Do you remember the book called The Power of Habit? I read a bit of it then lost interest but as I remember it was encouraging and made the point that the path to bettering one’s self is simply a matter of creating better and better habits.

Here’s the thing.

I need to fit a bunch into my day if I’m ever going to reach my life goals: blog, walk the dogs, feed the reptiles, violin, banjo, weights, stretch, read, tend the garden and of course work full-time running a private pediatric practice in the middle of a crazy winter where everyone is coughing and no one seems to be able to breathe without a major amount of support and encouragement.

Everyone has forgotten how to be sick and with every fever comes panic at the disco. So my job is a lot right now though it gets dark early and I’d love to be a sloth. Sorry, me, there’s just too much on my plate for that.

I made a schedule a few nights ago and here it is –

6:30 am – blog, 7:30 am core work and stretch, 8am shower, 830-915 – feed animals and drive to Lafayette, paperwork and 15 mins of violin, patients 10-12, 1230-130 hike and weights, 130-2 violin, 2-5 patients, 5-6 paperwork, 630-7 feed animals, 730-9 – gym, banjo, 9-11 read etc.

Hahahahahahahaha.

I made that schedule in a desperate attempt to get on track to reaching my life goals before my sixtieth birthday. Sixty is a big one.

I also downloaded an app called Productive.

You punch in your daily activities and goals and if you opt in they will remind you to wash the dishes/drink water/stand up straight/do some jumping jacks – anything that feels important. You just enter it and they will text, poke and encourage you on your merry way.

I am reasonably good at coming up with plans but I rarely complete the tasks quite as I imagined I would. Anyone who reads this blog, and there are at least ten of you, know that I am not a ballerina en pointe, I don’t run ultra marathons, and clean eating only accounts for around 75 percent of what goes in my mouth. Also, after half a decade of writing a blog called Datergurl, I do not have a boyfriend and more than that have not had a single date nor a locking of the eyes in over a year.

What I have managed is to take some ballet classes (B.C.) and I stand up straighter. I once ran a half marathon but when training for something longer my knee seized up at mile 18 and I’ve never managed to run much since. I still try to eat well – daytimes are a cinch but my nights inevitably get a bit sloppy.

And no, I don’t want a boyfriend anymore.

But I DO want to make music, read a novel or two, and improve my physical shape and get stronger. Work and animals take priority but there’s the rest that I want to do before I leave this earth and body of mine.

I am writing this post and this blog to take you on a journey through what happens when all my best intentions go up in flames. Its both sad and funny and if you are at all like me all too common. It also is why we need to forgive ourselves because at this point in our lives the world keeps dumping on us in steady rain and occasional avalanches. We have created full lives that sometimes get in the way of our other goals, and changing our habits and rearranging our priorities is somewhere between difficult and next to impossible.

Occasionally the sun does shine but let’s face it, we’re living in Oregon most of the time – to pound this metaphor to death.

I used to be able to bang out a blog post in one hour and I’d do it when I first woke up and my brain was the most fluid. For whatever reason it now takes me 2-3 hours to write a post, and many are abandoned for lack of anything worthy of saying again and again. I read what I have written and I simply don’t find it adds value so I bail.

My posts repeat themselves because my life repeats itself. Over and over until death do us part. I used to get so down on myself for not finishing things I started, but I don’t anymore. I forgive myself because as you will see I do do things. I can try and point my feet in new directions through new habits. The refocusing is essential and I am a firm believer in standing up and catching every wave that I can. But sometimes I get tossed around in the surf and sometimes I have to swim with the current to save myself from drowning.

My next blog post is going to take you through my first three days with the Productive app. Get out your hankies and also feel free to point and laugh, as always.

I have to stop now because in the middle of writing this I took an important call and now I need to go to work. It’s raining – not metaphorically – but actually pouring down rain. I am going to be late.

But I will show up and do my best.

Hurrah, hurrah.

Life is funny because you never get everything you want all at the same time but if you keep on going and pay attention enough to notice what’s right in front of you, you’ll get everything you want in little bits and pieces: here and there, between the rocks and the hard places, in the tiny cracks, along the way, and up against every wall in your path…here, there and everywhere you will collect all your moments and memories and many of them will be momentous and wonderful – as they should be because…..this is your life!

Some things in life aren’t as good as we’d hoped they would be. I’m sure you have your own examples but mine are breast-feeding and bearded dragons. I was certain both would be amazing and I would not actively seek out either experience ever again, if I’m being real.

