A Thought for the Day

Some things can’t be understood by the mind.

Some things need to be felt by the body and the soul.

Old Friends

Old friends ground us and give us roots
so we don’t float away with every storm.

Old friends break the trail ahead of us,
cutting through the tough vines to make our journey easier.

Old friends bloom like perennials,
maybe gone for a season, but they always come back.

But, old friends can also slip through our fingers-
gone before we are ready to let them go.

Flowers On Her Grave

I remove the old bouquet. The petals now limp and faded.

How many lives are buried here?

How many stories that were told and how many that were not?

Even as we remember, we forget.

The memories change.

Some soften into nostalgia. Some harden into regret.

Funny thing, mortality.

It drives some to achievement and others to despair.

I lay fresh flowers on her grave.

They promise new hope for those who pass;

hope that someday someone will remember them

and lay flowers on their grave.

My Garden of Earthly Delights

Remember that song from The Sound of Music, My Favorite Things? This is like that, but describing my garden of earthly delights.

Music can be an outward sign of my inner feelings, be they sad or happy, moody or introspective. Music is the morning glory in my garden of earthly delights.

Then there are books. I love the feel of books, the aroma of the library stacks. I love good stories, be they mysteries, romances, or science fiction. Books are the daisies in my garden of earthly delights.

Although I don’t have any of my own, and regardless of how my allergies kick in if I am around them too long, I adore cats (and animals in general). I’ve always been drawn to the animals in the zoo (although I do prefer them to be in the wild!). I enjoy cat sitting for my nephew’s two cats, Skye and Loki. They warm my heart and make me smile. Animals are the black-eyed-Susans in my garden of earthly delights.

My questions and doubts about life are the dandelions.

My family and friends are the lilacs.

My husband is a rose, sweet and prickly.

I water my garden. I sadly remove the withered leaves and drooping flowers.

I treasure the new buds, the colors and the scents. There I can breathe, I can imagine, I can rant and I can find peace.

And, in some way, I can begin to understand what it is to live, in my garden of earthly delights.

How Dare I?

How dare I complain about my life
when so many others have it so much worse?

How dare I whine about having to cook
when so many others are going hungry?

How dare I worry about how long my retirement money will last
when so many others have to work to death to make ends meet?

How dare I moan about my aging aches and pains
when so many others are dealing with disease and nursing homes?

How dare I wallow in self pity, having no grand purpose
when so many others are just struggling to survive?

How dare I nonchalantly speculate about death
when so many others are slowly fading away?

Rather than celebrate my gifts and my blessings
I curse the universe for not giving me more to live for.

How dare I?

Heat

Heating glass makes it stronger.
Melting colors change with the temperature.
The beauty is not revealed until after the oven.
The end truth is not the beginning truth.

So it is with our lives.

Sometimes the heat in our lives makes us stronger.
Changing times color our perception differently.
We may ultimately see the beauty of the difficult things.
And we realize that the end truth is just the beginning.

Out with the Old, In with the New

Did you ever wonder why the Western New Year starts in the middle of winter? Why not at an equinox or a solstice? I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said:

So New Year’s Day falls in the middle of winter because:

• It’s a political and administrative marker, not a seasonal one.
• It reflects Roman governance, not natural cycles.

Interestingly, the calendar still quietly remembers its old seasonal logic:

• March was once the first month.
• The month names still carry that history.
• Easter is still tied to the spring equinox and full moon.
• Many religious calendars still begin in autumn or spring.

If the calendar were designed today based purely on nature, New Year’s Day would almost certainly be:

• The spring equinox (new life), or
• The winter solstice (return of light)

January 1 survives because tradition is more powerful than astronomy.

Who knew? (Well, I guess AI knew.)

Anyway, on January 1 each year we celebrate a new beginning. For many of us, the new is pretty much the same as the old. We say, this time things will be different. We promise ourselves we will change.

But change doesn’t come with a time table. It sometimes comes with a bang, like a marriage, a birth, a death. But mostly, it comes with a whisper.

Side Note in case you interested (I was. Again from ChatGPT):

The line comes from T. S. Eliot.

It is the final line of his 1925 poem “The Hollow Men”:

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

People often paraphrase “whimper” as “whisper,” but Eliot’s original word is whimper, which makes the ending feel even smaller and more powerless than a whisper.

The poem reflects Eliot’s view of spiritual emptiness and moral paralysis after World War I, suggesting that great civilizations don’t usually collapse in dramatic explosions, but in quiet decay and loss of meaning.

For me change has come both ways. The year 1994 was a bang moment for me. I lost and found jobs. I changed churches. My Dad died. My life was different in immediate ways, and in ways I wouldn’t recognize for many years to come. And yet, in some fundamentals I stayed the same.

My whispers, or actually, whimpers, came gradually over time. My enthusiasm, my excitement about new things, became almost mundane. Each New Year I felt a little more jaded, a little less hopeful. As my body changed, with menopause, with arthritis, with sleepless nights and wasted days, I changed. But it was not all bad.

I grew more accepting. I became calmer in my reactions. I learned that mourning won’t kill me. And I have my memories (at least for now). And I feel wiser, like maybe I do have something to say to the generations coming after me.

When it comes my time to die and others’ time to mourn, I hope they don’t say “out with the old and in with the new”. I hope they say, as I have learned to do, “along with the old, we begin something new”.

Happy New Year, no matter when it is celebrated.

Faith

Faith is not
just blind acceptance

Faith is not
unmovable stone

Faith can be doubt,
honest wrestling

with some truths
that can never be known.

Just Another Day

Christmas was mainly for children
but I am no longer a child.

Christmas used to be filled with joyful anticipation
but now it’s all chaos and clutter.

Christmas used to be about being with family and friends
but years of loss and change have left their scars.

Christmas used to be a time to remember,
but the memories are so far away.

Christmas used to be about love and peace,
but now, it’s just another day.

The Feeder

Feeder full of birds
while snow floats slowly down.
Little cheeps and chirps
that echo all around.

With a sudden noise,
perhaps a scary sight,
all the little birds
then scatter in the light.