Category Archives: Awareness

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Advent Day #4 – Soil

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Reblogging from two years ago is not as synchronous as I thought it might be.  Two years ago, the fourth of December was a Sunday, and my post was very Sunday-related and had little to do with the Advent gift of the day, which I designated Soil.  So, I went looking for another post from that year.  Luckily, I found one.  My parade of gifts from the Universe has featured Sun, Air, Water and now Soil.  The four elements of our natural world, if you will.  Here’s the post:

As Time Goes By

My daughter is a certified massage therapist.  This makes visiting her an extra special occasion. Not only do I get the pleasure of her company and hospitality, I get a 2 hour massage as well.  As I lay there thinking about my body, my cells, and the amazing things going on just under my skin, it occurred to me that the whole process that I call my biological life began exactly half a century ago.  Yup, I figure I was conceived Thanksgiving weekend, as my parents celebrated with joy their gratitude for life.   Not that they ever divulged so private a story to me, mind you.

I marvel at how life is sustained over time.  I mentioned this to my kids as I was sipping my post-therapy water.  My youngest piped up, “Yeah, well, half a century is nothing when you think about how mountains grow and change.”  Touche.  I have to get better at taking a longer view, getting a bigger perspective.  I look at my kids bustling around in the kitchen preparing food together, all grown up, and a second later, they are playing a patty-cake game from their childhood.

We are all still so young on this earth; we are such a blink.  What kind of impact will we have on the bigger picture?  What will be the most lasting legacy of this family whom I love so intensely?  The trees that we’ve planted?  The children we beget?  The words we pen? The votes we cast?  The ashes we give back to the soil?  I can’t say for sure.  It could be the love that we circulate, although it would be impossible to document.  I am just grateful to have been a part of it, a crinoid in the limestone, among thousands of others.

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Advent Day #3 – Water

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Reblogged from 2 years ago:

Handmade, Naturally

Today I had an opportunity to get into the holiday spirit by doing some arts & crafts with kids at the Nature Center.  Unfortunately for fundraising but fortunately for me, not too many people showed up this morning.  That meant that I got to play with the materials myself.  I was at the wrapping paper station with an array of washable paint colors and objects to dip into them.  Leaves, cedar boughs, fir needles, spruce branches, feathers, pine cones, sponges and whatnot.

Years ago, I went into the prairie with scissors, came back with leaves and seed pods, spray painted my treasures in gold, silver, and clear varnish, and decorated a mask with them.  That hung on the wall of the den for ages.  I’m always looking for ways to decorate indoors with pieces of the outdoors.  And all for free, essentially.  (Cheap & Weird – my kids’ nickname for me)  That reminds me of the dried macaroni gifts I gave the Christmas I was, what, 9?  Too funny.  Spray paint macaroni, glue it to a box, call it a gift.  I suppose I could get away with it as a kid, but what is it called when I’m almost 50 and still messing around like that?  Okay, call it messing around.  I have fun.  Here are a few examples:

Imagine me gleefully slapping a piece of butcher paper with a paint-soaked cedar branch ala Jackson Pollack!  I tell you, kindergarteners should not be having all the fun.

The best things in life are free.  So far on my December countdown, I’ve received Sunshine (Dec. 1), Fresh Air (Dec. 2), and Water (Rain – today).  Each day I go outside to receive some miraculous gift, and there’s always something.  No need to wrap it or trap it.  Martha Stewart or Andy Goldsworthy, I’m not.  Just a kid in a fabulous universe, trying to stay happy with what there is.

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Advent Day #2 – Air

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Look!  Up in the sky!  It’s a bird…it’s a comet….it’s ATMOSPHERE!

The second gift in my December calendar of counting blessings is air.  The blog entry I posted two years ago is about an encounter with duck hunters.  Ironically, I met a duck hunter yesterday.  He came into my daughter’s home with a mallard drake dangling from his fist, took it out to the back yard, and began to pull back skin and feathers to reveal a dark red breast.  If you’ve never eaten duck, this may conjure a shocked response.  If you have (and enjoy it as much as Steve does), you may shrug your shoulders and think, “Okay, that’s how we get duck meat.  Yum!”  My daughter came into the house minutes later with a collection of feathers in a plastic bag and announced, “Everyone’s getting feather earrings for Christmas!”  My daughter makes and sells jewelry.  Her designs are beautiful, I think. 

