Posts Tagged ‘Love’
Just Clinging
We have arrived at the week with the earliest sunrise in our location and the weather is at its most wonderful summer-est. Our doors and windows are open and the ceiling fans are turning, yet the warmth hovers around the edge of too much. Tank tops and loose shorts, bare feet and a tall glass of ice water put things right.
The cut hay in our fields was raked and round-baled on the same afternoon yesterday. If you look close, Cyndie captured a lone deer crossing the image view as the field became draped in the shadow that was replacing the disappearing sunlight.
For as much as we are forbidden to wrap our arms around our fellow friends and family, we are striving to wrap the summer up in a grandiose hug of epic proportions. Despite the chaos of a political circus, a global pandemic continuing its invisible spread, and citizens bellowing for justice against centuries of systemic racism against indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the entire spectrum of non-white human beings, I am just clinging to the precious moment of a few glorious quintessential summer days for their faint distraction of nature at its finest.
We are doing so without a rambunctious picnic of music and food and a hundred of our favorite people. I am doing so without my annual week of biking and camping somewhere around Minnesota with hundreds of friends and brilliant like-minded adventurers. We are doing so without concerts enjoyed among thousands of similar music-loving fans or sports competitions with hoards of supporters cheering on the efforts of athletes at every level of skill.
There will be no county fairs and ultimately, no Minnesota State Fair. Graduations have already been morphed into sometimes blessedly shorter shadows of the usual pomp and circumstance, and weddings and funerals constrained to unrecognizable whispers of the emotional extravagance they deserve.
Navigating the days that turn to weeks and then months of the COVID-19 pandemic is dragging us all into a marathon of paying heed to the best-practice precautions of constraining the spread to manageable levels despite our preference that it just be a short duration fast-walk competition among friends.
My dentist’s office called and left a message that they are now accepting cleaning and checkup appointments scheduled for the fall. My rather feeble home plaque-scraping exercise since my appointment in March was canceled is now going to need to suffice until autumn. Thank goodness I won’t need to waste a beautiful summer afternoon splayed back in the reclined chair getting my teeth cleaned and inspected.
The best medicine I have right now for the pandemonium of current events is the natural summer surroundings of our little paradise. I love it. We love it.
It helps fuel our ability to nurture and grow that love for beaming out into the great big world.
Here is Wintervale LOVE to all who are willing and able to receive it… <muwah>
Cling to that.
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Flowing Again
Problem solved. A full day in operation and the water level is holding. It was indeed the orientation of the waterfall that was contributing to the surprising loss of water every day.
The peaceful meditations of splashing water have returned to grace our idyllic surroundings once again.
Pretty good timing, given the visceral angst boiling over in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in the middle of a global pandemic that had seriously derailed the economy while killing vulnerable people with abandon.
With such a wallop of bad vibes unceasingly resonating far and wide, people understandingly are reacting with a protective perspective of wondering what more awful situation could be around the next corner. If we expect the worst, maybe it won’t hurt so much when it arrives. I remember that mindset from my years of depression.
Thinking like that may come across as protective on the surface, but it doesn’t actually work as well as the alternative. We can hold space for best possibilities.
Neither method can entirely control outcomes, but it is hard to argue that they don’t have some influence. Consider how strongly people feel about the power of prayer.
I no longer brace myself for the next possible calamity to befall us. I have grown more inclined to visualize the best possible outcome humankind can achieve. It is easier for me now that I have narrowed my focus to the power of love. Love is the answer. Love can heal all wounds.
It is time to get love flowing again, equally among all races, all income levels, all orientations.
Let the love flow and splash down over everything and everyone.
Amen.
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Birthday Squared
In a classic demonstration of Cyndie’s gift of thinking about others, the planned driveway celebration of her birthday this year was secretly morphed into a surprise celebration of her brother, Steve’s 60th birthday which occurred in April when the family was unable to gather. Cyndie collected thoughts about Steve from all the family and a list was made of the top sixty things we love about the new sexagenarian.
Each thought was numbered and randomly distributed to those present so we could read them aloud to the almost safely distanced tribe.
It was a lovely display of family love on a fabulously lovely June evening that became a birthday squared celebration.
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Her Day
My trusty sidekick for 40-some years of my life is having a birthday today! Send love to Cyndie! She’s a horse-whisperer without a horse.
