when i think about my sweet momma and my poppo, my big brother, my godfather uncle allen, my grandmother-mama-dear, more beloved family and dear friends – all who have left this earth – i don’t think about their jobs or upward mobility, their income or the status symbols they owned. i don’t think of the timeline of their school or work or whether they had finished a degree or if they had even gone to college. i don’t ponder awards or certificates they received or resorts where they may have vacationed.
i think about what a difference they made in my life. my mom’s devotion to cheery kindness, my dad’s quiet and stubborn thoughtfulness, my big brother’s goofy humor and ability to tell a story in all its details, my uncle’s absolute commitment to his fun-loving smile no-matter-what-was-happening. i think about the joy my mom experienced when my dad brought her grocery-store-flowers. i think about big bowls of coffee ice cream with my brother, neil diamond playing in the background. i think about my uncle generously paying for my very first recordings in ny, diligently holding me up and gently pushing me. i think about simple moments with them. in what could be a crowded-with-information-obituary in my head for each person, i hold a piece of their heart instead. they have made a difference in this world. they made a difference for me. i remember.
(from THE FAULT IN OUR STARS) “you know, this obsession you have, with being remembered? this is your life! this is all you get! you get me, and you get your family and you get this world, and that’s it! …. and i’m going to remember you. …. you say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. i know about you.”
we live on an infinite continuum of opportunity. chances to bring light and hope to others. deeds we can do out of kindness, goals reached by collaborating together. we face choice just as soon as the sun-peeking-over-the-horizon wakes us. we innately or intentionally decide, we head in a direction, we live a day.
“We’re all traveling through time, together, everyday of our lives… All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable life. I just try to live everyday as if I have deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it… As if it was the full, final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.” (from ABOUT TIME)
this song. i have performed it countless times. in nyc’s central park for tens of thousands of people, in small medical clinics, in large oncological settings, in chicago’s grant park. at a pharmaceutical conference in puerto rico, outdoors with the lance armstrong tour of hope. across the country, in pajamas and jeans and all-dressed-up. in theatres and at walks/runs, in schools and churches. for organizations including y-me, the american cancer society, gilda’s club, young survival coalition, susan g. komen foundation, the annual breast cancer symposium. and each time, heidi and i, working together in performance, fighting back tears. the list is profound. not because of the innumerable times i have sang this song, but because of all the people in these places and behind the scenes, joining together, remarkably touching the lives of others: those they know and those they may never know.
we make a difference. in every arena of our lives. every place we go. every interaction. every gesture. every assumption. every conversation. every every-thing. every single thing.
what intention will we have? will we be positive or negative?
“the truth is, I now don’t travel back at all, not even for a day. … live life as if there were no second chances.” (ABOUT TIME)
the sun lights our room early in the morning. we don’t have room-darkening shades so if artificial measures haven’t been used (read: obnoxious alarm clocks) we wake with the light.
thoughts stream in with the light in this just-past-the-dark-hour. our quiet as we sip coffee, like jiffy-pop starting to pop on a hot stovetop, is punctuated by bits of conversation. the dreams we are climbing out of, the babycat’s snoring through the night, dogdog’s sweet need for early pets, what the weather looks like out our window peering into the backyard, projects we are working on, what is on the docket for the day. ideas, reminiscences patter through. we stretch into the day yawning in front of us, putting on, and trying to keep on, caps of making-good-assumptions. today is a good day to have a good day, as the saying goes.
good assumptions. apparently, they are a high ticket item. for we all are, in the world, surrounded by those who do not make good assumptions. my sweet momma would tell me, “don’t jump to conclusions.” “ask questions,” she would admonish. a difficult lesson worth oft-repeating.
we would sit on the couch at the end of the day, sipping tea and eating chips ahoy cookies. we’d talk about the day, bitter jabs by classmates or exclusionary moments i had endured. “try to find something good,” she’d remind me, while at the same time not underplaying the hurtful behaviors. “make good assumptions.” this is the same woman who, on the emergency room table in the wee hours of the night, in great pain and fearing a broken hip, looked up at a cranky and tired nurse and remarked, “you have a beautiful smile.” it changed the moment; i suspect it changed the rest of the nurse’s day; perhaps it changed all those who she interacted with thereafter and so forth. those undeniable concentric circles.
