Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Page 31

SoCS: flying

I used to like to fly. The first time I flew I was in my early twenties and I loved looking out the window at all the landforms I had studied in geology and the clouds I had studied in meteorology. Those were also the days when checked baggage was free and so were snacks and meals. I even remember getting hot towels to freshen up at the end of a long flight – and this was in coach, not first class.

Now, I don’t like flying as much. Flights are really packed and service is – ummm – let’s say spotty. For example, on my recent flight back to NYS from Hawai’i we had blankets for the flight over the ocean in the afternoon but no blankets for the overnight flight from LAX to Philly. The airline sent me an email to order food for that flight, except they don’t serve food that late at night. Originally, I had a morning flight into Binghamton from Philly, but the airline cancelled it so I was in Philly for five and half hours before getting to come home in the afternoon.

I guess in a way it is lucky that I don’t fly very often. Less to complain about and more money for my bank account.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “fly/flies/flew/flu/flue.” Join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/07/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1815/

SoCS: Is it really almost over?

Is it really almost over?

I have been AWOL from One-Liner Wednesday and Stream of Consciousness Saturday for the last several weeks as I have been visiting my daughter in Honolulu. Her husband has been away doing research for his PhD dissertation in London, as well as visiting his family there.

My husband came out with me for the first two weeks, during which time we stayed in a hotel. Then, he had to return to go on a business trip. I moved to my daughter’s apartment and have been staying with her for almost three weeks.

It is less like vacationing and more like living here, which is cool! I have been blogging about it, such as this post about settling into the Kaimuki neighborhood where she lives, but there are others to check out at Top of JC’s Mind, if you are interested. (Shameless plug!)

I fly out on Tuesday, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it. Just a few more days and I’ll be back – and six-hours-of-time-change jet-lagged – in upstate New York. Back to the stuff that is filling up my calendar back home – appointments and meetings – and the catching up on mail and errands and visits.

I’m not sure I’m ready – but it is what it is.
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Linda’s prompt for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “is” Please join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/07/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-415/

SoCS: You’re leaving when?

I am almost ready to go to Hawai’i for five weeks. On second thought, that is almost entirely untrue.

In fairness, I have been making preparations, beyond the obligatory travel arrangements. I’ve just been making them for other people – helping T move to Albany for the summer to start an exciting internship with the NYS DEC, getting things as squared away as possible with the elders, making plans for the spirituality group I facilitate to carry on without me, etc.

What I haven’t done yet are things like packing and making arrangements for the mail to be held and printing itineraries and copying important documents and emails into the cloud so that I can access them when I am 5,000 miles from my desktop.

So, now It’s crunch time and I have three days.

Ready, set, go!
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This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. The prompt this week is: “almost.” Come join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/29/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-3015/

SoCS: What I would like

I would like to spend a leisurely time writing an amazing SoCS post. I would like to snap my fingers and get everything organized and accomplished because there are many appointments and obligations coming up in the next week and a half, including helping a daughter move to another city for her summer internship.

Obviously, snapping my fingers isn’t going to cut it.

So, short and sweet and on to the next…
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This week, Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “ke.” Use the letter combination at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the word you choose to base your post on.

Join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-2315/

SoCS: growing up in the sticks

I grew up in the sticks.

It’s an expression I don’t hear much anymore. OK – I don’t hear it at all anymore. I’m not sure how widespread its usage was but it means to grow up in an out-of-the-way place. I grew up in a town of 200 people, give or take, in western Massachusetts along the Vermont border. We had a little general store which had the post office in it. We had a paper mill where most of the people in town worked. We had a school that went up through eighth grade. We even had a little bar/restaurant called “The Club.”

Everything else – big grocery stores, clothing stores, the high school, doctors, banks, etc. – was twenty miles away.

So, to me, where I lived was the definition of “the sticks.”

I was surprised after I moved to Broome County NY – aka Greater Binghamton – that the definition of “the sticks” was different. In New York State, it seems that everything gets compared to New York City. There is The City, its suburbs and Long Island – and everything else becomes “upstate,” mashing together large cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, with smaller cities, towns, villages, and very rural areas, such as the Adirondacks.

So even though I live on the southern border of the state, just a few miles from the state line with Pennsylvania, I am “upstate.” I live in a town that is a hundred times larger in population than my hometown, about the size of the twenty-mile-away city that we used to go to for shopping and services when I was growing up. My current town is a suburb of Binghamton, which is a city with its own opera company, symphony, minor league baseball and hockey teams, and all kinds of other amenities that were much further afield when I was growing up.

Yet, because we are small compared to NYC, we are considered to be “the sticks.”

Go figure.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “stick.” Come join in the fun! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/15/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-1615/

badge by Doobster @MindfulDigressions

when things come in threes

Three has been an important number for me.

I was one of three sisters.

Trinity has been one of the themes in my life, from church to a high school friend to the name of my younger daughter.

There are lots of sayings about events – good or bad – happening in threes.

