Life Goes On

“Each of us walks along a path with no sign of where’ve we been and no knowledge of where we’ll end up. The earth rises to meet the soles of our feet and out of nowhere comes a gift to support and sustain our awareness, which is our life. Some days the gift is a bite, and some days it’s a banquet. Either way, it’s enough.” from Paradise in Plain Sight, by Karen Maezen Miller I’ve not been sleeping very well lately, and there are some practical reasons for this. One of my little dogs has allergies and she wakes periodically in the night with a stuffy, sneezy nose. When she wakes, often about 3:00 a.m., I wake. And then I am restless and fitful until morning, my mind buzzing with thoughts, ideas, and always a running loop of my To-Do list.

Sometimes I leave my bed and go across the hall to the room that serves as my writing room during the day. There is a queen sized bed in this room, a bed covered with a quilt my aunt made me for a wedding present. The quilt top is cross stitched in an intricate floral pattern. She stitched every stitch herself, by hand,  then stretched the quilt top on the frame in her basement and quilted every tiny quilting stitch herself by hand. A labor of love, and one that seems miraculous to me, as I have neither the patience nor the talent for sewing. When I take my restless body and crawl under this quilt, I feel instantly comforted. It is the perfect heft to be warm yet not suffocating. It’s like being held close to someone you love, someone who knows just how to calm a racing heart.

Every time I pick up my copy of Karen Maezen Miller’s book, Paradise in Plain Sight, it falls open to the page that contains the passage quoted above. This small, elegant book is very much about finding meaning in the here and now, so I think there must be a reason these words appear before me so often. What are they trying to teach me?

On these bright and beautiful summer days, I am spending so much time immersed in the lessons of my past. This is not a bad thing.  While collecting and curating my writing for this book I am piecing together, this book that is like a patchwork quilt of the past eight years, I am beginning to see myself not just in part but as whole, see the path I’ve walked along for not just the past decade, but get a glimpse of what led me to it in the first place. One foot in front of the other, sometimes through soft mossy meadows, other times through thickets full of briars, the path of my Life in General has led me here: to this place where Life Goes On.

“Out of nowhere comes a gift to support or sustain our awareness, which is our life,” Maezen writes. “Some days the gift is a bite, and some days it’s a banquet.”

Life feels like a banquet to me these days. I try not to be smug about that. Or complacent. After all, I know about the dark side. I remember those few years ago when losses stacked up like dominoes and then began to tumble incessantly. But I’m beginning to see those moon-shrouded days as part of the path I had to walk to get myself to this place, a place where I feel as if I’m right where I need to be to take the next steps wherever they might lead.

The gifts that come to me are usually small - the sight of a hummingbird at the feeder, my little dog asleep with her head on my pillow, the gentle harmony of wind chimes in the breeze, morning coffee in my favorite chair. My husband’s fingers intwined in mine. My son’s voice on the phone.

A gourmet feast.

Your banquet will be different from mine. But if you look at your world with new eyes, perhaps you will find more than just a bite to support you on your own path. Maybe you will find the incentive to walk briskly rather than just putting one weary foot in front of the other. It won’t happen all at once, it won’t happen every day. One sweet morsel at a time. One sprightly step in front of the other.

This is how life goes on.

Another reason I’m having trouble sleeping is because I’m in the process of developing something deep down, a sort of spiritual growth spurt that happens only when the body quiets down and the busyness of life is stilled.  I think these nights under my quilt are part of what I’m learning, like everything on my path these days. They remind me of the love that surrounds me, the care and labor that goes into everything beautiful.

The way a hundred thousand tiny crossed-shaped stitches can- when you stand back and survey them whole- become a wildly spreading garden of flowers.

Pieces From the Past: I Remember Nothing

I’ve been spending a lot of time sifting through eight years of blog posts and essays to include in my book, Life in General. Since many of my Facebook friends indulge in something called “Throwback Thursday”, posting photos of themselves from the past, I thought it might be fun to do something similar here, posting some of my favorite “ Pieces of the Past.”  Here’s one from 2011: We were online the other evening, purchasing airline tickets our upcoming trip to Florida.  When it came time to enter the credit card number, my husband turned to me and said, “Okay, let’s have it.”  I rattled off the 16 digit number, complete with expiration date and security code.

“Amazing,” he said, shaking his head as he always does when I come up with arcane bits of information out of my head.  ”How do you remember that?”

Time was, I would smile with smug satisfaction, proud of the mind that was like a steel trap, keeping track of everything from passwords to birthdays, drug classifications to recipes.  In recent months, however, my smug smile has faded.  Clearly, the days of my ability to reliably classify and organize information in my head are coming to an end.  In spite of recalling that credit card number upon request, I have been forgetting more and more things.  In fact, sometimes it feels as if I  remember nothing.

I know that women of a certain age have fuzzy memories.  Apparently, the gradual loss of estrogen from a woman’s body directly coincides with losses in her memory bank as well.  I try not to panic when I can’t remember where I’ve left my cell phone, my watch, my purse…it’s common at your age, I tell myself reassuringly as I dash madly from room to room.

