Today I am grateful for:
sleep and naps or both
sense of humor
redemption
warm blankets
dogs
hugs, holding hands w/ someone you care about
food - spiritual food and leftovers
my cubicle which I've finally decorated
my family
college football on Saturday (no major allegiance)
the end of the World Series (looking toward next year)
the last remaining warm days of autumn
haircuts (badly needed ones)
fruit (healthy produce)
songs that are beautiful but don't get stuck in my head
the talking heads
the grateful dead (I'm grateful for the... get it?)
Grateful that slowly I can bounce back a little bit better from harder realities. But it's like this guy told us last night, trying to kick the drink again, "I just don't bounce back like I used to." And no doubt he doesn't. What the good doctor Evans once referred to as "resilience," why some of us are weak and others tend to have more visible fortitude. Even so, it seems important to just keep on with whatever one has in front of them.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Today I am grateful for:
-the clear, crisp coolness of the morning, reminiscent of autumn
-leaves on the linoleum, they make me want to clean, but I walked
into a building yesterday and it looked like they were part of the decor
-poems, with my feet kicked up on the ottoman
-curling up on the couch with a comfy blanket
-chinese food, with Brooke, waiting for the crab rangoon at the end
-the importance of pictures on the wall, throughout the day
-cranberry juice in the morning
-knowing I miss being in the right bed when the alarm goes off
-driving on tires that I feel safe with, when other people's tires spin on the wet pavement
-the alkaline smell of the wet pavement
-the measure of standing still, of staying the course (even if a Bush first said it)
-the clear, crisp coolness of the morning, reminiscent of autumn
-leaves on the linoleum, they make me want to clean, but I walked
into a building yesterday and it looked like they were part of the decor
-poems, with my feet kicked up on the ottoman
-curling up on the couch with a comfy blanket
-chinese food, with Brooke, waiting for the crab rangoon at the end
-the importance of pictures on the wall, throughout the day
-cranberry juice in the morning
-knowing I miss being in the right bed when the alarm goes off
-driving on tires that I feel safe with, when other people's tires spin on the wet pavement
-the alkaline smell of the wet pavement
-the measure of standing still, of staying the course (even if a Bush first said it)
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
The older I get, the more I listen to people who don't have much to say.
Today I am grateful for-
-my father, plain & simple, that I have a relationship where I can open up to him
-that I can admit my faults to people who love me, and they still love me
-that this experience teaches me greater that unconditional love is possible
-that people close to me still try to teache me lessons
-for ham sandwiches waiting for me in the fridge
-redemption and the promise of resilience
-humor, that anything can seem funny after a vail of tears
-the right to vote
- the right to shrug off my heavy coats.
The heavy coat. Bearing down on yourself, don't know why I ever think that's going to be beneficial, maybe on a watch for the rudiments of pride. Can you really ever smash pride?
There's this other sense that you want to be somebody, stand up, be counted, have people
recognize your true worth. That, out in the real world, when your glad-handing your way through the day, it will amount to a steady progess. Trusting the process. That it is a process even if it just feels like a continuum.
After the weekend, with my father here for such a short period of time, I reflected on the several pictures that he showed me and Brooke before we ate dinner. I asked him at one point, seems like you have had occasion to see some pretty heavy things from other countries, other histories. Not in so many words, mind you, but that was the gist. He could tell about the different places of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, and their direct ties to past history, and let's say, recent times. He showed me St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, which had been ripped down one side by shrapnel by German bombs in World War II. Entire buildings which echo the haunting shadows of the past. The train lines which go south in one direction, or west, or else north, strecthing all the way to Siberia where prioners were taken for the gulags... We do and do not possess these kinds of tokens of a dark past. Only we do not recognize them as such always, we are not always to carry them with us. Not the daily reminders that the country we are continuing to become and the country we are really still very close to one another. Not like there. Not the reminder of sixty to a hundred years of history stacked on top of us... though I'm not so naive of that as to think of what happened South of here, or through the northeast, the midwest for the people who were here long before us. Enough of that soapbox.
Keeping it simple. My father mentioned that at my grandmother's funeral. How she managed to do that on many occasions, throughout the life that she knew of her. So it comes back to trying not to complicate things... give oneself the chance to settle down a little bit, settle down and keep it simple. But keeping it simple has a great deal to staying true to yourself again. Knowing where your place is in the world. I read an article about how to build resilience- which I've heard defined as "the ability to bounce back." That life gives you the punches sometimes and it's all how you beat it. Not look at it in terms of how it beats you down, how much its wearing on you. There's the Time that weighs you down, but then there's also keeping up with time, staying in the present moment. Knowing that this moment is right now/ not forever. It can be changed in the second moment if that is what is required.
I know I take things too seriously sometimes, maybe more than most people. But I don't know how it is for most other people. I just don't know what it's like for a tremendous amount of people. Onlya precious few. But those words keep coming back to my lips it seems, "life is short... life is short" and conversely, time flies. And forever may be a long time to contemplate, so it should and can be taken only one day at a time. At least for folks like me...
