The Blue Birdbath has been something of a gift to me this summer, but never more so than after a windstorm. We had intense winds and torrential rain this afternoon and when it stopped, there were all kinds of leaves and couple of flowers in the bird bath, there were also shadows and hues.
It’s been raining a lot there is mud all over the pasture. The donkeys and Maria are tight, they are glad to stand still for her while she scraped the mud off of their hooves. Sometimes they will stand still for me, but they always do for her.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to p ut to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
Something about this quote is very healing to me.
A friend of mine lost someone she knew to suicide, she was upset and she wrote that she was “living deliberately” today in response.
The phrase stuck in my mind.
Thoreau, it seems, was writing about his search for simplicity, to him the core of spirituality and meaning.
I am very fond of Thoreau and his search for a meaningful life, I relate to it. I am not in trauma, I am not overwhelmed by sorrow, I am loving my life, but I think I am quite unconsciously living deliberately. I am always working around the abyss.
There is always a deep hole in my being, trauma or death or mishap or not. I know I will never succeed in completely filling the hole, because my needs are not finite or exhaustible. Whenever I meet one need, five more resurface or appear, hungry for redemption and attention. I accept that life is just like that.
I have to work around it, nip at the edges, circle around and around, fill up the holes one shovelful at a time, play chess with it.
At times, my anguish has been so enormous, the abyss so deep I want to run from it.
I don’t ever seem to do that, though, not any more.
I am conscious of two extremes to avoid: being totally absorbed and consumed in my pain, or being so distracted by so many things that I don’t take the time to help my wounds heal.
Living deliberately helps me heal.
To me, that means living consciously. It means pausing to be grateful for what I have. It means learning from the light as well as the darkness. It mans reaching out to do good, a selfish kind of self-medication.
It means living thoughtfully and with perspective.
I believe that everyone has it worse than I do, and that everyone who reads anything I write has suffered the same things I have suffered, and fought and lost some of the same battles. If I write about the death of a dog, I know every one of you has lost a dog. Sometimes we forget that.
If I write about a death, I know everyone reading it has lost someone, or will soon enough.
We are unique in so many ways, and quite alike in others. The writer who forgets that falls into narcissism.
But we needn’t be happy all the time, or trouble-free. In a wonderful essay called “The Importance of Being Scared,” the writer Wistawa Szymborska laments children’s book publishers who insist that children should not be scared by anything in their books.
“Children like being frightened by fairy tales,” she wrote. “They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. Hans Christian Anderson scared children,” she writes, “his marvelous tales about in indubitably supernatural beings, not to mention talking animals and loquacious buckets.” His favorite character is death.
Children love to read his stories. Sometimes we need to be frightened and upset, the question is how to we rebound, how to keep out of the abyss. If you can’t ever be frightened, you can’t ever learn to live with fear.
A friend asked me the other day if I believed that everything happens for a reason. I think he was speaking of God, and of sickness and death. I told him I am not religious in that way, poor God can’t be held responsible for every flat tire I get or arrogant publisher or stomach bug.
I believe we learn from everything, but that fate is random and quite free. I believe that life happens to all of us, every day.
I came to the country today because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I am much closer to being dead than being born, and living deliberately is very important to me.
When Ed became physically immobilized by his cancer, he had only the use of his right hand. I went out and bought him some art supplies to supplement the colored pencils Carol had purchased for him.
We had to try different kinds and sizes of brushes before we hit upon the acrylic paint used to paint glass.
Ed made about a dozen glass sculptures from bases and bowls.
The first dozen or so were interesting, some quite lovely The rest showed the decline in his ability to work his hands. The one above, which he called the “chicken” was, I thought one of his best, colorful and graceful.
Sandi, one of the blog readers, was one of the first to buy it, and I was preparing to send it to her when she message me and she said she didn’t want it for herself, she bought it for me. I said no, and she insisted, and I gratefully accepted her gift.
I appreciate it all the more today, and Maria went out and filled it with flowers. It’s on my desk. Thanks, Sandi.
I love the color in the Blue Birdbath, it is the perfect backdrop for flowers, some of which have blown in, some of which have been placed there by a woodland fairy.
