Providence

Photo Credit here.

 

A slippery fish

Fighting the pull of current

Yet still pushed along

To some destination yet unseen

 

The steely-eyed hawk

Soaring on the winds

A dance with changing direction

To keep aloft and flying

 

A sunflower

Raising its weighty head

Adores the sun and moves

To communicate its praise

 

And what of me

Fights or soars or adores

Through the flow of my life

Directed by forces unseen? 

 

Tomorrow is mystery

Unfolding in every breath

A past which whispers

“Bidden or unbidden, God is here.” 

 

3/14/26

Wildflowers, Weeds and Heaven

Photo Credit here.

I ripped plants out of the ground this afternoon after work and before the sun set. I recognized the irony in mourning a tree but mercilessly pulling out dandelions, creeping charley and other nameless blights from the wet earth. If I did nothing, I would have a yard of color – mainly white and yellow - dotting shape-shifting greens with wild violets punctuating the ensemble in deep purple. 

 

My aunt tells a story about my grandmother and flowers. The story goes like this: My aunt and uncle built onto the old farmhouse sometime after they married, eventually moving into the main house while my grandmother occupied the one-bedroom apartment my aunt and uncle initially constructed. My aunt began planting around their shared home, and Granny asked her what she was planting. “Flowers,” she said, to which Granny replied, “What a waste.” 

 

Growing up, much of the back yard supported corn, beans and peas. A side yard had turnip greens, tomatoes and okra. The flowers bloomed on those plants, but the end prize was the fruit or vegetable it produced. I don’t know what she did about all the “weeds (and their flowers)” which have now overtaken the back yard. 

 

As a small child, I loved the wild violets and always hoped they would survive their harvesting (which they did not). I loved dandelion seed heads and finding one which looked perfectly round in order to try and blow off all the seeds with one giant breath (which rarely occurred). I don’t remember the other variety of flowers and plants which I now grab and pull from the earth with abandon. 

 

When I stop to look at the plants, these so-called weeds, awe overtakes me. I can think of at least a dozen different types of leaves, growth patterns, flower designs, heights, root structures, etc., as I consider what I grabbed by fistfuls and yanked from the ground earlier today. Their ability to replicate and proliferate far outweighs mine. Thousands of flowers formed week after week and I trample them to admire scrawny azaleas and thorny rambling roses – both miserly with their blooms, demanding a certain amount of pampering to keep up appearances. 

 

Still I clamor after showy blooms and shocks of color, preferring the hassle of prima donnas to the scruffy take-what-take-can of chickweed, henbit or purple archangel. 

 

My mother, who could kill pretty much any plant in her general vicinity, told a different story about Granny and flowers. In her version, her mother took a hillside and transformed it with gladiolus and a crepe myrtle. According to mom, Granny loved to witness the flowers unfurling each summer and delighted in them. As she aged, she bent more toward roses from what I remember. 

 

On her deathbed, she woke out of whatever stupor held her and spoke of seeing Jesus. “Everywhere he goes is love and peace,” she said. Then, her eyes brightening, she added, “And the fields are filled with yellow and purple roses!” A few moments later, she had passed into the place where roses grew like wildflowers and weeds. 

3/13/26

 

The Third Option

Photo Credit here.

Just underneath my left rib cage I feel a small hole opening, a beak scraping the inside of my stomach as it opens and closes waiting to be filled. Just above the curve of my right hip, a small pinch nags my back until it moves just enough to shush the nag for a moment. My feet cheer the invention of ottomans. My eyes would like a break from the day. 

When I perform a body scan, my body talks to me, tells me about where I hold stress, reiterates the need for rest, reminds me all things change, get out of kilter occasionally (or more permanently) and grow older. At the end of the work day, my body tells me, and I mainly feel, tired.

 

There was a time I would have pathologized my tiredness. Do I not like my work? Am I in the job I’m supposed to be in? Do I need to change professions (again)? A lot of close-ended questions, begging a polarity which serves no one. 

 

Granted, many people discuss the importance of loving one’s job summed up in the “Love what you do. Do what you love” mentality. I loved the idea of this and have wanted work which felt effortless and filled with “flow” or the “energy of love.” Yet I didn’t account for my own personality quirks or even reality. 

 

I believe there are people who “love what they do and do what they love.” They are likely the ones who came up with the phrase. They are likely extraverted sales people who know how to market an idea which can hook people into the dream of what might be. I tend to enjoy living in the “what might be” space because dreams are easy and require no work and little effort. In other words dreams are easy and reality is hard. 

