Springtime has a scent all its own

Nothing else smells like spring. It is dank earth, green-growing life and early blossoms. It is new leaves returning to lavender branches that when, rubbed, give off a heavenly reminder of my grandmother's linen drawers. It is the change in the wind – when the air moving against your cheeks feels moist and carries with it promises from far away places and sometimes, rude surprises.

Last year the fresh-scrubbed scent was springtime in Paris. This year, spring is playing hopscotch with all the other seasons in Colorado – we had at least three of them just last week. Sunshine flirted with rain, then hail, and tornadoes, and snow, then more rain, then sunshine. Then snow. Call it springtime in the Rockies.

In springtime, scent and light are twins....or perhaps it is that all the hidden things respond to the promise of more light and warmth and come looking for it. Even before the pageantry of last week, the earth had awakened. Pansies were smiling purple and yellow and tulips were looking up. I had begun to clear the winters accumulation from my garden beds, where perennials were sprouting beside the sentinel line of crabapple trees. As I moved my way along the garden, the green scent of living things wafted up, mixed with dead leaves. Rachel Carson's words sprang to mind: “For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity that we use it so little.”

I am not alone in my spring, 2010 garden. The scent of growing things pulls me back to memories of my Mother tending her beloved flowers, or determinedly pulling beets in the vegetable garden for super. I see one Grandmother in her raspberry patch, and with another, smell her roses. I recall a photo of my Great, Great Grandmother as an old woman, standing in a sea of flowers in her garden.

Also, for some strange reason, with the smell of spring my mind comes to rest in my Mother's handkerchief box. Let me explain. My Mother was a devoted handkerchief girl. I doubt that she used more than a few dozen Kleenex in her life. She had dozens and dozens of handkerchiefs, in all sizes and colors; linen, cotton, laced, tatted, embroidered, flowered. She always had a couple in her purse, and one in her pocket or tucked up her sleeve. Like me, mother had allergies so it was both utilitarian as well as lady like. She particularly liked white linen hankies with stitch work and deplored the fact that her daughters did not share her sensibilities about this matter.

During the past year as we have slowly sorted and emptied her house of her lifetime collections, I came away with a half dozen white linen memories. They smell like my Mother. One, that I found in her purse right after she died, I brought home and tucked in my lingerie drawer. Every time I open the drawer I lift it and, pressing it to my nose, inhale. Mother's scent is faint there now. So perhaps like baby boomers everywhere, I am finding not a Silent Spring, but a spring where it is the scent of new growing things that remind me of her. Since her birthday was April 28th somehow I think this delights her!

“Smells are surer than sounds and sights to make the heartstrings crack.”
Rudyard Kipling


©2010 Jan Johnson Wondra

Asleep in the Tuileries Gardens

This morning somewhere between asleep and awake I found myself walking in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. I knew I was there because the trees marching along the path on either side of me were cropped in that special French shape; the elongated bobbed torpedo that signifies that the tree has been conformed in a civilized, most sophisticated way.

Leaves were beginning to unfold on those branches. The fountains had come to life again after a long winter's nap. The fine gravel beneath my shoes crunched and I realized I was strolling eastward toward the Louvre. The sunlight was breaking through the fog and the scent of early flowers was again in the air. I could see the glass pyramid and as I came to a flowering tree, I paused to pull the branch toward me to smell the blossoms. It snapped back. I woke up.

What difference does a year make?

This week last year, my family spent in Paris. Not Paris, Texas. Paris, France – the city of light. A good part of this very day, we spent at the Palace of Versailles – the historic seat of government – and as chance, or fate, would have it, where Louis, the last king of France and his queen, Marie Antoinette were arrested and carted off to the Bastille. If I close my eyes, I can still see the impressionist infinity of the grounds stretching into the distance, the Venice-style waterways crisscrossing thousands of acres of grounds connecting its formal spaces and wild places.

It was a wonderful day, marred only by the loss of my camera, sent flying from my hand by people rushing by us on the trail to an outlying palace. The rush was at odds with the pace of the place. After that I got no pictures other than those in my mind's eye. I don't have the best luck with cameras so perhaps it's best that my visual memory is what it is. Having lost my other fabulous camera by leaving it in a rental car in San Francisco following an adventure to Muir Woods and the Headlands above Sausalito, I should probably not be trusted with anything that costs more than $29.99.

A year is a blink of an eye...and an eternity. Even when one is trying desperately to savor the moments, to hold the memories, it disappears like the fog in my Tuileries Gardens dream. This year has added to my understanding that human life is precious – and time is very fleeting. As Emily, the young deceased wife in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, observed: “It all goes by so fast. We don't have time to look at one another...I didn't realize. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?”

From the distance of time, I can still say that that week in Paris was one of the best experiences of my life – a chance to blend my love of history, other cultures, and new experiences with precious time, before my family moved on to a new stage. Our children were on the cusp of momentous life events, and this was a chance to see them now as young adults, away from childhood roles. They may hate to hear me say that we raised a gentleman and a lady – but we have. They are wonderful human beings.

