~thankful thursday~ the slightly belated conclusion

Posted on January 25, 2018 by marybethrew

11/24/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

i am thankful for being able to spend this past week with my boy!

11/25/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

i am thankful for babies, new blessings to shower love upon.

11/26/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

i am thankful for john denver and radio serenades from my sweetie.

11/27/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

last night what i originally wanted to say was something about my gratitude for the wonderful friends in my life, but when i read what i had typed about the shining souls i call friends, it was about as interesting to read as a grocery list. that’s when john denver came along and saved me from myself. i just couldn’t do justice to the amazing people in my life or how lucky i feel. i mean, i have all the best ones, and it’s not because i’m very good at being a friend. i have lucked into some amazing connections with people who for some reason put up with my intensity, and i have been careless with more than i have been able to hold onto. even those friendships i have managed to maintain are sorely neglected. and i have squandered some friendships and completely lost touch with some really good ones. the few who seem to persist have really thick skins and are the kind who can tell me, as neil young puts it, when i’m “pissin’ in the wind.” i don’t know what i’d do without my best woman whom i take for granted until i have to dump-process all of my overthinking on her, or my sister friend who “accidentally” cooks too much dinner and feeds my family on a suspiciously regular basis, takes care of my son whenever he’s out of school and i have to work, and meticulously pulled together the details of my all-over-the-place hippie wedding as my wedding boss. i don’t know where i’d be without the lighthouse beam of support my online radical mama friends shined at me 10 years ago when i was lost in darkness, and it’s only logical that many of them have become friends in real life, while my real life friendships often take place mostly online due to time zones and geography. regardless of format, i am so grateful for my friends!

12/3/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

i’m thankful for the sunshine today. i am slowly finishing up my 30 gratitude posts for this year. i wanted to take my time writing a few more of these, and a few busy days have slipped by. still mindful of gratitude during those days, and feeling it especially well during the flood tide of my son’s homecoming on friday, by the time the sun shone today, i was brimming with gratitude. i won’t claim i have done a brilliant job of creating my own light this season, but i have been working on it. a bright sunny day like today does wonders for me. we slept in, ate pumpkin pancakes and drank coffee while the rain finished falling. once the sun came out, i rushed outside and bedded down my dahlias under some leftover straw bales from the wedding. then the three of us took a winding sunday drive along the river to cut ourselves a christmas tree. when we got to the one we would take home, a hawk flew overhead and called out. it was such an easy decision at that point. (i mean, how do other families choose a tree?) the beautiful view out the passenger window, whether it was of cascading water we can’t see when summer foliage is filled out, a rusty bulldozer overgrown with blackberry vines, or cattle grazing in a field, it all looks still more beautiful to me when the winter sun is shining on it. i dug out my mom’s swedish meatball recipe for dinner, and then rich beckoned us outside to gaze at the supermoon (also made possible by the wonderful sun.) photo credit on a couple of these, including the blinding sunshine on mama’s shoulder, goes to quinn.

12/25/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

unable to find the newspaper clipping that my dad saved for me over a decade ago, that held a christmas story (or maybe it was a reader’s digest?) i have been saving this post, and hoping to unearth it somewhere. in the meantime, a miraculous rose has been blooming outside my front window, and is still going strong as of this writing, even after enduring a fairly hard frost this past week. its juxtaposition with the rainbow twinkle lights bordering the window is a perfect date stamp on a photo of the brave little blossom.

when my dad gave me that story, i remember that it was lovely. i remember that it made me feel good, both the story’s content, and the fact that my dad had thought of me when he read it. in return, i painted him a rose, in watercolor, that christmas, and it still hangs up in the living room of mom and dad’s home.

i did find a legend about a christmas rose when i typed my vague search terms into google, about a young shepherd’s daughter named madelon, who was ashamed to go and see the baby king lying in the manger without a proper gift to present. her tears falling in the snow resulted in the growth of a rose right there at her feet, and she presented this miraculous rose to the child she had so longed to see.

i have friends who have lost a dad this year. i have friends who have lost a mom this year. i am thinking that it’s not the content of the newspaper clipping story that matters here, and though i cannot share for sure whether it was that story, i feel i can share what really matters, which is that it is a connection i will always have between roses, my dad, and me. roses have other significance for me as well, but this little miracle rose in particular, blooming right on through the month of december, seems to point to the dad-christmas rose connection strongly.

photo from christmas day!

i hope that my friends who have lost parents this year let their tears fall openly on what must be a terribly confusing day full of both joy and grief, and that some gift of healing results from their falling tears upon the earth.

i am grateful for my dad, and for my mom, and for roses and miracles today.

