Inner Beauty

A few weeks ago, June honored me with this award.  There are lots of blogger recognitions out there, but this one really touched me, probably because I've certainly not felt very beautiful of late, or very powerful.  Today, reading this simple sentence, I started thinking about the times in my life when I did walk with a sense of strong inner beauty, times when I felt powerful enough to turn winter into spring and set flowers to blossom in my footsteps.  Times when I had the confidence to take on the world and all its challenges, when I felt as if my life had a purpose, as if it mattered in more ways than just getting through another day.  The first year of my marriage - oh, how beautiful and powerful I felt then.  And certainly that feeling arose from being loved so much, but also from being in charge of my own life for the first time, and seeing the future spread out before me, twinkling with promise like a million stars in the night sky.

Finishing college, finally getting my degree after 10 years, and graduating with honor, in spite of doing it all while working part time and caring for a toddler, gave me a unique sense of accomplishment, one I hadn't felt in a long time.  Walking across that stage to get my degree, I could almost see the ice melt and smell the flowers springing up behind me.

Certainly playing music, performing, working as a team with other musicians - that's heady sense of beauty for me.  Over the past dozen years I've pushed myself to new heights in that arena, worked to overcome performance anxiety and discovered what fun it is to entertain.  There is power and beauty in making people smile, through music.

And through writing.  Coming again to the practice of writing, finding a way to share thoughts and ideas with others- well, that provides a uniquely beautiful experience. 

 So it was good to recall those days when my sense of inner beauty reigned.  It reminded me I need to search for ways to allow the beautiful girl inside me to come out and play.  I don't do that often enough, and I suspect most of you don't either.  Because there is a beautiful girl inside everyone of us, even if they sometimes get lost among the tarnished realities of everyday life.

The words of Mary Oliver's poem, When I Am Among the Trees, have really been speaking to me lately.  As a matter of fact, I printed the poem on a small card and have it tacked above my desk at work.  Here are the verses that resound in my heart...

 I am so distant from the hope of myself

in which I have goodness and discernment

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly and bow often.

And yet, the trees remind her with their simple grace and inner beauty, it's really quite simple - "you too have come into the world to do this...to go easy...to be filled with light...and to shine."

So now -thanks to June and Mary Oliver- I'm looking for ways to shine, my friends.

How about you?

Raised to Read

Although my mother wasn't much of a reader, she honored my lifelong passion for the printed word, and took great pride in the early manifestations of my bookishness.  Books were never denied me, and whether obtained from the library or local department store, they were the things I most coveted throughout my childhood (along with fashion outfits for my Barbie doll).  I give my parents a lot of credit for indulging my book addiction, since an obsession for reading was probably rather foreign to them. My son would likely have a different story to tell about me, and the way books figured in his life.  I suspect he would relate to Eudora Welty's description of her mother, which I happened across yesterday while re-reading One Writer's Beginnings...

I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else.  In my mind's eye, The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour - my mother was bread maker, she'd pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven.  I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol Mary Pickford.  A generation later, when my brother Walter was in the Navy and his two little girls often spent the day at our house, I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of "Little Red Riding Hood" with the children.  She'd just look up at the right time, long enough to answer - in character-"The better to eat you with my dear," and go back to her place in the war news.

Reading is infectious, but there are lots of ways to raise a reader - just because you aren't necessarily one yourself doesn't mean your children won't be.  I'm thankful my parents and grandparents recognized and nourished my love of stories, for it is one relationship that has stood the test of time.

All this by way of introduction to my essay, Raising a Reader, which appears in this week's issue of BiblioBuffet.  Go read it - and the rest of this fine e-zine, which focuses on the living the literary life. It's one of my favorite bookish reads each week. 

And ~ keep reading.

cross posted at Bookstack

Sunday Scribblings-Telephone

She was on the phone when it happened.  I was playing on the floor in the living room, so I could see her standing in the archway between the dining room and kitchen, the dark corner where the telephone sat on its narrow wooden table.  I wasn't listening to her conversation, being wholly absorbed in lining up a series of Matchbox cars on the ramp of my Fisher Price service station.  I can still hear the skittery sound their tiny wheels made on the hard plastic ramp, like dry leaves blowing across the pavement on a fall day.  The pleasant tone of her voice droned in my ear, probably an ordinary conversation with one of my aunts, whom she talked with daily. From the corner of my eye the hem of her pale blue house dress was visible, its wide circle skirt hanging in gentle folds just above her ankles.

