The Home Stretch

Two months from today, I will not publish a blog post for the first time in 365 days.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.

I set a goal on March 14, 2023 to write and publish a blog post every single day for a full year. god willing, on March 14, 2024, I will have reached that goal.

I am getting close. It is still sixty days away but I figure it’s time to start thinking about what’s next.

A book was supposed to come out of, or at least be supported by, this blog writing exercise.

No manuscript yet and that goal may have changed. I am not 100% sure.

Here is what I have learned since I started publishing this blog ten months ago.

Words saturate the world like wedding confetti. Depth and valuable content, however, seem scarcer these days, generally speaking.

There has always been an inherent promiscuity in the writing game. It was the French writer Moliere who aptly said: Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

I’ve learned lots about myself in this writing discipline/exercise. I am more old school than I first believed. I have actually come to cherish that about myself. Conservative and cautious at core though sometimes my decisions are impulsive and ill-thought through. It seems to balance out.

Certain life facts are immutable. Where you are born and who you are born to are among them. Choices have consequences. The world will move along, with or without you.

The most significant moments in anyone’s life are the moment of our birth and the moment of our death. Everything in the middle is… well … in the middle. Each person’s stories and paths are different. But the beginning and end are the same for all of us.

I believe only some things in life are tried and true. It is our individual job to discover them. We must meet the twists and turns life hands us and overcome challenges while learning from them. This is the process of maturing, I believe, or adulting or whatever you call it.

If you still hold the same life views at sixty that you did when you were twenty, I’d venture to guess you haven’t moved very far along life’s continuum. I have met elderly women who sport the same haircuts they had in their university graduation pictures.

They speak with the same breathless adoration of their college alma mater or sorority and use the same jargon of their youth. Perhaps I am typecasting, but those are not the type of women I usually have much in common with or want to know very well.

If you have one or two good friends in later life that you share much in common with, you are lucky. If you have a handful of friends in that category, you are wealthy beyond measure.

In our society, we have a tendency to equate happiness and success with quantity over quality. As I get older, quality is becoming more desirable and precious.

Quality time with loved ones. Quality consumables shared with those loved ones. Fine books (There are many if you but look.) Fine music. Paintings. The sound of wind moving through a stand of trees. Birdsong. Conversation.

We tend to ignore or give short shrift to simple joys and pleasures in our youth. Not enough action in them to satisfy our ambitions. Fact is, we are much too busy in young adulthood trying to build some semblance of a life based on the scripts we inherited.

We all have to keep body and soul together as best we can. And, one day, if we have a family, we have to keep their bodies and souls together, too. It is all very distracting and energy intense.

I have learned that universal truths remain universal. And for all of us, one day, everything will come to a screeching halt. I have tried to wrap my head around that certain eventuality.

It is either life’s kindness or built-in denial that serves as a survival mechanism. We generally find it hard to imagine ourselves not being here any more, in this body, and on this planet.

Who knows what happens when we depart this mortal coil? Certainly not I. I have some theories but they are only that: theories. So the seeker in me will no doubt continue the hunt for answers to life’s “big” questions when this blog posting goal has been accomplished.

I may do something different with my writing. Or I may focus the writing on something similar. Who knows? I may actually bear down and write that novel/memoir/novella. It all depends.

The question I have yet to answer is, on what exactly that new path going forward will depend?

Here’s to having hope and keeping faith that I will eventually find out.

Men in Kilts

Yesterday, I connected with my roots at the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games.

My middle name is MacPherson, you see.

I am descended on my maternal side from a line of Scottish soldiers who served in the late 18th century in the Eastern outreach of the yet-to-be confederated British colony that would eventually become Canada.

The retired soldiers settled on land that would become the province of New Brunswick in 1867 with the confederation of the Canadian Dominion. It is one of the four so-called Atlantic provinces that hug the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

That burgeoning colony produced sailors, boatbuilders and farmers aplenty in the early days of British colonialism. Scottish soldiers who had faithfully served His Majesty and were honorably discharged were given tracts of land as payment.