Today's perspective: chance, modified by fate, equals time. Memories make our time transcendent. In my mind, I am in Paris this week.

Now if I could just translate the memory of those melt-in-your mouth Parisian croissants into a real-life plateful right now!

Contemplating “was” and “is” and “will be”

Yesterday was a gorgeous blue-sky day.
Today it is snowing.
Spring will be here tomorrow.

In those three lines lie the essence of a seasonal cusp. For many of us, the equinox carries the emotional promise of hopes, dreams and new beginnings. As winter wraps up in the northern hemisphere, we literally and figuratively prepare to sweep out (and sometimes we have to shovel) the dirt and dust tracked in during the past, long months. We're ready to let in the light.

Yesterday, a blueberry sky lay over Colorado and temperatures were down-right tropical. My daughter and I headed to Red Rocks Park with the dog to hiked some trails. It made for a rare, few hours with my college student during her spring break. We left the phones in the car. It was just us, the dog, the earth around us and the blueberry hue overhead.

Then we wandered the soaring Red Rocks amphitheatre. Tourists...from Ontario, Japan, South America, China and Texas, New Hampshire, Florida.... milled about with us. We paused to watch the multitudes of folks who walk and trot for exercise, back and forth, row-by-row, up, up, up the seating area. Watching them, I was more tired than I had been hiking. It was a wonderful day.

Today, is very different. This last day of winter, a snow storm has wrapped itself around Denver. We are white and wet and somber. I-70 has closed and opened again. Road plows are in action. The tulips in my south flower beds are buried in white. I'm about to break from writing and go shovel the driveway.

Tomorrow Spring will arrive.

As long as the sun rises, the promise of “was” and “is” always evolve to “will be.” Have you ever thought about the import of language? I know; probably not. I love words and I love writing. Words contain time...distance...emotion.

I love how the exact words we choose portent significance and meaning to our days. When we use thoughtful words, we increase our access to the enormous potential of time, space and possibility that lies between our ears. Words help us show respect, dismay, disapproval, disappointment, joy, eagerness, love, happiness, sorrow, hope. Words can replace violence and words can reveal the future. “Use your words,” I used to say to my small son; when frustration and anger overwhelmed his small frame because he couldn't learn fast enough, when bullies, bullied him, when his eagerness drowned his manners.

We have become such a visual society that, as a people, we discount the impact and meaning of words. Often when writing for social media clients, I find my writing is mere “content” that (for them) simply fills visual space.

I didn't exactly know where this blog was going when I began it. Now I hear the whisper of these words. They are the whisper of light:

“Would it be better to discover meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because that meaning is in you.” Flannery O'Connor

Yup. That's what I meant!

Light and the being of IN-spirit

What inspires you these days? Lately I've been writing like crazy – none of it this blog. It's not that I don't have enough to say. I think of at least six blog ideas every day. But I made a rule when I started this thing that I would not become one of those tweeting “quantity not quality” folks who let every thought in their heads go right out on to the Internet. I honestly don't think most of you care whether I have a nonfat grande latte this morning, (did I say that in the right order?), if I'm wearing clean socks, or if I'm having a bad hair day.

Frankly, neither do I.

Like many of us weathering this deary, never-ending down-turn, I am doing my best to just keep treading water. I try to wake up each morning grateful to be alive, working to make things happen and try each day to help just one person. Hate to bring up that disco anthem, Stayin' Alive, but it did a quantum pop into my head the other morning and it will not leave. The gritty tempo, that determined, survival attitude, matches the way many of us are walking through each day. For the most part, we're getting by. Somehow.

But that doesn't have to be all there is.

Like I said, I write. I'm polishing one manuscript and researching and writing another. I'm doing freelance writing, digital media and contract marketing brand work, while helping to create a new non-profit and serving on the boards of two existing non-profits. The writing/publishing world says that writers should choose a “platform” -- a place to stand and pronounce our expertise. Somewhere in there are at least four platforms on which I could stand.

I choose to magically give myself eight legs, keep my two ears, one mouth and the fingers on this keyboard. I stand on a platform of light and possibilities. For me, that's what being creative is about: to produce what I've been put here to do that wasn't here before...to bring it into being.

Did you know that Italian word for birth means, quite literally, “to give to the light?” Or that great sculptors were known to say that they did not so much chisel a great work into being as that they chipped away the excess to reveal to the light the figure trapped within in the marble?

Then there is that word - inspiration. “So what was your inspiration?” we ask the creator of an “inspired” works of art, or the composer of an “inspired” piece of music. The word's root truth means to be “in spirit.” To say that a thing is inspired is akin to saying.... there because of the grace of God. It means that the creation is recognized as connected to the source of all good energy. That it was moved by the divine to be brought into being by the person who was put on this earth to do that work.

Find your inspiration. If and when you do so during these dark winter days, remember what Albert Schweitzer pointed out, “In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”

Now if I can just get that Stayin' Alive chorus out of my head.....

Do you believe that thoughts are energy?

