Meri's Musings

December can be a hard time for many people,  who keenly feel their life losses  at a time  when they expect to feel nothing  but joy and celebration.  Instead of expecting holiday times to be a perpetual  infusion of happiness, we should learn to  identify  small,  fleeting moments of joy  in everyday things -- a stranger's smile a surprise meeting with a friend an outrageous pair of tennis shoes finding a quote that resonates with our soul seeing a beautiful thing in a store window hearing a song that reminds us of falling in love the hummingbird unexpectedly hovering near a window and not wait for the staccato  and flash of fireworks  and the shushing sounds of angel wings to signal joy's arrival. For if we wait for the ruffles and flourishes to tell us it's time to take notice, we will have missed a thousand little episodes of joy.  That would be a damn shame. And for those of us who write,  we must...

Let go. Why do you cling to pain?    There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love?                                -- Leo Buscaglia We often cling to our memories, even the painful ones, because we don't know who we would be without them. We mistake our history for our destiny. It's time for me to invent new stories.  Care to join me?

One of my dearest friends made an observation in a conversation not long ago that's bothered me a lot. She said, of my former husband, "He was the love of your life. You completely and totally adored him." And yes, she's right. I did adore him. Utterly. I loved his scent, the texture of his skin, the sound of his voice, how gifted he was at working with people. His soft green eyes melted my heart. My heart skipped a beat when he came through the door. He made the best Spaghetti Carbonara, Veal Scallopini, and Fettucini Alfredo I've eaten anywhere, including in Italy. His touch undid me, made me shiver with delight. He provided amply for our family and was generous with friends and family. There were times when he made me feel so loved, though now I wonder if that was just illusion created by a master manipulator because so much of his secret behavior was inconsistent with loving me and actively undermined our marriage. In any event, his good points as well as the...

Yesterday, I read the Mary Oliver poem that Nina Bagley posted on her blog. It sparked something. It evoked one of those episodes in which the words pour out, making me feel as if my job is merely to convert the energy sizzling in my brain into word forms and then to edit carefully, lightly, with intention all while preserving the power and authenticity of the energetic signature that's both me and foreign. Yes, that's it. I felt as if I were translating. So I wrote and edited and the poem below came into being. Then I searched for the perfect image to convey the freight of the words, because blog readers love the pairing of words and images, but alas, no starfish could be found. This little gem had to substitute. A nautilus, I think. I'm "still looking for starfish of love." "Still Looking for Starfish of Love" - photo copyright 2009 Meri Arnett-Kremian Looking for Starfish of Love* My heart leans forward, into the gale of longing, its sails snapping,...

In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time. - Terry Tempest Williams Mother Nature has her way with the landscape. Whether water trickles in measured drops or comes in torrents, eventually it carves changes into stone, in the outlines of seacoasts, in the course of a river. Wind can level cities, form delicate arches in layers of rock, and create beautiful ripples in the sand. The power of one of the earth's plates ramming itself under another can create mountains where none existed. Massive forces building inside a volcano eventually find release, whether in swarms of earthquakes, expulsion of gases and steam, pyroclastic flows,  or outright  explosion. Change happens, whether in infinitesimally small increments or cataclysmic shifts, whether or not we like it. Photo copyright 2006 - Trevor Ducken a/k/a TREVERI Used with permission. And so it is with us.  With the passage of time, we change.  We grow o...