Travel Time

The shortest distance 

between heart and mind

not found on a map but

felt in the body where

Joy leaps and smiles and plays

Tension tightens and hides

Calmness stands tall and firm

Anger bursts with fire

Gratitude shines as the sun

each one overlaps the other

until compassion sheds a softer light.

“The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest..”

~ William Shakespeare, 

Portia from The Merchant of Venice

To ReCreate: A Verb

Journal March 2008 - “I gathered my confidence around me like a ragged coat…..” 

There are times when I read some of the many words I have penned and wonder: Who wrote that? Nope - that’s my journal and my handwriting. Do I remember the specific day or time even though it is dated and timed? Seldom. I have been tempted to just dump all my journals. In the past, I have been sorry for such a rash act. Of course, throwing something out that hasn’t been used or looked at, or in the case of clothes, worn for years should be easy. As long as it’s not looked at again. When it comes to my journals and the writing practice I’ve struggled to develop, it becomes a different issue. But I digress. 

Yesterday, my confidence in the value of my life and the way I live it was challenged when I realized that yes….I am no longer employed as a nurse or anything else. I’m no longer even interested in returning to a nursing career. What I do have is an unflagging interest in the puzzle of word crafting. Creative expression of a moment, a story, or personal experience. In my case, creative expression of my nursing experience. Retirement, only three months old, is still in its infancy. I can accept a long gentle learning curve or rush headlong into it risking my self-confidence in this new phase. So once more I gather what confidence I do have around me like a ragged, and very much repaired and mended, coat. Get out pen and paper ~ or this lap top ~ and review and reshape my dreams of so long ago. Recreate my writing life from my experiences, my strengths and my hopes.

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

Enough?

Anniversary day ~ kind of because it's three months since my last nursing shift.

Not a global anniversary day

A ‘just me’ anniversary day

Beautiful gifts and heartfelt congratulations poured from many and every single one appreciated, yet followed up with a wondering ~

What are the congratulations about? That I don't have to work anymore to earn my keep?

But this morning, and maybe for a few mornings before that 

my ‘just me’ question is:

Have I done enough in this life?

Is 'enough' proscribed by employment?

How do I, or anyone else, know about the enough of participating in life?

No Rule Book

No Standards of Care

No Best Practices for Retirement

despite authors that have written about ~

What to look for

How to respond 

despite encouragement to ~

Slow down

Have fun

Do what you want 

when you want to do it

Travel

Somehow there’s a mismatch in all of that.

Earning my keep being greater than a paycheque,

I’ve come up with ~ and borrowed ~ a couple of my own

   Every day is Saturday (unless I have to match someone else's schedule)

   Do the next right thing (could be making soup or serving soup to others).

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, 

and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know….

Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.

~ John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

Book Review: The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

The Little Paris Bookshop will remain on my bookshelf to be reread and reread. Unfortunately for me and for this post, I was unable to attend our book group yesterday. A suspected cold (or was it allergies) had exhausted me, so erring on the side of caution I sadly missed the discussion. Nina George has penned a beautiful love story. From a man’s perspective. Monsieur Jean Perdu, his only love having left him twenty-one years past, has sealed off that part of his life. He does not speak her name, even to himself. He lives in an apartment in Paris surrounded my other long term residents. Most of them chatty, and a bit nosy, women who quite like him. One woman who has recently moved in, divorced and heartbroken, has nothing in the way of furniture. A brief encounter with her cracks open the seal he has so carefully guarded. His work is on a barge named the Literary Apothecary, where he provides books as a physician would write a prescription. Moored on the Seine, he shares this floating library with two cats, named Kafka and Lindgren. A young author, Max Jordan, has moved into the same apartment building and as the story progresses, joins Jean Perdu on his quest to find his long lost love and to resolve his great sadness. He has a problem with that scenario: he has learned that she has probably died. My only concern with this novel is that, for me, the ending is rather weak. Of course, I had decided on certain editorial changes that could have been done to make it more satisfying for me. Regardless, I loved this novel of Jean Perdu and his passengers as they travel down the Seine in fair and foul weather, stopping in ports along the way. Books, food, romance and France set the scene.

“And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because 

you die, because your future dies and you with it…

There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. 

But it gets better. I know that now.”

~ Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

Title: The Little Paris Bookshop 

Author: Nina George

Copyright: 2013 

Translation Copyright: 2015 (Simon Pare)

Published in the United States by Penguin Books

Format: Novel

Type: Hardcover and paperback

ISBN: 978-o-553-41879-8

ebook ISBN: 978-o-553-41878-1

All the Things

December, 2007  - Journal

If all the things I count as baggage had not happened when they did ~

if they had not happened with

such force and terror 

would I have paid attention to

my life? Would I have learned

the things I’ve learned, 

the ways I erred ~

to lose myself 

and to find myself ~ 

A journey interesting and long.

May, 2019 - Perspective

If all the things I count as blessings

had not happened when they did

if they had not happened with

such surprise, gratitude and joy

would I have paid attention to

My life? Would I have learned

the things I’ve learned, 

to change the ways I’ve lived

to find parts of myself that

I thought were lost or never there?

Short or long ~ that journey is fascinating!

“You can add up your blessings or add up your troubles. 

Either way, you’ll find you have an abundance.”

~ Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway

Nourishment

Up against hard cold concrete 

bright flowers droop heavily

leaning away from the lush green

shelter of the mother plant yet

connected firmly to potted-deep roots that nourish form and beauty.

“Where is your water? Know your garden.”

~ Hopi teaching

Happy Mother's Day!!

Mothers……Mothers of everything and everyone. None of us have a handbook with those first babies and of course neither do dads! There are of course all the published works about parenting since time immemorial. None of those works show us what motherhood really is. Motherhood begins with a pregnancy. Birth brings both relief (to have your body back) and joy to see that tiny face with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes. If all is not in place, according to our vision of the perfect child, the feelings can be very different. The challenges greater, the belief in that new life is more important. And then the child grows. And grows. And grows. Out of everything. Sometimes before a garment even shows signs of wear. On the inside is when motherhood becomes something different. The wear that our children experience does not require knee patches or new socks. It requires patience and understanding. Things that, as mothers, we don’t always have in abundance on the days when our own hearts are worn and scarred. Our grandmothers, aunties and role models have shown us, for good or ill, how and what to do for those places of life’s wear and tear. As our children grow and become parents and grandparents, our love grows and motherhood ~ parenting ~ grows along with them. All the hard-copy books? They can never prepare us fully for this delicate transition.

“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. 

They get bigger, older, but grown, In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

~ Toni Morrison