Tag Archives: shadows

~thankful thursday~ the helpers

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11/11/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for weekly date nights, for blackberries pulled out of the freezer and turned into syrup for date night cocktails, and of course for my handsome date. The photos are from other dates, we did not go to the golden gate bridge this evening, just to the Noodle Café, for which I am also grateful. But I do get to go to some very cool places with him when I am riding in the passenger seat, even when it’s not vacation.

 

11/12/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

I was having another one of those “grateful for husband/kitties/popcorn, again?” moments, wondering whether it was worth repeating all the same things over again that I am always grateful for. Then I looked back at my memories, as I’ve got a good pile of previous year gratitude posts to fall back on if I am already going to be repeating myself. I saw that one year ago today, my dad was spending the night in the hospital after a scary heart rate drop. A year later, he has a pacemaker and has re-emerged from retirement yet again and is back driving bus, but now with the proper number of beats per minute. My post from two years ago concerned butterflies and migrations and extra trips I had flown in 2019 to visit my parents, including the very last one I took there in October that year while my mom was having radiation. I am so grateful to be able to say that she is cancer-free and he is marching steadily to his new beat and in four more days they will both be boosted. My gratitude for my parents’ health is of course both amplified and shadowed by my husband’s loss of two parents in one year. But I’ve noticed that at least for me, this gratitude season always seems to involve looking into shadows, trusting that stories about shadows are so often secretly stories about light.

 

11/13/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

Grateful for a blue-sky farmer’s market day, a long evening nap on the couch by the wood stove, and bagels, the college roommate of nachos. (I took no good photos of my rainbow display today, so this one is from a few weeks ago; now there are more root veggies and fewer eggplants, but still colorful and abundant.)

 

11/14/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

While not vacationing in Oklahoma, I was grateful repeatedly for strangers who helped us take care of things. There was C, who reassured us that we were moving Nancy into assisted living at the exact right moment and not a moment too soon, and then texted me after her first night to let us know Nancy had enjoyed hot cocoa after dinner! There was E, who sat patiently with us in the bank, untying confusing paperwork knots and offering real sympathy, sharing her own story of loss even though we were randoms revolving through her office. There was J who sat with us in the funeral home, explaining the steps to this Advanced Adulting task over again when I got lost. She radiated sweetness, kindness.

And finally, I will be grateful forever for D, the nurse on 3 West at St. Francis hospital who could tell, without being able to talk to her, that Nancy needed her room a little bit warmer to be comfortable. D, who received word of decisions made in accordance with Nancy’s wishes to remove feeding tube, then a day later to remove oxygen cannula, and whose hands carried out those important jobs. D, who applied chapstick, and told us about Nancy puckering, appreciating the attention to her dry lips despite having maxed out the morphine drip. Into the isolation room she would hustle when the morphine drip beeped its “downstream occlusion” alarm, proclaiming, “it’s the song of my people!” And would joke along with us about how Nancy was just trying to get us to change the subject. D showed us her trick of being able to write both backwards and forwards with both her left and right hand. Instead of logging into the isolation room computers, she would write backwards on the glass doors, to be able to input her notes when she exited a room. D has been on the COVID ward since the pandemic began, so she has had time to perfect this skill. Concurrently with Nancy, she had two pregnant patients and was worried for them. She also had a belligerent patient who kept ripping off his cannula, who then signed himself out AMA. It’s no joke in there. When a patient from the psych ward was also COVID positive and on suicide watch, she would play tic-tac-toe with them using the dry erase markers, sitting on the other side of the window. She thought Nancy was “just a doll,” and shared about her work at the facility her Grandma had lived in. She understood dementia but it didn’t seem to get her down. She would ask her Grandma and her other residents, when they told her each incongruous story, “how old are you?” And when they said 39, or 56, it often made the story make marginally more sense. After two different days of D having a feeling “this might be her day,” based on Nancy’s vitals, she finally told us, “I’ll see y’all on Saturday,” the day before Nancy died. We did not see D on Saturday, but I’m so grateful for the days she took care of Nancy and of us.

 

(originally posted two years ago)

11/15/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

Still grateful about this.

Happy Monday, friends.

 

11/16/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

I am grateful for books! There are some gems in this rainbow of recent reads.

 

(from gratitude 2019)

11/17/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

Today I am grateful for the Ghost of Gratitude Past.

~summer shorts~ butterfly shadows

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I have been gathering the dried seed heads of the various columbine flowers that grow in my garden, and was headed to the final patch, the one that grows under the butterfly bush with the dark purple flowers, which are in brilliant bloom in late July.

I was so focused on the seed collection task, hunched over and looking down, that I was startled to see a shadow among the bush’s own shadow that was moving, a flutter that betrayed its being cast by something more than leaf. Abruptly, I stood up and almost hit my head on a butterfly.

This swallowtail had such tattered wings that I could see the purple of the flowers through the hole in its left forewing. It was also missing the frilly lobe that should be along the trailing edge of the left hindwing, and had other torn and frayed edges, signs of a long, hard journey, perhaps beating to windward.

