Building Our Own Violins aka Mindfulness

NOTE: This post was originally scheduled to run a few days after the Capital was overrun with domestic terrorists. So I kicked it back to a draft to make room for a few posts about current events. Today is Inauguration Day and I'm sure most of us are holding our breaths waiting to exhale when/if we get through it peacefully. In Trump's inaugural speech four years ago he painted a dark picture of America and promised: "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now." In a perfect world, he'd realize those words should have been spoken today, on his last day in office. In a perfect world he'd know that his legacy will forever be connected to the worst carnage ever set upon our Democracy. But it's not a perfect world and more than ever we could do ourselves a service if we'd spend a little time each day practicing mindfulness.

 
Do you know what impresses me? That a guy could apprentice to a long line of violin makers and still be able to take the craft to such new heights of perfectionism that people nearly three hundred years later are willing to pay millions of dollars to own one of his instruments. Antonio Stradivari, in his seventy years of professional work, made 1,100 stringed instruments and 650 are said to still be in existence. Truly amazing! From a little stab of maple, some pine, glue and varnishes, and with a methodical persistence to find perfection the Stradivarius was born, a line of instruments with full woody tones unsurpassed even today.

I wonder what it would feel like to be truly gifted at something. I wonder if Antonio knew he was a gifted. I doubt it. After all the whole town of Cremona in the northern region of Italy where he lived and worked had a history---three centuries long---of making musical instruments. Did he think of himself as just another guy on an assembly line? Like some guy in Detroit punching out automobiles? Or could he feel that his work was special? Antonio must have had some idea; he kept his vanish recipe a secret even from his wife and children and many people feel that his varnishing process is what gave his violins their magic sound. But then again he was making a living and people protect their livelihood from their competitors, so that doesn’t necessarily mean he knew he was creating masterpieces that would endure over centuries.

I have a book titled, Wherever You Go There You Are---at least I had it before the big book purge last summer. That title amused me whenever I saw the book on the shelf. The author would not be happy to learn that I’ve never actually read the book cover to cover, but I’ve read enough of it to know that it’s about cultivating our ability to live in the present moment. Mindfulness. I don’t know where I am going with this except that I believe a person like Antonio Stradivari must have understood living in the moment. As he worked, he let the woods and varnishes speak to him and he listened in an analytical way that his predecessors, and those who came afterward, hadn’t done. He was not just another guy on an assembly line punching a time clock, picking up a paycheck. He had the “it factor” that Simon on American Idol used to talk about.

I have a sister-in-law who is a wonderful cook. Not only does her food taste fantastic, but her presentation, creativity and thoughtfulness in menu planning are something that I have long admired. She has the “it factor” in the kitchen. She’s in the moment when she is in the kitchen. I have a niece who when her two sons were young, she had the “it factor” when it came to motherhood---and now when it comes to grand-parenthood. Her older sister once said that Melinda is not just a mother, “She’s a human development specialist.” She’s in the moment when she interacts with the children in her life, gives them 100% of her attention.

You can guess what I’m going to say next. Yup, I’m going to tell you that we don’t have to build Stradivarius violins or paint like Rembrandt to achieve a state of oneness with our surroundings. To find that one thing that we can be passionate about, that something that regenerates our spirit and soul, and when we find it we can’t help but give it 100% of our attention. We do so many things on autopilot, thinking of past regrets or worrying about the future, instead of seizing the moment we’re in. Yada, yada, yada. This could be lecture #704 to myself because I fall out of mindfulness as often as I fall into it.

Someone in another blog said words to the affect that we live for the little moments in life that tell us that we’re alive. I couldn’t agree more. I would only add that increasing our happiness can come from practicing mindfulness—of teaching ourselves to live in the small moments of life. Over the past year when the pandemic and politics because the strangest bedfellows ever paired together it’s been impossible for me to live in the moment and I’m hoping I can get back to at least trying to do that. Granted, I’ve never been good at it for more than an afternoon, a day or a week at a time but those times when I do achieve mindfulness have the power to heal. And 2020 left me with a lot of wounds that need healing but it’s time to say, “Yup, today I'm metaphorically building my own violin”---to enjoy the process of whatever I’m doing at the moment. Antonio Stradivari might have said it this way: “If you live in a town that builds musical instruments, build the best damn one you can build.” If you're me you vow to bake more bread, a process that never fails to pull me into the moment. ©

Cemeteries and Guru Ants

Over the weekend I did something that should have been done around Memorial Day. I packed a bucket up with garden gloves, a spade, scrub brush, plastic bags and a gallon of water and headed off to the cemetery to tend to my husband’s grave marker. If the sod around the stone isn’t edged once a year, it wouldn’t take long for the entire stone to be covered over with dirt and grass. Location, location, location---like buying a house, when you pick out a gravesite location matters. Don’t buy one in a low spot. Of course, we didn’t think of that when my husband and I picked out our site. It’s in the same row as plots our friends bought and that pleased our funny bones to be neighbors when we die. Don is there waiting all by himself. Well, not exactly. He grew up near the small town where his ashes are interred and he delivered newspapers to most of the houses, back in the days when newspapers were the kings in the media world. He knew a lot of the people buried in the cemetery. He also trimmed trees and cut the grass in the grave yard for an entire summer of restitution for a juvenile crime. Hint: Don’t move city-owned picnic tables into the river. Yup, the guys in our row at the cemetery will have much to talk about when they reunite.

