Tag Archives: buoy

encouragement from crab

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i was tagged in a facebook post by a woman whose friend is having surgery for breast cancer, with a request for sending love and encouragement from one woman to another, so her friend would arrive home to a pile of cards and well wishes. it is easy to ignore such a post, because i think it makes us face our own fears, and what do you even say anyway, and then there is the fact that i don’t even know this woman.

but i do know her on some level, don’t i?

aside from the fact that she is a friend of a friend, we’re all one, when it comes right down to it. so i decided to snail mail it up, sent her a mix cd, a buoy quote in a card that i printed, and some beach sand in a film canister. it felt nice to share, and it prompted me to do a teensy amount of writing as well, which i will also share here, in case anyone else can use some encouragement today.

this crab jumped out of the card pile to come to you and i figured out why. cancer and crab are written together in the stars, but i see another layer of meaning. crab wears protective armor on the outside, and follows the moons and tides just the way all of us women do in the salt water cycle of our blood and tears. what’s inside is vulnerable and soft, but crab is tenacious, knowing how to hold on, clinging to rocks as challenging waves wash over, knowing when the best way forward is sideways. crab intuits what needs to be shed, and though it can be extremely vulnerable when it is exposed, it replaces its armor, a little bit stronger each time, taking what it needs to rebuild it from the healing waters of the ocean surrounding it.

i wanted to send you a little beach sand and ocean healing magic, from one woman to another.

~thankful thursday~ in which we sing the last verse

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11/23/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

today i am grateful for a full day to relax and cook only with my microwave.

 

11/24/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

i am grateful for color; the rainbow veggies of market, the orange and yellow leaves of the vine maples, the red violet of my strawberry-beet smoothie and my rose elixir. i’m a rainbow person, but red violet-colored lenses help me see the world with an attitude of gratitude.

 

11/25/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

today i’m thankful for animals, who remind me that it is important to play.

 

11/26/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

last night after a wonderful spontaneous mid-day date of doing nothing, which turned out to be some of the very best something, watching seals and whales play in the ocean surf, rich and i watched christopher robin. i was reminded how grateful i am for winnie the pooh. i loved pooh as a kid, and i remember re-reading pooh when i was a teenager and realizing there was more substance layered in those stories than i had realized. which paled in comparison to how i felt when i started reading the same book to my two-year-old, who gobbled up chapter after chapter. when he had reached the limit of his attention span, he would shift into incorporating pooh stories into every aspect of his imaginitive play. we played pooh sticks whenever we found a nice bridge over a stream, we hauled piglet up to the letter box, we found a new house for owl, we pounded eeyore’s tail back on, we hunted for heffalumps and woozles. the hundred acre wood took up a good percentage of his internal landscape from an early age. i of course had tears rolling down my cheeks over the movie last night, not necessarily sad ones, but the ones that have everything to do with the inevitability of little boys growing up.

 

11/27/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

i am grateful for all of the twinkly lights bringing light into the lengthening darkness.

 

11/28/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

today’s facebook memory was an all-photo post about dolphins from gratitude 2016. it reminded me of my gratitude for their existence in this world, and how they’ve been a symbolic guide for me this year. i chose the word “streamline” for 2018, and of course, there is no better mascot.

i wrote about this on my 40th birthday, as the days were lengthening rather than the nights, and as the first trilliums were blooming, rather than the last blossoms drooping.

“…in a more metaphysical sense, streamlining is a term that makes me think of the ways i spend my life energy, and ways i could conserve it more efficiently. dolphins have been friends of my spirit for more than half my life now, and provide the perfect mascot for becoming more streamlined. some of the definitions of the word focus on how the motion of the fluid around the object is smooth, or the condition of being free from turbulence; however the more i think about it, the less it has to do with the status of the flow of life around me, and more to do with shaping myself in such a way that i present less resistance to the flow.”

this was only part of what i wrote, but i’m focusing on this excerpt because out of all the ways i intended to use this year to streamline, the part about getting out of our storage unit and finally getting all the way moved into our house was not the part i achieved. however, i think i’ve improved on the part about presenting less resistance to the flow. so i’m grateful to my spirit friends who’ve helped inspire me in that area this year.

