Formed knowing it will meet a crushing wave,
she dedicates herself to what brings her joy.
Though words may scatter like spray in the wind,
through uncertainty and half-formed understanding,
I persist until that moment of clarity—
"Ah, I see!"— throws open my heart's door.
I press forward with words and images,
offering my spirit in this moment
to the welcoming ocean.
Time ticks away,
like a stopwatch,
tick, tick, tick—
until the end is made clear.
Precious like the gold watch,
marking the end of a career,
or possibly a sturdy Timex
that does the job well,
without a thought or a care.
The beat of time is steady,
as it ticks on in our awe,
or with our fear, marking grief
for our loss before it is near.
It is said, “Time marches on.”
The body knows this to be true,
while spirit dances free,
released from the beat,
the measured cadence,
of tick, tock, tick.
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
Albert Einstein
“Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.”
Charles Schultz
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
St. Augustine
For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind
When my baby lay dying, we called all to our home to meet her, to hold her, to kiss her goodbye. When everyone departed, we lay on our bed with baby at rest, spooned between, and I slept. While I was sleeping, she took her last breath, swaddled in a yellow rose blanket, smelling of powder and lotion. When my father lay dying, We were called to his side. We sat, stood around the bed, told stories, laughed, wiped tears, and sighed. After a night and a day I walked out to rest. While I slept, he took his last breath. Then we sat and waited and remembered as his spirit fully left. When my mother lay dying, we called all to her home, as we sat, cooked, ate, and talked, laughed, and cried, for five days and nights. At dusk she lay quiet. Leaving my brother to sit vigil, I slept. She took her last breath. Seconds later, I was at her side. We washed her body and adorned her with rose petals and oil. When my sister lay dying, I slept in my bed, then awakened from a phone call to rush to her side after she drew her last breath. I sat with tears, spoke to her spirit as memories of her sweetness and her challenges washed over me— the joy, the delight, the losses that formed her life. Now, I wonder, will I wake before I die?
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”
Marcus Aurelius
“If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you. There’s nothing to take because you’re already fulfilled. That’s why the wise being is always ready to die.”
Seneca
“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ and find that there is no death.”
Eckhart Tolle
For Ongoing resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind
“One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.”
Henry David Thoreau
Our summer 2022 is wrapped in the bookend of grandkids. In June a trip following down along the Mississippi to La Crosse and now Labor Day when the grands descend on our home and our hearts for two days. The weekend marker that reminds us that summer is over, children will head back to school, the days and nights are cooler, the State Fair comes to an end, and bedtimes need to be earlier. The troupe ages 12-20 arrived to enjoy pizza, little sleep, lots of laughs, movies, late nights, eating favorite foods, enjoying favorite local activities, and celebrating their Opa’s birthday.
We want summer to last a bit longer. Summertime that brings a sense of letting go, relaxing, resting or playing in the sunshine, in a sundress and flip flops, or shorts and t shirt, offering a lightness to the body and the spirit. As we return to schedules and obligations, not totally forgotten in summer but more lived in a feeling of vacation, we also feel relieved as we do when we travel and long to return to our familiar routine. While our outer life might now feel more regulated, we long to hold onto the inner spirit of summer, the warmth of the sun within our being, the light of joy on a summer afternoon.
As I feel deep gratitude for the fact that our grands so desire to be with us and the joy they bring to our home in lifting spirit, I sit now and reflect on the overwhelming views of flooding in Pakistan and take in the horror of loss, crisis, grief, shock, and all that will not happen for those citizens and their children and grandchildren, their family unit. The incredible disruption to livelihood. The uncertainty for now and the future. The feeling of instability as life as it was known has been swept away.
One does not retract the other as there is pain and joy in every moment as we all live in one world separated only by miles. Each moment that I live, is also a moment of another’s life with a wholly different expression. Each to be honored for what it is, attended to with whatever presence we can bring to each other’s stories, knowing that all is in constant motion. Everything changes. Knowing your pain on my day of joy brings balance, truth, honesty to the full expression of living.
It is quite easy to find the sacred in these days of joy and family on a warm summer day, it is another to find the sacred in trauma or catastrophe. Yet, we do. It is there when we look, when we open to its presence, the possibility, to our memories stored within. We only need to remember our own stories of a lifetime to remind us that the peace and warmth in our hearts is there to touch. Summer is not just a season in our outer world but one that resides within.
“A little bit of summer is what the whole year is all about.”
John Mayer
“Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside me.“
Benjamin Alire Saenz
“Some of the best memories are made in flip-flops.“
Kellie Elmore
Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind
8×10 Acrylic
Janis Dehler
“One has to be in the same place every day, watch the dawn from the same house, hear the same birds awake each morning, to realize how inexhaustibly rich and different is sameness.” Taoist Philosopher Chuang TZU
A sage reminder and words of hope in the midst of a global pandemic. As I contemplate these verses, I reflect on my morning routine of waking and climbing the ladder to our cupola for a few yoga stretches, journal writing and meditation. The ladder is called a monk’s ladder as it is created in the style of each step, left and right, being at a different level. The cupola sits at the top of our geodesic dome home and in this way, I am sitting on the roof of our house in an enclosed space with windows in all directions. This daily journey to the top brings me comfort in its sameness and grounds me in this new day.
Through this circle of windows, I look east across the ravine out our front door to the rising sun. I look south to the stately elder birch tree and to the road winding out to eventually meet Hwy 65. I look west to the last remaining oak tree clumps holding a squirrel nest, then let my gaze move beyond our neighbors’ home and back yard to the bank of trees on the other side of the Rum River and to where the setting sun will appear later in the day. Finally, I move to the north with a meandering look following the banks of the river while watching for the eagles who like to fly down to our house and either circle our home or continue on down the river.
The windows, the sunrise, the sunset, and the river are present every day when I arrive with each day totally new in its sameness; the sunrise and then sunset show themselves in their daily dependability but different in their reds, yellows, oranges and maybe a hint of lavender or a simple greyness; the air is moving or calm or whipping and whistling; the earth is green or brown or white with snow or covered in deer tracks or filled with dandelions, lilacs, and hydrangeas; the river is full and flowing fast or shallow and slow with the contours shifting just a bit with the level of the water. My pen moves on paper and new words arise each day with varying emotions, thoughts, reflections and gratitude’s. In meditation the breath I rely on might feel slow or rapid as I settle in and my thoughts might act like monkeys flying from limb to limb or resting like a floating lily pad.
I look out of the same window and can tell the time of year by the slant of the sun and how it reflects on the trees beyond the river. I can see how the wind will alter this day and what it might do to the temperature. I can see what damage the deer have wreaked in the garden and reflect on the changes this brings to all the work we have put forth. I observe the cardinal pairs with ever surprising awe as they show in their jaunty coats, striking against the new snow on the hardy spruce.
We did not realize a year ago that sameness is what that year and this new year would bring to us, day after day, and that this experience of sameness could bring us such riches. The day to day ordinary is not always what we want to live in as some days bring forth so much struggle within us to stay grounded and aware that we would rather be able to jump in the car and make a run for it. It is a comfort to know that this experience of my world is available to me if I make myself available to it. If I pause and look. If I breathe and open my eyes.
Challenging doesn’t come close to describing the pain of these times for so many in our communities and in our world, testing us to the depths of our resilience. I and many have the luxury of staying home and waiting in place but that has its own struggles as well as it challenges our emotions, our psychological reserves, our social needs. Rather than being bored by the smallness of our lives while sheltering in our homes far longer than ever imagined, we can begin to explore our environment like reading a favorite book for the second or third time, different with each reading, finding something I had not understood or felt in the same way, allowing it to surprise me, challenge me, and open me to what I need to see or to learn. We might then, within our own story, find a new way of seeing something as if for the first time. A new perception, awareness, or insight into this one life I am living. This is my life. It looks different and it feels different and it has taken quiet and slow living to see it, but I am alive and breathing and filled with the richness of this moment. All so familiar, abundant and alive.
