Category: blog Page 50 of 54

This bracelet  showed up in the mail. A reminder to embrace the journey. The journey might not take you where you wanted to go. But surely there is something in each turn of the road that can provide opportunity to speak gratitude.

The tiny heart has a cursive “B” engraved on it. It may stand for the name of the jewelry company for all I know. But I interpret it as the word, “Be.” As in, be joyful. Be grateful. Be a friend. Be available. Be a source of wisdom, of hope.

The word be suggests choice. I get to choose whether I want to be thankful or complaining. Kind or not-so-kind. Loving or selfish.

I sent a farewell letter to the full survivorship e-mail list at work on Friday, my last day in the Cancer Center. A friend wrote back, sharing the words that became his mantra during the journey of losing his young daughter to cancer:

Define your purpose; live your reason.

I have an idea of what my purpose is for this next season. I believe God gave me a love for writing, an ability to write, stories to tell. And so I’m placing all my eggs in one basket and giving it my full-time effort.

The “B” on the bracelet speaks to me in this endeavor. Be unafraid; be a risk-taker; be creative, it says. Be about finding your purpose and living it.

Temps in the single digits and I’m wearing extra layers. Celebrating the start of a New Year by snow-shoeing. Not forgetting anything important. The Camelbak for hydration. Snowshoes. Trekking poles. Homemade toasted nuts to feed the birds.

Glorious powdery snow. So much beauty along the trail. Fallen logs tucked in tightly with fleecy blanket. Christmas trees decorated all in white. A family of snowmen created by fellow snow-shoers.

Much fun. Great exercise. Natural beauty. Four and a half miles round trip with plenty of uphill and down.

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Final post for 2014. And what a year it’s been. I hadn’t planned on losing Hubby this year. I was sure we still had more time together. An E. M. Forster quote on a card from friends reads like this:

We must be willing to let go of the life we had planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

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Lovely, memorable, family-filled, fun-filled Christmas in the Far East Jersey. I’m amazed and grateful that it wasn’t hard to be with family without Hubby. I had not expected this. I had always heard that the first holidays and birthdays and anniversaries would be the most difficult.

As always, it’s good to be home. Some nice welcome-home gifts. Stacks of mail and packages. And this beautiful white fluffy stuff.

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Incredibly fabulous costumes and sets. Music superbly rendered with beautiful African strains, with magical dance and drumming. The Parents and I went in together on Christmas gifts for the munchkins – tickets to The Lion King on Broadway, fourth longest running show. Going strong for seventeen years.

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This first Christmas without Hubby. And still unexplainable peace. Christmas Eve service with several hundred other people. Notes to Santa and carrots for the reindeer. Cooking and savoring of delicious food. Putting together of puzzles. Playing several games of Sequence, through which The Parents gloat, which wasn’t really gloat-worthy since it was against a feeble grandmother and two young children. (I’m thinking they need therapy.)

Wonderful family time together, this first Christmas without Hubby. So why hasn’t this been a more sorrowful time for me? Why another day of waking up to peace?

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Sarah, my young cancer widow friend, stopped by with her six-year-old son, Oliver. She brought a gift that had been given to her last year from a fellow widow. With instructions to pass it along this year to another widow. Before Christmas.

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Thin blue skies. Temperatures soaring into the low thirties. That’s all the invitation I needed to layer up and find my hiking boots in the too-clean garage. My favorite in-town trail follows the Deschutes from Farewell Bend Park upriver for a mile and a half before it crosses the footbridge and heads back down.

It’s beyond my comprehension how the color white—a sort of non-color—can be so beautiful. On boardwalk.

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The rules are childlike. You simply list ten things for which you are grateful. But the catch is this: the Top Ten things must have something to do with the moment. So, last evening, for example, as I was driving home from Saturday evening service alone, in freezing temperatures and darkness, and my car started up and the heater kicked on and the roads were paved and Christmas lights were cheering along the way … well, there you go – four things on the list already.

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Daughter Summer recommended a book a while back by Jon Acuff entitled Quitter: Closing the gap between your day job and your dream job. It’s a how-to-quit-your-day-job-the-right-way book. The first chapter is entitled, “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.”

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