THANKFUL FRIDAY

Chris turned fifty three on Monday. I tried desperately to not pay attention or say anything about it, but spent the day continually checking his Facebook memorial page to see if any one had left messages. Then I swallowed my ball of hypocrisies and posted nothing, leaving it with plain old lurking. Today marks eleven years since his passing and it has always felt like an extra layer of cruelty that we celebrated his birthday and said our final goodbyes all in the span of one breath.

Tiffany asked me on Monday what age Chris is to me, like is he the same age as when he died, younger, older? In general, Chris is at various ages in my head. I am surrounded with pictures of him during our life together, along with pictures of a much younger Chris before me. Those images make an impression. Mostly though, Chris ages with each birthday. I imagine him now with a bit more gray in his hair, particularly around the temples. Chris, even though he had Lasik years ago, needs readers now and it has become a big joke about how often he loses them on top of his head. He’s a little thinner because he took up running. He likes to run up to the coffee shop at seventy fifth and Wornall and he spends half his day there typing away on his laptop. There’s a comic book nerd guy that hangs out at the same coffee shop with his computer and he and Chris have become comic book pals. Chris has settled in here, found a group of his kind of people. He’s taken to smoking a pipe, not really because he likes the tobacco, but because it is ridiculous. Sometimes he replaces the tobacco with soapy water. You can imagine.

Chris is still Chris.

This, these anniversaries, it is not any harder today than it was last year or the year before that. That doesn’t mean it is easy. Like a habit, missing him has just become a way of life. It is just like the parts of my body that now ache when the weather turns suddenly from tolerable to freezing. It is a dull pain like all the other pains that come with an aging body, that I just live with. This is how I am now. Like the other day at work when I was hot. I am always cold at work, but the other day I wasn’t and I said out loud that I was hot and I didn’t know if it was because the room was being heated or if this is just how I am now. There is gratitude in accepting the things that I cannot control or change. Because while I cannot change the fact that Chris is gone, I can still imagine a life where he is still with us.

Imagination: the ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful.

The number of times I have heard someone say to me “I just can’t imagine…” My reaction was always “why would you even try to imagine?” Now I wonder if imagining a life without Chris would have actually prepared me for the inevitable. I have become more creative and possibly more resourceful, but not delusional. I don’t go home at the end of the day and expect to see him sitting on the couch, Empire Strikes Back playing on the TV while he pokes around on his computer. I no longer keep a chat window open for our daily random chats. Because while I can imagine all of these things, I know it is all just a practice in creativity and Chris was all about practices in creativity.

I am no longer mad at Chris. Releasing the anger has allowed me to see the gifts that he left me with.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I’ve been having some left arm pain for over a month. It started with my shoulder, but after an adjustment the shoulder pain went away and moved into my upper arm. Before everyone starts yelling at me, it is not a heart attack. It’s my neck. Wonkiness in my neck is causing nerve pain in my arm. One of the ways my chiropractor is treating this issue is by making me wear a shoulder brace for hours at a time. The brace pulls my shoulders back, relieving some strain on my neck which has been working at keeping those shoulders up near my ears. When she first put it on, I though “Wow! This is great!” but after ten minutes of it, I felt like screaming. The thing about pulling the shoulders back, is that it also opens the chest.

Heart opening poses are great for physically stretching the front of the body. Mentally and emotionally though, it can be terrifying. Heart openers can make a person feel vulnerable. Lifting and stretching open the chest can release some emotions, emotions that have trapped inside a body for days or years. While releasing all of that pent up crud is good, it is also scary. Heart openers are an invitation to courage. You have to be courageous enough to be vulnerable. I’ve basically been walking around in a heart opening position all week.

The first day of my forced vulnerability made me want to shove all of the things away from me. I wanted to yell at people to tell them not to stand in front of me and not to look at me. The second day, I cried a lot. I couldn’t stop thinking about episode three of The Last of Us and if you haven’t seen it then you are missing out on the most beautiful love story in television history. The third day, I stood at my desk all morning, occasionally dancing. I didn’t sit down until I went to teach my chair yoga class at noon. After that, all I wanted to do was lay down under my desk and sleep.

Does anyone remember the Care Bears’ cartoon? They would rub their bellies until light a beam of light would irradiate out from their centers. I think Teletubbies do this too. This was the Care Bears super power for thwarting evil enemies and healing those corrupted by that evil influence. That’s what today feels like. I feel like I’m emitting a beam of light from my chest and I have the power to thwart evil and heal all emotional distress. I am no longer fighting the vulnerability or crying uncontrollably at my desk. That’s something to be grateful for, for sure, but also…super powers.

I’m grateful for my new super powers.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I moved to a different cubicle this week. The new space is closest to the microscopy room, which makes me the first person someone sees when they open the door, looking for help. That’s one of the reasons for moving me here. I am the fixer and the helper and the make things better person. The new space is bigger than my old space and includes a large window. At first, when I moved all of my personal things over, I kept my self compacted as if I was still in the old space. It took me a day or two to spread out. It’s taken me all week to remember to stop walking over to the old space to set my things down. At first, when I was told I was being given this new space, I was really excited about the window, but then I got here and it has been cloudy and gloomy. The new cubicle also feels a bit isolating, like I am further away from my coworkers. It’s almost lonely over here.