It spent a long time sipping from the bright orange throats of the dark purple flowers and let me take close photos on that bright sunny day. I was grateful for this little reminder of the butterfly effect of gratitude, grateful also for the visual reminder that we may be tattered and beat up, but we should keep going, that there is still beauty in our surviving, that there is still sweetness to drink in.

I find it interesting that I saw its shadow first, even while looking down. I am peering into shadows even in summer, because if 2020 was a butterfly, it would be the most shredded looking one still flying the friendly skies. Even though July is full of bright sunshine and winged beings for the sun to shine upon, this is a different sort of summer in a different sort of year.

Normally July is a time of flying around the country visiting family, this time of wings and flight. Instead, this July is a month of being still and figuring out how to be okay with that, grieving the loss of that time with beloved kin.

As I peer into the shadows, I must remember that at least these shadows are being cast by butterflies, and take note that it is also the time of year to stop, spread my wings out on a leaf, and just absorb some sunlight.

~thankful thursday~ trilliums are red violet, shop towels are blue

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~timeline/gratitude~

Saturday 4-4 With all of the mask-making theory coming across my screen, it’s no wonder I woke up thinking about the people sitting at their sewing machines to produce PPE to donate for health care workers. It called to mind a saintly woman I haven’t thought of in a long time, Grandma Jo, who used to lead us in rolling torn bedsheet bandages for missions when I was a small child. She was not my grandma but she was everyone’s grandma.

When Rich alerted me that some studies are showing that blue shop towels provide a superior material for making masks, I had to admit that I was not surprised.

Quinn is back in a phase of wanting to binge watch all of Vi Hart’s math videos. Today, after Quinn and I spoke, she put out her first-author publication about contact tracing to digitally slow the spread of the virus. What an amazing woman. Vi Hart is extraordinary, and I am not sad that Quinn idolizes her. She is the Isaac Newton type, and I’m not even going to hold that against her.

I was visited by birthday santa yesterday, then a birthday easter bunny left a big pile of veggies on the door step. Then camp boss must have been birthday tooth fairy, because she made lasagna rolls for dinner and a peanut butter pie for me tonight, with a card and flower bulbs. I am so grateful for my dear friends who made sure my pandemic birthday didn’t slip by uncelebrated.

~timeline~

Sunday 4-5 I slept in (it felt super late) until 7:30. I made coffee and we ate more peanut butter pie to give me the energy to cook potatoes, eggs scrambled with spinach and garlic and topped with leftover sausage gravy.

Q and I spent almost two hours on hangouts today doing math doodles. His choice of activity lately is to watch Vi Hart videos “with me” meaning he’s watching them, I’m watching his face in hangouts and maybe also playing the video on my phone. But mostly just looking at him because it’s all I want to do. I suggested that today we bring graph paper to our hangout and do some of the math doodling she talks about and we worked on Pascal’s triangle and Ulam’s spiral and then he wanted to do a Fibonacci spiral. When he had drawn the squares and it was time to draw the spiral he said, “the perfect spiral in any given square of your series is the same as the infinitieth iteration of the net thingie…. I think for my next programming assignment in javascript I should program a Fibonacci spiral and have it draw the spiral using the distance between two pixels, I could have a totally netted up Fibonacci spiral … hmm, where did I put my pencil?” Absent-minded professor Quinn.

Grateful that some are using this time to kick coronavirus butt. Grateful that it is also okay to not be a super-efficient pandemic producer and to be just managing to do the daily necessities and not invent gravity or write King Lear or cure any diseases or sew a hundred masks or write any books or even any chapters.

Cooked stir fry, joking with Rich that he could do it (it is fabled by his children that his stir fry is the yummiest in all the land, but alas, I have never tasted this mythical ambrosia.) In the middle of cooking the carrots, I had to turn off the burner and go outside with my camera to witness the rainbowiest rainbow I have ever seen. It hung out over our house/forest for a very long time.

I am feeling a little withdrawn. I know that social distancing is really a physical thing in time and space, not a social thing in terms of connecting with our loved ones, and that connections matter even more right now. And yet, I feel very depleted and unable to handle much connection, cannot handle much discourse without totally wiping out everything I have left in my emotional reserve, and defaulting to less is more when it comes to communication. Trying to find a balance with connecting in ways that do not contribute to the depletion, but instead help to replenish the reservoir.

Monday 4-6 Having mutual pep talks with Lau, about how we need to cut ourselves some slack. I could not get started on work this morning, so I graded camp boss’s son’s home school science labs and swished the toilets. Now I’m feeling like I can tackle some work with audio Harry Potter for company. Something has got to give. We have to be kind to ourselves.

Tuesday 4-7 Today was sunshine and birdsong. Today I parked a lawn chair in the bayou and did an hour and a half of data analysis overlooking the trout lilies.

John Prine passed away today, such very sad news. I have loved his music since the days I dragged my guitar along on schooners and we would sit around on deck at night and sing Angel from Montgomery and Paradise, all the way until now when I burn his songs onto my love’s mix cds, because “in spite of ourselves, we’ll end up sittin’ on a rainbow.”

