Today I woke up with some sadness creeping round my heart. I don't know why it was there, but I got up anyway. Got dressed for work. Fed the dogs and let them out to walk, and fed Marcos, the cat, outside. I walked past my wind chimes and let my fingers drift across them so I could hear them before going to work. On the way to work, I thought about God and my kids and the hot pink bloom on a plant my former mother in law gave me before she died recently. I'm horrid with plants, truthfully, and have little affinity or desire for them, but this one has survived even Me, and on Easter Sunday it graced my morning with a single vivid blossom. So as I pushed on the gas to pass the slow trucker, (sorry, Natty), and as I turned up the volume on the Lenny LeBlanc CD I got for a quarter at the Sunnyside Community Book Sale last week, I focused all my inward thoughts on that single pink bloom.
And my spirit lifted. Just like that.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
yellow sunshine, blue sky
This morning as I sat in my car at 4:30 a.m., letting the engine hum before putting it in drive, the lights illuminated my carport and our miniscule front porch. My youngest daughter, Caroline, left her blue scooter out again, I noticed, its black rubber handles leaning casually against the bamboo chair in the carport where I sit to read in the evenings. My old wind chimes, both bamboo, hung still and silent in the no-breeze morning. I glanced at the two plastic bowls, one red, one white, neatly placed by the old dog bed we have out for Marcos, the orange cat Caroline rescued when his owners left him - along with his litter box and those plastic bowls - on the front porch next door as they rumbled away in their U-Haul truck back in September. My heart filled as I sat there, dwelling on my simple, full to the brim, rich life here with these ordinary symbols of the family tucked within.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
wabi sabi: my take
Wabi Sabi...the art of imperfect simplicity....is a Japanese concept that first called to me when I heard about it nearly four years ago. Today, a divorce and death of my father later, I know that my life is all about wabi sabi -ness... and I am deeply grateful.
My heart thrills at the thought of the small, worn wooden chairs I have carted around for years, my daughters' handmade art gracing my walls, and the heart-lifting treasures I surround us with in every room. We do not and never have had the kinds of furnishings that would turn heads. My girls and I live in the midst of the ordinary...nothing really matches, but everything, somehow, goes quietly well together. When I fall asleep at night, I take long, slow looks at my bedroom...at the golden wood of my little bookshelf, gleaming in the soft light from an oddly shaped purple lamp my youngest girl gave me...I see four framed pictures...my girls, my dogs, a flower...resting on the second shelf. On the top shelf is a wide sea blue vase, crammed with a mass of huge pink blooms. Beside it stands the stern wooden nurse statue that Mama gave me, her face flat and harsh but honest, her nurse's uniform crisply white, her posture ramrod stiff. A small oval plaque proclaims "Well behaved women never make history." For fun, I put a hot pink-and-lime green alligator I found at a Florida dollar store, snaking his way past a hotter pink and green cup that holds my plastic daisy and rose pens. My room, like the rest of our little house, is a shout -out... of who I am, what I love, and how I see the world around me.
A simple, humble, honest joy springs up within me when I look around at the ordinary bliss of our common little life. Our furniture is a surprising mix-match of treasures discovered in local Goodwill stores, on dewy Saturday morning yard sale jaunts, or in tiny, hidden away thrift stores.
I think of the charming turquoise antique sofa and chair that grace our miniscule living room. I fell madly in love with them at a Goodwill in Palm Coast, FL, but was reluctant to pay the inital price of $129 for the sofa, $69 for the chair. I waited two weeks, holding my breath, whispering prayers that no one would buy them. Blessings happened: no one bought them. I wandered in exactly 14 days from the first time I saw them, and they were marked down....$49 for the sofa, $19 for the chair. I grabbed their tickets and practically ran to the register to pay for them. My then-husband, Dave, used to my eclectic sense of beauty, wisely kept his mouth shut and his muscles at the ready as we loaded them up and drove them home.
I think of a quote by songwriter Leonard Cohen that I read in a magazine somewhere: "There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in." My life has been so full of cracks this year. It must be filled with light by now...my heart has grown, I know, stretched wide with compassion, hollowed deep by grief, pushed and pulled and flattened out in the process of losing, and finding, and losing again.