It was the skirt that first caught my attention, for it puddled across the hardwood floor when she fell creating a pale lake on the dark wood.  I turned my head just in time to see my mother's body crumple to the floor, a dull thud the only sound she made.  The heavy black telephone receiver fell from her hand as she went down, taking the rest of the telephone clattering to the ground behind it.

Within seconds my grandmother came tearing through the kitchen door - I"m sure she was screaming, because she screamed at everything anyway, and the sight of her only daughter lying unconscious on the floor would certainly have set off paroxysms of alarm.  But I didn't hear her - I was frozen, transfixed by the sight of my mother so still and motionless on the floor, one arm awkwardly folded beneath her back, the other outstretched, reaching toward me.  The next sound I remember was the relentless cry of ambulance sirens, racing toward our house.  Huddled behind the brown sofa, I stared wide-eyed as paramedics burst through the front door, quickly buckled my mother's still form onto the stretcher, and rushed her into the ambulance.  As they sped down the road, sirens screaming away into the distance, I became aware of the telephone, ominously droning one long penetrating tone into the empty room.

In medicine we talk about sequela, a pathological condition resulting from an injury, disease, or attack.  Not surprisingly, there were a number of sequela resulting from my mother's allergic reaction to penicillin, back on that spring day in 1959.   For her, it spawned a life long fear of taking medicine - even though she had been taking penicillin all her life,  that one dose nearly killed her.   For me, a frightened three year old who watched her mother collapse instantly in front of her eyes, and then be rushed to the hospital where she would remain for nearly two weeks, it triggered an obssessive need to be close to her every moment, so great was my fear that something would happen to her.

Oh, and one more sequela from this event - I despise telephones. 

for more telephone tales, go here

On Level Ground

Lots of ups and downs lately, a veritable roller coaster ride through life.  Things have evened out a bit on one front, thank goodness- my daughter in law came through her surgery with flying colors and a very positive report from her physician, so my worries on that front have eased up a bit.  (Thanks to everyone for their concern and good thoughts - the vibrations apparently reached all the way to the South Pacific!) When I came home today, my husband was on the phone with our friendly mortgage company, trying to work out the details of that re-finance on our property in Florida, and I felt the roller coaster car speeding toward the top of the next precipice, preparing for another belly wrenching plunge.  But I held on to the safety bar, pressed my feet firmly to the floor, and gutted it out.   My darling husband managed to come up with a few choice "questions" for the banker that actually sent them scampering into their corner with a pledge to "check with their supervisor" and "get back to us tomorrow."  He's really good at that kind of thing :)

And that's only one of the reasons I've stayed married to this guy for the past 32 years (today). 

On May 8, 1976, I was nothing but a baby - 20 years old, and I had never even spent the night away from home- really!  What in the world was I doing getting married?  I'm sure nearly every one of the 150 people in that church were shaking their heads in dismay. 

I was the first of my 13 Michigan cousins to get married - but I'm the only one still  married (to their original spouse, that is!)

So there.

Not that it's always been a picnic.  Of course not.  We've certainly been apart far more than I would have dreamed back on May 8, 1976, when I could barely stand to let him out of my sight for 20 minutes.  He's worked away from home a lot - on long term assignments everywhere from Dayton, Ohio, to Chengde, China.  And he's worked long hours even when he was home.  Sometimes I felt as if I were raising our son alone - and that's a big reason why we didn't have more than one child.  But the reason he worked so hard was to give me the ability to stay home and be a full time mother, something we both felt was really important.  And I'm more grateful than I can say, for those years were a true and lasting gift.

