Micro Memories - Homecoming

When my mom returned to my grandparents’ house after work I met her in the dining room and embraced her. My head rested on her stomach. She smelled strongly of perfume and faintly of nicotine. Her parents didn’t like her to smoke. She smelled like home. I stepped back and adjusted her skirt. She wore it high-waisted, belted just below her bra. I pulled her wide band, elastic belt down as I said, “That’s not your waist! This is your waist!” She always let me. She always left it that way the rest of the evening.

Downward Facing Ego

Yoga class is no place for competitive drive. In fact, it’s rather frowned upon by yogis. My ego didn’t get the memo. So, I pushed past my limits and entered pure pain, holding downward facing dog long past my physical abilities and right into excruciation. Still, I felt good at the end of the class. Then my friend and fellow yoga novice asked me what was in my eye. I looked in the mirror. Blood. It was blood. I’d burst blood vessels in my eye from my sheer stubborn competitive will to deny my newbie status, to avoid embarrassing myself by falling mid sun salutation. Instead, I walked out of the studio breathing in wellness while looking like a drug addict.

Namaste.

Choice

Today I learned two things that put life into perspective.

First, today is my would-be-graduation-day. That is, it’s the day those I began my MFA in Creative Writing program with have donned gowns and goofy hats and walked across a stage in completion of three years of writing, thesis revisions, teaching, and oodles more revisions. I left the program after one semester. I say I left for financial reasons and because it was in the middle of nowhere. I was miserable. Truth: I expected to have teaching assistantships lavished upon me for my mere presence. Truth: I chose to focus on the negative. I chose to be miserable.

Second, today I received a text marking a turning point for a dear friend fighting cancer – a text with words like morphine, hospice, comfort and hope. It seems her ultimate journey home has begun. From the beginning, I’ve been in awe of her strength and courage. Even when she moved from solids to an all liquid diet, she didn’t complain. She appreciates each moment she has. Hope for her right now means that she will have little pain, that she will have dignity and comfort. Hope means she will get to leave the hospital and return home for in-home hospice for her remaining days.

Today has led me to consider gratitude. How the lack of gratitude causes harm and steals life’s joys. How a life lived in gratitude touches others and brightens the world even if one expresses that gratitude quietly from a hospital bed.

All that we can expect from this life is a unique journey that begins with a crying out followed by innumerable opportunities to learn and grow. Whether we appreciate each obstacle as a lesson, each person we meet as a teacher, that is our choice.

When a Dream Grows Up

Why is it that both the deepest, most cherished wishes and the most heartbreaking, primal fears are oft not spoken, as if to utter them aloud would dissolve hopes, empower dread? Call it superstition; call it what you’d like, but unspoken dreams have a kind of power, a potential energy that is lost or diminished once announced as fact. Once a dream is outed as an intention a roadmap appears – one riddled with deep chasms no bridge could span, impassable deserts, uncharted roads. In short, every imagined roadblock grows obvious while the destination recedes, a dot nearly indiscernible from the surrounding flora.

As it turns out, dreams take imagination while intentions take hard work. Moreover, intentions become goals, hard and tactile, that require commitment – commitment to a belief in a self capable of finding detours, scaling canyon walls, and navigating the most treacherous terrain.