Gratitude... be grateful for afternoon naps, morning coffee, Brooke singing while she gets ready for work in the morning... memory, "I know something about you that you don't know," it had always been a mystery, but it was something I could guess, something I could look at it. I need to be reminded that I deserve to give myself a chance, a chance to really work something through to its completion, to get lost in the process for awhile, to stand with the winds of time and be swept
Today I am grateful for-
-my father, plain & simple, that I have a relationship where I can open up to him
-that I can admit my faults to people who love me, and they still love me
-that this experience teaches me greater that unconditional love is possible
-that people close to me still try to teache me lessons
-for ham sandwiches waiting for me in the fridge
-redemption and the promise of resilience
-humor, that anything can seem funny after a vail of tears
-the right to vote
- the right to shrug off my heavy coats.
The heavy coat. Bearing down on yourself, don't know why I ever think that's going to be beneficial, maybe on a watch for the rudiments of pride. Can you really ever smash pride?
There's this other sense that you want to be somebody, stand up, be counted, have people
recognize your true worth. That, out in the real world, when your glad-handing your way through the day, it will amount to a steady progess. Trusting the process. That it is a process even if it just feels like a continuum.
After the weekend, with my father here for such a short period of time, I reflected on the several pictures that he showed me and Brooke before we ate dinner. I asked him at one point, seems like you have had occasion to see some pretty heavy things from other countries, other histories. Not in so many words, mind you, but that was the gist. He could tell about the different places of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, and their direct ties to past history, and let's say, recent times. He showed me St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, which had been ripped down one side by shrapnel by German bombs in World War II. Entire buildings which echo the haunting shadows of the past. The train lines which go south in one direction, or west, or else north, strecthing all the way to Siberia where prioners were taken for the gulags... We do and do not possess these kinds of tokens of a dark past. Only we do not recognize them as such always, we are not always to carry them with us. Not the daily reminders that the country we are continuing to become and the country we are really still very close to one another. Not like there. Not the reminder of sixty to a hundred years of history stacked on top of us... though I'm not so naive of that as to think of what happened South of here, or through the northeast, the midwest for the people who were here long before us. Enough of that soapbox.
Keeping it simple. My father mentioned that at my grandmother's funeral. How she managed to do that on many occasions, throughout the life that she knew of her. So it comes back to trying not to complicate things... give oneself the chance to settle down a little bit, settle down and keep it simple. But keeping it simple has a great deal to staying true to yourself again. Knowing where your place is in the world. I read an article about how to build resilience- which I've heard defined as "the ability to bounce back." That life gives you the punches sometimes and it's all how you beat it. Not look at it in terms of how it beats you down, how much its wearing on you. There's the Time that weighs you down, but then there's also keeping up with time, staying in the present moment. Knowing that this moment is right now/ not forever. It can be changed in the second moment if that is what is required.
I know I take things too seriously sometimes, maybe more than most people. But I don't know how it is for most other people. I just don't know what it's like for a tremendous amount of people. Onlya precious few. But those words keep coming back to my lips it seems, "life is short... life is short" and conversely, time flies. And forever may be a long time to contemplate, so it should and can be taken only one day at a time. At least for folks like me...
Gratitude... be grateful for afternoon naps, morning coffee, Brooke singing while she gets ready for work in the morning... memory, "I know something about you that you don't know," it had always been a mystery, but it was something I could guess, something I could look at it. I need to be reminded that I deserve to give myself a chance, a chance to really work something through to its completion, to get lost in the process for awhile, to stand with the winds of time and be swept
Friday, October 17, 2008
Just spent a few minutes viewing a google search on Hubble space telescope images for various parts of the galaxy. If you can say that the galaxy is the largest term that you can use. It seems, instaed, that what must be larger would be the universe... since you have to think of it in terms of Frank Zappa's notion that it is all one note... all one big loud sound in the echoing, burgeoing universe. And maybe that's just what I came away with today as I viewed the Christ-C nebula or even the Pleiades, hard, white, crisp stars -some brighter than others. But I often ask myself, as must the astronomers, viewing these entities from light years, literally hundreds upon thousands of light years away, where and how far and what must exist in that space? Why did we wind up here amid these galaxies of seeming lifelessness. It's not so much an extraterrestrial thing... but the billions of years which must have had to occur before the inevitability of human life began to stir in the marshes and the reeds of this planet. And then there's us, adapting making ourselves more in tune with being able to function in this world, with all its hazards, all its challenges, sometimes we make terrible errors which seem costly beyond our understanding. Other times, we simply hurt other people, seemingly without reason, but mostly because we are in conflict with someone and cannot bear a something, basically things aren't running our way. So we go through this whole song and dance with another human being, all the while forgetting that there are stars which may or may not have already burned out, whose light still reaches, whose light protrudes through the fabric of the universe. That we are not stars in the least, our light is quite comparatively short to the rest of the existant plain. But it is still a light, and greater light we seldom see, though we forget that that very thing is a light of sorts. So there are those stars and perhaps they are reminders of the formula, the greater design that seems to permeate all things. The Crab Nebula, the Horsehead Nebula, all reflectant of other entities we find in our world. But it makes us feel small, insignificant on the one hand while on the other, it seems there is no limit to the power of a creator of such wild and terrific things. That that power must weild and have such great force for its creation, that it must have limitless intentions for a race like ours.
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