1/22/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

i think it’s high time i write a gratitude post for day 30. i’m sure my topic won’t surprise anyone too much… no, it’s not nachos! i’m thankful for my husband of six months (!) today. since i have left quite a gap between posts, i have forgotten all the other things i said back in november, so i am not too worried about making sure this 30^th gratitude is original.

on december 22 rich and i celebrated being together for 6 years; on january 10th i realized it was yet another dorkaversary, the occasion being 1.5 years since we got engaged! so we decided the next night would be date night, to celebrate (it would have been date night anyway.)

one other milestone has been reached (when i announce these things to rich i like to tell him we’ve reached a new level in our relationship)… the brisket from the wedding is all out of the freezer! we ate up the last of the brisket burritos (and brisket omelettes for breakfast), so that is a big deal.

on a recent saturday morning waking up well before dawn, we noticed a star shining brightly out the window, so we turned the lights back off and looked out at it, sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. we saw a few shooting stars, so we called it another star date (we also spent several night sessions lying on a tarp in our front yard during the geminid meteor shower in december). i finished getting dressed in the semi-darkness, but it wasn’t until 12:30 near the end of my shift at farmer’s market that i realized i had put one of my layers of clothing on inside out.

yesterday, we observed the eve of our six month dorkaversary with all day dates: breakfast, football and movie rental dates, as well as a quick trip to the beach to reenact some of our day-after-the-wedding shenanigans. then we got into a fight. we think it’s our second one. the first one was about rinsing the eggs (don’t ask) but this time he provoked me with, “i’m so lucky you’re my wife.” it was all downhill from there, as we duked it out over, “no, i’m the lucky one!”

it’s not that we agree on everything, but we can hear each other out on anything.

and then we have a good laugh.

rich has a bone in his left arm that was set the wrong way when he broke it as a child. he opted to not have it re-broken (can you blame him?) and so his left hand is naturally oriented palm downward. when we were planning our wedding ceremony, we decided that instead of one of us having both hands in either the bottom or top orientation, we’d each have one upturned palm, and one palm downward, when we joined hands. i don’t know that anyone noticed this, but it felt very symbolic. we both give, we both receive, we balance. yin and yang, masculine and feminine seem to be out of balance in so many instances in the world. it is such a comfort to me that this is not the case with us. i’ve got a guy who’s so secure in himself that he isn’t even bothered by me gushing about him on the internet.

i’m definitely luckier.

star date 95577.75

Posted on December 22, 2017 by marybethrew

today we celebrate our six year anniversary! one thing about the shortest, coldest days of the year that warms my heart, is that i found the love of my life during this part of the year. if there is anything symbolic of the return of the sun to my life, it is his love for me.

it’s been a big year for us! we went from happy fiances to happily married as the earth made its way this time around the sun. and now we are an old married couple! just like that.

we still like to have fun. on a recent morning, as we were wooing each other in the reverse strip tease of going-to-work morning readiness, i flipped my hair (think conditioner commercial… he was doing it with his long tresses, too, in my defense) and also accidentally tossed my (solid rock) pendant up in an arc past my face. we then laughed and joked about having nearly chipped a tooth flaunting my beauty. it isn’t easy being pretty!

photos from the day before our wedding!

we spent a recent span of weeknights going out on nightly “star dates” to watch the geminid meteor shower, because we had freakishly clear weather for our part of the world, coinciding with the shower’s peak viewing nights. by the last night, we had improved our setup from standing up and craning our necks, to lying down on a tarp/sheet with a fleece blanket on us. we saw lots of meteors! appropriately, he popped in the movie stardust, just before we went out for the star date on the peak night of viewing.

we also went to star wars the last jedi, and that’s all i’ll say about that! and we saw some live music. actually, it was quinn’s school christmas concert, and it was delightful to hear children’s voices singing, “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go!” my son is getting so tall he looked to me like a stick figure wearing pants that were paradoxically both too short and too big to stay up around his waist.

he has been away for two weeks, and came home today to celebrate christmas! we are so happy he’ll be home. it’s a great anniversary present.

i’ve been enjoying a chuckle about this particular calvin and hobbes comic shown to me by quinn, and extending the metaphor i’ve been using this season of finding my own inner light. sometimes it is hard to locate the proper muscle. however, i do think rich finds my gluteus maximus to be a source of light, for his part. so there’s that.

snapdragons still blooming, saying something about the tenacity of us dragons. on our anniversary date (observed last night, of course), we reminisced a little about how much we went through in the early days, and how i was so amazed he stuck with me. i’m so happy to be spending my life with him, even after all these years!

