It's OK (Imagine Dragons)

digital art by Mike Parsons

Sunday was such a hard day, but I had a wonderful therapy session Monday; surprised she kept to the every-other-Monday schedule since it was Memorial Day, but glad she did.  I had forgotten that, when I first started with Leigh, I filled out some forms related to both depression and anxiety, and she asked if I was ready to re-answer those questions (maybe 7 in each category); for the former, I went from 17 to 3 and the latter 14 to 1.  D*mn.  That's progress.  Funny that, after celebrating my "test" results, I burst into tears, and queried where that came from, seemingly out of the blue.  Leigh responded that grief is like Florida weather:  gorgeous one minute, thunderstorms the next... or how sometimes it rains on one side of the street and not the other.  Sounds cliche but it was perfect.  Anyway, the 50-minute hour was exactly what I needed... 🤗

I left therapy and went to the Hope Garden to dump compost, long overdue since Claire and I decided to go to an every-other-Saturday workday, meaning we weren't there this past weekend.  I had my containers... plus Sarah's, Nancy's, Didi's, Pam's, and our heat wave continues; even at 4:15 p.m., it was in the mid-to-high-90s.  Our compost bins are all the way down at the end in the Banana Circle, which is mostly shady, but the effort still got to me and I had to lie down right there on the ground; I couldn't figure out if I was having a panic attack or a heat stroke, and I tried to stay calm and prone until the feeling passed.  Frightening.  Fortunately I had my phone with me, and of course I had left my water bottle in the car, but I did slowly make my way back to the cafe and bought my favorite Green Lotus smoothie (Pineapple, Spinach, Kale, Cucumber, Celery, Lemon, Ginger, Green Apple, Coconut Water) which helped lower my body temperature, and I still felt woozy when I got home... but stretching out under the ceiling fan in the A/C helped me turn the corner, and I soon felt perfectly fine.  Whew.

Takeaway:  grieving is not for sissies; nor is climate change.  Ha!

SONG:  It's OK by Imagine Dragons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClwtqeHF264 

BOOK:  Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith

POEM:  Dear World by Maya Stein

You are a big turtle. You are a violin bow and a ladder of backbones and a lettuce leaf. You are weeds and woodpeckers and a T-shirt with strawberries on it. You are the hint of a sunburn at the tips of noses. You are restaurant toothpicks and a bowl of pink-striped mints and bubble gum commercials and a crossword puzzle. You are the sound of the dryer going on Sunday nights, and the smell of erasers. You are dental floss and a roll of paper towels. You are a twist of Oreos with the icing licked clean off. You are pinky promises and video arcades. Dear world, you are also scratchy and full of tangles that no soap or comb can tease out. But you are also bright stadium lights and stovetop popcorn with real butter. You are a popsicle drip on bare skin. You are sprinklers, and drive-in movies, and fireflies in the middle of night. World, I am doing what I can to keep you here. I am growing my own tomatoes. I am pulling the weeds. I am writing a poem now and again. I am walking down to the rocky beach and wading in the water and I'm staying there, watching the crabs scuttle underneath, and I'm trying not to move. I'm looking up at the stars when they come out. I'm trying not to count them but instead, I'm holding them in my heart. Lightly, like a breeze. And then I try to imagine those stars like the squares on a turtle's back, and I wonder how many of them I could fit in my heart. How many squares. How many turtles. How many strawberries and Oreos and popsicles and fireflies. How many movies and lights. How many erasers and violins. And then, dear World, I start counting.

QUOTE:  “Here is one way to look at yourself through spiritual eyes: you are a message. When you wonder what existence is all about, when you ask about your purpose in life, or when you feel small in comparison to the troubles of the world: remember that you are a message sent by the Spirit into creation. What you say, what you do, how you think and feel: your whole life is a long and sustained message for others to encounter, experience and receive. You are a living message: sent to touch more lives than you can imagine.” ~ Steven Charleston

The Parting Glass (so many covers, so little time!)

No personal commentary now, but I loved the way the various parts of this post came together for me today from random corners of The Universe... 💞

SONG:  The Parting Glass by Hozier

BOOK:  Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith  

POEM:  The Opposite of Nostalgia by Eric Gamalinda

You are running away from everyone

who loves you,

from your family,

from old lovers, from friends.

