Category Archives: Gratitude

Christmas 2017 (30)

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As soon as I string the Christmas lights across a section of the bougainvillea, the little Costa’s hummingbird alights, claiming one loop for his new perch, a good spot to spy on his feeder. For two weeks in November he came to sit on the back of the chair beside me each morning. When I spoke to him, he swiveled his head, studied me, considering my words, the sound of my voice. He darted off to chase someone away, then perched near me again. It surprised me how moved I was to have him there beside me. I’d talk to him, go back to reading the paper, look up again to tell him how glad I was to have him there. Sometimes I’d forget to greet him, need to apologize. Now I have to love him from a distance, unless I’m near the feeder when he drinks, and then I have to stop myself from reaching out to run my index finger along his back. I don’t know where he sleeps, but maybe near that strand of lights in the bougainvillea. They keep me company when I wake up in the night. The lights have always been my favorite part of this season. When I hang the two strands outside the gate, I walk out three times to see them. I stand in the middle of the road and let myself feed on them. They’re like magic to me, fed by the sun, coming alive when the light leaves the day. They awaken a longing in me, too, a kind of nostalgia, decades of Christmas lights in all my homes, in all my places. But I think what calls to me, what feeds me, is a kind of hope. Might we all know brightness and beauty. Might we always have light in the darkness like this, quiet, steady, full of peace.

Weaver Be Praised (25)

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He was getting cold, but he wasn’t ready to leave. The winter sun abandoned his usual spot in the mid-afternoon, and he’d left his blanket outside the walls, folded with care and tucked up in the fork of his favorite tree. He wasn’t yet used to the sun being so far south in the sky, and these narrow streets blocked so much of the light in all seasons. He sighed and got to all fours, managed to stand up without groaning out loud. No one wanted to hear him groan, he knew. No one wanted to think he might be truly suffering, and he didn’t want people to think he was faking it to play on their sympathy, a ploy for more coins in his copper cup. The truth was he was getting old and creaky. Getting up off the cobblestones wasn’t as easy as it used to be, and the dampness in the stones, the cold that never left them for long this time of year, made it harder. But he didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. He liked his life for the most part. He wouldn’t have chosen to go blind like this, slow and steady, but if something had to give, he thanked the Weaver every day that she hadn’t taken his hearing. Then he would have had to struggle not to feel sorry for himself. He might have become the pitiful sight some people already thought he was. But the Weaver had left him his hearing and his voice, so every day he got to lift himself up to the sky, carry himself across the tops of the eastern forest, sail across the southern sea. Weaver be praised.

[Editor’s note: written from a prompt from Creative Writing Prompts. Plus, I have borrowed the Weaver from my favorite writer, Guy Gavriel Kay, and his wonderful Fionavar Tapestry.]

October Morning (19)

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I move the curtain from the open window by the bed just enough to greet Venus in the eastern sky. I’m glad to see her there, glad to catch the scattering of sunrise-colored clouds, but I don’t want to be awake yet. I let the curtain fall and snuggle back beneath the blankets. Blankets, I think. I grin, so pleased it’s autumn now, and I return to blankets. I have a nine a.m. videoconference call this morning. And I want to remember to mention the aloe vera gel to my mom for these last stages of the wound that’s finally healing on her leg. I’m going to focus on building next week’s online classes today. I want to write a blog post, too, I think. I can’t believe it’s been so long. Is this the longest gap in over seven years of my commitment to posting? I must be a zillion weeks behind by now. I don’t even want to know. I can feel the tension mounting in me with each thought. For a little while I even replay all the well-worn reasons I believe I was wronged by someone years ago. I take a deep breath, smoosh the pillow beneath my head, settle down on my left side, close my eyes. I hear bird calls in the distance. I think of my two cats, dead now these two years. I whisper to them, send their spirits love. And then I let myself imagine them going back to sleep with me in this cool early morning air. They used to flank me, Sofia wrapping herself in the curve of my legs and Sable curling up against my belly. I know it’s unlikely I’ll fall asleep again, but I let myself drift, using my imagination now, reaching for memory. I remember waking in the middle of the night, their soft little bodies pressed against me, the comforting weight of them. It always made me feel like the luckiest woman in the world. Drifting, I wonder what that makes me today. But even in that dreamy place shaded by a longing for them, I know the answer. It makes me the luckiest woman in the world because I had that, their dear companionship, night after night for years. And because I get to love them forever.

