Autum Haiku

Hiking in autumn
leaves micromanaging trails.
Where the hell am I?

What happened at school today?

Something must have happened at school today. I don't know what it was. Because my daughter came home and cleaned out her backpack.

But then she moved on to the big basket of crapola in the kitchen--stuff I can't identify that belongs to the kids--and proceeded to clean that out, too.

"Junk," she said, tossing out a plastic-thingy with string. "Junk," she said, tossing a broken necklace. "Junk," she said, tossing a bald stuffed animal.

And so it went on...until she moved to a corner of the hutch where CD's, tape, glue and knitting needles cluttered the back wall, virtually pushing out the cat who considers the hutch her buffet.

"Junk...junk...this goes here..."

And next....the junk drawer. (Yes, we have that thing we call a junk drawer.)

"Mom, what ARE these? These tin things? We never use them."

"They are to hold crab cakes. Toss 'em." (Like, have I ever baked a crab cake?)

The more she organized, the more energized I got.

Sweep that floor, clean that counter, cook dinner, make some pudding for dessert...kitchen Zen.

Remind me to thank her teacher.

What difference does it make?

Have you ever wondered if what you do makes a difference? I mean, do you reach the end of the day and say, "What did I really accomplish today? Did I make the world a better place?"

That sounds like the beginning to a stupid infomercial. "Well, wonder no longer, because the new ego-stroker will make you feel good about your worthless lives no matter how pathetic you are."

Okay, so this isn't meant to be a depressing post. It's just a reflection.

Theoretically, we are supposed to acknowledge that every smile and random act of kindness we bestow on the world will make some kind of positive difference. Now, I believe this. I really do. But sometimes, when I look at that huge world around me and think of the billions of people that inhabit the planet, I think, wow. What I do is so much a drop in the bucket, it's practically not even wet.

Please don't get me wrong. It's not an ego stroke I am seeking. I am not one of those who needs a pat on the back because I let the guy behind me go first in line. What I am trying to say is, did that act on my part make a difference in the long run?

Maybe it did to him. Maybe he was in a rush to get home to his infant daughter and sick wife. Maybe he needed to get to work which is, let's face it, a bit of a commodity these days. Maybe he was just more tired than I was and really appreciated saving that extra minute.

Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered one way or another.

We never know what our actions will mean to someone else, and I think that's really what kind of annoys me. I like to think I am doing positive things, and generally I like to think what I am doing is making people happy. But how can we be sure? I mean, what if we are actually doing more harm than good and we don't know it? Hel-lo! A little road map here would be greatly appreciated.

But okay, so maybe all this makes me some schmucko people-pleaser. Well, so be it. I won't be a jerk to please people, and I won't go against my own value system, and I won't neglect the more important things just so I can make someone else happy. I'm not a kiss-but. So in my mind, that's fine. But I will go out of my way to a certain extent because I like people to be happy. When people around me are happy, I am happy. So you see, it's a kind of selfishness on my part, really.

I also like people to be good, however, and I realize you can't make someone good by making them happy.

Which is a good thing.

Because I have a hard enough time making myself good.

Why Poetry?

"Let us remember that in the end
we go to poetry for one reason,
so that we might more fully
inhabit our lives and the world
in which we live them, and that
if we more fully inhabit these
things, we might be less apt to
destroy both."
—CHRISTIAN WIMAN, EDITOR, POETRY MAGAZINE

Thought for the Day

Slacker

Haven't celebrated a word of the day in a long time because I have been working my be-hind off. And now, I would love to be quiescent, but alas, I have many more things to do.

For Our Veterans

My Daughter Says

My daughter says

butterflies are the souls

of people. Yes,

I say. They are the souls

of all good soldiers.

Which is the current me?

How's this for hair changes?

It's nice to know I can go incognito at any time.

On God and Prayer

For a variety of reasons, including because my barefoot blogger friend Sandra has posted on God, I've been thinking about what "God" is to me.

