Finding heart in the strangest place

A few days ago, as I was walking down the driveway to get the newspaper, I noticed something white which was at the end of the driveway, just a foot or two into the lawn.

It turned out to be this.


I know the end is in sight for our great big (well, big for Denver--we don't see mushrooms in our yard very often) heart-shaped mushroom, as the weather has turned and we are expecting close to 90 and plenty of sun today.

It has been my daily pleasure to visit the mushroom and take a photo or two each morning. This is my favorite shot.

Such it is (My Sacred Life, Sunday)

Such it is

There's a sadness inside of me which brings tears, all unbidden, all needing to be felt.

Without any idea where the sadness comes from, I acknowledge and honor the feelings and cry the tears.

Oddly, the very act of crying, of allowing the sadness, provides some relief.

Is this what it is, why we are here?

Is this the name of the merry-go-round, the definition of the purpose?



Experiencing the answer, and knowing it will never be complete in my head,

I settle for what there is to be, what we are given to understand

And I nod, smile, and get up from my seat in the middle of uncertainty

And step into the next moment.

Finally, there is only the realization that all we have is one more moment, if that.



Is it enough?

It is more than enough.

It's never too late for gratitude (My Sacred Life, Sunday)

It has been a long time since I wrote a post specifically as a Sacred Life, Sunday post.

Today seems like a good time to break the habit of not writing them.

If I were to list all the areas where my life could stand improvement, I could list dozens of items. The question is, where would I be at the end of writing such a list?

Exactly.

Instead, today is a simple gratitude-driven message. Heck...gratitude-driven, gratitude-fueled, gratitude-focused!

It strikes me, this morning, that I am among the most-fortunate folks on the planet. Here's the evidence.

As has been the case for more than eleven years, it begins with my wife, Julia. She is everything to me, and as important as all that she does for me and teaches me is the fact that she needs me. If you want a relationship which lasts, be certain that you need each other. Julia and I are better people for being together. I would wager that she would agree. It's not always a comfortable situation, and that's another important point I wish to make. We grow, just as all God's creatures do, in the face of discomfort, and at least partly because of it. I am blessed beyond measure to know Julia. To be her husband is a miracle.

The four girls, really all young women now, who constitute my offspring are the center of my heart. They will change the world in ways no one can yet imagine. Each of them brings something different in their unique talents, and they all are so passionate about life and love what they do so much. It is honestly hard to remember who I was before I became a dad. It is my honor to be the father of Aubrie, Allison, Wendy-Anne, and Claire.

Because my wife and I just celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary a week ago, I'll include a photo (old style: a scanned image of a real picture you can hold in your hand) here because it is from a magical day when all of my life's blessings were within my reach, all at the same time.
I'm blessed to know Julia's lifelong friends, all of whom came to our wedding. One of them visited us only two weeks ago, her first trip to Denver since our wedding. These are special people, folks one would love to be able to count as friends. I know how lucky I am to know them, and, yes, I count them as friends.

There are several people with whom I am still in contact from my days in the Air Force, now almost 30 years distant. Darryl, Jimmy, Pat: you are gems, and I look forward to continuing to touch base for many years more. We only knew each other for a couple of years at Ramstein, so it is special to still know you today.

I'm happy to say I have seen them all since our days in the service, and I hope to see them again as our various travels bring us into proximity.

For someone as ancient as I am, my health is very good. Sure, it takes me a couple of steps to get all the parts working again if I have been seated for a long time, but I can tolerate such an issue with no problem. Overall, my odds of seeing my kids' kids all grown up are pretty good. I'm grateful to be fully functional at this point in my life.

While I have finally come to accept the fact that I will never dunk a basketball, I can still play golf (note to self: play some golf this year!) and I can probably still bowl, at least a game or two (note to self: bowl!). Both games were central to my life for many years. When I was 12 or so and lived in Texas, I would ride my bike to the golf course (or the bowling lanes) and tote the appropriate sports equipment along with me. If you have never tried riding a bike while carrying either a set of golf clubs or a bowling bag, don't try it now. You are too old. It's a skill best learned when 12.

Finally, I am most grateful to be who I am. Yes, it is a bit of an odd thank-you to offer, but I truly am as happy as I can be to be exactly who I have become, and I'm grateful to have a clear path toward new adventures which will allow me to grow and become someone I like even better.

If all of this sounds too good to be true, you need to sit down and write your own blessings list. You may be amazed to discover how much you have to be grateful for. Feel free to let me know where your list takes you!

The Garden: burstng forth

I'm not here today with any great insight or wisdom to share. Instead, it's just a day to honor our little backyard gardens.

We have had a great deal of rain over the last ten days or so, and the results have been spectacular. Of course, the garden has no idea which plants we wish to encourage and which we assign the dreaded W word to--you vile weeds know the W word I'm talking about, as it starts with W and ends with -eeds--so we had amazing growth among the plants which are not allowed in the garden.

No, I don't understand why they can't read and heed the signs.

Julia and I were sitting on the patio enjoying the cool breeze and the freshly trimmed lawn (I had just finished mowing for the third time in the last 10 days) when I noticed a couple of tall plants in the corner garden which I was fairly certain did not belong.

I was a little tired from the already-completed chores, but I thought it would be nice to rid that area of the tall weeds, and I asked Julia to confirm their weed status. She threatened to kill me if I mistakenly pulled any delphinium (no need--had I pulled any, I would have sacrificed myself, falling on my upturned garden spade, for the sheer magnitude of the sin), and moved purposefully over to that area of the yard.

Here's the thing: I was planning to pull a couple of tall weeds which were interfering with our view of that portion of our gardens simply as a symbolic show of good intent.

