we pass under them every time we leave the house and every time we return. our prayer flags fly between the house and the garage…a welcome sight either way. although better given to you as a gift, we purchased our flags in a little shop in ridgway, colorado and i consider it a gift that we were able to spend time in that tiny mountain town in the san juan mountains. these flags represent that place to us, that time, and so much more.
each color is symbolic of an element…white is air and wind, blue is sky and space, green symbolizes water, red is fire and yellow is earth. flying these in a specific order produces a balance of health and harmony. flying these promotes peace, compassion, strength and wisdom; the wind blows the prayers into the universe. i cannot think of more visual evidence of constant prayer. it matters not to me what religious practice is associated with them. the prayers are so much bigger than that. everything is bigger than that.
every time we watch any depiction of an everest story, there are multitudes of these buddhist prayer flags. they grace base camp and the summit and each camp between, the prayers issued by those people seeking to reach the highest place on earth.
we can’t claim trying to reach the highest physical place on earth. but we can claim seeking peace, compassion, strength and wisdom, a balance of health and harmony. for me, for us, those things are the highest place on earth.
20 rolled his eyes at himself when he told us the story. he was at the grocery store and was looking at dish soap. he likes dawn dish soap; it gets the best ratings, he said. as he is peering at the shelf of containers, he can see that way in the back is a container with just a bit more…the volume of the ones in the front seem lower than this particular one in the back. so he reaches all the way in, moving aside other dawn bottles now rejected by him and pulls out the one where he can see the soap level just-a-little-bit-higher. he notes that the plastic bottle is not squished or dented (for obviously that would cause a rise in level) and he triumphantly puts the chosen bottle in his cart. voila! “there must be something wrong with me,” he said.
as a person who grew up with soap socks and leftovers i couldn’t disagree more. of COURSE you look for the highest level of soap in the bottle. that’s a no-duh. penny-pinching and making things last as long as possible were unspoken mantras for me; they still are.
my sweet momma kept a soap sock. for those of you who have no clue what that is: as a bar of soap gets smaller and smaller it becomes increasingly difficult to use. never to waste anything, my momma would gather all of her tiny vestiges of soap bars and put them in a clean white sock (generally a sport sock…something a little thicker with a tooth like a washcloth.) she would tie off the end and voila! there you have it – a washcloth with built-in soap! a soap sock!
i have inherited this trait from my momma. i will turn bottles upside down and squeeze the life out of them in order to finish all the product. days after d has declared a shampoo bottle empty i am still encouraging shampoo out of its depths. our refrigerator rarely has much extra in it – we buy for what we need and we use it up, even if it ends up as some weird concocted leftover. growing up i didn’t need the “starving children in ….” speech. i had dna.
so when 20 told us that he takes three pre-packaged 3 lb bags of potatoes over to the scale and weighs them i listened. apparently, 3 lbs of potatoes can look like 2 3/4 or 3 1/2 or 4 1/4 lbs. who knew? you can bet i’ll be trying that. more potatoes for the money! voila!
“there must be something wrong with me,” 20 said. nah.
it comes in waves. in less than two weeks i will be 60. i’m not a consumed-with-my-age-person, but this particular birthday is proving me different. without any prompts, i find myself sorting through my life, the six decades that lead me to right now. memories flow in and ebb out like the tide on a surfboard of emotions. trying not to resist, i ride the wave as it brings me growing up times on long island…my nuclear family all together, all alive, gathered in our dining room on abby drive or up in the catskills in a rustic state park cabin….bike hikes and carvel….simple times of arguing for john denver over bob dylan….time walking or sitting or playing frisbee on crab meadow beach…late sunday morning mc-arnson sandwiches or waffles and ice cream around my sweet momma and poppo’s table in florida…the time of building the first home i ever bought, a big choice for us as a young couple…the sheep farm in new hampshire….moving to wisconsin away from family and the challenges that raised…celebrating the amazing birth of our daughter and son and watching them grow into the people they are….recording my first album and what that meant….letting go of the day-to-day mothering as my children became adults and still being an every-single-day mother….balancing the impact of good decisions and bad decisions….times of intense grief….choosing love….starting over….wondering what is coming next….
the inner monologue chronicles through all of these years…i sit in quiet watching the slideshow in my mind’s eye and ponder. what was most important, what is most important, what will be most important. what it all means. and it’s clear most of the time. the people who have surrounded me, who have loved me, who i have loved. the people i am missing – and will always miss – as well as the people who are right here. the times i am missing – as well as the times -moments- i could miss right now were i to be too engrossed in something else.
