Live Each Day

Dropped in on Facebook this morning to find a lot of my younger friends were wishing their lives away:  "How I wish this day were over;" "If only this day would end;" "Pray for this day to be over."  I thought, how sad this is.  When you get to my age time moves so swiftly...reminds me of a song lyric from Eric Anderson in the 1970's "Time like a freight train..." Days, weeks, months, even years are gone before I realize it.

Whether one is faced with the problem of moments that drag or moments that vanish to quickly the solution is the same: work on being in the moment, noticing and experiencing life as it is happening to you. Not that this is at all easy. But it does not mean working all the time or being "on" all the time. Some times the best way to be in the moment is to relax, practice deep breathing, a quiet moment of reflection, a brief walk to the window or door, even take a nap (albeit few people have the luxury to nap at work).

{time out for a stroll to the mail box and a lawn mowing break and the sweet, sweet smell of morning grass, mixed with the pungent odor of gasoline from the mower; unaccustomed muscle use, sweat, and heart rate elevation!}

 I wanted to extend this thought to several people I know in a gentle non-judgmental way. I know their work is not always full-filling, their days often tiresome. I've noticed that people often respond to what I call "bumper stickers" on Facebook--images with meaningful statements on them--much more readily than direct advice. So I crafted the message above and floated it out into Facebook land.  I'm happy that it seemed to reverberate with a number of people, and has been "shared" repeatedly. I know I've going to post it prominently somewhere to remind myself of one of my better thoughts and try to put it into practice more often.

Musings on the Changing Nature of Friendship in My Life

This evening the Facebook page Humans of New York (HONY) https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork had a picture of a man about my age, sitting on a stoop and the quote was the following:

"Back in Greece, your circle of friends grows larger and larger as you go through life. In America, the circle mostly shrinks or stays the same size."
"Why do you think that is?"
"Time. Nobody has time here. It seems that every time you make a new friend, another friend has grown too busy or moved away."

I always like HONY's pictures and quotes (if you haven't discovered this young man's incredible portraits in photo and words, you really should); all of them speak to me in some way, but this particular quote hit very close to home. I know that I am ultimately responsible for the lack of friends in my daily life, but I'm not entirely sure how to change the situation after all these years.

When I was a teenager I spent my time outside of school alone. I had good friends at school, some of whom I am still in touch with today (especially thanks to tools like Facebook). In high school most of my friends lived miles away; I had no car, neither did they, so our interactions generally ended with the school day. I was lonely, but also liked having space and time to read, write, draw and paint, dream and sing on my own.

College was amazing to me. There were people to talk to, to do things with any time of the day or night. People with whom to sit and listen to music, to go to a movie, have a meal or drink, to discuss the nature of reality or plan the revolution. Graduate school was more of the same: there was always someone with whom to talk, to share things, to laugh or cry. Even my first college teaching job involved intense friendship networks. The college faculty was mostly very young, and mostly a long ways from their family and kin networks, so there were Wednesday "seminars" at local watering holes where intellectual and political ideas could be debated, frequent potluck parties, and other singles with whom to have meals, go to movies, shopping, or just hanging out.  

During those decades from college to first teaching job I tried very hard to make and keep friends. I reached out to others, gave parties, made an effort, because as much as I loved the intensity and the wide ranging nature of the friendships of those years, I am at heart an introvert who loves people, not an extrovert. I still needed plenty of alone time for recharging.

When I failed to get tenure at my first teaching job, and had to leave that intense friendship network, I found it difficult to put energy into a whole new set of friendship ties. The whole process was made so much more difficult because my second job (like my current one) was at a school where almost everyone on the faculty and staff was local and most were older; they all ready had extensive networks of family, kin and friends.  They were friendly and pleasant, but few people invited me to their home, or had social events at which I could get to know my colleagues the way I had known those at my first job. What I should have done was make more of an effort, not less of one. But as the new person I didn't know how to reach out to those already in place.

