The Reluctant Fundamentalist

We just watched The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 
Very heavy. But very worthwhile. 

No diatribe here, but it seems sometimes that our country just needs to . . . step away . . . from other countries' personal business, and let those countries' cultures exist as they will and not as we would have them. It seems we forget that we're all, this whole world over, just people. One by one. All just human beings.
And maybe money isn't every, single, important, thing in this world.

The movie made me think of New Hymn, written by Reynolds Price and sung by James Taylor.

Source of all we hope or dread

Sheepdog, jackal, rattler, swan

We hunt your face and long to trust

That your hid mouth will say again let there be light

A clear new day

But when we thirst in this dry night

We drink from hot wells poisoned with the blood of children

And when we strain to hear a steady homing beam

Our ears are balked by stifled moans

And howls of desolation from the throats of sisters, brothers, wild men

Clawing at the gates for bread

Even our own feeble hands

Aim to seize the crown you wear

And work our private havoc through

The known and unknown lands of space

Absolute in flame beyond us

Seed and source of dark and day

Maker whom we beg to be

Our mother father comrade mate

Til our few atoms blow to dust

Or form again in wiser lives

Or find your face and hear our name

In your calm voice the end of night

If dark may end

Wellspring gold of dark and day

Be here, be now

30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself

A friend sent me this in an email yesterday. At first I thought it was one of those goofy things that end with "I sent this to you because you're special. Now YOU send it on to all the special people in your life." But this isn't treacly hackneyed folk wisdom (God help the folk!). This is worthwhile. Taken in toto it reminds me of AA wisdom. I guess wisdom is wisdom . . . and largely common sense. 

It was written by marcandangel, whose blog I've added to my bloglist.

When you stop chasing the wrong things you give the right things a chance to catch you.

As Maria Robinson once said, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” Nothing could be closer to the truth. But before you can begin this process of transformation you have to stop doing the things that have been holding you back.
Here are some ideas to get you started:

1.     Stop spending time with the wrong people. – Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you. If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot. Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth. And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.

2.     Stop running from your problems. – Face them head on. No, it won’t be easy. There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them. We aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems. That’s not how we’re made. In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall. Because that’s the whole purpose of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become.

3.     Stop lying to yourself. – You can lie to anyone else in the world, but you can’t lie to yourself. Our lives improve only when we take chances, and the first and most difficult chance we can take is to be honest with ourselves. Read The Road Less Traveled.

4.     Stop putting your own needs on the back burner. – The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too. Yes, help others; but help yourself too. If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do something that matters to you, that moment is now.

5.     Stop trying to be someone you’re not. – One of the greatest challenges in life is being yourself in a world that’s trying to make you like everyone else. Someone will always be prettier, someone will always be smarter, someone will always be younger, but they will never be you. Don’t change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love the real you.

6.     Stop trying to hold onto the past. – You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one.

7.     Stop being scared to make a mistake. – Doing something and getting it wrong is at least ten times more productive than doing nothing. Every success has a trail of failures behind it, and every failure is leading towards success. You end up regretting the things you did NOT do far more than the things you did.

8.     Stop berating yourself for old mistakes. – We may love the wrong person and cry about the wrong things, but no matter how things go wrong, one thing is for sure, mistakes help us find the person and things that are right for us. We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come.

9.     Stop trying to buy happiness. – Many of the things we desire are expensive. But the truth is, the things that really satisfy us are totally free – love, laughter and working on our passions.

10. Stop exclusively looking to others for happiness. – If you’re not happy with who you are on the inside, you won’t be happy in a long-term relationship with anyone else either. You have to create stability in your own life first before you can share it with someone else. Read Stumbling on Happiness.

11. Stop being idle. – Don’t think too much or you’ll create a problem that wasn’t even there in the first place. Evaluate situations and take decisive action. You cannot change what you refuse to confront. Making progress involves risk. Period! You can’t make it to second base with your foot on first.

12. Stop thinking you’re not ready. – Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first.

13. Stop getting involved in relationships for the wrong reasons. – Relationships must be chosen wisely. It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company. There’s no need to rush. If something is meant to be, it will happen – in the right time, with the right person, and for the best reason. Fall in love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.

14. Stop rejecting new relationships just because old ones didn’t work. – In life you’ll realize that there is a purpose for everyone you meet. Some will test you, some will use you and some will teach you. But most importantly, some will bring out the best in you.

