Good morning! Welcome to poetry day on the blog. On Sundays, I often implore you to write yourself a poem. This poet says it best:
I follow a man named Joseph Fasano on Twitter. He’s an English teacher in NYC, but he is also a published prose writer, poet and a musician. Joseph Fasano is also an incredible curator of other people’s poetry. I highly recommend for you to follow Joseph Fasano on Twitter. You will learn so much. Recently he assigned his students this: “Your assignment tonight is to read a writer someone told you not to“. Readers, let’s follow that assignment. Go to a banned books list and amaze yourself by just how many of the books on that list you have already read, and loved (and perhaps, were even assigned to read in school). Let’s not let sterilized AI and limited, fearful ideology take over the beauty, creativity, honesty and humanity, that comes from the written word of so many different perspectives and experiences, told in the voices of true, vulnerable humans, seeking some form of wisdom and understanding. Empathy is uniquely human when we decide to utilize it.
Below is one of Joseph’s most excellent poems. (anyone who has ever had to leave a terrible situation, can relate to this one):
And he posted this poem the other day. This poem so reminds me of my grandparents’ generation. They just had a way with living life in acceptance that I think we may have somewhat lost throughout the years:
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy Friday, friends!!! Happy Favorite Things Friday!! Today my daughter officially heads back to her university for fall semester of her sophomore year. She and her father managed to fit all of her things into her car. (I stayed hidden under the covers. I wasn’t sure what types of emotions might be erupting from this situation, and I decided that my excitable energy would not be good for the mix. I kept our crazy spaniel, Trip, with me, too, for this same reason.) Speaking of emotions, ours are a big ol’ mixed bag here. Back to school (even when it comes to college) has a tendency to bring up nostalgia, excitement, wonder, fears, hopes, relief, and exhaustion with adjusting to a new schedule. I know the “mixed bag” well. Our family has done the “back to school” experience for over two decades. As I send prayers and blessings to my own daughter, I do the same for your own back-to-schoolers. Praying for safety, wisdom, knowledge, fun, confidence and inner growth this school year, for all of our babies and our grandbabies (and for their teachers, and for all of us who love these precious kids more than life itself)!!!!
Today my favorites are going to highlight two of my most loyal, wonderful readers whom I have never met in person. (It turns out that they both live all of the way across the country from me, in beautiful California.) I feel so grateful that they both found their way to my blog somehow (I like to believe that it was a mystical sort of fate). Both of these women are excellent writers, and they have supported my blog for years with their daily presence, their frequent comments, and their financial generosity. Kelly and Gail, I love you for what you have shared on the blog, in so, so many ways. I am grateful for you both. I am humbled by you both. I am inspired by you both. I appreciate you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Please know that I feel this way about all of my dear readers, but these two women deserve this special recognition from me, in a way that I can give back to them. This I know.) Please go to these links for Kelly’s and Gail’s websites to enjoy their own amazing gifts for the written word:
I know that some of my other wonderful readers are also great writers and poets. Please add your own links to your websites in my Comments Section. I am so greatly honored that other writers like to read my work. It means the world.