So, natural resources…we use them, we share them with everything on the planet.  We breathe something like 19 cubic feet of oxygen each day.  Our air quality affects every breath we take, every bird and animal and plant as well.  There’s an air quality exhibit at Discovery World where I work, so I am reminded of this several times a week.  We will use the resources; we will affect the web.  The question we must continue to ask is “How?”  Are we mindful?  Respectful?  Wasteful?  Grateful?  Entitled?  Do consider before acting.

Now, the reblog…

Make Way for Duck Hunters

I’m new around here.  To Wisconsin, that is.  People here shoot animals at state nature areas.  And the DNR is okay with this.  They post helpful signs that indicate which recreational activities are allowed and that includes the hiker dude whom I recognize, and a hunter dude whom I don’t.  Well, I recognize him now.  I’ve been seeing more of him lately.  He’s up there next to the binoculars.  I can’t figure out how all these things coexist, though.  If you’re in a wildlife refuge area to view wildlife and hike around, and other people are there to shoot at the wildlife, what’s the etiquette for getting along?

Steve and I walked in the Vernon State Wildlife Area on Wednesday.  This was our fourth visit.  We’ve seen so many different kinds of animals there: birds and frogs and turtles and fish and muskrats.  I wanted to see how the place was changing with the season.  We walked down the gravel trail alongside the railroad tracks and heard 3 shots.  When we got to the other parking lot, we saw 4 pickup trucks with gun racks.  One of them had a sticker that said, “P.E.T.A. – People Eating Tasty Animals”.  Gun deer season was just over, I thought.  We walked out on the dike and saw decoy ducks on the water in several different places.  As we got nearer, people in camouflage gear appeared in the cattails.  I had my binoculars and my camera.  They had guns and a dog.  Steve and I were talking in low voices, wondering to each other, actually, what the protocol was for this seeming conflict of interests.  Were the hunters harboring ill will for us, thinking that we were maybe scaring away the ducks and geese?  Were we harboring ill will for them, thinking that they are killing the wildlife we’ve come to enjoy?  Were the water birds harboring ill will for all of us, wishing we’d just let them be?  We nodded greetings.  At one point, some birds flew over in formation while the hunters tooted away on their duck call devices, but apparently, they were too high up to shoot.  If they were any lower, would they have shot anyway, while we were standing there on the path??  I just don’t know how this is suppose to work.  Are we supposed to stay away during hunting season?  It’s not posted that hikers can only be there on certain dates.   We heard shots as we walked back to our car.

I’m still puzzled about this.  I have heard a few more stories from folks I’ve met about deer hunting.  People have great family memories about hunting traditions.  I imagine my favorite postal employee out there in the field, waiting 8 hours to spot a deer, and I suppose it’s kind of like fishing.  You get to sit quietly in nature and forget about business at the post office.  No one bugs you for hours at a time.  And if you see a deer, you aim and shoot.  If you hit it, you get to be all physical and field dress it and carry it away.  Sounds like a complete departure from stamping packages all day long.  I appreciate that.

As if Andy Goldsworthy had been here

There’s a particular stark beauty in the late fall landscape.  Trees are skeletal.  Light is low and angled.  Ice forms in geometric patterns.  It’s rather post-modern feeling.  It makes me moody.  So does the hunting scene.  In a way, it fits, though.  I guess I’m coming to a kind of ambiguous acceptance of it.  Survival, mortality, an uneasy coexistence with everything.  In the summer, this same drama is played out, except it’s covered in fecundity and green light.

Still, the universe is a complicated tapestry, as Steve said last night – a magic carpet stretching in all directions forever.  I look for a perch from which to see as much of it as I can.

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Re-inventing Advent

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Two years ago, when I first started blogging, I ran a series of posts every day in the month of December.  This series was in lieu of an Advent calendar, which had been a big tradition of my family.  Back then, I had only a handful of faithful blog followers, instead of more than 400.  So, I intend to re-gift these entries.  After all, I am in the resale business! (Check out Scholar & Poet Books – there’s  a link in the side bar.) For my family and for Helen (God bless you!), these will be repeats.  For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy opening your daily presents!

