A Priceless Gift

The garden's last flowers

I received a precious gift on my birthday, making it the most beautiful of birthdays in a long time. It came from a beloved member of my family, who was given the great burden of a severe-early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis, shortly after Mom died of that disease.

To understand the gift’s significance, you have to understand that severe Alzheimer’s steals not just memories, not just language in all its totality as the foundation of communicating between people. It steals the brain’s computer processor, so it can’t access stored information, filter data, recognize context, transfer essential messages, or discern logical pathways in the process of decision-making. Areas within itself are isolated from each other. The brain fights through this incredible interference to make sense of a whole world in incoherent motion, as it tries to serve its owner’s needs.

After months of withdrawal, as my loved one struggled in the aftermath that diagnosis, a birthday card arrived the day before my birthday. It was followed by a phone call on my birthday, opening with the birthday song, and then a long conversation, full of news and willingness to patiently work through spots where words would vanish, a strength of attention to hear my words. Love lived energetically in that phone call, a wonderful feat of reaching out.

At dinner with my husband later, I opened all my birthday cards, saving that special one for last. It was signed with a loving message, warm with recognition of our history together. At first I wept at the evidence of language difficulty, fleeing to the ladies room for another (brief) war with God over this. I washed my face, came back, and read the card again, this time thankful for the strength and love that glowed in its message. Sorrow can be blinding. When I wipe my eyes, I can see the tender mercies that always there.

It was a blessed birthday, rich with loving gifts from my family. I’m thankful to be part of the human experience, present and sober and wiser for the life given to me to live on this planet. May all our days be rich with reaching out, offering some simple blessing to someone else.

Ripples in the Pond



Fog in the harbor, Morro Bay, California



Ripples in the Pond


Sometimes it hits me upside the head,
how what happened to her
touched him and he touched me
and I told someone and
in the telling she was touched
and the touches keep touching.
One day I want to ask God:
Please show me
the ripples in the pond
where my stone reached.

That Jumping-Off Place

I’ve had three hours of sleep, and today I’m thinking about bliss. I even looked up the word to be sure I knew its correct definition: complete happiness or a state of spiritual joy, according to the dictionary that accompanies the Word program.

I’m thinking about “following your bliss,” a phrase coined by myth master Joseph Campbell as he discussed mythology and the hero’s journey with PBS journalist Bill Moyers in a series aired in the late 1980s. It means something like discovering you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be in this life, doing exactly the right thing for you to be doing, and finding fulfillment in it.

I’ve had about eight hours’ of sleep in three days; yesterday began for me at 6 a.m. and ended around 3 this morning. I was doing the work needed to compete in the final floral competition at our local fair. I signed up to do two separate, complete wedding flower displays. I don’t know what I was thinking. At 2:30 this morning, the work still wasn’t finished, but my body made me give up.

This morning I wrapped up the last bits at 7 a.m. and my husband helped me haul the pickup-load to the fair. I was content with the work I’d done and immensely grateful for many things. Friends let me harvest flowers from their gardens because my main bloom is still a few weeks off. The strength to work on my feet all day and all night was there. The inspiration was there, and the problems I encountered had simple solutions. Mostly, I was grateful to have found the desire to do a thing I love to do and follow it through all the friggin’ way, even when the work was hard.

Someone asked me at the flower building this morning if I would give her some tips on floral design. All of a sudden, the years fell away and I was 16 years old, living in a small desert town. My brief stint at McDonald’s hamburger joint had come to an ignominious end. My spirits couldn’t keep up with the busloads of tourists on their way to Las Vegas wanting burgers their way right now. I promptly went across the street to the town’s flower shop and offered to work for free if they would teach me how to arrange flowers. The owner looked at my little application, lifting her glasses off her face, and then she put them back on and looked at me. “Come back Monday morning,” she said. “We’ll pay you minimum wage to start.”

