In with the New

The first day of a new year, this one with 366 days. A bonus day for a bonus year. The bonus day is because we have a Leap Year, but the bonus year? 

The idea is this: If I think of it as a bonus, I'll appreciate it more. I'm not ancient, but I'm old enough that this idea resonates. Even if I wasn't, the bonus concept makes sense. 

I'm just finishing The Book of Joy, a compilation of interviews between the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. One of the recommended "joy practices" is to make time each morning to set an intention for the day. 

Today's intention is to appreciate this new year as it's dawning, and to live this new year as if it is a gift. Because it is.  

Christmas Greetings

Once again the days have passed, the splendid ones and the trying ones. Once again we've come back to this point, which is for me, and for many, the great pause. Christmas Eve. Christmas Day. Soon to be followed by New Year's Day and the delicious week in between. Once again I'll re-run this blog post, one I wrote in 2011. Merry Christmas!

12/24/11

Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper's paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we've ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we'll have time to watch in the next few days. In "It's a Wonderful Life," Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he's been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he's had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn't take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that.


Photo: Flow TV

Anticipation

The presents are wrapped and tucked under the tree. The refrigerator is stocked, and the mantel is filling with cards. The Seattle branch of the family arrives today, and the Kentucky branch tomorrow. If I could ask for anything right now it would be for a super-duper slow-down-time machine — because I know the next few days will vanish in a blur.

Since I'm pretty sure such a device will not magically materialize, I'm doing the next best thing: savoring the moments, anticipating what's to come.  

I'm contemplating the tree, not the biggest we've ever had but not the smallest, either. And the gifts themselves, small tokens of the great love I feel for the people receiving them. How good we have a season devoted to giving. For me it underlines this basic fact: that joy is not ours to hold — but to spread around and give away. 

Extending Thanksgiving

If Thanksgiving lasted a week instead of 24 hours, this would be its final and most celebratory day — the last verse of the hymn, when voices sing louder and the organist pulls out all the stops. It would be the  gratitude you feel after sickness, relief tinged with wonder that the body can be again as it once was. 

The last day of a week of gratitude would be a crescendo of thanks, cymbals crashing, timpani rolling, a fanfare of trumpets. 

And because this week of thanksgiving would be ending on the birthdays of two people dear to me — a daughter and a brother — there would be a special surge of gratitude for the presence of these two people in my life.

Come to think of it, a week of thankfulness might prove so invigorating that next I'd need a month of it. 

 

Ripeness

Before the flurry of preparation begins, I search for a poem to serve as grace before the meal. Or if not, to sum up gratitude for my eyes only. This one does: 

Ripeness

Jane Hirshfield

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.

Not only the heavy apple,

the pear,

but also the dried brown strands

of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested --
this sorrow, that great love --
it too will leave on that clean knife.

Stealth Gratitude

I've known people who keep a gratitude journal, and I admire them for it. Appreciating what we have is an art improved by practice, and noting the specifics for which we feel thankful — not the generalities but each particular stroke of good fortune — is one way to do it.

But I enjoy being ambushed by gratitude: opening the shutters on a cold spring morning and being shocked by the light that pours inside. Running an errand and being enraptured by a sunset that sets the sky on fire. Eating warmed-up baked ziti and marveling at how good it still tastes.

Gratitude can be coaxed and analyzed and marshaled like a foot soldier. But I prefer the stealth variety, the kind that surprises me with joy. 

Flash Gratitude

I have in my temporary possession a book called The Best of Brevity. It's a compilation of short essays from the journal Brevity, which features flash nonfiction. 

The genre of flash nonfiction is relatively new to me, although I write it everyday. It is the true-to-life equivalent of flash fiction. part of a trend — probably long since peaked if I'm catching onto it — toward the brief, the ephemeral, the transitory. 

Let me add to this canon with what I've come to think of as flash gratitude. 

Flash gratitude is the sudden, piercing awareness of life's blessings. Stubbing one's toe and thinking ... at least I have a toe to stub. Or hearing the gentle purr of forced-air heat and giving thanks for the warm home I sit in as a result. 

I had a moment of flash gratitude yesterday when I heard about fellow Virginians trapped for 18 to 20 hours on an impassable I-95. They were cold, hungry, frightened and, most likely, angry. They were bearing the brunt of the snow storm in a real and all-too-personal way. 

