Time with Topaz

Today, on page 9 of “Listening Spirituality”, I read the following: “to give over one’s own agenda and be open to the promptings of that mysterious being whose ways are not our ways and whose time is utterly different.”

Sacrilege alert: Patricia Loring is, of course, writing of God, but my thoughts went immediately to our cat, Topaz. She is, indeed, a mysterious being whose ways are not my ways and whose time is utterly different from mine. So, she is a good practice partner for giving oneself over to another’s agenda.

Topaz lives on and about our porches. She has her own list of things to be done and is often active when I sleep. Equally, she’s frequently apparently indifferent when I’m going about my daily business, content to let me get on with it. Still, when I go out to weed the front borders of our garden, she nearly always comes to greet me, to smell the pungent marigolds and receive her rightful ear-rub, marking me as her own.

I don’t go out just to sit with her often enough. Very occasionally, it’s too chilly, more likely, it’s too hot or too buggy. Mostly, it’s my inner condition of busyness that stops me from intentionally spending time with her.

When I do go out to be with her, she may be nowhere in sight. If I sit quietly for a while, I’ll hear a maowl, she’ll appear and leap her weight effortlessly onto my lap. It is always a deep pleasure to sit with her warmth, her fur, her purr; for both of us. When we part, I always know what’s next.

The Outdoor Living Section

Seventh Day, we moved our glass topped table and attendant four chairs from the east facing dining room to the south-west facing porch. Much of my time during the school year is spent inside brick walls with only a slit of window upstairs and essentially none downstairs. I noticed I was dreading (the word is not too strong) grading this weekend, not because of the work, but because of being indoors again. Thus, my sainted husband assisted with the removal of our dining room table and I was cheerfully set up under the Hook Norton Brewery picture with papers spread all over enjoying the insights and inspirations of my childcare management students.

I spend a lot of time teaching the importance of sensory experience, yet so little time living it. Indoors is a head game, a world of electronic breath. Outside, even with temperature and humidity both above 80 as a storm builds, everything is open and dynamic. Sweat happens and cools. Children run, rain-soaked, up the street calling for a lost dog. Everything smells wonderful just after the rain. Everything smells.

So this is the beginning of the outdoor living section of this life, for real.

Closer to Home

Today, my daughter is in the same time zone as me, instead of the usual three hours west.  Most of my life, over forty years now, like many others on the planet, I’ve lived with loved ones across an ocean or a continent or both, measuring distance as much by time as by miles.  There’s all my folks at Greenwich Mean Time, the New Englanders, like me, on Eastern Standard Time, my Mountain Time son and daughter-in-law, and, most days, my daughter on Pacific Time.  It’s a great spread out village so much wider across than the straggling single mile of fields, farms, cottages, and semi-detached homes of my childhood.

It makes a difference to have your ten minutes to seven be the same as your kin’s ten minutes to seven.  When the United States military put out the urban planning contract that brought my daughter to the eastern seaboard, it’s pretty unlikely they thought that one of the kinder consequences would be facilitating a conversation between a mum who lives in Florida and a daughter who lives in Oregon.  So lovely to talk before my day has drained out, to be able to have a brief ordinary weeknight chat.

Right now, it’s 8:19 p.m. here and 4:19 a.m. in Afghanistan.  If my daughter were there, an engineer, say, instead of an architect, I’d have to allow an eight and a half hour difference; not so easy.  I understand those who are occupying Wall Street and the space across from our local Chamber of Commerce and so forth, but I’m more troubled that we are still occupying other people’s countries.  So, for me, the sooner the occupants of Pennsylvania Avenue see their way clear to bring our sons and daughters home to their native time zones the better for all concerned.

Taking a Breather

Today is a “teacher non-workday.”  Of course, that’s a joke; there’s a long list of tasks awaiting a teacher in this wonderful interstice, which is neither a work day, nor a weekend day, nor even a holiday.  It is a very welcome breather.  I plan to go to the wellness expo at our workplace to get some free medical check ups and a free flu shot in hopes that will contribute to being able to work through the winter.  In the afternoon, I plan to take Muffin for her first visit to our kind vet and check a couple of diet and bug protection questions for her.  With a couple of family health care issues taken care of, I can clean house, run more errands, get the car its badly needed service, accomplish all sorts of worthy and useful things that have been on hold during the time since school reopened and while we have been being with Beverly and the family for the past several weekends.

