Posts Tagged ‘relationships’
Detecting Numinosity
Cyndie and John
The initial attraction was mutual and undeniable. In our early years of exploring a relationship as potential significant others, there were plenty of twists and turns. Cyndie was a year older than me and in the high school class ahead of mine. In many ways, we were opposites. She was more of a go-getter. I was more inclined to wait for things or opportunities to show up in my life.
I bailed on our relationship several times, thinking it was unlikely to survive the ravages of time. However, the magnetic pull between us was relentless. She was all I ever wanted, so it was easy for me to give it another go.
Cyndie pursued multiple university degrees; I sought the least expensive and shortest path to a trade that offered stable employment. We shared an equal passion for similar music, certain foods, and an empathy for the plights of others. I took pride in fulfilling the [at the time] non-traditional role of supporting her career as she repeatedly climbed higher and higher in educational administration positions, being the only woman among numerous old-boy networks.
Somehow, together we managed to raise two intelligent, well-adjusted children while simultaneously unraveling and resolving our own personal issues that originated unconsciously in each of our formative years and grew with us into our adult minds and relationship dysfunctions.
She let me go off on bicycling adventures on my own; I enjoyed being allowed to stay home when she wanted to travel to distant shores. No one seems able to fathom how or why I would pass up a trip to Italy. I consider having gotten permission to stay home one of my great accomplishments. (No offense intended, Italy.) Cyndie says it was one of her favorite trips.
I experience greater pleasure from saving money than spending it. Cyndie is uncomfortable with tight constraints on our expenditures.
We have benefited immeasurably from more than a year of work with a couple’s therapist.
Cyndie was always more of an optimist, while I was a classically trained pessimist. We have rubbed off on each other enough at this point that I occasionally am able to note the switch for her.
When Cyndie came home from a training session with horses and reported receiving physical sensations and eventually messages in her mind transmitted by the animals, I was dumbfounded. I had no reason to doubt her experience –even though she was unsure about what was happening herself– but it took some time to reconcile the unbelievable aspect with which we were suddenly presented.
We’ve been through a lot together. Today, we share an equally strong understanding of the presence of a divine loving energy around us in every direction and in all creatures, plants, and materials in the universe. We understand telepathy is a reality because we have experienced it.
Looking back from where we are today, I better understand that magnetic attraction that was relentlessly drawing us toward our eventual long-term relationship. Nothing short of numinous.
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That’s October
Now, this is more like it. Although that doesn’t mean we are necessarily enjoying it. Remember how much griping I was doing about the hot weather extending well into September and October this year? There has been a change.
That is what October is expected to look like. It is chilly, rainy, blustery, and miserably dreary-looking outside. That leads to cold and wet animals, as well as the people who need to be outdoors caring for them. Just the way it should be in the tenth month of the year up here in the Northland.
We have successfully completed our most essential winterization steps while it was still comfortable outside, making days like yesterday much easier to endure. The pump was removed from our landscape pond on Monday, and the water line down to the labyrinth was drained and blown out with my air compressor.
The horses all have on rain shells to give them a thin bit of added protection from the battering wind-blown rain showers. There is little that we find sadder than a sopping wet, shivering horse. The rain shells do prevent that result, at the very least.
This blast of real October weather has allowed me to become more sloth-like than usual, and I am taking full advantage of it by doing little to nothing that could be construed as useful or productive unless one considers napping in a recliner as being useful.
At this age, I find that doing nothing produces less guilt than it did when being responsible for raising children or working for someone who was paying for my time. I’m sure that Cyndie would rather I stay as busy as she is every day, but since she sets such a high bar of comparison, I long ago proved my methods fall far short of the examples she sets.
If there are two ways to do anything in this world, Cyndie and I will always choose opposite methods. It makes it all the more special when we succeed at things as a couple. We rely on the magic (flexible) thread of love to keep us together after banging heads trying to execute any version of a metaphoric two-person lift.
The end goal always tends to be the same for both of us, so that helps.
Thirteen years after moving here, our end goal has blurred a bit. Wintervale never became an income generator that could help us cover expenses like we originally envisioned. October has a way of feeling like our beginning, but it also always ushers in the end of so many things growing outdoors.
It’s hard to think about ourselves and the big picture of another year at Wintervale when videos keep surfacing of masked thugs uncontestedly kidnapping people in broad daylight in US cities, while portions of the White House are being demolished by heavy machinery. Rather symbolic of a very scary future for our country.
I wonder how business is going at the inflatable frog costume factory these days. If Cyndie and I were going out for Halloween, we’d probably dress as a masked thug with a military vest handcuffed to an inflatable frog.