That was my first "jumping-off place." For the next five years I worked for her after school and during summers while in college, learning how to arrange flowers for every occasion. I went to college in the first place to study floral design and horticulture, which I promptly abandoned after the first semester to become an English Lit. major. English Lit. gave me a wonderful career in magazines, but I worked in flower shops off and on over the years between jobs. What’s not to love about working with flowers?

I’ve been blessed over and over throughout this summer’s floral competition by the awareness that I’m exactly where I should be, at this stage in my life. I’ve received bountiful gifts from my Higher Power, in the form of joy, ideas, flowers, weather, prizes, love, and memories. It’s been a spiritual experience, leading me to the discovery that joy has returned. Another "jumping-off place" has happened.

This is what Joseph Campbell says about bliss: “I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word ‘Sat’ means being. ‘Chit’ means consciousness. "Ananda’ means bliss or rapture. I thought, ‘I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.’ I think it worked.

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

The judges liked my wedding work, pictured here. Now I’m going to enjoy the refreshment of a nap and say another prayer of thanks.

***
Several hours later….

Couldn’t sleep, so I got up and cruised around on low speed, cleaning up here and there after the explosion of floral detritus over the past 10 days. My house looks like a tired flower shop on Mother’s Day: stems, leaves, vases and buckets of aging greenery and unused flowers everywhere. I even swiped the vase that normally sits on the corner of my desk with something in it all seasons, and the blank hole there bugs me. So I arranged yet another vase of flowers, which I later took to an AA meeting tonight and gave to my sponsor in thanks for letting me have trimmings from her redwood, eucalyptus, Japanese maple and pine trees for my greenery. Can’t bring myself to put another vase together tonight. A nice chore to look forward to in the morning.

The AA meeting got me thinking about the tie between a couple of my life’s jumping-off places and being sober. “We stood at the turning point,” the Alcoholics Anonymous text says of that moment when a person is suddenly driven to ask for help with her drinking problem. There’s a willingness at that moment to surrender to anything that promises an iota of relief from the misery of drinking oneself to death.

I drank to change how I felt, to feel more of something, to feel less of something. I did that from the time I had my first drink. When alcohol hit my bloodstream, something inside said, “Oh, yes!” It never stopped saying yes with an exclamation point. I couldn’t picture my life without it. But some mysterious awareness had bloomed in my brain, which told me that alcohol might be the source of my misery instead of being the solution for it. I discovered I wanted to live, and I found myself seeking out Alcoholics Anonymous and teetering on the brink. I can’t live with booze, and I can’t live without it, I metaphorically said. The people in the AA meetings said, “We know how you feel and we have a solution that allows us to live sober, happy lives.”

I took that leap of hope. Today I can do all the things I thought I’d never be able to do without at least a little buzz. AA saved my life and gave me a life, as I’ve heard said in meetings, a gift I didn’t foresee when I stood at that jumping-off place in the doorway of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in May 1990.

And I’ve found that it’s true what I heard said in those early meetings: You walk in the door with a little list of hopes—just to stop drinking yourself into misery, stop being so very ill from alcohol poisoning, stop losing parts of your life like your job, your spouse, your self-respect. You think that’s all you want. But you’d shortchange yourself if you settled just for that little list, because sobriety brings with it an enormous list of miracles. People are reborn.

Flower Power

Have you ever dreamed up something that doesn’t exist and then made it exist?

What causes that creative inspiration? Where does the idea come from? What part of the brain can picture something it’s not seen before, let alone then figure out how to make it happen?

I was talking with my husband about the creative act. He doesn’t have a brain that makes things up. He won the top baking prize at our regional fair last week, the “Best of Show,” for a lemon tart that tastes like heaven. Joe follows a recipe when he makes it, the same recipe he was given by the chef at the culinary school where Joe trained and now volunteers every day. He gives that recipe to other people, who make the tart but it doesn’t turn out as well as Joe’s rendition of that tart. So Joe has a special touch as he cooks the juice and blends the curd and then the crust and then bakes the tart. He makes a beautiful, unbelievably delicious tart, but he doesn’t invent anything.

