The List On My Mirror

THIS YEAR:
1. Be angry less.
2. Allow for more silence.
3. Be less passive-aggressive.
4. Pray more.
5. Surrender More. Control less.
6. Own less.
7. Write more. Create more.
8. Worry less.
9. Keep no record of wrongs.
10. Buy less. Give more.
11. Sola Gratia.
12. Assume less.
13. Wait.
14. Be present where you are.

Peace

Unsolved Mysteries

[Where are you?]

The Black Thumb

If thou dependeth only on the rain to water thy potted plants, they shall surely perish.
-Gardening 1:1

Equinox

Today is the first day of Autumn, and I really have nothing in particular to say about it aside that my heart seems to be overflowing from the sheer fact that the afternoon light is streaming through the atmosphere and hitting the sidewalk at the perfect slanted angle and trees are becoming confused about their colors and leaves about their subsequent displacement. Today the earth with divide equally the time it spends turning to face the sun and the time it spends making its retreat. Everything is going to sleep, but I am waking up. Waking up and drumming and exercising my imagination and writing run-on sentences with haphazard punctuation. All of this being reflective of my lack of direction, but my uncanny joy at the forward motion of life and my need to express said joy as it comes up.

A Story Told with Permission

Disclaimer: Not all quotes are direct...more of paraphrases for narrative purpose

I always appreciate the opportunity to be a spectator when people reveal a little bit more of their humanity - especially the people whom I love so well. I don't remember how it came up, but the other day my family was sitting around talking about homesickness and anxiety. Mom told me this story:

"When we moved [from Baton Rouge] to North Carolina, Rachel was two years old and we only had one car. So we had to share the car to go anywhere. Every morning, me and Rachel and Papa would get in the car and drive Papa to work at Research Triangle Park. We would drop him off and then all the way home I would cry and Rachel and I would sing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'"

Aunt Em asks, "why did you cry?"

"I guess I was just so homesick I didn't know what to do."

For some reason this really struck a deep chord in me. My mom was 26 or 27 years old at this point - still young, but older than I am now, very a much a person well-established in adulthood (as much as that's really possible for any of us...). And for months, she cried every morning from homesickness and used music and the company of a two-year old to cope. I see so much of her in myself - experiencing the same fear and emotional undoing that I regularly experience and will probably continue to undergo in similar circumstances, beautiful as they may ultimately be. It's so important for me to see that she made it. That she's a person, overall, in a state of internal peace. These struggles never leave us - especially those of us very often hanging on a last frayed nerve. But how alive we are!

"Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all."
-Emily Dickinson

On-My-Ownness

Today has been just one more new and exciting adventure in adulthood. I never thought my Saturday To Do list (if I ever thought I'd have one) would be this exciting:

Laundry
Cut the Grass
Pick up Prescription
Buy toothbrush and trashbags
Write thank you note

I know. I'm the most fun person I know today!

That's not to say I don't enjoy it, though. We have a non-functioning lawnmower, so our entire yard (small, though it is) has to be cut with the electric weed eater. Cutting the back yard was a learning experience. The front yard was like trying to reduce an afro with a nose-hair trimmer. My right elbow will definitely be sore tomorrow, and I am no longer a human being - I'm now just one giant mosquito bite. (As suburban as it is, I now understand at least a little, why people hire teenage boys with endless energy reserves to do their yard work.)

As tedious as I make it sound, it was empowering on a new level. It was satisfying to see the piles of loose grass along the road after I raked them out and knowing I did that myself. It was not unsatisfying to observe the stark contrast between my strip of grass and my neighbor's, where I had stopped cutting at the property line. If I had my say, these wouldn't be first on my list of Saturday morning activities, and I'm sure the novelty of adulthood will wear off sooner than I can imagine. But I'll always take opportunities when they're given - to laugh at myself, to interact with the post-man because he has to walk up my front steps to put the mail in the box, to wave at my neighbors when I'm walking or when I see them outside the neighborhood, to get my hands dirty.

What a sweet life.

"I'm amazed by life, and it's amazed by me,
We're a strange old pair, me and eternity...
It's a long, hard road with a good, good end."
-Waterdeep

Lycopene and Nicotine

I was listening to a discussion on NPR last week about the recent outbreak of E. coli in certain crops of tomatoes and other plants, which have caused some consumers to become deathly ill. Subsequent to this epidemic, tomato markets across the country have nearly bottomed out and left many single-crop farmers hanging by a thread. One commentator mentioned that what has actually been so detrimental to the market was not the actual risk assumed when buying tomatoes, but the perceived risk. Although the E. coli occurred in relatively few select crops which were consumed by a comparatively small group of tomato-eating individuals (who happened to become very notably ill), consumers across the board, perceiving a high level of tomato-consumption-associated risk, stopped buying tomatoes. They made this decision even though their risk of tomato-contracted illness was slim to none.

I found this interesting in light of the success of certain markets with products boasting high levels of consumption as well as high levels of actual risk - namely cigarettes. Ultimately, a person is much more likely to develop serious and possibly lethal health complications from smoking cigarettes than he or she would be to consume a contaminated tomato and subsequently contract E. coli. Furthermore, the health risks associated with cigarette smoke are printed boldly on every box of cancer sticks sold; they can't be missed. This risk is not only perceived, but acutal, known, clinically documented. And yet, most people don't seem eager to bring down the cigarette market because is is harmful. But God help them if they should buy tomatoes!

Where (aside from the addiction factor of cigarettes) is the logic here?

What are the odds?