Weaving The Dream

So here I am with my husband at our oldest son’s, Stephen, home in northern Virginia.  He and our daughter-in-law, Mindy, just moved into this house last month and the living room is filled with unpacked boxes.

Yesterday, Bob helped Stephen install three new water-efficient toilets.  Over the years, Bob has shown his sons how to fix, mend, repair and replace what can’t be repaired.  Bob learned much of that from his father.

While Bob and Stephen took care of the toilets, I put on garden gloves, grabbed a rake and a pair of pruners and went outside to make an initial dent in the thick carpet of leaves that lay on all their flower beds and to trim back some of the shrubs.

Glad to be outside in the balmy (40 degree) weather in relative quiet, stretching and working my muscles, I piled up leaves and clipped back magnolia bushes and other shrubs.  As I worked, I was strongly aware not only of the passing of seasons but of the passing down of traditions and skills.

When Stephen was only five, Bob and I moved him and his two brothers to our 1840’s Greek Revival farmhouse in the foothills of the Catskills. Over the next few years, every time my mom and dad came to visit, Dad came prepared to help with the yard work—digging, weeding, planting, mulching.  Many times he brought divisions of his carefully grown daylilies for us to plant. 

Being my father’s daughter, I did for Stephen and Mindy, as my dad has done for Bob and I, raking leaves and pruning back deadwood.

Yesterday, I made sweet rolls for Thanksgiving breakfast, having taken up the tradition from my mother.  This morning, my son and I worked together at the sink to first clean and then prepare the turkey for roasting.  And I remember my mother standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, cleaning the turkey and suddenly lifting it by its wings to pretending this naked turkey was talking and squawking. My siblings and I laughed at her silliness.

While today’s turkey roasted, Mindy and I stood together preparing pies and I showed her how to crimp the crust the way my mother showed me.

Yesterday and today, I am overwhelmed by such a strong sense of the passing of seasons and the ongoing cycle of the generations.

Not everyone gets a chance to experience this.  Not everyone wants to. 

But I do.  So Bob and I are especially grateful this Thanksgiving for the opportunity to do for our son and daughter-in-law what our parents have done for my husband and I—pass on life skills and family traditions, and work to create a sense of home and an appreciation for the legacies and lineage that are our roots.

Even as I clipped the deadwood from an old magnolia at the corner of their house, I also noted the buds of new growth just waiting for Spring’s warmth to blossom forth.

And someday, as they fill this home with the new growth of the next generation, Stephen and Mindy will do for their child what Bob and I now do for them—and give thanks in the doing.

Autumn…makes a double demand.  It asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping.  But it also asks we learn to let go…” Bonaro W. Overstreet in Meditations for Women.

Living in the northeastern part of our county, I’ve always loved autumn because of the intensity and clarity of color that the season brings.  The air is crisper, less humid, so the sky is a metal-bright bowl of blue arching over me.  Sugar maples are show-offs in their bright shifts of orange and red, especially next to the deeper, quieter black-greens of the pines.  Wild asters and grapes compete to define purple.

While reveling in the elixir of color that autumn brings, I can’t help but hear the footsteps of winter approaching, reminding me that all this piercing bright beauty will not last.

Just as the sugar maples and oaks let go of their leaves to make ready for their deep sleep beneath winter’s blanket, I am challenged to let go as well—of the weeding I didn’t complete, the plants I never planted, the vacation I didn’t take, the creative projects I didn’t finish, some I haven’t even started.

Autumn has also been a time of letting go of those I love.  My mother died 24 years ago this past September.  My paternal grandfather died six weeks after her.

And early yesterday morning, as the day was just being born, as leaves dropped silently and unseen in the night, I lost a sister of my heart—author, writer, and teacher, Liz Aleshire.  Liz was (and how hard to use past tense in this sentence) a woman of great courage and determination, of bright intelligence and wit, of fierce loyalty and friendship.  We’ve only been close friends for about seven years, but we traveled many creative and spiritual roads together.  It is hard to say goodbye.  To release our clasped hands.  To know she is no longer just a phone call away.  That she will never again sit on my patio looking out over our yard, smoking a cigarette while our dog, Duncan, keeps her company.

