This is a poem a woman named Kate sent today.
She wrote: It's by a poet from Wellfleet, Massachusetts named Marge Piercy. It's one of my favorites.
The Seven of Pentacles
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
I am grateful -
to Sari, to Esther to Jalieh, to Kate, to Nancy, to Lilly, to each person who connected with me in my state of vulnerable humanness today (or on previous days).
This morning I wrote on a widows board about how hard it is for me to reach out when I am sad or lonely, and how much easier it is to do this through e-mail on the board for widows. After I put it out there, and I mean stuff rom childhood through the present about how much I extend my heart, it was freeing. I called a girlfriend and asked her to go for a walk; though she was not home, she called back later. Various people wrote to me and one asked me for my phone number and called. I am in that after-glow of receiving understanding, love. I feel like I'm surrounded with a kaleidoscope of wonderful beings, and if I wrote down every name from each source, I would be amazed. They are there - but my system for connecting with them isn't yet in a routine or regular and sustaining. They are there, like fountains, like beauty, like people who will write to you when you are down and they are not ashamed or embarrassed to be seen with you or shaming or embarrassing - they say they feel that way some times too.
I am so lucky. Now back to bills, throwing out piles of paper, etc...
But first, I bought three laundry holders in green, blue and white at Ikea the other day for Throw Away, Give Away, Put Away, as flylady.com suggests. And a friend came over - Laura Sweezey. She came over Sunday and began cleaning my sink. She helped me open up my Ikea laundry holders and I started to sort. Before I knew it she was out trimming my lavender plants where you had little 1/8th of side walk to walk on and together we made so much progress, and all this messy side of the house became swept and clean.
Who is she? A person from a simple family in Massachusetts, a working family. She said she likes to work, it makes her feel good afterwards. Then we went for a super energy smoothie at Jamba Juice with some berries from Brazil and soy milk - light purple, sipping away. What a friend. She told me she has training as a coach from Dale Carnegie, and she is a natural - feisty and not getting caught in the emotions. How lucky am I!
Monday I used the momentum to throw away more tree cuttings, trim a tree in the back of the house and totally organize the chaos in the landry-room (just remembered I have a load in that needs to dry). I also cleared a patio space out back to put give away items as Laura suggested.
If any of you happen to want to see my vulnerable human story of how it has been hard for me to reach out, just e-mail me at Penofgold9@sbcglobal.net. I reached out to Laura for help because she is a financial advisor and I'd seen that my output was greater than my input and had asked her for budgeting help. As she swept and chopped, to the point where she had several blisters on her hand, she said that sometimes this is part of getting the finances in order - you have to get your mind straight first. It helps me to know there is a harvest to come from this work!
Expressive Art Playhouse: I'd like to take this suggestion and have in the past:
1. Make anything on which you can list people who have offered to be a support to you, or who acted in loving, caring, uplifting ways.
1a. If you like, cut out angel wings, or sunflowers, or stars or some symbol you feel and write the name of the person, what attribute you see in them (loving, kind, humorous, generous, or ?) and a phone number of e-mail address on that object. You can, for example, do a whole list of names on one set of angel wings, or do a wing for each person.
1b. Or put the names on slips of paper in a box.
2. If you made wings or a star or sunflower or whatever, you can hang your design up on the fridge, or from anywhere you will see it.
3. When times get rough, and praying or reading or affirming or whatever you do isn't getting you what you want - you want a human understanding being to hold onto -pick one slip from box, or one person from the list.
I believe that I and other people who have lost someone that is a close partner need to be around other people a lot, the more in person the better.
Reaching Out ChallengeThis is the challenge: To call someone you truly think is wonderful for at least one minute a week. Who will join me in this challenge? Can we do it for July?
Thanks for dropping by. I hope you will find hope and treasures and energy and all you need to do your highest calling and handle all the details of life.
Good night after a very full day. Claudia