In the case of my descendants, they settled along the banks of the Nashwaak River in what is now central New Brunswick. Many of their descendants still live in the area today.

This was the 46th edition of the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games held in Winter Springs, Florida.

Spread across a number of fields were border collies demonstrating their sheep herding skills, men in kilts tossing cabers which look like old wooden telephone poles, and a changing program of Scottish bands that boomed in the background.

The bands were no match for the Pipe and Drum bands that paraded on the field in front of us. Bagpipes are not to everyone’s musical taste. People either love or hate them. The crowd gathered yesterday were in the former category. I am firmly among them.

The sound of bagpipes and bass drums stir something in me that is either memory based or stuck in the ancestral echoes of my DNA. I am not quite sure. But I quite love them and their oddly grating sound. It is an acquired taste for many.

So when the announcer said the Parade of the Clans was beginning, my ears perked up. I was wearing my newly acquired MacPherson Clan T-shirt. Would my ancestral crowd be represented? I should never have doubted it.

When they rounded the corner of the entrance to the field and began marching my way, I jumped up to show them the credentials emblazoned on my shirt and was welcomed into the parade. It was oddly moving and restorative.

It was fairly astonishing to watch competitors (male and female) in the “Boulder Boogie.” Any and all comers could jump in to pick the large granite boulder of their choice. Carrying heavy boulders or tossing a caber were prized demonstrations of strength and necessary skills back in the day.

The goal was to hoist it up and carry it as far around the field as possible. A dutiful handler with a measuring wheel followed behind them to record the outcome of their effort. The lightest boulder, I’m told, was 98 pounds. The heaviest was 178 pounds. When they start competing with a handful of river rocks in each pocket, I might consider participating.

Out here in the middle of the sun and fun state, I encountered a bit of the “old country.” I am no longer immersed in the daily reminders of that culture like I was, say, when growing up in Newfoundland. To be fair, that was mostly Irish based music but I dare you to try and tease out the difference in tone or tempo during a pub crawl.

Reconnecting with my Scottish roots was more soul-restoring than I had imagined it would be. Something that mattered to me in my environment when I was younger is still healthy and alive out there. It heartened me.

It was fun to connect and engage in the ages-old argument of the differences between “Mc” and “Mac” in that old and historical family name. It was fun to smile and celebrate our shared family motto on the MacPherson crest.

“Touch not the cat without a glove.”

It is a motto that has served me well and often many times in the past. I intend to hang onto and refer to it a little more often thanks to the weekend refresher course.

I look forward to what future Highland Games hold in store. I’ll be signed up for the Parade of Clans beforehand and be totally “ready, aye, ready.”

Forests vs Trees

I like sharing the work of insightful writers here. I usually share their work because I have learned something. I have taken away from someone else’s writing something that I need to practice and focus on.

So I share the wisdom of Avery Hart today. She says “out loud” what I am frequently guilty of. I spend so much time worrying about small things, I can miss out on the big things.

My priorities can go badly out of focus. While trying to set up a workable bookkeeping system for daily expenses, I let my taxes go unfiled. I scurry around trying to find every possible deduction and then pay a penalty because my taxes are filed late.

This is a real and nagging real-world example in my life. I have always struggled with accounting and financial management. Not that I am that bad at it, per se, but I could do a better job. I am solvent and financially comfortable. I should start acting it.

My takeaway from Avery Hart’s insightful piece is that maybe I should just get the damned returns in. The weight of carrying the task of filing them corrodes my spirit. As it is such a stumbling block and bugbear in my life, that sure sounds to me as if there is something fundamental there to investigate.

Avery Hart puts it this way. She’s talking about spiritual growth. And what else is our life purpose if not that as its fundamental underpinning?

Have you ever heard the saying “missing the forest for the trees”? It may be a cliché at this point, but I feel like this is something we all do on occasion. It’s easy to get so caught up in the smaller things to the point that we completely forget to attend to the big important things. This is especially true in our spiritual and emotional life. After all, what even are the big things when it comes to spirituality and emotions? How are you supposed to make sure that you’re getting the big things right if you don’t even know what those big things are? 

