i read this text after rehearsals tonight. today was one of those days…not enough time and so many layers. we all have them. all the colors in the crayola box. at once.
“…the present now will later be past…”
my sweet momma would say, “this too shall pass.” knowing that applies to the most astonishing moments as well as the most staggering, i’m thinking i will try to cling to the present a bit harder. even if it is a-changin. especially if it is a-changin.
i stopped and went back. i had to take this picture. reminders are everywhere and right now, although, truly, as always, i knew i wanted to capture as many as possible.
it feels as if we are surrounded by whirling hypocrisy. those people who proclaim one thing and treat people in an extraordinarily different way. i’ve been stunned into i-don’t-even-know-what-to-say-silence more than once lately. people who demand respect but don’t give it, people who are unnecessarily controlling, people who go behind your back, people who list toward cruelty, people who declare appreciation but tear down, people who hide behind glossy words. what is going on? narcissism seems to be alive and well as we suffer the effects of those-who-believe-they-are-on-pedestals, pedestals that seem to exist on every step of the ladder. it’s shocking and more than a little disconcerting. we each have first-hand in-our-own-life experience. what a disappointment. we are humans capable of so much more.
and so, the reminders are incredibly welcome. the heart leaves or rocks, the sun’s rays glowing through clouds in the sky, the presence of a cardinal or two blue jays crossing our path in the woods. a text message or call out of the blue, beautiful generous raw-matte-finish words spoken to you. all reminders. a kindness extended by a stranger, an eye-contact smile. the big initiatives, the little gestures. not picking up the tug-of-war rope. reaching out to offer the olive branch. life-giving. practicing. we are truly capable of so much. we need be reminded.
“live generously and the world will treat you royally.” (crown royal commercial)
“practice makes perfect,” it says on an index card in the piano bench of my old piano downstairs in the basement. written in the careful-penmanship-printing of me-probably-as-an-8-year-old, i have kept this card in my bench for over 50 years. i’m sure there were multiple times i rolled my eyes at this, as i opened the bench to take out and work on lesson music. i still roll my eyes. everything takes practice.
everything. including living generously. there’s always that moment when you have to decide to either take up the rope, as they say, and tug back or let the rope lay still. so much easier to pick it up and tug, letting it lay there and not touching it requires sheer grit-your-teeth-restraint sometimes. it’s too easy to tug, to even wrench, and too royally hard to let a sleeping rope lie.
but in those moments, the really tough ones and the little ones, that you actually and intentionally choose to mother-teresa your way through, your generosity spins outward in concentric circles and goodness spreads. goodness has a way of coming back, returning to center, with centrifugal force and your heart in the middle. gravity draws back goodness and keeps close the spirit of all with whom you have been generous. kindness bestowed upon you is royal treatment; it is the world treating you royally. we are all so fortunate. we are already receiving lavish unconditional love. what would happen if we practiced living generously even more?
“all of us have special ones who have loved us into being. would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….ten seconds of silence.” (mr. fred rogers)
he brought it up on the trail. the movie we had recently seen. not an action thriller or a mystery. just a movie about a man who changed the world. mr. fred rogers.
quietly hiking on the trail, he broke the walking-arm-in-arm silence, “i’ve been thinking about all those people. those people who loved me into existence.”
what could you possibly be more grateful for? that trail of thought found us yesterday morning and wove its way into all day, skirting along the edges as we cooked, back into the center on facetime, at the table with wine glasses, in a late night text out of the blue.
the people who love you into being.
mr. rogers got more specific, ” from the time you were very little, you’ve had people who have smiled you into smiling, people who have talked you into talking, sung you into singing, loved you into loving.” what kind of legacy do you have to be known for this kind of wisdom? it changes everything.
the people who love you into being.
we spoke of these people on and off all day and late into the night. there was a moment i could feel shadows that were cast by any of those we talked about falling off, light covering the shadow. reasons. seasons.
the people who love you into being.
too many to list. too many to remember. we backtracked and stood still in our memories, telling stories and finding wonder as names – and the dear picture of that person in our mind’s eye – spilled out of us. a wealth of being-makers. every one of them a builder in the construction of some piece of us, like a giant box of tinkertoys or lincoln logs or even crayons. so much potential. a wildly wide spectrum of color and characteristic, texture and depth. profoundly moving. a tiny bit of shake-up. both.
