Of Furling, Unfurling, and the Great Mystery of Timing

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying January 13, 2015

Well, it’s been almost seven months since I lasted posted, way over my deadline. Whoops. Fortunately, it’s not like I’m not getting paid for this or anything so no harm done.

I lost my voice there for a while, during all the aftermath, and didn’t feel like writing anymore so in the end I just didn’t. Simple enough. But lately I’ve been getting the niggle again, to express myself in this lovely, endlessly adaptable language we all share, which both surprises and, I admit, relieves me.

The whole process reminds me of the snails I used to love so much when I was growing up. How I’d place one on the palm of my hand and then sit still and watch it’s slow and graceful slide across my skin, the waving, tubal antennae that I’d gently touch just so I could see them telescope down into themselves, tucking away for temporary safety into the snail’s translucent little head. And then I’d wait, breathless, and count the seconds until they slowly, magically…for no apparent reason that I could ever ascertain…start to telescope back up again, a glorious and tiny display of snail-curiosity and snail-hope reaching back out into the world and waving around, feeling outside itself for the next thing.

(Here’s a lovely little video blending the grace of snail-world with an original piano piece. Really, it’s endlessly amazing to me how whatever moves you, there’s someone else out there who’s moved by it, too.)

The returning of my urge to write feels a lot like that, and I don’t understand why now? with the timing of this anymore than I understood it back with the snails, but there you have it. I guess sometimes we don’t really need to understand, things just happen when they happen anyway, and every exhale is always followed by another breath.

Well, except one exhale of course. Let’s not forget that one.

Anyway, yesterday morning I walked out of the house to head out into the world, my antennae waving around in the air above my head, only to be greeted by a sky full of the undulating song of Canadian geese in flight. It stopped me dead in my tracks as I gazed up and watched the dark, flying V’s approach and pass over and then recede again, their song receding with them. Then as suddenly as I was frozen I felt myself released, so I started for the car only to find a little Mallard duck couple waddling up the driveway toward my feet which instantly froze me all over again.

They didn’t stay very long, this pair. I spoke soft words of welcome and affection to them but all they really wanted was bread so they eventually turned around and waddled back down the driveway towards the next door neighbor’s house where their panhandling is usually rewarded.

Really, it’s such a complicated zone, this transition area where the wild and human worlds meet, full of so much error and so much tender longing. I admit, it can be difficult to know what’s right sometimes.

And then, with their departure, I felt myself released again and finally reached the car to head off deeper into a day where my antennae telescoped up and down, up and down all day, with the contact.

Frankly, I find that the human world doesn’t maintain the same cautious distance that the wild one does. At all. When I’m around people the antennae-hits tend to come with more velocity and frequency, which is harder for me and which I’m working to find a fix for. There are just way too many frozen moments at this point, way too much time spent waiting to internally unfurl again, which has got to change if I’m going to get anything of substance done.

There’s much to learn here, clearly, but today at least I’m writing again and it feels good. ‘Nuff said.

p.s. Happy Birthday sweetheart. Today is a very, very beautiful day for me because you were born. May it be even more beautiful for you.

A helpful greeting for a rough day…

Posted by Dia in Happiness and tagged with Happiness, humor, photography June 18, 2014

The girls next door lose their tennis balls over the fence all the time, which Dane the mangy rescue mutt then chews into uselessness. This cheerful bit of mastication greeted me this morning when I opened the drapes.

His name is Claude and he presents me with a little study on the qualities of absurd happiness. I’m growing attached.

copyright Dia Osborn 2014

Moving On: A Stop-motion Music Video by Ainslie Henderson

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with animation, creativity, Living and Dying, Oddities May 28, 2014

My son just sent me a link to this music video with the brief message, “This video reminded me of something you might like.” He knows me so well, my son.

Thought I’d pass it along because it’s just that good. Here’s a tiny, four minute, very compelling story told in yarn…yarn!…of all things. It’s a tale of life and love and loss, joy and birth and death, about being fully human I suppose. Who knew that a simple textile could be so damn eloquent? This kind of creativity just knocks my socks off.

