I am entering into new layers of self-authorizing, self-organizing, and (the newest that I’ve learned from my friend and peer, E) self-responsive around how I want to live.
I’m feeling more free, happier, less burdened than I have in my adult life. I’m experiencing these new ways of being because I am dedicating my most precious resource of time towards actions that fulfill, nurture, and galvanize me across a range of activities:
- gardening
- reading books
- baking
- writing
- exercise
- swimming in saltwater
- sleeping
- napping
- calling and texting and communicating with people whose voices and stories I am curious to listen to
I have discerned differently in the month since Mom’s death. I’m doing far less caretaking of other people, particularly people who do not emote with me or cannot be vulnerable in the limited minutes we have together either over the phone, in real life and even in correspondence through email or text messages. By obligating myself to ask people who don’t or can’t meaningfully talk about what’s happening for them, I was spinning in analysis and confusion and preoccupation in the hours and weeks afterwards. As I have reduced the frequency of phone, text, email and conversation, I’m spinning less in that confusion and resentment which would foment anxiety.
I have been aware for years that I could easily enter into the kitchen but not into the carport just as I could pick up a book but not a spade, a watering can, or a bag of seeds.
But I’m now gardening multiple mornings every week, sometimes with the kids, sometimes alone. Though, a small fire to burn grasses and weeds and wood into biochar will entice them in ways that weeding and seeding alone do not. I’m baking and cooking plenty, increasingly a range of new recipes and baked goods as I have more inspiration and a mild dose of daring to attempt new recipes. When the kids spoke of coffee cake during lunch, I baked it the next day before school, because I’d located a new recipe. And the act of baking a sour cream coffee cake with chocolate chips sprinkled on top was a place for me to meet their imaginations.
There’s no wrong with reading books, as I have a large range of memoirs, novels, history, poetry, anthropology, graphic novels, mythology from the library. And my love of reading is contagious, demonstrating that a book is a way to slow down and go have some alone time (when not reading aloud to someone else). They have each had library cards for nine months and their appetites for books expands with the imagination-stoking characters, topics, plots, justice, oppression, journeys, suffering, geography, history and humor that they read and see. Their relationships with books are vast and multi-dimensional. A few days ago they spoke of other planetary existences and as I read aloud another adventure of Hilo and his friends Gina, D.J. and Izzie by Judd Winick, two nights ago before bed, I noted that some of their notions of moons around Saturn and life elsewhere are being compelled by these illustrations of kids’ antics, their dialogue as their bizarre lives morph into heroic journeys.
As I explore more new practices, I am feeling happier with some of the old, familiar habits that I’ve known for decades. I feel more gusto this season.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 