Comfort and Joy

Some things have been added to my home this week - some very important things that add another dimension to my level of contentment. My bookshelves arrived, and I've been happily unpacking and arranging the books I brought with me so far. I realized this is the first time in my life that all my books are together in one place. For years they've been scattered haphazardly throughout the house. And although I could pinpoint in my mind's eye where each volume was, it's ever so much nicer  having them arranged all neat and orderly on the shelves. I also have a comfy chair, a reading lamp, and a warm blanket in case of a chill.

Plus, you can see there is ample room for additions to the library.

That makes me very happy indeed.

Still basking in this bookish glow, another exciting arrival brought even more joy this week.

Since we moved here, I've been without a piano in the house (for the first time in 50 years!)  I decided against bringing the grand piano, and instead moved this pretty little console that was my birthday present back in 1962. It's still in beautiful condition, and with a good tuning it will serve my purposes just fine.

So now our cozy basement is a haven for all my favorite things, and I have especially enjoyed it on this cold and snowy Friday.

Having these two all-important portions of my life settled into place reminds me to honor what  makes life interesting for me. It's never changed much, since I was a little girl just embarking on a lifelong love of books and music. My parents bought the piano for me (after much wheedling and whining, I might add) on a pure leap of faith, unsure whether I would stick with it. After all, the whims of a six year old are not known for their reliability over the long haul. But when we were moving it the other day, my mother recalled the day it was delivered as "one of the happiest days of her life." She remembered my excitement, but she also remembered my grandmother sitting down and playing her favorite hymns. "I thought to myself, what could be better than this?" she said fondly.

I can still recall with exact precision of feeling the jaw-dropping wonder I felt when I came home from school and saw it sitting in my living room. I started playing that day, and haven't stopped.

And books - well, books and stories soothed me through childhood illness, kept me company during lonely times, taught me about life and educated me on the ways of the world. As we were assembling the bookshelves last weekend, I was remembering a little two-shelf bookcase I requested one Christmas when I was about eight  years old. It matched my maple bedroom set, and when it was delivered I filled it up with my Nancy Drew's, Trixie Belden's and Little House books.

Then I took a permanent marker and wrote in the appropriate Dewey Decimal numbers right on the surface of the shelf.

Yikes.

But no one scolded me for it. My (very forgiving) parents realized that I had a plan, and were wise and kind enough to let me play it out the way I wanted.

I think we all need certain things in our lives that bring us comfort and joy. I was lucky enough to find mine very early on, and they have stood me in good stead for more than half a century now.

I hope you have yours close at hand on this winter's day.

State of Contentment

When we moved to Brookwood Court, I had this pretty vision of how I wanted my daily life to be - the early morning coffee in my bedroom reading nook, walking the pups along the ponds, writing or working in the sunny corner of my upstairs office. Afternoons chores and errands, followed by reading in the living room with a cup of tea, or curling up in the cozy library corner of the basement when the weather was cold and gray. Preparing meals in my large, bright kitchen, with some Chopin, Debussy, or Secret Garden playing softly in the background. Well, guess what?

My vision came true.

That doesn't often happen in life, does it?

Real life rarely looks like what we picture in our minds. And even when life mirrors imagination, sometimes it doesn't turn out to be as fulfilling as we had hoped.

But a good number of my days play out exactly as I imagined they would, and they feel as right as I had hoped.  I have such an overwhelming sense of contentment here, a feeling of being in exactly the right place at the right time. The restlessness that plagued me for the past few years is gone.

I feel at home.

If you know me, either "virtually," or  in real life (or both!) you know how much of a homebody I am. Sometimes I love my home too much, want to cocoon myself safely away from the rest of the world which seems more and more cacophonous and intrusive. I don't fight it anymore, but simply indulge myself in the need to nest, trusting the instincts that tell me to say home, be quiet, revel in the stillness.

The real world constantly urges our participation, invites us to expect big things, exhorts us to make something happen.

We're forever being nudged to the next big thing.

Right now I'm just letting contentment happen, and for me that's something big.

How about you? What's the big thing in your life right now? 

Loud and Proud

Sunday night I spent some time watching The Golden Globe awards. I'm not really star struck, I  just like to see what everyone is wearing. I know that sounds suspiciously like the old excuse men used to give for having a Playboy magazine in the house. ("I only read the articles, honey!" Right.) Anyway, I wasn't giving the show my entire attention. The other half of my brain was surfing the internet, looking at bracelets on Etsy. (What can I say? It was Sunday night, it was late, I felt like doing something mindless.)

When I realized that Jodi Foster was getting some sort of  lifetime achievement award, I started paying closer attention. Jodi Foster is younger than I am. Why were they giving her a lifetime achievement award? I wondered. Did she have some terminal illness I hadn't heard about?

No, it seems the Cecil B. DeMille award is a prize that recognizes "outstanding contributions in entertainment." So not really a "lifetime" achievement, even though she is the second youngest person every to receive the award. Judy Garland was the youngest, receiving it in 1962 at age 39.

I digress. The award isn't the interesting thing here.

Her acceptance speech was the real stunner. Af first it seemed like some rambling stream of consciousness diatribe. But then it took a different tack, although her tone continued in the same satirical and humorous vein. "I guess I have a sudden urge to say something that I’ve never really been able to air in public," she said. "So, a declaration that I’m a little nervous about...but I’m just going to put it out there, right? Loud and proud, right? So I’m going to need your support on this. I am single."