It feels strange not to be dashing about to drive east as soon as it is not a work day.  I wonder if and when we will take the journey through Bithlo and Christmas and across the marshes again.  Will we ever ride the pontoon boats that we always said we must ride one day, when it’s not buggy?  Will we have the dark drive home with music playing and all the reflections of being together spinning in our heads or quiet chats about life that rarely happen in the daily back and forth of going in different directions?

More than anything else, I feel a slowing of pace having been beside Beverly’s side.  What, when all is said and done, is the rush?  Where is the fire?  So what, if… But I do not want to lose passion.  How do we keep and carry a flame within, while breathing deeply and gratefully with each and every step?  If I can bring that to work and bring it home again, I might be a little closer to where I want to be.

Temps Perdu

Today, the truth was revealed.  Our old carpet was taken up and taken off in a red pick up truck; goodbye, 1989.  Under the deep aqua pile, now mostly a stained and weary grey, under the foam underlay, there extended the original 1930 pine floors, with cavalier paint and Spackle splash all over, remarkably little termite damage, a shameful amount of cat harm along the perimeters, an odd patch of ugly repair at the front door and a strange pale patch in the middle of the archway between living room and dining room.  But, considering all the mistakes, neglect, and the weight of time, there is something very salvageable here.

We have been walking on a fragment of forest.

So many are worried about repaying our debt, but repaying our debt is an illusion.  The best we can hope for is a profound acknowledgement of the cost of our presence here, an open request for forgiveness, then daily truth and reconciliation.

Sorting and Clearing

Today, Nancy Bauer and I tended the garden together.  We worked on weeding the new corner beds, which Nancy planted earlier this summer, she pulled vines off the house and we clipped and trimmed toward each other to find the camellia at the corner of the porch.  Time had turned it into a sleeping beauty, almost overrun by vines, oak, lantana, and other over-eager volunteers.  Nancy gave us more freebies, too, to enrich the barren gap in front of the side porch; with work and water we’ll have purple, red, and white blooms, where now we have scrabble and crabgrass.  Her parting gift was a free bag of mushroom compost.  She is our garden’s guardian spirit.  We started at 8:00 a.m. and by 10:00 a.m., with the temperature moving past 90 degrees plus humidity, I was definitely done, though Nancy was good to go for the rest of the day, proving herself strong in much more than spirit!

Still, I was not done with sorting and clearing, as I went on to the Meeting House to spend some time in my role as Meeting Librarian going through old boxes of books from the Meeting Library; rather a “busman’s holiday” given my main occupation at home for the past nine days.  Last year, at about this time, I was going up and down a mountain in Colorado.  This year’s mountain is one of books, papers, photographs, and other memorabilia as I prepare our living room and dining room for removing our carpet of twenty-two years and refinishing the wood floor underneath it.  This floor turns out to be heart of pine.

It is hard work and good work to weed through the accumulations of two decades.  Looking back at pictures from when we first moved to this house, I see how much space we had inside and out.  Leagues of new aqua carpet stretch between our few bits of furniture.  Neat borders of well-trimmed azaleas define our territory.

Things filled in: layers of gold and dust, a warmly lit moment before Rachel left for a prom, dog hair, hand-carved treasure from Dan, cat hair, file folders of hurricane records, endless pictures of ourselves in love with ourselves, sheet music for lost religion, one tiny dessicated lizard, murder mysteries that kept me awake too late, theological tomes that put me to sleep, stuff that was once so new and necessary.  Now, I could keep just a few bright minutes and let so much go, but I keep a little more than needed still, just in case.

 

What I Like About Rain.

Today, a Great Blue Heron was hunched high in the cypress trees overlooking Park Lake as I walked to Meeting.  The lake, the heron, the air, and the rain, all were shades of gray-blue, the color of the quietness of this First Day morning.

Thanks to Vickie, we restarted Friendly Bible Study; it had been laid down before I started coming to OMM.  It was very good to listen quietly to each person’s responses to the queries regarding the passage.  We read and responded to Isaiah 58: 1-11; I had the New King James. I found myself convicted yet again by the words, “the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness” – how hard it is not to point and tut.  So I can begin by not wasting any more time pointing and tutting at myself.

