1. Morning walks. I love doing this so much, and especially doing it with Ringo, and I’m really going to miss it someday when he is gone.
From Ringo and Eric’s walk this morning
2. Fall color. On Friday morning, Ringo and I waiting for the sun to come out to start our walk so I could see the full fall color and get some pictures — I took so many, a walk that should take us less than an hour took an hour and a half. The sky was extra special that morning too. It was just so gorgeous, this dying of the light.
3. Our visit with Terry and Moose. It was so fun to have them here. (Moose is Alisia’s nickname, has been for years, so long I don’t even remember how she got it anymore). When they left to go back to Oregon, even though we were ready to have the house back to ourselves, I came out and saw root beer and a bag of sugar and the three chairs at our table and got really sad, really wanted to call Mom and tell her because she always did the same thing when I left to come back to Colorado, would find some receipt or luggage tag of mine in the trash and get really sad, but I can’t call Mom and that made me even sadder. 🥺💔
Crew with his new Colorado hat and Wyoming hoodie that Moose brought him back from her trip. He didn’t come out with her because he didn’t want to miss a day of school. 🙂
4. Practice. We had to cancel yoga at Red Sage for the third week in a row, and I teased them, “I sure hope we remember how to yoga when we are back together again.” It’s been eight years, with a break for COVID, that I’ve been teaching for them and I’m so grateful for the ones who keep showing up. Friday morning wild-ish writing was extra fun, as Michelle’s mom joined us to write for a bit. I appreciated the mom energy.
5. My tiny family, small house, little life. We are having a quiet, easy weekend — my favorite kind.
Bonus joy: dinner out with friends, the yellow roses Eric brought home from the grocery store, leftovers, molasses cookies, submitting something for my short memoir class that I feel good about, Kim’s pottery, the Maria Bamford documentary, book club, mocktails, crispy green grapes, getting the laundry done, clean sheets, down blankets and pillows, physical therapy exercises for my si joint (it is so mad at me), yoga, wool slippers, a warm shower, a hot cup of coffee and a warm mug of tee, a new notebook, ink refills for my favorite pens, stickers, tape, Ted Lasso (I’m super late to the party and it was exactly what I needed right now), blue sky, that guy I ran into at the ponds who’d come all the way from Ohio just to take pictures of birds with the backdrop of the fall colors in Colorado and how patient Ringo was while I talked to him, a comfortable guest bed that I can fold up and use as a couch when we don’t need it, canceled plans, starting over, being able to try again as many times as necessary, tiny brass animals (I found more tiny crows Eric left for me), acupuncture, all the various supplements and prescriptions keeping Ringo healthy, Eric watching a dumb video over and over because it makes him laugh, making each other laugh, inside jokes, other people’s kids and pets and partners, groceries, bread of all kinds, purple highlighters, patchouli oil, my meditation shrine, texting with Chloe’ and Chris, getting a text from Dana and scheduling a massage with her, naps, toothpaste, electric toothbrushes, birthday cards, discovering new artists and musicians, comedy, poetry, limes, how sweet Ringo was with Dr. Gaffney, her new kitten Julio, a really good camera on my phone that fits in my pocket, my new laptop, wireless, streaming content, Ringo coming in just now to lay on the bed under my desk, reading in bed at night on my Kindle while Eric and Ringo sleep.
2. Wildflowers by Kristen Freeland. This one made me cry. “It’s because that day reminded me how little we know about the lives unfolding around us. What felt like an ordinary summer afternoon in our front yard was one of the hardest days of someone else’s life.”
6. Artot. “Get your fortune read with an Art themed Tarot Deck…a joking-not-joking approach to art interpretation that links artworks with the weird and wonderful world of fortune telling: one way to think about an artwork is that it’s telling you the future.”
17. Sounds True: Insights on the Edge Podcast — Michelle Cassandra Johnson: Invocations and Spellwork for Support and Protection.“What are we actually being protected from—and how do we call in the support we need to stay grounded, whole, and connected to ourselves? This week, Tami Simon speaks with Michelle Cassandra Johnson—author, mystic, activist, spiritual director, and racial equity educator—about her new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, archetypes, elemental energies, and spell work, Michelle offers a grounded, practical vision of protection—not as armor against the world, but as a way of staying rooted in our own center.”