My husband left me and then my father. Both leavings caught me by vulnerable surprise: I stood, shell-shocked and tiny, small in the enormity of my pain. I did not think I would survive either loss, they were so great and I was so transparent in their overwhelming midst. Dave left me with a kiss and a smile and promise to see me on Sunday. He left with his surfboard and his body that I loved so hard, and I was knocked blindsided when he didn't return, when he finally called to say that he did not want to be my husband anymore, not even long enough to help me pick up the shattered pieces of our life he'd left behind. Or to help me move the turquoise sofa he'd just moved for me a week before. Dad left me sweetly, sadly, not wanting to go but unable to stay, helpless in the face of the colon cancer that ravaged his body so fiercely, took him so quickly...34 days from the day of his diagnosis...from our startled, breaking hearts. I felt the anguish of these cracks that came so abruptly and so finally...and the comfort that I felt was in the simplicity left to me.
I wandered for weeks among the only joys left to my daughters and me: we ate from our simple, ordinary dishes. We ate frozen pizza and freezer cookie dough for days on end, but we cut them in tiny, delicate pieces with our old pizza cutter and the thin, flat knife Mama gave me when I first left home. We drank milk and Coke and sweet iced tea in tall glasses with thick bases, the ones we marveled over at Goodwill, before buying the lot of them for fifty cents a piece. I sat alone at night, while my girls slept, fingering the uneven bamboo of my headboard, a yard sale find, drinking in its cool whiteness in the semi-darkness of my room.
We do not have a lot of things: we have nothing that is of much monetary value. What we have is a rocker I bought for $75 at a yard sale 17 years ago, that I rocked all three of my babies in, its arms worn where I gripped them in pain as Zoe, my first born, nursed too vigorously for my untrained breasts to accommodate. We have mismatched pottery bowls and cups in every room, none to eat or drink from, but all happily serving second lives as holders of pencils, pens, rubber bands, paper clips, spare change, and the occasional crayon or two. We have a black metal chicken, perched on a kitchen shelf, keeping guard over our little flock by night and day. We have a round wooden table just right for homework and family meals and snacks for friends, with four chairs that do not match it or each other, but that we have used thoroughly and happily for years.
My house is rife with faults, as are the people that live within it. I am so marred: i have made so many mistakes. But I am a woman of beauty, as are my girls. I like the wrinkles round my eyes, and the hard-earned wisdom in my hazel eyes. Much of that wisdom came from my mistakes, so I cannot begrudge myself them.
Wabi sabi is the way I choose to live my life, to raise my girls. It says that I embrace the natural, that I am warmed by the simple, in food and furnishings and relationships. It is a spirituality that is made stronger with each day of honest, true living that I face, and endure.
It is about my scars, my shortcomings, my failures as importantly as my triumphs. It is about living my life, experiencing it on a visceral level. I don't want to exist. I want to thrive. Wabi Sabi style.
My heart thrills at the thought of the small, worn wooden chairs I have carted around for years, my daughters' handmade art gracing my walls, and the heart-lifting treasures I surround us with in every room. We do not and never have had the kinds of furnishings that would turn heads. My girls and I live in the midst of the ordinary...nothing really matches, but everything, somehow, goes quietly well together. When I fall asleep at night, I take long, slow looks at my bedroom...at the golden wood of my little bookshelf, gleaming in the soft light from an oddly shaped purple lamp my youngest girl gave me...I see four framed pictures...my girls, my dogs, a flower...resting on the second shelf. On the top shelf is a wide sea blue vase, crammed with a mass of huge pink blooms. Beside it stands the stern wooden nurse statue that Mama gave me, her face flat and harsh but honest, her nurse's uniform crisply white, her posture ramrod stiff. A small oval plaque proclaims "Well behaved women never make history." For fun, I put a hot pink-and-lime green alligator I found at a Florida dollar store, snaking his way past a hotter pink and green cup that holds my plastic daisy and rose pens. My room, like the rest of our little house, is a shout -out... of who I am, what I love, and how I see the world around me.