I do. I know for a fact that how I think about a situation colors the way that I deal with it. Many of us are naturally glass-half-empty folks, but by nature I'm a glass-half-full type of person. Life has enough grimness to it. I don't need to help it along. What I can do is decide that I will think differently.
I know for a fact that when I change the way I look at things, the things I look at change.

It can be infectious. Have you ever had an absolutely gray, miserable day where you work? Everyone around you is bummed by something...a client loss, budget slashes, trying to get more done with half the staff, how they're going to get home in the snow storm, the credit card interest increase just received in the mail...then in walks someone who is absolutely sparkling. He breezes in, shaking the snow from his shoulders, stomping his boots and cheerily announces “Boy, is it beautiful out there!”

In a single moment, unless you work in a place where every person is Scrooge, the gloom can brighten. You lift your head, look out the window and realize that the falling snow is beautiful! Even its drifting snow-ness is ethereal. Peaceful. Inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it – EXCEPT – to decide how you respond to it. Just a few days ago, during Snowmagedon, Part I, a FaceBook invitation swept big portions of the east coast and people came out doors for what might have been the largest snow ball fight ever. Talk about the choice to think differently about something over which you have no control!

Which is the next truth – if thoughts are energy, then there is a positive or negative charge to the thoughts you send out. I have not led a charmed life. If anything, I have had to deal with more loss and grief than much of the population. It threw me for a while. I lost my health, along with several other important aspects of life. It was then I came to understand, not just mental toughness, but the importance of positive energy to a person's ability to accept life as it comes at us. To dream the dreams of possibility, while letting the things I can't control flow around me without dislodging me from my rock.

I will be the first to admit that my decision to look on “the bright side of things” doesn't always work. But it makes just about every situation better. Choosing to look at what is possible can accomplish at least three things:
* It can inspires organizations, teams and those around us to do what they may not think is possible.
* It creates a mind/matter/energy field that helps you to be more resilient to bad things that happen.
* Authentic, daily invoking of positive energy is the source of our well being - improving our quality of life and moving us toward the purpose of our existence.

Which brings me to my final conclusion: In energy there is light. And here's where I share a piece of wonderful energy that came my way today, a few hours after I began musing this blog: A brand new effort by my nephew's wife, Amber Johnson, who has decided to brighten her corner of LA. She has begun a non-profit community coffee house that can help working parents and teens who need a place to be after school.

Go to http://fuelcommunitycafe.blogspot.com/ and think good things for this great new reality. And while you do, remember this by Remez Sasson, “You can close the windows and darken your room, or you can open the windows and let light in. It is a matter of choice. Your mind is your room. Do you darken it or do you fill it with light?”

©2010 Jan Johnson Wondra

Salt. Lots of it. Rubbed into our consciousness and poured into our democracy.

I'm buried in salt tonight. As if we haven't had enough, there is a new pall over American's citizen's right to self-government.

This blog isn't about politics or the economy. It has never been about the things in life that get us down, but about the things that give life meaning and purpose; a thoughtful treatise on a personal code by which to live and make this world a better place. I had a new blog all ready...a contemplation about well...someday you might see that blog.

But something happened today about which I can NOT remain silent. It's as if today's decision by the Supreme Court has ripped my skin down to the bone and poured a couple tons of salt directly onto the raw, ripped-open flesh. I speak of the Court's decision, delivered by chief Justice John Roberts, that guts the laws that have stood for over 60 years (since the advent of television) limiting corporate spending and messaging about political candidates and issues. The ruling equates a corporation's free speech with the same rights as living breathing people. You know – those living, breathing human beings with the right to vote. Us.

Corporations will now be free to spend as much as they want, say what they want to say, drown out the voices of ordinary citizens, honest politicians and those individuals who want to make a difference.
We will see untold billions of corporate money controlling America's political debate – not just overwhelming the free speech of ordinary citizen's and unions that represent them, but buying, selling and bullying our elected officials who do not do their bidding. We've had pacs before – but we've never seen pacs like what we are going to see!

I've spent most of my life inside corporate America and all of that as a marketing executive. I'm a marketing expert. (Not my words', but what has been said about me, folks and my awards prove it.) It's been pounded into my head over the years that big business is in business to deliver profit to their shareholders. Period. The responsibility to make a good product, take care of their employees or act particularly benevolently within their communities is not the top of their agenda. Honestly.

I'm an independent. I investigate the issues and I vote my conscious. I don't like the idea that a big, faceless corporation has more weight than I do. What makes it even worse is the catch22 that exists between corporate leaders and our government. You see, political advertising is not held to the same standard of truth by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as the rest of advertising is. This works out well for politicians – during election years they can sling as much mud as they want to at each other and we all role our eyes and say, “Well, it's a campaign....you can't believe all that you hear.” And it's going to work out extremely well for corporations who will be able to say what they want as long as their billions hold out.

As a marketing person, I can tell you that advertising messages about say, French fries, or adhesive tape, have to tell the truth. If you say that your fries are 23% crispier than your competitor – you have to prove it. The FCC is funny about that. It's called “claims substantiation” and if you're a lowly AE at an ad agency, it's your job to file it and make sure that it's approved by the FCC before your TV spot runs. Funny thing. The same rule doesn't apply to political advertising.

