Hallelujah

 

“There’s no solution to this mess,” Cohen once said, describing the human comedy at the heart of “Hallelujah. “The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say 'Look, I don't understand a f***ing thing at all—Hallelujah! That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.”

The Secrets I Never Wanted to Keep

 

I have been posting on "Coming to Terms..." for 18 years...almost a third of my life.

I am very attached to my little blog.  It has served many purposes over the years.  It brought new people into my life (and back out of my life, I'm afraid...)  It has given me a place to share my love of birds, cats, and photography. It's been the garden where I've sown and tended my political opinions. It's been a catalog of my spiritual awakening and growth. 

It's been a record, though a slightly erratic one, of my personal history over nearly two decades.

And it is a matter of deep personal sadness to me that not one member of my family--not even my husband--has ever been interested in reading it. 

Early on, I did invite them.  But I never had any takers.  In fact, it was as if the mere suggestion violated some kind of family taboo to which I was not privy. Kind of like, rather than a mild, "No, thank you!" I got more of a "God no!"

I'd like to think that everyone just believes this is a diary, so it should be private.  (But, guys, it's out there on the interwebs...!)  At any rate, I don't think that's the problem.  

The problem is--and this just pierces my heart--none of the people to which I am most intimately connected, are interested in knowing me all that well. 

Not the sisters.

Not the husband.

Not the long lost dear friend, whom I rediscovered back in March, and from whom I never heard another word after my second email to her, in which I specifically invited her to read my blog(s) if she was interested in catching up with what I had been about for the past eighteen years.  That one really hurt. 

If I really let myself think about this (read:obsess) it makes me question my life on the deepest of levels.  The fact that I have never meant enough to, well, anyone, to make them interested in what really makes me tick...  I just can't go there.  

So, most of the time, I don't.

But I come here anyway, and clack away just to hear myself clack.  And to interact with my one faithful friend who visits from time to time, and actually leaves evidence that she has done so. (Thank you, Jackie!)    

Oh, well.  I decided a long time ago that this was my safe place on the internet.  So here I will come, and here I will write...until I can no longer navigate a keyboard. 

Merry Happy

 

A New Name

As I stood outside doing my devotion this morning, I was whispered a new name for that which is called the Creator, or the Great Spirit, or God.  That force, that energy from which all of creation has sprung and will spring.

Heart of the Universe.  

The heart that never ceases.  The heart that maintains life in all its innumerable forms.

"Heart of the Universe, show us the light.  

Guide us to the light.  

Immerse us in light, that we may reject the darkness."

 

 

“OK, Boomer...” 😡😡🤬

If you hang around social media enough--particularly Twitter--you will have come across the phrase, "OK, Boomer."

The first time I saw it, it sent me into an orbit of shock and indignation.  I felt compelled to make some kind of move in defense of my generation.  So, I threw out a comment about it.  I was immediately swamped by a stack of nasty, confrontational retorts, all basically exclaiming that the Boomer generation was responsible for all bad things in America and the world, and I should just shut the fuck up.

Since that time, if I'm ever hankering for Twitter interaction, all I have to do is step up to the "OK Boomer" challenge.  I can argue a thread for an entire day.  Of course, it doesn't get me anywhere.  So what's the point?

I get that all generations tend to turn on their parents at some point in their lives...for awhile.  When I was in high school, it was practically required that you actively hate your parents in order to be a card-carrying teen-ager.  I didn't necessarily subscribe to that...I saw no reason to hate my parents, so I didn't.  But I was definitely in the minority.

Becoming an adult is a matter of going through many phases of awareness of the parameters of one's life, and (hopefully) gaining wisdom in how they came about and how to deal with them.  At some point, kids start to figure out that their lives are highly affected by things over which they have no control.  It's frustrating and maddening, and the first instinct is to find somebody to pin it on, since they know it's not THEIR fault.  Parents, being the closest-at-hand representations of authority and "unreasonable" restrictions, are the easiest targets for the blame.  THEY set up the unfair world which WE now have to live in.  They suck.  

Fast forward a decade or so.  Having had to navigate the world for several more years, and getting a broader and broader view of how things are set up and who or what is responsible for creating the culture in which we are required to function, we start to understand that no single generation can be saddled with the blame.  We understand that our parents faced challenges THEY had no voice in creating, as did their parents, and their parents, et cetera ad infinitum.  We Boomers got that eventually.  We went from vilifying our parents to conceding that they were "The Greatest Generation."  

In the end, we understood that they deserved our love and respect.  

