socrates

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.
Socrates

I love this; it is so comforting. It is amazing how someone that lived over 2400 years ago can still be relevant. I agree with this philosophy and try to live my life in the middle somewhere - never making much to do about highs and holding my breath through the lows, waiting for them to end. I love that middle ground, that ho hum of the everyday, dishes to wash, grass to cut, supper to cook, kids to hug, friends to call, seeds to sow, moments to laugh, bills to pay, chickens to feed, words to write, paintings to paint, granola to make, berries to pick, walks to take, buttons to sew, towels to fold, groceries to buy, beds to make, and songs to hear; the best parts of my life . Thank you Socrates for saying what I feel.

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kindness

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.  Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.  Your life will never be the same again. 

Og Mandino

The sun is out today; it has broken through the gloom and cold and is scattered throughout my house and it is very welcomed. I have enjoyed these few winter days of being held inside, too cold to spend more than a moment outside watching through the kitchen window, but I think a day of sunshine will be especially nice. This morning I am thinking of my 20^th birthday, surely propelled by the stillness of the season and my house at this moment. I am there because I am thinking about my dear friend that I spent that birthday with and I am thinking of her because she lives in New York and I always think of her when this extreme winter weather barrels in on her state. These little beads of memory lead me to a painting, a painting I did that long ago of “birthday flowers”. My friend and I were art students in Nice, France in 1974 and on June 29, I turned 20, but no one knew it was my birthday except her. We had NO money but she showed up with a random bouquet of delicate birthday flowers she had bought at the French Market and I did a small painting of them; it still hangs on my wall. I have had 56 birthdays and certainly do not remember most of them, but this is one I am remembering on this cold February day. It is the act of kindness that I still hold dear and although I seldom see my old friend, she is there in my little painting and is there in how I see the world; she was sunshine.

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. 
Chinese Proverb
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now

It’s so wonderful now, now that it doesn’t matter if the paint is peeling or the whatumacallit is broken or if it is rusty or squeaky or missing or crooked; it only matters that it is there and that I have time and energy to clean it. To tidy it up. I have given up trying to replace things that are old and used; I now enjoy them. I have released this wasteful preoccupation of my youth where I thought the surface of things, literally, were important enough to have (steal) my time and my money. I love this place I am in now, it is so much more comforting and pleasurable and it is as it should be. The patina should wear off of the tables just as I lose the color in my hair and the arbor should lean just a bit from bundles of wisteria that were once there just I lean ever so slightly from the weight of motherhood and 56 years of life. It is how it all happens, time and wear, bending, breaking, but with it emerges a deeper splendor, one that is so much easier to be with than the beauty of youth, not as exciting perhaps, but far less anxious and demanding. I like it here.

 I think about my grandmother and how she lived in a tiny two bedroom house with one bathroom and a wringer washer where she raised 5 children and then my mother who had a three bedroom house with two bathrooms and an electric washer and dryer and only 3 children. I remember how my grandmother, her mother, would fuss about having so much when she would come to visit – so many clothes, so many things. I have more than my mother and having more means having less (time). My grandmother had time to sit on the porch every afternoon to visit with whoever walked by or stopped in; my mother had coffee nearly every weekday afternoon with her best friend, Flo. I, rarely do either of those things – too much stuff. Okay, I have to stop, I am depressing myself. I will work on this; I am determined to spend this chapter of my life beneath the surface.

Their They’re There

It’s not that hard

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differences

a grade school drawing that is remarkable (and different)

What would life be like if we focused more on what we have and less on what we don't have? I am not referring to material possessions; I am thinking about characteristics, although all of that "stuff" that people allow to define themselves can be part of this thought if you need for it to be. I mean things about you that make you different, things that are not status quo, things that make you you. Being comfortable with who you are allows you to be confident and that confidence projects and it becomes how the world sees you, as an extraordinary and one of a kind person.Celebrate the differences that make you you.

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Inquire Within

Internalizing seems to be my winter theme. I hear others talk about it also, people I might not even expect to go beneath the surface of their lives, sorry, but so true.I am convinced it is what winter requires. It starts with a cold day and a closet; you start "cleaning out" things, knocking down the literal cobwebs and ultimately discovering their figurative counterparts in your mind. There, is where the real work begins. "There" is where I am. It seems that as each year arrives, I release more baggage; for whatever reason, I am lightening the load - the load of youth, the load of pressure, the load of lists, the load of propaganda and society's set of plastic rules, and instead I am feathering my nest with my interpretations of what matters. How long does it take to "be you"? For me, it has been an evolutionary process filled with cause and effect situations that have brought me here. It is so hard to "listen", to internalize, because the world is filled with distractions - distractions that are mostly composed of propaganda driven by $.

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
Henry David Thoreau

 

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