‘Tis A Season

When I was a kid, I always had an Advent calendar to count down the days from the first of December until Christmas Eve.  I had the same tradition with my own kids.  The secrets hidden behind each door were often Scripture verses.  It was important to tell the story of Jesus’ birth and make sure my kids knew that was “the reason for the season”.   There are other little treasures we could open each day, though.  When my son was taking German in high school, they sold Advent calendars with chocolates in them.   My father used to make us calendars out of magazine pictures and various old rotogravures with fortune cookie strips for the daily message.  We made our own calendars for each other, too, with simple crayon symbols behind the cut out doors.   The season has multiple images in my mind, and now I’m trying to figure out what it means to me at this point in my life.

I will always have respect for Jesus and the Christian story.  They were supremely important in my life for many years.  My spirituality was formed around them.  I think it is good to examine and re-examine beliefs, though, and strive for genuine and authentic expressions of experience.  My experience is expanding as I age, and I want to include more of those experiences in my belief system.  I want to include respect for other cultures, other religions, other parts of the planet and the universe.  I have a sister who is Sikh, a son who identifies with Buddhism and Native American spirit stories and a father who once taught science.  There is a lot going on all over the world in this season.  What do I want to acknowledge or celebrate?

My youngest daughter has always loved this season.  She used to go to the local Hallmark store in the middle of the summer to look at the Christmas village set up there.  What was that about?  Sparkly, pretty, cozy, homey, yummy expectations of treats?  Possibly.  Peace, love, joy?  Possibly.  Emotions?  Definitely.  Why not focus on pleasurable human senses and emotions?  Up in the northern hemisphere, we are spinning away from the sun and plunging into a cold, dark time.  Light becomes more precious, warmth becomes holy, food is life itself.  Why not celebrate that dependence?  We are sustained by the sun and the producers of this planet that make food from its energy.  Evergreen trees remind us of that.  Gifts remind us that we receive from the producers; we are consumers.  Gratitude is the attitude of the season.  Giving is the action that sustains us.

Vernon Marsh, sunset (click to enlarge)

I sent a text message to each of my kids this morning saying that the gift for Day #1 this season is sunshine.  The sun is shining here, showering us with Vitamin D and all kinds of other goodies we need to be healthy and happy.   We are blessed, saved, sustained, given life in this universe by an amazing set of circumstances that we did not originate.   However you acknowledge that and whoever taught you to acknowledge that deserves attention.  May you be happy as you think and act in awareness of this.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Unexpected

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Surprise!  It’s not what you expected.  How do you respond?  Laughter.  Disappointment.  Curiosity.  Do you set it ‘right’?  How did you come to have an expectation about this, anyway?  Expectations produce emotions.  They set you up, mostly for suffering, if you become attached to those expectations.  If the discovery that you have harbored some expectation takes you by surprise, but you’re not emotionally invested in it, it can be funny.  “Oh, yeah, I guess I wasn’t expecting that.  But there it is.  How interesting!”  Steve’s favorite story about this goes something like this:

A Zen master who had recently had a mini-stroke was invited to perform a traditional ceremony of calligraphy.  He had practiced this art for years and participated in the ritual often.  He calmly took his place and lifted the long, slender brush.  Carefully, he dipped it into the ink and raised it above the thin rice paper.  The assembly was silent.  His hand was still.  Moments passed.  Gradually, a wondrous smile spread across the master’s face.  He laid the brush aside and beamed.  “I’ve forgotten how!”  he laughed. 

May you know delight in all that unfolds.  Peace, my friends.

unexpected

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Layers

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Complexity.  Wow.  There’s an important concept that we’ve invented to describe our Universe.  It’s based in observation and experience.  We can feel that our world is complex and give myriad examples.  And we often have a reaction to that complexity.  Awe.  Anxiety.  Does simplifying make you feel more comfortable….or uncomfortable?  Does digging deeper or looking wider make you feel more anxious or less?  Does acknowledging the limitations of your grasp bother you or free you? 

