A Lot of Life

...has happened since I last posted, almost a year ago.

Luckily for me, this isn't a diary; it's just a place where I occasionally ramble on about whatever is in my head at the moment. Sometimes I'm on here a lot. Sometimes, I go a year or more with nothing much to say.  Right now, I'm saying an awful lot about nothing, but I have words in my brain that do want to come out. I just need them to formulate themselves.

I've noticed over the last several years, since I was introduced to the world of Reiki, some very big changes that happened within me, all of which happened very quietly. Most notable of these is my level of patience with people who are behaving in a way that I find toxic. I am both more patient and more impatient. I am always hopeful that with some gentle guidance, perhaps with my example to lead them, that they will catch a clue about their behavior and its negative impact. I am quite often disappointed to see that while they might observe the difference in my behavior, it isn't enough to shine light on their behavior. But then, it's a little hypocritical of me to want them to change their behavior. Especially since one of biggest toxic behaviors I've been around in the last year is a demand that everyone around a particular person should act and think like that person. (No, I'm actually not talking about the current POTUS, though this could easily apply there as well.)

I find it confounding that a person should feel insulted, slighted, or even marginalized by someone else failing to follow a "How are you?" greeting with a reciprocal status request. Just because I don't follow with that doesn't mean that I don't care about you. In fact, it most likely is because I'm just thinking about something else, so I'm only responding to the question and not thinking beyond that. I do things like hold the door open for others, let someone with fewer items in front of me at the grocery checkout, smile at strangers I encounter. I'm not antisocial. But I think that you should not expect others to respond in kind just because it's how you are brought up. People are people, and we all have stuff going on, and most of us are too wrapped up in our own pile of stuff to realize that.

To The Girl

You post your heartbreak as loudly as you post your love.  I want to tell you a million things.  I want to tell you, "Welcome to my world." I want to tell you, "I understand your pain and confusion, and I am sorry you are feeling this."  I want to tell you, "Shut up, little girl. I told you there would be crying."  

If you come to me for solace, perhaps I will say some of the things I am thinking.  I do feel pity for you, having gone through this myself so many times. The emptiness, the sadness, the grief - they come in waves just like for a dead loved one. You have to go through a mourning. 

What will you do if he comes back again, little girl, old soul, unwanted sister? We both know he will gladly go back to your bed. It is a given. He will go back to her bed, too.  And to mine. But what will you do? You said you couldn't put yourself through that again, and I hope for your sake that you are stronger in your resolve than I am in mine. You thought you could change him, but I knew better. I know better.  He is himself, and he "loves" each of us, all of us, but he LOVES only himself. 

Some part of you must have known he would go. Now you get the pain of ignoring your very smart guts.  Shut up, little girl. Cry quietly in the corner like the other women. 

Smart Guts

We all have them. Gut instincts. We think/feel/know something so strongly that our body has a visceral reaction. We sense it in our gut. And nine times out of ten, that gut instinct was 100% correct. We don't always know it until much later, but our guts are almost always right.  

I am as guilty as anyone on the planet of ignoring that instinct, or listening to it but denying that it might be true. But what do we do when our gut instincts give us conflicting signals?  How do we decide which response to honor? Is there ever a way to honor both sides without being torn apart inside? 

My guts told me long ago, when I first met my husband, that I could be hurt. They were correct, of course. They were also correct when they told me that I was deeply connected to him and that even if I tried to walk away, my heart and spirit and mind would all three remain focused on him and the attachment would not weaken with his absence, but would become deeper. 

He is in my first thoughts on waking and my last thoughts before sleeping, and often invades my dreams. My mind drifts to him when I am working, when I am imagining ways to help people, when I am deep in conversation with someone about almost any topic. 

It sounds as if I am obsessed, but if that is so, it is not an unwelcome obsession. His behavior when we interact, either electronically or in the same room together, tells me he welcomes my presence, my thoughts and my insights. So do the requests I get from him, asking my thoughts on his latest website creation, or a new technique he is developing. 

Though we are very different people, and are living very different lives right now, we are able to communicate on whatever level is necessary at the moment. And for the most part, we agree with each other.  We have differences, though, and some of them are big - phenomenally big - which is where the hurting happens. I may hurt him, as well, but if that is the case he never expresses it. 

The thing is, we each know that the other might get hurt, and we hope it won't be the case, but we each have to be the person that we are, and that is just what happens sometimes. So, guts, what do you do when you know that staying is going to cause you to continue to be hurt, but you also know that you do not want to leave and probably couldn't if you did? What do you do?  

You write silly, meandering blogs addressed to your really smart guts that won't give you a clear, definitive answer. And you stay.  Yaw Agyei Tutu, you are my husband, and at least until my guts stop dragging me in conflicting directions, I will stay.  Those other people will just have to deal with that.  

Lightning Bug

Tonight, I would like to be a lightning bug and join the other lightning bugs, doing the things they do. 

I would like to flit around in the dark near the tree tops so that sleepy-eyed humans can lay in their beds, looking out their windows, and wonder if that's really a lightning bug, or if it's a space ship coming to Earth, or a star that appears to be moving because it's shining through tree branches, or maybe a celestial event that's never been seen before.  

Actually, I think tonight I would like to be a space lightning bug and join the other space lightning bugs in space, doing the things they do. 

I would like to flit around the outskirts of distant Magellanic clouds, or whiz through super massive black holes to see where they lead, or find other life forms on distant worlds.  Maybe I'd even find other creatures with lights in their butts and we could have a light-butt concert.  

Or maybe, just maybe, I should step away from the keyboard and put myself in bed before something crazy comes out of my mind, like politics or something.  

zzzzzz...

