Love Song for Nearly Perfect Days

Nearly perfect days are few and far between, but I've been having quite a few lately.

I ran into a friend the other day and he told me that I sound great. He had that kind of weird, surprised look on his face that had me wondering if there was something about myself I hadn't been seeing lately. I got a similar reaction from some of the ladies at church last week. 

"Is there something we ought to know?" one of them asked.

I think they were asking me if there is a new man in my life. It was the sly smiles that clued me in. I'd just gotten a new haircut and, granted, it was quite a change. I was dressed in a relatively new top and jacket. I'd picked up a couple of things for spring since I'd noticed my wardrobe has been getting a little thin. I've also been eating healthfully, walking every day, and getting to bed earlier. That, probably more than anything else, accounted for my rosy cheeks and bright eyes. The lift in my step. They noticed all these things. You can't get much past the ladies at church. 

"Nope. No babies or new men," I said, laughing.

So, later, when my friend commented, I simply said that I'd had an attitude change. And that it made all the difference for me. And it has. I'd been noticing that my stress has been higher lately and that I'd been over-functioning at work. My life had tipped out of balance and I'd taken a couple of weeks to restore that balance. Nutrition, movement, meditation, rest, boundaries, time in nature, time with friends, and other lifestyle adjustments have helped me to experience many of my days as nearly perfect.

Mornings are critical. When I start the day well, the rest seems to flow more smoothly. It's as if I am setting a context for the rest of the day, creating a container to hold what I'd like to pour into my day. 

I've done that on many levels. Created a container to hold the life I'd like to live. Lightened things up a bit.

And for now, things feel nearly perfect. 

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 is a riff off a Natalie Goldberg retreat I attended a few years ago, where every day we wrote from prompts and shared what we wrote. Part of my second annual 100 Day Summer Writing Practice, I'll be writing whatever comes to mind and not editing my ideas. So, writing and putting that writing out into the world. Every. Single. Day. 

   

I See a Theme Beginning to Emerge

I'd be a lot happier if June 1st had been a Monday or a Tuesday. Sundays are brutal writing days for me. Not sure if I can even think of a prompt today. Yesterday I had this great idea to use photos for prompts rather than words, sentences, or phrases. Of course, that didn't work out so well yesterday. I loved what I wrote but it was not what I'd expected to write and today I simply don't have the energy to write about what I'd like to write about. 

It happens that way sometimes. 

It's 9:22 in the evening and I am having flashbacks to last summer, the first 100 day writing project, and to those evenings when I put off writing all day for whatever reason and then struggled to put two words together, two thoughts, two ideas.

It happens that way sometimes.

I say to myself, "If I can only come up with a few more paragraphs, then I can publish this and close the laptop and start again tomorrow when I'll have morning writing time and will be fresh." And then I remember that some of my best writing came forward when I thought I was too exhausted to be coherent.  And some of it was a single line or three. 

It happens that way sometimes.

I see a theme beginning to emerge. And I remember that there are times when we just have to show up for ourselves, especially when we're living a writer's life and want actually to write. I suppose it is that way with anything we want to develop. 

I remember when my daughter was very young and she chose to learn to play the trumpet in her elementary school music program and first band. Day after day she sat on a chair in the living room and buzzed her lips and emptied the spit valve and struggled to make rudimentary trumpet sounds. Her determination was extraordinary. When she was in eighth grade, she sat first chair in all the bands at school, including the jazz band. The next year, she put the trumpet down and never picked it up again. She focused her determination on singing, drama, and guitar. Again, that steely determination emerged and soon she was singing lead roles and winning awards and writing songs and performing with a rock band she helped found. She graduated from high school and put down her aspirations around performing and began to explore what she might do next. She decided to go to community college and figure that out and then apply to what she called her "dream school." 

And she did. In her chosen field of visual arts. Where her determination reared up again and led to endless nights in the studio or long days in the foundry, a tiny but epic smith who seemed to have walked right out of myth and into whatever came after the post-modern world. I used to know what that was. She told me. Those kinds of determinations often come out of the art world. Or at least are first consciously expressed there.

She moved to Chicago a few years after earning her B.F.A. to begin reading in Critical and Visual Studies for a Master's Degree. I watched, again, as she spent two years doing something completely new with as much determination as she's expressed in every other endeavor. She graduated a few weeks ago and is once again in the liminal space of not knowing what comes next. 

I think about her when I begin to hem and haw about sitting down at the laptop and writing. I wish I had half the determination she has in her little finger. Maybe. My own expression is what it is, something lyrical and restless and mobile. I'm a vagabond creative. A wanderer of wild places in the soul's landscape. A wayfinder.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 is a riff off a Natalie Goldberg retreat I attended in 2016, where every day we wrote from prompts and shared what we wrote. Part of my second annual 100 Day Summer Writing Practice, I'll be writing whatever comes to mind and not editing my ideas. So, writing and putting that writing out into the world. Every. Single. Day.     

Only the Mama Duck Knows

I walk on a canal towpath most mornings.

Right now is the best time of the year. A sweet spot, actually. Winter's cold has long passed and the mosquitoes are not yet buzzing around. The air is thick with the heady fragrance of honey suckle and wild rose. There are ducklings and goslings and cygnets. Turtles sun themselves on felled branches that rise from murky waters. Dragonflies cast shadows, but are elusive to the naked eye. Everything is lush and green and growing.

