Meri's Musings

“We go on. Because it is the hard thing to do.  And we owe ourselves the difficulty.”        -  Nikki Giovanni Do you ever wonder why so many good people have such difficult lives? So much pain and sorrow? I found some insight in Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People , that helped alleviate my urge to blame God when shit happens. Maybe there’s a tempering effect when we’re thrust into the crucible and manage to withstand the searing pain that accompanies our time of trial, emerging somehow changed, transformed into better, wiser versions of ourselves. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross once said that the most beautiful people are the ones who’ve known defeat, struggle and loss and learned to find their way out of the depths. It is surviving the challenge – slaying the dragon – that imbues them with a gentleness and inside-out compassion. Beaut...

Bless those who challenge us to grow, to stretch, to move beyond the knowable, to come back home to our elemental  and essential nature. Bless those who challenge us for they remind us of doors we have closed and doors we have yet to open.                   - Navajo Saying May those I have resented be truly happy. May they live in peace. May they live in love. May they know the power of forgiveness. May they live in recognition that their life has deep meaning and good purpose. - Loving Kindness Practice

I love the mysterious, flower-like and undulating nature of sea anenomes. I'm also a big fan of starfish and colorful fishes (though I draw the line at blue sharks). (This heart-shaped one is especially dear.) But because of a swimming trauma when I was in kindergarten that indelibly imprinted the panic of near-drowning into my psyche, I'll never be diving below the water's surface to see them. Once, however, with a bit of encouragement from the man I loved,  I overpowered my fear and went snorkeling off St. John in the Virgin Islands. I saw some fish and stuff, but never managed to relax while my face was underwater. Mostly, I was just relieved that I'd survived it and very proud of myself for doing something so very challenging for me. Oh -- and did I mention that  I checked "Snorkeling" off my bucket list and vowed never to do it again? (As you might have guessed, getting dive-certified isn't on my list.) In other words, I'm a sh...

Don't you wonder sometimes about those people up your family tree? This young woman, Wilhelmina Blomgren, was my great-grandmother. She was almost 81 when I was born and died in her 90s when I was a teen. She lived in the town where my mother grew up. a place where we visited a few times a year. But as for my great-grandmother, I really have few memories of her. Except that her hair was white and thin, she wore old lady shoes, she wrote phonetically spelled letters to my mother, giving away the fact that she'd come to the U.S. as a young woman and gave up speaking her native tongue to become an American. Oh -- and the place that she lived always smelled like coffee. We went to her funeral. I don't remember the funeral particularly but I remember the wake that followed, primarily because my grandmother's elbow got bumped when she was carrying a lemon merengue pie. I happened to be next to her and wore the pie on my head. I was the only person who didn't think it was ...

Sometimes things aren't what they seem. We settle in somewhere, thinking it's going to be safe and hospitable and just what we hoped for, a magical haven that provides us shelter from harm. Then reality sets in and we realize that we were mistaken. That soft place to land turns out to be quite a bit less soft than we'd anticipated. In fact sometimes things get downright hard and cold and unforgiving. Not at all what we expected. Do we stay and make the best of it or fly away to build a new nest somewhere else? Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from learning to see the beauty right in front of your eyes. Sometimes we bloom most gloriously when we learn to thrive just where we are and come to love just what we have. Maybe each of us is exactly where we need to be, learning lessons custom-made for us.