Things and feelings changed on Thursday morning. The clouds had lifted and morning sunlight streamed into my cubicle. I stood at my desk, checking my calendar schedule and catching up on emails, and bathed in that morning sunlight. Then feelings flooded into my body and I had to really think about what those feelings were and when the last time it was that felt them. I felt joy and energy and was like “Oh my Gods! This day is spectacular!” The sunlight situation only lasted a few hours and then a new layer of cloud cover rolled in, but in those few hours I was reminded that we are very much like plants. Water and sunlight are essential to life. It is not as if I was previously working in dungeon. Our office space, in general, is open with tall windows on one side. My old cubicle put me in indirect lighting. I did not realize that I was a direct sunlight plant until I moved to the new cubicle.

No wonder winters are so difficult for me.

I am thankful for a lot of things this week. The whole office has spent the week snacking on cheese, thanks to the most epic birthday (cheese) cake Michael made me last weekend. The joy of his accomplishment in building this beautiful tower of cheese was almost better than eating the cheese, and the joy of sharing some that cheese with friends has been priceless. I started teaching a six week beginning yoga session on Monday and it feels real good to teach people how to make yoga accessible for their own bodies. I declined on an event with my self-care people because it is later this evening and there is nothing more I want to do on a Friday evening than be a potato because by the end of Fridays, my brain feels like mashed ones. That’s self-care in action. I allowed myself to be talked into a mustache waxing last Saturday and my upper lip is just now starting to look normal again. So I’m thank for that.

Most of all though, I am grateful for getting some direct sunlight.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Today, I turn forty seven. I thought about this post last week and how I was going to say that this is the first month I’ve missed a period since I was maybe fourteen, but then my period started. It was almost two weeks late and included a little extra gore than usual. This had me doing an extensive search of medical journals to see how seriously I should take all this extra gore. It took an awful lot of digging to determine that it was probably due to a lack of ovulation. So, in honor of turning another year older, my ovaries are creeping into retirement and spitting out dust balls.

How fitting.

At first, I was a little sad because nothing really says “YOU’RE OLD” like an internal organ ceasing to function because it has reached the end of its life cycle. Then I got really annoyed at the level of research I had to do in order to determine that what was happening to my body is considered to be normal. Apparently, perimenopause and menopause are the real life Fight Club. The one thing I do know is that I have one to ten years of unpredictable menstrual cycles before it is really over. It is hard enough to get the appropriate attention for women’s health needs during their reproduction life stage, unless it is to restrict their reproductive rights. Forget any attention addressed to a woman’s needs when that stage ends. Remember when I said that thing about everything being a social construct? A woman’s aging body is so deeply rooted in a social construct of silence and invisibility that it will take multiple generations to rid this garden of the weeds.

But the revolution has begun. I’ve pre-ordered my copy of Karen Walrond’s new book, Radiant Rebellion (you should too) and I have a feeling it is going to be my handbook for fighting the war on growing older. It is not a war to fight aging, but a war against the negative ideas of aging.

Old, young, it’s all a perception and there are no rules. Recently, I was in the coffee line with a graduate student who was bemoaning adulthood and how difficult it was being a grown up. She is twenty five. Here was my tidbit of advice. I told her that there is no such thing as being a grown up. Sure, there are daily responsibilities that we didn’t have as children, but that doesn’t mean you now have to leave behind the joy and sense of play of childhood. I will even argue that you can maintain an aspect of being carefree. There are no rules other than the ones we place on ourselves. There may be outside voices with advice on how you should feel and act at a certain age, but they don’t know and really are probably only trying to sell you something. Take care of the basics like food, shelter, yearly health checks, and then do or behave any way you please.

I’m taking my own advice. Today is just a celebration of surviving another rotation around the sun. My aging body just makes me a target for the snake oil industry of anti-aging and as someone who tends to think of literal meanings of words, anti-aging sounds ridiculous and impossible. I will have none of that. Life cycle. Our lives are cyclic. My body is just cycling back to pre-teen age.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Thursday morning, we all woke up around here to a thin layer of snow coating everything outside. The skies remained dark for most of the day, a stark contrast to the previous days. Our first week and a half of January has been fairly mild with temperatures reaching sixty degrees during the day and bright sunlight flooding in through all of the windows. The weather helped erase the memory of the deathly freezing temps we had around the holidays.

January is a yo-yo month for many reasons.

I received a card from my mother early in the week and I can see where she started to write my brother’s name, then my sister’s name before finally landing on mine on the envelope. This is an old habit. I do not remember a time when, while calling to me from another room, my mother didn’t run through the names of her previous children before settling on mine. I have always been some form of RandyJanellRaJaCindy. It has never bothered me because I know my mother was keeping track of all of the things at once, making sure we were at piano lessons or dance class or band or choir practice. On top of all of that was her career and maintaining a household. Sure, my dad helped out as best as he knew how, but he wasn’t the one laying on the floor of the sewing room while I attempted to construct my 4-H sewing projects. My mother’s only saving grace was that our age differences made us three separate children.

