Category: Journaling My Days

I journaled for years on paper and I expect to be doing it in some form until my last days. In short summary, I teach mindfulness to parents of kids with challenges; I garden as often and as much as I can in Wisconsin and I am working through the threads of grief six years after my husband’s death. I am very grateful for finding and chasing the joy in this unexpected life.

another notice to all who read here

Thank you for reading what I put on these pages. It is always surprising, shocking and amazing that I have a reading community that goes beyond my immediate friends. Your continues presence continues to inspire me to move beyond my perceived limitations. Thank you for your words of encouragement and advice, and for just showing up.

And to my immediate friends, I am profoundly grateful for your interest, your love and your care. I write because I have to write, but I publish here because I have a need to share. In the analogue workings of my mind, I have a vision of a bunch of us sitting on the couches at the Lakeside Coffee Shop in Madison just catching up.

Many of you read my posts via Facebook. In the coming days and months, I am contemplating moving away from Facebook for a short time or forever. I would ask those of you with whom Facebook is our connection to consider subscribing or following ChasingJoy on this page. If the process to do so is not clear, I will try to clarify it in the coming days.

Thanks and love you all!

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 0

healing

Eleven days into the new year and I have been sick each and every day.  What a way to begin something new no matter how artificial the construct of time and new years are. 

So, first off, I am home and have been since late Tuesday, arriving by ambulance because I was attached to oxygen. I am participating in a Home Hospital program. I am still technically a patient of Newton Wellsley Hospital—my wrist band and IV port prove that—but I am getting my care and monitoring at home. I needed to meet some health criteria—after lots of tests to rule out other causes for my condition, I was found to be relatively stable and treatable —as well as home condiitons like a supportive carer.  I wear a very sensitive arm band which is constantly monitored, two nursing visits each day, PT and PA visits and daily deliveries of meds. It felt like too much activity the first day to keep track of everything. Meds are delivered by the nurses when they visit but I must coordinate for myself the early morning and late night meds including five times using the nebulizer during the day.  It felt like too much to take in and actually do on Wednesday and I was quite grumpy about it all.  It didn’t help that my cough was still wicked then and answering either in person or on the phone was tortuous for everyone. 

For me; however, this is a great program. I am home.  Julia, who had a hard time when I was in the hospital, is doing much better with me home. Other than the visits and care that I am getting, there is nothing more that a hospital stay could offer me.  And I have my best carer, Ed, seeing to what I need.  I feel a bit guilty for all the cooking and shopping and cleaning up and caring for Julia and just making me as comfortable as possible that he has done.  But it is lovely having his support.  He is much more than taking-up-the-slack these days. 

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RSV

Yesterday, after hours in an emergency room bay, I was put in a holding area, hooked up to monitors and oxygen, and told I might be moved to a room later on in the evening.  It had been a long day and I was hungry, head-achy tired and still coughing but the day of oxygen cleared some of my brain and I felt a shift to giving into this process of being sick. 

My not-feeling-so-well of new year’s eve blossomed into just plain sick the next day. The seasonal cough that humidifiers and inhalers and gallons of water could not conquer shifted into something else — a dry hacking that would not stop.  The cough and chills and body aches and an exhaustion that drained every ounce of will power out of me.  

The beginning of January is probably a good time to be sick.  Julia’s activities, as well as mine, are on hold for the holidays. We had gotten through almost all of the seasonal visiting and partying. I was looking forward to a few days of lying low; however, not quite as low as I was laid. 

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consequences

New Year’s Eve has always been a veguely uncomfortable holiday for me. I’ve never been to Times Square to watch the ball fall, I don’t favor loud parties, rarely have I gone out for diner and dancing. We never built any traditions for the evening which didn’t bother me at all until I was alone.

I think I was happiest when I was working in restaurants or when David and I (and one or the other of the girls) went to movies and maybe somewhat of a quick dinner out. The turning of the century was a good NYE—a bunch of friends gathered at David’s father’s house in Jersey. We were living in Indy then and we still had NYC friends, some with small children. We cooked a nice dinner—I don’t remember what. Wine and maybe champagne. We sat in the kind of dining room that I knew growing up and ate on Dad’s good china, lifting his best wine glasses. One friend didn’t accompany his family because he was a computer guy and needed to guard his hard and soft ware if the worst case of Y2K predictions came to pass. Another friend announced that she was adopting a baby from Vietnam—the baby who now has one year old twins of her own. 

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of ghosts and christmas tree lights

I have been trying/drafting and deleting/ to explain just how this week is.  It is time out of time, ordinary moments out of ordinary order, days of big meals and late church services and traveling and visiting. And too much traffic through tunnels and delays at airports.

No flying this year, but I noticed something I have not really taken account of before.  I have been aware but not articulated to myself the presence of so many ghosts in and around every event, every visit, every meal, every ornament hanging on the tree, every candled trimmed to fit into Julia’s great grandmother’s menorah.

Not one of those events, practices or things stand by themselves. Nothing is new. Rather they are the latest version, the pencil sketch with many erased sketches beneath, the latest in the series of what I remember as winter holiday times. I am aware of both what my eyes perceive and also what I hold in my heart.