in early days with david, clearly in the beaky-beaky school of thought, one of the most-oft-repeated things i remember him saying is “ask questions.” don’t assume you know. don’t assume anything. ask. listen.
quite some time ago, mike stated, “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.” watch, ask questions and listen, he advised. don’t make assumptions. the best way to learn, the best way to collaborate, the best way to approach challenge, the best way to move in the world.
momma would smile and look at me, facing down adversity or standing tall on a personal summit, and say, “wowee!”
i can practically hear her now, her eyes dancing, saying, “see? if you ARE going to assume anything, assume awe.”
for obvious reasons, i’ve been reading articles lately about broken wrists and professional pianists, seeking wisdom, seeking reassurance, seeking healing.
i want to share bits of what i have read:
“…becoming injured can be emotionally devastating for a pianist. if a person’s thoughts, aspirations, and perhaps, very livelihood center around the piano, then to be unable to play one’s best, unable to play without pain, perhaps unable to play at all, is a dreadful experience. injured pianists often become deeply depressed and discouraged…an injured pianist desperately needs emotional support and understanding from friends, relatives, colleagues…”
and so i want to say thank you. thank you to all of you who have reached out since i broke both of these wrists. thank you for your calls and cards, flowers and meals, wine and snacks, coffee and brownies, texts and emails. thank you for asking me about the piano, what it feels like to play, for your hugs and words of encouragement. even those of you who have simply asked me, “how are you?”
you all know who you are. your thoughtfulness and caring concern mean the world to me and i cannot express my gratitude for your generosity and love.
yesterday was new-cast-day. another chapter in this strange journey. but moving ever-forward.
there is a screen door that i am lusting over. it sits outside an antique shoppe, subject to the rain and snow, sun and wind. one of these days we will take big red over there and purchase it; the test is that i am still thinking about it. we have no idea where we will put it. but there is something about it; it has a story and that story will always be a mystery to us. giving that door a home again will add to its journey, its history.
last night i had a dream. it was, as dreams are, fraught with inconsistencies and unlikelinesses, but i remember one thing about it in particular. in my dream, david handed me a check he had received from someone. someone, presumably the person who wrote the check, had scratched out the address and, all along the top of the check, had written in a different address: my growing-up-on-long-island address. i was delightedly startled and pressed david to tell me about the person who clearly now lived in this cherished house, but, in the way that dreams make both little sense and all the sense in the world, he was unable to give me any more information. what i know is that it left me with a reassurance of the feeling from that house. it was a reminder of a time gone by, a time woven deeply into who i am and, for that house, the fabric of about two decades of our family.
houses remember. and you can feel it. the moment i walked into our house i knew. this was the place i wanted to live; this was the place i wanted to have the next part of my life. this house had all good things to offer; i wanted to sustain its story. i suspect it would have been easier to have purchased a brand new home way back then, something pristine and customized to our needs. something that had a sparkling new kitchen or an attached garage, central air conditioning or an open floor plan.
but this house said, “wait. don’t go. give me a chance. i can offer you a lifetime of sturdy foundation. i can tell you i have been there in the light and in the dark times. i can be a safe place for you. i can hold you and celebrate you and listen to the laughter of your children. you can walk on my old wood floors and keep food in my old pantry. you can have dogs and cats and they can run circles through my rooms and children can push or ride plastic wheeled toys round and round hall-kitchen-dining room-living room. you can use my rooms as you need. a nursery with a singing-to-sleep-rocking-chair can later be a studio with a big piano; i can rejoice in listening. you can sit in my south-facing living room and delight in the sun streaming in the windows. i know it will need a little tuck-pointing down the road, but you can burn all the torn-off-the-packages-christmas-wrappings in the old fireplace. you can paint and redecorate and remodel as you wish for it won’t change how i feel. i can be your house. and i, even someday when you have moved on to somewhere else, will always remember you.”
