The cranberry bread is cooling beside the stove. I'm packing presents and the Wii and making certain everything is there as well as giving the house a final cleaning. We leave tomorrow morning for my parent's house which doesn't have internet access - so I will take this time to wish all my dear friends a most Merry and peaceful Christmas!
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Letting go. Breathe.
After the last post I felt very sad for a day, still mourning. But a day after that I enjoyed a movie with a friend and did some shopping and felt peaceful. It is so important to get to the root of pain and sadness and simply acknowledge it. To explore why the sadness is felt, to let myself really feel the pain, mourn the loss, then breathe it out. Otherwise I get caught up in the pain cycle - in pain but not knowing why, so that I just keep hurting myself over and over. But when I recognize the root, when I let myself feel the pain it is at first overwhelming, but the pain passes and there is a kind of peace in letting go. Letting go of holding on to the past. I will always miss my grandparents in some way. But now I can let that pain go, to see those Christmas pasts and love the memories of them without longing so terribly for them to come again.
I am beginning to understand the yogic and Buddhism wisdom of letting go. I could not move on with Christmas and my life, I could not enjoy the Christmas of now, because I was holding on so tightly to the past. When I was able to look inside, acknowledge the pain, I was able to let go of it. This week I feel energized and ready to enjoy what this Christmas brings. The future is not static; it is ever changing. Trying to freeze the present, to mold it into beloved past memories only freezes ourselves, because time ticks onward with alarming variety. We cannot move forward and enjoy the wondrous change going around us if we are so desperately trying to recreate past memories. Trying to hold onto people is even worse; it freezes both them and ourselves. I can't let you change and become a better person if I'm holding you to your past behaviors and forcing you back into patterns of behavior that you may have outgrown. People are as varied and changing as the future - the person who holds too tightly onto her friends ends up friendless or with friends who resent her. Letting go of a friend in the yogic sense means allowing that friend to grow and change and loving dispassionately what she becomes.
Letting go is a good thing for me to understand and practice as a new year approaches and I bemoan that it'll probably be just like the old. Yep, it will be if I can't let go of the old year, if I can't let the past stay there and look with an open heart to the swirling change that is the new one.
I am beginning to understand the yogic and Buddhism wisdom of letting go. I could not move on with Christmas and my life, I could not enjoy the Christmas of now, because I was holding on so tightly to the past. When I was able to look inside, acknowledge the pain, I was able to let go of it. This week I feel energized and ready to enjoy what this Christmas brings. The future is not static; it is ever changing. Trying to freeze the present, to mold it into beloved past memories only freezes ourselves, because time ticks onward with alarming variety. We cannot move forward and enjoy the wondrous change going around us if we are so desperately trying to recreate past memories. Trying to hold onto people is even worse; it freezes both them and ourselves. I can't let you change and become a better person if I'm holding you to your past behaviors and forcing you back into patterns of behavior that you may have outgrown. People are as varied and changing as the future - the person who holds too tightly onto her friends ends up friendless or with friends who resent her. Letting go of a friend in the yogic sense means allowing that friend to grow and change and loving dispassionately what she becomes.
Letting go is a good thing for me to understand and practice as a new year approaches and I bemoan that it'll probably be just like the old. Yep, it will be if I can't let go of the old year, if I can't let the past stay there and look with an open heart to the swirling change that is the new one.
Monday, December 14, 2009
What is missing in Christmas.
I've been wondering why I hate Christmas so much anymore when it used to be the best time. Why I feel so bah-humbugish, when I used to anticipate it for months to come, shopping for just the right gift all year. And I realized, as I lay down tonight after a disappointing weekend trying to sleep - I miss my grandparents terribly. Every holiday after early morning opening presents, we'd go up to my Grandma and Grandpa Niemoeller's house. Grandma would exclaim over us, then we'd hear Grandpa's bellow from the living room. He'd do his best to give me rug burn from his whiskers, then we'd sit down to a huge meal that Grandma cooked up, joined often by the littler cousins. They who would roughhouse with Grandpa, who'd joke around, loving everyone being there. Aunt Nancy would take pictures and stand by rather shyly, showing me new cat things she'd bought, telling me where she'd gone the past couple months. And, after dishes were done, Mom and Grandma would sit at the table with their coffee and talk and talk while the guys watched football. Then we'd go over to Grandma Grant's tiny house, and she would have tons of people there - all the cousins who were about our age, Uncles, Aunts, Great-Uncles, Great-Aunts and family friends. All crammed into a tiny kitchen and living room. Lots of bustle, everyone trying to catch up while Grandma passed around the present of the year - some particular ceramic she'd made and painted for everyone.
