09.13.2012

and then there were stars

Photo courtesy of Paul Brian Thomas, because I was too busy gawking to mess with a camera.

I’ve been ignoring you, internet. I promise it wasn’t intentional. At least it wasn’t intentional at first. It’s just that the more I stayed away, the more I liked being away. I remembered things about the world that you tend to make me forget. Like the taste of a blackberry picked warm from the vine or the color of the sky in the space between night and day. I spent hours standing in the sun and letting the wind mess up my hair. I even played with my shadow, internet. More than once, I’m afraid.

I thought I would feel bad about leaving you on your own for so long. A whole summer? Surely, you’d be lonely without me. But you barely noticed. After all, you have so many other friends. I even worried that I’d be so out of touch with everything you’ve been up to these past three months, that maybe we wouldn’t know each other anymore. But whatever you might have been thinking about last month or last week – or even last night – doesn’t seem to be on your mind anymore. So in a way, it’s as if I never left.

Which makes me wonder if I won’t leave you again, internet. Just for a little while, every now and then. But don’t worry; I promise to come back. I like you far too much to stay away forever. You’re often clever and quite sly and you seem to love cats almost as much as I do. These are important qualities I look for in all my friends. But we both know you aren’t real. Not the way oceans and forests and mountains are real. In fact, there’s a whole huge world of real out there, internet. I know you know that already because you have so many pictures of it. But no matter how fast you can stream a video or how many more pixels you manage to shove into a single square inch, I’m afraid that a picture of the stars will never be the same as standing underneath them. © 2012 Amy Bilhorn Thomas

05.10.2012

the secret wisdom of bees

{digressions}

Photograph courtesy of Benson Kua. Used under Creative Commons.

Nature is trying to take back my house. Ants, slugs, bees, weeds, birds, squirrels, beetles, and vines – all are intent on undoing any kind of order I attempt to create. There was a time when I would have thought about what this could mean. At a much younger age, I probably would have asked the universe exactly what it was trying to tell me. It isn’t that I’ve stopped believing that important messages can come to us in surprising ways when we pay attention; it’s just that I’m busy. I’m getting stuff done. I have this giant checklist, you see, and when it’s all finished, then I will have time to learn to whatever the universe thinks an army of ants has to teach me. That’s what I’ve been telling myself, anyway. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, one of my closest friends told me she was going to look up bee symbolism for me. I had been telling her about the three bumblebee nests that were in my attic – I’d even joked about the ‘bees in my head’ – but it never once occurred to me to think about bees in the attic on any other level than to address the gaps between the roof and the siding that are big enough in some places to accommodate a not-so-skinny cat. “Fix roof gaps” went on the task list, and that was that. But even though I was still too busy for bees, somewhere in a dusty cabinet, I knew I had a book about animal symbolism. I was sure the bees meant nothing, but it might be fun to look. Here’s what the book said:

The bee is the reminder to extract the honey of life and to make our lives fertile while the sun shines. The bee reminds us that no matter how great the dream, there is the promise of fulfillment if we pursue it. The elixir of life is as sweet as honey, and the bee is a symbol that promises us that the opportunity to drink of it is ours if we but pursue our dreams.” Animal-Speak, Ted Andrews

Now I admit that to my 41 year-old ears, that all sounds pretty hokey. As a twenty-something, I probably would have eaten that shit up. The elixir of life was where it was at for me once upon a place in a land long, long ago. But now? I laughed and shoved the book back on the shelf. My task list was waiting, and it wasn’t going to accomplish itself. But try as I might, I couldn’t get anything done. Why?

Because I was hearing bees.

I know – believe me, I know. I wouldn’t make this stuff up. I swear that no matter where I went in my house yesterday, I was convinced I heard bees. I stood on chairs and pressed my head to the ceiling, I knocked on the walls to try and make the sound louder, I even went into the attic to actually look for them. Which was no small act of courage, by the way. Alas, no bees. Still, the buzzing wouldn’t stop, and frankly I was beginning to nurse some strong concern about my own sanity. I needed something to do. Something to distract me. There had to be some task on my list that I could actually get done.

I sat down at my desk and looked at my list for the day, and then the week, and then the month. I’m not sure what I was hoping to find, but slowly it began to dawn on me that some important things were missing. Where was my book? Where was this blog? Where were any of the tasks associated with my dreams and my aspirations for myself alone?

They weren’t there. Not for the day, the week, the month, or even the year.

Now, it would be awesome if I could say that the buzzing stopped right at that moment. My story would tie up into a perfect little ‘meaning of life’ parable, and we could all go home. But it didn’t. Even as I write this, I swear I can still hear them. Those stupid bees. Am I losing my mind? Do I have the bee hebejebes? Could something simply be stuck in my ear? I don’t know. All I know for sure is that somehow the bees in my attic got me to see that I have been leaving myself off the list for longer than I care to admit. Also, I may need a good ear specialist. Or a shrink. Maybe an ear shrink. Do they make those? © 2012 Amy Bilhorn Thomas

01.13.2012

forethought

{digressions}

I’ve bet a lot on myself this year. My to-do list is filled with large, seemingly impossible, life-altering goals. I won’t call them resolutions. I resolve seven times a day to be a better housekeeper, a better writer, and a better human being. Most days, I fail. Certainly at the housekeeping part. Resolutions in and of themselves aren’t enough for me. I need a reason to get something done. Preferably, a dire one.

I could die, of course. On the list of dire reasons, death is pretty high up there. But I’d probably need to leave the house for that to happen. A bus is not likely to run me over in my living room. And while I could conceivably drop dead of a hundred different undiagnosed reasons at any time (brain explosion from repeated resolution failure, for example), death as a motivational tool isn’t particularly effective for me. If I’m going to die, then who cares if I do any of the things on my list? Imminent death might make me reconsider what I put on that list, but it won’t actually make me do any of it.

I’m not sure what I believe about an afterlife, but I don’t really see myself wringing my hands over not achieving my life goals once I leave this world. Regret is for the living. And I’m not having it. But that doesn’t mean I’ll simply give myself a retroactive pass for making poor choices. To live a life with no regrets is not to look behind, but to look ahead. To choose now, as best you can, what you know you will be proud of in the future.

Come January 2013, I’ll likely be sitting right here in this same house, probably even in this same chair. I’ll look back at 2012 and account for what I’ve done, how much closer I am to who I want to be, and how much further I have to go. How will I feel if I didn’t try? If I spent more time resolving than actually doing? If the only thing I learn from being a better housekeeper is that I have to keep house more often? Disappointments will happen, but disappointment in myself? Not if I can help it. © 2012 Amy Bilhorn Thomas

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