Deck Chairs On The Titanic

I dither. I dither a lot. I am an unrepentant ditherer. Subsequently, long periods of time can elapse before I complete a project, a book, a piece of art, a sandwich, a blog. There is always something to lead me away from whatever it is that I'm doing at the time. This is not procrastination. Seriously. On any given day I can manage to find myself with a multitude of "works in progress". Half started, almost done, stuck in the middle of, completely stymied by and oh, why don't I go and play a video game... I am certain that I am not alone in this. There must be thousands, if not millions, of people out there who earnestly, and with all good intentions of staying on task, start to do something and wander off at some point when another thing absolutely, positively must be done at once. Or have a brainstorm about how to arrange, solve, repair that "thing" that desperately needs it. Now. Or realize it's time to google cute cat pictures. Or sit and count how many commas they used in the last two sentences they wrote. Or play with the plastic Jean-Luc Picard Star Trek action figure presiding over the mutterings. Whatever.

Take today for example. I decided to sit down and make a list of all the things I could think of that I haven't done that I used to do and that I really enjoy doing. It didn't take long. There were only four items:

Making art
Walking around Clark Pond
Celebrating seasonal changes with ritual and/or ceremony
Writing my blog

I looked at the date of my last blog. April 2011. What the hell have I been doing? Had I really dithered two years of my life away? Then I stopped, smacked myself in the head with an imaginary rolled up newspaper, and tried to come to grips with the fact that the last two years of my life really have been about unfinished business, loss of momentum, frustration, futility, tragedy, havoc, and discontinuity. I was hospitalized with an over-the-top allergic reaction to some new medication. I fell and broke my ribs. My husband had surgery. My beloved cat Sissy died. A month later my 19 year old stepdaughter was diagnosed with Leukemia. Ten months after that she died.

And then came darkness. I was totally adrift. I dithered. About everything. And I kept right on dithering until just a couple of weeks ago, when two things happened that stopped me in my tracks and enabled me to find my feet again. For these two events I will be eternally grateful. Both involved connecting with two wonderful women - one a cherished friend long estranged, the other a fabulous long distance friend that I had never actually met. The confluence of these two formidable forces of nature crossing my path within 24 hours of each other made me sit up and say, "Hey... Pay attention! Something very, very cosmic is afoot." I tentatively started a new project, cooked some really lovely fresh local food, bought a bathing suit (!!), started to heal, and began to re-ground myself in the here and now. I started to find closure of sorts.  The incredible, elegant synchronicity of all that had set the mysterious, incomprehensible wheels of change in motion. So now I find myself back here -  sitting in front of my computer, listening to old jazz and sorting through the silly string that's taken up residence in my head. And deciding to leave the bloody deck chairs alone. Land ho.