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Choose: Focus

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[Note: Some of this week’s posts were originally scheduled to be written last week, but I’ve been very ill since Wednesday. The only two that are slightly off as far as timely are the reflection for January, which was supposed to appear yesterday, and the review of the Wayward Sisters episode of Supernatural, which will appear later in the week.-Kb]


Focus is the key. (c)2018

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.

 – Michael Leboeuf 



Last Wednesday, I had planned to talk about focus, both in general and what my focus may or may not be for my writing, and that was going to tie into a post for this past Friday about intentions. Unfortunately, on Wednesday, i couldn’t focus on anything except continually alternating between covering myself and uncovering myself with two or more (or less) blankets, and being all around miserable and sick.
It really just illustrates that you can have the perfect planner, the schedule mapped out, the outline written, the post forming effortlessly in your [my] mind, and life will find a way to knock you down.

Because that’s what life is about. Whether they be big or small, life is about facing challenges.

I spent all day in bed on Wednesday, barely lifting my head when an angel from church texted me that she had made my family dinner. She had no idea that I was sick or how much of a lifesaver she was truly being. She had mentioned it last week, but it was a maybe, so when she called, it was a wonderful godsend.

And that’s also what life is about. Sharing love, sharing food, sharing ideas and thoughts and challenges. Apart from my family and church, my writing is the most important thing to me. I think that’s because it encompasses every part of my life. It surrounds and warms, it emotes and comforts, it laughs and screams, and when I can’t do it, for whatever reason, it pains me.

Choose was/is my word for 2018. My second word is focus. Not merely the pinpointing of a topic or a photograph or a subject, but where will my writing take me? Where will I take it? I consider myself a Jane of all trades, which is simply another way of expressing that I take on all kinds of things and remain expert in none of them. Like a Jeopardy contestant, I’m all about a little knowledge about a lot of things, and that’s actually a great thing for a writer, but is it a good thing for a writer’s audience?

Only time will tell, and you, dear reader, will also tell; by your follows and your likes and your opinions, which I love and appreciate.

So where is my focus? What do I write about? So many things interest me, and I can expound on many of them: spirituality and fandom. Self-help and self-assessment. Travel. Writing. I feel like sometimes I can’t decide on which writer, which person I want to be in the moment. I multi-task, but when I looked up synonyms for multi-task, it gave me focus as an antonym. How strange. When I muti-task I tend to focus more on what I’m doing even if it’s three things at once and a delegation of a fourth.

How does all of this align with who I am and the kind of writer I want to be?

What’s the one thing that connects them all for me or to me besides me?

2018 may take me on that journey of discovery. A fork in the road or a crossroads? We’ll see.

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.

 – Greg Anderson

15/52 – Chosen

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​Lent is over. The Easter fire is lit. In just about seven or so hours, it will be blessed, we will light our candles and illuminate the church. And so begins the Easter Vigil; practically the same way across the world in their own time zones. It begins so late because we wait until dark.

Every year from Ash Wednesday until tonight, I am asked if it brings back memories of my own first Easter Vigil. I never know what to say. Of course, it does, in many ways, but in others it fosters new memories that blend with the old ones. It is also hard to explain that my Easter Vigil is often somehow with me more often than not. Every time, I cross myself at the holy water font. Every time, I receive the Eucharist, I think back to that very first one. Each one feels like the first time, and each subsequent one is a crumb on the path I have chosen.

For many, Christ is chosen for them, through their families and traditions, through their spouses or wanting to give something to our children to connect them to “their people”, but as we get older and understand more and hear more, and even listen more, we make choices along the way, every step of the path we follow. Turn left? Or right? Confirmation? Or not? Weekly communion? Or is that first one enough? Is it all that I need?

I didn’t know what was being offered when I chose Christ. I had only intended to choose a ritual, a place of being that make me feel…something; feel better about my life. In staying, I chose a new path, a dim path until one day, just like that, it was lit, brighter than the sun, all encompassing, my eyes rising to meet the glow. Despite the glow of suns and brightness unimaginable, my eyes stayed. I didn’t hear words or sounds, but my heart heard the words. Not words, but something translated, engraved on my soul, that while giving me many choices really gave me none.

Once it was there, it can not be taken away. My only choice is to accept what I’ve been gifted and continue my direction, my directing, my learning, my new way.

Every day that I have not been on retreat, I have attended the daily mass during Lent. For the past two weeks, I have remained in the church to recite the rosary. Those two commitments have given me a steadiness to carry me through this time in the desert.

