Greetings Dear Readers:

This will be a different sort of blog. First let me say thank you for reading Life Opening Up. I am very happy that you are out there enjoying, agreeing, disagreeing and responding to the blog.

I am able to follow the numbers: how many people are reading and which blog and when. I even know when people are reading from a foreign country. I can see when a few people are reading in New Zealand, Germany—there is a constant 2—Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Sweden France, Israel, Belgium, England and more. I marvel! Generally speaking, those readers come and go.

I know nothing about any of you, unless you respond either by email or on Facebook or directly on my blog.

But this week has really pricked my curiosity. At the beginning of the week I noticed 1 reader from the Ukraine. The Ukraine?  Where bombs are going off? Where people are being dragged through the streets, imprisoned, executed, and terrorized? Someone is reading Life Opening Up? Is it an American? A Ukrainian who speaks English? Who is this person, I wondered?

A day later the number from the Ukraine revealed 2.  I thought: a friend. That happens, I’ve noticed. If 1 person shows up in a foreign country, it’s likely that shortly there will be 2. They may hang around or disappear, but in the case of the Ukraine readers, over this week, the group has grown to 8.

So, briefly, I am writing to those 8 people right now, hoping that they will read this blog.

We are thinking of you and praying for an end to the violence in your country. America yearns for peace in the Ukraine, a resolution to your political differences and the opportunity for the Ukraine to fulfill its unique destiny: the highest, best outcome for all Ukrainians.

 If you 8 readers are Americans living in the Ukraine, I hope and pray that you will stay safe.

I would love to hear from any of you and if you do write, I will, but only with your permission, pass your comments along without publishing your names.

If English is not your first language, please do not worry about it. Anything you might write would be most welcome.

I am honored that you are reading Life Opening Up. Thank you and God bless you all.

***

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Can I Deliver?

Tonight I will speak before a group of people I do not know for a purpose I believe in. It’s not a long talk I have put together, but I hope it expresses the passion I feel for the cause.

I leave in an hour. I have to change my clothes, appear pulled together, maybe even look really nice, so as to present myself in a good light, thus helping to gain their ear.

So many years have passed since I have done anything like this, performed in this way. Is that person still inside me who actually used to enjoy this sort of thing?

I fear not. It seems to me that someone entirely different exists, someone less sharply pointed, less ambitious, someone less of a performer. She has mellowed with age and now there is a milder me not needing to score, just hoping it will work out, be all right, please those who asked me to do this thing—or at least not make them wish they hadn’t. None of this mellowing makes me less anxious. If anything, I’m more so. I have to dig deeper within myself to come far enough forward to deliver.

Will I be able to do that?

There are butterflies in my stomach—as always. The same butterflies from past years? From other speeches given? Or perhaps these butterflies are the grandchildren of those earlier butterflies: a new crop altogether, even more fluttery and intense because I am older and less able to accommodate them.

Still there is a familiarity about their presence. A familiarity that makes me smile. “At least this part of me is the same,” I’m thinking.

I will sweat right through whatever I am wearing. I always have, so I choose my clothes carefully. I don’t care what the commercials tell you--- there is no foolproof deodorant for this person when she addresses an audience. Annoying, but there we are.

All this angst is so familiar it is almost comforting.

Time to go. I laugh out loud and decide to trust the butterflies, the adrenalin, even the pernicious self-doubt. Grabbing my bag and coat, I go forth. I know that somehow, in some miraculous manner, when introduced, I will stand up, smile at the people and suddenly be there doing exactly what I intended to do.

After all these years I know this to be true.  Over and over we go through our “stuff”--whatever it is--and God willing, we are delivered to the other side.

And The Body: What About the Body?

Our bodies need us. Mine needs me, I know. To pay attention, to listen, to learn, to nurture: to remain as mindful of it as if it were a young child crossing a street.

What are my body’s signals? Do you know yours? The signals for food? The signals for enough?  What are your alerts for distress and your vibrations of joy?

How does joy show up in my body? The cells cheering, clapping their hands, warmth spreading through my chest, a tingling at the back of my neck, tiny hairs rising, when the choir in church nails it—hits those high notes and soars!

My body when I walk alone: am I in it or out of it? Aloft in the treetops, dazzled by sunshine, furiously fending off below –zero wind that threatens to rip off my face? Am I present?

My body: what about my body in despair, curled and damp, listless, dull-minded and limp. Am I paying attention? What does it yearn for? What does it need?

When I exercise too much and a throbbing begins in my hip, does it deserve some time out with an ice pack? How hard can I push it and still respect its limits?

When I am tired, can I be tired?  Lie on the couch, have a cup of tea, smile at the tree outside my window, watching the gray-blue nuthatches that tiptoe upwards along the bark?

It’s always all right to get moving. Is it all right to quit? All right to admire the strength in my legs and all right to smile ruefully at the pleats of flesh that fold down over my torso when I sit in the bathtub?

Can we offer our bodies some tenderness? Some gratitude?