I'd spend all day walking if I could.

And maybe I will one of these days when I've got a whole day free. 

Wild yellow irises grow out of the waters. Yellow water lilies grow out of the waters. Both plants lead seemingly impossible lives. Actually, all life along this waterway feels impossible to me. 

I count the ducklings every day. They hatched sometime on Monday and the first time I saw them was Tuesday morning. They were mounded together on the grassy swath between the path and the canal. Right out there in the open. A guy who fishes in the same spot every day told me he saw thirteen of them right after they hatched. On Tuesday morning there were ten. On Wednesday there were nine. On Thursday there were eight. On Friday there were five. We'd had dangerous storms the previous three days and it was possible that some of them were lost to the storm. Others to foxes, hawks, and other predators that prowl there. I don't know how the mama duck can stand it.

The strangest thing happened today.

I saw the ducks in the distance as I walked, grateful that they'd survived another day of storms. I wondered where they hid during the storms. How they sheltered. I thought about seeing them two days before at a distance, across the canal in a wide lagoon. That was the day after the first set of storms moved through the area. We'd had tornado warnings, high winds, and torrential downpours. Yesterday they'd been in their usual spot in the grass between the canal and the path. Before the storm. they'd started to venture down the canal - the ducklings followed their mother, swimming and foraging for food while they meandered downstream. Today they were once again in their usual spot and there were eight ducklings.  

I've been documenting with photographs and checked my photos from yesterday. I wondered if somehow the three ducklings had been sleeping beneath their other five siblings and I'd somehow just not seen them. Nope. Five ducklings the day before. Eight today. I marveled at the wonders of nature. Had they been lost and found their way back? Had they been hidden and then retrieved by their mother? Did they belong to another mother and were adopted by this one?

I don't know. It's a mystery.

It's also a mystery to me that this writing became about ducklings when I'd planned to write about wild morning glories. You never know where a prompt will take you.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 is a riff off a Natalie Goldberg retreat I attended in 2016, where every day we wrote from prompts and shared what we wrote. Part of my second annual 100 Day Summer Writing Practice, I'll be writing whatever comes to mind and not editing my ideas. So, writing and putting that writing out into the world. Every. Single. Day.

Showing Up

And sometimes a whole day goes by and you really have nothing to say.

But you've committed to writing every day.

Sometimes it's enough just to show up

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if I have one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

And Sometimes the Dreams Are Strange

Strange dreams woke me. 

Someone gave me a gift and when I used it, it created massive explosions. And destroyed pretty much everything.

I was so shaken by the explosions it was hard to remember the details of the dream. But as the day moved on, I remembered more and more.

Yesterday my mother called me. A strange dream had awakened her. The details were easy for her to recall and she felt compelled to share it. 

When we spoke on the phone today and I told her about my dream, we shared a strange feeling of odd connection. As if the concept of Wyrd had come to life. 

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about. 


Photo: (c) 2017 Katherine Cartwright. All rights reserved.

Sometimes the Transitions are Shaky

What I remember from yesterday's annual review and new year's dreaming is the feeling that I have a good life. A beautiful life, actually.

Taking the long view, it's easy to see. When you're in the trenches of the day to day frustrations, disappointments, and challenges, it's much harder.

How do we reconcile the two in order to live our best life?

Maybe some of our difficulty comes from an underlying fear of complete collapse. What if everything falls away? Can you have a plan for that? And what if there is no plan that can meet an unforeseen circumstance?

You can't live as if the worst is going to happen. And you can't plan your life as if the worst might be your lot. If the worst is going to happen, then you meet it with courage when it comes.

Until then, you live life as if you expect to have the best life possible.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about. 

New Moon Woman

I spent the day today relaxing into possibilities for the new year. Thinking about the year that has been and about what I might like the new year to feel like. What might be ways to shape my life so that I can feel the way I'd like to feel and do the things I'd like to do.

It was an amazing day. It's always an amazing day when I do this annual practice. 

It begins with a little angst, as I am sure that I've completely wasted the year and not accomplished a thing.

Until I do a quick inventory. I usually find that I've had a pretty amazing year and that I really love my life. Even the challenges, failures, relationship disappointments, and lost opportunities, which so so often seem to dominate my thoughts, pale when compared to the long list of accomplishments and good things I remember without even having to look at my calendar or diary. 

And knowing that there is so much more.

I think about what I loved about the year, what was hard, what I learned, what I can distill as pure essence. 

This year the essence goes something like this - 2018 was a deep dive into the YUK I had to let go of, and I did a lot of releasing. It was a time of discovery and wonder. I held my book in my hand.

That had been my intention. To hold my book in my hand. And, wow. What a lesson that has been about intention setting. I got exactly what I asked for. This year, I'm going to refine that intention to include getting my book out into the world. As it is, I've got exactly one copy, a print proof with several problems. The project is stalled because of a merger. 

Of the rest of the day, I'll say only that I'm still digesting. 

I'll let it percolate for awhile. And while it does, I discover that once again I am drawn to what living my best life might look like and stepping into that for the last three weeks of the year. To engage once again my low risk, high yield experiment.

I leave the experience of a day immersed in review and possibility feeling like I cultivated energy that has been lying dormant and reinvigorated myself around living well. I feel like I've thrown off the chains and that I am light again. 

A new moon woman. Truly.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about.