Let this be a gratitude trigger, I told myself. Whenever life looks bleak and purposeless, I will conjure up those poor souls trapped in their Kias or Toyotas or Hondas or Fords, those poor shivering drivers and passengers, and my heart will nearly burst with joy that I am anywhere else but on a snow-packed, jack-knifed-tractor-filled I-95. 

(This snow has its beauteous moments, too.)

Merry Christmas!

Once again I'll re-run this blog post, which I wrote ten years ago. Merry Christmas!

12/24/11

Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper's paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we've ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we'll have time to watch in the next few days. In "It's a Wonderful Life," Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he's been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he's had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn't take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that. 

Together

It's 9 on a Thanksgiving morning and for once I remembered to turn on the TV in time to catch the parade from the beginning. It will be on in the background as the dust flies, the turkey roasts and the potatoes boil.

But the big story for most of us this year will not be on a screen. It will be in living rooms and family rooms and kitchens across the nation.

It will be when we rub shoulders, click glasses and — dare I say it? — hug each person who enters our home. For the big story this Thanksgiving is that we're celebrating it together.

Morning Thought

For someone who doesn't always sleep through the night, I'm always grateful to wake up, glance at the clock and see that it's truly morning, not some middle-of-the-night hour. (Glancing at the clock is necessary now as the light dwindles. I did it this today since it was still dim at 6:30.)

It strikes me often, though, that the gratitude I feel upon finishing a seven- or eight-hour snooze ought to carry over to the four- or five-hour  variety, as  well. After all, I usually drift back, and when I don't, there is always something relaxing I can do: read or write or pick up a dream thread and follow it back to its source. 

William Arthur Dunkerley said it best: "Thank God for sleep! And when you cannot sleep, still thank him that you live to lie awake!"

Luck of the Irish

Most people assume my Irish roots come from Dad's side of the family. Something about the last name of Cassidy tips them off, I guess! But Dad's family has been in Kentucky for generations, perhaps since the Revolutionary War, and he always seemed surprised when someone thought he hailed from the auld sod. 

Mom was the Irish one. She was proud of her lineage and traced her Concannon, Scott, Long and Hughes roots back to Counties Clare and Galway. She made us wear little green shamrocks made of green pipe-cleaners every March 17, back when it wasn't cool to be green.

But it's Dad I want to write about this morning. He would be 98 today, so I've been thinking about him and his way of looking at the world. 

Dad was an optimist and an extrovert who took joy in ordinary pleasures: his first cup of coffee in the morning ("ah, Brazilian novocaine," he would say), a bowl of popcorn after dinner, his wife and children and grandchildren, whom he adored. 

He never tired of telling us how lucky he was to be our father, a compliment I threw right back at him as I grew older and (sort of) wiser. But he was lucky in the way that many of his generation were: tried and tested by early hardship and provided with free college, a low-cost mortgage and a trip to Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth courtesy of Uncle Sam (though he had to fly 35 missions in a B-17 bomber to pay for it).

Most of all, though, he made his own luck. When the tough times came, which they did, Dad just plowed through them. Gratitude came easily to him. Luck, too. Whether it was from being "Irish" or just from being Dad, I'll never know.

A Triumph

I'm writing this on the deck, pushing it a little since the thermometer says it's 44 , but doing it anyway because it's so gorgeous out here that I don't want to be inside. 

The grass is bright green and striped with shadows from the still-low sun. The trees have their earliest leaves, tender and golden. 

The azaleas have burst into bloom — the lavender one along the back of the house, the bifurcated pink one beside the trampoline, and the fuchsia one in the middle of the garden — a mistake in terms of landscaping but a triumph from the azalea's point of view. 

Knowing how rare such moments of perfection are, I plan to sit here a moment, sip my tea and be grateful for every bit of birdsong. 

Focus

In the Headspace journey I'm taking courtesy of a program at work, we just finished a 30-day course on finding focus. We learned that focus in not something you must learn and strive for; it's something you already have. 

Finding focus means attending to the moment, losing yourself in the here and now. It's like an image used at the beginning of the Headspace program, one of blue sky and clouds. Blue sky is always there, but clouds hide it, just as the stresses of daily living block the natural calm that can be ours if we learn to still ourselves. 

This morning we take another, more advanced course on mindfulness. I'm grateful for these opportunities — because there's never been a better time to master the art of living in the here and now. 

After This?

