Night before last, an image came into my mind of daffodils.  It came to me while Paul was praying with and for me for peace.  I was going in for a medical test and was afraid.  The image was clear and strong.  I was given a spiritual bouquet of daffodils.  The anxiety I had prior to the prayer and the bouquet was near to overwhelming and after… released.

I found myself curious about what daffodils mean, and did a little research.  The first definition I found resonated with me.

Daffodils symbolize rebirth and new beginnings.  Lore connecting the daffodil to not only a sign of winter’s end but a lucky emblem of future prosperity.  It is the March birth flower (*interestingly, March is my birth month).

This means as much to me about my life and where it is headed as it does about my concerns and challenges with my health.  They are tied together, inseparable. Regardless of the outcome of the tests, this symbolism was and is a perfect, loving and supportive message to me.

I also searching on the spiritual meaning of daffodils and found:

Daffodils have meanings of faith, honesty, truth, forgiveness, and forthrightness.  They are ever vigilant in returning each spring, and with their return we are reminded that their beauty is capable of following on the shirttails of even the harshest winters (or tribulations).

- and -

The daffodil is symbolic of the power of inner beauty and the clarity of thought.  It reminds us that clarity of thought makes our whole world change and it makes many decisions easier of they are not over analyzed but instead clarified and soundly resolved.

“Their beauty capable of following on the shirttails of even the harshest winters (or tribulations)…” Much of this season of life that I’ve been living in has felt, truthfully, ugly to me.  And at my darker moments, I’ve despaired of either my life or of me ever being beautiful again.  This definition interprets like a promise… and promise rooted and birthed in faith, honesty, truth, forgiveness and forthrightness.

“…clarity of though makes our whole world change…”  And in the darker moments, what I have lacked is clarity (and honesty) of thought.  So, again for me, this is yet another hope filled horizon in the symbolism.

Last, but not least, I found this beautiful William Wordsworth poem that is so worth sharing with you.  I hope you enjoy it.

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or “Daffodils”

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Daffodils have never been my favorite flower, and I don’t see them being my favorite after this either.  And yet, they do now hold a special place and even more importantly, a loving and embracing message for me. I’m hoping that something in this message to me will be a valuable, sustaining and a loving and embracing message for you too.

After my “great declaration of 2009 that I must write”, I haven’t done much of it, have I? At least, not here. I have been writing in my journal and that’s been good. I also decided last week to take part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  This might be a little insane, but it feels like the right and good kind of insane.  If all of you, my sweet and dear readers, haven’t abandoned hope of updates on this site… I hope you start checking back in.  Your thoughts and comments are always so wonderful and welcome.

Weekend before last, Paul, Amira, Mom, Dad & I went to Whidbey Island.  We stayed at Fort Casey Inn. I have a lot of pictures from that weekend to share with you.

These are from the rocky and driftwood filled beach at Fort Casey.

We had the most perfect weather (well, except for not enough wind for kite-flying, which caused Paul a little frustration).

The beach was our next to last stop of the weekend.

Paul & I couldn’t remember when we had a weekend like this.  It was spiritually awakening, renewing, and energizing.  The beauty was nearly more than I could hold.

Amira spoke of never going home.

The weekend was filled with beautiful, sweet, peaceful, happy, and joyful moments.  One lapping on top of the other.

This morning, as Paul was leaving for work, I told him how wonderful it was that our family name has only become more appropriate and meaningful.  With each day, we have become more immersed in today, in now, in this and every moment.  We are so glad we are the Moments.

My friend Tabby and her husband Clyde came into town on Sunday for a short visit.  It was so good to see Tabby - it has been nearly 10 years.  MUCH, much too long!

Yesterday, we spent some time together leisurely walking through Port Gamble.

It was a perfect day with blue skies, light breezes and warm sunshine.

Tabby and I walked around with our camera snapping photos.  Port Gamble was incredibly photogenic.  With every click, she showed off for us.