15. Stop trying to compete against everyone else. – Don’t worry about what others are doing better than you. Concentrate on beating your own records every day. Success is a battle between YOU and YOURSELF only.

16. Stop being jealous of others. – Jealousy is the art of counting someone else’s blessings instead of your own. Ask yourself this: “What’s something I have that everyone wants?”

17. Stop complaining and feeling sorry for yourself. – Life’s curveballs are thrown for a reason – to shift your path in a direction that is meant for you. You may not see or understand everything the moment it happens, and it may be tough. But reflect back on those negative curveballs thrown at you in the past. You’ll often see that eventually they led you to a better place, person, state of mind, or situation. So smile! Let everyone know that today you are a lot stronger than you were yesterday, and you will be.

18. Stop holding grudges. – Don’t live your life with hate in your heart. You will end up hurting yourself more than the people you hate. Forgiveness is not saying, “What you did to me is okay.” It is saying, “I’m not going to let what you did to me ruin my happiness forever.” Forgiveness is the answer… let go, find peace, liberate yourself! And remember, forgiveness is not just for other people, it’s for you too. If you must, forgive yourself, move on and try to do better next time.

19. Stop letting others bring you down to their level. – Refuse to lower your standards to accommodate those who refuse to raise theirs.

20. Stop wasting time explaining yourself to others. – Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it anyway. Just do what you know in your heart is right.

21. Stop doing the same things over and over without taking a break. – The time to take a deep breath is when you don’t have time for it. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. Sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly.

22. Stop overlooking the beauty of small moments. – Enjoy the little things, because one day you may look back and discover they were the big things. The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with someone who matters to you.

23. Stop trying to make things perfect. – The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists, it rewards people who get things done. Read Getting Things Done.

24. Stop following the path of least resistance. – Life is not easy, especially when you plan on achieving something worthwhile. Don’t take the easy way out. Do something extraordinary.

25. Stop acting like everything is fine if it isn’t. – It’s okay to fall apart for a little while. You don’t always have to pretend to be strong, and there is no need to constantly prove that everything is going well. You shouldn’t be concerned with what other people are thinking either – cry if you need to – it’s healthy to shed your tears. The sooner you do, the sooner you will be able to smile again.

26. Stop blaming others for your troubles. – The extent to which you can achieve your dreams depends on the extent to which you take responsibility for your life. When you blame others for what you’re going through, you deny responsibility – you give others power over that part of your life.

27. Stop trying to be everything to everyone. – Doing so is impossible, and trying will only burn you out. But making one person smile CAN change the world. Maybe not the whole world, but their world. So narrow your focus.

28. Stop worrying so much. – Worry will not strip tomorrow of its burdens, it will strip today of its joy. One way to check if something is worth mulling over is to ask yourself this question: “Will this matter in one year’s time? Three years? Five years?” If not, then it’s not worth worrying about.

29. Stop focusing on what you don’t want to happen. – Focus on what you do want to happen. Positive thinking is at the forefront of every great success story. If you awake every morning with the thought that something wonderful will happen in your life today, and you pay close attention, you’ll often find that you’re right.

30. Stop being ungrateful. – No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life. Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs. Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.

As long as this exists...

I would be unsurprised to know that people who read this blog are familiar with Public Radio's The Writer's Almanac. On Monday morning as I drove to work, Mr. Keillor's voice was at first simply a soothing sound as he began to read "As long as this exists..." By the time he reached the second sentence, I was thinking of the appreciation of people throughout the world, throughout time, for the peace of nature. 

As long as this exists...

by Anne Frank

"As long as this exists," I thought, "and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy." The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

Night magic

It has been a beautiful week, sunshiny and exactly the right combination of warm and cool, thoroughly amazing weather for this time of year. Had I known, last October and November, that the winter would be so pleasantly painless, I would have been a far happier woman for all these months.

A few nights ago I got in bed and spent a long time lying in the dark looking through the windows at the stars. The night sky was so clear, and the stars so bright that night! When I was little, bright stars in the black night sky did the same thing to me as thoughts of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy: they gave me physical thrills, chills that ran from the top of my scalp to my heels, accompanied by nearly audible harp glissandi. I imagined other people out there in the far far places standing in their back yards, looking at their night skies, thinking of the possibility of someone else in the far away mysterious spaces that they watched. Magic!