That was Christmas - more than presents, more than Christmas trees or cut-out cookies. Thanksgiving and Christmas were sure times that I would actually see my Grandparents as I grew older and I became more and more busy. It's been seven years since we lost Grandma Niemoeller, six since we lost Aunt Nancy, three since we lost Grandpa and just one since we lost Grandma Grant (though the Christmas gathering was lost when she moved to assisted living three years before). Their houses are other people's residences now. And though I try very hard to get into the gathering of my sister's family at my Mom's house - every year I miss my Grandparents terribly. As a non-Christian, Christmas holds no religious meaning for me; it is all about family gathering together. I miss Aunt Nancy's childlike delight, her simple ways of loving us. I miss Grandpa's laugh, his whiskers, his gratitude at having his family around us and his delight at seeing us. I miss Grandma Niemoeller's rough concern and love, the way she offered us her best through her cooking. I miss Grandma Grant's cheerful optimism, her simple wisdom. I miss them enough that when Christmas comes around there's just a huge hole, there's just too much missing. Maybe as the years come and go, the loss will be blunted. It's been three years since Grandpa's death - but only two Christmases. Maybe it'll get easier, more traditions will fill in -or fewer will be expected so Christmas will be less of a huge, silly deal - more of just a nice couple days off of work for Brian. But for now I go through the motions that our society seems to feel we need to go through, all the buying and partying and running around and feel empty inside.
That was Christmas - more than presents, more than Christmas trees or cut-out cookies. Thanksgiving and Christmas were sure times that I would actually see my Grandparents as I grew older and I became more and more busy. It's been seven years since we lost Grandma Niemoeller, six since we lost Aunt Nancy, three since we lost Grandpa and just one since we lost Grandma Grant (though the Christmas gathering was lost when she moved to assisted living three years before). Their houses are other people's residences now. And though I try very hard to get into the gathering of my sister's family at my Mom's house - every year I miss my Grandparents terribly. As a non-Christian, Christmas holds no religious meaning for me; it is all about family gathering together. I miss Aunt Nancy's childlike delight, her simple ways of loving us. I miss Grandpa's laugh, his whiskers, his gratitude at having his family around us and his delight at seeing us. I miss Grandma Niemoeller's rough concern and love, the way she offered us her best through her cooking. I miss Grandma Grant's cheerful optimism, her simple wisdom. I miss them enough that when Christmas comes around there's just a huge hole, there's just too much missing. Maybe as the years come and go, the loss will be blunted. It's been three years since Grandpa's death - but only two Christmases. Maybe it'll get easier, more traditions will fill in -or fewer will be expected so Christmas will be less of a huge, silly deal - more of just a nice couple days off of work for Brian. But for now I go through the motions that our society seems to feel we need to go through, all the buying and partying and running around and feel empty inside.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
A continuation.
Well, Nanowrimo is over. The novel is not done. Mr. Ips. has told me I need to keep going, not lose myself in the winter depression to where I don't write at all. Holidays depress me, as do the days getting even shorter. My health issues are ever present - now both knees are in pain for absolutely no reason at all, my hamstring isn't healing, and my gut is full of gas pain, even as the really nasty pains have died down. All that leads to the blahs, receding from society and friends and depression.
So, Mr. Ips. has asked me to at least write one page a day on Seeing Shadows. 250 words. I averaged 2174 words a day during Nano. I've decided to up his request, at least here in December, to 500 words a day - two pages. If I get into it, I can write more. If I just don't have anything at all in me - two pages is bluffable. And it could be I'll sit down feeling uninspired and while in my office at the laptop I'll feel inspired.
I've never been able to write in the winter because of the depression - maybe Mr. Ips. is right, that I've been setting my goals too high. I expect summer quantity out of my winter sludgy brain. Hopefully this will be the year I keep going and finish a novel in the winter.
So, to the top left I have my "write or die" meter which will show my progress - 15,500 words (62 pages) is 500 words a day.
So, Mr. Ips. has asked me to at least write one page a day on Seeing Shadows. 250 words. I averaged 2174 words a day during Nano. I've decided to up his request, at least here in December, to 500 words a day - two pages. If I get into it, I can write more. If I just don't have anything at all in me - two pages is bluffable. And it could be I'll sit down feeling uninspired and while in my office at the laptop I'll feel inspired.
I've never been able to write in the winter because of the depression - maybe Mr. Ips. is right, that I've been setting my goals too high. I expect summer quantity out of my winter sludgy brain. Hopefully this will be the year I keep going and finish a novel in the winter.
So, to the top left I have my "write or die" meter which will show my progress - 15,500 words (62 pages) is 500 words a day.
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