Seems like a lifetime ago… but at the beginning of this month, Paul, Amira & I went to the zoo with my Dad and Uncle Preston.  We had a really great day.  I’m only posting these photos now because I’ve been without Photoshop for a while now… and I just got it re-installed!  Yay!  More photos coming soon!

Here are a few highlights of our day:

Elephants are amazing, aren’t they? They are other-planetary, other-worldly, other-other, to me.  I look at them and see a creature that lives in a place I’ll never see or understand.  It’s hard to explain. In seeing them, I feel like I can see a reflection or a shimmer of light from the world they live in and experience, but I can’t actually know it.  Just beautiful.

Speaking of other-worlds, the sea otter. They transport me to a place of happiness and play.

The penguins. What a brilliant exhibit that lets the kids and the penguins interact like this!

Amira with two of her favorite men in the world - Uncle Preston and Papa!  She’s got good taste! 

This lovely restored carousel at the zoo is an irresistible magnet for Amira. Her ever-awesome Uncle Preston treated her to a ride.  You can see, it was a hit!

The ride home was no less perfect!

This is for Tanya - who if I remember right, enjoys lilacs.

The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine.

– Kate DiCamillo

The last two weeks have been hard. I’ve been depressed in a way that I can’t remember being since college. I can’t blame it on any one thing. It has been, with no particular rhyme or reason, Paul’s crazy long and exhausting (read: worry-making) work hours, our financial stresses, concern for providing the Amira everything she needs and deserves, grieving Freeni’s death, my health, the loss of my faith as I knew it and so on.  When I’m down, I’m a crappy friend.  I hide out and I don’t show up for even the basics of friendship and connection. And of course, knowing that I’m doing that makes me feel worse.

Mood cycles are incredibly self-referential, aren’t they?  Loop upon mood loops circling on themselves.  Happy tends to beget more happiness and feeling depressed tends to delve you further into more and deeper depression.  The trick is finding what works to cut the circuit ways on that particular path.  Hopping onto a new path can feel no less daunting than jumping off a cliff with no chute or safety net below.  Reality kicked in though when I realized I had already jumped off a cliff.  Spiraling down into depression is no less of a cliff dive than jumping off another cliff toward peace and happiness.  It’s a no win situation if you are avoiding a free fall.  But it’s a win-win, depending on how you choose to look at it.  Both jumps are free falls. Only one, though, allows for that adventurous joy-filled experience of the moment.  (Don’t know if that makes sense to you, it does to me.)  Anyway…

I don’t write when I’m on the spiraling downward loop-de-loop. And so the good news for me is that I am writing about this. It shows me that I’ve jumped onto the new path.  Hip-hip-hoorays all around. 

The sunshine is starting to break out here.  The trees are reflecting in the shimmering pond while the baby ducks practice their motorboating skills.  The swallows are darting and I can see the dogs wrestling and sprinting on the far side of the pond.  The red-winged blackbirds are balancing on the cattails and Amira sings while playing on the floor behind me.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-ee cummings

For the first time in 13+ years, our home lacks for a feline presence. Two weeks ago, Sabu’s body finally gave way even though our sweet boy’s spirit never did. He was a smart, happy, vibrant spirit from the day we met him until the day he died. I haven’t written about his death until now because I couldn’t find the words. I want to tell you all about him - his soft silky fur, his soothing rumble when he purred, his warning system when you annoyed him, his incredibly smart and empathetic personality and everything else that made him so dear to us. But what I need to write about right now is his death.

On the day Freeni died, I had just put Amira down for her nap. I was tired too - so I decided that I would have Freeni nap with me on the couch. Freeni’s hind legs hadn’t worked for a little while, so I would pick him up and bring him out onto the deck with me to soak up the warm sunshine. Other times, I would hold him while we napped together. Sometimes he enjoyed laying on the floor in the living room, just to be more a part of the day-to-day life. Most of the time though, unless he was being held, he preferred the safety, quiet and solitude of the large closet we outfitted especially for him. When he lost his sight, large rooms, the noises of the dogs and Amira would make him nervous.