I see far too many people focusing all of their time and attention on tiny details while the greater foundation of their spiritual life is crumbling, and I don’t want this to happen to you. Today we’re going to talk about why this happens, how you can recognize if it’s happening in your spiritual life, and what you can do about it. 
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Do You Get Caught Up In The Small Details?

Have you ever spent so much time trying to pick a guided meditation that you end up not having enough time left to meditate at all? Or maybe you’ve taken the time to set up the perfect altar and get every crystal and candle in exactly the right place, only to realize you have no idea what to do at this altar. Maybe it’s even something simple, like focusing too much on trying to pick out the exact right crystal to wear that day and completely missing the fact that you’re bulldozing yourself in every situation you run into. Whatever it may be, it’s all too easy to fall into this trap of focusing on the minutia to the point that we start missing how much we are letting the big stuff slip. 

There are about a million examples of how we can get our priorities mixed up in this way. 

You can see it in the yogi who meditates excessively even while their relationships are crumbling around them. 

It’s trying to learn every esoteric skill and psychic ability out there while completely ignoring your real life. 

It’s striving to create a picture-perfect image of yourself as some spiritually enlightened being while paying no mind to the way that this cuts you off from the people around you. 

Getting caught up in these less-than-important details isn’t your fault. It happens to all of us on occasion. The problem is simply that we don’t know how to recognize what is truly important and what is a distraction. There is one easy way to begin to decipher the important things from the not-so-important things. 

Spirituality, at its core, is meant to improve your life. It’s not meant to make you feel better or to distract you from your life, it’s meant to make your actual, mundane, day-to-day life better in very real, observable ways. If your spiritual practices are not supporting this basic goal, then you are focusing on the wrong things. 

What’s more important, learning astral travel or doing inner child work? Reading tarot cards or meditating? Working with crystals or communing with your ancestors? 

The answer is that it depends on your intention in pursuing each of these practices. The practices themselves are not necessarily better or worse, it’s what you intend to do with them that matters. Inner child work may seem more important than astral travel at first blush. I mean, what do you actually gain through astral travel? But astral travel can be used to do deep shadow work and at a certain point, inner child work can become a distraction from taking real action in your life. In contrast, astral travel can be used as an escape to experience a fantasy reality while inner child work can be used to heal the beliefs and patterns of behavior that are creating problems in your relationships. 

It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it and why you’re doing it. 

This, unfortunately, means that there is no easy answer to whether you are really focusing on the important things. I can’t tell you which of your practices are important and which are distractions. You have to evaluate for yourself what your intentions are in every practice that you do and how these practices actually benefit your life. Does your meditation practice help with your anxiety, or are you simply using it as a way to feel better about yourself as a more spiritual person? Are you using your tarot cards to evaluate your life direction and gain real insight or are you using them to avoid making decisions and shunning responsibility off onto the universe or some other nebulous power? 

This honesty is one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself. It’s one of the few things that will accelerate your spiritual growth exponentially.
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Letting Go

It is among the most common things a healing person hears as they work to move on in life.

“Just let it go.”

That phrase used to infuriate me.

It smacked of absolving the perpetrators of their misdeeds. It meant giving up control over how I believed the story should end.

The evildoers should collapse on their knees in front of me and beg for my forgiveness. They should admit all the wrongs they committed. They should express their repentance for the hurt they caused me.

A person could wait around for a really, really long time for that to happen.

There is something comforting in the belief that evildoers may eventually be “hoist on their own petard.” That maybe karma will have its way with them. The hope that one day they would suffer as much as they made us suffer.

All of that is profound wishful thinking that merely gives us an illusion of control.

In the end, there is nothing we can do to shape or alter another’s behavior. Not really. Sure, we can dole out favors and dispense punishments to control those who depend on us.

But serious harm rarely takes place in that type of situation. Keeping children or employees in line is fairly straightforward. One cannot confuse the mindless actions of dependents with the evil intent of those who actually mean us harm.

Healing from harm eventually all comes back to us. We can whine and complain and “woe is me” as long as we like. It will change nothing. It will only keep the pain fresh and alive in us. It will only frustrate and diminish us.

