Out of the Mire and From the Heart Post

Hello again and thank you for your kind patience. I truly appreciate it!

Now for the *"critically important news":  on the weather front...it sprinkled Sunday evening, most of  Monday and on into the evening. Very nice, quite refreshing. *Sorry, I couldn't resist! Lol!

Just to the left of center is the silhouette of a tiny little finch drying out on Monday evening.

While on my little mental holiday, I had lots of time to think, read and surf the internet. Funny what one can come away with after a little silence of the brain...stopping ceaseless output and just quietly absorbing...quite amazing. I ran across some quotes that gave me pause...such as:

To live is the rarest thing in the world.

Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Written over a century ago....

(Note:  two other quotes have been added to the right-hand side column.)

Let me see if I can explain a bit better. It seems to me, life is so over-sensationalized, so hyped up, so oriented to the next best/biggest thing...what can top that event, this story, that person and so on. And, I should add, always in a negative context.

Even the poor old weather, going about it's daily, seasonal business cannot escape the glittering generalities, but instead becomes "the worst (insert impending disaster and/or doom here) of the decade or century or all recorded history". There is no pause, no escape from the bombardment. In fact one recent weather headline made me think of "Chicken Little" and "the sky is falling" from ages ago.

It's not like I didn't write any posts while away, there are, in fact, about thirty-something of them. Just none "good enough". There was my post (which you'll never see) about the events leading to my post on the oblivious and rude manner in which most people go through life. No sense of common courtesy (or even common sense for that matter), personal responsibility for one's actions or thought of others...only self-involvement. Take Twitter and Facebook, what are they (for the most part) other than electronic billboards for what "you're" doing, following and liking (or not liking). Someone "un-friends" you and you die of mortification. Really? Seriously?

Is life so very tiny? It almost seems that existence has just turned into a glorified pile of superfluous nothingness. I don't want to sound preachy because I hate that kind of thing (yes, I said hate, a real feeling requires a real word, not a polite cover up) plus, I am the very last person to tell someone how to live. Really, I am! The absolute last! But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try in whatever small way I can, to make the world better and hopefully myself with it.

By the way, this is the reason that the list of favorite blogs on my site is so small...I'm very picky. Someone's writing has to speak on a deeper level. These blogs may have the elements I'm bemoaning above, but they also are written with heart.

When I went on hiatus it was because I felt I was a "bad" blogger. My posts were (and always have been) about things that I encountered as my life went on, starting with the hideous five year divorce. I thought I was getting better and personally, I think I was, until, the beginning of the second week in January, when life just kind of started sneaking in, again (serves me right for talking about miracles). I was faced with events that were less than positive (ha!) and would affect the quality of my life. So yes, this is/was all quite selfish.

Important thing was that my "vacation" started making me pay attention to articles, posts, and information that addressed life as it is not as defined by the world mass media. I found blogs on aging, poverty, on the disenfranchisement of large sections of our population by all the classics:  government, big business and of course the media. Segue:  One article I ran across was this...Link here...it disturbed me a great deal and illustrated the cold callousness of today's society.

Very few blogs address real life issues (IMHO). What one finds are diversions such as how to make a better blog for income, crafts and recycling materials into art, sites whose sole purpose is to show "pretty" photos they found and so on.

The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers.

How will you know if someone really loves you 

if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?

Robert Fulghum

It's not that such information is in any way bad, in fact if we didn't have something uplifting out there, we'd all just wither from some of life's uphill battles. There simply seemed to be a lack of people really talking about real life with any depth and without fear of their blog being unpopular. Sites I did come across that at first seemed to do this, were about subjects addressing political, religious or personal agendas. But they weren't offering thoughts about changing things other than for you to, in some way, agree or join in with whatever they were currently embracing.

Again, this isn't bad, it just seems to be a limited perspective. The more I thought about it, the more I felt compelled to speak. Not just about what was going good in my life but what wasn't. Things that are facing or probably will face everyone at some point in time. So rather than just crawl back into the shadows and stay on hiatus, I decided to be true to my feelings, thoughts and experiences.

I'm not saying this is going to turn into some sort of ranting platform, rather, as I run across bumps in the road, I am going to write about them and how I feel. I learned in my twenties that holding negative energy ("stuff") in, eats one up inside. Maybe something I find on my path to making my life better will help someone else. Who can say? I just know that I love writing and in order to be popular, I'm not going to pretend that life is a bowl of cherries, well...maybe it is, but cherries have pits.

Life is messy, forgot who said that but I couldn't have put it better. And the sooner we show up for life*, acknowledging it's not always a cakewalk, the sooner we may find a way out of the mire we're currently in.  (*someone else said that too, but I forgot who)

Lines from the Dylan Thomas piece that I read at my dad's funeral were floating through my mind before, during and after writing this..."Do not go gentle into that good night". Here is a link to a beautiful essay explaining Thomas' poem. I hope you'll read his poem (below) and then take a look at the essay.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

P.S. I've loved and been moved by this piece ever since I first read it in grade school. Even then it struck me as a powerful statement on living fully and not just fading away in the face of life's battles.


To be continued in a day or four.