This is the challenge of autumn.  In the other seasons there is a looking forward to new growth, to warmth, to harvest.  In autumn, we look back, not forward, with the desire to spin out time, to slow the relentless fall of leaves, to push back the dark that arrives earlier and earlier each day.

But we can’t do it.  We can’t stop the trees from letting go of their leaves, we can’t slow the earth in its path around the sun.  We can’t stop Death in her tracks.

So we put mulch in the flowerbeds and stack wood for the woodstove, raising our heads to the sound of honking Canada geese as they wing their way to warmer climes. 

I whisper goodbye to Liz as she heads for her own Summerland of sunlight and flowers, where Nathan, her son, waits to greet her with both arms spread wide, laughter in his eyes and voice.

And my tears fall with the leaves.

Summertime, like Sundays, used to be a time of rest and relaxation. Of renewal and restoration. Of recharging batteries drained by the demands of the year.

Not anymore.  We don’t know what it means to relax anymore.  We have to take classes on relaxation so we can learn how to stop our endless, and sometimes meaningless, motion.  So we can learn how to breath deeply from our bellies instead of only the upper third of our lungs.  So we can learn how to unclench our muscles and our stomachs and our jaws.

Our advanced technologies bring us so many advantages, but they also sabotage every effort to unwind, to get away, to get quiet.  They sabotage us because we let them.  We feel compelled to stay tuned in, turned on and accessible—afraid we will miss something important, earth-shattering, life-changing.

It is that accessibility that is life-changing, however.  When we fail to give ourselves time away or alone without distraction or interruption, without any intent or purpose other than to have none, we fail to nurture our souls.  And we definitely fail to nurture our creativity.

One of the hardest things for artists, writers, and other creatives is the ability to get away from our creativity.  So many of us work in studios in our homes where our work constantly calls to us.  Others have such limited time for creativity because of demands of work and family that each free moment becomes a challenge to fill it with our creative work.

Yet empty moments and time out of the studio are necessary to refill the well of our creativity.  It is in the silence and stillness that our spiritual and creative batteries are recharged, that our creative well is refilled. 

Summer is a good time to slowly sip the sweet refreshment of silence and stillness.  To sit on your patio to watch the birds dip and weave their ways through tree and bush. To float on your back in the water and watch clouds drift by. To stare up at the moon while she bathes you in light.

Be still.  Be silent. Your body, mind and spirit will thank you.  And so will your creative muse.

How will you give your creativity a summer moment?

For several years in the spring, an area of unidentified plants sprouted and grew in our back yard.  They didn’t seem to blossom so, having no idea what they were, my husband cut them down with the first mowing of the yard.

But then, a couple of years ago, my husband and I went out to dinner at our small local restaurant.  The menu noted that it was ramps season and then listed several specials for the week featuring ramps.  I decided to give one of the dishes a try.

After the waitress set the artfully prepared plate before me, I looked at the leaves and said, “Bob, look!  Aren’t these the same leaves that are growing in our yard?”

After consuming the dish with its pungent, yet earthy taste, we came home and hurried to the back yard.  Yes, ramps were running riotous in our backyard!  Hurray!

What are ramps?  Wild leeks that grow in places like Quebec and West Virginia and here in New York. Some places hold festivals to celebrate this plant with its unusual flavor combination of onion and garlic. Ramps may be short for rampions, which are native to England and other parts of Europe, (though somewhat different there) and play a central role in the story of Rapunzel.

Remember?  It’s the theft of those rampions from the witch’s garden that forces Rapunzel’s parents to give her up to the witch where she is then imprisoned in a tower with no door.  And even the witch has to use Rapunzel’s long hair to get into the tower. In fact, the name Rapunzel supposedly derives from the Latin name for rampion, Rapunculus.

To me, the ramps definitely have their own kind of magic, growing wild in the spring, sending up those leaves with their red stems for several weeks and then seeming to disappear.  Because they grow wild, you have to look carefully to find them.  And, if you aren’t paying attention, you can miss them altogether and miss an earthily delightful addition to your diet.

Just as we can sometimes miss the seasoning and magic of the wild things that sprout up in our writing or other creative project.  We can be so focused on our vision for that book, or painting—how we imagine it should look—that we enthusiastically weed out and mow down anything that doesn’t seem to belong or, perhaps worse, we fail to recognize the freely offered wild and tasty things that spring up along the way.

