Posts Tagged ‘Love’
All About
Cyndie. This Weekend, it’s all about Cyndie as we celebrate the milestone of her 60th birthday. With Jackie tending to animal chores at Wintervale, Cyndie and I are submersed in the loving energy –and I do mean energy– of the Friswold family. We are staying at her parent’s house in Edina, MN, but have twice in a row found our way to downtown Minneapolis.
Last night, it was dinner and music at the Dakota, where we ate like royalty and swooned over Shawn Colvin‘s very personal solo guitar song performance.
This morning, Cyndie is sleeping in. My brain is busy trying to process the onslaught of activity, memories, and emotions –not to mention distractions of mental and physical preparations for my biking and camping trip that starts on Friday– conspiring to confuse me over whether it’s all about Cyndie, or all about me right now.
I had the great pleasure of starting the day yesterday riding bikes with Cyndie’s brother, Ben. He rode over from about a mile away just as a rumble of thunder rolled over us.
We took pause inside to watch the radar long enough to see we would have a perfect window of opportunity after a very short wait. The tiny disturbance sliding south of us was just a precursor to the precipitation that would arrive in the middle of the day and hang around for the afternoon.
While the sky was watering the earth, more of the Friswold clan gathered for lunch at Jimmy’s restaurant near our old Eden Prairie stomping grounds.
After a little nap before heading out for the night, attention turned to a gift brother Barry presented to Cyndie. Her jaw dropped when she saw her younger face on the cover of a memory book of pictures he had spent many loving hours to produce.
Just as she finished a first pass through the overwhelming collection of memories the images trigger, we stood to witness Justify run for the triple crown. Then eleven of us headed out for dinner and the concert.
With noted local musician and song-a-day YouTuber, Zachary Scot Johnson opening the show for Shawn Colvin, we were treated to a range of guitar-accompanied stories, providing me with a second recent prompt to wonder whether I am still a guitar player, or not.
A variety of reasons have combined to allow months to pass without my spending time with fingers on frets. I am inclined to blame my yet-to-be surgically treated arthritic left thumb as the primary culprit for the hiatus, but deep down, I have a sense I may be giving that more credit than is due.
Somehow, while distracted with too many of my own concerns rarely focused on accomplishments, I have been granted the chance to flutter around the bright light that is Cyndie for 44-some years.
It makes for a tangled web that isn’t so much all about her or me in the end. It really has become all about us.
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Love Rules
Love rules the day. I was going to write a blog post this morning, and then a royal wedding showed up. The wedding of Harry and Meghan is so far away from my world, that I had no intention of bothering to watch it, despite the almost universal broadcast coverage being made available.
Cyndie wanted to watch it. Not long ago, we did a binge watching of early seasons of the show, “Suits,” where we came to feel Meghan Markle was someone we knew. She set an alarm so she could get up early to see the wedding.
I had no idea that I would end up having dreams of getting ready to view it in my parent’s bedroom in the house on Cedar Ridge Road in Eden Prairie, and that my dad would be there among others who had gathered. As dreams do, it later morphed to my being on a roadside curb looking to reserve some space with Cyndie’s brother, Steve, to watch the procession move past.
I woke almost every fifteen minutes after 5:00 a.m. and wondered when Cyndie was going to turn on the tv in our bedroom. Eventually, I heard her getting up and assumed she was going to sneak out to allow me to sleep. I let her know that she could turn it on here.
As the pageantry played out, we exchanged fun banter over the spectacle of the event. Then love burst forth in the form of one Michael Curry. The Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry, the presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church gave the perfect wedding sermon.
You can read the text online, as Kensington Palace released the transcript immediately following his delivery. However, it is his delivery, including small enhancements to the script, that is necessary viewing to grasp the full impact of emotion and truths of which he spoke.
Love is my “religion.” Remove all the technicalities of each and every religion with their variety of origin stories and various traditions, and beneath it all there is love.
Bishop Curry boiled it down nicely. Watch it. Then go out into the world and love.
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First Ever
This is the first time I ever tried to do this. In honor of Mother’s Day today, I have given Cyndie the day off and I have taken over the job of making her classic caramel rolls for the family brunch this morning.
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What an adventure. Just melt too much butter, a lot of Karo syrup, and way more brown sugar than can possibly be healthy, on the stove and then pour it in the pan(s). I lined one with nuts, first.
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Using a pre-made sweet dough cuts the job down to size, but what a challenge it was getting that sticky blob to roll flat and then stay formed for the cutting.
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Arranging the rolls in the pan is a guessing game of wondering how much the dough will rise before baking.
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With a little creative arranging, I got everything to fit.
I’ll be a nervous wreck in front of the oven, but the hard part is done.
Best wishes to all you mothers out there! I have great respect for all that you do.
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Two Wolves
Last week, Cyndie and I squeaked in time after a hard day’s work to watch the Disney movie “Tomorrowland” (2015) that arrived in the mail on our Netflix subscription. We liked it a lot. It includes significant references to the popular teaching legend about two wolves, which highlights the importance of how our thinking influences our lives.
We have been repeating variations of the punchline with noticeable frequency in the days since.
A simple synopsis taken from the movie:
Casey Newton: “There are two wolves” … You told me this story my entire life, and now I’m telling you: There are two wolves and they are always fighting. One is darkness and despair, the other is light and hope. Which wolf wins?
Eddie Newton: Whichever one you feed.
This resonates for me, because it reflects my direct experience from my years of chronic depression through the ensuing years following wonderfully successful treatment. I learned to feed the good wolf instead of the bad one.
This recent focus on the two wolves legend has renewed my attention to how often I still automatically default to a negative perspective, despite my desire and intentions to do otherwise.