The other night as I lay in my bed, and watched the fairy lights twinkling way up in the far far dark, I felt, for a second, the same feeling of excited possibility . . . the thought that what I know of life and what I hear from other people about life is not all there is to Life, not all there is at all.

I felt, for just a few quickly passing seconds . . . Magic.

Peace

Ah. It is 4:30am, it is Saturday, Christmas Eve. I have no evergreen tree in my house. I have no Christmas lights, nothing to indicate that it is The Festive Season. Husband and I will exchange no gifts. And yet, you know...? It feels different here right now. I feel content and at peace.
Nothing has changed. Max is still old and feeble, I'm still fat. It's still gray and dark outdoors.
But still, I feel different.

Somebody asked me yesterday if I believed in God. First, I answered with the Correct AA answer: I believe in my Higher Power. Then I said, raising my arms to indicate the cosmos, "I believe in Something, some Plan." I don't need or care to delve into it any more deeply than that. I'm content for it to be Solstice or The Nativity or whatever.

It feels so good.

It is Sunday at 4:37am and I am awake and growing drowsy. One of the reasons I love to get up in the wee hours is the fuzzy foggy fading that precedes my return to bed and the floating return to sleep. Ah, going back to sleep is one of my life's great pleasures. 
One morning I toddled back to my pillows with chilly toes. I arranged myself among my pillows, pulled the covers up to my ears, made sure my nose was well out into the air. My drift off to sleep was plagued by those cold toes. "I wish I'd fall asleep!" I thought. "My feet always warm up when I fall asleep." 
My consciousness had nearly gone away when a wave of warmth rolled over me from shoulders to feet. It felt just like a bolt of warm cloth moving down my body, enshrouding me in pure deep comfort. It felt so good that I smiled into my pillow, there all by myself, and the thought came to me: "I bet this is how it feels when you die."
Wouldn't it be just something, and not the least bit surprising, to find out that dying feels good?


I read something long ago that pointed out that the human body is designed to enjoy everything that it has to do. The functions required for ongoing life feel good. Eating, sleeping, digestive functions . . . they all feel good. It would make sense that dying would feel good. Not the getting ready to die: I don't mean that. I mean the final moment . . . the giving up of life. 
Maybe it feels good.
Maybe in the last seconds, there is a flash of, "What was I so scared of?"

It's just what you do

I've been feeling a little bit embarrassed about that last post. Some of you seemed to think I had gone above and beyond, and that makes me feel as if I was tooting my own horn. It took a long time for me to write about that day, although I knew I would. Melinda seemed to me so singular, such a character. She was the reason for the post. I have so much more memory of her than I wrote . . . sometimes I want to get the story told and I leave out details. Her direct brown eyes, her square jaw, her wide straight-line lips. The faint dramatic intonation: "Yes . . . mine is a lonely life." 
What I want to say here is that that's how it is in the country. I always thought so, and now that I live here, I do know it to be true. Maybe it's true in the city too; I don't know because I haven't lived in a real city. Maybe it's true wherever one human being asks another human being for help.


A long time ago, before we bought this land, but after we had begun looking around for a country place, I spent a few hours driving around being happily lost on country roads. It was late fall, might have been Thanksgiving weekend . . . and in the 'burbs the roads were clear. In the country, of course, they were snowy, slushy, muddy. I was on a long, long, unpopulated road when I slid into the ditch. I don't recall the details now. It was not a very cold day. Cell phones hadn't yet been invented. I didn't know where I was, but I remembered having passed a house less than a mile back. I trundled myself down the road, thinking to call Husband for help. There was one person at home, a young man. Early twenties, I'd say . . . big and burly and blond and country-messy . . . which is to say, clean but surface-dirty from physical labor.
But get this: his job was driving a tow truck.
That guy got on his overalls, got his truck and his big heavy chain, and he got underneath my car in the mud by the side of the road and he pulled me out most handily. I felt so bad that he was getting so wet and dirty but he said he was used to it. 
I had no cash to give him, and he didn't care. 
I never saw anybody work so hard and smile so much.
I still don't know what road I was on, or what his name was, or how I ever found, on a long, long, empty country road, the one person who would know exactly what to do and how to do it in fifteen minutes.