“The third time’s the charm.”

This afternoon, on the third day since the events of the stream of consciousness post I wrote this morning, I read this call for submissions from Silver Birch Press, making it the third instance of dealing with the meaning of names in as many days.

I have to write a poem for this. It was meant to be.

I’ve already been through several drafts in my head and two written ones. I think I will be bringing it to my poetry group this week rather than what I had planned to bring so that I can have it in shape to submit.

Here’s hoping that this poem will be a good-thing-that-comes-in-threes…

SoCS: the meaning of names

On Wednesday, I went to hear my friend Pat Raube and Martha Spong of RevGalBlogPals read from their new book, There’s a Woman in the Pulpit. It’s one of those rare times when a publisher offered a book deal because of a blog. It was great to be able to attend the reading and get my book signed.

Pat’s reading included a reference to her daughter’s name – Joan – and for whom she was named. I immediately thought of a welcome ceremony that Pat’s soul-sisters of Sarah’s Circle had held for Joan as an infant, which featured a coat of many colors that Pat had made for Joan. It also included a personal blessing from each person in attendance, given verbally at the time and recorded in a book which Pat gave to Joan when she turned sixteen.

When we had a bite to eat together after the reading, the Sarah’s Circle members in attendance were reminiscing about that day and telling stories about names and their meanings and how we came to be called what we are called.

Even though Joan is about to graduate from Oberlin later this month – with Michelle Obama as commencement speaker! – I remember that I had written my blessing to her about the origin of our name. Joan (and Joanne) come from a Hebrew root and I have heard them translated as “God is gracious” or “gift of God” or my favorite “God’s gracious gift.” The last is the one I chose to incorporate into my blessing for Joan.

When I was a first year at Smith thirty-six years ago, I studied Latin with Professor Skulsky. One day she went through the class and told us all the origin of our names, although she was disappointed that none of us had names with Latin roots, like Amanda, which means “the woman who ought to be loved.”

Years later, there was a rise in popularity of Amanda as a name for new babies. My younger daughter had a number of same age Amandas in her class. I wonder if they knew the meaning of their name…

[Update: This post now has a postscript.]
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “name.” Please join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/08/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-915/

Badge by Doobster @Mindful Digressions

SoCS: Accepting compliments

It seems that it should be the easiest thing in the word to graciously accept compliments. Someone says something nice about you or something you have done and you smile and say thank you.

Somehow though, if you tend to be the self-deprecating, or perfectionistic, or even the humble sort, it can be difficult not to go on with a “but” … it was really a team effort, or I made a mistake in the third movement, or it was just a little something – or it was nothing at all.

Sometimes, we don’t feel worthy of the compliment. It may help to look from the point of view of the complimenter instead of reflexively rejecting the substance of the compliment.

Next time, maybe, it will be just “Thank you.” With maybe an extension of the gratitude, like, “I’m so glad you liked it.” “It means so much to me to hear you say that.”

A gracious acceptance of the compliment with no “but”s.
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The prompt for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “compliment/complement.” Anyone can join in! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/01/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-215/

SoCS: very, very, very

I am very, very, very tired so this is likely to be very short.

I am also very, very, very behind on posting – and most everything else. My mom was in the hospital for blood transfusions this week; there is a backstory there, which I’ll get to tell at some point. And also a story about my poetry appearing in print. And about half a dozen other things I’ve been meaning to write.

Part of my brain fatigue is that I attended the first two sessions of this conference today. (Sorry – writing on Friday evening and scheduling for Saturday again.) It is fascinating but takes concentration, which is very tiring and came on top of not a lot of sleep this week. Two more sessions on Saturday and maybe a church service on Sunday, which would be in addition to early Mass. If I’m not too tired…. And I’ll try to write about the conference at some point, too. If I can wrap my head around everything enough to be cogent…
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is vary/very. Join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/24/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-2515/ .

SoCS: peace through justice

I’ve recently joined a new organization, the Catholic Peace Community of the Southern Tier. There are people from several different parishes and we are hoping to build peace through working on different social justice areas.

Our first activities are dealing with the environment and climate change. One of the main tenets of Catholic social justice teaching is care of creation. Also involved are other tenets, such as the protection of the most vulnerable. Those who are living in poverty are much more likely to be subjected to pollutants and also more likely to be impacted by severe weather and sea level rise, as they live in vulnerable areas without strong shelter and do not have the means to relocate out of harm’s way.

We are looking forward to Pope Francis’s upcoming encyclical on the environment and will study the document when it is released in the late spring or early summer. Then we hope to get the word out about the encyclical not only to Catholic parishes but also to the general public in advance of the Paris climate summit in December.

Our first public event is on the 25th of this month when we will have a table at EarthFest. Pope Paul VI said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” We hope to build peace by working on various justice issues, but I am glad that we are starting with this timely work for ecojustice.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness this Saturday is: “piece/peace.” To join in the fun, visit here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1815/

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