Tag Archives: musing

WHO I AM – Day 75 in a year of…

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Day 75, October 5, 2016 @1:14 pm

img_4891Lunch is over.  The dishes not quite put away.  I always feel overcome after lunch, unable to think or do anything.  So I come here to my space with my cup of tea to muse and tap on the keyboard.  I feel comforted and not so melancholy, surrounded by light from windows.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I am not unhappy or sad.  I am not in any dire straits. I am a muse.  I am by nature whimsical, sometimes melancholic.  I sigh, heave my chest, sip and tap.  That is how I am.  I poke along at a snail’s pace.  By chance I am reading a book about Patricia Highsmith who raises snails.  She takes them in her purse with some lettuce to events. The book, The Crime Writer, is a novel.  But Highsmith and snippets about her and her life are real.

Highsmith loved cats, and she bred about three hundred snails in her garden at home in Suffolk, England.[17] Highsmith once attended a London cocktail party with a “gigantic handbag” that “contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails” which she said were her “companions for the evening”.[17]   – from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith

img_7928I hope I’m not like Highsmith, though I have been called eccentric.  But I am meandering, straying.  Blame it on the weather.  Blame it on the snow.  It is only October the 5th.  It is snowing and still snowing.  I am prepared if not quite ready for it.  I am not fighting it.  It is a good day to sip tea, have a cookie or two, muse, read about snails……

What are you doing today?  Is it snowing where you are?

RAINY MORNING MUSINGS

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It’s raining – the first of the year.  I’m grateful.  My garden is grateful – for this drink of life. It is cool – 4 degrees Celsius after last week’s blistering 32.  Tomorrow and the next night, the forecast for -1 and -2 respectively.  Nothing is predictable anymore.  Was anything ever? Have a look at what is happening in Fort McMurray, Alberta.  It is like a dream.  I am sure it is a nightmare for the residents fleeing their city as the fires rages.

I am philosophical, uncertain but happy and grateful this rainy, cool 10th of May.  I took a tour of my garden, securing the covers over the tender young tomatoes I planted 2 days ago.  I might have been too optimistic and foolish thinking that the temperature could not possibly dip below 0 anymore.  But what the hey?  Nothing ventured, nothing gained/learned.  I have a good feeling about my green thumb.  I feel like a winner at the moment.  I’m going with it.

IMG_5382I’ve doubted my feelings and myself for too long.  I’m making up by taking taking a giant big step forward. I’m being confident.  I’m being happy with myself as I am, no apologies.  It feels good.  There’s no time for putting myself on the back burner for others.  I’m moving closer and closer towards my own mortality every day.  If I don’t live for me now, when then?

Life is messy and wonderful.  That is what I take away from Anne Lamott.  In Bird by Bird she wrote,

“Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived …Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation… Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”

IMG_5373I am now wondering why I have been so taken with Marie Kondo and her The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I have been a clutter bug all my life.  I could learn to be a little neater but more would be trying to get a leopard to rid its spots or a zebra its stripes. What was I thinking?  There’s beauty and artistry in our clutter and messes.  After all, it is what our lives are made of.

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I am tired of holding my breath, suspending my animation.  I am letting me out of the bag. So happy to have this rainy interlude to muse much about it all and savour life.