Thanksgiving

It’s a month till Christmas Eve. Saw my first Christmas tree lot yesterday. I am just like my mother – don’t buy me anything – take care of yourself/your family.

But I’m in the cabn wth the "i" sticking terribly. Minor annoyance when you can be n your cabin in the low light of a Tuesday morning at 7:10 two days before Thanksgiving when you were ready to sit insde and decided at the last moment to see what it’s lke outside and find that even though you thought you turned the heater off, expecting the cold to come like the weather people said it would, it’s not here yet and you must have hit “low” instead of “off” so that it’s 49 degrees and balmy.

I was reading The Dialogues yesterday – the end. I’d brought it along when I left for work, and I parked on the side of the road across from a field full of geese. It was drizzling again but I rolled the window down and listened to the geese talk as I read and let it fill me with a sort of hope about myself. Forget hope for the world. I needed that hope for myself.

I’ve noticed the geese in this particular field for about a week. It’s a plowed field but all kinds of stalks stick up from it so that it’s got this pattern and texture and if you weren’t looking with observant eyes, you wouldn’t see the geese dotted throughout the field like so much more texture or so many more reeds. There had to be a hundred of them. One day they were there and another flock – one of the biggest I’ve ever seen – was flying over head, taking so long to come together that I never saw them enter formation. There was so much to look at that it was dizzying.

I walked at the park the other day and the cat tails at the side of the lake were so thick and there was something about them, their multiplicity, the things they hide, the sheer visual impact of their tall standing number and muted colors that I wanted a camera for Christmas, just like I have as I visit the fields. They’re speaking to me as much as The Dialogues are, and if it’s not about hope, it’s about home in some way. I relax with the fields and geese I visit. I breathe. I stop. I pull to the side of the road.

I thought of changing my pubjournal blog’s theme from writing a book with a non-traditional publisher to writing a book in crisis. The first line would be: the crisis rules.

Then last night, cleaning my office, I found this piece I’d written last Thanksgiving when I was doing PalTalk. It was about Ed (my father-in-law) and the fried chicken breakfast he liked to have on Thanksgiving, and then it morphed into being about the beauty that you see in hard times. I thought of reading it to the family Thanksgiving morning.

I was working so hard, just then, to be in crisis, to be honest about it, and to find ways to relate it to A Course of Love. I’d forgotten completely that I was doing that at this time last year. Which means I did it for at least three months. Probably four or more. That is so bizarre to me. It feels like a lifetime ago. Makes me realize how long I’ve been in crisis. In change with no let up. And how a course about life and love and heart has to get you through the rough times or otherwise you might as well call it a crock. Yeah, you want instant relief, but if you get the strength to endure, and to not close your heart and get bitter, that’s a lot. A lot to be thankful for.