Leading You There

I am being tossed and thrown about in the midst of a storm. It is nearly retirement age.

I plant flowers and let the beauty wash over me. It is tangible and true. During times of great change when the earth shifts underfoot and there is no stabilizing bar that is not also in sway, it is hard to not feel afraid. The land - the wind - the birds - the weeds - the rocks - and yes, even the mosquitos - gives a singular anchor, and somewhere to leave footprints.

I see by the broken branches and trodden path that others have passed this way before. They have stood in this spot and looked at their lives in astonishment, knowing that time has rushed by faster than it seemed, and now they stand at the edge of life in recall.

It is an insecure time. Perhaps I did not plan well enough, and will not be ready. Or maybe I am clinging to my former, more robust self.  I contemplate my anchors of purpose and value, and how I can best adapt to the coming transformation.

I study my hard working and calloused hands that are puckered with age. They were beautiful once, with long slender fingers, white with a light dusting of freckles. They could do anything, and they lived many lives.

They speak to me now with reassurrance. There will be purpose ahead and something to anchor you. Trust us to lead you there. But to begin the journey, you have to let go.

Continuity

A high school friend recently published a book to favorable reviews, and the same goal is on my Bucket List, and I secretly wonder if I will ever get around to it.

The white sleeves that protect and surround the trunks of tiny almonds dot the ground for miles to the North. The sticks have sprouted now and every day they are tended and watered and weeded. Giant farming equipment comes and goes, and workers till and furrow, and crops grow tall in the sun. A farmer's job seems so much more gratifying than mine.

Sometimes the work I do feels invisible, without a rhythm to it or even a beginning or end. Certainly it is nothing like the life of a farmer who can stand back at the end of the day and survey his accomplishments. Yet purposeful work begins, things are accomplished, and we advance to the next thing in my world, too.

Life now is not as idle as it was. Saturdays and Sundays are work days with a new set of clothes. Yesterday, while the Hubs was mowing and clearning, I continued working on a broad planting bed for daisies and ice plant. I kept my eyes down, for fear of distraction by the weeds in the drive or the tall grasses beyond the garage.  I dug and planted, and trickled water into the roots, and rocked back on my heels afterwards when the sprinklers ran. There are so many areas to do, big and little projects that will take vision and time, but every day something is accomplished. It will come together if we keep at it, and one day we will be astonished to see the progress here.

I can't seem to turn off thinking of new ideas. There are glorious bulbs popping up - Iris, at least 3' tall already, against a cyclone fence that is in an ugly part of the yard. Let's use up the old wood hanging around to frame in ground level planter boxes, and let them grow wild. Ideas build on what we discover.

My husband rolls his eyes at my enthusiasm. I tell him I will be learning to do some of this myself and perhaps we can work on independent projects sometimes. He mentally counts off the twenty projects ahead of that, but lets me add it to the list. In pencil.

We took off on Saturday and nosed around antique stores while waiting to meet the guy with the used composter and haul it home. Now that we're here, a day off might mean something more along the lines of a real weekend away. On it.

Quite the Imagination

An interesting idea sparked during a listen to my favorite radio/news/talk show. The conversation was on a phenomenon called mis-remembering. That's not the proper name, but good enough for a discussion about experiential datas and how our brains process it.

Mis-remembering is when the brain strongly identifies with a story and imprints a memory about it.  It reminds me of telling those big childhood stories, when our parents would say, you've got quite an imagination!

It turns out that we have. This researcher brought a bunch of people together with a CatScan machine and one by one put a listener inside and registered how the brain responded when listening to the re-telling of a dramatic or traumatic event. She was able to isolate which part of the brain was active for passive listeners, and ways we listen and identify with the story.

Some listeners were passive, as she expected. It was an interested but detatched listening, with empathy and other emotions as they followed along. But she discovered some were so involved with the story that their brain activity actually created its own fresh memory from the story, as though they experienced the event themselves. 

This kind of research begs to be linked to the ongoing debate about exposure to violence in all of its forms, and the spike in violence and fantasy mass murders. We have too many examples of those who act out internal stress disorders from people whose lives were not full of violence and brutality.

If anyone's random brain can hard-wire the experience of violence, murder, brutality and gore into their active memory, how can we not hold the entertainment industry accountable?