The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Moms

 Posted by
Feb 212012
 

Joie de Vivre Four of Swords

There are many things that no one tells you about being a parent. It’s not that they are keeping secrets or candy coating the experience. It is simply that there are some things you cannot tell in a way that will make them understood. Some things need to be lived to be understood. Parenting is very much one of those things. We have five children. After each one was born and I was home that first night with our new baby there was a moment when I woke up in the middle of the night to feed the child and felt a bone-deep exhaustion I hadn’t felt since the last child was an infant. I could go on and on describing the feeling but unless you had that same sort of night you won’t really know what I mean. Letting new parents figure this out on their own is not cruel. There really is no other way to know it and that right there pretty much sums up parenting.

One of the many things you find out the hard way is dealing with illness. Try to take care of small children with a stomach virus while you yourself are afflicted and you’ll know what I mean. Thankfully those kind of bugs only last a day or two. Having a few friends and neighbors whose children have disabilities or serious, chronic illnesses keeps the whole stomach virus thing in perspective. So, when Joyful January turned into Germy January I tried to roll with it. I kept the phrase “This too shall pass” in the back of my mind and powered on.

It started when the littlest one came down with what we thought was a cold. She just turned thirteen so it’s not like caring for a frightened toddler. I didn’t give it much thought until the third morning when she wasn’t any better. She was, in fact, worse. I took her to the doctor thinking it might have been strep. He thought it was mono. It wasn’t mono. It wasn’t a cold. It wasn’t the flu. After a whole battery of blood tests we have no idea what it was. All we know is that it was/is a virus and it’s contagious. I like our pediatrician quite a bit. One of the reasons is because when he doesn’t know what the problem is he actually owns that. He is one of the few doctors I ever heard say “I don’t know what this is.” It is actually much more satisfying to hear than some made up diagnosis that means the same thing like ‘non-specific dermatitis’ which is doctor-speak for “I don’t know what caused this rash.”

Joyful January became Germy January and deteriorated into Jammies January which was the point when we gave up pretending and spent our days in our jammies. This past weekend was the first time since Christmas that I actually felt like myself. It was the first time in a month that I had a decent night’s sleep. I haven’t sneezed in a few days. Nothing is runny or swollen or achey. I managed to function at about half power for the last month or so. I didn’t feel well but didn’t really feel sick most of the time. I was sharing this feeling with three teenage girls. (Somehow my husband managed not to catch this. I think he should be studied.) None of us were very productive. The youngest one seems to have had it the worst and missed two weeks of school. The rest of us just went about our days as if we were sleep deprived and on the edge of a cold which is pretty much how it felt. According to the doctor this bug is going around. It isn’t killing anyone, just annoying the hell out of them so it may never get a name.  If you catch it then you will know what I mean.

As for Joyful January, I still have all my notes but I’m not sure how I’m going to follow through. It’s obvious that I need a better blogging routine. I will be picking up where I left off with my card of the day on Facebook using the Joie de Vivre Tarot as I intended for the month of January.

Now, I’m going to go clean my house because I haven’t really done that for a month and a half and I just can’t stand it anymore.

 

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7th Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Slam

 Posted by
Feb 022012
 

February 2nd is Imbolc, the Pagan holy day associated with the goddess Brigid, patroness of poets among many others. She was later turned into St. Brigid, also the patroness of poets. In her honor on this day, for the last few years, many bloggers have posted poetry. I have actually lost track of the original blogger who started this but I like the idea so I’m going to keep doing it. I like to use Irish poets to honor an Irish Goddess/Saint.

The Two Trees

W. B. Yeats

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours of its fruit

Have dowered the stars with metry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed,

Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

There the Loves a circle go,

The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro

In those great ignorant leafy ways;

Remembering all that shaken hair

And how the winged sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

~

Gaze no more in the bitter glass

The demons, with their subtle guile.

Lift up before us when they pass,

Or only gaze a little while;

For there a fatal image grows

That the stormy night receives,

Roots half hidden under snows,

Broken boughs and blackened leaves.

