Cozy Connections

I send a text message to a group of friends this week with a photo of my Wednesday latte. Katie writes right back saying that being loved from places all over the world “makes the planet feel cozy.” That made me feel warm and loved, and cozy.

Technology does make the planet feel cozy. Except when it makes it sad and scary. Like the news on TV and radio yesterday of fighting over Gaza (again). And a school bus accident in Egypt that killed dozens of kindergarten children. But there’s a baby elephant about to be born in Portland after a two year pregnancy, and a nearby highway repaving project has been delayed for fear the vibrations might disturb the sensitive mama. The news story mentions the 1962 birth at the Portland zoo of Packy. I remember that! Childhood suddenly seems less distant.

Also this weekend:

• “The leaders of China and long-time rival Taiwan had rare direct political contact after Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou sent congratulatory messages to China's new and outgoing Communist Party leaders, Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao. 'Looking towards the future…’” 

• “60 per cent of the largest US cities now have smoke-free laws.” 

• “Everyday life [in Iraq] is showing signs of becoming more stable, and the government says it can now look again to funding the arts.” 

• “A positive cycle of enterprise financing and increasing citizen empowerment is slowly improving Africa's economic prospects and reducing poverty.”
• “Moscow's new Jewish museum is Europe's largest and Russia's first major attempt to tell the story of its Jewish community.”
• “A report, by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), found 61 per cent of Chinese consumers would pay more for a product made in the United States.”

You can actually Google “good news from around the world.” Somehow the stories don't make it onto the mainstream newsfeed, but the internet can make the world feel cozy, and not like such a bad planet.

I met a family member by marriage at a family reunion a couple years back who lives in Hungary, and is Hungarian. I see her on FaceBook. I read about the lives of cousins on FaceBook, too, who would just be names on the family tree. While we may not agree politically or religiously, I love virtually knowing them and their children, and celebrate difference and blood ties. I am not an island. I chat online in real time across time zones with friends and family in North Carolina, Illinois, Virginia, and Colorado, and in Seattle. I recently connected on chat, unexpectedly (it's always unexpected), with my childhood friend and neighbor from 45 years ago. I have friends who play scrabble-type word games with friends online. I might join them, except I suck at word games. Say what you will, the internet can connect people who otherwise would not be connecting.

I am continuing, for now, to create the newsletter for my previous employer, remotely. I am grateful to live in the age of technology. Because I don’t have the computer program I need on my Mac, however, I use the neighbor’s computer. No one ever brought me tea and cookies while I did it on-site. It made me feel all warm inside.

My sister and her beautiful shop “HUBBUB” celebrate their seventh anniversary this week. I am so proud of her. One of our friends buys a scarf I made a couple of years ago. I sat on my yellow sofa on a chilly winter evening, my legs covered with the shawl my other sister knit for me, a cat on my lap and a fire in the fireplace and candles on the mantle; and I knit that multi-colored scarf. I had no idea back then that two years later I would live on the other side of the country and sell the scarf to a new friend. I made several other scarves that winter, scarves that have been gifted or sold by me in North Carolina, or by my sister in Washington. I don’t know if they were kept by the buyer or given away as gifts. But I knit my story into those scarves. Across the continent, and who knows where else, people wrap my story around them. They aren't aware of it, but we are cozily connected.

I wake up one morning this week to a photograph of my five-month-old grandson on my phone. His mama wrote, on his behalf, “Good morning, Gigi! Love you!” Makes my day cozy, and every time I open my phone I smile and virtually squeeze his adorable little plumpness.

As I write this Saturday evening, it is raining on the roof, and on the garden, at my new home. My sister’s afghan is over my legs, and my mother is in the chair next to me. I am living with another human for the first time in almost nine years.

Friend Laura, three time zones away and up late, just popped up on FaceBook chat for a couple of minutes. I now know she is exhausted from a leak under her house, precipitating digging a new drain. I got to wish her a good sleep. Soon I will go downstairs to my cat and my cozy chair that my dear friend Dori gave me when she moved away from physical proximity. I am glad she is still close by via the internet, and her chair. It is cozy in the garden.

Shall We Dance?

I read the story in Reader’s Digest, and I haven’t read the Digest in decades. But the story has stuck with me through the years. The multistory office building was burning, and its occupants streamed down the stairwells, parting to get around the woman standing frozen at the top of a flight of stairs. Finally a man stopped beside her and said quietly, "You have to go down." She replied, "I can't." He said again, "We have to go. Now." "No!" she repeated, "I can't do it." "I'll do it with you," the man said, taking her arm. "But I'm scared," she cried. To which he said, "Then do it scared."

