An Accounting

I've written 21 of 31 July days for my daily writing practice. It's interesting to me to notice my own reactions to this news. When I began these summer daily writing projects, I was strict with myself about showing up every day to write and ship. One night, I even got out of bed because in the busy-ness of the day I'd forgotten to write. 

I knew this summer would be challenging in different ways than other summers have been. A new house, a new job, anticipating the sale of my mother's house, a deadline for a new anthology, some more focused attention to my health and well-being in the middle of a lot of stress, and a hundred other little things. A friend suggested I might like to give myself permission to skip it this summer, but that did not feel like something I wanted to do. 

Instead, I've been practicing some kindness toward myself. I don't get out of bed to write. I don't turn around when I'm headed upstairs for bed to write. I continue my practice of swimming in the morning as a priority. I'm fitting all the things in where they fit and I'm not worrying about it. Actually, I'm a little surprised with how relaxed I've been about most things. 

That may be coming from the same well of kindness.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions about the small things in life.   

Sixty of One Hundred Summer Days

The momentum of the season seems to be gathering speed. It's all perception, of course. The first thirty days of summer moved gently like the slow ripple of a meandering brook. 

The brook opens into a rushing river. 

Days flow one into another with such force that I sometimes wonder where the weeks have gone as we come to the end of July. 

August is on the doorstep.

My days stream in a now familiar pattern. A morning swim, and if I'm lucky time in the sun. Afternoons at work at the church or at home. Evenings gather up moments and make space for things I was not able to do during the day. Last night was a trip across the river to Jersey for gas and a stop for provisions at Trader Joe's. Come home, put away the groceries, have something to eat, watch the Olympic equestrian events in the gardens of Versailles. Cross country.

In my quest for gymnastics, I've instead come across surfing, fencing, skateboarding, white water kayak, dressage. It's been a delight to watch. 

The poem that inspired this writing series begins ~

Be glad dear soul for what you have / You now have a hundred summer days / And today is the first.

It ends ~

Pay close attention to where you stand / Before you know it, tomorrow has become yesterday, / Wandering (through life) goes so fast. / Pay close attention to what you receive / Which is a hundred summer days a year, / And tomorrow is the second.

Be glad, dear soul, for what you have. You now have these summer days. Pay close attention to where you stand. 

Before you know it . . . 

The days flow, a rushing river . . . 

You can never enter the same river . . . 

The flow changes everything . . . 

Still, we have . . . 

So much.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Pivots and Turning Points

The handy man is here. I understand there may be an updated way to refer to this kind of service provider, but I like the term handy man. Reminds me of my childhood and the simplicity of those times. Today he's working on a project I've waited about three months for, a kitchen project that will enable me to (finally) unpack the rest of my kitchen boxes.

He's removing the utility room door and a wire shelf from the wall, moving an ugly-but-usable pantry cabinet into the utility room, and building the pretty-and-useful kitchen island I ordered from Wayfair in March. He's looked at bi-fold doors and will find one that will work in that space. At some point, a contractor will replace my counters and put in a tile backsplash. Then the kitchen will be done.

This feel significant to me. A turning point. Once the boxes are unpacked and moved from where they sit in my dining room, the living room boxes can go into that space. Cleared of boxes, the living room will feel less chaotic, even though there's no furniture yet. I'll be able to work my way through the rest of the boxes and have those done in time for the delivery of my furniture.  

I am looking forward to a little less chaos in my home atmosphere. I've not been sleeping well, and wonder if a little bit of chaos is the culprit. 

Ikea (finally) replenished its stock of bookshelves, so progress can be make in my library. I have a new writing desk picked out. I'm looking forward to using that space for more than storing boxes of books and supplies. I pivot, as the original line of bookshelves has changed so much I'm looking at another line. More expensive, of course. 

I stand, poised for the next phase of this move, or maybe I've stepped over the threshold. Not sure which it is beyond experiencing the many stops and starts of this. I've moved so many times I figure I'm an expert at it, but I've forgotten things like changing the address on my driver's license and following up with the now-more-difficult process of changing my voter registration. Maybe I'll pop online and get a moving checklist, just to make sure I've thought of everything I need to think of. I like checklists. They help me feel grounded when there's a lot to be done.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Fifty Shades of Days

We've lived fifty of the hundred days of summer. Here, there's a break in the heat, humidity, and scorching sun. We're in the dog days, as bright star Sirius rises in the early morning sky and nears its conjunction with the sun. Twenty days before and twenty days after are the hottest days in the Northern Hemisphere.  Another wilderness time. Sirius conjuncts the sun on July 23, so the dog days this year are July 3 through August 11. 

The full moon is July 21. There's lots of beauty in the sky these days. There usually is most days and nights.

