31 January 2015

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said.   [Nicole Krauss, The History of Love]

I’ve been DOing this daily writing in the same way for some time Now. It has been like a cup, just the right size and touch to hold my morning ginger tea. When I’d miss a few days, [which usually I didn’t but surely have in the past 10 months or so] the container brought me right back to center. Showed me how to BEgin. And when to say WHEN.

I felt this in a wholly on BEyond way just Now. I felt like there we were, you and I, and in just the blink of an eye I went quiet. Incapable of sitting up or writing.

I wonder if what I have to say truly needs saying.

If it needs to BE said, using my voice and your ears, or read by your eyes same as I see it here, on the screen.

There are so many possibilities, impossibilities, wonders, miracles, confusions, misconceptions, and, moments Now.

I’m living in them NOT recording them or documenting them. I don’t want to straddle this divide, tell all, and harm anyone/thing.

But you’re in my thoughtsandfeelings and when I can I will share. Using this trusty container.

I love you, Currie

29 January 2015

Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.   [Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke]

Writing is hard. I am a sore noodle-body. So I’m pushing myself, making “a constant flux of approximation and distanciation” out of this time when I'm somewhat caught apart from My Life.

Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.   [Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia]

The hardest part of this sickness is feeling cut-off. On the other hand, I feel that everything is progressing in a more natural fashion. There’s talk of Mum coming home, when some modification has been done, and in the ER yesterday, my oncologist came and put me on hospice.

I imagine it may sound odd that I’m glad of that, but I am. If I had been on it the past week I would NOT have had to BE home entirely alone. And I could have still seen Mum on the Palliative Care Unit.

Such things in Life don’t step to my tune, they just ease in, like you land a canoe.

I love you, Currie

27 January 2015

This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.   [Sarah Dessen, Just Listen]

So much for predictions of little hiccups is all…

I’m really sick and I’ve been really sick going on 6 days Now. It’s a fog. Painful. And a little insulting.

Yesterday, talking with my palliative care nurse, I started to get a “bigger picture” view when I realised that all I want Now is to BE able to see Mum. Even more than the pain, NOT BEing able to see her has done me in.

I didn’t understand that what was underneath all this is my fear of BEing unable to DO the “normal” things. So, there you are. A Very Normal Thing I CanNOT DO Right Now.

Instead I will BE grateful for talking it through with my nurse, with my brother, a little, and God.

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.   [Ralph G. Nichols]

Absotively and Posolutely.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 23 January 2015

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.   [Neil Gaiman]

Making mistakes has always been my learning style. Especially important stuff.

I didn’t feel well yesterday, but I went to Mum’s early, planning to take an easy day of just BEing and NO DOing.

Whoops!! Despite curling up with my heating pad while Mum snoozed, things progressed quickly. I am Now at home, riding this sick out, and Mum is in a palliative care place for a couple of days until we’re both able to DO what we’re DOing.

I worried at BEing Mum’s caregiver. But it’s working. Well.

And This?! It’s a little hiccup is all…

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 22 January 2015

Just the fact that you're even asking yourself the question pretty much proves you're qualified. Most people spend more time worrying about how to raise tomatoes than they do their own kids.  [from the film, Martian Child, 2007]

I’m immensely grateful for movies. Cycling through my favourites, old and newer-ish, thanks to Amazon and a gift card from my brother, is a deLIGHTfully delicious way to wind down BEfore sleep in this particular passage, and Let Go of my days more gently.

Last evening it was Martian Child. I’d forgotten how lovely the dialogue is, which made it especially sweet. It’s also a BEautimous love story in the sense that only Love can open us and make us surpass even the wildest imaginings we dream for ourselves. And others.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.   [Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume]

The expanse and edges of Love, and of its myriad tributaries, amaze me on a daily basis Now. I’ve held myself back from Love, which I don’t regret BEcause I have discovered the magic in loving myself. In loving my Life, as it is and as it is NOT.

Loving myself teaches me “better ways” to love other humans BEing human. Which is the work of Life, y’know?!

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 21 January 2015

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.   [Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith]

I’ve thought about grace a LOT this past year. It is a Light, it DOES carry me, and I am, many times a day, utterly undone by its capacity to Change Everything. In a blink. Or a breath.

