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Having and Losing

Diary 6/13/19

I have exciting news! I am now a grandmother-to-be. My daughter and son-in-law’s baby boy will be born around December 20th. It is a time of awe and urgent patience. Waiting is not the right label for this state of hope. Time will invisibly unfold its wings, cell by cell, revealing a human child when the stars, the hormones, and my professor daughter’s semester is over on December 12th. If the little feller bides his time, she will somehow get all of her grading done before his arrival. She can only plan so much in advance, tailoring her syllabuses accordingly.

I am gaining a new role to play, one which I have long desired. My eyes have been misting over beautiful baby clothes in catalogues for the last twenty years. The entry of a new family member into our midst is as astonishing to me as it is to every family. The continuity of emerging generations is becoming more palpable as I age. I know of my recent ancestors and a smattering about more distant ones, but living with three generations is something to experience. Plenty of my friends here at Kendal are great-grandparents. My own grandmother got to hold both of my daughters before she died. Photographs are faded proof.

Did you know? Because a female fetus is born with all the eggs she will ever have in her small ovaries, when I carried my daughter, she already held the egg which is now becoming her son. So he was potentially there inside of me as well. This biological connection helps to underscore the powerful thread of family bonding, partially constructed of mothers and daughters and eggs. Of course fathers have their own paternal bonds, DNA and otherwise, and I am so grateful this child is born in the time of equal co-parenting.

Which leads me to the losing that is happening simultaneously with the having of such wonderful news. Richard so looked forward to being a grandfather. He always operated within long arcs of time. He anticipated sharing his loves and passions with the next generation on our sixty acres of land. He wanted to share his love of the earth with gardening, animals, and farming. His love of skiing, hiking, and riding, and his love of the arts would have been communicated in his wanting to discover and support whatever his grandson would come to love. As a therapist, Richard was steeped in the wonder of connecting early childhood development through the adult stories people told of their lives. It was a miracle of love to him; unraveling the wounds of the past to better heal the pain carried forward into the present. To share in the earliest journeys of evolving personhood with a grandson would have been a great blessing.

Since my son-in-law also lost his father in childhood, this child will not have a living blood relative grandfather. I will not have a partner to share this new role with. My daughter and I both feel a tinge of sorrow concurrent with our joy. The early factors of my grandson’s life are already being written. The state of our country and our threatened world is part of his story. I can only imagine what his generation will face and what his contribution will be. What will be called forth from all the new members of society as humanity faces our dire legacies?

The upcoming dates of Father’s Day and Richard’s birthday heighten our nostalgia in this month. Already my unborn grandchild heralds the unity of having and losing, joy and sorrow, and the reality of Love. A new being to love is coming soon to a screen very near and dear to me.

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The Daisy Masacree

Diary 6/1/19

It was a “massacree”, as Arlo Guthrie called it in his famous Thanksgiving Day talking blues song. This was a slaughter of the flowers in my tiny garden beneath one window. I heard this morning at breakfast that I was not the only one to have lost their plants. This doesn’t make me feel any better. Everybody’s gardening work was whipped down by an ill informed wielder of the weed whacker from the grounds staff. In my case, we are talking daisies and day lilies, quite common flowers, and considered weeds in some places. I chose them carefully from the plant sale precisely because they are hardy, and need little to no care. Their nature is to spread rampantly over the years and that was also my intent for their future.

To me, those plants represented hours of investment. I dreamed a small garden into a possibility by buying a few necessary tools and bringing over my hardy Swedish outdoor walker (Veloped) from Emilia’s house. This has large wheels designed to travel over grass and woodland paths. I purposefully strained my legs and back by getting the flower bed ready, transplanting the plants, watering them and keeping my eyes and heart on them many times a day. I got permission from the nurses to occasionally deactivate the alarm on a door leading outside that is meant to prevent wandering residents with memory issues from disappearing. It opens directly onto the outdoor cement patio where I store my Veloped and tools. It is only fifteen feet away, as the rollator rolls, from there to my patch of earth. I considered the subsequent stress on my body as “functional PT”. From this experiment, I learned that I would recover from each round of gardening in a couple of days. This is a positive new development in my reaction to inflammation.