To heal and grow, we must move on. A friend swindled you out of money or position? Unfriend him or her and move on. Your fiance cheated on you? It is up to you to explore your heart and mind to determine if that act can be forgiven or ends the relationship. Someone treats you badly, maybe even assaults you? Get as far away from that person as is humanly possible.

I watch lawyer’s ads on television and they repel me. One lawyer consistently gets high dollar awards for their clients who have been wronged or injured in some kind of accident. The satisfied customers express undying gratitude to the lawyer. They are grateful for their awards as if the lawyer was their savior and the dollar outcome was their due.

It is not their due. It is a game. It is luck of the draw. It is the strength of the fact pattern and narrative. Life owes us nothing.

It is only when that penny drops can we begin to take concrete steps to define what we want and what we can and cannot control. We can control our reactions. We can control our actions. We can decide how to move forward and move on in life.

This is the importance of taking personal responsibility. We are the only ones who can decide that degree to which external events affect us and shape us. Blaming others – the perpetrator, our parents, the system, god, “bad luck” – is a common reaction and revenge tactic when we have been badly hurt.

The problem is that it is ultimately unsatisfying and out of our control.

By taking full and absolute personal responsibility for the impact of our injuries, only then can we devise strong coping strategies and learn to call on the inner strength we all possess in our core.

An injured wild animal will slink off into the woods and find a safe place to hunker down and heal. I have had to do that a few times in my life When the threat was large and my options limited, absenting myself was often the only healthy solution.

None of this is to say that healthy solutions are easy or don’t generate their own type of pain. Turning your back on unhealed family members, for example, is not without its own hard feelings and complications.

But like the fox who chews off its’ own foot to escape the trap, it is sometimes the difficult choices is the only way out. The fox evaluates its options and makes its decision based on what it can or cannot do. The fox who chooses to accept the trap usually pay with their lives. Many people do the same thing.

So I am in a phase of letting go of some things and feelings I should have let go of years ago. So what? Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

If we believe that each day is a new beginning (and in my world, it is), we can choose to start anew. We can turn our backs on the past and plot a path forward.

It likely won’t be easy, I’ve learned. And it is not a perfect science.

But I’ve also learned that letting go is so worth it.

Conversation Cafes

“Come up with a crazy business idea.”

That was the WordPress prompt today.

So here goes. Conversation cafes. This would be a Starbucks-like franchise (Tim Hortons-like for any Canadian readers).

You could even set up one of those “mug walls” where regular customers come in, grab a mug and a coffee. Like the good old days.

You could still get your long, tall, short, skinny, grande, cappuccino or moccaccino with or without whipped cream and cinnamon. The choices would be as generous as they would be in any urban coffee bar burning through mounds of ground coffee hour after hour for a grateful paying public.

Now, here’s the wrinkle. My conversation cafes would not allow any technological devices to darken its doors.

No cellphones or any other kind of communications technology. No iPads. No laptops.

The speed at which technology has become central to our lives to the point of absolute necessity is astonishing. So much so, it is hard to remember what life was like before technology.

Rectangular paper maps to get directions to go somewhere? Unwieldy and messy. I could never refold the blasted things the right way.

A busy signal on the other end of the phone line? “Oh. S/he is talking to someone else. I’ll call him or her back later.”

Remember coffee dates or dinner dates where getting together to have a conversation was the main idea? Neither do I. Not well anyway.

Like many Boomers, I grieve the loss of conversation as much as I grieve the loss of cursive writing. I am glad my adult children were exposed to it and can sign checks when and if needed. Oh wait. Checks. Also an out-of-date twentieth century business practice.

So my conversation cafes would have a nostalgic vibe, obviously. Big hair. Hoop earrings. High heels. The women would dress retro, too.

The conversationalists might either know, or not know, each other. And if they didn’t know each other, they would not be allowed to look up their profile picture and bio on Facebook, LinkedIn or X account. (For the uninformed, Twitter recently became known only as “X.” High marks for originality there, Elon Musk.)

Imagine the thrill of sitting down with a near stranger and not really knowing whether he (or she – no gender bias) was a potential axe murderer.

