A Saturday meditation.

Dear friends,

I’ll be doing my job today. And maybe some quilting. And reading. And dreaming. Topped off with a dinner out with Mr. Mom.

What more does one need on a rainy spring Saturday?

Exactly.

With gratitude {for weekend meditations},

Joan, who as the former Mayberry Magpie is still stuck on bird motifs, so she added one here and plans to make a paper flock very soon for flight to friends everywhere

PS: PicMonkey is my new favorite photo editing software. If you’re no pro with Photoshop and are looking for something easy to use, give it a try here.

Oh. Hey. Hi.

Dear friends,

This lovely 2013 day planner is available here.

I haven’t intentionally been ignoring you.

I have been unusually content in some ways, and contentment for me often leads to quiet reflection.

Life has been both perfect and hard, and I’ve been living it instead of writing about it. But I’ve missed you and I thought I ought to pop in and say so.

Our holidays were everything I needed. Kate was home from college for three weeks and I luxuriated in her company. Christmas break was low-key. On Christmas Day, we had a Barbecue feast that was super-simple to prepare and left me plenty of time to laze around with the kids. We dragged an air mattress into the den and piled on blankets and pillows for a marathon movie session. We tackled a zigsaw puzzle. (Who knew CupKate was a puzzle whiz?) We invited friends over and played board games. We had a bonfire. And then we spent New Year’s Eve in Memphis watching my alma mater (The University of Tulsa) kick butt in the Liberty Bowl and enjoying the flavor of Beale Street blues and seafood. The last two weeks of 2012 were so perfect I was lulled into a dreamy stupor, making Jan. 2 a particularly sharp jolt back to reality.

So the hard parts? Well, there’s been more developments on the mountain. Nothing I’m ready to write about. In fact, like most of the saga, Mr. Mom has been handling it alone in quiet frustration because I’ve blocked it out, so I really don’t understand the details of the latest developments yet; mostly I just tried to distract myself while I watched him spend hours on the phone with attorneys and surveyors and adjacent landowners and the dozens of characters that populate this unfathomable story. My most fervent wish is that this chapter of our lives will end in 2013.

Also — I’ve been running, chasing the thousand miles I said I wanted to conquer in my 51st year.  Lawzy, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.  It’s been a mental and physical challenge that I wholly underestimated. The first three weeks almost reduced me to tears several times and very nearly convinced me I could never do this. I have ached. I have been so tired I lost all concentration at work, and I have gone to bed at 7:00 pm more than once. I have mentally shouted at the gods and cursed them for my lack of strength and  stamina. I have found myself hating Missouri and blaming its godforsaken hills for my misery. I’ve sunk to the lowest possible emotional depths a runner can reach without quitting.

I have a glimmer of hope, however, that I’m turning a corner. In fact, I need to wrap up this post so I can head out for a run. I must log a minimum of 10 miles this weekend and I’ve got a hot date with Mr. Mom later this afternoon so I need to get after it.

But, hey, you know what? My waist is making a slow reappearance in my life. It used to be a beautiful thing and it just might be again, who knows? And the other evening my left leg was aching so badly I asked Mr. Mom to massage it. He did two better: He massaged it, he told me how toned my legs were becoming, and he brought me a heating pad. A good man is such a glorious thing and I never fail to count my blessings when I notice them.  Which is one more reason I need to make an appearance here and remind you to do the same. It’s a great way to ease into 2013, friends.

With gratitude {for a sparkly, blessed, challenging, infuriating, totally-normal new year},

Joan, who invites you to tell her how you’re easing into 2013 and what you hope the year holds for you

Some reflections on fifty.

Dear friends,

The author, front and center at a family picnic, circa 1968.

I turn 50 on Monday.

1962 seems another world ago. Jackie Kennedy. The Cuban missile crisis. Love Me Do. James Meredith.

I’ve seen so much and so little. My life is expansive and somehow tiny, like a sliver of light that slips under the door of a darkened room and beckons me to cross the threshold into something bright and exciting.

I have so much — and I want so much more. Not things, you know, but moments. Of all sizes and all sentiments, moment after moment fitting into this intricate, zigsaw puzzle I call my life. I’m greedy that way. I want more love, more joy, more reflection, more grief, even the inconsolable kind, more sweat-spit labor and tired bones, more ragged emotion, more evidence I’m here, heart still beating, mattering to somebody, being somebody’s mooring, or if not, at least a bright spot no matter how transient.