A few years later when a large new crop of faculty were hired at one time, I saw it as an opportunity.  I volunteered to be on the welcoming committee. I reached out in dozens of ways: providing both  a young married couple and a single mom with a large family with temporary beds, bedding and other furnishings while they waited for their own to arrive, doing the apartment hunting for another incoming colleague, and even offering my guest room to one new faculty who was having difficulty finding a place to live. I did my best to mentor the new people in a way that I had not been mentored. Well you know what they say, "no good deed goes unpunished." A new female faculty member decided that I was a controlling, dominating bitch that had to go if she was going to rise in power and position (she literally said that if I got tenure she would be forced to leave...I didn't get tenure and she left anyway). A new male faculty member decided that my offers of assistance (as part of an official new faculty welcoming committee) were sexual harassment and that I was responsible for all his difficulties with students in the classroom.

I made a couple of friends among colleagues, one of them my husband, John.  Getting married changed the dynamics of my life and provided for the first time a best friend who was available all the time.

Failing to get tenure again, I found a new job at a community college, where people were even more tightly integrated into family, kin and community networks. They were kind and welcoming, but had their own lives, and I was afraid to invest too much energy into building friendships - my last efforts having backfired so badly.  There are people here that I care very much about, whose parents I've met and whose children I know (many of whom end up in my classroom). But our friendships end at the edge of the campus (with the exception of Facebook in recent years).  I have only once been to the home of some one from work and that meant so much to me to be invited. 

I know that I'm responsible for my lack of friendship ties.  I have not invited anyone to my home (while I love my cats and dogs I am somewhat embarrassed by the constant chaos and smell). I have not made a point of issuing any invitations of my own, to dinner or movies or a "night out with the girls." First blogging and then Facebook have come along to fill some of the spaces and needs that local friendships used to meet.  The Internet has introduced me to some wonderful new people, especially women my age who are talented and interested in similar issues (thank you, Deb, Chris, Beth, Geraldine, and Mimi) and to some young women who've helped me understand the next generation (thanks, Susan and Gwen); the Internet has also brought me back in daily touch with the friends of my adolescence and childhood, and the occasional friend from college, grad school and earlier jobs. My life seems overwhelmingly busy between work, house work, caring for animals, Facebook, writing, and I don't even seem to have enough time to spend with my wonderful husband...yet I miss the face-to-face and voice-to-voice friendships of colleagues - women especially. 

So I wonder how do I go about changing things, and do I still have the energy to do so?

Fictional Drama and Real Life

Over the last six months, I have heard several different friends make similar comments to me about no longer being interested in reading or viewing certain types of fictional drama, because of the drama in their own lives. Each of these friends had very different types of drama playing out in their own lives and different types of fiction that they eschewed (while continuing to embrace other forms of fictional entertainment).

 It is important that people act in ways that are true to their values  and when some form of entertainment is counter to their values, or causes distress in their lives, they should remove it from their lives. I commend my friends for excising things from their lives that were not contributing to their well-being.

 The problem I have with these pronouncements is that whether consciously intended as such or not they have come across to me as a form of condescension, not to me so much as to other people generally. It seemed to me that  these friends were saying  that anyone who witnessed or knew real tragedy, death, pain, drama would not wish to immerse themselves in the fictional kind whether it be movies, TV or books;  the corollary of that (never spoken but implicit) was that people who did immerse themselves in fictional drama did not really know real tragedy, death, pain or drama--something not only condescending, but demonstrably false.

An twenty-four year old environmental puzzle

The second blog post I ever made (back in 2005) concerned an environmental puzzle that I had observed for some 15 years. It is now eight years later, and I am no closer to having a real answer to my question.

Since 1989, when I moved into this part of central Appalachia, I have been observing a trend with the Ohio Buckeye tree.  These lovely trees can be seen all over eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and northeast Tennessee. They have large hand shaped pinnate leaves in groups of five.  They seem to like moist areas and are often seen along creeks and rivers (and the roads that run along creeks and rivers).

Guides to eastern trees speak of the gorgeous pumpkin orange color of Ohio Buckeye trees in the autumn.  However, my environmental puzzle concerns why the Ohio Buckeye has been showing fall color earlier and earlier each year for the past twenty-four years.

 When I first arrived in the region, the Ohio Buckeye changed color at the beginning of the normal autumn season in late September or early October. Between 1989 and 2005 I observed the Ohio Buckeye beginning to show it's brilliant color earlier and earlier.  In my 2005 post, I observed by early to mid-August. Since 2005, the color change has moved even earlier. This year, the color change began last week - the first week in July. The images here were taken today, July 5, 2013 in Kingsport, Tennessee along Reedy Creek from the Kingsport Greenbelt pathway.