 

Being back in my childhood home, taking the same route into downtown my mother and father took before me and experiencing, again, various degrees of resistance/dislike for my work; I am reminded of my mother’s expressions of frustration around her own job. She got up early and rushed to get out the door to beat traffic downtown. She was responsible, conscientious and trustworthy; but she hated working. When my father retired, she got out 1 year later when she was about 55 years old. She did not want to miss any time with Dad and she resented having to leave him everyday, at home, when they could have been together. 

 

I failed to appreciate this early example of “don’t love what you do but do it to survive,” which I saw in my mom. I do not know how my Dad felt about work. When the work was steady, he steadily worked and came home caked with dirt and simply wanted to sit and relax. He worked extra when he could to cover for the inevitable times he would be laid off. 

 

Somewhere being exposed to all of their attitudes and actions regarding work, I absorbed a “hate work” mentality. Don’t get me wrong, I worked from the time I was 16 years old. But no job ever brought me to the place of feeling “flow.” The psychological weight of work made getting out of bed miserable each morning. I have wondered for years what was “wrong” with me and why I could not find the work I “loved.” 

 

Now I recognize I “stewed” in an atmosphere with a vocal mother who really never wanted to work outside the home but had to work to pay the bills. I saw my Dad physically exhausted from his blue collar job. What felt normal for me was to have resentment about work or to find it fatiguing. I had few examples of people who “loved” work and certainly no examples within my home. 

 

Some of my disdain for work was simply carrying on the family tradition because that is what felt normal for me. In this realization, I felt some release from “weight of work” I carry. It also gave me freedom to live in a third space which isn’t just “love what you do” or “hate what you do,” but allows me to do both and be okay with it. It also helps me allow work to simply be neutral to me – I don’t have to get so emotionally involved – it’s just work!

 

But I still want to enjoy what I do. And after years of trying out different options, I finally found the work which smacks of vocation and calling even when I am tired at the end of day or occasionally dread the beginning of the work week. I don’t have to love the work all the time, nor do I have to question if my quest for my “life’s work” is in peril because of the occasional dip in enthusiasm or energy. The third option, as usual, gives the most freedom. 

 

For being tired, this post is way too long. Good night and may you always find the third option.

3/12/25

Ventilator

Photo credit here.

His family hangs

On

Every

Breath

Refraining from taking

Too much in.

 

Oxygen, Nitrogen

Carbon dioxide

Molecules heavy with meaning;

Molecules worth their weight 

In gold.

 

I hold the weight

In my gut

A never-ending

Sucker punch-

Inhalation halted

The life force 

Expelled

 

Can I not give mine

To him?

Brain burning-

Mechanical breaths 

A metronome - 

Counting time

He may not have.

 

8/1/25

 

Sweetness and Gall

Photo credit here.

J and I surveyed the damage from the pine in the early morning light. Later in the day inspections confirmed the ramp and gutter damage, but part of the facia board and some places on the roof sustained damage, too. The “kaboom” of the tree’s felling turned out to be its bounce. From what we can tell, as the momentum stopped, part of the trunk hit the ground, splattered debris along the right side of the house and left a perfect imprint of itself a foot in front of the hedge. The bounce took it toward the road to its final resting place. Maybe the torn cables encouraged its “away-from-the-house” trajectory.

We discovered our insurance deductibles vary depending on the cause of damage to the house. Surprise! So the damage from the tree may cost us twice the amount of having taken the tree down to begin with. Lesson learned, I guess. 

 

The pine remains fragrant and as I walked around it this afternoon, the pine scent mixing with the tulip magnolia’s perfume was a lovely serendipity. I stood there: A mangled tree, mangled roof, mangled cable lines dropped by some toddler-giant forgetting himself as the next, better toy called. My eyes viewing mud, pine branches, rotted roots and then my nose caught the sweet scent of spring married with winter’s cologne – a birth brought out of death – a phoenix rising. 

 

As with many posts, I don’t know where I will go once I start, and often I have to start to know where I was meant to go in the first place. I think tonight I need the reminder to pay attention through all my senses – to not miss the sweetness while taking in all the gall. 

 

3/10/25

 

Loblolly Pines

Photo credit here.

Pines provide the boundary for our property and have since I was a child. My great grandfather seemingly cleared this land for farming, then my grandfather took over the few acres given to him when he married Granny. In elementary school, a neighboring house stood at a distance from ours, surrounded by woods, mainly Loblolly Pines. As a teenager, the family who owned the house sold the land to someone who created a subdivision and all the pines disappeared – the land scalped, the earth paved over. 

