Catching up on thanksgivings!

It's amazing how quickly time can get away from a person. When I least expect it, I catch my breath and realize a whole week has passed, then just as quickly, a whole month turns into months turns into years. My grandmother, who was a very wise woman, always told me not to rush any single stage of my children's lives or my own because before I knew it - like a blink! - they would be past and gone and I'd be wishing for time to slow down. She was very right. I am a week behind on my thanksgivings, but I remember then, day for day, and so I will take the time now to catch them up.

I have been quite sad the past couple of days, with sinking spirits and low, weak energy. I am struggling with coming to terms with, for lack of a better word, disappointment. I am still processing the great disappointment I have suffered this past year with the ending of my marriage and the realization that the man I married was not the man I had come to know but someone else entirely. I am not anywhere near done the work I need to do to move on. I am still a long ways away from forgiveness. Slowly, in little pieces, I process what I can handle and otherwise keep my head down and keep moving through daily life. I am working through another disappointment. Newer. And I feel sore and tired. When you hold someone in great esteem and then discover that your ideal of them is not the reality of them, the disappointment can feel like the ground under your feet has suddenly started shifting and cracking and lurching away from what feels safe. So it is for me in the past year.

I share all this because I have learned that when the ground beneath my feet is unsteady and uncertain, working at turning the focus of my heart and my spirit and my energy toward those things that remain solid and steady and continue to bless me - those things will hold on and be the ever-present safety net that will not let me hit ground from which I cannot rise: my children, my mother, my brothers and sisters, my faith, and my undying hope that someday I will fully understand and accept the lessons that I am meant to learn. With that so much in my mind, I want to start catching up with my blessings: last Saturday and each day this past week.

Saturday, November 5: I slowly cleaned my house today. In bits and pieces spread out across the day, I worked little by little to pretty up the environment that I call home. I am grateful for all the pictures I have in my house - all over the house. They remind me of the life I have lived and the love that I have been able to give and have been so fortunate to have had in return. Pictures of my great-grandparents when they were young. And of my great-grandmother in the later years of her life - oh! how she could tell a story! Pictures of my grandparents on their honeymoon and later with my children. Pictures of my children: Daniel in his kindergarten graduation get-up, his lifelong friend Justin with his mischievous grin smiling behind him; Jacob swinging on a rope swing in New Zealand; Daniel and his beautiful wife, Tiggy smiling at one another; Jacob and Daniel when they were little, hugging one another; my brothers and sisters and me when we were little and all dressed up in our matching Easter outfits; my father with my two sisters at my cousin Carrie's wedding, smiling and so happy; my whole huge family and extended family at my niece, Jennifer's, wedding; Daniel and Jacob in May the weekend that Daniel graduated from UNC-W and Jacob graduated from Wake Forest (on the same day!!); my sweet little mama and Jacob at Jacob's UNC graduation in May of 2010; my friend Bobbi and me up at the "old house" at the foot of Roan Mountain; my friend Cindy and I sitting on a rock by the river across from her house in Tryon; one of my patients and her new baby and her husband and me, all grinning up at the camera just a short while after I delivered that baby into this world............ I have lots and lots of pictures. They are visual reminders that I am a very lucky woman. And I am grateful for that reminder. Not just in these days when I am not feeling so lucky, but always.

Sunday, November 6: I hiked up to the top of Elk Knob today with Dan. Elk Knob State Park is not far from where I live and I have been wanting to get up there and see if I could indeed make it to the top. I wore a knee brace, pulled tight, and did not try to rush it. There was an open understanding that it was okay for me to turn back whenever I wanted or needed. The trail is only 1.8 miles but it sure felt longer. (Yes, I am very out of shape). Baby came along for the hike, too, and was busy taking in all of the millions of smells that dogs process every second, even when they're moving. It was a beautiful day. And, when I reached the summit, I was absolutely elated!! It's pretty darn incredible up there. You can see Mount Rogers up in Virginia, Roan Mountain over in Tennessee, Grandfather Mountain, Mount Mitchell, and the South Mountains way off in the distance. The sign at the top said that on a clear day, you can see Pilot Mountain from up there, way down by Winston-Salem. I couldn't quite make it out, but an older gentleman up there said he thought he could. It was breathtaking. The hike down hurt a lot. My knee does not handle "down" very well. But it didn't give. And it saw me all the way back to the car. I was reminded of my younger years and all the time that Dan and I spent hiking the mountains, camping, backpacking, rock climbing. I am grateful for this old body and the way it saw me through today. And I am grateful for a friendship that has lasted through 33 years and has survived much loss (grandparents, then each a parent, friends), divorce and remarriage for each of us and each another divorce, financial hardships, and all the curve balls that life will slam at you from time-to-time. It is the mutual adoration for our two children that has kept our friendship intact and allowed us to forgive each other our short-comings and accept each other for who we are, as we are. I am deeply grateful for that.

