Posts Tagged ‘Perceptions’
Fine Fellowship
Cyndie has left the building. I got home from the day-job yesterday and jumped right into ranch chores, during which I received a message she was on her way to the airport. Of course, I am not alone in managing all the tasks while she is gone. She enlisted the help of two pet-sitters who will be covering for me while I’m away at work.
Even though they will be cleaning up after the horses, feeding all the animals, and walking Delilah, I couldn’t resist the urge to do extra work to get everything looking especially well-kept during my shift. Honestly, I did want to reduce the amount of work they need to bother with, but part of me also hoped to avoid giving the impression we don’t put much effort toward good housekeeping.
Kind of like cleaning your house before your hired cleaning person shows up to work.
With the primary chef of our household on leave, you might think I would be forced to resort to reheating leftovers in the microwave on the very first night of being home alone. If you would think that, you’d be wrong.
George wasted no time in contacting me with an invitation to dinner at his house. I ate like a king! In addition to that, I was presented with the additional pleasure of meeting a friend of his who showed up to join us. Much to my surprise, Ed happens to have spent plenty of time in our house, before we lived here.
We bought this place from his sister. Yes, it makes the world seem another increment smaller to me today.
I think Ed and I have a pretty similar knack for talking, and we commanded most of the conversation while getting to know each other. Meeting him was an added bonus on top of getting together with George and consuming another delicious sampling of his fine culinary skills.
I almost feel guilty over giving Cyndie a full description of the fabulous food and fine fellowship I enjoyed in her absence.
Maybe it would be best if I choose to paint a picture of suffering that I endure whenever she is away from me, instead.
I’ve seen enough sitcoms in my lifetime to know how these things go.
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Above Zero
I am intrigued by how noticeable a relief it is when our temperature climbs back above zero (F) after an extreme cold snap. There’s an almost magical difference in how it feels. After a full day indoors at work yesterday, I stepped out the door and was immediately aware of the softer feel in the air.
It doesn’t necessarily come across as being warm, but there is a definite lack of it feeling mercilessly, brutally cold.
I don’t know if any of this has anything to do with the headlights in my car burning out, but it seems to me that I always find myself changing a bulb when it is uncomfortably cold for my hands to do so. Even though it is above zero, it is still cold for a hand to be navigating down through limited space of dirty metal and plastic, and then awkwardly trying to press a release tab to wrestle a reluctant connector out of a socket.
It’s worth it to me though, because I really don’t like having only one working headlight. I noticed the reflection of my padiddle in the tailgate of a truck while approaching a stoplight. I was headed to get gas on my way home yesterday, and the station is located very close to an auto parts store.
How convenient.
I successfully replaced the bulb within an hour of discovering the need, despite the not-below-zero-but-still-hard-on-the-hands cold temperature. I’m pretty sure that was a personal best time interval for me.
Cyndie leaves for Florida today, but before she goes, her plan is to take the blankets off the horses. I’m a big advocate of letting them adjust au naturel, and the weekend may bring a warm up that gets us above freezing, so it seems like a chance to give them a break from the straight jackets.
I think they will be happy with that. But that’s coming from a guy who prefers to sleep naked, so my opinion is probably biased.
As long as we anthropomorphize how cold they must feel, it would stand to reason to assume they grow weary of the constricting confines of the blankets, as well.
I’m going to assume they have the same reaction as I do, to the incredible difference in how the winter air feels after a cold spell breaks.
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Get Up
You get up and face another day. It looks just like most other days. To some, it may be a day of dramatic significance, but for the rest of the world, it is normal to the point of being unremarkable. It hardly matters that it is the 15th day of January today.
How did we get here, to the middle of the first month of 2016 already?
I deal with the date a lot at work. Often, it is days far into the future that I am committing to as goals. As a result, I find myself growing numb about what the actual day’s date really is.
If you had long ago set today’s date as important and pondered over it at length throughout the ensuing time, achieving this day would understandably hold particular worth.
I don’t know how to pull that off for every single day.
When I was home all day, every day, managing all the ranch chores, I tended to lose track of what day it was. Now that I am in the completely different situation of driving to work to spend the days dealing with future dates on the calendar, I find it funny that I still lose track of what day it is.
Throughout my life, I’ve not been very good about waking up everyday with a feeling of awe over the gift of the day. Maybe that leads to my tendency to feel shock over the times that I do pay attention to the date. I don’t know.
Lately, I have been enjoying periods of intense pleasure over an immediate moment. The color of the sky, just after sunset. The look in someone’s eye. The sigh of our resting dog.
It doesn’t matter what day it is, when a fleeting moment catches your attention and feeds your soul.
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Vibration
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reaching
after a feeling
grasping
an idea
a sensation
vibration
both halting
and fleeting
forgotten
too often
it floats
ethereal
we remember
it is familiar
we know
when it shows
invisibly
flowing
up the spine
tingling so fine
wafting
divine
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Four Tattletales
Our lovely dog, Delilah, took advantage of Cyndie’s decision to allow some time off leash in the afternoon yesterday, while she shoveled away the accumulation of Wednesday night’s snow. After a couple of successes, in which Delilah returned to Cyndie when called, there came the great escape once again.
Out of sight in a blink.
Cyndie hollered and whistled for Delilah. She walked through the barn and found the horses in the paddock, looking at her while she made the ruckus. They’d witnessed this routine enough times before that they knew what was going on. Cyndie decided to drive the roads in search of our wandering canine. She hiked up to the house to get the truck keys, but was stymied by a dead battery.