On the other hand just about everything else in the world has the potential to be amazing or at least a thing of value. Whether its a stepping stone or an end unto itself, LIFE (the stuff we’re busy doing while we are making other plans) has some decent things in store.

But the thing is you gotta get out and live it and that is easier said than done.

Many many times in my life, I have been overwhelmed by change, sorrow, loss, loneliness – THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF SO MUCH NOTHING, etc. Many times I have just wanted to stay the heck in bed, and I’ve done that for sure.

After high school I had no idea what to do with myself. There was a lot of flailing before Tina Bettencourt told me to go to med school!

Medical school was fun but I was very alone for quite a bit of it and when I made friends they were of the desperate kind. They walked and talked like friends but deep down I don’t think we had what it took to go the distance.

We were placeholders for each other.

We tried.

Raising children (one of the most looked-forward-to of endeavors in my life) wasn’t a slam dunk because I was also divorced, working full time, and hormonal through a lot of it. Plus kids are way more than anyone ever tells you. For both good and bad it’s a hold-on-to-your-britches-and-pray-you-come-up-for-air-someday kind of an experience.

Note to those of you who still have kids at home: you will be thrust up for air one day and you’ll wonder how it went by so fast. You’ll be happy to be finally on your own without all the little sucker eels attached to you but same time you will be so despondent about the end of your kid decades that you’ll have to sublimate a lot until you get better. You will get better when you start to enjoy your adult children for who they now are, but gawd is it bittersweet.

Ending all of my relationships was hard, but especially the last big one that was seven or eight years ago. After Peter there really hasn’t been anyone. I catalogued it all in my DaterGurl blog – whine whine whine.

FYI I can now appreciate that all the men who didn’t want to come out and play with me were doing me a favor but at the time is was a tearfest and discouraging. I wanted a best friend and mistakenly thought it needed to be of the suitor variety. Turns out turtles and geckos and the kids next door are all magnificent best friends.

So here is my life hook and the thing I want you to rememeber: life can deliver some great happy blows in between all the difficult ones. As long as you keep trying to live it, good things will present themselves.

Like what you ask? Ok how about the Band. I am calling our band the New Ramblin’ West Coast Better Late Than Nevers. It’s a band that is really the embodiment of something I always wanted to do but didn’t think I could do.

Doing things you didn’t think you could is probably the secret to a long and gratifying life. If I had to pick one guiding principle this would be it.

The cool thing about getting older is that – in my 50’s and soon to be 60’s – I have been much more open to doing whatever it is because if not now, when and the you only have one life to live thing becomes really evident the older you get. No one misses the chances they don’t take makes more sense the longer you live.

Take The NRWC Better Late Than Nevers. When I was a little girl I really liked to sing and spent many hours doing “Life is a Cabaret” (old chum) in the driveway waiting to be discovered. I didn’t have a bad voice but it wasn’t great and I was too shy to act so my Broadway career stalled out. Kinda. Sorta,

I still made my Oscar and Grammy speeches in the car where no one but the adoring fans I imagined in my head would hear me. I still had lots to be appreciative of and gave many heartfelt thanks to all who helped me get this far. But I also had a day job.

Then an idea I’d been kicking around (the thing I could never do) – it got a kick in pants from a friend Monica and then somehow other people showed up and now third practice and here I am singing my little heart out having THE time of my life. Bam! I only had to wait fifty years for this!

So the purpose here is to say that all the things that make up a life can only happen if you are out in the world and sometimes the world makes it hard because so many overwhelming things happen but don’t give up!

Say hello to your neighbors because one of them might play the accordion or teach guitar.

Plant flowers to cheer yourself up when you’ve forgotten you pushed them into the ground. Bulbs are great for that! Talk to the kids where you live because some of them can be a lot of fun. crochet! Make friends who knit and swap patterns! Make things with clay.

The most important thing is get out in the world and do the things you want to do and be the person you want to hang out with because in the end its just you and the world.

It’s a lot, for sure, to be shackled with having to make your own life but if you engage as much as you can, you will be rewarded, adored, discovered…singing, hiking with dogs, listening to great music, growing insanely beautiful dahlias… it will sneak up on you and it will be more than enough….just not all at once.

I have not been blogging because I’ve been too busy doing. In order to write about things you have to stop what you’re doing and get it all down on virtual paper and it takes time and things have been good enough that I don’t want to interrupt the flow.

Flow is a bad-ass surrendering to life as it unfolds. It’s what happens when you give in to the moment and let everything else go. It’s living in the truest present you can muster and it resists over-planning. Which isn’t to say I don’t have some bomb happenings on my calender.