The daisies were just starting to bloom: three, count them, three! were already open. I walked back across the hall from our breakfast eatery and my jaw literally dropped in shock to find them gone. I made fast tracks (for me) down the halls and round about outside to find the unwitting culprit and not in anger, but in sorrow, to let him know what he had inadvertently done. He was clearly ignorant of plants altogether to not have noticed how carefully spaced my babies were, with no other weeds around them. To him, he saw only juniper bushes and some random green stuff in between that had to go. He looked stricken as he heard me out. Back in my room, I saw few minutes later that the head of grounds was there with him and I spoke to her through my open window staring down at the now barren dirt.

She apologized for not instructing Mr. Weedwhacker better and said she would have the plants replaced next week. When I heard others in the apartments on the other end of this main building had sadly complained of similar destruction, I realized this young man had blundered his way through the morning. Well. Obviously, this is no terrible tragedy. It is merely the loss of my anticipated pleasures. I already had the satisfaction of a job well done, as the plants were clearly going to thrive in their relocation. I will enjoy their relatives when they arrive, and presumably the young man in question will have gained some knowledge, and/or, someone better equipped will take over weed whacking.

All spiritual practices warn of worldly attachment, which does not mean that we shouldn’t love our lives and all that we encounter. Rather, it is to remind us that nothing is permanent. I love the Buddhist saying, “The cup is already broken.” To fully live this concept means that we can choose to deeply invest our love and enjoyment of everything and everyone, right now. The objects of our love will not last. Nothing does. Above all, it is only love itself that endures. Because my garden was decimated on the anniversary eve of my life at Kendal, the incident momentarily triggered my far more serious loss of husband and home. By the afternoon, I managed to incorporate the whole experience and let it go. I wasted nothing in creating my small nursery- soon -to- bloom garden. We come and we go in our seasons. May we learn to passionately love them all in the time we are given.

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Veils and Luminescence

Diary 5/31/19

It has been a year since my trek from Woodstock, N.Y. to Oberlin, OH. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of my arrival at Kendal at Oberlin. This calendar event weighs both heavily and lightly in my thoughts. It is a safe and lovely haven for docking my small boat. The burden of sailing through grief and loss, anchors the memory in my being. Sparkling new revelations were also stirred in the wake of a broken heart that shone in the water like luminescent plankton. My past was torn up, shredded, and tossed on the Ohio waters like confetti. My daughters and son-in-law were my steady pilots in the initial transition. They supported me in each their own ways, and were in my daily concerns as my daughters also acquired new lives as fatherless young women. Our family reconfigured in benign paths that we are still co-creating to our mutual benefits.

At Kendal, I have been met creatively on every front. Writing, performing, singing, dancing, meditating, and supporting others as I am supported, engages and nourishes me in ways that I have not been for many long years. Since my laminoplasty, I am now moving towards greater mobility with good help from my Physical Therapy team. After working with me twice every week for this whole year, they know me well. They truly rejoice in my slow but steady recovery.

I miss my N.Y. friends often but, I find new friendships the more I participate in any of the committees that are the internal backbone of this sprawling organization. I recently became a member of the Quiet Room committee. In my overflowing grief on the first week I arrived, I was surprised to discover that there wasn’t a non-denominational chapel or quiet room where I could retreat. The old one had been absorbed into a new wing built specifically for those residents with dementia. Six years later, a committee has been formed to address this glaring lack. It is finally “in the 2019 budget”; magic words that speak to manifesting a designated calm space for staff, residents, and grieving families coming to be with their loved one approaching death.

With six other women, it was a pleasure to arrive at a consensus, which is the Quaker way of conducting all business. We were given someone’s former office to make a practical, but comforting room. We chose a soothing paint color, and new carpeting and furniture. We await fabric swatches for our chosen seating that is neither too high, too deep, or too difficult to get into and out of for our eldering bodies. All accommodations were duly noted, and no wheelchairs were harmed in the making of this quiet movie.

