Coming off a winter weekend with good friends and family, in which we found ourselves homebound and cozy, but still managed to lose an hour, is a conundrum entirely unfit for a wintry Monday morning. Instead, we shall take our usual look back at the week that came before, and eventually I’ll do a little write-up of all the fun we just had.
Say what we will about the annoyance and agitation that any and all snowstorms may conjure at this point in the season, this recent snowfall was nothing short of spectacular, especially in the way the snow clung to all the branches and the wind left everything alone to be seen the following morning. On that day, my commute became a thing of wonder, and I was reminded of how beautifully haunting winter can be. That beauty was spellbinding, and it stilled the morning in the best way. Many times nature will lead one into mindfulness, forcing us to pause and take in the moment.
Here, in the hushed air of winter, when wind has decided to join the silence and put down its , we find the makings of mindfulness, I think of the Buddhist monks who can meditate in the snowy mountains of Tibet, seemingly unaffected and unbothered by the cold or precipitation, calmly finding their focus, generating all the heat they need in their breath and serenity.
There will always be certain people who act contrary for the sake of being contrary. When you find one of these people, do your best to lose them again.
My current guilty pleasure/obsession is ‘The Gilded Age’. I want to be Bertha Russell, faults and foibles and failings and all. While I sadly won’t be squeezing into a corset or bustle anytime soon (never say never) it’s interesting to see how people behaved and communicated over a century ago. The means and mechanisms may have changed, but the same social cues and codes to indicate one’s location in society remain intact. And humans have a need to know where we are in relation to one another, even if that’s a fault that can only lead to unhappiness.
Today we make judgments and appraisals based on follows and unfollows, friending and unfriending, inviting or blocking: subtle social media motions that carry either a forbidding chill or a warming embrace. The game is the same, even if the apparatus is different.
I don’t place much stock in it, as labeling and putting people into categories has never been my jam. I trust my good friends know that too – and understand that a ‘like’ I’ve clicked on something they’ve posted should carry no more meaning than the lack of one elsewhere. My social media mode of operating is too whimsical and changeable to be bound to the rules of modern online etiquette. Still, it’s fun to watch and study the actions of those who do place importance on these subtle and insignificant maneuverings. Keeping a sense of amusement is the best way to navigate the social media world.
Just when I think I’m ready to venture off on some culinary tangent, the kitchen reminds me I know little to nothing of its ways and whims. Having made a relative success of some recent forays into Moroccan tagines, I got overly-confident and carried away when I tried to do a beef version. Conjured mostly from the frazzled workings of my brain, I thought I could do it right, but this made-up recipe left the beef tough and difficult to chew. I will need to work on that.
Such semi-failures (it tasted good, flavor-wise, and the next day it was decidedly less tough) are a regular part of my cooking journey, and likely will be whenever I branch off from the tried and true recipes and methods as presented by the experts. It’s still fun to try, and the act of cooking can be an act of love when you learn to find joy in the process.
This is a holiday cactus without a holiday this year, as it has decided to bloom with neither Thanksgiving or Easter nearby. (I absolutely refuse to call it a St. Patrick’s Day cactus.) I’m not mad about it – these blooms are a life-giver in these despondent last weeks of winter, made so much worse by snowstorms and plunging temperatures that would have been better-received in January or February.
This stalwart plant has been with us for about two decades, becoming a cherished friend like so many of these cactuses tend to do, and throwing out these magnificently-colored blooms in two main shows per year – once in the fall and once in the spring. The last few years have changed just about everything we thought we knew, especially those things I thought would never change; this little plant is a welcome reminder that there are some things that continue no matter what else is going on, triggered by seasonal light and set into motion by nature herself.
It seems a silly exercise to complain or be bothered by anything in this charmed existence when so much is so terribly wrong in so many other places. There is a heaviness that seems to bear down upon us all now, at least among any slightly empathetic or feeling human beings, and it’s wearing on my heart as much as anyone else’s. I wish I had the words or the power to make things just a little bit better, but I don’t know if those words exist, and if there’s anything remotely real about power, it’s not something that one person can use to actually change anyone else. Not on the inside, at least.