Yet, sometimes, it is precisely those magical wild things that can add a flavorful seasoning and significance to our writing or creative project.

True, we don’t want to harvest them all.  If we did that there would be none for the next time.  Nor do we want to add so much of that wild seasoning that we overpower our work.  But a careful selection, a willingness to expand our creative diet and to experiment could result in an expressive dish that is uniquely ours.

Last night, my husband and I had grilled salmon, sweet potato fries, and ramps sautéed in butter.  Yummmm!

Yes, it’s spring.  Are you harvesting your creative rampions?

Part of the joy of celebrating a new year is letting go of and saying goodbye to the old year, especially if that year has been particularly challenging.The year both my mother and grandfather died, and the year my husband’s father and then mother died were two years I remember being particularly glad to say good bye to, embracing the following New Years with a sense of hope and relief.

Just in time for Christmas…a winter wonderland!  The snow fell softly but steadily yesterday from late morning until early evening here in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains—whisper-light snow, perfect for kicking with your feet or for diving into to make snow angels.

The steadily falling snow piled into billowy drifts.  Our six small pine trees that Bob draped with white bee lights two weekends ago, were now also frosted with soft white mounds, turning nature’s beauty into holiday magic.

In the dimly lit darkness, Bob used the snow blower to clear the driveway while our son, Jason, and I shoveled the walkways, the patio, the paths to the bird feeders and up the hill to the woods where the dog has his latrine.

I knew where to shovel because our dog, Duncan, had already plowed through, decking himself with snow on his back and snow balls on his legs in the process.  As I shoveled his path to make it easier for him and us, I thought about how winter forces us to define and recognize the paths we habitually travel—we most often use this door to go out, we walk this direction at this angle uphill, we go to this point and that place.

Winter snows discourage meandering outside—unless you have snowshoes or cross-country skis on.  So, we clear and shovel our habitual paths, and then follow them as long as the snow lasts.

Sort of like what we do with our lives—our creative lives especially.  Which is odd considering that our creative lives are where we should be meandering the most.

But having done the work to clear our creative paths by creating routines, connections, and habits, we can often fail to explore new opportunities, new relationships, new ideas because they require more work—in effect, more shoveling.  And heaven knows our muscles are still aching from the last effort at clearing paths.  And what is wrong with those old paths anyway?  After all, they are usually the shortest, fastest, and easiest ways to where we want to go.

Nothing, of course, is wrong with them, but what happens to some of the critical elements of creativity—discovery, growth and…well, fun—if we stay on the old paths?  We can’t kick up snow or throw ourselves into snow angels by staying on those paths.  Creativity demands exploration.  Life does too.

Maybe that is why Duncan politely sniffed the paths we carved for him and then loped off into the pristine snowscape of uncharted yard.
 

Okay, tomorrow is Thanksgiving and, since the origin of the holiday is our ancestors giving thanks centuries ago, numerous articles online and in print the last few weeks tout the importance and benefits of being grateful.

So, since everyone else is reminding you to be grateful, and some are sharing with you what they are grateful for, I won’t.  I know—you’re grateful, aren’t you!

Instead I want to stress the importance of accepting gratitude or receiving thanks.

I don’t know where we got into the habit of brushing off thanks, of discounting appreciation, of pooh-poohing gratitude but it seems that we are as bad at receiving thanks as we are at receiving compliments.  Maybe our parents were worried we would get a big head or something if we received too much gratitude.  Or maybe our therapists were concerned that we would only do good things in order to receive gratitude.  (And I have to wonder, how bad would that be? Think about how much nicer the world might be if we all got off on doing good things just to hear someone say thank you to us!)

How good did you feel the last time you gave someone a gift and received their thanks in the form of a hug, a kiss, a thank you or, one of the sure signs of gratitude, tears?  The thing is, discounting the gratitude in effect discounts our gift, whether that gift is of time, money, love, or other resource.  How many times have you expressed appreciation to someone only to hear them say, “Oh, it is nothing.”

What is nothing?  The act of giving?  The gift itself?  If that is true then where is the gift, where is the meaning and intent behind the gift?  So, what, you gave me something that is nothing, means nothing to you?  Then why bother?

I don’t know about you but when I say thank you to someone, I want them to fully accept and take in my gratitude and appreciation because that too is a gift. 