 

~4-8 gratitude~

I spent an hour in the bayou this morning while it was sunny on the trout lilies. Heavenly.

Quinn and I sink into an hour and a half of hexaflexagon making on our hangout, easily folding ourselves into this comfortingly familiar activity. Like a plate of nachos or a hot bath, it soothes us to just sit together and crease paper strips into a long accordions of triangles, then twist them into a foldy hexagon. His face smiles at me through the curve of the tape dispenser among the screenshots I have gotten in the habit of capturing while we spend our space phone call together each day. I started drawing butterflies on my hexaflexagon, so that when I fold it, they can trade wings, change directions of their flight, and reunite their wings in cycles.

 

~timeline~

Wednesday 4-8 Grocery store run – first in two weeks and two days. Needed coffee and will soon need dairy products. I buy organic milk as usual. I think about dairy farmers as I place the carton in my cart and push it towards the self check-out. Without the restaurants and schools they normally supply with milk they have been dumping it into their manure pits. I am not sure the organic farmers are in the same predicament – I suspect not. As a dairy farmer’s daughter, this whole category of thought makes me want to weep.

It was announced today that Oregon schools are closed for the rest of the school year. I know we all saw it coming, but the response among fellow parents seems to be dismay. I feel that ship had already sailed for me – I was already operating under the assumption of done for the year, but I also have a much easier schooling situation than some, with just one thirteen-year-old. He is not a senior, he is not a small child. It is an oddly “good” time to have a pandemic, middle school (raise your hand if spending some of your seventh grade year at home would have been okay?). He is fairly self-tending, without any major high stakes like graduation and college entry looming. If anything, this is freeing him up to pursue his chosen learning endeavors, and I secretly hope he really likes it and wants to choose to continue it (but please let it be by choice in fall 2020, not because of pandemic reasons.)

Amanda Shires’ iso-lounging show tonight was a tribute to John Prine. Amanda and Jason shared that the advice to couples they had received from John and Fiona, the most important thing from their perspective, was to stay vulnerable. Both Rich and I seem to have been overcome at the same moment by a sudden cloud of cat hair in the living room.

Thursday 4-9 Rich’s 50th birthday!

I gave him his painting right away in the morning, I couldn’t wait! He loved it. Then I made him french toast and sent him off to work. I ordered us Sorella’s for dinner: lasagna, rigatoni and meatballs, caesar salad, garlic bread, a half rack of ribs, and chocolate cannoli for birthday dessert. I lit the tall taper rainbow candles, sat on his lap and sang him happy birthday. Then we both got sleepy in our chairs and fell into bed as usual.

all found artistry is on etsy and is the same artist who made my wedding earrings; check her out!

I had a moment where I needed to clear the table so Rich could eat his ribs there (instead of his chair in the living room), but he came to the kitchen before I had a chance to clear it, and I found that I could not let him clear anything, as this is now my work place as well as my virtual parenting space. I’ve been camped at the kitchen table for weeks now, and I’m going to need to be there again tomorrow and know where to find things. It took me a few minutes to realize why clearing the table was such a big deal but when so many things feel out of control, it amplifies one’s need to control the little things when one can.

Planning ahead for Friday game night hangout, Quinn decided we should design our own d and d dice (4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12- and 20-sided) out of paper and then make up a game to play using them. I knew it would take us far longer than Friday to make such a thing, but agreed it sounded fun and we started in on our project.

~meme of the day~

“It’s just that masks are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.” ~ the Dread Pirate Roberts

~timeline~

Friday 4-10 Today might be a little hard. It is day 14 since the family visit but Quinn has been thinking it over and he wants to stay at his Dad’s until “we hit our peak” and then come back here to “ride out the rest,” and I am struck by his maturity level and how literate he is on this subject. So I am supporting his decision and he is not going to come home today as we had tentatively planned, and I’m trying not to think about how our peak is still estimated to be in the future and how this estimate can change based on so many factors out of my control.

~4-10 gratitude~

I am feeling grateful today for our continued incomes, our solid relationship, and strangely, the timing of this in my life’s timeline. Lauren and I talked about how there were times in our lives that would have been so much worse to have had to live through a pandemic. I mentioned last post about having had far worse birthdays – those were spent under the same roof with a person I am so thankful to not have been stuck in shelter-in-place with back at that time because, oh, lord. It makes me mindful of those who are stuck in homes in abusive circumstances, and seeing how high emotions are right now, I know in my gut, without having to check statistics that I am sure would only confirm, that abuse is skyrocketing behind so many closed doors. Just like I’m grateful for this timing for my son – who is neither a toddler nor a 17 year old, and who is dealing very well with missing seventh grade, I am ever so grateful for my life situation, safe at home under the same roof as a wonderful, kind husband. I am also grateful to have heard from my parents on my birthday and hear my dad jump briefly on the line to tell me, “I had a cold but I got over it.”