The lessons I have learned and continue to learn from my mother are invaluable. I have learned through her examples of strength and independence to be the strong capable woman I am today. My mother celebrates a birthday on Sunday, another year of survival. In spite of her beliefs and views on growing older, I am truly grateful to be able to celebrate another year of her life. My wish for her is that her day is filled with good wishes, sunshine that floods her windows and creates dancing rainbow reflections, ease, and the knowledge that she is loved.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Many of you may not know that I took the MCAT before I took the GRE to apply for grad school. I was still undecided about medical school. Honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted. Here is what I knew: I was flooded with excitement and wonder whenever I looked in a microscope and even the smallest scientific discovery made me clap my hands with glee. Life around us is fascinating and the tiny life forms of this planet are spectacular. I did very well on the MCAT, well enough to probably get in to medical school, but something told me that I would not find that life to be as fascinating.

When I started working for Margaret, I didn’t know anything about Dictyostelium, but I learned very quickly how to grow, culture and care for these little soil amebas, as well as manipulating them for microscopy viewing. When food is scarce for Dicty, they’ll send out a signal to other Dicty cells in the area. Then they all group together to form a slug that eventually transforms itself. The head of the slug becomes spores while the rest turn into a stalk with a fruiting body on the end containing dormant cells that can fall off under more favorable conditions. A large portion of the cell community dies so that some cells can live on later when there’s more food or the environment is nicer. We kept plates of Dicty in this form and I remember asking Margaret once about seeing them like this in the wild. She assured me that it was possible to find Dicty in the wild as fruiting bodies and since then I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea. 2022 was my year for seeing Dicty in the wild. First, Heather sent me a picture of them growing on her car. Then I found some hanging off my porch light. That sighting made me light up and immediately morph into Jordan from Real Genius. I excitedly told Michael all about the life cycle of Dicty while I took photos of our porch light.

Recently I’ve been talking to one of our graduate students about making miso. He’s been experimenting with trying to make his own koji (think starter, like sourdough, but with Aspergillus oryzae instead of yeast). This week he brought me a book on making koji and we had a long nerdy talk about trying to culture the powder koji starter that he has. I helped him get set up on a microscope and then went back to my desk. I started flipping through the pages of the book and came across some glossy prints of microscopic images and I got so excited. I ran back into the microscopy room and sat down next the grad student and started blathering about culturing and checking strains with microscopy and I got really excited about making my own miso. The part that excites about making miso has very little to do with making actual miso, but a whole lot to do with the science side of fermentation.

So here’s my gratitude. I am so grateful to be in a position where I have been able to maintain my excitement and enthusiasm for life sciences. With my job and the people I get to interact with every day, it sometimes feels like a dream. It is the difference between just having a job and getting to choose your job and that is a privilege.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

When I lived under my parents’ roof, we went to church. Both parents were devout Baptists and going to church meant twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays. Even though I was developing my own views on faith and drifting away from the restrictions and hypocrisy I witnessed within the church, I continued to attend service out of respect for my parents. There was one time a year, though, where I truly enjoyed going to church and that was always for the candlelight service on Christmas Eve. Everyone in the congregation would get their own little candle and then starting at one end of each pew, a candle would be light. That person would then light the candle of the person next to them and so on and so on until all the candles in the congregation were lit. As we lit the candle of our neighbor, we said “I pass to you the light of peace and understanding.” Once all of the candles were lit, we would sing hymns of joy and peace.

It was beautiful.

During our first Christmas together, as Michael and I were driving to pick up the Cabbage for Christmas, we heard a story on NPR about lighting the menorah. Michael said that we should celebrate Hanukkah. I heartily agreed and we went on wild hunt for a menorah. We’ve been celebrating Hanukkah ever since. This year, since the first night started on Sunday, we had time to really prepare a nice meal of latkes topped with caviar and roasted salmon. Every night this week, with out prompting or reminders, we’ve lit our menorah. Michael lights the candles while I say the prayers. My favorite section is always “Blessed are you, Our God, Ruler of the Universe, for giving us life, for sustaining us, and enabling us to reach this season.” My second favorite part is when we stand for a moment after the prayer is said and the candles are lit and just watch the flames flickering.

The words behind lighting the candles in both instances is the part that I want to honor and celebrate. On one hand, you are taking a moment to have gratitude for just being here to celebrate anything. On the other hand, you are sharing your light with others. Lucia comes from the latin word lux. Names adapted from Lucia include Lucy, Luciana and Lucinda. Elena comes from the Greek Helene, meaning torch or light. My name is Lucinda Elena. I am literally named for the thing I am always searching for, the thing I am always celebrating.

Light.

Thank you for traveling with my through this year. I pass to you my light of peace.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The most perfect snowflake landed on my windshield and I did not take a picture of it. I tried. I dug my phone out of my bag and started to set the macro settings, but in the time it took me to do all of that, the snowflake melted. I sat there for a few minutes watching little star shaped flakes collide with the glass but gave up on the idea of taking the picture.

