Crow: Day One

In April, I marked off the days by making little quilts of things that delighted me every day.  April is over, and here are the last few I created:

Then the question was, how do I mark off the days in May? I decided to write short journal entries every day about things that struck me as worth thinking about. Occasionally, I will put these out there on my blog. I will call it The View From the Crow's Nest.

Perhaps you'll find that these topics are worth thinking about, too.

Here are the first two entries.

May 1:

Last week, after I posted my first blog in months, I felt like a fraud.

In the blog, I told readers I have found my happy place, and I am abiding in it. This is true, but it is not the whole story.

There are bad days and tearful hours, too. Like Easter Sunday -- it was not good at all. I missed my kids and grandkids, I missed the church service with everyone singing with gusto, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” I missed a dear friend who had died two days earlier and I had not been able to say goodbye. I tried to make gluten-free cinnamon buns to take over to the grandkids, but I think I killed the yeast. “Christ has risen indeed, yes...but not these buns,” I grumbled. Because I was grumpy, I took it out on the resident sweetie. That was ugly.

It took me another day to sit with those bad feelings and come out the other side.

Finding your happy place and being grateful does not mean that life is always hunkey-dorey. It isn’t. It never was, even in the best of times. But still we abide, salvaging shiny bits of joy from the rubble of the day and putting them in our treasure box of delights.

In the dark times, we pull them out and remember.

May 2:

I’m noodling about that word Abide. The dictionary has many meanings, but the one I like the best is this: to continue in a place, sojourn. And unpacking the word further, I find that sojourning means staying in a place temporarily.

We are here in the land of Covid 19. How long this sojourn will last is unknown, but in the meantime, I will abide in this place.

I once asked a wise woman the question, “What do you do when you find yourself all dried out spiritually?” She told me, “Do what the Israelites did when they found themselves marooned in the wilderness on their journey to the promised land: they pitched their tents, and made themselves at home there.” And so will I.

In a sense, we are all on a journey to the promised land, and we are all sojourners here. In the meantime, do good and make this temporary home a better place.