This week has been a sunshine daydream and I’ve spent many of my work hours in my bayou office beside the trout lilies. I keep my camera handy in case a hummingbird visits again, but mostly I’m pressing data through the playdough fun factory at a pretty high level of efficiency, considering this is a pandemic and all. Today I did see an osprey briefly circle above the spruce boughs, and the sun shone through its fanned tail feathers so brightly that the light spots shone like stained glass, outlined by the dark feathers against the clear blue sky.

The trout lilies are starting to drop petals and some of them have seed pods starting to swell, but the late bloomers still have their petals and have been throwing them back in a sun dance all week. A time to mourn, a time to dance.

The trilliums, too, are beginning to age, but while they look a little more weathered, they are also turning the most beautiful shade of red violet. This makes me think of Glennon Doyle’s pep talk the other day about how we need to burn the memo we received that says, “my role as a parent is to protect my child from pain.” She says it better than I could paraphrase, but the gist is that pain is going to shape our kids, is shaping them right now, in this painful time, and they are going to be all the more amazing and strong and resilient and brave and wise and smart and compassionate because of it. Burn the memo, because our job is not to protect them from it. I don’t mean that I won’t protect him from physically catching this virus – I will – that is my job, as much as it is in my power, to protect him from physical harm – but protecting him from the emotional pain of knowing about it, from understanding the impacts it is having on his community and the world, no. He is grappling with that in his own way and I’m not going to try to keep him from experiencing that. I wonder just how many young people are deciding to pursue medical careers as this pandemic unfolds. I would not be surprised if there is a surge in nursing and pre-med enrollment in the years to come. At the end of the day, humanity is still humanity, and we create new meaning even as we mourn the death of our old normal. We may come through this season of shadows more weathered and beat up, but we are also turning a deeper shade of red violet.

~thankful thursday~ gratitude garland

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11/29/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

At noon today, Rich and I were standing in the frosty back yard again, noticing how incredibly low the sun was in the sky at the apex of its climb for the day. This is routinely a thing which I lament; my fear, dread, and dislike of cold darkness have been foregone conclusions for all the years of my life. But without winter, would the sunlight linger at such acute angles to the ground on which I stand? Would it illuminate the webs, and then the frost, with such iridescent rainbow vividness?

Developing the gratitude gaze is a little bit like getting in the beachcombing zone. Once you learn how to see the fossil, agate, or shell you’re looking for, even if you go longer stretches between seeing them, you have your eyes focused just the right way to eventually see the next one. Once I started seeing rainbow spider webs, I knew how to see them, and started seeing more of them. Once I started to seek out the blessings in my life to start stringing them on my strand of popcorn and cranberries, I kept seeing more and more of them, and the strand just grew and grew.

I feel less like I need to rush through winter and cling to the coming of spring to keep me from succumbing to the darkness. The buds of spring give way to butterflies, the bursting blooms of summer give way to webs which give way to frosty fallen leaves. At all of these moments, there are qualities to admire and beauty to savor. This gratitude practice has helped me start to trust in it.

True, the angle of the sun this time of year increases the length of the shadows. But it also means there are afternoon sun rays beamed at just the right angle to produce a rainbow in the spider web, something that would not be the case in the height of summer. It means the morning sun creeps up gently enough to set the frosty grass aglow.

Looking into the long shadows is not always a deep dive into darkness. I am grateful for back yard walks with my husband today, and grateful that so many stories about shadows end up being stories about light.

11/30/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

The hummingbirds were nestled all snug in their hummingbird-down sleeping bags. It was cold in the Land of Gratitude.

Inside the dragon house, the wood stove had been stoked by the husband person, the kitties were snuggled on laps, naps had been taken, and we had eaten another Thanksgiving meal that couldn’t be beat (and I don’t mean nachos!).

shadows and light

Tying off the end of this strand of my gratitude garland across my corner of the web, I looked back to try to see where the other end was knotted, but it reached out so far behind me that all I could feel was a little tug on my soul.

please

As I simmered in my slow cooker, I could feel my molecules starting to align into a new arrangement, just the first hint of the influence of a month-long Quest causing the molecules in solution to align with an almost magnetic inner compass bearing calibrated to a true north called gratitude.

thank you

It’s full of shadows here in my slow cooker, but I am doing my best caterpillar soup meltdown meditation, spending the dark season doing the building and gleaning and restoring in anticipation of the promise of soaring in sunshine among bountiful blooms in seasons to come. This chrysalis of mine got its name from the Greek word for gold, and although that name might refer to the droplets of gold meticulously painted onto the outside of the monarch’s container of transformation, I think maybe it could also have something to do with what’s developing within, waiting to emerge and unfurl its wings with the daffodils and cherry blossoms, come spring.

I am grateful I don’t need to tie up every metaphor I used this month into one cohesive final chapter. I am grateful that I do not need to get an A in gratitude. B is for Butterflies, after all.

 

12/2/19

~30 days of gratitude~ Epilogue

Rich cried himself to sleep last night because, “nothing to read.” As I climbed into bed, I handed him a blue shop towel, and told him a story about how the Gratitude fairy will come back next November, even though she needs to hibernate for the winter now.

I am grateful for laughter and love.