Beautiful things don’t ask for attention. - James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

In the last few weeks, I have neglected to tap the shutter button or even get my camera out from under my bra strap (this is where I carry my phone, like a holster). I will admit that some of the reason for this is that I’m just not feeling it. The other side of that is that I’ve been fully engaged in recent activities as opposed to just observing from the other side of a lens. Stepping out from behind the camera is not unusual for me during this time of the year. The lack of color and sun in winter time is less than inspiring. At least for me. I do make an occasional attempt at stepping outside with the camera, but I can’t deny that I am a warm weather bird. Lately, it has felt more important to be part of the conversation with the group I have gathered with than it is to photograph the group.

In February of last year, Roze gave us all in the Self Care Circle an assignment to write a letter to ourselves. She gave us those letters last week along with a note to maybe write a new letter to ourselves before reading the one from February. I wrote a new note to myself on Sunday and in that letter I told myself how important it is for me to seek out beauty with my camera. In the last few weeks, I’ve had two different people bring up the topic of showing my prints. I am grateful for that time I spent not taking the picture of the snowflakes. They were beautiful, but it got me thinking. Beautiful things may not ask for attention, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve attention. I ended the letter I wrote to myself in February with “You are enough. Really…at the end of the day…this is the only thing you need to remember.” Those words meant something different to me then. Now, those words feel like a blessing, a whisper saying “your photos are beautiful and they deserve attention.” My creations are enough.

It is time to start considering my next showing.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Josephine turned nine years old yesterday. Nine! I can’t believe it. I watch my friends posting pictures of their kids on social media and I am always marveling at how those kids grow and change. It slays me. This week, my great-nephew turned twenty seven. He was born the year after I graduated high school. I sent him a birthday message reminding him about the time he was so little he could not stand up in the crooked house at Silver Dollar City. He just kept falling over and we laughed and laughed and laughed. Now he’s a grown ass human being with a job and a wife.

Ugh.

When Michael brought Josephine home, she was so little that she fit perfectly on his shoulder like a parrot. She didn’t stay small for long. All of her growing changes happened in the span of a year. So for the last seven years, Josephine hasn’t aged. She still looks the same. Mostly. Recently, I’ve noticed that when she gets up from laying in one spot for too long, she has to really stretch the stiffness out of her little legs. That’s the only visible sign of her age. She still chases the cat and attacks the vacuum. Her little legs do not slow down as we trek through the neighborhood on our walks and she can shake the stuffing out of any toy.

Sometimes Michael will say something about how it might be time to get another dog and I seriously consider it. I’ll spend few hours scrolling through adoptable pets online and will even find one that I think about making a call on. Then I think about money and the size of our house. I don’t think we can really afford two dogs. Our couch isn’t really big enough for two dogs. Josephine is so used to being the only child. I mean, she does well with other dogs with a few exceptions. She loves Sarge who will not give her the time of day and she can hold her own with Terry’s gang. I’m sure she would be okay with sharing her home with another dog. I think the problem is me. I’m not sure if I am capable of opening my heart even more to fit another dog. I realize how that sounds, but I honestly think I have a one dog at a time kind of heart. Josephine has filled it up. Of course she has! Have you seen her?!? She’s the most wonderful puppy in the whole wide world.

I am grateful to be celebrating another year of Josephine Boisdechene Clofullia.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I had a bag of dried lupini beans that I purchased on a whim from the local Halal Market the last time we were in, stocking up on spices. I didn’t know anything about them other than they looked like lima beans, so I thought I’d just cook them like lima beans.

This batch of beans started out with promise. I had sautéed onions, bell pepper and garlic before adding the beans and stirring in a tablespoon of miso with the water that I added for cooking. I tossed in some salt, cajun spices and a bayleaf (for no reason) and let the beans cook for about twenty minutes before I tasted the broth to check the flavoring. I sipped the broth and said “This is not good.” Michael was in the middle of his weekly lunch prep and turned around to say “That’s not true…let me taste.” Then he tasted the broth and said “No..it’s fine….wait…this is not good.” Then we went down the list of things I had added to make it so horrible and bitter.

Beans…I had added beans. Lupini beans have to be soaked overnight, cooked until just tender, and then rinsed and soaked again for 5-7 days in order to remove bitterness.

It was quite a blow to my ego. I was left staring at my cast iron pot filled with what should have been a delicious healthy meal, but instead was a pot of ruin. I’m good at beans. It’s in my wheelhouse of cooking superpowers. I felt terrible. We ended up ordering out for Indian food, but not before I was texting Heather about my bean fail. Heather referred to them as ‘sneaky beans’. She told me that I had not failed at cooking beans; these were sneaky beans. Of course, she’s one hundred percent right and I knew/know this. I know that the only fault I had made was thinking these beans were just like all the other dried beans, but sometimes you need someone to reassure you.

Heather is always a good source for reassurance and I am so grateful for her, but she is not my only source. I am very blessed and thankful for my group of supporters and I can only hope that I give as good as I get.

FAMILY AND GRATITUDE

Missy B’s

Gaels Public House and Sports

Woody’s KC

Side Kicks Saloon

Sidestreet

Buddies

These are all safe places for our LGBTQ+ community to gather and any one of them could be Club Q. Politics is just a symptom of the division in this country. It is a symptom of fear, an emotion that drives hate and jealousy. The people in this country who consistently support and elect government officials who promote hate are people who feel small and scared. They are jealous of those who live their lives authentically. They will go to their graves being fearful of those who are different and filled with hate for those of us who are brave enough to love. I’m not saying we should feel sorry for these people, though I do pity them. I’m saying that they will not be swayed into another way of thinking.

