Month: July 2015

SHIFTING

IMG_2885What I know for sure is there is no certainty. The world according to our plans does not exist.  Faced with reality, there is no comfort in known adages the likes of:  You are not getting older you’re getting better.  You are not alone.  You are beautiful just the way you are.  Funny how time and circumstances can change my outlook.  Once upon a time, I believed in those truths.  Now…I am older  wiser, and more vulnerable. I don’t believe in fairy tales anymore.  Perhaps it is with the shift of the planet and the sun.  I feel and smell the coming autumn.  The sun comes up a bit later.  Its slant and quality a little different.

photo credit: Ava as Wonder Woman via photopin (license)
photo credit: Ava as Wonder Woman via photopin (license)

I feel a little melancholy with the change.  It is not a bad thing but somehow I do feel inadequate and apologetic that I do not put on a brave face and say regardless, the show must go on.  To whom, I do not know.  Yes, I would like to stand tall and be the Wonder Woman of my dreams.  I want to pump that fist and give life that confident pump.  But I do not have the bravado to fake it till I make it.  I wonder if it is true.  Maybe I CAN fake it – not to make it, but to become it. Life and our planet are shifting.  Things are never the same.  We stand on feet of clay in the sand.  I am shifting.  I am changed.  Maybe I need to change my stories, too, along with my posture. I can learn to strut and punch like the Wonder Woman that I am.  They say body language sends powerful messages about who we are.  I want to pump it up a little.  So what if I am faking it?  Do you want to make something of it?  Bring it on!  I’m ready.

WORDS, WONDER AND AWE

IMG_2871It’s another hot day.  For now I can still sit here on the deck.  I am trying to tap out a few letters, words, a thought or two.  They do not come easy, but I try anyways.  That is how it is.  Life is hard.  I have never expected it to be anything else.  So you put one foot in front of the other and take a step.  You do that over and over.  You end up with a journey that is your life. I am doing likewise with my writing – one tap, another tap, and so on.

Meanwhile inside the house, my Roomba is whirling around the dining room and the kitchen, cleaning the floor – making life a little easier for me.  I accept help wherever I can.  It is called wisdom.  It’s taken me IMG_0515this long for me to accept that I do not have to do everything myself.  I am not Wonder Woman but a woman in wonder awe – of what life, the world and I can be.  There is magic and wonder in the trying, the struggle of each step and tap.  The tap of the keyboard is grounding.  I see with more clarity with each letter, word and thought that come.  I am doing an archeologic dig of that it means to be alive.

The heat is rising.  Our forests are still burning.  It is difficult to believe that everything is as it should be.  It is hard to be at ease and not to be with fears when so much is wrong in the world.  But it is what is before me today.  I accept what is.  I cannot change it.  Instead, I focus on what makes me feel good – the open spaces, the roses along the roads, campfires, the dog and the man.  I can choose where my mind goes.

The sun has disappeared.  The sky is grey.  The world feels eery and ominous but it is cooler.  Rain would be very welcomed but the air feels dry and empty. The forecast is for a dry, dry summer.  The forest fires will burn till winter.  The hope is for them to be controlled.  Hope is where I choose to reside.  It is where everything is possible.

I inhale and exhale, releasing stress and taking in chi.  I take comfort from Sheba at my feet and the petunias nodding in the breeze.

 

 

 

THE CANYON OF MY MIND

IMG_2548It’s been such a long while since I’ve flexed these fingers over the keyboard.  The movements have become awkward and unfamiliar.  It’s like losing touch with one’s close friends.  After awhile you find you have nothing to say to each other.   You look at each other and wonder how it happened – this strange awkwardness.  And so, I am sitting down with my old friend.

Can we get re-acquainted?  Can I get the Midas touch and let the letters and words flow from my fingertips again?  I hope so.  It’s been lonely without words and pictures and stories they tell.  There’s no reverberation.  I only hear the sound of one hand clapping.  It echoes in the canyon of my mind.  You can hear a pin drop in its grey emptiness.

I rouse myself from the lassitude that I have fallen in.  How I got here, I do not know.  But it has lasted long enough.  Time to get up, get dress and show up.  Time for the words to march across the page to tell the stories.  Time to show a little colour and life.  There’s a person living on Preston Avenue.  See how her vegetables and flowers overflow their beds and pots?  See the brilliance of the greens, pinks, blues and purples?  Then there is the orange of the lilies, blooming in defiance of the drought.  We are having a very dry summer.  Forest fires are raging up north and the military have stepped in to help.

The morning is beautiful.  The smoke has cleared and the sun is coming through.  Won’t you step around to the back and see what I have growing there?  There’s peas in the pod, grapes on the vine, the scarlet runners climbing the tower, green tomatoes and little cucumbers.  The broccoli is flowering and cabbages forming under cover.  The petunias are nodding their approval from above.

Oh, there’s the Bing Cherry bush, too.  It’s covered with fruit.  Sheba has discovered she likes sleeping outdoors and made her bed beneath it.  I wonder what else she has discovered as she sleeps with nature in the night.  Maybe if I can quiet my mind and open my heart, they will come to me.

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