on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART, the track that i selected to follow MISSING is called CONNECTED. because it all stays a part of the vast ocean that is each of our lives. the missing and the now and the wondering, all part of the whole. all waves to ride.
pax: the kiss of peace (latin); peace (ecclesiastical latin)
“pax,” he wrote to me. years ago, in a chaotic, somewhat scary time of my life, the word “pax” was an end-goal, security in an insecure world, the warmest blanket on a bitter cold day. it doesn’t just happen. there are people around us, some epicentered and some peripherally, who create a place where we can find this peace, even momentarily. their stalwart stance, their steadiness brings us back off the brink of angst. the smallest iota of peace, like a mustard seed, grows until we can balance back on our own feet, strong enough to walk on…with leaps or even baby steps.
this painting makes me think of one of those people in my own life. a dear deeply-valued friend, his help and his accessibility helped me deal with someone else’s craziness unfortunately directed at me. he was the lighthouse in that storm for me. he helped me feel safer so that i could find peace in the chaos.
for various reasons, we don’t always realize when we are someone else’s rock. we don’t feel central, we don’t feel involved, we don’t feel informed. but there are times we don’t know – times we plant ourselves into someone’s life and nurture them, even in the tiniest of ways – times we may never know how much what we said or what we did counted. times of giving peace to someone else, one of life’s most essential elements.
“the finnish wood carvings, ” my sweet momma would answer when asked what she wanted in her little assisted living apartment, a place she would occupy without my dad, some time after he died. those finely carved statues accompanied her from new york to florida, house to house, and, finally to her small apartment. she cherished them and spent long hours deciding to whom she would give each one. the list in many notebooks and on many scraps of paper showed that she pondered each recipient’s personality and interests before deciding on a gift choice; these wood carvings were important and each was later given with decades of love. placed on an equally significant-to-her live-edge wooden shelf in her tiny living room, they seemed to represent comfort to her, something that spanned the years, something that, in their familiarity, gave her a sense of security. a piece of what-had-been-home in this new home.
when you walked down the hall in eileen and duke’s home, just in front of you before you turned in to their master bedroom was this painting. duke was an amazing artist, a painter and sculptor with an enormous collection of work. when we were helping 20 move his momma eileen into her assisted living apartment a few weeks ago, this painting beckoned me as something that might be a familiar sight in her new unfamiliar home. as we placed other artwork on the wall, i kept thinking about this painting that we had left in their home and i nagged 20 about it. i felt it could be placed so that the moment that eileen stepped into her new bedroom it would be ahead of her, before she turned to head to her bed. jogging her memory of the home she and duke had made together, a touch of comfort for her. 20 picked it up later that night and the day his momma moved in we hung the painting. this sunny, but somewhat austere space, suddenly was lifted to a different level. the photographs of duke and eileen in the kitchen, the familiar prints in the living room, this painting in the bedroom. all touchstones from home in this new home.
there are certain things i like to have around me. things that even in times of uncertainty give me a sense of footing. were i to pare down there are items that would definitely make the cut, unlikely choices maybe, but things that bring me solace, things that alleviate angst, things that gladden my heart. what are yours?
corrugated metal. i have a thing about it. i have a thing about texture. and a thing about capturing texture on film. i love design and white space and fonts, simplicity and the challenge of balance. this image started with the side of a building against clean snow. i felt (and still feel) connected to this building and what it represented, so its texture is beautiful to me; the image both inspires and saddens me. an experiment in contrast and point of view, it may be hard for a viewer to discern what the original pure image might have been. manipulating it, changing what the viewer would see is simply an orchestration of color and space, light and dark, angle and edge, point and counterpoint (melody) lines. skewing it changes the emotional response; although it remains fundamentally the same, it becomes something slightly different and is seen through a different lens. it’s all a matter of perspective.
how we look at anything. how we see anything. how the pieces come together, how we view them, how we sort, how we sometimes have to let go. it’s all a matter of perspective.
i remember thinking that this would be easy to write about when i jotted it down. in your right mind. ptom and i had discussion about being in your right mind; michael gerson had written part of a column about being in right mind….surely i would have something of depth to say.
now that this is sitting right in front of me, i find that it’s not so easy to articulate. or maybe it’s territory that feels too revealing, too human.
the moments when calm finally comes after the storm of anger and you are -again- in your right mind. the moments of blind dire panic of imagined-worst-case-scenario when your right mind eludes you and something else takes over until the adrenalin rush eases up and you can see again. the moments when absolute white-knuckled-fear precedes the back-to-your-right-mindedness. the moments of really bad choices and the post-choice-angst you feel, the remorse for a period of time you weren’t in your right mind.