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Payback Week
All’s fair in taking turns covering the ranch while your spouse gets a break from the routine. Cyndie is out of town for a week, and I am chief cook and bottle washer, dog walker, and horse wrangler while she is gone. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing for me since I really do enjoy time on my own, but unlike my time up at the lake last week, now I am responsible for the care and feeding of our animals throughout each day.
It’s not that much different from when both of us are home, except everything tends to take a little longer alone. The benefit of getting two things done at the same time is gone. Luckily, our animals all demonstrate a respectable amount of patience with me. I think they can tell I’m on my own.
To my benefit, a January thaw has taken away a lot of the stress of doing anything outdoors.
I thought about doing some tree branch trimming, but for the life of me, I can’t remember where I put a new pruning hand saw I got for Christmas. Didn’t find it in the shop or the storage cabinet in the house garage, so it must be somewhere more ingenious that I picked so I would know where to find it later.
Think, John, think.
As long as I was rummaging around in the shop, I decided to bring a wood sculpting project to the house and spread it out all over the dining room table. It’s one of those perks of being the only one home for a week, leaving a mess out, and not having it be in anybody else’s way.
I’m ready for the week to go smoothly, so Cyndie won’t have anything to worry about while she is away. I want her to have such a great time that she will come home eager to pay me back with another chance to escape to the lake when no one else is around.
You should know that all my gleeful ranting and raving about having time alone lately is simply because it compliments the wonderful times with Cyndie when we are home together and times with my many friends when I get to let my gregarious side run wild. Don’t let my advancing age fool you into thinking I have become a crotchety old, anti-social curmudgeon.
I’ve got a couple more years left until I fully grow into that description.
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Silly Victory
“I win.” Simple as that. When engaged in meaningless banter with Cyndie, particularly if my point has no basis for accuracy, I will swiftly blurt, “I win.” The debate is over.
Most accurate at that point of our back and forth is that I have totally lost. It served well for many years in introducing humor into our interactions but not so much anymore.
Pretending to win when you obviously haven’t isn’t funny after a certain grift leader managed to make it to the highest office in our country and then inspired his minions to violence in an attempt to keep his position.
One of the safeties of a home is the opportunity to be silly in ways that might come across poorly in public. [loud belch]
This morning, to occupy Asher’s mind for a moment of distraction, Cyndie assembled a hidden treat vessel from found materials. He would need to figure out a way to get to the delicious bites he could smell wrapped inside paper and resting in the 12 pockets of an egg carton.
I watched as he was trying to figure out how to open the carton, surprised that he didn’t just bite into it to rip it apart. As he picked up his head to see what Cyndie was doing, his paw rolled across the carton and it popped open. When he looked back down, there were all the wads of paper.
The exercise lasted maybe 5 minutes and certainly won’t help to discourage him from scrounging in our trash in the future, but it was something new and different to entertain his food-driven curiosity and distract from his whining for attention.
Even a mere five minutes of re-occupying his mind can feel like a silly victory sometimes.
“We win.”
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New Visitors
This morning we found evidence of new life arriving overnight down under the overhang.
At least two recently opened eggshells were on the ground beneath the horses. I won’t be the least bit surprised if the many barn pigeons have expanded their numbers. They will share a close birthday with the new robin hatchlings nesting in the branches of the spruce tree just outside our sunroom windows.
Yesterday we spotted the momma bird hopping up branches of the tree with a worm in her mouth and the little heads soon appeared with mouths opened wide.
We also enjoyed a visit from a new connection made at the Tour of Minnesota bike week. After several years of seeing each other on the tour, Scott Skaja overheard me mention having horses and quickly showed interest in bringing his family to see the place one day.
Yesterday was our opportunity before his oldest leaves for college in Florida and we were graced with a beautiful day to roam the property and mingle with the horses while also giving Asher plenty of attention.
The Skaja family was able to witness our experiment with refamiliarizing the horses with the inside of the barn. A vet appointment on the calendar in early August will require the horses to be in the stalls, so we will be offering them multiple opportunities to grow comfortable doing so.
We tried this last year but when Cyndie shattered her ankle in November it interrupted the process and the horses ended up making it through the winter without ever needing to be brought in.
Moving them one at a time when they aren’t sure about coming inside was a challenge I did not want to deal with all alone.
Scott and his wife and daughters stood outside the half-doors to observe how the four horses made their way inside and sniffed around every nook and cranny before eventually finding pans of feed to snack on inside each stall. Cyndie and I felt as though the horses showed evidence of remembering the visits last year and seemed pleasingly comfortable being inside.