That’s an ongoing occasional drama for another time.
She went back up to the house to get her car to widen her search. Down the road, when she spotted a flock of turkeys luxuriating in a field, she knew she was in the wrong spot. No dog in that vicinity.
As she returned to our place and pulled into the driveway, she spotted all four horses, now in the hay-field, lined up and facing one specific direction. They didn’t even turn to look at her, as is their usual behavior, but rather, maintained their intense stare in that single direction. They were clearly signaling a message for Cyndie, compelling her to look at what they were seeing. She turned her head to follow their gaze and immediately spotted the bright orange flash of Delilah’s vest across the street, in the neighbor’s field, past the snowmobile trail leading into the woods.
Cyndie described how it was the distinct posture of each of the horses which made the message so clear. They were not lolling around aimlessly, or relaxed in the stance of a nap, but instead were straight and tall, flexed as if on a specific mission. She would totally have missed that Delilah was in that direction, had it not been for their help.
The horses had totally ratted out our dog on the lam.
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Not Static
Nothing is as static as my mind tends to imagine it to be. The constant changes and endless activity I have witnessed on our property in the past 3 years are convincing me that my general impression of the world has been a gross oversimplification of reality.
I think I’ve already written about my amazement over how relatively fluid the “solid ground” actually is. I know that farmers who need to pick rocks out of their tilled fields year after year are well aware of this ‘fluidity.’
Yesterday, a day that was about as plain as an uneventful winter day can be, I was trudging up one of my shortcut paths through the trees between our barn and the house when I suddenly became aware of all the debris collecting on the snow covering the ground.
It is a blaring announcement about how much activity is actually occurring in the seemingly static days that have followed last week’s snow storm. I’m guessing that squirrels are responsible for much of the shrapnel that has fallen from the trees, but I expect there are plenty of other less visible actors in the constant change taking place.
I need only look to the manure pile to witness evidence of the microscopic players at work in a feat of perpetual transition. Even though growing things all appear to be in a winter state of dead or dormant, the manure pile continues to cook at 140° F. There is an amazing amount of activity going on in the center of that pile.
I used to think there were two states of a mouse trap: tripped, or not. Now I know there is a third one. It is called, gone. I have lost too many mouse traps to count. Before we went out of town last Thursday, I added new peanut butter bait to the two traps in the garage. It had been too many days in a row without any evidence of activity, and I knew better. The mice had definitely lost interest in the traps.
The tally upon our return was, one trap with a mouse in it, and one trap gone. I don’t know if a mouse got caught in the trap and something else hauled it off somewhere, or the trap snapped on a mouse that could still run away, dragging the trap with it.
My response to all this is that I am not going to devise any single solution to situations that arise. I will endeavor to change the way I deal with things just as often as the challenges morph in new and different ways.
It’s not any spectacular new innovation. I’d say it’s pretty much how things have been throughout time. I’m just coming to a realization that I can choose to frame my perspective differently.
You could say I am planning to observe and respond to situations with more fluidity.
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Christmas Sentiment
I am giving myself a present for Christmas, and it comes from everyone who loves me.
I am going to choose to consciously allow myself to absorb, feel, and appreciate the love that others shower over me in myriad ways.
It’s simple, but oh so powerful.
Thank you to all who love me. May you feel and receive an abundance of amplified love in return!
Merry Christmas!
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‘Tis Season
‘Tis the Christmas season for sure, as we’ve reached the final week before December 25th. If you sense anything about me, it might include a perception that I am a bit mall averse. I do not like going to shopping malls. I avoid them on weekends whenever possible, and I especially seek to stay clear during the holiday season.
Nonetheless, I try to stay flexible enough to go with the flow when events lead me to places I might not choose on my own. So it was, that I found myself yesterday, facing the double whammy of going to the Southdale Shopping Center on the Saturday before Christmas.
No, make that a triple whammy. I was also going to a movie theater there to attend a showing of the latest mega-event movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, on its opening weekend.
I figured it was a recipe for every possible challenge related to having too many people in one place at the same time.
On top of preparing to face this adventure, my mind was also occupied with peripheral planning to deal with our animal care and a goal to also attend, on the same day, a holiday party in the evening, some 50-minutes away in a different direction.
We had a fabulous day. I credit Cyndie’s precious ability to send love to all around, and especially to those afar. We also did some intense planning which involved arriving to the movie theater early. It all played out flawlessly.
I was surprised to find that it wasn’t as crowded as I imagined it would be. We were second in line at the theater door, and when the doors finally opened, we discovered that being early enough to line up hadn’t been necessary.
Despite my ability to imagine the plan for our day being ripe for one hassle after another, it turned out to be nothing but peace, love, joy, excitement, and a fair amount of extra highway miles.
My movie review: classic Star Wars, doing justice to the genre and paying nice homage to the original.
It was sweet to see our kids and Cyndie’s family. Thirteen of us showed up for the flick. From there, we raced home to give Delilah some much wanted attention, feed and clean up after the horses, grab a quick bite for dinner, and then headed out into the darkness to find a holiday party at a home we’ve not visited before.
I negotiated one obstacle in a shortcut I had chosen, and we arrived in good time for a sweet visit to a BIG holiday party in a beautiful home in the country.
The day turned out just the way you would imagine it, if you were to choose to expect the best possible outcomes.
It serves as inspiration for me, to see if I can’t improve on the tenor of my visualizations going forward.
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Relative Something 