At least we still have each other.
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Happy Birthday, Cyndie!
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I Hope
Yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that I don’t have the same skills for conjuring up “hope” out of nowhere like I do for manifesting “love” by way of a basic mental exercise of simply doing so. Could that be a remnant from a life-long propensity for a dysthymic depressiveness?
The violent clashes between protestors and police forces seem to be getting worse around the country, while things have calmed down dramatically in the Twin Cities. Part of me fears the local rabble-rousers will become re-enthused by the expanding uproar and want to get back in the game.
Another part of me fears the possibility all this turmoil will be for naught, like too many times before. In a year or two, or five, a white police officer will kill a person of color and we’ll still be questioning how this could have happened again.
Cyndie is working a different program. Hopefully, she will prove to be more successful than me at mentally growing neural networks of hope by reducing thoughts focused on the angst of violence, looting, and arson and the racist hatred and inflammatory rhetoric fueling it all and replacing them with visions of the world as a place of equal love and acceptance for everyone.
If we can imagine it, we can build it. If we build it, they will come?
Let there be hope.
All you need is hope. Hope is all you need.
We hope you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
With a hope like that, you know you should be glad.
I Hope
Dixie Chicks – Writer(s): Martha Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, Keb’mo’
Sunday morning, I heard the preacher say
Thou shall not kill
I don’t wanna hear nothing else about killing
And that it’s God’s will‘Cause our children are watching us
They put their trust in us
They’re gonna be like us
So let’s learn from our history
And do it differentlyI hope, for more love, more joy and laughter
I hope, you’ll have more than you’ll ever need
I hope, you’ll have more happy ever after
I hope, we can live more fearlessly
And we can lose all the pain and misery
I hope, I hopeOh, Rosie, her man he gets too rough
That’s all she can say, he’s a good man
He don’t mean no harm
He was brought up that wayBut our children are watching us
They put their trust in us
They’re gonna be like us
It’s okay for us to disagree
We can work it out lovinglyI hope, for more love, more joy and laughter
I hope, you’ll have more than you’ll ever need
I hope, you’ll have more happy ever after
I hope, you can live more fearlessly
And you can lose all the pain and misery
I hope, I hopeThere must be a way to change what’s going on
No I don’t have all the answersI hope, for more love, more joy and laughter
I hope, you’ll have more than you’ll ever need
I hope, you’ll have more happy ever after
I hope, we can all live more fearlessly
And we can lose all the pain and misery
I hope, I hopeI hope, I hope, I hope
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Protest Exhaustion
Night after night, we who aren’t out violating curfew instructions just can’t get ourselves to stop watching the uninterrupted live coverage of what is happening in our communities between people protesting police misconduct and the battalions of police and the national guard who are tasked with enforcing regulations. It’s exhausting.
I think that’s one of the points the protesters would be happy is being made. Imagine how exhausting it is to be “living while black.”
Three nights ago in Minneapolis, the drama on our television screens was hours of media coverage revealing overt vandalism, looting, and arson in the unbelievable complete absence of police action. Two nights ago, the scenario changed dramatically in that the freeways around Minneapolis and St. Paul were closed early and a very heavy police and national guard presence showed up within an hour of the curfew to control outcomes.
There were a lot fewer fires.
Last night, there was hope that a full day of peaceful protest would end quietly, but then a maniac driving a semi barreled toward thousands of people crowded onto the 35W bridge, and chaos ensued.
Even after a full night’s sleep, I still feel exhausted by it all.
When can we get back to just worrying about the contagious virus for which we have no vaccine?
When can we get back to concerns over how the millions of people facing financial calamity resulting from the pandemic will keep from going hungry or losing what little possessions they have?
Which came first, the angst of racial oppression or the angst of the pandemic?
One foot in front of the other. One deep cleansing breath at a time. I think we are going to need to figure out the trick of carrying on with everyday life even while exhausted, because the change we need to happen is going to take more time than just a week of overnight riotous protests.
Afternoon naps make a lot of sense in times like this.
We could also work on the visualization of planting our love to the world like a seed in the ground that we feed and nurture and watch as it sprouts and grows into a towering tree. Make it a time-lapse visual, so we don’t have to wait a hundred years for the love to get to its maximum height.
<yawn> I’m going to do my visualization while lying down. With my eyes closed. For a couple of hours. Couple-eight.