~thankful thursday~ stoking the gratitude fire

Posted on November 23, 2017 by marybethrew

11/16/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

i am thankful for dragons. we have fondly referred to our house as the dragon house since quinn was about 5 years old. all three of us love dragons. like many households in oregon, there is a head on the wall as part of our interior décor, but in our case, it’s a sculpted glittering dragon, not an elk.

a friend commented on my post for days 11-13 about edges, that dragons used to be drawn on the edges of maps by cartographers who had reached the limit of their geographical knowledge. it took me until just now to put that together with my dragon loving husband who likes to drive off the edges of maps for fun (which i mentioned on day 9).

my friend also mentioned how dragons traditionally guard treasures of rare and unsurpassed value, and i think that in retrospect, this makes them a very fitting guardian of our household. dragons also stood guard over our wedding!

quinn knows that all the best stories contain dragons. he had a dragon theme for his 8^th birthday party, and is often to be found playing video games that involve dragons, reading the wings of fire series about dragons, or creating characters and landscapes for dungeons and, yep, you guessed it, dragons.

there is so much to love. their mystery, their magical capabilities, their indomitable spirit. their ability to wield fire.

fire dragons can be protectors, exhibiting strength and courage. i also think of them having enthusiasm and energy, ready to overcome obstacles in the path.

water dragons might be more concerned with connection, depth, transformation, peace, compassion, healing. but that doesn’t mean they lack courage and passion.

my relationship with fire has been long and not always peaceful. i loved helping my dad “fix the fire” in our cellar wood-burning furnace when i was little, shoving sticks into its bright orange mouth. and of course nothing was better than summer campfires at fish creek campground. however, when our heifer barn burned down, i was only four, and i think a touch of irrational fear of fire stuck with me after that. as a person who tends to feel chilly, i do love wood stove heat in the house, and the handsome fellow who fixes that fire for me daily, and seems to be able to handle flaming hunks of wood bare-handed, is a welding fire building fiery guy. all that hotness is hard to live with, but i manage somehow. (on my tour of the manifold pictured in last night’s post, so he could show me the rainbows, i hung on his every word about how “you have to get the heat right to get the color.” did you know colorful welds are strongest? just as i would have suspected.)

but i digress. about my husband. as usual.

anyway, we’re keeping the gratitude fire stoked at the dragon house.

11/17/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

jumping for joy and full of gratitude to have my dragon boy home at the dragon house.

11/18/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

i am thankful for my great aunt margie. i attempted to write how i feel about her in a post a few weeks after she passed away, and just a few weeks before rich and i got married this summer. today a small memorial was held for her, and many of her loved ones were not included in that, but in a way, i can hear her saying, “i don’t want a fuss.” i don’t know the story behind why it was kept small and all but secret, but i decided instead to focus on my own grieving of her death/celebrating of her life right here, and it’s easy to feel immense gratitude for the unparalleled impact she had on my life. of course, tied up in that is incredible sadness and a gaping hole in my heart. exhausted from selling organic brussels sprouts and cauliflower and butternut squashes all day, i laid down for a while and read back through that post, and shed some more tears. after that, there was only one thing to do. so i got up and made nachos for dinner.

11/19/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

i am thankful for my dog ruby. i don’t actually have my own dog, but at the same time, ruby and i both know we are human-dog soul mates. she’s only the second dog in the world i have felt that way about. i am far from a dog person, and certainly don’t love all dogs across the board. some of them are smelly and some of them are scary, and a little one bit me one time for no reason. but ruby is my doggy love. i am her fairy dog mother when her real family goes out of town or especially when they go camping. she favors comfy chairs over campgrounds. one of our favorite times to be together is for thanksgiving. her family is vegetarian, and the week she spends here while i’m cooking turkey, ham, sausage, and lots of gravy, her mom says is like a dog spa retreat. she is asleep on my lap as i type this. she may eschew camping, but she does love long walks on the beach, just one more reason we are meant to be together, once in a while, which is all i can handle of the responsibility for a canine life. quinn is thrilled to have her for the week, they also have a special bond, and to give our kitties their usual sleeping space with us, ruby gets to sleep in quinn’s room, and he loves the company. borrowing ruby is the perfect arrangement, everyone wins, especially me.

11/20/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

i am grateful that although i would pretty much rather gouge out my eyeballs than play the game risk, the folks at hasbro at least made it rainbow-rific to look at. also, i am thankful my son wants me to play games with him, and thankful for the tip from my friend to serve honeybush tea with honey and heavy cream at bedtime. thankful for drinking in sweetness as the theme of this gratitude-enriched season. and also for parsnips.