I admit I use the word often but then sometimes feels disingenuous because my version of "God" isn't the one most people think of when they hear the word "God."

My God isn't a strictly Christian or doctrinal God. My God is more like The Great Spirit, Wakan, the Transcendental notion of the creator, nature and humanity as one, the Oversoul, the Great Chain of Being, Brahman and Allah all wrapped into a mass of Spiritus Mundi which I call God.

When I pray, I pray from that place between the eyes and above the bridge of the nose, the spot where a Hindu woman might wear a Tilaka.

I have only recently started to pay attention to the place where my prayer comes from. I suppose I thought about it because I constantly have people around me talking about prayer. I know I "pray" but I also know that my version of prayer isn't usually the same as theirs.

When I was a child, I would look up when I prayed because to a child raised in Christianity (Catholicism, to be exact), the notion of heaven is part of heritage, and as everyone knows, "Heaven" is "up" and "Hell" is "down." Though most Christians will acknowledge that isn't cosmically accurate, the tradition stands. Jesus, after all, was said to ascend into Heaven. He didn't beat a horizontal pathway into the trees.

My mind's eye, however, does seem to wander amongst the trees when I pray. The words move from my mind's eye to the forest to the fields, to the streets (if that is where I am) and back into myself, a succession of pleases and thank yous and "Let me call you God for lack of a better word." I am speaking to someone personal, yet I know that the omniscience of that spirituality I believe in is more than I can hold in one thought or a million words. And so I just call it "God" and talk to "God" the same way I did when I was a child--like I am talking to myself almost, but another part of myself that is both external and internal.

I've come to accept that my prayers are simple as are my beliefs about what constitutes a "message from God." Deer that stop long enough for me to whisper to them are messages and parts of God. Trees decorating me with fall leaves are God. Tears of joy are God, my daughters' eyelashes are God, my dogs' kisses are God, my husband's cowlick is God. The sound of wind is God, the good works people do is God, learning and compassion are God. When I pray, it is to all of these things I wrap up into that one convenient word that means love, creation, goodness, acceptance, meaning--God.

And I believe we come back to these things again and again, that death is not death, that our bodies and spirits are recycled here on Earth and when Earth is no more, we return to the cosmic bodies we might have once called the heavens. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, matter is neither created nor destroyed, so there must be something after we die, and I have my own beliefs about what those might be. I intend to come back as a purple lilac and then as a Canadian Goose.

Whenever I panic about my aging dog and companion Shiba dying, I comfort myself in knowing she will return to me in a different form, and that what she has left as a mark is permanent on this Earth. No one and nothing entirely disappear, ever. Bodies and spirits and minds and the things they leave behind live on, sometimes in different places, but still here. And I think we, as spiritual beings, want it that way. We send ourselves here to learn and only when we reach a higher spiritual level will we be able to move on to a higher life and spiritual form. Where we go and when is a mystery to us that we don't want ourselves to see while we are alive on this Earth. Else, how would we grow?

Only goodness will get us there, to that evolved spiritual place we should be--the goodness we find in the great teachers and philosophers who all hold God within them just as we do. It's a matter of getting more in touch with that God we all have and letting it out, just as Jesus and Buddha did, as Gandhi did, as Mohammad did, as Martin Luther King Jr. did. Some people are better at it than others, some are more spiritually evolved, and these are those who should be our spiritual role models. And the natural world--it should be our role model and we should respect it as part of ourselves.

And so, I see God everywhere, and I see the opposite of God everywhere. And I can't say why we sometimes can't evolve the way we should or the way we want to or why some of us have had so many lives we have lost count (I'm one of those people, and I know for sure I will be back again).

I can only say we have more to learn and more to do, and that it doesn't end at death. I can ask the great teachers and read what they said, and maybe someday, I will evolve like they did, but for now, I am just who I am--this little part of God, this one person who talks to squirrels, maunders and hopes to pay the mortgage on time.

And like...

..am I NOT nervous about today's reading?

--read post in Valley Girl accent which sometimes comes out--