For ill things turn to barrenness

In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness,

Made when God slept in times of old.

There, through the broken branches, go

The ravens of unresting thought;

Flying, crying, to and fro,

Cruel claw and hungry throat,

Or else they stand and sniff the wind,

And shake their ragged wings; alas!

Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

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Being the best candle

 Posted by
Jan 312012
 

(If you’ve come here from Donnaleigh’s blog, welcome and thanks for playing along with the Tarot Blog Hop. If you have no idea what I’m talking about follow the links at the beginning and end of this post and you’ll catch on.)

 

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.” ~ The Buddha

 

The very first tarot reading I did for someone other than myself, wiped me out. I was surprised actually by how very fatigued I felt after just forty minutes with the cards and a cooperative friend. It seemed out of proportion with the effort I put forth and I didn’t make the connection between the reading and the tiredness until it happened the next time I read for someone else.  It was confusing and discouraging. I was eighteen years old and there was a lot I didn’t know about the way energy works. To say I poured myself into those readings would be spot on. In my eagerness to explore tarot, to share and hone my reading skills, I made a fundamental mistake. I used my own personal energy for fuel.

When a candle is lit the wick catches the flame and starts to burn. At the base of the wick, caused by the heat of the flame, a pool of wax forms from the candle itself. This wax travels up the wick and is used as fuel for the flame. If you were to take a piece of wicking that was not part of a candle and lit it on its own it would have only itself to use as fuel and would burn out much quicker than its candled counterpart. In not understanding the energy I was tapping into and how to use it I was that naked wick. One reading would kick my butt. I knew I was doing something wrong. I didn’t know what it was.

As stupid as it seems to me now, I powered through and kept reading for people and sapping my energy each time. I wanted to read tarot. It called to me. I didn’t want to be exhausted all the time. After a dozen or so readings that each required a recovery nap, I put the cards aside. I didn’t give up. I gave in. It was obvious to me that I was doing something wrong but I didn’t even have the language to understand what it might be. I didn’t know where to look for the answer to the question I couldn’t frame.

“Better to light a candle than curse the damn darkness… Fiat Lux!” ~ Willow Rosenberg

The answer came to me months later from a friend who was exploring alternative spirituality. She and I were discussing the most recent book she was reading when she mentioned energy. Something about what she said and how she said it lit me up. I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation but I do remember we were on the train on Staten Island heading home from work. In the time it took to go from the ferry to our train station she had given me the solution to my problem. In that fifteen minutes she taught me about grounding and centering. What it was, how to do it and why.

A wick on it’s own doesn’t give much light for long. It’s just a piece of cotton string. Sometimes it burns out shortly after it’s lit. Without the pool of wax to draw from the flame can’t sustain itself. A candle burns best when the wick is properly secured and goes all the way to the bottom of the candle. The pool of wax, the fuel, is more readily and steadily available if the wick is in the center of the candle. Before the candle is lit the wick gets trimmed so the flame will be right-sized.

To read tarot without burning out you need to be like the candle: grounded and centered. Connect your energy to the energy of the earth beneath your feet and the source energy of all. You become more than just a naked piece of string you become the wick. You are a channel for that energy instead of the source of it. Centering brings you into balance within yourself. Just as the wick that is centered in the candle burns best you will use the energy more effectively if you are centered in yourself and in the moment. Clearing away distractions and negative energy is like trimming the wick. It keeps the flame/energy usage in proportion with the flow.

Now, before each reading I take a moment. I connect to the energy of the Earth and invite the energy of the universe in from above. I focus on the flow of this energy within myself in the moment and at the same time take myself out of the equation. I become a conduit for the energy and not the source of it. There is now an actual moment when I feel lit. I can see the light and feel the energy at the same time. I can light a thousand other candles from that light and it still burns as brightly.

(The next blog in the Tarot Blog Hop is Hillary’s. Enjoy! and Thank you for stopping by. I hope to see you again.)

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Bring in the Joy!

