it is easy to have a list of things we wish for. a list of things we lack. a list of ways we aren’t enough. it is easy to perseverate over these things. things that make us different from someone else, things that make us less successful, less wealthy, less chic. it is easy to measure yourself against others. it is easy to fall short.
in those moments, it is easy for someone outside of you to remind you of what you do have, the ways ‘it could be worse’, the ways you are rich beyond compare. it is easy to push back against those words, against those admonishment-reminders. it is easy to stay in the lists. alone. to wallow.
but in the new tide that follows the overwhelmed sobs, the tears that cleanse but don’t solve, the grief of wishing-it-were-different, there are deep breaths of renewal. there are realizations. there are glimpses of beauty, the seeing of kindnesses, winks of hope.
there were rocks planted along one of the trails we hike on, positive messages painted on them. each one made us smile, made us wonder, made us look for the next. life-giving.
gratitude is like that. in a time swirling with negativity, personal challenges, darkness overtaking the sun, we offer these gratitude cards. print and cut them out (PDF link below), write your thoughts, hide them somewhere as a surprise, tuck them into a nook or cranny, or give them to people who are unsuspecting, people who maybe need the spark of your expression of gratitude.
the more grateful you are, the more grateful you are. it’s an amazing, wondrous cycle.
jen pulled the sliding glass door open for the fourth time (within a short visit of potlucking time around the kitchen island) and we all laughed. sweet henry and chester wanted out. wanted in. wanted out. wanted in. this is a familiar tune. dogdog finds it irresistible to demand to go out and then not want to miss anything and want back in. on repeat.
andrea and scott have two golden retrievers. impeccably trained, they wait for a sign or a word to do most anything. they are not the in-and-out-ers that dogga and henry and chester are. i remember them as calm and happy and i vowed that one day i would have a dog as well-behaved. this is not that day.
but dogdog is, yes, dogdog-ish. his sweet face watches our every move, trying to anticipate to which room we might be moving, trying to assess why we are feeling what he knows we are feeling. he doesn’t like conflict; he doesn’t like the sound of metal touching metal. it took him a while to warm up to the ukulele (which he now loves and wishes he could play) and the piano draws him into the studio. he won’t touch food on the counter or the table or really anywhere unless given permission, but his direct eye contact begs for a bite every breakfast. he destroyed very few things as a puppy (well, the kitchen cabinet door and the table legs count) but de-heads every toy he is given and un-stuffings them. he bows to all things babycat, yet loves to drag him around and taunts him until babycat asserts his ruling paw. his aussie-ness makes him intuitively try to keep track of all people and animals in the house, a tiresome and difficult chore when one is peculiarly averse to going upstairs or downstairs. he is quirky.
on island he was quiet. here at home he is a barker. i guess he knew the littlehouse wasn’t his. he loves errands both places. he ecstatically runs miles in circles in the backyard and certain names will make his eyes wide and his australian-shepherd-jumping-bean-dog-heart jump with glee. he clocks out of all responsibility late at night, content to quietly languish in whatever room we are in, happy to have pets and go sleepynightnight. sweet, sweet dogdog emerges from constant-motion dog.
i don’t remember the story we were talking about around jen and brad’s island. i’m sure it was one of tripper’s many idiosyncratic tales. we rolled our eyes and laughed. and brad said, “you should be proud that you raised an independent dog!”
on an unusual foray into facebook-scrolling, i came across a post by a friend that quoted tom petty. “the waiting is the hardest part,” it read. yes. the hardest part.
i remember d telling me that arnie’s mom had an addition to the adage that when one door closes, another one will surely open. she said, “it’s the waiting in the hall that’s hell.”
i feel like i am waiting. just like this sunrise, there is a division of light and dark – a line you can see. the hall. it’s not still dark. it’s not quite light. it’s the in-between zone of co-existence.
i suppose we can co-exist with waiting. we can co-exist with not-knowing. not-knowing about tomorrow. not-knowing where it goes. not-knowing what will happen. not-knowing if dark will linger or if light will overtake the dark. not-knowing how the story turns out.
questions on the keys. answers somewhere in-between the notes. quarter tones of ambiguity. i stand an arm’s length from creating. i wait. there is no sign, there is no clear indicator of any return-on-my-creative-investment. the hall doesn’t provide a reason to write. it is not a door. it is full of question. it is a gathering storm of hope. it is a waiting place.
the hall is just for me. jumbled and clear, both. a stew of hearing all the old notes floating – thousands of them – and seeking the new ones. lyric snatches appear on scraps of paper, waiting. melodic gestures fall from my hands as yearning to keep-on-keeping-on falls from my eyes.
i’m trying to be patient in it. to reconcile all the other mysteries and issues and complexities before i step closer. to do the ‘other work’ first. to be solvent and steady. for the time on the bench to be worthy.
why does a composer compose? why does a composer wait?