All I can do is post these photos of a bouquet of sunflowers I procured for a friend’s birthday many years ago. Born in the early days of May, she personified so much of what is good in this world, so much of what I most wanted to be. She loved sunflowers, so when we met in Boston for dinner I brought her these. I wish I could remember more of that night – what we talked about, where we went to eat, what was going on in her life at the time – but it has slipped away, barely rekindled by these photos.
She is gone now, from my life and from this world, taken too soon by cancer, yet still haunting me because we never got to say good-bye. Sunflowers remind me of her, bringing back her quick and loud laughter, her keen intelligence, her steely vulnerability. In the nodding head of a flower, I see all the good that is somehow present amid this madness, even if my friend is somewhere else. I also feel all the sadness, all the loss, and all the ways we have failed each other. Even looking into the face of the sun, it is sometimes difficult to locate the light.
It came without much warning, only whispers on the wind and a few casual notifications, most of which went ignored at this point in the year. A few inches in March feel much different than a few inches in October. And so yesterday’s snowstorm, throwing more white stuff than wanted or anticipated, dumped its contents on a landscape that was just starting to show the very first signs of spring. Luckily, I wasn’t surprised or duped. Such late-season attacks are expected, and likely to continue throughout April. It’s not quite time to let down your guard. This isn’t over yet.
Take solace in the beauty that winter provides, in the cotton-like decorations clinging to the Chinese dogwood branches, the way the fluffy snow collects around the interior of a sea-urchin-mimicking puff of pine needles.
Yes, there is beauty in this snowfall. It almost makes it worth the annoying aggravation, the slowed commute, the delay of spring bulbs. Almost. And while it comes as no shock, this is still a post I didn’t want to write. We are done with winter. We want to move on.
When this website first went up in the winter of 2003, the world felt a lot simpler. After almost 20 ensuing years, much has changed, but the main tenets of it have remained the same – and as I determine where it goes from here, I’m drawn back to that simple beginning.
To that end, I’m decluttering things a bit, reducing the posting schedule (three posts a day is just too much with everything else I’m doing these days) and simplifying those posts into shorter and more succinct bites rather than sprawling multi-course meals. No one has the attention span anymore, and that includes me.
And so, enjoy these pink tulips on a Wednesday afternoon.
The other day our outside temperatures reached into the mid-60’s for perhaps the first time this year, and though I’ve been hesitant to prematurely herald the end of winter, we seem to be on the right track. I took a quick look at our side yard, and after startling a rabbit, I found this little sign of spring poking through the ground.
The very first jonquil to appear is always a happy sight. My parents have a few that have already shown up in a protected space outside their front door. These brave and bold shoots run the risk of being buried in blizzards and snow squalls up until April, so to see them take such a chance and demand their place in the sun at this early point is emboldening and heartbreaking at once. The simple yearning of the world to shake off the frigid countenance of winter always touches me.
Whenever I see a spring bulb poking through the winter snow, I’m reminded of a May snow squall from my childhood. Yes, May, because in upstate New York that’s the bullshit we sometimes get. A little plot of tulips was just about to bloom, and I had been anxiously awaiting the show for months. Every day as the buds swelled and then started to show some color, I rushed out to make note of their progress, carefully studying and examining each bud as it evolved, wholly invested and caught up in their growth. When at last they opened their red and yellow petals, the snow squall hit, and snowflakes piled up on their petals and leaves, rising on the ground around them. I wanted to cry. How cruel, I thought. How utterly unfair and cruel to snow on such beautiful flowers and destroy all the months of slumber and growth it took to get here. I went inside dejectedly, wondering at life, accepting its harsh lesson, and teetering between feeling despondent enough to give up and invigorated to try again.
The next day I went out to see them, and to my surprise all the snow was gone, and the tulips were still blooming. They’d survived the quick brush with snow and recovered. A few of the leaves sagged and bent beneath the ordeal, but overall most were intact, and as beautiful as before. That was my second lesson in as many days. Even when you think all is lost, keep going. Some things are stronger than we think they are, even if they’re delicate and pretty.
Have you ever wondered what happens to the artsy-fartsy stuff that decorates some candles? I’m talking about the dried flowers and grasses that sometimes come embedded within the wax. I always did, especially in this lavender candle I got from Pottery Barn a couple of decades ago (yes, decades, because it cost a fortune and I kept it as a decorative piece until this winter when I started to burn it).
Well wonder no more, because here’s how this one went, in pictorial fashion.