Across the street a similar story: one home on the hillside, surrounded by woods. Then a sale and bald earth and finally a subdivision with two and three-story homes. Some of the pines remained, but most were gone. 

 

When we moved back to my home place 5 ½ years ago, my aunt and uncle removed one, maybe two, of the pines at the roadway. Mom, Dad, J and I sat on our porch watching the theatrics and death-defying stunts of the tree removal crew. I sensed sadness for all the years of life felled in a few hours. The tree had definitely watched over the land when my grandparents still thought of growing old; watched when my mom and dad first kissed; watched as our home was built bit-by-bit by my father. 

 

Little is a stately and grand as a Loblolly Pine, decades old, wide and thick, branches reaching towards the sky. A giant reminding you how small you truly are. A teacher of how to weather storms. A sage whispering “carpe diem, your life, Little One, is brief.”

 

When our neighbor asked if we would remove one of our Loblollies a couple of years ago, I simply could not do it. I have watched the skyline since childhood and these trees have been a part of it. It seemed wrong to simply cut it down. . .

well tonight, it chose to take itself out. Or maybe the high winds helped it make up its mind. 

 

I heard cracks and pops for a bit, just outside the office window. I thought the wind was blowing debris against the house. These noises occurred on and off for five to ten minutes. Then a loud crack followed by the shaking of the house. I met my husband’s startled face in the hallway. Something big had happened. 

 

We went outside to see the pine draped across our front lawn and the ramp for my dad. The scent of pine fragranced the air while bent gutters spilled water onto the hedges. For tonight, it is the only damage – and miraculously so. 

 

I will miss the tree, though maybe not its yellow pollen. I wonder if this tree produced the large pine cones of wonder which litter the yard and drive? Maybe I will investigate tomorrow. 

 

But tonight, I offer this eulogy: 

Thank you, pine, 

    For providing shade, for giving us pine straw for our garden beds

    For being a resting place for birds, a playground for squirrels, a haven for the blue-tailed                 skinks (who are anything but Common)

    For providing enough edges for cicadas to shed their skins, enough grooves to commute ant         colonies and enough natural wood for busy carpenter bees. 

May you rest in peace. 

3/9/26

Time Compression

 

Photo credit here.

A week’s worth of a day

Open air and cadence

Sweet nothings and coffee

Cleaning, preparing, going. . .

 

Arriving in hurried conversation

Check the boxes

Make the orders, give

The unexpected, crushing blow

 

An injury, a promised filing

Tears in the hallway

Cuttings on the floor

But you must move forward

 

Leaving at last

Light streaming

The cows making dinner

For a beloved companion

 

Then the screen

Recalling countless words

Which make no sounds

But fill me weary

 

A usual consequence

Of time compressed,

Jammed, stomped from

One week, into one day.

 

Lord help us all.

3/7/26

Leaps of Faith

Photo credit here.

The trip had been long – a red eye out of LA, landing in Sydney with another 2 hour flight into the interior. We hiked another 3 hours deep into the Outback to the place locals called “The Fair.” 

 

Daylight was fading on the deep reds of the landscape and the sky looked maroon as Earth reflected Sky reflected Earth. As night crept further down the window of the horizon, a structure appeared – the original Fleur-de-lis? A rollercoaster? A statue in metal memorializing a child’s drawing of a tulip? 

 

Then people began appearing up high on the crest, down low at its base. . .

And even. . .

Upside down?

 

“I knew it,” she said, as all the weariness of travel fell away by the force of some gravity as yet unexplained. “I knew Newton was wrong!”

 

She went off on physics and Einstein and quarks and ended on string theory and the expansion and compression of time. When she finished, she looked at the rest of us stunned into the silence of the uninformed. . .

 

“Gravity,” she said, “it’s vector is just an illusion. . .” and she ran full throttle toward the structure and leapt. She swung up on the fence nearest the perilous looking curve and then walk/ran up and around the loop like Spiderwoman or a gecko or some other tiny creature for whom gravity holds little power.

 

All I wrote at the Writer’s Workshop, 4/27/25 (if I weren’t so tired, I might try to finish it, but not tonight!) The photo used for the prompt was of the structure in the picture above, but not this particular picture - though it looks cool and otherworldly in this photo (Ulrich Genth Tiger and Turtle Magic Mountain)

 

Returning

Photo credit here.