So, you know... What goes around comes around.

Melinda at my door

To the east, regions already suffering the aftereffects of flooding from Hurricane Irene almost two weeks earlier had those problems aggravated by 2–4 inches (51–100 mm) of new rain on saturated ground and rivers still swollen. TheWallkill River crested at five feet (1.5 m) above flood stage in Ulster County, and the village of Washingtonville in Orange County to the south was isolated as it had been after Irene by the rising waters of Moodna Creek. The Orange County Government Center in Goshen, just reopened a day earlier, was closed indefinitely. Roads were closed, including exits on the New York State Thruway in the Mohawk Valley and, south of the Interstate 84 exit at Newburgh, the entire road. Some businesses that had spent considerable time and money to reopen after Irene were once again flooded.^[52] Damage in Tioga County in the Southern Tier was estimated at around $100 million.^{[53] ~Tropical Storm Lee}

When the second inundation, courtesy of Tropical Storm Lee, was imminent, I left work early so as to get to this side of the creek before I could not. At home, I ensconced myself on the couch with my book. It was chilly. I thought about starting a fire in the stove, but it didn't feel as if it would be worth the effort. It was very quiet. The rain pattered against the windows, stopped, resumed.
I thought I heard a car's tires roll up the driveway, but from where I sat, saw neither Husband's truck, nor any other vehicle. After a few minutes, a tiny tap-tap-tap of a key on the glass of the door. I unwound my legs from among the poodles and got up, craning my neck around the end of the kitchen counter to see the door. A tall white-haired lady peered in, hoping for a human. I opened the door and she stood on the porch in the rain, telling me she'd been a mile from home and had gotten detoured . . . and lost. "I could see the church up on the hill there, you know the one, with the blue cross? And he wouldn't let me go on!"

She wore no coat, and her black sweater was soaked. I got her inside and settled on the couch, provided, with my apologies, a cup of coffee reheated from the morning, and put the afghan on her shoulders. We visited for a little bit, and I heard the short version of her life story. She's from Lubbock, Texas, had a husband who died, then a son who died. She went to school for architecture but then decided she didn't like it because she didn't want to have to work with men all her life, so she got a degree in interior design. She was in cohoots with builders and worked a deal in which she'd decorate the new houses that they built. Anyway, then her son died, and this man Bob somebody (who owned the place near here where she lives now) married her and brought her here and then "no sooner did we get here, but he died."

She was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, except a slight wonderment at all these people dropping dead around her, and I enjoyed listening to the Texas flavor of her speech. In the short time she was here we covered a vast amount of conversational ground. She said the women here have been unfriendly to her. I said, "Well, you know, there's that little bit of antipathy between Northern and Southern women." I mentioned Jeannie to her, who had said once, in one of her Scarlet O'Hara fits of pique, and probably quoting some romance novel heroine, "That's work that only niggers and Northern women would do!" My guest was aghast. "I was raised with ladies, you know. No one I knew would ever have used language like that!"


While we talked I checked the computer to see how to get her home. 
She said, "I'd better write this down." 
"You don't have to," I said. "I'm going to lead you there." 
She did that whole upper-body recoil that it seems to me only Southern ladies do so well, and said, "You're going to lead me there?"
All little back roads and the poor thing had no idea where she was, I couldn't send her off into the rain alone to follow directions that included no landmarks. Some of the roads look like hardly more than somebody's camp driveway. But all told, it looked like only about seven minutes from here to there. 


After a while I said, "Well, you finish your coffee and get your keys, and we'll go out and get you home. And you get into a hot bath and warm up."
"I will. I'll put on one of those things, you know, that you wear over your bra." I expect she meant a camisole. Another Southern lady thing. I would have put on my flannel jammies.
I wasn't real sure where I was going but I knew where we needed to end up, and I knew the general direction. Some of those roads were ones I'd never been on, but lo and behold, after a while, we came out on the other side of the big pond that was the state route and I delivered her to her door. We blew our horns, waved out our windows, she pulled into her driveway and I went on. I wanted to see the flooded road. I saw it . . . all covered in several feet of water, guarded by sheriff vehicles with red and blue flashing lights. Having seen it, I had to back into somebody's driveway and, anticlimactically, pass by my erstwhile guest as she stood at the end of her driveway, in the rain, talking to someone I took to be a neighbor. Getting more soaked as she did so. Excessively gregarious. Maybe that's her "Texas" coming out.
We waved again and I wended my way home.


