My Little Golden Book of Phobias

Welcome back to the USA and proud owners of really big cars. After a week on retreat in Canada, Nanaimo to be exact (means hill with 7 potatoes in Japanese, apparently), I came back to land of the free and home of the fearful, by the looks of things. The garden is still growing and the NYTimes was still delivered to my door so all is well. An article about suicide was cheerful and the economy situation...well, Hummers get 8 miles a gallon! I can feel righteous putt-putting along in my eany hybrid.

Canada has weird things, like red lights on the freeway. You are whizzing along at 90 K and whoops, a flipppin' red light,and you fling your hand and arm across the chest of your passenger as you screech to a stop. They have national health insurance, can you imagine? And KD Laing, who I am listening to right now because she can belt "One cigarette in an ashtray". There were quail that sat on the roof of the building and tut-tut-tutted to us. I thought quail couldn't fly, it must be the Canadian water. Oh, Canadians don't do July 4th, brilliant, as they say, just brilliant. No sounds of gunfire all night for 3 days, scaring the horses.

A friend told me recently that she is feeling happy sometimes. I am not sure I know what that experience is like. I don't do happy so much. I swam in a lake every day when I was away. I could call that happiness, stroking out to the middle of the lake, floating on my back and knowing if I couldn't continue to swim, I could float. That's why grief takes courage, the getting through it part. And nobody can do it for you. Like having a baby, you gotta do it by yourself.

Impermanence, that's what Adrianne reminded us, all will pass. Even this sorrow.