****Also speaking of support, I added a new tip jar to my Home page (see the Leave Tip black button on the Home page). It is safely and securely run by Stripe, and it accepts Google pay. I have decided not to add distracting advertisements to my website, and nor do I make “fake reviews” for financial support from companies, so I rely on keeping this website alive from the generosity of my dear husband’s support and from other donations. (you have to pay for a web host, and for WordPress in order to maintain many blog websites) I write daily, and I offer my blog up to anyone in the world who wants to read it. (I don’t do Patreon or Medium or Substack, which require paid subscriptions.) Therefore, if you feel an urge to help with the costs of keeping Adulting – Second Half going, I am ever so grateful!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning, friends. I’ve experienced a lovely weekend. I hope that you have, too. Today, I decided to stop slacking, and I finally wrote my own poem for today. (Write a poem today. If I can do it, you can do it. Trust me. I consider poems to be messages in a bottle sent from the deepest recesses of your heart, up to your head to be translated, with understanding and resonation.) Baudelaire once wrote, “Always be apoet, even in prose.” Here is my poem for today:
Light breezes, finding the perfect seashell,
puppies, babies, foreign lands, spicy food,
the joys and angsts of raising children,
flowers, books, singing robustly when driving my car,
laughing, playing, loving with intimate vigor,
sunny, clear days, and calm, fire-lit starry nights,
As I ponder of what trinket of beauty to write a poem about,
I ask myself,
If I were to be thrown into a small, dark, dank prison with iron chains,
Or I found myself tied to a lonely hospital bed for the rest of my days,
would have I let myself experience enough life and unbridled emotion,
from my vital, gifted, assumed days of freedom and health,
to fill those lonely, lost days with poems of lush and vivid memories?
Am I living the poetry in my heart that is begging to flourish right now?
There is nothing sadder than a heart without poems.
Living life is what beats a heart.
Poetry flows from the beat.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I remember many years ago my uncle relaying a story of sitting next to “The Boss” (Bruce Springsteen) on an airplane heading to New Jersey, and my uncle said that Bruce was an incredibly nice, gracious, down-to-earth man. Since the theme of the blog this week seems to be trending towards “good, kind-hearted people”, I thought that I would share this video. Good people are everywhere. Make it a point to look for them. They usually don’t make a show of it, but they are everywhere. If you make a point of looking out for something, you will be surprised about how often you find it. Sometimes you will feel inundated. Try it. Pick anything – a red rose, a butterfly, a dolphin, an orange car, etc. and marvel at how many times in a small amount of time you see this particular thing or an image or representation of this item, as you are going about doing your daily life. ( “The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is an example of such biased attention. What is it called when you learn something and then see it everywhere? This phenomenon is called the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or the frequency illusion.” – Scribbr) Why not add kind, wonderful, thoughtful people to your list of things that you want to see on a daily basis? Wouldn’t that be a great uplift to your every day?
This week I had a wonderful experience of sending flowers to someone who loves flowers, and who is also so deserving of receiving beautiful flowers. I have learned through trial and error, the best chance of getting really wonderful, “just right” flowers to a person, is to look up a florist with excellent ratings in that person’s zip code. You then make a real live phone call (they need to hear the emotion in your voice) to that particular florist, and you relay your personal story – “the why” you want to gift a meaningful bouquet of flowers to a person, the particulars of why this person and this occasion is so vitally important to you, and then you give the floral designer their own creative license to translate that story, which you relayed to them in words, into their own artform – flowers and foliage and beauty and form. Florists flourish when you give them your trust of artistic freedom.
In my experience, florists/floral designers love their work. They take great pride in their work. Their artform is all about translating some of the most beautiful, delicate pieces of nature into a message of cheer, hope, beauty, celebration and love. What a wonderful calling!
When I received the text from the florist that the flowers had been delivered, and then soon afterwards got the extremely excited texts and pictures from the receiver of the arrangement, I texted the florist to say how pleased and happy we all are, with how the bouquet turned out.
Soon after, the florist sent me a sweet text back, gushing with pleasure that we were so happy. He ended the text with “thank youuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” (his creative license with gratefulness is also adorably “extra” in the unabashed, wonderful way, seemingly only true artists can be)
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Later this evening I will be travelling up to Virginia to reconnect with my seven best friends from college. We used to be really good about having a yearly reunion, but the last time we have had this reunion (or GW as we call it, “Girls Weekend”) was January 2020, when the coronavirus was just this weird virus happening over in China, that none of us knew anything about.