I’ve been grumbling about this milestone for nearly a year. In recent weeks my outward angst has magnified, why I’m not sure. Vanity surely plays a role. I’ve said a woman can’t be sexy and 50, but that’s not true and so maybe I think it’s only so for me. Truth is, though, I’m still the apple of the eye of the only man who matters, the one who daily reaches across the gulf that is our king-sized bed just so his hand can rest on my hip. He still desires my glances, my kisses, my laughs, and who can estimate the inestimable value of a man whose affection is so evident? I am still a prize, it seems, in those sparkling blue eyes I first looked into on Christmas Day 27 years ago, a blind date that turned into blinding devotion.

I want to feel alive, pulsing, resisting decay with every ounce of my energy, even as my energy depletes, unceremoniously, unaware of the urgent stirring inside me. It must always be this way, I suppose, this quickening of the heart even as the limbs stall. It is Mother Nature’s great joke, this divergence of passion and intellect from stamina and dexterity. You can have it, sister, but you can’t have it all, not at the same time, she whispers to me.

I seek to outwit her. To fiercely disprove her, and so I contemplate ambitious goals, like running a thousand miles in my 51st year. Who knows if I will or I won’t. In truth, I won’t be better or worse for it, but I might feel a tiny bit victorious in having beat back one more time the crone who seeks to claim me.

So there you have it. My heart laid bare on the eve of an occasion I have dreaded but should surely celebrate given the alternative. We’re going out to dinner tonight and I’m wearing heels and drinking wine as if age has no recourse but to ignore me. Perhaps I’ll ignore it, too, Love.

(Maybe I’ll even start calling everybody “Love” because inappropriate eccentricity is kindly tolerated in women of a certain age.)

With gratitude {for another birthday},

Joan, who has no memory of the family occasion pictured above, who can’t figure out what’s on top of her head for Pete’s sake, and who has recently started seeing in Parker’s profile glimpses of her brother (photographed behind her in the orange shirt and who died four years later), which makes her heart full to bursting

Abundant blessings.

Dear friends,

Not what we say about our blessings but how we use them is the true measure of our thanksgiving.

– W.T. Purksier

My heart is full this Thanksgiving, brimming with gratitude for our abundant blessings.  Our table is full and our bounty is evident.  A house full of guests, love for each other, good health, a delicious meal shared in safety and comfort . . . peace . . . these are the jewels of this day I dare not take for granted. May we use these blessings, in measures large and small, that reflect a glad and generous heart.

And I wish you, dear friends, abundant blessings.  Drop in sometime this holiday weekend, won’t you, and leave me a comment letting me know how you’re spending your Thanksgiving?  Power eating . . . football cheering . . . napping . . . traveling over hill and dale to see loved ones . . . whatever your activity, I wish you good cheer and godspeed.

I’ll be here on our beautiful Missouri acreage, happily humming ‘round the kitchen, delivering stealth hugs and kisses to any child within arm’s reach, and steeping in the life God has granted me.

With gratitude {for abundant blessings},

Joan, who’s got 13 tasks on her Thanksgiving to-do list today and has already completed three of them while the six other souls in her home sleep soundly

In the dark.

Dear friends,

While millions of folks in the eastern U.S. sit in the dark, I am happily illuminated. But recently, I’ve been re-thinking what it means to be “in the dark.”

You see, I’m running again. I’ve always been a morning runner and since I re-started my routine a month ago, it’s been pitch black at 6:00 am when I head out.  (Perhaps this will change after we roll the clocks back on Sunday?)

I ran alone in the dark for years in my Oklahoma hometown.  The difference is that back then I was running along the streets of my hometown (streets I knew well and on which I grew up playing hide-and-seek with my childhood friends long after dark on summer nights) and those streets were mostly well-lit.

Here, there are no street lights. Our housing addition is far outside the city limits, the lots are quite large, and the houses are very spread out. Even when porch lights are on, they cast a faint glow roadside.

I’m not afraid. I never have been, especially not back home, where at least 20 people I knew were always within shouting distance. Back home, the only thing I ever had to worry about was the occasional mouthy dog or stray skunk. A few times, inattentive drivers caused me to jump in the ditch when they came too close, but I ran for years in the wee hours of the morning without incident.

Here, I’ve mostly noticed how different it feels to run without benefit of street lights. Obviously, it’s really dark. Like, easy-to-trip dark. And when you can’t see anything, your hearing is magnified. The pat-pat-pat of my own feet fills my ears. My loud and strained respiration going uphill and my soft and steady breath going downhill are my only soundtrack. The occasional squirrel (rabbit?) scampering through the woods beyond my sight is as noisy as a passel of kids in a leaf pile and can be quite startling.

