Living-Deliberately.com

I can hear windchimes and I know I’m standing on a porch. The tree nearby is green and I’m not wearing long sleeves. I know the porch is mine and that I feel calm. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see children and primary-colored paint on sheets of paper.

I’ve had that dream about five times now. It gives me hope…like it’s a little premonition, something to envision for the tomorrows, when the hardest part of this will be over.

Often I’ve heard the definition of insantity to be “doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting a different result every time”. A friend recently told me that she respected me because I try lots of things, and when they don’t work, I move on, instead of trying to wrestle a different result out of something that will never be successful. I get to enjoy The Trying, having not been too afraid to taste, but with the freedom of not locking myself into it forever.

I’ve tried to remember those words as I’ve had to let so much go. My motto of, “hold all things loosley” seems strained to the point of extreme. But things are only things…. Will I ever garden again? Have an address? See those baby spoons again? Store my clothes in a dresser, rather than a suitcase? Over christmas I spent time on a real working farm…and found out once and for all that while I have a deep passion for urban homesteading, knowing where one’s food comes from, and how it’s raised, I am not a real farmer at all. I have raised chickens, enjoyed fresh eggs, and served up my own rooster but I know my personal line is with the hens and eggs and garden of herbs. I’d rather give my support to those really up for the task of pig castration, goat birthing, and butchering-day. They have CSA’s for people like me :-). And there’s freedom in that you know? I can still eat with a conscience, support my neighbor, and know my own limitations at the same time.

Still, letting go of ideals, and ideas, that I so hoped would work is not easy. I paint on my grief like black nail polish….long, strokes that I hope remain contained and do not spill over, so that some portion of life can be unstained. But of course, sometimes that’s impossible because more than ideals, more than ideas, more than experiments, sometimes we have to let go of people…and their mark is indelible upon our souls.

Retaining sanity is at the heart of it, more than we’d like to admit I think. Knowing what is irrevocably broken, what has died, what simply does not fit or does not work, has to either lead to giving the up the body, ending The Trying, or admitting failure, or one can not move on. Stagnancy, or worse….stuck in an endless cycle of the doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting a different result, is not really living.

Once, when my daughter had been in the CICU for 6 weeks and we waited every day for her lungs to get stronger, I asked the doctor if she was living or dying. He didn’t know and there was nothing any of us could do but wait. It was the most stagnant time of life… one long held breath, and in some ways, her eventual death was a sort of relief. We had no power to change that place inbetween where she lie and we could not move on from it. That “Land of If” is still a place I loathe going, and when I can effect change, I will. It seems to be a part of my sanctification to learn how to live in times where I have no such power, where all I can do is “be still and know”.

And so I am. Sometimes the most deliberate thing to do is to let go. When there is nothing else to be done….just breathe. And when I’m quiet, I hear windchimes in the stillness and know.

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