Our voices have got to be louder, our actions bigger.

Two-thirds (64%) of respondents had experienced anti-LGBT+ violence or abuse. Of those that had experienced anti-LGBT+ violence and abuse: 9 in 10 had experienced verbal abuse (92%). 3 in 10 had been subject to physical violence (29%). 2 in 10 had experienced sexual violence (17%).

Galop Hate Crime Report 2021

Ways to help Club Q victims:

• Colorado Healing Fund

• Good Judy Garage raising money for funeral and medical costs

• Blood Donations

Michael and I are spending Thanksgiving with the family I built, a group of men who introduced me to all of those places I listed above. When Richard Fierro was interviewed about tackling the Club Q gunman, he said that all he was thinking was that he had to protect his family. I can’t say that I would not do the same. I am so grateful to have them in my life. They make me a better human just by knowing their names. In a memorial service this week, one of our grad students said “I love all of you. I wish I had said this more often, but I am no longer waiting to say it. I love you.”

I love all of you.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

This week, we saw our first real snow of the season. Technically, there was snow a couple of weeks ago, but it happened early on Saturday morning with only a handful of people to witness it. Me being one of them since I get up with the sun even on Saturdays. The day turned out to be sunny and warm though and no one believed when I said that it had snowed that morning. This week was real, honest to goodness, snow that quickly melted. Though there is still some on the roof of my car. The weather was warm enough for the snow to melt on the ground, but then quickly fell back into freezing temperatures for the rest of the week. Morning walks do not happen during such conditions.

I have wavered between getting up and onto my mat in the early morning hours when I am usually walking Josephine and snuggling back down under the covers. The snuggling back down under the covers has been the winner for most mornings. I get up to open the pet door for Josephine and the cat. Then I hop right back under the covers. It only takes a few minutes of being out in the cold for Josephine to have the same idea. She comes running back inside and jumps on the bed as I lift the comforter for her. Then she curls her little body up as close as she can to mine. This is where we stay for another hour or so before I get up to feed her and the cat. Then Josephine and I have moment of snuggling and tussling while I wait for my turn in the shower.

At first I felt really guilty about not taking the walks. Especially because Josephine gets so freaking excited just at the sight of her leash. These moments of snuggle and play time that we have had this week eases that guilt of not walking. Michael’s moms had to say goodbye to their little dog over the weekend and then a Facebook friend had to say goodbye to her best kitty. So, I feel pretty good about skipping the walks in favor of showering Josephine with extra love.

Treats for everyone.

Speaking of treats for everyone. Tomorrow is Michael’s birthday. He’s been talking about being in his late forties for months now, sometimes with a tone of excitement and sometimes with a tone of dismay. Michael changed up is diet after our return from Vancouver. Then he made appointments with doctors and scheduled routine tests. He’s checking his blood pressure and monitoring his salt intake. He eats a banana every morning. It looks like he has plans to live past the age of fifty. Sometimes, I’m really surprised he sticks around (for various reasons), but then he talks about our future together. A lake house. Travel. Retirement. I am thankful for his random acts of kindness like yesterday morning when I walked out to my car and Michael had scraped my windshield for me. I am thankful for his raccoon/possum/even squirrel trapping skills that he didn’t even know he had until this year. I’m thankful for how he insists on getting my car washed which is something I never bothered doing unless I couldn’t see out the windows. I’m thankful that in spite of those vague various reasons that he still sticks around.

Here’s to surviving another rotation around the sun.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Today is Veteran’s Day and last week I was surprised to discover that I have the day off. I don’t believe this has happened before. Veteran’s Day feels like an overlooked holiday, which sounds about right for this country in general. Most veterans I know don’t walk around in uniform or carry signs depicting their service to this country. I think there’s even a large number of our population who hears the word “veteran” and conjures up an image of an older white man. Military service is distant and remote to many.

The last time I was visiting Mom, she gave me a storage bin filled with my Dad’s old Air Force uniforms. My high school letter jacket was in there too. I took two of the military coats along with the letter jacket to the cleaners. The rest of the bin contains the jumpsuits he wore while replacing breaks on fighter jets. When I was a kid, one of those jumpsuits could always be relied upon as a quick costume. Roll up the pant legs. Roll up the sleeves. Put on a pair of boots and aviator glasses and viola. You were now a fighter jet pilot. Every time I pulled on one of those jumpsuits, zipping it up, I never once thought about my dad as a soldier. He wasn’t. He was a mechanic.

This is my naivety on display.

Our veterans are not just gun totting soldiers. They are medical workers, chefs, mechanics, teachers, aid workers, veterinarians. They don’t have to have seen a battle or have been in the thick of artillery fire. They still served this country.

Veterans Day pays tribute to all American veterans—living or dead—but especially gives thanks to living veterans who served their country honorably during war or peacetime.