But the distance between us has never been in more than miles.  For at the end of the day, we can count on each other - he knows it, and I know it.  We cover each other's back in those hard "life" things, but we also give each other space to pursue our individual dreams.  We share the same values - the importance of family, of caring for other people, of giving your best effort to everything you do.  And we share the same dreams -traveling the world, making beautiful music, trying to make the world a better place, and sharing life with our children and their children.

I'm certainly not complacent about marriage, even one of 32 years.  My parents marriage ended after 42 years, so I know we're nowhere near home free in the longevity department.  As we move into this middle aged stage of life, with more physical challenges presenting themselves everyday, more world problems intruding on and affecting our hopes and dreams, our patience and thoughtfulness is called upon in new ways.  Because of Jim's neuropathy, he has a hard time taking walks, one of the things we used to love doing.  I admit it, I occasionally get annoyed about that.  Or about the fact that his medications make him sleepy, so he tends to nod off the minute he sits down. 

But he still jumps up when I call his name, ready to do whatever needs to be done.  He still sends me little notes during the day (text messages now) with encouraging words when he knows I need them.  He still thanks me for making dinner, tells me I look great (when I know I don't), and never complains if he can't find a pair of socks that match (as long as he can find the tv remote, it's all good!)  Next Saturday, he'll get up at the crack of dawn and drive me to Sandusky, Ohio to play for my friend's elementary school choir in a competition at Cedar Point - he does it every year.

On May 8, 1976, I might have been only 20 years old, but I knew what I was doing.

He's a good guy. 

And he keeps me grounded on this roller coaster ride of life.

Happy Anniversary, Jamey.

 

Stormy Skies

For most of my life I've been an expert worrier - if there wasn't a good reason to worry, I could make one up.  And there have been several periods in my life when stressful situations were outside the norm - the year my parents split up, the year my grandmother died and my husband lost his job (all in the same week), the year my son moved away from home.  During those times, I found it difficult to eat or sleep, found myself obsessing over the situation to the extent that I was unable to concentrate on anything else, found myself lying around staring mindlessly at the television for hours on end. It's been a long while since I've had a really substantial worry, and I guess I've grown a little complacent.  I believed I had learned how to handle life's smaller vicissitudes with a bit more aplomb, and that's probably true.  But I have several very substantial worries right now. 

Just last week I was musing about my son, comparing his life to a multi-colored kite soaring in the breeze.  That kite has encountered some stormy weather, and is being tossed about quite roughly, so we're all feeling the effects here on the ground.  For not only have he and his wife run into some significant roadblocks in their quest to start a family, my daughter in law is suddenly facing unexpected surgery this week. 

It never ceases to amaze me how life can turn itself on a dime, how things can be going just swimmingly, and suddenly you're caught in a riptide being sucked under before you have a moment to catch your bearings.  I find myself slipping into that familiar mode of obsession/distraction, riffling the problems over and over in my mind like strings of worry beads between my fingertips (maybe I should get some of those).  I had saltines for dinner,  spent two hours last night watching the Entertainment channel (ick), and fell asleep in the chair.  I wander around the house, picking up clutter and setting it down somewhere else, desultorily play a song or two on the piano, just pounding the notes mechanically beneath my fingers. I feel as if I haven't learned a thing about how to handle stress, for I've simply reverted to patterns established years ago.

Most of my difficulty arises from the loss of control that is inherent in any situation like this -from not being able to fix things, from not knowing what will happen next.  I feel completely incapable of handling life, so I wander, dither, worry.  As the saying goes, "Worry is like a rocking chair - it gives you something to do, but gets you nowhere."

There is much written these days about the power of positive thinking, of envisioning the future you want to have.   I would like to buy into that philosophy, but maybe I'm just too old.  I keep slipping back into my familiar mentality - bad things will happen, and there's nothing you can do to change them.  Because lately I haven't seen too much evidence of good things happening to anybody, positive attitude or not.  Amidst the continuing stories of economic and social doom and disaster clouding even the bluest sky, there hasn't been much evidence that anyone's vision for a brighter tomorrow are coming true.

But right now, the concerns of the wider world are of little consequence to me.  It's just my small corner of the world I'm worried about - my family, it's present and it's future. 

And the skies are a bit too blustery for my liking.