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Peggy O'Mara

A Quiet Place

What is Love?

February 13th, 2012

 

Like most of us, I have long pondered the meaning of love. As a young woman, I equated love with sad poems and tragic romantic scenarios. Now I see love as an action rather than a feeling. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defines love this way:

“GENUINE LOVE IMPLIES COMMITMENT AND EXERCISE OF WISDOM…THE WILL TO EXTEND ONESELF FOR THE PURPOSE OF NURTURING ONE’S OWN OR ANOTHER’S SPIRITUAL GROWTH.”

In order to explore the more mature love that Peck describes, one must be able to delay gratification, accept responsibilities for one’s actions, speak and act honestly, and keep things in balance. These are all things that we are challenged to learn to do during the early months of parenting and that then inform our couple relationship.

Our couple relationship is fragile during the early years of parenting because we have so little time for ourselves, much less for one another. We are also both changing so much and learning so much as new parents that we have to redefine, just like everything else, our couple relationship.

“WHERE LOVE IS, NO ROOM IS TOO SMALL.” Talmud

How can we make room for our love once baby has come? Without putting too much pressure on yourselves, be ready to respond to a time when the baby first goes down for sleep at night, for example, as a time to check in with one another. Eventually find two hours a week to be together to talk. You don’t have to go out; make a special candlelit dinner at home. Have a picnic on the living room floor. As the baby can tolerate it, go out for two hours together one time a week. This is a period during which the ability to delay gratification will come in handy.

‘LOVE CONSISTS IN THIS, THAT TWO SOLITUDES PROTECT AND TOUCH AND GREET EACH OTHER.” Rainer Maria Rilke

Do nice things for one another. Leave a loving note. Write something on the bathroom mirror. Offer to help out with an inconvenient task. Notice something that needs to be done before someone mentions it. Lean on one another. Pick up the slack for each other. Let yourself be helped.  Here’s where accepting responsibilities for one’s actions will go a long way.

I HAVE FOUND THE PARADOX, THAT IF YOU LOVE UNTIL IT HURTS, THERE CAN BE NO MORE HURT, ONLY LOVE. Mother Teresa.

We suffer for love. Real love is not always convenient and we can’t control it. The early months of parenting are a time that we just have to suffer through and we must not criticize ourselves if we break down at times and feel that we’ve reached our limit. This is simply evidence that we have the courage to suffer for love. Here’s where speaking and acting honestly will help ameliorate the suffering.

YOUR TAKS IS NOT TO SEEK FOR LOVE, BUT MERELY TO SEEK AND FIND ALL THE BARRIERS WITHIN YOURSELF THAT HAVE BUILT AGAINST IT.” Rumi

Through suffering the early months and years of parenting, we learn to take ourselves seriously. We see that our children are mirrors of ourselves and learn from our example. If we want to love them, and hope to guide them, then we have to change ourselves first. We always have to change ourselves first. And, at the same time, we have to refrain from taking ourselves too seriously and continue to trust that things are as they should be. A healthy sense of humor can help keep things in balance. Humor is the universal antidote to any and all of our negative emotions.

When I’m feeling sorry for myself and over-dramatic about my own suffering, I like to listen to Monty Python’s, “Four Yorkshiremen.‘

How do you keep your sense of humor as a parent and a partner?

 

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Apocalypse Not

January 16th, 2012

 



Because optimism is a job requirement for parents, I look for ways to interpret life that do justice to the hope implied by my children’s existence. Yet, pessimism tempts me every day.

The word apocalypse is often used to describe our times and to frighten us into believing that the end is near. I don’t want to believe this so I looked up the word apocalypse in the dictionary and found, to my surprise, that the word does not mean the end of the world at all. The word has come to be associated with the end because The Apocalypse of John, the last book in The New Testament, and other Christian and Jewish texts, contain prophetic visions of imminent destruction.

Apocalypse comes from the Greek word, “apokaluptein,” which means to uncover. According to Wikipedia, apocalypse means “a lifting of the veil or revelation, a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception.”

One could interpret this to mean a new beginning, a fresh start.

The Mayan Calendar ends in 2012, but it also begins again in 2012. Do we see the end or do we see a beginning? We make the choice every day.

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Toys with a Conscience

December 13th, 2011





The holiday season can be a tough time for the conscience. We want to give presents to our children, but we don’t want to overwhelm them with consumerism. We’re concerned about fair trade and how things are made, but we don’t always know how to determine this. Plus we have a limited budget for presents so price is also a consideration. We have to get creative.