See, giving is a circular action of giving, receiving, and giving appreciation for the giving.  If we don’t fully receive the gratitude, we stop the circle of giving.  We halt that flow of life that creates abundance.

So much of the recent writing and teaching on abundance, like The Secret, stresses the importance of feeling and expressing gratitude to the Universe, God, Source in order to keep the flow of abundance going.  The implication, then, is that the Universe, God, Source happily and completely receives your gratitude.  So happily, in fact, that He/She/It gives to you more, and then happily again receives your thanks.  On and on.

Giving and gratitude are part of a whole.  “You can’t have one without the other,” as that old song says.

So don’t just give thanks, receive it.  Joyfully.  Completely.  It is NOT nothing.  It is something.

Happy Holiday!

You’re welcome! Truly!

Where are those hazy, lazy days of Summer?

Every time I turn around lately, someone is bemoaning the fact that the summer is racing by and they haven’t had a chance to enjoy it yet.

What happened to long, lazy days of warm sun, a good book, and a tall glass of iced tea or lemonade?

This probably sounds strange, but when I was the mother of three much younger sons summer was slower.  Even in the midst of bringing up three very active boys, my husband and I savored summers with days at the lake while the boys took swimming lessons, evenings on bleachers while the boys played Little League baseball, and a week or two traveling around the country on vacation seeing the sights and the relatives.

Summer had a beginning and an end shaped by the boys’ school year.  And in between were opportunities to slow down, to play, to rest, to vacation.  Now spring blurs into summer and then blurs into fall.  And the sad thing is, often the only thing to mark its passing is my husband’s weekly mowing of the yard and the blooming of the daylilies.

I feel as if we have lost the secrets to enjoying summer.  We have forgotten the value and importance of taking time away—the value and importance of relaxation and retreat

When did this happen?  How?  Rest, relaxation and retreat are important not just for our stress levels.  They are vital to the creative process.  Vital!

Just ask a pregnant woman in her first three months of pregnancy, the ultimate creative act.  When I was pregnant with each of our sons, I would get so tired and sleepy producing all that nourishment for those quickly dividing fetal cells that I often fell asleep in my chair, head to knees, while the world went on without me.

It is the same with our creativity.  Have you ever noticed how hard it is to be creative, brilliant, innovative when you are tired?  For our creative ideas to gestate, to grow strong and mature to the point of birth, we need to rest.  To stop frenetic activity.  To let go of our need to be doing and relax into being.  To retreat from the noise and demands of daily life so that we can feed our mind and soul.  Silence, rest, time away allows us not only to nourish current creative ideas but also helps us to renew the creative well.

I admire my husband’s friend from high school, Bill.  He still knows how to relax.  He works hard but he also is very good at taking time to slow down and unwind whether for a half hour or for a week.  For example, on Sunday afternoons, just before dinner, Bill will pour himself a bourbon, and go out and sit on his patio.  He’ll take slow, leisurely sips, enjoy his yard and read the paper.  No rush, no hurrying from one activity to the next.  Just a sip of bourbon, a glance about the yard, a long in and out of breath.  Ahhhh!

Imagine that.  Taking time each day to slow down, breath deeply and say, “Ahhhhh.”  Imagine what that might do for our stress levels.  For our health.  For our creativity.

I think Bill makes a great role model.  A relaxation guru.  I am thinking of going to sit at his feet and asking him to tell me the secrets of summer.

Good thing he lives in Indiana – not some high peak in the Himalayas.  Now if only I liked bourbon!
 

One question I keep asking myself at this time of year is “How did they do it?” 

“They” are the people of the 19th century, and the reason I ask myself this question is because I live in a house built in the first half of the 1800’s, somewhere around 1840, before central heat, electricity, and indoor plumbing.

Two days ago we had a snowfall in 24 hours of around two feet, not an unusual event here in the foothills of the Catskills, but until several weeks ago, winter was in disguise with mild temperatures and barely a flake of snow on the ground.

Then the temperatures dropped into the single digits and below.  Next we had light snow flurries—an inch here, another inch on top of that.  Still, the new snow blower we bought on sale last spring continued to gather dust in the garage.