When I was still DOing chemo and learned of Mum’s diagnosis, I thought I had completely lost my heart. I felt NOTHING but overwhelm and my glaring inadequacies simply overtook me.

I was sure that I could DO nothing and I was ashamed on top of the overwhelm. It was NOT my finest hour.

I can hardly BElieve the ME I was Then is NOT who I am Now.

Every day seems something of a miracle to me. 

It is simply grace.

And mayBE a little willingness, too.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 20 January 2015

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise. The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s classic novella.   [Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End]

I had a scare yesterday. I couldn’t reach Mum by phone. She calls me when she gets up, and it was noon. No call. No answer.

I took my myriad fears for the 20-minute walk to her apartment and found her dozing in her chair. [insert HUGE breath of relief]

How Mum experiences the end of her Life and how it affects those who love her IS the point. Sometimes I forget or overlook that.

I’ll remember that going forward.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 19 January 2015

He began to see the situation from another angle. An assignment had been given him. Someone’s life, a small set of lives had been placed in the palm of his hand. Maybe he would never have any more purpose than this: to accept the assignment gracefully, lovingly, and do the best he could with it.   [Anne Tyler, Morgan's Passing]

Angles. Perspectives. Points of view. It seems Life is always set in some relation to Time, Place, or Person[s]. And I seem always ready, set, GO to choose mine.

When I have the opportunity to reflect, to look backward as it were, I always see something I missed. Some way of seeing and BEing in my Life that is Past where I understand how wrong I was, how clearly I did NOT see from where I stood.

Even something just days in the Past can look this way. If I choose to SEE it, or mayBE look at it…

I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.   [Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye]

I’m daily surprised by those characteristics I’ve let annoy me about Mum. How in their place is only tenderness.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 18 January 2015

I could not get used to the idea of there being classes of people inherently inferior to oneself, to whom one could be as odiously condescending or downright brutal as one likes, yet with whom one lived as intimately as family.   [Robyn Davidson, Desert Places]

It’s how Life is, I suppose, even if I don’t want to BElieve it so, especially in myself. But there it is. I feel “better than” some and “inferior to” others. As I’m certain others are about me, or “my kind” of people, as well themselves. I never really thought about getting “used to the idea,” I think I have struggled with recognising it. Then, of course, acknowledging it.

The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.   [Robyn Davidson, Tracks]

I had a struggle inside of myself yesterday. Did I want to rest and just BE or could I, mayBE, allow myself to BE greater than how tired and sore I was feeling and BE who I truly want to BE, or at least who I want to BElieve I can BE?!

Life is all about making choices and taking steps…

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 17 January 2015

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

[From the poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye]

I love the whole of this poem so much that I have it on the wall, where I see it daily, reading it almost as much. In many ways I think only Now am I truly coming to know what kindness CAN BE. I think mayBE always I have stood aside, even stepped back, away from kindness. Now that is NOT how I am. And NOT who I try to BE.

I have thought about each line of this poem. I’ve noticed how the imagery resonates inside me each time, like a Polaroid picture comes to Life, slowly, little bit by little bit.

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.   [George Sand]

Yet another aspect of the meanings of Kindness. There is the assumption that Kindness is [and always has been] Right Here, inside of myself. I wonder at that, considering my reluctance and wrongthinking about what it “looks like” when I am kind.

So Now I practise, giving, losing, letting go, and receiving without hesitation, regret, and especially meanness.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 16 January 2015

Let me be. Kindness unwanted is unkindness. [Hecuba from The Trojan Women, 1971]

Talking with my brother yesterday he shared this: Kindness unwanted is unkindness. I decided it was his brilliance, yet when I Googled it this morning I learned its origin. It was said by the character, Hecuba, in this long ago film, when others were trying to help her up…

When I found the Let me be part, I was astonished. It is gently putting things back together inside me, these long ago words, and I am deeply grateful. Sometimes it is so hard to BE who we choose to BE in this Life and this World. Everyone wants to “help” and offer “advice.” Yet what I most want and cherish is the people who Let Me BE, even if they don’t understand or agree.