Everyone is in such a mad rush these days, even with COVID slowing things down. It feels like we go extra hard and fast when in the office or running errands because there is simply more to get done in shorter timeframes. Trips have to be consolidated and made in one fell swoop to better deal with rising gas prices, multi-tasking is no longer an optional challenge, it’s absolutely necessary to simply get through an average day, and the idea of slowing down often feels like an unobtainable luxury.
I was hoping the universe was using COVID to collectively teach us that we need to slow down, not just for the health of ourselves, but for the health of the planet as a whole. I watch it crumbling around us and realize with a tinge of sadness that many of us did not learn that lesson, or any lesson for that matter, and it’s incredibly disheartening. There is just so much any one of us can do to change that, however, and getting bogged down or upset over that doesn’t help matters in the least. And so I do what I can in my own little world, slowing things down in little ways during the day, learning when to say no, learning when to push myself a little harder, understanding what I can tolerate, and understanding what I absolutely will not tolerate. Most of all, I’m finding that the way to deal with many things that feel stressful or agitating is to simply slow down, examine what’s going on, and if needed step away from the problem or dilemma until it can be understood without anger or unreasonable passion. Enter this cup of tea and some soothing Tibetan flute music.
This video runs about three hours, and though nobody has that kind of time to stare at a stone Buddha and listen to some slow-ass flute music, everyone has time for a cup of tea at some point in their day. That’s what I try to do when things threaten to overwhelm. Pausing for the act of making a cup of tea is often just enough to keep one from tottering over the proverbial edge. So many big mistakes and irrevocable actions can be prevented by waiting a moment instead of rushing ahead.
And so I stand up and walk away from the desk. Selecting a mug that is comforting to the hand, I feel its sturdy composition and stalwart substance. It’s one of Andy’s mugs, from a set that goes back before we even met. I think of our history, all the years and all that we’ve been through – not specifically, merely the overarching reach of our time together – and already any negativity has been knocked off-balance.
Finding a sachet of tea – lemon and ginger – I drop it into the mug and fill it with water, allowing it to steep, and waiting for the air around us to still itself so I can watch the water vapor elegantly rise in ungraspable wisps of gray. I sit in the moment, in the stillness, while the tea cools. And at the end of the five minutes this exercise has taken, I feel a sense of calm and peace, and carry on with the day.
The ‘friend’ referenced in the featured screenshot above is apparently me, which came as a complete surprise. It seems that a certain writer at the Times Union thinks I ended our ‘friendship’ because of Chick-fil-A, and she sent out a newsletter to her readers describing as much. What the point might have been for this flashy headline hyping the ‘dead friendship’ and the baseless description in the newsletter of how I supposedly ended it is anyone’s guess. I reached out to her privately with a couple of simple questions on how it came to be, but after confirming I was the one she had written about, she never answered anything else.
Right now, I’m confused and wondering why she did it. Was it for an uptick in subscriptions to her newsletter? Was she genuinely interested in having a dialogue about such a divisive subject? It raised more questions than it answered, and they were about deeper things like the true meaning of friendship, the effect that posting some things on social media has on our lives, and, quite frankly, basic journalistic integrity.
By sending out a newsletter and then refusing to answer my questions about it, she was able to voice her take on it, without allowing me, even privately, to challenge her characterization of events. It went entirely against her purported stance of always being open to discussion, and leads me to the current dilemma of whether or not I should write my own blog post on what really happened.
Andy thinks I should do just that: post a blog detailing how it went down, showing all the receipts, and getting my side out there, and he usually has sound and reasonable advice. Part of me agrees, if only to clear up the very questionable perceptions that the newsletter contains, as well as the resulting comments on FaceBook that question my values as a friend. Another part of me thinks it’s so silly I can’t even be bothered, as simple as it would be to put it all on public blast. For now, however, I’m simply going to put my thoughts down in a draft and file them away for a bit, confident that at least one person will be checking this blog regularly to see if it’s about them. Stay tuned…
A week of March is done – and the first one was as lion-like as promised. I can hear the roar of the wind as I write this, but it’s 60 degrees and sunny out so I’m not complaining. There are other lions still to come, though I’m not quite ready to unleash them. All in good time. Until then, let’s do our usual Monday morning recap of the week that started the month of spring.