Oh for a full night’s sleep again…
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Pay Attention
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Attention to what? That’s a good question.
Here are some possibilities:
- Your posture right now.
- Who is suffering most among those you know and love.
- The best return for your investment of time.
- How long it has been since you voiced appreciation to someone deserving.
- How you might help someone less deserving.
- Your most common habitual “tick.”
- When you sense yourself not acting in your own best interest.
- How false information is being used for unethical advantage.
- What it is you are actually afraid of.
- How long it has been since you laughed and cried at the same time.
- What you actually ate in one day that was not a healthy choice.
- How swiftly days become weeks and weeks become months.
- How much sleep you are getting.
- Maintaining a healthy social distance from all others.
- The expression on your face when not actively smiling.
- How much of our unspoken thinking is inadvertently communicated.
- When you find yourself unable to ask for what you need or want.
- The power of love.
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Another Way
There is about as much information being blasted into the world right now as there are virus germs and sanitizing spray. It’s all a bit mind-boggling, but the crackpot theories are a particularly fascinating dose of lunacy. I suppose all human conditions tend to amplify in times of global crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic sure has taken attention away from the equally global threatening planet-warming that industry and fossil-fuel dependence has hastened.
The Associated Press provides clean reviews of falsehoods around the virus and politics that serve to expose some of the deviously manipulated claims that then get shared and reshared on social media so many times they gain believability points among the less astute.
Even within the credible reports about which surprisingly common underlying health conditions are making the coronavirus more severe, there is such a vast amount of pertinent detail it gets overwhelming. As much as we assume it’s lungs that are taking the primary hit, evidence reveals the heart is being damaged from within.
As often happens, I find myself thinking about things in another way. As we begin to take a more focused look at how the virus can spread by our actions, it reveals how often we’ve already been sharing. Think about how many contacts we have had without getting incredibly ill. All those sporting events we attended, the concerts and plays, lectures, public transportation, shopping carts, and doorknobs grabbed.
The number of germ-phobic people who hyper-sanitized their way through daily activities was minuscule compared to the majority of us who took our chances and tried to remember to occasionally wash our hands after touching anything publicly shared.
It’s a wonder the time between pandemics was as long as it has been throughout history.
Here’s another way to think about this pandemic. Don’t be gullible to every crazy thing you see or hear. Recognize your emotional response and reasonable fears, and then check and contain them. Seek credible sources of factual information over and above the entertaining drama of wild reports and survival-of-self-above-all-others mentalities.
Participate in and demonstrate actions that are part of the solution to this pandemic and not part of the problems. Don’t become a pawn in the panic-buying dysfunctional human response.
Even though we may not be able to know if undiagnosed people around us are shedding the coronavirus, they still all deserve to be loved just as much as we do.
Yes, even if they believe crackpot theories that have no basis in scientific fact.
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Bad Dreams
I reached for something that wasn’t really there and despite the nonchalant attempt at pretending I meant to do that, it was obvious to anyone looking that something awkward was going on. It’s hard to fake being in control when there isn’t control to be had. When the brain snaps to attention and static is the only result, it’s hard not to suspect the worst.
When limbs won’t move and words won’t form, I think something deep within us begins to recognize a dream is underway and nudges consciousness toward the surface.
How can sleep be restful when a spectacular theatrical extravaganza is going on in a mind and driving the heart to pound like a hammer?
How can sanity be maintained when virus-mania is boiling over from every reporting entity at a-mile-a-minute?
Thankfully, I can happily report that there have been no positive COVID-19 test results for anyone at Wintervale up to this point. Of course, take that news with a grain of salt because no one here has been tested, either.
In that same vein, we will not be attending any NBA games, but we had no plan to do so, regardless. I will miss watching the excitement of the men’s NCAA March Madness basketball tournament this year, but I’m happy that sports businesses have joined the growing movement to postpone or cancel events that involve stadiums, or theaters, or classrooms full of people.
There are going to be a lot of folks out of work at the same time that the financial machine is melting down and my feeble mind is at a loss as to how this is all going to play out.
I have a feeling that not being able to watch spectator sports is going to become the least of our worries.
There will be unprecedented opportunities to practice the art of beaming love into the world in proportions greater than any suffering this latest pandemic might dish out.
May we all rise to the occasion.
Oh, and wash your hands out there.
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Relative Something 