Selfie in Hells Canyon

Posted by Dia in Camping, Living and Dying and tagged with camping, Hells Canyon, Kayaking, Life, the natural world May 27, 2014

The hubster and I spent most of last week in Hells Canyon tent camping for the first time in decades. (It went well. Fantastic in fact, so we’ve decided to plan another trip.) While hiking on one of the trails through the gorge below the dam we got a wild hair and took a selfie…mainly because it’s the only possible way we were ever going to get a shot of both of us in the same frame. It was fun and, surprisingly, turned out halfway decent considering we’d been camping for four days with accompanying grime build-up.

Here it is.

Truly though, the surrounding scenery looked better. For example:

The canyon

The snowcapped Wallowa Mountain range

A wild rugosa in bloom

Cascara sagrada leaves (from the tree whose bark gives us the active ingredient in ExLax. Gaze and be grateful.)

Our campsite (just prior to departure so sans tent, etc.) with Sherpa Pepe and the Kayak Twins

And an alpine rock garden on top of one of the many peaks

Did I mention it was wildflower season? It was wildflower season.

We also saw a couple of mountain goats, nesting bald eagles, and a brown bear but alas, being no wildlife photographer, I was unprepared and missed the opportunities. Oh, there were also bats. And a head full of ticks…no, two head fulls…but we were way too frantic trying to rip them out again to even think about taking pictures. No rattlesnake sightings though, even though the canyon is full of them, and thank God for that.

copyright Dia Osborn 2014

An & Ria’s #First Flight: The difference between courage and fearlessness

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying May 26, 2014

I love, love, love corporate advertising that reveals something beautiful about us as people. When I watch the kind of commercial that Vodafone created below, I feel like it’s a fair trade–my time and attention for their insight. If they did business in Idaho I’d even consider switching carriers if their product was as decent as their advertising.

This little ten-minute video follows two elderly Dutch women as they prepare for and then take their first flight. It’s delightful on way too many levels to list them all here, so I recommend you just watch it and settle into your own take on it…prepare to smile!

But one of the things that caught my attention was the great example it offers on the difference between courage and fearlessness. Here. See what you think.

When I was younger I always assumed courageous and fearless were just two words for the same thing. That essentially they both described the act of being brave. But as life went on and events required me to face some major, crippling fears of my own I gradually came to understand that there’s a huge…HUGE…difference.

Fearlessness is essentially an absence of fear, no courage is required if a person isn’t afraid to begin with. Ria was fearless, which is a lot of what made her so delightful to watch (not to mention that grin and contagious laugh.) For her, the whole thing was a grand and fantastic adventure, low on challenge, high on learning and fun. I think most of us long to be like Ria.

Courage, on the other hand, is more of a rare flower that can only blossom in the light of fear. Otherwise, it stays dormant…unnecessary and unavailable.

For that matter, even when fear is present courage can remain dormant anyway. The instinct can be so overpowering to play it safe and it can be so much easier to just stay home, even if one risks eventually falling into paralysis that way. Courage seems a little mysterious and ephemeral actually, as though it requires a remarkable confluence of events to finally spark it, but what that spark will be there’s no way to know until it actually happens.

I thought An was the more courageous of the two, because even though she was deeply afraid of flying she still summoned the strength to climb on that plane in spite of it. She seemed to be the more vulnerable of the two with the greater challenge to overcome, but maybe that’s why, once they were up in the air, I found her quiet wonder as she gazed out the window to be the most moving. Certainly, with the phobias I’ve endured, I understood why she wept when she spoke of the beauty of it all later.

Secretly, I think I long even more for An’s courage than Ria’s fearlessness, although to be honest I think everyone probably has a little of both lurking inside them. I suppose my real job is to just go ahead and delight in any periods of fearlessness I experience and then be really, deeply grateful if I’m frozen and that mysterious spark of courage ignites to help get me moving again.

copyright Dia Osborn 2014

Today I am…

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying, Mother's Day and tagged with Living and Dying, Mother's Day, Relationships, the natural world, wonder May 6, 2014

Today I’m both a little fearful and a little in love.

I’m a little fearful that I may be bad somehow…a sneaky shadow from childhood no doubt, still creeping along the ground of my life trying to keep a low profile.

