Lessons in Gratitude

Somehow the sniffles which I had thought were gone have returned. How does that happen, anyway? I am not feeling very well, so I might be briefer than usual (though every time I write that, I end up writing my usual blog.)

I am astonished to be at the end of another week and to be headed toward the end of April. Time continues to fly by, yet I find that I am grateful for the week just past. Tonight I am simply grateful to have come through another week with relative calm in my heart and a smile on my face. It is proof that progress is possible if one approaches one’s challenges with as open a heart as can be managed. I go back to Khalil Gibran’s quote, “Awake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” While I can tell you that I definitely did not wake with a winged heart this morning (though I did wake around dawn), I did give thanks for another day of loving.

It was a pretty good day–Jared and I went to a meeting this morning, which as it turns out was so short that the drive to get there was twice as long as the time we were in the meeting. It was over almost before it began, and us with all this time to kill before Jared needed to be at work. So we went home and sat outside on the back porch talking and soaking up the first real spring day in months. Jared went and got his guitar playing several new and emerging tunes. After a while I went and got one of my guitars and we played a little bit together, though not much because Jared is such a better player than I am that we can’t really play much together. It was such a sweet way to spend an hour and a half, and I was reminded once again of how powerful it is to share the love of playing music with both of my children. They are each talented songwriters and musicians. I am in awe of how talented they both are, and the gifts they each have to offer the world.

As I have nodded off in sleep a few times while trying to write this blog, I will sign off for this evening. I am looking forward to feeling better after a good night’s sleep. May it be so!

Today while I was minding my own business, my sister sent me a miraculous gift that perhaps she didn’t even know she sent. This livestream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/3064708) allowed me to intrude on the lives of a parent and offspring, watching and listening to what was in my sight and hearing one of the most beautiful things I’ve been privileged to witness in a really long time. To be able to do so from the comfort and ease of my computer is remarkable and a blessing that I hope to take advantage of from time to time as long as the feed/stream exists. This particular “eagle cam” is the Decorah Eagle Cam from the Raptor Resource Project in Decorah, Iowa.

I started writing this post this morning after I discovered the stream on my sister’s Facebook page. When I got home from work and sat down to write I started wondering what the noise coming from my computer was. It was the night sounds coming from the live feed of the happenings in the eagle’s nest. I returned to site and watched in fascination for another quarter hour enthralled by the simple beauty of this natural scene. I am a nature lover, and am so grateful to have spent much of my childhood living and playing in a three-plus acre back yard. I grew up loving all kinds of animals, birds, even insects, reptiles, and amphibians. And even though I currently live in an urban area, I am always delighted by nature wherever I find it. As I watched the mother eagle tending to her eaglets I found myself curious about eagles so I went to “the Google” and  asked a question about eagles. Lo and behold, I discovered that there are eagle cams are everywhere and watched nests from Virginia, Iowa, and a few right here in California. (http://www.iws.org/interactive_nestchat_allUstream.html).

Near where I live I don’t have occasion to see eagles, but I find that I am always entertained and never bored with the antics of the neighborhood wild turkeys. I am not certain why I am so intrigued by these large birds (called “earth eagles” by some Native American tribes). They are part of my daily life–my bedroom window looks out over the parking lot of our complex. Behind the lot is a wooded area which is, I believe, where the turkeys roost. I hear them gobble past the window in the early morning (between 5:30 and 6:00) and hear them gobble back through in the evening. During the daytime, they range in the hills around the complex, and clearly our parking lot is their thoroughfare. I’d never been close to wild turkeys in the past, but this year they have become my favorite wild thing. They aren’t terribly intelligent, but are highly entertaining. I have photographed them under a variety of interesting circumstances. Besides their entertainment value, they are actually beautiful birds.

One could suggest that it doesn’t take much to make me happy. (I’m sure there are plenty of people who would argue that it takes a great deal to make me happy.) But put me out in nature in some capacity in which I can sit in and interact with the natural world and I am one happy camper. I am grateful to have discovered the eagle’s nest this morning. I plan to visit it regularly, especially while the eaglets are still young and living in the nest. In the meantime, I will continue to draw inspiration and chuckles from my friends the earth eagles who hang out around my house. I am grateful for such simple pleasures and cheap entertainment.

Today has been a really good day. Another regular sort of day with writing and work and a dozen other things to be grateful for. And here at the close of the day I am grateful beyond measure.

"They Couldn't Possibly Mean Me..."

This has been an odd, slow sort of day. I suppose that’s not a bad thing for a Sunday. I slept later this morning than I have in  many, many months. I think it was a combination of feeling a little under the weather, of being up late the previous night, and all around tiredness. My cell phone buzzing at 10:00 this morning roused me or I might have slept until noon. I figured today would be a low-key day given that I had finished my taxes and having that weight lifted would be followed by a slight crash. And so it was. And that’s alright.

There are times when I get discouraged; when the fog of my day-to-day challenges obscures any sense of past accomplishments, current opportunities, or future possibilities. I am somewhat hard pressed this evening to write many words. Perhaps this is a good time to stop and listen. As I sit here, I hear the sound of a bird or other creature that I totally don’t recognize and is a new sound for the area near my house. I wish I could isolate where it is coming from and see it, but in the darkening of dusk, I cannot. I went outside for a few moments just now and listened until the chill air ran me back inside. I am grateful for the music of evensong as rendered by the birds and other creatures who life in the wooded areas near my complex. And as always I am grateful for the physical ability that allows me to hear and discern what I am hearing.

