Am I enough?

What IS enough?

Known:
3 cranky kids in the back of a station wagon.
One more Oreo will be..
72 degree in the swimming pool.
68 degrees inside.
Love. Most of the time.
0 unarmed kids shot by armed adults.
Two World Wars
Saturday afternoon chores followed by a warm homemade meal and college basketball on in the kinda background.
The penultimate thing I said in our last fight.


Unknown:
Is it enough to make lentil soup with old lentils to waste not want not?  Is it enough to have my late mornings be reframed as self-care?  Is it enough to check things off a list so that programs will run smoothly?  Is it enough to pay my own bills, eat healthily and go to the gym? Is it enough to get literary allusions 80% of the time, even for books I haven't read?  Is it enough to pray daily and sometimes with discipline?  Is it enough to love and not be loved?  Is it enough that I do my dishes every other day, almost? Is it enough to know all the good advice, down pat? Is it enough to write almost daily even when what I am saying is kinda meh?

Lords and Frogs a Leaping.

Rough Draft: a piece about desire and gifts  and True Love...

I suspect that some of my dearest friends hold one resolution on my behalf: find her a man.  I suspect this because I have very good friends and they would do me this enormous favor of not having to wish it for myself, alone.  That makes my desire classier, when it is housed in their hearts. 'Oh stop, go on' I can can feign in response. Stop.  Go on. Push pull.  Quiet yawp.  I have heard rumor (and the worst kind: weird Christian rumor) that the Days of Christmas isn't nonsense but a coded Christian allegory.  This rumor asserts, on various un-researched websites, that the 10 Lords a Leaping represent the 10 commandments.  Follow these rules, this whispered rumor exclaims, and you will find a lord with whom to leap. This desire I have sure does make for a heavy lens with which to view the world. I want to go back to yesterday, when I was just a lady dancing with my eight friends.  Or even better, milking with other maidens- just this past Thursday.  If I can get through this day, through this unmet desire- the pipers will keep on piping and the drummers will allow me to forget it all. And I can whirl back into gratitude for all that my true love has given to me.

The Second.

On a day like today, one has to be wary of the rationalization that comes in to trump pure hope, sheer

potential, attachment to the ideal that is to come. I armed myself this year for this attack. I made uncountable new year's resolutions so as to make it harder to rationalize my way out of all hope for improvement in 2015.  Of them, I am banking that one might just stick this year.  I can't even tell you what they all are or I might talk myself out of them in the process.  I am sure they are, none of them, original.  I am sure that there are 20 somethings in Brooklyn who have accomplished all my goals, three years ago with less trash, less gut flab, more poetry and cooler leg warmers.  But I am going at it as a numbers game, and I think I might win the battle with the world as it spins madly on. Look at me.  I am writing, and there is still a chance that this might not become one of my 17 journals that have 5 pages filled (yet I can't throw away or reorganize for reasons of sentimentality and aesthetic). I am smelling the Peruvian spiced chicken warming in my crock pot. I went to the grocery store and came home without unnecessary plastic.  I have added no trash to my garbage.  I have planted a clipping and am waiting for roots.  I have contacted friends.  I have organized my reading priorities.  I have looked at my budget.  I have played the piano.  I am planning on heading to the gym...

After New Year's Eve

From what I understand, what we all first recognize before language or relationship or chocolate or beauty, what we each first recognize is contrast: black and white, light or shadow.  It's no wonder, I think then, that I can't find a person in all my travels who likes a New Year's Eve celebration. The festivity is a known disappointment, not because we are inherently a non-celebratory people, or because I only know people who tend towards depression or cynicism.  It is because this very attempt at celebration ignores the important contrast that actually exists. The revelry as is it demands we only see the light, when the shadow is the part that gives the whole its context, depth and place. So we don't recognize what we are doing on that night be it in Times Square faking it, or around a board game pretending to ignore the whole mess. Sure, it is a perfect time (as day's lengthen yet we are still victim of a darkness that lasts too long) to celebrate those seedlings of hope we still have bursting in us.  The embers that are warming under layers of coal.  New Year's Eve celebrations,however, ignore the grief and celebrate only the potential of what is to come.  It is discombobulating to our core of understanding.  To toast and celebrate and make light of the unknown while stepping over the carcass of what has been known without a nod to it seems inhumane.

Don't get me wrong, I went out with friends and I loved their company, and enjoyed the music that was too frenetic and the good food that could have been better.  And I made a bunch of resolutions.  I just wanted to pause and consider why the mantra continues to persist: I hate New Years.


New Year's Poem

Dairy.

Dairy did me in first.  More than shampoo or toothpaste or plastic-wrapped delicious bacon- half-n-half broke me. On day 9.  I knew I was out of it at home; I stopped at Lambert's on my way and made a quick dash to the dairy section to get my fix ready for the morning coffee.  There were three kinds of half-n-half available to me- one flavored for the Irish, one low fat (?) and one normal.  All had little plastic side spouts for easy pour.  Did I consider the high road and plan to drink my coffee black or with milk?  Did I consider buying out and bringing a reusable cup to my local coffee roaster for an over priced but earth-friendly start to my morning?  Did I consider stopping at Shaw's to see if they had an old school version where you have to gently massage cardboard just-so to get the dairy out of the container.  Yes.  I thought of all these things.  And I promptly spent 2.99 on a little plastic spout that has haunted me since.  Who am I with such weakness?

Plastic Free?

2014 is going to be the year that I try to live plastic free.  Though I know there will be some moments when I decide to purchase plastic, my goal is to strive to live without being responsible for any plastic waste.  I survived day one.  By not leaving my house.  On Day Two, I ventured out to Whole Foods. I know; I am annoying already.  The bulk food aisle had paper containers.  Phew.  The bakery didn't, but the baker was kind enough to wrap the bread in a spare paper bag and didn't think I was totally neurotic for asking.  Just a little, and in a charming way.  (I was in Cambridge, too- did I mention?) I knowingly walked past some of my favorites, with a little too much pride in the disappointment I felt because of the sacrifice it indicated: no bacon, no pre-wrapped meat, no cereal, no yogurt, no CHEESE (except this one ridiculously expensive Cowgirl Creamery wrapped in paper.  I bought it.  No regrets.)  LOOK at all I was doing in my HUGE sacrifice for the Earth!   Produce was a bit tricky- I could buy organic potatoes wrapped in plastic mesh, or Conventional Potatoes (whose growth was responsible for the addition of pesticides to the Earth) with no plastic wrap.  A conundrum that my boyfriend pointed out and made my head spin: Is this neurotic?  Should I bother? Does anything matter?  Is everything corrupt?  Should I just buy the bacon? He made me laugh which snapped me out of my dangerously angsty existential spiral as he found an organic yam- no wrapping.  Conundrum solved- for now.  For years, Mary Oliver has been singing at me (not really- but metaphorically) to "pay attention" and to answer what I am going to do with this 'one wild and precious life'.  I am hoping that this year, as I head to 40, this little exercise gets me to pay attention and in the process remember the wild and precious nature of it all.

Running

A Saudi National was running from a bomb that exploded in the middle of a crowd and he was tackled and questioned for it.  He is cooperative and scared and tackled.  I saw a photo of a man who was injured.  I was warned, by the Atlantic twitter feed, that it was graphic and I am haunted and horrified for that man who was being carried by three others because his legs were gone, one of the merely injured.There is one official feed of the explosion that keeps running on the air.  It's the one where the 78 year old man falls down just before the finish line.  I had seen him 30 minutes earlier on Beacon Street.  I cheered for him from the street.  I smiled at his speed and his commitment to the work of it.  Now I can't stop watching him fall.