11/21 and 11/22/17

~30 days of gratitude~ days 21 and 22

i am thankful for today, the penultimate dorkaversary before we celebrate six years together! rich and i have now been married for 4 months, and celebrate like goofballs when we realize any given day is a significant one (namely, the 22^nd of any month), or when it’s not and we’re just happy to see each other after a long day of work. looking around on a day like this, prepping for a big feast, it’s easy to feel gratitude for all the abundance surrounding us. the food is bountiful and fresh, the boy cranking the apple slicer has grown into a competent helper, loved ones are close at hand, and a kitty is in the empty ham box. the borrowed pup is sprawled on her blanket on the couch, nose pointed towards the wood stove in worship. tomorrow the man i love will shut off the alarm and we won’t get out of bed any earlier than we want to, and we’ll be so grateful for the extra sleep.

11/23/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

happy thanksgiving! it’s been a great big gratitude day here at the dragon house, stuffed with goodness and topped with gravy. i’m feeling thankful for amazon prime getting my new oven element to me on tuesday, because when it gave out on the friday before thanksgiving, it could have presented a minor source of stress (if, you know, there wanted to be anything baked for said holiday). i am thankful for a relaxing morning after a busy night of making pies, and time to play skip-bo with quinn and listen to him read to me about the ice cow goddess audhumla of norse mythology from whose udder flowed four rivers of milk, and about the rainbow bridge bifrost connecting asgard to middle earth, all from one of his library books. i am thankful for how my son’s pursuits inspire me to learn new things; i have so many questions about this cow! i am very thankful for cows, i know i mentioned growing up on a dairy farm during last year’s gratitude posts, and riding around in the passenger seat next to rich, he is used to me mooing out the windows whenever i see a pasture full of cows. i had no idea, until today, that such a cow featured in creation mythology, and i’m thoroughly intrigued. cows are the quintessence of birthing energy in my experience, which includes years of observational and participatory cow midwifery, and this choice of motherly cow likeness licking the father of norse gods (buri) into being, brings me joy. and then we can talk about rainbows some more! you can imagine my delight at having these things brought to my attention through the voice of the son i birthed into being while channeling all of my inner cow mojo over ten years ago. i am thankful for this family i am blessed to be a part of, the wonderful surprises life brings, pie crust confidence, libraries, friends, rainbows, and cows today.

five years of love and light

Posted on December 22, 2016 by marybethrew

retrospective… 4… 3… 2… 1…

y’all, it’s been five years since i fell in love with this man!

five biggies from this past year:

our first trip to the e.r. as a couple; sickness and health: check.
we found dragon house 2.0, in all its wood stove glory, and started the bayou walk tradition, including sightings of a river otter and a baby hummingbird being fed.
rich performed in one flew over the cuckoo’s nest and i broke a board with my hand.
we took our annual trip to new york in september.
we got engaged beside a giant dragon in a magical forest filled with music and fairies.

we’re going out tonight to the same restaurant we went to five years ago for dinner, when we discussed our more or less healthy eating habits, coparenting arrangements, and musical and book preferences. (we had already covered quite a bit of life story background material at the laundromat, so we were filling in the more minor details.) we’ve decided that since we are five years older and wiser, we do not need to re-enact the sitting in his truck (until an hour i will not name) portion of the evening, during which the police came and made sure we were of legal parked-in-a-truck-at-an-unmentionable-hour age. instead, we will go home to bed like the grandparents we are.

my word for 2016 has been “lighthearted,” and though i’ve been struggling with things trying to weigh down my heart, the darkness and heaviness will not prevail. days like this make it ever so easy to remember my blessings, and be filled with lightness of being.

this e.e. cummings poem right here….

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

the paradoxical lightness my heart feels in carrying around another heart… this and many other miracles (e.g. the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart) i plan to spend the next 99+ years studying in depth by this man’s side.

tomorrow i’ll wake up again to more greatest hits of our love soundtrack, and smile just like i do every day when i hear my ring click cheerfully on the glass of the jar of honey i will stir into his coffee and tea. we’ll chuckle about “barticle” the cat insisting that he fits perfectly into a box 2 sizes too small for his 19 pounds. we’ll shuffle around in slippers and pull on sweatshirts and hug and kiss goodbye for another day. and if i’m lucky, i’ll forget whether we kissed and get a bonus one before we head off to work.

then i’ll pick up my kiddo after two long weeks apart, and we’ll all celebrate some more.

happy holidays from our nerdy-glasses family to yours!

and hurray for the return of the sun, to lighten our hearts even more!

