Tag Archives: awareness

It’s a Wonderful Life

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November 14, 2012, my 72nd birthday.

I have made it my custom for years now to give myself birthday gifts which no one else can give me.  I cherish the hugs and surprises from my husband and children, love every phone call and email, and smile all over with my granddaughters’  “Happy Birthday, Granmary!”  But no matter how else I spend my time having a happy day, I give myself music – this is the time when I begin playing my favorite Christmas albums, beginning with James Galway’s Christmas Carol and going on to thrill to an English Handbell Choir, Renaissance pieces by the Tallis Scholars, Handel’s Messiah, and John Denver’s Muppet Christmas, which was the one my little boys loved to listen to when they decorated the Christmas tree.  It still makes them laugh and we still play it when the tree is staggering to stand up and be dressed.  but I also play Paul Hillyer’s Home to Thanksgiving.  And in the last couple of years I have added a gift to myself.  I write a list to go along with Hillyer’s music.  This is a list of sacred ordinary things from throughout my year and is a way for me to move toward the celebration of Thanksgiving in our family, which also is the springboard for Advent.  Since I keep a gratitude journal where I record 5 things I am grateful for each morning, I simply make my birthday list from that journal, choosing 2 or 3 entries for each month in the past year.  Just remembering and writing these things is a reminder of hope and joy. What a gift!

 Gratitude

In my 72nd year, these are things for which I give thanks:

greens from our garden on the table with peas and cornbread

time to curl up with a book

walking around the lake on a clear, cold day

pain management for Joe

silent room, dark except for Christmas tree lights

Christ, who came, is come, and will come

warming my aching fingers on my coffee cup

my son taking down the Christmas tree and making our dinner

safety during a storm

winter sunshine after the winds

puttering and pruning in the garden

rainbows on the floor from the prism in leaded glass at our front door

the buttery taste of winter squash

memories of babies and boys

my husband’s gentle spirit

morning quiet time

13 bean soup

settling, being settled

deep colors of roses blooming in January

mockingbird singing on top of our rose arbor

“hope is that thing with feathers that perches on the soul and sings….”

Sabbath heart

a perfectly timed call from a dear friend

hoping in, not for

the poetry of Luci Shaw

my nursing education and experience

books on hold at the library

planting Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato seeds

quiet – no rushing to fill with noise

still – no rushing to “do”

Places to Play and Pray

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Everybody needs beauty, as well as bread

.Places to play in and pray in

Where nature may heal and give strength

to body and soul.

~ John Muir

November

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Autumn leaves go very near the top of my favorite things list.  I grew up a few hundred miles north of where I now live, just far enough away for seasonal change to be much more apparent.  I remember watching for the colors to appear when temperatures dropped.  After the first frost, scarlet Sumac, yellowing Sycamore and Sweet Gum were blazing drifts of foliage that popped out of the evergreen forests of Pine and Cedar along East Texas roadsides. A few years in Oklahoma are remembered as having beautiful fall colors.  Some time living in and near Dallas when our boys were little brought us plenty of pretty leaves and fallen ones to pile up and scuffle through.   My sweet niece sent me pictures of the brilliant confetti of New Jersey leaves just last week before Hurricane Sandy caused so much destruction in their area.  I am grateful she and her family are safe, but know that so many others are ravaged from the brutal storm.  Winds didn’t just blow away the beautiful leaves, whole trees were uprooted.

Swirling in the mix of my concern and prayers, I have thought how glad I am that Jen saw the beauty of those leaves and shared the images with me.  In reality, I have lived a good deal of my life where the autumn colors were little changed, or at most subtle – South Texas, Southern California, Indonesia.  For twenty years now, at home here on the South Texas Gulf Coast, I need to look more closely at the gifts of Autumn.  I love the yellow leaves that swirl from Chinaberry and Elms, the little vermillion flags waving from Hawthorne and Crepe Myrtle. But most of all, I treasure the leaves that fall from my Magnolia tree, bronzed and gilded on one side that is lacquered shiny, and soft sueded brown on the underside.  Magnolia leaves were my playthings when I was a child.  A bank of Magnolia leaves graced our wedding.  I stood in front of a Magnolia tree in Bogor on the island of Java.  As I walk in these days leading to my turning 72, the turning of these magnificent leaves is with me again.  I am thankful.

Awe

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  How Filled With Awe

Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Oh, Holy One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. and we, clay touched by Thee, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it.”                      ~  Rachel Naomi Remen, quoting a prayer from the Jewish Prayer Book, Gates of Prayer

And Now, I Bud Again

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A seed from some Cosmos planted in a nearby bed drifted over to a flower pot where this bloom is on a single plant that has become a giant reminder of parent plants much smaller and long gone.  This is more a bush, and is now taller than me!  It is covered with flowers that compete with the sunset in their vivid color.  It is an unexpected gift and I love it.

“And now in age I bud again after so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, and relish versing.”  ~ George Herbert

Smooth Stones

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I keep a small basket of smooth stones, each marked with a word,  on the back porch which I use like prayer beads. Somehow, as I lift a stone and place it beside me with a prayer for each thing the word I have written there represents, I am able to focus more sharply and receive these gifts.  I keep the same list by the coffee pot in the kitchen and can cover it with the palm of my hand in my petition.  Laying the stones down is a random process, so I am drawn to the pattern on this particular day when I look at all of them together.   I begin with seeking Light and the progression leads me to the most important request, “Thyself.”  I realize that if I could have only one request it must be that, for it is in the presence of God I find the all the rest.

The poetry of John O Donahue helps me imagine he might have had a basket of stones, too.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,

Clear in word,

Gracious in awareness,

Courageous in thought,

Generous in LOVE.

– John O’Donohue

Lagniappe

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Recently our favorite garden center had a greenhouse sale. It is hard for me to pass up plants we love to have in our garden on sale for $2, so I came home with a large healthy milkweed.  I parked it on the back porch until I could pick a good spot in the yard for it. I shouldn’t be surprised since I know that milkweed is the only plant on which Monarch butterflies lay their eggs, but was pleasantly amazed the next day when I discovered my lagniappe – 6 tiny caterpillars munching away at the milkweed leaves.  I had to laugh as I remembered a conversation I overheard while I was looking at the nursery plants.

A lady standing next to me said  yes, this was a good buy for such a large plant but she had one like it and caterpillars kept eating it up.  I smiled and reassured her that meant she would have alot of butterflies, too, since the caterpillars would crawl off to neighboring spots, form a chrysalis, and emerge as Monarchs.  She looked at me and stomped off complaining that the butterflies were OK but she couldn’t take the caterpillars.

It is true, the little yellow and black wigglers completely stripped my new plant, so much that I took caterpillars and all out to another milkweed in the garden and let them lunch there too.  Within a few days there were no leaves left, and no caterpillars either.  Now as I enjoy the flickering color of butterfly wings I am happy they had what they needed to become what they are.  Today I see that both milkweed plants have new leaves popping out all along their branches. I am thankful for learning to let the caterpillars be.

* Mark Twain writes about the word in a chapter on New Orleans in Life on the Mississippi (1883). He called it “a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get”:

We picked up one excellent word — a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word — “lagniappe.” They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish — so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth.”…  It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.

See and Tell

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Pay attention         Be astonished        Tell about it       ~Mary Oliver

Small children often have a practice at school called show and tell.  That seems to be kin to Mary Oliver’s words.  First you have to notice, to really see before you can choose something to show or have its description to tell about.  I grow a great many herbs in my garden.  Each has unique characteristics of growth and appearance and fragrance. Part of the joy of tending this garden is in seeing and knowing the differences.

This Cuban Oregano is one of my favorites for its beauty – softly variegated colors on aromatic velvet leaves that I love to touch. I like the way it leans into our weathered wood fence as if to press its restoring oil into the splintered plank.  When I water the plants around it, I look for it, I pay it attention.  I am rewarded with fresh amazement at the loveliness of growing things, surviving the heat of summer and thriving.

“Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization.  Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.  It is, as Ruskin says, ‘not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.’  I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing…But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.”   ~ Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Not Always What it Seems

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From Where You’re Standing
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.  It also depends on what sort of person you are.”   C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
Most call it a weed
But it declares itself
Survivor
Victorious
Determined to reclaim territory
in grassy lawns, between flagstones, under a rose bush
Wildflower?
Native Texas Plant?
Field green when found in a bag at the store?
Its highest purpose blooms
in feathery puffs –
bane of gardener
delight of every child
who holds it up to make a wish
blowing away a cloud of laughter

Beyond First Sight

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Our pomegranate harvest won’t win any beauty contests.  Most of the smallish globes that make the thin tree branches droop down don’t look at all like those available in supermarkets.  No luscious rounds of rouged skin here.  I am not sure what it is, but some blight attacked the trees and left these dark freckles on the skin of all our fruit. But I learned a long time ago that it is not what’s on the outside that counts with pomegranates and people.  I cut the tough skin, submerged the pieces in a bowl of water to break apart the arils inside, and look at the scarlet, glistening, juicy results!

Now comes the reward!  A handful of these seeds drips intense flavor and power packed nutrition!  I love the sweet yet tart pop of juice each tiny aril provides. We like them for snacks, but I will also use them to top salads, make salad dressings, and squeeze some for juice to freeze.

My garden as always teaches me truth – take time to look beyond the exterior. Soon it will be time to harvest the Meyer lemons.  I think their lesson is going to be “don’t give up!” It took a few years for this tree to have more than a few lemons but this year there are too many to count.  Don’t worry, I have a list of “100 things to do with Meyer Lemons!”