Embrace The Suck

Objective? Who am I kidding. The problem of saying goodbye to someone you love is that a gaping hole is left where that one used to reside. Not just in your heart, but in every room in your house, in the car, in the back yard. I've heard that amputees can still feel their missing limb. It's been eight years since my mother passed away and there are still times I feel her presence every bit as real as if she were sitting on the stool across the room from me watching The Price is Right. Today there was no need to get up and open the back door. No need to mess with the dog food. No one standing at my feet hoping for a morsel of turkey as I clean the bones for soup. No collar rattling. No dog to trip over in the dark hallway. No poo on the rug. (Well, okay, this is probably not something I'm going to miss.) I don't know much about physics. Who am I kidding? I know nothing about physics. But isn't it some Newtonian law that a space will fill itself up - that a vacuum d...

"Grieving is a very necessary process." Andrew, Touched by an Angel I'm beginning to feel a bit like the Angel of Death. Not a dark and scary angel. More like Andrew from the TV show Touched by an Angel. You always knew someone was getting close to dying when Andrew appeared in the scene wearing his all white suit. Even though you knew the goodbye was going to happen and you'd probably need a couple of tissues, there was something comforting about watching Andrew lead the dying one across to the great unknown. At one point in my life, because I'd never experienced the actual death of a loved one - you know, actually seeing the lifeless body - I was really scared of being in the room when it happened. In the way (S)He does, God put me in the right place at the right time so that I'd have practice before I was called on to sit by my mother's death bed. Each and every time has been anything but scary. In the last few years I've also been present when som...

I really shouldn't be sitting here. Dad seems to be sleeping soundly so I should be doing stuff like laundry, putting away the good dishes and whatever else needs to be done. But I just don't feel like it. I'm feeling a little depressed. We're barely past a day which was set aside for giving thanks and counting our blessings and Christmas is still a month away (I know that 30 days will travel at the speed of light, but still it's not tomorrow) yet there seems to be a collective frenzy going on to get things to put under a fake tree that smells more like pine sol than fresh evergreen. I have to admit, the idea of getting up early and joining in the craziness appeals to me on a level I don't even understand. I don't get sleeping on the sidewalk for days just for a piece of electronic equipment. Yet every year, as we sit around the T-day dinner, feeling more stuffed than the bird that fed us, I kind of want to see what the madness is all about. As if I don...

"There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze." Etty Hillesum "The sky is falling!" cried Chicken Little. "The sky is falling!" Most every day the first email I read is from "gratefulness.org". The daily quotes are always uplifting and thought provoking. When I read the Hillesum quote above, my mind went to a woman Terri has blogged about who is struggling with her own personal darkness. Since Terri has had some experience with the aftermath of one extinquishing her own flame, not to mention her big ol' compassionate heart, I sent the quote on to her. My mind was on people I don't even know who are suffering in a place I've been. It didn't really occur to me to think about my father, until I came back to check on him. He's had a few pain-filled days. New pain medication seems to be zapping him of the little bit of str...

My Sweetie and I had an actual date tonight. We got dressed up, went to dinner, then went to the Symphony to hear Brahms' German Requiem. Good company. Good food. Good music. I must say it was all quite delightful. At one point in the concert, I quit trying to watch all the musicians and closed my eyes letting the music take hold of me. I could feel my body relax and my spirit soar. I can't wait to do it again. Wishing for you unexpected pleasures, Merry ME

Can anyone see the strings attaching me to the Divine Puppeteer? I kind of feel like I've being moved about by forces I don't usually notice. I don't go on Facebook much but I went there this morning after reading Terri's blog , Honor Yourself. Today is the anniversary of someone close to Terri taking her own life. Someone young, with a full life ahead of her, who didn't know how to hold on or who to turn to. In what had to be a moment of pure agony, she felt it was better to go out into the unknown than live in the pain she could no longer bear. Our mutual blog buddy, Pam, went on FB and declared this "YOU MATTER" Day in honor and remembrance of that girl who hadn't lived long enough to know that no matter what else happened, she mattered. I don't know what drove this girl, or so many of the other teens (no to exclude the adults) we are reading about in the news. Suicide, it seems, is becoming an epidemic. Ironically, in a world where there are so...

There are few things that can make the mother in me want to turn and run. For instance, I can, at the sound of a young child standing at the edge of my bed in the wee hours of the morning, crying, "my stomach hurts" go from sound sleep to full speed in a matter of seconds.I've learned "my stomach hurts" is usually followed by projectile vomiting. Or, though more gross than anything else, is the coughing, hacking sound, usually emanating from another room that you can't get to fast enough, of a cat hacking up everything it just munched from its food bowl. Cats seem to think this ball of bile-covered, unprocessed cat chow is like a gift from the Gods that should be left in the middle of a rug for all to see and admire. Then there are the sounds of a college student, full of excitement and wanting to share. Let me just say some things are better left alone. But up there at the top of the list is the sound from a child wearing Mickey Mouse ears, carrying a stuff...