simmering a rew part 2 ~ heat thoroughly

Posted on February 10, 2016 by marybethrew

continued from simmering a rew part 1

<3 <3 <3

the demise of summer/fall seems to be what prompts me to traditionally pull some cards from the two decks full of magic and bioluminescence that i keep on hand for inspiration and affirmation, and once again i pulled some for my man and my boy as well as myself. the man cards… turkey vulture and st. john’s wort, all flow and generosity. no big surprise there. flow; of our housing adventures in short sale negotiation, he summed things up with, “it was starting to feel forced, so i knew we needed to go a different way.” generosity: the quote by hafiz on the second card :

“even after all these years, the sun never says, ‘you owe me.’ imagine a love like that. it lights up the whole sky.”

is one i’ve used to describe his love for me before, and it is still so fitting, even after all these years.

whole sky, lit up

and even after all these years, there are new surprises. at a fancy birthday dinner for his mom, rich added a drop of cream to his dessert coffee. i was shocked, because in four years, he consistently uses a giant dollop of honey (or raw sugar if no honey is available) and never once have i seen him use creamer. “i don’t even know who you are anymore,” i fake-wailed, and we shared a belly laugh over our flourless chocolate torte with homemade lavender ice cream.

friday’s sunrise on rich’s truck: “hold on, honey, don’t drive away yet…”

rich told me back in september that he didn’t like hearing me laugh with quinn’s dad over some of the things quinn had said about his first day of school (it was a dad week, so i was getting the first day report over the phone). rich was really careful about how he talked to me about it, careful not to make me out to have done anything wrong, while still communicating a request that i not do it again. it was more protective than jealous. he talked about how he likes my “very musical laugh” and reminded me “he doesn’t deserve it.” imagine someone having an objection to something you’ve done, and while telling you that, managing to make you feel like you’ve just been given a compliment and told how much you’re treasured.

imagine a love like that.

our sushi anniversary date

<3 <3 <3

click here to continue reading simmering a rew part 3

four years

Posted on December 22, 2015 by marybethrew

“You do something to me

Something that simply mystifies me

Tell me, why should it be

You have the power to hypnotize me

Let me live ‘neath your spell

You do that voodoo that you do so well“

~bing crosby, singing my nana and poppy’s song, you do something to me

i researched some family songs for my brother’s wedding present, and the one that my nana and poppy loved, supplied by my mom, felt like one i could easily adopt for our anniversary mix cd this year. whether he is hauling in our christmas tree, letting the cat nest on top of the newspaper he was trying to read, or showing quinn how to do a proper push-up on the living room floor, there is some magic that happens to me that stops me in the middle of whatever task i was trying to accomplish.

and those are just the everyday things. then there are the moments, like when he gets up on stage and dances to come and get your love in taming of the shrew that make me downright giddy. (track one on this year’s cd, of course.)

our interdependence has become a comfortable, well-worn pair of jeans of a routine, and it is anything but stagnant. we find ourselves fine-tuning the division of labor even still, like just yesterday when i discovered i don’t mind changing the vacuum cleaner bag, as long as he still handles everything else in the vacuuming department. i have gotten better at interpreting the grunts that are issued when i ask for the occasional child care favor as “yes of course i’ll hang out with quinn for you, love” and thank my lucky stars once again for the positive examples in my son’s life of a hard-working man and a loving, respectful relationship.

i wouldn’t say that this one has been an easy year, though the marathon of life’s little hiccups in our year one will always give any year a run for its money. it was already looking like coyote had some things in store for us early on in the year, and i am proud to say my prediction that we would be “definitely outlasting bad weather, and looking ahead to contented long days and abundant journeys ahead,” has proven itself to be accurate. as challenging as this year may have been, the overwhelming sense i feel is one of contentedness and abundance.

we have also, as predicted, kept our sense of humor, as coyote teaches, and we seem to always find a way to laugh at the situation, even when it is hard, like missing our pancakes, coming to difficult decisions about buying a house, or crossing our fingers about me finding a job. sharing one small driveway, we park and re-park each other’s vehicles on a regular basis, and while he can get our bumpers to nearly kiss, my truck backing skills usually involve a 10 foot gap, which is what happens when i back up until i am absolutely certain that i am going to hit something. the next morning when i walk him out to his truck for work, he thanks me for parking him part way to work, saving him part of his drive.