It was a great chance to let the Skajas watch the horses explore new things and behave like the big, beautiful creatures they are, including pooping in the barn. Daughter, Bella graciously volunteered to do the scooping up afterward. I took advantage of that momentum to show off my manure composting process.
Not very impressive compared to Cyndie serving up freshly baked scones, a variety of incredibly delicious cold salads for lunch, topped off with a peach pie she baked earlier.
Obviously, Cyndie and I have different areas of expertise.
It will be tough to beat the fun we had yesterday, once again confirming our impressions that hosting visitors is truly what brings our paradise to its fullest splendor.
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Pain Management
Which is more difficult: Suffering great pain ourselves or watching a loved one suffer pain that we can’t do anything about? It hurts either way. The good news is that Cyndie is home and making great progress in coping with the immediate after-effects of a TKA.
You know, Total Knee Arthroplasty. Geesh. Loosely, arthro -joint / plasty -molding, grafting or forming. Otherwise known as knee replacement.
Progress doesn’t mean mastering. As of last night, I would describe it as the pain having the best of her. Pain: 2 / Cyndie: 1.
My biggest challenge is figuring out how to keep her from doing anything that isn’t helpful to her situation while she is on pain medication. Keeping Cyndie from doing things is akin to herding cats.
She was on the couch resting when I stepped out to walk Delilah and tend to the horses yesterday afternoon. In the fraction of an hour that I was outside, she got up off the couch and worked on hanging up new shower curtains that were delivered to our house on Monday.
That wasn’t something that needed to happen and could easily have waited for me to take care of later.
This kind of behavior makes it even harder on me when she later cries in pain and admits maybe she did a little too much. Ya think?
I’m not a great one for policing her actions in general. How do you stop a perpetual motion machine? As a result, it’s complicated for me when my role in caring for her involves trying to control her activities. She tells me it hurts if she lays too long, so she gets up and walks. Looks to me like it hurts to walk and it hurts when she struggles back into bed.
Thankfully, there was room to increase the dosage of pain meds to manage her comfort at this phase of the recovery.
The saving grace of this knee replacement is going to be the iceless cold compression therapy machine Cyndie rented. Chilled water is automatically pumped through a wrap on her knee and it cycles on and off in programmed intervals.
I was able to watch Cyndie’s initial physical therapy session before we left the recovery hotel and I asked the therapist about how important the exercises are to optimizing recovery. Her answer: they are 100% the key to achieving full range of motion but you must do them all consistently as prescribed and no more than prescribed. Shouldn’t underdo or overdo it.
Hmm. I’m gonna opt out of being in charge of that.
Hopefully, it won’t be long before the pain is managed without narcotics altering her consciousness. It’s challenging enough for me to keep pace with Cyndie’s mode of operation on normal days.
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Never Enough
There are a lot of ways that Cyndie and I are wonderfully compatible, and near the top of the list should be our shared appreciation/fascination with rocks. We both agree that you can never have enough rocks. Toward that end, yesterday Cyndie went into our woods where our newly cut trails had uncovered old piles of fieldstone and hauled a bunch out for use in the labyrinth.
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Our farmer neighbors think we are weird to hold their old rock piles in such high regard.
Cyndie shared a sweet story from her day. When she dumped one load of stones it made a loud clatter that caught the attention of our closest neighbor who was out trimming branches near his deer stand. He called out to her to ask if she was okay. I’m sure from his location it could have sounded like quite a crash.
It’s very comforting to know neighbors watch out for each other here.
These perfect specimens will get placed around the labyrinth pathways to build up the existing borders and allow removal of more of the artificial rocks we used when first establishing the circuitous route. We had pallets of manufactured stone left over from the decorative veneer plastered around the block foundation below the log walls of our house. At the time, it seemed like a good use of the material, but they don’t hold up well against the elements when laying flat on the ground. Some have broken apart from the moisture and many others are simply getting swallowed by the earth around them.
It was interesting for me to work on the different labyrinth design up at the lake over the weekend because that one has very wide borders that are three times the width of the narrow path.
Our labyrinth at home has wide paths with just a single line of stones as dividers.
After working with both, I now wish we could make our rock dividers wider at home, but doing so would narrow the path more than we want. Maybe by placing larger rocks strategically we can beef up the pathway borders enough to provide more of the visual impression I desire without compromising the walking space too much.
There never seems to be enough time to work on the enhancements we both dream of and there are never enough reasons to stop tweaking the design once and for all.
Our labyrinths will always be growing and changing with time.
And they will never have enough rocks, no matter what.