Second band practice is tomorrow – whoop whoop!

What this being in the moment/flow thing is for me is taking my down time and letting it unfold organically (sounds mumbo jumbo-ey but just go with it, okay?).

This weekend there’s plenty on my list: a baby visit, garden and house-cleaning, music and a sesh to prepare for band Monday, charting, Farmer’s Market for food, laundry, cleaning my office and cleaning out my car…..

Yesterday with so much to do I hardly knew where to start so I let Jesus take the wheel and turned it all over to Mother Nature and Flow.

Watering, I noticed some sweet little surprises…..like these seeds. I didn’t know the balls on this plant contained seeds but looky here!!

I mean I should have guessed the balls had some kind of function but honestly I was completely surprised. I’ve also been surprised by the artichoke plant growing from the root of the prior artichoke plant. I did not expect this!!

I did the baby visit and cleaned my office and went to the market and then my talented little (big!) patient called and said OMG she forgot to remind me about the Paulson Court Concert and I dropped everything and showed up there because I just love the vibe. See for yourself:

Then I had kind of a loud time playing music and chillaxing in the hot tub.

And that is how you do it!

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Synchronicity abounds: this just came up in my feed….the Art of Doing Nothing….is really the art of paying attention to the world around you…

https://apple.news/nowPlaying/AdUPaG7CtT1ylpB0BZkj_bA

I cut off my hair about a year ago. It started to grow then I shaved it off again even shorter. If you don’t believe me, here it is.

I was surprised by the number of people originally who said they loved it. I suspected many were just filling the air with words of encouragement given the lack of anything else to say when a person buzzes off their hair.

The standard response was: you look great, I’ve always wanted to do that, you can pull it off but I don’t think I could.

My answer was and always is the same: anyone can pull it off. The truth is that just about everyone looks good without hair. Pulling it off just requires sheers and attitude. A big smile and some Doc Martens. Glittery eye shadow is my secret weapon the nowadays.

Yesterday I posted a picture from the beach on Maui. It wasn’t a great picture of me, from the perspective of neck and jowls. That’s what buzzed hair has done for me. I worry a whole lot less about my neck and my jowls.

So one of my Facebook friends said how beautiful I looked but would I please grow out my hair?? This woman is someone I love of course in part because she speaks her mind.

Well, I’m gonna speak my mind too so listen up.

I’m 58 and as far as I am concerned, it isn’t my job to look pretty anymore. My job as I understand it is to be kind, to help others, to take care the world around me, to create art, to make music, to educate others and myself…..those are some of my jobs.

I already blogged about the magic of no hair. It saves me a lot of time. It’s not just the time it used to take to wash and style my hair. I also spend exactly no time thinking about my hair. It’s never a bad hair day….or it’s always a bad hair day depending on one’s perspective. It is what it is so….next?

Without revealing my occasional illusions of grandeur, casting off stereotypes of femininity and rejecting the obligation as a woman to crank up the heat as high as it will go is tremendously empowering.

Roar.

There are also moments when it’s esthetically on point. But that’s not my point. My point is that as humans, hair has a function beyond esthetics. Our bodies are here to do things beyond attract a mate. They are our vessel. No more, no less.

Our vessels are miracles and should be revered as such. We can adorn them and shape them or mould them. Our vessels show signs of wear and tear and it’s a good idea to take care of them some. But it’s an even better idea to tend to our souls and our inner beings. Self-love and a sense of magic and whimsy about life is far superior to a rigid adherence to standards of beauty.

Balance is key and I am going to suggest that fretting too much about our outer appearance keeps us from tending our inner garden.

So am I going to grow my hair out as my friend recommended ?

The answer is….maybe.

I have an idea of just not cutting it until I turn 60 as a way of welcoming in the next decade. I will say…40 was a cheeky bit of managing to not age while aging. 50 was a come to Jesus decade when the getting older started. But the reality of 60 is much different. Real aging has happened with the lumps and the odd folds and the thinning skin. It’s here, get used to it.

I will use my hair to feel the things I want to feel and abject beauty isn’t always the overriding goal. Strength, longevity, moxie, determination….these are more up my alley at the moment. A buzzed head aligns with all that.

As an aside I’m also going to say that when you don’t have much hair, hair itself can seem kind of icky. Like long nails when you like them short. I’m not judging the long hairs out there I’m just saying that a neatly trimmed head has a certain kind of clean appeal.

I do have a wig. My mom doesn’t like my bald head and as a mother myself I cut the woman some slack by making it easier on her.

But everyone else can just deal.