They run after you with accumulations

of a former life, copper earrings,

plates of noodles, banners

of many lost revolutions.

You love to say the trees are naked now

because it never happens

in your country. This is a mystery

from which you will never

recover. And yes, the trees are naked now,

everything that still breathes in them

lies silent and stark

and waiting. You love October most

of all, how there is no word

for so much splendor.

This, too, is a source

of consolation. Between you and memory

everything is water. Names of the dead,

or saints, or history.

There is a realm in which

---no, forget, it,

it’s still too early to make anyone understand.

A man drives a stake

through his own heart

and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia

begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves

and the leaves take over

and again he has learned

to let go.

QUOTE:  "Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out." ~ Robert Frost (thanks, Sheryl!)

New Mexico (Carrie Elkin)

[ I ordered a Carrie Elkin T-shirt during her and Danny Schmidt's live Facebook concert Saturday before last.  It arrived only a week later, wrapped in this beautiful painting.  Thanks times a bazillion, Maizy Rae...  💚 ]

It's Feel Good Friday.  Zippity!  Five items below of beauty, interest, and humor.  As Carrie sings in the blog title song, "I can hear the heartbeat in everything around me".  I hope you can, too...  :-)


~ One Bright Thing:  Need a little lift? Amid the bleakness, 18 New York Times writers shared moments that lightened their mood (be sure to scroll past the jump to read them all.)

~ QuaranToons:  Broadway.com illustrator Tug Rice has been thinking up what our favorite Broadway characters are doing while theaters are closed and they're at home social distancing.

~ Coconut Macaroons, Two Easy Ways:  I am not a baker, so I am shouting this recipe from the virtual rooftops.  (I used JustEgg to veganize it, and added cinnamon and a splash of vanilla.  Easy-peasy, and so yum!)

~ ElizaLive!  Songs of Comfort and Consolation, Friday April 17th, live from Eliza's Living Room via Facebook @ 5:30 pm Central.  
From Eliza:  Dear Friends, it has been disappointing to not be able to tour my new record  “2020”  when it was designed to motivate and inspire during a critical election year. But the Coronavirus puts things in a whole other perspective. And while I remain focused on making sure we can and will be able to vote come November, I also want to perform music for my friends as a way of reaching out and staying connected in a more communal way. We need to stay sane, grounded and hopeful, aware of each other and our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths... Someday we will gather in person again and we will speak of this time in our lives as the challenging and deepening process it has been. I look forward to that with all my heart. 

~ Help Luna Star Cafe Survive the Coronavirus
When Luna Star Cafe is closed there isn't any trade.
No one’s sitting at the bar, no music’s being made.
No one’s drinking any beer or ordering from ‘the board’.
No one’s tipping Monica who’s much loved and adored.
No one’s there with any cash, no one’s there at all,
Now Alexis’s cafe bank account is seriously small!
So send in your donations.  Help Luna Star Café!
If you live in another state, send something anyway!
Imagine you drank a beer or two and paid the cover charge.
 Imagine you ate a pasta dish served on that plate so large. 
It’s easy to thank Alexis with applause and words of praise  
Now let's thank her with with donations till the VIRUS goes away!


SONG:  New Mexico by Carrie Elkin

BOOK:  Journey to the Heart: Daily Meditations on the Path to Freeing Your Soul by Melody Beattie

POEM:  Heart by Maggie Smith

A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape
she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold,
cutting, then opening. Where do you open?
Where do you carry your dead? There’s no locket
for that—hinged, hanging on a chain that greens
your throat. And the dead inside you, don’t you
hear them breathing? You must have a hole
they can press their gray lips to. If you open—
when you open—will we find them folded inside?
In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made
whole by opening? I mean besides the heart.

