new ways to go to hell

and...

I have just heard that the pope has named seven new deadly sins that condemn a person to hell. This is not good news ... particularly since I don't have the list ...

Do we really need this kind of thinking? Maybe we need to be more concerned with how to live than how not to live. Just my opinion.

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Now that I have made my big pronouncement I have learned what the sins are ...and they are pretty good. Here's the list: genetic modification, experimenting on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy, taking drugs...

happy birthday to Meg!!!!

Happy birthday to Meg - happy birthday to Meg. Happy birthday dear Megan.... Happy birthday to Meg.

This is the birthday of one of the prettiest, smartest, funniest people I know. Her name is Megan Kate Mulder, woman of many adventures, lover of cats and birds and interesting animals, hugger supreme, lover of any clothes that are bright and sparkly, chaser of boys, wearer of pink hair, and most of all ... Mimi's favorite 8 year old!!!!

Have a happy day dear Megan. I hope you like your present from Papa and me!

on little girl's noses

I have a granddaughter, Megan, or Nut-meg as we like to call her, who has a permanent snort. Not a sniffle. Not a small drip. No - we are talking a magnificent snort, accompanied by hucks and horks and blechts. At night the snort takes the form of earsplitting snore-snorts ... you would think Papa was behind the door with the Big Pink M on it.

This week Nut-meg had her nasal passages frozen and a camera fixed to a wire inserted through her nose down into her throat. She loved it. She loved that they were fixing her snort. But more, she just loved the adventure 0f having a camera down her nose. She told me she even sneezed and they didn't take it out and it was so funny to her! The camera she said, turned this way and that way, and looked at her snort. She is the only person she knows who has had a camera in their nose. Now that is worth being proud of.

The long and short of it is that Nut-meg is going to lose her adnoids. Who needs adnoids anyway? They contribute so little to the important things of life: racing on a bicycle, eating banana smoothies, chasing boys ... you understand. And what is surgery but one more adventure?

Megan's joy of life fixes more of what ails me than anything else I can think of. This is why we need children. And snorts. And cameras down noses.

the price of a little fame

Off and on I am watching crazy British shows on BBC this weekend. I made the mistake of scrolling through a couple weeks of BBC scheduling, marking shows I thought would be interesting. Now I have dozens of kooky health, shopping, and intervention kinds of shows lined up waiting for me to watch.

What mind altering drug must be in the water to move average people to want to be photographed in the their underwear from the least flattering angles and broadcast worldwide? Why would anyone allow a man with a camera to cover a childish fight between you and your fiance over a wedding plan? Don't these people know that if they ever run for Prime Minister, "Yes, your Majesty," these sorry accounts will be exhumed and displayed?

Which makes me think about what I want to be known for. I want to be known for my stunning beauty and style, the rarity of my wisdom and 7 best selling novels that reveal the human condition subtly and yet with astonishing insight.

But I will probably be known, by a very limited audience, as being a pretty good woman, always on a quest, always with a new wacky idea (we should do it - come on it will be fun!), always hoping to one day be willowy, and always open to loving people, especially my grandbabies.

I have surprisingly few unfulfilled hopes. I do not want, for instance, to be famous. I do not want to be filmed in my underwear for TV. I do want to try that new Indian restaurant in town - I hear their Korma is fabulous.

I've found my center ... again

Living from my center - something I've read so much about, pursued, and somehow lost. But now, in Lent, it is being restored to me. I exercised last night - first time in two weeks, spent time on my favorite chair in solitude and reflection, and this morning I walked into my office without the trail of heaviness I have been carrying. I am smiling - making fun with Jeremiah - looking at the beige open file on my desk with its two inches of printed papers with a sense of freedom and not burden.

The soul is a deep well. But it is a narrow gap through which we can access it. I have this mental picture that I can crawl through an overgrown hole, and down a burrow, only to tumble out into a wide open garden - the place carved out of the is universe that is mine alone.

That is my center. Where I meet God in solitude and silence. Where I discover my own self as beloved and joyful.

I will be there today and bring up a rose or two to pass out to others as hope.

paved paradise, put up a parking lot

I am in a strange kind of sad place after my drive home from the early monday meeting at Panerras. The road between here and there is designated scenic byway and I never fail to revel in the twists and hills and meadows of straight backed black cows with puffs of hair under their bellies.

More I love the old old trees, all gnarled and bent, with leaves coming off only half the branches. They are the old folk of the hills - stately and beautiful with their twisted forms and lofty reach.

But the traffic is heavy, sometimes. And progress will not be stopped. So today the best of my old Ent friends are laying on their sides like huge charcoal briquets, having burned most of the night. The sight was reminiscent of a scene of the underearth in Lord of the Rings ... one huge burning briquet after another, surrounded by torn up roots, rocks and earth piled recklessly where streams and pond puddles used to lay in repose.

If felt like an omen. It felt like a sign of what is happening in places like Darfur (just read the front page of the New York Times today), like how we burn our own history so we can get our lives from point A to point B as fast as possible.

Today I am going to find someone old - so old they are almost disolved by life, and I am going to do something to make them feel precious.

mothers

"In the natural order, perhaps solitaries are made by severe mothers." I read this statement scratched in a journal by Thomas Merton, who was working to understand his chosen life as a solitare and contemplative writer.

I was anything but a severe mother. I was, for the most part, a dancing mother. My children were encouraged to play and be amazed at the natural world around them. We were treasure hunters and scroungers of the earth.

I didn't make any solitares, but I made something. Upon reflection, the impact of a mother is impossible to quantify. So I am sitting here wondering what I have done by what I have been.

My first thought is that I've grown up too slowly. The old German phrase my gramma used to say, "Too soon old't, too late schmart." I wish I could have a mulligan for a few, maybe more than a few, things. I would tell JV he has to bring his own quilts down off the roof of the garage after his night of star gazing with 'the boys'. I would make sure I didn't feed R chocolate by the pound when she was heartbroken - what does that teach a girl?! I would go to B's wedding reception even though I had a fever of l05 and was throwing up. Or maybe I wouldn't.

Maybe I would do it all the same. I guess we have to live in the moment, being the person we are. We don't get a script or a screen writer to give us pithy banter and wise solutions. I am thinking that I mostly did well because I lived out of who I truly was ... and the real work I did well was to keep facing my stuff, to keep growing and crying and struggling til I was the kind of person who could make a more mature choice and possibly do better.

So today I have the chance to live any way I feel is right - but really in my heart of hearts? ... I am inclined to plod through my garden in 3 inch mud to check on new buds, struggle across the melting lawn in my heels to fill the feeders for my beloved cardinal and finches, drive all night to see my granddaughter's recitals and then make ice cream sundaes that are pretty much obscene, and stay up drinking wine and watching reruns of 'what not to wear' with my daughter. So maybe maturity hasn't changed me all that much. Good thing I am finished with mothering. I leave that daunting task to my kids - I can be the gramma and just have fun.