Enjoy it all...

Joyce, commenting on my "tomatoes" post ended with some seemingly simple advice, that really caught me.  "Enjoy it all," she wrote.

Simple words that seem profound to me.

Enjoy it all.  Why do I have such trouble remembering to just do that simple thing?  There are so many good things that happen through all our days -- surely through all of mine.  If I'd just let go of wishing and fussing, and simply go with the good times and the funny moments and the joyfulness of where we are right now, I'd be way happier.  If I'd use my energies to imagine the life we want to lead, and then work to bring that imagining to life, I'd be way more content with the fruits of my efforts.

That is the trick.  Celebrate what is.  Recognize the good things.  Work for the future that you want to see.  Be glad.  Be grateful.  Be creative.  Be alive.

swan

What's Your Role?

I think that one of the biggest misconceptions; one of the biggest fallacies about the BDSM lifestyle concerns "roles."  We tend to fall into and then perpetuate the foolish notion that people take on or fulfill or live a particular role within their relationship -- and then that's it!  Submissive, Dominant, Switch, Top, Bottom, Master, Slave, whatever; we too often fall into the trap of one word labels and descriptions.  It doesn't work; can't work.  We are, each of us, multi-faceted humans -- and we each play a variety of roles in our own lives and in the lives of those to whom we relate.

I've played lots of roles in 57 years:  child, daughter, first-born, big sister, cousin, classmate, student, best friend, geeky kid, nerdy kid, girl friend, college girl, fiance, lover, wife, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, bridesmaid, parent, mom, job-seeker, employee, co-worker, boss lady, teacher, grandmother, seeker, divorcee, sister-heart, bottom, submissive, slave, top, switch...  I look at that list and I realize that there are very few of those labels that are a single thing either.  Each of those "roles" contain a whole host of ways of being within that context. Who has ever been just a parent, for example?  Doesn't that one include things like coach, and confidant, and cook, and disciplinarian, and advocate, and tutor, and...?

Yes, I've worn plenty of hats along the way.  Right now, though, as we go through the rehab and recovery from this knee replacement -- I am coach and cheerleader and, let us not forget ... chauffeur.  We think He would be just fine to drive, now that He's off all the prescription pain medications.  His right leg is just fine, after all.  But for now, I remain, as I have been through these last four weeks, His personal driver.  Just call me, "James."

swan

Pretty Little Things

Our condominium homes have just a bit of garden space.  There is a bed in front, between our two front doors.   It is about 8 feet wide and about 12 feet deep -- and it is in the shade most of the day.  We've filled it up with rambling rose bushes and some sedum and blanket flower.  In back, our patios are bordered by planting beds that are about 2 feet deep and about 16 feet long.  The soil is just miserable, even though we've worked with it for all of the ten years we've lived here.  There seems to be an endless supply of discarded building materials buried out there, and no matter what we do, some chunk of concrete or roofing tile is forever floating to the surface.  Blech!

Still, I keep allowing myself to get all excited every spring.  We would really enjoy fresh tomatoes and some cucumbers and peppers -- or so I tell myself.  How hard could it be?  Containers have been my answer to the crummy dirt...  This year I filled up my containers with some cucumbers and peppers, and I planted a pot of strawberries.  Tomatoes?  My best success has come with those funny tubular hanging planters that grow the plants upside down.  I have four of them.  This year, there are two cherry tomato plants and two that will hopefully grow bigger tomatoes.  Usually, the way this works out, I grow a few really yummy tomatoes each year.  Given what I invest in terms of time, effort, and actual money, they are the most expensive tomatoes on the planet.  Sigh.

Anyway, the cherry tomatoes are beginning to ripen.  Here's my first "harvest."  Aren't they just the prettiest little things?

swan

Domestication

I am not a great housekeeper.  I do not enjoy the daily chores that go into keeping things tidy; and bigger tasks tend to intimidate me into procrastination.  I grew up in a house that was "perfect."  My mother was a neat freak, and we learned early on to pick up after ourselves and keep things in order.  Failure to do those things created firestorms that were just not worth it.  We made our beds, hung up our clothes, cleared the plates, and did the dishes.  There was no question about any of it.  Ever.