It’s harder to remain unconcerned when my fuzzy thinking has more dire consequences.  Last weekend, I was filling my husband’s weekly pill container.  He has a new medication, a tiny pink pill, which is fine except for the fact that two of his other medications are (practically identical) tiny pink pills.  He takes two of one of these pills, one of the other, and one-half of the third.  Well, I got them all mixed up and placed two of the one he was only supposed to take one-half of!  Frantic, I tried to reach him on his cell phone before he took the medication, already  imagining the headline -”Menopausal Woman Kills Husband in Medication Misdemeanor.”  The text I got in reply was less than comforting -
“Too late on those pills.  Already took them.”

Don’t worry, I’m not a widow.  In fact, he didn’t seem any the worse for wear other than some extra neuropathy pain because I shortchanged him on the pain medication.

But these are the kinds of muddle headed snafus to which I’ve become more and more prone.

In addition to age, I blame some of my frazzled thinking on the internet.  I know I spend too much time on the internet, or texting on my phone.  The constant barrage of information makes my brain feel as if the synapses are overloaded.  Sometimes I can almost feel the sparks flying around up there, as my heart literally palpitates in agitation, flipping from Facebook to blogs to Twitter and back.  So much to read, so much to think about, so much to say!

Oh my.

But mostly this increasing loss of memory makes me feel less capable, and that’s a feeling I’m not familiar with.  I’ve always prided myself on having a good grip on life in general.  Paying bills on time, keeping up with appointments and errands, maintaining a regular schedule.  Orderly and neat, everything taken care of the way its supposed to be  -that’s how I like to operate.  Lately,  I’ve begun to worry about what I may be missing, what I might have forgotten to do, what addle brained mistake is out there waiting to snag my progress through the world.

The world is definitely more complicated than it was in our parent’s generation.  It seems my life is continually crowded with things that must be done, all vying for my attention with varying degrees of intensity.  And sometimes I wonder if all the things that have been invented during the past 50 years ostensibly designed to make life easier don’t in fact make it more complicated.   My yearning for a simple life is rooted in a need to have less to process, less minutiae to worry about.

Less to remember.

Because I’m definitely remembering less and less.

Tender at the Broken Places

Driving along yesterday afternoon I glanced in my rear view mirror and noticed the familiar double hood scoops of a late 1990’s model black Pontiac  Trans Am following close behind me, the same car my son drove from the time he graduated high school until he sold it seven years later. It wasn’t exactly the same - none of the custom charcoal gray striping or badging my son designed for his - but it gave me a little start nonetheless to see that familiar “face” in my mirror. I was surprised to find my eyes filled with tears. Suddenly I missed my son so much - it was an ache in the pit of my stomach, the same ache I used to get driving home after work and knowing his car wouldn’t be in the driveway, the same ache I felt getting on the airplane after I visited him when he first left for college. My heart felt so tender in that moment, my emotions gathered in a huge lump in my throat.

When all this happened, I was on my way to meet my stepmother for lunch. I had not seen her since we parted after my dad’s death in November. We’ve talked on the phone, texted and emailed occasionally. I am always mindful of her words the day I left last November- “Please don’t forget about me,” she said. “I won’t,” I promised. And I have not. But I was anxious about seeing her again, seeing her without my dad. I couldn’t help remembering what we went through together just the two of us in those strange three days when we said goodbye to him. I anticipated being washed in sadness and feeling lonely and grief stricken all over again.

But we hugged and smiled through lunch, and we talked about her children and grandchildren - her new great-grandson whom she had come to Michigan to meet for the first time. I told her my best Connor stories and showed her pictures and videos. She told me she’s had some cardiac problems, and I wonder how much she neglected her own health in these last few years as she expended so much time and energy caring for my dad.

I felt sadness, but not as much as I had expected.

My son has been gone from home a long time, and I feel like I’ve come to terms with all that. I don’t get choked up at the airport anymore. I don’t constantly wonder where he is and what he’s doing. He has a good life, a happy family, and although I think of him daily, it’s most often with a sense of satisfaction rather than longing or angst.

My dad has been dead for nine months, and I thought I’d come to terms with all that too. But I realized that there will always be tender places in my heart for those precious things that are no longer with me - my son’s childhood and youth, my father’s warm and loving spirit. It’s like the bone in my elbow, the one I cracked 10 winters ago in a fall on an icy sidewalk. When I stretch or strain it too much, there’s a sudden, sharp twinge of pain followed by a few moments of achy tenderness. In a reflex movement, I reach over with my other hand and massage it gently. “There there,” I say with my protective touch. “Just calm down, it will be alright."

When we get those little soul-aches, those episodes of wistfulness and longing, where do we go for comfort? I spent today looking for that kind of comforting. I wasn’t terribly successful - not in line at the Secretary of State, not fighting traffic on the well-traveled road to my mother’s house, not shopping for groceries in the local supermarket.