I am not an Earth Mother type. I don't go around Doing Good Without A Second Thought. I would not be one of those women about whom people would say, "Oh, she's just an angel . . . help anybody." But it never occurred to me not to go out in the rain and take that poor soul home. I think it's just the way it gets to be when everybody's all together in a big uncontrollable mess and we find out we need each other to survive. When I look at it that way, it makes natural disasters look a little bit like blessings.

...and the gifts of the season are these...

"Christmas gift suggestions: 

To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. 

To a customer, service. To all, charity. 

To every child, a good example. 

To yourself, respect." 

~ Oren Arnold 

Illumination

Cloud shadows pass over the hills. Where there was sun, a shadow as big as the whole hill. And then it passes on to the next hill, leaving illumination in its path.
In the mornings the western slopes are dark, in the evening, the eastern sides lie in the shadow of the hill's own mass.
Each hill and each hillside get their shares of both the light and the dark.


I am no more or less than the trees on those hills. I am no more important or necessary in this world than the wildflowers or the geese or the rabbit or the deer. I am no less important either. We are each one of a kind and we are all of a piece. We all live, go dormant, bloom, grow. We all thrash in the winds of the storm, shelter ourselves from wild weather, lose pieces of ourselves and grow protective scars. In this season of young tomato plants growing from seed, growing daily larger and stronger, even after some small unmeant carelessness breaks a branch, I see quite clearly that living things want nothing more than to go on living and growing. We can't help it: We all go on because Life makes it easier to go on than to cease. 


I hope the illumination that I feel, in the wake of this latest passing cloud, remains.
I hope I don't forget how fortunate I am to be alive.
No matter what.

Live like you were dying

On April 9, I went to the doctor for a long overdue checkup. And because I had found a lump where a lump should not be. 

On April 12, I had some non-invasive diagnostic tests.

On April 13, I had a biopsy done. Four skinny little worms of core samplings of my tissue laid on a saline-soaked gauze pad. The doctor showed them to me. I could see the white of the tumor among the pink of the apparently normal tissue. They looked like two-and-a-half-inch-long strips of chicken meat, with a little white fat.

I got dressed and met the surgeon in the hall at a little writing desk.  He told me where the tissue would go, when the results would be back. He was putting a rush on it, he said, and I should have my husband with me, or a friend, on April 16.

That's when I made The Mistake.

I asked him, "What do you think?"

He said: "I'm concerned that it's a breast cancer. But I've been wrong. That's why we do biopsies."

For a good portion of the drive home, I was talking to myself.  

• Of course he thinks it might be cancer. Why else would I be having a biopsy? 
• There are lumps that aren't cancer.
• You don't know yet. You don't know yet. You don't know yet.

Jack Daniels whispered in my ear, "Let's talk it over." He was my companion in times of trouble for so long that it was a simple reflex of my brain.

I stopped and bought a chocolate mocha cake.

I stopped and filled the car's tank with gasoline.

I cried the three miles home from the gasoline station.

The trees, just beginning to be limned in green fuzzy buds. The sky. The hills. The hills!

I said to my Higher Power, "Please let Heaven be at least as beautiful as this."

When I was little, the beginning of summer vacation felt like standing on a mountaintop in the sunshine, surveying a limitless number of days of reading, playing croquet or cowboys, long warm evenings of catching lightning bugs.  Now I know school summer vacation is sixty-five finite days.

Driving home, stopping at the mailbox, coming down the driveway and seeing the house that we built standing against the background of hill and sky, driving into the barn, turning off the car, hearing the dogs' ecstatic barking: all were numbered now. Tick, tick, tick off a list of checkboxes.

I got out of the car, clutching the mail and cakebox.  


I let the dogs out and we walked around the yard. I stopped in the front walk and let out my two milligrams of Fiery Anger: I deserve MORE. I deserve BETTER! 


We all came inside and I fixed the dogs' supper. I told myself I should go outdoors and enjoy the weather, but my body was too tightly clenched.  I took off my clothes and put on my robe . . . and went on this informative and comforting website.  

...and then decided if I wasn't dead yet, and if the treatment might not kill me, I might as well go outside and live. That's when I got the garden trowel and Max's ball...

