Casserole Ladies

My good friend passed away at the age of 88. She told me she was ready to go, had lived a good long life and now, just wanted to get on with it. She was ready to go home. My friend knew in her heart that she was going somewhere better and would be reunited with her loved ones, where she would wait with them, preparing to welcome those she had left behind. My friend was a woman of faith.

My friends passing sparked a scandal. She was a very active member of the community for all of her life, and gossip has it that the church auxiliary, the VFW auxiliary and the volunteer fireman's auxiliary are fighting over who gets the honor of feeding the crowd of people expected at the funeral. Meanwhile, the town had to call an emergency board meeting to approve funds for a county sheriff to direct traffic on Main street during the calling hours because of the expected influx of visitors to a one stoplight town. The final estimate was somewhere near 8,397 callers and just as many flowers. My friend was well known and loved in her community.

Casserole ladies have started arriving by the droves as we sort through boxes of photos, discuss which dress she looked best in, and pass a box of tissues. I have to ask myself – Am I living a life that will bring droves of casserole ladies to my doorstep after I pass? I hope so.

My friend believed in the Bible, she asked me if I had read it, I think she was surprised when I said yes, I had, twice. She said I should read the Bible more, there is lots of good stuff in there. Then she said she figured I was doing pretty good for someone who had only read the Bible twice. So Hey, I got that going for me.

101 Posts

Today I hit a milestone. Well, didn't exactly hit it- hey, what does that mean anyway, hit a milestone? It's more like I arrived at it as I posted my 101st article to my blog. For me, that is a lot of writing and a lot of great practice for my future best sellers. Thanks for reading. - Meandering

Runaway Buckboard!

The buck board had been piled high with supplies when I left the town a few hours (or was it a few life times?) ago. The sun was shining, birds singing. The horses sauntered along, the rhythmic clip clop of their hooves causing the relaxing alpha waves to enter my brain. I was awake, aware, but very relaxed as we sailed along across the expansive dry open desert. A luminous turquoise sky above stretched from one horizon to the other, suggesting the immensity of the ball of dirt, hurtling through space, that we call a planet. Wide open was what came to my mind, that feeling of growth and possibility and freedom - wide open.

I can’t say I know what spooked those horses, but spooked they became. One moment we were sailing like a boat on a calm lake and the next we were rough shot right out of a cannon and hurtling forward at a speed that felt like something Einstein imagined. I was holding the reigns as best I could, as I struggled to stay in the seat. I was sliding back and forth and bouncing up and down so fast I wasn’t sure what was up and what was down. I held those reigns but just, I certainly wasn’t in control of the wagon. The bushes and rock formations seemed to speed by, it was as if we were still and the world was moving way to fast. I guess a jolt of adrenalin will do that to you, change your perspective and maybe switch things around in your head.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the load on the back of the wagon begin to topple. No wonder, we were plummeting down a narrow lane, bouncing every time we hit a rock or stand of sage brush. With every bounce, the wagon gave a shudder that became a bone rattling jolt, then, sighed like a forty year veteran of door to door sales. At any moment I expected to see nails start rocketing out of the wood rails of the buck board, shooting up like popcorn popping in a pan with no lid. At any moment I expected the wagon to wrench apart, boards screaming, nails popping, splinters flying, just like a big whaler on the open ocean caught in a category 4 hurricane.

As the load teetered on the edge and then fell, I saw my things flying off into the dirt, bouncing, and bouncing again, and rolling away. The dust was so thick and I was going so fast that I could just make out the shapes of my things, just for a moment, as they bounced away behind me, left on the trail for some future passer-by to pick up. My half finished children’s book, my illustrations for another book, my paintings of vacation spots I have loved. My yoga workout and my bike rides, my hours of reading mystery novels. My time to write interesting, entertaining, enlightening articles for the loyal readers of my blog. All, all, bouncing behind me down the lane.

Honestly my dear readers, I’m sure things are going to calm down here soon, I will get used to the new job, it will get easier and less time consuming as I go along, and soon, very soon, I’m sure I will have my life reigned back in to a meandering pace and I will re-claim my time to write.

The Monks Are Coming!

I'm still getting acclimated to my role as professor for a class of 46 university students. The class is going great, I'm still adjusting to the early mornings and to the technology- ie:the software used for all homework and grading. It may take me the rest of the week to get that down, I went to a class today for all us new instructors, and the IT classrooms system was down ( WHAT?!, you gotta be kidding!) so we really could not get into the program to look at it or ask questions. I said heck with that and came home, booted up and got to it. It's a little tricky but I'm getting the hang of it and it's a good thing because there are 46 papers sitting there waiting for me to grade!

