Real Life Reflections

I feel the cool breeze as I sail through the air. It's amazing. I fly. I career. I sail. I am euphoric. The early morning sun shines brightly. It's too early in the day for its heat to overbear. Instead, the sun offers the perfect balance of warmth to the crispness of a new day. It colors the sky with pink, purple, and shades of blue. The clouds smear across it like cotton candy across a child's face. Below me, the newly mowed grass smells strongly of summer days. This is what I was made for. This freedom. This abandon. This liberty. This emancipation. To sit, hour after hour, in a confined space. To exist through a span of days without this experience. For life to fly by me when I should be sailing through the middle of it - soaring through the middle of it - is a pitiful existence. Painful. Remorseful. Depressing. True, I've seen better days. I'm not all that I used to be. My skin isn't smooth or blemish-free as once it was. The sun has taken its toll on me. L...

Have you ever been disappointed with yourself? Have you ever attributed to yourself certain admirable traits and then tried to live up to them? I know that's backwards, but that hasn't stopped me in the past. I find it easy to expect from myself what I admire in others. Instead of simply esteeming a particular quality I see in someone else, I (sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously) try to emulate it. It's good to reach for something higher, a standard just beyond where you are now. It causes growth and learning. Right? Right. The problem comes in when my desire to better myself isn't actually bettering myself, it's changing myself, and it leads me to have great expectations - too great. Unrealistic. When what I admire in someone else, what I want to emulate in my own life, is completely foreign to my personality, when I reach for something that's not just a little beyond where I am right now, it's completely off my grid, that's when I have a pro...

I love the story of Joshua and the Israelites crossing the Jordan. Picture this: you and your parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, third cousins, first cousins once removed, second cousins twice removed, great aunts, third cousins thrice removed, great uncles of your eighth cousins nine times removed etc. etc. - your very extended family - wander around for forty years. You live in tents. You eat birds that fall from the sky every day and bread made from some stuff that the dew leaves behind each morning. You've never seen a field planted with corn or wheat because your wandering is in the desert. You hear stories about how you all used to be slaves. The stories speak of the miracles that set you free, but for you, they're just stories because you're only forty years old. You were born on the road. All you know of miracles is in the stories because although your parents always called the food you eat a miracle, you don't really get it. The birds an...

. . . the final frontier. And I don't mean Star Trek. I mean brain-space, heart-space, space for thought. Space for God. Life is full. Each day bombards us with a cacophony of sights and sounds. It takes work on our part to sort through this barrage and pull out the information we need, the information we want, the images, the thoughts that will belong to us and to our memories. In addition to this onslaught of stimulation, most of us carry around a to-do list so long that it wouldn't fit on a triple roll of Charmin written in a size six font. We're a civilization that exists on over-load. Captain Kirk had to risk taking the Enterprise out of its dock in order to explore that final frontier because space doesn't just happen. It doesn't come to us nor does it scream at us for attention. It doesn't jump up and down flailing its arms. Some of us need more of it than others. Growing up, our next door neighbor used to sit out in his screened-in porch for hours every ...

I will eventually move on to a subject other than my so-sweet granddaughter, but for now, I pray, humor this new grandmother. . . Sunday evening, I drove west on I-70. I was headed for my pillow-top mattress and feather pillow. That night would only be the eighth night out of the last eighteen that I would spend in the arms of their incomparable comfort. It has been wonderful to be home these past few days: sleeping in my own bed and finding some kind of routine once again, but yesterday I found myself in a perpetual state of melancholy. It was a watch-the-clock day at work ("only six more hours . . . four more hours . . . two hours. I can do this . . . one hour . . . "). Finally, the work day ended. I headed home. At dinner, I told my husband that I had felt sad all day, but I had no idea why. He hugged me (good man that he is!) and gently asked, "are you having Brooklyn-withdrawals?" Oh dear. Could it be? It didn't take long for me to realize the answer to his...

The waiting is over! Brooklyn Adeline arrived this past Thursday, and while I awaited the euphoria that my fellow-grandparents assured me would come, I found that instead of what I expected, I fell in love. Deeply, unreservedly, unconditionally, in love. Everyone decided to lie down for a nap. I voluntarily sacrificed my nap (that's just the kind of gal I am) to stay with Brooklyn. I mean, what three day-old infant can take a nap by herself?. Someone had to hold her, so I volunteered. I'm such a martyr. As we lounged on the sofa together, she slept. I absorbed every bit of her: the curve of her tiny little ears, the motion of her eyes beneath her eyelids as she dreamed (of what? Being back in the womb maybe? Nursing?), her perfectly shaped lips so like her great grandma's, her soft, so soft, skin with its perfect complexion. I stared at her and basked in simply loving her. I let every part of her sink and settle deep within my heart. This was my first time alone with her,...

Waiting. Ironically, even in our hurried lives, our days are full of it. Don't you just love to wait? What could be better than waiting in traffic? Or waiting for your computer to boot up (especially when you're in a hurry)? Or for your turn at the dentist's office in anticipation of a root canal (oh joy)? What about waiting in the drive-thru lane at Starbucks for a venti vanilla double espresso latte on your way to work when you can barely keep your eyes open for the lack of caffeine? Or waiting at the airport to see your best friend whom you haven't seen in ten years? Yep, we do a lot of waiting during the time we're roaming around this side of eternity, but what a difference there is between waiting for something we dread and waiting for something we're excited about. For example, I'm currently waiting to meet my first grandchild (I write that so calmly, but inside, I'm S-C-R-E-A-M-I-N-G, jumping around, flailing my arms, wriggling, twisting, and hopp...