So more than three years later, all eight of us will finally reconvene, in person, again. And I am so excited. I have known these wonderful women for 34 years, since I was 18 years old. Imagine it – eight, 18-year-old ladies, just coming into early adulthood, connecting in college, and sharing funny, crazy college-age adventures together. (and yes, there were other friends along the way, but none of them seem to have “the sticking power” over the three decades that the eight of us magnets seem to have held on to, despite all odds) It is not lost on me, that as I am early entering into this next stage of my adulthood, I will be with seven of the women who helped me to enter into my first stage of adulthood, and who were there to support me, and to moor and anchor me, and to remind me who I am at my core, as I waded into the murky waters of becoming the adult woman, wife, mother, friend, and the overall person who I am today.
As anyone who has lived a life knows, none of us ladies knew what was in store for us, when we launched each other into the first halves of our adulthood. We had inklings. We had dreams. And all eight of us have experienced amazing, wonderful experiences, and also devastating events in our individual lives. This is just the way of life. But what isn’t always the way, is that not everyone has seven constants on their shores. Not everyone has seven giant rocks and pillars of support who have witnessed all of your milestones throughout your entire adulthood. Not everyone has seven people who know you intimately, and have decided to stick with you, and to focus on your lovely qualities and to mostly ignore your flaws. Such kind mirrors, long-time friends can be! Something in our friendship experience feels divine. Something about reconvening with these ladies right at this early empty nest period of my life, feels divine. Why wouldn’t anyone cling to the people and the experiences in your life which feel divine? There are seven strong pillars waiting for me to unite with them. We have survived storms and waves and calm and sunshine and even some battering among ourselves, and no doubt, we will continue to do so. Our shared friendship has withstood the test of time, and I believe that this combined friendship will help to see me (and us) through all of the next set of adventures in this next stage of adulting, and all the way through to the end of our journeys.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I’ve come to learn that being a mother means that you will regularly have a constant stream of difficult goodbyes, starting when your baby first leaves your womb. And from that excruciating, and yet exhilarating moment, the goodbyes just keep flowing, on and on and on. You say a goodbye, filled with light-sleeping trepidation, when your baby sleeps in the nursery for the first time. You kiss your baby a million times over, and you leave a list of reminders, dozens of pages long, when you leave your baby with a babysitter for the first time. You pry your baby off of your leg the first time you leave your baby at preschool, and then you pry your own fingers off of the door handle of the classroom, and you force yourself to go home. You bravely wave goodbye when your baby steps on to the bus to go to school for the first time. (Usually with sunglasses on, to hide your tears) You go through first dates, graduations, and you help your babies unpack for college, and new apartments, and new adventures, and then when you tell yourself that hopefully you have done everything in your power to help your babies be all set for this particular new adventure in their lives, you let go of your babies, and you say goodbye. Again and again and again. It’s a constant cycle of goodbyes, and the goodbyes never seem to get any easier. It could be that the goodbyes are so hard, because we mothers always carry the background fear that this particular goodbye could be the last goodbye to your baby, and that is about the worst thing any of us mothers can possibly fathom. And yet I know women who have gone through the final goodbyes with their babies, and they are here. And they are still filled with hope, and with life, and with brave, openhearted love to give. I think that there is nothing stronger in this world than a mother’s heart because it has to practice the wrenching process of saying goodbye, again, and again, and again, and yet it constantly replenishes itself with love to share, hope to shine, and strength for the future. A mom constantly extends her heart with a firm hug, a pat on the back, and a “you’ve got this, baby” confident goodbye. And then she turns around, she wipes her tears, and she excitedly anticipates the next “hello.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
We are in yet another city this weekend, visiting our son who is a second year medical student. Our son is more stressed than usual which says a lot when you are in medical school (Medical school is obviously intense and stressful to begin with – the whole family has started to ask for just “the gist” of his experiences, especially when he starts talking about amputations and other emergency room scenarios.) The reason our son is particularly stressed is that he is having to decide on what specialties he wants to hone in on, and so he is going through angsty rounds of “What ifs?”, “Where can I best be utilized?”, “Is work life/balance important?” What if I hate my choice?” . . . . You know the questions. We have all gone through similar handwringing choices throughout our lives.