Back home, I used to pass time by counting cars. During a four-mile run through my hometown, I encountered anywhere from one dozen to three dozen cars. Here, I might encounter half a dozen cars in a week of four-mile runs. Back home, I used to think “I had no idea this many people drive around this early. I wonder where they work?” Here, I ponder “Why isn’t anyone out and about?”

It’s a strange sensation — this diminished eyesight accompanied by amplified hearing while running on a road in what feels like the middle of nowhere. It has the effect of removing all the clutter from my brain. I can’t explain it except to say my mind is clear. I don’t think about work. I don’t think about the kids or the bills or tomorrow’s supper or anything except putting one foot in front of the other. Because there’s no visual stimulation, there’s no mental distractions. It’s like meditation, except while running. I find it exceptionally calming and restorative. It makes me think a little darkness always re-calibrates your perspective on the light.

I bet the unfortunate folks impacted by Hurricane Sandy feel the same way.

With gratitude {for a safe neighborhood, the ability to run, and the pleasure of an early morning meditation},

Joan, who wants you to know she always runs against traffic and was reminded why yesterday morning when an oncoming car cut a corner dreadfully short, prompting some quick footwork into the ditch

The activity formerly known as awful.

Dear friends,

After a couple of months of flat-out laziness, I vowed two weeks ago to get back in the running groove. I bought some news shoes hoping they’d put a literal spring in my step and I hit the road.

And lord was it awful.

During the first run, it was so awful I thought I would vomit. And I wanted to cry. Vomit and tears, the awful combo.

During the next run, I thought it was so awful I wanted to collapse at minute 3, and again at minute 11, and again at minute 24 and again at 29:30 when I finally gave up and walked the last 4/10ths of a mile home.

During a couple more runs, I thought it was so awful I seriously questioned why I was doing it and why I shouldn’t just throw in the towel. Lazy is as lazy does, I thought.

During another run, I thought it was so awful I might never again enjoy this thing I started doing in 1985 and have done regularly since then (where regularly equals taking a few lazy breaks and having a few lazy pity-parties now and again).

During the next run, I thought it was merely awful. (No elaboration needed.)

And after yesterday’s run, I thought to myself: Well, that was not awful.  Not good. But not awful.

By the way, awful has nothing to do with my performance in terms of time or distance. It has to do with how I feel. Awful — all 70 or so degrees of it — refers to how bad my legs hurt, how weak I feel, how taxing the hills are and how much they make me want to scream at the heavens, how bad my lungs burn, how loud I wheeze, how embarrassingly red and blotchy my face gets . . . you know — awful.

Anyway, as soon as I mentally declared yesterday’s run as not awful, I wondered what it would have been like to spend the last two weeks describing degrees of good.

As in “That run was one-part-per-million good.”

Or “That run felt really good for both of my hands.”

Or “That run felt good for exactly three minutes” or “good for nearly four blocks” or “good for the first 100 strides.”

I like to think I’m not usually a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal, but holy cow, what does it mean when I describe a part of my life in degrees of awful?

Yes, it means I’m out-of-shape. Yes, it means I’m feeling sorry for myself. Yes, it means I’ve got a long ways to go to feel comfortable and strong in my stride again. But it also means I’ve got a lesson or two to learn about finding the right attitude to conquer this thing called life.

So I snapped myself out of it and vowed to extend a little gratitude to the activity formerly known as awful.

And then I remembered that just a couple of weeks ago during a dinner party, I chided a guest for describing her running as jogging. “I’m slow,” she said. “I don’t really run. I jog.”

“Are you kidding me?” I snapped back.  “Anytime you are not walking, you are running! Give yourself credit. You could choose to walk, but you don’t. And if you’re not walking, you are running, sister!”

I’m running, baby. And it may only be 189-parts-per-million good right now, but that’s better than any part awful.

With gratitude {for any part of good I can get},

Joan, who thinks her friend Nancy is right when she said “Turquoise shoes always make you run faster”

Just this.

Dear friends,

There’s absolutely no reason for me to write this post. No urgent topic. No compelling story to tell. Nothing really.

Just this:

I’m sitting in my kitchen, staring out the window at the beautiful Missouri foliage and drinking coffee while my family sleeps in for Fall Break.  And my heart is full. Full to bursting.

So many times, it seems, we are pushed and pulled and frustrated and exhausted and worried and terse. I sometimes get a Bad Case of the Terse and I hate it even as I feel it overtaking me.

