Rain Gardens

Rain, rain, rain nearly every day. When the rain stops, the sun creates a steambath effect.

When I got out of work a little early, stopped by a garden center to pick up bee balm, Russian sage (such a heavenly scent), rudibeckia (in memory of my friend Becky), black sweet potato vines, artemesia, diantha, blue salvia, and hen and chickens. Most of these plants were distressed and half-priced, so I brought them home to heal.

The Two Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

Henry James got it almost right. Those two words are surely summer morning, not summer afternoon.

A summer morning cool, heavy, washed with dew and birdsong and with the promise of untold delights ready to unfold. Who knows what a day might bring?

First go get the newspaper from the mailbox near the road, then check all the little gardens. They’re all looking a little better, and the soil is gradually coming to a lovely, friable state

And In A Moment, Everything Changes

The phone rings. It’s my sister, Charla, with news from her mammogram and other tests. Cancer.

Suddenly nothing is the same.

A new life story for us both as we walk this new path. I want to be with her (at least in spirit) and support her as much as possible. How can I be most helpful? What can I do? I can’t do what I most want to do: to take this illness from her.

A Change of View

Just back from a short visit with my mother and sister in the Ozarks. A glorious drive of only a couple of hours through “hollow lands and hilly lands.” Breath-taking hill top views, dense dark forests, fast clear streams and rivers, and of course I forgot to take the camera.

The wild flowers along the roadways were essentially the same as ours here in the central part of the state, with other varieties I want to look up in my guidebook (which I also left behind along with the stress).

Creating Thinking Time

During a recent visit, Barak Obama and David Cameron—Leader of England’s Conservative Party—discussed the importance of not getting bogged down in details. “The most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking,” said Obama.

After all, we all need planning time, time for reflection, decision-making time, problem-solving time, and time for “simply being.”

Listen

“Only connect,” wrote E. M. Forster. How to be connected in a world that seems to be pushing all of us toward disconnection with stress, information overload, long work hours, and the breakdown of community social structures that no longer function? In the past, most new acquaintances would be introduced by a friend or close connection so that you knew something about that person and his or her background.

Connection makes life rich. To have happy and nurturing connections is to live a life of joy and fulfillment. Easily said, but sometimes difficult to do. One of the best ways to connect with someone is to listen. Listen with all the resources at your disposal.

That means not interrupting. Paying good attention (not reading the newspaper or playing video games), giving eye contact and “squaring off,” facing another person directly, not looking over your shoulder. You might want to draw the other person out by asking “Is there more?” or “Can you tell me more about that?”

When Frank and I met 16 years ago, one of the first and most important things I noticed about him was how intently and acceptingly he listened to me with his whole being. He mirrored my feelings on his face and provided a comfortable “container” for me to open up and be myself. It was a wonderful, comfortable feeling.

When someone is angry with you, good listening alone can often restore the peace. Just hear the person out. Let them express their feelings freely. Wait. Let the anger dissipate. Only then do you say what you want to say. Give them several chances to get the anger out until it’s exhausted.

And the same with someone who is upset or anxious. Listening is a healing balm. Often that’s the main thing someone wants from you. A good listening.

I grew up with an extended family who all listened to me, and I am privileged to be able to listen to my sister, Charla, as she inspires me by walking courageously and confidently through her cancer testing and treatment. She has granted me the boon of phoning in updates as soon as she gets any new piece of information. Consults, second opinions. Waiting for a surgery date.

It’s the least I can do for her, or perhaps one of the most important things.

To live in a world of connectedness is to live in a world of friendship and love. As theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “The first duty of love is to listen.”

The High Brix Garden (To Which I Aspire, Fairly Soon, Perhaps)

Days of driving rain, then more days of blast-furnace heat in which I’ve been so busy I haven’t even ventured out to look at my little gardens. I suppose I could take at least two different perspectives on my projects, the first being horrendous failure.

The weeds (mostly grass) are taller than many of the things I’ve planted and are in the process of reseeding themselves. Most everything looks puny or a little blighted. The potato plants simply shriveled up before blooming, the zucchini blossoms stay on the stem but don’t bear fruit, the basil looks a tad pale, and the cilantro has bolted, gone to seed, and turned a crispy brown. It looks pretty awful, I must say.

On the other hand, the coleus and other pots of annuals are doing well, and this morning’s perusal of the kitchen garden netted a double handful of bursting-with-sweetness cherry tomatoes (I gobbled them right off the vine), three little cucumbers, four fingerling potatoes, and all the sage, mint, and thyme I could hope for. So not so bad. The cucumbers will go in tonight’s salad, and I’ll boil the potatoes with sage and thyme.

