Daily Reminder # 40

It's too hot to think. It was in the 90s today and HUMID. I could deal with the heat but the humidity just sucks the life out of me. What's really awful is that it has stayed humid and warm and the girls and I are feeling pretty miserable. Saying that, it's amazing how relative things are in life. I lived in an un air conditioned apartment in NYC for 33 years. I can't help but pity my friends who still live in the city right now. The heat bakes into the concrete and brick during the day and radiates through the night... and thousands of air conditioners spew additional heat into the air. Mostly, with my ceiling fans, I was ok, but there were days when death seemed like it was knocking and that all that would remain of me would be a puddle of fat and tears. It got so hot in that apartment that candles melted in my cabinets.

So... I'm reminding myself of that as I complain about feeling just a little warm in my sweet house which really keeps quite cool on even the worst of days. In winter I have taught myself to live at 55 degrees. We are much more adaptable than we believe. I remember a friend years ago who had volunteered in Somalia during the drought. She returned to August in NYC and was walking around in a sweater feeling cold. She had grown accustomed to 120 in the shade. Life is pretty amazing. We humans are pretty amazing. We forget how amazing we are. We survive terrible weather, terrible tragedies, and come out smiling. Pretty awesome, if you ask me.

Here's tonight's poem. Wrote this when I was very young.

Cry against the dark night of shining tears

Whose source you do not know

Joy and sorrow

Blending in rivers of no source, no end

The restless stillness of life's passing

Cry against the dark night of dreamless sleep

And sleepless dreams

All levels blending into something else

Can rainbow colors see themselves or

know their hues?

Where is the light I seek (too bright to bear)

The light whose music sings a soul to joy

Unlocks some caged and cowering power within

The light that is my soul and more

The light toward which I am perpetually turning,

Turning,

And turning too away

My blindness frightened at the prospect of

such vision

Cry against the dark pain of all this loneliness

Our frail forms groping forth and falling back

Almost, but not quite, touching on the hand of God

Almost, but not quite, hearing the voice within

Cry for the unanswered prayers

The ones we do not know we make

Which the Universe, therefore, cannot answer

Cry for what we think we seek

Mistaking our own shadows for the face of God

Cry for the dark night of shining tears

For that imperfect strife which is mortality

Cry for the vision that remains unseen and out of reach

Within us.

- Katherine E. Rabenau

Some things I'm grateful for today:

• water
• fans
• the microwave oven
• birds
• music
• cheese