A Little Seasoning....

A good friend of mine sent me one of those lovely Power Point presentations this week. The message, conveyed with breathtakingly beautiful photography, was a simple one. It was a message of seasons, each one separate and distinct, each one flowing into the next, each one to be seen as part of a whole and not in and of itself. The message stressed the importance of not isolating one single season. By itself one season can be a disappointment, so seasons must be looked at in their context to the others, the sum of all the parts if you will. The whole.

I made what I thought was a witty comment remarking that, "If you think about it...the seasons also "season" us." How true that statement is, they do season us. How very seasoned are those who have lived through and experienced many trials and triumphs over the course of their lives. I know I am seasoned, certainly.

We all go through difficult times. We face difficult situations, encounter difficult people. Thus making me think about another set of seasons entirely. Seasons we taste. We taste both the bitter and sweet of each season, the bitter and sweet life has to offer. We savor and relish the sweet times, the pleasant and idyllic ones. The bitter, pungent, hurtful ones are quite another matter. We hasten to cleanse our palate of such bitter taste, look to wash the remnants from our consciousness lest it linger and become a heavy aftertaste. We look for something sweet and light to take its place. Something soothing and gratifying to replace the sourness. We don't forget what was unappetizing and distasteful as it become part of us. We do focus on the pleasant, the savory and enjoyable tastes of life we find, but never do we forget the others less appreciated.

That's the season, the seasoning best remembered. The sum of all tastes, the delightful and sweetly satisfying ones along with the salty ones. While all our lives are a contrast of taste, a palate of balance and diversity, in the scheme of things it is the combined taste of all the seasons and all the tastes that I want. I want it all, not just one morsel, one mouthful. I want all the varied tastes of my life combined to make the whole picture.

My friend had a comment worth remembering I think. It was, "Our experiences should make us better and not bitter".

Better to have tasted all of life, tasted all the tastes, and not found it just bitter. Found it better.

Better indeed.

Dandelions and Wishes

I was talking with a friend the other day and sharing a nice childhood memory. I was reminiscing about laying, flat on my back, in the back yard eyes closed, feeling the sun wash over my skin. I swear I can close my eyes now and take myself right back to that yard, that grass and that feeling. I can still see the effect the sun made turning the inside of my eyelids "red" as I kept my eyes tightly shut. I can still feel the picky grass beneath me, still feel warm breeze rustle my dress, still feel that lovely, safe place. That lovely, safe time.

I can also recall picking the dandelions from the yard and making "bouquets". I would pretend I was a bride, and march down the little stone path in my yard, listening to the music in my head as I floated down an imaginary aisle. I loved those dandelions, sunny and yellow, bright and cheery. I would pick them and my mother would give me a juice glass to use for a vase and I would set them on my nightstand.

Sometimes the blooms would dry and become wispy white creations. I would pluck them from the grass, make a wish, and blow the puffy white seeds into the air... sending my wish along with it. My mother told me that if the seed travelled far enough the wish would come true. I would puff and puff ,at flower after flower, watching the seeds float away and imagining that they travelled on and on and on. Imagining that my wish would come true. Someday.

Nobody ever told me they were weeds.

Nobody ever told me that one day I would own a house, with a lovely yard, and that I would pay someone to come over and make sure I never had any dandelions in my grass. Nobody ever told me that my life would be so full that I would never take the time to lay in the grass, flat on my back, and feel the sun warm my grown up skin.

Nobody told me that all of the wishes I made on wispy, floating dandelion seeds would be all for naught.

Then again....maybe they weren't all for naught. Just maybe one, single wisp of a seed traveled someplace nobody even knew about. Maybe one lone seed did make it and grew to a bloom that is now a wish come true.

It's best to leave the dandelions be. You never know.

Indeed.

Everything.....

This week the news cycle was full of stories about a Connecticut woman, Sandra Herold, and her chimp, Travis. Travis nearly fatally mauled Ms Herold's good friend. The police eventually had to shoot Travis, killing him. Ms. Herold made a comment following Travis's death. I can't seem to get it off my mind. She said...He was my everything....

Her everything.

The simple fact that her "everything" was a chimpanzee notwithstanding, I thought about her life. A life such that she made her "everything" hinge on one single individual, albeit a chimp, but one single individual nonetheless.

Can a person really be everything in life?

I wondered if one person could so greatly impact me that I would make that complete and total emotional investment. I wondered if one person, at the exclusion of all others, could mean so much that they would in fact be my everything. I wondered, when all was said and done, if it was reasonable, I wondered if it was prudent and I wondered if it was perhaps essential.

