Posted in Life Experiences, Life Truths

The Dog Can’t Help 

I have recently started getting a beautiful weekly poem service provided by a pre-retirement colleague of mine from Georgia Southern University.

This week’s poem is titled, “Perseverance Prayer.”

“There is no one who has not their hour and no thing that has not its place.” —Pirkei Avot, 4:3

Perseverance Prayer

Be it rug or couch or bed, the dog
can’t help but turn and turn and turn again
before lying down, his angle always

a little off, the vantage never
quite as desired. Still the ritual persists.
Yet once in a prairie gone tall

with summer, high grass whispering
with afternoon breeze, he began—one, two,
three times around—and the stalks found

new joints with each of his orbits, swaying,
kneeling, prostrating away from him into
a massive golden wreath, an ideal bed.

A pursuit others call pointless is often just
the right action in need of its right place.

–Jessica Jacobs
from Unalone (Four Way Books, 2024)

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that I am going round and round and round in circles and not exactly sure where to land.

But I believe there is a “right place.”

Posted in Family

Bye, Bye, Boopers

Over the weekend, we noticed Robert’s older cat Boopers was having difficulty breathing.

And Sunday, Christmas Day, he was worse.

So Monday morn, HR dropped Boopers off at the vet. We went for breakfast and then got the call that Boopers was probably not going to make it much longer. Robert was shocked. We headed quickly back to the vet, only to be told the moment we walked in that Boopers was crashing. And then, that he had passed away.

Robert got to hold his beloved kitty one final time.

A few Boopers pics from the past.

With brother Benny …

Posted in Monday Moaning or Monday Marveling?

Monday Moaning or Monday Marveling? 10/3/22

Sitting in my faithful study chair with my “it’s-a-brand-new-day!” coffee precariously perched upon my knee (what? you don’t do that?), I suddenly noticed/was mindful of the Glorious Morning Sun streaking in through the blinds.

A shiver of joy awakened me once again to the Consistencies of Life: new morns following each night, breathing out following each breathing in, beauty all around just for the price of looking and seeing.

Here’s another day, dear,
Here’s the sun again
Peeping in his pleasant way
Through the window pane.
Rise and let him in, dear,
Hail him “hip hurray!”
Now the fun will all begin.
Here’s another day!

— from Glad Day by Graham Robertson

Posted in Holidays and Seasonal Changes

The Year

I love this short but oh-so-truthful jewel of a poem, The Year, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, written back in 1910. For we experience, year after new year, all that she writes about, all the realities of life.

************

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

************

The weight of our 2021 year—the good (we did have some, right?) and the bad (no need for the same question) and the we’re-not-sure-which-it-was—now nears its tipping-over point into 2022’s own “rhymes” of a “thousand times.”

May we all “rise up laughing with the light” tomorrow and tomorrow.

Posted in The View from Behind

The View from Behind: Introduction

For some reason, I have always appreciated, even revered, “the view from behind.”

As a child, on the first day of each new school year, I was a nervous wreck waiting for the teacher to announce our seating arrangement. Front of the class? 😢 Too much exposure! Too revealing! Too out there! Far too much responsibility to “be.”

A nice, comfy seat toward the back? 😁 Perfect. I get to observe, to “see.” To calmly breathe.

Note to self: ASAP, schedule at least three long therapy sessions to discuss the three short paragraphs above.

But for now, allow me to introduce my newest NealEnJoy blog category: “The View from Behind,” where I invite you to join me somewhere in the back.

Little gator and me, Okefenokee Swamp Park, Waycross, Georgia

Always hold an “alligator” (or any challenging life … critter) in front of you, and if you can, kindly but temporarily tape its mouth closed.