movingforwardslowly

Now that I’m living in real time, all the maladies of age are coming round.

My left leg is giving me trouble. My doctor ordered a hip x-ray. Everything looks fine.

I might need physical therapy. Epsom salt soaks is what I’m settling for right now.

On top of this, I lost my voice this past weekend. Congestion and mucus are messing things up.

I keep assuring my daughter that I will live. Though, to be honest, her need of constant care is wearing me thin.

In the past when my stress piled up like this, I’d turn to the numbers, convinced I could rewrite the code of my life. This approach just made things worse.

The other day the identity property of addition got stuck in my mind. Something plus nothing equals something was my take-away.

The good news is that I’m back where I started, which is not such a bad place to be.

Sitting outside in the sun helped my spirit. I would have liked to have gotten down in the dirt to pull weeds, but my leg will need a little more time to heal.

I don’t know why I titled this entry — Out of Sync: Never on Cue. It just felt right to me. There was no need for reason.

As the breezes stream past me, feelings of loss can still reach inside and twist my heart.

All the reasons for my choices are not clearly rooted; sometimes impulse had the upper hand.

No matter how hard I try to keep spite from rearing its ugly head, it still can strike me out of nowhere.

Yesterday is gone, and focusing on today will hopefully dim any regrets obstinately holding on.

I pray that optimism will pave the road in front of me, and consideration of others will help guide my choices.

In the end, I will not run away. I will stand up for myself.

I never knew that the word ‘poach’ could mean to sink into mud until I looked the word up today.

I’ve always associated the word with eggs. A poached egg is one that has been cooked either above a simmering liquid or cooked within it.

The word can also mean to gain access to something illegally by trespassing on someone else’s property.

Reading the definition gave me a creepy feeling.

My husband’s nickname for himself has always been ‘Mud’. However, I have never called him this.

The madness that I have been pulling myself away from these past several years definitely had given me a feeling of having my mind and soul trespassed upon.

The old French word ‘pochier’ means ‘to enclose in a bag’.

Thoughts of being some kind of bag or egg or egg sac toyed with my mind during my years of paranoia.

Now, it all seems so laughable, and yet, the question of whether I really was a poached egg did cross my mind as I read the definition.

The weirdness and absurdness of it all leaves me no alternative but to shrug it off, and force myself to get busy doing something else. Maybe forgetting it is the best solution.

It does not help matters that the letters of the word ‘poach’ adds up to 43, and the digits of my birthday, that is quickly approaching, adds up to 34.

I was saved when I realized that the word ‘grace’ also adds up to 34. I have decided that I will dwell with the idea of aging with grace, and forget about all the negativity.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner I’ve been thinking about the meaning of love.

Anybody who has been reading my tree of thoughts has to know by now that my brain got tangled up within a net of numbers.

The panic and anxiety disappeared over time as my mind slowly worked to untangle the mess. However, my relationship with numbers will never be the same as it was before all this happened.

Now that I’m a little past middle-age, my definition of love has changed since I was a hot and bothered teen. Many people confuse love and lust. Love is far more valuable than lust, even though the latter can be terribly tempting.

Love means consistently showing up to help and support one another through good times and bad. This kind of love involves unpaid time and personal sacrifices.

Nothing is more consistent than 24 hours a day for 7 days a week. We often write this as 24/7.

Today I wondered what the number would be if I used the slash bar as a division bar. Since old habits die hard, I picked up a calculator and divided 24 by 7. The digital screen showed the numbers 3.428571429. I then added up all the digits and I arrived at 45.

I already associated the word ‘love’ with the number 54 since l=12, o=15, v=22, and e=5.

So, after all this nonsense, I determined that 24/7 does indeed equal love.

This is for my Sunday meditation. Through years of soul-searching and profound sadness in my personal life, I’ve come to realize that God is in the air.

Each and everyone of us can breathe God in. We must sit alone in nature or in some other sanctuary away from other voices. We don’t need someone in authority to tell us what to think or do. Each of us is capable of breathing in God’s goodness.

If we meditate and listen away from other’s propaganda, God’s word will slowly begin to communicate with our own individual hearts and minds.

It is getting harder these days to get away from all the angry noise. Everyone wants to bend our minds and hearts for their own intentions. Each and everyone of us has our own unique perspective and we need to have the courage to hear our own hearts, especially when the pressure builds.

Some in power want to take away all our quiet sanctuaries. They don’t want us listening to our own hearts or the voice of love and mercy. They want to drown it all out with the roar of their rhetoric.

God’s mind and heart works through us when we take the time to listen. He wants us to have faith in ourselves and in our own hearts and minds. We must have confident faith in ourselves and in God. He loves us. He is not an angry God.

 

Forward and onward are synonyms. I’ve been pondering their meanings and applications. They do have distinctions.

When I think of the word onward, the image of marching soldiers comes to mind, perhaps a parade, perhaps Christian soldiers.

Onward implies motions like actors in a play. The director moves the play forward.

The word forward appears to be more anchored. Maybe this is because it reminds me of foreword, which comes at the front of a book.

Both onward and forward divide up space into partitions or wards.