11/29/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

it’s penultimate post day! it really flew by this year, it doesn’t seem possible that november is already coming to an end. it seems like i’ve only just begun to notate the things for which i’ve felt grateful recently. some of the ones i may not yet have mentioned:

i am grateful for saving 13% on my groceries today because my fairy mother-outlaw snuck a handy coupon onto  my passenger’s seat. best outlaw mother in all the land.

i am grateful to feel like a real adult, depositing my little supplemental income paychecks from my farm job into my son’s savings account. i think the two dudes doing their banking were slightly jealous that he has almost earned enough scottie saver bucks to get the light sabre!

i’m grateful my husband is always burning holes in his clothing so my sewing machine motors don’t seize up due to lack of use. mending isn’t my favorite sewing to do, but for that smoking hot guy i’ll gladly zigzag his clothes back together. i am also grateful to have learned a useful skill set such as sewing from a panel of very talented women while i was growing up.

i’m grateful when the sparks only burn the clothing layers, not the man. (he barely notices, but still.)

i’m grateful for kitties! and wood stove fires!

okay, maybe i’ve mentioned some of these before, but are you sure it was this year?

finally, i’m grateful my son comes home to me tomorrow. i’ll give you three guesses what we’ll be having for dinner on gratitude day 30!

11/30/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

gratitude is powerful stuff. three years of doing this have taught me that gratitude is a self-perpetuating spiral; i keep being pleasantly surprised how many times the words just flowed, because the feelings were so easy to access, because… practice. you get to where you’re just so darn grateful for gratitude.

but now it’s time to sing the last verse of the song for this year. the part of the song where it all comes together metaphorically and the sound waves ripple through the air to touch your heart, and though it has the same melody as before, there are several strains of harmony woven in now, and when you get to the chorus, you reach down to your toes to send the last few notes up a third or a fifth or an octave. you take it higher, you take it on home. you know, that part of the song.

(30 days isn’t long enough if i haven’t been grateful for music yet! good thing we’re squeezing it in before the finale.)

this is where i stall briefly in writing today’s gratitude, because PRESSURE! because finishing a song is something to take seriously and anyone with a perfectionist side can find this to be an obstacle. i believe i finished day 30 sometime in january last year, but i promised myself i’d end on time this year.

so i have been thinking about it for days, and i can’t think of a better way to close the circle on this 30 days than by coming back to where we started, with a certain navigational aid called Buoy. Buoy was stationed in one spot in the sea, but sometimes when he was ready for a nap, he would travel in his mind down the long chain that anchored him all the way down to the sea floor… each color of the rainbow would fade away as he dove deeper, until only those creatures who could create their own light dwelled…

“then down the chain. to the seabed. and there, rooted in the depth of the Sea, Buoy felt a humming. a hum that seemed to come from deeper than the Sea. it reminded him somehow of the song of the Whales. but he did not hear this song. he felt it. it seemed to be a part of who he was. he did not understand that it was he who was a part of the song.”

thanks for singing along, friends.

~thankful thursday~ snails, whales, puppy dog tails

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11/8/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

there is the usual ebb and flow of the gratitude juice, modulated by snags in the fabric of my experience that focus my gaze inwards, and then disasters both natural and unnatural that draw my gaze back outward again. each time the latter occurs, the gratitude surges forth, for all that i have, the health and safety of my loved ones, the ease of my ordinary life. today i feel gratitude for opportunities to be the rainbow in someone else’s cloud, or the buoy on someone’s horizon, in keeping with my theme. and i feel so grateful, in turn, for the buoys who shine their light to me, out on my own horizon, the friends who shine by reaching out and loaning me their ruby dog, the friends who shine at me across  cyberspace and cheer me on, the friends who shine from down the road to make a plan to get together. i wish to use my own light to reach someone else’s gaze from out on their horizon in those same ways.

i’m also grateful for clear nights filled with starlight, and for the miracle of star names that are still lodged in my memory.

11/9/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

today i am grateful for date night on the bay front, for wood stove fires built by the husband i’m dating, for his sweet gestures like starting my car to defrost on a chilly morning, for the way he makes me laugh over his “gratitude” that he did not having to read yet another really long post on day 7 (the night off). i am grateful for him always taking the time to read what i write, and for knowing it means pretty much everything to me (and that he checks this and every other box on a wish list i made 8 years ago). i am grateful for how good he smells and how diligently he sweeps and vacuums me off my feet. i am grateful for his amazing popcorn and the lessons he teaches my son and the way he snuggles the kitties so well that they run to the door to greet him. i am just so darned grateful for every second i get to spend with him!