Of course that wasn't the important declaration at all - Foster was talking about the fact that she is gay.  She went on to say she "did her real coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age, when a very young girl opened up to trusted friends and family and co-workers and, gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her and everyone she met. She poked fun at the current trend of celebrity confessionals, but then stated something quite thought provoking. "Seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy.”

I have to make a confession of my own. I didn't even GET it until the next day, when I read about it on the internet. While I was watching the speech, my attention must have strayed for a moment (those dang bracelets on Etsy). I missed the "loud and proud" reference, missed the reference to her "real coming-out about a thousand years ago."

Now she's become the center of a little whirlwind, is being both praised and vilified by Gay Rights activists and the general public. Praised for at last verifying what inquiring minds apparently have wanted to know for the past 20 years, vilified for not being more forceful about her declaration, for not be "loud and proud enough" to come out and say the words "I am a lesbian," but only to dance around it with rhetorical humor.

It doesn't matter to me what Foster's sexual orientation is, which is probably why I missed the reference in the first place. I admire her acting, her directing, the classy way she has conducted her long life in show business, but I've never given her private life much consideration because she herself has never made an issue of it (unlike many celebrities whose lives become part of their "brand.")

But I'm wondering (because I'm always all about why people do what they do) if she does indeed "value privacy above all else," why did she feel the need to make that public declaration now, after a lifetime of maintaining at least of modicum of privacy about her personal life. What compulsion led her to jump on the Honey Boo Boo bandwagon and put it all out there in this particular forum?

Because it seems to me she has defeated the decades of privacy she evidently worked so hard to establish.

Perhaps she was simply thumbing her nose at the public or the entire celebrity culture. Or perhaps, as she told  her two sons who were in the audience, "this, this whole song, was all about them," about demonstrating honesty and forthrightness and being proud of who you are.

About being able to tell your story.

I believe so much in the power of stories. They connect us, they equalize us, they inspire us, they provoke us. Telling your story to one person or one million people is a gift to you and to the listener.

But I also believe the way we tell those stories is important, that it should be in kind with type of life you've lived, the type of reaction you want to inspire, and the reason you're telling it in the first place.

And I wish Foster had chosen a different way to tell hers.

There's An App for That

Last night we were channel surfing and happened across Piers Morgan speaking with Ariana Huffington about gun control. I was impressed with some of her comments on that subject, but then she spoiled it all by changing the subject to new technology. She was speaking from the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, being held in one of my favorite (not!) cities - Las Vegas. According to Ariana, the focus for consumer electronics this year is on health and wellness, and she introduced the Huffington Post's new app in this genre called, appropriately, "GPS for the Soul."

Based on something called "HeartMath," the app is designed to help you enter into a state of "coherence." You can read all the details at their website, but the basic idea is that our heart rate varies throughout the day, and these variations can be caused by emotional and physical factors. The naturally occurring HRV (heart rate variations) are not all alike, however. Those caused by  pleasing factors are of a different and more healthy nature than those caused by stressful or emotionally unpleasant situations. The positive changes in HRV lead to a state of "coherence" of heart, mind, and body.

It is that state to which we should aspire.

And yes, there is an app for that.

When you detect that your heart is in a state of IN-congruence, when your soul has lost its way, simply whip out your phone, dial up the GPS for the Soul app, and there you will find some lovely paintings, music, inspirational sayings, and all sorts of nifty digital ways to dial down your emotional stress and put your heart back into a state of congruence, thereby restoring your soul to its "center".

Friends, might I suggest an alternative? How about a walk outside, or listening to some music, or petting your dog? Why not try reading some poetry or knitting a sweater? For some, a good game of racquetball or tennis might be effective. Others might prefer to bake or throw pots or pull weeds in the garden.

In other words, aren't there a lot of non-digital ways to relax when we're stressed? Must we have an electronic solution for everything??

I hope we haven't become so dependent on our technology that we can't even unwind without it telling us how.

That thought alone is enough to put my heart into a permanent state of incongruence, one that no amount of apps could fix.

Out With the Old...

Today I had to get a new library card. One would not think that would be an emotional event.

However, I have had a library card from the Redford Township District Library since I was six years old. That means I was a library patron for over 50 years.

But today, I had to relinquish my Redford Library card and get a new one for the Northville District Library, here in my new town.

I've been dreading this, with the dread that only a sentimental book lover could understand. I spent countless hours in the Redford Library. It was my hangout in the summers, where I gleefully participated in the summer reading programs. It was the first place I drove solo when I got my drivers license. (I know, I'm a geek.) And then when my son was little, he and I would take frequent trips to the library on our bikes, usually stopping at Donutown for libations on the way back.

So more than just bookish memories were associated with my library card, although there were certainly plenty of those too. The Redford Library was the place I discovered the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, and Madeleine L'Engle's work for readers of all ages. It was the place I could always find the best new releases, and, in recent years, was able to take full advantage of their computerized hold services to make sure I got them immediately.

One of the things I've been most surprised at during this moving process and the inevitable culling of possession it has entailed, is the things that mean the most to me. They often were not the most expensive items in the house - the crystal serving pieces or the lace tablecloths. What I really hated to part with were things like the scratched pyrex bowls I used to stir up brownie and cookie batter or the stainless steel cutlery we ate from every day for 37 years. The worn flannel blankets my grandmother used when she was in a nursing home. The throw pillows on my bed that I propped my head on to read in the morning.

The library card I've used ever since I learned to read.

A new home demands new things, and I have enjoyed gathering bright, shiny new feathers for this little nest. But there is suddenly a tiny whole in my heart for some of those well-used, well-loved pieces of daily living that were part of of my old life. And I suspect there always will be.