I invent things, and he thinks that’s amazing. I can’t make that tart, but tell me to make a flower arrangement that represents a famous writer of my choice, and I’ll picture a full-blown floral design that illustrates not just the writer’s specialty, but uses components of his style and references to specific works. I’ll see it all in my head. How does that work? Why does that happen? I love that it happens, but it’s so curious.

The second floral competition of the fair required floral designers to do table settings for 1) a famous person associated with mountains and 2) a favorite writer. I chose Ansel Adams and John Muir.

I used Adams’ unbelievably beautiful shot of Yosemite Valley as my inspiration, those incredible textures and lines of that monochrome shot. With angular black and red Asian tableware and vases on a white cloth, I used red dahlias, red miniature roses, black eucalyptus and highly textured white-green foliage for two floral designs.

It was stark, monochromatic, and totally true in structure to an Ansel Adams composition. I loved it. I didn’t shoot a very good photo of it, but here it is:

John Muir’s design got redwood foliage in homage to the redwood forest state park named after him here in California. I used wood tones in vases and tableware, and combined small curving branches with lavender Echinacea coneflowers and golden yarrow in simple, woodsy arrangements.

The judge gave the Muir setting a thumb’s up, with a first place ribbon and the Judge’s Award. He or she was not overly impressed with the Ansel Adams work, giving it a third place. I usually agree with the judges in the floral design competitions, but when I saw the first and second place settings in the same class as Adams, I got myself an attitude. I saw blue ribbons on my four other pieces illustrating winter….

spring….

autumn….

and summer…..which I forgot to take a photo of…. and laughed at myself and at my Higher Power, who listened to me asking please, may I have a couple of special ribbons for my work, and who generously saw to it that I got blue ribbons for everything (except Ansel Adams) plus a big fat “Judges Award” plus a big fat “Best of the Day” award for a lovely little flower called a peacock orchid that I had entered in the show’s cut-flower divisions, which I found in my garden this week after having totally forgotten I had planted it years ago and so I did nothing to make it grow and it grew only because of God’s sun, rain, and fine weather.

So I was given the couple of special ribbons I asked for, plus more besides, and who do I think I am to whine about anything, I ask you? I am so blessed to get to work with lovely flowers and make things that I picture in my head. Now I’m going to rest up like a happy camper until Monday, when work on the third and final flower show begins.

(The photo at the top is the exhibit I made on the first day of the fair illustrating the fair's mountain theme. I speak of it in the post below.)

Glad Tidings of Great Joy I Bring

The state fair has opened here and the tidings were good for the first group of competitions I entered. The rusty iron garden marker I made garnered a blue ribbon, and so did my kite (see post below). My floral arrangements did well, and I was happy to see firsts on six out of ten, including the one above, representing “On Golden Pond”…

and this one, representing “Indian Summer”…

But it was my big fair-theme exhibit, illustrating “Mountains of Fun,” that really knocked me sideways. Using things passed down to me by my mother, I made a “mountain” camping scenario with flower arrangements in her cast-iron frying pan, her Dutch oven, her old coffee pot, and her old gray-wool blanket. I found it covered with big ribbon rosettes: First Place, Best Fair Theme Award, Judges Award… I don’t have a photo of the whole exhibit because I constructed it there at the fairgrounds, but here’s the frying pan with its batch of “eggs”…

I sat on a bench and wept for the resilience of the human spirit. For the grace and mercy of God, who brings healing after a long season of sorrow. For the great blessing of my parents, who, in spite of their imperfections and the tragedies of their deaths, helped make me the person I am today. For the tenacity I’ve learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, to discover myself by simply being willing to put one foot in front of the other in pursuit of dreams. The ribbons meant more than just a prize; they represented rebirth. They proved to me that you can accomplish meaningful things if you're willing to just make a beginning. And everything that happens in your life, both the miseries and the untold many ordinary events, combine to enrich you and bring you joy if you make the smallest attempt to view life with eyes of hope.