My evil twin has been in charge all day. I don't really know what bee has been up my ass, but I do know I haven't been or felt very nice. For all my talk of being kind to others, I think I need to take a little bit of my own advice. By then end of the afternoon, after fussin' and cussin' about most everything, I went to Sweetie's inner sanctum and asked for 10 minutes of silence. I sat in his chair, closed my eyes and prayed. I tried to breathe in serenity and breathe out my pissy mood. I think it helped ... at least for those 10 minutes. Later it occurred to me that giving myself permission to step out of the frustration and into the quiet was an act of kindness. To the people who have to live with me but mostly to myself. Seems I rarely include myself when I get on these virtuous bandwagons about being kind and gentle and giving and loving. I wonder why that is? My plate is plenty full these days. And I see the holiday season as a runaway train aiming right at me....

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce Back when I started this blog, I didn't even know what a blog was. But I knew I liked to write. I needed an outlet for my words or they were going to continue spinning in my head until I burst. And it seemed like it might be fun. I believed my Sweetie, daughter, sister and Aunt Letty would read what I had to say even if no one else would. And I trusted them to be gentle with their comments. You see over my lifetime I have only shared my creative side with people I could trust not to make fun of me. Fear of failure, fear of success and fear of being shamed held me captive. A constant question was "why me?" Why should someone spend their time reading my words? Why should I be published when there are so many others out there who are better? Who do I think I am, Miss Fancy Pants? It might be beginning to sound like an old story, but what I've gotten from blogging has been mu...

"Don't say that you want to give, but go ahead and give! You'll never catch up with a mere hope." Johann Wolfgang Goethe So here I am writing about kindness and hope and I get an email from a blog friend, Teresa . She told me about what her daughter, Madeleine, had decided to do to celebrate her ninth birthday. Not her nineteenth birthday, mind you, her NINTH. I don't think when I was nine I had advanced much beyond gazing at my own naval. I could try to tell you about her idea, but I think it would be better if you just check out some of the videos on the site . Be sure to watch 'til the end because seeing the footage of fresh water come spewing out of the ground will make your knees weak and eyes leak. At least they did mine. [Akasa, you're going to love this!] Being a nosy sort, I immediately wrote her mother back and asked her to tell me about Madelein, aka Luna. Of course, asking a mother to tell you about her child is like asking Mrs. Fields (or S...

A few months ago I read a book by Katherine Center. It was an easy, fun read, about real life drama with a happy ending. I gobbled it up then read every book Center has written. Then, I started reading her blog. Before she took a hiatus to work on another novel she wrote about a kindness project she was a part of. I was intrigued then and since I'm on a kindness kick I think now is a good time share it with you. It takes the idea of random acts of kindness a step further. The Hope Revolution website suggests that little notes of hope and goodness can counterbalance the stories of despair you hear every day on the TV or internet or maybe even in your own backyard. A hope note is nothing more than a small piece of paper with words that inspire and help one to feel hopeful. You can make the notes as plain or fancy as you'd like. Either way be sure to include the URL, hoperevo.com on the bottom or back of the card. The next step is to take the notes out into the world and leave...

Dad wanted to go on an outing this afternoon so we put our jackets on and headed to the Jacksonville Veteran's Wall. Neither of us had ever been there before and I got lost a couple of times. The wall sits between the football stadium and the fairgrounds which was full of carnival rides, etc. I had to ask 4 different policemen for directions and make it past a parking lot attendant who thought my 93 year old father in a wheelchair and I were trying to sneak into the fair before finding a place to park. A brisk wind blew but the sun glistened off the polished marble. For a few minutes we were the only ones there. Us and the spirits of hometown men and women. It was quite a moving experience and one I'm glad to have shared with my dad.

Once upon a time there was a girl. She came of age when the moon was in the 7th house and Jupiter aligned with Mars. Instead of wearing flowers in her hair, and protesting the Vietnam War the girl followed all the rules. She married a man who flew helicopters in the Navy and soon had babies. The girl's husband spent the war years flying anti-submarine missions from bases on the East Coast of America. Pilots stationed on the West Coast flew combat missions over SE Asia. SE Asia was a long way from the girl and her family. No one she knew was ever sent into harm’s way. From an early age, the girl knew what it meant to be proud to be an American. She always stood when the flag passed by, and covered her heart during the National Anthem. But she was silent when men came home from an unpopular war, wounded in body and spirit, let down by the people they served. Her eyes were opened one day when she met a man her husband went to school with. The man was in the army. He took of his s...

This video says it a lot better than I can. May kindness walk with you along your life's path, Merry ME

"If anyone is in need, just lend a hand and help them out." An anonymous 6th grader Because I've had kindness on my mind lately, and we are rapidly approaching the season of joy that is often more stress-filled than joyful, I've decided to wait to write about waiting and go with kindness instead. After my mother died (in 2002) one of the ways I busied myself to keep from being too sad, was to compile recipes from the ladies at church and put them into a cookbook. It is not much different from other church cookbooks, except that it holds a little bit of my heart and soul. It is a project I am still quite proud of. It has recipes, sure. But it also contains pictures, quotes, stories and prayers. I was an Internet novice at the time, but as always seems to be the case, I found my way to people (or they found me) who uplifted me and encouraged my creativity. Strangers, like Anne Wetzel and Jaletta Desmond who were kind enough to share their talents with me. Ladies who di...