It is May first. The weather feels more like March 15, with cold southerly gales and stubby brown grass and black branches, but there are signs of spring: hawks, bears, a cow moose moving in the woods, and rafts of ducks and scoters.
There are boxes of nice stuff that I don’t need anymore in my garage waiting to be dropped off at the Fairgrounds Friday for the annual Hospice Rummage Sale this weekend. That’s something good for me, for you (if you need any of it), and for Hospice. Spring-cleaning, like Thoreau’s firewood, warms me three times.
First Friday this week promises to be a big “First” of a summer of amped-up Friday nights. Some two-dozen places are showing off Haines’ arts and culture, food and drinks, and high community spirit. I am especially looking forward to the fisher-poet reading at the Pioneer Bar.
My week began with Mandy’s Monday noon yoga class. I didn’t giggle once when she talked about the moon and tides, and chakras and truth and beauty and love and trusting our hearts and the wisdom in them, and all that woo-woo stuff. I held my hand on my belly and heart. I breathed deeply and was grateful.
I am all in with adding piles more of this “stuff” to my life. (What the world needs now, is love sweet love. Sing it loud.)
There I was, stretched out on the floor of the Chilkat Center Lobby humming a mantra about the moon and truth. Listening to the floor creak upstairs, over our heads, as people walked around at the radio station, with my eyes covered and hands facing up to catch the energy of the universe, and trying not to take a long nap, it was that comfortable. Mandy is a poet, so of course she is speaking of honoring the love in my heart, and inviting the moon to help me illuminate it.
I could blame this soft feeling on the moon or my counseling, which by the way, is great. But it may have to do with the spring light and hope that comes with it. Still, it makes sense to pay as much attention to emotional therapies as I do to physical therapies.
I smile, thinking about my daughter who has just taken the front of her car off and repaired some dents using a YouTube video, and how I want to be more like her, too. I was afraid she’d break something. Her car is big and new. She had no doubt it could be done.
Fear not, the angels say.
I have an elderly friend who sees things that no one else can. Children dancing on the lawn, and a favorite cat that’s long dead. “They don’t scare me,” she says. They comfort her. I told her I wish I could see them, too.
When her doctor said that what she saw was not real, she replied, “How do you know? You can’t see love, and you can’t see hate, and you can’t see God, but they are there.”
I wish I could feel the tides and the tug of the moon’s truth inside me the way Mandy and the yogis can, or see kind spirits, the way my friend does, and I’d love to be able to fix my car myself like my daughter did. Maybe I will. Who knows?
Gandhi said to be fearless, truthful, and gentle.
Kind of like a golden retriever.
Still, that’s very good advice when dealing with others – as long as you don’t knock them over by mistake– but it’s best when I apply it to my own heart.