QUOTE:  "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." ~ Albert Camus

Resilient (Rising Appalachia)

As discussed previously, my family is writing in, and passing around, a journal as a tangible way to capture our thoughts, dreams, and fears through essays, drawings, poems, and songs.  Here is my entry from a few days ago:

I find myself in a pendulum between "this too shall pass" and "these are the end times" but, I am the MOTHER, so it is my Job to stay strong and hold it all together when everyone around me is losing their sh*t.  That is what I do, as at various times my family has experienced stitches and broken bones... MRSA hospitalization... an emergency C-section... prostate cancer surgery.  My default mechanism is to envision myself as the voice of calm and reason, their advocate and protector, asking the right questions, buffering between them and the healthcare system, sleeping in super-uncomfortable recliners.

Once the crisis had passed and things were back to "normal", I allowed myself to freak the f*ck out, finally able to fall apart with the tragic What-Ifs swirling around in my head, all the bullets dodged, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god flipside scenario.  Poetry is one of my many coping mechanisms (thankyoujesus for Maggie Smith:  the poet, not the actress!).  Donning my She-Ra cape, rattling my Wonder Woman bracelets, and conjuring the Shield of Invincibility to keep my loved ones, and myself, safe throughout this storm and chaos.

SONG:  Resilient by Rising Appalachia (major thanks to Fred for the heads-up on this song.  Wow!)

BOOK:  Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World by Pema Chodron

POEM:  The Mother by Maggie Smith

The mother is a weapon you load

yourself into, little bullet.

The mother is glass through which

you see, in excruciating detail, yourself.

The mother is landscape.

See how she thinks of a tree

and fills a forest with the repeated thought.

Before the invention of cursive

the mother is manuscript.

The mother is sky.

See how she wears a shawl of starlings,

how she pulls the thrumming around her shoulders.

The mother is a prism.

The mother is a gun.

See how light passes through her.

See how she fires.

QUOTE:  "I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward." ~ Isabel Allende

Reelin' in the Years (Steely Dan)

I am having a deja vu moment, in that I popped back onto my blog in January 2013 to resurrect it and then nothing, until today, seven years and 25 days later, I am making the same attempt.  Let's hope it sticks this time!

Allow me to re-introduce myself.  I'm Susan.  Wife/Mom/Lala, vegan, fanatical reader, music lover, eternal optimist.  I not only retired from my office job in June 2019, but also the booking/presenting of a 14-year folk and acoustic concert series.  I said to someone the other day that I've been scraping so many things off my proverbial plate lately that I almost don't even need a plate anymore...  :-)

At midnight on New Year's Eve, I deactivated my Facebook account, and I was a bit nervous.  Trying more to *Be Here, Now* (thanks, Ram Dass!).  It's actually been very liberating and exciting, catching up on reading and sleeping, and accomplishing much on my shorter-every-day To Do List, without the need to check the little blue f icon.

Still not sure if it's temporary (at least until the end of this month) or permanent, but I don't have to decide that yet.  However, I *really* missed writing on a regular basis, hence my move back to blogging.  I've always fancied myself to be a good writer, as well as a worshipper of words in most forms and fashion.  My goal is #9 of 40 Resolutions for 2020 by Ellis Paul (musician):

"Write. Then write again. Write songs and letters, quotes and notes, scribbles and doodles, to do’s and don’ts, lines with rhymes, lyrics and scripts, limericks and puns and one liner quips, zingers and ringers that spin round a phrase, and grocery list stories that run off the page. Write novels that grovel, unstable fables, a treatise of words that could break an oak table, a haiku, a sonnet, a speech, a play, a love song that takes the world’s tears all away. Write graffiti that makes a beating heart rush, write something so dirty Bukowski would blush, write comedies, jokes, and twenty act plays, tragedies with maladies only Shakespeare would say. Write like you’re bailing a boat with a cup, write like your pencil will never give up."

Sooooo much to catch you all up on.  Happy 2020 (what a f*cking great metaphor, right?), and Welcome (back)!

P.S.  I don't have Photobucket anymore to host my pictures, so I am leaving the ones on my past posts with their watermark, not having time to go back and fix them all.  Moving forward...  :-)


SONG:  Reelin' in the Years by Steely Dan

BOOK:  Becoming by Michelle Obama

POEM: Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

QUOTE:  "In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior." ~ Ray Bradbury