14 posts tagged “diary”

Some days, the act of breathing somehow seems important. I know that today I am aware of my breathe, consciously saying, in, out, breath calmly and smoothly.  It isn't as if I am hyper-ventilating, just that I am aware of it. Just how sometimes, I notice my heartbeat, as if the pulse was all that was important.

Lots going on, selling house, buying new place, juggling financing.

The usual

out

Got lots of ideas that seem to putter out when I start to write them, so have been doing other things. Lots of Sudoku, playing board and card games, and a desktop game I like called Civilization IV. Soon as the snow is gone and mud season is finished, I will be spending some time outside with paper and pen, find a calm place and write down what ever comes to mind.

I became a Great Aunt last month, I think I need to spend time with my little niece.

It isn't an excuse, just a fact. I have cabin fever. I have the overwhelming urge to get out of the house and stay out until hell warms up. I don't want to write as long as I can't get out of the house. The car is Kaput. I mean it, the oil tank finally gave way and the other vehicle is under mounds of ice and snow.

I Want Out!!

I don't want to look at a keyboard, I want a writing tablet. I don't want to be sitting in my chair as I scratch things out. I want to be in a nice, toasty warm room, filled with people and conversation. I want to see a human soul that is not connected to me in a familial way. I want to see the sun and feel warmth, rather than a cold breeze that wants in my jacket.

Every light on in the house, does not make up for the darkness in the rooms, I want real light. The kind that warms your face and makes your toes itch for the feel of water. I want to go swimming, and I want to camp out under the stars.

I want to have a barbecue without freezing my toes off.

I am tired of the frigid mood of winter and all that comes with it. Give me spring, please.

The sooner, the better.

Can you believe it? How did this happen? I was sick for a couple weeks,sorry I didn't get back sooner. I see I started a story and never finished it, will have to fix that.

I've had a busy month, what with cleaning house, being sick and being chauffeur, I've had very little brain time. The few times I've been on the computer, I wasn't online. Just a quick game or two of backgammon or word yahtzee. This week, the kids have off from school, many New England states have winter holidays in February. Mostly due to the fact that most of the snow storms usually hit this time of year. Over time, the schools and towns realized they could save a few dollars by closing a week in the winter.

Besides, all that snow is meant to be played with, it shouldn't just sit there and look pretty. It was meant for the creative minds of children. I moved to the east coast when I was twelve, I still remember the absolute feeling of awe when I went out into the snow for the first time. Granted, I was bundled up with hundreds of layers of clothes and jackets. I froze my ass off anyway.

It didn't matter though, the snow was a wonder to me. I think there was only an inch on the ground but I figured out how to pile it up and create balls. Only children would have the patience to move small balls of snow on the ground and slowly pack more snow into them until they grew to the appropriate size. My balls of snow were packed so hard, I had problems rolling or lifting them atop each other. Yet, somehow I did it. I used stones and sticks to create hands, face and even gave my snow dude legs. There it was, my first snow man.

The next year we had more snow. This is when I discovered I was one of only a handful of people in the world who actually enjoy shoveling snow. I made my first snow fortress with the piles I gathered from the streets and sidewalks. Even managed to create a number of tunnels for "team meetings and logistics" to fight the teams stuck with just a couple of snow laden bushes for shelter from our snow ball barrages.

We kicked ass.

Now a days, I can't shovel the snow into huge mounds anymore but my children don't seem to mind. They get enough snow from the snowplows, to make their forts and tunnels.

Today, the youngest is at the recreation center in town, skiing down slopes with friends, tie-dying some shirts and building snowball mounds of fun. The eldest just called to have me pick him up with some of his friends, they are going to play Guitar Hero and generally stay indoors (it's snowing! they should be outside.) as playing with snow is so very childish. They think they are so grown up but it hurts to see them putting aside something that should never be willingly ignored.

Come on boys, aren't you even the slightest bit interested in the snowing white goodness? Aren't your fingers itching to grab a handful of that magical white clay?