The title of this post was going to be, "Doing It Scared," but yesterday, sitting in the Cafe Carolina garden as the sparrows hop around me, reading Saturday’s chapter in Walking in This World, I ponder on Julia Cameron's thoughts about restlessness. Restlessness can be frightening; often we don't know its source, or what it is calling us to. It is our tendency, I think, to ignore it; wait it out so we can go back to our routines. If our life is humdrum, lacking innovation, at least it is familiar and understood. But Julia says, "Restlessness means you are on the march creatively. The problem is, you may not know where…" and that is disconcerting and scary. She says, "When we listen to our fears with tenderness and care, when we accept them as messengers rather than as terrorists, we can begin to understand and respond to the unmet need that sends them forward. The next time you are restless, remind yourself it is the universe asking 'Shall we dance?'"

It occurs to me that restlessness and fear are dance partners. We feel restless and we know something is suggesting a change. And we are afraid. We dance around the inner malcontent, alternately trying to hear and wanting not to hear what it is that is calling us. Whether we admit it or not, it is fear that insists that we stick to our routines, insists on linearity. I wonder if we often dress that fear up in fancy dress and call it "responsibility." It is irresponsible to even consider changing what is working well-enough. After all, we have a family; co-workers; a mortgage; the lawn needs to be mowed... Besides, thinking about options and change is overwhelming. And what if we fail and lose it all? How irresponsible and stupid is that? Julia: "But [the One Who is More] is not overwhelmed. And if we fail at Plan A, God has an endless supply of Plan Bs. There is always a fallback plan, and a net. Faith to try again is the net. Ignoring the urging, we will, most likely, still get to our destiny; but when we are willing to [listen to the distant ill-defined music and irrational promptings], we will get there sooner."

The photo I took of my cone flowers, before I left my house for the last time, reminds me that our new ways of being don't begin in full bloom. A lot of rain has to fall and sun has to warm our face before we are fully transformed from seed to fullness. The garden is not in hurry. Why are we?

When he learned that I was leaving my employment and North Carolina, a church member who is a pilot offered to take me somewhere in a VSP (very small plane). It sounded terrifying to me. And thrilling. And isn't that what adventure is? Both of those－fear and excitement－dancing together? It is my year to venture; I say yes. I figure I will do it scared. As it turns out, though there are some bumps and buffeting as we fly through an unavoidable cloud bank, the fear is powerfully overshadowed by the thrill. Saying "yes" is really the scariest part. We fly west to Asheville and meet my family for dinner; and as the sun sets in the pink sky garden, we fly back home to the moonrise.

My mother is a worrier; always has been. I think she worries that I don't worry. We are going to live together for a while. I am worried that her tendency to worry will rub off on me. I consider the difference between fear and worry.

Fear is being afraid that my car, with its 205,000 miles, won’t carry me and Smudge across the country. I take it to my favorite mechanic (Village Auto Werks) and Pam and Greg check it out from stem to stern. And I upgrade my AAA membership so I can be towed more than three miles without taking out a loan. Worry is obsessing about a car hydroplaning across the center line and hitting me head-on; and then, if I survive, landing in a hospital in God-Knows-Where, Texas; and my insurance won’t cover it because I am out-of-network; and no one knows I’m there and I have forgotten how to contact them－or forgotten who "them" is; and what happened to Smudge? You get the picture. Fear tells us what we need to think about so we can take resolving steps. Worry spirals us out of control into ridiculousness, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it anyway. Except not go, and miss the adventure of a lifetime.

A story on NPR this week fascinates me. "How do mosquitoes avoid being killed by raindrops?" (And who knew anyone cared?) Raindrops, afterall, weigh 50 times more than the mosquito, and are like plummeting comets falling all around their teeny bodies. A team of mechanical engineers checked it out. What they discovered is that the mosquitoes don't try to avoid the drops, they hitch a ride. For a fraction of a nano-second, they dance with the drop before letting it go and moving on. Huh, they don't try to avoid the very scary dangers that lurk in their universe, they embrace them. The danger is, however, if they are too close to the ground they risk getting crushed between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Perhaps that is what results when we put off our dreams, our inner restlessness－when we stay too close to the safety of the ground for too long. We get stuck.

When we came down out of the sky in the VSP and got in the truck to head home on the dark road where deer and other scariness lurk, Jonathan said, "Now for the dangerous part." Safe or not, I am leaving the well-known ground. I am choosing to dance－and to fly. I am following my dream, my inner restlessness, to return to my heart home. I don't know what it is going to look like; I am just taking the first step. I will learn the dance as I go. I am doing it scared. I leave two weeks from today. First stop Asheville, to meet my grandson Ethan; who danced－not fully formed, but in his perfect beginning－into this scary, beautiful world yesterday.