Away, Too (18)

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The morning after the last of my fever, I feel like something sat on me all night pushing my bones into the earth of our campsite. I head toward the meadow to do my qi gong, but I stop inside the pines. I don’t want the sun, don’t know why. I study the pine needle ground and choose my spot. I face west. Maybe because I am already slow, creaky and sore, I move through all the movements without a hint of rushing, without becoming lost in the habit of it. Halfway through I hear a tinkling passing back and forth among the trees nearest me, like hummingbirds but not, like bells, like the shimmer of light on water if it were a sound. I think of Tinkerbell, sprinklings of fairy dust. I don’t even feel goofy for it; it feels like my soundest reference, in fact. Unseen bird or invisible beings in this grove? Whoever they are, it feels like a visitation. They don’t stay long. After, I press my palms together before my chest, quiet awe and gratitude seeping out of my skin, chasing away the last taste of fever. Thank you, all.

Away (17)

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I do my qi gong in Clive’s back yard. I face east, the direction of the liver in traditional Chinese medicine. I stand before the climbing vines and blackberries, the wonderful vegetable garden, old growth, parts untamed, calls to me. I lean forward from my waist, head hanging, arms loose to the ground. I like the looks of me, this upside down view, my feet’s tan lines darker than ever from all my walking this week, the blues and thin-lined purples of my plaid pants, my stones dangling from my throat, the aqua aura bluer today against the blue of my thin shirt, the red yarn still tied to my left wrist, and that little rush of recognition, of familiarity, of fondness for myself. This is me.

20 Days Off (16)

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I’m going on holiday. Twenty days, more than I’ve taken in decades. It is blowing my mind. I’m not there yet. How do I wrap myself around almost three weeks of vacation? I want to stretch, slither, flick my tongue, grin. And not only that, but I have this big longing to truly feel like I’m on vacation. I’m saving crossword puzzles from my L.A. Times, just the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday ones, the easy ones before they get too hard later in the week. I’ll have six to do while I am whiling away my hours. I amuse myself thinking I will need to be present a great deal during this time, so I am always appreciating that I am on holiday. And isn’t life a romp?!? So do you think this yearning for the real feeling of being on holiday counts as a dream? Might I use it for a blog post this week? I am hoping, too, for a kind of writer’s holiday, all that public transit, all those good chances to write. Wakes up in me my dream of walking the camino. Watched The Way again last week. One of these years it will be me. I think it is the only “concrete” dream I’ve ever had. I want to walk 500 miles across northern Spain, from France to the sea. I want it like I want soft shoes in winter, down blankets, good goat cheese, an empty page and a favorite pen. I don’t know what year it will be, but I am hoping it will be more than one. I want to walk the camino again and again. I even dream of walking the camino front and back, or forward and backward. Shall I not only take my sweet time walking from France to the sea, but then turn right around and make my own sweet snail pace way back again all the way to France and beyond? Shall I watch the grapes ripening as I walk west in the late spring, see them crushing the dark fruit on my way back in the early fall? There will be nuts on the ground, too, late summer berries. It makes me squiggle. It makes me grin. One of these years. Yo voy. Yo vengo. I am coming.

Beyond Deserving (15)

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Something odd keeps happening to me. It is unexpected, feels a bit unreal, almost dreamlike. Again and again in recent weeks I am visited by sadness—swift, keen, quick to pass. I am washing dishes. Or I am walking to the bus stop, scarf over my bent head, concentrating just to move through the hard heat of a July afternoon in this desert town. It isn’t even as if something else sparks a thought of you, the more ordinary path. And I can’t tell if this might have begun because my book, this story about the two of us, is close to being finished, this third time a charm. (Touch wood.) Or if it might be only that the time has come all by itself, a natural ending, a kind of completion of big loss, even a final letting go. I know I began to write this book much too soon, have said this before. In what is happening now there is this flicker of feeling, this sense that now is when I might have more properly begun this book. Only now. Or maybe a little bit of time from now, when this time, too, has passed. What I do know is this sudden sadness comes, piercing, bittersweet, as though I am only just now losing you for good after all these years. It makes me want to buckle at the knees, fall to the sidewalk, cement hot against my shins, quick sword thrust of sharp grief. But at the same time, in a way that makes no sense to me but that my body seems to understand, the grief is fleeting, even quiet, softened, like the regrets of our youth at the end of a long and happy life, riches beyond deserving.