It was a pleasant day, sunny but not too hot and I got the edging done without taxing myself. Last year I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up the stone’s maintenance but this year I realized my recent strength training at the gym made the chore not only manageable but almost meditative. I was so in the zone of what I was doing that when I walked back to the car I was surprised to see another woman was working less than 50 feet away. I’ll have to go back another day to affix a Snoopy trinket to the corner of the stone. It was too wet to do it while I was there. But I don’t know why I keep that tradition going because by fall some little kid will have peeled the trinket off the stone. I use Crocs shoe charms and if you hear about an old woman mugging a little kid to get the Snoopy charm off his shoe it will be me, taking back was as taken from the cemetery. 

I picked Saturday to go to the cemetery because there was an art show going on in the community pavilion in town and I wanted to know if any of the artists knew of someone who teaches painting. At the sponsoring group’s table they took my email address and I was told one of their members does hold classes. (Fingers crossed.) After checking out all the artist’s work I walked across the street to a hot dog place that overlooks the town’s damn and garden park. With my lunch packed to go, I went out their back door and ten steps later I was connected to the nature trail. I found a bench in the shade about a block away where I could watch the swans and kayakers go by. The trail was busy---bikers of all descriptions, skateboarders, joggers, dog walkers, fly fishermen, and people pushing wheelchairs. I’d done my share of pushing a wheelchair and walking the dog on that trail but a bad tick season made me stop doing the latter and Don’s death, of course, ended the former. It wasn’t a sad day of memories although earlier when I turned into the cemetery I was swallowing hard the way you do when you think tears might spill. That brief moment made me wondered if that was the reason why I’d put off doing my spring chore until mid-summer. But it wasn’t. I just got too busy.

As I sat by the river a slight breeze carried the sweet scents of summer and I glanced down to the cement pad my bench was sitting on and I got side-tracked watching a black ant carrying off a shredded pickle longer than he was. It had fallen off my hot dog. A piece of shredded cheese was near-by. I picked it up and put it down in the path of another black ant but he just walked over it and before I knew it I was engrossed in the curious dietary preferences of ants. Pickles and bun bits, yes. Cheese and onion, no. I thought about giving them a few drops of my Coke but I’m pretty sure that would have been akin to yelling “THE KEG'S HERE!” in a college frat house. Without planning it, without consciously commanding myself to relax and live in the moment, to mediate myself to a place of peace, it happened anyway. I was both in and of world, a god to ants in the same way some higher power might be putting ‘pickles’ and ‘cheese’ in my path to see how I’ll react. They say the benefits of Mindfulness (living in the moment) are: It reduces brain clutter, brings better force in your life, lowers stress, helps you better understand your pain and connects you with the world around you. I get that. I got that tenfold on Saturday. After spending over three hours between the cemetery, the art show, lunch and playing mindfulness games with my guru ants, I went home and took a long, dead-to-the-world nap. ©

“In today’s rush, we all think too much — seek too much — want too much — and forget about the joy of just being.” ~Eckhart Tolle

A Widow's Letter to Myself

Are you tired of crying? Are you tired of feeling sorry for yourself? What are you waiting for? A committee of friends to bind your wounds or maybe a White Knight to come riding in to save you from the perils of your own thoughts?

Don’t cry over the past, it’s gone.

Don’t stress over the future, it hasn’t arrived.

Yada yada, yada we’ve all heard that two-line platitude before. It goes around Facebook like a round-robin. Whoever coined those words knows jack-squat about widows. We cry over the past. It goes with the title. We stress over the future and if a White Knight did come riding in I’d probably tell him to go kiss the frigging wind as he rides off to live in the fairytale where he was bred. The only one who can fix what is wrong with my life is me, the solutions to all widows’ problems has to come from within.

“Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”

Yup, we’ve been through a cyclone. But wait. There is something to be said for living in the moment, for straddling a line in between yesterday and tomorrow. Mindfulness has always served me well when the past was too painful and the future was too scary. Live in the moment. Concentrate on those vegetables I’m chopping up for soup. Drinking coffee? Pay attention to the taste, the smell, the color and way the steam curls above the cup. Live in the moment, fully engaged in whatever you’re doing. Jeez, I’ve sold that platitude short. Living in the moment is a rational way to cope and isn’t that what those two lines are really saying? Don’t think about the past, don’t think about the future. If you don’t have the courage to move forward, coast in the middle.