I am on other committees as well, and just agreed to join a brand new one initiated by a new resident- the wildlife committee. Not everyone thinks of benign solutions concerning squirrels, rabbits, goose poop producers, and so on. There already is an Arboretum committee, as our Kendal grounds are officially an arboretum. No one needs to begin a Lorax (Dr. Seuss reference) committee to speak for the trees. I have a dawn redwood tree outside one of my windows. It is fully leafed out in its frothy delicate way. It will be here long, and very tall, after I am gone, perhaps even after this building is gone. At the moment, my imported cement frog and turtle, dubbed, “The Aquanauts” by my family and friends from N.Y., rest beneath its branches. I looked out the window the other morning and did a double take as a mourning dove folded her feathers and lay down on the turtle’s back, covering him completely. Perhaps she enjoyed the radiant heat. She was still there when I left for lunch.

This last month has been a veiled time of remembrance, grief, and gratitude. The acute pain of my losses has dulled, as it must. The waters are stilled and more placid. My senses are less vivid as the flow of life inevitably carries me along into the larger pond. I am not exactly waiting for whatever comes next. It will come whether I will it to, or not. I am endeavoring to simply be open and ready and led into the unknown by this new year of life at Kendal, my home.

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Perfection

5/23/19

Today is one of those perfect late spring, early summer days. When I am too much indoors, I crave getting outside. My eyes need to look out over long distances, my lungs need to inspire and expire fresh air, my skin needs a touch of sun, and my whole being hungers to be magnetized by the quality of stillness and life on the observation deck of the vernal pond off Buttonbush Bridge.

It is warm and sunny and very breezy. There is very low humidity, which is rare around here. Once my scooter wheels rumble over the wooden decking, I pull into the corner by the fence, and turn off the motor. The wind is strong, whooshing the leaves of all the trees surrounding the pond. We know that trees communicate with one another in an arboreal community. If there is a threat from parasites, it has been observed that one tree will take on the assualt so that other nearby trees may continue to thrive. They “talk” by chemical messaging through the fungal “internet” of tiny filaments. Around the pond in this environment, I imagine them singing out loud to one another. I may not understand the words of their language, but I gladly share the gusts of song as they are wildly dancing.

The pond is rippled into a million sparks, snapping along the surface. Leaves, seeds and small twigs are carried into the dark brew. There is the lone goose egg left behind on Mother Goose’s abandoned nest. The water rose so high from rain this year, that underneath the diminishing nest circumference, the excess water most likely suffocated the goslings in their eggshells. I saw the gander mating with her two weeks ago, but they seem to have left this pond. Perhaps they will raise another clutch elsewhere?

When I settle down more into the rhythms of the pond life, I now spy two turtles sunning on a mound of slithery weeds. The sun beats down on their glistening black shells and a tiny plop turns my attention to the larger turtle disappearing into the brink. The younger one pokes out its head and tries to gain puchase on the slimy surface to follow suit. It starts to gain traction but slithers down sideways, and then, it is also gone.

The breeze quiets, and a tiny maple seed pod perfectly helicopters all the way down to the weeds beside me. A frog trills. Birds dart around and dip in and out for a fluttering bath.

I finally arrive at pond silence. I close my eyes against the hot sun, allowing the whispering air to cool me. I am christened by gratitude. I am overcome by a deep sorrow for the inevitable destruction we have invoked for our dear great planet. I am lying at the bottom of the pond muck. I am transformed into food for invisible organisms. I am subsumed by silence, nested beneath the clay bottom of this pond, in this moment.

Another resident arrives, pushed in a wheelchair by her grandson who I am told is an oboist for the Philadelphia? orchestra. I couldn’t quite hear her as the wind carried her words away. He is young and fresh-faced, and clearly loves his grandmother who is so proud of him.

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Perennials and Patience

Diary 5/7/19

End of the first week of May! More and more, time seems insensible to the way I live my life. Retired as I am, I do have activities, meetings, appointments and obligations every day. I do have a changing schedule to adhere to. Without them I would feel too adrift, without purpose. In and of itself, to be aimless would be very stressful. I need to know I am accountable for interactions with others- that I have ideas, support, practical skills to contribute to the people in my community. Even my bit of garden is shared with others. But time is elusive and working on my garden is based on reality, not my desires.