We’d go by the old cues. Through conversation. What do you do for a living? Who do we know in common? Where did we grow up? What school or schools did we go to? Not bad for a first conversation cafe “getting to know you” date script.

These days, the strength (or even possibility) of a first meeting depends on how closely your profile pic matches what you really look like.

If you look wildly off the mark in person, you can be ghosted before the connection is even made. Not bad in terms of efficiency. Kinda lame in terms of real human connection.

So this is an admittedly desperate attempt to steer our society back to the exchange of pleasantries that were so vital at a different time in history.

It is a call to insert humanity back into every day social discourse. An impractical attempt to hold apart the walls of technology’s inevitable march before it utterly engulfs all of collective humanity.

So my solution is conversation cafes. A place to talk. Hang out. Chill. People watching. Remember that? Conversation cafes is a wild, and probably impractical, business solution to an evolving social problem.

I admit it is hard to conceive of a world now where technology isn’t front and center in our lives. Our secretaries. Our pals. Our lifeline. Our dictionaries, encyclopedia and old wives’ tales all rolled up in one tidy and portable package.

So a conversation cafe where no technology is allowed is a stretch. And likely, if I’m being completely realistic, no business either.

I’ll admit even the notion of promoting human connection sounds old-fashioned and irrelevant these days. Which is seriously sad.

The Nature of Things

There is a pivotal scene at the end of Orson Welles’ cinematic masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

This rich and powerful man has destroyed many people’s lives in pursuing his ruthless ambitions. Now he is on his deathbed.

The only word Citizen Kane utters is, “Rosebud.” SPOILER ALERT: Rosebud is the name of his snow sled. In the scene that follows, we see workmen tossing it into a blast furnace along with a lot of other seemingly useless stuff.

Here we see that on the brink of his impending death, the protagonist Citizen Kane goes back in his mind to the freedom and joy he once had and enjoyed in the simpler time of his childhood.

I, too, had items of deep sentimental value that were my constant companions when I was a child. I clung to them then as children seeking security often do. Much like Linus and his famous blue blanket, my “pinkie blanket” was my constant companion when I was a toddler.

This cuddly soft blanket was a 100% wool Kenworth in a light shade of pink. It had been given as a Christmas present from my paternal grandmother in the year I was born.

There was a darker backstory behind that gift. For reasons known only to her, my grandmother refused to see me when I was taken to visit her shortly after my birth. Who knows why? She was pretty crazy best of times.

My father – the youngest of three boys who came late to fatherhood – was devastated by her rejection. And as terrible sadness often presents in hurt people, Dad was deeply angry.

When a gift box arrived a few days before Christmas, it was all my mother could do to keep Dad from taking it to his mother’s house and throwing it on her front porch.

But he was talked out of it and didn’t. It turned out to be a lucky call. My grandmother dropped dead of a heart attack a few days later on December 23rd in the same year I was born.

Had that gift been angrily rejected and returned, my mother worried Dad would have taken on all of the guilt for causing his mother’s death. As it was, he seemed guilty enough for just breathing the same air as she did.

It is more than a bit ironic, then, that the pinkie blanket became my constant companion and primary source of comfort as I grew a little older. I now wonder how Dad must have felt seeing me drag it around all the time after the drama surrounding its origins.

I had a white toy dog, too, who was very important to me, too. He was most reminiscent of some breed of schnauzer or terrier. He walked forward shakily on his four stiff legs when you pressed a button in his neck. Though the name on the sales tag said, “Knee High,” I called him “Highknee.”

The perceptive and Yiddish speakers among you will note his name is pronounced and so might easily have been spelled “h-e-i-n-i-e.” Which could have been pretty accurate as that is about how tall he was in relation to my backside back then.

After years of upheaval, both Highknee and my pinkie blanket were lost in the mists of many, many moves. Yet, the comfort and companionship and pleasure they afforded me when I most needed them still lingers in the recesses of my childhood memories.

Come to think of it, I have cycled through various artifacts and icons of comfort over time. They varied. I toted around a huge pink elephant with neon bright psychedelic patterned ears a teenage boyfriend gave me until it fell apart.