Just quickly checking in. The bug turned into a nasty virus (and it is going around the house,which means I am most likely going to get it again in a few weeks), feeling a bit better today but not by much. Trying to catch up on stuff at home. You know, the usual.

I'm a bit tired. Winter has not been very snowy, yet it has been cold. Too cold (zero to minus ten), as the heater just can't keep the house above sixty degrees fahrenheit. As a result, I've have come down with a bit of a cold. The low grade fever, fuzzy head foggy brain kind of ickiness that just makes you want to avoid light and staying under mounds of blankets.

The kids still have to get picked up though, and dinner needs to be made. So, I am conserving my energy for the important stuff and just taking care until the fever goes away. Hopefully, no more than a few days.

At least last night it finally snowed, which means it is warmer outside. The furnace finally had a chance to catch up and I don't need a sweater but damned if I am still not freezing my toes off. Gad, just figured out why it is so quiet today, the wind has stopped.

Off to na-na land with ibuprofen, hot tea and rambling disconnected dreams.

Just in for a few moments, doing the paperwork and running around to enroll my youngest back into regular school. We had an agreement, as long as he spent a few hours every day learning something, he could stay home. I would take him to different places like museums and he would not be pressured.

For the last two months I have been reminding him of this bargain as he watched tv and played games. Now, he still learned despite himself, I made sure of that but enough is enough. The straw that broke the camels back was a few days ago when husband said it was time to look for a job again.

I looked at Morgan and asked him if I could trust him to do his schooling at home on the days I would be working. He said no, I give the kid props for honesty. So, today I do the run around.

I still have ten minutes before I have to go out again, to take son to doctor for his physical. That gives me a few minutes to read a couple of blogs and then I am off again.

Maybe I'll do a quick game or two...

I am not exactly sure where this is going, but am certain that it will come up again. Who knows, maybe one day I will read all that I have written on the subject and finally understand what it is I am thinking.

Thoughts weave in and out, snippets that fade with each moment as others take their place. Religion and faith, politics and economics, culture and language, all seem to intertwine and fight one another. For all our attempts to interact and relate to one another, we seem to find ways to misunderstand or even refuse to understand one another. I don't know if this is the human condition because I see just as often the ability of our race to bridge the same obstacles to understand and grow.

To me, faith is more important to us than our religions, yet it is religion that tends to become factions that split us apart. The fact that we are imperfect does not seem to matter, nor the fact that each person "translates" various dogmas individually. The rituals may help to tie the religious beliefs of communities more tightly together, there is certainly a comfort to be found when in the midst of many. The feeling of isolation is not as strong but a dependence on that feeling could create a false sense of unity. Religion is a man-made structure of politics and community. This is not necessarily a bad or good thing but it should not be confused with faith.

Faith does not need a religion, as much as some believe it to be a false belief, the fact is that belief can not exist without faith. Because we believe that there is more of the unknown than the known in the world, we have a faith in that uncertainty. We may be able to prove it to some extent, with science, but we never sit back on our laurels and say "we know everything"; for every new thing we learn, we discover more areas of what is unknown.

In some respects, curiosity is the most important aspect of faith. We ask questions, hypothesis and wonder about things; our faith is what gives of the impetus to investigate the questions, "I may not find the answers but I know that someday, someone will". When medicine researches for cures, there is an expectation, for every failure they learn more about the problem and make it more likely to find the correct answer. There is an implicit faith in this act.

Over the millennium, politics have changed. Political structures and designs, no matter how rigid or flexible become stagnant. Civilizations come and go with the eons but the skeletons of these times remain. I am certain that this century we will find many changes in governments as well as political associations and interactions, we are experiencing some of that now with the EU, and the wars being declared, in progress or finished. All of us find some form of structure important, it is the amount of structure and law that tends to create division. Yet our faith continually moves us to try to find a way that will work, to find the common ground as well as the division and see if we can live within these structures.

Faith tends to create flexibility, maybe it is from prehistoric days when our ancestors tried to eck out a living along the glacial fringes. They would have needed a lot of faith as well as optimism to forge their way into the future, using government, specialization and religion to give hope to the community and keeping the will for survival strong.