I actually feel both.  I like to be in control, and I like to be reminded that I’m not in control.  I often set out to “fix things” and then realize that they don’t need to be fixed, and so I let them be.  “How does it work?  Oh, never mind.  It’s amazing.”  I have seen a few David Copperfield shows, and I laugh at my reaction.  I’m not content to be entertained; I want to figure out how he creates those illusions!  And then I give up and admit I’m amazed.  Visual aides of this complexity concept are always engaging to me because of that dynamic.  Here are a few examples: my photo and a link.  First, the photo…

cone headNow, the link.  This is a Science Project created by two 9th-graders, and it is absolutely outstanding!  I may have posted it before, but I don’t hesitate to do it again.  Enjoy The Scale of the Universe 2! 

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit

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Habit might be the enemy of Awareness or Mindfulness.  Doing things routinely without thinking is a practice that allows our mind to wander into the past or the future or the make believe without really being present.  Sometimes, this is just what I want to do!  Yes, I admit to blowing up Mah Jong tiles and Free Cell rows when I want to veg out.  But if I want to be truly alive, I try to pay attention to each present moment.  Thich Nhat Hahn gives a wonderful lesson to Oprah Winfrey on drinking tea mindfully in this clip.  Oprah, out of habit, takes a sip of her tea before the meditation even begins.  I smile, thinking, “how embarrassing!” and noting that I probably would have done the same thing if I wasn’t careful.  Habits can be comforting…and they can lull us to sleep.  Do you want to be awake?  Do you feel like there will be plenty of time to be dead – later on?  I do.  Except when I don’t.  It takes a lot of psychic energy to be alive!  Think about all that’s involved when you do a simple thing like climb up a short flight of stairs.  Your weight is shifting, balancing, your muscles are contracting, your toes are gripping, your hand may reach out to the banister, your eyes are measuring the height of each step, you’re breathing with the exertion, and all while trying to remember what you’re going upstairs for!  Walking meditation, tea meditation, stairs meditation…it’s all the same practice of mindfulness.  This picture adds another aspect: Steve meditation.  I see him every day.  I want to be mindful of that miracle.  He’s alive, different, changing, dynamic, and important.  So am I (but I have a long way to go on that one…appreciating myself is the hardest practice for me!).

Habit

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Infinite

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Happy Columbus Day!  As it’s a federal holiday, United States Postal Service workers got a day off, so Steve & I went on a 7-mile hike on the Ice Age Trail around Holy Hill.  The air was crisp and sunny; the leaves were resplendent, and I couldn’t have been happier to be outside with my favorite trail partner.  We’ve missed this in our recent life and are making plans to change our lifestyle so that slow walks in nature are given priority again.  We talked about the process of awareness and making decisions.  We can do better.  This is an infinite process, but it’s not about the results; it’s about the journey.  The climb.  The progressiveness.  “Pointing the canoe” and paddling toward your values – like integrity.  I am dedicated to giving it my best shot.  And here’s my favorite of the day – very fitting for the theme, I think:

infinite

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I’m still alive

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Hebba-lubbo, frebbends! (Does anyone remember the PBS show Zoom?  Ubby-Dubby language?  Anyone?  Beuller?)  Are you wondering where I’ve been?  Why I went AWOL?  Have you missed me? *looking up, fluttering my lashes*  Well, I feel a need to justify my absence anyway.  Silliness aside, I need to take time to write again. 

I am anticipating the end of the season for my job at the living history museum, Old World Wisconsin.  By the end of next month, I will need to make up those wages by doing something else.  Fortunately, my previous employer still values my skills as a proofreader, and I have been able to contract with them for some work I can do at home.  Hopefully, I will be able to pick up some new voice students as well.  I have been spending my home days working on those enterprises and helping Steve with the book business.  So, I have not been spending my home time in leisurely rambles of creative writing.  And the memory card in my camera is full, so I haven’t been taking pictures.  I have been thinking, though….

