day twelve: 27 days of gratitude

Holidays... as a single mama, I share the holidays with a wider circle of family. This translates into spending many of the anglo-christian glory days alone. Adaptable as ever, our little family developed the tradition of celebrating holidays whenever we decide and so Sunday was THANKSGIVING at our house! Our time together, between Owen's Thanksgiving and Christmas trips to Illinois, is short, so with a desire to maximize on holiday cheer we put up our tree serenaded by Frank Sinatra singing Silent Night.

We spent our afternoon preparing a delicious feast consisting of requests made by each of the boys: Owen wanted mashed potatoes and gravy with homemade cranberry sauce and Bodhi wanted turkey and Grandma Mojo's special steamed red cabbage recipe.

For dessert Bodhi helped make his favorite gluten-free peanut butter cookies (he always leaves one cookie "unsmashed" to remind him which one to eat first).

We watched the documentary Happy, sipped warm almond milk eggnog and munched our cookies together in the living room with Christmas lights sparkling nearby.

While we watched, we worked on mandalas, drawing the areas of our lives we wanted to invest with intentions for healing and growth in the year ahead.

Then I read a chapter in Peter and the Starcatcher while rocking Bodhi in our cozy chair. He fell asleep in my arms. As I sat watching Owen completing his mandala and listening to the sounds of Bodhi at rest, I realized that I have more to be thankful for than I have words to express. I am so grateful.

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Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...

angelbirdflies

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