Rain washes away our dustiness.  We feel it, see it, hear it, smell it, stick out our tongues and taste it.  It’s all encompassing.  A listening walk in rain is a way to be home.

Swept Away

Today, I swept the sawdust from Jim and Gary’s work off the front porch.  This is, of course, a joke.  If this house makes it another twenty years to its centennial, there will still be sawdust from now sedimented into the complex of crevices in the porch boards, just as there’s certainly some detritus from 1930 dwelling among the more intended molecules here today.  Sweeping is good.  On a morning in the low 80s in Florida, with humidity in the 60s, you work up a healthy glow.  You sweep away your worries, feel yourself in action.  There’s a nice zen peacefulness to it and it is one of the most classically futile of all our human activities; the dust is deployed, then settles again after a brief uplifting and floating around.  It’s an ancient thing to do.  When did a habitation or work space first get swept?  It means you have a place to sweep, whether that signifies a livelihood, a shelter, or both.  The brush, brush, brush and the small pain between the shoulder blades can give a brief romantic illusion of solidarity with the poor, with centuries of women’s work, work of lowly status, the janitor, the untouchable, the outcast of the outcasts, sweeping things no one else wants to sweep.  As recently as November 2008, sweepers in Gujarat requested permission for mass suicide to draw attention to their desperate lives, pay of 60 cents an hour and miserable conditions; in truth, a long way from a sunny porch in Florida.  You can have too much of a good thing.

Friday Night Lights

Today, Gary and Jim completed the current batch of work on the house and we appreciated how they take care of details without needing direction.  In addition to the flooring, we now have freshly painted porch steps and back porch, much needed wall repairs in both bathrooms, wonderful carpentered pet gates with curved tops, and new moldings all around the floors.  It gives the house a hopeful feel.

We both had this Friday off work, Ray for recovery time for his oral surgery, while I had statewide professional day and actually spent some of it reading something professional, Ellen Galinsky’s excellent new “Mind in the Making”.  Also, went in to work for a brief spell for the Wellness Fair, got my first ever flu shot and some numbers done, mostly pretty good, including a very nice BMI, but more muscle needed!  So with that in mind, after a happy day working together on household budget, having a sunny lunch outside at Christo’s in College Park, and shopping for a new vacuum cleaner and kitchen rugs, we set forth for our evening constitutional.  This took us past Lake Highland just as everyone was warming up for the Homecoming game.  It was such a clear, perfect evening and such good energy that we went home, changed to suitably Highlandish colors, got $5 each and went back for the game.  We had a great time and enjoyed the splendid new bleachers where we lucked into luxury seats.  I’d forgotten the “all things bright and beautiful” quality of the players under those lights.  The Mount Dora Hurricanes had a terrific quarter back and sturdy defense with bus loads of fans, band, and cheerleaders to support them.  They were matched by canny coaching from Coach Borky and indefatigable teamwork from Lake Highland who made the winning touchdown for 17 to 14 a few minutes out and then held the lead to the end.  We were both totally involved with this game, thirteen years after Dan last played there; fun, inexpensive, outdoor, local entertainment, complete with a heron fly over and a walk home under the stars.

Make Your Dwellings into Places of Worship

Today, we sat down to Meeting at 10:00 a.m. on 10/10/10.  The vocal ministry centered on change and choice and at least one new voice was heard.  At Meeting for Business, we had 25 persons present aged 7 to 80 plus, practically a revolution as Business meeting is usually six to ten faithful souls.  We had a lively group continue to lunch, too, and much encouragement for the health of the Meeting.

Yesterday, I cleaned the window end of the kitchen, now that Gary and Jim have our new floor tiles in place.  I set up the kitchen table beside the window, ate lunch there, and enjoyed an angle on the house I have never experienced before although I have lived here for 21 years.  It’s another sunny corner, close to the green of outdoors and a fresh perspective.  This afternoon, we went to see Beverly and spent some happy hours looking through a box of photos from the past few decades, seeing the children grow and the house fill and alter with time.  It’s a very accommodating space no matter how we arrange our bits and pieces.  Desks and chairs and tables come and go as needs change.  The house admits light and harbors our communion in all circumstances.