I have plans to meet a friend for breakfast before getting as many chores done as I can so that the rest of my weekend is truly free for whatever I want. This is a privilege and one that is afforded to me because of a veteran.

Thank you to all veterans who served this shit show of a country during war and or peacetime.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I hate public speaking of any kind. As soon as standing on a stage, singing or playing an instrument, stopped paying for college, I walked off the stage with a sigh of relief. I am surprised that I do not have these same feeling when I’m standing in front of a class of yoga students, but I stepped into my yoga teacher self with ease and comfort. I loved it, but I also really loved the break I gave myself from teaching after moving to Kansas City. I have been reluctant to step back into my yoga teacher self. That break gave me space to cultivate my own personal practice that was so much sweeter than the one I had before when I was teaching all the time. I did not want teaching to interfere with that and I’ve done well at keeping my set boundaries.

I’ve been teaching yoga classes at work for some time now. What started out as a last minute fill-in for another yoga teacher, turned into a regular schedule. The yoga classes I teach have morphed and changed based on requests and needs. I now teach a chair yoga class once a week. When I was first approached to change my Wednesday samatva yoga class to a chair yoga class, I said ‘yes’ immediately but was a little disappointed. I wasn’t really into the idea of teaching a chair class, but I asked for the class to remain a forty five minute class as opposed to cutting the length down to thirty minutes.

I love my chair yoga class. I didn’t think I would love teaching it as much as I do, but it is my favorite thing to teach now. My friend Melissa, who has a spinal cord injury and is wheelchair bound, comes to my class and she is a willing (Guinnea pig) participant. This class has become the most soothing class for me to teach, as well as the most challenging. I have always struggled with a forty five minute time frame for a yoga class because it never feels like I have enough time to do the poses I want to do and give my students a decent final relaxation. I do not have that problem in chair yoga. When my chair yoga students peel themselves up from a ten or fifteen minute savasana, I can feel their peace and calmness radiating from them.

This brings me joy.

I recently sat down with the director of our fitness facility, Amie, to talk about my classes and ideas for January. First, I can’t believe we are already planning for the next year. What the hell happened to this year?!? Anyway, here we are barreling right on into 2023 like a truck with no brakes. Class attendance for my Thursday evening class is pretty low to absolutely empty and I told Amie that it should probably be cut from the team. She agreed that the timing for that class just wasn’t working and then she proposed an idea of teaching a six week beginning yoga course starting on Monday evening in January. My feeling about this idea registered on my face before it really hit me in my heart because Amie said something about how my whole face lit up with excitement.

Y’all?!?! I LOVE teaching a beginning yoga series!

I think it’s because of my first yoga experience and how my practice was born from just muscling my way through class after class. Yoga teacher training was a V8 for my personal practice because I learned how to do those poses without muscling my way through it. Then I learned how to teach this to other people. This knowledge of how to teach people the safe way to get in out of yoga poses makes me want to buy the world a Coke, but instead of soda make it a yoga mat. My six week beginning yoga class is for every person who ever said to me “I can’t do yoga because I’m not flexible.” It is for every person who as ever walked into a class and felt overwhelmed because they had no idea what was going or what even the teacher was saying. I could go on and on, which makes me realize just how excited I am to teach yoga again.

That’s a feeling I haven’t felt in a long time.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

More often than not, when I sit down to write my Friday gratitude post, it turns into a list of complaints. I just start writing about all the difficult and annoying things that happened during the week. The aches. The pains. The exhaustion. The list of things I didn’t accomplish. All of this flows out onto the page with such ease and I will have whole paragraphs of complaints written before I even realize that I’m complaining. Then, I’ll sit back and really read what I wrote and I will select all and hit ‘delete’. It’s not that I don’t feel like I have a right to complain. We all have complaints. Complaints are valid. It’s just that there is something therapeutic about writing it all down and then destroying it.

In a way, this whole process of writing is like cleaning out a closet. I’m getting rid of all the things that I don’t need and leaving behind the good stuff. But I am also making space for extra goodness. A few weeks ago, we received our Gene Keys for Self Care Circle. I have no idea how my gene keys were determined. It has something to do where and when I was born and the website descriptions make me roll my eyes real hard, but the results that came back to me are not untrue. In fact, there is so much not untrue things in my results that I have struggled to read them all completely, but I am going to share with you a few things that really stood out for me.

In the section on what keeps me healthy, it says that one of the most important factors in my well being and longevity is my ability to laugh. When I read this, I thought about last year’s October camp and how much laughing I did. At the end of camp, we went around the circle sharing what we got out of that camp. One woman said that she didn’t come to camp thinking she would end up laughing so much and I looked over to see Amani poking a finger at me, outing me as one of the causes of all the laughter. And it was all true. Last October, I rediscovered my laugh and my ability to see the humor in the ridiculous. This is important because the next thing my gene key says is that “life for you is about finding lightness and humor, especially in difficult or challenging circumstances”.

Shut.

Up.

