Saturation

My brother taught me that rainy days provide some of the best opportunities for nature photography. Even though bright sunny days seem optimal, the color is most saturated on days like today.

The rain is more welcome than I had anticipated. This week's dose of spring sunshine was exhilarating, but the rain is what I needed.


I'm not a true nature girl, but I relish the power of nature to lift me outside myself, to provide gentle external larger-than-myself motion that somehow quiets my mind. It's why we love the seashore and the fireside. The waves and the flames create a rhythm that's far more harmonious than the frantic rhythm of our own minds. So I submit to the motion of the rain and the drama of the thunder, and I find some of the clarity I've buried beneath the debris of my thoughts.

Taking the camera out in the rain also brought the opportunity to spend time with loved ones. My mom's Garden Angels keeping watch over the flowers, my grandmother's old water pump, and my husband's grandfather's wagon wheel.

Moving On

I just made a familiar commute for probably the last time. A short-term arrangement took me periodically to a town a few hours south of home, and now my reason for driving there is gone. I've never been one to be sentimental about the past, but I'm entering what I sense will be a period of change that will challenge me more than any before.

I shall miss Route 29, oddly enough. I've grown up a lot on this road, perhaps more than I have almost anywhere else. My first dozen trips were fraught with sadness and fear. Incrementally, the anxiety was replaced with quiet happiness and optimism.

This time, there was wistfulness. These days are good days, and I'm not sure I want to let them go.

Heaven

I'm a believer, but I've never felt as if the tools we're given in this life are sufficient to understand what lies beyond. But recently I've discerned a definition of heaven that doesn't feel earthbound.

Heaven is a place where all the people you've ever loved are happy.

Serenity Prayer

I came of age in the 60's and the 70's, and the Serenity Prayer was a bit of a cliche. That powerful mantra that helped so many people get their lives back from all sort of addiction and abuse became trite. So it's receded into a cobwebbed corner of my mind.

Time to dust it off. I tend to be full of misbegotten courage to change the things I think I can. But I'm coming up way short on the acceptance and wisdom parts. I am, more and more, trying to operate outside what the motivational speakers call my "circle of influence."

I don't exactly know why, but I sense that I do need to figure out the reasons before this will be fixed.

Regression

Lessons that should become easier with time are frustratingly difficult to learn.

Eigenzeit indeed. It takes so little for the conviction that taking control of one's own time is important to be bulldozed by an army of opposing forces: things that scream to be done, and the belief (deep somewhere in my bones) that to stand in the way of these demands is selfish, childish and unrealistic.

Until something takes over my body and my soul and demands that I stop.

My father says that I have such a poor memory because I don't look back. "She lives in the here and now," says he. I wish it were so. The ugly truth is that I don't remember anything because I'm never really present when things happen. I'm in the future. Planning, obsessing, worrying, strategizing. It seems like a harmless enough game, but that's an illusion.

I woke up yesterday and realized that it had probably been days since I had taken a deep breath. One of the symptoms of living in the future: forgetting that your body can't leave the present. And the first thing that happens when I breathe deep is that I cry. For absolutely no reason. Nothing is terribly wrong. Many things are amazingly right.

Those people for whom mindfulness is a way of life: how do they get there? Were they closer to start with than the rest of us? Is their will so much stronger? Do they trust more?

All of that self-discipline that's lavished on the to-do list needs to be redirected.

Morning Person

I always thought that one of the signs that I had become a true grown-up would be my transformation into a Morning Person. Sadly, I’ve almost never spontaneously risen earlier than I absolutely have to. Occasionally, though, when I have to rise before the sun (as I did this morning to catch an early train to New York), I catch a glimpse of the clarity and calm that Morning People call their own. And on days like today, I promise myself that I will finally become one of them. It’s a game I play with myself, but for a few hours, it feels like real life.

Distance

Parents rarely have the opportunity to see their children in the same way that the rest of the world does. We all know that our kids save their rawest, neediest behavior for us. It’s a compliment, really – that they feel safe enough to be able to disintegrate, knowing that we won’t love them less even when they are a complete mess. (This applies to 20-year-olds as much as 2-year-olds.) So we are sometimes surprised when outsiders recognize our offspring as the fascinating, mature, wonderful people they really are.

Those of us whose kids indulge in sports or performing arts sit back and wonder who that interesting, brave, strong young person is out there on the field or up there on the stage. That young man looks so confident and pre-possessed. Could he be my son? That young woman seems so self-assured and compelling. She’s related to me... imagine that! Seeing them without myopia is the only way to know who they are.

Important details often come into focus with proximity. But sometimes distance is the most important lens there is.