Saturday 5-9
I am grateful for a beautiful day. Rich worked, but he didn’t go in until 8 so we slept until it was daytime instead of “still nighttime” as I describe normal 4:15 wakeups. After he went to work, I meditated, worked on lifelong learner (13th birthday edition) and then spent an hour in the garden, arranging dahlia bulbs, black eyed susan roots, and moth mullein and chrysanthemum seeds in the freshly weeded yellow terrace. Then I drove to pick up my veggies, stocked the fridge, did some more writing and some more gardening, and got on the video call with Quinn. We read about when the nine leave Rivendell, and their fight with the snowy pass on Caradhras, when they turn back and the men have to carry the hobbits through the snow, but Legolas can walk on top of the snow to bring hope back to all that the journey is one they can endure.
Rich came home mid-day and then we spent the afternoon together in the yard. He mowed while I transplanted pansies, verbena, monarda, nicotiana. I planted some more seeds out in the red terrace – hollyhocks, cosmos, scarlet sage. I found him on his knees in the rhododendron bed we planted a year ago, weeding. I joined in and did the perimeter where lots of new columbines are joining the herd.
Sunday 5-10
While I made breakfast, Rich played George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass disc 2, which we had pulled out because Sheryl Crow played such a lovely version of Beware of Darkness the other night. We hadn’t played George’s version yet, but I woke up with the song in my head, and when it came through the speakers when Rich pushed play on track one, it merged seamlessly with what was already in my head. Synchronicity.
“Beware of darkness
Watch out now, take care
Beware of the thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your head
The hopelessness around you
In the dead of nightBeware of sadness
It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for”
Gardened all day on Mother’s Day. Nothing to do but power through. I added ten buckets of compost in the front garden, where the slugs have been preventing any poppies or nicotiana or lilies from growing. I’ve been on regular patrol, and now I have Lauren’s grape poppy seeds on their way to me in the mail to start again. I had a lovely extra visit with Quinn. He showed up at noon after sending me a Sierpenski’s triangle Mother’s Day card, freshly showered and with a button-down shirt on. He dressed up for me.
Monday 5-11
I am grateful Mother’s Day is behind me.
I gardened hard from 6-8am thinking it would rain any second… got lots more compost spread around and seeds are ready for a good soaking. At 3pm there was not really much rain yet, but a wee sprinkle.
Picked up groceries and filled my tank. Just shy of two months on one tank of gas.
Four wilsons! In the bayou. A whole wilson family! And more hummingbird bayou visits to the twinberry.
Tuesday 5-12
Quinn and I started an email story where we each write one line and send it back and forth. It began,
Once there was a boy who lived in a land where
the only things were a chain of islands and the ocean.
I’m excited to see where it takes us!
I am grateful to be starting to learn not to explain myself.
Rich and I went on an errand date to pick up more garden hose, lightbulbs, cat litter, whiskey, and coffee beans, and put gas in the highlander. Then I made nachos, of course. Always grateful for nachos.
Wednesday 5-13
I have been through the abundance meditations twice now and picked favorites. Number seventeen with the flowing stream and bird sounds, “I move through my days lighthearted and carefree knowing all is well,” is good for me to repeat.
Also cathartic is my walk around the rainy yard sacrificing slugs. I’m grateful for balance. Water sounds always help, even if it’s rain. I’m happy about this rain as it is timed very well to soak all the flower seeds I just planted, though I, and the seeds, will be ready for sun again soon!
Yelling also feels good. Playful laugh yelling at Rich’s mischief, yelling at the butthead deer who eat my flowers. Lighthearted and carefree is easier after a good yell.
Thursday 5-14
Grateful for music and literature. One of Quinn’s favorite bands, Ok Go, put out a new song called all together now, and I love it, as well as what they wrote. The song references Rebecca Solnit’s piece where we are melted down in the chrysalis, which I also love.
“There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.
“But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure. But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit.”
~Rebecca Solnit
I’ve been thinking about how being able to live with my choices includes not just my decisions about where I go, how I behave, what I do concerning Quinn and our physical safety and the physical safety of others around us, but also how I speak, write, react, how I treat others. It’s not unique to this time, but right now there seem to be so many opportunities to put this into practice. It helps when I can remember The Four Agreements, to not take personally what is coming from other people. My integrity is based on me being responsible for me.
For me, fear is not weakness; bravery is not absence of fear; delving into emotions is not the opposite of courage. I’ve definitely been swimming in the deep end, emotionally. Anything can make me cry; tonight it was the encouraging note from Quinn’s algebra teacher, for example.
But I know that for me, the alternative to stringing these weekly beads of emotional intensity on a continuous strand, is to let the strand tie me up in knots. There is a certain amount of tension in the line I must maintain; too much slack and snarls start to form. I am grateful for the tool of writing, for the way the strung beads can sometimes reflect light when the sun shines again to remind me when I look back over its length.
Friday 5-15
The sun is coming out, and it lit up every spider web in the woods as I went for an early morning walk. Everything is still wet from the rain, and the wet edges of things allow the light to refract so the edges are visible in a new, crystalline, gossamer way. I love the fresh new beginning of the sun after a three-day rain. I love spotting the spiraling new beginnings everywhere around me, bending the light.
Mercies are new every morning.
