LIVING BETTER

Hellebore or Winter Rose

It's been muddy here where I live.  We've had so many damp warm days that the daffodils have popped up too early.  The Hellebores, though, are right on time.  Also known as the Lenten rose, the Christmas rose and the winter rose, but they only resemble a rose, they aren't one.  Last Spring my brother transplanted some for me from our woods where they couldn't be seen without traipsing over rotting logs and dodging the stickery overgrowth.  Leaves, stem, flowers, sap and roots--the whole plant is so toxic that the deer leave them alone.  Last weekend my husband brought a few more closer to the house.  The main erosion prevention where we live is rock.  Rocks partly buried, rocks under the earth, rocks wherever we place our spade.  So we got a little rock pile out of the holes he dug.  Since I've loved playing in the dirt since childhood, it was a happy day for me.  If you're a gardener too, don't you just love kneeling on the wet earth? 

January has brought loads of suggestions for living better.  Gadgets, technology, energy savers, mood boosters . . . .  but I'm thinking that being outdoors trumps them all.  Bundled up or stripped down--whatever the weather demands.  I read about rates of depression climbing among teenagers and young adults, women, veterans and just about everybody else.  So anything we can do for ourselves or for others, deserves our attention, don't you think?   Otherwise health or family issues, job or money issues, or plain old unhelpful thoughts can push us toward our limit. 

These ideas are ones that bear repeating--I can't remind myself too much.


1.  Take more time for ourselves.  Not so easy I know.  I remember when I had no time for anything but putting a meal on the table, supervising homework and getting ready for tomorrow.  Feeling like I couldn't carve out a minute. But that wasn't so healthy.  Experts say that time alone helps us regulate our emotions so we can better deal.  A sort of Time Out I guess. And where better to have this Time Out than outdoors. There's actually measurable evidence that solitude can be restorative, build confidence, help us set boundaries and boost our creativity and productivity. Solitude isn't loneliness. It's time to enjoy our own company, to please no one but ourselves.  Have you noticed how you're not lonely when you're on a walk, taking a hike, by a waterfall, rowing a boat, whatever it is you like best in nature to do?  Some days for me that might be just reading on a bench or sitting by the fire pit.  

2.  When something is good, enjoy it! Wholeheartedly.  Sometimes when I'm enjoying the outdoors my mind goes to what I should be accomplishing.  As if nourishing our bodies and souls in nature weren't enough of an accomplishment!  Or I might wait for the other shoe to drop. This day or hour is too nice; what's going to happen to spoil it?  Or try to anticipate some future hypothetical disappointment so I won't be taken off guard.  Sometimes I do that right while I'm in the midst of having a good time!  Negative expectations they're called.  And what a waste those are!  When something negative does happen it's never what I was preparing for anyway.  In fact the worst things that have happened to me so far I could not have anticipated, not with all the foresight in the world. So, why not savor the good without worrying so much about what will come next?  Why not give ourselves a break?  Cradle our joy.  

Illustration by Lori Roberts

3.  Give mistakes their due but no more than that, our own or those of others who may have hurt us. 

Remorse - is Memory - awake -

Her Parties all astir -

A Presence of Departed Acts -

At window - and at Door

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

 

Remorse and regret are pretty much the same.  Not happy feelings.  One way to manage bad feelings is to accept them, knowing they won't last forever.  Just like our thoughts, our feelings come and go.   The more choices we have the more likely we are, apparently, to fear we've made the wrong one. And maybe we have, or someone else did and it's affected us.  Better to find a middle ground between avoiding something we wish hadn't happened and obsessing over it, whether it's something we did or that was done to us.  I've been working on this a while now.  Last night was the first of eight weekly classes on "Loving Kindness Meditation" at Duke Integrative Medicine.  That is a part of this effort.  And today I'll be outside again doing the quarterly maintenance on the mossy path I've made winding in the woods beneath the trees.  In other words staying with the present which is not where obsessions live.  

With much hope and expectation for living better this year.  Nina Naomi

  

 





 

EMBRACING THE ORDINARY

How do you capture the beauty of the world around you? A friend of ours tills the soil, plants and tends the roses, photographs them catching each drop of moisture on each velvet petal, then turns the photographs into greeting cards and makes gifts of them.  So start-to-finish hand-made with care.  

A family member has taken chisel, hammer, wrecking and pry bars to an outdated bathroom and is creating a place of natural beauty for invigorating showers.  Making a place of joy for their morning and evening routines.  

I try to garden in spite of the deer and pesky squirrels.  And fill the house with plants to clean the air, add humidity and promote sleep.  I like to photograph what I find beautiful and meaningful, simple things like the shadows on snow in the photo above. Or the close up of tiny pine cones, or the icicles dripping from the mossy rocks.

Many people write.  My husband is one of those, capturing the truth, the sadness and the difficulty of everyday life.  All of us I suppose keep the beauty of life in our memories and that may be the best way--noticing and remembering.  And imitating.  Somewhere I read, be like a tree:  flexible, adaptable, resourceful, bending with the wind and springing back after a storm.  Or like a houseplant:  calm and steady.  