 Posted by
Jan 062012
 

How are you making out without the evening news? Better? Worse? Having news-withdrawal jitters?

I didn’t watch the news at all this week and I still know who won the Iowa Caucus. I don’t actually care who won, because I have election fatigue already. I think the process we use takes way too long and there is only so much I can take of politicians. It’s about thirty seconds worth and they don’t even have to be speaking to wear me out. My point? I actively avoid all the campaigning and the news of all the campaigning and I still know who won in Iowa. Thus, proving that avoiding the evening news won’t cause you to be ignorant and uninformed. Ta Da!

What you feed your mind is as important as what you feed your body. (I keep threatening to embroider that on a pillow.) It is true and it is necessary to understand it as true to step out of the stress and into joy. There has been a lot published and touted about brain chemistry and the effects of chemical imbalances in the brain. For everything that is known there is much that is not. The theory goes that chemicals in your brain affect your mood. That is the underlying belief behind prescriptions for depression and ADD. What is also known but not reported much is that your mood and your thoughts have an effect on your brain chemistry. There are also many who believe that your diet has a significant effect as well. If alcohol can alter your mood and brain chemistry why not any other food? I think a part of the attraction to high fat comfort foods is the chemical alteration that occurs.

But, I’m getting off my point. What you feed your mind is important. You’ve stopped inputting the craziness that is the evening news. That’s great. I made a playlist on youtube.com called Bring in the Joy. The videos included are ones I find particularly effective at getting me out of the present moment and into the space of connectedness and joy. There are only seven videos at the moment. I invite you to send me the links to videos that lift you out of yourself and for that few minutes it’s just you and the music. I want to add them to this playlist.

Enjoy!

A step toward Joy!

 Posted by
Jan 022012
 

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” ~ Mark Twain

One of the best things you can do for your peace of mind is to turn off the the television news programs. How is this a step toward Joy? Manufactured fear gets in the way of the flow of joy. The anxiety produced by watching ‘the news’ undermines your ability to experience joy. So, turn them off. All of them. Every blasted one. Don’t watch them.

They are not news; they are TV programs called news. Their purpose is to generate ratings which brings in revenue. The networks are for-profit businesses and that is what for-profit businesses do: generate revenue. Nothing wrong with making a profit. That isn’t my point. The primary concern of the news directors and programmers is ratings not how well they inform the public. They may be held accountable for factual accuracy but they garner higher ratings by airing sensational stories, hyping the drama, the fear and dragging it out with endless chatter. They tease you about what’s coming next and when you stick around to find out what it is you get more of the same fluff you heard earlier just repackaged and fed to you by a different, pretty, talking head. Television news programs are junk food for your mind. Turn it off for one week and see if you don’t feel better.

I’m not suggesting that you ignore current events. I’m telling you that you will have greater peace of mind and be more well informed if you seek out the information you want for yourself. If all you’ve done up until now is watch news on TV you aren’t up on current events anyway. Don’t believe me? Did you know there was a revolution in Iceland? If you live in the US then you probably don’t know that. Do you know why there was no straw poll in Texas when there usually is? You may not care what goes on in Iceland or Texas but it should be your decision to ignore those stories. Instead of informing you about citizens of Iceland peacefully overthrowing their government you were fed scary stuff, like anxiety producing nonsense based on one study about the possibility that your cell phone might kill you. Or perhaps it was an open-ended story about whether or not the basically harmless stuff that has always been in your drinking water is now suddenly dangerous… or not. Heaven forbid there is an impending storm. The catastrophic possibilities will dominate the programming.

Instead of letting some random news programmer decide what you feed your mind go out there and get it yourself. There are plenty of reliable sources of information on the internet. Where do you think the news programs get their stories? You’ve heard them cite Reuters and  The Associated Press. Check them out for yourself. There are other sources, too, from all over the world. You will be in control of the information you allow into your mind. That’s the most important part of this. You will get the story before it has been edited for drama and you can ignore the fearmongering nonsense that passes for news most nights. If political happenings are important to you I’m sure your favorite pundits have blogs or post columns several times a week. You can read them at your leisure and shut them down when it becomes too much.