It’s only hair. We’re only on this planet a short time. Anything that can change our perspective, help us find strength, drive our attention inward and our interactions with others towards deeper connection is to be celebrated.

I celebrate my nearly bald head and if the hair grows and it serves me I will celebrate that too. But it will never define me or color my day as good or bad. And for that, I am quite grateful to have shaken things up a bit with trimmers and a gleam in my eye.

Namaste, world.

Today is Mother’s Day.

I was cleaning the house yesterday and I decided to listen to some Opera. I probably wouldn’t even know that I love Opera were it not for the fact that I grew up with it. I grew up listening because my mother played Opera on the stereo, took me to Opera in the park (Pavarotti was there, I think, or maybe I imagined that….but I’m pretty sure he was there), and talked to me about Opera. Occasionally we even went to the Opera.

That was back when records were a thing and there was no internet. We all had loads of free time and not much to do. There wasn’t even a Blockbuster or VHS, or Beta. You could watch whatever was on T.V., or read or play some music on the stereo. Every family had a record collection and every kid spent hours memorizing album covers and just listening.

We had Trini Lopez, Harry Belafonte, some Mozart, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez and Opera.

I decided yesterday to listen to Don Giovanni and scrolling through my options on Spotify I saw an album cover I recognized. I remembered a label that put out collections of excerpts from operas and I recognized the font on the cover and the layout so I figured it would be a good choice. I also saw on the cover the name of the soprano: Te Kanawa.

Oh, that’s Kiri Te Kanawa I said to myself.

Then I said to myself how crazy it is, the things I know.

We know the things we know for many reasons. One of those reasons is our mothers. Mothers share their world with us and some of it sticks. They expose us to so much that becomes a part of who we are and we don’t always think about it until we realize that for a time we knew all the famous Opera stars by heart, and the reason is our mom.

Then I wondered about my own children. They don’t know Opera. I played old timey, rock and bluegrass around the house so what they heard was very different. My kids know John Prine and Emmylou…some Bob Dylan…..but not Opera.

I always think it’s a little bit narcissistic when people talk about kids as being mini-me copies of their parents. Sure some things wear off on a child but what kids really get from their parents is something else. Kids get inspiration – and a blueprint for how to live. Then they go out in the world and put their own spin on it.

I was very lucky to have – and still have – my mother for inspiration. I played different music than she did around the house with my kids…..but I’ve always listened to music, especially when I clean. I fling the windows open, blast the stereo…..or whatever we call those little doodahs we listen to nowadays – a floating speaker – and I clean as the music plays.

My mom knows how to live and she ingrained it in me. She taught me how to cook and how to entertain. We do it differently, but she taught me how to do it. My mom always makes dinner. I don’t always make dinner but I did when my kids were growing up and I know how to do it. My kids are all excellent cooks and I don’t remember teaching any of them to cook but they say I did. I guess it just rubs off. They make things I don’t know how to make. They amaze me!

We always had a piano growing up. There were castanets. We had a guitar. It was a normal thing to try and make music and I briefly took violin lessons as a child. So picking up the violin again was a normal thing. My kids are all musical. They all make music. French horn, singing….computerized music. It’s all music!

My mother also made art. She can draw and I can’t really but I can collage and I can throw pots a little bit. She had potter friends and she let me collage my closet door. My front door is collaged in my home, as is the door to the basement.

My mother now quilts and I don’t….not yet anyway. She also went through a really odd phase of collecting dolls. I found it creepy but she was really into it.

She and I both garden and so does my daughter. Some things are the same, but a lot is different.

The thing about my mom is that she lives life fully. She doesn’t sit around much. She’s busy doing this or that and life never gets old. She is truly remarkable at living!

One funny thing is that my mom is a terrible nurse, and I am too. She was always very sweet with me, up to a point. She didn’t like it when I was sick or injured and she’d do her best and then expect me to suck it up and get better. I internalized an ability to suck things up so that when I decided to become a doctor it was easy to think of others before my own self. She taught me that too….compassion and empathy.

I remember her saying a hundred times…..how would you feel IF…..so I learned to think about how others would feel, sometimes to a fault. I’m not that good at boundaries but my kids are. I think I purposefully let my kids put themselves first sometimes and as a result they understand boundaries better. But my mom and I are a little more blurry in that department.

Growing up I had every animal known to mankind. I have no idea how we ended up with all the cats, dogs, birds, rabbits, reptiles and insects but we had them all at one time or another. So of course my kids had a similar assortment that at one time also included a ferret and stick bugs.