Sometimes it takes me writing paragraphs of complaints and then deleting them in order for me to make space for finding the lightness and the humor under any circumstances. Especially in difficult and challenging ones.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

In my Self Care Circle group, we’ve talked a lot about ways to incorporate movement and cultivate joy in our every day lives. Roze gave us all the gift of the one song dance party where for one whole song, you dance with abandon, like no one’s watching. I’ve never been shy about moving my body to a beat, but I did find it important enough to remind myself to get up and dance. So I put it on my calendar and every day at 2:00pm, I get an alert that it is time for a dance party at my desk. I scheduled it for this time because I start to get sluggish and sleepy in the mid afternoon. It might not make sense to force myself off my butt to dance when I’m slumping, but dancing is an energizing exercise. So at 2:00pm, I can be found shaking off my mid afternoon slumps by wiggling my hips and flailing about like a wacky wavy inflatable tube guy.

There’s a scene in Beetlejuice where he makes a group of people at a dinner part start dancing. I’m sure you are familiar with the scene, but the dinner party guests all start involuntarily moving their bodies to the beat of the Banana Boat song and looking all confused. I become one of those dinner party guests, except with less confusion, whenever a song with a good beat starts playing. I can’t help myself and do not ever wish to help myself. At concerts, I will look around me while I’m flailing about and see most of the audience just standing motionless. I want to grab ahold of the nearest person and yell “MOVE YOUR BODY! HOW CAN YOU STAND STILL TO THIS BEAT! I MEAN, CAN’T YOU FEEEEEL THIS MUSIC?!?!” That’s the thing. I don’t just hear music as much as I feel it physically inside my body.

Every morning when I get out of the shower, I poke my head into the living room and say “Alexa, play some music.” Because there are three of us on this music account with various listening preferences, I usually have to poke my head out into the living room again and say “Alexa, play a different station.” This week, I told her to play songs by the Scissor Sisters. I have danced every morning this week while brushing my teeth, putting on makeup, drying my hair and getting dressed. Then Josephine and I dance while I’m getting her goodbye treats and I pretty much dance right up until I ask Alexa to stop so I can leave the house.

This simple act of adding music that makes me dance to my mornings is what has made this generally normal, just a week kind of week, more than just a normal week (side note: on two separate occasions this week, I had at least one article of clothing on backwards). I often sneak vegetables into our meals because getting Michael to eat something other than corn is challenging. Well, adding dance music to my mornings is like sneaking in vegetables, except in this case joy is replacing kale. I have been sneaking joy into my life each morning with dance music.

I highly recommend it.

Also, I highly recommend kale.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Fall blue skies are like no other season’s. Sharp, vibrant, fierce. On particularly clear days, the sky can look unreal, like flat backdrops to a stage production. They are so brilliantly blue and crisp that it cause the eyes to squint to look at it. These skies are deceptive. There is no way of knowing by looking out the window what the temperature will be like when you step outside. It could be perfectly wonderful out there or chilly with a cold wind that you can only feel on your ears. Fall skies are strikingly beautiful in an almost painful way. It is as contradictory as my feelings. I love the beauty of it and I hate the cold that comes with it.

The mornings this week have been so dark. Wednesday was the worst for it. It started out with rain and thick, heavy clouds. Josephine and I had to skip our walk, which she didn’t seem to mind since she crawled under the comforter when the alarm sounded. But even when it was time to get up and into the shower, the sky was still dark. I drove to work in the dark. I walked the building for my morning coffee in the dark. It was just …dark. Then I looked out the windows and in the distance, I could see a clear division line between gray clouds and blue sky. It was if we were playing a game where we had covered ourselves and the whole city with a blanket and now someone was slowly pulling the blanket away, not just revealing ourselves to the above, but opening our eyes to a blinding blue sky.

Friday morning as I drove to work, the radio starting playing Be Sweet by Japanese Breakfast. I turned up the volume and sang along with my whole heart. That song makes me think of those ridiculous plastic charm necklaces that we all collected as kids, side pony tails and ruffled skirts. I’m wearing my KSwiss tennies, baggy jeans with strategically ripped knees and an over size sweater and felt all the angsty tween feelings while belting out “I wanna believe in you. I wanna beelieeeeveeee.” The sky around me was that blinding blue sky of Fall. Not a cloud was visible as the sun broke over the tops of the trees, sun rays sparkling on glass and turning the fall leaves into a kaleidoscope.

Be sweet to me, baby
I wanna believe in you, I wanna believe (be sweet)
Be sweet to me, baby
I wanna believe in you, I wanna believe in something

These are the days for sweaters and wool blankets. These are the days for wrapping ourselves up in warmth while sipping on hot drinks. These are the days for reveling in the almost painful beauty of those kaleidoscopes of leaves. These are the days to be sweet to each other.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Right as you walk in the front doors to our local Trader Joe’s is a display of pumpkins, two large crates full of decorative gourds and on the first day of October, this display is a traffic jam of aggressive women filling their carts with these pumpkins and gourds. After successfully maneuvering my shopping cart through the pumpkin gauntlet, I ran smack into a display of dwarf olive trees. There were eight of them and a woman was scooping all of them into her cart. I managed to snag one of the eight even though I had no business buying an olive tree. I kill house plants. I have had plants rescued from my house because I am not a plant witch. I grabbed that olive tree with a fierce determination to keep this thing alive and so help me, I’m going to do it. In three years, we will be eating olives that I grew.