I took advantage of the Annual Plant Sale that is a much anticipated feature every spring at Kendal. It started formally at 7:30 a.m. on Friday. At 7:15 the hallway where the plants were on display was already jam packed with people clutching their plants, eagerly waiting to pay for them. “Who says when it is officially 7:30?” someone asked. The rest of us laughed but soon enough, money began changing hands and the crowds continued all day as the tables emptied out. The next day there were a very few left, and I scored three more outdoor plants, half priced, which were the last to be sought after.

Other folks helpfully carted off my plants for me to the concrete patio off of the lounge area of my section of the Care Center. The door is locked from the outside, with a sound alarm, preventing anyone with dementia disappearing outdoors. That was a necessity established years before the beautiful new dementia unit was built where there is now a lovely enclosed courtyard for safe access to the outoodors. The patio door near me, however, remains locked. My helpers and I had to navigate a circuitous route through various hallways to get to the outside door closest to the patio where I can store my gardening tools and plants until I get to them. From there, my garden patch is only about 15 feet away, over the grass. It is fairly uneven ground beneath its deceptively smooth grass cover. Pushing my rollator over the bumps carrying plants, my kneeling gardening bench, my hand tools and then watering cans, required many trips to and from the patio.

I have been told that the soil here is heavy wet clay. It should have been no surprise that it was, in fact, black tarry lumps that I encountered as I went to prepare the nearest portion of my patch. Because the perennials I bought were thinnings from other people’s gardens (at a very fair price), I figured they were used to this soil for bedding, and so far, do seem to be adapting fairly well. The surprise came in working the next section that I tackled for transplanting some daisies.

Kendal had planted five low spreading juniper bushes beneath my windows, two of which are happy and thriving. One had died completely and I had Facilities rip it out. As I dug around with my used but hardy, newly purchased trowel, I encountered a rock. A large rock as big around as my arm…no a round vein of compressed gold colored clay. It was like cement even though the soggy malleable clay around it was very wet. This lump had absorbed not a drop of water. A single large dandelion root had pushed it’s way through a tiny section of this stuff; an admirable accomplishment given I couldn’t chink off even a chip with my trowel. Maybe I will place potted flowers to stand on top of this root killing area.

Yesterday, while chatting with my PT, he told me that the next county over was once known as the “Sandstone Capital of the World”. Oh. I also found out that I had sprained some muscles compensating for my weakness. My back was sore but resilient enough to be OK. My ankles are swollen from navigating the uneven terrain. I am humbled that I can garden at all. The act of pushing and kneeling, digging and nurturing, are strong motivators for me. I have not completed my efforts yet, but unlike the dandelion root, I will not succeed by forcing my way through sandstone. I am relearning patience as I regain mobility and curb my insistence to DO more. After 30 years, I see my willfulness reappearing as I emerge from a more contemplative life. My ankles and plants smile, as they patiently wait with me.

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Perennials

Diary 4/19/19

Last year at this time, I was still recovering from the outpouring of love and and intensity around Richard’s memorial. Gradually my focus turned towards leaving Bearsville, the home of twenty five years of our lives, of his death, and of my childhood since I was 5 years old. His death chapel/living room was filled with boxes of our old life. Every day was an invitation to dispose of what was left after the first go round of auction-able items. Some decisions were easy and clear cut. After Richard’s family and our friends had chosen a few of his nicer clothes, and after we gave away any of his useful work-clothes and boots (and tools, tools, tools) to men he had worked with over the years, all of his other clothing went to a charity organization in our nearby small city. I imagine someone wearing his barely used suit to a special occasion. Or his various coats for the many seasons endured in Catskill Mountain weather, walking around on other people’s bodies. A few of my own dressy dresses also went to that good place. How many weddings would I attend in the very near future? Would antique styles be back in fashion fifteen years from now as grandchildren graduated and got married? At the time, my body was already in rough shape and I couldn’t imagine traveling anywhere, anyway.