A simple, humble, honest joy springs up within me when I look around at the ordinary bliss of our common little life. Our furniture is a surprising mix-match of treasures discovered in local Goodwill stores, on dewy Saturday morning yard sale jaunts, or in tiny, hidden away thrift stores.
I think of the charming turquoise antique sofa and chair that grace our miniscule living room. I fell madly in love with them at a Goodwill in Palm Coast, FL, but was reluctant to pay the inital price of $129 for the sofa, $69 for the chair. I waited two weeks, holding my breath, whispering prayers that no one would buy them. Blessings happened: no one bought them. I wandered in exactly 14 days from the first time I saw them, and they were marked down....$49 for the sofa, $19 for the chair. I grabbed their tickets and practically ran to the register to pay for them. My then-husband, Dave, used to my eclectic sense of beauty, wisely kept his mouth shut and his muscles at the ready as we loaded them up and drove them home.
I think of a quote by songwriter Leonard Cohen that I read in a magazine somewhere: "There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in." My life has been so full of cracks this year. It must be filled with light by now...my heart has grown, I know, stretched wide with compassion, hollowed deep by grief, pushed and pulled and flattened out in the process of losing, and finding, and losing again.
My husband left me and then my father. Both leavings caught me by vulnerable surprise: I stood, shell-shocked and tiny, small in the enormity of my pain. I did not think I would survive either loss, they were so great and I was so transparent in their overwhelming midst. Dave left me with a kiss and a smile and promise to see me on Sunday. He left with his surfboard and his body that I loved so hard, and I was knocked blindsided when he didn't return, when he finally called to say that he did not want to be my husband anymore, not even long enough to help me pick up the shattered pieces of our life he'd left behind. Or to help me move the turquoise sofa he'd just moved for me a week before. Dad left me sweetly, sadly, not wanting to go but unable to stay, helpless in the face of the colon cancer that ravaged his body so fiercely, took him so quickly...34 days from the day of his diagnosis...from our startled, breaking hearts. I felt the anguish of these cracks that came so abruptly and so finally...and the comfort that I felt was in the simplicity left to me.
I wandered for weeks among the only joys left to my daughters and me: we ate from our simple, ordinary dishes. We ate frozen pizza and freezer cookie dough for days on end, but we cut them in tiny, delicate pieces with our old pizza cutter and the thin, flat knife Mama gave me when I first left home. We drank milk and Coke and sweet iced tea in tall glasses with thick bases, the ones we marveled over at Goodwill, before buying the lot of them for fifty cents a piece. I sat alone at night, while my girls slept, fingering the uneven bamboo of my headboard, a yard sale find, drinking in its cool whiteness in the semi-darkness of my room.
We do not have a lot of things: we have nothing that is of much monetary value. What we have is a rocker I bought for $75 at a yard sale 17 years ago, that I rocked all three of my babies in, its arms worn where I gripped them in pain as Zoe, my first born, nursed too vigorously for my untrained breasts to accommodate. We have mismatched pottery bowls and cups in every room, none to eat or drink from, but all happily serving second lives as holders of pencils, pens, rubber bands, paper clips, spare change, and the occasional crayon or two. We have a black metal chicken, perched on a kitchen shelf, keeping guard over our little flock by night and day. We have a round wooden table just right for homework and family meals and snacks for friends, with four chairs that do not match it or each other, but that we have used thoroughly and happily for years.
My house is rife with faults, as are the people that live within it. I am so marred: i have made so many mistakes. But I am a woman of beauty, as are my girls. I like the wrinkles round my eyes, and the hard-earned wisdom in my hazel eyes. Much of that wisdom came from my mistakes, so I cannot begrudge myself them.
Wabi sabi is the way I choose to live my life, to raise my girls. It says that I embrace the natural, that I am warmed by the simple, in food and furnishings and relationships. It is a spirituality that is made stronger with each day of honest, true living that I face, and endure.
It is about my scars, my shortcomings, my failures as importantly as my triumphs. It is about living my life, experiencing it on a visceral level. I don't want to exist. I want to thrive. Wabi Sabi style.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)