I am writing this epilogue just to declare that there is no way in the world that I would be able to write four years of daily November gratitude posts without this guy’s support and encouragement. There is no way. I asked him last night if he ever felt I revealed too much about our life on the internet, and he just chuckled and said, “well, that ship has sailed.” He never gave me so much as a disapproving look or held me back in any way. Instead, when I talked about something else besides him during the first week of the first year, I remember him lamenting, “I was a one-hit wonder!” He makes me laugh and keep writing.

It is early morning and I am sitting on the couch, having been invited here by my son who is up extra early on Monday morning after a well-rested long weekend. He is reading his book and we are snuggled under fuzzy blankets by the wood stove. The page has turned, and it is December, though I’m still feeling grateful, my garland of popcorn and cranberries strung in a prominent place in my heart to remind me how.

I am turning to writing other writings that have been on the back burner for the month. If anyone wants to read more of my writing throughout the year, and not just in November, I have a blog that I post on roughly once a week, though the subject is not limited to gratitude. A lot of times I end up posting photo rainbows or updates about Quinn for his Grammy, the origin story for many a mommy blog; it is definitely not a food blog, though nachos do get mentioned occasionally. Oh, and the November gratitude posts are all archived there as well, for easy binge-reading when next November seems like a long time to wait. A few years ago I started a facebook page for my blog, and have been posting there consistently so that people who prefer to follow along that way (vs. the three of us who still use blog feed readers) can do so. If you have any trouble finding where to like/follow it, let me know and I will send you an invite.

A final thank you to all of you lovelies who have joined in and encouraged this crazy habit of mine. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

~thankful thursday~ butterfly effect

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11/21/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

When the frost covering my windshield called for me to dig up my ice scraper this morning, Quinn said, “Ooh! Can I help?” And I felt so grateful sitting in the driver’s seat, sipping my coffee, while he did his detail-oriented scraping.

Riding on a school bus full of seventh graders headed East on Highway 20 this morning, I felt grateful (I realize that sounds far-fetched, but it’s true). Quinn and his friend played chopsticks, coconuts, and I Spy, requiring nothing more than their hands and voices to be entertained indefinitely. The tree-filtered sunlight projected the smiley faces drawn on the frosty bus windows across the gray seat backs, and they danced and smiled and stretched larger as we drove along.

A Newport grad gave us a campus tour, and then we watched the women’s basketball team be amazing. Quinn’s sound sensory overload in the basketball arena quickly dissipated when I distracted him with my Sudoku app. Watching his awesome teachers handle everything so capably, I felt very grateful. I feel especially grateful for teachers like the one who shared with Quinn her own story of growing up in two households, and how jazzed she was when she got to her college dorm and had all of her things in one place at long last. He is with others more and more, and with me less and less, so it makes me feel good that others care enough to relate to him on such a meaningful level. The boy, all the kids, the teachers, the grad, the team, all made me feel optimistic about the future.

After my day of chaperoning, I was grateful to check a very big item off the to-do list, and Quinn now has a passport application pending. A swim lesson and a karate class later (grateful for these instructors as well), and now we have eaten our nachos and are toasting with kitties by the wood stove. We have eaten nachos an undisclosed number of other times this week already, and I am grateful that my dudes never complain about having them no matter how November it gets around here.

 

11/22/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

One of the best things that ever happened to me happened during the cold, frosty, dark part of the year. I was a single mama having just debuted a schedule including two father-son overnights per week. One of those nights of the week featured a yoga class to which I signed up, and there was a handsome man in the yoga class, and we went on our first date on the shortest day of that year, seven years and eleven months ago.

Now his name pops up in my phone as “Rich husband person” with a picture of us being wind-whipped on Agate beach in our wedding attire, the day after we got married, two years and four months ago, and laughing our faces off.

This morning as we wished each other a happy dorkaversary (as we do on the 22nd of any month) he teased that I had probably already run my background check on him by this point in the year, but as you may have noticed, I write things down. According to my documentation, my trusted background checker had not yet reported back on his worthiness as a crush. Soon, she would give me two thumbs up, and our yoga teacher (who would end up officiating our wedding) would pair us up as partners and start assigning us some partner poses that made it somewhat difficult to focus on the breath.

Recently we went on a date to the play Tiny Beautiful Things, an amazing performance we both thoroughly enjoyed, though I basically sobbed my way through it. The play (and the book it is based on) peer into the shadows, much the way I have spent this November, but ultimately the story shines such a warm light out to the world. As we settled into our seats before the show, the woman next to me joked, “I only brought enough tissues for myself.” I reassured her that I had brought some for me, then turned to Rich. “Honey, I hope you brought something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue shop towel! Of course. Industrial strength.

I’m grateful for his steady, stable presence. So big and strong, yet very flexible – as evidenced by the way he is wrapped right around the pinkies of three granddaughters. We’re a great team, through thick and thin, and even internet swooning.

 

11/23/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

Because religious dogma and personified male deities are subjects I have grappled with in my life, I have taken a long time to embrace the application of the action verb to pray to my personal noun, but when I look at the way I relate to the spirit and energy in the universe, I find that there are a few one-word messages I say to it that are prayers.