Then I went home and hot glued one hundred googly eyes onto my Halloween wreath.

This was how Michael found me when he got up. I was sitting at our table, hot glue gun in one hand and a bowl full of googly eyes in the other. He suggested I take a break by going to get lunch. I agreed and pointed out the olive tree and that needed a pot and potting soil. We also needed to decide Saturday’s dinner. I glued the last eye onto the wreath while Michael was in the shower and then the two of us drove off in search of food and planting material, which didn’t take as long at it usually takes us to do Saturday things. This meant that I was able to get all of the things done, the cleaning, the planting, the Halloween decorating, all of it accomplished before dinner. I did the things that I usually put off until Sunday and so on Sunday, I didn’t have to do anything.

So I went to a yoga class, a rare treat for me.

I’m telling you all of this now in a Thankful Friday posting because all of those things that I did last weekend have played a big role in helping me tackle this week. I woke up Wednesday morning and thought “It’s only Wednesday.” Michael sent a text to me that he had only poured hot water into his travel tea mug, no tea bags or sugar. I forgot my smoothie. The day was gray and cloudy. And all I could think was we still had two more days of this week to get through. This week has been long and uncomfortable.

Every time I have walked up to my front door, I have chuckled at the one hundred googly eyes looking back at me from my wreath. It is my reminder to allow for silliness and the healing power of laughter. Walking past the dining room window and seeing my olive tree still looking happy has brought me joy. That olive tree, a symbol of peace, is also a reminder of resilience. Making it to an actual yoga class set a precedent for my own practice this week, which has gotten a little wonky lately because of teaching and schedules. Josephine and I even made it out for our morning walks every morning this week. Sticking to these routines have been a source of grounding and have kept me present.

I am thankful that this week is nearly at an end and that I have this weekend to refill my buckets with good things.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Every time we camped in Colorado, I would set out our hummingbird feeder. There were times when I would be stepping out the camper door with the feeder in my hands and I would be swarmed by hummingbirds. They had no fear of me as they perched on the feeder I was holding. I would spend hours watching them buzz in and out of our campsite. If there are magical creatures, the hummingbird must be on that list. They truly are a marvel of evolutionary design and I don’t think I will ever grow weary of watching them, but they are migratory. They chase the warmth of the sun, a need I can respect and desire for myself and have been known to travel over 3,000 miles in their migrations. Every night, hummingbirds slow their metabolism down as a way of saving energy and enter a state known as torpor, a hibernation state of deep sleep. They often use spider webbing and lichens to build nests. They sleep in beds made of spider silk. And that sounds like a magical fairytale all by itself.

I took my hummingbird feeder down this week. It has been days since I have seen a hummingbird. For a while there, I had three of them fighting over my feeder. They were my favorite things to watch. One would perch on the cable line and keep watch. When another bird would fly near the feeder, the one hanging out on the line would zip down and off they’d go. Like fighter jets zipping around in the air. In the quiet moments, when they were not arguing over who gets to eat, you would have the privilege of watching one of the hummingbirds hover by the feeder, taking tentative slurps from the sugar water. Sometimes they would get comfortable enough to perch at the feeder. In the evening, the sun reaches a level where it shines directly from the West into our yard. It can be blinding, but this is my favorite time of day to watch the hummingbirds. Their wings are almost translucent as they filter the light.

My hummingbirds are not as bold or brave as the hummingbirds I have met in Colorado. They are tentative as they approach the feeder and any sudden moves sends them darting off. In order for me to watch them, I have to sit very still. I have to be still to watch their wings beating at a rate of eighty eight per second. It seems almost comical to me that this fast tiny bird creates stillness within me and I will miss them through the winter months. But, oh the gift of joy that I receive when they return in the Spring. I am building my own nest of spider silk to tuck these memories into so that I may hold them close as the days grow darker and colder.

Today I am grateful for spider silk nests.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Don’t let yourself only love one thing. Because if you only love one thing and that thing goes away? Well…then you’re left with nothing. And that sucks. - Bunny Folger, Only Murders in The Building

When I heard this line while watching Only Murders in The Building, I made Michael rewind the scene so that I could accurately jot the line down in a notebook. The words seemed important to me for some reason. While the character speaking the line was referring to her life’s work as the board director for her apartment building, I feel that this line goes deeper than just one’s life work. It can be easy to turn all your love and devotion onto one idea.

I wonder how my life would be now if I had only allowed myself one thing, one interest, one person. I probably wouldn’t notice how I had limited myself until the one thing was gone. I drank the kool-aid of interdisciplinary curriculum during my undergraduate years and made it a point to surround myself with more than science, building my own circus family in the process. Except, in a way I did love one thing. A person. It is no secret that I still love that person even though he’s gone and has been for awhile now. I think the thing Bunny failed to realize on her last day of living was that you can love just one thing. You can devote your life to it, fully immerse yourself into it and soaking in it so that your fingers are perpetually wrinkled. You can do all of that just as long as you recognize that everything is temporary. If you can love that temporary thing that much, then you can love something else when it is gone. All that is required is that you keep your open to the idea of something else, something more.

If anything, loving one thing teaches you that you have the ability to love.