Sometimes I try to envision what our lives will be like coming out of this. I believe that eventually, once there's a vaccine and treatment, they will be somewhat the same. More chastened, more grateful, I hope, but similar to what we used to have. People are social creatures, after all. We want to be together.

But until we feel safe doing that, we will wear masks and stay mostly to ourselves. This is a poverty. It's a shrinking of our lives rather than an expansion of them. It's hard to stay aware of all the possibilities the world holds while we're in this cloistered state.

The life we had is a world I miss every day; we all do. A world we lost so quickly, almost with the hair-trigger quickness of a bomb exploding. All it took was a wily, tenacious pathogen.

What I hope most of all is that this pathogen, like so much else, doesn't succeed in pushing us farther apart, but instead pulls us together. All evidence suggests that it will split us up. But I'm an optimist; I like to believe that common sense and human kindness will prevail.

Not Complaining

Somehow, there is still moisture in the sky, and rain in the air. It's falling now in gentle sheets, greening the new leaves and the grass and the weeds, making us feel more hemmed in than we already do.

Not that I'm complaining. There's a roof over my head, and the basement doesn't flood every time it rains, only in downpours. There's electricity so I can turn on lamps in the morning (something I've very much needed to do this gray day).

And in the kitchen, just steps away from where I now sit (on a comfy new couch, I might add), there is more food than we know what to do with.

So I will take this rainy day, embrace it and even (in my own way) celebrate it. Because that's where we are now ... or at least it's where I hope to be.

(Sunrise on the Mekong ... from the vault.)

Still There

Yesterday, I escaped again. This time to walk with another daughter, in an inner rather than an outer suburb —an old neighborhood with houses tucked into hillsides. The iris had popped there, and the dogwood and azaleas have bloomed longer than usual this year, thanks to cooler weather, so they were still in fine array. The flowering trees gave each house and yard the enchantment they deserved.

I've said this often (here and elsewhere), but the Washington, D.C., area is at its most beautiful in spring — and this year spring has lasted months.

This particular walk took us to the bluffs above the Potomac River, where we clambered on rocks and rain-slicked trails, through tunnels of foliage colored an eye-popping green. How lovely to be in that place in that moment. How good to have gotten out not once but twice (both for valid reasons, I feel I must add — for exercise and food drop-offs), to see a little more of the world that's out there. It's a good reminder, six weeks into quarantine, that it will all still be there when we emerge.

The Land of Other

Yesterday I escaped home and yard for a brief sojourn in the Land of Other. The Land of Other is not some mythical place far away. It is simply any place other than my own.

I hadn't been in this land for two weeks, and it felt good to be there. It's not that I mind being home all of the time. Mostly I don't. But as the weeks wear on, and family members remain tantalizingly close, I can't help but visit them.

Interactions were brief and mostly took place outside. There were two long walks, three frisky dogs, a daughter, a brother and — at the end, a box of take-out fried chicken.

Simple pleasures, deeply enjoyed. The Land of Other — it's still out there. And knowing that makes me uncommonly happy.

Sweet Normalcy

Okay, I take back what I said about yesterday. It wasn't a "not so super Tuesday." It was a surprisingly pleasant Tuesday, and went a long way toward removing the sense of existential dread that has been dogging me of late.

It gave me hope that someday we might have sweet normalcy again — a time when civility rules, when I'm not afraid to read the newspaper, and eventually, when it's permissible to shake hands or cough discretely into a tissue.

Normalcy is always underrated until it goes into hiding. But today I sat on Metro appreciating the ride and the sunshine streaming into the car when it was above-ground. And now I look over at the nondescript office building outside my window, watching a reflection of the planes taking off at National Airport. And I think that normal hasn't looked this good in a long time.

Picturing Food

I'm not one to photograph the food I eat, though I know for some it has become second nature, what passes for a blessing in this secular age. And isn't there a similarity, after all?

When we photograph, we pay attention. We study the subject, frame it, seek the best angle. And isn't this a type of gratitude, an attentiveness that elevates the meal from just a quick downing of protein and carbohydrates into a ritual?

Maybe this takes it a bit too far. But picturing our food means we preserve it, means that long after I've eaten and digested these greens, they live on in memory.

Many Loves

On a day dedicated to love, I think of my people and of love's many faces. Of romantic love and parental love, the love of friends.

I think about the love we have for those who are gone, and the love we have for animals. The love we have for place, for movement, for moving through space, which I celebrate on these pages.

So many loves we are given. Loves that light the way. Even when we don't see them, they are there.