Easter begins and Passover is ending, and they both celebrate the release from bondage, the exiting from the desert, the wilderness, our yearly exodus.

(c)2017

Fireboat

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This is a photo of the John J. Harvey as its passengers disembark onto the deck of the USS Slater. This photo was taken on August 20th, 2001.

It was a greyish day, a little cooler than we thought it should have been so late in the summer and as my husband and our son, all of four years old and a dedicated junior fireman took a stroll along the Troy riverfront, the John J. Harvey was getting ready to sail down the Hudson to NYC to its new home as a museum and historic landmark.

They had been giving free rides between Troy and Albany. The crew offered them a ride, but the voyage was one way only. Could someone pick them up in Albany?

Mom, of course. Please…

The hoses went to work, drawing water up through the pumps from the river and out again, demonstrating how the fireboat worked before its retirement in 1995. Sprays of water arched against the grey clouds. The passengers got a little damp. I could see a tiny sample from the adjacent highway as I was driving to get to the drop off area before they arrived.

The gangplank was laid between the ships, the Harvey and the Slater. Both crews had done this several times before that summer. As they went from one former working boat turned floating museum/historic landmark to another, they were given a quick tour of the Slater as well.

From crew to passenger, their days were made!

No one knew that day was a mere three weeks from the bright blue September sky that turned black with the rising smoke from four hijacked airplanes.

We know the story of September 11th. We were there or we watched it unfold in real time on our television sets. We frantically called family and friends. We watched in horror as one tower fell and then the second, the incessant sound of beeping of firemen down.

Along the waterfront of Lower Manhattan, however were boats. Big boats, little boats, sailboats, fishing boats, trawlers, ferries, the Coast Guard. If it could get in the water and do runs from Manhattan to Staten Island and Brooklyn or wherever they needed to go, they went, and they continued to go until everyone who wanted to leave had left.

This was the largest water rescue since Dunkirk.

The John J. Harvey came out of retirement and went back into the fire service that day. They ran hoses and they ferried passengers. Other firefighters came out of retirement simply because they knew they were needed. They searched. They rescued. They recovered. They and the John J. Harvey exemplified that day what it meant to be a public servant, a fire fighter; what it meant to be an American.

September 11th isn’t mattress sales and rolled back prices. It’s the day they thought we could be torn apart but instead brought us together.

Read about the heroes of that day.

Read about the John J. Harvey. Visit her at her home at Pier 66.

That four year old of mine is now 19. He is a fireman and an EMT, and he is in his second year of college studying the fire protection service.

Support your local fire departments.

Support the 9/11 First Responders.

Stories of September 11th should be told, and will be told even when the witnesses have gone.

From Death into Life

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There is a line in a hymn, I think it’s sung at funerals or as they’re called in the Catholic church, Mass of Christian Burial. It goes, “from death into life.”

I began attending this celebration of life by accident in one of my early days of attending Mass. I was there, and I couldn’t leave without drawing unnecessary attention to myself, so I remained, hidden in plain sight, in one of the back pews, wishing I was invisible, feeling as though I didn’t belong in such an intimate family gathering. I was, however, wrong – this mass invites the community members, the congregation; to be in communion with the family, to send their loved one on their next journey. I followed the program, I sang along, I prayed, and I found something in that service. I think my first funeral service was for a woman named Dottie. I still have her program in my church papers that I’ve collected and saved.

After that first time, I continued to go to the Rite of Christian Burial when it occurred during the daily mass time. I almost never knew until I arrived at church, and after one or two more, I found great comfort in this Mass.

But I still didn’t get it – that death into life bit.

I could never understand that phrase. How can you go from death into life?

It wasn’t until after my spiritual conversion, and after passing this tree, always on my way to my writing workshop.

On the way to the library, I passed the church adjacent to this tree, and the cemetery that surrounds this tree, and one spring day it was gloriously sunny and bright, and the green leaves had sprouted and grown.

I could see them bright against the white of the siding on the church building; this delicate new growth rising from the fallen tree, its life long thought buried and gone.

This was when I could grasp death into life, life from death, the infinite from finite, everlasting life from our journey on earth.

Now, when I sing the hymn, I picture this tree when I sing death into life.

