Category Archives: Eric

Something Good

4 Replies

1. If You Have Unrequited Dreams, You’re Probably Making Some of These Mistakes from Life After Tampons.

2. New Origami Street Art by Mademoiselle Maurice on Bored Panda.

3. I hope you wake with a gasp, a thousand flutters in your heart, a 10-Line Tuesday poem from my new favorite poet, Maya Stein.

I hope you wake with a gasp, a thousand flutters in your heart **
Not from the whirlpool of worry. Not from a bad dream.
Not from a deadline or a string of demands, or the great to-do
of the still-to-be-done. Not from the lopsided weight of futility and failure
or some wayward mutiny shaking your bones. Not from the loss
of letting go or the grief of giving in. Not from the illusions of your metaphorical
imprisonment or escape. Not from grass-is-greener or anywhere-but-here.
I hope, instead, you rise from the tremble of something finding its edges,
earthquaking its way into being. That riotous pulsing of birth, and the cry that comes
just after, the lungs taking in their first overwhelmed breaths. That same lucid
sweetness of entry and release. The song of your life being sung.

** I stole this line from Jean Reinhold’s latest writing in her must-read blog: http://jcreinhold.blogspot.com/

4. NOW I know why my finger bleeds like a %*##@ when I get a paper cut, from Reddit.com. Eric emailed me the link to this image and said “it looks like a tree.” (Have I told you lately how much I love him?)

wearetrees

5. This wisdom, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” ~Chinese Proverb.

6. Your Daily Rock from Patti Digh: your daily rock : ask the question. wait for the answer and your daily rock : you belong.

7. My weiner dog kind of looks like snoop from Reddit. Makes me smile, every time.

snoopdog

8. Twelve Habits of Happy, Healthy People Who Don’t Give a Shit About Your Inner Peace from I Am Begging My Mother Not To Read This Blog.

9. This wisdom from Tulku Thondup,

By just allowing our minds to be caring, peaceful, and relaxed, our daily activities and work—even our breathing—can become part of our healing practice and we will gain strength spontaneously. If we are open to it, our ordinary life will turn into a life of healing. Then, even though we may not be spending hours in formal sitting meditation, our life will be meditation in action.

10. Judge Less: mini-mission and Why You Should Give Away 50% of Your Stuff from Be More With Less.

11. How To Stop Making A Big Deal About Your Problems, Pema Chödrön on MindBodyGreen.

12. From Brave Girls Club,

Dear Gorgeous Girl,

Chances are, you are needing some rest right now…after all, being brave is hard and exhausting work.

Would it be so bad it you took a little break and let yourself recharge? Of course it wouldn’t be a bad thing….to the contrary, it would be a VERY GOOD thing for you to do, especially if you can’t even remember the last time you let yourself rest for a little while.

Choose a good, uplifting book and let yourself read it without interruption, take a hot bath….get under the covers for an afternoon nap. You’ve got to recharge or you will burn out…it’s just a fact of life. This doesn’t mean you are weak, it means you are human…and little breaks here and there are an essential part of a productive life.

Enjoy some time to yourself…you deserve it. You are loved. xoxo

13. Jamie King on The Conversation: Listen to Your Intuition.

14. “What you teach is what you are. You don’t teach by telling people things.” ~Milton Glaser

15. “Does one really have to fret about enlightenment? No matter what road I travel I’m going home.” ~Shinsho

16. This wisdom from Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance,

New meditation students often mention the value of learning to focus and settle the mind, but they also name something more basic. As one person put it recently, “Just having those moments to be quiet is a gift to my soul.” It is a gift to the soul. Stepping out of the busyness, stopping our endless pursuit of getting somewhere else, is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.

17. The Time You Have Left (in Jelly Beans) from ZeFrank

18. Like dollhouse rooms left abandoned, a poem from Lisa Bonchek Adams. *sob*

19. What If I Feel Like Giving Up On Self-Acceptance? from Anna Guest-Jelley on Curvy Yoga.

20. More new to me music, Royals from Lorde, shared by my friend Aaryn. Also new to me, what I’ve been listening to for the past few days, the band Daughter, specifically the Daughter radio station on Last.fm.

21. An interesting perspective from Notes from the Universe, “Anger is almost always a sign, Jill, that you’ve been quiet for too long.”

22. “Too sexy for the Internet?” 3 questions to help you decide which stories & shots to reveal — and which to keep sealed in a vault! from Alexandra Franzen. I think these questions work when you are considering anything you put on the internet, sexy or not.

23. Thinking about money from Seth Godin.

24. Wisdom from Tiny Buddha: After Tragedy: 3 Reasons And 21 Ways To Bring Joy Back into Your Life and Why We Need to Create Our Own “Normal”

25. Thoughts to contemplate from Raam Dev:

Live as though your life can make a difference, because it does. What difference it makes though is entirely up to you.

and

You have no idea what you’re capable of until you’ve done it, or until you’ve truly failed trying to do it. If unsure, fail again.

26. This wisdom from J.K. Rowling, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”

27. From Susannah Conway’s Something for the Weekend list: 30 Important Websites For Highly Sensitive People, Master of Pen and Ink: The Monumental Drawings of Manabu Ikeda, and this wisdom from Arianna Huffington,

“I was lucky in that I had a mother that was full of this colloquial wisdom and she used to say to me ‘You know, failure is not the opposite of success, it’s the stepping stone to success. There is nobody who has not failed along the way.’ So I think its very important for young women, especially as they are starting in life, to recognize that because otherwise, they only see people’s success. So, when I speak, I speak of my failures.”