Epiphany after Winning a “Best of Show” Ribbon at the State Fair

I was taking a piss in a bathroom stall
at the fairgrounds when everything changed
between God and me.
Dad, I said,
inexplicably since
I was raised with Almighty God
on the Judgment Seat,
Dad, I said, you’ve been good to me.
I’m a sinner and a cheat but you don’t knock me
upside the head & say, To hell with you!
You say, Here, sweet thing,
is food & water
& more than you have wished for.
I have a drug addict heart but you see
the thing in me you made on a good day
when your creative juices
were pumping up a storm.
You see me with love that says,
You are really something,
my blue-ribbon child.
I left that toilet a woman changed
just because
for reasons I don’t understand
I called him Dad.

This Bud's for You

Breaking news in the California wine country where I live: The vineyards have experienced "bud break"! That's what you see in my photo above...the new shoots have shot forth and the grapevines are reborn. It's cause for celebration in my region, makes the news and everything.

It IS wonderful to witness the renewal of things. It makes me downright cheerful, a state of mind I sorely needed after the pity-party I threw two weeks ago. Here's a snapshot of how things stood then:

I haven't been a happy camper inside my own soul. In that quiet place where I've found contentment through the years, a few words from a few unhappy people and a few sad situations wormed their way in and started putting down roots. [Here's the rest of "Hanging Pictures in the Sewer."]

Titanium over at Element 22 had something to say in response to a remark I made in that post, i.e., if I fall in a cesspool, pretty soon I start hanging pictures because I start feeling comfortable there. Here's what Ti had to say about that:

"There’s something in these dark places, too. Like bulbs wintering over in a cool cellar, devoid of sunlight, all we can see and smell is the desiccation, the decay, the frailty of our own wintering-over. It is a season of the soul, this dark place- and one that will feed the source of the green shoots that are soon to come.

"Without the winter, the dark, the stink- there couldn’t be new growth. Sometimes we have to be cut back and cut down completely in order to return full of life. The green shoots are coming through the soil with these words of yours and soon the sunlight and gentle rain will coax flowers like you’ve never seen.

"In truth, if each one of us is NOT a troubled soul, we are not stirred in any way. Try to see ‘troubled’ as a transitive verb. See it as the transition that it is, the agitation of soul that stirs change and growth. Sometimes even the unkind messengers are prophets unknown, harbingers of change that was already blowing in the wind."

What are your thoughts on Ti's equation: agitation = growth?

The Dragon Is Full

We call it The Dragon because of its shape. The lake near my town is the Nacimiento, a Spanish name meaning birth or the headwaters. In these shots, we're standing at the Dragon's neck.

Built when I was two years old, the Dragon has this year filled totally up. It's famous for its 165 miles of unspoiled shoreline, its reputation for the greatest water skiing in California, and its white bass fishing. Bald eagles nest here. Joe and I went out there Tuesday, to take pictures of its historic level, more full than at any time since it was built in 1956.

The lake is so full it's pouring over the spillway of the dam, and the water force is a mighty thing.

This is Spanish moss.

Oak branches with lichen.

This is a sample of our stickery dandelion.

Along the hillsides, sage is blooming.

The drive out to the lake is buccolic.

World class horse trainers live out here.

It's a glorious place to live, and in early spring the grass and budding oak trees turn it into paradise.

Today's thought:

You can have anything you want if you will give up the belief that you can't have it.

Diamonds, Vultures, and the Pulitzer Prize

Yesterday was a lively day. Two exciting outings: lunch with my auntie and then a visit to a local thrift shop. I’m telling you, they were the epitome of liveliness. Especially when I found the bargain of the decade: a diamond pendant on gold serpentine chain, marked $2.

Nonchalantly, I strolled up to my favorite jeweler’s shop with the diamond necklace in my pocket, practicing what I would say: “I just want to confirm that these ‘diamonds’ are glass….oh, really?....10 beautifully clear diamonds?....Worth HOW MUCH?....Can you believe I paid $2 for the necklace?....What extraordinary luck!”