The night before he died, something subtly shifted in his condition and Paul & I could tell that it was time. Saddened but accepting, we agreed to make plans to take him into the vet over the weekend. The next day, when I picked him up, I could tell he was agitated. Something was bothering him… not so much pain as a sense of overall disorientation. I scooped him up and held him close as I walked to the couch. His muscles were stiff and he pushed as though he wanted to get away. I figured he was afraid. I curled up on the couch in such a way to give him the greatest sensation of safety and comfort. I pet him and spoke to him softly, promising him that he was in a safe place, that he was okay and that I loved him. After about fifteen minutes of this, he relaxed into my arms. He purred quietly and leaned his head into my hand as I pet him. He moved his body so that he could tuck his head into the nook of my neck. Happy he was feeling settled and at peace, I fell asleep with his warm body against me, his purr vibrating softly and his head tucked under mine.

I woke up an hour later and Freeni was snoring lightly. I pet him a few times and the snoring stopped. I lay there for about a half hour just being with him. Then Amira woke up from her nap. I moved slowly and gently to minimize any concern or fear Freeni might feel from moving. When he didn’t respond, I rightly suspected that he was close to dying. Looking back, I believe Freeni had slipped into a pre-death coma.

I didn’t want to put him down, so I didn’t. Ahmis came home and when she came up to visit… I whispered to her that Freeni was dying. She stayed with me.

With Ahmis by my side, Freeni died in my arms around 4:30pm.

There’s no over sentimentalizing death when you are there when it happens. It’s not graceful. Nothing about it feels right. Even so, Freeni’s death was as right as it could have been.  What makes me happy in the midst of my sadness and tears is to think of him whole and playing in the sunshine. His spirit was too big to be housed in a broken body. I’m so grateful he fell into his first sleep curled up with me. I’m thankful that he also fell into his final sleep with me. I miss him so much.

I have a few more pictures from this evening to share soon.  We spent the evening eating our dinner picnic style, swaying on swings, climbing ropes, putting our toes into warm sand and cold, cold water.

If you hear, ‘Look at you. You quit! You’ll never get this. Look how long you’ve been trying to be aware and you’re still a failure at it,” realize this is conditioned mind trying to control you - and recommit. If you play close attention, you are going to see how a process has been keeping you prisoner. You’re going to learn that when you’re present in the moment you don’t need to fear yourself, anyone or anything. A huge part of doing this work is getting to the point where it all falls apart.

We don’t need to get through the good times! We need to learn what to do when things don’t go well, when the voices get the better of us, when we feel like a failure and want to give up. What I hear over and over is that people start something they want to do, do whatever it is, feel great, stop (for reasons they rarely understand) and get the stuffin’ beat out of them by their conditioned voices for being a lose and a failure. It’s a cycle…

At a certain point we must without self-hatred, stand at the crossroads, hear the little voice that says “You can go in a new direction,” heed that voice and make a choice to end suffering.

Cheri Huber, Making a Change for Good

I need to write yet I rarely do.  Whether journaling my day or expounding on where my thoughts and heart travel, I fill my life with other tasks and priorities.

When I sat down to write this, I was about to go down a well-trodden lane in my life.  I wondered why I don’t just don’t write and was ready to reprimand myself both mentally and here on my blog.  Instead, before that could happen, this floated clearly into my mind and spoke not only out loud, but loud:  “You don’t want to let the cat out of the bag!“  Did I mention it was loud?

What cat is that? That cat would be me.

I’ve said various versions of this before.  But here it is.  I’m going to do it again. The cat. I’ve let her out. Again.  Because that’s what there is for me to do when a voice speaks out loud.

I’ve been on a journey that feels strange. I don’t know where I’m heading. And I certainly don’t know where I will end up. In fact, I think the idea of “ending up” somewhere, anywhere, has revealed itself to me as an illusion. I find it very difficult.