Perhaps having someone be my everything meant that this is the one person who understood me, loved me, accepted me and delighted in me. Perhaps this person would impact me so deeply that for all time I would be changed. Perhaps I would be better for having known them, wiser for having allowed them access in so complete a manner and stronger for having such a combined force at my side.

Perhaps having one person be my everything is truly the secret to having it all.

I still think it was a shame Ms Herold looked to Travis to be her everything. She deserved more in this life than a chimpanzee.

She deserved everything. As do I. As do we all.

Indeed.

Who Loves Ya Baby!

Telly Savalas coined the phrase "Who Loves Ya Baby" on the 1973 hit TV series Kojak. The phrase was rhetorical in nature as it was used by the character. I like to think of that phrase in a literal sense. Who loves you?

We give a lot of thought to the object of our own affections, the ones we love. We think in terms of how we feel about the person, how much they mean to us and sometimes we wonder what we would ever do without them. We love them and our time is spent lost in wonderful sweet memories encapsulated in these moments. We simply think about how much it is we love them.

But what of those who love us? How often do we give a passing thought to what it's like for that person who loves us? What is it really like for them to love us?

We don't often realize our impact on another. We don't realize what our words mean, what our touch can evoke. We don't always recognize our importance to someone in a visceral sense, we can't feel it, can't feel the depth of emotion they have inside borne of love for us. We don't see them pause and break into a smile because they've thought about us, recalled something we said, remembered the last shared embrace, last shared kiss. We don't hear them sigh when they miss us. We don't hear that sharp intake of breath when they find us. We don't know when they whisper I love you's before they fall asleep. We don't feel how their heart pounds with delight or aches with worry for us.

Perhaps we should. Perhaps to truly appreciate the weight and measure of another's love for us we should think about their expressions and offerings as the remarkable gestures they are. Perhaps we should think about all of those things that occur out of our line of sight. Perhaps the next time we hear them say "I love You" we should pause and imagine all that lies behind those three words. Imagine the scope of their emotional investment, imagine the enormity of their risk taken. Image the breadth of feeling that follows those three little words from their lips to our hearts.

Imagine what it took for them to offer all of that to us. Offer all of that.

Indeed.

Shades of Gray.....

I am not a big fan of Country Music, but I am a fan of a good songwriter no matter what their chosen genre. The words to a song, a good song, rise up and away from the melody and embed themselves inside me. They stay with me only to be pulled out, and examined over and over, until I settle on what the writer said and how it spoke to me.

It seems every time I tune to a radio station lately I hear a song called, "In Color" by Jamey Johnson. The song was co written by Johnson, along with James Otto and Lee Thomas Miller.

The song carries a simple message that becomes apparent quickly. It's not the message that gets me, but the power behind it. The song has a grandfather showing some photographs of key moments in his life. In order to explain the significance, weight and importance of the moment captured in the photo he says, "you should have seen it in color".

Isn't that exactly how life's moments are? We try to capture life's moments on film for posterity...but what we really have is a piece if paper with an image on it. An image in shades of gray. An image that doesn't come near to defining that moment. That doesn't come near to expressing the myriad of emotion present within. The real importance, the life, in a photograph is the memory attached to it. Only the individuals who lived that moment truly understand what took place. The photo captured the image but the individual captured the memory. They look at the photo later...and they see it in color. The color that lives in the memory.

I looked at some old photos not long ago, wanting to scan them and share with a friend who didn't know me when I was young. I had photos of my childhood, me in the dorm at college, my wedding. Photos of me with my children, with my parents, with my husband. Photos, now that I think about them, really don't tell my story at all. The photos show images, happy faces, pleasant poses, fun times. What they do not show is what was going on inside me at the time, They do not show what I was feeling, what was behind the smile. They don't show that I cut my knee and tried to look happy on my grandmother's porch. They don't show the sadness I swallowed, and capped by a smile, the day I left college and came home. They don't show the struggle, from the day before, surging between my husband and me. They don't show the worry I had inside for the child standing next to me. They don't show the near tragedy brewing inside me just four days before becoming critically ill. They show happy, smiling faces, but you should have seen them in color.

The song's refrain, so beautifully crafted goes....

A picture's worth a thousand words
but you cant see what those shades of gray keep covered.
You should have seen it in color.

I'm leaving the photos unscanned. I'd rather tell the story than show the picture. A story told in my words. A story told in color.

Indeed.