 

11/10/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

grateful for rainbow food for the eyes, soul, and body.

 

11/11/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

i am grateful for the way my fairy dog pulled me outside and down the trail this morning while the sun was streaming through the trees and the frost was just starting to melt. i’m thankful for the reminder to sniff out paths i might not have gone down in a while, to remember to wander and stop and appreciate. while standing and pondering and letting her sniff, i decided to picture a fairy dog in my mind, tiny enough to wander down the paths of my neural circuitry, but powerful enough to pull me out of well-worn grooves that may not serve me, and into lusher, if more challenging, terrain. i’m thankful that there are always new ways to look, and for getting to see rainbows in the frost.

 

11/12/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

i am grateful that today i got to see some whales.

“’i see them!’ cried Buoy.

closer they came. moving the water with their magnificence. the sweep of their great flukes a metronome to their song.

when they were finally very close, Buoy spoke.

‘hello, Whales!’ he called.

‘hello, Buoy,’ said one.

‘who do you sing to?’ asked Buoy.

‘we sing to the Stars,’ said the Whale.

‘why?’

‘to let them know that we are here, and that we are watching still.’”

~ excerpt from buoy, by bruce balan

11/13/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

this kid. the greatest teacher of my life. would rather be reading his self-chosen geometry textbook than doing his algebra homework. would rather be building a new magic deck than playing a sport. demolishes seaweed snacks in 30 seconds. huge feet attached to lanky legs. sorts his blankets into 3 separate piles while he sleeps: one sheet, one grammy quilt, one fuzzy owl blanket. has a birthmark on his back in the same spot i do. has 21 teeth. doesn’t want to take a bath, but won’t get out once he’s in. loves pancakes. loves nachos; ergo, belongs in this family.

 

11/14/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

gratitude for the st. john’s wort/vitamin B-C-D/iron/rainbow salads or whatever component of that is giving me enough energy to make it through these long/short days and not feel as much like my gratitude gland is shrunken this year. on the contrary, right now it feels more difficult to choose one thing to write a gratitude post about, the gratitude rolodex of my mind offers up too many to choose from some days!

11/15/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

i’m grateful that my boy comes home to me tomorrow, in time for a nice week off from school!

~thankful thursday~ third annual nacho november

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11/1/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

unlike last year when i debated joining in on 30 days of gratitude, this year it was a no-brainer to sign up for a third season. a few of the odds are stacked in my favor, such as my husband being away at play rehearsals on week nights this month (time to write), the pantry being stocked with tortilla chips (easy dinners planned), and on off days, say, when i’m standing over my eleven year old cracking the homework whip, i will just lazy-post facebook memories from gratitude challenges of yore. (let’s be honest, we don’t remember what i wrote, so it’ll be ok if we air some re-runs. it’s not lying, i’m still grateful for all that stuff!) i was curious how much i posted since last november, and while my timeline is sprinkled with fun messages from friends, as well as karate functions and family weddings in which i am tagged, my single original post for the rest of the entire year appears to have been about the founder’s day sale on tillamook cheese. but no one here is deluded about my priorities: gratitude and nachos.  exhibit a, word art compiled from previous 2 novembers’ gratitude topics.

i am grateful for a sweet little out-of-print children’s book by bruce balan called buoy that i found when quinn was obsessed with boats as a toddler. i was a tad isolated as a new mama, which i know is common for new moms, especially those who have moved places without family or friends, and/or been the target of someone’s emotional abuse for a while. the book got lukewarm reviews, apparently some critics don’t think children can be captivated by a story about an inanimate object, but i find it to be a delightful piece of literature, winnie-the-pooh-esque in the way that its messages have meaning for people of every age who might come to read it. i revisit it often, and so does quinn.

on one evening with just the right conditions, Buoy and his friends Seal and Gull were watching for the green flash, and arguing over what caused it. the ruckus dies down, and Buoy decides to trust in his hunch about what was causing the green flash. when he saw it, he flashed his own light as brightly as he could in response, so The Other Buoy could see it, so The Other Buoy would know he was not alone either.