And.  I do think that I have a touch of adolescent rebellion with regard to all of that.  All of that cleaning and tidying just does not fire my rockets.  Some people get a kick out of being really good at all that domestic work, but not me.  Not me.

However.  I do get a huge kick out of accomplishment.  When I get myself over the threshold of internal resistance, and get after whatever project is at hand, I can knock things into shape pretty well, and the results just tickle me.  Way more than you would ever think...

Summertime tends to be the time when I go after jobs that reach the level of "projects" (at least in my mind). I save the work that requires focus and some number of hours -- work that is going to leave me a breathless, sweaty mess -- for summer breaks.  And then, with a list of such projects that would overwhelm a team of 5 or 6 people, I tick them off, one after one.

I've been a little constrained with what I can go after because Tom has been in recovery mode following His surgery.  While He's been awake, He's kept me hopping getting the things He needs.  Then, when He sleeps, I've been reluctant to make much noise -- for fear of waking Him.  So, it has been a challenge.  But, He's better now, so there's a little more opportunity to get after it around here.

I cleaned and reorganized the refrigerator.  Can I get a "WhooHoo" here?

And closets.  Closets have been a problem for a very long while here.  Our condos are really very nice, but they do not have "a lot" of storage space.  There are good sized closets in the Master bedrooms in both places, and then a smaller closet in the guest room/exercise rooms.  Tom and I have shared one master bedroom closet for years, but it has become more and more and more crowded.  I have done everything I could think of to try and make more space; or make better use of the space we have.  Every single time I'd get in there to try and hang up clean laundry, I'd end up spitting and hissing and swearing because it was impossible to cram ONE MORE THING in there!!!  Grrrrrrr....

And then I had a brilliant idea.  Brilliant, I tell you!  There is a funny little notch in the smaller bedroom.  I imagine it was designed as a place to put a dresser.  Mostly we've used it as a place to pile stuff in the "exercise room."  The stocks were stored there, but then with a fair pile of assorted junk piled in on top of them.  "What if," I wondered, "the notch could be made to work like closet storage space?"  That would provide about four liner feet of additional storage space, and I could move my clothes into that space -- freeing the master bedroom closet for His things.  BRILLIANT!

I hunted for closet storage options.  Didn't want to spend a fortune.  Then, I found this little gem, called a Honey-Can-Do, on Amazon.com, and got it delivered to the front door, with no shipping, for under $70.00.  It took me about a half hour to put it together, and it works perfectly.  I am unreasonably thrilled with the whole business.  So, here are closet pictures.  Try to contain your amazement.

swan

What's the Word for "Doesn't Matter -- Not Important?"

irrelevant

 adjective

not important or not relevant to what you are discussing or doing

inappropriate

 adjective

not suitable in a particular situation

unimportant

 adjective

not important or relevant

marginal

 adjective

not considered important or relevant

immaterial

 adjective

not important or relevant

unrelated

 adjective

not connected to a subject that you are thinking about or discussing

extraneous

 adjective

not relating to the subject or situation that you are dealing with

academic

 adjective

not relating to a real situation, and therefore not relevant

beside the point

not relevant or important to the subject you are discussing

neither here nor there

used for saying that something does not matter because it is not relevant

I've had lots of time for thinking here lately.  Watching someone heal and recover from surgery can be busy by times, but there is also a lot of time to just wait...  I've gone back through the years of archives here and at Swan's Heart, and read a lot of what I wrote way back then.  I've also noticed that, in those earlier days, it was common for posts to draw comments.  Not dozens of comments, but sometimes a half dozen or even a dozen (singular).  And it used to be that the things I wrote about here sparked responses from Tom.  

Now, if I do think of something to say; something that seems to matter to me -- mostly there is no response.  I have, after  all this time, run out to the end of my "useful blogging life."  Things have been too serious here for too long.  We hardly spank anymore, and most often when we do, it is me doing the spanking.  There's the beginning of exploration into shamanism, but that is just weird.  I could put up menus and recipes but that's not what this place is supposed to be about.  Baseball?  Football?  Politics?  Our aging and living and quietly loving as we've come to?  I've just got nothing to say that matters to anyone but me.  

