The weather of simply living

I’ve been on a learning curve the last two column weeks, mouth mostly closed, ears open and listening to the stories of others—and through theirs was reminded of my own. I learned about literary boundaries and I continue spinning a web of words in my head that will find its way out the end of my fingers and onto the page.

I don’t have cable or satellite television. I stopped that madness, as it pertained to my life at the time, in the spring of 2012. I don’t miss that kind of television at all—not the news programs, the soap operas, nor the prime time weeknight tv dramas and comedy shows, or drone of incessant commercials about hair shampoos and shiny new cars. 

This is not to say I don’t partake in “TV World” once in a while, as I did in mid-January in my hotel room during a weekend in the big city. I was glued to the blue-light eminence that never really loses its addictive quality no matter how long one boycotts it.

And as I did Sunday night, when I watched in its entirety the “88^th Academy Awards,” ceremony “’LIVE’ from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.”

I was parked in front of a flat screen television on a comfy couch in my comfy clothes, with two of my favorite people, amid homemade appetizers of tasty measure, a glass of red in my right, and my left hand at the ready for proverbial “thumbs up” and pumping arm gestures in support of really great movies, sound mixes, adapted screenplays, and the men and women who played the roles that made their big screen pictures a nomination station.

I listened with much interest that night to the very public black and white controversy of who is and who is not getting the roles they believe they deserve.

And I watched and listened with silent honor and speechless admiration to the powerful message of “Til It Happens to You” performed by “Lady Gaga.” The soul filled song is the “Pied Piper” for the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which continues to face controversy and challenges in its groundbreaking movement to open the doors of awareness.

To paraphrase Mark Nepo, “It is essential to bear witness to our own naked stories.”

Nepo goes on to write about the never ending work of relationships and how “each of us in our own time and way move the stones between us, repositioning the heavy things that get in the way, so the life of feeling can continue. The weather of simply living jams things up, and we, like every generation before us, must roll up our pants and sleeves, step into the river, and unclog the flow.

What are the heavy things that get in the way? They are habits of not: not seeing, not hearing, not feeling, not being present, not risking the truth, not risking the heart’s need to live out in the open.”

Every day this life teaches me more about who I am and what matters most to me—but only if I listen.

The truth can set you free

Many, many years ago—26 of them in fact—I was sucker punched in the side of head by someone I was married to.

I was holding my four-year-old daughter at the moment he punched me, and even though it dropped me to the floor my child never left my arms.

Then he said he was going to get his shotgun and the words drowned my lungs in terror and I could not breathe. At the moment he left the room I leapt from the floor with my child, threw open the doorway to a flight of stairs that led outside, and ran like hell.

I was so terrified, that I left my other child—a one year old—playing on the kitchen floor because I didn’t think I had time to stop and pick her up.

I tore up those stairs like a steaming locomotive and burst into the front yard of the little suburb street of the city I lived in, and ran.

Instantly, he was behind me and I expected to be shot.

There was no one around to help me.

I made it to the neighbor’s front yard across the street before that man grabbed me, and when I turned around to face him he didn’t have a gun after all.

I pushed myself to the ground, determined to cement myself there on the grass, arms wrapped around my daughter, as I listened to that man shout abusive violations as he pulled at my shirt.

Within the hour I was back in the house with him trying silently to figure out what I’d done to deserve that.

I couldn’t walk straight for a week because that punch damaged my equilibrium and when I went to the doctor about it, I lied to him about how I got that way.

The man who punched me never apologized and I never talked to him about what he had done to me. I didn’t want to make him mad. I believed I could fix it by myself with magical thinking, library books on relationships, and by just keeping my mouth shut.

I never told anyone about that time nor any of the other times when he got really mad and said things that leveled my self esteem.

It took me another five years after that punch before I believed in myself enough and found the courage and made the choice to stand up for my children and myself and walk away.

When I finally made the decision to leave him, it got much harder for me than I ever imagined, but I kept my eyes ahead. I asked for help, told my truth, and learned just how amazing that village of support is that awaited me when I made a stand.