Monday, November 7: I am limping today and sore from yesterday's hike. I have moved slowly all day, guarding each step and trying to stay mindful of how I put my foot down before I put weight on this messed up knee. I am very ready for sleep and think that I will not be up too late. My Baby-girl as I call her, the sweet lab mutt that I adopted 5 years ago, is very patient with my slow moving. She sits close to me and sighs. Her presence is a balm against the loneliness that I might feel where it not for her company. She is a warm and calm energy. I love her dearly. She sat by the bathtub while I soaked my swollen knee and watched me closely to assure herself that I was alright. I believe what they say about the healing power of animals. She heals me every day. My traveling companion and my sounding board, she never disagrees with all my rantings (though she sometimes closes her eyes and drifts off in boredom if I go on too long!). She was a blessing to my life when I moved to Virginia and found myself hours away from friends and family, in a place unknown, on my own. She has continued to be a blessing. Thank you, God, for sending her to me when I needed her.

Tuesday, November 8: I am worse today. I had a long talk with my mom and was trying so hard not to whine, but whine I did. At least for a little while. My mama only lets you whine for so long! The ache in my knee worked its way out and up into my hips and groin and into the big muscles of my body. I am feverish and feel like I am getting the flu. I know this will pass. It is just part of it. My mom and I talked for a long time about depression. In our talks, she helps me remember non-medicinal ways to fight it, beat it, work with it, manage. My mother is a very special woman. Especially when I am hurting, I am so grateful to just hear her voice. I am blessed by her wisdom, her love, and her example. Thank you, Mom, for that special Mom touch you have. Even over the phone, its healing power is one of the most powerful things I know in this life. I love you.

Wednesday, November 9: Home during lunch for a 30 minute nap and a nap at the end of the workday before supper. I am grateful for napping. I would not have survived nigh on 16 years in practice without that skill. I learned it when I was small, came to depend on it when I had babies, and trust it to see me through another 10 years or so of baby catching.

More later. I still have Thursday, Friday and today to go. I'll get there.

Peace all.

http://www.reverbnation.com/c./a4/1525809/639158/Artist/639158/Artist/link

One Child

This is One Child, a song that I wrote in the weeks that followed a mission trip I made to the Petrovsky orphanage in Russia. As I say in my introduction, I felt like what we had done was a good thing and a powerful thing but it seemed like such a small thing in a big and mean world. I wanted to do more. I wanted to bring a whole bunch of them home with me! I wanted to sell all my possessions and move in with them and be their mama. I wanted to really really really make a difference. In the end, as Mother Theresa said, "we can do no great things. Only small things with great love." We may never know how much of a difference we made for those children, but we can know that we loved and we tried and, if not for them, that will make a difference for us, in us, and so, the world changes ever so slightly. Ever so slightly, multiplied by a million ever-so-slightlies, can change the world. We just have to start...........

Peace to you.

PS - A big thank you to Jon Elion for his lead guitar and Lorna Roberts for her harmony vocals on this performance

I am crying out to heaven. I'm so tired of being scared.
I'm asking God to send me an angel.
Won't you send me someone who cares?
Everywhere I turn I see such sadness.
Still I have this hope I hold inside
That someone will want to make a difference
And they'll start with one child.

I am one child, can you feed me?
I am hungry and cold down in my bones.
I am one child, can you see me?
I am lonely and longing for a home.
Change the world. Be the turning of the tide.
But could you start with one child?

So many times I've been shattered
By an angry world I cannot control.
I try to hide the ways that I've been battered,
Such a heavy weight for a tiny soul.
I would give you all that I hold dear to me
Just to see the sweetness of your smile.
You could change my world this much is clear to me
But could you start with one child.

I am one child, can you teach me?
I am willing to learn and understand.
I am one child, can you reach me?
I dream I see you holding out your hand.
Change the world. Be the turning of the tide.
But could you start with one child?
Start with me - one child.

-----Yours truly, One Child, June 2008

Thursday, November 3: On the occasion of the 105th anniversary of my grandfather's birth, I am grateful for the freckles that adorn my face and for the red tones in my hair, both of which I got from my grandfather. When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to hold me up to the mirror and smile at me smiling at her and she'd say, "Who do you look like? Where did you get that strawberry freckle face?" I was her favorite grandchild because of that strawberry blond hair and those gazillion freckles that light up my face. I grew up loving those freckles because my grandmother and grandfather loved them so. Years later, when my grandparents were gone, I would discover that my brothers and sisters and my cousins all had special, unique inherited gifts that my grandparents adored. We were all their "favorite" grandchild. My grandmother had that particularly wonderful gift of making a person feel extra special and extra loved.

I delivered a beautiful, healthy baby yesterday on my grandfather's birthday. And I felt proud to be his granddaughter. I am so grateful to have been loved so well.

Friday, November 4: I am grateful today for Friday afternoons and weekends off and the chance to have nowhere to go, to just be home with my sweet dog Baby and my strange but equally sweet, drooling cat Buster. Like Baby and Buster, I have become especially fond of naps. I am a skilled nap-taker. And I'm grateful this afternoon for the cloudy gray sky and the time to curl up under the covers and drift, unfettered, out into whatever world my mind chooses to create for me. It is good to recover. It is in my dreams that I fly, that I succeed, that I laugh with abandon, that I face my demons, that I battle and win, that I pray and sing and heal. And so, on this cloudy Friday afternoon, I am grateful for the chance to do just that.