As a mother, this is when I would love to open my purse and pull out the ever-ready, sparkly, golden magic wand (the proverbial magic wand which we all wish that we had access to). I would show it to my son, with a proud and knowing and able look on my face, and I would bonk it on his head three times, and then I would wiggle my nose and then we would all see a little pink cloud appear with, ta-da, “The One and Only Infallible Perfect Answer!” My son would beam with relief and ease and thank me once again for being such a wonderful, reassuring mother. (and then this is when he would probably ask me which of our four kids would get the magic wand in the will.)
Okay, enough of my stupid fantasy. Of course I don’t have a magic wand and I don’t even have the right un-magic answers to guide my son. We talked about intuition, and prayer, and what just “feels right.” We talked about values, and overall well-being. We talked about practicalities and time. My husband and I talked in circles with our son, trying to ease his stress. At one point, my son mentioned something about reading that you should live your life by thinking about what would be written on your tombstone and what would be said in your eulogy. And that’s when I had, at least to me, a little flicker of a magic wand moment.
Backstory: When we flew down here, my husband insisted that I continue to get out of the dark ages, and he asked me to download yet another airline’s app on to my phone. And so I begrudgingly did it. And in creating my profile I had to answer 542 security questions. (it felt like 542) One question that stood out to me, and was the most easy for me to remember the answer, was the question, “Who was your favorite elementary school teacher?” My favorite elementary school teacher was Mrs. Simmerman, in third grade. She was a tall, elegant Southern woman (in Pittsburgh, PA no less!) and she cared. She oozed care. She wasn’t just teaching little kids facts, she was teaching us to love each other, and to love life. She seemed noble to me. I adored her.
So, as my husband, and our son and I sat at dinner last night, ruminating on his upcoming choices, and my son talk about considering his epitaph in regards to the decision, the whole Mrs. Simmerman security question popped back into my mind. I exclaimed, “G, when you make your decision, remember that when it comes to your life’s end, it doesn’t nearly as much matter WHAT you do, or WHAT YOU ACHIEVED in any field, as it is, HOW you lived you life, HOW you made others feel in your life, and IF YOU MADE A POSITIVE difference doing whatever it is that you end up doing.”
And then much to his chagrin (this reserved young man has never had a mother who embarrasses easily), I asked the two young men who were waiting on us, if they could name right now, in that very instant, their favorite coach or teacher from elementary school. It turns out that the young men were originally from Cuba and they did not speak English well, but when they finally grasped what I was asking them (I gather this is not a regular question which they get from their customers), they both had beautiful, shining expressions on their faces. Their eyes shown. They had instant answers. One young man said, “Mr. Sandoval. He was like a father.” These young men beamed. I beamed. And in some small way, I think that I had a wee little magic wand moment. At least, it felt a little magic to me. And I feel quite confident, that whatever my son decides, he will do just fine.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I thought that the above “card” was better than a poem today. Certain holidays that bring up so much joy, also can bring up an intense amount of pain. Remember, no matter what, today is just a day. And there is no one true definition of love. . . LOVE IS.
And to my children: being your mother is undoubtedly the greatest experience of my life. I love you all, intensely, gently, yet ferociously, forever and ever and ever.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
I slept in this morning and it was so delicious. I am taking this “do whatever you want/it’s all about you” Mother’s Day weekend thing quite seriously. So far, so great. And what I want to say to all of you, no matter who you are, or what you are (we all some have feminine energy in us), celebrate Mother’s Day. You don’t have to be an actual mother to understand the wise, serene, fiercely strong beyond measure energy which lies inside all of us. This is the mother/female/yin energy which leans towards protectiveness, and nurturing, and guiding, and sheltering, and hoping, and feeling connected to all living things. This weekend, celebrate everyone in your life who has helped to “mother” you – your own mother, your grandmothers, your aunts, your friends, the neighbor ladies who helped you to grow up, your pets, and most importantly, yourself. You have mothered your own self your entire life and you will do so until you die. Honor your inner mother.