This is how it begins a small branch or two of each tree turns brilliant color, then more do, and then the leaves turn yellow and brown and fall off - MONTHS before any of the other trees in the forest. Each year the process of turning color and losing leaves gets earlier.  A tree that once turned color in late September early October, now begins turning color in June and July and has lost all its green leaves by August. At some point in time, if this continues, the tree will not have green leaves long enough to provide the energy it needs to keep on living.

What is going on? Why is this happening? There does not seem to be any pest involved. Is it changing climate? If so what is it about the climate?  Central Appalachia is getting both measurably warmer, but also wetter.  We've just completed one of the wettest Junes on record.

Anyone out there know someone with an answer?

Father's Day Thoughts

Father's day is a difficult day for me to spend time on Facebook.  On Facebook it seems like everyone I know has or had the perfect father, whom they love unreservedly, and if deceased miss whole-heartedly. Reading all these posts makes me feel weird and a little crazy, and jealous of these people with their wonderful fathers. The cynic in me also wonders a little how much embellishment of reality is taking place.

I never particularly liked Father's Day while my father was alive.  It was an annual obligation. As a child there had to be a gift, as an adult a card and a phone call. These were rote duties that must be performed, or my mother would be upset with me.

Father's day is even worse since he died because my feelings do not fit into some nice acceptable "oh I miss my dad" box. Fact is that I don't really miss my father. I didn't really have much of a relationship with him for nearly 20 years before he died as his profound deafness made telephone interaction with him impossible. My relationship in him in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood was very conflicted relationship. Which leaves about 15 years in the middle when I had a reasonably comfortable albeit long distance and sporadic connection with him.

My feelings about my father were ambivalent as long as I can remember. There are many good things I can say about him.  First of all I loved him, simply because he was my father. He made sure there was a roof over my head and food on the table. Of course he always made sure we knew that the roof and everything under that roof was his and only his, and everything under his roof had to be done his way.

He was a very intelligent and creatively very talented, but he had not gotten education after high school as a young man like his brother and sisters because he had the bad timing to graduate in 1930 seven months after the stock market crashed.  He frequently spoke at home of the ignorance of the men who were his supervisors. They had more formal education than he did but he expressed low opinions of their mental abilities and talents. He spent most of my childhood attending night classes at the local community college until he finally completed his degree, and was granted the advancement to management that he had always craved.

His diligence at his studies was a good example. Both he and my mother were adamant that me and my brothers would get a college education, and good grades were the primary achievements lauded in our household. But, when a man who works 40+ hours a week goes to night school two nights a week and studies at his desk many of the other nights of the week, it makes it difficult for his children to connect to him. He was either gone or very busy, and when he was studying we had to be very quiet.  The only conversations that I can remember from childhood were primarily related to school work, when I took homework (mostly math) to his desk to ask him a question.

Meal times were particularly difficult. My father would come home from work, around four, at which point the TV that we children were watching was immediately shut off. There were the occasionally really good days, especially in spring and summer when after he got home, my dad would take us outside or to the local park to play softball or tennis. Or he'd go out to the garage to help us with some project - a race car, scooter, or other such thing.

More often however, were the days when after work my father would begin to complain about his day. He would rant about whatever slights he felt had occurred at work, and about the stupidity of the men with which he worked. He would pick up the evening paper and look at the headlines, and then shift into that evenings political rant. His political rants would last through supper which went fairly quickly.  We children said nothing. Our opinions were of no consequence. On the rare occasion that my mother offered an opinion, especially on those occasions where she suggested that perhaps there might be some other interpretation to events, she was loudly berated and shouted down by my father. No other thoughts or opinions were tolerated other than my fathers at the dinner table, and no other conversation other than his nightly discourse on his work, American politics, world affairs or the economy were acceptable.

My father was a liberal, a hard-core union man who gave me a copy of the Communist Manifesto when I was about 11 or 12, and who believed in political equality for blacks and women (but not equality in the home when it came to housework), and all though registered Republican he voted for Kennedy and Johnson and  most adamantly against Nixon and Reagan.  I agreed with his political values then, and still agree with them, but did not enjoy his tyrannical control over all conversation at the table. I was afraid of my father, who frequently bellowed and yelled and bullied and intimidated his family verbally. 