and then there are the times when you know…you can feel everything align and you, in your right mind, are able to make a decision, to be rational, to be measured in good intention. your right mind is calm, cool, collected, more at peace with the reality around you. your right mind is accepting, forgiving, altruistic in empathy and goodness, benevolent and generous. your right mind is reasonable.
i have known, at least after-the-fact, the times i wasn’t in my right mind. they are times for which i, impossibly, wish a do-over, a chance to make all well. times that range the spectrum from angry words spoken to life decisions made without, well, my right mind.
i suppose ptom is right. you recognize the moments you leave your right mind. you ask for forgiveness. from others, from yourself. and you move on, a little wiser and maybe more capable of steeling yourself against being somehow out of your right mind. and michael gerson is also right. he said, “…in our right minds, we know that life is not a farce but a pilgimage…” “..in our right minds, we know that hope can grow within us…” “…in our right minds, we know that love is at the heart of all things….”
we are in our right mind; we are not in our right mind. we live life on the roller coaster of right-mindedness, for we are human and we sometimes are, in the complexities of the moments we live, incapable of mindedness. so we make mistakes. we learn. we grow. and we try again.
for “…we learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” (maya angelou)
“sometimes it takes longer to understand and appreciate what is around you.” (liner notes)
it’s the ah-ha! you feel when you realize that it’s ALL about perspective and even this moment will soon disappear into vapid space. yet this very moment is the one that counts. we simply can’t waste it. there’s no time to not appreciate it, no time to throw it away while yearning for the next.
i have come to realize this over and over and over, through loss, through mistakes, through absolute joy, through reminders spoken, seen, felt on an excruciating gut level. we are all repeated students of this lesson, for we are all human. we are all human, for we are all students of this lesson.
on an everest documentary we watched the other day there was this quote: “it’s not that life is so short. it’s that death is so long.” if that doesn’t make you spring into action – noticing life – i’m not sure what will.
there truly is nothing as powerful a game-changer as touch. the touch of your lips to the tiny fingers of an infant, the touch of your ailing parent’s hand in yours, the touch of an embrace by a beloved. when you are yearning to be held, to hold – waiting – and the moment comes, the briefest of hugs, the slightest brush of fingers against your cheek, the feather kiss on the top of your head, the swept-up entwine…all capture the attention of every nerve ending and of your heart, and you sigh, at last. surely all will be well. you are not alone in this vast universe.
the high ceiling at husby’s invited some creative decorating. twenty years ago, at some point in time after their renovation, the staff and clientele starting throwing money at the ceiling tiles. there are specific instructions for this, which include tacks and quarters and precise folding, but the end result is a ceiling full of paper currency – a virtual piggy bank of resources that are donated to local causes in sister bay, wisconsin. seeing the bills on the ceiling and the posted list of good causes just makes you want to throw money. encouraging others to throw money, continuing the twenty-year-old tradition is generosity. it turns their vision out.
as the season of lent starts, many people will, for reasons they may not even be able to articulate, “give up” something, a sort of faux-fasting. back in the day when i was a young teenager, and maybe even now, it was something of a contest…who could give up the most interesting thing, the hardest thing, the easiest thing, who could boast louder. that all seems antithetical to the point. way back, giving up lima beans would not count; giving up candy counted. i haven’t often participated in this. i’ve just tried, successfully and unsuccessfully, to moderate at all times.
yesterday or maybe the day before i saw a post about giving for this period of time. in an effort to raise consciousness about austerity, the suggestion was made to each day give a THING away, something you do not use but someone else would value having, or something you know, even though you sometimes use it, would be vital for someone else. that way, at the end of this period of 40 days there would be 40 THINGS that you have put aside to give away, a contribution to others who need the things you are easily (or actually not so easily) able to donate. giving clothing or shoes or backpacks or kitchen gear or blankets, things that pare down your own concentric circles of stuff and grace another’s life with something he or she needs. turning your vision out.
today i will take out two laundry baskets for us – as a start for this new practice. this makes more sense to me than giving up candy. as a personal practice in everyday life and honoring this life i was given, i should always be giving up anything in excess that isn’t good for me, lifestyle choices as opposed to a diet choice or a lent choice. as a new ritual practice for these six weeks however, gathering things for others will illustrate how someone else might be benefited by my lent. it’s not just about me. it is turning my vision out.
reverse threading 