Each day as Quinn leans towards me, letting me kiss the top of his head before he lugs his giant red backpack off to middle school, I inhale his cinnamon scalp, then exhale a prayer for his safety as I pull away from the curb. Please.

When I kiss my husband as he goes off to build metal fuel tanks out of fire aboard floating grease tubs: Please.

Each time I think of Mom awaiting the results of her most recent round of medical tests: Please.

I utter many prayers of Please. Prayers of Thanks? I think I spend November intentionally focusing on these, because the scale is usually tipped well over to the Please side of the balance the rest of the year.

My intriguing son. Thank you. My loving husband. Thank you. Mom, Dad, kitties, wood stove fires, library books, coffee, veggies, nachos. Thank you. The way my fairy dog is snuggled under the blanket on my lap, her soul string knotted securely to my heart. Thank you.

It doesn’t seem to matter that my prayers of Thanks are repetitive. Threading gratitude onto a string like popcorn and cranberries, I tend to alternate Rich, Quinn, Rich, Quinn, with some other nuts and berries and cinnamon sticks mixed in at intervals, This still results in a long, festive strand of gratitude garland with which to decorate my dark December interior. November is spent running my fingers over each of these nuggets, like rosary beads, breathing each one in, breathing out like a prayer. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

11/24/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

Today I am grateful for sleeping in, sunshine, and a breakfast date.

For dog snuggles, for making our home cleaner together, and for a nice chat with Mom.

Mom and I both feel like November has rushed by. When November begins, at least for the past four Novembers, I feel this daunting sense of “30 whole days?!” when I’m committing to doing this gratitude challenge. Then suddenly, it’s day 24! Blink, it’s December.

I told her I still feel like this gratitude thing is good for me, especially at this time of year. It has become my way of intentionally setting the tone for my hardest season, of dwelling on the good of the present moment.  A small change in the initial conditions of my winter might be enough to determine a very different set of outcomes for me, by the time I make it to next spring.

I think someone has already called that the Butterfly Effect…

 

11/25/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

I am grateful for good news and good signs today.

I am grateful for natural beauty that makes me pull over the car and get out to look at it, with my mouth hanging open.

I am grateful for dinners leading up to thanksgiving that I like to think of as “gathering together ghetto”, in which parsnip fries and roasted kalettes are sides to… hot dogs! We’re not trying to create too many leftovers in the early part of this week, after all. Another gathering together ghetto dinner I like is to top Papa Murphy’s faves with fresh organic veggies from the farm! Now you see why I’m not a food blogger.

I am grateful for time to get my turkey and cranberry shopping done today.

I am grateful for karate kid movie nights with my rainbow love.

Popcorn and cranberries, repeat.

11/26/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

I am thankful for my brothers, one of whom is celebrating a birthday today. I feel particularly grateful for their positive role model position in my son’s life. They both take him under their wing for various areas of expertise when they get around him (one for chess and computer stuff, the other for drums). But it’s more that they are nice, caring men being themselves in his general vicinity that I really love. Neither one of them is afraid to be who they are, not afraid of hugs or babies or rolling out a pie crust. Both are wonderful fathers and the most excellent uncles.

None of these are very recent photos, but they are all special ones that I was looking through this evening, feeling the sibling gratitude.

11/27/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

Speaking of rolling out pie crust… I am thankful for a reliable family pie crust recipe. I am grateful for the threats from Rich to wake up in the middle of the night and start eating the chocolate bourbon pecan one that is cooling on the table. Luckily the threats are empty, because I would sleep right through that. I am also thankful I know what to make for dinner when I’ve been in the kitchen long enough for one evening already. It starts with the same letter as November.

I am very grateful that Quinn comes home tomorrow. There is a special kind of gratitude to be felt watching a boy who is growing at an obscenely fast rate eat plate after plate of food, so tomorrow will be the perfect homecoming during which I can heap abundance upon his growth spurt.

I’m not usually grateful for cold hands, but I certainly tend to have them this time of year, and I’ve heard they are useful in making pie. “Cold hands, warm heart,” the saying goes. Last night as I made grilled cheese (it’s still non-leftover meal week!) I thought of how my mom began a tradition of “putting the love in” the sandwiches when we were kids that my brothers and I do for our sons. I like to think of the food I feed to my guys as a love language, and foods like pie, where each molecule of buttery dough is held in my hands before being filled with sweetness, seem like especially good vehicles for conveying food love.

 

11/28/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

Happy Thanksgiving! It’s been a day full of abundance here at the dragon house. Abundant sleeping in, abundant good food, abundant wood heat, and abundant love.

Today I am feeling very grateful for our parents. Rich got to talk to his Oklahoma Mom and Dad today, and it is nice to hear their updates filtered through him, as well as hear his side of the conversation. He says such nice things about me when he talks to other people, and I really like that about him. I found out that Bob (of the legendary popcorn) has been ninja-reading my gratitude posts. We are very grateful to hear that they are both in good health.