As a child I was a big fan of Clarence Day's Life with Father and the play and the movie it inspired and did not really see the correspondence between that father and my own. However, when Archie Bunker hit the small screen, although I watched regularly with friends who loved the show, I never really cared for it, because despite having 180 degree opposite political views and being far more educated and articulate, my father was way too much like Archie for me to be really comfortable with laughing at that show.

I was afraid in other ways that I understand less clearly.  From a very young age, I was unable to sleep through an entire night without having to use the bathroom at least once. I was frightened of the dark (in my early 20's I came to realize that my night vision was dramatically poorer than most other people my age which accounts for some of my night fears). Every night, I would wake up and I would call out very softly to my mother: "mama, mama, I have to pee, mama." It was very important to me to wake her up and have her watch over me. However, I was absolutely terrified -with a deep cold dread- of waking-up my father. Waking my father was worse than getting up alone in the dark.

When I was about 12 or 13 my father injured his back (not the first time), and went into the hospital for an extended stay. I remember experiencing an enormous sense of release and freedom at his absence. It was as if an ominous cloud over our existence had been lifted briefly. I remember that my mom experimented with some foods that we kids wanted - in particular I remember her getting mint chocolate chip ice cream and spumoni with pistachio ice cream (my father forbid green ice cream in his house).  Life with him in the hospital was like a holiday.

In high school my relationship with my father went from bad to worse. I was painfully aware that my family dynamics were the exact opposite of nearly all my friends. Most of my teenage contemporaries did daily battle with their mothers and adored their fathers. I almost never fought with my mother, on the surface we were always in sync and often felt like we were comrades in an on-going war with my father, who bullied and terrorized me constantly. Home work was suppose to be a priority, but should my homework keep me up past the time my father wished to go to bed there would be yelling and threats.  Personal space was not respected, even in the bathroom for me as a teenage girl. My feelings of hatred were strong enough that they scared me; so much so that I sought out my high school "counselor" (a P.E. teacher who did academic advising) for advice.  I remember only that she had a hapless, bewildered look and no real advice to offer.

Ultimately I ran away from home to get away from my father. Yes, I went to college, 2500 miles away.  I was one of less than a dozen (out of 425) students from my high school class who left California to go to college (there were such great, tuition free public colleges and universities in California as well as outstanding private institutions that it was rare for students to leave the state in the 1960's and 1970's). It was my "great escape" and my mother encouraged me to begin planning  it when I was a sophomore in high school.

Our conflicts were never discussed, never openly examined, never resolved. Distance simply allowed me to move on with my life. However, I have come to realize since his death things buried in the psyche never really go away, they just influence you in ways you fail to recognized consciously.

While there are many things that I admire or appreciate about my father, and I loved him because he was my father, I cannot say that I miss him. I am not sorry that he is gone. He lived a long life (died just before his 98th birthday), and expressed a readiness to go for some months before he died. 

Confluence

One of the things that I most like about Facebook is how my very diverse group of friends bring such varied items to my attention - which often in serendipitous fashion form some type of gestalt.

This morning my attention was called to an interesting article in Mother Jones "The Problem with Men Explaining Things," by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit was complaining about the phenomenon of having to listen to men explain some technical or historical facts to her - men who knew little or nothing about the subject on which she was a recognized, published expert.

The article itself was very interesting, but as is often the case the comments had more to reveal than the article itself. A lengthy argument had broken out in the comments over whether or not women were equally guilty of "explaining things" to men as the reverse. Tempers flared, names got called. Little light was shed.

I have to say all my personal experiences of having sociological, technological and scientific things on which I have expertise "explained" to me by someone with less expertise have come from men. However, later this morning also on Facebook, I happened across some comments left by some female friends on a post I made yesterday, and realized that women do engage in a different type of "explaining" related to emotions.

My experience with women, beginning with my mother, is that many women presume to be experts not only on their own emotions, but on yours. When they hear or read the emotional statements of someone else, they translate them into their own emotional matrix, and then "explain" your feelings back to you. The intent is well-meaning. They are trying to be kind, sympathetic, and supportive, but since they have translated what you have said into their own emotional matrix, their interpretation of the meaning is often 180 degrees off - because not everyone feels the same things.