It is the beginning of a new week. Every day when I get up I thank God, and on most days I tell myself good things about what the day will hold, and at the end of the day, I reflect on what I am grateful for. This is the simple prescription is part of my path for now, and on days when I can’t tell up from down it provides just enough of what I need to see my way through til my vision clears. I look to the coming week hopeful for good things unfolding and with simple gratitudes to share at the close of each day. For tonight that is the best I can do.

I am fighting off the sniffles–I haven’t had a cold or any significant illness in over a year, not since I’ve lived on my own after the end of my relationship last winter. And this is only the sniffles. I have been fortunate to be relatively healthy and able bodied. Periodically as I am walking or running or turning a certain way, I am reminded not only about how fortunate I am to have the use of my limbs and to be in overall pretty good health, but also of how miraculous this body actually is. In the intricacies of structure and function, the delicate dance of interactions of chemistry, biology, physics and myriad other sciences, all coming together to produce movement, thought, speech, perception, and so forth. I am grateful and awed sometimes by the wonder of how it all manages to work.

Nevertheless, I don’t feel so great physically, so not sure how long I’m going to last here in the blogosphere. Today has been one of those relatively unproductive days. Mind you, productivity isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. My more meaningful moments of productivity often have more to do with getting my garden tilled, smoothed, planted and fenced or starting to put together lyrics and music and sticking with it until it becomes a song, or writing a few chapters in my novel as it does about attending a meeting, sending an email or writing a report. I have done all these things and many others and felt either more or less productive depending on my perspective at the time. I have a list of projects I’d like to be working on, mundane things I need to do like clean the clutter off my desk, bathe the dog, and get my brakes repaired, and stuff I’d like to do like read some of the books I’ve had in my library for years but only read parts of. I wonder what combination of these things I could do that would enable me to feel, be seen as, or be productive.

We shall see. I do know one thing I need to accomplish within the next 48 hours: finish and mail my income tax returns. This year for a variety of reasons I am later doing that than I have ever been. As I was unemployed for much of 2011 one might think that taxes would be relatively straightforward and simple, but no. I had a variety of complicating factors over the course of last year that are making have made it way more complex. Nevertheless, sniffles and all, I will sit down, pore over various figures and finally wave the white flag over them and hit the “finish” button. I’ll mail it out with a check–yes I owe–that will be a kind of down payment on the tax bill.  Then I will get on with the rest of life.

I have another 90 minutes before I go pick up my son from work (he gets off at 11 p.m.) Hope I can fight off sleep and sniffles until we get home and I can crawl into bed. As always, I am grateful that I have a home to come to and a bed to crawl into. And I will trust this miraculous body to work on healing itself as I offer it rest and tea and perhaps some antihistamines. It’s all good.

Tonight I am a bit tired, so I will take my rest shortly. Outside my window this evening, I can hear the rumble of thunder–an unexpected sound as we don’t have many thunderstorms in the Bay area. It has been an odd sort of spring–usually the rains come in December and January and the greening of the hills and all things spring happen beginning in mid to late February. We are instead getting our rain in March and April, and are still at only about 55 percent of normal. Still, the rain is a good thing and we’ll take what we can get.

I am grateful to be at the end of a relatively productive day. I worked a bit in slow motion at times today; I felt sleepy and sluggish at times. In spite of that, I managed to make some progress on both of the projects I’ve been contracted to work on. For the most part the people I am working for have seemed pleased with the work I’ve done, and though I haven’t always known the details of the work I’m doing, I know enough to pull things together and deliver them to the folks who need the information. It’s not work that I studied or “trained” to perform, but it is work that meets an important need for a community of underserved people. I don’t think I’ve found my next career, but I am grateful for work that I can do, that uses some organizational skills I’d forgotten that I’d had, and pays more than unemployment benefits. It also buys me time to remain out here in California so I can see to the disposition of my kids, both of whom are in the midst of transitions of sorts.

Nearly a year ago, as I contemplated what I was going to do after having been laid off from my job, I made a commitment to staying put in California for at least a year until my daughter graduated from college. As the months went by and I couldn’t find work locally and our financial situation got increasingly precarious, I began looking for work out of the state. As fate and the really bad job market would have it, none of the out of state jobs panned out, though I was a finalist for two different positions back in the midwest. While this was frustrating and disheartening, it also allowed me to be here to help my kids with different issues and challenges confronting each of them. We are now nearly at the finish line in some ways: my daughters graduates from college in May and with any luck some of the challenges my son is facing will likewise be situated before summer’s out. My reasons for having to remain in California will be resolved; if I stay out here it will be because I choose to, not because I feel like I need to.

Much remains up in the air in my life at the moment. But every day I feel like I am getting closer to clarity and settledness. If I can only keep myself calm in the midst of some of the current chaos and hold onto a measure of faith, with a dash of hope thrown in then when things finally settle into place I can exhale and move into the next phase of my life. Continuing to practice gratitude and generosity, offering compassion and kindness, walking steady and reaching out to others in the midst of turmoil are at least part of the remedy. And leaning on and resting in the love of family and friends, being buoyed by the prayers of persons known and unknown to me all helps as well. I am so very grateful for you.