So, now that the Supreme court has made possibly it's worst decision in over one hundred years, one simple thing might save us: a law that states, very simply that any advertising, including political and cause marketing, has to provide claims substantiation for what it says. In other words – it has to be true! Now isn't that American -- just prove it!

I Hear the Bells on New Years Too.

After the stillness, there are the bells. Bells give off light, did you know that? I think it is light passing on to our souls through sound.

I've always associated the continuous peeling of bells with New Year's Eve. It was then that my Grandpa August Johnson would climb the rickety stairs to the bell town of the little, white country church where I grew up and pull the bell ropes. They would be rung exactly one thousand, nine hundred and whatever odd year of the twentieth century we had arrived at that stroke of midnight. One for every year since the birth of Christ. He took a great pleasure in it, for New Year's eve was also his birthday.

There is something about bells that is hopeful -- filled with the light of both joy and sadness, don't you think? Bells ring for occasions that are personal celebrations – birth, death, marriage, anniversaries. And they sound for common celebrations and shared grief – the death of a president, the marking of a national tragedy like 911, the end of a war, the landing of men on the moon. Tonight and tomorrow, they mark a brand new year, a new decade, a new turn of the page.

This year, this year...where we pass from the 000 years to the century's teenage decade, I remember the peel of the bells of Paris. Because, for me, Paris counted as one of the five wonderful high marks of our family's year. And there was something about the respect accorded bells there that I wish we paid to bells here.

Bells. The carillon sound came from every quarter...on the half hour, the hour and to mark particular points of the day. They say that the bells of Paris rung on August 25, 1944, the day of the liberation of Paris – like they had not wrung since Bastille Day. What must that have been like to hear the banging, clanging, tin-tinnabulating echo sounding across the rooftops and rolling down the boulevards on a day like that one?

We weren't even there during a special time of year and we could hear them through out the Arrondissements. Here, some of my favorites – the throaty sound of the bells in the 200 ft tall bell towers of Notre Dame. The higher, lighter peel from the bells of the Church of st. Eustache at Les Halles (the church of the market workers). The deep heavenly tone of the bells in the campanile of the Sacré-Coeur where hangs the nineteen ton La Savoyarde. The tingling peel of the bells – in an acoustically perfect echo, of the bells of Sainte Chapelle, completed in1248 and still called the most beautiful church in Paris.

Bells rang from La Madeleine in the Paris financial district and at St. Suplice, the “Chapel of the Angels” in the Latin quarter , where they blend with the sounds of the bells at La Sorbonne, founded in 1253. And bells hold sway over the Eglise du Dôme, over Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb, although they didn't ring that I heard while I was there.

Still, for me, the dearest bells are the poor simple bells in the bell tower of the East Immanuel Lutheran Church. Those bells Grandpa rung told the sweet story of our family's sojourn in America – as he was the first one born in his family in America. I cannot say whether he rang the old year out, or the new year in, but this truth as Madeline l'Engel once pointed out, I do know; “a new year can begin only because the old year ends.”

Happy 2010!

In the Stillness there is Light.

If you're looking for a treatise on the history and customs of Christmas, this year, you need to go back to my December, 2008 blogs. Go ahead, just scroll back there. You'll find customs and history and the reason why I have always felt that the people of the north, my ancestors, had real reasons to celebrate even before they became Christians.

This is the time for parties and eggnog and decorating. For preparing gifts and making the special holiday foods. For wearing ridiculous holiday ties and sweaters and drinking too much. For office parties and neighborhood gatherings and attending more events in a single week than should be human. It's noisy and stressful and mostly materialistic. I don't know about you, but come December every year, all of this rushing around gets me rather melancholy. Until this year I'm not sure I figured out why that is.

But this year I've been contemplating that which is the opposite of what most of us experience; stillness. Stillness has a relationship to how we see celebration, service, humanity and destiny. I truly think that the spiral path of stillness can help us find and follow our own light.

Don't get me wrong -- I love a party as well as the next person. And being a marketing refuge, I have no business putting down all that spending and wrapping! It's just that in all the secular goings-on I feel a disconnect. As if all of this is just a frantic cover-up, a poor replacement, for the light that makes me an authentic being. Do you?

Jacquelyn Small has noted that “We are not human being trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human.”

With all the noise and rushing around at this time of year – how can we meld the human and spiritual halves of ourselves? A few weeks ago attending a morning church service, I was reminded that stillness and silence are relatives. That “silence is the cessation of sound: stillness is the cessation of movement.” Interestingly, stillness appears to be something that both the Good Book and most therapists advocate to put all your parts back together; that it is good to let the “still, small voice” of calm take over sometimes.

At this time of year as we anticipate what is to come on Christmas day, it might be good, as Psalm 37:7 says, “to be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.”

Stillness is hard when much of what is around us is rushed and frantic and the news is dark. I know, because I've tried practicing stillness. Like so many folks, I could use a job and an income and a good health care bill and just some hopeful news. In an ADHD world, stillness takes discipline.

