Today four years ago, I was wandering through the city, marveling at the lace of a hard frost. It was freezing and I was waiting outside the Uni for something to begin, something to end – maybe Tech Boy to get out of a meeting. A lot of my life is spent waiting for something to end, but for every ending it’s another beginning. I’m grateful that we live in a continuous state of starting over.
I can’t believe November is over! I can’t believe that December is just a sleep away… Does being mindful and grateful really make time seem to move faster? Or is it just the exercise of marking days? Odd, how I’ve lost some of the overarching sense of winter blahs, when I’ve had to focus to the level of… today. Now. And grabbing a second to enlarge upon why I could feel grateful. This is a hint, I’m sure, a pro-tip for life.
But, next door, the Christmas lights are already up, and across the street, they’re unloading the tree… so, on with the dance.
The title of the post is taken from the title of the new book out which talks about home stylist B. Smith’s Alzheimer’s… a head injury which produced amnesia (much less romantically – or frequently – than it occurs in novels), Alzheimer’s Disease or senile dementia – these things were once what I feared the most in the world, because who am I without my brain? Without knowing ALL the things? But, watching my grandmother fade from the person I knew into someone with whom I was unfamiliar, hearing my friend S. tell me she doesn’t remember my name each week, but seeing her smile and shrug – and knowing that my assuring her that I remember my name is enough – I realize now that losing my memories doesn’t have to be the end of everything.
All around me are people who have, in their minds, lost out on things. Missed opportunities – I should have a better job now, lost out on relationships, lost out, lost. And I was thinking the other day how much happier I was than most people, because I could be truly contented at the privilege of reading in bed all afternoon. I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything, not really. I wish I’d had more of a social life in high school and college. I wish I’d traveled more than I have. I wish I were a better artist. But… that’s about it for regrets. And, those are fleeting. Fixable, mostly.
My word, I am as lucky as heck.
So, before I forget to mention it, thank you, world, for this morning. Thank you for how clear the sky was. Thank you for all the words in all the books that I can still read. Thank you that I get another chance.
While there’s life, there’s time. I haven’t lost anything.
“An old-fashioned vegetable soup, without any enhancement, is a more powerful anticarcinogen than any known medicine.”
James Duke M.D.(U.S.D.A.)
Clearly, the family that has Thanksgiving together manages to make each other sick. Whilst Tech Boy coughs at me, I am reading a funny book on fermentation and paging through cookbooks and happening upon several gems… Hope your day is full of antioxidants, health, and rest.
It’s time for my favorite Tanya Davis poem, the one I should probably make an attempt to memorize so I don’t forget it.
I love this poem, because it is how I want to be – happy, in myself. Whatever the physics of a body alone, and a tree falling in the forest, unheard, there is also the physics of a thing freezing, releasing heat. Within these antithetical ideas, too, is the crowdedness of aloneness. Aloneness doesn’t have to be alone, really. I think… I think this is one of the best truths. Too many people greet solitude with grief. Instead, I want to be, in my self, happy.
Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them.
But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.
You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.
But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay.
Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.
It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relieved, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.
Take silence and respect it.
If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.
If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.
There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
from “How To Be Alone,” by Tanya Davis
Poetry Friday is at Carol’s Corner. Whether alone today, or diving into crowds to continue shopping for Christmas and Hanukkah, may you find a moment to be —
Annually, there’s a football game Thanksgiving morning in our community; touch, mostly offered to kids in junior high and high school, though a few slow adults play. There’s a pancake breakfast and several congregations make dinner for any and all who show up. When there’s not dinner at my house, there’s such a lot to discover in every open door on this crisp blue autumn day. I’m grateful for every discovery, and send good wishes for a wonderful day down the line to you.
I may have mentioned that we are losing a twenty plus foot tree in the backyard. Or, maybe I haven’t. I’ve been busy working on getting someone to remove it before it, you know, falls on the house. California’s drought situation has made a lot of pine trees vulnerable to beetle attacking the bark and we are losing… three; two twiggy, one massive. It’s kind of heartbreaking to lose this massive old pine that’s probably at least as old as this neighborhood. But as always, there are compensations.
This is a cheater shot taken not in the backyard because I can’t get them into focus for long enough to actually get a good shot, but we have teensy birds coming out the — well, let’s try that again. We have teensy birds all over the place. Birds we’ve never seen and aren’t sure we can identify. Tiny ones with peach colored belly feathers and stripey heads. Tiny black and white ones with red crest feathers. These are varieties of wrens and chickadees, creepers and dippers and wrentits (I know, is that a real thing? Apparently, yes). Bushtits and nutthatches. Flycatchers, grosbeaks, buntings. (The Audobon people have had a field day with the names, let me tell you.)
We may not be able to keep the trees, but I’m grateful for the little buggers eating the beetles and feasting on the pine cones, cheeping and chirping and generally just jumping around happily on its gently dying corpse. For every ending, there is a beginning, right?
Leftovers, on every available surface. Odd pairings of foods that shouldn’t go together, but work because… you’re eating them. This week we’re happy to nibble on what’s left of Sunday’s feast. Because the sister’s surgery is Wednesday, I’m feeling a little guilty that she will be on water Tuesday until midnight, and then ice chips after that, but I’m grateful she had this feast when she could.
It is strange to look at this holiday from the vantage of already having had the main portion of it… and now to discover what else remains.
When my nephews were small, after they’d gone home, I had handprints on my slider to remember them by. Now they’re six and eight, and …I’d like to say that there are fewer handprints. There are different handprints. The Godniece just turned two, though, and now I have new fingerprints on the cabinets, on the fridge, on the glass doors… Also, I have blurs to remember her by in all of her photographs. The kid never stands still! She’s either dancing or jumping or twirling or running and – whoosh, there she goes!
I’m grateful for those fingerprints, though. I’m freaking exhausted, but I’m grateful as I clean each one away, that a very small (and wildly energetic) person came to visit today.
(I’m also grateful that she doesn’t live here… in the most loving way possible. Does this make me an awful person? No, just a tired one… I am grateful that the word “visit” means “temporary gift, eventually returned.” Whew.)
Dear Self: Do not try changing the bulb in the kitchen – the great long tube fluorescent bulb – whilst you are cooking. Once you drop it, it shatters like a bomb, and you will be picking glass out of everything and sweeping for the rest of the afternoon.
*sigh*
I am grateful for my whisk broom, my big broom, my dust mop, my sponge mop, and the ubiquity of hardware stores open early ’til late.