But every now and then, in fleeting moments, we soak up a drop or two of now. Of just this. For me, I relax my jaw. (My jaw is hardly ever relaxed by the way.) A surging tide of calm washes over my heart and I startle myself by actually being in my surroundings. I feel the comfort of my favorite chair. I see the soft stubble on Mr. Mom’s face. The narrowing of Parker’s eyes when he grins. The delicate beauty of Kate’s hands.

That, my friends, is God.

I may startle you by saying that because I never talk about God. (That’s because I figure God is not mine to talk about. God is yours to experience and I get fidgety, frankly, when people start talking about God like God is the celebrity on this week’s cover of People magazine and they’re all Oh, yeah, I know ALL ABOUT God.)

I won’t say anymore because you don’t need to hear it. But you may want to feel it, see it, let it wash over you and flood your heart like beauty sometimes does on a Thursday morning for no particular reason.

With gratitude {for tiny quiet moments just like this},

Joan, who has no agenda for the day other than cooking a great supper for her family and soaking up as much of this as she can

My life of entitlement.

Dear friends,

It’s campaign season and I bet if you’re like me, you’re worn out. Some of my friends on Facebook are still railing, but most are offering olive branches and pleas for civility. And no wonder. I chuckled when President Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention and said “And if you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am I.”

I don’t want to rail today. And I’ve already suggested we ought to think more and talk less, so this post isn’t about that, either. Today, I want to share something more dear to me. You can call it what you want, but in the political arena, it would be called my life of entitlement.

By definition, an entitlement is a right to a guaranteed benefit. I’m not going to cover the many facets to this argument as it is being made in the media. If you’re upright and drawing breath these days, you’ve likely heard more than you want to on the subject. I just want to say I have been the beneficiary of a few entitlements in my lifetime, though I didn’t use that word. And, today, I still don’t. You see, I tend to think in terms of assistance or opportunity.

I grew up in a makeshift family in a barely-getting-by town on the edge of a last-resort state.  That is to say I know a little something about expediency and improvisation.  About flying by the seat of my pants.  About slapdash solutions and provisional plans and stopgap measures.

I am, you could say, a “native” of a land called Make-do.

I always wanted to live among the landed gentry – the folks whose multi-generational wealth affords a measure of social stability even if it doesn’t assure nobility. But birth is nature’s first great lotto and my number came up Okie.  And poor Okie at that.

Poor folks have poor ways, the old saying goes. It’s true, but don’t confuse poor with unresourceful. I’ve observed a lot of poor folks who can be ingenious when caught a day late and a dollar short.  My nephew once moved a cast-off sofa on the roof of a car with nothing more than salvaged weed-eater string to tie it down.  My mother once left an abusive husband while he was at work by making creative use of the utility deposits to fund her move.  I once pawned a ring to buy a plane ticket home.

Let me be clear:  making do isn’t the same as doing something half-assed, though I’ve done both.  Half-assed is about choice, and making do rarely is.  Half-assed is peanut butter on stale bread because you couldn’t care less about your meal.  Making do is a pot of vegetarian chili because the only items in your kitchen cabinet are some beans and a can of tomato paste.

Some people mistake the make-do folks for the half-assed kind, concluding that people with diminished circumstances must have created — even deserved — their predicaments.  You might not know I grew up in government-subsidized housing.  Yes, my mother was the property manager and, yes, it was the ‘70s, but I learned a few years ago that her monthly wage for that job was $500.  Ever try to support an elderly mother and three daughters on $500 a month, even with your housing provided?

Unfortunately, even more people find themselves in diminished circumstances than when I was growing up. You’ve likely seen the statistics and I don’t need to repeat them here. You either believe or you don’t that times are tough. And if you do believe many of our family, friends and neighbors are at a pinch-point, you probably have a few ideas about what we ought to do about it. (And my guess is you have more sophisticated and nuanced ideas about balancing opportunity with fiscal responsibility than we’re hearing on the campaign stump.)

So as you consider the options, and engage in debate, and think about what it means to be a citizen of our nation, I offer you my face as the poster girl for opportunity. As a girl who lived in government housing, ate my share of government cheese, and who qualified for a federal Pell grant that largely paid for my college education and helped me beat the average, I still like to think some government programs are worth the lives they improve.