Steve and I will soon be hitting the 5-year milestone in our relationship.  Our first date was October 4.  The evolution of our partnership has been an intense journey toward maturity, and keeping that energy going is quite a commitment.   The other day, I went back to some of our early e-mails (yes, I still haven’t deleted them) and came face-to-face with my former self: a grieving widow struggling to be a single Mom for the first time.  Yikes!  The more dramatic e-mails were the ones I exchanged with my 17-year old daughter.  Our grief, our survival, was such a strong agenda that we were hardly communicating anything besides our fears, our wants, our upset feelings.  It was very hard for us to listen to each other and be generous.  Steve stepped into that gap and calmly spoke his observations without judgment, even when my daughter’s anger was focused on his role in my life.  A metaphor that he uses is “clearing the windshield”.  We often have so much mud covering up the clarity of what life is and how we want to live it.  Steve has always come back to articulating his vision, one that he’s known since he was very young.   He’s been very patiently illustrating it over these past 5 years, and I’ve only recently felt that my windshield has been clear enough to see it. 

I have been reading a little book he gave me — Finding the Still Point: A Beginner’s Guide to Zen Meditation by John Daido Loori.  Here’s the nugget I will keep returning to:

“From birth we have been conditioned by different events and people — our teachers, parents, country, culture, neighborhood, friends, and peers.  Everything we cherish — our positions, attitudes, opinions, all of our attachments, all the things we think give our life identity — is found in our conditioning.  Now here we are, decades later, trying to live our lives out of this random programming we call “my life”.  We feel so strongly about parts of the program we are ready to die for it.  And it is all created in our own mind.

There is no escaping the fact that getting beyond this accumulated conditioning is a long process.  Thirty or forty years of programming takes time to work through.  We look at the thoughts, acknowledge them, let them go, and come back to the breath.  Day by day, we uncover what is underneath all of the conditioning.  What we discover is called freedom.  It is called human life.  It is called wisdom and compassion.  It’s the nature of all beings.”

Living freely is the reward of maturity.  Cleaning the windshield is an arduous, stinky task at times.  I am tempted to hide behind the caked-on guck and call it my safe cocoon, expecting my partner to join me there.  He will not.  Is that ungenerous?  Or the most loving thing a friend can do?  Sometimes I have a hard time deciding.  Even when he doesn’t join me there, he has waited for me to emerge.  He finds that very frustrating at times.  He would like to see me free.  He would like to see all people free, including himself.  His sadness and disappointment when we are not free shows in his face and posture.  I think of where my daughter and I used to live.  We have emerged joyfully from that place.  We know freedom.  But we are still cleaning the windshield.  There is more to be done, and the view from that one clear corner is my inspiration to continue the work. 

I am alive.  I am maturing.  I am working on my life.  And I enjoy taking time to write about it every once in a while.  Thanks for listening!

 

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Focus

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Focus.  Concentrate.  What is important?  Who decides?  And what about the other stuff?  Again, photography acts as a metaphor for life.  How do you get the experience of your own powers of creation?  Make decisions, make art, and you know that you are making a universe.  Then, unmake it, and you’ll know what you can control and change.

Is the glass half empty?  Half full?  Is the glass solid or as liquid as its contents but moving at a different speed?  Am I half done with my life or beginning a new day?  Are the things that exist only in my memory real or not?  If they exist in my memory, have I lost them? 

I had a birthday on Wednesday, and a good cry on Thursday.  The quiet, summer afternoon transported me to another time and place.  My husband was alive, snoring in the Lazy Boy in my living room.  I had a living room – a full house with 4 bedrooms.  My oldest daughter was in her room, reading children’s books.  My son was in the yard playing with a next door neighbor.  My two youngest daughters were entwined on a bed, thumbs in their mouths, damp curls encircling their sleepy heads.  It seemed so palpable…and so untouchable.  Never again; though, yes, it was.  Once.  LOSS loomed in my brain.  A word I envisioned; I’d conjured it like the scene of that composite day.  When I focused on it, I was awash in gut pain.  It was powerful.  Over moments, the focus softened.  Its power faded.  It became a muted background of warmth, of subtle longing, a wistful smile.  There are other things in my life.  Some embryonic, some ripening.  That previous life is like the green light of a summer day.  It is there, all around.  It is not in focus, though.  It is enough.

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