i’m gonna stay by you

you’re gonna stay by me

we ain’t gonna need to spell out

no D-I-V-O-R-C-E

we ain’t like tammy and george

we don’t sing them tunes

you and me we’re gonna be more like

johnny and june

~truckstop honeymoon

a lot of the songs on this year’s cd talk about dancing, mostly thanks to the come and get your love pandora station i listen to while i pipette dna. dancing isn’t something we regularly do, other than our once a year date at oregon country fair. (there’s a rising appalachia song on the cd, which is one we did actually dance to while dragonflies buzzed around our heads this summer). but i think of dancing more figuratively with us, the dance that ani difranco refers to (from way back a few cds ago now) “there is nothing like dancing our dance of give and take – one step forward, one step sideways, the helpless feeling when the earth shakes.” our daily dance: my cell phone alarm goes off, his clock radio clicks on some pink floyd or led zeppelin song, bart starts circumnavigating our bodies and homing in for a good petting session, rolling out of bed, him heading to shower, me heading to the kitchen to stir honey into his coffee and whip up a batch of biscuits and gravy, blowing him a kiss as he drives off to work, the healing power of that coming home hug, the kitties once again circling like rings around the planets of our ankles, then taking up posts as gargoyles to oversee our activities until we finally sit down and make laps for them to sit on, snuggling into bed, me shivering, him throwing off all covers but the sheet, laughing once again about our incompatible heat settings, the laughter warming me up to a survivable temperature, and re-setting my internal accumulated day’s worth of angst back to zero and we drift off to sleep again.

gargoyles

laps

Ah, home, let me go home
Home is wherever I’m with you
Ah, home, let me go home
Home is wherever I’m with you

~edward sharpe and the magnetic zeroes

we didn’t know where we would end up when this year started, but we knew we would be here together. and wherever that is, that’s where i call home.

goodness and light

Posted on December 16, 2015 by marybethrew

dear family and friends,

i am not sending a christmas card this year. as far as holiday greetings go, this post is all i’m planning on doing, and if you want to send us any cards, you’ll need to email me for our po box. it’s like we’re in witness protection. i’m planning on sending out cards after we’ve moved permanently, whenever that day comes, but that’s still out on the horizon.

quinn is so big now that he remembers the words from christmas songs he learned last year, and has been breaking into song whenever the mood strikes. he’s starting to hit more of the notes, which warms my heart, though i love to listen to his cute off-key voice. i have had my harry simeone chorale pandora station playing the christmas music i grew up with (it used to come from a reel-to-reel tape, not a smart phone). i shipped out some used books to my nephews, along with some homemade pinecone ornaments that quinn and i put together for our family members. as we worked side by side, wielding scissors and hot glue gun, we sang together, “do you hear what i hear? a song, a song, high above the trees, with a voice as big as the sea…” until we had it re-emblazoned in our hearts. “the child, the child, sleeping in the night, he will bring us goodness and light, he will bring us goodness and light.” these words are pleasingly ambiguous (to those of us with issues) about just which child will bring goodness and light, and really, to what child anywhere, sleeping in the night, does it not apply? they are all so full of goodness and light, at least when they are asleep. (wink)

goodness and light

last night rich and i stood against the wall of the jam-packed gym at quinn’s school and listened to him and his cohort belt out the penguin polka and santa is my buddy. plenty of goodness and light emanating from the kids. it was fun to have them all file in past me (because of our awesome “seats”; thank goodness for my zoom lens) and have all his classmates say hi to me by name, or exclaim, “hey, look! it’s quinn’s mom!”

he bops and sways to the music. love him so much.

all of our christmas things are in our storage unit, because in june when we were packing it all, we just knew we would have everything out again and moved into our new home long before christmas. thanksgiving was going to be the drop dead latest. we were sure we’d be setting up a tree right about now, in that new home, figuring out where the decorations fit into the new space.

said decorations are not just in the storage unit, they are in the far back right-hand corner of the 10 x 26 storage unit, at the bottom, 26 feet deep behind layers of boxes and all of our furniture. there will be no access to any of the christmas items, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. it really clued me in to what the most important necessities are, and makes me thankful for friends and family who are sharing, and especially my mom, who whipped up some loaner stockings for us to use for this year. (this is why she hangs onto extended family members’ ex-boyfriend’s stockings, just yank out their names and embroider a q on it!) quinn’s got a different advent calendar this year, but the lad (a known creature of habit with strong resistance to change) seems to be managing okay since it has a lego star wars theme. next year he’ll have two advent calendars, lucky guy, when the playmobil one resurfaces. we will have to wrap presents in dollar store paper this year, because all of the cloth bags from my mom are buried, and we will have to borrow a copy of the grinch from the library.

so we’re letting go of many things, and it just seemed fitting to let the christmas cards go this year, and keep it really simple. we’re still on vacation, after all.

speaking of letting go, that new house we had our hearts set on is the latest thing we have let go. we spent months waiting for approval to go forward with the short sale, and finally on friday, november the 13^th, we received the approval. then we spent until yesterday not progressing any further, because of one reason and another put in front of us by the people handling it all, and now a full month of frustrating dilemmas has passed us by. rich said it best, “it just feels like it has to be so forced, and makes it seem like we shouldn’t go that way.” i’m paraphrasing him because my brain goes a little fuzzy when he talks to me with that honey voice of his, and he looks at me with those gorgeous brown eyes (with or without reading glasses). let’s not even talk about his sexy beard. actually, we can’t help but talk about it, it compels people to talk about it. people stand around discussing whether he actually dyed it to look so badass. nah, he’s just a natural. so what i’m saying is, we’re still in perfect alignment, as we have been every step of the way.