First, it’s good to remember how little children really want. A ball in a big box wrapped with lots of paper (could be newspaper) to rip off is always a hit. In a great column from last year, GeekDad identified the 5 Best Toys of All Time:

A Stick

A Box

String

Cardboard Tube

Dirt

I would add toilet paper, pots, pans and wooden spoons to this list.

For great ideas on handmade gifts, check our community thread on The Annual Mothering Homemade Gifts Ideas Contest. It’s six pages and still going. Come vote for your favorite idea.

If you have a budget for store bought gifts, take a look at Mothering’s Natural Toy Review Guide 2011. It includes reviews of Dolls and Doll Houses, Baby Toys and Rattles, Art Supplies, Push, Pull & Ride, Games & Puzzles, Educational and Imaginative Play and Blocks and Stackers.

This is the criterion we used for selecting toys to review:

Must be designed for use by children ages infant-16 years.

Must be made of at least 80% natural or recycled materials.

Must be manufactured in the US or Canada or in a facility outside the US that is proven to provide fair working conditions.

Must meet all current US testing standards.

Toys like these contrast with what the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) calls the Nagging Nine, toys and games most advertised on children’s cable television networks during “Black Friday” week. According to CCFC, “Lego Building Sets, which lead the list, were advertised 415 times during these seven days. “If we want companies to stop advertising to kids, we have to stop rewarding the ones that do,” said CCFC director, Susan Linn. The Nagging Nine is a play on the title of Mothering’s article, Why They Whine by Gary Ruskin, an exclusive report on how advertising to children is designed to make them whine for new toys.

If you want to support artisan toy manufacturers who “preserve unique handmade and small batch toys, clothes and all manner of children’s goods in the USA,” check out the Handmade Toy Alliance. Make a donation to the organization or support the members with your purchases.

See the natural wooden toys that we just added to the Mothering Shop. The educational toys, arts and crafts and kids room furniture are made by Guidecraft, a 40-year-old company and leader in the industry.

Buying with a conscience doesn’t have to be cumbersome. There are plenty of companies deserving of our respect and our patronage. We just have to know where to look. Let me know how you keep your integrity intact during the holidays.

 

 

 

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Watching the Birds

November 16th, 2011

I picked up the book The Big Year when I went to buy bird food recently and it’s rekindled my love of bird watching. The book is about a year-long competition to see the most birds in North America and has been made into a movie with Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, and Jack Black.

When my oldest daughter was ten we would sit on my bed watching the birds at the bird feeders on the porch off my bedroom. We learned to identify our local mountain birds together and later incorporated some aspects of an ornithology course from Cornell University into her homeschooling studies. Now, years later, we both still love watching birds and plan on making a trip after Thanksgiving to Bosque del Apache, a National Wildlife Refuge.

One February I participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count sponsored by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which counts specific species of birds. This year, I’m thinking of participating in the Christmas Bird Count sponsored by the Audubon Society, which goes from December 14, 2011 to January 5, 2012.

The Audubon Christmas Bird Count began in 1900 as an alternative to “side hunts,” contests to shoot the most birds on Christmas day. Frank M. Chapman suggested that we count birds rather than kill them and today the Christmas Bird Count helps amateur and professional bird lovers study the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America.

If you are already providing food, water and habitat for the birds in your area or want to, look into the Wildlife Habitat Certification offered by the National Wildlife Federation.

After decades of feeding the birds and leaving out fresh water for them, I now see new generations of birds growing up already accustomed to the bird feeders. Watching them helps me to keep in touch with the wild and learning the names we give them helps me to feel part of it. I’d love to hear about your experiences sharing bird watching with your children.

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Help for the Holidays

November 7th, 2011

In 2003, one of our Mothering community members, Tracy, started the first Holiday Helper Forum. Gemini, SpatulaGirl, JustVanessa, DreamsinDigital, Maluhia and other members have developed the program over the years.

In 2009 we helped 73 families, nearly 100 in 2010 and this year we hope to help up to 150 families; we have 40 families signed up so far.

FAMILIES IN NEED

To be eligible, a member’s family must have significant financial need. The member must have been a Mothering member for one year as of October 24, 2011 and have posted 500 times. In the interest of privacy and security, Families in Need remain anonymous to the community and are identified by a number. Only the administrators and moderators of Holiday Helper know their contact information.

