Tag: life

Wednesday’s Whimsies

+ Yesterday, I texted my husband that I had written a blog post. He told me that he loved that I had given myself permission to just blog on whim. Kelly Corrigan recently interviewed Christy Turlington Burns (supermodel from the 80s) and also the current creator of a series called The Art of Recuperation, on Kelly’s podcast. Christy said this in their conversation, “When movement feels like freedom and not duty, your feet will carry you further.” Do things because you want to do them, not because you “should” do them. And if there are things that you think that you absolutely have to do/should do, find the “want” behind the should. I will go to my annual physicals, because I want to remain healthy. I will go to work, because I want to feel financially secure. There are a lot more things in life that are self-imposed “shoulds” that you really don’t have to do, if you consciously consider everything. (Everything in life is really just a set of actions/energies and the consequences of those actions/energies) And after coming off of a busy time period that now, allows me to catch up on some truly delicious rest and sleep and recuperation, this quote from the conversation makes a lot of sense, too: “Not all that tires depletes. Some exhaustions feed the soul.” My soul has been fed incredibly delicious experiences all year long and now I am really enjoying some contented, deeply experienced, rest. (long, happy sigh)

+ I read this quote by Eckhart Tolle yesterday: “Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not “yours”, not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.” Don’t say, “I’m depressed, or I’m angry, or even, I’m happy.” For you are not those things! You are feeling depressed, or you are feeling angry or you are feeling happy and you probably feel these various feelings and many more feelings, every day, throughout each day. YOU are the peaceful, timeless observer inside of yourself who experiences your bodily sensations, who notices your thoughts, who experiences your everyday escapades, who feels your emotions. YOU are a tiny spark of Source/Creation/Life/God/Spirit experiencing being alive as a human being on Earth at this moment. Live fully in all your powerful glory. Experience it all and know that all is well.

+ We were boating with friends of ours over the weekend and we saw the effects and changes caused by the hurricanes on the beaches and the barrier islands by our town. It was humbling and yes, much of the human created parking lots, and structures and widened beaches have been devastated and need to be repaired, but the natural beauty remains constant. No matter the changes it goes through, nature looks beautiful in every cycle of its life. (as do we – we are part of nature) We saw several dolphins, a pelican decided to fly along beside our boat (similar to that recent car commercial where the bird is flying in unison with the car), and we had the best shelling experience that we have experienced in a long, long time. (The storms sure churned up some beauties!) No experience is ever one-dimensional.

+ I collect potheads and other garden goop. One of my regular readers, Kelly from Cali, recently asked me how Harmonia did through the hurricanes. Harmonia (the muse of my blog, you can read about her on my front blog page) remains solid, still, and beautiful and nonplussed. Here she is today with Celeste, one of my favorite potheads:

This is one of the first potheads that I ever brought home. I never named her. She looks like the masthead of a noble ship:

And here are Bert and Ernie, who are so kind to hold our sunscreen and bug spray. They were discovered in an old barn in my grandfather’s tiny hometown of Windber, Pennsylvania:

And this is Garden Girl. I recently met her maker, a self-proclaimed “yardist”, but that is a story for another day (or check my archives. I have written about him before):

Don’t you just love people who can bring life and whimsy to materials like clay and rock and concrete? They are creators. We are all creators and we are co-creating this world every day. Let’s make it a wonderful one.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Kinship

Maybe this is just in my mind, but my experience in going about my daily chores yesterday, is that we women were just a little teeny bit kinder to each other. There was a little more sweetness, a little more understanding and a little more compassion felt for one another. I sensed it. Deeply.

No matter what your politics are, and no matter who you voted for, as women, earlier this week, we were on the brink of something none of us have ever experienced in our lifetimes before – an American woman as president. And I have to believe, that even in the most diehard Republican woman out there, there was at least a teeny, teeny part of her (that teeny part of her that was promised as a little girl that a woman can do anything), who found that idea exciting and hopeful and vindicating. And yet it was not to be . . . .

There is good that comes out of everything. Yesterday, I found a knowing kinship with other women (most of them strangers to me), that I honestly haven’t felt in a long time. And it was good.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

30 years

Today is my 30th wedding anniversary. I have known my husband since I was 18 years old. We met on my first weekend in college. I have spent my entire adult life with my husband. He is the most important person in my life and he always will be. I’m still very much in love with my husband. I believe that he is still in love with me. I understand that this is special. I understand that this is a rarity. I am totally, totally grateful.