The winter holidays always bring on some blues, as they did a few weeks ago, but the sitting with the revelation of sketches in time has brought some awareness, some clarity, some way to find the joy, the blessings in the times that have past.  I am aware of the richness and the subtlety, the near inmoveable traditions dressed with the changes that time brings.

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enemy from within

Julia jacket this year.

The “enemy from within.” That’s what he has called us and I rather like that title today. And I am telling my disappointed daughter that she needs to be part of the change, part of the fight for what we as a family, as well as a community, want to see in our country.

We support and defend the rights of women and workers and immigrants and transgender people and unhomed people and people with disabilities and our elders. We believe in diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe in climate change and that our world and its environment needs protection.

Julia’s jacket in 2016

We stand for healthcare for all, for public schools, for an end to book banning, for the separation of church and state, for the rights of students and teachers to demonstrate against any and all wars, for strict gun control, for taxing the rich their fair share, for subsidized housing, social security, medicare. We fight against racism and sexism and homophobia and christian nationalism and facism.

In my gut I feel that the party of our choice did not strongly stand for what we believe in nor did it fight against what is abhorant to us. That needs to change. We all need to attend to the change to be worthy of the title “enemy from within.”

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counting joy

The blur of the busy, the full plate, and the inability to see what is missing or left out or left behind until I trip over the very necessity that I proclaim I steadfastly chase and hold onto dearly . . . 

Joy.

In the darkness that I allowed to blossom last week, I saw the glories of fall—the orange and gold leaves of the massive tree I can see from my kitchen window!  I have observed this tree washing dishes and cooking and watering plants and wondering how I am going to close my two kitchen windows tight. The tree is a few doors down the block in another backyard.  Green all summer, it has slowly been turning into a mighty blaze of autumn color. Last Monday, it was glorious as if lit from deep within, as if ablaze of yellows and oranges. I was almost unable to take in so much color. As the week moved forward and the wind picked up, topmost leaves fell in a rain of gold. By Wednesday, some of the orange was fading into brown and some of the brown joined the rain. By Friday, the gold had almost vanished and the tree top was almost bare, and the weekend saw more of the same.  Today, much more than half the tree is all branches, a skeleton of its summer self.

The noticing filled me with something that I had lost to exhaustion and frustration.

I can admit to missing the necessity of raking leaves.  I know I used to complain when my Madison gardens were filled over and over with the leaves of big trees for what felt like months.  And I miss the Julia as a little girl who raked and jumped in piles and enjoyed it all. Now, I look in yards full of leaves with a bit of longing, but not enough longing to volunteer to help rake.  Maybe some year soon?

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morning walk on the beach 

Ferry Beach, Saco, Maine

Impressions in wet sand. Sneekers and boots, sandles and a few bare and naked feet. Just a few bare feet, it is october afterall.  Round impressions from walking sticks and baby feet every so often. But regularly, those baby feet. And I wonder why. I imagine a parent, scooping up a toddler into a piggy back ride and then letting the wiggling wee one down after a short riding respite. Dog prints in wild archs going in and out of the ends of waves, the line where the tide erases everything. 

And I imagine how sooner or later, tonight and tomorrow early morning, a tide will come in and take away all traces of our shod and unshod animal prints. Flood the prints with the waves coming ashore, leaving the sand smooth and pristine again. 

What if the bits of sadnesses, stresses, worries and longings of our lived days were left in the prints we leave during our walkings. Left to be swollowed up by the lapping water. As if by intention, as if what we could not carry any longer could be returned to some universe. As if by returning to the sea what we could not bear, we might be comforted and even healed by the rhythmn of the to and fro, in and out, of the salty waves. 

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beginnings again

It is a beginning of September and my traditional time to return to what fuels my creativity and thus, my soul.  Cool weather, the first sight of the un-greening of leaves, and children back to school.  And a morning ritual that I have abandoned during a summer because who in their right mind can be disciplined during the hot, sun drenched days with a demanding offspring. But right now, the house is quiet, I am sitting at my desk and the only thing to do is to look for and return to how work happens. It is a return and it is always new.

I seem to have many loose threads that go together fine in my living them but don’t make for a cohesive blog post.  And I haven’t spent enough time writing this summer to keep them all going.

Baby Alfie is two weeks old. He has presented himself as a child who needs to be held to sleep which is tough on his parents during the night, but as the visiting grandma of the day to sit and hold a little baby who is happily sleeping in my arms is such delight.  He who I did not expect continues to surprise me. There is no doubt that I have loved my children and Wilbur, but I have never been drawn to infants.  This one has opened a new place for me.

And it is worth noting.

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alfie ray borick

Our newest little person made his debut very, very early this morning.  After going to the hospital around midnight and being sent home, Cheshire and Justin headed back only a few hours later. Alfie Ray Borick was born at 4:15 a.m. weighing in at 7 pounds, 14 ounces. 

I got to visit around lunch time and hold Alfie and watch his face and hands move.  He is such a sweet bundle. He is an old soul.

I don’t have pictures of mama or daddy — what was I thinking?  But just look at that face!

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 2