While it is pleasant to know that I am viewed by some as kind and nurturing, I do not feel any sense of loss for not having been a mother, and do not need to be reassured that I am "really" a mothers for having cared for others.

Indigo Bunting - Woven Dreams "Blue"

Indigo Bunting

More elusive than happiness,
more rare than desire,
seconds on a fence
engraved forever
in memory only,
Passerina cyanea,
bluest bluebird of all.

sgreerpitt
Sunday February 10, 2013
Photos by others http://www.pbase.com/dadas115/indigo_bunting


for more creativity on the theme of "Blue" check out Woven Dreams http://wovendreamsprompts.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/woven-dreams-prompt-1-blue/

Good-bye Momma, Good-bye Christmas

I'm having a difficult time getting a handle on exactly what I am feeling this week. Several of my good friends who also lost their mothers this past year have expressed deep sadness and a sense of loss especially on Christmas.

I do genuinely miss my mother, and feel sad at her passing, but I also feel a sense of relief that I could finally let go of our three decade long battle over Christmas.  It stopped being my holiday thirty-two years ago when I converted to Judaism, but it continued being a bone of contention between me and my mother.

Our conflict had less to do with religion than with the mother-daughter relationship. My mother, although a life-long Methodist, was what I liked to call a "loyal dissenter." I have so many memories from childhood of my mother whispering commentary in my ear about how various things being spouted by preachers were "not believed by everyone." My mother believed whole-heartedly in God the Father, and thought that Jesus was an important teacher, but she was openly (to me) skeptical about most of the conventional Jesus story from birth to death (or resurrection). She didn't really understand my conversion, but she didn't overtly object to it either. However, she did object, frequently and volubly to my not celebrating Christmas. To her this was my rejection of our family history, but even more so of her as a mother and her efforts each year to create a "real" Christmas experience for her family. Something she felt cheated of in her own early childhood (her own mother was a severe asthmatic and would not allow Christmas trees or greenery around the home).

It is only from a distance that I can see that she did not really enjoy creating these family Christmas. She viewed it as a challenge, to find the right gifts, wrap them appropriately, have the right tree, and fix a perfect dinner.

My memories of the last Christmas that I spent in California with my family (1981) just before I began my conversion process, are dominated by Mom's anxiety about everything being just so. Her anxiety was so great and so grating that my brothers decided to go to a movie (The Life of Brian) during the hours while the turkey was cooking and invited me to come with them. At the time I was just so delighted that my (younger) brothers actually wanted to have me go with them, that I did not think about how our disappearance for two hours was going to increase my mother's frenzy.

For years following my conversion, my mother would actively pump me for details: Was I going to get a tree this year? Why not? Was I going to send cards? Who was I going to send cards to? What would I say in them? Was I going to go Christmas Caroling? Was I going to go to church?

Paradoxically, I never found it unpleasant to spend Christmas with my in-laws, who accepted our religious differences, did not try to change me, and simply welcomed me into their home for a family meal. Sharing another person's celebration is quite different from being pressured to engage in that celebration directly.

I consciously and deliberately avoided going "home" for Christmas for a number of years. I broke down one year (1985) because my first husband had just moved out, and I needed to go home and lick my wounds after the semester was over. It was not a good move. Much of my visit involved a battle with my mother over why I would not go to church on Christmas eve. Now if she'd been asking me to accompany her to church, I might have felt differently about it, but she didn't want to go, she just wanted me to go. I never went at Christmas time again. In 2001 I went for three days from Dec. 20 to Dec. 22 to celebrate my father's 90th birthday, but I would not stay for Christmas.

Our struggle over Christmas only ended with her death this year. Finally there was no one left to make me feel like I had abandoned her, when I stopped celebrating Christmas.

Winter Meditations

I have always liked winter. When I was a child in California, winter was when the rains came and the hills turned green instead of brown. I liked wearing sweaters and wool more than I liked sundresses.

The thing that I have come to love best about winter is the bareness of the trees. In winter the architecture of the world is easier to perceive. I have always seen a parallel between the world in winter and human life in times of stress and difficulty.