Mothers inspire us and we absorb some of what they are and some of what they aren’t. We process it all and give it our own spin. We aren’t copies but we definitely are based on our mothers in many respects.

I have grown up with a real love for life. I am fortunate enough to feel passion for my chosen profession. I like my funky house full of animals. I make art and music and I garden. I blast Opera when I clean the house. And it’s all because I had a mother who showed me the way.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom!!! And to all the mothers out there – thanks for showing us the way. By watching you, we’ve learned so much and made it our own.

And the beat goes on!

You know when you realize you’ve been doing it wrong?

My first thought is: why didn’t anyone tell me? But the thing is, usually the world has been trying to tell me and I just wasn’t listening right. I hear words all over the place but it’s just blah blah yes-of-course-I-get-it until one day there’s a shift and I go – whoa – epiphany!

Remember when I wrote my How To Be Healthy and Wonderful post about my own journey to perfection? It wasn’t called that but that was the gist. I remember Jennifer my best Facebook friend posting something like she couldn’t wait to hear from me the next day regarding my progress. She is so sweet that she has yet to point out that there’s been radio silence on that topic ever since, and that was four months ago.

I’m 58, so I’ve had plenty of time to close in on all that is healthy and wonderful. I’ve made countless lists, set plenty of goals, done every diet and exercise, and gone in and out of many various habits – the good, the bad and the ugly. I am a little bit healthy and wonderful but there’s room for improvement like right now I’d like to have less belly and more time on my violin.

When I got all into Dr. Mark Hyman and decided to really embrace an uber-fit lifestyle I found that as good as I felt eating all the vegetables, proteins and fats and avoiding all alcohol, carbs and sweets – I eventually fell off the wagon. Eventually as in – after thirtyish days. Here I had discovered the way to radical health and I started to cheat. I cheated with a chocolate-banana croissant. I drank some hard kombucha and some whiskey. I snacked after 8 P.M. I scrolled Facebook mindlessly.

Sorry, Jennifer.

But Mark said something else. He said that it took years to get to where he is now. Two steps forward, one step back. You’ve heard that, right? You know what it means.

Well, maybe you don’t, because I didn’t. Not really.

Slap me, but if you are like most people you don’t always make space for the ole two -steps-forward-one-step-back dance. How do I know? Well….the way many of us flip-flop around getting excited about some new thing then pivoting when new thing number 54 isn’t quite the bomb it promised to be tells me that if we don’t get amazing results – and fast! – we move on.

We give up and we regress back into the distracted blob of cells we inhabit, dragging our bits and pieces through life until we decide to try the next new thing.

It’s fine to change course, necessary even. But my message today is that we don’t give things enough time in life before we chuck them. There are of course some exceptions to this. I should have chucked cigarettes long before I quit them. But many other things I abandoned too soon, like typing lessons and piano. I should have stuck with it.

If you want to really understand the actual pace of things talk to someone who’s survived cancer. These people have to nearly kill themselves with chemo then build back better while still feeling like crap. I saw an old friend recently who’s two years cancer-free and she explained to me that she still has chemo eyes and fatigue, but she is celebrating all that she can do now that she couldn’t do a year ago. She described the pain she has in all her joints from a med that she’s going to have to take for five years.

She feels well enough to rejoin life as we know it but only sometimes. She has had to surrender to the pace of things and can’t push it too hard or it will set her back. But still, she moves forward.

Little by little, off we go.

So how has it been for me the past four months? That depends on how you spin it.

In between the cheating I have adopted some much better eating habits. I am going all in with Athletic Greens, Chia seeds, broccoli and faro. When I crave something sweet I eat a frozen banana with a little peanut butter or nutella. I get what little animal protein I eat from the Butcher’s Box which is the most humane and sustainable source I can access and I buy most of the rest of what I eat at the local farmer’s market. I eat herbs in my salad and geek out on Omega-3’s.

For four months I’ve looked and felt mostly the same and that is because the changes to my health and vitality have been slow and a little zig zaggy. And it’s also because results are incremental and tiny day-by-day and it takes time.

Wait, that sounds an awful lot like two steps forward and one step back!!

In actuality I have lost ten pounds and I am moving a lot more. I have more energy but not all the time. After work I’m still toast. In a fit of wanting to do it all I signed up for Spanish two mornings a week and Banjo and Violin and……it was not fun. I was in a perpetual state of not studying Spanish and not playing music and stressing out about it all. I wasn’t writing much and my house wasn’t as clean and Marie Kondo-ed as I’d like. And that ten pounds? The scale didn’t budge for weeks and weeks so it’s not like I felt much in the reward department.