The same boyfriend gave me a blue and cherry pink reversible satin comforter. It also eventually succumbed to the vagaries of age and a cannibalistic washing machine.

These days, I take comfort from a variety of beautiful things. A sitting Buddha statue sits serenely in my bespoke mango Asian room.

Articles of my children’s clothing from when they were infants and toddlers are socked away in dresser drawers and fawned over occasionally. To be taken out and used again, perhaps, when my children have little ones of their own. If wishes were horses ….

I have a multitude of candles I keep stored away. When I want to bring light and spirit into a room, I bring them out and light them.

Certain artworks I’ve collected evokes special memories. The art has not always come from a place I’ve been to except in my mind’s eye. Still those pieces comfort me by emotional and geographic association.

I treasure a few other special artifacts for the positive memories they bring up, too. But I know I don’t need them. They are luxuries.

I have lived long periods of my life keeping no reminders of my past lives on display around me. The artifacts of my material life was often put in storage, for example, if I was moving around the country for a contract or some other work engagement.

Most of these desirable “things” are “wants” in my life, not “needs.” As if on cue, some material item often comes up or comes back to me when I most need comfort. Not necessarily the same item or in the same form as the original.

But close enough in shape or form to evoke the memories of comfort I needed when I was younger and more vulnerable. Those memories often rise again to comfort me in adulthood.

I have white Kenmore wool blankets now. Highknee has been replaced by a tortoiseshell cat named Nalita.

I am as grateful for the memories of comfort I had in childhood as I was for the items themselves. I am more than grateful for the living breathing things that give me comfort now.

My husband. My friends. My daughter. My cat. My house plants.

If we are lucky, we eventually learn that things – no matter how luxurious or expensive or rare or treasured – are, after all, just things. If we are very lucky, we learn to comfort ourselves in the midst of having nothing material at all.

Resolution

I’m not crazy about problems but I do like resolving them.

Depends a lot on the problem, of course.

I like little problems like unwashed dishes in the sink. The solution is pretty easy. Wash ‘em by hand or throw them in the dishwasher. The resolution is the same.

Then there are the big problems. A marriage on a precipitous downhill slide. A job that started out fine but has been tangled up and thwarted by an atmosphere of pettiness. A cancer diagnosis. A child sliding farther away from you into a serious drug habit.

No quick fixes to any of these situations. Each problem demands its’ own unique approach. Each demands a different level of engagement and attention.

We sometimes have enough control over a certain situation to see a positive outcome. But at other times, we simply don’t. The worst is, sometimes we have no idea whatsoever how things will go or how they will turn out. We just have to grit our teeth and press on.

Uncertainty is a bugbear for me. And yet, uncertainty is what life is. I don’t think I am alone here. We all struggle to impose order on chaos whatever sphere of life we are operating in. Career. Education. Home environment. Family. Gardens. And sometimes, we even try to impose order on our love relationships with questionable results.

But we impose order to achieve results. Order can create the conditions for a positive outcome. The wrinkle is we are led to believe that the order we have learned to impose is the only way to achieve something.

I used to be sensitive to keeping up with the chronological order of living life with my peers. I was aghast at those who delayed formal schooling after high school. “They’ll never catch up,” I believed. I couldn’t imagine parents going to university. “How could they possibly attend courses and raise kids at the same time?”

An out-of-wedlock pregnancy before university was tantamount to career and romantic suicide. I was a very narrow-minded young person. I was a product of my time. I learned those beliefs. I did not come up with them on my own.

When I read a story the other day about a 100-year-old woman who graduated from university with her first degree, I celebrated her achievement and her gutsiness. As I read somewhere else, but for Rosa parks, blacks might still be riding in the back of city buses.

Nature has its own order and rules. But it does not necessarily approximate the order rigidly imposed on our social systems.

If that were so, apartheid would never have been upended. The civil rights movement would never have had traction. Most women would still be supporting male colleagues in secretarial pools and strictly administrative staff roles.

There are benchmarks in the scripts of social change that mark the resolution of certain social problems and inequities. It is far from perfect science. Getting to a place of resolution can be gappy and inconsistent. The trick is to keep moving forward.

The problem must be identified and brought to light before it can be addressed. Otherwise, we likely wouldn’t even be aware there was an issue. A new order is often born out of chaos and disruption. Revolution often leads to resolution. And still, any resolution will never be a perfect solution.

Challenging problems is much like living life. A start-stop process of learning and relearning and failing and getting up and starting over again. Once we get that, then we can rest easier in the knowledge that “the world is unfolding as it should.”

We learn that life is a journey and not a destination. So it is with the problems in our lives and their ultimate resolution. Our job is to face problems squarely and work on them to resolve them in aid of our own growth.

Looked at in that way, problems are not only inevitable but opportunities for learning and growth. And yes. Even in the face of a child’s heartbreaking life choices or a cancer diagnosis. We must accept what is and move forward from that point. Few life problems are solved by ostriches with their heads in the sand.

Enough for Today

I am sharing this poem.

Short on length but long on wisdom.

Loves me some (or any) Mary Oliver, I does.

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it.

I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

Mary Oliver, from Dogfish

Rain On

It is pouring rain outside. Pouring with the kind of intensity that would keep you off the roads and safe at home if it were snow. But it isn’t snow. TBTg.

I used to hate rain. Destroyer of picnic plans. Ruination of spring weddings (though rain on a wedding day is supposed to be good luck. Heaven knows why. Certainly not for the bride’s wedding dress.)

A random rain shower for which you are unprepared can leave you cold and damp. Then the rain adds insult to injury and utterly abandons any semblance of comfort once you go inside.

You might have to sit on a hard wooden seat in the damp and cold while suffering through a less than scintillating lecture. The cold and damp do nothing to elevate the subject matter. Quite the opposite. They mirror it a little too precisely.

At home, at least, you get to strip down, throw the outerwear in the dryer, get into some cozy dry clothes and start the day over.

In point of fact, rainy days have not always been doom and gloom for me. I’ve had magical experiences in rain. Years ago, I was preparing to trek the Pokhara to Jomsom route in Nepal. The crude hotel rooms were a bit makeshift by our standards. They were really nothing more than cinder blocks stacked on top of one another.

Set on the four corners of the block walls, the roof was simple sheets of corrugated metal, held down by fairly hefty rocks. This flimsy arrangement held together well enough most of the time. Until monsoon season.

if you have ever been caught in a monsoon downpour, you are unlikely to forget it. The nearest analogy I can come up with is standing directly under a waterfall with an industrial fan blowing at you.

The corrugated sheets of the roof were no match for the monsoon. I was both dazzled and distressed by its power. When the roof of your hotel room blows off and flies away into the distance, it creates some intense feelings.

My primary concern was for my precious Canon 35 mm SLR camera left in my hotel room. It would not survive, I was sure. I dove into the room, fished it out from under the bed covers where I’d stowed it for safety and tucked it under my clothes. Hugging the lens toward my chest, waiting for the deluge to die down.

In a similar monsoon season in Sri Lanka, another downpour aforded a unique personal care experience. The rain shower was so intense and lasted so long I was able to go out into the hotel courtyard to wash my hair. Not only wash it but condition and rinse it with plenty of time to spare.

They say that into every life, a little rain must fall. That is not necessarily always a bad thing.

More and more, I see rain more as a gift of nourishment. For the earth and the plants and for us. It refreshes everything. It washes the plants and softens the earth. It quenches their thirst. We recently planted fruit trees and a hedge around our house which are still being established.

The frequent rains are not only life-enhancing for the plants, but they let me off the watering hook when they come.

I am more than grateful for this frequent, if unbidden, gardening assistance. Rain on, say I.

300 Posts and Counting

My 300th post in a row today. Only 65 more to go to reach my goal of writing a daily blog post for a full year.

Starting out on March 14th of last year (2023 for any of you who are just shaking off the trauma of whatever last year was), I wondered what the year would bring when I started out. I wondered if my goal of writing a book would be enhanced by this discipline. I wondered what I would learn about life. I wondered what I would learn about myself.