Looking back, I can see I made both solid and irrational choices based on “widow mind”. There is a reason that you shouldn’t make any big decisions for a year after losing your partner. Grief renders your executive thinking into unrecognizable mush. The hospice team said,“ It’s perfectly normal to feel crazy in your grief.” Crazy is when you can’t see for yourself that you are not entirely rational. It seemed perfectly reasonable to let go of some things I now wish I still possessed. I only knew if I was to live in one room at this unknown place called Kendal, I probably would live like a nun. A renunciate’s life appealed to me at the time. I had already lost all of my best beloved earthly delights- my husband, my home, and my health. I was more than halfway there. My daughters firmly kept me here and were so dearly supportive of wherever I needed to go and however I deemed best to get there.

At the time, I couldn’t have known that the brutal wounding of my heart broke me open in marvelous ways. Letting go of what was my life, for better and for worse, yielded a reemerging hunger for new life. Not the life I knew before, but the life that was yet in its infancy when I first arrived at Kendal. The reshaping of my identity as Judi took surprising turns. Living in a community with its established celebrations and excellent vehicles for creative expression brought out a dormant fount of my own need to write more songs, poems and essays; even to choreograph a dance. It has been a revelation to see the offerings that have sprouted through me. I saw a need to nurture simply being in the midst of this very actively doing group of people and now I lead weekly meditation groups. They are small but we are fed by our partnership in silence.

This chapter of my life released me from being a wife. Ten thousand decisions ,always undertaken with two of us in mind, fell to me alone. I had been with Richard since I was sixteen. I barely had time to see “me” as an independent person before becoming a “we.”. Waking up to myself is a gift I have been given and I do not take it lightly. I am more dedicated to being alive as fully as I can be. That nun has gratefully shed her robes and entered into the world wearing colors and styles that are much younger than her peers at Kendal. I am more my own age than ever before. My physical compromises pointed me to a necessary inner life earlier than others in my late sixties bracket. I am grateful for the depth of my spiritual explorations: they sustain the me that I am and they abide as my overriding passion.

I am fortunate that I can also kick up my worldly heels at the same time. My body has been re gifted with more stamina to engage. I have a small garden outside my windows that calls me to enduring fertility, nurturance, and flowering. I am going to buy composted soil this weekend to prepare for new perennials I will soon plant. I need to kneel down, get dirty, and be responsible for their colorful lives.

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Whose Dance Is It Anyway?

Diary 4/16/19

So much has happened since my cervical stenosis was relieved through surgery. I still have pain and weakness from pinched nerves in my lower back that is due to “mild “stenosis and bone slippage at L4-5. I saw my spine doctor just before I flew to NY last Thursday evening. The good news is that he said he didn’t think the discomfort would get any worse than it is now. I can live with it as I have been for a long time. Actually I can’t truly summon what it would be like to be totally pain free. As we age, most of us identify with many aches and twinges we never had before. I am not at all alone in this. The doctors would not operate again for at least another year. We’ll see if recovering atrophied muscles in my back might stabilize my spine. I am working on them to do just that.

My butterfly dance is in the digital “can”. I wish I could post the low resolution version of it here but since the photographer used gorgeous copyright footage of butterflies for the credits, I cannot. Originally, he was going to superimpose them over us dancing. The piece turned out to be compelling enough to stand on its own legs. Well, on Martha’s legs and on the legs of my “emerging from cocoon” chair where I am sitting throughout the five minute piece. The manifestation of an idea into a film has been a delightful process. It is a tribute to Kendal and all that it offers, that I could so easily collaborate to create this. Whenever it comes out, I can at least post the link for Kendal’s two minute promo version of the highlights.

The other minor miracle is that I flew to NY for a whirlwind weekend to attend my friend Phyllis’s eightieth birthday party. The whole first day was about seeing people who would not be there. They were so kind to drive in to see me. I wished I had time to see more folks but it was too much to do any more than I did. The next day was all about being with my two darling daughters and saving my energy for the evening celebration which was terrific fun and deeply moving. I basked in the well deserved love that Phyllis’s family and friends showered her with.

Emilia drove us back to the airport early Sunday morning and there ensued a tangled travel story. I will not add to the detailed repertoire of airport woes we all can trot out. It was actually weather related as there was “extreme fog” in Manhattan that morning. Driving into the city was eerie- you couldn’t see the top of the bridge overhead and only the very tops of the tallest buildings emerged from the gray mass before us. We had fortunately changed our flight to an earlier departure and it turned out to be the ONLY flight that wasn’t eventually cancelled. The last scheduled flight to Cleveland left at 5:00 P.M. After three very sore hours of sitting before our plane finally departed, I can’t imagine how I would have made it if I had to spent the entire day in that most uncomfortable airport. I returned to a local Ohio tornado warning, but no wicked witches were killed at Kendal on Sunday evening.

