Ordinary Beauty

I know you have been waiting breathlessly for pix from the big ReFirement party. Hope to have some Flicker links soon. In the meantime, this is what the transition looked like:

Finally, using my talents for good!

One entire week into “retirement” and now scrambling to get ready for The Inevitable Event next Saturday. This is the party we decided to host annually after we had such a great time at our wedding last year. Drop me a comment with your email address if you didn’t receive the Evite (a whole lot of folks got theirs stuck in a spam filter or something so perhaps that’s where yours is??).

The backdrop I am painting is for the entrance to the party. Quite welcoming, eh?

Here’s one of the things that will keep my busy in my retirement: watching and enjoying the wildlife in my backyard.

You might not catch it at first glance, but in the photograph below, at the top, a mother raccoon is peeking out from between the tree trunks, encouraging her offspring below to climb the tree. The little one did not manage so well.

6:48 a.m. Northern Flicker outside my west window, Hairy Woodpecker outside the east window, and through the north window I can see a raccoon beneath the Western Cedar. (There is no south window.) It is already 54 degrees outside and the cast of the sky gives me hope that at this time tonight it will be plenty warm for al fresco dining.

My life is lush and I love it.

This morning the flickers are landing on the house roof. I’ve never seen that before; is it because of the owl feather?

This morning I found a feather on the ground. Wing feather, large, soft, “striped”.

I believe it is an owl feather. I’ve never seen an owl feather of this ilk–so large and “striped” as this is. But I recognize the velvet quality of an owl feather. And, when I saw it on the ground, pretty much it told me it was from an owl.

Some people believe that owls portend death. Like the “death” card in tarot, I believe that death is symbolic of endings. So it seems only right that I found this feather outside the door of the office which will very soon be my former place of employment.

However, I am not so inclined to view owls as symbols of death, as much as they are so many other things.

Some people want to know what will I be doing, once I “retire”–which at this point is 7 working days from now!

First, I have to mention that I like Michael Meade’s term for this new section of my life: ReFirement. And the playlist I have been working on for my “retirement” includes many songs that celebrate fire and new beginnings.

To my husband’s confusion, I have been spending a great deal of time thinking about this next part of my life. I have been working with Ellen Newhouse to sort through my feelings, fears, and exhilarations about not having a day-job anymore, and having so many hours of the day (and night) open up for me to do with them as I wish.

My dear husband thinks I ought to chill and let my new life unfold. I agree. But as I suddenly realized, I have too many options–so many options that I am overwhelmed. So, I am setting my sights clearly on some things that I want to do with my life, in the near future.

• I am going to aim for Peru. June, 2009. Study a bit of Spanish language. Study a lot of Peruvian history and culture. Ask around for words of wisdom from those who have traveled there.
• Maybe get off my sorry a*s and learn some yoga. Yoga is a large component of the trek to Peru.
• There’s the stuff of my inheritance that still sits in my big-a*s moving truck: that’s got to be redistributed, some to my home and some to other folks. October 10 is my self-imposed deadline for being done with that chore.
• A book. With Robby Pellet. More on that as it comes together.
• Garden. Garden. Garden. Weeds. Schemes for a pond and placing large rocks. Weeds. Bird watching. Weeds.
• Volunteering with Heron Habitat Helpers.

A few more focuses. Perhaps I will visit my brother and sister. Perhaps I’ll see my cousin. And there’s a pair of skates in the back of my closet that really miss me. Plus, fersure, a trek to Wesley and Wiktor’s naked pool party, in August.

The dear Elke Macartney is one of several people in my life right now who have been spending a lot of time in hospitals, tending to the critically ill and injured. Her young son was in an auto accident recently. His girlfriend was a passenger, and the accident caused extreme injury to her, and to Elke’s car, which her son was driving at the time.

Elke spent many weeks tending to son and girlfriend–hours bed-side at Harborview and Children’s hospitals. The girlfriend made a storybook “miraculous recovery”, in no small part I know because of the love and attention of Elke and kin. Girlfriend is home now, and Elke can turn some attention to other important matters.

Below is a story she sent me this weekend. She calls it, Creating Pearl 190.

–

Life is settling down a bit in the aftermath of my son and his girlfriend’s car accident. Girlfriend Kristin is home now, well on the way to full recovery. Son Eron is recovering as well from his emotional wounds. It’s time to move on in life. The car in the accident was my newer model Ford Focus, a car I was still making payments on when the accident happened. The insurance paid off the rest of the payments, leaving me with nothing to spend on a new one.

After the accident, I was in no mood to look for a car. A generous family friend who owns a dealership nearby loaned me a safe Taurus to get around in while I looked for a car, so that helped for a while. Yet, as I began my search, I found myself anxious about the process. The cars I looked at for my budget of the $2000 I had in the bank were either rust buckets or unsafe or both, and I was feeling quite discouraged. At one point, I thought about buying a car I liked very much for $6000 , but realized that with the accident came an uncertain financial future, so putting my family into further debt was out of integrity. I felt helpless and thought I’d never find a car I could afford.