Meanwhile, I've done a bunch of meandering but have not captured it on paper as of right now. So I thought you might like to take a look at a few photos from the last "monks tour". The Monks (Gaden Shartse) will be visiting us again this fall and I am just starting to get the tour stop put together. As we go along I will share photos and news with you, meanwhile I hope you enjoy these.

For more information, look to the side bar on the right for a link to the official tour website.

Spinning

I’ve been percolating for a few days on this idea of change. Why are most humans so uncomfortable with change? One of my friends recently told me she did wash, not because she was out of clean clothes, but because she was out of her favorite clean clothes. See what I mean? We like to get cozy with certain things, places and patterns in our lives and just stay there. Like our favorite clothes, our patterns are our comfort. That is, until our patterns become a rut. That, how ever is a whole ‘nother matter and I’m just contemplating the why of change in the here and now. (Remember, I’m really practicing being rather than doing, and being means just being here and now).

So I watched a good movie a few nights ago, Martian Child. I got it because that handsome guy John Chusak is in it and I figured even if the movie was a bomb the scenery would be great , and the movie was actually good and John was looking great. He’s aging with style and I’m looking forward to the release of the movie he wrote and produced called War Inc., due out in October. Originally scheduled for release last spring, now it won’t be out ‘till after the elections- geeze, wonder why? Dan Ackroyd will be in it as well, it’s a follow up to the movie Grosse Pointe Blank that they did together way back when, so that right there makes it worth seeing.

Any-hoo, in Martian Child John’s character makes a long speech about how weird this whole life is, we are spinning on a planet ( 700 to 1000 miles an hour depending on if you are at the equator or the poles), around a spinning star ( the sun spins at a speed of 4,400 miles an hour) in the spinning arm of galaxy ( our galaxy spins at 140 miles a second) that’s spinning across the universe ( at 190 miles a second), meanwhile every atom in our body is spinning and I said Eureka! That is it!

Maybe we all cling to our favorite clothes because we are so tiny, little, small. We are to small to actually see and feel all this enormous movement that is going on all around us but maybe at some instinctual level we know, we can feel, our DNA twirl, our atoms spinning, our earth revolving around the sun which spins in a solar system, spinning in a galaxy that spins out across the never ending void of the universe.

Just look around you, every moment is change and every season is change. Just sit in the yard and watch the lawn grow, the flowers bloom and die. Or drive around your favorite town. Homes go up, buildings come down, business opens and another closes. Look at your photo album, you once looked like that, every day you changed a little, now you look like this. It can’t be stopped.

You are constantly changing, as your cells die and new ones are replacing them. You think you have the same body your whole life, but really, all your cells are replaced many times over your life so even your same body is an illusion. No wonder we are grasping for a little stability!

We are so little, tiny, small that we can’t feel the earth spinning, but maybe we know. Maybe somehow we do feel all this never ending motion that makes up our very being and our whole incredibly humongous environment. Maybe at some level all that large moving stuff makes us feel like an ant holding onto the branch of a tree in the fall wind. Holding on for dear life as everything swirls on around, holding on just trying to remain with feet planted .

Maybe we are just craving some small spot of stillness. A place of no movement. A place to hold on. Maybe our favorite clothes, the painting that has hung on that wall in that house for 30 years, the favorite recliner tattered and worn, the familiar grocery store with every item exactly where we expect it to be helps us to forget for a moment that we, just like everything else in existence are spinning. Maybe we can’t help this clinging, maybe we think if we let go of our familiar, our routine our same whatever- maybe we think we are going to spin right off into space.

And even though a favorite shirt lasts maybe 8 or 10 years, and that is an amazing infinitesimal amount of time when it comes to the span of time in space, maybe because we are so small, just having that same thing, place, person or routine for ten years makes us confident, gives us stillness and a thread of consistency to hang on to. Maybe it makes us feel like we are moving in the stillness rather than still in the movingness. Maybe it gives us a feeling of rest.

Maybe we are resistant to change because if we can just hold a few things still in our tiny lives, we can feel like we are bigger than we are. We can feel like we are in control. Then maybe our intuitive understanding of the vastness and the speed of it all won’t be quite so scary.