My eldest son just got engaged. My second eldest son has been ring shopping (and I can say this because he and his girlfriend went ring shopping together). What has been my advice to my sons and their significant others for a long and happy marriage? Always, always put your “marriage” first. When you get married, the marriage becomes its own living entity. When you make your marriage the most important thing in your life, and you nurture it, and you believe in it, and you give it your highest attention and your energy, it will give you everything that you gave it, back in spades. (Now I realize that it takes two people who are willing to treat the marriage like a sacred child to raise and to adore and to be committed to in life, but if you do your part, and you believe that your spouse will do the same, then the battle is already won.)

Our married life hasn’t been perfect. Life isn’t perfect. However, my marriage has been the most vital part of 30 years of really good living. My marriage is my sanctuary, my comfort, my joy, my adventures, my framework for how I go about living my life. It’s been perfect for me.

J, thank you for choosing me. Thank you for believing in our sacred marriage as much as I do. Thank you for everything. I love you forever and ever and ever.

Flowers Bloom

So, I am back home and I am bone weary. And I am brain weary. We had a wonderful visit up north, celebrating the wedding engagement of our son and his fiance’, and enjoyed visiting other family members. We did some hiking on the Appalachian Trail. And also, we might as well have been hiking in New York City. (14,000 steps in one day) I was so busy with all of the fun and the action and getting home and getting organized and getting unpacked and getting our groceries replenished, that it is just now, when I have fully and completely realized that my mind and my body and my spirit have yet to process what we have collectively been through in my community. I am tired. I am quiet. I am taking a big exhale.

We moved to Florida for my husband’s job in 2011. We have been through many hurricanes since then, but only one other time did we decide to evacuate. (that was for Irma in 2017) People who aren’t Floridians watch the hysterical, oversized, 24/7 news stories about hurricanes and wonder why we all don’t just flee the state, and also wonder why we ever go back. It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is. People don’t evacuate their homes for hurricanes for many reasons: finances, pets, stubbornness, a perhaps false sense of security from past experiences, horrific traffic and gas shortages, the uncertainty of where a hurricane is going to hit despite the gigantic “cone of certainty” ominously pasted over the entire state of Florida, for every storm (there are many, many recounted stories of people evacuating to places that end up getting the worst of the storms. For instance, one acquaintance told us that she tried to escape Hurricane Helene by going to her dad’s cabin in Lake Lure, which is in the mountains of North Carolina, with her elderly grandmother and young child. You can imagine the rest of that story, a story that she will likely tell for the rest of her life. Sigh.)

Since living here since the summer of 2011, this is the worst that I have ever seen our own local communities hit by hurricanes. It is sad. It is horrific. The pictures that you are seeing on the news are not exaggerated. Helene flooded most of our coastal communities. People have piled their ruined belongings, furniture, carpeting, mattresses, drywall at the end of each driveway, or have dumped them on specified empty lots, where the piles of debris are growing up like instant, ugly little mountains. Right after Hurricane Helene, in less than two weeks, Hurricane Milton decided to stir the pot with ferocious winds and rains and tornadoes. The devastation is immense. Trees, and street lights, and billboards, fences, and people’s roofs have been tossed around like Milton was an angry three-year old, throwing around his legos.

And yet, the facts are, most of us are relatively unscathed. Most of us (in our county alone there is over a million people who live here) survived with our lives, and our homes mostly intact. Most of us had some small, inexpensive clean-ups and repairs to do, and maybe some raking up of some sticks and leaves in our yards. And so most of us, walk around with that sickly feeling of great relief which is mixed with some sad and empathetic survivor’s guilt, when we see what the hurricanes brought on to others less fortunate than us.

So why do we live in Florida? Why is my one small county densely packed with a million people? Why do we live with the fear of hurricanes every year, and why are we willing to pay four times the average cost of homeowners’ insurance compared to the rest of the country? You tell me. Why do you come to Florida for vacation? I bet almost everyone of you has been to Florida at least once. We have gorgeous beaches. We have amazing wildlife. We are surrounded by water everywhere. (and water is from whence we came) We get to experience beautiful sunshine almost every single day of our lives. We have something for everybody here. Florida is one of the few true melting pots, of the bigger melting pot of our own great country. You cannot feel out of place in Florida. Anything goes. We embrace “Florida Man” and everybody else.

Please don’t feel sorry for us Floridians. We get the hurricanes. We call them “the price we pay to live in paradise.” We understand, and we take on the risks. We are processing right now. We are licking our wounds. Some of us will decide that the price is no longer worth it, and will leave. And that is okay. In the end, we will all be okay. The sun still shines upon us, the land of flowers. Flowers bloom.