we really need to go get that old screen door and add it to the story of our house.
i don’t subscribe to ‘inspirational daily’ but somehow this showed up in my email feed on thursday, a particularly good day to read the wise words of eleanor roosevelt. an activist, the first lady regularly published her musings and views. her accomplishments as a diplomat were far-reaching; her life story difficult and profoundly inspiring. and she was wise. her words remind me of sue bender’s words (from ‘plain and simple journal‘) “to reconcile our seeming opposites, to see them as both, not one or the other, is our constant challenge.”
what would either of these wise women say about our current climate, i wonder?
would eleanor roosevelt pine for the fine-tuned, thoughtful, intelligent discussions of her lifetime? would she abhor the fact-less, jarringly aggressive re-telling of stories, of narrative, all-dressed-up and skewed to one side? would she shudder to hear of attempts to decimate human rights, to place limits, to undermine? i can’t imagine that she would consider the display of indecency, of avenging and putrid name-calling ‘great-mindedness’. i fear she would, instead, point a wagging finger at the players and implore them to be wide awake, to be thinking, to be discussing idea and possibility and wholeheartedly move forward with conscience.
i wonder, does sue bender, in her middle 80s now, feel a sense of deep disappointment in a society that does not attempt to reconcile seeming opposites, does not see them as both, does not cross the aisle but instead builds walls of hateful rhetoric, looks for the worst in each other, advances the ugly? what would her kind soul say about the divisiveness, poisoning all in its rampant siege, a pandemic reaching unsuspecting venues, its toxic arrows out of the quiver and readied. how would she parse out the arguments, the lack of concern for the victimized, the harassment of those on the other side than the leadership?
goodness knows, i suspect both of these amazing women, living in different generations, would be saddened by this climate. they might weep in absolute dismay. or, they might just whisper into the wind, to whomever might listen, “great minds discuss ideas. average minds discuss events. small minds discuss people.”
with these broken wrists i have moved from a whole rest to a quarter rest. i have made progress playing my piano and my broken-wrists have told me when to be silent. in the silence the earth keeps spinning, we trek around the sun, everything keeps keeping on. but for a moment, i rest.
we are each granted rests upon entrance into this orchestra-of-earth. sometimes they are chosen, sometimes they are not. always they are necessary. it is in your quiet that others make noise, that others speak, that other timbres color the muted. the hush is yours to own; the rest is yours to take. the silence both sometimes frighteningly deafening and sometimes a grand relief. the metronome really never stops.
(a reprise of paragraphs from 8.13.2015 post): at 1am, we walked to the lakefront. away from as many lights as we could get away from, we laid on some old steps, bricks and mortar digging into our backs so that we could gaze straight up, watching the night sky for the meteor shower.
the streaks of white light across navyblueblack make us draw in our breath. i’m wondering how far away this meteor is…how it is that we, here on earth, can see this amazing sight. such a big sky. such tiny bodies in contrast lying on the ground, waiting for the symphony to start, waiting for the downbeat, the symphony that has been continuously playing, the downbeat lost in centuries upon centuries of time gone by. like any good piece of music, it’s the rests in-between the notes, the rests in-between the meteorstreaks, that build the anticipation, that create the emotionflow, that bring tears to your eyes. each burst, each streak of whitelight is a miracle, a tiny moment exploding in time, so far away, in vast vastness.
time stretches out in front of us. and behind us. we are tiny and we are big. we gather in the moments, we breathe them, we rejoice, we worry, we ponder, we move. there is no downbeat and the symphony is already playing, has been playing and will continue to play. always. it is magical. and it is vast.