 A FB friend wrote today of his child’s 6^th year and the “normal” 18 year trajectory leading to college or career, then independence and the child’s own family. He found poignancy in statistics indicating 1) the most time a child is with a parent is the first 18 years of life and 2) on a deathbed, someone wishes for more time with family. With these, he concluded 1/3 of the time he will have the most contact with his child is over and the other 2/3’s will be over in a blink of an eye. He wished to cherish the days while confessing *cherish* may not always be how he reflects on happenings and interactions with said child. 

 

I could argue with the cultural standard he purports: I know of many families with children of ALL AGES living under one roof, often for financial, medical or needs-based reasons. The luxury of education or even having a job which could support independent living is not a given. 

 

However, stepping outside of my childhood home and seeing a scene familiar for most of my life, his words hit notes I do not hear. My husband and I care for my father in the house he built for our family while I gestated. Granted, I left for years, but I came back sensing the importance of doing so. The surreal experience of “returning home” in adulthood strikes dissonant chords some days, harmonic the next, in melodies I never expected to sing.

 

One oddity is the balance (or not) between respecting the surroundings of my father while attempting to make my childhood home seem like my adult home. We changed little in the common spaces for the first couple of years, maybe three. Then we finally moved out my grandmother’s dining table and chairs in the sunroom, rearranged the furniture to open up the space and unobstructed the window with a view, eventually changing the window to a picture window free of blinds. We moved couches out of the den and living room, but mainly shuffled furniture which had been in the rooms 30 years. 

 

Each change helped make the space a little more shared, but the walls still had the four paintings of my siblings and me when we were 2 years old, the painting of my mother and her brother at 5 years old and 2 years old respectively; my father’s high school graduation picture and several other family photos. I looked around and saw my parents’ lives and my childhood, but not my present life or my shared life with J. We lived in the house, but we were still visitors.

 

In February, figuring 2 years of Dad no longer regularly using the den meant we could change it, we tackled the room. J scrubbed, sanded and painted the walls and trim. We took out furniture, added our furniture back in, divided the room into sitting areas and bought new paintings for the walls. With the modifications, the den became “our” den and the house felt a little more like “our” home. 

 

Now, we have started on the living room, but the amount of kitsch is overwhelming. I am in process of wrapping my mother’s keepsakes, mainly bells, from her and Dad’s many travels. The layer of dust inside the closed cabinet betrays its usefulness. I take out each bell and consider my own collections. I picture them tossed in a box with a “free to a good home” sign or, even more likely, tossed in a box then piled high with other boxes on the side of the road awaiting the trash truck. Why keep so much stuff? 

Then I pull out the “Sacred Cat” from the King Tut exhibit we went to when I was a toddler. I remember the trip to New Orleans in the van. How my mom and I played games on the platform Dad built for the back so we could carry all the luggage for 6. I still see the long line snaking its way out of the exhibit hall and then the golden chin rest for a pharaoh carrying too much weight on his head. I tired of all the rooms and all the exhibits, finally sitting against a wall and watching swarms of people look at crafts belonging to a time and culture they could barely imagine – if they tried at all. 

 

“I’ll keep this one,” I think, a circle unbroken.

 

3/5/26

Wonder(ing)

 

Photo credit here.

How did the universes begin? By a spoken Word over “waters” – things that are NOT becoming manifest by breath and voice? 

 

If so, where did the waters begin? In the belly of God – an artery cut open to bring about life?

 

Does the serpent swallow its tail,

Spinning time in endless loops

Until the flick of creation

Telescopes a spiral

Reaching to eternity?

 

Or maybe the learned ones know best

A single atom

Exploding with instability;

Then opposites attracting

And coalescing

Swirling together and

Settling into non-ending expansion

 

All of us stardust

Matter to the matter that is us

And then to pass through and onto

Some other galaxy light years away.

 

A burden of questions

Known only as (in?) mystery

Inviting us to embrace

Wonder.

 

Writer’s Workshop, July 2025

Hints of Spring

 

Photo credit here.

The sky turned a deeper blue today

Its back toward winter’s edge

Spinning the waves of light

Through new angles

Particles bouncing

Back and forth

Up and down

Creating

This

Moment

Chlorophyll,

Rods and Cones

Chemicals moving

Into brown, gray matter

To create a flood of colors

Overtaking by wavelengths only

Imagined in winter’s wildest dream

3/3/26