020 would be it. And in some crazy, weird way, I think that I am grateful for it. Only time will tell.

Caterpillar

I don’t spend very much time on social media, but I do check out our Nextdoor app on a regular basis, to keep apprised of what is going on in our neighborhood and to get good recommendations for repair people and the like. Often, people post pictures of their missing pets on Nextdoor, and almost always, before the end of the day, the pet is found and everyone posts kind words of relief and happiness that the fur kids are back at home, with their beloved families.

Recently, a woman posted frantic requests for help to find her cat. Days and days went by, and everyone posted words of encouragement and hope for the fraught lady to find her kitty. Finally, after twenty days, her precious kitty was found and reunited with our neighbor. The relieved woman wrote a post thanking everyone for their love and concern and for sharing her joy, in the cat’s safe return home. She posted, “Don’t ever underestimate the power of prayer!”

This experience reminded me of Caterpillar. Caterpillar was my cat, growing up and he was a legend. We called him Pillar. Pillar was a huge, long-haired, grey tabby cat. Retrospectively, Pillar probably was a Maine coon cat, but back in the late 1970s, cats were just cats, and we got Pillar by responding to an ad in the local Pennysaver, from a lady whose cat unexpectedly had kittens. Still, Pillar was a gorgeous cat and he totally lived life on his own terms. He was an indoor/outdoor cat, as most cats were back then. From his outdoor adventures, Pillar often brought us “presents”, alive and dead, and we had to chase live birds, their wings flapping frantically, out of our home, more times than I can count.

Pillar adored my sister and she adored him. Although, my sister had terrible allergies, she wore Pillar around her neck, like a slinky fur stole, as she went about her day, playing with her toys. Pillar slept with my sister every single night, right on top of her head. To this day, my sister is a “cat person.”

Pillar followed us around wherever we went. If we went on a walk, before you knew it, out of nowhere, Pillar would pop out of the bushes, to show you that he was along for the adventure. When we would go sled riding, Pillar would chase our sleds and little ice balls would be attached to the back of his furry legs, because we would stay out in the snow, all day long. And Pillar stayed with us.

Pillar cemented the idea into my head, that cats truly do have nine lives. As I said, he lived life on his own terms. Once we took him on our vacation and he wasn’t happy about being at a lake house far from home. He camped out under the lake house, and we ended up spending half of our vacation looking for him. Pillar liked attention. Once, when my dad sold our boat, and the new owner, having driven the boat home, several hours and hundreds of miles away, called us, to let us know that Pillar had been a stowaway on the boat. Sadly, one year, Pillar almost died of a urinary tract infection, but our vet was so taken with Pillar, that our vet spent his Christmas, with Pillar at his personal home, nursing him back to life. That was the one of the best childhood Christmas presents we ever got. Pillar lived!!

Memories about Pillar came up for me a lot, these past couple of weeks, following my neighbor’s daily posts, asking everyone to keep an eye out for her kitty. You see, one time Pillar disappeared for a very long while. Pillar disappeared from our lives for days that turned into weeks and then into months, nowhere to be found. Despite our desperate shouts and long “hunts” for Pillar, he didn’t come home. I remember clearly, one day, my mother stating to me that it would be best for me to accept that Pillar was “gone” and that he probably wasn’t coming back. I was probably around 10 years old at that time.

That day, I remember so clearly and vividly, climbing high up into a big old apple tree that shaded our yard. I climbed as high as I could go and I cried. I sobbed. And then I prayed. I’ve stated before that I don’t consider myself a religious person, but I am a deeply spiritual person. Luckily for me, my intense faith has been with me, ever since I can remember, and my faith has never wavered. I have always had a very personal relationship with my Creator. After I cried and I prayed, I felt that soothing, regulating, peace and calm, that only my Creator can give to me. I climbed down from the apple tree and I went about my day. Pillar came home, a few days later.

Pillar lived to a ripe old age. I was already married and out of my parents’ home, the day that he died. My mother said that as Pillar took his last breaths, he reached out to try to catch a fly who had landed near to him. Hunting was always Pillar’s greatest passion.

We have all been suffering gut punches left and right, since practically the beginning of this year, which we (not so fondly) call 2020. When my memories flooded back about Caterpillar, our childhood cat, these past few days, I was reminded of my friend who has been texting pictures of the cocoons that she has been watching carefully in her well-tended butterfly farm. She has released several gorgeous butterflies into the world these last few days, and it has been so much fun to watch the progression, through her pictures, which started with snaps of striped caterpillars chewing on their leaves. Interestingly, towards the end of the cocoon stage, the cocoon gets so translucent that you can make out what the butterflies will look like. You can see what the butterflies will look like, before they even know what beautiful creatures, they have become. I think that we are all in the cocoon stage these days. We are sometimes hanging on by a thread, like I felt that day in my childhood, clinging to the branch of the apple tree, crying out to our Creator. Yet, we are being protected in our cocoons, and our Creator can already see the marvelous transformations that have happened and are still happening to us, during this difficult, transformative stage.

Let’s hold on to hope, friends. Let’s know the power of prayer. Let’s just try to rest in our cocoons, for now. Let’s visualize our cocoons surrounding us with the energy of Love. There is nothing stronger than Love. And it’s protecting us. Fiercely.

Kia Ora

Wow. I always want to start out of the New Year starting gate, raring to go, but I think that I am a slow starter. No, I know that I am a slow starter. The tortoise wins the race, though, right? In New Zealand, today is officially celebrated as the New Year’s Day holiday. Today, I am a New Zealander.

Thank you for my New Year’s wishes from some of my regular readers (and friends). We had a lovely time with our college friends. How can you not have a great time with people who have decided to remain friends with you for 30+ years? That needs to be cherished and rewarded. And luckily, all of us girls married nice, solid guys (the good ones whom we decided to hold on to 😉 ) and we are all blessed with wonderful, kind, pleasant children. It was a fantastic way to end one year out and bring in the new one.

I was scrolling through Twitter this morning and this post caught my eye. It was a re-tweet from a twitter account called Jessica Dore (I do not know anything about her, but I find this post very thought-provoking.) Let’s all be heroes and really, really start living even more full and authentic and brave lives this year, and throughout the decade ahead! As the New Zealanders apparently say, KIA ORA in 2020! (Maori for “be well”) Here’s the post: