Happy Birthday, Mom : )

      Happy 115th birthday, Mom!  1903 is, historically, a long time ago, and yet you are still so very much alive to me in the memories I have of you, the pieces of me that are you, the love that I have for you.  I wonder what life was like when you were born.  Just after the turn of the century, new immigrants continued to arrive here, World War I was in the distant future.  You joined five siblings, and there would be two more.  You were the sixth child, just like me! You told me once that you cannot imagine what I will see in my lifetime as you saw so many changes in technology from electricity to cars to airplane travel to a man on the moon.  You did not live to see the internet, which is rather the defining technology of my life. 
    When I think of you, I think of strength and devotion to belief.  Raising Jeanne Marie and I, just 12 and 7, after dad died when you were just 52.  You never worked outside the home, choosing to live frugally yet providing us with a solid private school education.  You devoted your life to causes, most specifically the Catholic church's causes, as well as dabbling in political causes from registering voters, to allowing our home to be a polling place, to actively campaigning for John F. Kennedy.  You listened to people talk about their problems and tried to help.  You didn't stop.  You were President of the Senior Citizens club.  You were generous with your time with your grandchildren.  You had many friends and were a great friend to many.
    While you were not formally educated, you were well read and modeled the importance of reading and learning.  You supported my writing, complimenting my efforts at poetry and prose.  You encouraged me to be the best of who I could be.  I continue to live my life to make you proud.  I know you would be.  You taught me humility and not to be boastful and to help others.  The touchstone of your life was faith---in God, in humankind, in yourself.  I see that now.
      While you were not openly affectionate, you never turned down a hug or my hand in yours or on your arm. I understand you were likely not raised with overt affection and it was difficult for you.  Your sense of humor helped me to see the world in absurd ways and to realize comedy is the flip side of the coin of tragedy.  The quick sense of humor I have, the part that carried me through so much tragedy, was a solid life lesson from both you and dad.
       I never saw you cry.  Although you must have carried great sadness through the deaths of your husband, your son, your daughter, your siblings.  You told me on more than one occasion that I had leaky eyes.  I still do.  But then, as now, the tears that flow do not impede my actions.  I, too, am a strong woman.  You have modeled that.
      I miss you, Mom.  I wish I could sit at the kitchen table and have a cup of coffee with you and discuss for hours the state of affairs of the world and the problems in the family and how they can be supported and fixed.  I watched you do this with my older siblings.  For hours.  I know we would have had much to talk about, I think I reminded you of yourself in many ways.  I am my mother's daughter.
     So on this anniversary of your birth, I remember all the times.  Some not so positive.  Many times I was not given what I needed, but I never fault you for that.  You were going through so much in your own life and you did the best you could.  I turned out quite okay, in fact, quite well.  I never believe that what I was not able to receive from you was withheld because you were callous, but rather because you were human.  I marvel at all you went through and maintained a steady course that allowed us to grow and develop into mature women.  For this I am so grateful to you.
     Happy birthday, Mom.  Forever alive in my heart.  Thank you for being you and for loving me, encouraging me,  and believing in me!  I feel your strength and your spirit and your pride.

New Year 2018

     The holiday season officially comes to a close today with the celebration of New Years.  This year, more than most, I wave goodbye to it quite vigorously.  It's been an odd time of trying to connect, and almost connecting, and missed connections, and a touch of togetherness here and there.  Usually at this time of the year I feel a spirit that is pervasive and brings joy.  I looked for it for the past few weeks and found it missing. Perhaps something missing in me as well.
      2017 held many positive pieces for me.  Travel, reading, friends, family, writing, theater, goals set and met.  I feel grateful and blessed to have celebrated 70 years on the planet, and am gearing up for many more.  So much left to do before I sleep, or some such semi-quote.  And yet, there is a pall as well.  A step off, I feel.  I try to overlook it, to let it ride, but I carry it with me, sitting on my sleeve, hanging on my heart, burrowing in my brain.  My optimistic nature  acquiesces to the tumult and spirals.  I recognize this.  Depression.  I am familiar with the fight. 
     I will do what I do when the doldrums develop.  I will ride with them and on them and over them until the waves pass and like a successful surfer I will ride them to the beach.  I will look outward and consider the state of the world and the rantings of the man-child who would be king and shake my head and say no, this unconscionable divider of the nation is not the cause of my state right now (although contributory to my feelings of lack of justice).  I will turn news of him off.  Narcissists cannot thrive on backs being turned.  I will look inward and contemplate how the death of my closest friend since I was born, my sister, rocks my world, but is not the cause of my state now (although the focus of many losses in my life).  I will grieve her and go on.
     Recently I have returned to one of the enjoyments of my childhood---painting by number. It's soothing and keeps me off the computer as I watch tv in the evenings.   I had done one rather easy and mindless rendition of elephants on the veldt.  For Christmas, I thought to paint two Clydesdales ready to pull a sleigh. I would finish that and a smaller pic of Santa Claus before Christmas.  But the Clydesdales  were quite a project of simple numbers and mixing numbers.  I finished on New Years Eve.  I was so focused on the pieces to the painting and judging how I blended this and that here and there, that I was in a near constant state of disappointment, even as I carried on to completion.  I was looking at all of the little parts and missing the whole.  When I finished yesterday, I took a picture to send to my daughter.  The picture was the whole.  And it was beautiful.
     This year, 2018, I make no resolutions, other than to live life to the fullest I can.  I doubt that I can thoroughly give up being disappointed and looking at the little parts of life and judging and worrying as I move along.  But I hope, and here is the hope I found missing earlier, I hope that I can carry on to completion to the beautiful whole, and then pause to appreciate that whole and all of the necessary imperfections and flaws that in some sort of alchemical wave created the beauty.  This is life. 

Taking Time

         As I stood in the backyard at 7:00 this morning waiting for my puppy and senior dog to finish their playing, I realized how much I have been standing around the backyard in the past three weeks.  Sometimes in the rain, often, like this morning, bundled up and waiting as the sun rose over the mountains to the east.  I looked at the sky, at the houses, at the large concrete empty building behind me, and at the dogs playing.  I exhaled to watch a trail of condensation into the cool morning air.  I watched the dogs, Sadie, the elder, allowing Cali, the puppy, to climb on top of her as she lay on her tummy and their muzzles do an open-mouthed dance back and forth.  Sadie, 40 pounds and many inches taller and heavier, could have pinned and beaten Cali, but instead, Sadie played.  I thought about the times I have forsaken play, forsaken enjoying the moment in my haste to go through my to do list, to assuage my anxiety that always bubbled beneath the surface, waiting to leak out in small movements of shaking foot or scratching my head or biting my cheek.  Then I realized a subtle shift in the nearly three weeks my focus has been on my new puppy, now 11 weeks old.  My to do list gets done, but I spend a lot of time watching and waiting.  This is a forced slower pace as I focus outside of myself.  This is somehow what I knew I needed when I decided to buy a puppy.  Trusting my intuitive self is something I do, but don't often know why until I stop to reflect.  Until the time is right to do so.
      The first two weeks were a lesson in losing control and feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and abandonment.  The first two weeks were depressing.  But now there is a kind of rhythm and I follow along.  Today I see the rhythm as having brought me to a place of understanding.  I am learning to slow my pace, to be.  I'm taking time to see, to listen.  I'm observing.  All of this is a rebuilding of a foundation that will, I think, allow me to change in ways I do not yet know, but somehow think will be positive.  That I am writing a blog again informs me that my writer self is merely dormant, not absent, not lost, not tossed out.  Citing Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, I am moving up from survival, inch by inch.  I did not know, really, how much time a puppy can consume, until I brought Cali home.  But now I do know and as of now, I'm okay with that.  She's taught me to take time and live it puppy style...in the moment, in short bursts of craziness, with curiosity. I don't know if I will feel so lovingly tomorrow, but I'll see what tomorrow brings.  I have time.  I am grateful to have time.

Challenges

   

 Throughout my life I both choose and am handed challenges.  When I get too set in my ways, something seems to come up, or I stir something up.  I never run from a challenge, even though I don't sometimes embrace them tightly.  Often when I'm in their midst I falter, feel not up to the curves thrown, but somehow I power my way through, even on low, and when the challenge is over, I look back and reflect, noting how the challenge has strengthened me and, in many cases, changed my perceptions. This is so even if I have gone through the challenge on survival mode.
      Retired now for ten years, part time job teaching online, writing novels, playing in many ways, teaching creative writing, so much else, enjoying life and me being with me.  But something is missing, I know.  I am not in love.  I am ready for a relationship, but one is not forthcoming, where do I meet someone?  I've been patient, but so far, nothing has arisen.  No hints, no possibilities.  Life is not bringing me that piece.  So, I need a challenge.  I'll find my own sentient being to love.
      I set up a new aquarium, but the fish only care that I feed them.  I am not a cat person really, although I have had cats.  I am a dog person.  My dog is 12 and she and I had settled into a comfortable routine.  She didn't demand much, except to be near me, and I didn't demand much of her.
     This year I'll celebrate my 70th birthday.  I am energetic still and decide that my challenge will be a new puppy.  By the time I get her all trained, she'll be a great dog when my energy may not be as high as it is at this point.  The inevitable loss of my senior dog will be tragic, but my new dog will be at my side.  I romanticize this notion.  I decide to get on a list for a golden retriever puppy.  The puppy is born, I'm excited, I look forward to when I can bring her home at 8 weeks.  The time passes and I bring my cute puppy, Cali, (aka California Sunshine Cali) home.
     And then I realize I am alone.  With Cali.  All day.  All night.  She doesn't know not to pee in the kitchen or on the way out to the backyard to pause in the living room.  She doesn't know that sleeping through the night is a great way to honor her keeper.  And so, here I am, not enjoying the runs out to the backyard every half hour or hour or maybe two.  I am not enjoying waking up in the (relative) California cold in the wee hours, sometimes more than one wee hour, to pick her up and race outside into a backyard where I have seen raccoons, skunks, squirrels, snakes, opossums, feral cats, owls, hawks and other critters I know are there but have not seen.  I take my older dog and my flashlight as I slip on my shoes and coat.  I muster, "Good girl, Cali, get busy" at every squirt and squat.  I carry her back inside and slip back to sleep myself.
     What was I thinking?  I feel sorry for myself, but what are my options?  Power through, girl, power through.  I think back to when my children were babies and I was up in the middle of the night and so tired during the day.  I am sure this time is never going to end.  I asked for the challenge of raising a puppy, but I got a challenge I didn't think through.
     And then, about ten days in, something flipped.  I could see incremental change.  She was beginning to learn a few commands, not perfectly, but enough to give me hope.  She played with my senior dog, as well as me.  I tried to establish a rhythm to our days.  She slept more during the day and a little more at night.  And for me, I began to enjoy her more.  I accepted the responsibility of being for her.
     As I enjoyed her more, she became more enjoyable.  She allowed me to cuddle.  We played games.  And my heart opened more.
     Cali has been here two and a half weeks and it seems like she's been here forever.  In my acceptance of our building and future relationship I've had to cancel a play, change a vacation, and rearrange what I take for a good night's sleep.  But all this is temporary.  I am in the forest and I'm beginning to make out the trees and that is a positive to any challenge.  In this case, it bodes well for our future together.  But I still wonder...what was I thinking?

   