You can guess what happened.

We spent the next good bit of time pulling all kinds of those obnoxious delphinia-imitators (they really do look a lot like the real thing, and they grow snuggled up right next to the real delphinia just to piss me off) from more than one area of our gardens.

I made two runs with the garbage can full of trashed weeds out to our composting bin by the time we were done.

My lesson learned was to never offer any sort of symbolic gesture when it comes to garden maintenance. In IT project parlance, there is a high risk of scope creep. I was glad when we finished to see the progress, and that was probably the lesson I was meant to learn.

Interspersed in my griping are a few shots I took in the garden yesterday. My favorite is the clematis (immediately above this paragraph) which finally has taken off and come to love its spot in the shelter of the big pine tree we planted ten years ago. When the sun begins to beat down unrelentingly in a few weeks, the clematis will still have the tree's branches shading it from the afternoon heat.

On a side note, today is the day of my JJL post for this month, a month when we are discussing our progress toward completion of our 2009 goals, given that the end of this month will mark the halfway point of the year. Check it out! The discussions are typically quite informative as everyone brings their own unique view to the table.

Starting slowly

I must have at least half a dozen partially written blog posts in my folder where those live.

In most cases, the posts I write come flying out my fingertips and onto the screen in a matter of a few minutes. Sometimes, the words start slowly and then build up some steam as the process transpires.

Lately, the words have started coming slowly, and then petered out altogether. Reminds me of this sprinter, who seemed fine right up until the gun went off.


What's up with that? I'm writing in other venues without this odd symptom, so I know I'm not somehow blocked or anything. I suppose part of it was my greater involvement at JJL this month, where I contributed three times as much as I normally do in any one month.

It could also be that I have yet to hit on a topic which has a few hundred words behind it, just waiting to be birthed. Instead, I keep finding subjects which have three sentences behind them.

Rather than further beat this into ground, I'll segue into one of the topics which I have already started, and we'll see where we end up.

Malcolm Gladwell is a smart guy, good writer, and interesting read. His article from last fall in The New Yorker on late bloomers is worth tracking down. Heck, tracking it down is as easy as clicking here.

The conundrum is one for which I know no solution. Genius, when presented in the prodigy, is easy to spot. What of the late bloomer, though? The Grandma Moses or Cézanne? Here is how Gladwell presented the puzzle:

Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it.

I hold onto this concept because it allows one as old as I am to believe in a blooming which is yet to come. "I'm not a disappointment, I'm just a late bloomer."

By whatever means necessary, one must engage in order to live, so if it takes a belief in late blooming, so be it!

The idea that life is lived for one's first several decades for no better reason than to get ready for the meaty, meaningful time of life, that being the years after becoming 40 or older, is anathema to those who are 20. And, honestly, there are a few old souls who are already making contributions even at that youthful age. Most, though, are more like me and will come to life, come to be truly living their lives, much later.

What do you think? Are you blooming late, right on time, or holding off on the whole bloomin' topic for now?

Change: what do we expect, anyway?

We had an unusually mild late winter here in Denver, with February and March temperatures regularly 10 to 15 degrees above the average for the date.

In fact, the warmth fooled lots of our beloved trees and bushes to think it was time to go, when it was not. Not at all.

Our crabapple is the centerpiece of the front yard, a tree planted by the only prior owner of our home, a man who loved that tree. It is now about 45 years old, and it has seen its share of challenges. We had massive snows several times in the last five years, one of which hit while the tree had much of its foliage still on its branches. It lost its crown--the top-most portion of a tree--that year, and in the years since, it has recovered pretty well, but as with any living thing in the later portion of its lifespan, the recovery has been less than total. Still, the tree normally puts on her crinoline every spring and parades to the ball, a vision in pink.

We planted a forsythia in the narrow grass border between our driveway and our neighbor's a few years back. Each year, the bush has become more effusive, waving longer and more-plentiful limbs in ever-more-dramatic patterns.

This year, both the crabapple and the forsythia were set up and then ambushed.

After the early warmth convinced the two to bud, we had a very cold couple of days and a foot of snow. The snow actually protected the only-barely-awake garden perennials, but the forsythia flowers and the crabapple buds were quietly terminated.

This is the first year since we moved in ten years ago that we have not been blessed with the crabapple show. The forsythia is not nearly as old, but it has never been so badly treated, either.

Of course, plants do exactly as I described the determined little pansy volunteer doing last year: they start with whatever the current situation presents to them, and move on from there.

The photos accompanying today's post are from this year, carefully taken shots to show a couple of the forsythia's very, very, sadly very small number of brilliant yellow flowers. In fact, you can see the green leaves trying to crowd out the few flowers which were opening so late that the frost didn't get them.

And, because I wanted to see what she looked like in her prime, here is an undated (of course! a lady never reveals her age) shot of the crabapple from seasons past (with a supporting role from the forsythia).

There's no big lesson today, just an observation. Change is not an aspect we can choose or decline, but central to being alive. Expectations, though, are completely within our control. When we expect the same as we have seen before, reality can seem harsh and cruel. When we open our eyes to what is and harbor few expectations, though, change can feel refreshing, new, exciting, and invigorating.

I'll still be looking for the show from the crabapple next spring, even as I try to be more tolerant of nature's vagaries.

Habits

We're talking about habits over at Joyful Jubilant Learning this month: what they say about us, how we use them as learning tools, how we can end up in fights with them over who's in charge.

It's my turn to offer my opinions, and I invite you to stop over and see what's been said. Heck, you can even chime in if you are inspired to do so!