78

Today would have been the 78th birthday of my Mother, Queen Rose, Ma, Mom...  

It has been a tearful day for me.  I've allowed myself the day to feel whatever I felt fully and wholeheartedly.  I took the whole day off and spent it with my Dad and my sister.  We visited the beautiful bench where the ashes of Queen Rose reside.  We took flowers - I selected some small, dark red roses because they resembled garnets, her birth stone.  Dad selected some big pink daisy-like flowers because they were pretty.  

We set them on the bench along with the Christmas arrangement Ann and I selected for the holidays, the silk and gold roses that my niece left when she came earlier this month, and with the rose bush my oldest sister left there earlier this morning before returning to Georgia.  

The three of us - Dad, Ann and I - stood in the rain and told her how we love her and miss her.  Dad went back to the car first, fearing he might break down completely if he stood there any longer.  Ann stood in the rain trying to take pictures for the family to see on the Facebook page I created when Mom was so sick.  I took the crazy umbrella (that blew into our yard after a storm) out of the back of the car and held it over her so she could get a picture without raindrops.

We got back in the car and went to IHOP to have some lunch - the same place we went the day we had her Memorial Service - the one that's just around the corner from the house we all called home until a few years ago.  We didn't go by the house.  Dad said there was nothing left of us to see there since he sold it.  Ann and I didn't want to see it anyway.  Our emotions were already strung very high; we didn't need to feel that much more.

We came back home and things sort of returned to normal.  Ann had to take care of things for her and Mark.  I tried to take a nap, but ended up piddling around until I decided to check on one of Dad's meds.  After taking care of that, I had other important things to do for myself.  We gathered for a soul-warming dinner of beef stew that Ann and I made together; we had desert, did our evening rituals of caring for Dad and cleaning up, and we all said goodnight.  And now each of us finally has that quiet time alone to have a few minutes, hours, or centuries to mourn in our individual ways.  I guess mine is putting in writing the minutia of my day.  For what it's worth, it helps me. Thank you for your time. 

Today I am thankful for the opportunity to help people heal themselves, for loving family and friends, and for the people who sacrifice their own comforts to ensure that my loved ones and I can continue to enjoy our freedom. Hug your loved ones and show some love to strangers, today and every day!

Today we had Thanksgiving at the Courthouse Restaurant, where they offer a free meal to the community to show thanks for support throughout the year. We started the tradition of eating there on Thanksgiving a few years ago. It was one of Mom's favorite places to eat. She loved everyone who worked there and took an interest in all their personal lives, the way she always did that made people love her so much. It was nice to go again this year, but a little strange without Mom there. But this year, we brought along a friend who lost her husband in October; she and her husband were also regulars at the Courthouse Restaurant. Mom would have been so happy to have her along, and I know she was with us, shining her love down on all of us.

Magic Numbers

They're just numbers. They really are.  But somewhere along the line some bureaucratic agency here in the US decided that certain numbers (or ages) meant certain things.  

A person isn't old enough to attend kindergarten until she is five or six years old.  If that person is born later in the year (like November), she has to wait longer than the other kids because she isn't old enough at the start of the year. 

A person isn't a "teenager" when the teen numbers start (ten); that doesn't come until she is thirteen. 

A person is suddenly old enough to handle an automobile on her own at the magic age of sixteen. 

A person is magically able to vote, smoke cigarettes, and die for her country at the age of eighteen, but for some reason isn't old enough to drink alcohol until the magic age of twenty-one.  

All of a sudden, at age twenty-five, a person is considered old enough to be less of a risk to auto insurance companies, so her rates go down (assuming she has a good driving record, of course).

At the age of thirty-five, a person now needs to start having mammograms every few years because cancer doesn't become a risk to anyone below that age.  

At forty-eight years old, a person is suddenly too old to get cheap rates on life insurance policies if she doesn't already have something in place. Tough luck for you, missy! (I turned forty-eight this morning, or last night if you go by where I was born. Fortunately I do have life insurance, so no worries.)

At fifty-five years old, AARP is suddenly interested in her.  She can receive "senior" discounts at some places who consider us old well before we feel it.  

Retirement and Social Security benefits are suddenly available to a person who has reached the grand age of sixty-five, though if she hasn't properly prepared for that retirement, she will have to keep working until the day she dies.  Or she can spend oodles of money on lottery tickets and hope to hit the big one. 

I know there was research that led those bureaucrats to make those numbers mean those things, but it is a very dangerous thing to create large-scale rules based on something as tenuous as age.  Age and maturity or frailty are only partially connected.  

I've known twelve-year-olds who were much more mature and sensible than any twenty-one-year-old, including myself at that age. And I've seen a number of elderly persons whose emotional and behavioral age dwindled down until they were mentally only five years old. But I've also seen senior citizens who were so physically active all their lives that they were still in peak physical condition well into their seventies.  Who's to say they should stop working and sit in an old-folks home because of their age?  

I'd love to see our culture unhook itself from all its conservative conventions that cause us to make laws and rules and regulations designed to protect us from ourselves.  That's a silly basis for a law.  Common sense should be good enough.  If a person is doing something stupid or dangerous and gets hurt or hurts someone else, then hold that person responsible for the damage. 

And that's my birthday soapbox rant.  For me, each year is just another number. It's not that I don't celebrate it - I  love the attention, what can I say? I just don't get hung up on the numbers.  I'm exactly as old as I feel and that varies minute by minute.  Don't pin a bunch of silliness to me just because of it. In five minutes I won't be that age in my mind and your silly bureaucratic rule about me will suddenly be a moot point. So, nyeh, and have a good day! Now I'm going to look up movie times and treat myself to a matinee with lots of oily popcorn and a soda!