That’s a lot of nots.

I had big ideas and wasn’t pulling off much of anything, or so it seemed. Not even if I made a list. Not even if I made a schedule. I wasn’t morphing into the new and better person I had envisioned. (or so it seemed)

What actually happened is that I noodled around not doing all that I wanted to do but I kept trying. I kept circling back to what I wanted to accomplish and I’d do some little thing long enough that I’d make one little new habit that would stick.

I started drinking a morning drink that starts my day off right. It is both healthy and symbolic of a commitment to feeling good and living large. It’s a ritual and a ceremony and it gives me focus and strength. A glass of lemon water might do the same thing – it may just be the intention that’s working.

It’s taken four months for me to find a way to make progress. I had to quit the Spanish because there was no way I could find balance starting my Tuesday and Thursday mornings off on Zoom freaked out over not having studied. It scrambled my brain to try and study even though I loved my teacher and even though in some ways it was a good exercise for my noggin. Wordle is going to have to be enough right now because that’s all the daily braining I can legit do.

I had to also accept that after work I can do nothing. Accepting that lead me to embrace the one thing I can do – read. I have my books and I’m no longer fretting about what I can’t accomplish. I can also put one load of laundry in the washer so I do that – but I don’t necessarily move it over and I don’t fold anything…..too much pressure!

I have wanted to get up earlier but it takes me a long time to wakey wakey. My eyes flutter open at 6:30 but I generally have not been able to start moving until 8:30 or 9 a.m. I looked it up and there’s a name for it – sleep inertia. I first developed this condition when I was anemic and now that I’m no longer sick I expected it to improve but it hasn’t. I am slow in the morning. I changed my work start time to 10 and it’s going to have to remain there. I just can’t get it together before then says the mom that had her kids to school for band practice at 7 a.m. No idea how I did that, or how I’d go for a run before my kids got up.

Yeah well, that was then.

I do write best in the morning so I finally figured out that I can stay in bed and blog on my laptop instead of surfing Facebook and snoozing and if I do this from 7-8 a.m. I can start moving earlier and get up having written a little. The writing transitions me from sleepy to awake enough to stand up and that little discovery is a win. All I have to do is resist the urge to fall back asleep. It’s a little tricky because morning sleep is my favorite (as opposed to nighttime sleep, which I fight off to the bitter end)

Next the animals need feeding and the plants need watering. I have to feed the five dogs and the pig and that’s a bit of a slog but the watering can happen at night. I’m playing with whether I have the bandwidth for that after work. It’s a WIP to figure out where all the parts go.

Fitting in violin has been disappointing. It’s the thing I most want to do and yet the most elusive. I finally am starting it up in the 9-9:30 morning slot and it’s working. Turns out when I play in the morning it also paves the way for playing throughout the day.

I still haven’t figured out the weightlifting piece. That’s next.

Enough about me.

All I really want to say is never give up, and keep shifting things around until you hit on what works. Keep your eye on the prize but don’t feel impatient because all the little bumps and valleys are trying to teach you something about yourself. Stop trying to shove a square peg into a round hole but don’t stop pushing forward. Let go of goals that aren’t working but hang on to what matters most. Don’t throw out the baby with bathwater!

Most importantly, give yourself time and celebrate the little successes. And when it seems like nothing is happening realize that internally you are working things out. More on that later but for now surrender to the process that is life. Two steps forward, one step back – a zig and a zag and off we go!

Namaste!

My house is on a hill and the front yard slopes down. Years ago when I bought the house the yard held a few plants but mostly it was covered in wood chips.

Gardening on a steep hill feels dangerous. One dizzy spell or a little balance lost and you could crack your head open, legit.

When I’m out front pulling weeds, the neighbor kids often join me. I don’t let them up on the high places but there’s a strip on the ground that dandelions and grass and things I don’t want to grow are forever trying to invade.

We have a thing about getting weeds out with their roots intact.

Today Zoe was chief surgeon and Kallie was her assistant. Zoe asked her sister for tools like she was in the operating room. “Pencil,” she ‘d say, and Kallie would hand her the pencil, for digging. This went on for quite some time. The neighbor kids are the only kids I know that when they offer to help, actually help. There is no tap root too stubborn for these maniacs.

I have to answer Kallie’s constant stream of why questions and accept long distance phone calls on her rock (it doubles as a phone and she refuses to take a message), and there are times when I need to check out and do some meditative gardening, but social gardening with the neighbor kids is mostly a joy.