Fifty days of summer remain. This feels abundant. Even as the light begins slowly to diminish, stone fruit and root vegetables swell and ripen. The roses are blooming again. The birds and rabbits are nesting again. A new bunny came to call today. The garden is overgrown and invites some tending. The spent iris flower stalks need to be cut down. Weeds need to be pulled. The cone flower and borage plants still need to be dug into the ground.

Of course, none of this needs to be done. Still, I want to do it and bring the garden back to the beauty that meandered through most of the June days.    

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Twenty-One Minutes

The summer days begin to shorten. The sun rises about 15 minutes later and sets six minutes earlier. Twenty-one minutes. The days will continue to shorten as July slips away, and by early August the diminishing light will be remarkable.

I think about the poem that inspired this series and my thoughts during these summer days. Soon they will be half gone, the 100 days of summer. I ask myself if I've been living each day to its fullest and wonder and, at the same time, if it's possible to live all our days to their fullest.

For now, the days are long and the morning light comes early. Evening light still tarries past eight. The air hangs heavy with moisture and the sun's heat is fierce. The garden is overgrown with weeds, and the herbs spill over the edges of their pots. Rainfall relieves me of watering. Heat and humidity keep me from the weeds. Mosquitos keep me from enjoying the patio in the evening. Morning swims continue to delight. 

Work feels meaningful and time with friends is valuable and uplifting. I continue to work my way through moving boxes and work the puzzle of what home is here. 

Another storm moves through this evening. Lightning flashes and thunder sounds. Rain comes hard and loud. It's expected to clear by morning and pass through again tomorrow evening, cooling the days.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Thunderstorm In My Bones

There's a storm outside and a storm within. 

A strange pattering on some surface outside echoes in my bones.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

A New Day

A new day, and I was greeted with a vase of flowers early this morning as I stepped onto my front porch to go to the pool. This happened last month as well. No card. No note. Just a vase filled with beautiful flowers.  

Sunday, when I was on the way to church, my thoughts filled with many things, I drove up over a rise in the road and was greeted by a field of sunflowers blooming. I drive by this field often, but had never noticed the flowers before. 

There is so much beauty. Sometimes it nudges us out of our worry for the world for a moment. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

The Day after Yesterday

I don't have the stomach for thinking and writing this evening. Preaching and holding space in the congregation today drew energy that took me to my reserves. It was my first preaching in this new congregation. An hour-long swim in the early evening restored. Sitting in the breeze and listening to birdsong as the sun went down refreshed. I long for bed but feel restless, and catch myself chewing on my fingernails.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Elegy

The shock of violence rocks a nation

Fruit of violent rhetoric

Silent witnesses wait and wonder

What may come next

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Welcome Home, Mrs. Lipa

She lived in my mother's basement for years, and in my grandparents' before that. Now she is home with my brother and his family. I am so glad she survived the cull.

Mom's house is finally empty, everything from that life and from those of generations before has been cleared, distributed, redistributed, and otherwise scattered to the four winds. Mom sent some items to museums; my brother held on to correspondence and other historical items for possible donation to museums or universities or other archives. I have some things. My grandparents lived in bold times and my grandfather was in the thick of it, from the founding of Czechoslovakia in Tomas Masaryk's administration, through the war years, to the Partition of Czechoslovakia and Benes's government-in-exile while Hitler occupied the country, to those awful years following the war when the country was overtaken by the Soviet sphere of influence. Mom helped Czech and Slovak historians with their research by providing correspondence, photographs, and her remembrances. 

Mrs. Lipa was an opera singer, and a sculptor made a bust of her. That's about all we know. The bust had pride of place among artifacts in the basement. I have no idea how the bust came to be there, but Mom wanted us to remember her name, and so she wrote (over her heart) "Mrs. Lipa."

I remember as we were going through the house in the aftermath of Mom's death, my brother and I looked at the sculpture and asked, "What are we going to do with Mrs. Lipa?" We let the question hang for two years, but she remains with the family.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Waiting til the Midnight Hour

Getting in under the wire as I begin this writing at 11:56 p.m. It's still today. 

And what a day! I seem to be running from one end of it to the other, at least after my morning swim. It appears that I can't keep time today. 

Midnight has struck and today has become yesterday, tomorrow is today. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

Forty Days and Forty Nights

It's my big landmark. The forty days and, this year, forty nights since I've been writing mainly at night. It's not my usual pattern, but I've been swimming in the early morning, and spending time outside in the sun listening to the birds, enjoying the blue skies, and watching the clouds move and swirl and create their fantastical patterns. Night time offers a different perspective and different energy. 

