Celebrate Mother's Day Well!

I’m celebrating mine with a stunning raspberry pastry from Bottega Louie and a steaming cup of Earl Grey tea in my favorite tea cup. How are you celebrating yours?

Blooming Mondays: Explosions of Color (gerber daisies, 04.30.12)

It’s spring. Really, is there anything to do but laugh and spin?

pearls of wisdom

Many times in my life, I have navigated situations with the grace of an elephant in a candy store. I have felt the need to prove myself with all the subtlety of a brass band in a library, afraid to be silent or still long enough to learn from others. I have shrunk from the risk of failure rather than embrace its power as a catalyst for change, and have then found myself shrunken.

Recently, however, I’ve found myself breathing a bit more deeply, giving myself a bit more space and looking for something other than all the answers or the magic pill or an authoritative nod of approval.

What I seek now are pearls of wisdom, as small as grains of sand and as valuable in their natural, accidental state as in a well-packaged strand.

Have you discovered any recently that you treasure?

Blooming Mondays: Never Boring (tulips, 4.23.12)

Isn’t it funny, the stories we hold in our head about what’s exciting, how things should be, the way the world is supposed to look. I’m discovering that I really dig this process of discovering the fictions I used to hold as fact and the opportunity to create new stories, better developed ones.

What stories are you rewriting, whether inconsequential or profound?

dandelions

Make a wish.

Blow a long, forceful kiss.

And wonder whether the seeds of your dreams will grow into sun-mimicking flowers, to weave into crowns, or just weeds, to be violently ripped from dusty cracks of abandoned pavement.

I come from a line of women who like being in control. Actually, they insist upon it. They have been mislabeled as rigid and bitchy or, by the more diplomatic among us, uncompromising and strong. The truth, however, is that they are ruled by fear – fear of being hurt, being abandoned, being killed, being fooled – bundled up into an overriding need to control their environment and their place in it to ensure their emotional, physical and mental safety (perceived or real). It’s a false sense of security, of course, but only those outside the bubble are aware of the inherent danger in attempting to place rules on this thing called life.

Life. That’s what I’m talking about. It is entirely unpredictable. Ultimately uncontrollable. And it is my experience that the more someone ignores that truth, the more unmanageable life becomes. Have you made a similar observation?

My mother suffered a heart attack a few days ago, followed by emergency double bypass surgery to route blood flow past the 80% blocked arteries that were slowly killing her. She’ll be 67 in May.

And suddenly, just like that, her unmanaged diabetes, with symptomatic sky-rocketing blood sugars, is no longer something we can leave to her to handle. Rolling our eyes at the absurdity of her claims that she’s doing something about it, claims her family has heard for probably 40 years, is no longer responsible. So I’m now having to attempt the infuriating and frustrating conversations that anyone dealing with an unrecovered and unrepentant addict has. Because a person with unmanaged diabetes is just like a boozing alcoholic. Vodka and truffles are both ultimately sugar.

Sugar may very well be evil. The ultimate temptation (for those religiously inclined). It can morph you into the very devil, and not in any hot and sexy way.

But my mother has decided that she knows better than the multitude of doctors and family members telling her how ugly and protracted her death is going to be, and how moot this surgery will have been, if she doesn’t get her shit together.

Yes, I’m angry.

But at least I know I have no control – over whether she’ll finally start listening to someone other than herself and loosen her death grip on her life, over when and how death comes knocking on the door of any of my loved ones, over how people – known and unknown – perceive my reactions to this current drama and other life events… or over whether I’ll take advantage of her ignored wake-up call to begin correctly managing my own recently-diagnosed diabetes.

I am, after all, my mother’s daughter.

I just intend to learn more from her mistakes than she has learned from the previous generation’s.

And hope that she surprises me.

But control? I have no further craving for that.

Simply put, nothing is as I thought it would be. One could argue that I should have been prepared for that revelation or that, in fact, it isn’t really a revelation for anyone over the age of five. Alas, I continue to be surprised by the depths of my self-deceit and the prevalence of fairy-tale thinking that permeates my perceptions and, yep, expectations about the universe and my role in the grand scheme of things.

Valentines Day by EyePoetryPhotography on Etsy

Take relationships, for example. I’m in one at the moment. It terrifies the hell out of me to even type that, much less own it. And yet the number on my driver’s license indicates that I’m an adult.

It’s Valentine’s Day. My heart, my mind, and the messaging created by those good folks currently employed at advertising, marketing, entertainment and publishing companies are in a bit of a tussle for supremacy.

Things are complicated.

I hope someone gave you a kiss today. I hope you gave one to somebody. And, hell, in this case, I vote for anthropomorphizing pets.

xo

As the first day of the new year draws to a close, I have the shaky stability of a new colt. I’m not quite settled into 2012 yet. It will probably be weeks before I correctly write the date on a document. I’m still in awe of how quickly this last year passed. I haven’t crystallized my intentions for the coming months – where I wish to go, what I intend to accomplish. So many of the facets of my life reflect a different light now than they did 12 months ago, I have no idea what outlook to expect as I contemplate future reflections, and I must laughingly admit that I’m entirely okay with this state of affairs. As long as there are many facets to my life, and they reflect the light, I am content.

I am content.

I hope your 2012 unfolds to let pleasure touch every facet of your life. I look forward to sharing with you whatever may come.

xo -em

Blooming Mondays: Unexpected Greenery (green mums & cattails, 10.24.11)

I simply couldn’t resist this surprising bit of greenery at the market this weekend.

Don’t you just love the unexpected?

striking the match

Lindsey over at A Design So Vast drew my attention to a gorgeous Virginia Woolf quote. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised that Woolf’s message moved me. After all, “To The Lighthouse” was one of my favorite books when I was growing up and it was mostly sentiment over story.

I am struck by the gift in Woolf’s words.

“What is the meaning of life? … a simple question; one that seemed to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

I used to attend only to the romance in Woolf’s phrases. Now, I understand her nuggets of truth.

Tell me if this ever happens for you, too…

The little bursts of illumination that occur randomly on any given day keep catching me by surprise. I find myself so delighted, amused, even (frequently) flummoxed by them that the overwhelming meaning-of-life query about which Woolf speaks, and which used to plague me with uncertainty and a spinning head, is of less importance.

For this moment, I don’t need the answer to any grand question. I just want to keep playing in the sumptuous darkness of life’s mysteries, and clapping in glee with every strike of the proverbial match that brings kaleidoscopes of light to the dance.

Have you ever been in a similar place?