Buoy has a characteristic flash, as all navigational lights do, which in his case is flash flash flash… wait…wait…wait… flash flash flash … wait…wait…wait… (repeat forever). i am trying to be like Buoy in my facebook postings, and if i can’t find anything nice to say, i’m doing a lot of wait…wait…wait… apparently around 11 months of that. but come november, i am set to flash my light as brightly as i can, moored to a sentiment called gratitude that keeps me safely focused on the right things.

the spaces between the flashes are part of Buoy’s identity, part of how his light has the ability to shine out when he flashes it. i’d like to say i have spent my waiting time storing up summer sunshine to boost my ability to radiate light to share with my fellow humans, but as is my usual status this time of year, my light feels depleted. a friend flashed a beam of light recently through a post that had an impact on me. i don’t even think i liked or commented, or told her that it did, we all know how potential meaningful connections slip away into the abyss of the endless scroll-down. but a snippet of what she shared said, “if your body doesn’t make enough neurotransmitters, store bought is fine.” i spent $1.10 on my own self care and brought home st. john’s wort and made myself a “collect light like a plant” tincture that i am happily taking every morning. as the dimmer switch of fall gets dialed down i think i’d like a little help to make the most of what light there is. i am visualizing my newly enhanced light-absorption capacity gathering to myself what is needed and actively converting it into life-affirming, life-giving necessities. anyway, that other buoy shining her light made me feel less alone. and i am grateful for that!

11/2/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

tonight, quinn attended his very first school dance. and today i am feeling grateful for middle school teachers and the invisible capes they wear. the transition from fifth to sixth grade, from elementary to middle school, has been rather daunting, with bumps on the roller coaster ride that hearken back to the ones that derailed his successful matriculation into kindergarten. luckily in this case, he has stayed enrolled past the two-week mark and doesn’t even have any Fs anymore as of this writing. i have now met each of his teachers and i have been delighted to find that they are all wonderful people who clearly care about my kid and every other student they teach. it takes something just a little bit extra to willingly, enthusiastically, spend all day with a rotation of 30-40 (how ‘bout them class sizes?) eleven-year-olds. and then to give up their friday evening to show a crowd of tweens a good time on the dance floor! just feeling very grateful for the local superheroes who teach my kid.

11/3/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

feeling well fed and quite sleepy after a bowl of curry winter squash soup (varieties: scarlet kabocha and buttercup, if you must know), it is easy to feel a lot of gratitude for the good people and land over at gathering together farm. i lucked into this sweet veggie-slinging gig over 4 years ago and i still feel like i’ve won the lottery every time i go home with my saturday haul of organic produce. this year i feel like i leveled up as a part-time farmer when i embarked on an evening you-pick adventure with my husband and son in late august to “clear out” the siletz tomatoes still lingering on vines slated for ploughing under the next day. we cast our long twilight shadows across the first 10 feet of a tunnel that felt like it might be a mile long. we filled up the bed of the pickup truck with tomatoes too ripe to go to market, and therefore no longer worth the price of the real estate they were occupying. now they are filling up our bellies every week, tucked away in their 67 quart jars for the winter. and the good farm people acted as though i was doing them a favor by not allowing those ten feet of the crop to go to waste, when i was really the one reaping all the tomato wealth a gal would ever want to put up for one season. don’t tell nachos, but i love pasta just as much, and a pot of organic sauce simmering on my stove is a happy thing in cool november weather.

 

11/4/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

cracking the homework whip on a sunday night is making me feel grateful for another book, one that i read back when my three-year-old was full of intensity and a sense of his own agenda. the book playful parenting was not the only source of the concept that has been so helpful in my parenting journey of infusing even the most mundane aspects of parenting with play, but it was the most succinct and direct communication of the concept i came across.

middle school is turning out to be a timely moment to recall this concept, and i’m feeling pretty grateful to have remembered to engineer a playful approach to math homework just 6 weeks along. at 3 (and 4, 5, 6, & 7) he just would not put on his clothes or get into the car when asked, but he would get dressed in his hogwarts robes or hop in the batmobile. “do your math homework,” has been about as appealing and likely to rise to the top of his priority list as “put your clothes on,” but once it became about slaying goblins, he was down.

i was just telling him about when he was 3, and how even that long ago, he had the endearing quality of completely ignoring what i was saying. back then, i was explaining to him in calmer moments how i really wanted him to acknowledge what i was saying, even if it meant just telling me you heard me and aren’t going to do what i asked, for whatever reason. one time when he sensed that i was about to get testy after several repeats of a request receiving no response, quinn shouted, “i recognize your knowledge!” which given how it made him giggle tonight may soon be trending at our house as the way to “use your words” when you ignore your mom.