The point is that I did it at all and, yes, it was extremely fatiguing, but not devastating to my body. It means I can occasionally go to see Marion in upstate NY and not have it all on her to come see her family in OH. Of course, I had Emilia to buffer everything- I could not have done it without her. But to spread my wings even this much was an unsuspected possibility two months ago.

I have been pondering all month. How do we arrive at this exact point of time? Would I have created that dance if someone hadn’t years ago recorded that particular piece of music for Richard on a CD? Did it begin when I first read Chuang-Tzu’s Taoist writings in my twenties? Or when I danced to my mother’s guitar playing as a toddler as that one cute photo attests to? How did I end up here at Kendal? All of our hundreds of seemingly random choices conspired to bring us to this hour of this day in this circumstance. Eldering offers us the time to reflect on how we chose any number of threads to weave the tapestries of our lives. How did it all transpire? Whose dance is it anyway?

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Loneliness and Love

Diary 4/1/19

April is here.There are forced forsythia branches in our morning eatery sunshining up the kitchen. It is sunny outside today, but chilly, and I am watching yesterday’s snow leaving the south facing roofs. Now the grass is slowly peeking through the northwest lawns in my purview. The sky is blindingly blue and requesting my presence. I have a meeting at the far end of the building later this afternoon, and I will bring my coat and continue on out the back door to visit my favorite accessible bit of Kendal’s “wilderness; the Buttonbush Bridge. The pond there is murky and dark after the ice melted, filled with the ratchet of spring frogs, shrill peepers, and too many bird calls for me to discern individually. Last time I visited, the clash of two geese on the apartment roofs behind me, shouted down all other sounds until they slithered down the shingles to the ground and flapped raucously away.

It is always a revelation of an experience larger than myself. I leave touched and opened. I did so today, learning why those two geese had caused such a fuss on the lawn behind the pond. They chose this pond as the spot to lay their eggs. It was now their territory. The mother goose created her nest right on top of a muskrat’s nest. The mound had been there last week and looked even bigger and sturdier now. Sitting on her eggs, the goose reached out her long neck from time to time gathering more strands of duckwweed within her reach to add her contribution to the mound.

Both creatures don’t know that this is a vernal pond, and by midsummer, it will be dry or reduced to a very small puddle left in the middle. How they will get on with one another I can’t imagine. Geese are very aggressive and muskrats are very shy unless cornered. Perhaps the upstairs/downstairs arrangement will work out for them. One enters by air, the other by underwater doorways. I wish them both well in starting their new families.

Three days ago I awoke with such a longing for the simple human intimacy of being with Richard. This initially painful gift is also a heart opening. Only when I drop down as deep as the pond, am I touched by Love, an equally welcome though differently painful opening.

Diary 3/30/19

Morning loneliness

seeps through the skin

foggy tendrils of sorrow

grasp coiling around

your ghost

Your breath is gone

you hands your smell your voice

the empty spaces

exuding lost masculinity

intimacy of humor

the steadfast love of you

not here not there

Pulling me

through the illusion

of separateness

into restful

arms that hold

for a moment

nothing and everything

Such Intimacy

I can hardly bear

.

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Undaunted Daffodils

It has been snowing lightly all day. Despite that, “April, come she will…” The daffodils will withstand this day and emerge as proof that tomorrow is the first day of April, no fooling.

Despite the slow nature of my recovery, my body is recovering. Some days I walk accumulatively about 3/4 of a mile. Some days I sit for two meetings, my my meditation group, and then dinner. Remembering my former life of consecutive actions filling a whole day is amazing to me. Today is not one of those days. After walking carefully on the well salted, but icy path to Quaker meeting and back, I am tired. I take my cues from my body for the need to move or to rest, and today is all about resting as the snow lazily drifts down.