Until later, peace all.

I am a day late starting my annual November gratitudes. And it is late. So I will be brief, I think, though I never know once I get started writing how long I might be. Back in 2006, I packed up my whole house and all my belongings, left everything familiar, and moved to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to take a job there. I sent Jacob to college in that same week and faced, not only a whole new place, but an empty nest as well. During that first winter there, I was living in a great big old beautiful farm house, a half a mile out a dirt road, on a 200-acre soy bean farm. I loved it there, but was prone to bouts of intense homesickness and, of course, the depression that generally seeps into my bones and my psyche about this time of year and takes up residence until the spring chases it off with her flowers and green and warm. I was having a particularly difficult time that first winter on the Eastern Shore. During a conversation about my sinking spirits, my mother told me about an article she had read about gratitude and how life-changing, life-saving it can be. The writer of the article suggested starting and keeping a gratitude journal and writing daily notes on things that bring about gratitude - a particularly beautiful sunrise, a baby's laugh, a call from a friend - any little or big thing that draws that feeling forward. The writer said that we should all go looking for gratitude.

And so I began. And I worked at it. My gratitude journal from those days is here on my blog and has continued, in all sorts of forms, since then. It was a very powerful exercise and helped me tremendously through that first long winter up there in the middle of nowhere on the Eastern Shore. And it continued to help me through the many changes and trials and struggles and celebrations and losses of the next four years there and my first year back here in Boone. I am trying to live a life of gratitude. I am not always successful. I sometimes forget. I sometimes don't forget, I just sometimes would rather not do it. But when I focus on living a life of gratitude, I am amazed at how different life feels to me, how much happier it is, how much more sense it makes.

When I am driving in my car to work or driving back home, I try to remember to focus my mind on gratitude. When I am feeling sorry for myself, I do the same and, amazingly, I can stop that self-pity drain. When I am tired and aching and wanting to whine about the tough aspects of getting older, I think about how grateful I am to be as young as I am (in spirit!) and as healthy as I am, and the aches don't bother me quite so much. I know deeply that I have been tremendously blessed in this life. I sometimes just need to remember. If I forget for too long, there will generally come a trial or a crisis to remind me anew. If I let the activity of acknowledging all of my blessing slip, if I forget to say "thank you" for all that I have been given, if I get to complacent or lazy to just open up my eyes and see, my spirits will sink and sadness will likely take over. It is a daily, conscious process. And decision, too. And one that I try to respect. I am trying to live it.

So in celebration of Thanksgiving month, I would like to try to make a note, every day, of my blessings and my gratitudes. I did this last year and the year before on Facebook. I thought I'd do it smaller this year. And write it here.

In keeping in tradition with my unfortunate and lifelong lateness (yes, I will be late for my own funeral, I am sure), I am starting a day late. So here are two days worth:

November 1: Today I am grateful for the morning. Every day above ground is a good one. I am not much of a morning person. I am slow in the mornings and quiet. Not grumpy. Just not quite with it. But I am learning to appreciate mornings more. The older I get, the more I appreciate the turning slowly and that first blinking, yawning, sighing recognition of the light of the day coming in through the window. Another night is passed and here is another day, another chance, another hope. Nights are for dreaming without direction. Days are for dreaming with hope and intention. I am grateful for every morning, every day that I can begin again.

November 2: I have a sense of myself again. I kind of lost touch for awhile. A lot has changed in the past two years. And I just lost focus. I didn't lose me. I gained some new dimensions. It was like I was walking through a maze for awhile but the path has gotten easier and the ground more even and the way more familiar. I was very intensely introspective there for a time but my insides were so muddy and murky, it was mostly just like wallowing in the mud. I wasn't able to see myself from the outside. I couldn't get out of my own way! I am glad to have steadier footing again and to appreciate what I've just come through and how it has affected me, changed me, strengthened me, given me some wisdom. I am very grateful for that. I am grateful for my own strength and my own will to survive, not just as a living being, but as a living, caring, contributing, productive being. I have been blessed.

Peace and love and all that. Till later.

Ranford Almond - Where Have All the Average People Gone? [Tosco Music Pa...

This is for Margaret. But also for anybody else who might happen along and take an interest. I have songs posted on a ReverbNation page. Kind of like My Space but less confusing. You can find it at www.reverbnation.com/lisastevens. If you'd like, you can hear some songs there. I think I'm a much better songwriter than poet. But then, I guess the difference between the two is a thin veil. There is a song that I wrote for my son Jacob already posted, and I'll post a song I wrote for my Daniel this evening.

I haven't forgotten to write. I've just been hanging on. Sometimes my "hanging on" gets fouled up in my body and most I can manage is getting to work and getting home and the rest of the time I am sitting still, wondering where my energy went. Winter is especially a "hanging on" time for me. Double whammy these days - winter and heart-sickness. But it will get better. It always does.

I have so much in my head.

Peace all.