19. Lost in Another World, “James Ellis Ford on creative alchemy” on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad.
20. Meet the Retirees Turning Their Farms Into Wildlife Corridors.“Throughout the summer, both John Rice and John Sessler are busier than ever – retirement hasn’t slowed them down. They’re farmers working together toward a larger goal: increasing biodiversity – the variety of all living things and their interactions. Unfolding on farms in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley are Smithsonian science-guided management practices that create, restore, and connect habitat while keeping farms productive – and farmers and neighbors like Rice and Sessler are willing to work across fence lines to help keep then region home to bustling biodiversity.”
21. Instead Of Main Character Energy, Here’s How To Be The Author Of Your Life. “Unlike the main character, the author is ruled by the imperative to see both the bigger picture and each of the many individual components it’s made of simultaneously. The author has to figure out how to make them all work together, zooming in and out, keeping track of not just the main character but all of the many supporting pieces in time and space, whether they are on the page or off. And when the author’s work is done, when the book is written and the edits are made, and this thing is finally launched out into the world to find its readers, the author releases what little control she might have had completely. The thing she’s made no longer belongs to her, and the story becomes whatever the world makes of it.”
26. My current obsession: Chewy Ginger Cookies recipe. I’ve been buying mine from The Bread Chic, but I think I need to start making them myself at home if this is going to continue.
26. Talking to Trees, “and listening for what they have to say” by Alix on Earth & Verse.
30. Good stuff from Lion’s Roar: The Nature of Fear (“In this classic piece from the Lion’s Roar archives, Joseph Goldstein explores the different types of fear, and how we can sit with fear and hold onto it in our practice”) and Everything Dies (“It’s the Buddha’s basic teaching. It’s life’s universal truth. It’s what we most want to deny. Sallie Jiko Tisdale on how this hard but liberating truth can transform your life”).
34. From Jena Schwartz: TEAM PEGGY “Walking (and raising money) for a cause on October 25” and Sigh. No Really. “11 things from a rehab room with a loud ticking clock, which is amazingly not a metaphor.” As I mentioned to Jena, my mom had Vascular Dementia rather than Alzheimer’s, but my heart still breaks for anyone living this, “many things: A time thief, a trickster, a train wreck, a tender package of tiny treasures to unwrap one small conversation at a time” and also, “Everyone I know has big things going on. Whether you’re in your 20s or your 90s, life heaves and hurls and heals, clobbers and clutches and calms down. Repeat.” *sigh*
35. The Power of Radical Acceptance, “How resisting what happened hurts more than what happened” by Sara Kuburic on Notes From My Phone. Because, this “What keeps many of us from contentment, or even happiness, isn’t that life is imperfect. It’s that we can’t accept things as they are, and keep pushing against the truth.”
36. Things Will Never Be the Same by Elizabeth Kleinfeld. “On two kinds of grief caregivers carry and wondering if my father’s memory loss is a preview of my own” by Elizabeth Kleinfeld. This is spot on. Because this, “Adult children taking care of aging parents often experience multiple layers of grief, for the parent they are losing and for themselves as they imagine themselves aging.”
41. Anti-chaos and Fertile Questions by Erin Geesaman Rabke, “the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly.”
42. Do we really ‘hold tension’ in our hips? on The Guardian. “The idea is popular in wellness circles, but experts say there’s no evidence that trauma uniquely affects the hips. Here’s what causes hip tightness and what can help.”
43. Dog’s breakfast by Danny Gregory. “Making the most of making mistakes.”
44. the obituary i’m not writing by Amy Marie Turner. “The entire time I was working on it, I was composing a different obituary in my mind. One that’s just for me. The published one describes who she was to the many people whose lives she touched. Her public persona. But not who she was to me. I suspect creating that personal obituary will be a years-long project as I sort through my loss. We shared a complicated and often difficult relationship, but that didn’t cancel out the fact that she was my mother.” *sigh*
45. And finally, this not so random thing I saved to my phone this week.