That’s when Spirit found me, sitting in a bar, crying over a drink after having looked at yet another car I couldn’t afford. “All right Spirit,” I whined, “I give up. You take it from here, ‘cause this is not working!

And just like that, the tears stopped, and I heard a very distinct, yet gentle voice in my head: “State your demands.” It said.

From me: “Huh?”

The voice in my head repeated, “State your demands.”

So I did: “All right, I want a nice car I will not be embarrassed driving, it has to be safe, and in great condition. It needs to be no more than $2000. And, by the way, I need to look cute driving in it” I threw in that last point for fun.

The next day, I looked online at Craigslist, in the Cars section, and found nothing. I went to close down my computer, but instead pressed the “refresh” button, and saw a new listing for a 1990 Audi in Bellingham (an hour from my home) within my price range. Two phone numbers were listed on the ad: one for the owner of the car, a Korean gal who spoke little English, and the other for a nice man who posted the ad on her behalf. After speaking to the Korean gal, and not understanding her very well, I called the other number and talked to a lovely gentleman named Jack. I told him my situation, and said I needed a car right away. He offered to drive to Bellingham from his home a half hour away to act as translator/transaction facilitator.

I called on a friend to drive me there, and we went to the spot on the street the car was supposed to be parked. No audi was parked there, but a nice looking white Mercedes sat in a nearby parking lot with a man sitting in it. I commented to my friend: “If that pretty car was for sale, I would buy it!” She agreed I would look rather cute driving it….

We turned around, and parked in front of the Korean gal’s house, and saw the Audi parked in the driveway. “Hmmm,” I said, “the car has been moved. I wonder what that means.” Then we looked to the Mercedes, where a gentleman got out and walked toward us. “Are you Jack?” I called out.

“Yes, he answered, “Are you Elke?”

We shook hands and looked into each others eyes. “I have bad news,” he said sadly. “My friend sold her car fifteen minutes ago, all by herself!”

“Just my luck.” I said, shaking my head.

He regarded me and then said, “You know, I feel badly about you driving all the way up here, and about what has happened to you, so I have an offer for you. See that Mercedes over there? I want you to take it and drive it for a few weeks until you find a car to buy.”

“What?” I asked, astonished at the offer. “You don’t even know me!”

“True, he said, “But I looked in your eyes, and I know I can trust you. Listen, you need a break. Please take it, drive it, and if you like it, I’ll sell it to you for $2000.”

“Let me buy you lunch” I said, and we trooped over to the restaurant, where he held the door open for me, took my coat, and generally treated me like a princess. A retired inventor, he tinkers with cars, had bought this 1988 Mercedes 190E, fixed it up, and was willing to part with it just to give me a good ride. I drove him home, then drove it to LaConner through snow and rain, and fell in love with it.

The next day I brought my German mom with me on a lovely country drive in the old Mercedes to meet with Jack and buy the car.

I couldn’t be happier or feel more abundant. Abundance isn’t creating more debt in one’s life in order to have nice new “things”. True abundance is being in integrity with life and its challenges. True abundance is meeting someone who genuinely cares and wants to make a difference in someone’s life.

By the way, I knew the name of my car immediately upon driving it for the first time: Pearl 190. She was created in a time of major irritation in my life, and is a bright pearl in my eyes.

Dear Elke,

In my dream this morning you were hosting another mentoring group, all women. We were outdoors, I think it was a large meadow. To the side were three people who were not part of the group, one of them a man whose skin was gray (paint? clay? ashes?); he was a storyteller.

You were going to teach us something new (a healing technique?) and asked me to help you by selecting one by one from the group the person you would use for demonstrating the technique. You asked me how I felt about that and I said, “Nervous”. Then you indicated a woman who was right there next to us and said, “She definitely needs this.”

But she seemed reluctant (not resistant, but reluctant). She was a very small woman and I was on my knees at the time and embraced her in a fashion meant to be reassuring but which also served to “capture” her (remember, she wasn’t resistant per se). She became even smaller and my embrace enfolded her completely. She said, “Oh, I thought you were in love with me,” as she sorted out what was going on. Then she said, “I’ll just wait and go last.”

I explained that we couldn’t know in advance when would be your last demonstration so she ought to go now, first, with the certainty of having the experience.

But then someone came and required your attention so you left. The group was momentarily flummoxed but quickly found something “useful” to do with our time. One of the members distributed very large opals, about the size of baseballs. Now it is the nature of opals that they come with their own “fire”, but our task was to hold them and amplify the fire. For most of the women, their opals did come to glow more intensely, but mine was just dull with some mild natural opal fire deep in it.

But then I turned it over in my hands and saw that on the bottom it was displaying sentences, in rapid succession. They looked quite a lot like the paper fortunes in fortune cookies, and they were changing so quickly that it was possible only to read one sentence swiftly before the next appeared. They seemed to be answers of some kind.

When you returned to the group, you asked about my rock and such, and I showed you what it was doing. You instantly ascended, rising straight up into the blue sky a very great distance.

And that’s the last element of the dream that I recall.