I read a portion of a book about one woman’s leaving the church because of its lack of recognition (at best) and complete suppression and oppression (at worst) of women. (This is another post altogether.) It, combined with so many other things, left me looking yet again at my relationship with Christianity. Maybe it’s the nature of how Christianity is taught and inculcated into us, or maybe (and I have to emphasize here, hopefully), hopefully something more true and pure, but I haven’t been able to simply slough off my connection and hope in God and Christ. Still, I’m more at odds with my faith than at peace with it.

Then today, I finally got around to reading an interview of Bart Ehrman on Salon.com. His book, “Jesus, Interrupted“, was published recently and it is causing a bit of a stir. He was raised Episcopalian and his 10th grade year asked Jesus into his heart. (Unrelated side note possibly interesting only to me: the summer of my 10th grade year was when I first asked Jesus into my life… a personal decision separate from my own Christian training and upbringing.) Bart Ehrman followed his passion to the Moody Bible Institute and that was where things began to unravel. Ultimately, he went from being a traditional, Bible-inerrancy believing Christian, to a more liberal, meta-myth Christian believer to where he is today. He’s agnostic. What was the straw that broke the camel’s back for him, and caused him to move his check marked theology box from God-believing to agnostic? Suffering. His words: “I finally got to a point where I just didn’t believe it anymore. I just didn’t believe that there’s a God who’s looking over this world and is in some sense active within it, who’s intervening to solve problems of suffering and is answering prayer. I just don’t believe that.”

I grew up with both a spoken and unspoken training and belief that God is somehow intervening and fixing our lives and our suffering. Today, I find myself in Ehrman’s camp. The world and my experience holds too many inconsistencies for me to believe that God intervenes in the ways I once conceived of. If the suffering isn’t fixed, the average Christian argument (and mine for so very long) is that God has “mysterious ways” that we can’t understand… and that there is a reason for the suffering we experience. But the assumption still lies in the view that we aren’t supposed to be suffering… unless we are to be brought out of it for God’s glory or there is a greater good (a mystical, spiritual weaving of purpose, or a burning of the dross in me for my own good) that God has designed but I don’t/can’t/won’t understand or know.

Paul & I talked a while back about the possibility that what makes God God is God’s inexhaustible and illimitable nature to be with, take in the world’s (and our) suffering. God’s ability to be with…

Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking that this God, that has eternal capacity to hold close and be with the evil, pain and suffering in this world… is, not a form or entity (and as such, may have outgrown for me the title and my prior definitions of “God”), but is instead Love. And in being with and holding suffering close… suffering is, by Love, transformed.

The experience of life is, for me anyway, turned on its head if I consider that suffering isn’t something to be done away with, but rather something to embrace. Not in a self-punishing, masichistic sense, but in a peace-giving, life-affirming and ultimately transformative sense. Honestly, I’m not sure how that looks yet.

Hardly a sensical or comprehensive theology or idealogy, embracing God not as some type of quasi-human deity like we think of the Greek gods or similar, but rather the essence and being of Love… That has created a new kindling in my heart and soul. Prayer has been a mess of an experience for me over the last several years. Recently, my prayers have turned into some form of this:

Love Eternal, Love Divine,
I give myself to you.

Love creative and transforming,
I give myself to your service.

Love sacrificing and suffering,
I humble and give myself to you.

Love forgiving, accepting and whole,
I give myself to you.

Love Eternal, Love Divine,
I surrender to you.

And praying these prayers, they are moving and challenging me. And most importantly to me, they are both reshaping me into someone that I want to be and on a journey that I do, most definitely, want to be on.

Despite the fact that Mother Nature is messing with us by bringing snow, rain, wind and cold these first two days of April… thanks to Ahmis, it’s springtime in the Moment home!  Last weekend, Ahmis trimmed her cherry tree back and offered me an enormous vase to fill up with branches upon branches of trimmings. I put them in water and in two short days, we have this!

Amira & I enjoy telling each other how beautiful the flowers are.  She makes me laugh when she sniffs them and tells me that they smell like tortillas.  I have giggled too each time she’s given herself a startled tickle on the nose by diving in too close to the blooms.

So, happy spring everyone, even if Mother Nature isn’t quite yet in the mood…