It's easy if you try

On Tuesday, Dolly Parton received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine. This seems only right and fair, since last year she quietly donated $1M to Vanderbilt University researchers who developed this vaccine. Parton released a video of the process and urged everyone to also get vaccinated.

She is such a mensch.

In her honor, then, today’s earworm is Dolly Parton singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”. 

 

 

A dude's gotta do

I’m beginning to wonder if I have lived too long. “Dude Wipes” is apparently a thing:

I mean, is there some reason why dudes need their own wipes? How are flushable wipes better than toilet paper? If you’re concerned about consumption of TP, install a bidet, no? And, again, if you're concerned about the environment, what are the individual wipes wrapped in? Do you not care about all that plastic? Where would a dude carry his pack of wipes if he is in fact “on-the-go”? In his dude-bag?

Evidently I’m not the only one with questions. Here’s what Google served up when I searched on them:

 

People and places

This now being March, I’m hoping winter is behind us. But I haven’t used up all my photos of the Snows of February. So here are a few.

I shot this sequence of snow folk about three or four days after the event, so they look like they’ve been through hard times.

Nearby, there were the remnants of a snow fort, which was more metaphoric than defensible.

Back in the ‘hood, there were like-minded people who built a wall in front of their house.

Complete with portholes/arrowslits. 

 

Openings

There’s an old joke—and do not report me to PETA—about a farmer who buys a mule from a neighbor. The mule has a rep for being able to pull a plough all day long. But the farmer discovers it won’t move. So, naturally, he drags the mule’s former owner over and starts ranting.

“I bought this mule because he was supposed to be a puller. ‘Never stops,’ you said. ‘Pulls all day long.’ Well, this SOB won’t move. Not one bit. You sold me a slug. I want my money back and you take back this worthless animal.” And like that.

The former owner nods, picks up a two-by-four and smacks the mule right in the head. The mule immediately starts pulling at a good clip.

“You have to get his attention first,” he says.

Well, sometimes it seems to me that the Universe has to get our attention for us to get moving. This past week has been one of those metaphorical two-by-fours for me. But I didn’t realize it until I got a message from a friend asking about a quote from Rumi, the 13^th-Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic.

To some extent, Rumi is the Magic 8-Ball of life coaching; you can find a Rumi quote to answer any question about why your life sucks. But that doesn’t mean you should disregard them. In this case, the quote was, “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.” On reading it, I immediately thought of two things, Kintsugi and Leonard Cohen.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold; it’s based on the philosophy of wabi-sabi, embracing the flawed. With Kintsugi, the goal is not invisible repair, which disguises the damage caused by using the object; the goal is to celebrate the beauty of utility and the strength that comes from putting broken pieces back together as one. Kintsugi proclaims, “I have suffered, but I am strong and I am more than that suffering.”

The Leonard Cohen reference is from the refrain of “Anthem”:

“Ring the bells that still can ring
“Forget your perfect offering
“There is a crack in everything
“That’s how the light gets in.”

Bells can crack when flaws created during casting are struck by the clapper. Once cracked, a bell might be restored through welding, but often it needs to be recast—melted down and made anew. Cohen tells us not only to nevermind about the flaws (“forget your perfect offering”), but instead to celebrate them. Because when life hits one of our innate flaws, the ensuing crack is not inherently catastrophe; it can be an opportunity for enlightenment—for literally opening oneself up to the light.

And this is where a Sufi mystic, a Japanese art form and a Canadian poet came together to smack me with a board. Some things have transpired at work that have pissed me off a lot, culminating in last week being a complete adrenaline suck. They came about in a way that threw up trust issues the size of a Christo installation and I spent a lot of the weekend trying to reconcile myself to doing a job that holds no particular interest for me, considering other options and figuring out how to park my Drama Queen somewhere while I navigate a (new) org that has demonstrated itself to be both disorganized and deceitful.

(I’m not going into details. I’ll just say that a VP asked for my candid opinion—“no hard feelings” (a direct quote)—about whether moving my two colleagues and me into his group was a good fit; then he told the VP of my previous org that he has concerns about “people who aren’t whole-hearted” working for him. And that he can fuck all the way off.)

I do not interpret Rumi as advising us to be reckless in how we give our hearts; honestly, doing the same thing over and over (even in loyalty) expecting different results is just nuts. He’s reminding us that the cracks that come from the practice of love are not just the price of use; they are signs of strength and opportunities to grow. Taking a risk does not equal recklessness; never taking a risk, though, is the mark of sterility. It's finding that balance that's the hard part.

I’d been looking at this work tsuris from the perspective of how much pain it causes me. This weekend I realized that’s because I was giving it too much importance in my life. For the past 16 months I loved what I was doing and what I was contributing to; my value was clear to those around me. Last week that changed, but I have not. My heart, so to speak, was broken (yet again), but I choose not to close it. Perhaps I don’t give it to my employer as fully as I had done—at least, not to these particular people. But if I let resentment overtake me, that’s a self-inflicted wound, so no. That's the wrong lesson to take from this. 

This frees me to open myself to other things. I don’t know what other things as of yet. I might need welding; possibly recasting some major components; maybe some painstaking mending with molten gold; or something entirely different. I embrace my flaws and the light they allow into me. My heart is open.

Universe—you got my attention, ‘kay? Lay off the smacking.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Cheers!

One of my friends has a spectacular gift for, well, gifts. So much so that I refer to her as the Gift Fairy.

Some time before Christmas she asked if I like mimosas, which I confess I do; they make me think of summer and of brunches with friends. (I used to be quite the brunch bunny.) I also confess that I did not question why she would ask that. And, in fact, almost immediately after answering, I was OBE.

Then, right before Christmas, two packages showed up at my door, which has largely been the contact between GF and me this past year. One was in a Christmas bag, and the other was an open-topped box with a VERY FRAGILE FOR NEW YEARS notice on it.

One of the seriously mention-worthy packets in the bag was a pair of silicone strips that you snap over the ends of oven racks. In my pandemic-fueled baking, I acquired hash mark blisters from reaching into a 450-degree oven and touching my forearm on the rack. (The first one was noticeable enough for my primary care doctor to ask me about it during a telehealth visit; one of the others put that to shame, and that was the one I showed GF during brunch last Autumn.) But not any more!

Well, but today I’m here to share my gratitude for the New Year’s gift, which turned out to be champagne flutes that are so pretty that I went out to buy orange juice to make mimosas.

Then it occurred to me, that the glasses were the right size for just OJ, which I’ve been doing for breakfast ever since. Which is a good thing because I can’t recall the last time I’ve had OJ; probably at a hotel in France in 2018.

And finally, it occurred to me that they’re fine for sparkling water, which for some reason I’ve preferred to either coffee or tea lately.

Every time I take a sip from one of the glasses, I think of my friend. It’s almost as though we’re sitting together over breakfast; while that’s not yet the case, I’m grateful for the glasses that remind me of her and give me hope for more shared beverages.