A New Secret

I’ve discovered a secret: how to save one-half of an avocado.

There is no fancy way to wrap it, although I’ve tried excluding all air contact by wrapping with saran wrap, sealing it in a sandwich bag, and popping it into the fridge. I’ve slathered lime or lemon juice all over it and put it in an airtight container. I’ve also been known to eat the whole avocado and relieve myself of the problem in the first place.

The easiest solution, however, is to leave it alone. The silly thing grows a scab all of its own by letting the open edge of the avocado meat dehydrate. Whala! It’s sealed, and, if one doesn’t leave it for a month, nothing rots. In fact, the thickened covering doesn’t age either and the inside gets even riper.

Reminds me of a scab.

Reminds me of my moving through grief.

Every time I try to wrap my sorrow in a covering to isolate it from the rest of my life, it gets pushed to the back of my proverbial shelf of ‘stuff’. Then everything in front of it takes on more emotional responses. I can rant about the government, the wars, health insurance, DMV, and on and on. I take one topic onto my soapbox until I’ve exhausted it and can tell by listener’s rolling eyes, I’ve battered their ear drums past listening.

Then I take out another one until I grab, without looking, to find myself staring at the main irritant that’s turning black. Those are the moments when I realize I’m damn mad at Y for dying and leaving me with piles and piles of collected building parts and photos and etceteras to deal with. Ironically, like the rotting avocado, I’ll probably throw away all the preciously amassed bits and pieces he always thought might some day become useful.

If I don’t want to isolate my grief, I can keep picking at it every moment of every day, like pouring salt on a wound, and I make myself miserable. I might be going through a necessary process but bringing up the fact I’m only one half of a whole, doesn’t let me find my own unique flavor. It leaves me wanting. “What?” I wonder.

I wish somehow I could take on the whole grieving process and get it over in one ‘fell swoop’. I know, it would be too much. I can get overwhelmed as it is with the smaller sections of sorrow as they drop in my lap, so why choke on the whole thing?

So, like the half of an avocado, if I just let myself be, I experience a short-term, thickened skin of protection which lets the inside of myself begin to heal and ripen. The crust will come off eventually.

Isn’t that a great secret?

New Year Thoughts

On the other side of Solstice and Christmas, I can sit at my red-bedecked kitchen table to let my mind wander. I watch a raven swoop over the garden, calling to its partner, maybe reporting I’ve not left the daily food offering yet.

I’m mostly feeling grateful this morning. I appreciate I’ve enough wood for the fire, the pump hasn’t frozen, and my solar-charged batteries are still working (even if they are five years old). Among many other things, the generator still starts with the hand pull. I have plenty of food, and I finally have the refrigerator gasket problem glued with gorilla snot in place. Oh, and my phone works.

I’m grateful the yard is strewn only with small branches and tree limbs. If anything big came down, it must’ve happened in the forest areas away from the house and out-buildings.

I have to admit I’ve been the recipient of a kind of magic around this year’s holiday season year.

Did Santa Claus leave me surprise presents under the non-existent tree? Not one bit. Was I visited by the spirits of Christmas present, past, and future? Not as gaseous forms. Only in my thoughts.

In fact, no talking snowmen, magic princes, or oracle-like frogs crossed my threshold.

But there was magic.

During a brief sunburst between storms, every raindrop at the tips of every fir and pine needle sparkled in splendor. Whenever I needed to go for wood or tend to the generator, the rain stopped until I was done.

When I lost my purse on a shopping trip, it was returned to me. When I faced the make-up department in Wal-Mart, a sprightly, young woman happily shared her knowledge and skill in this art I’ve neglected for 30 years without judgment of me or a question of why I wanted to start painting my face now.

Surprise phone calls helped me over some rough spots. Invitations arrived when I needed to go out. Inspiration came when I had to solve a problem.

And in the quiet of the house, I felt myself move with our Earth as she turned on her axis and become part of all life as it shifted and changed through this season of slow growth and rebirth.

The Puzzle of Loss and Gain

How is it that devastating loss can be freeing?

Fran Brown, my Reiki Master/Mentor of 25 years passed away last year, and a cloak of responsibility to carry on the traditional teachings of the Usui System of Natural Healing dropped across all her students. For me, I also felt freer to express who I really was to the world and stand as a Master with my own gifts.

And when my step-daughter, Linda, died in June, 2009, the turmoil of our 31 year relationship uncoiled. I no longer had to fear the mine-field of our communications or her visits. I did suffer the loss of the only one of our four children who remembered with enthusiasm every holiday of the year, and my birthday.