NOT everyone agrees with my choices. NOT everyone agrees with Mum’s choices. Their caring and kindness can actually hurt and even hobble. And of course that is NEVER their intent.

Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one. [Harry Callahan from Dirty Harry, 1971]

Yes. And most of us walk around offering up our opinions about people, places, and things that are really None Of Our Business. Keep your eyes on your own paper, Now that’s something to aim for…

Just saying.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 15 January 2015

In my experience, anger and frustration are the result of you not being authentic somewhere in your life or with someone in your life. Being fake about anything creates a block inside of you. Life can’t work for you if you don’t show up as you.   [Jason Mraz]

I hit a wall head-on yesterday. I’m still frustrated. I’m still angry, though it is a sort of free-floating anger, or mayBE it is that I am angry with myself. With my reaction. With my frustration.

Mum fell. It didn’t have to happen, but it did. So there it is. Just the facts.

I was right there, but I couldn’t stop her fall, and I couldn’t pick her up. Even if she has lost 50+ pounds. So thank goodness for an alert button I pushed [handily placed in the bathroom, right next to where she landed, on her knees] and for Larry, who came and got her up…

All of her recent sweetness and her oft-expressed appreciation for me seemed to vanish after this. And I’d hurt myself, too, with the rushing about and trying to “fix” things. That frustrates me. That I am limited. That I canNOT take care of my mother.

I don’t know that I’m grateful for frustration. Or my anger. I’m just trying to BE me.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 14 January 2015

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.   [Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help]

Asking is an art. It is an essential skill for navigating Life. We’re here with each other FOR each other. We all have gifts to give and that means we all have gifts to BE received. Sometimes it is small and deeply meaningful. Sometimes it is excruciatingly difficult yet something so ordinary.

I helped Mum in the shower again yesterday. Every day seems to ask more of me. And every day I seem to BE stepping up higher and DOing more than I’d ever imagined.

I completely trust this. Just last week we were trying to find mutually happy places for things and I was pushing more than I wanted and far more than I intended.

Learning to BE a better version of myself seems to BE all about asking. I really never imagined it could feel like this.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 13 January 2015

Do you think any of us know how to love?! Do you think anybody would ever do anything if they waited until they knew how to love?! Do you think that babies would ever get made or meals cooked or crops planted or books written or what God-damn-have-you? Do you think people would even get out of bed in the morning if they waited until they knew how to love? You have had too much therapy. Or not enough. God knows how to love, kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors. Forget love. Try good manners.   [Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood]

I thought for a Very Long Time that I’d missed the week when they were teaching How To Love. I mean, Love, like the No Matter What and You Can Count On Me sort. MayBE I just had teachers who taught me Love was dangerous, difficult, and definitely NOT in my skillset.

Now I know something quite different. HOW?! is never the right question. It’s NOT even the point. Love is bigger than words can express, but it’s NOT BEyond my grasp.

Or anyone else’s.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.  [Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere]

Still, I/we DO the best I/we can.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 12 January 2015

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.   [Anne Tyler]

I’ve made discoveries awkward as this one. I’ve wondered at my easy irritabilities. I’ve been utterly confounded by my pettiness. I think this is actually rather a normal response to Life at times. Still, it isn’t one of my proudest revelations.

Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.   [Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar]

This has been a sort of theme for my Life. Now. And I imagine for some time. I have learnt who Currie is and who she might BEcome, should that BE her choice. I’ve stumbled upon this in the midst of experiences I’d expected to BE “bad” ones and it has changed EVERYTHING in a blink.

In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.   [Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia]

And in all our BEginnings. And our Middles. At our Ends it’s, well, it’s just too late, y’know?!

BE grateful. First. Last. Always.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 11 January 2015

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying, “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness."  [from the film, Shall We Dance? 2004]

I’ve thought a LOT about the end of my Life these past 9 months. I’ve considered things I was NEVER aware of considering until, in a blink, I realised what I thinkandfeel and really WANT, in Life.

Life Today, I mean. That’s all that matters. This one day. Right Now.

