Today, after five or six days of only walking in our neighborhood (and being cooped up happily in our house otherwise), I told D I had to see something else. And so beasts of burden it was. It felt appropriate....this cow giving me the side-eye. I feel a little bloated and bovine after slubbing around for days on end and eating entirely too much dairy.
It is New Year's Eve or Arbitrary Time Delineation Day Eve as I like to call it. Where most people toast in the falseness of a new year, but more importantly, an all new and improved possibility of themselves, a them it is probably not possible to be at least within the mere span of 12 months and certainly not on day two or even the first 30 days of January.
As much as I dislike all the rubbish around this day and tomorrow, I find myself reflecting on this past calendar year because it has continued what has been several years of milestone-ish events and nausea-inducing whirlwinds (if I think too much about it).
My dad's open heart surgery in 2019 followed by mom's second breast cancer thereafter (or maybe hers was right before...who can remember).
COVID in March 2020, followed that summer by Dad's cancer, chemo, radiation, and more surgery and radiation in 2021.
N turning 18 in early 2022, the two of us going to the Galapagos two months later and that trip followed by her graduation from high school.
G starting high school.
Our family trip to Scotland this past summer as a celebration of 25 years of marriage (as of late 2022) and me turning 50 (in 2023).
And now M has applied to the same high school where G attends, so I'm apprehensive about that and anticipating the strangeness of my baby being in 9th grade.
Around Christmas 2020, I really thought we were going to lose Dad and so I told myself that anything beyond that moment was gravy. Time with him beyond that instant was something unexpected and so I should pay special attention to it.
As much as I do not like to use terminology like this, the realization felt holy to me and still does. It centered around my dad at that time, but it has expanded to include most everything I do. (Of course, things like earning money have to be done when and how they have to be done.)
I've always been reflective, even since childhood. I was one of those "mature beyond her years" kids, which I think mostly means you're well on your way to needing therapy and a solid antidepressant regimen. But that reflective moment felt deeper than others.
As much as 2020 was a complete shitshow in so many ways, every year since then has been an effort in me considering time and what I do with mine. Do I want to be busy? Do I want to sit with my thoughts? Do I want to have a relationship with this person or that person? Who gets my valuable and limited time?
Although her poem is tiled The Summer Day, Mary Oliver's line, "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" has been on my mind almost always since that Christmas 2020.
Even in the bleak early winter as I roamed through the woods today, on the new year's eve, I found myself thinking how right Oliver's poetic lines have been for me these past years:
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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