Author Archives: Patricia Wild

February 20, 2011: Let Go, Let Time

Friday, a woman I know left a message on my answering machine: “Guess I haven’t been in touch for a while,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

The last time she and I had talked had been five months ago, shortly after my father died. I’d been bereft, of course.

“What can I do?” she’d asked.

“Check in with me from time to time,” I’d requested.

So today, I prayed over this complicated and frustrating relationship. (This is not the first bumpy incident between us. Oh, no.)

I’m stuck, I realized. And have no idea what to do or say other than same ol’—which hasn’t worked, isn’t working for me.

Now, usually, moments like these are pretty devastating, when I’m feeling helpless and, can-you-believe-it, humbled by my cluelessness. But today, for some reason, my sudden realization that I had no idea what to do was tremendously exciting!

So I’ll wait. I’ll “trust the process” as my dear friend Anne advises. In the fullness of time, Something will happen.

February 19, 2011: Let Go, Let Flow

Today I spent a couple of hours tabling at Somerville’s winter farmers’ market on behalf of Somerville Climate Change. (“That’s a verb?” my mother asked earlier this morning when I’d told her what I’d planned to be doing today.Yes, it is.)

Mostly we SCA folks talked with passersby about our “350 Challenge,” i.e. encouraging 350 Somerville households, neighborhoods, schools to take one positive action towards reducing Somerville’s emissions, encouraging sustainability, etc. And, as you might have expected, the sorts of people who shop at a winter farmers’ market were positive, curious, eager to do their part.

‘Course the “teutonic” me, the me that loves order and charts and graphs and checklists found these 350 Challenge conversations, lively as they were, a little frustrating. “How are we keeping track of who’s doing what? How do people register, so to speak, so their individual action can be counted? Huh?”

But, hey, it’s early days; this challenge is just getting started. So this accounting mechanism will happen. I have faith.

And, besides, the fact that one of the initiatives we’re pushing is around depaving should calm that teutonic me right down:

Fact: Somerville is 77% paved over.

Fact: We had terrible flooding last year.

Fact: Today, when I talked about rain water and “Where will it go?” I saw keen interest in the eyes of my listeners. Ditto, when I showed pictures of SCA depaving a Somerville back yard last fall.

So maybe I should let go of my need for record-keeping and just believe that this shared community concern of impassable streets and flooded basements WILL capture the interest of lots of people who, over time, will contact SCA for volunteer help, guidance, resources.

And when they do, . . .

February 18, 2011: Let Go, Let God?

Okay. True confession:

I’ve been reading The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson. Like Wilkerson, herself, and countless readers of that amazing book, I have completely fallen in love with Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, one of the three people featured in the book.

BUT: Having read of Ida Mae’s hard life from small child in Jim Crow Mississippi to great-grandmother in cold, racist Chicago, I know that much of the hardships she’s had to endure have to do with the color of her and her family’s skin. Yet when something terrible happens, Ida Mae always says, “God don’t make no mistakes.”

I am just having such a hard time accepting that.

February 17, 2011: Let Go, Let Nod

Today, after an embarrassingly easy Mohs procedure, I took a walk to Porter Square to get surgical dressing stuff for the incision and, why not, flowers. A beautiful, warm, sunny day, the florist had the door to her shop open it was so warm and the two of us oohed and aahed about the balmy weather.

“You’re going to get some customers,” I promised. “Because I’m walking home and I’ll be carrying these flowers and I’ll have a big ol’ smile on my face.”

A couple of doors away from the florist shop, bearing my cobalt-blue flowers—sorry, don’t recall their name—I walked past two young men in tee shirts who were sitting on their front porch, drinking beer.  Catching one guy’s eye, I grinned; he returned my grin with an all-incompassing nod.

You’re an old lady with a big bandage on your cheek and carrying flowers, that nod said. And I’m a young hipster. But, hey, isn’t this fantastic? We’re both so grateful for this day. And, hey, isn’t this fantastic? Neither of us have to say a word!

Let Go, Eat Chocolate

My most honest thinking often happens when I vacuum. So today, after a complicated and expensive and seemingly 4-eva session at my dentist’s to get a new crown over a broken tooth, in anticipation for some minor surgery tomorrow and therefore being out of commission for a couple of days, and knowing my beloved daughter and her husband arrive Friday, I cleaned.

Hey, I realized, vacuuming. I am in a really foul mood. And maybe need to just take care of myself before tomorrow’s Mohs procedure?

So tonight, instead of going to the prison circle/trying to be sociable but feeling ornery, after I finally could feel my upper lip (it had been completely numb for over 4 hours), I ate leftovers. Including Ben & Jerry’s chocolate brownie ice cream.

I believe I did everyone a favor by doing so.

February 15, 2011: Let Go, Let Democracy

Last night I watched “Return to Kandahar” and  today read of projected deep cuts to anti-poverty agencies here in good ol’ USA and wonder why we spend billions fighting in Afghanistan when the concepts of democracy and equal rights for women are free?! Do we really have so little regard for the preciousness of what we espouse that we must bludgeon, bomb, bribe the people of Afghanistan? Why can we not see what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Iran as expressions of the same Spirit, the same mighty “wind of change”* that has blown from sea to shining sea? (And still blows in good ol’ USA; I believe that.) Yes, the Afghani people have suffered greatly—but I believe that despite years of war, that Spirit bravely and courageously endures in that raped, mined, devastated country.


*[“The wind of change is blowing all over the world today. It is sweeping away an old order and bringing into being a new order,” declared Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963.]

February 12, 2011: Let Go, let Rumi

[from A Year With Rumi: Daily Readings—here’s an excerpt from the February 12th poem]

Humankind is being led along an evolving course,

through this migration of intelligences,

and though we seem to be sleeping,

there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream.

It will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are.

February 11, 2011: Let Go, Let the Years

If you might be tempted to ask, “Did you like the Beatles?” of someone you’d just met, as one character does in “Another Year,” then you just might love Mike Leigh’s new film.

I do and did. And found how the film’s four middle-aged characters—two aging pretty gracefully, two not so much—enormously touching.

february 10, 2011: Let Go, Let Gravity

Yesterday I discovered that a different route to where I needed to go—Davis Square and Porter Square—was 98% smooth sailing; sidewalks were mostly cleared, mostly easy to walk on. Yet this morning, about to walk to Porter Square again, hesitated to take off my YakTrax.

Whoa, I realized. I am really, really scared to fall. Even when I know my journey will involve, tops, a couple of yards of ice.

Time to reconnect with Learning to Fall, I advised myself, striding along.

May I suggest you do, too?

February 9, 2011: Let Go, Let Truck

Readers to this blog know that this month is all about spiritual exercises: letting go, letting  . . . Something. For readers not living in Red Sox Nation, today’s posting may seem, well, weird. But for those of us who know the answer to the question: “What is a directional turn signal?” (Answer: “A sign of weakness.”),* you’ll completely get it.

Yesterday was Truck Day**. So all over New England, there was a collective sigh: Together we let go of our fears that winter will never end. Although sometimes a stern, Puritanical bunch, at about noon yesterday we allowed ourselves to imagine a hot summer day at Fenway Park, cold (incredibly overpriced) drink in hand and, maybe, Jacoby just stole a base. Or something equally thrilling.

Aaaahh.

*[I think this comes from  a Dunkin’ Donuts ad. Not sure, though.]

**[Truck Day is when a green moving truck carrying Red Sox equipment leaves Yawkey Way for Fort Myers, Florida, the first visible sign in Boston that spring training has begun.]