I was looking for a course, a way
and meaning in my life
and thought the answer could be found
in all that wise men wrote.
And they are surely not to blame
if I ended up no wiser.
That mystery so clear, so deep,
is not to be found in books.
It was in your eyes, shining, blue,
that I first saw it once.
Eternity opened a tiny crack,
And earth and heaven sang.
~ Olav H. Hauge
(The Magic of Fjords)
A new beginning is a welcome thing. A new week, a new job, a new term at school. Each brings the thrill of a clean slate, a shining start. The heart leaps up at the chance to try again, to do our best, to sow the seed of something that will grow. Autumn is when we plant the promises of spring, unsullied, pure and perfect.
~ Sally Abbott
(Call the Midwife, season 12: episode 6)
We have successfully made the move from Connecticut to North Carolina! What a wild, hectic, chaotic and exciting time these past few weeks have been. But somehow, with lots of help from family and friends, we managed to pull it off.
One kink in our planning was Tim developing bouts of shortness of breath and chest pressure on exertion. He spent a morning in the emergency room before we left where they determined he wasn’t having a heart attack and advised him to follow up with his cardiologist. So Larisa and I did our best to keep his activity level as low as possible while we scrambled to tie up all the loose ends.
After we got down here we repeated the process, spending a morning in the emergency room which thankfully resulted in an appointment with a cardiologist the next day. We really like him. Through the magic of “My Chart” medical records he had thoroughly acquainted himself with Tim’s cardiac history. He suspects that 15+ years after Tim’s by-pass surgery scar tissue may have built up and is starting to block the flow of blood. So he has ordered an echocardiogram to see what is going on in there before he decides what needs to be done.
In the meantime our plans to go out walking in our new adopted home have been put on hold. But I am comforted with the feeling that he is in good hands medically, UNC Hospitals being highly ranked among the best in the country.
Dima & Larisa have made us feel so comfortable and welcome and it is a delight having our grandchildren here to talk to and play with every day. Our real estate agent already has us under contract with a buyer for a selling price higher than we ever dreamed possible. Soon we will be able to find our own place down here. We’ve already started looking online.
I’ve gone out on a few short walks around this cohousing community with the little ones. (Cohousing is an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space.) This is a magical, nature-loving neighborhood with birds singing all day long. There is a very loud frog outside who has croaked us to sleep for a few nights. Deer are allowed everywhere and help themselves to the abundant greenery.
A new beginning… I love it here!
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking a moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
~ Gilda Radner
(It’s Always Something)
Our last day in Connecticut. Tomorrow we depart for North Carolina! The next time I post I will have changed the name of my blog from By the Sea to Inland Wanderings, unless of course, a different inspiration hits me between now and then.
Skunk cabbages (above and below) were emerging everywhere near and in the water at the arboretum on our latest walk. Three difficult weeks had passed without a walk and it was such a relief to finally be outside again.
May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
~ John O’Donohue
(To Bless the Space Between Us)
Our longings have taken us in a new direction. We have decided to move to North Carolina this summer to be near our grandchildren! It was not an easy decision to make as we’ve lived here most of our lives and love New England. I will also miss my sister and living by the sea.
Early in February we came down with our first head colds since before the pandemic began. (Our covid tests were negative.) Ten days of misery… And before he was fully recovered from his cold Tim was struck with a violent case of food poisoning. He’s okay now and we were grateful to finally take another walk!
In the arboretum there were plenty of signs of spring being right around the corner. January was the warmest one on record for Connecticut, with temperatures averaging ten degrees above average. I won’t be surprised to learn that February will be setting a similar record. Hey, if it’s not going to snow and be winter up north here we may as well move south, right?
While blowing my nose nonstop I kept busy online exploring the area that will become my new home, the Piedmont plateau region of North Carolina, the gentle rolling hills between the flat coastal plain and the Appalachian mountains. There are a lot of land conservancies, open spaces, state parks, botanical gardens, an arboretum and trails to keep us happy walking and exploring, at least when it isn’t too hot to go out. We suspect we will be more active in the winter down there. 🙂
There might even be more birds to see. But for this chilly and raw walk we were pleased to see a pair of hooded mergansers swimming and diving for food in the pond.
Thanks to a tag on this shrub, Alnus serrulata, I was able to identify these smooth alder catkins, flowers on a spike, another sign of spring.
The [smooth alder] flowers are monoecious, meaning that both sexes are found on a single plant. Male (Staminate) catkins are 1.6-2.4 in long; female (Pistillate) catkins are 1/2 in long. Reddish-green flowers open in March to April. … The ovate, dark brown, cone-like fruit is hard with winged scales. Seeds are produced in small cones and do not have wings. Fruit usually matures during fall and is quite persistent.
