Remembering Those We Love

I bought Reba, whose husband just died, a little book she can carry in her purse to write memories in. The saying on the card is that when someone dies you their presence is turned into memories. I love the whole concept of remembering someone after they die, of having them live on in our memories.

Being in the Moment - Perfect Day One

And then we were ten women with ugi breath doing cat and cow rolls rhythmically until we sprang up into downward-facing dog. I felt the pull on my calves, straightened my back, balanced my weight evenly onto my hands and my feet and tried to get my heels to the ground, which never happens. I didn’t fret. I went with the flow as we rolled forward into plough, chataranga-ed to the floor, and brought our hearts up into upward facing dog. I paid attention to my feet that tended to sickle and cause chronic pain. I listened to my breath, the breath of the women around me, the sound of our instructor’s voice, the rhythmic chanting music, and smelled the lemon verbena scent on my skin. I felt how strong my thighs were as I bent my right knee and placed my left foot at a 45-degree angle behind me and rose up into Warrior I and spread out to Warrior II. I felt the lengthening of my back as I bent forward humbly and came back to extended side angle twisting my neck up and my arm near my ear, one long length of body from my foot to the tip of my hand. Before I knew it we were in shavasana and I was listening to the soothing music and the instructor’s voice telling us to not fall asleep, to stay present, to just let go and be in the present.

A Cookbook for Life

I love the long blocked-out writing time on the weekends. It has to be kept sacred. One doesn't really tune into the muse when writing a cookbook as one does when writing a novel, but it's satisfying to make the connections between food and where I was at particular points in my life when I started cooking some of my favorites. I discovered quiche at a Christmas Party in 1978 and when Paul and I moved to Pittsburgh and someone bought me the Vegetarian Epicure, quiche became the center of many meals, including those when company came to share our table. I took a picture of the broccoli and mushroom quiche I made for dinner the other day, for the cookbook.

30 Perfect Days

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron asks us to imagine a perfect day. Most of us will dream of a day without work, without worries, without concerns, a day when everything goes perfectly, a day when you can be yourself and do whatever you want to do.

Why not have 30 Perfect Days in a row? What if those days are imperfect? What if the days are as perfect as we can have them be in our lives of having to make money, maintain our property, and care for our loved ones?  How many of us want the perfect life? We think we know what it is, but we somehow make it about living in Tuscany or being a writer or owning a bed and breakfast or being a missionary in Africa. How about if we just embrace the life we have, day by day?

Thirty days is a month, twelve months become a year, and a year becomes a lifetime. Maybe I could have the perfect life. Ten days ago, I woke up at 5:00 AM to go to yoga. I started the first of thirty perfect days. A month of days strung together like a necklace of pearls, perfect in their wisdom, beauty, and possibility. I stayed in the moment, paid attention, responded with joy, and avoided negativity.

Guess what?  I've had ten perfect days so far.

Voice and Poetry

I wrote that I wanted to make my journal into poetry, but then I lose my voice. Or don’t I? Or am I writing poetry by using my voice? Is my voice, and what I write, poetry? I think I hear a rhythm as I write, but do I? Or am I just imagining that at the moment?

Harnessing the Wind

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an inspiring story of William Kamkwamba, a boy with no education, reading lots of books in his village library in Malawi and learning how to make windmills. He used discarded motor parts, junkyard refuse, whatever he could hoard in his room that he thought might be helpful, while in search of a dream to bring light to a village that went to sleep at 7PM when the sun went down. They lost hours.

The famine in his land and his family’s struggles, all of Africa’s struggles, were captured in the book, and it opened my eyes to how a country can literally be without food and how it can be controlled by only a few people and how powerless people can feel when the land fails to yield a crop. Entire lives are ruined, time cannot be captured again, a young boy loses years. In this case, he missed 4-5 years and then went to school when he was a young adult. He was one of the lucky ones—he survived while thousands of people, who foraged for what little food they could while the light went out of their eyes, died. He not only survived, but he eventually was admitted to a boarding school so he could study, his sense of possibility still strong, and that’s part of what makes the story so good

Farms and Foods of Ohio

Marilou Suszko has written about food for years, and in her book Farms & Foods of Ohio, we have a culmination of her love of where she lives and the food it brings to the table. It’s a thoughtful and instructional look at what it’s like to be a farmer in the twenty-first century and a call to all of us to support our local farms. I appreciate her passionate descriptions and her cause. Her recipes are unique—I have never seen a recipe for raspberry cream custard. I didn’t realize she teaches culinary classes and has a connection with the cooking school in Vermilion; that would explain her sidebar for turkey brined in buttermilk: “To brine or not to brine? It comes down to a question of personal taste. Traditional brining is a process that enhances the flavor and increases the moisture content of lean meats without using a salt, sugar, and water solution.” Hmmm, I’ve never thought about brining.