Celtic Cross

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Long before I was Catholic I was enthralled with Celtic knotwork, including crosses. I didn’t collect crosses but I admired them. Looking intently at the weaving, the criss crossing where two lines meet. Knotwork is a most appropriate description. I look at the twists and the turns and the loops and all I can picture is a knotted rope. Thick, muslin colored, braided rope, fringed and frayed at the ends but the beauty in the center never ending. Never ending, like a circle, but more elaborate, each one different from the other.

Look at any Celtic cross and tell me how it’s not the perfect blending of artistry and spirituality.

It’s a good note to end this week on.

Thursday Travels – Writing Space

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Today I am in a writing place. Sometimes, the traveling is far, and sometimes it’s close by. I’ve had this on my mind to write since July, and I’ve finally say down with my computer to start it. Twelve hundred words in and its started. Writing places are special. They can be at desks, tables, coffee shops, parks, and in beds. I’ll get back there this afternoon.

Stuff and Things – Rosaries

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My First Rosary

Growing up Jewish, rosaries were as unfamiliar to me as the Chinese language. I’m not sure I ever saw one outside of a television show, and even then it would have been a fully habitted nun.

When I first began attending Mass, the woman sitting in front of me prayed her rosary before the mass. Every morning I would walk in, sit behind her, and glance over her shoulder as she worked the beads. It was both equally intriguing and foreign to me.

In the Fall of 2013, I traveled to Williamsburg, Virginia to participate in a LARP (think dinner and a show except there’s no audience) and Premiere Viewing of Supernatural. I was staying with a friend who was working on props for the event. Among her prop work, she gave me my first rosary, the one in the second picture, that she made for me by hand. It’s beautiful. It is in my two favorite colors: greens and silver. I was touched that she would spend the time and honor me with her gift. As soon as I returned to New York, I brought it to my priest to bless it. It is primarily the rosary that I use. It not only brings me closer to G-d and Jesus and the Blessed Mother, but it also ties me to friendship and love here on earth.

In the first picture are my other rosaries. These were lovely gifts from special people who helped foster my Catholic education.

In the first photo, from left to right:

This gold rosary is very shiny and has the delicate features of a necklace. It was sent to me for Christmas after my baptism from my dear friend and godfather. He stood up for me as a witness at my Easter Vigil, but more importantly, he introduced me to the practicalities of knowing Jesus: compassion, forgiveness, and loving one’s neighbor no matter what. Those three things, those ideals, changed my heart and my life forever.

Second in line is the rosary I’ve already spoken about.

Next is the white one. This is from the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima. I was given this by the RCIA teachers who taught me the class on Mary. They are a couple who I know from my memoir writing workshop, and they have a large devotion to Mary. They collect Mary statues and pictures/icons from all over the world, and they are magnificent. This rosary comes in a little clear box with a gold picture of the shrine/Fatima icon.

The fourth is not actually a rosary, but a chaplet. Chaplets have less beads than a rosary, and are personal prayer devotionals. This one is the chaplet of St. Anne’s, and was a gift on my baptism day from another couple who taught me during the RCIA program.

I don’t pray the rosary daily, but I will often be called to at the oddest moments, and I try to stop, take a breather, and pray.

Stuff and Things – Y Ddraig Goch

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For those of you who don’t speak Welsh, the subtitle translates to The Red Dragon. The Red Dragon, Y Ddraig Goch is the national symbol of Wales, and in addition to being pictured on the official flag, it is pretty much on everything else in country.

When I was there, I picked up stuffed red dragons for each of my three kids, but for myself I got this little keychain. For the longest time, I had it clipped to my pocketbook, and it went everywhere with me. His tag fell off, but the plastic hangy thing is still attached to his ear. On his left side, as you can see if you squint and zoom in, he has a patch of the Welsh flag attached.

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A few years ago, I was in the post office, my purse slung over my shoulder with the red dragon hanging in the front. I finished my transaction, and the postal clerk asked if I went to college at Oneonta. It is a state college in upstate New York, and I had in fact graduated from there.

I was confused how she knew that, and she pointed at my red dragon. My response was that it was a Welsh dragon, not an Oneonta red…

And then I realized, and it hit me that I hadn’t realized it before, but the coincidence was ridiculously obvious to me and I chuckled. I might have said that I guessed it was after all.

At college in Oneonta, our mascot was a red dragon. I lost that in the twenty-five years and I’d been carrying around my Welsh dragon and never once associated it with my college mascot.

So in the 1980s I had red dragons, and in 2009, I went back to Wales and got a different red dragon. It only cemented my connection to Wales. There are many threads attaching me to the land, and their only connection is me. In my mind, it makes sense. It’s a faith thing.