Kathleen Botsford

Time is Fleeting

Time is fleeting.  Always.  We look forward to vacations and holidays and they are gone before we can take the time to really experience them.  Even as I strive to stay present and live fully in the now, I can feel the future steadily seeping in, threatening to rob me of the moment as we make our preparations for times yet to come.  Victoria is not even a junior in high school but we have completed our first trip to visit possible college choices.  Yes we had fun.  Lots of fun.  While we were there to access decisions for the future, I did my best to stay focused in the present.  My moments of quiet communion watching schooners sail silently past my lounge chair in Newport quickly dissipated as we joined the multitudes of people scurrying about Time Square on the way to a Broadway show.   Each experience holding its own unique gifts and memories made the others that much more vibrant and alive.

Life is such a paradox.  There is always the tension of living on the edge.  Chaos and order.  Black and white.  Night and day.  You must have one to have the other.  Present and future.  They are so intimately interwoven yet each owning its own place in time.  Where will we spend our moments, our days?  It is always our choice, however difficult the ultimate unraveling may be.

Practicing Presence

Victoria, my youngest, will be a junior in high school this autumn.  She spent many an hour filling  out admission papers, collecting letters of recommendation from teachers and drafting essays.  She sat on pins and needles for a month or so and was justly rewarded when she was accepted into the Summer Scholars Program at Columbia University in New York City.  Tori will be spending 31/2 weeks taking classes in Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing.  She will see lots of museums and art shows, attend flamboyant Broadway musicals and experience off-Broadway grit and drama.  She is very excited and will undoubtedly have the time of her young life while bringing back many colorful stories to share. 

While I am excited for her there is a part of me that is just a trifle melancholy.  Victoria will experience all of this without her siblings, her father or me.  Up until this point in her life, all of our "adventures" have been holidays shared by the whole or most of the family.  When Victoria returns from NYC, she will have an entire chapter of her life that none of us are a part of in any way.  She is beginning to break out of her chrysalis and her wings will not be far behind. 

My husband and I are accompanying Tori to the East Coast tomorrow morning.  We will spend a week visiting colleges from Boston to NYC.  We will spend a few days relaxing by the sea in Newport RI before we we move her into her dorm room at Columbia and say our goodbyes.  As always, these moments are bittersweet for me.  My family is changing and growing and leaving the nest.  This is as it should be.  While I am  happy and excited for each and everyone of their accomplishments,  I am also a bit sad as I continue to  say goodbye to their childhoods.  Those cozy warm memories will live on in my heart, side by side with this soft ache of grief as I practice staying ever present to the wonderful and fleeting moments at hand.  Presence and practice.  Practice and presence.  What more is there?

I'm Bored!

Summer.  I fondly remember the summers of my youth.  The summers of baseball in the back yard and swimming in the neighbors pool.  Lazy afternoons with a pile of books to keep me company under a shady tree.  Catching fireflies in the evening and trying to sneak a couple minutes more of playtime before my mother called to us for baths and bed. 

Spending time at our cousins and Grandparents, picking strawberries and eating petunias.  (Ahh, petunias.  I remember their spicy taste and aroma just like it were yesterday.)    Choosing up sides with my cousins and racing like madmen around the blocks on bikes competing to win whatever crazy game we had thought up.  Walking to the neighborhood grocer with a small account book in hand.  I was always amazed they let us walk out with groceries and we never gave them any money.  Just the little book of accounts and receipts.  So different from the "big" city we lived in. 

Getting up at 5 am to get my grandfather off to work and then a short stroll to morning Mass.  I used to love sitting on the porch of the Convent, helping the nuns prepare for fall classes.  They always gave us holy cards.  I had a huge collection.  Almost as big as some of my brothers baseball card collections.  And just as dear to my heart.  I never did find them when we closed up my parents home.

Summer should be a time of pleasure and leisure.  Of innocence and play.  And especially of boredom.  I remember the best parts of summer springing from those two little sentences heard 'round the world in every language.  "I'm bored.  There's nothing to do!"  Those feelings of boredom inspired more creative and spontaneous play than any x-box or iphone ever could. 

I remember those summers fondly and yet those summers were filled with boredom.  Sweet, and heavy like the foreboding of an afternoon storm.  And then the sun shone from our bright faces as we rose to the occasion with another new game to play, craft to make or business to explore.  (We all envisioned ourselves as budding young millionaires.)   Boredom was the catalyst and our imaginations soared among the stars. 

The lazy, crazy, BORING days of summer.  I wonder......

Do You Have the Patience to Wait?

 Some of my friends have contacted me worrying about my last post.  I did not mean to alarm anyone.  One of my theories of life is the endless parade of lessons we are so generously presented with on a daily basis to further our spiritual growth.  I know any one of my apparent "problems" is really a spiritual opportunity for me to evolve and grow as a human being and as a spiritual being.  Sometimes the lessons are very obvious and I have written about these before.  And often times they are much less obvious.  They require contemplation, prayer and brutal honesty.  The good thing is the only person I need to be brutally honest with is myself.  It's always about me and me alone.  Others may play a role in my little dramas but alas, they are only there to mirror back to me something I need to attend to in my own life, my own heart, my own soul. 

The Tao always seems to point me back in the right direction.  It is simple, elegant and uncomplicated.  Just like I want my life to be when I grow up.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.