P52 Week 25 - Mulligan

The prompt refers to the golf term. Mulligan: a shot not counted against a score, permitted in unofficial play to a player whose previous shot was poor. This week, photographers are invited to redo a photo of their choice.

I never knew that mulligan was a golf term. Heavens knows I had several mulligans years ago when I hacked away at the fairway and in the rough with my clubs. Blessedly – for me and for those I played with and who played behind me – I only bumbled at golf for a very short time.

Mulligan first reminded me of the beloved children’s classic by Virginia Lee Burton: Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. My children loved this tale of perseverance ending in a creative solution to stuck-ness and obsolescence.

And then I thought of Mulligan Stew and looked up its origin. I never knew that it was a dish said to have been prepared by American hobos in the early 1900’s by combining whatever food they had or could collect. That reminded me of another beloved children’s classic: Stone Soup in which an impoverished lady begins a soup with a stone and entices the villagers to add all kinds of vegetables and meats. The resulting hearty soup feeds the whole village – and the poor lady.  

Back to Mulligan as a redo. What would I like to redo? I’m flummoxed with this one. I don’t think I’d want to redo much in my life. Sure, I’ve made mistakes but most all of them have been grist for the mill of my individuation. I mostly subscribe to the adage, corny though it may be: it was meant to be.

Maybe I would redo all the time I spent out in the sun as a kid on the Sydney beaches – my wrinkles are the payment for that indulgence. But in the fifties, who knew about sun damage, and I relished my beach time.

For now, maybe I’ll just redo Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and read it to the next generation: my granddaughter.

P52 Week 24 - Monochrome

Monochrome…black-and-white. I’m not a black-and-white fan. – I like color too much and was delighted when color TV was introduced in the sixties. I do like the idea of different hues of a single color – like a monochrome of purple, for instance, or rose – rose-colored glasses. Looking through rose-colored glasses – staying optimistic. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing in today’s bah-humbug, fatalistic world.

Monochrome…. Single-mindedness, presence, bare attention. I still struggle to achieve this in my daily meditations, and I find it much harder to realize bare attention in a world where multi-tasking is considered to be an efficiency devoutly to be desired (apologies to Shakespeare,) where I am bombarded with a plethora of multimedia: instagrams, emails, apps, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, ads and shows – all shifting by the millisecond. It’s challenging to slow down enough to quiet the mind and focus on one thing – monochrome.

Monochrome …… inflexibility: the inability to see issues from more that one perspective. Ah, I am guilty of that, for I can be as opinionated and judgmental as the best of them. I am learning to be less so and something I heard Deepak Chopra say years ago helps ground me. He was the keynote speaker at the 1990 American Holistic Medicine Association in Seattle that I attended. Loosely quoted he said:

To look at an issue from one perspective is to be stuck in a rut.

To look at an issue from two perspectives is to have a dilemma.

To look at an issue from multiple perspectives is the beginning of flexibility

And to look at an issue from infinite perspectives – that’s enlightenment.

I strive for at least some level of flexibility and continue my daily meditations to calm the mind, and open to new perspectives.

P52 Week 23 Out Of Focus

Ha! How I used to smirk at my parents when, in their forties, they began using reading glasses. I had no idea what it was like to see objects out of focus. I’d snicker when my mother asked me to thread her needles or when my father fumed as he searched high and low for his glasses. It was so easy to be cheeky in my youth. I so easily dismissed the aging process: I would never grow old.

In my twenties, I needed glasses to clarify distances. Not a huge refraction, but enough for it to require corrective lenses to get a drivers license, and enough to enable me to see movie screens with precision. I still remained haughty. I only needed minimal correction and I needed it just for distance – my near vision remained perfect and that was the gauge for getting old.

Ha! The pride continued in my forties – I still had good close vision. I wasn’t going to succumb to the old people’s affliction after all.

And then it began. 

In the clinic, I had to adjust my focal length just so to remove that drat sliver and I even began to use magnifying glasses for close work such as removing moles and doing biopsies.

Then came a rude awakening. When using my distance glasses, I could no longer focus on reading material and had to begin using dreaded bifocals.

From then on it was all downhill! My whole close-in world became out of focus. I could no longer see hangnails or stray whiskers that needed plucking. Even with reading glasses on, I had to constantly adjust the focal length to get close stuff in focus.

And now that I have begun to needlepoint again – I find I must have excellent light to see – even when using reading glasses. And I am humbled as I fumble to thread my needle. Apologies to my mother!

After an hour or two of stitching, my vision goes completely kitty-wonkers It’s a blurry, double imaged mess and takes several minutes to readjust.

And, for the first time, I’m needing to use glasses to see my computer screen. Mercy!

Ha! The cockiness of youth! How it comes to bite you in the butt.

And yet I must appreciate that, even though my world is out of focus, I can still see and other than the refractive errors, my vision is perfect – no cataracts, no retinal disease. I must be grateful.

Out of focus, one of the infirmities of age that I am learning to live with. Ha!

P52 Week 22 - Abstract

Recently, I’ve wanted to deepen my spiritual connection. How did I arrive at this awareness, for it is certainly abstract? It began as a small unsettling, a subtle disquiet. It surfaced into consciousness as a tiny niggling thought, as a yearning for something more – even more than the general happiness and satisfaction I have in my life.

Where did it come from? I don’t know. What do I do with it? I’m not sure I know that either. It’s easy to dismiss it and I’ve done that many a time but this time the draw to deepen is persistent; it keeps coming to mind, and the opportunities for clarification are springing up all over.

Amma – the hugging saint – comes to town and I absorb her loving presence; I have dinner with a soul girlfriend and spend a day on Whidbey with another soul girlfriend.  With these remarkable women, I have the opportunity to open up about the niggling inside. I get to articulate the abstract, the ephemeral, the cloud of unknowing. And then in my regular spiritual direction session, I flush out the abstract even more and I come up with a plan: to read inspiring material, to slow down, to start the day with intention, to meditate more often. It’s a re-commitment to what I already know.

I want a deepening. I want that abstract something to become tangible – I want to feel it, see it, hear it, taste and smell it.

And what if I don’t get it? What if I don’t get there? The exercise to try to obtain it is a worthwhile endeavor.  My search for spiritual connection – that which binds us all – people, animals, plants, earth, universe – is a lifelong odyssey: hard to get my arms around but when I experience it in fleeting glimpses, it’s as real – even more real – than my mundane happy everyday.

And so I begin the trek, this next stage of my abstract expedition, my pilgrimage to find the divine, the sacred that is within, and already here.