there are days i know my poppo is in the wind. i can feel him there. somehow he lets me know. it was six years ago today that he left this earth and, before he said goodbye, i made him promise to hang around. i told him i had no idea how i was going to adjust the timing on the ’71 bug without him, i wouldn’t be able to call him on the phone to ask him how to rube-goldberg a fix on something, i would be missing his “hi brat!”
with him in the wind and my sweet momma and my big brother and all the others who i miss, i have help from guardians. with everyone who is by my side on this beautiful planet, close or far away, i have help from champions. we each do.
we face into the wind, challenged by change and our ever-fluid lives. we put on our invisible capes, take a deep breath, hold onto each other. together we are superheroes.
dogdog doesn’t like the rain much. he pretty much avoids the puddles in the backyard…that is, until one neighbor or the other lets their dogs out. then? then he doesn’t care; all inhibitions are off and he runs like a maniac, his long aussie hair first flying, then clumping and muddy, joy joy joy on his face.
that’s probably a good lesson for all of us…inhibitions off and joy joy joy. despite the messy puddles and the bad hair day. my sweet momma used to sign off her letters with “enjoy, enjoy!” yes. enjoy, enjoy.
if my sweet momma couldn’t find me in the house, she knew to go outside, round the house to the maple tree just beyond my growing-up-window and look up. there i would be, sitting in a crook, notebook and pencil in hand. it was a place of inspiration for me, a perch for penning thoughts, reflections, poems, stories, lyrics.
i think we all have one…a poetry tree. it may be the kitchen table, an adirondack chair on a porch, a blanket on the beach, a desk tucked away in a quiet spot of the house. or a time that gives us more room to think; for me, it can be walking, blowing my hair dry or those moments that brilliant (or not-so-brilliant) ideas strike in the shower. we have a spot that helps us think, sort, dream, create, rest. a spot that fills us with creative juju. mine was a tree, just like chicken’s.
lumi is our granddog. she is our only grand-anything so far, so she, like all first grand-anythings, holds an esteemed place in our hearts. kirsten and becky adopted her the end of last summer and, in many ways, they are learning what it is like to have a toddler. well, kind of. happily, The Girl sends me photos and videos of lumi-girl, the “powderhound” (as she says). she is an amazing little dog, literally chasing their snowboards down gigantic mountains, zigging and zagging behind them. she hikes long distances uphill with them as well, as they splitboard up seeking height and good snow. many of the videos are of lumi at night, mushing into the blankets, curled up next to them, sleeping, snoring, in funny positions. she goes everywhere with them. they worry about her, accommodate her needs, love her desperately. lumi roots their little family.
and what better way to root a family, but in love. in steady, holding-fast, unconditional adoration.
it was the first. the very first butterfly of this season. we both stopped to watch it as it freely flitted around the path in front of us. it felt like another harbinger of spring; maybe it’s really here. a few minutes later we stopped and sat for a few minutes. we didn’t talk; we just listened to the woods. the rest was soft and rejuvenating. the quiet was punctuated by birds and chipmunks. even a raccoon came out to wander. we got back up, ready for more hiking.
i distinctly remember a day i sat in the front yard. it was summer and, just like chicken marsala in this chicken nugget, there was a butterfly that came to light on my hand. it circled around and came back, landing on my knee, my foot. it felt like a message to me, a reinforcement to quietly sit in the sun.
this world is full of chaos and confusion, deadlines and worries. looking at the furrows lining people’s brows, it is obvious that we don’t take enough time to just rest, just sit, just soak in new energy, just let butterflies lead the way. good things will come.
wendy (aka saul aka ben) and i have this thing about unicorns. well, unicorns and bubbles and rainbows. i can’t look at any of those without thinking about her. individually we look especially for unicorn “stuff” for each other; those tend to be small gifts we send from time to time. i have a unicorn calendar that offers pretty straight-ahead advice each day, without mincing words. i have unicorn socks. i have a stuffed unicorn on my piano in my studio. my new favorite unicorn thing is a white plastic stretch unicorn pen she sent me for my birthday…hard to explain…a unicorn with a rainbow mane that looks a lot like a dachshund and is a pen. yep, too much information. you are probably thinking i am too ‘old’ for unicorns, but i beg to differ. one is never too old for unicorns. they are happy and free and magical. plus, as a person who has been horse-crazy since girlhood, anything that even vaguely resembles a horse gets my vote.