(those long legs help provide surface area for both kitties to rest on. the eye is also drawn to the flexed biceps while he holds my smart phone to look at sports highlights, which he now operates like a champ! goodness! and light!)

so instead of dwelling on the house, i’m going to refer back to a lesson i was working on learning in the early part of 2015, and not work harder on it than the other interested parties are working. moving forward in our search for dragon house 2.0, i want to continue to bear that in mind. we will continue to do our parts, and trust that the right house is going to be ready for us at just the right moment, without any forcing. from my yoga background, i am reminded of sukham, the balance point between effort and surrender that one seeks in each pose, the place where you find the ease. i think we both feel we’ve come to a point where the effort-to-surrender ratio was getting much too high.

speaking of yoga, this time of year will always be special to me, thinking of the dimly lit partner-pose yoga classes leading up to our first date, the fourth anniversary of which we will celebrate next tuesday. i am sure i will have more good mushy stuff to say about him/us closer to that day, but it’s not too early to start celebrating/being mushy. besides, tomorrow is the anniversary of when i asked him out in the laundromat.

“can we go to a date?” ~brick (i didn’t take this picture… credit to anchorman 2)

wishing you a holiday season filled with the ease of sukham, the gift of music, children nestled all snug in their beds, humor, and an abundance of goodness and light.

love, mb

~rainbow mondays~ so much to celebrate

Posted on December 22, 2014 by marybethrew

quinn and i spent a lovely, lazy saturday decorating the beautiful tree rich brought home friday night. quinn’s sense of tradition is blossoming, and he is both inventing new ones, as well as recalling ones that he finds meaningful.

lots of other celebrating going on as well. my parents celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary on saturday, rich’s parents are celebrating their 50th today (!!!) and my brother and sister in law have been together for 10 years now as of today. oh, yeah, and this other couple i know are also celebrating a happy, and that is understating it, 3 years together….

red: so i don’t know how many of you remember way way back when i invoked salmon medicine over a certain guy i had a crush on in my yoga class, but it seems like maybe it’s working for us. can’t help but rub off on us since we live right in their habitat. all i know is i am crazy about the guy, and grow crazier about him all the time.

red: this winter holdover is living in our tree most mornings and feeding at our feeder. a nice bright red flash to start each day.

orange: quinn always loves hearing me tell about my third trimester pregnancy craving for clementines around this time of year.

orange: silly old bear.

yellow: some of the last of the clinging leaves still need convincing to let go into winter. me too.

green: more of our beautiful tree, with laughing boy.

blue: while the lighting generally sucketh at this time of year for photography, i did manage to have a fun time playing around with the tree lights reflecting on the ornaments.

purple: yeah. like that.

brown and black: that’s squeaky and ms. b, quinn’s new guinea pig friends who thankfully live at his dad’s house, out of reach of our predator kitty cats. he is having a wonderful time being a guinea pig caretaker.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

two years!

Posted on December 30, 2013 by marybethrew

recently it snowed and then got very cold, and we had some issues with our spring-fed, gravity-driven water system. i was reminded of how my inner feminist has completely sold out for the conventional male/female division of labor, and how interdependence with an extremely capable handsome man really suits me. i am sure that if it was just me, i would have been able to fix the problem (it would have taken me at least twice as long) and even speak intelligently about the particular issue that occurred, but i am quite content not to understand much about what happened, having bided my time inside the toasty wood-heated house making the dinner while he handled it. i am also sure he would have managed to feed himself, had i not been in his life, but the thing i am surest of is that neither of us would choose that other version of reality over this.

speaking of the handsome man in my life, he has now officially been my man for two whole years. wow, is it just me or do you guys feel like i was only just recently talking about the mysterious stranger in my yoga class and trying to work up the nerve to chat him up at the laundromat? two years!!!

as you know, since i go on and on about him, he has turned out to be mister exactly right. serious lifelong commitment material. although we are only committed for 99 more years at this point in time, forever is certainly on the table for discussion. i feel unworthy. for our anniversary, i wrote him a love letter and made him a mix cd with a pablo neruda poem inscribed inside the track list; whereas he started speaking not at all cryptically about manifesting the newer, better car he would like me to be driving. with four wheel drive to get me all the way up our driveway in weather such as we just endured, and more room for him to drive it comfortably on road trips we will be taking together. mix cd, subaru. 50 cents, $6 grand. the best thing is, nobody is keeping score.