The Highest Tide - A Tribute to Marine Life

I just finished The Highest Tide, a novel by Jim Lynch, and I loved it. At the beginning I was thinking about how slow it was going with all the marine-life description, but that was part of the charm of this coming-of-age book about the summer of a 13-year-old boy who discovers a giant squid, a rare starfish, and many other strange things in Puget Sound near his home on Olympia’s coast. We come to love this curious and intelligent boy; Lynch successfully takes us into his head and allows us to feel what it’s like to love nature and be conflicted about growing up. “People usually take decades to sort out their view of the universe, if they bother to sort at all. I did my sorting during one freakish summer in which I was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine.”

We get a ton of philosophical views here, including many from Rachel Carson who wrote in The Sea Around Us, “’There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.’ How do you read that sentence, yawn and turn out the lights?” And how do you read his descriptions of life in the sea without being intrigued?" The narrator writes: “Those shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light.” As he grows and synchronicity and the responsive universe happens to him, he writes “It wasn’t that I was starting to feel that I actually had some higher calling, it’s that I’d begun to feel as though I’d received a bigger role than I’d auditioned for.” Miles said people need to pay attention, and then they did. They came out to the Bay and started categorizing all the sea life and found it amazing, all those scientists and people who lived there who thought they knew what was going on but didn’t. “At the end of The Sea Around Us, she [Carson] summed up the entire history and role of the ocean in two sentences: ‘In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.’”

Sharing Our Gifts

So now I’m home again. The weekend swept me into a world of friendship and support and big goals and lots of energy. The Sharing Our Gifts weekends are amazing. They are my sisters, my mothers, my daughters. They are my people I can talk with any time without reserve, without fear, without knowing judgment. They let me do what I want to do and say what I want to say. They tell me everything is going to be okay, something I need to hear and know more than anything. Everything is going to be okay. Why do I need someone to tell me that?
 

Envisioning a Dream

Most people I know are aware that my life's dream is to spend my days writing while running a bed and breakfast that hosts retreats and people who come in and out the door with stories to tell. Every time I visit the Idlewyld, I feel that dream strong within me, and I see what Joan and Dan have created over the last 24 years, and I am awed. A friend told me that I need to envision that dream, keep it in my heart constantly, and somehow, someway, the universe will respond. She says the B&B is tied up with my writing, and while I spoke with my friend, I touched on that dream again, the one I've had for almost twenty years, and I wonder if God will provide a way, maybe a different place, a different house, maybe something altogether different from what I envision. So is it a good thing to envision when that vision will inevitably be replaced with something else?

Walking the Path to God Connection

Oftentimes we don’t know why we choose a particular path—certainly it’s that way for me. I sometimes have to go with my gut, and that’s what I did when I chose to be part of Disciple study again. I’m reading about the kings of Judah and their evil and good and God’s turning against them and to them again, and the message is that we should avoid outside influences and focus on the Temple, on our temple, our traditions, our heritage, and walk with the Lord. I go this way and that in my way of thinking, from believing that being with nature and doing yoga and writing from the heart are a way that is just as good as being in church and fellowship with Christians. Is it a selfish seeking to look for other ways to find that God connection? Perhaps, when you look at it from the viewpoint of the chronicler in Chronicles. I am a child of the church, of the United Methodist Church—should I not make that my focus? The Artist’s Way and synchronicity and my God connection have been my way to creativity and salvation, have helped me on my journey. Is it time to turn back? No, it's time to embrace it because it's all part of my journey, part of what I personally need to grow.

Letting Go of Fear

Fear is the door getting ready to open for us if we can let go of fear, it will open to something new. Celtic tradition says that fear is the dragon guarding treasure and that we limit our stories by limited beliefs. When we get close to the truth, our course may be altered. On Wednesday nights, I have the choice of a writing group, an Artist's Way group, or a Christian Spirituality group. Which one do I choose? Am I choosing a path that’s outdated and based on a hidden set of needs? This too takes meditative time, God connection, and making sure that Fear is not in control.