But I’m a little in love with my snail shells, too.

Snails and I also go back to childhood, only in a better way. I used to spend hours and hours with these tiny friends of mine, placing them on the palm of my hand to wait however long it took until they finally worked up the nerve to peek out again…oh-so-cautiously…checking to see if the coast was clear before spilling out to explore my hand.

Honestly the level of trust required for that really knocked my socks off.

I used to find these companions in a thick groundcover of pickleweed growing on the semi-desert hillside behind our house. My snails loved the succulent jungle it provided and I’d go out on the back patio alone to pick the slimy, slug-like creatures off the leaves and cradle their impossibly fragile shells in my hands, waiting for those two graceful antennae to reappear and wave around, reaching, feeling for something…anything really…to touch. They didn’t seem to care what.

I was fascinated by their antennae and the way they looked like they belonged underwater, slow and undulating and tube-ish and transparent. They reminded me of the multiple tendrils of sea anemone, how they drift in ocean currents, only my snails antennae waved gracefully all on their own. I thought…and still do…that it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

They were also one of the most vulnerable creatures I’d come across. Their squishability was breathtaking to me, their supposedly-protective shells totally useless, which I still consider odd and unfair and a little deceptive from a destiny standpoint to the point where I feel a little betrayed for them.

Which is why their willingness to reemerge over and over again, no matter how many times I touched their antennae and drove them back into their shells…mostly gently but sometimes a little harder, a tap, to find out just how long it would take them to try this time…blew me away. They never gave up, these ridiculously flimsy creatures. Never quit trying. Never spiraled down deep into their shells saying Fuck it. Who needs this shit? I’m staying put.

Their curiosity won. I used to watch them for hours, secretly longing for their kind of snail-trust. I was over-the-moon smitten with these guys.

Which is why I eventually carried a handful of them into my bedroom to put in the brand new plastic jewelry box my mother had given me for my birthday. They were a treasure to me, exquisite and beautiful and full of hope, and I couldn’t have cared less that they left snail tracks all over the red, synthetic material lining the inside, the slime staining the fabric while slowly drawing it into permanent wrinkles as it dried.

Turns out my mother cared though, and she was furious when she found them. She didn’t realize what they looked like through my eyes and, falling into that perilous abyss of misunderstanding that ever-gapes between adults and children, she returned them to the patio, built a little pile with them, and buried them in a mound of salt. I felt responsible for their deaths. And very bad.

Of course, my mother was aghast when I explained to her in later years why I’d been collecting them, and she apologized to me over and over, feeling responsible and very bad, too. But then I knew my mother always loved me like that. I never once doubted that she’d regret it once she realized what happened. Not that she’d love them like I did, because to her they were still snails, but I knew she’d cherish and mourn them with me because she loved me that much.

Sometimes I feel like I was her little snail and my childhood was full of that same kind of thing, with Mom tapping on my antennae and then watching, fascinated and patient and smitten every time, as I’d peek back out and then spill into her hands. Sometimes, sure, she tapped my antennae a little too hard and I’d wind up curled inside for longer than usual, but in the end I could and would always come out again. I could snail-trust with her. That was her gift to me.

I miss her.

Today, I’m a lot in love with my mom.

A Little Post-Olympic Joy From Russia

Posted by Dia in Happiness and tagged with dancing, flash mobs, Life, Relationships, Russia February 28, 2014

This fabulous flash mob video from Moscow is a great reminder for me that Putin and the Oligarchy don’t define the true Russian people anymore than Washington and its incredibly malfunctioning Congress define us. I’m pretty sure that on the whole we the people, of any nation, just want to be free and happy…preferably together.

Here’s how some Russian people did just that recently. (Maybe it would help if all our government leaders got together like this? I bet THAT video would go viral.)

Of Storms and Stars, Whales and Grief

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Grieving, Life, Living and Dying, Talking about dying, the natural world, wonder February 12, 2014

“People gonna be okay, storms never come to stay, they just show us how bad we need each other…how bad we need each other.”