I’ve learned a few things. Among them, I have valued the feedback and support of fellow travelers. People in my life who may have only known me superficially before have stuck with me. They’ve read my posts, liked them and made valuable comments. I am grateful for you Diane and Gary. And Katie, too.

I have connected with other blog authors who are doing their bit to share their voice and insights with the world. Eclectic and interesting.

I’ve gleaned a few faithful readers and commentators along the way. I’ve signed up for their blogs and have learned from and enjoyed their writing. Thank you, Frank and Tony and Patti and Mangus and Kris. I see you too, ThatScaredLittleGirl. If I’ve missed any other regulars, please forgive me.

In the past, I have both applauded and decried the onslaught of technology and the power it has over most of us today. I’m just waiting for the internet to crash one day to see what kind of blind panic that triggers across the world. I don’t really wish that to happen, but admit I find it a fascinating prospect to contemplate.

I have discovered the memoir I originally set out to write is not as compelling a goal for me as it once was. I believe I was driven by a need to be validated and to share my learnings and survival strategies from the challenges of my childhood. How I overcame those challenges might be of help to others facing the same situations, I believed.

Part of me still believes that. Yet my life has evolved from a “survivalist” mindset and into a place of stability and contentment. I don’t have the same fire in my belly as I once had to share the atrocities I suffered in my childhood with the world. My solutions of choice come out in my blog writing practice anyway.

My deep-seated beliefs in spirituality over religion, self-care, meditation, yoga, healthy eating all inform my daily writing. Love over hatred. Kindness and compassion as a starting point for any new connections with others. When others disappoint or hurt me, I simply withdraw. I now believe it is their loss as much as mine for what we might have co-created together.

Like a wise farmer, I need to choose where I sow my seeds and try to pick fertile and welcoming soil. I spent too many years not doing that and have the results (or lack thereof) to prove it. I quote the wisdom of the late Maya Angelou who said: “When people show you who they are, believe them … the first time.”

That is such an important and hard-won lesson. My late mother destroyed her life by ignoring this truth. When she met my father, he was a firmly established drunkard and womanizer with a hair trigger temper. My mother believed that her love would change him. If it were not so sad and the consequences so tragic, I would laugh at that presumption.

Her misguided belief underscores a fundamental learning we all eventually come to. We can’t change anyone. It is difficult enough to change ourselves. Any of you who have successfully quit drinking, smoking, overspending, procrastination or other self-sabotaging behaviors know that truth intimately.

I have learned the hard lesson that you cannot push a string. People are as they are as you meet them in the present moment. What you hope and dream they will become one day, may or may not happen. Deal with them in the present, not in the someday you imagine.

If the present person you encounter proves to be a bad fit with where you are in your evolution, the only solution may be to walk away. You may wish them love and healing.

You do not have to expose yourself to the threat of being pulled under or back into the undertow of their unsettled and unresolved issues. That’s their job, not yours.

That was a tough learning for me. We are all tightly sewed into fraught expectations around family and friend relationships. Abandoning them may be seen and felt as disinterest or cruelty.

In my life, I have made those choices as an action of self-care and, yes, an act of love. It is often only in solitude and isolation that people learn the lessons they need to learn in their life.

Like people we lose through death, they are not gone from us. They are simply elsewhere.

I have learned lots over these past 300 days. I have much more to learn. I will always have much more to learn. It is an immutable truth that the more we know, the less we know we know.

I’m closing in on the final leg of this one year marathon. At the moment, I have no idea whatsoever what I will do on the 366th day. Carry on with daily posts or change direction? I do know this for sure.

Writing is not just a vocation but an avocation. It is an exercise in exploring the depths of the soul and spirit as much as it is a tangible product that others can ingest and ponder. It has given structure to my days, even when some of those days were very rocky and unpredictable.

I am finding my voice. I know her better now. I feel there is still much more to learn. So we’ll see. As we used to say regularly in the news business, the outcome “remains to be seen.” At any rate, you can safely assume there will be one even if I don’t yet know what that will be.