But I have made a discovery about stillness. It helps me see more clearly, no matter how dark the world is around me. As Eleanor Roosevelt expressed it ~ “It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.”

©2009 Jan Johnson Wondra

The Gratitudes.

How Much is Enough? I've pondered that question a lot recently. I know people who have surrounded themselves with such excess that they have become used to plenty that would embarrass the rest of us. They don't see the abundance. They truly don't. Conversations with them focus always on what more they need. They don't need a thing, but for them, life will never hold have enough.

I know other people who, until last week, didn't have a place to call home. And these particular people shine with the light of abundance. For them, even when what they have is little, they tithe their thanks. For them, life will always hold enough.

What is enough? Most would describe it as the absence of want. But for many, “want” and “need” are relative terms. We “want” therefore we think we need. Frankly, we don't need most of what we want. During this great recession, there is more true need out there than this country has seen in decades. It's more like the reality that large portions of the world know as life every day.

We were founded as a country because people came here seeking; seeking religious freedom. Seeking opportunity. Seeking adventure. Seeking a new start. And from the first, we found enough. From the start, we were a grateful people. Have we forgotten that?

I've had opportunity recently to research the lifestyle of the first European people to this shore. No, not the pilgrims or Columbus. The Viking settlers of Vinland, who built turf and timber longhouses and scrapped out a living at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland before the year 1,000 AD. Leif Erickson stayed only one winter, but ranged the east coast from Labrador down to(some say) New York Harbor. Gundrid the Far-Traveler, her husband Karlsefni, their infant son and their household spent three years in this strange new world.

It was an indescribably hard life. They came with little and found both want and plenty. It was only after they discovered that the Native Americans were not too pleased to see them that they packed up their dragon ships and returned to Iceland, leaving evidence of their time here in those turf longhouses on that Atlantic shoreline.

What drove them? The same things that the founders of our country articulated hundreds of years later. The same kind of dreams that inspire us now. If we keep our wits about us, we will truly know, down deep in our bones, how blessed we have been. And that deep knowledge can return to us an attitude that is gratitude.

Tomorrow, Americans worldwide share a ceremonious meal of Thanksgiving. Many of us have traveled great distances to be with family – or have telepathy-sent our wishes to loved ones living far away from us. Let's keep our wits about us and remember how far – how very far-- we have come. And remember too that we Americans have – more than enough.

Come Ye, thankful people come, raise the song of harvest-home.
All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.


“Wits must one have who wanders afar.”

From the Hávamál (Viking Code)
© Jan Johnson Wondra 2009

And Things Tumbled Into Place

And Things Tumbled Into Place...twenty years ago a little something came down in Berlin that changed the course of my family's life. That day I was busy with other things. New client advertising campaigns. 1990 marketing plans. A just over-two-year-old son with a head cold who had to be picked up from daycare. Icy roads. A pending birthday.

And into the ordinariness of that day dropped one of the five most significantly historical days (according to my reckoning) of my life. In Berlin, the wall came down -- over which were pointed the guns of my husband's secret missile site while we lived in Germany. The wall came down -- built as a retched split of the city and symbol of a defeated country. The wall came down -- that divided two clear sides of the cold war. The wall came down -- behind which lived millions of faceless, freedom-lacking people. That day the gates of freedom were thrown open and the wall came tumbling down.

I watched events unfold that night with awe – seeing something that I never thought I would see in my lifetime, so cold was the war, so frozen had been our attitudes. Although I didn't yet know it, the falling of the wall changed my life in a way I could not imagine. Not two years later my daughter was born in a tiny village on the western edge of Russia's Pskov Region and began her life of waiting in a country orphanage for a family. Only five years later in 1994 we would board a plane to bring her home to America. The realities I saw in that orphanage launched me into fifteen years of advocacy in children's issues, here at home and in the former Soviet bloc countries as a member of Families for Russian & Ukrainian Adoption.

A short fifteen years after the wall came down, that toddler with the cold boarded a plane to fly around the world to live for a year as a Rotary exchange student in Ukraine. He returned, with a different view of his world and a completely changed perspective on what he was going to do with his life. A few more years and mutual study at the University of St. Petersburg acquainted him with the woman who became his wife this past summer. Having now lived in four former Soviet countries, he speaks fluent Russian, some Armenian, Ukrainian and Georgian. As a Fulbright Scholar, he and his new bride now live in the Republic of Georgia. The tiny daughter has become a marvelous college freshman who can also speak Russian. My Russian? Not so good.

None of this would have happened if the gates had not been thrown open; had the walls not come down. An entire generation of children has grown up in a world that is a different place. New fears and uncertainties have replaced that iron curtain. There is truth, I think in this: that every wall built, represents failed policy. Every wall torn down represents new opportunity.

Today as the world celebrates what was in reality the end of the cold war it is important that we remember to listen to each other. Because while we do what we do, another generation of children will grow up.