ohmygosh, women are beautiful. women are strong. women are underestimated. women are courageous. women are tender. women are emotional. women are smart. women are bold. women are modest. women are utterly and undeniably amazing…
sharing two previous posts that i could not pen better than i did when i wrote them. thank you for indulging me this repetition. with love to the great big tribe called ‘womankind’. xoxo
WOMEN. WE’VE GOT BACKBONE. (dec. 1, 2016)
living with an artist means you get to poke around inside their passion. you get to see the things that paved the way, that set the stage, that were behind the scenes. you get to hear the stories of mountains climbed and deep valleys (read: chasms) scaled. an artist’s story is not a straight line and an artist’s art is fluid.
it also means you get to go through the piles, so to speak. i’ll play songs for him that never made it anywhere, onto any album, nor any stage. he’ll show me paintings or sketches that didn’t get framed or hung or shown or even looked at. sometimes i will just go downstairs into the studio and page through the painting stacks, traveling in time through my husband’s work. color and space and frenetic movement and paintings that breathe air; all tell a story about the place he was in when he painted them.
in a recent stroll through paintings, i stumbled upon this one. i pulled it out and sat down – right there on the floor – to gaze at it. there is just something about it.
grace. strength. i was struck by the beauty of its simplicity.
it made me think of so many women i know. my beautiful girl kirsten, who made her first turkey after spending a day on a snowboard on mountains she had never even seen a short three years ago. linda, tossing hay to a horse with a pitchfork and hugging alpaca, never before retirement dreaming of such a thing. marykay who wisely makes brownies (gf!) for every occasion, creating inroads for people to talk and share and become a part of a whole. jay, who is zealous about the children she works with at schools, a social worker beyond compare. jen, who stretches herself to learn new things at all times, while standing strong for her husband, stunned by changes in their lives over the last year. which brings me to randi, with a similar story and the same dedication and generous spirit. daena, who grades papers and reads elementary school novels in-between playing her handbell parts, because she is more than prepared every school day. susan, who, singlehandedly, day after day raises three young men and teaches them to see this very strength and grace in women. sandy, who quietly and fervently and proudly stands strong for the LGBTQ community. heidi, a writer who bravely serves up pizzas with a frantic pace, because it helps her family. dianne, who tirelessly works side by side with her pastor husband, keeping a full-time job and volunteering for, well, everything. beth, who posts a picture of her stunning chemo-bald self every time another friend is diagnosed with breast cancer. my sweet momma, who was kind every single time and didn’t see differences or lines, even in pain, even in dying.
because it’s true. in this time in our world, who of you cannot think of a woman or women you know who are the picture of strength, the picture of grace. i want to celebrate these women. i want to encourage these women. i want to honor these women. i want to celebrate, encourage, honor each of Us.
please forward this to women you know. not because there is a link to purchase Stuff – but because it is a Truth and as many women (and men) as possible need to see it…just to be reminded. add names to the list. in our herculean (and extraordinary) lives, let’s make this a herculean (and extraordinary) celebration.
i can’t think of a better time to further the celebrating, encouraging and honoring than right now. at a time when each of us WOMEN needs to be seen as strength and as grace.
we ARE women. and we DO have backbone.
WOMEN. YOU MADE IT THROUGH. (dec. 6, 2019)
“i want women to see that you do not get pushed around.” (* attributed below)
this piece today is dedicated to all the women who have made it through, all the women who are making it through, all the women who will make it through.
your fire has brought you to the edge of the battlefield many times and you have still made lemonade; you have still prevailed.
you have made it through intensely emotionally abusive relationships. you have picked up the pieces and you have moved on.
you have made it through physical or sexual abuse. you have risen from the ashes.
you have made it through terrifying health scares. you have pulled up your boot straps and determinedly plodded through with massive courage.
you have made it through society’s prioritizing of body image and appearance. you have been measured by your cleavage or lack thereof, by the indent of your waist, by the clothing you choose, by your hair. you struggle to remember you are beautiful. you stand tall.
you have made it through vacuumous times, the middle of chaos, the middle of multi-tasking. you have created.
you have made it through physical summit experiences. you have scaled mountains. you have boarded down untracked chutes. you have trained your body with weights and exercise. you have run. you have skated. you have pedaled. you have breathed in and sighed an exhale. you’ve run thousands of lengths of playing fields. you took the next painful recuperating step. you dove to the depths. you have been on world stages. you have risen with hungry or fevered children night after night. you have competed. you have given birth.