I think one of the hardest things in the world is watching another woman walk a really hard road, a situation unique in its own right and yet not so far off a path I once walked.  

I know all about magical thinking, second-guessing yourself, feeling helpless, alone, empty, and overwhelmed.

Change is hard, change is damn scary. “Stepping onto a brand, new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation which is not nurturing to the whole woman.”

I listen. I hear.

Keep going. Reach out. Ask for help.

Eyes ahead.

You are not alone.

And again.

Stand. Stand. Stand.

Do right by yourself

So goes the Universe, ebbing and flowing over our lives, swirling experiences produced of free will mixed with an unfolding set plan we often do not understand.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Many of us remain stuck in old ways that aren’t working for us, and yet we are unwilling to change the one thing that would change everything. We question what our heart tells us and keep doing what we’ve always done because it is grossly familiar and the unknown is a scary place.

Pay attention to your intuition. Follow it. It speaks the truth.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Of particular interest to me, of late, are the wise little children around me who don’t worry what others think. They believe in their voice. They ask for what they want and need and aren’t afraid to put themselves first. 

Some of the women out there could take a lesson or two from the primary school of thought and start acting like the grown ups they think they are. 

We are not born to be quiet, hide our emotions, our wants, and our needs. Somewhere along the line, some of us lost our way—were encouraged and convinced by selfish forces to put those precious gifts of individuality at the back of the line. Some of us forgot that our individual precious inside happiness matters. What a shame.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that children are the greatest teachers. They are more honest with their immediate feelings than most any other living creature on earth. They are not afraid to wear their heart on their sleeve.

You there. Don’t use others as excuses to hide behind. Do not blame the other for what is wrong in your own life. Find better things to do than soak in self-imposed sticky pudding excuses for not standing up, hard as it may be, and owning yourself.

This life is not about what someone else has to fix in his or her own life. This is about what you are willing to live with and what you are not, and what makes you happy and what does not. No one else can do that for you.

Today, begin to believe you are a phenomenally strong woman who knows for sure that choice is possible and that “stepping onto a brand, new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation which is not nurturing to the whole woman.”

If you want positive change, start with you. If you need help, ask for it.

The late Martha Graham, one of the pioneers of modern dance, believed that we learn by practice.

“Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.”

Or so I believe, anyway.

An unforgettable moment on ice

Ice fishing. Ever since I tried it for the first time two years ago, the sport has remained my #1 favourite pastime of the winter season.

I’ve spent countless blocks of time in the fishing tackle aisle at local hardware stores, reading package specs of small bait hooks, trying out ice fishing rod and reel sets that beg to be rescued from the store shelf and put to work on landing the big one.

I’ve watched YouTube videos on how to tie fishing knots and how to spool a spinning reel, and I’ve joined the ranks of ice-fishing websites.  

I love the sport so much I daydream about taking a day off middle of the week and sitting in an ice shack for the whole day, quiet, and focused, and feeling like I’d won the lottery because it wasn’t yet the weekend.

The entire ice fishing experience fills me up with such excitement that my heartbeat races the closer I get to my fishing destination. It’s the truth.

Driving on a frozen lake to get to where the fish are still fills me with wonder at the scientific process of how ice is made, across miles of a liquid sea of fresh water.

I’m 55 years old and I feel like a little kid, eyes big as saucers, when I see an ice auger drill that butter soft hole in the ice until the volcano of winter white shavings change to an icy blue snow cone mixed with the water that signals the break through. Amazing.

And then there’s the refracted sunlight that bounces back through the ice-hole, decorating the auger rings and lighting up the minnow on my hook, on its way down, down, down, glowing until the dark deep waters swallow it up.  

I’ve read the ice fishing advice that suggests that the best thing about ice fishing is that you don’t need a lot of equipment. It’s a simple pleasure.  

And it’s a newborn fantastic experience every time, when I see the bobber dip below the surface and get dragged down with a fish on—and the excitement of pulling up my line with my hands, in what always seems like a forever moment, and spotting the fish I hooked, lit up in the light of the ice hole like a piece of gold as I pull it through.