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Incidental Accents
I suffer to imagine how plain my world might become if I lived alone. Once again, I am tending to the day-to-day alone while Cyndie is away from home. My meals have become embarrassingly simplified. I don’t change sheets, I wash the ones I just slept in and put them right back on the bed. I move from one chore to the next methodically, practically.
Too often, I take for granted the myriad enhancements Cyndie bestows upon our surroundings. Incidental accents that subtly enrich my environment, not only visually, but energetically, too.
As much as I like having alone time, the void created by Cyndie’s absence greatly impacts the cost/benefit ratio.
Where do the magical flower blossoms come from that are scattered along our pathways? I don’t have anything to do with them. That’s all Cyndie’s effort.
I usually walk past all the places she stashes them without noticing, but the other day, I spotted this one that looked like it was reflecting the expanse of starry space, light-years beyond our planet.
That priceless morsel wouldn’t be here if it were left up to me at this point in my life.
I might fail to pay worthy attention to the flowers, but I will never fail to appreciate that the compliment of Cyndie’s and my way of doing things is so much more than just the sum of two parts.
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Co-Favorite Place
For all of my adult life, Cyndie’s family vacation home on Round Lake near Hayward, Wisconsin has been my favorite place. As I wrote yesterday, my affections are now split between our paradise of Wintervale Ranch in Beldenville and Wildwood Lodge Club up north.
I now have co-favorite places.
It is wonderful to be up at the lake again.
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As always, the special feature of the lodge club is communing with the other families and we received an early dose of camaraderie when the next door Whitlock clan showed up just after Cyndie and I arrived. Much love ensued.
There is a lot to do around the property to make it look less neglected as the ravages of winter appear to have wreaked havoc on anything left out in the elements.
Case in point: The front steps to the Friswold “cabin” for which I was so proud to have repaired a single paver block last summer are now failing en masse as the foundation underneath appears to be giving out.
Entire rows are tipping forward. I suppose it’s unfair to blame one winter for this, but it sure seemed fine last year.
I can’t blame the extreme state of the smoke clouded doors of the living room fireplace on anything but neglect to tend to the task of cleaning them in a timely manner. When Marie asked me to build a fire, I figured it wouldn’t add much to the ambience if we couldn’t see the flames. It took a lot of ash-soaked newspaper to rub off the insanely thick baked-on accumulation of smoke on those glass doors.
At least I had the joy of trying to ignite unseasoned firewood that had been supplied for our fire-building pleasure. No wonder there was so much gunk on the glass of the doors.
Maybe, if I love this place as much as I do home, I need to more equally split my attention to maintenance chores. Is the building of a lake-place woodshed in my future?
I would sure appreciate the luxury of selecting dry wood for our fires. So would the chimney flue.
The more immediate concern will be cleaning the beach today. The lake ice pushed a new berm of sandy leaves about a foot high along the full length of our beach shoreline.
What a wonderful location for putting in a day’s work.
My co-favorite place, in fact.
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Chicken Thoughts
It was a good question. What are we going to do differently to protect our new chickens this time? When I heard myself answering, I realized how little in-depth thought I have actually given the subject.
Are we doing them justice by raising them amid the same risk of predation that decimated all our flocks before? I’m not sure.
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Cyndie has dubbed them the Buffalo Gals and the Rocketts in reference to their origins.
My primary reason for wanting our chickens to free-range is for the service they provide in controlling bugs. I’ve also discovered how much fun they are as companions and that they convert the things they find to eat into amazing eggs.
I’m not against considering ways we might dissuade such frequent attacks on our flock as we recently experienced. I will put renewed effort into staging my trail cam in locations where I might capture evidence of visiting predators to give better confirmation of what we are dealing with.
It feels a little like our efforts to constrain water runoff and control erosion or prevent excessive sediment where we don’t want it.
Nature does what it does. Our best successes will come from finding constructive adaptations instead of entirely stopping things we don’t desire from happening.
Imagine the predation phenomena from the perspective of the flies and ticks that try to survive on our land. They are under constant assault from chickens.
Our chickens face threats from their natural predators. We’ve decided to not confine them to fenced quarters that would make it harder for the fox or coyotes to kill them.
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Today, we hope to clean up the coop and try making some modifications to accommodate housing more birds than ever before. The Buffalo Gals will be moving to the coop soon. That will allow us to get the Rockets out of the basement bathroom and into the larger brooder tub in the barn.
We will give our chickens the best life possible for their time with us. Past demonstrations have shown their natural instincts help them control their own destiny up to a point. Their life here will not be risk-free.
For the time being, I guess we are demonstrating we are choosing to accept that.
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Relative Something 