If you would like to apply to be a Family in Need (FIN), please fill out the Holiday Helper Application (scroll down to the middle of the page) and send it in a Private Message (PM) to AdinaL. Applications will be taken on a first come first serve basis.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

If you would like to help a Family in Need, here are some things you can do:

Cash Donations will be used to buy gift certificates for the Families in Need. To donate cash to the Holiday Helper paypal account, email MDCHolidayHelpers2011@gmail.com.

Post the gently used items you have available, items you are willing to buy or gift certificates to the “I Have Available Thread.” We’ll match you with a FIN.

Donate to a specific family by checking the Families in Need Forum. Send a Private Message to the person who started the particular thread and she will send you the family’s address.

Donate specific items by checking the Families in Need Master List where items are listed by category and are linked to the specific families who need them. Again, PM the person who started the thread for mailing information.

THE SHIPPING FAIRY

Donate to the Shipping Fairy. This account helps pay postage for people who have things to send but may not be able to afford the shipping. If you donate $3.00 or more to the Shipping Fairy, a customized tag will be placed under your username. PM incorrigible if you are in need of Shipping Fairy help.

Adina told me today that already one member had decided to take care of an entire family. Another gave gift certificates directly from Amazon. And, Sarah’s Silks, one of our advertisers, made a generous contribution.

BUSINESSES WHO CARE

As a thank you, Mothering will be providing special free promotion for companies who donate through November and December. Please contact our web editor, Melanie, to take part.

I’m proud to be part of such a generous community that wants to help our members in need. At a time when many of us feel uncertain about the future, we are reassured by our sense of community and inspired by our generosity. We renew each other. Thank you for helping.

Holiday Helper FAQ

Questions: AdinaL, Queen of the Meadow, TiredX2

Shipping Fairy Questions: incorrigible

Canada Questions: weliveintheforest

 

 

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Freedom Summer

October 26th, 2011

I’ve been reading Freedom Summer, a book about the summer of 1964 when 700 college students went to Mississippi to help African American citizens register to vote. This was a time when poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as intimidation, assault and murder, were routinely used to deny Black citizens not just the right to vote, but also their humanity. Though Black citizens were the majority of the population of Mississippi, few voted and none held public office. I cry almost continuously as I read the book because of the atrocities described.

I’m also crying because the book is about my coming of age. When I recall the sixties, I remember the disillusionment I suffered as a young adult because of the Vietnam War, but reading the book reminds me that my disillusionment had more to do with social injustice and inequality in general. And, it was this disillusionment that made so many of us want to do something to help alleviate other’s suffering.

When I was a high school student in California, the state became one of the first to enact a fair housing law, the Rumford Act (Proposition 14). At the time, housing in the US was racially segregated. The Rumford act was passed in 1963, but repealed the following year. It was not until the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act that segregated housing was legally laid to rest in the US.

We debated about racism and racial segregation in high school and I participated in a panel discussion of teens that was later published in a Catholic magazine. In college, I wrote a paper comparing St Thomas Aquinas’ idea of the Common Good with the Rumford Act.

It’s probably hard for those of you younger than I to imagine a time in America when schools, housing and bathrooms were segregated by race. I remember riding the train from Florida to Wisconsin on my way to my first year of college and seeing White Only bathroom signs from the train window. In college we boycotted the Elk’s Club in Milwaukee, where our college dances were held, because they admitted only whites.

The inequities that fueled the Civil Rights Movement were kindling for the growing dissatisfaction with The Vietnam War. In fact, it can be no coincidence that Martin Luther King was assassinated April 4, 1968, on the one year anniversary of his speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” in which he said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of spiritual uplift is approaching spiritual death.” If you have not heard this speech, please take the time to do so. It will blow your mind.

I bring all this up because Freedom Summer’s strategy of organize, educate and mobilize as well as Dr. King’s message of social justice and economic equality are up again. Something familiar is in the air. The Occupy Wall Street movement is reminiscent of the mood of the sixties. There is disillusionment among the people and discontent breeds change. At such a time, it helps to know our history. While there are big problems yet to solve, it’s good to remember how far we’ve come since Mississippi. As one of the Freedom Songs (see below) says, “Freedom is a constant struggle.”

Check out the PBS Special about the Civil Rights Movement:  Eyes on the Prize

Here are two great albums of classic protest songs:

Barbara Dane and the Chamber’s Brothers

Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs

 

 

 

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One Day of Peace

September 20th, 2011

The Vietnam War shaped my life in powerful ways. I was politically conservative when I entered college in the fall of 1965. As the daughter of an Air Force pilot I was unaccustomed to questioning authority. I believed what I was told.

I was sitting in front of the mirror in my dorm room one evening in 1966, listening to the radio as I cut my hair. I had just finished sealing an envelope I was sending to my dad in Udorn, Thailand; he was flying rescue helicopters in Vietnam. As I listened to the radio, I heard a member of Congress angrily and loudly reply to a reporter’s question about the Vietnam War, “We are not in Thailand. We are not in Thailand.” This was the beginning of my questioning of authority.

I was also influenced by what was happening to the boys of my generation. There was a military draft, which meant that a young man’s name had a number associated with it, the lower the number the higher the likelihood of being called. When someone’s number was called, he went down to the Draft Board for an examination. It was customary for my friends to pretend to be either injured, gay or insane in order to fail the exam. When they were successful, we would have a big party.

What was different during the Vietnam War was that the news coverage was graphic in its depiction of the war. We saw the war every night on the nightly news as the count of the dead was announced. We saw the body bags with our friends in them. We were able to take the war seriously as a society because it was taken seriously by the media.

We took to meeting in parks and walking down the streets together chanting anti-war and peace slogans. What started as spontaneous collective expressions of rage and powerlessness became demonstrations. Eventually there was tear gas and then police in full-riot gear; the demonstrations quickly became dangerous.  It was Kent State that turned most of my friends and me toward peace. When my peers, students like my friends and me, were killed by National Guard troops, we all started talking about going back to the land.

I concluded that if I were serious about peace I should start at the beginning, start with making peace with my family of origin, so I moved to New Mexico. When I had my own family, I decided to raise my children non-violently and learned how to talk from my own feelings. I did not punish my children, but rather relied on their natural need to cooperate.

As a mother, I have been challenged to find more inner peace, to hear a more gentle inner dialogue and to seek solace through meditation, chanting and prayer. Being more peaceful helps me to be the mother I want to be and is the work of a lifetime.

Because of my history, I am especially taken by Jeremy Gilley, who founded Peace One Day in 1999, a campaign to establish an annual day of ceasefire and non-violence. In 2001, the United Nations unanimously adopted September 21st as an international day of peace.

Gilley is an actor and filmmaker who documented his efforts to create Peace Day in two inspiring films. He encourages others to become involved by meeting up with other people on this day, playing a sport for peace, or dancing for peace. The website has many other examples of what people all over the world have done on this day of peace as well as resources for schools and communities.

Peace Day is a day for a kind inner dialogue, a day to stay steadfast with ourselves. On Peace Day we can choose non-violent communication with our children and stay peaceful with other people in our lives or on our paths. It is a day free of bullying, a day free of verbal abuse, a day free of domestic violence. On Peace Day, soldiers can catch their breath.

Striving for peace for one day makes it easier every other day. And doing it together reminds us that we are a world community that can choose peace instead of violence.

 

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Labor Day

September 5th, 2011

I always associate Labor Day with BBQs and family gatherings. I never before knew its origins. When I wrote the blog on Holistic Moms and UNITE HERE (see below), I ordered From the Folks Who Brought You the Wekend: A Short Illustrated History of Labor in United States. According to the book, 18,000 US strikes were held  between 1881 and 1897 for higher wages, the eight-hour day, and union recognition, among other goals.

In September 1882, the Central Labor Union in New York City, one of the national craft unions affiliated with the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), held a parade. Instead of going to work, 30,000 men and women marched for labor’s rights. In the years following, Labor Day parades became annual events in New York City, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Lynn, MA and other cities, where marchers held placards and banners with the slogan, “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Sleep, Eight Hours for What We Will.” The eight hour work day became the rallying cry of the labor movement. At the FOCLU convention in 1886, it was resolved that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” In 1894, Labor Day was declared a federal holiday.

In recent times, those of use involved in the childbirth reform movement have come to associate Labor Day with the labor of birth because of the work of Karen Brody and her play Birth on Labor Day (BOLD). Every year on Labor Day performances of BOLD are held all over the country and  this year Karen celebrates the 5th anniversary of BOLD at the Museum of Motherhood in New York City with guests Ina May Gaskin, Ricki Lake, Abby Epstein and with Debra Pascali-Bonaro. The play will also be webcast around the world 11 times in September.

The labor of hard work and the labor of birth have in common their demand for honest communication both with ourselves and with others. Labor Day reminds me of a poem I wrote in May of 1982, six weeks before my fourth child was born. When my third child was born with a birth defect, I worried about having another child.

Birthing After Bram

Time is knocking on my mind now.

It is time now, the echo calls.

Time to think about my real life fears.

How will I handle it if I can’t handle it?

How will I handle the silent stillness of my soul, alone again?

 

For on the path of birth, at some point

a woman steps off the world

and is totally alone.

Alone with her special strengths.

Alone with her private fears.

Alone with her personal sorrows.

Alone with all that she brings to that one moment of birth,

the moment that precedes all other moments of life

with the new one.

 

I focus on the birth because it is imminent.

But what I really fear,

what I struggle to illuminate,

is how it will be after the birth.

What will happen after that moment to my life?

What will happen to my soul?

What will happen to my dreams?

What will happen to my heart,

If it must break again?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What is Mindful Mothering?

August 31st, 2011

As a young mother, I was always looking for balance. I thought that balance was something I could create, should create, in my home and believed it to be within my control. Over the years I’ve learned that the only thing I can control is myself, and I’m not always successful at that. That’s why I’ve been so attracted to meditation and mindfulness, practices that help me to keep an inner balance

Meditation and mindfulness are not the same, though they compliment one another. I had a note on my bulletin board for years that said, “Meditate” and I could never find the 10 minutes to do so. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is not an action, but a mental practice and can be done any time, all the time. It’s something that really is accessible to new moms. It’s an inner dialogue that witnesses our experiential landscape in a non-judgmental way.

Because of my interest in mindfulness, I am excited by the work of Cassandra Vieten, author of Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year (New Harbinger: 2009). When my children were babies, no one was connecting motherhood and spirituality though it seemed apparent to me that they were one and the same. To be a better mother, I had to access deeper spiritual dimensions of myself. It both amused and angered me that it was considered laudable to get up at 3:00 AM to mediate but deplorable to get up at 3:00 AM to take care of your baby. I tried to bring these two dichotomies together in my own thinking. Cassie’s work heralds a whole new, yet timeless, paradigm shift for mothers.

Cassandra Vieten, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, director or research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, co-director of the Mind Body Research Group at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute and co-president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology.

Her research has focused on mindfulness-based approaches to cultivating emotional balance; the involvement of emotion regulation in addiction and recovery; and the factors, experiences, and practices involved in psychospiritual transformation. She is co-author of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life.

Cassi is also an avid soccer player and mom of eight-year-old Indigo. I had the privilege of interviewing her this past summer at Ghost Ranch, an education and retreat center in Abiqui, New Mexico, an hour north of Santa Fe. Cassi met her husband at Ghost Ranch where they both volunteered one summer and both of their families have been going there for decades.

Ghost Ranch is best known for its association with Georgia O’Keefe, who had a house there for many years and painted in the area. In fact, one of the exciting new offerings at Ghost Ranch is the Georgia O’Keefe Landscape Tours, hour-long tours to the scenes and locations of O’Keefe’s paintings. Ghost Ranch offers a dazzling array of course offerings in such diverse disciplines as Archaeology, Paleontology, Art, Health and Wholeness, Music and Performance Arts, Outdoors and Hiking, Religion and Spirituality, and Peace and Justice to name just a few. Every year they hold a Family Week during which there are classes for both parents and children. I took my children there several times when they were growing up. There’s a swimming pool, dining hall and lots to explore. Ghost Ranch offers a potent combination of immersion in nature and intellectual stimulation.

Ghost Ranch was the perfect setting in which to interview Cassi because the philosophy of Ghost Ranch is a living example of mindfulness. An old friend, Gail Anderson, who is now marketing coordinator there, chauffeured me to the interview. I am grateful to her for making it so easy to interview Cassi and to Ghost Ranch for granting her the time to do so.

Cassi’s definition of mindfulness sounds easy: pay attention to what you feel, to the emotions you are experiencing, to what you think and to what you want to do. By practicing this type of self-observation, we have a means by which to come back to ourselves moment by moment and in times of crisis. It helped me very much to hear Cassi’s stories of the women she works with. I feel calmer every time I listen to this interview.

You can also feel calmer by listening to a guided meditation by Cassi. She suggests that it’s something you can listen to while nursing, during a lunch break, while your baby is sleeping in the car seat, immediately upon awaking or before going to sleep. In addition to the mediation, Cassi’s website, Mindful Motherhood has other helpful resources for moms interested in personal transformation, including a free downloadable pdf “guide” and “reference sheet” for the Mindful Motherhood Yoga Series. Look for a Mindful Motherhood online course through the Institute of Noetic Sciences (and hopefully on Mothering.com) in November. Also, read some of Cassi’s blogs on All Things Mothering.

My interview with Cassi Vieten is just about 30 minutes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

 

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Perseverance Furthers

August 21st, 2011

For years I’ve been wanting to blog more frequently on mothering.com, but I couldn’t find the time. I felt like I was making excuses for myself when the truth is that I really couldn’t do it until now. The time is finally right.

It’s the same for a lot of things, mushrooms, for example. A couple of days ago I saw an unusual group of mushrooms growing on the ground outside beside a daylily; it looked to be part of a small pile of dung. Today I noticed a delicate yellow-white mushroom growing in the soil of one of the plants in the sunroom. It’s been raining more in the last three days than it has for many months and mushroom season in the southern Rocky Mountains has begun in earnest.

It’s been my goal to learn how to identify mushrooms for nearly forty years, since 1972 when I bought The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide, which was de rigueur for all good hippies of that era. I never successfully used the book to identify mushrooms. The photos are in black and white and I found it very confusing.

In recent times, I bought The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mushrooms and every year I peruse the community college summer catalog with the intention of signing up for a mushroom identification class.

A couple of years ago, my friend, Michael, showed me how to make spore prints but I forgot I knew how until I saw these two new mushrooms.  Yesterday morning, I got several small glasses out of the cupboard and took a stack of white paper from my office. I cut out squares from the paper that could lie on top of the glasses without drooping. Then I folded each paper in half and cut a V in the center for the stem to go through.

I carefully used a knife to cut the two newly sprouted mushrooms one at a time at their bases and then placed their stems through the V in the paper. Now they rest snugly with the base of their tops on the paper and their stems hanging down into the glass.

I wrote notes about the mushrooms, whether I found them on the ground or on a tree, whether the mushroom was found alone or in a cluster, the color and the smell of the mushrooms. This morning after I check the spore prints I will see if the gills are attached or not.

There’s more to identifying mushrooms than this, obviously, but I have a new confidence about it. I’ve looked at the field guide enough times now that it’s beginning to make sense. Somehow, all those years of being intimidated by the process have been replaced by a new confidence. Simply persevering so long begins to feel like experience and for the first time, I believe I can identify the mushrooms I found.

Life is like that. Some things just take longer than others. I bought a sink in the 80s that reminded me of a sink my grandmother had when I was a child and stored it in my garage for over 20 years before it was installed into my bathroom. I had imagined it there for years and one summer a few years ago the money and the workers came together to finally make it a reality.

It’s like that with intractable problems too, even simple things like garbage cans. For over 25 years, I had the same grungy, red, plastic open garbage can in my kitchen. I had totally lost track of it as an object because I was so accustomed to it until my 30-year-old son happened to mention that he remembered climbing in it when he was little. I suddenly realized that this was not a fixed object, but something that could be replaced, even improved upon. Now, I have a stainless steel, two-compartment, garbage can that looks nice and smells nice too. Who knew?

Things just take as long as they take and we have not failed simply because we have not acted upon an idea immediately. There is no such thing as a lost cause, unless we give up on it. I’m always inspired by advice in several of the hexagrams of the I Ching:Perseverance Furthers. Sometimes I think this phrase is all we need to know about life.

As the Dalai Lama says:

“No Matter what is going on, never give up. Develop the heart. Too much energy in your country is spent developing the mind instead of the heart. Develop the heart. Be compassionate, not just to your friends, but to everyone. Be compassionate. Work for peace in your heart and in the world. Work for peace and I say again, never give up. No matter what is happening, no matter what is going on around you, never give up.”

 

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    Mothering's long-time editor and publisher, Peggy O'Mara, shares observations and insights about overcoming parenting obstacles, appreciating unacknowledged epiphanies, and taking care of yourself. Also, great food ideas and recipes, as well as beautiful home and garden tips.

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