The gifts of the day for me are usually the busy moments themselves. To meet their demands, I have to push beyond myself for a while and and let the interior air out a bit.

Oddly enough, I need a command from Jesus to get curious and stay curious: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Otherwise, I’m far too content to stay in my own head, preoccupied with my disengaged and ungrounded speculations about the world and the people in it. The command, at least, gives me a goal toward which which I might apply myself, and the impetus to gather the information required to pursue it.

I would choose to be centered within myself, instead of merely self-centered.

It feels like a deep and aching desire to give and to receive (what?), and to know and be known (by whom?). I’ve had it fewer than half a dozen times in my life. – I can never pinpoint the object of that desire; but at that moment, I want to put my arms out physically and embrace it.

Memento mori helps. Against that truth, the petty fictions I reflexively adopt to get through this day or that task take a back seat.

The world seems too big to me for this practice. No one person or thing emerges as essential before all others.

The solitude, if I have the courage to embrace it.

Leaning on people I know I can trust to bear some of it with me.

I no longer have any favorite relatives, because each one who used to be a favorite has since made life decisions I judge to be wrong. – And there’s the rub–that judgment thing. Maybe it’s time I walk that back.

On an episode of the TV show “Malcolm in the Middle,” guest star David Cassidy once delivered a line that more or less went, “This moment is a gift. That’s why I call it “the present.” I love that pun. – If I believed every moment is a gift, I’d probably spend fewer of them watching reruns of “Malcolm in the Middle.”

My mother, deceased since 2009. It wasn’t an easy relationship, and sometimes I’m quite bitter about the sins that went both ways. But when I’m in a better place, I remember how hard she fought to provide for us after my parents divorced and my dad fell out of touch with us.

My maternal grandparents, too, who always had Mom’s back when she couldn’t quite keep it together herself.

I don’t remember a perfect day. But, feeling as I do that my levels of self-absorption border on narcissism, I believe that if I had one, it would have been a day in which I was so taken up by some wonderful something or someone outside me that I effectively forgot myself the whole day through.

I love being surprised by a sudden proximity to a wild creature unselfconsciously going about its day.

Your journey to retroactively celebrate the sister you didn’t know well is quite moving. And I think you’re right that expectations, whether our own or someone else’s, should have little place in determining the paths our walks through grief should take.

Bless you, Christine.

I think birds, bats, lizards, frogs, and some fish are obligated by creation to see them as a gift. The rest of us can be forgiven for seeing them otherwise. 🙂

The smell of pluff mud is something my wife and I have experienced only in the past decade, as we’ve taken our sailboat down the Intracoastal Waterway and through the Low Country. It may not be to everyone’s taste – one cannot confuse it, for instance, with roses – but it is a rich, fertile, wonderful smell.