Expiration Date

     Once a month I teach a class at the Senior Center called Conscious Aging.  I volunteer my time doing this because I believe it is important to view aging in a positive way, not as what we've lost, but as what we can find.  There's a different topic every month designed to provide some psychology underpinnings to some common sense ideas and to give some thought provoking grounding.  Each topic has a positive tone, a you can do it tone.  I prepare the day before, going over my notes, deciding how I will present the class to leave room for lecture, groups, individual comments.  I am usually enthusiastic about the topic.  Not so the topic of today.
    The first time I presented this topic, Death, I glossed over and sanitized it as much as I could.  I was uncomfortable as I didn't really know how to view death in a positive light.  I still felt in a bit of disbelief that it's going to come to me one day.  Somehow I'm going to be the one person who will not have to face that deep unknown.  Oh, I know it's so, but I don't want to die.  I'm not afraid of death, I much prefer, however, living.  This time when I faced preparation for the class, I wanted to not shy away but present it fully and see what would come of it.
   I looked at the full title of the class, "Death Makes Living Possible" and I couldn't initially (as in the first time I gave the class and the beginning of my preparations for this class) understand the connection in any other sense that I can only die because I am living.  But then, the word living took on a different meaning somewhere in my preparations this time.  Living in this sense doesn't mean only breathing in and out and paying bills and figuring out what to have for dinner.  Living means the fullness of life.  Paying attention.  Being Conscious.  Coming to a moment and being in the moment and then going to the next moment.  A lightbulb!  Death makes LIVING possible.  If I know death can happen at any time, that nothing is promised, I can view life in a different way.  I can LIVE.
    The rest of the preparation for the class centered on this positive idea.  Live.  In my relationships, with others, with myself, with the world.  Live. In the sunrise and the sunset and in all the times in between.  Live.  In kindness to myself, to others, to the world.  Live.  LIVE.
     Some day I will no longer live, in either the sense of breathing in and breathing out, or in the sense of being present.  What will happen to my other-than-body, I do not know.  I do not want to know my particular expiration date, but if I had a glimpse of my best used by date, well, I wouldn't mind that.  Knowing neither, I will focus on death as the idea that makes my LIVING possible.
 

Flower Stories

 

Flowers in a garden.  Even the same varieties at different stages have uniqueness.  Some mature, some buds, some with tightly wound florettes. All perky, facing the sun, a mirror of it's color, with traces of fiery red over an orange ball.  Circles within the circles.  A light dusting of fallen petals lay beneath, caught by the undercarriage of leaves.   And then there's the interloper flower, the bloom nearly gone, petals pointing up, down, contrasting color, an early sunrise, a sunset.   Scruffy array standing with the order of the coifed, providing a break from the tension.  This flower, time of bloom and blossom nearly spent, offers a mindful visual of the importance of being and beauty at all times in life.  Flowers needn't speak to provide their stories, but oh if they only could.  What stories would they tell of accepting and appreciating, of living life together, of understanding difference is transitory, and part of life.  Alive is alive. 

Wisdom Speak, Elder Wisdom, Elder Stories

         The convergence of this and that often leads me along a path not yet fully visualized, but a path that feels at once possible, exciting, and comforting.  And here I am now.  I drove, a couple of weeks ago, to the Mendocino Coast to attend a writers conference.  As is often the case for me, processing takes a bit of time and I allow myself the unconscious doing before I tiptoe into the conscious part.  The conscious part means wrangling with how to do what I want to do, and often leaves me feeling whelmed (can I be?),  if not overwhelmed to some degree.
        Before I left for Mendocino I became part of an online class to collect required continuing education units for a clinical license.  The online class had to do with activism and deep storytelling.  Not the rah, rah kind of activism that makes my palms sweat when I think of making cold calls or knocking on doors, but a kind I can make my own by championing an idea that can be helpful in the world.  I can do this in my own way, which, to me, means starting small, and writing.  At the end of the class the challenge was to pick an area.  I left it to marinate before I began to work with it.
      The convergence led me to write about wisdom speak, which I defined as ways of knowing, ways of understanding, ways of being when open to the knowledge of the world and gathering it in and sifting through those inner workings of self.  This is the experience of wisdom, and the speak comes through putting the wisdom into the world through stories.  I most particularly want to focus on wisdom speak when it comes to elder wisdom.  The story is the vehicle.
     Elders in many parts of the world are valued for their wisdom.  In the United States the voices of elders are often overlooked.  The culture of youth and the idea of obsolescence in general underpins this disregard.  Elder stories provide a myriad of experience to connect generation to generation through feelings and subtext, through commonality of life's struggles.  Elder wisdom through stories provides the circularity of life, interweaving the hope from the past to the hope for the future, providing and verifying the interconnectedness of life.
     I take the small steps along the path, uncertain of where I'm going, of where to go.  What will I do to enlarge the idea?  Who will listen?  Who will join?  And yet, here is the path.  I take a step.