Buried in a Cosmic Joke

Buried in a Cosmic Joke. It's white, cold and 20 inches deep and it hasn't stopped since Tuesday night here in Colorado. Note the date. It's October 29th not December 29th. In a year where winter hung around until the end of May and we barely had a summer, we seemed to have skipped all but a few weeks of fall and circled back to winter. I was already more than irritated at having to shovel snow in October. Having to shovel four times in ONE day was just too much.

Strange how light it was last night on our normally dark cul-du-sac, as the deep, drifting snow and falling flakes illuminated the night sky. And the peace and stillness was – and is – profound. All we have is the wind and the falling snow and the weight of the accumulating drifts. Amazing how much time and energy it can take to stay ahead of the shoveling...to accommodate the dog...to make a path for the milk man...to try to clear the mail box for the postman. To try – and fail-- to keep the driveway open. To futilely search for the morning paper (which I haven't yet found!)

This morning I moved another ten inches that fell over night, carefully uncovering some of the Halloween décor around the front door. While I labored, Tycho, the Golden Retriever, who believes that all of this wonderment has happened expressly for his enjoyment, galloped about the cul-du-sac and down the walking trails next to our yard, gathering great clumps of ice on his belly and snorting delightedly into the drifts.

If much of the quality that is ours in life is because we choose what to do with our time, part of my brain wants to say “I've been robbed!” I calculate that since yesterday morning I have spent nearly six hours shoveling snow and we haven't begun to uncover the Jeep, which must become seaworthy for me to begin another drive to Wisconsin tomorrow. I am not looking forward to sledding across Nebraska.

On the other hand, sometimes it takes being buried not to take yourself so seriously. It has been said that a genuine sense of humor, combined with an active imagination are two of the most valuable qualities you can possess as a human being. While wringing out the bottom half of my pant legs where snow had gleefully lodged itself in my boots and contemplating this blog, I went looking for cosmic inspiration. I found a most delightful site that offers a wonderful explanation of The Great Cosmic Joke by Doc Barnham at http://holosla.com/2009/03/29/1485/

To quote the source, it goes something like this. “The Creator says, “Billions of years ago, I created an infinite universe out of nothing, and somewhere along the way there formed billions of galaxies. There was one galaxy that formed called the Milky Way, and way out on the edge of one of the spiral arms of this galaxy there is a little solar system with a medium-sized star called the Sun and a tiny little blue planet rotating around it called Earth. Now somewhere on this Earth is a soul that I created and filled with the Divine spark who chose to incarnate and wear a bodysuit for a lifetime. Now he’s in the middle of one of those lifetimes - along with seven billion other souls, all coming and going - and he’s rushing around and fretting and thinking he’s very unhappy because he isn’t getting his way right now. Actually, though, he isn’t so unhappy as he is forgetful, because I have surrounded him everywhere and every moment with constant reminders that he is safe, he is not alone, and that the universe is a very funny place if only he will look.”
And then I look. I look down and see my body. I look at my hands and realize, “Oh yeah, that’s right. I chose this.” I remember I am a soul having a human experience, an infinite being that chose this again, a lifetime in the material world; to be shoehorned into another bodysuit that is always trying to keep itself together for a brief period of some eight to ten decades, if I’m lucky. I’m a soul in a special sort of shaved monkey suit that is filled with holes and always huffing and puffing and sweating and farting and pissing and pooping and drinking and eating and fighting gravity just to maintain itself and stand upright, all so I can run around and play and learn the lessons to be able to understand more deeply, love more fully, accept Truth more completely, and share my gifts more freely with others without forgetting where we all really came from, the Creator.
And I laugh.”

Down here, it's still coming down like the gods are having a great cosmic pillow fight up there. I wonder if there's snow in their boots?

What Does A Tomato Know About Life?

Pondering my next blog a few days ago, I got to thinking about the balcony gardeners in Paris. To understand why I noticed them, you have to know that long-ago, they passed a law in the inner arrondissements of Paris that no building can be more than four or so stories high, thus preserving the authentic character of the city. Every single flat in Paris seems to have a balcony. So, flying by on the elevated portions of the metro, even in April, you see the pots sitting in the sun on the balconies of the flats -- the herbs, a few vines, the tomatoes -- straining toward the feeble spring sunshine.

Which brought me to yesterday's question. Tomatoes know quite a lot, as it turns out. At least the particular tomato plant that inspired that question does. I found myself diligently covering that intelligent tomato plant as our first heavy frost approached.

It had a less than illustrious start.

Last spring I bought exactly two tomato plants; a regular America hybrid, and a second, decidedly sentimental choice. It was called a Black from Tula and the label said it was a Russian heirloom. I had no idea what that was, but I'm a sucker for things Russian because my daughter was born there and I seem to have given my grown son back to Russia. So I planted them side by side in my herb garden.

The hybrid went right to work, growing straight up to a 20 inch by 20 inch dimension, blossoming out in June and producing about ten bright red, standard-looking, not necessarily stellar tomatoes. That was it and it was done.