— Mark Scibilia

I’ve been at something of a loss for words over the last few months with the successive hits that mine and the hubster’s families have been taking. Two suicide attempts by young members (one successful and one thus far not) as well as the dignified and loving departure of a beloved elder seem to have taken their toll on even my desire to talk about dying.

Who would have thought?

But this morning I came across an old Yuletide letter I wrote back in 2002 and the tender perspective expressed in it helped me remember the rich beauty and wonder I once found in the rooms of the dying, sprinkled in among all the horrors. Reading it again reminded me that what I saw back then is still true today…the dying world really does contain profound and graceful gifts…even if I can’t currently see any of them in the aftermath of recent events.

I suppose this is where some faith helps. I needed reminding that the stars still hang up there in the depths of the night sky and that they’re just as luminous and lovely as ever. Certainly once this storm has spent all its fury and the clouds have finally cleared I’ll be able to find them again.

In the meantime, I can always read my old stories.

I thought I’d go ahead and paste in the old Yuletide letter here, just in case anyone else is slogging through heavy weather and hoping for a break. Maybe it can help.

**************************************************************************

Dear everyone that we hold with deepest affection:

Cal and I (and all unbeknownst to them—the kids) send our warmest greetings in this season of silence, celebration and relentless Christmas catalog barrage. Here in Idaho’s banana belt we’re experiencing an inversion—a meteorological event where the warmer air at higher elevations traps the colder and dirtier air at lower elevations and those of us down under reap the harvest of all our months of collected carbon emissions in the form of smog. A ban on wood burning is currently in effect in the valley so the cord of wood we just split stands leaning precariously by the garage while the fireplace waits cold and patient. Cal’s primal and eager impulse to poke around in a nest of flaming materials is temporarily thwarted so for his sake I hope a low-pressure system returns to the area soon.

This year seems to have flown by faster than any year before (a trend we’ve been noticing of late) and I suspect that it speaks to the fact of our aging. When I think about it, it seems logical enough. Between the two of us Cal and I now have almost 94 years of collected living to our names with all the learning and memories, laughter and heartbreak, wisdom and foolishness that that much life of necessity contains. Think about it for a second. When held up and compared to such an accumulation of time how long can a single year really take to pass after all? Sometimes I think of an old-growth redwood or an ancient mountain peak or a star and I wonder what a year seems like to them. I imagine it would be like a breath or a blink.

A solitary heartbeat lost in aeons of warm and pulsing rhythms.

Two great things happened this year for us. One was a cruise to Alaska—a generous gift from Cal’s dad up one of the most magnificent coastlines I could ever imagine—and the other was the work I began with hospice. Somehow the two are closely entwined although I’m not entirely sure how.

The cruise was something of an enigma for me. It was our first time and in preparing for the trip I found myself conflicted around issues of the seemingly decadent opulence of American spending and a very real anticipation of fully immersing ourselves in it.

The food was everything I’d ever heard it would be. We ate lobster and shrimp and French dishes and baked confections in lush dining rooms with scores of people waiting on us hand and foot. All we had to do was ask (frequently we didn’t have to ask at all) and nothing was denied us. There was even one climactic moment when we were sitting with our aperitifs at a linen-covered table, gazing out a huge window at the dark and choppy waters we sailed through when suddenly, Cal said, “There’s a whale!” And when I turned to where he pointed a giant humpback suddenly breached about twenty-five feet off the side of the ship, surging up into the air with a mass and drive that staggered the imagination. As it rose it gracefully spiraled 180 degrees, arching its body back and outwards as it twirled in a movement that looked like some kind of liquid ecstasy, before plunging back into a whitened maelstrom of water to disappear again beneath the surface.

I felt overwhelmed by the wealth of it all—both the riches of human civilization and the priceless treasures of the wild. Cal and I tended to forego the lure of bingo and Broadway shows, naturally gravitating toward the decks and railings of the ship where we spent our time watching the mountains and islands and vast tracks of forest gliding by. During one shore-leave we hiked on a mountain in Juneau, climbing up beyond the hordes of camera-snapping, cruise-line tourists (no doubt attempting to elevate our own camera-snapping activities to a higher moral plane) and on into the mist and muffled silence at the top where I sang to occasional marmots and ptarmigans who tipped their heads in curiosity.