But this conglomeration of little cats X,Y and Z (hat tip to Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat) has decided that Boomers are the easy and sole target for their angst.  We are responsible for every difficulty they have to face.  They have not yet, and possibly will not ever, get past the "blame game" stage.  Because they seem to be frozen in time, paralyzed by the economic, ecological and political minefields they are having to navigate. I don't mean to minimize the challenges they are facing.  In many ways, they're having a much more difficult time than we did.  But it seems like it's so much easier for them to glue their noses to their phones or video games and whine about how hard thing are, than to get out there and LIVE, and try to figure out how to change things.

I wonder if technology has just robbed thees generations of their imagination...of their creativity.  They don't seem to have the chops to imagine the world they want and to make it happen.  I read articles whining about how Boomers are standing in the way of millennials getting the goodies of life.   We shouldn't buy homes, because we're supposed to leave the homes in lower price ranges for the millennials.  We're "hoarding wealth" if we hold on to the homes we've owned for years, that have, through no fault of ours, skyrocketed in value.  We need to die or retire, so millennials can have our jobs.  

It's like they don't have enough imagination to come up with new strategies, new businesses, new policies.  They want OURS.  And we're supposed to hand them over.  Yesterday.  Because that's how the world works, right?  

Talk about entitlement?!!?!     

In attempting to do some research for this post, I came across this article:  What Does "OK Boomer" Mean?  I could barely wade my way through all the rhapsodizing about the many, varied, highly-reasoned meanings for this offensive, ageist, divisive, dismissive meme.  

Millennials are OVER years and years of condescension by "boomers".  They're tired of "boomers" criticizing their gender identities, their recreational activities, their attitudes toward employment.  Millennials don't believe "boomers" are invested in helping them change the world (to their specifications.)  Millennials don't feel they are required to follow or even listen to "out-of-touch" advice or rules set up in workplaces by 'boomer' bosses.  

Thus this two-word condemnation of an entire generation echoing through social media is entirely justified.  And "boomers" need to just get over it.  Because millennials are allowed to react to what they perceive as generation-based slights, but "boomers" need to shut up and take it.  Because it's millennials' turn to...be assholes?

My first reaction to being "OK-Boomer-ed" on Twitter was to think..."Ah.  Just what we need.  Yet another way to divide people.  We don't have enough of that going on already."  In the end, above and beyond any argument I could make for the economic challenges boomers face today right along with the rest of the peons; or how we stood for progressive change when we were young, and made it happen; or how we as school kids were trained to cover our heads and hide under our desks when the atom bombs were dropped on us; the most caustic fact about the spread of this meme and the attitude it encourages is that it advances the division of the human race into smaller and smaller and smaller warring factions.  How is that good, or cathartic?  How does it improve the human condition?  How does it make anybody's life better?

It isn't, and it doesn't.  

So spare me your, "THIS is what 'OK Boomer' means, and THIS is why it's smart, on-point, justified and perfectly OK."

No...it's ageist, dismissive, bigoted and downright mean.

If that's who millennials want to be...

Well, that's just pathetic. 

The Winter of My *Content*

Back in March of 2020, the husband was still employed by the inexorably disintegrating Little PDX Pillow Factory.  Though “we” had left Portland and moved to Eugene, Little Pillow Factory had remained on the top of husband’s priority list.  He was committed to spending three nights a week in fleabag motels so that he could be at the factory in PDX three days a week.  He came home on Thursdays to work from home Fridays and Mondays.  We had weekends together.  A familiar arrangement that conjured up unpleasant memories of a terrible time in my life.  But I consented to it.  Because that “old” arrangement was almost 20 years in the rearview.  In the intervening years, we had lived together apart for so long, it no longer mattered to me if he honored the “agreement.”  I knew I could/would carve out some kind of life for myself without him here.  I had been there and done that.  For many, many years.

Then COVID hit. 

And I lost it.

I dove into a pit of anxiety on the level of a 24/7 panic attack.  I could barely leave the house to even walk the dog around the neighborhood.  Going ANYWHERE—to the grocery store, to the DMV, to the optometrist, even to my sister’s homes—was too difficult to imagine.  I couldn’t go anywhere, could  hardly touch anything…could barely breathe.

While it was possible (though unhealthy) for me to stay home and hide under the bed, there was this issue of the husband traveling up to Portland every week and exposing himself, and ME, to god-knows-what.

I couldn’t deal with it.  Though I was so awash in anxiety I could hardly string together sentences to form a coherent thought, I gave him an ultimatum.

If you go to Portland this week, DO NOT COME HOME.

Wonder of wonders, he did as I requested.

Immediately, my anxiety began to wane.  Just having him HERE, being able to focus on someone besides myself, was the miracle cure I for which I could never even have thought to hope. 