The Russian heirloom, on the other hand acted like no tomato plant I have ever seen. It began to grow. And grow. And grow! June came and while not a single blossom had appeared, it went on growing, it's branches sprawled across the entire four by eight foot herb garden. It overran the oregano, buried the basil and lavished love on the lavender. The spreading greenery arched against the house, climbed the six-foot cedar fence and leaned over the support structure around the puny hybrid. “Look at this!” I announced one evening, Hands on my hips in disgust, as my son walked in the garden gate. “It's sprawling all over the place and not giving me anything – enough of this Russian stuff!”

“Give it time,” he laughed. “Russians know their tomatoes...it will come through!”

I shook my head. Then in July, blossoms appeared. Hundreds of them. By August tomatoes were taking shape, everywhere, on every sprawling branch. I got a little busy with wedding preparations and travel and forgot to look in on it. September arrived, and when I checked, was amazed to see the first few dark brownish tomatoes, I thought “Darn! I waited too long and let them spoil!” So I ignored them.

The next week I spotted a few more, equally dark, and reached to pull them off to give them to the birds. They weren't mushy, they were firm! I plucked one and smelled it. The most heavenly scent wafted up my nose. I searched beneath the tomato forest and found the plant tag. “Black from Tula. Russian Heirloom. Dark reddish-brown. Sweet rich fruit, prodigious producer ideal for short growing seasons.”

That night I tasted probably the best tomato I've ever had. And there were at least 150 more like it burying the herb plot!

Back to what a tomato knows. First, an heirloom tomato is closer to its past and hasn't had the life bred out of it. It hasn't forgotten that tomatoes are really a fruit, not a vegetable, so it stayed sweet. This particular species put down deep roots, while spreading those enormous branches. How else could it hold up those branches and get ready to provide the nutrients for its bumper crop?

Even better, it didn't let itself be rushed or pushed into becoming something it is not. It kept its identity and its promise, producing a dark tomato whose color is so much better suited to absorb what light comes its way and to hold on to the warmth of the day to meet night's cool darkness. Reaching for that light, this Russian heirloom produced so much more than I expected; firm, sweet life in abundance.

Whether you're a fan of salt or sugar on your tomatoes, this tomato's job is to give flavor to the world and it does it in spades! I underestimated this plant. I got angry when it just seemed to be using and not giving back anything. But it was just preparing to produce an astounding bounty of goodness. Are you like this tomato? I hope I am.

Salt. Light. Life. Amen!

©2009 Jan Johnson Wondra

Sometimes We Float Over the Bridge Instead of Under it.

It has been said that time waits for no man. While I have dithered over how to express the conflicting emotions that have buried me over the past weeks, time quietly carried me away with her. Earlier this year I recognized this passage and had resolved to be more “care-full” of the moments given me. But I blew it. I found myself floating in what I can only describe as unreality. I, who had so firmly resolved to walk, head high, eyes bright, into this transition, had what I can only describe as a few weeks of floating unreality. I think the fluidity helped.

Perhaps it was my way of dealing with way too much at once; feelings so joyous and so mixed with the loss experienced in the midst of great change: my son's wedding. My daughter, my youngest, leaving for college. My son and new daughter-in-law's departure on his Fulbright for the Republic of Georgia. One minute I was on the highest point of the bridge looking at the best parts of life. The next moment I hadn't just crossed this bridge, but began to suspect that demolition crew was working overtime behind me.

Our house went from bursting at the seams....with activity and teens and 20-somethings, backpacking trips, summer jobs and wedding preparations, arriving guests, welcome parties and mountains of frosting and cakes as I fulfilled my commitment to the wedding couple to create their wedding cakes (yes, plural, but too complicated a story to get into when one has been floating)....to empty. The only sane thing to do was to float.

Time – or the passing of it-- is sometimes compared to rivers, oceans or to water over the dam. We admonish people attempting to “hold back the flood” to “go with the flow.” Those objecting to change are advised “don't rock the boat” and to deal with today's turmoil by “getting past the rapids before regrouping.” The more I think about it, I think I may have floated under the bridge instead of getting out of the flow, crawling up the grassy bank and trudging over the bridge. I honestly wanted to stand there at the highest arch of this summer's bridge, stomp my feet and shot out loud “not so fast....I'm not ready!” at the top of my lungs.

But shouting at a thing rarely stops it from happening, with the exception of what it can do to the child poised to carry the black water colors down the newly carpeted, peach-colored stairway. Bitter experience taught me that the child will stop, but that the paints and water won't and then there is a heck of a mess to clean up. And shouting this time would have masked the very real joy I felt in seeing my children – these wonderful, talented, accomplished young people -- move across their own bridges.

As any person knows who suddenly becomes tired after treading water for too long or attempting to swim across a lake, some times it helps to just roll over and float on our backs. And you know, when I stopped struggling, I passed right under that bridge and looked up. Beyond its dark, cool arch, I glimpsed concerts and recitations, soccer fields, far-away beaches and mountain peaks, lost teeth and swimming pools, first loves and disappointments, but triumphs too. Shared memories of Gothic cathedrals and family reunions, graduation stages and wedding days – all mirrored in the love in the eyes of my children as they turned toward their future.

Floating there, I am in the company of a few golden, drifting leaves. Just a few.

Are You Brave Enough To Be Authentic?