Throughout the seven days we saw harbor seals whelping, bald eagles flocking, glaciers calving, and ice so old and compressed that it had turned a luminous color of blue. At the peak of the cruise we sailed up a fjord (I felt such a smug sense of satisfaction to finally experience the thing that carries such an exotic name) and on that morning I stood alone out on the deck for hours, shivering in the drizzling rain and cold breezes, held spellbound by the sheer, green cliffs rising up from icy waters—their towering heads hidden by clouds, their sides split time and again with plunging waterfalls fed by spring-melting snows—and in the cold, wet, wildness of it all a silence of great age, of vastness, weighed upon me, somehow aging me, too. Lending me a temporary grace that I suspect only comes enduringly with advancing years.

And I recognize the same vast silence I felt that morning each time I sit by the bedside of someone dying. It’s such a paradox to me, the moments that exist—tucked in among the bathing and dressing and care of wounds, among the laughter, overwhelm and expressions of tremendous sorrow and tenderness, among the changing of oxygen tanks and long hours of just listening and listening and listening—when I feel that same great weight of grace I felt in the fjord pressing down upon me again. Whispering to me of an indescribable beauty of great depths and muffled echoes and mist. And in spite of the moments of horror and heartbreak, I feel strangely uplifted.

I’ve come to wonder if much of the difficulty in dying lies in the necessity of having to give back all the many and deeply treasured gifts we’ve been loaned for the process of living. There’s so much to love in a lifetime be it brief or long, so much to wonder at and remember and touch with trembling fingers one last time. There are all those whom we love and our many achievements, the mountains and moonlight and extraordinary beauty of the world, the gifts of walking and laughter and being able to feed ourselves and go to the bathroom alone, and in our last moments the necessity of returning even the gifts of sight and touch and breath.

But in the end, while the gifts themselves must be returned, somehow the deep love and gratitude that they forge within us remains, growing ever more quiet and measureless upon being freed.

I remember again the brief instant of that breaching whale. The suddenness of it and surprise, the delight and the awe, the twisting, the power, and the arc of it’s body that seemed to express not so much purpose or deep import as a simple moment of sheer and unbridled joy. A moment of irrepressible delight, driving it to rise high and higher for an instant of unforgettable and breathtaking splendor. And so I’m coming to think of life. Something so brief and unpredictable and extraordinary surging up from invisible worlds, rising within us with such drive and vitality and joy—learning through us, loving through us, touching and being touched for what amounts to only a fleeting heartbeat in the vast rhythms of creation—before ultimately returning once again to the deep and gentle mystery of the waters that are its source.

With our newly graying hair and sagging bodies we wish for you all, this year and always, that each moment of the great wounding and joy of Life will be just such an arc of unforgettable beauty.

With all our love,

Cal and Dia

Should a family suicide be mentioned in a Christmas card? I could use some help on this one.

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying December 11, 2013

(I found this card after I wrote the post– Cafe Press.)

For the last couple of decades I’ve been writing a Yuletide letter to stick in with our Christmas cards, a missive that generally includes any big family news along with some philosophical musings on something…anything really…that happened during the year.

And up to now I’ve never been one to shy away from topics that some might consider questionable holiday fare (i.e. working with the dying, menopause, the incredible stench of alligator pits) but this year I’m up against the news of Cam’s recent suicide and it’s the first time a family event has given me pause. Partly because the announcement needs to be handled delicately out of respect for the hubster’s family, but also because suicide is a socially taboo topic that’s never supposed to be mentioned at all, even in the off-season. So how exactly are people going to react to my breaking that taboo in the heart of a major holiday devoted to joy and good cheer?

I admit, I just don’t know. And I feel kinda caught between a rock and a hard place because, realistically, what could I say instead? I mean, what exactly is the etiquette for glossing over a piece of information that catastrophic?

Hey there! We went kayaking in numerous spectacular places this year and are delighted to share that Beloved Daughter got married in June! We couldn’t be happier.* Happy holidays all!

*(Accept for that one loss in September of course, but really. We don’t want to bum you guys out with THAT!)

Yuck. I don’t think so.