The body is not a vehicle for us to kick around, starve or stuff, prod and push: a vehicle that too often the mind drags around like a wobbly cart through thick, wet mud. No. Never.

For we are one holy and miraculous tripartite system: body, mind and spirit. Merged and interdependent. Abuse to any part of us is an abuse to all of our parts.

I wonder why we don’t get that?

***

“And the body. What about the body?” was a time-limited prompt given at the Westport Writer’s Workshop I attended on April 6. I dove into it and the above is essentially what I wrote.

***

 FYI: My body loves:

1.Acupuncture and Qigong Healing with the Master, Jeff Zimmerman, at Center For Energy in Westport.

2. Pilates at Black Rock Pilates

3. Massages with Sue Kaufman, Fairfield Therapeutic Massage

4. Yoga at Yoga4Everybody, Fairfield

Spirit Prevails

I have just returned from California, where it was warm and sunny, flowers blooming in abundance. What a change. What a delight.

As lovely as it was, however, the Freeway at rush hour--the time I arrived---made I 95 look like a back road in Nebraska. I have been told that the CA Freeway is “the most dangerous road in the country.” I am not hard-pressed to believe it.

Driving south through Malibu, the expensive houses are on the Pacific side of the Freeway. On the opposite side, smaller houses range upwards along steep, curving roads, which are carved into what looks like parched, unstable land: land of potential mud slide. Sun and flowers notwithstanding, California has some drawbacks that we do not share. And I haven’t even mentioned the regular earthquakes.

Nonetheless I was glad to be there, even in an unstable state—California and my own. I was both eager and anxious to visit my younger brother, Brandon, who has battled cancer for almost three years and whom I have not seen during the last two of these difficult years.

The sight of him wracked me. The disease has taken its toll. Nonetheless, to my joy, I found that the funny, lovable, creative brother whom I have cherished all of my life remains alive and well inside the body that chemotherapy and radiation have both saved and seriously damaged.

                   

      My brother lives.

The human spirit is awesome in the fullest sense of the word. Battered and weakened, my brother continues to paint breathtaking watercolors.

Together we sit on the couch and watch a movie that Brandon made years ago—Love Among the Ruins, starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier. Brandon mimics Olivier’s rapid speech patterns perfectly, and I wave and feather my hands like Hepburn, both of us smiling and praising the skill of those two extraordinary actors. 

The time was precious and too soon over, but the visit provided some wonderful memories. Enough to last for my lifetime? Perhaps. But I pray that will not be necessary.



Dear Readers: If you used to receive this blog via email and for reasons known only to the cyberspace gods, that no longer happens, please, if you wish to, re-subscribe in the same way you did before.

Thanks, Cecily

Perspective Is Everything - March 2014

I had a recent fasting blood test. No big deal, I know, but for the needle-resistant chicken that I am, it is close.

I made an appointment so that I could go early in the morning. I wake up hungry, never mind that my usual breakfast is cereal the consistency of shredded doormat. This rough, tasteless mass is redeemed—at least somewhat--by blueberries and a dollop of Chobani yogurt.

Anxiety mounts. Days before, I stuffed the order form from my doctor into my every-day pocketbook because one time I showed up at the lab without that scribbled-on, green-lined paper with all the checked boxes and screwed up the entire event.  

Resistance is so creative!

I don’t trust myself to remember to fast either. I worry that, on automatic pilot, I will steer myself right to the fridge and end up having to reschedule. To sidestep this possible pitfall, I stick a large Post it on my bathroom mirror that warns in black ink: FASTING!

I can’t miss it.

When I get up, the sign prompts me to drink two glasses of water, straight down. If they are going to remove three vials of my blood, I’m determined to be ready for them. Besides, it helps to wake me up.

At the lab, the paper work is accomplished and the tall, lanky, young nurse moves around the tiny room organizing vials and needles, while I roll the sleeve of my sweater up along my right arm.

I know this vein. Its prominence is a nurse’s dream. I have been told so repeatedly. Once exposed, it is so eager to be assaulted by that needle that it practically follows the nurse around the room. I rub it gently. The vein remains lifted, blue/green, and asking for trouble.

And trouble comes. This nurse is not a slider injector but instead, a jabber. “Yikes!” I react.

“Are you all right?” She asks, in a pro forma manner.

I am, of course.

She nods her head as she skillfully switches to a new vial. “You’ve got a great vein here,” she tells me. “So easy.”

I do not respond. She has jabbed my “easy” vein, a vein that would have poured out blood for her at the gentlest insertion.

Two vials later, I watch as she presses a square of gauze against my arm and then covers it efficiently with a bright orange Band-Aid.

 As I roll down my sleeve, suddenly I am remembering the people I love who are required to have frequent blood tests and worse. Much worse. My heart goes out to them. I can only imagine the traumatic and painful procedures that they have suffered.

 I think how lucky I am to be healthy and my irritation completely dissolves. Perspective is everything.

Isn’t it interesting that we are called to accept ourselves and get over ourselves at the very same time?