That is a serious question. Do you consider yourself to be creative....or do you leave that to the people who seem to fit the label? You know, those writers, artists, designers, composers, musicians, dancers, film-makers who create the great works. Surely, not you. But what if your great work of art is to create an authentic life, with all that means for you and for the world, and you never do that? What if, by refusing to create that which you were put on this earth to do, that regret is what ultimately kills you?

When I found MontMartre....the hill in the18th arondissement on the Right Bank of Paris, authentic parts of my heart found a home. The hill, whose name means “mount of the martyr,” has great religious significance. It is the place where St. Denis, the patron saint of France, is said to have been beheaded in 250 AD. Before that, legend says it was a Druid holy site. Martyrdom is not why I feel connected to this place, however.

The streets are a jumble, circling 'round buildings and tiny, multi-sided squares, rising rapidly through breath-snatching steps, seeming to cut through alleys that emerge onto respectable cobblestone byways, that disappear again under archways and end at stout iron-wrapped gates. This place has been synonymous with theater, art and music, famed actors, dancers, musicians, artists and writers for over 150 years. At its peak, rising above the jumble of streets and visible throughout Paris, are the distinctive alabaster domes of the Basilica of Sacré Cour, built to honor the heroes of the 1871 Franco Prussian War. Our word courage comes from the French word for heart, or coeur.

No coincidence, I think that this place's visible symbol is sacred heart – sacred courage. For the artists and writers who made Montmarte home knew what the brave always learn. That acts of courage come directly from our center of being. And to create anything, requires an ability to channel that heart to action.

We spent an entire day wandering Montmartre. Not just the tourist-crowded streets, sites of raucous dance halls and seedy rendezvous on the front side, but the quiet, vine draped back streets near the monastic vineyard. Up and down the steep cobblestone paths we tracked the homes of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Anaïs Nin...the haunts of artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Monet, Utrillo, Van Gogh. All of them drew courage to create in this place. Not just works that represented entire departures from the way things had been, but works that hang in the Musee d'Orsay. Works that drew deep upon their authentic selves.

In Montmartre, time slowed down. Musicians tuned away at odd corners seemingly just for joy, with not even an open violin case to receive tossed Francs. On that early spring day, when the raw tree branches were barely softened by spring green leaves, artists plied their paint brushes and photographers sat waiting for the light be be right. Writers could be seen propped up against stone walls, laptop computers and pens at the ready. Even in the hectic Place du Tertra where art commerce was in full swing, the mood was bright, full of possibility.

When it came time to begin the descent from Montmartre, I was not ready to leave. Big parts of my heart were home. Rather than be intimidated by what had been created here, I found myself buoyed by the courage at its center.

Summoning the courage to find ones true self is the heart's creative work. How creative are you?
©2009 Jan Johnson Wondra

Moments Make up Life

Most of us think about life as flowing from one big event to another. And certainly, there is a flow. But now I think that life is really about little moments in time. The root of the word “momentous” is “moment.” Think about that. When we talk about something being a “momentous event” we are actually describing a tiny, emotion-laden instant in time, around which our lives may balance for only a few minutes, but which may change the course of our lives.

It might be, as Gwen Ellis describes it “A moment when our hearts nearly burst within us for the sheer joy of being alive. The first sight of our newborn babies, the warmth of love in another's eyes ....” Yes, and also the moment a few years ago when my son called the first day of a summer job and began his conversation with “Mom, there's this girl.....” In that instant his course toward his life-mate was set in motion. Last Saturday, for a moment, I glimpsed his face – as he watched his beautiful bride walk down the aisle.

Emotions are laced with memory. Memories are emotional moments. It's not just what happens, but how we feel about what happens. I don't think it is a coincidence that Moment and Memory are linguistically so close. It has been said that to remember the past is to sanctify the present. And what we remember are really those moments in time when life sounds the bell of fate and providence reaffirms that life, with all it's imperfections, is still worth it.

Sometimes we get almost more than we can handle. I have had reason, these past weeks to consider the entire spectrum of the human comedy – from birth through life, to death. For two days after my son's glorious wedding came my husband's birthday, on what would have been my Father's birthday, which was also the first anniversary of my Mother's passing. Oh how I miss my Mother, especially as Mother would have loved the wedding. We would surely have talked much about it in the days leading up to it and following it and she would have reveled in the presence of the entire family, come from afar to celebrate with us.

So many of us let our moments slide by, waiting for better parts of life. But those moments ARE life. I think the only guarantee we get is yesterday's memories and the precious here and now. As James Otto sings the Seth Godin words.... “These are the Good Old Days,” only most of us don't see the truth of it soon enough.

This past year I've tried to see the world with new eyes. Sometimes it takes a conscious effort to let the moments renew me instead of beat me down. But in the process there is a heartfelt appreciation of life stirring in me again. I hope the same will be true for you. You have the choice to embrace your moments rather than flow along through them. Life truly is beautiful once we decide to appreciate the moments for what they are. After all, as the writer Colette observed: “What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner!

©2009 Jan Johnson Wondra