When I was in Rome, I purchased some things in a jewelry boutique, and I connected to the lovely, fashionable young man who owned the shop. The shop owner had an adorable shop dog, an aloof black Chow Chow named Mala (who was as diva as they get). The shop owner and I talked about our mutual love of animals and as I left and I wished him well, that is when he looked at me deeply and he said, “Thank you, mother.” And there was a little twinge of me that was like, “Ah shucks, I’ve clearly reached the age where the youngies never confuse me as their contemporary,” but there was a bigger part of me that swelled with pride and connection and gratefulness that he felt comfort and joy from me . . . the kind of energy that deserves the title, “mother.”
I have this thing about my purpose, lately, that I visualize. I call myself “The Rose Quartz.” When you go into any metaphysical/spiritual shop they usually have bins full of crystals for sale, all used for various purposes. Each crystal is supposed to carry an energy that helps you with various aspects of your life. If you need clarity, you might be lead to buying selenite. If you need courage, you might be advised to buy carnelian. Rose Quartz is often considered to hold the energy of unconditional love. Now, I don’t honestly know if I completely buy into “crystal magic.” I do own many crystals mostly because I am attracted to all things beautiful and shiny. Also, I do believe that everyone and everything which we witness here in life are just various forms of energy (and there are scientific physics laws that prove this). However, there are a great deal of people out there, who do believe that rose quartz is full of the energy of unconditional love. And so if someone is willing to purchase a small pink rock because it helps them to feel the highest form of love in the Universe, why can’t I make it my purpose to be The Rose Quartz in human form? Why can’t I be the The Rose Quartz for my own children, and for your children, and for anyone whom I come into contact with, during the day? I have reached the age, with enough life under my belt, to so appreciate the living Rose Quartzes who have touched my own life throughout my over fifty years of struggle and triumph. I think it is time for me to step into my own Rose Quartz-ness, state of being. I invite you to join me. It’s a beautiful, glowing, calming, change-the-world-and-change-myself-in-the-process (without having to do too much), kind of a purpose.
And in completely other news, I loved the movie version of Are You There God? It’sMe Margaret. So did my 19-year old daughter, and so did the group of sixty-somethings sitting beside us in the theater. There was a lot of Rose Quartz energy I was feeling in that theater yesterday. The two best moments in the movie, in my opinion, were these (SPOILER alert):
When the “too-nice/too eager to please/too codependent” mother of Margaret finally stood up for herself with the overbearing PTA mom and when the PTA mom tried to get Margaret’s mother to volunteer for a gazillion more activities, her mom said this:
“Thank you. I’d really love to, but I don’t want to.” It’s okay to like what you like, to do what you want to do, and to say no. “No” is a full sentence. (Remember this, Rose Quartz – Rose Quartzes show themselves unconditional love, too! And when they do, they give others the ability to feel comfortable to do the same for themselves.)
And finally, when Margaret and her mother had just been through a traumatic, emotional evening and they were both utterly depleted, they sat on the couch together and they cuddled, and the only thing that Margaret’s mother said to her is this, “Isn’t it exhausting trying so hard all of the time?” And Margaret and her mother obviously felt so connected and understood in that moment, and I believe that all of us women in the theater felt so connected and understood in that moment, too. I know that my daughter and I both grabbed each other’s hands. (Remember this, Rose Quartz. Rose Quartzes don’t try. Rose Quartzes just “be.” Rose Quartzes just be what they are – a solid, beautiful, stone, calmly and easily holding the true energy of the Universe – pure, unconditional love. They glow with that energy, so that when others encounter Rose Quartzes, they too, remember to reach deep within, and to feel that same loving energy within themselves.)
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
