My Everything

My everything is you

You who shine

You who send your light afar and warm the dank and dark and dreaded

You who give and give and do not give up, but grow in your giving and have more

My everything is happiness

A nesting

A place of being

Inside, not outside myself

My everything

Is you

You who capture my attention again and again

You who continue to show all that is good

Thank you for being you

Beauty Heals

Beauty heals more than we know! Colors, textures, smells, sounds all conspire to keep us well, to keep us connected to the natural world: the one we were born of! As summer winds down, I have so much appreciation for my beautiful garden which will soon be struck down with frost!

Can’t you just hear this giant bumblebee going about his business of life? He’s not worrying – at least I don’t think I hear that! He’s doing what he needs to do. Creatures just do what they need to do for themselves. And they do what they like! I don’t know if they feel gratitude, but I feel it watching them!

Do what you need to feel joy! Drink in beauty! Beauty heals! Joy helps! It lifts us up! Let nature in!

Yesterdays Ago

Yesterdays ago

Something

Happened

Something shifted in me

And I couldn’t go on as we were…

My first term at college, a student across the room captured my attention with his European looks (Welsh, Finnish, English, Swiss heritage) with prominent brow, wavy shoulder length hair bleached by sun, eyes like water and sky. Oh, and fit body with broad shoulders! Confidence radiated from this guy! A pole-vaulter! He was different! We were different together! Eventually we married, started careers and family.

Now forty years later, a year or more until planned retirement, I realize I need hubby to retire his lawyerly battles now, not eighteen months from now.

Eighteen months is too long to wait.

Eighteen months is all my mom had on dialysis after years of struggle with Lupus.

Eighteen months after she passed is all my dad had until cancer took him. They were in their sixties! They didn’t get to retirement!

Eighteen months is too little time to live!

And yet, we’re lucky!

Others are dying unexpectedly by madmen, calamities, disorders. They don’t get another eighteen months! Or eighteen minutes!

Yesterdays ago, on a different day than the attack in Las Vegas, hurricanes, quakes, and fires, I learned a hometown boy I’d dated has passed. Months ago.

Three hometown boys I once cared for have passed. Not that I ever un-care about them, but we parted, moved on, went different directions.

“Am I that old?” I lamented? “So old friends and peers are dying? Who will be next? I’m not ready to lose anyone!”

I blinked back tears.

“NO! I’m not that old. I’m THAT alive! That lucky!”

 

Yesterdays ago

Something happened…

I will cry for those who part from this earth. Their physical presence will be missed. But I know they’re not “gone.” Only their bodies are.

Do you feel this way?

Do you feel sure of another type of existence beyond this one?

Does it help you get through the shocking, disrupting hardships inflicted on people?

What gets you through?

Journeying to Possibility

A long road to Possibility has been my journey. While my upbringing was filled with love, it was also marked with struggles in perceptions with lots of stories of mixed messaging, mistruths, diversions, deceptions, demonstrations of disappointment and setbacks.

All my life it seems a deep sadness tried to get a fix on me. It didn’t feel like me, but what was it? Now I know I’m sensitive, intuitive, even many times psychically in tune with people I care about. I wish I’d known and understood at a younger age how this affected me, but I’m good with it now. I was sensitive especially to my mother and her issues and problems. (Of course this colored the story which seemed to write itself to the page in my novels.)

I know we do not exist separately. All of life is connected. No coincidences. Only mysteries and miracles.

I didn’t always believe in miracles. Not the kind we can access. They seemed to be doled our selectively if not randomly. I did not believe we could have them personally, even create them?

Why didn’t we talk of miracles

Let them into our minds, our words

Was it so hard to believe in possibilities?

Why didn’t we dare into the unspoken? Too sweet to savor and likely to sour?

Why didn’t we think something different could happen?

Why did it take so long to discover the truth: goodness grows in our garden hearts. We are the cultivators. Not that forces don’t press upon us, but we can mitigate damages. We can visualize positive outcomes even if we don’t know how to get to them!

Why couldn’t I persuade you to believe truths I was yet to know?

I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you up. I hadn’t yet risen. Maybe you bring me up now to where you are. Maybe you send glimpses of grandness…

Maybe it was you all along bringing me on your silent journey…I just didn’t understand the language…

So thankful for my life’s journeying to possibility and the surprising connections I find! Here’s a good one which happened along right after I wrote the above piece:

http://carolcassara.com/vision/

Do you believe in miracles? Tell me about the miracles you’ve experienced!

Story Within a Story

Story within a story of loss? What’s the good in grief? Loss cannot even be true: even as water rushes over banks, spilling onto dry ground, it is not lost. Only soaked in, utilized.