I did not always take comfort in that revelation. When I was young I focused on frailty, on loss.

For the winds are bitterly iced
between trees that,
having lost their summer leaves,
are no longer seen as intertwined,
but only tenuously touching a few brittle twigs
here and there;
solitary in a gray world that prevents
even the insubtantial companionship
of a shadow.
December 11, 1972

As a young person I perceived (often falsely) the failure of friendships to survive stress. I mistook temporary solitariness for abandonment.

Over the years, however, I have come to cherish winter as a time of bareness and spareness. Living as I have now for many years with woods and forest all around, winter is a time when the world opens up, when secrets are revealed. Having seen more of human life,  and where once I saw bleakness and abandonment, today  I see strength, resiliance and people reaching out. It is in the hard and cold times that people draw together, offer each other support.

In winter
nature drops her disguises,
forest opens to sky,
rock cliffs are bared,
sheltering leaves fall away,
wind whistles through
tenuously touching twigs.

Walking the forest floor
one sees further, more clearly,
steps more surely
among rocks and fissures.
November 2, 2008

It is interesting to me that I used the phrase "tenuously touching" in both poems - an unconscious echoing. But there is a tenuous drawing away and a tenuous reaching outward. It is the latter I perceive today.

 

a dog's life

My all time favorite website is http://www.dogshaming.com/ where people post adorable photos of their miscreant pups. It reminds me of how much worse our doggies could be (and have been), and it reminds me of how we learned how to live with dogs.

Our first dog, Missy, was a grown up three year old when he rescued her from a shelter in Tennessee. She had been thoroughly trained and was by the time I met her five years later a quiet, well-behaved adult dog. When she got very old (she lived to the ripe old age of 19) she had doggie dementia and although she always went to the door to be let out she didn't always wait until she was let out to go. But she was our baby and that was okay.

A year and a half after Missy died, Rosie dog applied for the position of "dog of the house". Rosie just showed up in the yard, and on the porch, and hung out until we knew what she knew - the we were her humans. We thought we knew all about dogs, but Rosie taught us differently. She was young but big, and a dominant dog who wanted to be boss, and a little bit scary. The wonderful trainers at PetSmart helped us turn Rosie into a wonderful companion dog, who was still assertive, but knew that humans set the rules. In the process however, we lost lots of things, clothing, shoes, books, pens, blankets, pillows, dog beds, and one entire couch.  Rosie grew or was trained out of all those bad habits, but it took a long time, and more change on the part of the humans than on the dog. Gates had to be put up, shoes and socks couldn't lie on the floor, everything had to be tucked a way out (not just out of dog reach, but where cats couldn't knock it down into dog reach).

We'd had Rosie for five years, when Molly showed up.  Molly knew we needed an "auxiliary back-up dog", and pretty soon we did too. Suddenly pillows, blankets, rugs, and especially books were again at risk for chewing.  We sealed up every book shelf Molly could reach with plastic sheeting.  Molly had some new tricks - like eating remote controls (four in total).

So we made some adjustments, our wonderful open-concept new house, got two sets of dog gates with cat passages in them so that cat boxes (and all that lovely cat poop) as well as cat food stayed totally out of Molly reach, as did the garbage and the food, and other tempting items. New end tables with drawers for all the remotes and reading glasses and other crunchy items. Shoes are on top of dressers or shut behind closed closet doors. Bathroom doors are closed (against cats as well as dogs) so that no paper towels, bath towels, toilet paper, or other goodies can be shredded. 

By the time we adopted blind Bob this fall, we had this keeping things out of dog reach pretty much down to a science - except for the throw rugs which have been sacrificed to the cause.  Between the cats and the dogs, some things do get chewed - especially gloves, which the cats love to dig out of the big basket for outerwear and then drop on the floor for doggie tug-of-war. But we deal with that by buying cheap winter gloves by the dozen.


 Life with dogs (and cats) is wonderful, but it takes a lot of work and paying attention to make sure that no one gets into something that could hurt him or her, and that things that are really important and valuable don't get eaten.

Dona Nobis Pacem

In June of 1965 at Junior High School graduation my  14 year old self spoke to an auditorium of my fellow graduates and called ours "The Hopeful Generation."  Among the things that I thought we had hope for was the curing of disease, the alleviation of poverty and the attainment of world peace.

