True love never dies.
Nancy Shuman
7 February 1946 ~ 30 August 2017
Life
Periwinkle Memories
Yesterday, our family made a trip into the city for some much needed shopping. As always, I made a list and hoped we’d get all we wanted and that the day would go well. I had concerns because while shopping is always fun for us when it is being planned, it quickly becomes tiring when we’ve been on our feet for too long and more so if we run into problems over the stuff we planned to get. Plus, the travelling to and from the city taking close to 4 hours both ways is enough to blunt at least some of the fun.
Still, I knew that it is often the choices we make and the way we react to life that actually decides the outcome of any endeavour. With the right choices, choosing roads that lead to life, no matter how much the path twists and bends, life will sort itself out in the end. And even if things don’t go as planned, we always have the option of choosing how we react to it – we could either seek to find silver linings and thus save the day or get snarky and irritable and make things worse.
Hence, in the serene quiet of the morning, I decided even before we piled into the car that I was going to keep my heart on my husband and kids and focus on enjoying my day with them whatever shopping potholes we hit along the way. Our second child was due to leave home for college in a few short months and with two of our children – our great joy~gifters – embarking on the next phase of their lives, I knew that an aching quiet would soon find its way into our hearts. No matter how important and necessary the shopping was, making sweet memories was by far the greater call.
And what a day it turned out to be. Quietly and gently, the angels went about tucking little blooms into our hours. We didn’t get quite a few of the things we really needed and everything was so costly. But we had cheerful and kind sales assistants who made the shopping pleasant. The roads we traveled along were mostly traffic free and we easily found good places to park our car wherever we stopped. While we experienced a brief moment of disappointment when one favourite restaurant was found to have shuttered, we went to another and enjoyed the most amazing lunch.
The last thing on our list before we ended the day with sunset Mass at church was a quick stop at a garden centre. I was looking to add some colour to my garden, but with my gardening success rate being about 20 per cent, it had to be plants which could take my mostly erratic and sometimes over-enthusiastic bouts of gardening.
I had daisies in mind but the angels had set aside something else for me. Carefully making my way down the aisles at the garden centre, I suddenly spied pots of happily-coloured periwinkles. I already had a wee purple~pink plant which I had sent to the cliff’s edge of life and then thankfully saved. Having forgiven me now, it was growing by our fence, getting stronger by the day. But now here was a new baby, a pot of the sweetest reddish pink blooms, smiling up at me beguilingly.
So, of course that pot came home with us, its blooms with their girlish blush brightening its wee spot under our bedroom window. Later, reading up on this latest addition to our family, sunshine and song spilled into my heart. I discovered that the periwinkle is also known to be a miracle plant due to medicinal extracts from the plant being used in the successful treatment of cancers, especially childhood cancers, and other illnesses. It’s always a joy to have colourful flowers to brighten the garden but if the plants yield cures for our deeper sufferings, the power of strength and hope are added to their colourful blessings.
I do hope this new periwinkle puts down strong roots into our garden so that I can always gaze at them and remember a day embroidered with little miracles, a day that went so well because we placed our plans in God’s hands and kept our eyes on what mattered the most: time with family. Paul Bowles wrote these lines in his book, The Sheltering Sky,
…Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your life like this, some afternoon that’s so deeply part of your being that you can’t ever consider your life without it, perhaps four or five time more, perhaps not even that? How many more times will you watch the full moon rises? Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless… ~
But it isn’t limitless. There is a time and a place and a manner in which the petals of our life will close back in and the passing over to the next life will begin. We could live one day today and in the next find life has changed unalterably, that it’s no longer possible to go back into time and retrieve what has been taken away, what we have consciously given up or even what we have let slip from us. A great many of us have known this grief, the grief that comes when the path shifts and bends sharply. There is no going back, only forwards…
But as I learned yet again on this gentle day of the softest sunshine, that in choosing to focus on what really yields true life, we open our hearts to the gift of miracles. No matter how hard the roads of life can become, along the right way, there will always be the sweetest periwinkles, the kind we can pick and tuck into our hearts and take with us, henceforth moving forwards and onwards with renewed hope and joy.
Lent 31 ~ When the Road Ends
Oh what remorse we shall feel at the end of our lives, when we look back upon the great number of instructions and examples afforded by God and the Saints for our perfection, and so carelessly received by us!
If this end were to come to you today, would you be pleased with the life you have led this year?
~ St Francis de Sales
Lent 25 ~ Slow the Horses
The latter days of summer are a good time to wash the heavy linens used in winter. A clothes line is quite handy for this. I have a line full of soft blankets now, that were hung in the early morning, when the day was new and the scent of the mimosa filled the air up. Hanging clothes out is a peaceful task – and you are liable to solve a problem or say a prayer while doing so. I have done both. ~ Michele Warren, The Rabbitpatch Diary
One of my faults is that I tend to rush through life. In the midst of doing something, in my mind, I am already chasing down the next thing. I seem incapable of quiet deliberation, focusing on one thing at a time. Maybe that’s one reason why I am often tired.
Today, Michele Warren’s quote and Linda Raha’s post, The Coming of Spring, hold a teaching for me.
Bring presence into everything
To quieten the unruly horses within me, I need to learn to restrain my inner presence to the present moment. To be in the moment and to be deliberate in what I am doing. It will not always be possible, I know. Thoughts are much like clouds, chugging and skitting from one port to another. But giving free rein to wild horses is to run many races in one day and that is never a good thing if it becomes a way of life. In a rush, we fail to notice the little wants and needs along the path of life. We will be too intent on covering the course to savour the little joys hidden along the way. Racing from one duty to the next, we risk training ourselves to always focus on the next thing, missing all that’s precious in the present.
Life is not always about the next thing. Often, it is about how we live the now.
A new dawn slowly begins to light the eastern skies in gold. A busy day is ahead. Already I feel the day’s tension champing at the bit, waiting to be released in myriad ways. Today, like many others, it’s not possible to pare down the list of things to be done nor to reschedule.
But maybe it isn’t about doing as little as I can in a day as much as it is about slowing my inner horses, bringing my whole presence into every little thing I need to get done today.
Maybe it’s to be like the sun, moving deliberately and surely across the skies, in careful measuredness, till his work is done at the close of day.
Lent 31 ~ In Winter, Choose Life
During the worst moment of the illness, I thought I could die and I was scared of leaving alone my wife and letting my son grow up without a father like me ~ Pierpaolo Sileri, Italian Deputy Minister of Health upon recovering from Covid-19.
As I heard this man’s words, I marvelled at him. In the cold and dark of his fear, he chose to care about his wife. He chose to care about his child.
His worst moment was the best of all. Because in his winter of fear, he chose Life.
Come Into The Peace of Wild Things
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~ Wendell Berry
A break from work beckons. So does a whole ton of work. I am worn out and stand at the edges of a burnout.
How long more, Lord? I ask. How long more?
I want to live again. To feel alive and free. To feel the hope that I believe in and know is there. I want to work, not quit. I want to love and care for my family, not leave. But the air that is for our living must be made new, the water that flows through the existence here be purified.
Hope cannot birth and bloom until the poison in the wellsprings is cleansed.
This cannot be rushed. And yet, today, I can no longer wait, for the fist of life as it is here is tightening its hold, choking out breath.
How long more, Lord? I ask. How long more?
He does not give me my answer, and yet answer me He does.
When despair grows… go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
Come into the peace of wild things, says my Lord to me.
writingonmyheart 