You can call them entitlements — that free cheese and rice and macaroni I ate as a child, the Social Security benefit I received when my step-father died, the government-subsidized housing we lived in, the Pell grant that didn’t have to be repaid, the substantial Medicare payments my mother utilized in the last months of her life, the Veterans’ medical benefits my elderly father receives today, the state-subsidized college education my daughter is receiving, the National Forest my family hikes in when we visit our land in Colorado — but I don’t think they created in me the “cycle of dependency” we’re hearing about. Like everybody else I know, I go to work, pay my taxes, save for the future (admittedly not enough), give money when I can to charities I believe in, and endeavor to make my corner of the world a better place.

I’m able to do that, in part, because of my own initiative and hard work (and believe me I’ll take credit where credit is due). But I’m also able to be a contributing citizen because I got a little free food and subsidized housing when my family needed it, because I had help with my education and then leveraged it into a successful career, and because — and this part is important, so please pay attention — I got lucky. Lucky as in I managed to sidestep layoffs when others didn’t, my immediate family managed to avoid catastrophic illness or accident, and my husband and I had benefit of a small-but-tightknit family that shared meager resources whenever possible. (My mother loaned me her last $1000 for a down payment on my first home. Mr. Mom’s mother loaned him a small sum to start his business.)

That’s luck any way you measure it and a lot of folks don’t enjoy it. Or they get hit by the double-whammy of diminished resources AND bad luck. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t want to help others. And I’d be disingenuous if I said there’s a “private solution” that’s a ready alternative to the government assistance I received. I never once thought of the help I received as an entitlement, as a guarantee. I guess I was naive (or maybe not old enough to be cynical yet), but I thought “we the people” were investing in me, giving me a shot, and I knew I’d better do something with it.

If you know a truly dependent person who’s bilking the system, okay. Or if you just flat out believe there’s no room in government for much more than national defense and the protection of a free market, okay. Vote your conscience.

Like you, I’m sick of the rhetoric. But I still believe in the collective power of government as a force for good and I still want to invest my tax dollars in programs that help people — people like the young person I was who needed it — whether we call it entitlements or opportunities or any other word you can think of that is born of hope, of concern for one another, of belief in the power of community.

With gratitude {for having been born and raised in a nation of opportunity and achieving a life that right now can be described as nothing short of privileged},

Joan, who has one last request on the topic, which is please, for the sake of America’s youth, let’s stop referring to the “entitlement mentality” of the Millennial Generation because I’m raising two of them and I work in close proximity to a large group of them and the generalization does not hold true

Note: Portions of this essay were previously published as a post titled “A modest thank you” on my former blog

Hello, lovely.

Dear friends,

I walked out of my office yesterday and saw a most amazing thing.

A young man on a skate board zoomed past me — so close I could have touched him — and as he approached a park bench, he jumped on the bench and ran the length of it as his skateboard continued to roll beside him, then he jumped off the bench, landed on his skateboard precisely at the moment it passed him, and continued to skate across the plaza in front of my office.

I stopped and thought, wow, that’s a pretty neat trick. And then I realized I’ve seen a few skateboard tricks in my life (I’ve got a teenage son, you know, and MTV and YouTube fills our lives) and yet I’d never seen that particular one.

“That was awesome!” I said to the young man as he turned his board and headed back toward me and the bench.

‘Thanks,” he said modestly. “That was the first time I ever did it, actually.”

“Can I film you?” I asked him. “My son would love to see that.”

“Uh, sure . . .” he said, as he looked sheepishly at his friend standing nearby. The friend looked at me and said “I can’t do it. He’s better than me.”

So I pulled out my iPhone, turned on my camera, and the kid gave it another try but failed to land it. He tried three more times and failed to land it.

“Oh, well” I said. “It was a great trick and I saw it. And I’ll tell my son about it and he’ll think it’s cool,” I said as I turned to walk away. “Thanks and good luck!”

And as I walked to a meeting, I thought about those tiny sparkling moments in our lives, sublime and ephemeral, that pass in and out of our days without fanfare. It might be the moment you kiss your son as he heads out the door, or the moment your colleague brings you a cup of coffee, or the moment you pick a lovely bloom from your garden, or the moment you wave to your neighbor as he walks his dog.

Or the moment you see a kid surprise himself and you on an ordinary afternoon in an ordinary place and take note of the extraordinary.

It’s a moment that delights you and fills your heart if you let it . . . if you give the moment a hello, and a wink, and a nod.

With gratitude {for life’s lovely/surprising/cool-if-you-take-notice moments},

Joan, whose only tricks are in the kitchen, but admits they are some pretty good ones

Taking notice.

Dear friends,

With gratitude {for glimpses of wonderful whenever or wherever they may be found},

Joan, who loves all verse,  free or rhyming, simple or eloquent, abbreviated or epic, and the poets who dare put words to paper