I am not sure that I ever expected to find myself without children banging around this big old house. In the hustle and bustle I somehow forgot that kids grow up and leave and the noise stops pretty much on a dime the day they walk out the door.

That’s the time in life when you are supposed to get reacquainted with your spouse and find your own self again. You are supposed to maybe travel or contemplate retirement in Tuscany.

Well bad news on that front because I don’t have one of those partner thingies and I’m working enough that hobbies are tough to find time for. I have no money to ever retire and why would I retire when my work is one of the most consistently best parts of my life? I’d be happy with less of it but this house doesn’t pay for itself. Or clean itself, either. I also spend a fair amount of time doing that.

By the time the kids leave you’re ready to show them the door, but it doesn’t mean the whole thing doesn’t throw you into some kind of weepy crisis. Moving through the world without your ducklings is an odd thing to get used to, especially if like me you somehow didn’t see it coming. Every time I’d drive past an old school or some other loaded location I’d tear up and be hit with heavy melancholy.

I remember one particular thought that I had when my kids all left that now seems both sad and laughable. I was mad and sad that I’d never seemed to get the whole thing right before they left. A lot of wonderful things happened in this home, but I’d started and ended relationships, struggled with money, yelled at the top of my lungs and thrown things, and I never did figure out the chore wheel.

In the day-to-day, John Lennon was right, and life happened when I was busy doing other things.

I survived a horrible and crushing break-up and some really difficult times with my kids in this house. All of us went through a lot and then everyone left and I was in my home alone for about ten minutes until a couple of my daughter’s friends needed a place to live.

It was helpful that during the covid quarantine there were other people here. I kept working and despite the lack of activities, I never felt alone.

For a few years it worked great, and then it didn’t anymore.

Birds gotta fly. And me, I need to not be woken up by kids who keep vampire hours and bang around all night. I need to blast music if I want without worrying about who’s asleep at one in the P.M. The arrangement was making us both cranky so Dylan decided to move out.

I did not expect to go through another round of the empty-nester blues but it has hit and I am quietly terrified this time around. As Dylan was leaving yesterday I asked him if he knew where the funnel had disappeared to and I suddenly realized that the minute he walked out the door I would have no one here to open a jar or help me find my keys.

He needs to go. Initially he didn’t mind helping me and I didn’t mind the vampire schedule but in time we both soured so moving out is the right thing. But these last few years I’ve aged some and I’m not quite as capable as I was when he moved in. I feel my age and it’s unsettling.

I’m wobbly, but pressing on ahead.

Zoe has decided that our two houses are really one house and that all my stuff is hers and vice-versa. That means I now have a cat and she has five dogs, a pig and a hot tub. I like this idea.

I left easter baskets for the kids next door and I will hear them wake up and they will get loud and Darby will whine because she loves the neighbors and wants to visit them 24/7. I will turn up my music and get to the business of cleaning this house and tending to the garden. I will prepare the house for my daughter who is visiting next week and I will be okay alone, even if I cry a few rivers and suffer moments of panic adjusting to this new state of things.

I did not expect to feel this way, but here we go round again. I remember the first time I was inside this house. It’s a very old house with two stories and it feels solid. I thought it would be amazing to live in a house with such great bones, but of course I never saw past raising my kids and certainly never thought they’d all be in different states and I’d be single single. Like not even dating single.

It’s time to get moving. I don’t plan to crack my head open any time soon and there’s living to do.

Wobbly old knees and all.

I haven’t written in some time because I’ve been……blocked! I’ve been blocked, as in the dreaded (pirate)…..writer’s block.

Writing used to only be a matter of sitting down and cracking open the computer and letting all the thoughts swirling in my head run free. I had a constant narrative in my head running laps, making comments and observations, composing paragraphs, and all I had to do was open up my laptop and let it flow out onto the screen.

Then it all went still and when writing doesn’t flow it’s nearly impossible to figure out what to say and……. it’s not all that much fun.

Hence the not writing.

I did compose a short little piece about a very brief return to online dating and a very sweet man I met but there was an internet error and despite this site supposedly auto-saving every few minutes and despite him being a lovely man, I lost them both.

That post mimicked my short relationship. It and the man went poof and that was that and I did not have the energy to recreate either. I didn’t write again and I surely didn’t date.

But of the two, I miss writing. It’s on my list of things that make me ME, and there has been a void.

The block is simple: my mind is suspiciously quiet.

From a Zen point of view, that would be considered awesome, but for a writer, it’s death.

I have a few ideas I jotted down because when I get a brainstorm and have no time to write I try and make a note. If you don’t write down your ideas or flesh them out immediately you lose a lot. I’m not that great at recapturing thoughts, even when I’ve taken notes, but do have some notes.