~ Wikipedia
I have to admit, thinking about the logistics involved to move is filling me with anxiety. The last time we moved was 29 years ago and that was just across town. Except for a couple of years living in Greece I’ve lived in Connecticut my whole life. When I moved to Greece with my parents I only had a trunk to fill and that was pretty simple. My parents took care of all the other planning. Now I’m coping with a chronic illness that is bound to complicate things. But we have family and friends helping us so I think we will make it somehow. And to be settled and living near our grandchildren while they are still very young will make it all worth it.
May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
~ John O’Donohue
(To Bless the Space Between Us)
Experience is the Angled Road
Preferred against the Mind
By — Paradox — the Mind itself —
Presuming to it lead
Quite Opposite — How complicate
The Discipline of Man —
Compelling Him to choose Himself
His Preappointed Pain —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #899)
I’m not quite sure what Emily is getting at with this poem but it did get me thinking. Many folks say that experience is the best teacher, but personally experiencing all that life has to offer would take forever and, in my mind, often amounts to wasting time and learning things the hard way. But is it any better to submit to the discipline given by other people, obeying potentially immoral rules from authorities that might oppress or harm ourselves or others? Perhaps experience and discipline are opposite sides of the same coin. Perhaps we are as likely as our teachers to make painful mistakes in judgment as we learn ways to make sense of the world.
As we begin this meal with grace,
Let us become aware of the memory
Carried inside the food before us:
The quiver of the seed
Awakening in the earth,
Unfolding in a trust of roots
And slender stems of growth,
On its voyage toward harvest,
The kiss of rain and surge of sun;
The innocence of animal soul
That never spoke a word,
Nourished by the earth
To become today our food;
The work of all the strangers
Whose hands prepared it,
The privilege of wealth and health
That enables us to feast and celebrate.
~ John O’Donohue
(To Bless the Space Between Us)
May your Thanksgiving be blessed with good chat and cheer
and the love of family and friends!
For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones — for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
~ Alan Watts
(Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality)
When I came across this quote the other day it made me think of the art of saying good-bye. I want to give everyone a quick hug, say good-bye, hop in the car, rushing to get the painful separation over with. Like ripping off a bandage quickly, I tell my husband. But Tim tends to prolongs the misery. Announcing that it’s time to go, yet staying in his seat for another half hour. Slowly getting up. Dawdling! It takes forever to gather his things while new conversations are initiated and we linger inside the front door for extended periods of time.
I’m good at hurrying and he’s perfected delaying. Long ago we stopped judging each other and do our best to compromise. (Different doesn’t mean better or worse, good or bad, is one of our rules of thumb.) But this quote got me thinking, what would the proper timing of a good-bye feel like?
Maybe the way we used to say good-bye to my grandparents when I was a little girl. We said good-bye with hugs in the kitchen and then went out to the car. After we got in our seats, no car seats back then, my grandparents would stick their heads in our windows to see how we were set up for the journey home. And then my father would drive down the driveway while my grandparents stood arm in arm on the porch, blowing kisses and waving until we were out of sight. I can still see them standing there, after all these years.
How do you say good-bye?
So, last year we visited the sunflower field at the end of the harvest and I got a lot of pictures of blossoms past their peak, all still beautiful in their own way. This year we changed things up and went on the first day day of the gathering in and at a different time of day, evening instead of morning. Also unlike last year we’ve had plenty of rain while last summer we were dealing with a drought.
Each year we plant over 14 acres of sunflowers and harvest approximately 300,000 blooms for your viewing pleasure and to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Connecticut, a non-profit organization dedicated to granting wishes to children with critical illnesses. Sunflowers are available while supplies last. We offer cut your sunflowers with a $2 per flower donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Connecticut.
~ Buttonwood Farm website
There’s a small hill to climb to get a pretty view over a large field and then several paths to follow through the sea of sunflowers. This year I became fascinated with all the blossoms getting ready to bloom and wound up taking more pictures of them than the ones at their peaks!
The crop must drink; we move the pipe
To draw the water back in time
To fall again upon the field,
So that the harvest may grow ripe,
The year complete its ancient rhyme
With other years, and a good yield
Complete our human hope.
~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)
When celebrating, always take your cue from nature and adapt your rituals to circumstances. … Adapting to circumstances, like actively observing on your walks, brings you into rhythm with the natural world. And soon, checking in to a festival becomes second nature, as you remember past experience. … May the spiral of our seasonal journey be blessed.
~ Penny Billington
(The Path of Druidry: Walking the Ancient Green Way)
Can you tell we’re under the flight path from New York to Europe?
It’s hard to believe that a year has passed and we’re still struggling with the coronavirus pandemic, in spite of being fully vaccinated. The delta variant is running rampant through the stubbornly unvaccinated population, but the concerning part is that even the vaccinated are at risk now. Here in Connecticut we’ve had 854 vaccinated people with breakthrough COVID cases, and 150 of them are hospitalized. We’re back to wearing masks in the grocery store and many indoor places, like our doctors, are still requiring them. So much for eating inside our favorite restaurant for a while… It’s a good thing we’ve gotten used to finding things to do outside!
There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.
~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)