You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are...off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.   [Elizabeth Berg]

Life changes…Life Changes. These are things I know. And they are things I am learning. Each day. Knowing I keep others in my heart, even those from other times in Life, this is something I have come to love about myself.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 10 January 2015

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.   [Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe]

Less is NOT always Loss. Sometimes Less is the point. How little understanding I have of this. And yet I know it as surely as I know my own name.

…one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own.  [Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe]

It’s remarkable to me how books [and especially reading them] have been like a safe treehouse for me for as long as I can remember. I suppose it’s stories that hold me captive. I’m learning other ways to “read” with my whack-a-doodle eyesight. And I love walking BEside a good storyteller.

I am glad I am remembering this Now.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 9 January 2015

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.  [F. Scott Fitzgerald]

Sometimes I simply don’t understand myself. MayBE I don’t always need to though. MayBE it’s enough that I think about it and am willing to try.

I’ve been noticing my critical side[s?!] seem to BE on a holiday. I canNOT see what’s “wrong” with other people so much as I once [and for a long while] did. MayBE I’m kidding myself, but it really feels like it’s just “gone.”

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.   [Marie Curie]

Somedays I don’t recognise the fear in me. Instead, it bullies and pushes at me, interrupting my intention to BE someone who is open to Life. When I DO “see” it, I learn. And for me, learning is what Life’s all about.

We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest.  [Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year]

When loss is imminent, each breath feels deep and intricate. Every moment so very essential.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 8 January 2015

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.   [Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams]

NOT sure I understand this. I’m only certain that it makes sense to me.

On the outside, I look good. Healthy. Strong. Younger than my 61 years. I manage and I live day in and day out.

But cancer has been “an earthquake of the soul.” It has made everything buckle, shimmy, and some of it even fall, shattering into too many pieces to put it back together.

Even if chemo has messed up my eyesight, it has reavealed in me a sort of acceptance unlike anything I experienced up until Now. I understand something deep, more important, something that doesn’t require my eyes to SEE it, only my soul to embrace it.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.   [Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never]

I agree completely.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 7 January 2015

Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are… People are different when you can smell them and see them up close…   [John Green, Paper Towns]

I don’t know how many people actually read what I write here. And I don’t particulary care. This is a new perspective. Somehow I think I have lost my capacity for caring about things that no longer mean anything to me.

I never had a script for Currie with cancer, much less Currie & Mum both having cancer. Currie as caregiver I could envision, though that was much fuzzier and less likely, given Mum’s strong independence.

I haven’t got to know many of my readers, yet the ones I have met, even by email, blow me away daily. I wonder, is this all things coming to place?! Is it time for me to no longer forget I am NOT IN CONTROL of Life and enJOY the experience of Life, whatever it might BE DOing or NOT BE DOing.

There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.   [John Green, The Fault in Our Stars]

This is something I think I finally understand about Mum and me…

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 6 January 2015

Equip yourself for your own needs.   [Patti Digh, What I Wish For You: Simple Wisdom for a Happy Life]

When something is as clear and plainspoken as this, I realise how easily I forget it, especially when I most need to remember it. Apply it.

Lately I’ve been adjusting dials and levels. I’ve been taking inventory and separating the excess from the essential. I’ve been exploring Where I Am Today without judging it or making any decision about what it all means or HOW it will all work out.

If there is one thing I have bumped into again and again and again it is the notion of equiping myself FIRST, then taking care of the other people and stuff of my Life. It is so simple and I know I understand it, so why is it I forget it so often?!

Some questions canNOT BE answered in words. Some of the answers are hidden in my heart, my brain, and mayBE my left pinkie toe.

Perhaps we can recognize our way out of patterns rather than repeating our way out of them.   [Patti Digh, Life Is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally]

I am all for recognising myself DOing it “wrong” and stopping. Changing is hard, but stopping myself is essential.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 5 January 2015

“People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.”    [Anne Tyler]

I’ve been thinking a bit more, under the circumstances, that Life is often like unwrapping a package. There is a hint, perhaps, by the look of the Thing, but really I have no idea what each moment will bring. I sometimes tear into the paper while others I simply sit still and allow things to BE what they will.

Even when that means leaving them wrapped for some time.