The sky was even bluer than before, the clouds perfect little puffs of silver white, the hills stronger and more steadfast.  The dogs' voices were music, the dandelions snapped out of the garden beds as if they were joyfully jumping free.  The trees, the messy brush and weeds along the stone walls, were just as they should be and impossibly beautiful in their perfect random arrangements.  The breeze was perfume. I laughed with the love of all of it. 

I brought in a wagonload of firewood against the forecasted damp cool days. What patience I had with that process . . . a chore that I have habitually hurried through, making it harder than it had to be.  Like so much of life.

On April 16, the surgeon's office phoned at 12:40. The doctor had a cancellation, could I come in at 1:30 instead of 4:00?

"I would be delighted," I said. "Let me call my husband and I'll call you back in five minutes."

Husband said, "Sure.  I'll meet you at the doctor's office." I called the office to say I would be there within the hour.

We sat in the examining room for ten minutes before Dr. S. blew in, dressed in blue scrubs that matched his eyes. He was smiling.

"You have everybody confused!" he told me.

"The lab always has two people look at each sample. One said, 'I think it's...' The other said, 'Mmm, it might be, but I don't know.' So . . . your tissue has been sent to Yale for examination."

I had been prepared for "It's nothing," or "You're dying." So unprepared was I for nuanced speech that I couldn't grasp what Husband was able to hear. Between Dr. S. and Husband I finally understood that yes, it is cancer, but most likely (no one wants to say it out loud until Yale weighs in) it's cancer that is usually encapsulated and doesn't go speeding off to lymph nodes. Dr. S. hastened out of the room and back with his book, "The Breast," and showed me pictures of the likely suspect: "This is what it looks like under the microscope."

Usually this kind of cancer occurs in two percent of breast cancers . . . in non-Caucasian women fifteen or twenty years older than I am. That's why the lab technicians are so keen to make sure that it's what they think it is.

All the way home, the completely overcast sky looked bright blue. 

May 6 at 9:00am we will have confirmation.

And we will proceed.

Given the choice, I wouldn't have missed this last week for anything.

"And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter, 

"And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying."

~ from Live Like You Were Dying, Tim McGraw

Thank you to Hilary at 

The Smitten Image

4/21/2010

Nature is man's teacher.

Nature is man's teacher.  She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.  ~Alfred Billings Street

On my way to work on Friday morning I surprised a flock of thirty wild turkeys having a block party in the middle of my country road.  I say "thirty," but that's simply an estimate. Trying to count turkeys while they're doing their "Oh My Feathers Here Comes A Behemoth Let's Get The Flock Out Of Here" scurry is a little tricky.  
Most of them moved en masse into the woods to my right. Two didn't know which side of the road would be the better choice and spent a couple of seconds weighing their options. One finally quick-strutted off after the crowd, and the other, whom I was trying to herd, very slowly and gently, with the car ("I suggest that I drive over here; you go that way.") decided that taking to the air was the best idea.  I watched him (I think it was a jake, an immature male) rise almost straight up, with those wide strong wings stretched out, the feathers spread. Twenty feet above the road, between the bordering trees, he turned in a circle and headed toward his flock. I lost sight of him as he flew into and among the bare branches. 

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I smiled: This is what It is about. This goes on. 

"Wild turkey teaches us about the need to cultivate skills of cunning and agility. It is important to know how to read your environment and react in a way that preserves your way of life; this involves noticing that a certain situation has the potential to get dangerous for you, and knowing how to extricate yourself from it safely - and unnoticed where possible. Wild turkey is excellent at teaching people how to avoid arguments and unnecessary confrontation, through using skills of observation, cunning and agility."

"Like all animal helpers, this animal will only appear when right and appropriate, and cannot be forced to visit you, commune with you, or share messages with you. In places where the wild turkey lives, you may find that the wild turkey seeks you out through a chance encounter. Wild turkeys are more than capable of disappearing from view, so sighting one (especially more than once) can represent the relevance of wild turkey's lessons in your life."  ~ Wild Turkey Lessons and Challenges

Listen: I know there are turkeys galore in these fields, but I don't remember ever having come upon so many at such a short distance. 
And listen: I know that this totem stuff might be a bunch of hooey.
But then again . . . interestingly, my workday was quite unusually pleasant.