d often tells me that i have a wild imagination. that works against me as well as for me. i will imagine all sorts of things – both good and bad. sometimes this is an opportunity; i often find myself imagining things, ideas or plotting while i am blowing my hair dry (this seems to be a time of increased-imagination-activity for me.) or i will be off and running in my imagination on long drives or walking in the woods. sometimes this imagining thing can make you nervous, making up stuff before it even happens. but the word imagine conjures up many things for me. john lennon’s song ‘imagine’ or mercy me’s song ‘i can only imagine’. both have beautiful lyrics; both imagine places and experiences of great beauty and and grace and goodness.
one day when d was drawing our chicken marsala i asked him to include a unicorn. “for wendy,” i said. we decided on the words “give full rein to your imagination” to go along with this drawing of chicken and his unicorn. but when i was designing the cartoon nugget, i added the word “reign”….it felt right. after all, what could be the worst thing if we all let our imaginations be sovereign? if we imagined a world of peace and harmony and rainbows and bubbles. and yes, maybe even people on unicorns wearing creativity-tiaras. full reign.
what’s that saying?…’one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’? a walk through our house shows we drew this chicken nugget from our own lives. i’ve written before, ok many times before, about the stones in our home, the sticks and feathers, the old doors and windows, re-purposed old aluminum coffee pots as canisters, old stoves still working, my dad’s workbench wooden boxes, pieces of old desks or old wooden crates as end tables. everyone has their own definition of “treasure”; for us it’s just not always the shiny new stuff.
this weekend marks another earth day, a celebration of support for our beloved home planet. more than 193 countries now mark this day as a day of awareness and honoring. as we move about our days, we make seemingly miniscule decisions about how to handle our little piece of the globe. but each one of these has an impact and the ever-widening ripples will either be adding to the protection of mother earth or contributing to the harm that will adversely effect our earth in the long-term. yes, those blue recycling bags cost a bundle, but it helps. yes, those kitchen cabinets might look old for you, but they’d look better in someone else’s home (who maybe doesn’t have cabinets) than in the dump.
maybe a few sticks or rocks placed here or there in our home reminds us of all that. they are treasures for me. they always have been. we can’t fit all our treasures into our literal ‘special box’ of memories so they sit out. i can’t tell you specifically where each of them came from anymore, but i can tell that each one is meaningful and each one comes from our good planet earth.
right now my favorite boots are my timberland brown and black boots. they are hiking boots and they are always sitting at the back door….poised and ready. in between work(s), we will throw them on and drive off somewhere for a hike; our go-to adventures usually include a hike somewhere. at the moment, these boots are full of mud because the woods around these parts are completely muddy and squishy and on the verge of gleefully welcoming spring. but we don’t let that stop us.
beach towels, throw pillows, bath accessories
now it’s not too out-of-the-ordinary for us as we often have gotten caught in weather, but we chose to be in the woods in the rain last week and ohhh what a gift – the smell of rain dampening the earth was exquisite. looking back, it is one of my favorite moments in the woods and i’m glad to have not missed it.
today we are sitting in lake geneva drinking starbucks coffee and writing, a fire going just beyond our feet perched on the hearth. i think of the day we were out here having a glass of wine at an outdoor cafe. it began to drizzle and we got ready to go, but not sooner than the skies let loose. it poured down buckets of rain and we laughed and splashed through the puddles, playing in the water, nonplussed* by the torrents around us.
leggings
spring is around the corner. grab your rubber boots or your hiking boots or just be barefoot and go splash in those puddles. don’t let a chance to play pass you by.
*(so i just looked up ‘nonplussed’ to make sure i was using it correctly and was surprised to see two opposite definitions of it. the one i meant was ‘unperturbed’ but that was the second definition; the first definition was surprised and confused. words are funny, aren’t they?)
every child’s mom’s nightmare is that instant you realize, even momentarily, that your child is lost, that you cannot see him or her. in the midst of department store racks, in a playground, on a sidewalk of a city’s busy street…you turn around for the briefest of moments and you turn back and your child is no longer right there. just the mere thought of it makes my breath uneven and my pulse race.
feeling lost can elicit the same emotions. lost-ness is disorienting and scary; it makes you want to run; it makes you freeze, your breath shallow.
i remember someone once saying to me that when you are lost to go back to where you were when you got lost. not so easy when you are out in the country on some back roads, but i don’t think they were talking about being literally lost. it was more figuratively.
i think that, in general, lost-ness begets action – sometimes any action, just to not feel the displacement. it’s unnerving. so you try to ignore it, you try to do anything to distract yourself.