I used to think that part was the best thing about ice fishing. I was wrong.

The best part, the part I will never forget, happened this past Saturday when I looked out the window of the ice shack at my 10 year old grandson who was my fishing partner, on his inaugural ice fishing adventure.

He’d been out there fishing a hole for quite some time on his own, deep in concentration. As he was reeling in his line, no fish on, just in the moment he was, he turned and looked back at me and smiled. He was hooked.

Now that, folks, was a Kodak moment.

Feline capers good for a laugh

My cats know the exact moment that the dogs leave my house for their trip home. Up the stairs from the basement they barrel like steaming locomotives to form a synchronized three-abreast perch on the porch windowsill. There they watch attentively as their canine nemeses clamor into the cab of my boyfriend’s truck.

After the truck leaves the driveway the cats pile three-high with eyes as big as saucers in front of the kitchen door and clamor to get in before one of the dogs shows up again. It’s hilarious.

Once inside, they scatter like the break shot after the eight ball, and disperse in all directions. 

One heads straight for the dog dish to finish off any remaining morsels of food as if I’ve starved it for a week. Another makes a beeline for the living room where it drops to the floor and writhes there purring and stretching its legs and full of glee at the disappearance of the canine rulers. The third cat, the troublemaker, first checks all the rooms to make sure the coast really is clear and then—like clockwork—pounces on the other two, spurring feline follies that ricochet off walls and furniture and burn pent up energy after two days of skulking in the basement.

As for me, I do a reconnaissance walk through the house to see if the little dog with a big ego had left me a pee present on the floor beside my bed. 

In a moment of gesturing to protect myself as two cats practiced airborne moves from the “Matrix” movie I stepped in something warm and gooey that oozed between my bare toes.

I took up an impressively difficult yoga pose and balanced precariously on my clean foot as three messy possibilities were considered.

Dog poop, dog vomit, or cat throw up.

I hoped for the latter until I remembered that I’d recently fed my cat worm pills and wondered if what I had just stepped in were the un-dead writhing beasts expelled onto the bedroom floor.

I was afraid to move so I just stood there on one foot making improper use of the English language.

“They” say curiosity killed the cat. I was pretty sure that if I looked at the unknown byproduct seeping between my toes, my curiosity would kill the daylong craving I had for a creamy chocolate bar.

I made a plan to glance quickly and then hop to the bathroom and have a shower hot enough to cook a bird and the tapeworms I was convinced were sucking on my big toe.

I looked down to see the ripe and blackened banana squishing up between my toes that I’d peeled two mornings prior while sitting in my reading chair. I’d forgotten it there and the cats had found it, toppling the fermented fruit to the floor beside my bed. 

I was so happy I almost reached down and scooped up some banana goo on my finger to eat.

Thank goodness for second thoughts.

Say, what's that up ahead?

I finished my gift shopping two days before Christmas and on the evening of December 23^rd, I wrapped presents like the dickens. 

At 9 a.m. Christmas Eve morning I started my holiday baking and despite my best efforts, only my world famous butter tarts and homemade chocolate truffles rolled off the assembly line.

I’m a super woman but I just didn’t have my super power battery pack on that day. The “best ever” fudge, coconut macaroons, sugar cookies, rocky road and magic cookie bars did not make it from recipe to table.

I slid into Christmas holding onto the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. I didn’t make it without nicking the skin off the shin of that grandiose timeline that presses against us like concrete—and I suppose I didn’t get my gold stars for pulling off the perfect smoothie of a holiday season.

But who really cared? No one, that’s who. All that really mattered already was perfect—family together in love, with thankful hearts and gratitude.

Oh, the pressures that rain down on us to “get things done” before the holidays hit and oh, how so much of it is fleeting nonsense.

“We could never have guessed, we were already blessed where we are  . . ,” crooned the great James Taylor in the song “Up Er Mei.”

Sing it again, James.

And here I am, standing just inside 2016 with a butter tart and a dozen of my famous truffles left over, and all of it calling my name.