At age 61 my hope is a little tattered but still there. I think we've made progress on all those fronts. But we still have such a long, long way to go. As long as there are still people who hold these goals we have a chance. That's why I love Blog Blast 4 Peace so much, it tells me that the dream is still alive and that there is still hope.

Don't wish your life away...

Recently I have come to recognize how all of us, at some time or another, engage in wishing our life away.  If you've ever said to yourself, "I just wish this day was over," then you too are guilty of wishing your life a way.

Sometimes when things are particularly awful in our lives, we wish away whole weeks, months, or even years - "I just wish the holidays would get here."

The impulse to get past difficulty, pain and sorrow is understandable. We all have it. But when we focus on just "getting past" stuff, we may be losing out on the ordinary and even wonderful moments that come in the midst of trouble.

What is even more pernicious, however, is the wishing away of perfectly good ordinary days when we are too focused on achieving some future goal. If all our energy is tied up with thinking about what we'll do when  "I lose 30 more pounds," or "finish my degree," or "get that promotion," then we are not really appreciating the moment in which we are currently located.

a shoe in the road
straddling the yellow line
its mate fifty feet ahead
lying on its side
a testament to
what?
loss or joy?

sgreerpitt
July 6, 2012

finding a new path

Over the past two years my life has been rife with change, some good, some bad, some neutral, some unexpected, some much anticipated.

We've bought a new house and moved ourselves, our animals, and (most) of our belongings. It turns out that a move is a move with all the attendant disruption and financial pressures, even if the distance between the old house and new house is 25 feet.  A few months after the move, we took in a second stray dog - a 6 month old who still needed house training, and who chewed everything in sight (including some of the molding on the doors of the new house).

My mother descended rapidly into dementia and dealing with her bizarre delusions turned daily conversations into an emotional mine field. Ultimately six months ago, she had to be placed in 24 hour care.  At which point the pace of change ramped up.  The family house had to go on the market, decisions had to be made about belongings. Then suddenly mother had a heart attack and died. The family house got sold. Because of distance, lack of time, lack of resources, lack of energy, and lack of space here at home, the only realistic choice was let all those material things from my childhood go. Yes it would have been nice to have some of the beautiful pieces of furniture that my father had made in his workshop, or some of the delicate china and glass treasures that my mother had received from her parents. Now that choice is no longer available, all that represented my childhood has gone.

A week after my mother died, my older dog died.  For a long time, my day had been anchored in the evening by two things, walking my dog and calling my mother. Both anchors disappeared within a week of each other.

Six weeks after the dog died, I learned that my eating over which I'd lost control during this stressful period and the inevitable weight gain had thrown me over the threshold into full-blown diabetes. The fiction I carefully constructed for 50 years blew-up; that fiction was that being overweight didn't matter because I had good genes and the weight didn't affect my health . I'd always felt sorry for other people who had to watch what they ate. For 50 years, my cholesterol was normal, my blood pressure was not just normal but actually low, and my sugar metabolism was the envy of laboratory technicians in 5 states. Little did I realize the damage that I was doing, and that the bill would eventually have to be paid.

The next week while I was just beginning to figure out how to eat as a diabetic, my brothers came from California bearing not only mom's ashes, but also dad's (he died 2 and 1/2 years ago), to inter them in the cemetary in dad's home town in Virginia, which meant restaurants and family meals.

On the good change side, I received a modest inheritance, paid off all our consumer debts, paid down the new house, set aside some savings, and still had some left to indulge some long pent up demand - like replacing all the pillows and rugs that the young dog destroyed in her first year with us. But, being in debt had been part of my life for 40 years, since graduating from college, so this also is new, uncertain territory.

I was beginning to get a handle on how to eat, and how to exercise again (after hurting my back May 4 and breaking some ribs May 16), when the most recent blow fell this past Thursday from the cardiologist. The tiredness, exhaustion and shortness of breath - is probably some blockage in the cardiac arteries. How much blockage and where I go from here has to wait on more tests.

I have lots of friends who have been dealing with heart disease and with diabetes, several with both,  for many years.  I know that life can go on, and be a very rewarding life. I just don't quite know yet what that path looks like.