But a cooler breeze is blowing this evening, taking the humid summer air along with it. It’s quiet on the deck, and my new chairs are soft and enveloping. A steady parade of neighbors pass by, their happy dogs pulling them along, and we greet each other with smiles and nods.

All of us on this road of life together, each of us with our own tender places in need of a little loving care.

May we find it and take comfort in it.

Begin It

Just begin. Let your fingers hover over the keys, let the tips of them settle into the gentle concavity of each black square, let them select one letter after another and, with a gentle pressure, place that letter on the screen. Do that again and again while those letters become words, sending sparks to the engine that is your brain until it begins to fire and then to rumble insistently. Let the words multiply, let them trail across the screen like so many miles across the desert, wheels turning ever faster across thoughts and emotions and opinions and ideas, automatically making those thousands of decisions necessary to propel this thing, this writing, further and further along its journey.

Just begin.

****

Beginning has become difficult for me. It’s hard to find a way in to the things I want to write about. I’m reminded of those jump-rope days from long ago, two friends on each end swinging it tautly so it arced above my head, hearing the rhythmic swish as it swiped the pavement on its way around. “Jump in, Beck!” they’d call. “Jump in! Do it now!”

Oh it was so hard, so scary. If I missed, the rope would puddle over my head, all that momentum come to a dead stop, all that energy wasted, leaving me stranded in all my uncoordinated gracelessness.

But when I made it in how effortlessly simple it seemed to follow that pattern, to get into the groove and stay there. It was like riding a bicycle - you mustn’t think about the mechanics of it, about how to keep your balance on those teetering two wheels, you must focus first until you get the rhythm, but then let go.

Let go of that tight-fisted control.

Let go of the nagging “you’ll never make it” fear.

***

I pick up Still Writing, a book that stays on the desk in front of me, a book I use as talisman and devotional. It opens first to these words: "Writing is hard. We resist, we procrastinate, we veer off course. But we have this ability to begin again. Word after word, sentence after sentence, we build our writing lives. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book - the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again."

So today I begin again, with my fingers now falling more surely and confidently on the keys - at least as surely and confidently as they ever do. The road unwinds strong and clear before me, the rope sails above my head and I lift my feet at exactly the right moment.

I jump in.

I just begin.

Planning Process

The month of May is one filled with busy-ness, even in this pared down version of the life I once lived. There are concerts, rehearsals, and numerous end-of-season events to attend, while the siren song of spring calls me to the flower beds and the deck chair. But where I once panicked at the sight of my scribbled over calendar pages, I feel much more sanguine about the the month of May - in fact, I feel a welcome sanguinity about life in general right now, savoring this sweet spot I’m in where everything is going well. This overall sense of well being is nudging me toward some tentative steps for dreaming of my future.

It takes a certain audacity to plan for the future at my age, and in these days we live in. Having lived through a period of personal and national upheaval (2009, I’m referring to you), it seems almost dangerous to make plans - I can plan and prepare all I want, but the world will always have an agenda of its own that may not comfortably coincide with mine.

I feel silly writing this, but at age 58 I’ve just now figured out that life doesn’t always go as planned. It isn’t as if I knew nothing about fate before 2009 - the year I refer to as The Crucible. But in all the years leading up to that one, I think I believed I was planning when I was really just moving events around, reacting to what life presented me and going with it (or not).

True planning - thinking into the future about something you’d like to achieve or have happen, defining and implanting events or actions toward making that a reality - that’s a totally different animal. Still, Jim and I are allowing our minds to creep forward into the next decade or so, allowing ourselves to imagine “perfect world” scenarios and ways we might get there.

It feels frightening to do that. The worrier in me is always ready with a caveat, a quick slap in the face when I get to deeply involved in my dream world. “Sure, that sounds great, but what if - the economy tanks again, one us gets seriously ill, my mother needs long-term care - etc. etc… Why should I put all this effort into planning when it’s more than likely that something -Fate, The Universe, Karma, or just plain Bad Luck - will swipe all those plans onto the ground in a heap of shattered dreams?

Here’s why I keep planning:

♥  Because I like the feeling I get from dreaming, I like having something exciting to think about when I wake up at 3:30 in the morning, in contrast to the many nights in the past decade when I’ve woken in a frenzy of anxiety about houses and stuff and bills and sickness.

♥ Because I want to live a hopeful life, not one bound by the constraints of fear. I want to be expansive, to walk around with my arms and my heart wide open to the possibility -dare I say the probability - of happiness.

♥ Because, although I usually eschew “magical thinking,” I am willing to experiment with Walt Disney’s notion - If you can dream it you can do it- with the poets and theologians and motivational speakers who believe that thinking can make it come true.

There is a yin and yang to this planning for the future, just as there is with all of life:  a determined effort but a willingness to let go, a strong push toward the ideal without pressure for perfection.   I’ve had a taste now of how A Good Life feels, and it’s all the sweeter for having passed through a time of fire a few years ago.  I know more about what I want and have a better idea how to get there.  It is impossible to control every outcome. But I have to balance my latent fears of fate with my shiny new vision of the future and move forward with as much confidence and hope as I can muster.