The Honest Heart Stays in the Present

It is quiet. Q-q-q-u-i-e-t. The only noise I hear is coming from outside five floors down and the humming of my iMac, becoming increasingly old.

I awoke this morning realizing that I DETERMINE my NOW. I can either wake up and think everything is going to hell in a handbasket or know that this moment is as it should be and to act on it. I choose to act on it. First thing I did was meditate in the Blue Whale. Then I flipped through a small book of pictures and quotations Leila made for me when I turned, oh what, hon? 48? 49? younger, older, it's starting to blur. Eileen was over this weekend and saw it. I knew she would. I told her my place was my idea of a museum; things I held precious and I knew she'd light on that notebook. Today I placed it on the stand that holds the cable box so now when I am tempted to watch television rather than to write, I will see the open page that reads, "Embrace the Uncertainty."

Being home I am realizing I could putter around this place all day and still have something to do. But that's not what I'm here for in this moment. So I'm making coffee and leaving it until I've done my true work. Then clean up will be playtime.

Everything is as it is.

I have a photo of my father and I, taken when I was home from college. I must have been 18 or 19 and him 46 or so. Whoever took the picture, probably my brother, James, we are prostrate across Mom and Dad's bed, I can see his open closet in the background, his short-sleeve shirts nicely pressed and hanging. This was long before he turned to denim, sweats, t-shirts and power walking. His hair is slicked back with Rose Oil. My brother has instructed us to cup our hands under our chins, our fingers curled into our cheeks and our knees bent with our calves raised up to show the bottoms of our shoes. I am smiling until my eyes nearly disappear. Reedie Boy is looking quizzically into the camera. I often stare at this photo and see the disappointment in his eyes and the promise in mine. I keep that photo near me. I write for that photo.

My father had thousands of miraculous projects in him; he just never got them off the ground for fear of success. His father, my grandfather was a rather famous glider pilot, Albert Hastings, and somewhere within my father's life between the womanizing and caustic tongue of his father, my father decided to lay low and try just to be a good man. But the urgency, the desire to grow his worth was always simmering in his belly.

So I write for him. He died in 1998 with the complications that bring death on, pneumonia, a stroke, when the Alzheimer and Parkinson's Diseases were done doing their damage. I vow to break his fear of completion for I live with it, too, and I will finish what is inside me and stare at it as I do my beautiful daughters and know I have done a good thing for Reedie Boy and me.

The tea candles await. I go to them in this solemn house of life.