I don’t generally make New Year’s resolutions because I tend not to follow through. I have vowed to lose 30 pounds before the end of July but maybe I’ll move my “start that weight loss” date from today until next week.

I’d like to sail my boat more often to the places on Rainy Lake that eluded me last summer—mostly because I was afraid of the wind. Go figure.

I would like to spend more time with the love in my life, plant more strawberries and a bigger garden, save money, paint the inside of my house, exercise more, pick up my guitar and play it for once in 10 years, read more books, and raise my own puppy and make it my goal in life to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.   

And sometimes I want to be more wild and crazy than I already am, to break out and throw away the list and live out loud because of what I know to be true—that there are no guarantees. Life can change in an instant.

“Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming, “WOO HOO, what a ride!”

Here I go. Say, what’s that up ahead? Looks like a great big adventure to me.

A merry little Christmas story

“What if I choose not to believe?”

It’s a line from one of my favorite movies of the holiday season, “The Santa Claus.”  

I’ve always believed in the power of mystery and magic and the older I get the more I understand that my attitude towards everything really is everything.

I have an old rotary dial telephone in my kitchen—not wired in—but yet a direct line to the North Pole.

No “elf on the shelf in my house.” I’m the elf.

I can call the big guy in the red suit at any given hour on any given day and have a heart to heart.

My grandchildren know about the phone too, and this time of year it’s an especially popular item in my neck of the woods. It’s mystery and magic.

My grandchildren also know that the North Pole never says a word in return. Instead, the other end of the line has the best listening skills of all. The North Pole is a “mouth closed, ears open, presence available,” kind of mystery and magic connection.

You’d be surprised how many times I’ve picked up that phone, too, and made my own wishes known to the mystery and magic. Granted I’ve asked for “grown up” things—patience (because sometimes mine lasts about as long as my pinkie finger in a clothespin,) world peace, a break on my taxes, and a rush job on getting answers for some of my “issues.”

Why, just the other day after fighting my way into the porch with the “real” big Christmas tree I’d purchased and laying waste to the rug with sawdust after a pathetic attempt to saw a slice off the trunk, did I call the North Pole.

I was good and hot under the collar. I told the North Pole all about it and that I was swearing off the one-woman Paul Bunyan exploration for a Christmas tree. Next year I was going to instruct my “honey-do” to  “pick whatever tree you like honey, it’s not my department.”

Don’t get me wrong; home queens like me have got it together. My mind is a multi-tasking bionic unit like nothing man will ever know. I’m one of a kind. And I also know what a good Christmas tree looks like. I just shouldn’t volunteer to put it up.    

After my rant to the North Pole, a calmer me went back to the tree, now cringing in the corner of the porch—and mathematically evaluated whether or not 15 strings of LED lights, 20 years of ornaments and children’s Christmas art work would be enough to cover the monstrosity I had just purchased. 

At closer attention, I realized the woman with the saw had hacked off the trunk just below the two good branches on the bottom, leaving no room for the tree stand. Awesome. The tree would be just the right height for a dog to pee on—but that’s another story.

Merry Christmas everyone. Don’t stop believing in the mystery and the magic.  

Goldfish looking good right about now

One minute I was having the best of dreams and the next my eyelids dragged themselves up off my eyeballs to reveal the night—black as the inside of a cow. I looked at the clock. It was 2:30 a.m.  The soft jingle of a Christmas bell rolling across the floor pulled my carcass to a sitting position.

I listened. The bell rolled along, bumping into static objects where it stopped jingling until a kitten paw knocked it back across the floor. I flat stared the darkness.

When nothing is stirring—not even a mouse—how does a cat manage to find things capable of making noise?

Nonetheless, I had a mercenary kitten with nighttime vision terrorizing the Christmas decorations on the inaugural evening of my holiday decor.

Yet there I sat slack jaw, a trail of dream drool leaking from my bottom lip. I just couldn’t pull the rest of my carcass out from under the warm flannel sheets to investigate the festive mayhem.

Instead, I took the plunge and fell back upon my memory foam pillow and bed like the girl in the 1970’ s “Nestea” ice tea commercial, and drowned again into my dream world.

