living on both ends - an exploration of best and worst

just because..........

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
Jane Kenyon

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

 

wednesday nights

WORST-
 

She calls it the intensity of addiction
I know it as tears and heartbreak
Anxiety and a call
To surrender

Process, not details

Placing myself under the care of the
Meeting; the same tenor as
Admitting my powerlessness.

It is what keeps us sane, she says.
This time around, I feel that sanity.

It is enough.
I am grateful.

super powers

BEST-

New Jersey this spring was wet, muddy and messy for a gardener. Waiting for ground to be dry enough to double dig the beds I wanted, I found myself with muddy tennis shoes day after day. Muddy tennis shoes equals wet miserable feet.

I googgled best garden shoes/boots and, of course, up pops the awesome Wellington boot. A tad expensive, I sighed and thought about it. A week or so later, compelled I ordered a pair of dark green size eight knee length rubber Wellies. And waited, a bit impatiently, for the package.

Childhood dreams fulfilled are very powerful, and I see the satisfaction in Len each time he walks or sits with our Bedlington’s. A breed of dog he first wanted when he was nine, and had longed for one every since until we gave him one when he was forty-eight. There is a solidness to the fabric of joy that weaves around this dream fulfilled, and the gratitude, and awareness of how special it is.

So I have looked for childhood dreams of my own; and have not been successful in the retrieval. When my Wellies came, I was in my short overalls, dirty and wet, immediately opened the package, pulled on my boot and felt as if I had been granted super powers. When I wear them, especially with my shorts, I feel like I imagine the picture of my youngest son, at three, in his impossibly scuffed green and tan cowboy boots and his beige short-alls. His smile matches the smile in my heart. I can do anything.

And I realize that my whole life I have longed to be messy and wet and dirty, with my feet dry and comfortable.

 

tennis, anyone?

Well. Are we going to be those kind of friends who pick up the communication after a long absence and find that they have nothing to say to each other? Or will we be the kind who, within a few minutes, are engrossed in volleying the tennis ball of connection back and forth over the net? It has been a long busy month.

Radioactive ablation for my left-over thyroid cancer cells, hypothyroidism, a high school graduation, an 8^th grade graduation, lacrosse tournaments and games, Rock Band marathons in our living room, gardening (always the gardening), nassousness, mouth sores, nose sores, a sore digestive system, my mom and dad’s visit from Colorado to be present at the graduations, Judy - a friend from Colorado who tended to our family with infinite care during my period of isolation and recovery – sore throats, limits on talking, and some times of despair, mixed with an awareness of it is enough. The world we live in is enough.

So, that is how my month has been. How about yours?

PS – Each day I can feel my thyroid supplements kick in a bit more, I am taking it at night and that helps significantly with my morning sickness and ability to get up and be awake relatively quickly. There is a follow-up appointment with my endocrinologist in August, I am waiting for him, and the blood test, to confirm what the nuclear medicine doc told me – that my scan was clear. The numbness on the left side of my head and neck continues to lessen, and we are having a garage sale on Friday and Saturday. Oh, and my balloon flowers are budding and almost ready to pop!  

update

Slowing down. My body, my brain, I am sure my soul too. The garden, my planning, planting, is all I am interested in doing right now, and I am mostly only doing what I am interested in. When I read any words of substance, the meaning does not quite come together. Writing is worse. 

Tomorrow, I drive to North Carolina for our next residency in School of the Spirit. I missed our last one because of my surgery, I don’t want to miss this one.

My task, I think, is to practice not carrying the shadow for the group. It is okay to be weak this time, and slow. I hope the drive goes okay, I am going down by myself, but will have a companion on the way back.

Eighteen more days until my treatment, and hopefully, I can get back on my thyroid supplements, and my RA meds. 

Blogging will be sporadic until then, I am sure. Words are just not easily accessible.

quote for the day

The beauty and fragility of life on earth, it takes my breath away.

 Dr. Larry Fleinhardt, a character on Numb3rs, played by Peter MacNicol, Season 3, Episode “The Art of Reckoning.”

incense

WORST- Exploring one’s relationship with drugs (including alcohol) and addictive patterns. I could have sat in the courtroom, analyzed behavior, laughed off youthful stupidity, or named choices as addiction. How can grace to sit in juvenile court and feel pain, ache for the necessity of this teen to explore this complicated relationship that has so impacted his life, how can the knowing of that pain, without the anger or the fight or the cognitive gyrations that dilute it, be the worst?

Last week, I heard our Wednesday night family group facilitator repeat my words from our first family group “nobody holds their newborn in their arms and thinks “I can’t wait to go to an early substance abuse intervention program and explore our relationship with drugs together.” I was happy the words spoke to her enough to recycle them; sad for the opportunity to speak that truth.

After court, the youth in question hoed an unplanted area in our back yard. It used to be covered by a wooden deck that had been built in the anger of the previous inhabitants’ marriage disintegrating. Every screw shouted rage to me, and last year we finished taking it out.  Yesterday afternoon, he hoed the ground, he raked out the weeds, shirtless and sweaty, he created the furrows in a design of his choice, and then planted the green manure mix of field peas, oats and hairy vetch, with a few old packets of sweet peas thrown in for good measure. He covered them, and watered them, and then told me how much he loves to feel the soil.

I understand I said and his words carried the sweet scent of prayer.

 

Words that matter

BEST- Acceptance as a spiritual discipline.

Yesterday, there was an e-mail. Words I know to be true about me. Words I know I would have struggled to receive in the past. An awareness of the source of the struggle; ambivalence of the reality of how often who I am places me as ‘the other’ in community. An inability to accept that place, a compulsion to move into it.

This morning, a huge good ache at the beauty I live surrounded by and in, including who I am. A taste of freedom to see goodness. To be me. Fully. 

Thank  you Erin.

quote for the day

...the main thing in religion is to keep the conscience pure to the Lord, to know the guide, to follow the guide, to receive from him the light wherby I am to walk; and not to take things for truths because others see them to be truths, but to wait till the spirit makes them manifest to me; not to run into worships, duties, performances, or practices, because others are led thither, but to wait till the spirit lead me thither.  Isaac Pennington