All of this fits an idea that I've been coming across about embracing the ordinary, that once we learn to enjoy ordinary things we can stop searching for bigger and better.  Peace and contentment find us more easily.  We can enjoy the rose we planted, the room we renovated, the words we've written, the memories we treasure--all ordinary things to do.  When we appreciate the ordinary the world looks more special doesn't it?  That's what I want to do more of this year.  You too?  

"THIS IS MY SONG, O GOD OF ALL THE NATIONS"

Monday January 6 was the Twelfth Day of Christmas.  Epiphany which, according to legend, is the day the three Wise Men visited the baby Jesus.  Astrologers otherwise known by the carol "We Three Kings of Orient are / Bearing gifts we traverse afar." 

All week I've been singing, humming and listening to "This is My Song", the hymn we sang last Sunday. I've been listening each afternoon as night falls so early and it is black outside my windows.  The fire burns against the dark.  It's sung to the tune of Finlandia by Sibelius.  You can call up the melody under "This is My Song," Finlandia hymn.  Take a minute to listen. The words alone are powerful but with the music there is majesty.  It seems a perfect vessel for mindful attention.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine;
this is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine:
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine:
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;
may peace abound where strife has raged so long;
that each may seek to love and build together,
a world united, righting every wrong;
a world united in its love for freedom,
proclaiming peace together in one song.

text by Lloyd Stone (1912-1993) stanzas 1 & 2 and Georgia Harkness (1891-1974) stanza 3
sung to the tune Finlandia by Jean Sibelius 

Is this not moving?  "But other hearts in other lands are beating / with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine."  Imagine, these words written by a 22-year-old in 1934, someone born here who loves our country, but recognizes that others everywhere feel the same as he.  A thought sometimes so easy to forget.  The same with stanza 2--"but other lands have sunlight too, and clover, / and skies are everywhere as blue as mine."  Easy to forget that the earth belongs to us all and that God is "God of all the nations," that ordinary people are everywhere alike. 

Our preacher this past Sunday when we celebrated Epiphany wasn't much over twenty-two herself.  She talked about the visit of the Three Kings to the Infant Jesus and how King Herod ordered the death of all boys under the age of two so that his reign would not be threatened by the infant called the King of the Jews.  Mary, Joseph and their baby escaped by fleeing to Egypt like so many fleeing violence today. 

I had debated attending church.  I don't need a Sunday off as much as when I worked full-time, but during these cold and drizzly January mornings the home-fires are tempting.  But I'm glad I went if for no other reason than the hymn.
You may have a favorite version at your fingertips.  It's hymn No. 437 in the United Methodist Hymnal and No. 887 in the Lutheran Hymnal, ELW (Evangelical Lutheran Worship).  Or you can find it on YouTube at HD Classical Music, "This is my Song," Finlandia Hymn - Sibelius or MemChurchHarvard or Panoplyimaging and elsewhere.  

Sometimes it's all we need in a week where the news cycle is as bad as this one:  to be both calmed and invigorated by something that stirs our hearts. I am thankful this week for this music.       Nina Naomi 

 

THE IMPERFECT CHRISTMAS

Christmas is over and the New Year is here.  It went too fast, not just this Christmas but all of them.  The ones when my grandparents were alive and got to our house in time to see me and my brother wake up to Santa.  The one when my husband and I got engaged.  The ones in London with our baby where like the gift of the Magi we each gave the other a long winter scarf.  The one where we were planning that baby's January wedding.  The ones where the grandchildren were all in cat-in-the-hat pajamas.  

Our old analog photos show a young woman in a pink velveteen sheath dress flashing her new engagement ring for the camera, a handsome equally young man by her side.  A couple of years later the analog photos show a bald but happy baby in her infant seat next to the table-sized tree in our London flat.  The best gift.  But not all Christmases have been Instagramable.   More like imperfect Christmases to be exact.  There was the year my volatile aunt threw the dinner rolls across the table at her husband.  Worse, the year my parents drove to our country parsonage separately because they were living apart that winter.  Then the year the baby, the first grandchild, had an undiagnosed ear infection and couldn't be comforted.  And the year (this very year) I finally gave away the winter lace dress left at my house from the January wedding because that marriage is over.  

This is how life is isn't it?  Our Christmases are markers, sometimes marking blessings we'll never forget--the newborn in our arms, the red bicycle under the tree, the elderly parent presiding at table, the whole family together in church.  Sometimes marking a year that for one reason or another we are thankful to have survived. Sometimes a little of both.

As we enter the New Year I'm content with how life is and if your holidays follow a similar pattern I hope that you are too.  All things considered this was a good year.  My gratitude list is long.  I took out my 2020 brand new Prayer Journal this morning to tell God about that. But I bet God already knew.  With thanksgiving, Nina Naomi

  

WINTER LIGHT

    January 2020, 8 a.m. Winter Light Cornwallis Road

"When one sees the tree in leaf one thinks the beauty is in its leaves, and then one sees the bare tree."  

 The Bare Tree by Samuel Menashe (1925-2011), American poet

"I prefer winter and fall, 

when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -- the loneliness of it; the dead feeling of winter.  

Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." 

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), American visual artist

"There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... 

In spring, summer and fall 

people sort of have an open season on each other; 

only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."

Ruth Stout (1884-1980), American author and gardener