Considering the small amount of time and energy I’ve put into the project, I’m still getting an inordinate amount of delight as I pull fists full of grass. I know that no chemicals have been used, so I won’t even have to peel the cukes.

Oh, I almost forgot: the best part is that I finally found a little patch of lamb’s quarters (Chenopodium album) to transplant, and I have my eye on a few other isolated plants that I’ll put with the rest. The unenlightened call them weeds, but I was raised on their spinach-like vitamins and minerals.

Taste of home, taste of spring and summer, taste of childhood, cutting greens on the way back from the asparagus bed.

Olive oil, garlic, sweet onions, herbs, four little potatoes, “a mess of greens,” and now I know what else is on the menu for later tonight.

As with most everything else in life, I suppose it’s all in how you look at it. We always have choices. I declare it all a roaring success, and that’s that.

Someone Will Be with You Shortly

I was lucky: my family listened to me and read to me.

I waited in the front yard at dusk for the newspaper man to kick up dust on graveled Main as he threw the Kansas City Star into the yard. I’d rip off the string and run inside as fast as I could to have my favorite comic strip read to me, usually by my mother, but sometimes by my father or grandparents. I was impressed that they all could read. I’d sit on a lap and learn a few more new words as I was cracking the reading code.

For Christmas I got Alice in Wonderland (with the Tenniel illustrations), read it over and over, memorized long passages, and was mesmerized by the intoxicating smell of its pages. (That’s another book I’m looking for in the boxes).

From the time I could read a sentence, I read everything I could get my paws on: books, cereal boxes, and “do not remove” tags on pillows. I was certain life could hold no higher pleasure than to be carried away by words.

My father held my hand as we walked up the marble steps to the Carnegie Public Library (“Free to All”) in the next town to get my first library card. He was fond of arranging happy surprises, so I’d never seen the library and didn’t know what a library card was. I was dazzled by the curving staircases and the big hole in the ceiling that led to the second of three stories. A palace filled with books, and I could check out as many as I could carry. Both of us with arms filled.

In my sixteenth summer, my mother said to me, “Close your eyes and hold out your hand. From what I’ve heard you say, I think you might like this.” Gone with the Wind caught me by surprise, and I read steadily, cover to cover without putting the book down. At mealtimes, my mother put sandwiches in my hand. No one told me to turn out the light to sleep now, to do my chores, to shower, to come to the dinner table, or to practice the piano.

Was it two or three days that I read without stopping? I Don’t remember, but I was allowed to sleep all day after I finished the book, tired, but happy and satisfied, having lived a whole different life story than my own.

 Now in my sixty-sixth summer, I pick up Lisa Kogan’s Someone Will Be with You Shortly, and I don’t want to put it down, either. I had so many plans for this day, but they’re all shoved aside now as I’m caught up in the story of a single mother and writer living in Manhattan.

 Laugh-out-loud funny. Love and loss and wisdom and flippancy and joy and stress and longing. When I finished the chapter about the regret of not having listened to her grandmother and learning to listen to her daughter, I was so moved that I had to put the book down to write this post.

 I was relieved to know that I’d only finished 43% of the Kindle version and there was a good chunk of pages yet to come.

 Thank you, Lisa Kogan for reminding me that the first duty of love is to listen.

How Do You Know When a New Life Story Begins?

Sometimes you plan for new life stories, carefully laying the groundwork, planning, getting information, journaling possible new futures, visualizing, taking it step-by-step.

Sometimes a new life story develops gradually, growing and gaining strength beneath the surface. “Roads not taken” often do that. For one reason or another you consciously take a path and leave others untaken, then over the course of months or years, that path reappears, often in a different form giving us undreamed of possibilities.

Sometimes a new life story “happens itself upon us” in an instant. A chance meeting, a letter, a phone call, a change in a relationship, an illness, a promotion, and suddenly everything is different. Everything up for re-evaluation. New decisions to make. New paths to explore. The unknown to wrestle.

At such times, a journal can be your best friend. Write to know what you think and feel. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” wrote E. M. Forster. Just explore your now. What is it like? What seems like a reasonable next step?

One way to use a journal for new life stories is to explore “what ifs?” in imagination. What would it be like if…” How will I cope with…? If you write several scenarios, you will have covered all the known bases. Sometimes this kind of writing is like blazing paths before us, making possible what has been improbable or impossible. Writers often do this in writing new paths. It is as if they are consciously or unconsciously laying out a new road to travel in their novels, then their personal life often follows along the trail blazed by the fiction.