The more I think about it the more it seems like I should probably just trust in people’s basic humanity…maybe have some faith that everybody’s caring and compassion will rise up and trump this horrible, hurtful, isolating taboo. I’d love for that to be what this season is truly about…something big enough, loving enough, and resilient enough to wrap its arms around both the joy and sorrow of our lives. Both those who are hopeful in any given year as well as those whose hearts have been broken.

It doesn’t seem like the holidays should have to be an either/or thing, does it?

‘Tis the season for brushes with an unseen world.

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Grief Loss and Bereavement, Halloween, love, Relationships, Sense of Presence October 30, 2013

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

Halloween approaches, so it felt like a good time to tell a couple of recent stories about a sense of presence; those moments where a person inexplicably feels the intimate, invisible presence of someone or something benign.

The two stories I’d like to relate here involved the sensed presence of loved ones who died, one fairly recently and one some years back, but experiences of a sense of presence can also, of course, involve the presence of religious figures, friends, acquaintances, or even strangers, and can happen in all manner of situations from childhood isolation to survival scenarios. But I think the majority of people are most familiar with it during bereavement, where studies put it’s occurrence at anywhere from fifty to sixty-three percent and possibly higher.

As such, I think the experience deserves to be talked about more openly, but then perhaps that’s just me.

The first story is from my sister-in-law and involves the recent loss of our nephew Cam who could sing like nobody’s business. I’ll never forget the first time I heard him open his mouth and start belting out White Christmas. My mouth dropped. Everyone’s mouth dropped. It was unexpected in the way that Susan Boyle singing The Dream I Dreamed was unexpected, only Cam was fourteen and not as polished yet. But still. See for yourself. He starts singing about eleven seconds in.

You see?

Anyway, my sister-in-law was working alone a couple weeks ago and, out of the blue, one of Cam’s favorite songs popped into her head and she found herself singing it aloud, which wasn’t the strange part. What was strange was the fact that she was singing it perfectly, because before that moment she hadn’t really known all the words. But somehow she was singing them all anyway. She confided that in that moment she could feel Cam there with her, sharing the infectious joy he found in song while he was alive and which, it seems, he continues to enjoy afterwards.

Her story made us all laugh and helped lighten the load we’re carrying at his loss a little, which, IMO, is the real, deep, and abiding gift of these kinds of experiences.

The second story was my own and it happened on my mother’s birthday a few weeks ago. She died four and a half years ago now so, unlike with Cam, I’m already past the initial disorientation of a world knocked sideways by her loss, as well as most of those sharp pangs of grief that used to accompany each memory.

In fact, I didn’t even remember it was her birthday until around noon when I was out shopping and glanced at a calendar for the first time that day, at which point I remembered and felt the usual brief wind of loss I feel each year, quickly followed by all the other, sweeter memories that fill the lion’s share of my heart now. I savored them for a moment and then folded them away again, going on about my business until I got home, at which point things turned decidedly strange.

While putting everything away I wandered over to the dining room table, a piece of furniture which we never actually eat at but instead use as a long-term depository for all the official papers we’re trying to avoid. It’s kind of like a limbo world for documentation…behind the veil so to speak…and as such it’s usually invisible to the naked eye. Or at least to my naked eye, as I trained myself long ago to ignore everything on it.

So I’m not sure why I walked over there that day, or why, out of everything lying there, I happened to notice the back of an old greeting card lying near the corner, a little ways away from everything else. I absentmindedly flipped it over and thought it looked familiar but couldn’t place why. So I opened it up to read the inscription and that’s when the memory came flooding back.

It was the last birthday card my mother ever sent me, a scant three months before she died…back when I knew she was ill but didn’t know yet that she was dying. I’d found it among my things shortly after she passed and grieved over it for a long time before finally putting it away in a box of secret treasures I keep on a high shelf in the closet in the back room.

Which is where it’s been for the last four years. Or so I thought.

I stood there for a long time just staring at it in my hands, confused and reeling a little, trying very hard to figure out how it escaped the box and made it’s way back out onto the dining room table for me to find on her birthday of all days. I wracked my brain trying to recall when I could have taken it back out again, why I would have, but came up with nothing. Nada. (Which isn’t necessarily saying much since I’m forgetting a lot these days.) But still, it felt very strange.