Our tears soak into dry ground and disappear. But when a loved one “disappears” or passes, how can we feel more than pain? How can the “change in essence from body to spirit” be viewed as something beyond loss? Transformations to other forms are not visible. There’s only absence of what was. And it hurts so much!

Even our memories wither and begin to disappear. We can’t see what comes next, can’t know what we will feel later.

Wilderness does not linger in losses. It goes on with dynamic displays of change. Branches and roots reach out for sun and water.

Twenty-five or more years ago, we lived a decade in Coos County on the Oregon coast. How can it be so long ago already? Longer ago than I was old when just out of college and securing our first professional jobs there! A year into that rainy climate and desperate for summer heat, we found a drier spot inland along a sleepy stretch of the Coquille River. Many times each summer, we swam in the warm waters and basked in the pleasant sun on the beach then picnicked in the grassy park beneath towering trees.

Spreading branches of the myrtle trees made canopies of shade. We crushed the beautiful leaves in our hands and breathed the spicy, aromatic scent. And when autumn arrived, we kicked the golden leaves and played hide-and-seek with our young children and dog. “Better enjoy it!,” my husband would sigh, “Rain is coming! This is the last picnic of the year…” Sometimes it wasn’t! Sometimes the weather was warm enough to swim all through September and into October! We’d go again and again. He’d say the same thing each time, “The last picnic of the year…” And we’d laugh. Those times were magical!

After we moved East of the Cascade Mountains (about five-six hours away) we didn’t go back to this favorite place on the Coquille River. And we only returned to that part of the coast a few times through several decades. We were busy growing kids, careers, cows, chickens, market hogs, Labradors and fields of grass. But three years ago, after our kids married, we sold our 21 acre farm and the big house with barn and greenhouse and sheds and shop. We downsized! We were so busy paring down our possessions and preparing for the next stage in our lives – retirement – we didn’t look back!

We didn’t miss that left behind home any more than we missed the coast when we left it.

And we loved our new little place on a hill with a view of the mountains. But then we lost a young Labrador. That was not how it’s supposed to be! “The old ones should go first!” we cried. Then an old cat disappeared. I shed tears for sweet Butterscotch. But then we got a new Labrador puppy! Abby has been easy! Energetic, YES! But smart and well behaved. And actually, getting her helped us part with our fourteen year old Lab this winter – the longest winter I can remember! Snow on the ground four months! And it was so cold! I longed for summer.

The lure of past experiences tugged at my heart. It was sad to think our children now grown may never again see the old sweet places again. Their voices, or their children’s, will never echo across the grassy grounds we enjoyed so much. But, I told myself, they will find their own places of sweetness.

Recently, we returned to Coos County. We revisited the Coquille River we had loved, hiked for the first time at Golden and Silver Falls about thirty miles north. (Look at tiny me below the falls on the slippery rocks with spray washing over!) We, too, can find new places to enjoy! And it helps to forget the long winter!

 

We went another day to Bastendorf Beach: so much more beautiful than I remembered…

But somehow, all that water in the wet coastal areas reminded me of deep, inexplicable sadness I’d felt when we lived there. “Maybe it is only the rain,” I thought back then. (Some years more than eighty inches!) Maybe it was a sense of all we were to “lose” in coming years: passing of parents and friends, parting with pets, homes, jobs, expectations, and even our health at some points.

I got through the dry years of many adjustments in Central Oregon with protection of nature and quiet. I was thinking and saying, “As in nature, there is no loss, only change in form. Our beloveds are always with us…” And then our darling eight or ten year old rescue kitty, Betty, disappeared.

 

And all the things I’d been carefully covering with thoughts of the future and thankfulness, gratitude, and appreciation broke through. My heart hurt! I grieved for all the passings and partings. I grieved for the mistakes and mishaps and misgivings I’d suffered through the years. I cried! And I was angry with myself for feeling sad, for shedding tears.

And then I realized, again, life is a mysterious series. There’s always another line, another character, another chapter! We can go back, reread, revisit the emotions of our experiences. We can learn from our stories. And write new ones. We can rescue the little pieces of ourselves we left behind or overlooked. We can find new places to share. Our tears only wet the ground we walk and make ready for new growth and abundance.

We’ve now adopted another rescue kitty! Moona – because her yellow eyes are like moons, our grandson says! She’s settling in and getting more comfortable with us. And it’s strange how many things she does just like Betty. And I think once again, “There is no loss, only change…”

And as I write this, I realize the story within a story here: it’s fifteen years since taking mom’s ashes to the beach, thirteen years yesterday since taking dad’s to the river…Not that beach, not that river, but they’re all connected, as are we. Right? The water continually flows…Life moves on…Our tears only add to the flow.

Life is for loving. And I am so grateful for all of it!