Since my sister/friend of 30 years moved away, my routine of regular check-ins over coffee have had to be replaced by occasional hour-long phone conversations where her wise comments whisper in my ear instead of from her distinctive face. I miss our routine connections but am finding other individuals popping in irregularly to offer feedback and observations. There are also more spaces in my life where I am on my own to figure myself out without her mirrored vision of me. I’m having to see myself from the inside.

And so it goes with every loss I’ve experienced in 2009: a dance between loss and gain with doors closing and doors opening.

Did all that happen to give me some kind of teaching so as to get me through the loss of my husband this year? As I stumble through my days without him, I feel the weight of the responsibility to keep our hearth and home intact as well as the freedom to do it my way at my own pace. I’m learning what fits for me and what doesn’t.

As I’m facing the loss of the opportunity to celebrate each day with my best friend, I am freed from having to pay attention to someone else’s likes and dislikes, his chosen routine, and the passing flavor of his attitudes and forceful opinions.

I no longer have my sounding board against which to bounce ideas or refine plans. Nor do I have the comfort of companionship and sharing. What I do have are whisperings in my ear, suggestions and reminders I can choose to follow or not. I am comforted by their quiet presence. Sometimes they cheer me on to a new level of confidence, and I find myself having a new experience.

I’m startled frequently by glimpses into a future so different from my past in which I blossom as my own unique flower rather then entwined as a bud around another.

A Coping Method

Every day, it seems, I’m living my life as if I have, what I can only describe as, a temporary case of selective amnesia.

Let me try to explain this.

Try living a morning or a day so engrossed in what you’re doing you never chance to see a reflection of your face. All of a sudden you pass a mirror and wonder ‘who is that person?’ You realize your hair was never combed or dirt smudges your cheek. Those of us growing older, but who still feel young, are startled by grey hair and wrinkles.

In that instant of seeing ourselves we feel frustration at the disarrayed hair, anger because no one told us we’d smudged our face, or sadness because we recognize our loss of youth. When we were doing and experiencing our life in the ‘now’ is shattered by an awareness of another reality, a different set of details than the ones we were working with. And that’s how it goes for me.

The instant one thing causes a memory to arise, I’m slammed with a sharp energy, reminding me how totally my life has changed.

Each moment of reconnection is momentous and, until recently, I reacted helplessly. I don’t think this will ever really go away, but I’ve devised a plan where I’m protecting myself from the onslaught of unpredictable emotions.

To protect myself from the helpless awareness of how much my life has changed, I’m choosing to change it myself. I’ve donated the 20-year-old dishes and bought a newer, smaller set. The extra leaves to the kitchen table are stored now, and I’ve added a placemat and dried flowers where the Lazy Suzanne once sat. I moved the butter dish to a cabinet, recovered the living room couch, changed the bedspread and rearranged the bedroom. These aren’t drastic actions, but doing them gives me a small feeling of control. I remind myself I’m free to make these choices for myself now as well as make new memories. For now, this is what’s working.

Decisions . . . decisions!

(This was written in July, 2010, during Y’s illness.)

My mind was in turmoil again. Do I still want to publish my first novel, The Marriage Bundle? Is it the right timing now? Do I even want to publish it, ever? Maybe no one will like it! Then I've wasted all this time and money on something as pure foolishness. Maybe they’ll like it and try to find me and ask me for more than I can give them, especially now that time is so precious with my husband. What if I can't get enough advertising, and no one even knows it's out there? How can I pay back the loan if I don't publish and sell the book? What do I do about the people I've already told if I don't publish it? Around and around, again and again.

Talking to my wise web mistress helped, as she pointed out, “We are all being asked to step forward with our gifts, to be all we can be, to take the chance of exposure, surround ourselves with like-minded people, and trust in the powers that be.”

So I heard her, but her words didn't diminish my questions. I've stepped out before, by becoming a Reiki master and then a Universal Life Church Minister and self-publishing a Reiki Book and doing other ceremonies and seminars. Never have I had so much pressure at home though. Surely what I've accomplished so far is enough, but these books seem special: 'Inspirational, New Age Fiction,' they're called. The teachings inside weren't meant for me alone. So I dither and procrastinate, then dither some more, a habit I'm well known for doing.

In the middle of this muddle, I closed down the computer and collected the fresh laundry off the clothes line (lovingly known as the solar dryer). I'd already swept the floors twice that day and watered everything in the garden and green house. As I descended the stairs from the upper yard to the back door, a butterfly caught my attention. Flitting and fluttering in front of me, it reminded me of me. It just flew in circle after circle, until I prayed it would find a purchase, some place to land. I grew exhausted just watching it, so when it finally hung upside down under the eave, I breathed a sigh of relief. It had committed to some place of calm. And these words came to me: “Commit yourself to your path, and you will feel the calm of attaining some kind of resolution. Even if you feel upside down, you've reached a place of quiet. You can go from this point, which is at least somewhere.”