I’m hardly a died-in-the-wool skeptic when it comes to the possibility of unseen mysteries. For instance, I have no problem believing that we’re all bound together in intricate, beautiful, and frequently mysterious ways, and that the love we forge is probably the most enduring of all these links. It’s long seemed to me that if anything was strong enough to transcend the boundaries placed between us by death, love would be the likely culprit as it seems capable of transcending just about everything else.

But on the other hand, I’m a practical woman and as such lean towards practical explanations. While I have no problem entertaining the possibility that my mother’s love could bridge death, I have a harder time believing that her hands could. It seems unlikely that she could have pulled down the box, opened it up, rifled through the contents, found the card, and then carried it out to the dining room table to leave it there for me to find.

I’m not saying that she couldn’t do that, mind you…I’ve seen a lot over the years and have decided to stay open to all possibilities. But still, there are just other, simpler explanations that seem more likely.

However, the timing of it all was truly serendipitous and that’s what took my breath away. While that birthday card could have been sitting on the table for a very long time without my noticing it (our unfinished wills have sat there untouched for six years now…yes, six) the fact that I walked over, picked up the card, and opened it on her birthday of all days is what made me feel the brush of some vast and unseen mystery. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d reached between dimensions and nudged me.

In any case, as my overwhelming love for her spilled out to meet her undying love for me, in that moment I really could feel her there again in the room with me, her presence fresh and sharp and immediate, surrounding and enveloping me like a warm and gentle cloud of Mom-ness.

I don’t know. Perhaps, as the tradition claims, All Hallow’s Eve really is a time when the veil grows thin and we’re able to reach across the divide and touch one another again. I love the thought.

Happy Halloween to all!

The delicacy of autumn

Posted by Dia in Photography and tagged with autumn, nature, photography October 25, 2013

From a walk by the river. It was like finding a nest of newborn fairies. Lovely, no?

Returning to the world.

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with adventure, Kayaking, Life, Marriage, Relationships, wilderness October 22, 2013

Forgive me. It’s been almost three weeks since my last post which is a record. I’ve kind of let myself go on a lot of levels since Cam died, including eating somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty pounds of chocolate and sugar in various combinations…which I admit I thoroughly enjoyed but in a probably perverse way. Still, sometimes you need to stop doing everything and just float for a while. Let the wind blow you around. Drift. Rest. Think. Remember. Digest.

There’s much to digest here.

But this morning I feel myself returning to the world again, both figuratively and physically. The hubster and I spent nine days out of the last twelve running away to the wilderness every chance we got and there’s nothing quite like getting out on the water surrounded by snow capped peaks, and paddling for miles and miles and miles to help rebuild a crumbling perspective.

I think everyone develops their own way of finding a path back to that feeling of home at their center when they’ve become lost…prayer, meditation, service, gardening, cleaning house, work, family, friends, community, etc.

For the me the way back has always involved the silence and deep mystery of the natural world. It’s where I instinctively turned as a child for congregation and confessional and where I’ve returned ever since, especially when a wound needs tending. The stars and storms, mountains and forests, wind and waters have a way of taking the torn, raggedy edges from any injury and pulling them gently back together again, giving them a chance to meet and knit and eventually scar over.

The hubster loves the wilderness, too, only for slightly different reasons. He feels the silence, too, and needs it as much as I do, but his nature is more wild than mine, or at least wild in a different way. Where I crave the wonder and mystery of vast and ancient forces, he’s after all the grand adventures that wilderness provides, and over time he’s taught me a little of that particular joy he finds in throwing himself, over and over, against inclement everything…weather, conditions, terrain, the absence of any kind of safety precautions.

Looking back I have to both laugh and shake my head at some of the stupid, stupid, STUPID things we’ve done over the years. The hubster is naturally fearless and impatient of anything that stinks of planning…which I, on the other hand, tend to be a little obsessive about. (My basic nature exacerbated by the depression.) But he was always so irresistibly charming and relentlessly persuasive that I followed him anyway, over and over again, into situations that were way over my head. Often over his head, too, but then he loves that.