Heirs to such people, we have vast communities with unique cultures and languages. Our differences are the history of our race, our mistakes, achievements and milestones.

Each time we look with our eyes, our hearts and minds, we see something different. I know that I continually change my mind as over time, some things become more clear while others become more vague. Just as often I think I finally understand something, I am proved wrong. For all our genius of invention, there is always someone else who comes along to improve upon it. Yet the things we think of most often are usually put aside into a private corner or closet. To share such inner thoughts seems to many to be something of an invasion of privacy, a violation of the inner self.

I want things for my children, most especially to not experience many of the things I did. I want them to be open and honest, to live life with open arms and joyous smiles. To keep their innocence as long as possible but to also show them the world in a way that helps them to understand that not all things can be understood. That they must have faith in themselves and others, to trust that the world can become a better place.

Trust, yet another cornerstone to faith. Without it, we could not even begin to try to understand each other. The strength of trust is what makes us extend our hands to strangers. Bare and vulnerable, our hands when given in greeting can be damaged quite easily by an aggressive act. Still, we show our hands are empty and clasp them with strangers to show our trust. Children in many cultures may have been taught that this is a politeness of etiquette but if you do not like or trust someone, you will rarely offer your hand.

Could language have crossed the bridge of people if there was not some form of trust? I think not. Humanities need to socialize created the need to trust, to build a language so that two people could speak, to share that with their children and so on. To interact as a community, using the same set of tools to make it possible to work together required a level of trust in one another. If there is no faith, their can be no trust, no communication, no understanding, no acceptance.

I don't think that all of us need to speak the same language, have the same religions, politics or even the same culture to be able to exist peacefully together. Our species is an odd beast, we are social creatures who are separate and alone. We are both independent and dependent creatures, giving, taking and sharing our emotions, thoughts, needs and wants. We develop friendships, families, neighbors and other relationships yet at the same time, cleave to our privacy. We place our trust, faith and hopes in front of us while we strive to live our lives so that at the end of our lives we can say, we lived well.

I am an expert of nothing, save that of what I have experienced and learned. I am not sure of the exact words but there is a saying that goes something like this, "We are nothing more than the total sum of our parts". At the end of the day, if I lay down to sleep this evening and never wake, I could say that there are things I still wished to do and accomplish and things I wanted to see but that at this moment, I have lived my life with all that was in me.

I have faith that it will be this way tomorrow and all the days that follow.

My youngest and I just got home from the library. He is presently telling me about the book he bought called, "The Wand Maker's Guidebook".

Wandmaker Guidebook

Ed Masessa

"The book comes with feathers". He tells me, "the yellow feather aids in confidence and focus. The blue feathers help with inner peace. The red aid you in mental strength and give good fortune." The book has a sample of each feather.

Oh, he has more to say as he notices some vials also included in the book. "The crystals are power crystals." ok, that is interesting. "The sand is yellow, black and brown, ...And it (the book) talks about some of the things that are in different types of sand. ...And that is it."

He takes the book away and sits down in front of the tv, to check out the wand and browse the pages of the book.

This series of books is great. My son loves to read the mythology and mysteries of past times. I think, he may believe that magic is real. He asked me if I thought it was, to which I replied, "I believe that everyone believes in some form of magic, even if it is only in themselves." The last thing I want to do is stifle his imagination, he seemed happy with my answer. I didn't get one of those looks that says, "Mom, that was lame."

Anyway, here I sit, thinking about my answer to his question and why I think it was lame. Why do I think it was evasive? I do believe in magic but not necessarily in the magic of potions, it is like faith, hope and miracles all wrapped up in acceptance but not fact. Trying to explain what I mean or try to say what I think, produces a mishmash of nonsense. At least, I think it is.

Miracles happen everyday, I believe that. Things no one can explain, things we may never be able to categorize with reason happen all the time. Serendipity, coincidence,  happenstance, being in the right place at the right time, karma, all seem to fall into the real of magic.

Sigh, some things I just can't put into words...