But alas the jeweler wasn’t open, so I came home and rummaged around for the magnifying glass to read the symbols on the gold clasp. There was an O….an N….something like an A at the beginning….ah, crap, that’s a V next to it….AVON! It’s a blasted AVON necklace! Well, pooh. They were diamonds for an hour.

But God had something better in store: a red sunset on storm clouds, a glorious light show in the southwest, jagged bolts of lightning followed by reverberations of thunder. Lightning lit up the darkness, and thunder rumbled its way up my legs.

As the light show crackled around me, I came inside and dashed off a poem that I dreamed would someday earn a Pulitzer Prize. The whole day was about transformations of simple things: glass into diamonds, blue sky into evening wildness, vultures into hawks. Does it get any better than this? If it does, I will have to swoon.


Buzzard

She looks up and sees you riding the wind over the landscape,
and something—your freedom? your effortless wings lifting you
where she wants to go, on the updrafts straight to heaven?
—something about you makes her gasp Oh! A hawk!

She sees you not as you are but as she dreams you are. She’s busy
rewriting history in her head, remaking the whole world. A new
creation arises from her dying brain, and it is all so miraculous,
she needs a new language to speak of it. Nouns become verbs,
gerunds grow wings, words take flight in the midst of a sentence
and escape through open windows in her mind.

Oh, hawk! she cries, mesmerized by the circles you carve in the sky,
by your wide black wings like arms outstretched and fingers reaching
to grab onto God. She transforms you with a word. Vulture no longer,
you are majestic. You are not a scavenger, seeker of the putrid dead.
You are now the great hunter who has harnessed the wind
and she would ride you, if only you would please snatch her up.

A Sight for Sore Eyes

This is what summertime looks like where I live. My eldest daughter from Oregon has spent the past week with me while resting from her travels along the length of the West Coast. So I took her on one of my favorite drives. We went up this road here:

Then we hiked a bit, avoiding these:

Poison oak

and western star thistle, the nastiest plant in the West... We got through these and found this:

A sweet little creek still running in July...

and a reflection pool, where we found things like this...

and found things like this

and even some giants in waiting underwater:

We also found things like these two creatures from the blue lagoon:

We studied this orb spider's web for a length of time

before heading back to the car for home.

What I Love About Furry Legs

The view from my office on Christmas Eve

Christmas Morning



We lie abed with the old dogs and listen to the wind

the children are all grown and have flown with the wind

the window is a collage of leaves washed by the rain

these are the gifts of the Magi: the scent of old dogs

the wealth of the years and the preservation of love

We lie abed with wrinkles and our sagging skin

our love windblown by the turbulence of years

imperfect and well worn The smell of it is beautiful

and your legs are soft as fur where they mingle

with mine and I pet them with my foot

as I consider rising up and bowing down

with this great gift extended to the king transformed

as we are by the hand of God

____________________________

We start off Christmas Eve with a 7 a.m. meeting. There's so much gratitude among the sober alcoholics there, even if they don't have family here, or the family is estranged, or even if they're broke, even if they're homeless. The great gift of recovering from seemingly hopeless state of mind and body is all they care about. The clubhouse in town will have marathon meetings beginning at five p.m. and it will be a safe haven for all who come.


Then we go to work, cleaning the house, dropping off or picking up last-minute thingies, getting dinner organized for our 4 p.m. traditional family supper at our house. That's another great gift. We have shelter and family and food, and many people aren't blessed with such things.


We go to church at 7 to sing the old hymns and savor the atmosphere of our church in full joyous bloom. I know I'll be singing "Angels We Have Heard on High" at some point in the evening. Back home to tidy up and stuff stockings for Christmas morning.


We are alone here on Christmas Eve night, and we wake up on Christmas just the two of us in the house. My daughter will come with a couple of others for the unwrapping of presents, of which there are a few, more than anyone needs, but it's still fun to rip the paper and find the little treasures.


God bless us, everyone, especially those who work through the night in service to others. Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night!