That brings me to the second part of this: check the news for only about ten minutes at a time. You can do this more than once a day but don’t spend more than an hour a day on this. Even that is too much for me but if you’re a news junkie that may be cutting way down for you. Pour a cup of tea and read your top three news stories then leave it be and get on with your day. You don’t even have to do this every day to be up on current events. I’m not kidding. Most of what happens in the world has no direct bearing on your life. It may be important to know about but it changes nothing in how you live your daily life. Why give it space in your head and spend precious minutes of your day reading up on this? Check the world news once or twice a week. Check the national news two or three times a week. Spend ten minutes a day on local news. Check the weather and perhaps the sports scores if that’s your thing. Voila! You’re done. You’re informed without being manipulated or unneccesarily frightened. You have control over the input. You decide what you feed your mind. It makes a tremendous difference. It has for me.

25 things I am grateful for

 Posted by
Jan 012012
 

“In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.” ~ Brother David Steindl-Rast

1 ~ The snowstorm right after Christmas 2010 cancelled my daughter’s flight back to Georgia so I got to spend a few more days with her than I thought I would have.

2 ~ With all the snow we had at the beginning of 2011 I am grateful for our twelve year old snowthrower. It really earned its keep this year.

3 ~ I found the perfect fabric for my kitchen curtains on sale. Then I took it to Home Depot because they have this nifty computer that matches the colors you bring in with the perfect paint. I painted my kitchen and made the curtains in January, 2011 and it still thrills me every time I walk in there.

4 ~ Baby number three graduated from high school. That’s three down and two to go.

5 ~ My tarot business has grown to be more than a self-supporting hobby and I have some wonderful clients.

6 ~ I was able to go to Readers Studio a day early and spend part of that day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with one of my favorite artists. She invited me and Karen and it was a lot of fun!

7 ~ I spent the rest of that day with four amazing women (Karen doesn’t have a blog). We had a bunch of laughs, some dinner and Debbie gave us a highly entertaining tour of the area near Columbus Circle.

8 ~ I met another of my favorite artists and her fascinating husband when they stopped by Readers Studio for the afternoon. We hung out in the hotel bar for a few hours getting acquainted. Such fun, real people.

9 ~ I bought a morning glory to plant near my mailbox with the idea that it would climb the post and be lovely. There was so much rain alternating with hot sun that that one scrawny plant turned into this:

How cool is that? There is a mailbox and a planter under there somewhere.

10 ~ I worked the Great American Weekend with two good friends and even though half of the fair got rained out we had a wonderful time. It was actually quite nice to sit in our booth in the pouring rain and just talk.

11 ~ Hurricane Irene actually saved me money. We have a big weeping willow in our yard. There was a large limb that died this spring and was going to cost us several hundred dollars to remove. Before we had the money together Irene came through and knocked it off the rest of the tree.

12 ~ My husband successfully removed a few squirrels who had made a home in the roof of our enclosed porch before they caused too much damage.

13 ~ The stuff that the contractor used to repair the exterior of the enclosed porch is squirrel proof.

14 ~ The Gaian Tarot came out in a mass-produced version.

15 ~ My husband and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary and we still really dig each other. To paraphrase him, breaking us up now would be like trying to separate conjoined twins. Sweet sentiment in an odd, quirky kind of way. Sort of sums us up nicely.

16 ~ I’m grateful for Netflix. I know they raised their prices but they are still less expensive than going to the movies which is something I cannot do in my pajamas. I can, however, hang out with my husband, in our pajamas and watch all of the new Battlestar Galactica streaming from Netflix.

17 ~ Baby number four got into the technical school she’s been talking about since she was twelve and it is everything she hoped it would be.

18 ~ Baby number one came home for a week during the summer and it was nice to have all my girls together for a few days.

19 ~ We had the first ever psychic fair held in our town and it went pretty well. We’ll be doing that again.

