Witches Brew

I just about went nuts when I decided to keep a blessings journal. By the time I got to Day 20 of my 30 day project, I was feeling decidedly ungrateful for the opportunity!

But i had a lesson in gratitude Sunday, so I thought I would take a minute to enumerate my recent blessings. A friend and I rented two tables at the Expo Gardens Flea Market. It was a very slow day; I made back the cost of the table but probably earned 50 cents an hour for the outing. Still, Sunday afternoon while we had a small spurt of gawkers, this middle-aged man stopped in the middle of the aisle right in front of our table. He calls after his wife, “I’m bleeding. I just started bleeding!” She comes back. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was just walking down that outside aisle and my arm started bleeding.”

I got the fall allergies, so the tissue box was sitting next to my money box. I started waving a tissue at him. “Yoo-hoo! Need a Kleenex?”

He took the Kleenex and pressed it against the small trickle of blood on his forearm. Then he began to tell us this horror story about having a cyst/canker-like thing recently removed from his other arm. How it had grown like a wart–only hard–and then ruptured and the center of it had fallen out and he’d had a skin graft, and now this arm was bleeding the same way…! And my brain is trying to pretend that I am not hearing this, but it’s too late! Meanwhile my friend has produced a little first aid kit from her purse and peeled a bandage.

He’s thanked me once for the tissue and thanked her from the bandage. Then he says again, with heart-felt sincerity, “Thank you for the tissue and the bandage.” And my throat closed up for a second because he was really saying, “Thank you for noticing that I was in distress.” Thank you for noticing... He was standing in the middle of the crowded aisle, and we saw him.

Oh, well, shit! So here’s a list of blessings for this week. I don’t know if I can do ten, but let’s try.

1.) I’m grateful for the friends who hauled my tubs of junk to Expo and back.

2.) I’m grateful for the encounter that reminded me about gratitude and being connected to strangers and friends.

3.) I’m grateful for the stopper in my cash flow these last two weeks: forced back to a diet of Cheerios and ramen noodles, I’ve dropped some more weight. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing this is the thinnest I’ve been in about fifteen years.

4.) I’m deeply grateful to Ms Renner from the Social Security Administration yesterday morning and offered to do my application over the phone. I had struggled online for a couple of weeks with the disability report. I have been impressed with the helpfulness of everyone I have spoken with at the SSA.

5.) I am deeply grateful that the stopper in the cash flow has been removed: I will be able to pay my rent and my phone bill this week. –And I had been sweating the rent!

6.) I am grateful for the rosemary garlic chicken and the Ben & Jerry’s Karmel Sutra ice cream with which I celebrated the rent payment.

7.) I am grateful that my groundhogs were out at the riverfront yesterday. I had begun to think they had gone underground for the season, but there were four fat, sleek rodents grazing in the lot.

8.) I am grateful for Swiss Miss Mocha Cappuccino cocoa,which is lowfat and tastes good by itself or in actual coffee! A Milky Way is 75 cents and a box of eight envelopes of cocoa is $1.25

9.) I am grateful I made enough money at Expo to cut my hair–and maybe go to a movie.

10.) I’m grateful for the pork roast sitting in my freezer. I am going to have a lovely feast for Samhain.

Sat up late last night working on the Long Now entry. Totally blew off Blessings journal. Irritated as all hell that I committed to doing the stupid thing! It’s all hog wash anyway!

Day 21, did yesterday’s list and today’s. Nine more days to go. (Oh, I said 90 days, didn’t I? Mmmm, we’ll see…)

No question: counting my blessings has become a chore. It’s hard not to descend into satire or parody. In active rebellion, my brain wants to start a curses list as well–and if Pumpkin Head, the alcoholic who lives across the hall, wakes me up tonight for the third time running–well, I am tempted to wish him an intervention he won’t soon forget.

I am having an easier time with my “Accomplishments” list. A tool of my own devising, I keep myself on a forward track by making a list every evening of five tasks I accomplished during the day. Some days I may not make all five–some days just taking a shower is an accomplishment–but that’s okay. I can do six or seven tomorrow and back fill. I can’t do seven today and put down two of them for tomorrow. Un-uh! I have to start from scratch each day. Even worse, writing down an “accomplishment” that I have to get done the next day. That’s a sure indicator that it won’t get done at all.

Among blessings that I can count today:

My CDs by Dawn Dance by Scottish fiddle-player Alasdair Fraser and Drum Medicine by Dave and Steve Gordon.

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand. I don’t know how long this book has been sitting on my bookshelf, but it’s a compact paperback, so I threw it in my bag before I went shopping yesterday. What an amazing book!

Stewart Brand is the author of How Buildings Learn, The Media Lab, and the Whole Earth Catalog. He is is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation and co-founder of the Global Business Network. According to the blurb on the back of the book:

Using the Millennial Clock–a supremely slow computer that will keep perfect time for the next 10,000 years–as a paradigm for the Long Now, Steward Brand, called “the least recognized most influential thinker in America,” offers a practical manual that introduces us to the concept of long-term responsibility.

Each pithy chapter is chewier than a chocolate-covered caramel. From the Ancient Greek notions of kairos (opportunity or the propitious moment) and chronos (eternal or ongoing time) to the marvelous workings of Big Ben to a brief survey of burning libraries to the building of the 10,000-year Library, which will include the canon of human culture (and the instruction manual on how to reboot it if we are foolish enough to engineer the collapse of said culture). this little book is like a gourmet fruitcake, soaked in intoxicating ideas. And the website www.longnow.org has a mind-boggling collection of seminars offered by Paul Hawken, Paul Ehrlich, Neal Stephenson, Verne Vinge, and a host of others available on DVD.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep me from ever adding anything of note to my “Accomplishments” list, I have found “The Archdruid Report: Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society.”

From the website:

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of some eighteen books, including “The Druidry Handbook” (Weiser, 2006) and “The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age” (New Society, 2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Blog entries for May: “Rethinking the Rust Belt,” “The End of the Information Age,” “The Economics of Decline,” and “A Guide for the Perplexed.” And I haven’t looked at April’s entries yet.

I have a premonition that Brand and Greer will be at the top of my Blessings list for the week to come.

To keep my mind properly prepped for job-hunting, I have elected to keep a daily blessings journal. Every day for thirty days, I have to write ten things, big or small, that I am grateful for. Reportedly, at the end of 30 days/300 acknowledged blessings, I will be a new person.

Now, I know I can do anything for 30 days. Not a problem. Then it’s back to business as usual. After 90 days, I will have successfully trained my brain to look on the bright side–maybe. 900 blessings…

So, right here, on schedule, comes Blessing #1, my cat Sweetie, who has decided that I have become “lost.” Meow! Meow! Meow! She is now sitting on the mouse pad. Only 899 to go.

My Blessings Journal (in no particular order)

1) My cat Sweetie
2) Mass Transit (six days a week, and I’ll keep hoping for 7)
3) Pizza
4) Rob Brezsny’s “Free Will Astrology Newsletter”
5) Jose Cuervo Margaritas
6) Global Village
7) The Internet
Haagen-Dazs Carmelized Pear/Pecan Ice Cream*
9) Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake books
10) My DVD/TV combo

Phew! That was tough.

*Word Press has awarded Haagen-Dazs a smilely face. THAT’s synchronicity, folks!