But Tuesday night, the Snow Queen threw off her disguise, and snowflakes fell, small and light at first, then larger and heavier as inches of accumulation turned into feet.  Wednesday, Bob and I did several shifts of shoveling and snow blowing the driveway, the front walk and steps, and paths to the birdfeeder and up the hill into the woods where the dog goes to relieve himself.  By Thursday, when the wind was still howling and blowing some of that snow right back into those paths, both of us had muscles that were letting us know we had pushed them beyond their normal routine.

Still, I am not complaining.  The snow blower cleared paths in a fraction of the time it would have taken to shovel, and with both of us in our 50’s, our backs were happy to bend in honor to it rather than to pain and injury. 

And when we were done, we gratefully came inside to get out of our wet, snowy clothes, to take a warm shower, and to eat hot soup and drink a cup of tea, all accomplished with merely the turn of a handle.

And I kept thinking, “How did they do it?”  How did they contend with the mountains of snow, with cold temperatures inside and out, with the hauling of wood or coal to provide the heat necessary to survive our winter chills?

The amount of work required just to stay warm and fed all those years ago boggles my mind, especially since the first year we lived in this house we heated all winter with only a woodstove—and that was the winter wind chills outside dropped to 40 degrees below zero for a week when our sons were all under 6!

I mean, I understand how physically they heated their homes and food, shoveled away snow, and traveled by foot or horse-drawn sleigh.  I just don’t understand how they managed to get up each morning for four or five months in a row and do it all over again without succumbing to depression and insanity.

So I get up each morning in weather like this, and I move into that attitude of gratitude those spiritual gurus advise us to practice.  I am thankful for electricity that keeps my food cold and my shower water pleasantly hot; for central heat that means no matter what room in this old farm house I enter, I am still comfortably warm; and for that snow blower that vaults hundreds of pounds of snow into the air with beautiful ease.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Now, for some hot chocolate…

The Snow Queen is here…the temperature is 0° F, with the blowing winds of her breath making it feel even colder.  Her sparkling white gown covers the ground.  Thank goodness the sun is shining.

The birds do not seem intimidated by Her Highness.  I watch them busy at the feeder outside my studio window—some on the ground pecking at the snow to find the dropped seed as the Snow Queen watches, and I shiver.  How do they do it?  I do not wish to feel her icy touch.  All I want to do is curl up with a good book in some cozy corner of the house (preferably with a cup of really good dark hot chocolate) and read until I fall asleep.

And though I am not always delighted to see her, I think the poor Snow Queen gets a bum rap.  Oh sure, she has her crazy fans out there who worship her with this strange and deathly rite of hurtling themselves down steep inclines at break-neck speed, (they give the Queen a real rush), but most of us hate to see her coming and can’t wait until Her Highness has gathered her frosty skirts about her and departed for another eight months or so.

And I will admit that, if not treated with the proper respect, she can be deadly.  However, if welcomed into our presence with true honor and appreciation for her power and her gifts, she can be quite a generous guest.

Winter used to be a time for slowing down, for sleeping more and working less, allowing the body to rest and rejuvenate, but now electricity allows us to continue working and pushing ourselves as it if is any other season of the year.  Still, somewhere deep inside, our genes, our spirits want to welcome the Queen the same way the bear does—we want to slow down, to curl up, to rest, to sleep, to dream.

We so seldom give ourselves permission to slow down, to rest, to relax.  We rush around with to-do lists running through our heads like the banner update on CNN—and it never ends.  The Snow Queen can help us with that.

When she comes to visit, my husband and I always accomplish some redecoration or refinishing project that has been on our to-do list forever.  We find more time to sit and watch movies on DVD together.  And, since there is no yard work that can be done this time of year, we find ourselves entering into a dance of moving into our creative spaces—he to his woodshop and garage, and I into my studio—and then back out again to reconnect and check on each other’s projects.  We spend more time in the kitchen, my husband baking bread, and I trying out new recipes from my food magazines.  

I spend more time reading, exploring, planning and daydreaming in my studio, reevaluating goals and desires, clarifying my vision for the year ahead.

Perhaps, if more of us welcomed the Snow Queen with a true awareness and appreciation for her gifts and allowed her to lead us is into the darkness and chill of winter as a time to enter the stillness and silence of creative potential, she’d stop trying to create a permanent winter and she’d leave those Narnia children alone.

Which reminds me, I think it is time for a nap.