"This is going to be some day..."

Much has been written about mindfulness and there are various books, blogs, and classes out there in the ether, and in reality. For some it is a daily practice and complete lifestyle. One of my favorite books is World Enough & Time by Christian McEwen (Bauhan Publishing) and certainly worth another read–I can't recommend it enough. A favorite blog is called "Zen Habits" published by Leo Babauta and I had to laugh when I read his recent entry, "Three Habits for the Overwhelmed, Stressed, Anxious" because that fairly well pegs it right now. Then there is anything written, or said, by Jon Kabat-Zinn (who happened to be the colleague of a family friend, who was also doula for my first child back in 1988, **Ferris Urbanowski. But that is another story...), and certainly Thich Nhat Hanh who composed the lovely Zen calligraphy that I've shared here (a small representation of his work).

Lately I've been struggling with accomplishing basic every day tasks and larger ones related to my writing and potential writing projects. Putting my health first is also a challenge and I've never been very good at "giving myself oxygen first." As I answer to no one, except myself or the flow of the day, this is harder than it might seem. While my time is generally my own––if not involved with making a meal, overseeing a medical issue for a family member that can be all encompassing (like right now), or taking kids to school and back––it would seem that I should have no excuse. I really don't because I can be my own worst enemy when it comes to time management. Even the 2-4 round trips to our boys' school (18 miles each way), which used to translate into 2-4 hours a day sometimes, have been removed because one of our boys is now driving his own car and his brother, too. You'd think with all of that extra time I've have MORE time but it just seems like it's falling through a sieve. [Bouts of depression do not help, either, but fortunately there are pills for that.]

I blame this fleeting time/time wasted phenomenon that I am now experiencing partly on my age and circumstances. A person in their mid-50s has easily lived more than half of their lives and there is no guarantee on the rest. The old adage about "it's all down hill from here," after one turns 50 is apt: after all, one accelerates as they go down hill, while trying not to trip or crash, and time certainly seems to be doing that, too.

I also have two very independent young men in the home–one of whom will be off to college in August and the other with two years still in high school. Yet I hardly see either one of them! Between school, and activities, and driving themselves now, and their after school jobs, it can be a revolving door and they don't need me so much. I'm on the edge of empty nest all over again having gone through it once before when my daughter stayed back in New England, at 20, when we moved here. Then another mini-bout of it in 2012 right before I turned 50 and when she lived here with us for about six months and then headed out west for a new job and new life.

It was Ferris, actually, who said to me something I have never forgotten. When my daughter was born, Ferris said, "She is no longer yours and the rest of your life will be a continued journey of 'letting go'..." That resonated then and even more so now. Empty nest is a real thing but so is each milestone of a child's life: eventually we let them go into the world, but every day when they leave the house we are letting go, too, and hoping that they will be alright. Then one day you wake up and realize they are almost grown, and gone.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, 1931, MOMA

So there's that. Meanwhile, in my 20s, life seemed limitless and boundless and that I could do anything with it. At some point the reality creeps in that maybe you can't do everything you want, or wanted, to do. As someone with so many different interests, and an innate attention deficit issue, this can be cold comfort.

I have often written about my Old-Order Mennonite friend Anna who has been my primary glimpse into the world of a certain kind of mindfulness. She lives very much in the task–whether it be laundry (no electricity), baking, quilting, or gardening. Yes, she ponders but she primarily lives in her hands and is rarely idle–much like the Shaker saying of "Hands to work and Hearts to God." I get that but like so many things that I fully understand it is often the practical application that is the hardest. My mother is another person who always likes to be doing something–like gardening–and I have few memories of her actually sitting down except at the end of a long day. Both women are productive "do-ers" and it never ceases to amaze me that my mother worked on her feet five days a week as a nurse and then came home to care for three teenagers and her mother. And here I am, with no full-time job, fewer mothering tasks, and nothing but time all around me.

Well, that's enough pondering and "living in my head" for one day. Only so much we can do in the world (and what a world it is becoming) so it's always best to focus on the home front and what's right in front of me. Life is good and I am very blessed, despite the occasional glitch or hurdle (like getting in my own way).

Back to the spring cleaning! And it helps me to listen to a favorite album like "Big Science" (1982) by Laurie Anderson while doing so. One thing at a time, one moment at a time. It is all that we have.

"This is going to be some day...this is the time and this is the record of the time."

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

PS I have often thought about **Ferris through the years and have not seen her for almost two decades. She was a big part of the lives of my family for many years as she worked with my mother, a former nurse, at Whole Health Center in Peterborough, NH where Ferris was a counselor. In the 1970s, not far from our family farm, Ferris built a small off-grid cabin in the woods along with a like-minded community of other cabin builders well before it was the trend. She drove a school bus while putting herself through graduate school and raising two daughters, one of whom went to school with one of my brothers. She even put in a good word for a great job in public relations at Antioch New England back in the day, where she had studied (yes, it is about talent but I've also discovered it can be about connections–which is probably one reason it has been so difficult for me to get non-writing jobs in Kentucky).

She was also right beside me, and my mother and former stepfather, when I had my daughter, all naturally, on a hot June day in 1988. Long before her work in counseling and mindfulness, Ferris was featured in the natural childbirth Lamaze work of Elizabeth Bing when she lived in New York in the 1960s. I knew she had struggled with a brain tumor in recent years and could no longer find her website when I looked last year. I just Googled and found this video that she posted last fall. I can't tell you how it means to hear her voice across the miles, to hear about her struggles and continued triumphs despite obstacles, and to realize how her words mean the world right now. I encourage you to listen, also, to the video below and you, too might find magic–and more mindfulness-in your life.

"May we come home to our hearts."