Forward seems more psychological like the flow of ideas. It does not necessarily require the movement of weight.

Both imply movement towards a goal.

Working together they can move mountains.

Growing up my mother would always use the over-ripe bananas to make banana bread. She never threw them away. She grew up during the 1930’s and 40’s when nothing was ever wasted.

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. Wastefulness was becoming more routine. I’ve thrown many an over-ripe banana away. Recently I’ve been re-evaluating this habit.

When I caught a glance of myself in the mirror the other day, I had the thought that I was becoming my mother. She removed the gray from her hair up until her early eighties. I’m beginning to slowly shrink in height the way she did.

Today the transformation took another step. I began to mash three over-ripe bananas with a fork. I stirred in the sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs. Then added the flour, chopped nuts, a little soda and salt. It’s in the oven now. It was really pretty easy to make. I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. The smell is already beginning to lift my spirits.

 

This summer when I was reorganizing my bedroom and clearing space for a more peaceful and serene setting, I did a little redecorating to usher in the new me. I took off all the old pictures on my walls with the exception of a water color painting of yellow and purple pansies. It is in an exquisite antique frame. It had been painted by my paternal grandmother’s mother, Estella Grant Stamps. She apparently was deaf, but still managed to raise three daughters, and she was married to my grandmother’s father.

If you were to see the painting, I think you would agree that she was a talented artist, though I don’t think she was ever recognized as one. This is one of the few things that I have from my father’s family, so it has a great deal of sentimental value for me.

I have digressed with this little bit of family history. I set out to tell you about a new piece of art I purchased this summer. I wake up to it every morning since I placed it on the wall right next to my bed. It seems to haunt me in a way, and yet it also challenges me, though at the time of purchase this wasn’t clear to me.

It is a photograph of a conch shell resting on the beach with the ocean waves gently curving behind and around and down a stretch of sand. It is printed on a large canvass, so it deceptively looks like a painting. The sunlight is lighting up the spiral details of its head. I was drawn to it for many reasons.

Following the death of my father a number obsession took hold of my brain, and it had me tumbling down a path in a frantic search for patterns. The shell’s spiral seems to symbolize this for me. It is almost like a ghost on my wall and a reminder of hidden messages. Now that I  have made it out of this tunnel, it still seems to push me forward.

The other day a restlessness took hold of me. It was as if my subconscious had picked up a new message for me and it was trying to communicate it. I was compelled to look up the word shell in my dictionary, though it felt like I was grasping at straws slipping away from me. And then at the very end of the definition I saw: she’ll. This is slang for she will and she shall. The message pierced my mind and made an imprint.

The picture no longer symbolizes a cast-a-way of life or as a ghost of past lives. Now I see it as a motivational message for the future. She shall overcome and move forward.

I think my thoughts were being influenced by all the female empowerment that I have been watching on the news recently, however, I am taking it on as a personal challenge for myself.

 

 

 

 

 

The word that has caught within my mind’s snare today is the word “scratch”.

If you look it up in the dictionary you will see that is has many varying definitions, all depending on its context.

The best cakes that I’ve made in my life have been from scratch. In this context, it means to use basic ingredients, nothing pre-packaged. Though to be honest, some basic ingredients have been packaged in a way.

In any case, today the word scratch applies to my mind-set when I sit down to write. I’ve always been a writer in my heart, however, my vision has suffered greatly over the years. Part of the human condition is a self-centeredness that demands that all our thinking revolve around ourselves. (For ex: How do I benefit?, or listen to me, or watch me.) All our choices and decisions are inherently centered around our own well-being, and our own desire for attention and admiration.

Since none of us live completely alone in a vacuum, we need to navigate our world. Our vision has learned to look beyond ourselves to our family, and neighbors. We have learned that to survive we need to build alliances. Trouble comes when our vision cannot see far enough into the future to see all the tribes that extend out from our own world. In order for the tree of life to survive, humans need to extend their vision and honestly see the condition of our shared world, and all the hidden connections.

I will stop preaching now since I don’t believe I have it within myself to be a preacher. I always have a low level of discomfort when telling others how they should live their lives. Personal choices need to come out of individual hearts, and not be coerced.

My own heart has a heavy streak of resentment when someone tries to tell me what choices I should make. This is called oppositional defiance. I believe this breed is the hardest to teach. However, we are teachable if the teacher can be patient enough and constantly experiment with different approaches.

The whole strangeness of my thought process these past few years is that I believe that both the student and teacher has resided together within my own mind.

Scratch can also mean an aimless search, and this too has applied to me at times.

Today is the first day of the new year (2018), and I have decided that I really do need to sit back, and extend my vision, and practice it daily. And maybe then I will be able to tell the story  my heart wants to tell.

 

 

These are two pictures that I took several years ago and combined in a photo editing program. I was just playing around.

Today I wrote a poem about the moon and I was reminded of this picture.

Here is the poem:

Watching the glow of the moon in the night sky has fascinated humans for centuries. Animals in the wild innately follow her cycles. She controls the tides which can wash life away or bring it to shore.

Upon inspection at higher resolution, one can’t miss the craters on her face. This is a price she has had to pay to protect our earth and hold our lives within her grasp.