I am also grateful for Rich’s Oregon Mom, to whom I refer as my outlaw-mother, who came and saved me from having to carve the turkey. She is our one local parent of our five parents, and we feel lucky and grateful to get to celebrate holidays with her. I particularly enjoyed watching Quinn sit side by side with her as they laughed hysterically at YouTube videos this evening.

One of the first things that I learned about Rich, even before our first date, was that he has two moms, and that he loves them both very much. I knew he was going to be a good one, from that moment. You want a guy who loves his Mom. And this guy loves both of his!

My Mom and Dad… well, I talk about them a lot already, but I’ll always be very grateful for them. My appreciation for them grows all the time. I don’t know why I was thinking of this today, maybe because Rich and I took a walk through the frosty back yard and walked right by the spot where we gave our wedding toast, but one of the main things Rich and I agreed on wanting to mention during that toast was our parents. For their love, their support, and the wonderful example they have set for us. I’d like to honor them by dedicating this Thanksgiving Day gratitude post to our five wonderful parents!

~thankful thursday~ shadows and butterflies

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11/1/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

I am grateful that it is gratitude month! It’s year number four of me NanoPoblano-ing my way through the month of November on the subject of gratitude, and this year I found myself looking forward to November, which is an odd sensation for me, hater of the cold darkness that I am. This is not just because October was haunted house month, aka Exhaustion and Lack of Free Time month, and November means haunted house season is at its end. It’s also because the best cure for autumn exhaustion and ennui that I have found is a daily bowl of thankful soup. (Haha, just kidding. A plate of gratitude nachos is what we eat at our house.)

I am grateful for the way the band boosters haunted house showed me the generous side of this community. I met and got to know some wonderful people throughout the past few months. Whether it was watching a team of guys build the whole structure to plan on a Thursday, for free, then having the lead builder walk up and insist on paying for his ticket, handing my child over to the moms who do know how to apply makeup each night he participated, or having a football parent hand me a big donation check, this whole experience really made me feel grateful for this community.

Last night was the final haunted house for the season and I am still processing the toughest moment of the whole experience for me. I sold a ticket to an adult sized male child. I counted back his change, and as he turned to get in line, I noticed he had on a large backpack made of the same authentic looking materials as the fatigues he was wearing. I said aloud to my ticket booth teammate that I was concerned about his backpack, and kept my eyes glued to him while he joined the end of the line of 50 or so people, set his backpack on the ground, unzipped it, and pulled out a gun.

I flew out of the booth and over to where he stood, inches from him though he had quickly tucked the rifle back into the pack, and as he had showed it to some teens across the rope from him, I had noticed an orange tip. The situation de-escalated quickly, though the teen seemed unable to understand why I wouldn’t allow him to enter the haunted house with his backpack. “It’s just an airsoft rifle. I won’t take it out in there.”

Though there are many things that unsettled me about this experience, about the common sense gaps of this apparently harmless kid, who concluded that it would be a good choice to brandish a non-lethal but extremely realistic and not completely harmless weapon on public fairgrounds at a school function, I also learned a lot. I know I fancied myself a person who would step up to help in a real gun situation, which as a mom in our current day and age, you know I have imagined a time or two. In that moment, the shape of a gun was being pulled from a bag, and I was in flight towards it, the various disarms, blocks, and strikes I know flashing through my mind, simultaneous with the knowledge that I do NOT know all I would need to safely disarm an active shooter. (How grateful I am that this was not that scenario cannot be really expressed in words.) I now know that I am actually that type of person, not just in imagination. Even though this situation was a false alarm, for the seconds it took me to react, it was all too real.

I’m a little bummed to start off the gratitude challenge with being grateful for this new, albeit heavy, self-knowledge. I almost want to change topics, but one thing I have learned with mindfulness practices is that I should really handle what’s foremost in my mind right now, to stay as human as I can, as whole and integrated as I can.

I also wonder if this is the point of the gratitude challenge. We’re heading into the lengthening darkness, and yet we have a choice how we perceive the passage of the dark, wet, months as well as how we process difficult events and experiences. I think it is all part of choosing a thought process shaped by gratitude, even when peering into the shadows.

 

11/2/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

In August Rich and I visited the corner of my parents’ farm where the migrating monarchs were a kaleidoscope of wings wheeling among a rainbow of tall flowers. I took a million photos, journaled descriptive language, and vowed to myself that “as summer floats south on the wings of the magical creatures we witnessed, I will reserve a part of my heart as a sanctuary for the butterflies of summer.”

Dwelling on gratitude as the days grow very dark and cold is, to me, a bit like keeping the habitat open for the butterflies, holding space for what needs to take root to foster their ability to thrive. It doesn’t mean I can ever keep the clouds from passing over that habitat, or stop the clock on the passage of the seasons. What I can do is watch the clouds passing over, trusting they are not here to stay. Contemplating darkness doesn’t mean it will become a permanent condition. And indeed, I seemed to have launched this round of gratitude posts by delving into the shadows. While it was summer, I watched the butterflies alight on each flower, pausing to drink in sweetness, lifting upward on the next air current. While it’s winter, it takes all my courage to descend into the dark, but I trust that I will emerge next spring transformed by whatever develops in the darkness.