How to know when a new life story is beginning? Ask your deepest and highest self by asking in your journal. Talk to friends and people you trust. Be open to the goodness the universe has to offer, no matter in what form it arrives.

As Robert Browning wrote, “Greet the unseen with a cheer.”

Follow the Thread

What is the thread that leads you safely through the labyrinth of life? Once you know where you are in the great scheme of things (see previous post “You Are Here”), what is the path you follow?

Is it a set of philosophical or spiritual beliefs and practices? A path you’ve carved out for yourself or one given to you by a teacher?

As the saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” whether that be an actual person or a series of life lessons presented to you.

According to Greek mythology, a hero follows a thread.

As told by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the legend goes like this: King Minos of Crete had successfully waged war with the Athenians. He then demanded that, at seven-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man half-bull creature who lived in a labyrinth created by Daedalus, a cunning craftsman. One version has it that Daedalus had constructed the labyrinth so cunningly that he himself could barely escape it after he built it.

Theseus, a king of Athens volunteered to slay the monster. Out of love for Theseus, King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, consulted Daedalus who told her to give Theseus a ball of string so he could find his way out once he had gone into the labyrinth. She also returned a sword to him.

As soon as Theseus entered the labyrinth, he tied one end of the ball of string to the door post and brandished the sword he had hidden inside his tunic. Theseus followed Daedalus’ instructions given to Ariadne: go forwards, always down and never left or right. Theseus came to the heart of the labyrinth and also upon the sleeping Minotaur whom he killed. He then used Ariadne’s thread to escape the labyrinth and return to safety.

Stephen Spielberg considered Joseph Campbell his teacher and mentor, and he used the hero’s journey as a model for his Star Wars series.

In one of the films, Luke Skywalker fights with Darth Vader, knocking off Vader’s helmet. What he finds is his own likeness: a suggestion that, at the heart of the matter, Luke’s true battle is with himself.

It has been said that our one and only task is to master ourselves, to make peace with that self.

In Campbell’s words: “The flax for the linen of his thread he has gathered from the fields of the human imagination. Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path… where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

You Are Here

What are your most basic questions? My first question has always been “What’s going on here?” Then “What’s really going on here?” Sometimes not easy questions to answer, but important to whatever comes next.

Don’t you love the maps found in large shopping malls or office complexes? The first thing you see is the circle with the X inside it saying “You are here.”

“Oh,” you say, “This is where I am, so now I know which direction to turn to get to where I want to be.”

Without the knowledge of where you are, you can’t know how close or far away you are from your destination. Just so, it’s important to know where you are in the great scheme of things in life. This question presupposes that you know something about the big picture and something about your destination (destiny).

And within these questions: “Who am I?”

My mother always told me, “Just be yourself, and you’ll be fine.” But who is that self? And how do you find out?

Questions, questions. When you’re searching for truth, what you often find first are questions to be explored if not answered definitively. Your answers may change and grow from time to time.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. And behind that statement?

Well, that assumes you have a life to begin with. That means you have to live life first in order to examine it. If it is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, then it follows that the unlived life is also not worth examining.

Aspiring writers and actors are often told, “First, you have to live.” You have to have something to write about and experiences to draw upon.

Thoughtful and juicy questions may be one of the best ways to explore and examine your life to allow you to fully live and appreciate the life you have here and now, rather than wishing for some other place or some other life. This is what you have. Now is what you have. Here is what you have. Work with what you have.

If you’re in the here and now, just look about you. Be here. Be now. Describe what you see, feel, smell, taste, hear, touch. You’ll soon enough find plenty to think about and write about, plenty to ponder.

Formal writing prompts and jump-start quotations can also be brilliant food for thought. And why do they appeal to you? Because they’ve acted as an entrance into your own inner life. Something within you resonated with what you found in someone else’s experience.

Reading biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and fiction can help you to explore your own life stories, both old and new. Can help you re-interpret your past stories to use them as building blocks for your new paths.

You learn that you are not alone in all the world. You no longer have to remain “a stranger in a strange land.” You can find at least one other story that is remarkably like your own. You learn that others have faced and surmounted the same challenges that you do. “The way is thoroughly known,” wrote Joseph Campbell. You are not the first to tread this path, to make this journey.

And those who have gone before you have left maps. They have pointed out the rocks, crevasses, mountains, dangerous swamps and quicksand. They can inspire you to a new level of living. By showing you what peace and happiness they have attained. They can teach you if you will read, listen, and be open to learning.

Be teachable.

Practice beginner’s mind at whatever stage you find yourself, and you may find that one or more “maps” buried in your library, bookstore, or Internet sites will both show you the big picture and say to you, “You are here.”