But since we were lucky and actually survived it all, I now have a treasure cache inside me of memories when I followed him blindly through the labyrinth of all my clamoring terrors to emerge in breathtaking places of grace that were magical and impossible, as if I’d flown there.

My God. I shudder to think what the darkest years of the depression would have done to me without him there to drag me along behind on his adventures, bumping and pointing out every last, little, innocuous threat along the way. I’m pretty sure I would have ended up as a shut-in. It’s really too bad that the man can’t be bottled.

I owe him much, this beloved husband of mine.

Happy anniversary sweetheart and thanks for our continuing grand adventure together. I do so love you.

“Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Kindness, Life, Relationships, Respect, Speech October 3, 2013

I heard these questions posed today in the context of a discussion about how to “think before you speak.” (Not my greatest strength.) I was so struck by them that I’ve decided to adopt them as a mantra to try and repeat…every time…before opening my mouth to insert my foot again.

With the highest hopes,

Curious Dia of the Cannot-Keep-Their-Mouths-Shut Clan.

St. Anne

A subversive approach?

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Exercise, Medical research, Prescription Drugs October 2, 2013

There’s a new study out in the British Medical Journal suggesting that exercise is as good or better a treatment than drugs for heart disease and stroke. With news this good why are we just finding it out now? An important question but first, the meat of the study:

The BBC article Exercise ‘can be as good as pills’ covers a study published in the British Medical Journal suggesting that exercise might be just as effective as medication for treatment of some heart disease…or in the case of stroke, more effective…when it comes to preventing death. From the article:

The findings suggest exercise should be added to prescriptions, say the researchers.

Please don’t anyone go off their medications just yet, but definitely start thinking about adding some exercise to the mix.

Now that I’ve covered that important piece of information, back to my initial question: why has it taken so long to find this out? Since exercise is obviously a healthier, cheaper, more widely available option to drug interventions, with no side effects and ample additional benefits, why in the world hasn’t it been studied before this? To find the answer I turn to the part of the study that I personally found to be the most fascinating.

For a lot of intriguing structural reasons that I don’t have time for, medical research as a whole has been growing increasingly biased towards studying drug interventions vs. other treatment strategies. For example, in this particular case the number of clinical trials studying exercise is dwarfed by the number of drug trials.

This overall bias means that the existing medical literature (where the research is eventually published) is also increasingly skewed towards medications vs. other options, and this then tends to constrict doctors’ treatment recommendations since they base them on said literature. Ditto for the treatment options that insurance companies will cover.

In other words, even though drug therapies may not be the best option in every case, there’s no way to know for sure since other options aren’t really being studied much. From the researchers:

“Our findings reflect the bias against testing exercise interventions and highlight the changing landscape of medical research, which seems to increasingly favor drug interventions over strategies to modify lifestyle,” they wrote in the review…”The lopsided nature of modern medical research may fail to detect the most effective treatment for a given condition if that treatment is not a prescription drug.”

I’ve been sensing this shift for a while and I’m glad to see it’s being recognized and talked about, but realistically speaking it’s a complex, far reaching, structural problem and I imagine it’ll prove difficult to fix.

So instead, I think I’ll just take the research and apply it for myself. I’ll take Dane the mangy rescue mutt out for a vigorous walk and start my heart a-pumping without even getting a doctor’s prescription first, which feels strangely subversive.

P.S. By the way, the little walking, armless guy above comes courtesy of Wikipedia.

Articles:

Exercise could help stroke, heart disease patients just as well as drugs.

Exercise ‘can be as good as pills’

Stand Up Eight

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying September 27, 2013

via Stand Up Eight.

* * *

Whoops. If you don’t understand the above it’s because this was an unsuccessful attempt at using the “Press This” feature on WordPress. Not sure what went wrong but 100% certain it did.

What I was trying to do was reblog a great post I found on Nhan-Fiction. It contained a simple (Japanese?) saying…

FALL DOWN SEVEN TIMES, STAND UP EIGHT

…along with the beautiful characters/calligraphy in the original language. The message spoke to me today as I’ve been falling down a lot lately. Like when I tried to “Press This” post for instance.

Mental note: Stand up. Again.