I stepped in the house at the end of a long, strenuous day of laboring on our property and Cyndie checked in with me, commenting on the vast number of things we accomplished. Without missing a beat, my response grabbed the equally vast number of tasks that remain in need of attention.
Luckily, that default response no longer goes unnoticed by me. I caught myself and admitted I was feeding the wrong wolf.
It’s as if I feel the cheery perspective of the state of things requires a counterbalance to keep it from being a false representation of reality. But, thinking about it, I could see that no matter how I chose to frame it, either mental perspective did not physically change how many projects we did or didn’t complete that day.
The reality of whether the grass needs mowing or downed branches need to be turned into piles of wood chips does not change based on how I assess our achievements of the day.
So why not feed the good wolf?
In life’s ongoing battle between darkness and despair, and the alternative of light and hope, which one should we be feeding? I vote for light, hope, love, peace, compassion, understanding, and even more love.
Thank you, Tomorrowland, for sowing the seeds.
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Hearty Impression
What might the message be from this tree with an old wound that it is growing around in the shape of a heart?
I don’t know, but I’d like to think it is something heartwarming.
When we were cleaning out the landscaping around the back side of the house over the weekend, I discovered that a tie holding a maple sapling to a support stake was too tight and had begun constricting the tree’s growth. What a sorry sight to stumble upon; an occasion where my efforts to help a tree had ended up hurting it.
Trees seem to grow slowly, in general, but at the same time, there is a dramatic amount of activity happening in relatively short time spans. I think the trunk of that sapling has doubled in size since it was tied. I would have liked to see a time-lapse of that progress.
Just a week ago we were digging out from beneath a huge snow storm, and yesterday, on my drive home from work, I could already see the tops of tree clusters developing a green tinge from sprouting new buds. It warms my heart to know the leaves will soon be making an appearance.
Ever wonder how many leaves grow on the branches of mature trees? There are a lot of variables, but an oft-repeated average seen in the results of a Google search is around 200,000. That number makes my heart flutter like the quaking leaves of our poplar trees.
At the extension class we took last month to learn tricks of identifying trees, (did I already write about this?) we found out the thing that makes some leaves oscillate in the wind is the square shape of the leaf stem. It isn’t round, it has four flat sides.
Fun facts for people who love trees. Hopefully, that includes everyone. How could anyone with a heart, not love a tree?
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Thereof
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I’m trying to think what it is
that’s eating at me
I’m sentimental
this much I know
but I think there’s more to it
than that
it’s a feeling
or something that is creating
a feeling
deep in the farthest reaches
of what constitutes
me
or it could be a lack
I know there is something missing
something I’ll never get back
just like every other time before
what is it about this instance
that makes it any different
I was lost when I got here
why should it feel any different now
other than the added loss of foundation
in all I hold dear
daily being victimized by a bumbling buffoon
who somehow hoodwinked enough people
to make off with a prize
thoroughly and completely
undeserved
as if just to make some point
at the expense of all that’s good and right
and now an invisible sooty stink
sticks to everything
while the best and brightest
stumble around trying to make sense
of a system that is collapsing beneath them
like sand castles against unrelenting gusts of wind
I no longer remember
where I set the things
that mattered to me most
and the grains are flowing fast
through that graceful narrow space
of my delicate hour-glass
yet my work seems hardly done
pushing so many stones
up all of these grassy knolls
with all the water rising
and glaciers sadly waning
none of the genies
will ever go back in their bottles
and maybe that is what’s eating at me
but I have my doubts
my mind is a fragile thing to trust
busy both directing and reacting to
the chemistry experiments
simmering and sublimating
within my flesh and bones
while the invisible forces
of heart-fields and magnetic solar waves
simultaneously push and pull at us all
blindly gliding through
their ephemeral energized confines
we’re all distracted by shiny things and squirrels
dashing for the proverbial carrots
dangling in our minds eyes
sentimental racing rats
too often forgetting to focus
on the ultimate binary truth
concisely boiled down to
love
or
the absence
thereof
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The Diet
Not that we want to compound the misery we put our horses through, but the weeks of indoor confinement they just endured have come with the added insult of decreased rations. If protecting them from the ravages of founder (laminitis) means we need to closely control what our horses are consuming, we need to do it regardless of how unhappy they act over the situation.
I am certain that the reason Cayenne was prancing around snorting when I freed her from the confines of her stall on Saturday was because she had grown so agitated over the lack of anything to eat in her “cell.” She had made that clear with the kicking of the wall and pawing at the floor when I showed up to greet the farrier and get Hunter some padded shoes.
The precisely measured portions I had meted out at noon were ancient history and she wanted more. Luckily, she settled down a little bit while Hunter was brought out of his stall to stand between both mares and be fitted.
Later, after the three horses were done thrashing around outside in the paddock, they settled down and took up stations over the hay boxes, where bonus servings had been made available to augment their celebration over the return to the great outdoors.
Now, even though it was a bonus offering, it was still a precisely measured meager portion of a bonus.
It didn’t take them long to show their feelings about the restrictions of this new diet still being in place, even though they have been released from confinement in the barn.
Yesterday, I spotted them grazing on the winter manure pile inside their fence line. It seems there have been a few morsels of hay raked up with the manure.
Cyndie fretted the other day that feeding our animals (and I might add, her family and guests) is one of the ways she shows her love. For the record, she loves me a LOT. It breaks her heart to see the horses stoop to digging through the manure pile for blades of grass.
I’m sure it’s not the first time a restrictive diet has brought on behaviors for which pride gets tossed aside.
In reality, they aren’t really that desperate. They were just checking out the pile for a brief few seconds. I thought it looked funny and snapped the photo. It makes for good story!
The diet is for real, and their adjustment to it is going to take some time, but we are optimistic a new balance will emerge and we will be back on a path to optimal health, soon.
Soon, in a relative sense of the word.
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Relative Something 