Muddled Mind

I almost signed off the computer today without doing my blog entry. Instead I was burrowing through work chores and trying to get focused for a week of meetings, medical appointments, a friend's April visit and, I hope, some life to be lived. Thus, my mind is a bit muddled and my heart is a bit heavy with worry and grief.

The chaotic world is too much with us. So, to create my own world, I put myself in a church pew today and listened to Methodist "big" music, I call it. My church pulls in about twenty musicians from the Tucson Orchestra and adds the choir and organ every third Sunday. Today we heard Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Lizst. Wonderful sounds filled the arches and danced along the stained glass windows. Later, Mark and I walked along Mountain Ave. which added art work of poetry along the widened roadway. Ophelia Zepeda's poems were carved into granite boulders, in both English and her native Papago (Tohono O'odham) language. I smiled and cried as I read them aloud. {link for her poetry is http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ofelia-zepeda )

My son tells me not to "stress out" so much. But it's my nature to take things in deeply and, so sometimes, I feel overwhelmed. How do you try to keep your cup from overflowing or keep your feet on solid ground? Yet, sometimes, to have life gushing out like a waterfall or to fly in the clouds can also be a good part of living. Where I get into trouble is when I lose the sounds of hope and laughter. I really have to dig deep into myself sometimes to open up to those sounds. Cacaphony from the news or words of conversations drowns out the light music.

This week was Robert Frost's birthday (3/26) and I learned that he, one of my favorite poets, struggled with depression most of his life. I wouldn't have thought so from his poems which speak to me very clearly. "I want to go out as a swinger of birches..." is a line that called me to it in the 1970's and still does. We have no birch trees in Tucson, but to swing out on a Cottonwood, or, higher up in the mountains, to swing out on an Aspen would be a good way to let go.

But not yet. My counselor this week wants me to come up with some ideas of what I want my life to be in the next ten years. If today is an example, it would be with more music and more poetry.

What "more" do you want in your next ten years?