“one million plastic beverage bottles are bought every minute around the world. yet recycling rates remain low.”
(article: our addiction to plastic, national geographic magazine, 12.2019)
close to midnight and the texts started arriving fast and furiously. a warning from My Girl that she was “fighting with people on instagram”. her passionate responses to objectors on #pattiegonia’s instagram were well-spoken, well-placed, adamant about the wellness of this good earth, vehemently supportive. i paid attention.
pattie gonia is an environmental advocate drag queen. a voice. a loud, sincere, fervent, educated, inspired, contemporary, courageous voice. pattie/wyn is out there making a difference. it is easy to be proud of them, to stand with them. with the partnership of rei, they have created video to draw attention to the things we, as earth-dwellers, have failed to prioritize. if you watch their dramatic and profound videos, you will weep. guaranteed.
we must pay attention. what plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic netting, garbage, waste….are doing to our mother earth is deplorable. we would not live in such a house. why then do we live on such an earth?
i was driven to nausea the other day when we were helping someone clear out a house. it was our job to load things up in big red and go to the mini-dump not far from us. we pulled up and backed up to one of many large dumpsters, all connected to a compactor, to throw in what we had in the back of the truck. it took my breath away watching all the people throwing in all the stuff….just in this tiny corner of the world. the great pacific garbage patch looms in my mind’s eye. THIS is the reason we still have our 40-plus-year-old stove. because i can’t imagine where it will go if we just throw it out to get a shiny new model before it’s necessary, just to make our kitchen look chic (which, incidentally, is impossible anyway.)
we have been conscious, using refillable water bottles, repurposing, recycling everything we could recycle, a practice of being consumers-of-less, less buying, less keeping-up-with-the-joneses, more picking up trash and, scarily, pulling up next to people who throw things out their car windows to tell them they ‘dropped something back there’. but we have been learning. and we can do more. we all can do more. we have to. pay attention.
“…right now, there are more plastic pieces in the ocean than stars in the milky way…” (everything to lose by pattie gonia)
it’s bracing. and it’s tragic. and it needs our true attention. as pattie gonia says, clothed in a dress made of plastic bags, fully standing in garbage, a ticking clock her companion, “we have everything to lose.”
a short documentary to learn more about pattie gonia:
but the real question is – do WE improve with age?
yes, lush red wine, dark chocolate, bold roast black coffee – all have risen on my list of chosens. i remember the days of sugar and cream in coffee. i remember the creamy milk chocolate days. and i remember the 1980s and 1990s days of ‘white zin’, the go-to wine of that age and time, a staple of the culture. but those days are past and we have moved on to rich red blends or old vine zins, 85% dark chocolate with no milkfats, and the boldest of the bold coffees with no sweetener or added dairy/non-dairy product. all improved (in my opinion) with my age.
me…on the other hand…i’m not so sure.
i read a brief article which proposed that your thoughts are less important than your feelings. it reminded the reader that, in light of everyone’s hard-to-speak-of mortality, there is no time more important, nothing more important than feeling the present moment.
how often do we get caught up in the swirling mind games of reviewing all the past? thoughts. how often do we find ourselves double-clutching on the future because of something that has happened ‘before’? thoughts. how often do we hesitate as we ponder-ponder-ponder until it’s too late? thoughts. how often are those thoughts – skewed – which have accumulated all through these supposed improving-with-age years – ruling our moments, nonetheless ruining our moments, the ones right-now? stick to the topic/don’t go backwards in time and drudge up old stuff/stay in the “i-feel” not the “you-did”…any counseling master’s program notes referencing ‘conversation’ (read: heated conversation) with a significant other. feelings. do we actually improve with age? do we learn?
i’m guessing the wine cork has it right. the moments you are sipping wine are quieter moments sitting by the fire. or moments of laughter with friends. or moments with a good meal. the older we get, it seems the more value we place on those things. we drink-in the heart of these most important times, with or without wine. feeling.
we gain perspective. maybe like that glass of wine in the evening. a little every day.
it seems to apply everywhere, to everything. i can’t even remember what margie, in her 80-plus-year-wisdom, was talking about when she said, “it’s all a bunch of phooey.”
phoo-ey: (informal) exclamation: used to express disdain or disbelief; noun: nonsense
yes. it seems to be relevant. no matter where i look. each arena with its own bunch of phooey.
to what do we each ascribe? truth? phooey? do we straddle the line? how do we couch our opinions? why are we encountering so much phooey? how do we justify phooey? what parts of life are exempt from the phooeyness? fred rogers said, “try your best to make goodness attractive.” goodness > phooeyness
my sweet poppo never cursed. well, hardly ever. but in those moments that he felt absolute and extreme exasperation, he would exclaim in a burst, “this is bullsh*t!” he would be camping with me these days, simply because 1. he’s my poppo and 2. he would be exasperated. he would agree with margie.
even with more words, and i have plenty of words stored up but am reminding myself that less-is-more-less-is-more-less-is-more, i don’t think i can add much to margie’s wise ones: it IS all a bunch of phooey.
it’s a mystery. grace. it falls on us like morning dew, each and every day. we rise, buoyant or troubled, joyous or grieving, in clarity or murky, in the light or in the dark.
and it is a new day. beauty surrounds us. even breathing. there’s nothing we must do to receive it. we are granted grace…unconditionally. its simple and steadfast generosity – its rain – our gift.
we step into next, knowing we have yet another chance.
“…there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. help, thanks, wow.” (anne lamott)
the quiet simplicity of this painting SOFTLY SHE PRAYS draws me in. it makes me yearn to close my eyes and be softly in this moment, there, here. its invitation is clear. its message is universal. the location is unimportant. on top of a mountain, next to a stream, in the woods, next to your bed, on the kitchen floor, under a starry sky, in the pouring rain. all worthy.
“…you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve…” (anne lamott)
the words, the thoughts, the imploring, the confusion, the shouting, the gratitudes. all worthy.
i would talk to my piano students about practicing. i drew a comparison of the time they spent, the way they allocated their time to cupcakes and frosting. i would start by saying let’s talk about practicing, whereupon most of my sweet students would roll their eyes, a common reaction to the word ‘practice’. i would suddenly switch topics to cupcakes and they would happily skip down that path, thinking they were avoiding the ‘practice’ chat. we would talk about our favorite cupcakes and the very best frosting that could possibly earn the top spot on those treats. and once we discerned that very-important-information, i would pose a question:
let’s say you have a small cup of frosting. delicious, fluffy, sweet-as-can-be frosting. it’s just a small cup – like the tiny sippy cups you drank from as a baby. and you have a choice. you can either frost one cupcake with that sippy-cup-full or you can frost all 24 of the cupcakes that are waiting on the counter from the oven. which will you do?
my students, all brilliant cupcake-lovers and bright lights in the world, would sit and ponder for a second and then reply that they would frost the one cupcake. otherwise, they would explain, the frosting would be so thin that you would barely know it is there, you would barely taste it, and it would be like there was no frosting at all. and besides, if they got to eat the one cupcake, they wanted the one rich with frosting. who can argue with that?
contrary to their belief that the ‘practice’ talk was over, i would clutch and shift gears back to the piano. “if you have a little bit of time to practice and pieces of music that might be difficult to play, would it be better to hurry through every piece spending a few moments on each OR would it be better to spend that little bit of time on one or two?” i would ask (in student-age-appropriate language). invariably they would frost one cupcake.
i believe the same applies to connection. with the advent of the vast array of social media choices, we have applied an ultra-thin layer of frosting to our connections. we have thinned out the time we truly spend on relationship – pure individual relationships. we have, oddly, chosen to spend easily-addicted quantities of time and emotional energy on social media “relationships” with people we do not know rather than being in real touch with the people closest to us. we expect those people to learn of things on outlets and from posts instead of simply telling them, picking up a phone and calling or texting them.
we are not connected to a network. we are connected to a network. both of these are true.
the question for me, one that i must look at as well, is – how much time are we spending on that network, on individual people we love and care about? is there any frosting at all?
reverse threading 