28. From Positively Present Picks: Calm.com, 50 Life Hacks Your Future Self Will Thank You For, Major Radical Self Love Bible Inspiration! (what a great idea! and am realizing I already started making one of these, just didn’t know what it was called), Skillshare, and a reminder of this site, Tattly.

29. Pissed Off And Purposeful: Why Radical Self Love Incurred My Wrath This Morning from Gala Darling, (can’t wait to see her interview on Good Life Project).

30. A process for How to Never do Anything You Don’t Want to do Ever Again from Sas Petherick, in her July Love Note, (you really should sign up for her newsletter).

31. Defining Self-Care from Pittsburg PhD, one of my favorite people.

Day of Rest

8 Replies

*sigh*

This picture is the last one I took at Lee Martinez Park, the place we walk almost every day, sometimes twice. On that morning, that walk, I had no idea that the next day would be the day Dexter died. I knew it was coming, we’d known for a year it was on its way, but on that particular morning it still felt unknown, uncertain, undetermined.

We haven’t been back to Lee Martinez since Thursday morning, the last time we walked there with Dexter, the walk we took knowing it would be our last. We’ve been to City Park, Big South Trail, and this morning we walked at Colorado State University, but we haven’t been back to “our park.” It still feels too hard, too sad.

We’ve managed other grief hurdles. Eric cleaned the living room floor yesterday. The raw wood in that room was covered with tiny spots where Dexter’s nose had dripped, (because of his cancer, he basically had a constant runny nose). I washed some of the blankets from his bed, along with his Little D baby, (I’d originally planned to have him cremated with Big D but in the end I couldn’t stand to lose them both). Eric brought home his ashes, and I put those on top of his mostly empty crate, along with his collar and a clay paw print.

memorialWhen I’m able to, I’ll open the ashes and put some in the urns I have that contain Obi’s ashes (one is on my writing desk and another on my meditation shrine) — I left room for Dexter so they’d be together again, they loved each other so much.

pawprints

I still haven’t been able to put clean sheets on our bed (the ones that are there were slept on by Dexter) and his toothbrush is still on the counter, and I’m still putting a tiny offering of food in his bowl every time I feed Sam. I know it’s silly, but I was devastated yesterday when I went out to do poop patrol in the backyard and couldn’t find any of Dexter’s. I was so sad that I’d never get to pick up anymore of his poop — that’s a crazy kind of love.

Eric has been dealing with his grief, in part, by cooking. Yesterday, he made three pies. We did a pie drive by to our friends’ house last night because even as much as I love pie, we couldn’t eat it all ourselves.

griefpie

Jamie Ridler’s mom, who also had cancer, passed the day after Dexter. Jamie invited me a few weeks ago to do a guest post in honor of her mom, the prompt being something her mom had recently said, “It’s not about being tough, it’s about being tender.” I have so much to say about that, will be finishing up my post and sending it to sweet Jamie later today. These losses (something we all face as we live and love), this prompt, has me thinking about how important it is that we have confidence in our basic goodness, the essential wisdom and compassion and power that rests in each of us, that we practice self-compassion and keep our hearts open, knowing that life is beautiful and brutal, tender and terrible.

In this audio recording, Pema Chödrön talks about basic goodness. She tells a story about burnt cookies and a fox that is such a great metaphor for how we can approach difficulty — we can allow ourselves to become hard, closed off, or we can stay open to reality, to be present for whatever might arise. Yes this means we will be vulnerable, we’ll get hurt, but we will also be amazed, healed.

My heart is broken right now. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. But there is so much worth showing up for. Such as:

A chance to get away. We hadn’t wanted to do this when Dexter was still here, were worried about being too far away from a vet if something happened. But now, sometime soon, the three of us are going to rent a cabin in the mountains and spend some time together in the green and the quiet.

Pie. Especially the ones made by my person, who is as sad as me, who knows just how I feel, just what I’m missing, who will talk all day about what we’ve lost and never get tired of it, who wants to do whatever he can to make me feel better.

peachpie

Friends, near and far, sending us love and light. So many have reached out to me, offering such kindness, making this heavy thing so much easier to hold.

The sweet animal bodies that are still here, that long for love and need care. It’s Sam’s turn to become my favorite, and when we are all ready, there will be another dog.

sam

Laughter. Last night, on the way to our friends’ house to deliver the pie, Eric suggested that they expected this happy gift of pie, so it would be funny if when they opened the door, we gave them a pie in the face instead. It was such a ridiculous and awful idea we laughed the rest of the way to their house. It felt good.

Brilliant nature — blooms and fruit and animals and trees and landscapes and sky and deep water and weather.

Practice. Yoga, meditation, writing, and dog — this regular attention, showing up and being open to whatever arises, moving in ways old and new, creativity and discovery, is medicine.

Music. I heard this song for the first time yesterday, and am totally in love.

because nothing lasts forever
some things aren’t meant to be
but you’ll never find the answers
until you set your old heart free

I’m so sad, kind and gentle reader, but at the same time I am so in love with my little life, my heart so full of every last wonderful thing that sometimes it feels like it will explode.