Lust Changes Everything

Lust Changes Everything

Dense fog makes ghosts of trees lining the parkway.
No sun, no sky, no color brighten this bleak place.
Even dogs leashed to dedicated owners droop,
plodding onward on the sidewalk, joyless.

Then they come, the flock of cedar waxwings.
They drift like leaves from trees down to the bushes
where the red berries wait. Gobbling seeds,
these jaunty bandits change everything.
In their red-berry lust, they make even
the coldest heart delightedly sing.



************************************

Wednesday was a day filled with fear, anxiety, excitement, and sorrow. I had the radio performance to look forward to, with a small group of women friends coming over to support me in my anxiety.
I had to take my demented mom out for her Wednesday outing first, so I spent some time in prayer about her. I asked God to give me joy and patience with her infirmity, because she is a cheerful childlike woman whom I used to love deeply. I asked for gratitude for her and love of what she has become. In other words, I prayed thoughts of thanksgiving and acceptance.
I took her Christmas shopping, and everywhere she went, she brought joy to clerks and customers alike with her obvious pleasure. My attitude had changed from one of sorrow to one of grace.
I was frightened of the radio broadcast, thinking I would sound like a dork. I prayed all the way home prayers of thanksgiving for the opportunity to read in public, thanksgiving for the gift of words. I had invited a lot of my AA friends over to support me. They came and loved me up. I sounded like a dork reading but they assured me it was very fine, powerful in fact. We laughed and told stories, ate Joe's scones and Karen's wonderful tart, drank tea and talked of art and sobriety.
I went on my blog and found several of you had listened and it was the cream on the cake. My happiness knows no bounds.
My sense of thankfulness runneth over. I walked through anxiety and fear without having to medicate or drink. I'm in a 12-Step program that teaches me how to respond to negative emotions with prayer and gratitude. My Higher Power blesses me richly every day. My God has provided all that I need and blessed me richly besides. I feel more joy than I can stand at this moment, and I thank you for sharing this experience with me.
May God bless your day, and make you a blessing to others, too.
cheers from chris!

Today, Live on the Radio

Joy

A rain of lemony leaves
backlit by the sun
falls gently on the green grass
forming a yellow pool
lapping at the black trunk
of the tree
and a little black cat
dashes madly through it
as you wish you felt
on this ending sort of day.

***********************

I'm insanely thrilled to be a reader on today's local public radio station program called Ears On Art. There will be several us telling stories and reading our poetry at 4:30 p.m. West Coast time.

If you like, you can listen on your computer to the live broadcast at this link:

http://www.kcbx.org/Pages/Programming/listen_live.html
The link takes you to a live stream from the station programming. You can click on any of the four live-listening streams. If you have a media player, you can share this experience with me. I've never heard my own voice reading my poems, so I am totally excited.

You just need to account for your time difference in regards to U. S. Pacific time.

If you can't listen today, there is a link on the same website to the program archives, where you will find the archived Ears on Art program in a couple of days. Say a prayer for my peace of mind as I sit in my living room with a few AA women, drinking chai tea and eating hubby's wonderful scones. I'll be nervous as hell.

Yesterday morning, after my posting of the poem regarding red berries, cedar waxwings, and control-freak hubby, a huge flock of cedar waxwings, the first of the season, flew in to feast on the red berry bushes. I was jumping for joy at the sight. Then I heard my dear hubby fire up the leaf blower, and I ran out to beg him not to blow away my leaves. We compromised: He could clean the sidewalks, and leave my lovely leaves alone on the grass.

If that isn't synchronicity, I don't know what it is. I do know that God has blessed me richly today. May His blessings be on you, too.

Chronology of a Crone

Today has been my special day since I first learned it was my birthday. I thank God for the gifts in my life. I honor myself for the wisdom I have attained, and the growth I have before me. I have gorgeous red and purple-tiger roses blooming for this special day in November. I also had the most monster sycamore leaf drop into the birdbath and I'll treat you to that.
I’ll offer you to a poem about my life.

Chronology of a Crone

The woman—
who hides her gray hair under a blond rinse
—is not aged.