The butterfly then wiggled until it was upright. With a quick hop to the window frame, it gradually opened its large wing span and became still, never even budging when I walked past it and into the house. Putting the clothes away, I had to admit I had an answer.

It's like that sometimes for me. I stew about a problem I'm having until I let go and watch the world around me. Every time I allow my attention to shift from inside myself to outside my brain, I receive a teaching from the critters or in a conversation with a friend. My conversations are like meditations where I discover another form of connection to the 'all that is' and find peace and inspiration.

Looks like it happened again. “Commit to something and see,” are the words I remembered. I have to ask myself, “What's the worst that can happen?” Lose the rest of the money I've borrowed without having a product to sell or giving away the books and finding another way to pay back the money are two answers. Can I live with those possibilities? If that's the worst, either way, then yes I can.

So I'm deciding to go ahead with the publishing contract, to go for it and try my best. I'll never be happy if I don't at least try to offer these books to the world.

I am at peace and grateful.

Being Too Thrifty

Being thrifty has become a way of life for me. Looking through Cold Creek and other high end clothing catalogs gives me ideas of how to put together certain 'looks'. I get caught up in these dreams sometimes, only to discover the assembly of color and style look good only on a slim, trim figure, not my apple-shaped 65-year-old form.

Using and reusing plastic bags were the bane of my husband's dish washing chore. He flatly refused to wash aluminum foil anymore but suffered through all sizes of bags until they would either leak or not close.

His own thriftiness left me with piles of partially used lumber, boxes of electrical wire, plumbing parts, nails, screws, washes, and 'whatzudoozers' that might be used for some kind of project about which I have no idea.

We'd been talking about downsizing. Thank goodness we spent two weeks over two years ago clearing out ¼ of the metal building so the kids could have storage space during a move. Now I have a staging area for more 'stuff' to recycle, sell, or dump.

The reality that I might not need to be as thrifty with food as I have been was brought home recently. I have a habit of using the last dabs of anything to create something else. My kids dubbed my left over casseroles as Earlene's ETEs (Extraterrestrial Experiences). Everyone of them could never be repeated because they were based on the left over portions of what we'd eaten for the preceding three to four days.

I kept this habit long after everyone left home and was continuing it after Y passed away. So many wonderful soups and stews came my way. I couldn't throw out a thing until one day I detected a suspicious smell coming out of one 'reused' bag.

I knew I shouldn't eat it so I took it outside for whatever animal it might serve.

In about 10 minutes, I turned at the sound of heavy wings flapping in the yard.

Three vultures were perched, each on separate metal fence posts, watching a fourth try my concoction. They then vied to be the one to finish the last morsel.

I'll be setting uneaten food out a lot sooner from now on.

"It's a Good Day to Die"

I've been pondering the phrase “It's a good day to die.” I've always equated these words with those movies having American Indian themes where this phrase is written into their scripts as the thing one Red Man says to another before they go into battle. Taken in that context, my perception is that it's a macho statement; conceited, warrior-like, and selfish. No matter what the squaw and her kiddos are going to do left back at the tee pee without their provider. No matter that these beautiful hunks of filmdom bodies will be destroyed on a battlefield.

My husband never used those words in his last days. What he did do was have me help him into his recliner draped with the hide of a young buffalo. He settled his beaver bag filled with his chanupa into the crook of his left arm and with a cup of coffee nearby. From this vantage point, he watched the Earth come awake. What he thought or what insights he gained there I'll never know. He was too weak to tell me. His consciousness wasn't in the realm of forming words or concepts. My guess is that he was just experiencing the morning, being in it, and relishing every second of the coming of the light. I was the one who thought the words as I padded back to bed.

So I tested these words out loud on myself recently. “It's a good day to die,” I said to all that was around me. My system shocked awake. Muscles grew taut. I instantly wanted to take the words back in case some force beyond me heard them and decided to take me up on my thought.

“Erase . . . Erase,” I said until I realized my muscles weren't frozen in fear. They were on an edge, ready for something.

Ready for what?

Not war or destruction, and definitely not dying.

But ready for life, for living to their fullest extent. To do whatever was in front of them, be it hauling in wood, writing the next novel, sitting in the warmth of the fire and listening to the rain on the roof.

Just ready.