“your love is better than ice cream, better than anything else that i’ve tried.” i don’t even have to explain a single one of the intentional lyrics i planted on the cd to him. no matter how subtle, he notices every one, knows why each one is significant. which is good, because if pressed, i am not sure i could articulate exactly why the song from the movie zach and miri (hold me up by live) needed to be on this cd. then if i draw attention to any of the subtleties, he pretends to play it cool and oblivious, the same way he will thrust the sports section into my hands open to an article about the romantically sappy way some linebacker just proposed to his girlfriend, and then when i ask him what he liked about the article, will simply reply, “huck it, chuck it, football.”

i, on the other hand, am emotional in the more characteristically feminine role of being prone to weepiness, crying at the drop of a hat, or over the sports page. our living school sang some songs in spanish for our holiday party and it was magical. little drummer boy chokes me up on a regular day, but listening to all the children sing it en español, the non-readers and younger sibling toddlers booming out with “rom-pom-pom-poms” in between all the trickier phrases carried along by the more proficient readers, was quite something. sometimes the tears hit me out of nowhere. my mom sewed a gorgeous tree skirt for us, an amazing, 7-sided, quilted piece of pure beauty, and when i opened the package, sitting alone beside the tree, i wrapped it around myself and cried.

the tone of some of the songs on the cd mix echo my seasonal trend toward emotional tenderness, with a theme threaded throughout of how keenly i feel our mortality in the context of fierce love, how love sharpens the reality of the impermanence of all of this. take your pick. eddie vedder: “it’s a fragile thing this life we lead, if i think too much i can get overwhelmed by the grace by which we live our lives with death over our shoulder.” bob dylan: “and if there is eternity, i’ll love ya there again.” making a cd is partly my lame attempt at transforming the painful, desperate, grasping feelings into something more beautiful. a way to send my thoughts out in the form of music, as sound waves traveling out into the universe. i unclench and let each impossible thought go, each note a thread from a prayer flag, released forever into the infinite wind.

exhaling, i return to the present moment, where my son has just asked me, “mama, could i make you a christmas present?” and more transformations swirl into being, as a boy once filled only with expectations of piles of gifts to be received has suddenly blossomed into one who also gives.

another day ends, and i fall into bed with my love, only to blink and the supposed longest night is already over, my exhausted body unsure it has actually slept at all. the christmas tree lights blink on, and i know a freshly shaved face surrounded by the aura of witch hazel and tom’s of maine woodspice is about to burrow into my neck and wake me up to start another day. (isn’t it funny how certain smells can fit one’s olfactory receptors like a key in a very specific you-were-meant-for-me lock?) i know if i turn to the alarm clock, it will read 5:38 and it will be time for me to go wander sleepily around the kitchen manifesting coffee, breakfast, lunch. but first, i have a minute to hold this special man close and mumble nonsensical accusations about how he is an eskimo just returned from outer space, otherwise he would not be so cold. barely thirty seconds pass and he is already contributing more warmth to this equation than i am, in spite of his shirtless foray into the frigid arctic of our bathroom/igloo. yet another magical manifestation of the combined whole being ever so much more than the sum of two separate wholes.

two years, going on 99. and, because i know you will eventually read this, because you are unswervingly dependable and you always do: i love you rich! even after all these years!

more love and more light

Posted on December 21, 2012 by marybethrew

there is a signed custody judgement.what a relief!!!

happy solstice! there’s more light from here on out!

remember this? time to draw another big tree in this image. yes, we have definitely put down more roots.

since i will not be online tomorrow, and it falls in the same vein of bringing more light and love to the world, i have a few happy anniversaries to dish out.

my godparents will have been married 50 years as of tomorrow. wow.

my mom and dad celebrated 37 years, yesterday!

my brother and sister in law have been dating for 8 years, as of tomorrow, and engaged for 7. if i did my math right.

and last but not least!

tomorrow i will have spent a whole year with this shady character:

we’ve been through a lot in just the one year. i am happy to report that we have only ever argued over whether or not one should rinse eggs before cracking them. and i will gladly rinse all of your eggs for you, my love, for 98 more years, if i can be lucky enough to spend those 98 years with you.

there’s only going to be more love from here on out.

mb

magic & bioluminescence

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