And in the end, it was a path to healing for both of us.  COVID pulled the rug out from under what was left of the Little Pillow Factory, and it became obvious it was IN the tar pit rather than just heading for it.  I was able to at least be close by while husband navigated the demise of the thing that had been his number one priority for 26 years. 

So for 8 months, while the pandemic raged around us, the husband and I held each other up, learned to lean on each other, bit by bit, a little more with each passing day.  The Little Pillow Factory drew its last breath in August of 2020.  Desperate to grab a life line to The Next Thing, husband signed up for a tax preparer course that kept him engaged through January of 2021. 

Then that fizzled as well.  All that was left for him to do was keep applying for jobs in order to keep the flow of unemployment $$$ into the coffers.  Beyond that, he was ALL MINE.

We didn't have Thanksgiving last year.  We didn't have Christmas.  But we had a season of love, harmony and contentment that rivaled all our Christmases stacked on top of one another.

What a winter we had!  We drove up hill and down dale, looking for wildlife, taking pictures, dragging picnics to sodden little parks, sitting in the car and munching on chicken salad and potato chips.  We sat together in the evenings and binge-watched some of our favorite old TV shows.  We tackled project after project around the house—we painted, we constructed, we dug in the dirt.  With a minimum of the sniping in which we had customarily engaged when attempting to work together. 

I know this doesn’t exactly sound like paradise to most people, but for me, it WAS. 

In April, as luck would have it and with the unemployment about to run out, he landed a new job.  I wish I could say I was happy for him; I was...resigned.  I knew he was the type of animal that was happiest being engaged in some kind of occupation to give his days structure and his life some connection and meaning.  This was what he wanted.  This was what he needed.

But for weeks after he went back to work, I was SO sad.  Depressed.  Angry, even.  It seemed like I spent every hour on the verge of tears.  I couldn’t shake it.  I started to wonder what the hell was wrong with me?  I had spent years being by myself.  I knew how to do it.  Going back to it should be easy…liberating.   Comforting, even.  It was what I was used to.

Yeah.  I could go back to that.

But I didn’t WANT to.

So I sweated and coughed my way through the grinding days of summer, through vaccines and hope and almost going back to "normal," but then, not...through delta and re-masking and staying away from strangers, largely on my own once more.

Now that the days have cooled and the leaves have changed and I’m settling down into MY time of year, I’m thinking of last winter and how magical it was…and I sigh.

Because I know this year will not be the same. 

I realize that last winter, for the first time in way too long, I was happy.  Honestly, I feel a little guilty about it, because the world at large, and our country in particular, were going through the tortures of the damned.  Leave it to me to be so contrary that a wind that brought sadness, illness, fear and death to so much of the world, brought me connection and contentment—LOVE—I hadn’t known in ages, with the person with whom I had chosen to share life’s yoke so many decades ago. 

I am grateful beyond measure for those three months.

And, honestly, I'm afraid to hope we'll ever be able to recapture that bliss.  Because life does what life does.  And my life has not exactly pointed in the direction of sweet contentment for any length of time.  Between creeping old age and grappling with a pandemic, we can hardly dare to count on anything.

But we can hope.

And we shall see.

 

Morning Drill

Our cozy little retirement property borders on a school yard.  I believe I posted once here (or maybe it was on the now disgraced FB) that while I sit on my patio drinking my coffee in the morning, I'm treated to the school's morning announcements over the PA system, and it makes me feel like I'm on the set of MASH.

This morning, as I sat under my newly installed rain canopy beside my back door (Oregon's drought, at least in THIS portion of the state, seems to have come to a decidedly soggy end) the announcements came floating over the school yard at precisely 8:00. A man's voice...the recorded sound of children giggling.  I didn't bother to make out the words.  The sound has become part of my morning ritual.  Comforting, in a way...  (Though, given the ongoing complications of COVID and the lack of meaningful protections in schools, maybe a little less than comforting.)

About a half hour after the announcements, as I sat lingering over my second cup of coffee, I detected another amplified voice rising over the sound of raindrops on the patio cover.  It was repetitive.  Tinny.  Sounded like a robot from a 50's sci-fi flick.

As it continued to repeat and repeat, I was able to catch the words.

"Emergency alarm has been activated.  Emergency alarm has been activated." 

 All I could think was, "ACTIVE SHOOTER,"

I didn't hear any gunfire, so I'm going to assume (hope) it was an Active Shooter DRILL.

What a thing to have to hope for.

Gone are the days when all you would expect to hear carried on the wind from a school yard is the sound of the chattering voices of kids at play.

We live in a completely Fucked. Up. World.