In her lives the young girl laughing in 1963,
when she was all of nine, before the bloody pink suit.
In her is the teen with solemn eyes. Alive and well in her
is the young woman in black robes and mortarboard,
smiling wide with a degree of joy she earned herself,
In her, the bride with wide hopes.
In her too, the mother with child.

A parade of photographs marches around the bed,
telling the story of her long life. This gift
from her mother captures the deep, sweet roots
that ground her in the earth of herself.

The passage of time has smoothed her rough edges,
leaving behind the tracks of the years in her eyes.
You are a crone now, says her masseuse, kneading
the network of aches that lives in her shoulders.
You are the wisewoman who has found the answers
she sought. Lord knows where the diploma is.
The marriage is over, but the hopes remain.

The woman—
who has grown strong, and weathered many storms
—still dances.
She hears the music of the seasons
and she raises her arms high above her golden head.
**************************************
God bless your day, my beautiful people in the blogosphere.

Will Work for Dirt

The homeless man down on the corner
carries a sign that says I’m on the road
and hungry—will work for food
and while he can say love
in 14 different languages
passersby carefully don’t meet his eye
except my mother when we stop
at the light She says here’s a dollar
it’s all I have and when we drive away
she says My father gave up his violin
for some land and a mule to plow it
with and then I understand
we all of us dream for earth
that we can call our own
except that homeless man
and he is excellent at saying
goodbye

I've worked on an article about gratitude this month for a local magazine, and I thought the photo of the "hens and chickens" was apt since they freely multiply, just like a gift given in the spirit of love.

"The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings." That was said by philosopher and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Eric Hoffer.

The sun is rising over the horizon and shining in my eyes. Some of my blessings today are that I'm sober and thankful for this room I call my own, for my fat beagles and two kittens, and some earth to call my own, even if the bank owns it really, it is mine to plant and plow.

I'm excited that a friend of mine who drank again wants me to sponsor her, because I hear surrender in her voice.

Yesterday's Twenty-Four Hour a Day book had a meditation that touched me:

"In our time of meditation, we again seem to hear: 'Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' Again and again we seem to hear God saying this to us. 'Come unto Me' for the solution of every problem, for the overcoming of every temptation, for the calming of every fear, for all our need, physical, mental, or spiritual, but mostly 'come unto Me' for the strength we need to live with peace of mind and the power to be useful and effective."

Chris Alba © 2009

Cracks in the Ground

One of the oddities of the 6.5 earthquake we had here a few years ago was the humongous crack in the ground that opened up in the countryside. It was two blocks long and about 15 feet wide.
Cracks in the ground open up interesting possibilities. A child might ask: What if you fell into a crevasse and wound up someplace like China or Wonderland?
People fall into crevasses far more often than you might think.

Uncle Otto at 90 years old was a spry, wizened man smoking a pipe at a family reunion. Right in front of my eyes, he fell into a crack in the ground: a time warp in which decades drop away. Suddenly he was a boy again in Montana:

“In the dark before dawn, it was 20 below. I walked behind the wagon to keep warm, a young boy feeling sorry for myself. I can still hear the sound of the iron wheels crunching in the snow.
“In the manor where I live, there are 135 old people. I gaze at their faces. The women, they must have been beautiful once. Now, like the rest of us, we aren’t so attractive. But the beauty was there…”
Time is a crack in the ground that you can pitch headlong into, and you find yourself being somewhere different from where your body stands. Memories are like that.

Sometimes cracks in the ground open up when you’re walking through hard times.
One minute, for example, something troubles you, weighs on you like an iron wheel around your neck. You’re shackled to your worries. Then suddenly you fall into a wonderful crevasse.
You open your eyes, and beauty is there. Trouble has vanished in the soft sloughing of waves on the sand…the wheeling flight of sea birds…the irresistible desire to run your fingers through the pebbles on the beach in search of sea glass.
If you are worried today, may the ground open up beneath you, and may you tumble into a blessing.