Sneaky Bits

Hello. It’s a been a minute . . . but I’m feeling the need to write an update . . . . for me. My cousin was recently laid off from a high-powered job. She has started writing a blog about this experience. She has expressed to me, that me and my blog inspired her to start writing her own story. She says that she is surprised as to how cathartic it is to write about what happens in your life, and how it makes you so much better understand how you are processing everything which you are experiencing in your own one, precious life. Friends, write about your own life (even if it is in a private journal, just for yourself, for your eyes only). Learn about yourself. Be surprised. I am beginning to believe that this act of writing is practically an imperative, in order to fully experience the entire scopes of our lives. Your story is an important thread of it all. Write it. Read it. Embrace it. Begin to understand . . . .

I am writing to you from a hotel room in New York City. New York City has been a part of my history since I was young child. We would visit relatives in New York City almost every Thanksgiving when I was a kid, experiencing the Macy’s Day Parade, Broadway, and all of the visceral sights and sounds which are entirely New York City’s alone. The pace of NYC is insane. I was walking along city blocks tonight, all by myself, laughing at how out of breath I was, trying to keep up with the rush hour walkers. I usually pride myself in my unusually fast pace of doing anything and everything. Yet, on this evening, New York seemed to say to me, “Move to the side, Floridian . . . . we’ve got places to go and your slow-ass is in the way!”

Recently, I paused writing this blog, because I felt that I was in a turning point time for me. It was one of those times of false security. It was one of those times that I falsely believed that I had it all figured out. I honestly felt like, “You’ve made it, girl. You got all of your four children to adulthood, all in good stead. You got through the pandemic years, and the worst years of your son’s epilepsy, and the deeply depressing years of your mother-in-law’s slow decline and eventual death. And now, Voila! You got to a good year- a really good year -2024. And honestly, 2024 has been a year of amazing adventures, and new excitements, and pride and relief, and a rekindling of the focus on just me and my husband, since the two of us were barely adults. And it’s been great! And it’s been revitalizing! And then, in just the last couple of weeks, the community which I have called home for more than a decade has experienced two horrific hurricanes in the span of about ten days. And also, at the same time our eldest son and his wonderful longtime girlfriend, got engaged to be married. And I was soberly reminded that I will never be at the “all settled” point in my life while I am still living it. I got reminded that there will always be good in my life, and there will always be less than good in my life. Life is messy. Life is wonderful. Life is hard. Life is simple. Life is complicated. Life is confusing. Life is beautiful. And all of this swirl of life, usually happens all at once. And so you have to be brave to accept it all, and to deeply know that you are up to the challenge of feeling it all, experiencing it all, handling it all.

In my life, I am most grateful for my ability to connect. As Garth Brooks sings, “I have friends in low places” but I also have friends in palaces. Tonight, in my wanderings in NYC, I chatted with homeless people, and investment bankers in swanky bars. I chatted with bellhops, and a priest in a world-famous cathedral. I connected with all of them, all because of my deep intuitive knowing that we are all so imperatively and intrinsically connected to each other. I don’t think that this wisdom fully comes about until you are willing to surrender to the idea that you honestly don’t know shit. Your primary job is to experience it all, and then, to write it all down.

Cycles

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Lin

When you have spent a good portion of your life striving to get ahead, raising a family, doing your best in the societal constructs of our times, and you come to a point of culmination – family grown, savings in the bank, learning from your past achievements and your failures, you give yourself a little timeout time to just breathe, and to bask, and to celebrate, and to reflect. And then . . . . the fear of growing stale and bored starts building up in you, and so you start to explore new things for new times. And these new things feel exciting and scary and uncomfortable and necessary if you want to continue to grow. My husband and I are starting baby steps into some new things, for this new phase of our shared lives.

Recently, my husband and I talked to each other about an older couple who lives across the street from us. Our neighbors are kind, and predictable and reliable. They are a comfort to watch them in their completely regular everyday routines. They are like a wonderful, well worn pair of your favorite slippers. But this couple is older than us – much older. We aren’t ready for “settled in our ways” yet. And so we have started considering new ideas and new interests and this is kind of unsettling. We are brushing the dust off of some of “our old ways”, and we are getting brave to explore parts of ourselves which we may have yet to discover. We are stirring things up to get “unsettled in our ways.”

If I have seemed distant and distracted on the blog lately, it’s because I am. I am propping up my courage to actively explore what I want in the next five years, and beyond. I am trying to get really real and authentic with myself, about what is working, about what isn’t working, and about what needs to change, and about what needs to be brought in, and about what needs to be let go, now that I am at the early stages of a brand new era of my life. I am starting to execute ideas that have been building in my mind, and this is exhilarating and intimidating all at once. I haven’t felt those kinds of feelings, this deeply, for a while, since I was finishing up my last stage of the first half of my adulthood. I understand that these are just the cycles of life, which keep on cycling us forward into our futures. And like all of the beginnings of my past life cycles, I am full of hopefulness and trepidation in equal measures. But the energetic momentum keeps me moving forward into new adventures. I honestly can’t wait to see what is up ahead and around the bend.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1690. Who makes you laugh without even trying?