the only way to go back to where you were when you got lost is to get quiet. to sit still. to go inward and slowly breathe. to realize you are human and fallible and vulnerable and that the earth is continuing to spin and, as my sweet momma used to say, “this too shall pass.” lost is also on the path to something.
when i was little i used to travel with my poppo and my big brother in an old lilco van that they bought, converted to a camper and painted pale pink (the paint must have been on sale.) her (the pink camper) name was lily, although i can’t remember how they spelled it. they would travel all over upstate new york with her. there was this one time i recall vividly. i was probably somewhere around 6 years old. i don’t remember the adventures we had after we drove upstate. what i do remember is that lily was breaking down and i could hear my dad and brother talking about it. we got off the main road and traveled down some country roads. she sputtered and died on the side of the road. not only were we lost (in my opinion) but we were sitting on the side of the road, unable to move. my dad and brother got out of the van and opened the engine hood. then they sat quietly on the white-painted-front bumper for a few minutes. my ingenious poppo got some wire-clippers out of an ever-present toolchest and he and my brother cut a few pieces of a barbed wire fence that ran the perimeter of a farm field alongside the gully next to the shoulder. using those pieces of barbed wire, with some rube goldberg kind of fix, in what seemed like an eternity but was probably only an hour or two, my dad and brother got that pink camper running again. soon we were back on the road, heading home. and – the best part – we actually got there. home.
lost doesn’t have to be a bad thing. it doesn’t have to be a six-year-old’s-version of the-end-of-the-world. it’s an opportunity. to sit quietly. to look closely at a situation. to address it. and to move on. home is waiting. in our hearts, in our minds. it may look different after a time of lost-ness, but it’s there.
“…well, i will walk by faith, well, even when i cannot see, because this broken road prepares your will for me…” (lyrics from a really great 2002 song by jeremy camp called ‘walk by faith’)
trust. practice. faith. repeat. not necessarily in that order. through the ages, a common challenge – faith without seeing. ‘we’ are no different now than ‘they’ were ‘back then.’ faith. it’s ambiguous.
it’s funny. you might think that the most faith-reinforcing moments come during a service and this true for some. as a minister of music for three decades, i have always sought to create those moments for others…when all things come together: music, lyrics, emotion to amplify the words (and the word) spoken in the service and resonate within someone’s heart and reinforce their feelings of faith. it is a job i take seriously; sometimes you only have one chance to help connect a service with a person’s heart, one chance to reassure, one chance to raise awareness, one chance to have them ask questions within their faith, to challenge their assumptions for and otherwise.
for me, though, the most faith-reinforcing moments are outside of the faith-based venue, be it a church, temple, cathedral, mosque. they are the moments that i can feel the hugeness of this universe of God and my absolute tiny-ness within it: walking in the woods, standing in the sunlight, looking out on a mountain, holding hands, seeing the moon rise over the lake, watching the surf, seeing love pass between two people’s eyes, hearing my children’s voices, finding the right chord for a song, eating breakfast on the deck in the sun with cardinals, hearing music swell…
as a minister of music, i have heard a lot of sermons and been at an un-countable number of services. think about it. (and this is not counting all the years not spent in this position, nor does it count all the extra services at certain times of the year…you’re thinking, “ok, ok, ohmygosh, we get it!” ) so thirty years multiplied by 52 weeks multiplied by at least two services a sunday (sometimes three, but we will round it to two, as you roll your eyes.) that equals 3,120 services and sermons. and let me just mention, some have been…ummm…way better than others. so you would likely deduce that i would know all the stories of the old and new testaments pretty well by now. well, i beg to differ with you. for me, those stories are peripheral.
what really counts for me is the stuff you can’t see with your eyes, the things you can only experience: love, kindness, peace, generosity… simplicities. complexities. these are the foundations of my faith. faith in goodness. faith in being held. faith in grace. choosing actions that are life-giving. knowing that if i fail today, i can try again tomorrow. walking the broken road, faithfully believing that there is a higher power that i can’t see but i can experience. one that surrounds me in my joy and in my pain. ptom, in his lenten sermon the other evening, said, “God is for you.” it takes a little (read: a lot of) practice; it’s a new day every new day. but i believe.
every child’s mom’s nightmare is that instant you realize, even momentarily, that your child is lost, that you cannot see him or her. in the midst of department store racks, in a playground, on a sidewalk of a city’s busy street…you turn around for the briefest of moments and you turn back and your child is no longer right there. just the mere thought of it makes my breath uneven and my pulse race.
reverse threading 