It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.   [Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups]

It really is, though NOT in a way that is particularly strenuous as I’ve so long BElieved. It’s NOT a “bad” thing or even a “good” one. It is nothing more than A Thing To BE Aware Of Living Here On Planet Earth.

Dealing with other humans BEing human is what it truly is. We feel unique yet we’re constantly surprised by how similar we are to one another.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 4 January 2015

…suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.  [John Green, The Fault in Our Stars]

It is really quite amazing how many things don’t even cross my mind. EVER. Yet this idea makes a sort of sense to me that I just canNOT stop smiling about.

I’m learning about respect. About “boundaries” that really mean something. About stepping up and taking a step back. About listening without responding. About loving what once made me more than a little crazy and often, too often, NOT nice.

The fact that I am only coming to this place of realisation Now, due to wildly improbable cirumstances [or DO I mean unimaginable?!], well there goes Life BEing Life. Its terms. Its time.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.   [John Green, The Fault in Our Stars]

I am grateful for the simple/est things. For the way it feels to BE me in my Life Right Now. I’m discovering how little liking Life’s course ultimately matters. We get to make choices, each of us, all of us, yet so rarely DO we recognise ourselves DOing this.

I am DOing this Now. And I recognise me DOing it, too.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 3 January 2014

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.   [Ellen Goodman]

I won’t lie, I want to make a difference. In any way I CAN, that is. My thoughts about our healthcare practises in this country have been turned inside out and upside down since the arrival of cancer on my “homefront.”

In the BEginning I was quite vocally adamant that I wouldn’t have surgery. That’s a decision I made in 2005. I stand by it and did, despite a lot of “push-back” from people, when that was proposed.

Some of what I think I can change, improve, or help is largely BEyond my grasp. So, if I want to make a difference, I start first in the smallest of ways. Baby steps. 

I’m learning a LOT about those.

Day BEfore yesterday, something came up and I was really quite proud of myself. It made me angry, HOT angry, like smoke could spew out my ears.

So I took a step back. I set it aside. I slept on it.

Yesterday I dealt with it. Like a grown-up. Like the Me I hope to BE. Every day.

Today it’s both different and better. Me, too.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 2 January 2015

Have you ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with lack of sleep or hectic with mindless obligations and you about to rush off on an early adventure or business, but full of deep silence and absolute clarity of perception? A dawning which you truly observe, degree by degree. It is the most amazing moment of birth. And more than anything it can spur you to action. Have a burning day.   [Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration]

I never realised how amazing dawn and pre-dawn are until I did. And once I discovered this love inside me for this gorgeous and exquisite time, there was no way I could plan to miss it again.

Watching my mother’s Life slowly winding itself down, little bit by almost invisibly small bit, it reminds me a little of dawn, pre-dawn, and this idea lets me hold onto her more loosely. To give her room to BE who she chooses to BE as her Life ends.

It is hard, walking through this. My own walk has been a lot, but somehow I forget that when I am in the midst of Mum’s. I don’t always know to reach out. And sometimes I don’t even think to. I just DO or BE as seems each situation.

Birth. Death. NOT so different.

I love you, Currie

Currie's Gratitude 1 January 2015

Seeing a pattern doesn't mean you know how to pull it all together. Take baby steps: don't focus on the folks whose skills are far beyond your own. When you're new to something-or you haven't tried it in awhile- it can feel impossibly hard to get it right. Every misstep feels like a reason to quit. You envy everyone else who seems to know what they're doing. What keeps you going? The belief that one day you'll also be like that: Elegant. Capable. Confident. Experienced. And you can be. All you need now is enthusiasm. A little bravery. And-always-a sense of humor.   [Kate Jacobs]

A new year BEgins. And the need for bravery is great. As is the need for Letting Go. It’s a different New Year’s Day sort of day. One that reminds me of the many things that have made my Life My Life.

Losing someone I dearly loved. Conceiving someone I continue to dearly love but have lost it would seem, to Time and Misunderstandings.

Lately I have had to dig deeper, pull from all of what I saved, or imagined saving. I have had to make Time and that has meant finding it.

And I just keep on following that bouncing ball and singing the words a little BEhind the rest of the choir.

I love you, Currie