you have made it through falling. you have made mistakes. you have been human. you have forgiven and you have been forgiven.
you have made it through an education steeped in gender-inequality and bias. you have chosen to learn more, to actively seek the resources, rights and opportunities due you, to resist against the discrimination.
you have made it through a system that undermines your success and devalues your value. you have fought for your place.
you have made it through financial challenges of single womanhood, of single motherhood. you have been scrappy and, without complaint, you have layered onto yourself however much it took to get it done.
you have made it through work situations where you’ve questioned how you would be treated were you to be a man. would you be yelled at? would your professionalism be questioned? you have asked these questions. you have stayed, holding steadfast, or you have moved on; you have decided what is best for you and moved in that direction.
you have made it through the skewed-world fray into leadership roles where your every decision is challenged or thwarted. you have overcome; you have triumphed.
you have made it through being-too-young and through aging. and you are not irrelevant.
you have made it through. you have spoken up, spoken back, spoken for. you have written letters. you have marched.
you have been pushed around. but you have pushed back. and, just like the tortoise, you have made it through.
a fine line. the place between pre-joy and joy. for mike libecki there is no space on the continuum between the two. it is merely one or the other. pre-joy or joy.
mike is a mountain climber. because i am an obsessive mountain-climbing-video-documentary-movie-watcher, we watched him and cory richards in their national geographic antarctic mountain climb to summits not reached before. it was brutal. the wind. the weather. the elements of the climb. agonizingly difficult.
but mike was adamant, stating above the furious wind again and again, “it’s either joy or pre-joy.” any moment of torturous climbing or bearing the effects of the weather was a moment of ‘pre-joy’. all other moments were ‘joy’. it’s an amazing way to look at things. an amazing way to look at life. everything leads to joy. you are always in joy or on your way there.
in what we would describe as a watershed time, this short quote is a lesson in staying grounded. in sentiment i have heard before, but never as succinctly shorthand, a reminder to look always to the light, the horizon, not backwards, not at the dark, not measuring in the negative. re-group, re-center, re-evaluate, re-perspective-arrange and move through pre-joy to joy. a cup always with something in it, never empty. always a portion waiting for you to add to it, make the best assumptions, hope, appreciate, carry the jug to the next waterhole for it is there. “we must live sweet,” mike says.
we carry the torch so often for the negative. we moan and complain and gossip and pick fights. in this roller coaster of life, what about carrying the torch for joy? what about lighting the way for yourself, for others, helping to find the light, the joy? believe that we are only an ice-pick or a few carabiners or a length of rope away. we are on the mountain. all of us.
i would like to try to remember this “it’s either pre-joy or joy” and live and work and play by it.
because i believe in joy and the sheer power, potential of joy; it’s a force. i just need remember to believe that all roads lead there. one day is joy. the next is pre-joy. it is all on the same continuum. it is all the same life. we all share the same possibility. all paths summit.
it beckons. the moon, no matter, will seek you out. it has no agenda but to light your way. it has no preconceived notion, no prejudice. it is out there for all, for anyone who looks up. it offers stability to this good earth’s axis, regularity to the tide, illumination to the inky sky.
the moon’s romantic presence is the stuff of wishes and the pronouncement of love all the way to it and back. its moonline will find you, wherever you roam. always, always, it appears to light a path directly to you. each of us must be equally as important, then, for the moon shines for and to each of us. a gleaming line, luminous, brilliantly reaching to us. reminding us that no matter, on this big beautiful earth, we are all under the same dark sky, the same unlimited galaxy of stars, the same moon. we are closer to each other than we think and we all have even – at very least – these few things in common. how reassuring to know that we all, despite where we are, stand on different ground but gaze at the very same moon.
were the divine-in-all-the-universe to have a living room and be gazing out the window, i suspect the divine-in-all-the-universe would say, “i see the full moon out my window and in it, you.”
reverse threading 