11/5/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

i wrote about my gratitude for karate during my first annual gratitude challenge, and just over a week ago i tested for my green belt in the art of kenpo. as i sat nursing my sore muscles, i reflected on what i have learned from this journey the past two years since that writing.

like my time on board a schooner, karate has turned out to be something i love even more than i anticipated. also like sailing, i have taken some serious hits and have been lately in a process of reassessing to try and articulate what i am doing, risking injury on a regular basis, to continue to practice and progress in this art. my years of sea time ingrained in me a respect for the ocean that means i’ll never take it for granted, but also means i don’t live on a boat anymore.

when i was a kid, i added “find out how i would do in a real fight” to my bucket list. i’m not sure i ever wrote it down, or admitted it to anyone, but this has always been something i wondered about myself. it turns out, i can hold my own in a sparring simulation-of-real-fight, and it’s sort of thrilling to know that for sure. what i said 2 years ago still holds true: i would not cower.

while i feel my odds of surviving any attack encounter have greatly increased as a result of my training, i am also very much more aware of how vulnerable i truly am, and the limits of my skills against truly sinister forces that exist in the world. it’s not that i live in fear of being attacked in my actual life in rural oregon, and truly i know i would handle any true attack with much more competence, confidence, and reflexive skill now than i would have any time before 3 years ago. it’s the old conundrum of, the more i know, the more aware i am of exactly how much i don’t know. (i remember rolling this around in my mind when the knife attacks happened on the portland trimet bus, the same bus system i used to ride around on several times per week with my infant… would i, given my training, be able to counter a knife attack any better than those men who stood in harm’s way? probably not.) i am keenly aware of my own limitations as a result of paying this much attention to honing this skill set.

for example, my husband is 3 inches taller than me, but weighs one and half times my weight, plus in the dimensions that really matter, such as upper body strength, he is truly four times my size. when i sit shoulder to shoulder with him, it hits home that anyone in his same size range (a good percentage of the male population) who truly wished to do me harm, even without any training, most certainly could and probably would. my best bet is to be married to a soul who would never raise a finger or even his voice to hurt me, because as i know too well and is well documented in statistics, harm is ever so much more likely to come to a woman from within her home than from anonymous sources. if i were to be faced with an actual attack, i know my non-karate husband would stand in front of me and be the one to do the actual defending. (i haven’t had a fit of mushy husband gratitude overtake me yet on this year’s posts, but it’s sure to happen. so grateful for him!)

a few years ago, i went out there on that mat because of my kid, and after all this reassessing, i’m staying out there because of my kid. it’s a bond between us, and a way we can both practice asserting ourselves in the world, in a safe environment. it’s also how i know i would stand the best chance of being able to defend him in a fight, because you never know.

i have learned what my assets are in a fight, how to assess the opponent, see their weaknesses, and use them to my advantage. my reflexes are trained through all the repetition – i routinely catch heavy round vegetables falling off the veggie scale at farmer’s market, so these skills even play a practical role in my every day life.

before my test, i helped one of my fellow testers adjust some things in one of his forms, and at the end of my test, i read aloud the green belt pledge which plainly states that the requirements of this belt rank are to actively teach in the art. huh, i guess that does start happening if you just keep showing up long enough. i remember the thing that hit me from the blue belt pledge, last time around, that i will actively defend the weak and vulnerable; and the purple belt pledge before that, to never use my skill to harm or make afraid. there is much more to the art than how to punch and kick and win a fight. one could even apply these principles to voting in tomorrow’s election! i’m grateful for my instructor and all i have been able to learn, as well as the character traits that have been instilled in my son that reach a long way beyond the edge of the mat.

11/6/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

one of my goals is to only be grateful for nachos one time during this round of gratitude… and today is the day! it’s national nacho day, and gosh i think there’s something else going on, too. oh yeah, voting! it was my pleasure to vote against several appalling measures on our local ballot, and i think everyone ought to reward themselves for voting with a big plate of nachos. last year i could not think of any appealing images of nachos, but as i was scrolling through the toddler archives i came across one i quite like.

vote nachos! vote gratitude! gratitude for voting! gratitude for suffragettes, the 19th amendment, and the equal rights amendment (oops, still haven’t ratified that last one yet! gratitude for e.r.a. pending future ratification!)

11/7/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

i am grateful that i can just take the night off, because you don’t have to get an A in gratitude!