20 ~ This was the first time in twenty-two years that I didn’t have to go trick-or-treating with my kids. Not only that but the older girls took care of answering the door for the neighbors’ kids and I was able to sort of take the evening off.

21 ~ I’m grateful to and for my youngest brother. He got my son a job and let my boy live with him rent-free for a few months so he could save up to rent a place of his own.

22 ~ I’m grateful for modern medicine. My sister-in-law was hospitalized for weeks with a resistant staph infection that nearly killed her a few months ago and now she is almost 100% recovered.

23 ~ I won the Steampunk Tarot. I still can’t believe it. Barbara Moore had two copies printed up at a local print shop. She kept one, raffled off the other and I won it.

24 ~ My husband and I have gotten into a meditation routine. We used to go to an Om meditation once a month. It wasn’t held over the summer and scheduling conflicts have kept us away too many times. For months now we have been Oming on our own every Sunday. I feel it when we miss a day.

25 ~ 2011 was not the most stressful year of my life. It wasn’t even close but it was troublesome. It showed me how much better I can handle things now than I did in the past. I’m very grateful for the experiences that tested me, pissed me off, scared me and that I’m still here and doing fine.

Dear 2011: Don’t let the door hit you.

 Posted by
Dec 302011
 

I don’t know how this year has been for you. The general consensus among my friends, family and clients is that 2011 cannot end soon enough.

I live in the Hudson Valley and we here are no strangers to snowstorms and blizzards but we usually only get one or two big ones a season. Starting after Christmas last year we were hit with at least half a dozen. We skipped right over Spring into a very hot, wet Summer which ended with Hurricane Irene followed a week later by Tropical Storm Lee. That one-two punch destroyed roads, bridges, powerlines, large portions of a few towns up here and many of the local farms. Somewhere in there we had a 5.8 earthquake that by our standards was unheard of but California would consider a minor annoyance. An F2 tornado touched down in our town destroying one house and dozens of big old trees in a one mile swath. Tornadoes like that almost never happen. The hot weather continued into October tricking the trees into forgetting it was Autumn so they still had all their leaves when we had eighteen inches of snow fall on them. All that afternoon and into the night we could hear boughs and limbs breaking and crashing to the ground. By Halloween most of the folks in town were a bit frazzled. There were even a few jokes about keeping an eye out for plagues of frogs and locusts. Folks are bracing themselves for what this Winter might bring.

It’s not just the weather that is rattling everyone. The economy hasn’t bounced back as hoped. There are many vacant shops in town and quite a few people are still out of work. It’s difficult not to get caught up in the low-grade anxiety that seems to be everywhere. Each person who has wished me a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday has added that they can’t wait for this year to be over. I completely understand.

I don’t do New Year’s Eve parties. It’s just not my thing. I spend New Year’s Eve cleaning my house, catching up on my laundry and generally making sure I don’t bring unfinished business from one year into the next. Another thing I do, that seems to be a common practice for many, is to take an inventory of the outgoing year. Some people do this in a very involved way but I’m partial to Chris Guillebeau‘s practice. He simply asks what worked and what didn’t.  Truthfully I don’t even write this down. It’s more of a mental exercise for me and I go through it for a few weeks leading up to New Year’s Eve.

While I was thinking about this and how best to get out from under the anxiety it occurred to me you may want to join in. January is usually a down month for people. Business is slow. The weather is harsh. The excitement of the holidays is gone and there is the inevitable crash that comes afterward. Instead of New Year’s resolutions I prefer to come up with ideas to explore in the coming year. There is much less pressure with this approach and much more joy. What better way to start this off than to make January be about joy.

This will be simple and we can do it together. Little things every day or so to shift our focus. Rethinking exercises to bring us back to joy and squash the anxiety. Are you in?

Great! On January 1st I will post the 25 things I am grateful for from 2011. I invite you to do the same either here in the comments, on my Facebook Page or on your own blog (please link back here so everyone knows what’s going on). In keeping with the theme of Joyful January  I will be using the Joie de Vivre Tarot as my deck of the month. Here’s to making it a very happy new year.

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