when i asked d for a summary of this children’s book he wrote and illustrated called PLAY TO PLAY he told me that the gorilla teaches the little girl the value of playing simply to play, not to win.
my son played tennis. after growing up playing competitive baseball and soccer he decided, as people who are gifted athletically can, to “take up” competitive tennis. he didn’t just go hit the ball around. he dove in. he was persistent and worked hard. i drove him to lessons, individual and group, to high school team practices, to tournaments. when he was in college i drove to his matches, regardless of where they were.
not familiar with the psychology of tennis, i, too, dove in, in my own way. i read articles and books, asked questions of his various coaches. an individual sport, tennis is a mind game and i needed to understand a little bit of what was going on inside my zealous son out on that lonely court. indeed, sometimes it was hard to watch, hardly breathing in the stands. when wendy wrote to me the other day that she just wanted her son’s hardworking football team to win and that she was unduly stressed, i could totally relate. it’s your heart out on that court, out on that field, out on that diamond. so much pressure.
a couple years ago we had the opportunity to once again see the boy play softball. on a league in boston, that team, and another he played on, traveled all over the place to play, including paris. they were all adults, all working hard and playing hard. the thing i loved most about watching him now was watching him laugh. laugh. teasing and laughter were a part of this ball-playing. they were playing to play. winning was a bonus – and they actually did that often – but playing seemed to be the point. it did my heart good.
we often forget the point of play. we often forget TO play. in days of great stress, days of worry and sorrow, play seems so far away. it seems unlikely and unworthy of our time. but i suppose it would do us all well to remember how invaluable to our well-being playing is. how giggling or fun and games, teasing and laughter make us feel. and how they do our heart good.
the illustrations in this little book are dear and the lesson important: just play to play.
hunter doesn’t look surprised when we walk into greens and grains in egg harbor. it’s really his fault. he showed us flax chocolate brownie muffins. we bought them. we ate them. we are now addicted to them. yes, we blame hunter. in all good ways.
truth is, though, we love the feel of the store as well. a natural food store and healthy alternative grocery and cafe, the signs you can see on the windows tell a story about its purity.
hate has no home hereand NO H8 both align with our thinking, just as the flax brownie bites align with us. we will always choose a shop, a business, an organization, a community that is embracing over one that is not. i wrack my brain and my heart for reasons shops, businesses, organizations, communities, and, yes, governments, are not embracing, not inclusive, not compassionate earth-dwellers.
abiding in hate-filled rhetoric, prejudicial about anything and everything, hypocritical in obvious holding-both-ends-of-the-spectrum philosophies, demonstrably unkind, gleefully vengeful, inequitably elitist. i just ask why?
ick. i would much rather be thought of as “swell” than “moth-eaten” or “chic” rather than “dowdy”. good grief. this is full of possibilities for an emotional breakdown, an inferiority complex in the mixing bowl.
in the show schitt’s creek, moira (the ever-present, loving and compassionate mom -NOT-) is speaking to the dad (equally as despicable in his own right.) she states that to their children they are “the polar antonym of hip”.
hmm. is this not a defining characteristic of parenthood? we simply cannot be hip like them. we are not them. our children have different hip-ness than we do; our children are swell – and will be swell – in different ways than we have ever been.
i hardly think that the well-practiced eyerolls that my daughter has given me (in my view or from a thousand miles away) are because she thinks i am “modish”. nor do i think the radio silence in-between my equally sweet love-professing text messages to my son are because he is thinking, “wow! my mom is supercool!” it is part of their job to think we are un-hip. it is part of their journey in life to think we are “antediluvian”.
it IS the circle of life. forget rafiki and mufasa and the lions and all. the circle of life is the circle of hipness. you are hip until you are no longer hip. the line is foggy and you will not be notified until it is too late. there is no expiration date or deadline for payment. it just happens. the crease between your eyebrows is deep and the waistline on your jeans slowly creeps up from your hips. un-hip.
but such is life, as my sweet momma would say. maybe it’s time to embrace being ‘the polar antonym of hip’.
i will not be whipping out the credit card to try and stay ahead of it. ‘hip’ is untenable. the silky threads trailing behind it escape grasp. my boots and flipflops and black shirts will have to be my new ‘hip’. my philosophy of less-is-more will have to be my new ‘hip’. driving big red and littlebabyscionwithhundredsofthousandsofmiles will have to be my new ‘hip’. listening to john denver and james taylor and carole king will have to be my new ‘hip’. trying to keep being an honest artist in this world of machinated stuff will have to be my new ‘hip’. and my jeans, sitting sort of on my hips, will have to be my new ‘hip’.
and i will hope-against-hope that maybe, just maybe, my children will think, “wow! mom’s pretty hip.” (only even the word ‘hip’ isn’t ‘hip’.)
my sweet poppo ended up in solitary confinement. shot down over the ploesti oil fields in romania, he was a WWII prisoner of war and was being held in a prison camp in bulgaria. he was courageously condemning the rat-eaten stale bread the prisoners were served, throwing it down, and he was hauled off to solitary confinement. after months of imprisonment my dad, along with others, was able to escape this POW camp and find his way to freedom. freedom.
each of us has our own freedom route, courage to summon up. i look at both of my children as they make their way in this world. they are courageously carving out their lives. they are scrappy and they make sacrifices to seek happiness and freedom from fear of any kind. my sweet poppo is cheering them on, both of them.
this calendar page hangs in the choir room. the words seemed particularly timely to us, for many reasons, on many levels. we looked up the person to which they were credited: thucydides. a studier of human nature, he: “also has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by, and constructed upon, the emotions of fear and self-interest.”
we owe the freedom of our country to the veterans, like my sweet dad, who we honor today and to wise, thoughtful, inspired leaders of this country. we have much to be grateful for.
and yet. these savvy words of this ancient greek historian…”the emotions of fear and self-interest”. this is relevant.
my poppo sat in a prison camp cell representing a country fighting against leaders filled with self-interest and the indiscriminate propagation of fear and atrocities upon innocent people. his courage was buoyed by the courage of his fellow soldiers. my father was staunchly determined to put others’ needs first.
i fear what is happening in our country today would sadden him; his response would be that our leaders are not acting out of courage, not out of a rallying call for equitable independence of all, but instead, out of bullying and grandiose self-serving.
and i believe my sweet poppo would throw down the rat-eaten stale philosophy of this current government. with his great courage. in true freedom.
at this very moment, at this very time, with stacks and stacks of paintings and music, we both succumb to the realization that we are – indeed – under construction. the rests between the notes are there for a reason. space to breathe, to comprehend, to make the color and the music a part of your fiber.
the rests change you. they change how you see, how you hear. they give you pause. to re-appreciate what you have done and to wonder what will come. to be aware of the light.
it is the skill of an artist to learn how to sit in the rests without fidgeting. to just sit. it is an even higher level skill to create the rest. and then sit in it.
we haven’t just dreamed at the rest area. we have out and out drooled at the rest area. faces planted against the window, pillow smushed between forehead and glass, i’m sure we’ve been a spectacle.
one time we pulled into a rest area in iowa when it was still dark. we chose a spot close to the building. we just needed a few minutes to close our eyes. when we woke up, the sun was up, the rest area was full of people coming and going and our bodies were stiff from a shocking three hours of rest-area-sleeping. barely able to move, i slowly unfurled from my up-close-and-personal relationship with the steering wheel and d attempted to bring his foot down from the dashboard. with plenty of square-car-glass making us visible – like a snowglobe scene without the snow – we were right in the line of vision of absolutely anyone who had stopped to use the facilities. our wrinkled faces and the fog on the windows next to our baked-sweet-potato-smushy-visages belied any other story except resting-at-the-rest-area. i’m sure we were charming to look at.
it is not without stopping at a few rest areas that little baby scion has 237,000 miles on it. our road warrior days are accompanied by snacks and punctuated by rest areas. it’s a roadtrip symphony of necessities.
when we were driving long distance just a few days ago we googled the approximate distance across the united states, which, surprisingly, is around 3000 miles. (kansas and pennsylvania and north dakota make it seem so much further, and, going the other way, so do georgia and indiana.) but i digress. so that means that the current mileage equates to having driven this little vehicle 79 times across the country.
we have visited rest areas in most states in this nation and we can tell you where the nice ones are, like the ones in ohio on i80. we can also tell you where the scary ones are: montana, a certain rest area down south where you drive about a mile off the road and a couple security guards watch you walk in and out of the building. you can get a free cup of coffee at the rest area on the eastern side of colorado and orange or grapefruit juice entering florida. you can get maps and brochures at most rest areas and the ones in indiana specialize in those magazines where you can find coupons for hotels you would rather not stay in. pennsylvania has full-service areas, as does one little spot in kansas. you can “eat and get gas” as they say, the word-smithing on that not expected to be classy. you are reminded that this is a rest area, after all.
the rest area on the way home from on-island is always a stopping ground these days. for various reasons we won’t list, the little blue sign on the side of the road is a welcome sight and we eagerly pull into a spot. recently, after packing for hours and then leaving, we leaned back and closed our eyes at this wayside. full-out dreaming commenced. when we woke, which wasn’t too long after, we shared notes and our surprise about falling asleep in a matter of minutes. d said, “if you can dream at the rest area, you’re supposed to be there.” yup. i bet all kinds of safety engineers would agree with that.
it was in iowa again – this state must make us tired – just a few days ago on a trip when we traveled 24 hours in a 36 hour period of time. having sampled (read: gorged on) the whole buffet of snacks, i was driving, desperately seeking the little blue sign, pining for the chance to close my eyes.
alas, finally. the rest area. we pulled in. d handed me a pillow. i laid my face against the window. and voila! a sight to behold.
reverse threading 