The “Butterfly Dream” dance I mentioned in the last blog has gone through many iterations. The marketing folks at Kendal want to use the film for a promotional blog since it features me collaborating with an Oberlin dance student. Our intergenerational connections are important to residents here and that includes the children at the Early Learning Center down the hall. They, too, will be filmed chasing “bubbleflies.”

For the Kendal blog, I was asked to cut my piece down to three minutes. Then two minutes, then back to five again by the videographer. He said he would film the whole piece then edit it down to two minutes for the promo. He is really masterminding the film that will be shown at the Kendal Spring Fling event. He managed to get permission to use a gorgeous slow motion video of butterflies from the Cockrell Butterfly Museum in Houston that he can superimpose on us dancing. The last five minutes of Adagio for Strings will play as he plugs in the voice over of the parable prerecorded beautifully by my friend, and then he films us dancing. He will edit down the highlights for the two minute promo. In our many email exchanges he has been creative, inspired and very professional. I believe he will do a masterful job for both films.

Like the daffodils, this dance is my small plot of undaunted buds, ready to adapt to the changing weathers and emerge as colorful harbingers of spring.

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Personal Signs of Spring

Diary 2/18/19

The Ides of March are upon us (‘ides’ being a Roman method of naming the lunar cycle in March; Shakespeare named the dangerous time frame for Julius Caesar’s death, not for the rest of us) and it is good to know that spring is inching closer every day. Despite the gathering snowflakes on the lawn this morning, my ‘dirt’ fingers are itching. I can’t get out there to work the earth or plan landscaping for outside of my windows yet, but I am mentally puttering inside with potting the six plants now under my care. That is the #1 sign of my internal spring returning.

When I first arrived at Kendal I was adamant- No Plants. In my widow shock, the concept of caring even for a plant was beyond me. I had nothing to give. I barely kept a beautiful orchid alive that my in-laws sent me as a welcome gift. Likewise, I was relieved to be cooked for at every meal no matter what was served. It turns out my body is still sensitive to even incidental gluten and processed grains on a daily basis and I really do not like beef or pork. I am so glad I now have a kitchenette.

My personal spring #2 sign, is that I am cooking for myself more often to supplement the meal choices on offer. Kendal has a 7 week rotation menu schedule, changed for every season. I now know that ‘Caribbean Chicken’ tastes less appealing than it sounds. By my standards, the vegetables are mostly overcooked, there is little salt, and even less seasoning in most dishes. There are some exceptional meals, and there are unannounced surprises like excellent seafood gumbo for Mardi Gras. The variability and limitations of what I both like and can safely consume, are uncertain week to week.

Learning to use my microwave in unique ways- gluten free ‘banana bread-in-a-mug’ on Sunday mornings, Yum!- and ordering a small InstantPot will give me a much larger scope to stretch my wings. I am so grateful to cook again.

Speaking of wings, the #3 sign of my burgeoning growth is: I am going to choreograph a dance for Kendal’s next big community wide event. Spring Fling is about dances and the theme this year is butterflies. My senior dance major friend from Oberlin is returning the favor of being in my five minute piece as I was in hers for her senior project last semester. To begin our piece, another friend will read: “This is from The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang-Tzuby Zhuangzi or Chuang-Tzu, a great Chinese philosopher who died in 327 BCE. He was a major contributor to the philosophy of Taoism and had great influence on the rise of Buddhism.”

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a {wo}man.”

My friend, Martha, and I have many non-corny ideas to set this into literal motion using five minutes of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as our musical backdrop. She is also a meditator and this is a classic parable on the nature of reality. People will hear what they hear, and see what they see, but for us, it is a deeper revelation we are exploring. I just found out today that we can have it filmed by a professional photographer who is married to a social worker here. Kendal has a newly installed large screen to view it in the auditorium. Rather than doing a live performance, this video will provide for a more relaxed creation in case the actual night is a ‘bad body day’ for me. If it turns out well, I will learn how to post it on this site. My body is still sore, limited, and shaky, but I am filled with visions that cry out to me, “Come, move as you can.” Together, Martha and I will, and will not be, flying.

May we each find our personal signs of new growth in the midst of the world tragedies and sorrows that we all bear. May our tears water that which is starved for the waters of Love.