WordSisters

Category: Worrying

  • Navigating Life’s Turbulence: Lessons from a Country Walk

    Candidate signs and Halloween decorations needed clearing November 7th along the country road where I walked. My feet moved slower than my thoughts of how to accept election results. 

    Five hundred feet ahead, at least a dozen large, wild, turkeys covered the road as well as both shoulders. They can be mean in a standoff. Future concerns fell to immediate safety. Should I turn around, my clap hands, swing a fallen branch to clear a path? Yelling and singing haven’t worked in the past. My walk was over.

    Two deer bounded out from woods on one side of the road, gracefully crossed the asphalt, and entered deeper tree growth in beautiful synchrony. The turkeys scurried behind the white tails. Here, then gone. The walk cleared.

     “Awesome” I said out loud at the display of natural beauty. Unattractive turkeys had been swept into a brief glimpse of something amazingly natural on another day of unpleasant election rhetoric and deep discord.

    Decades ago, St. Mary’s in Luxemburg, WI began my Christian orientation. Small towns, filled with relatives, made it easier to accept a set of beliefs and traditions. What I still carry is a careful relationship with God. Call it spirituality or faith, old-fashioned or unnecessary, I value the foundation. At the turkey and deer moment, I followed the spoken word with a silent “Thank you, God” for a reminder of good possibilities.

    In November, regardless of voting on the winning or losing side, many people remain thankful for family, friends, freedom to have a public opinion. I dread how politics and powerful men with money will affect the quality of life. 

    Fear feels like too powerful a word at a time when caution is critical. Fear was two years ago when I had major surgery to save my life. I knew what I feared that day. I could balance fear and hope. Today I can’t name what to fear beyond unpleasant changes. Fear and dread appear in definitions of each word, but fear has a more expansive description. 

    I’d love to be one of those deer easily running through the woods. I can accept moving closer to the speed of the wild turkeys shuffling through fallen leaves or awkwardly flying up to their nightly roost. During the day I will keep looking for ways to move the threatening turkeys out of the way of my walk and yours.

    Two years of thankfulness. More to come.

  • Three Summertime Favorites

    This summer’s smoky air has forced me to confront the many effects of climate change. While I shop for an electric or hybrid vehicle, I’m consciously turning away from my anxious dismay to remind myself of three favorite summertime experiences.

    Fireflies at the University of Minnesota Arboretum 

    Walking the hardwood paths and wildflower fields at dusk, when the grounds are usually closed, was magical. The air was warm and still. The land exhaled. At first, we saw a spark of light here and there in the shadows. As dusk deepened to near dark, small clouds of fireflies shimmered in meadows and swamps. Flashed On. Off. On. Off. A silent conversation. A symphony of light.

    ShrinerFest 

    In a week, my extended family will gather for a weekend in Chicago we call ShrinerFest. I continue to be delighted and surprised my siblings, their far-flung children, spouses or beaus, and grandchildren love this get-together. We’re all so different—from introverted scientists to outgoing sales managers—and hold a range of political and religious views. But we sidestep all that and just enjoy catching up, eating, laughing, eating, teasing. One young niece even illustrated a book about ShrinerFest for a school project.

    Drinking wine on my small porch in the evening

    We sit in the glowing circle of lamplight. I stretch out on the loveseat reading a novel while my husband reads tomorrow’s news today. The dozens of birds inhabiting our blue spruce are silent. City buses trundling by interrupt the KBEM jazz or blues on the radio. Now and then we hear the cry of a small animal—a rabbit? Chipmunk? I’m not enough of a naturalist to know. The ceiling fan stirs humid air that’s cooled to comfortable by 10 o’clock. The neighborhood quiets. We sip and read.

  • In Any Way You Can

    “The war. What is more opposite to music? The silence of ruined cities and killed people…Our parents are happy to wake up in the morning in bomb shelters—but alive. Our loved ones don’t know if we will be together again. The war doesn’t let us choose who survives and who stays in eternal silence….Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about this war on your social networks, on TV. Support us, in any way you can. Any – but not silence. And then peace will come.”

    Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Grammy Awards Speech

    A hand in its winter glove. Shoes and ankles poking from the earth. Blocks of a modern city reduced to rubble. Couples saying good-bye. Mothers, eyes devoid of emotion, carrying babies and leading tiny children wearing bright snowsuits across miles of empty streets. Old women crying.

    Baby Boomers grew up reading about WW II and the Korean conflict because fathers, uncles, or grandfathers would not talk about what their experience. Pictures from the concentration camps and what we were taught was so vivid, I thought Anne Frank was a contemporary. Evening news in the 1960s and 1970s carried pictures of body bags, scorched lands, a young girl running naked through chemical-filled air in Vietnam. While the first wave of Boomer males received draft numbers and one-way tickets to Vietnam, many of their generation took to the streets to demand no more war.

    But men in power can’t seem to walk away from using weapons and terror to grab a piece of land, access to a bit more wealth, deny the right to life for people from different nationalities or faith. Their march of destruction and the death of innocent fellow humans screams evil. For the Greatest Generation and the Boomers, today’s television triggers memories of skeletal survivors walking Europe’s burned fields, of staggering death tolls on Pacific islands, a mushroom cloud over Japan, young vets missing limbs. I had not heard the language of genocide until watching interviews with Russian citizens who spoke about the need to wipe Ukraine and its people off the earth. I cannot forget it.

    As regular people, we are played by the intellectual powers of all sides. Russia probably claims success for each person frightened by images from their brutality in Ukraine.  Our government probably balances the need to keep Ukraine’s misery in citizens’ minds while controlling fear. No matter who manipulates the message, the Ukrainians own it in their daily fight for freedom.