Watching Caesar Go

The sun was out after some late winter severe weather in the past few days. I caught a glimmer of movement in the window that always occurs when a vehicle passes through the farmyard and is refracted by the shining light. Thinking that either my husband or boys were home early, I got up to look out. Nothing. Then I heard a low rumble on the other side of our small farm home and saw a truck pulling a cattle trailer. Inside of it, all alone, was Caesar with his big, black, Angus presence. Of all of the other bulls besides Edgar, who is our only bull for now, he would allow us to pat him on the head through the fence.

"I wish I hadn’t seen that,” I said aloud to the empty house (I am alone now here for long stretches—from 7:30am until 3:30 or 5:30pm—as my sons now drive themselves together to school). So I talk to myself a lot—or to two of our six cats who are allowed in the house.

I knew that Caesar would be picked up today and taken to auction but as I hadn’t seen him one more time since a few days ago I had already separated from the idea of him leaving. Every time an animal leaves the farm a part of us, and a part of our farm, goes with them. Their fate is undetermined as they go to auction—they could either live on another farm or go to the slaughterhouse. As a meat eater one has to accept that reality.

  

But to see that same magnificent animal, behind the relative prison bars of a cattle trailer, riding behind the truck up the hill away from our farm to an unknown future or demise—well, it was devastating.

I was reminded of another goodbye–of when my husband and daughter drove up the hill, pulling a small trailer, on their way out to Colorado where she would live. It was just after my 50th birthday and she had been living with us here in Kentucky for much of that year, in between two stages of her life. For the first time in five years I had everyone under one roof again. For a mother there is no greater comfort than that.

"What people don't tell you is that you lose your children. As beautiful and wonderful as you are now, the little girl whose hair I used to detangle and had bad dreams and used to crawl into my bed? She's gone." 

–Madeline, "Big Little Lies" (HBO)

All was quiet in the darkness of that early November morning-there were not even any birds. So it was fitting that it was like empty nest all over again watching my daughter drive off, at 5am, to an uncertain future where there are no guarantees, only possibilities. I watched until I could no longer see the small, piercing eyes of red tail lights on the back of the trailer–where my daughter's life was placed for safe transit. I listened until I could no longer hear the sound of the car engine on the ridge. I prayed for a safe journey for both of them–round trip for my husband and one-way for my daughter.

And then I went back into the house, and I cried.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Rebooting My Blog–& Middleaged Booty

I used to enjoy blogging, sometimes several times a week. Then, in 2012, we lost our satellite Internet from a lightning strike on our farm and the only time I could blog was on my (very slow-eg. ancient) laptop about once a week or so at our wonderful local city library in Somerset, Kentucky (both of my Mac computers are from 2004 with only one upgrade!). It took two full years for our local phone carrier to install our rural Wifi capabilities and I'd just let our satellite account go because when they came to repair it they said the equipment was outdated and I said, "Well, why didn't someone tell me that years ago?" I'm not a luddite on principal, and not as bad as my husband is, but upgrades are not something I am good at. Or reboots for that matter.

So, that, in short is how I got out of the habit of blogging.

I had also been working on another book, on the 1950s American kitchen, commissioned by a British publisher who decided to not proceed with their American list after I'd finished it in April 2014. [I am happy to say that the manuscript has now been shopped to another publisher, after languishing in a desk drawer for over two years. My bad.]

I was also preoccupied by too much social media (eg. Facebook, especially) which I've recently given up for Lent. I not only had extreme political fatigue from the past two years but I find social media can all too easily become a black hole of time-killing. When I wasn't blogging while we didn't have Internet for a few years, I also became more of a Facebook grazer. At the library, or wherever I could find free Wifi in someone's parking lot (eg. Lowe's or McDonald's), or even our local coffee house, I would check my wall for about ten minutes, maybe post, visit a few other walls and be done with it. Now I am on a complete FAST except for if I want to promote anything in my writing world (which I did yesterday).

A dear friend reminded me that I needed to blog again––and more often. I find this a wonderful way to connect and less psychologically immersive than on Facebook (as I don't have a SmartPhone I'm not on Instagram, as much as I might enjoy that with my interests in photography). Already, in writing this, do I remember how much I did enjoy blogging and the relative ease of writing here. It's often a warm-up to my other writing, too.

And finally, not only have I been busy with my two boys, and the farm world that I live in (more on the domestic end of things), but I was seized with an unprecedented depression. Part peri-menopausal, part situational, part locational (farms can be isolating), part biological––for whatever reason, there it was. Chasing me for many years and then backing me into a corner that I could not effectively get out of. Not without help, at least. This is something I am open about and want to write more about.

Depression in women and menopause have always been somewhat taboo in our mother's generation and even in our own. There are many things other women won't tell you about midlife and this is one of them: sometimes your mood swings and reactions are worse than when you were a teenager. I found out through experience. Then there is the other side of it all, the side that several writers have said that is like "getting your true self back again," after the hormonal broth of the past several decades of a woman's fertile years.

My friends, I'm here to tell you that I'm back. I'm writing more (for publication and for blogs--including Rethink:Rural), I've got a few book proposals in development, and I feel like my 25-year old self again in terms of attitude, outlook, and personality. Everything seems possible again, even if I am 54 and my mirror might say otherwise.

It's been almost a decade since The Pantry-Its History and Modern Uses was published. It's more than time to pick up the pen and start again. [You can browse and read some of my previous published articles here.] After all, I'm about to become an empty-nester for the second time with our oldest son who is graduating from high school, and his brother half out the door himself with his many activities, driver's license, and plans for the future. Both of them want to farm in some capacity––maybe here, maybe near here––and I doubt they'll ever be too far from our orbit. But either way, Mama has her own groove back and needs something to do in the years ahead.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine