Perspectives

I fell madly in love on Christmas Eve. Here’s what happened.
My husband and son walked into the house carrying a huge grass basket, singing we wish you a Merry Christmas at the top of their lungs. Inside the basket? Two eight-week-old Jack Russell Terrier puppies.

I believed the beauty, orderliness, and stateliness of the great house would offer a balm for my current sense of things falling apart, of immense changes not only in my life but in the world. However, I was mistaken.

Ironically, the morning after Ian left Florida to move on to South Carolina was astounding. After two days of angry wind gusts and a steady downpour, we were rewarded with a cerulean sky and a few wisps of white clouds along with temperatures that herald in the wonderful Florida autumn.

I tend to get nostalgic and think of my early childhood in Germany, when the landscape turned orange, red, and yellow, a precursor to the bare and wintry landscape soon to come. Time to collect chestnuts and stock up on firewood. Memories of Oma climbing wearily out of our cozy featherbed in the mornings and crank up the wood-burning stove to warm the kitchen before she came to get me up and dressed.

A few days ago, I received an email from my father that made my heart clench. At ninety-five, he is part of a dwindling number of WWII veterans, in his case one of Hitler’s teenage boys conscripted to the army. He fought on the beaches of Normandy, was wounded, and captured.

It’s not a bad idea to always be grateful for those we care about. Not only our spouses, parents, pets, and children, but also those people who enrich our lives in many small ways that we typically do not think about and who leave small or large holes when they are suddenly gone.

In the ten years I’ve been studying Buddhist philosophy, the one true thing that I have gleaned is awareness. I can’t say I’m more peaceful, or kinder, or wiser. But I do know that I can learn to be fully aware of the results that my actions create, which may eventually serve to make me kinder or wiser and let me live peacefully.

Fear is that corrosive rock of despair, the opposite of “that thing with feathers.” It’s a feeling of disorientation. Space shifts. Time warps. I start thinking about crazy stuff, like noumenon vs. phenomena and questioning what reality really consists of.

The wood ducks love to swim into our little cove and waddle into the yard to munch on the acorns our old live oaks drop in abundance. The drakes have gorgeous iridescent plumage with crested heads and distinctive white stripes from the eyes to the end of the crest. The hens are not colorful. Their plumage of browns intermingled with beige offer better camouflage.