In the few precious minutes before my 5 a.m. alarm, the mercenary of the night pounced upon me—a yet unmoving entity—to knead upon my skull. As my forehead got a facelift I pondered about the things I wanted to do today, like “not move.”

I pried my carcass from my cozy nest and dragged it to the kitchen for my routine morning glass of water and contact lens insert.

No sooner had I drank the vital liquid regenerate and reconnected my eyes to the world around me, did I soak up the scene spilling into my waking brain.

Meanwhile, the one in trouble purred and rubbed along my pajama bottoms in a show of pleasure at my morning awakening—seemingly happy to show me the Christmas catastrophe. 

I would have rather found three dead mice presented in a row on the kitchen floor with their heads missing than what I did find. 

Instead, copious beheaded buds of holly berries, ripped from the vines of décor I had placed most creatively on my bookcases and shelving, lay in twisted piles on the kitchen and living room floors.

Handfuls of Santa’s wee elves, uprooted from their holiday posts, were prone on their backs under the kitchen table, legs and arms askew in defense of cat mania.

And how did the kitten make it to the ceiling?  Sprigs of mistletoe from up there, dangled suspiciously, and Christmas lights from windows drooped in near spills of disaster.

The little cat sat down its haunches, fluffy black and white-chested with a big furry tail wrapped ‘round the front of its body like a photo from a Christmas card.

I just couldn’t help smiling at its cuteness amid my firm and pointed finger reprimand. “Next time I’m getting a goldfish.”

Then a mouse ran across the floor and up the Christmas tree.

“Oh no!”

My slant and rant

At the end of my fingertips, every day, there is a story. I see, I feel, I think, I write. 

I could take the next 500 words to expound on what I feel about the media’s obsession with terrorism.

I could take the next 510 words to paint a picture of what I think about the business of racial profiling that I see every single day in the news, when the media giants decide what is the most important story and suck the marrow out of it. 

I could add another 500 words to express my opinion and disgust for how we are drawn to the major news stations each day with a really good cup of coffee, and where we seek and find a stirred and foul pot so full of the bad and the ugly that it makes us bitter.

 Many of us come away with an empty cup, convinced there is absolutely no kindness anywhere, no smiles, no happiness, no friendship, no goodwill, no simple humanity, nor hope. 

I don’t have “cable.”  Call me naïve, it’s okay.  (I learned a long time ago that what others think about my choices is their “stuff” and not mine.)

I woke up one morning in mid-2012 excited that I was planning a trip to Wales, U.K. and the television news gurus were spouting at the mouth about how dangerous it was to fly.

All of the bad and scary news immediately robbed me of my excitement about my trip abroad and I was drawn deeper into the fray. From inside my heart leapt my joy--exchanged in an instant for fear, trepidation, and suspicion. Absolute joy sucked out—and replaced by the second-guessing of “living” for the “what if” of dying. That is when I turned the television off. 

Yet I’m not stupid. I know the world has a tremendous amount of chaos and angry disruption and unthinkable days that bring many of our innocent fellow earth dwellers to an end far short of their expectations. Despite the fact that I don’t have a intravenous line to cable television, I am not clueless. I am not heartless, and I am not ignorant of “what is.”

But, despite all of it, I will not respond in a conversation that begs the question “What is this world coming to?” That way of thinking is a direct result of too much media influences and be sure of this—the big guns—the mainstream media—capitalize on shock value and they are winning. 

And if you are going to spew out negative comments about the Syrian refugees and immigrants who will be given a chance at a new life in this great country within the next few weeks—I, for one, will not fuel that conversation either.

Unless you grew from an amoeba at the river’s edge—we are all the lucky stock of immigrants who long ago came from lands of unrest and poverty to find a better life.

Welcome home.

To paraphrase the best sayings of the moment;

Shut off the television. Dance, sing, and talk to strangers. Smile at everyone. Say “thank you” to someone who doesn’t expect it. Love, and make it count. Take chances. Spend a lot time with kids, laugh every chance you get.

Help someone in need.  Help others, again and again and for Heaven’s sake, be positive.