The caterpillar entering the chrysalis is of course not an activity/metaphor of fall and winter. Still, there is something about how they go inward and turn into caterpillar soup (caterpillar nachos don’t sound any more appetizing) that resonates in autumn. The chrysalis is a slow cooker of broth seasoned with imaginal cells, those bits of the crawling being that code for the dream of flying it has always known as its destiny. A little trust in the process, a little rearrangement of the molten materials, and out comes a winged creature.

It may take more years of this practice before I can truly feel thankful for darkness, or the meltdown it initiates in me. Simmering in my slow cooker today, I’m grateful for memories of summer, excellent walks with my husband, and butterflies.

 

11/3/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

I am grateful for the extra hour today, as long as I don’t think about what it means about the brevity of daylight during upcoming evenings. I used it to catch up on a seriously backlogged grocery list. I left my son to his homework. He is rising to the executive functioning occasion so majestically right now, planning his work and then actually following the plan, setting his own timers and hearing them go off. I wandered off to re-stock baking powder and vanilla and all the autumn baking needs. As I watched the fragrant curry powder, cumin, and coriander fill the paper bags in the bulk spice section, I pondered the soap opera phrase about sand through the hourglass. I remembered back to when Quinn was mostly unsuccessful at joining any preschools, due to his refusal to adhere to anyone’s agenda but his own. As one group moved obediently to snack time while Quinn persisted in pressing playdough through his garlic press, unable to move on just because someone suggested it was cleanup time, I mused how these moments of three-year-old parenting were moving more like playdough through the garlic press than sand through the hourglass. Fast forward to now, and time seems to be moving more like the zesty chipotle, the flaky oregano, rushing out of their jars in great dollops and clumps.

Tonight, I decided I hadn’t used my extra hour yet and took a bath. Winning at daylight savings, and feeling grateful.

 

11/4/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

By day four of the gratitude month, gratitude starts to become the predominant lens through which I view my day. It becomes easier to really taste the layers of flavor in that gulp of coffee rather than just pour it down the hatch. It is a joy to be able to take the overflowing compost container outside to the pile before work, because the daylight has shifted to the before-work segment of the day. Seeing memories pop up about “cracking the homework whip” just one year ago makes the progress I’m seeing in my kid seem even more sweet, having retired my whip some time ago. A Roy Orbison serenade and a wood stove fire started out my Monday just right, and it has stayed right all day. Before and after work hugs are bookends to contain my internal pages, regulate my breathing, keep my overthinking in check. The boy has decided on a night off from homework after a long day of testing, and is diving into the next book after Ender’s Game. The man is sipping whiskey and reclining. The kitties are basking in the glow of the wood stove. And I am playing with words, one of my favorite things to do.

 

11/5/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

Quinn and I drove to school, gray sweatshirts the unanimous clothing choice of the gray dawn commute. He was probably imagining his into a flash suit, deeply engrossed in Ender’s world. I was imagining the silver-gray Arctic cod I would be measuring all morning. As I pulled into work, the sun was partially obscured behind the sleek blue-gray clouds, like the still-sleeping eye of a great blue whale, buoyed along on a slim layer of pink krill. Before I could park, the whale had plunged below the surface, taking the krill with it, and all was back to gray and smooth and placid.

I am usually more of a rainbow type of gal than an appreciator of gray, but as I look around for ways to be thankful for what is, my appreciation of this subtle hue family grows. The photo I did get (not the sky whale) was from the afternoon; still gray, but I notice there is usually some silver, gold, or even pink hiding along the edges of the grays, whether in muted skyscapes or the flashing sides of tiny fish, and so much texture and nuance. I think it is a worthy cause, this consideration of the gray areas. Today I am grateful for new perspectives.

 

11/6/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

I learned that the monarch butterflies on their overwintering grounds are called The Souls.

A soul cannot be assigned to an organ system or even to the body at all, though it seems to be tied to it by the most infinitesimally thin heartstring.

You can’t point at your soul, but you can feel a tug on the string every so often. Like when I walked into the break room at work earlier this week to find a pile of donated Halloween candy on the table, m&ms and milky ways. My Nana, who died when I was 4, always had m&ms and milky ways for my older brother and I to choose from (he usually chose a milky way and I usually chose m&ms) when we would visit. Tug tug. This time I chose a milky way.

She is always with me, within me like rings of a tree, like if you look at us in cross section, each of us might be made of concentric circles holding inside the generations that have come before.

You can’t really point at gratitude either, but you can feel it. I spend November blabbing all about it, trying to point at it with words, but they are approximations at best (still, a worthy pastime that keeps me out of trouble). The more I contemplate it, what it is and what it means, the less it is about each discrete item I’m thankful for, and the more it is an awareness of being swaddled in a blanket of blessings, a coating of live butterflies surrounding my tree, encrusting its bark with all the joy of flight, the hope of survival through another winter, the optimism with which I look at the next generational ring growing outward from me, and from the source that is also my source.