I don’t particularly want to return to a racing mind, but I wouldn’t mind a little more material to get me writing again.

So…….what’s going on in my head, and why are ideas not banging around in there anymore? I would like to say it’s a bunch of inner peace and mindfulness that’s gotten me to this point, and to some extent, that’s true.

But there is something else you might be able to relate to: I’m just plain numb.

I’m not checked out. I still pay attention. But it’s all become too damn much to absorb and to process.

Everyone has their personal list of what feels like too much. I think I was kind of holding on until the war in Ukraine and everyone started talking about WWIII and the nuclear threat.

Seriously? On top of everything else we don’t seem to be able to unite and solve, we now need to rebuild another country that’s being leveled for no good reason and angst about ducking and covering?

What’s really great about this is everyone is watching so it’s not like we don’t know what is happening and everyone feels really bad and all we are doing is filming and talking about war crimes as if that’s going to end this suffering and bring these people back to life. What if we all had just lined up at Ukraine’s border and said sorry Putin. NO! before it even began.

I don’t want to say mothers should run the world but I think if that were true the world be a different place. As is, as an individual with not a lot of cash and very little unaccounted for time there’s shit I can do about this. Hence the numb.

I just don’t understand how we let all this dysfunction build up in the world when we have been given so much. This is our Garden of Eden and everyone’s just being dumb about things.

I’ve had one thought that has pushed me forward to live my life as best I can. It’s that suffering is optional, and should only be done when one has no choice but to suffer. In other words, there is nothing wrong with squeezing every ounce of joy from one’s life, even as Rome burns and other people and the planet are perishing.

Mass extinction? Well I’m planting a garden and enjoying the visiting hummingbirds and the explosion of ladybugs. Bank account perpetually on overdraft? I have some faith that it will improve and if it doesn’t I’ll eventually do something and it will be okay. Ukraine and other massacres? I don’t know WTF to say there except kiss the sky and appreciate every damn day I’m allowed to wake up to relative peace and comfort. Yeah, I give a little money when I can and try and help out but let’s face it – it’s nothing much and as individuals, other than treating each other with kindness, most of us don’t have the power or money or time to do enough about all this. Maybe that’s how they get us. They keep us busy surviving while they work their evil mischief.

It’s a lot.

Has it always been a lot, or did I just now notice? Is this life with all its ups and downs? I mean, generations have lived through plenty. There have been other waves of doomsday worries though climate change seems to be more of an actual fact and reality than a possibility to fret over. But still….this planet has a lot of tricks up its mother-earth sleeves. Sad to see the dinosaurs go but look at us now. Maybe there will be…..progress?

It’s hard to write about my own personal fluffy fluff when serious shit is raining down on this earth, but perhaps that’s just what we little humans do. We live our small lives as best we can and we plant little gardens and stick our heads in the sand. Maybe it’s not just okay, but necessary to take ourselves and the ten pounds we’d like to lose seriously.

I still believe that a good life life is made up of little things, and it”s okay to stare at our own navel sometimes. We are just people. We can do a little good and have a little fun but in the end we’re all gonna end up dust in the wind no matter what.

But I also believe that people can rally and make the world a better place. Seeing the images from Ukraine makes it hard to la-di-da our way through life. Realizing that much of the world suffers profoundly casts a long shadow over our privileged lives.

The only conviction I have come across that allows for joy is the principle of gratitude. We are not just allowed to appreciate our own good fortune, but compelled to.

I hike and I notice the wildflowers and the birds and everything that is in this world. These wonders will be gone one day, as will I, as will the entire planet as we know it. I am one of the luckiest creatures ever to have existed. I live in peace with an abundance of food and riches. If I don’t appreciate this, I’m a fool.

Suffering ourselves won’t help the world. Civilization is on life support, for certain. We each must do something, even if it feels futile. I’m thinking of ways to help but nothing huge has hit me yet. I’ve needed to do some navel gazing, and I’m planning to do more of that here in this blog.

I could do more. I could sell my house and donate everything and give myself over to an international organization and live in the field. I am not unaware of this and my unwillingness burdens me with shame and disgust. Maybe there is a compromise.

I hope to get strong enough to have more to give, but I am afraid to over-commit. I have decided to order a grabber and walk the streets picking up trash as a meditation on what I can do. I hope that as I walk ideas will come and I will find new purpose in giving back.

And as for the magic in the world, I am trying to appreciate all of it, before it slips away.

Namaste.