The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...: January 2016

Sunday, January 31, 2016

so the stress doesn't kill me

I woke up this morning with a new lease on life. I got myself organized for the week, planned the cooking I'll do this afternoon, and I went to the gym. I used to go to the gym five days a week and now I wonder when I stopped...and why.

I made a lovely lunch out of salad greens and my left-over salmon from last night. It was overcooked but the salad fixed that problem.

So, taking care of myself. First priority. I can't help anyone else if I don't take care of myself.

Monday, January 18, 2016

a dream

Regis had a dream last night that he was having lunch today with Wahoo McDaniel. He didn't even know who that was so had to check Wikipedia. They say he was a was a Choctaw-Chickasaw Native American who achieved fame as a professional American football player and later as a professional wrestler. Turns out he died in 2002, so if Regis is meeting him for lunch that is not a good sign.

My intentions were so good. I meant to start 2016 with a Whole Thirty and a yoga challenge. Then due to complex problem within our family, we have had a six-year-old staying with us since right after the 1st of the year. Out the window with yoga, the whole thirty, the Marie Kondo method of de-cluttering. In with organizing appointments, school visits, toys, small clothes, homework. It is a test for an old head, believe me. It was the same anxiety I felt when I first had an infant to care for...I had dreams about forgetting to feed her or putting her in the trunk by mistake. I finally had to get a binder and a couple of notebooks and write everything down.

Things are going better and this may be shorter term than we anticipated.

Saturday, January 02, 2016

not sure where this is headed, but...

I've had a feeling, an intuition, for quite a while now...maybe a year...that there is something afoot in my life. I am not sure what it is, not really even an inkling, but I know it's coming.

A few signs have been moving me along this path. One was the end of my job at Lone Star. I didn't work that many hours but it seems to portend change. I decided to take a sabbatical from my volunteer job at the Treaty Site. I've been working with a trainer since June and I'm feeling stronger. I have been reading this book:

Marie Kondo says it is life-changing. One blogger said this: I thought I was just going to clean my closets. But something much bigger happened.

So, hmmm. Not sure where all this is headed.

Yesterday I spent an hour looking for my yoga mat. I asked Regis if he ever gets tired of looking for things. He gave me a funny look and said he had just shared this book with me through Kindle. Whoa. If he is thinking about tidying up, it's time to get serious.

I went through a major purge a few years ago. Remember the pictures of boxes I set out every month for the EF? I got rid of a ton of stuff, but in reading this book, I know where I went wrong. I went through the house by locations and randomly chose stuff to get rid of without thinking about what I truly wanted to keep. That meant I kept a lot of stuff that could have gone. I'm learning.

So, again...not sure where this is headed.

Things I am grateful for in my life right now.

People. So many good people. So many new friends and so many old friends. I keep having this experience where I discover people in some strange way. It's almost eerie.
There was a time when I didn't realize that relationships are constantly being transformed. I am learning that even long-term relationships go through changes. It makes me love dragonflies all the more.
Physical health and strength. I realize how fortunate I am and I realize how easily both can be taken. Regis had a scare back in April that went on and on and made us feel lucky to have access to such good care. We keep learning the lesson that life is precious.
Good food. Clean water. Physical safety. Reading about the refugees around the world and many people right here in my own community. Everyone does not have access to these things we take for granted.
Reading. As always, books provide me with so much joy and entertainment and so many lessons. Anne Lamott's Small Victories. Strawbale Gardens. Chasing the Scream. Snowflake. (The part of the tidying up process I dread the most is the book part. Getting rid of books. Ugh.)
Yoga. I have taken classes over the years, some very hard and too difficult to follow but after I had cancer, my friend, Michele, taught a class called Cairns After Cancer. It's a gentle yoga and she is such a good teacher that I learned to love it. I haven't been able to go for a while because of conflicts with personal training and Lone Star, but I am getting back into it...when I find my mat!
To hell with it. Just went out to the garage where there had been a recent yoga mat sighting. No luck. Ordered a new one. Grateful for the ease of ordering on the internet. Maybe this will be the last time I have to reorder something because I can't find the original.

Time to go and clean out the refrigerator. Will continue gratitude list later!

Christmas 2015

As always, the fall and holiday season went by way too fast and hurried. I always resolve to slow it down but I never seem to get that accomplished. Ah, well. Yesterday I posted a photo collage of 2015, some of my favorite moments. Today I am sharing some of my favorite photos from the Christmas season with a couple comments. Nothing lengthy yet.

Regis and I exchanged Christmas gifts this year. We don't usually so it was fun. He gave me this Kermit the Frog puppet. He ordered one and two came. Amazon said to keep them both. Oh, good. Now my right hand Kermit can talk to the left hand Kermit!

My old friends, Doug and Penny Beed, were in Oxford, Mississippi when they spotted these socks and knew right there they had to be for me. I can't imagine why. Weirdo turned out to be one of my favorite words from December. I invited a few weirdo friends over for New Year's Eve and they were all quite proud to claim the title.

We went to see Hank and Rita three times since it opened in July. We loved it. The last time we went was Christmas night at the Mankato Brewery. Regis took this photo from his seat in the balcony.

This was my other Christmas gift from Regis, a dragonfly lamp I had been admiring. I posted a picture of it on the Facebook page called Minnesota Dragonflies and the woman who maintains that page told me it was designed after the earliest original award winning lamp by Clara Driscoll in 1899. Who knew.

Bob and Emily gave us this adorable mug filled with carnations and evergreens. I love Charlie Brown things, too. Let's see...Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Kermit the Frog, the Grinch, Calvin and Hobbes. Seems like a part of me still lives in my childhood.

Tim and Gail had a wine and cheese party on the 19th. Very low key, no presents, good food, and good friends. What could be better?

Regis and I had several nice meals out and about over the holidays. Here he is at El Agave, drinking a Dos Equis Dark, sitting in front of the Stay Thirsty My Friends bench. Ha!

Here's our annual group photo. The kitchen is a disaster but we had a wonderful time.

So there it is. The Christmas season of 2015. A blur, a hurried bunch of chaos, but always filled with love, good humor, great food, family, and friends. Here's to 2016!

Friday, January 01, 2016

2015...a very good year!

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Winter Grace

by Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over; your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Permission Granted

by David Allen Sullivan

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides.

"Permission Granted" by David Allen Sullivan,

from Strong-Armed Angels.

Gratitude by Barbara Crooker

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war

grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,

or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of

for twenty or thirty miserable years—

And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man

with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times

have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines

through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves

as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree

that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:

cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,

and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,

so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,

Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world

sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s

sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,

the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,

finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,

know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing

on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,

flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.

And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands

in gratitude, bend to the sky.

From Line Dance (Word Press, 2008).

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Do Not Expect That If Your Book Falls Open

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

"Riveted" by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace: Poems 1997-2002

I Was Always Leaving by Jean Nordhaus

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself

Barbara Crooker

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.