Soul Sunday

Good morning. Welcome to poetry day on the blog. Jane Hirshfield, a famous poet, says this is why we should write poetry: “One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn’t know was in you, or in the world. Other forms of writing—scientific papers, political analysis, most journalism—attempt to capture and comprehend something known. Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.” Below is my poem for the day. Write a poem today. I dare you.

“grief crests equally in times of joy and in times of difficulty . . . “ – Chelsea Bieker

Stirrings

Sometimes the ingredients get tossed about

When you had no desire to cook them in your mind

You are left to deal with the churning mess

Of things you thought you had left behind.

I cooked this already. I stewed in it. The meal is done.

Not really, though. It was only half-baked, silly.

In some ways, this recipe has only just begun. . . .

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

400. What’s your favorite accent?

Herd Animal

“Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they escape them, worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come.” – Seneca (one of the more well-known Stoics)

It’s so true, isn’t it? Have you ever watched a special on wild animals, such as caribou or gazelles? You see the cute little horned/hoofed animals, hanging out with their herd, peacefully eating some greens or drinking some water out of a lake or a stream, and then the camera zooms in on some big cat, like a lion, in prowling mode, watching intently, just waiting to strike and suss out the weak animals of the herd, like babies, or the old or infirm members of the group. And then you feel that distress and panic, filling your chest cavity, as you notice that a few members of the herd, have stopped what they are doing, and they are flicking their ears, looking and listening intently, and then suddenly and almost instantly, they bolt, the entire herd starts galloping . . . . . the terrifying chase is on, and the herd is going at a frantic pace, their galloping hooves pounding the earth with an intensity of nails being hammered deeply into the ground. And even though you know that big cats have to eat, too, you feel so stressed, and also hopeful that the herd will escape harm. Either way (depending on the wild animal special you happen to be watching at the time – I’ve seen it go both ways), the chase usually does end rather quickly, either with the predator giving up, or with the predator achieving its one and only kill, out of the hundreds that it could have gotten from the big, full, hefty herd. Wild animal specials are probably the only truly realistic “reality TV.”

Still, it never fails, once the imminent danger ends, the herd quickly goes back to chomping grass and drinking water. They seem absolutely nonplussed about the trauma they just encountered, nor worried about the next trauma that is guaranteed to happen down the line. The herd of hooved animals trust their instincts to help them in dangerous moments, and while they remain vigilant, they also remain calm.

We, too, are animals. We often put too much emphasis on our thoughts and minds, and not enough emphasis on honing our instincts. Interestingly, it’s our thoughts and minds that can become our worst predatory enemies, because they keep us hostage and hyper-vigilant. They keep us in “danger mode” all of the time. This makes us exhausted and feeling spent, and then not always clued into what is “real and actual danger” and what is not.

Don’t be your own predatory Big Cat. Be a gazelle. Be a giraffe. Know that your fine-tuned instincts/intuition will kick in when real danger presents itself. Learn to trust that inner knowing, more than you trust those thoughts that keep you prisoner in either a regretful past, or a fearsome future. Chew greens. Drink water. Be peace.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

123. Would you rather own a private jet or a luxury yacht?

Soul Sunday

Good morning!! Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit Have a happy last third of the year! I’ve really enjoyed 2024 so far. Have you? I had a delicious morning of rest and respite that I really needed. I wish for you, exactly what you need this holiday weekend.

Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Here is my poem for today:

There’s a game I play,

where you try to fill an empty space

with dropping fruits, coming from the sky.

The big fruits, are huge and exciting,

but they take up space quickly.

Leaving a lot of blank empty space around,

Only a few rare large fruits of plentifulness

The tiny beautiful berries that drop from above

Make room for more and more and more fruit,

Efficiently filling the space with as many tiny driblets of joy

That can be squeezed into where they are being dropped,

Leaving no empty space for anything but colorful fruits of joy.

Perhaps it really is the little joys that fill us up to fullness,

A constant trickle of happiness is true and renewable satiation.

Whereas when we rely only on the big harvests of happiness,

We leave a lot of empty space to be filled with sorrow and fear.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

999. How often do you self-reflect? (um, like always)

What He Said

Another busy day ahead, so I’ll just share this quote, in this online thought museum, which I call my blog:

“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.” – George Bernard Shaw

The only constant is change. You are changing every single day, just as everything on this earth is in a constant state of metamorphosis. Don’t you want to be a conscious part of your own change and growth?? Don’t expect things to stay the same. They don’t, and nor do you.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2648. Do you have much of an ego?