It makes me sad.  I feel lonely.  I wish for the days when there were lively conversations here.  Things change.  Life goes on.  This has been a good place, and I have loved knowing the people who visited here.  Time to move on; draw the curtains on this public thing.

swan

Passion

Oatmeal Girl, who writes a lovely, lyrical blog, posted that her partner had declared that passion might be the rarest, most valuable thing he'd introduced into her life:

Passion.

It's different from hunger.

Different from love.

Different from feverish sexual desire.

Now, as I commented on her blog, this is the kind of thing that gets into my brain, and sits in there, and just tickles at me -- like that cat hair in the back of your throat kind of tickle???  What exactly is "passion," I wonder?  Before this, without giving it much thought, I'd have said, if you had asked me, that I knew exactly what was meant by a reference to "passion" in the context of an intimate relationship, but this has me pondering...  

The word "passion" comes to us from a 5000 year old, Proto-Indo European root, pei, which meant "to hurt."  From there, we can trace it to the Ancient Greek, paskho, meaning "to suffer," and to Old English, polung, which meant "to endure."  It isn't until the 1580s that the word begins to be used to apply to a sense of sexual love, enthusiasm, or predilection.  Interestingly, one archaic use of the word has it as "passive."  The root leads to a number of related terms such as:  patient, patience, passible, passive, compassionate, and compassion.  So there is the surprising (to me) implication, carried deep in the ancient roots of the word, that passion requires one to hurt, to suffer, to endure -- with patience, passivity, and compassion.  Because I love this kind of word play, that all seems very intriguing to me -- forgive me...

Aristotle opined that, "All human actions have one or more of these seven causes:  chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire."  And that, too, rings bells for me.  How much of my life has been driven by pure chance; by the fires and drives of my nature; by my own obsessions and compulsions; by habits of mind; by my attachment to reason and logic; by passion (hurting, suffering, endurance, and patience); by desires for things spoken and not...?  Who, I wonder, would I be without all those currents and winds pushing and pulling me into my life -- beyond the safety and simplicity of the path that might have been my lot otherwise?

I have thought that what carried me through the last couple of years, through all the struggle and hurt and fear and uncertainty, was some less than lovely brew of stubbornness and determination and tenacity mixed up with hope and dreams and wishes.  I've done what I've done, and called it love; called it service; called it faithfulness and steadfastness -- but passion?  I hadn't seen any of this as "passion;" hadn't felt myself "passionate" in the doing of it.  Maybe though, I ought to rethink those assumptions.  Maybe passion is something other than what I'd imagined.  "Different from hunger.  Different from love.  Different from feverish sexual desire."

swan

Not Quite Apollo 8

It was Christmas time, 1968, when three American astronauts, Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr., and William A. Anders, guided their Apollo 8 spacecraft across nearly a quarter-million miles of black void, out of the grasp of Earth, into orbit around the Moon, and back.  It was a first; had never happened before.  At 13 years old, I was among the many millions who listened and watched as the explorers spoke across the emptiness. One thing I remember with almost visceral clarity is the silence that fell each time Astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders vanished behind the far side of the Moon, losing all contact with the Earth for 45 minutes on each of the 10 orbits. During the first long silence the black void crackled with tension until Mission Control in Houston reported, "We've got it! Apollo 8 is in lunar orbit."  Jubilation!  With one breath, we who remained bound to Earth breathed a single, universal sigh of relief in that moment.


I was reminded of that moment this morning when, in the darkness of the predawn, Master rolled over, pulled my still sleepy self into a hug, and asked if we could try to make love.  It was, for me, exactly like that exhale I recall after the long, silent wait for Apollo 8 to reappear -- "When will He reappear following the trauma of the surgery?  And, what if...?"  The unspoken fear, guarded closely in the long dark nights of the last three weeks, evaporated early this morning in the simple, often under-appreciated gift of an erection.  Now...I am assured that we are where we should be, safely on the radar, and soon to be headed home to more familiar territory again.  


swan