“You have plenty of courage, I am sure," Oz said.

“All you need is confidence in yourself.”

Are you tired of crying? Are you tired of feeling sorry for yourself? Are you ready to begin the process of rebuilding your life again? How do I start? Where do I begin to identify the route I’d take from the starting gate to the goal on the far side of tomorrow? We are all defined by the decisions we make. Time to decide: am I tired of dying inside? Moving forward means change. Moving forward means packing my past up in a clothe covered box---a box that can live in the back of the closet next to my ruby red shoes, magic and memories side by side, waiting in case I need them again. Don’t cry over the past, it’s gone. Is that where I start?

“It’s always best that you start at the beginning,”

Glinda the Good Witch from the North advised Dorothy and Toto.

Don’t stress over the future. I think we can all agree that’s much harder to do than tucking the past on a shelf. Some widows have too many choices, some too few. Do I move and if so where do I go? Or should I stay and if I do will the ghost in the house still help me feel rooted in something important? Some widows have children to consider; I only have a dog the size of Toto. And money, who doesn’t wonder and worry about that? Live in the moment when it gets to be too much to think about. Chop those soup vegetables up in nice, even slices. Chop, chop, chop until I get stronger and stronger.

“Look at the circles under my eyes,” said the Cowardly Lion.

“I haven't slept in weeks!”

Try to remember, dear cowardly widow and lion alike, that choices can’t hurt you, plans don’t bite. No one ever died from choosing between one thing or another---well, unless I decided to take a leisurely stroll in a war zone and I’m way far from being suicidal or stupid. A widow’s choices may not be as easy as plastic or paper but by finding our courage, as Glinda would say, it makes choosing doable. Choices are just a catalog of ideas that can be edited and revised over and over until the path forward is as plain to see as a yellow brick road in a forest. Don’t stress over the future; it hasn’t arrived and as sure as sure can be, plans don’t bite. ©

 “All right, I'll go in there for Dorothy,” the cowardly lion said.

“Wicked Witch or no Wicked Witch, guards or no guards, I'll tear them apart.

I may not come out alive, but I'm going in there.

There's only one thing I want you fellows to do.”
”What's that?” the Tin Man and Scarecrow asked in unison.
”Talk me out of it!”

Quoted text is from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz which was based on a 1900 book by L. Frank Baum

Walk Forward, Don't Run Away

In March of 2008 I wrote a blog entry titled ‘Immortality’ and it started out like this: “We all face our own mortality at one at point or another although some of us are good at pretending it doesn’t exist. Usually I’m able to ignore thoughts of dying or of losing someone I love, but sometimes the concept slaps me in the face and it can’t be ignored. Last week was one of those slap-downs….” Then the blog went on to talk about a heart catheterization Don went through.

I ended the essay with this: “For the next few days I worried about the ‘what ifs’ ahead of us, borrowing trouble from the future and generally forgetting the caregivers’ Cardinal Rule about living in the moment and appreciating what is here right now. The bottom line, I finally had to tell myself, is that after all the testing and all the worrying nothing has changed. Don is still in my life and he still finds life worth living. We don’t have to say good-bye just yet and I don’t have to make my way alone in the world. So I made a conscious choice to go back to the land where ignoring our mortalities makes sense in a crazy kind of logic that demands no explanation from those of us who have been there, done that.”

January 18th, 2012 I got the final slap-down, didn’t I, the mean-spirited punch from Father Fate. Don is gone and I’m trying my best to practice mindfulness but living in the moment is so much harder sometimes than others. In a book of daily meditations I’m currently reading---Wrinkles Don’t Hurt---it has a Jack Kornfield quote that is good advice for anyone dealing with grief: “Don’t run away. It’s that simple.” The meditation goes on to talk about how by letting our emotions come we can release them. If we block our pain, then we block our ability to find joy again. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not what I’ve been doing by keeping so busy ---blocking the pain because I don’t want to walk deeper into the valley of grief.

Dialogue with the Dog

Levi: “Is that all you’re going to do today is sit at the computer? Can’t you see my ball sitting there on the floor?”

Me: “Go get your ball, Levi.”

Levi: “That’s not going to cut it, old woman. Give me your full attention or I’m going to eat the schefflera plant. Again!”

Me: "Leviiiiiiii! Knock off the barking and go get your ball!”

Levi: “Not until you give me your full attention. All that New Age stuff about mindfulness you like to read about---well, you know you can’t do two things at one time if you want to practice it. Play with me! Now!”

Me: “What’s the matter, little boy? Do you miss your ball throwing partner? Do you miss Don?”

Levi: “Now we’re getting some where. Of course I miss Daddy! What a silly question.”

Me: “Want to go for a walk, Levi? Shall we clear our minds and go find out if any of your four-legged friends left you some pee-mail?”

Levi: “You’re just full of silly questions today, aren’t you!” ©