This summer's writing has been wilderness-y. Sometimes a slog. Showing up has not been as easy as in years past and the writing has felt more halting. There've been so many changes in my life this year, and it's not always easy to keep up with them and to fund whatever it is I draw on to show up, write, and publish daily. I feel more vulnerable. 

My theme, Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday, feels challenging. Embedded deeply within it is the commitment to live these summer days to their fullest, to notice and appreciate their bounty.

I think part of the vulnerability may be the home crafting that is part of this summer's winding path. It's slow and intentional, even confrontational, as I open boxes I brought home from Mom's the summer after she died two years ago, and decide what will become part of my new space. There are other boxes that wait. Boxes of things I packed after the divorce and stacked in a storage unit until I felt ready to open them and figure things out. Like my wedding album, family pictures, other items that figured prominently in a home that was part of another life. 

I remember when I was moving out of that home, how difficult it was to decide what to keep and what to let go. I made some decisions and deferred others. I rented for a long time, because it was hard to make a commitment to another home. Alone. 

And here I am. In a mostly empty new home, surrounded by boxes, so not really empty at all, but definitely under construction. The longs delays with furniture delivery have given me time, months of it, to face long unopened boxes and plumb their depths. 

And my own.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Heat Wave

Temperatures have been in the high 90s, feel like more than a hundred. The air is so thick I sometimes think I can see it. I got up early today and went to the pool just after eight. Didn't even flinch when I got in the water. The other night I went swimming in the evening and the water was positively warm, almost like a bath. Friends in desert communities report temps nearing 115. I don't know how they're surviving. It's almost too much for me, walking from the house to the car and then to the office door, and from the office door to the car and then to the house. A Facebook friend went on a three hour mountain bike ride through the desert the other day. I'm waiting for a break in the temps to work in the garden. That reminds me, she needs a drink.   

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Twilight

Soft glowing light lingers in a late evening sky

A scattering of the sun's rays before she sleeps

And gathers her light again at the dawn

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

 

Coming Into Form

The bee balm finally looks like herself. She's had an unusual journey from bud to flower. At least to my perception, and expectation. She has been fully herself, of course, and she's not done yet.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

Time to Weed Again

Even as dry as the soil is, a green carpet of weeds covers the ground. It's the only lush thing in the garden on these hot, dry days. Even as the plantings droop and wilt, weeds spring up with fresh energy. 

It's a mystery.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.  

Doomscrolling

There is so much anxiety in the nation right now, at least the mainstream media would have us believe this. I don't know what to believe. 

I feel heartened that the Labour Party swept the elections in the United Kingdom. It's a glimmer of hope in a world that seems to be careening right, into the folly that held the world a century ago. Do we forget? Do we take our relative freedoms and prosperity for granted? Do we, as one press observer noted, think the post World War II society can't possibly fall?

Time to take a breath and post some nature photos. The screaming Interweb is deafening.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

 

Holiday

The night is dark, and I've been watching fireworks through the trees. 

Beyond, another layer surfaces. 

Of a dark night, signs of celebration obscured.

A nation waits, wonders, hopes. Holds its breath.

 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.

Gifts of Summer

A friend sent me a text the other day about her visit to a lavender farm. I had no idea that there was a lavender farm in the area. 

Suddenly I have an uncontrollable desire to visit the lavender farm. To walk through fields of fragrant flowers and breathe in all that wonder.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonder. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

More Beautiful Days

The days have been achingly beautiful. Cool, breezy mornings. Clear, blue skies. Cloud shapes move across a wide-open canvas. Everything is deep green and lush from recent rains. Birds are nesting again. Cicadas have begun their songs. Butterflies move liltingly among the flowers.

The weeds are growing again in the garden. It's about time to claw them away. The coneflower still waits to be dug into the garden. I wait for morning glory vines to cover the fence and reveal big blue blooms to wish me a good morning. I never did plant the moonflowers. They'll wait for next summer.

I swim in the morning and enjoy the beauty. I pass in and out of my house and enjoy the beauty. I sit on the terrace in the cool of the evening and enjoy the beauty.

With so much ugliness in the world these days, the beauty and peace of nature softens the shocks that seem to come daily in the headlines. We must have places to retreat from the agony of living and enjoy the beauty of life. 

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.   

Beautiful Transformations

I've been watching the bee balm move through her stages of blooming. Today she began to take on the more recognizable look of a burgeoning  bee balm flower. Tiny pink tendrils begin to emerge from the center bud that resembles a delicate, sculpted ball. I noticed it when I walked outside into the cool evening air as the light fades from the sky. 

July begins, another beautiful transformation. The page turns on the calendar and the days stretch out before me, a new and pristine leaf ready to receive the writing of these days. The next 31 of 100 summer days. 

There's excitement as something new begins. Possibility is intoxicating.

Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.